Category Archives: abuse

working and sexual assault

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On bart. Yesterday was a whole series of adventures. I didn’t sleep much on Thursday night. Lots of anxiety and fuss and such. But Friday morning Noah let me sleep on the couch for a few hours because I wasn’t scheduled till the afternoon.
Working is such an odd experience for me. Noah told me to enjoy my busman’s holiday. (There is an old joke about how bus drivers go on vacation and drive around the countryside.) I washed a lot of dishes yesterday. I made a lot of ice cream sandwiches and two quiches. It doesn’t really feel like I’m doing something important or useful only this is all work that has to be done for this business to succeed. I think that the fact that I won’t benefit from the business at any point no matter how hard I work is part of why I’m just… flat.
But being there was useful because one of my internet fans came in and gave me a fancy-pants keyboard. Whoo! We had a really nice chat. I figured out who he was and we are a lot closer than two degrees of separation. It’s always funny to meet those people and go, “Oh wait! I know stories about you! And I have questions!”
When I talk to people in the kink/freak communities the whole topic of monogamy/nonmonogamy comes up. I think partially because when people make different choices there is the natural response to consider how those choices would work for you. It’s hard to explain why I want Noah to never sleep with anyone again and yet that’s the important bit. It’s not that Iwant to be monogamous. It’s that I want Noah to be and I know I can’t ask him to be without doing it myself. I’m grudgingly willing to accept that what is good for the goose is good for the gander.
Noah sleeping with other people bothers me. It makes me feel unwanted and unloved. Sure those are feelings I could work on but don’t I have enough to freak out about having to work on? For the love of toast why do I have to work on that specific bit of awful? No thanks. So we are monogamous.
But then I go out in public. For the first while I was there and working there was this hoooooooootguy. I looked up and saw him and I started salivating and I flushed and uhm more moisture appeared. Not in my mouth. Ahem. He was really gorgeous. God he was my type. Nerdy—this guy had to be a geek. Any other profession would kick him out. He had dark hair that was on the shortish side and a white streak and dark framed glasses. He looked like he could would smile when making someone cry.
It’s kind of weird to react like that. To want like that out of the blue given that I’m not allowed to follow my pecker through life any more. Why is it more important for me to say that Noah can’t have extra sex than for either of us to be allowed to do things we enjoy? Because seriously I enjoy anonymous sex.
I’ve been trying to come up with the whole list of people who have sexually assaulted me since I turned 18. It feels like I should get to the point where at least I know who I have to worry about. Dan. Paul. Kevin. That coast guard guy.
With Dan I wanted to have sex with him but I told him no unprotected sex. He got me drunk and had unprotected sex with me while I was unconscious. With Paul I wanted to have sex but I told him no unprotected sex. I was on drugs and unable to physically force him off of me. GHB makes it really hard to fight back. That’s kind of the point. Kevin was one of the few friends I had during a time when I was scared and lonely. He likes giving massages and I have always been in a lot of pain. I knew fairly quickly that I would have to say no to sexual contact every single time I saw him no matter how clear I made it that I was not interested, ever. I would often have to reach down and remove his fingers from my vulva or vagina while he was giving me a massage. I had to tell him over and over that surpriseoral sex isn’t ok. The coast guard guy spiked my drink but at least he used a condom.
That is my adult sexual assault history. I have done a lot of very heavy play with people that falls into the ambiguous land of consensual nonconsent but I would not accuse any of those people of being out of bounds. They did what I negotiated. There were others, like Matthew, who was so brutal and nasty that I felt physically bad and emotionally bad about myself afterwards but I don’t think it was sexual assault. I negotiated and agreed. It just turned out to be much heavier play than I wanted. And I never have the balls to say in the middle of a scene, “Whoa—slow down.” I don’t safeword. I take what people feel like doing to me.
Last night Kevin came into the coffee shop. I asked the other owners who were on shift if I was allowed to kick someone out if he sexually assaulted me years ago. They offered to do it for me so I wouldn’t have to. I took several minutes to think about it and process and decide. Then I squared my shoulders and marched over to Kevin. I said, “I feel really uncomfortable doing this but…”
He broke into my sentence and said, “I have to go.”
I said, “Yes. What you did to me wasn’t ok. No one should have to tell you no over and over. It’s sexual assault. Get out.”
He started to argue but I turned on my heel and kind of ran back behind the counter. I ran all the way to the end where I could duck down behind the coffee machine and cash register. I hyperventilated for a while and felt like I was going to puke on the floor. I pretty much kept my crying under control. It took more than half an hour before I stopped shaking.
This was one of the few times in my life where I was in a position of having to deal with someone who hurt me and I had multiple men offer to rescue me and solve the problem. I told them no. It’s hard to understand why it has to be. Why do I have to be the one to do everything? They wanted to help. They would have done fine. They would have solved the problem and I could have quaked with fear on the far side of the room.
But that’s just the thing. I am no longer 23 and alone and scared. A lot has happened. I have had enough experiences that I know the difference between things I have agreed to and things I have refused. I have gotten to find out what that is like. I didn’t know before. It has always been true that I have to just do what I’m told and accept unwanted, painful sexual contact. That has just been life for me. But not any more. Now I can say “Get out.” I feel like no one will believe me. Who cares if a whore is raped any way. Heck, a lot of it wasn’t “rape rape” any way.
I may not get to actually feel safe this lifetime but I do get to say that people who have already hurt me have to get the fuck away from me.
Today is going to be another very long day. I ran ten miles this morning instead of twelve because I am going to have to walk across the city later and I think it will be ok. I’m going to go make food and food and food. I should eat before I start working. Yesterday I ate lunch at 11:30a and dinner at 9:30p. I can’t do that again.
I’m really weirded out by how much running is an appetite suppressant. Not what I expected. I have two offers of couch crash space tonight. I may go out after working. I brought one of those frightening 5 hour energy drink things Noah gets from work. I’m going to be going to bed at like 6pm on Sunday. I hope I have fun. I hope I don’t feel too anxious. I hope I feel like I am still interesting to talk to even if I won’t be sucking anyone off.
It’s hard to believe sometimes.
And after working all day Saturday I’m tired. Holy moly. Lots of working. Tired. But I want to go out!

I hate limbo.

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But I love having a plan. I have thirty days left until the marathon. If the kids want to watch the ipad, fine. I’m too tired to be entertaining. I want to be able to stretch without being knocked over. I’m also trying to not smoke. That leaves me dependent on edibles/pills and that’s a different experience for mood control. I think my lungs deserve a break this month. The hacking cough is really gross.

I think I should try not to type much. I need to find arm braces. I need to start icing my arms and stretching more consistently. Otherwise NaNoWriMo will wreck me. I’m looking forward to this book. Smart ass working title: Mary Sue’s Love Story

It’s weird thinking of myself as an animal training for a performance event. It changes how careful I am with myself. I give more respect to an animal than I do to myself. It’s not like I think I am an expensive race horse or anything, but I am being nicer to myself than I was and improvement is the point.

I finally set up the drop keyboard stuff on the desk. Maybe I won’t fuck up my hands by typing at a surface 6″ too high this year.

I gave away all the last of my tomatoes because K likes green ones. She makes a relish with them. I am planning to rip out all the tomato plants today and do a bunch of digging and maybe some planting. I am having a hard time with everything being waiting.

But holy christ do I not have the energy for people. I can barely be nice to Noah. I’m nice to the kids but I’m distracted. I feel far away. I think that is one of the big differences between the edibles and smoking. I get far less of this complete dissociation with smoking. I also get fewer panic attacks this way. I’m kind of looking forward to a few weeks of being this kind of stoned, honestly. It feels really nice for my nervous system–like a vacation from being me. I don’t have the heart pounding and the skin tension and easy startle. I feel really guilty when I am stoned like this. Like it is a cop out. I’m not learning how to really live. I’m not so stoned I am sitting on the couch and staring at the tv. But I am moving slowly and stopping to stretch a lot. I feel able to pay attention to the weird knots in my neck instead of just feeling angry with myself for not being as stretchy/bendy/flexible as I wish I was.

But I feel like I am breathing under water. I feel just a slight heaviness on my chest. It’s still easier than the panic attacks. But I can’t drive this stoned. I know I am reacting a few seconds too slow. I’m not stupid. Which means for a few weeks I can’t drive much. (No, I don’t drive after smoking either, but I can come home and immediately smoke and feel relief from the anxiety and edibles work differently in my system–it’s less of a push-the-button-get-medicine effect. It’s global or nada.)

There is a part of me that looks at the time line of my life and mentally stocks up pot for the crisis points–the anniversaries. The specific new, big traumas. I think I will be able to get to a point where I’m ok for weeks or months in between trigger points. I’m starting to wonder if I should even be trying to “not react” to trigger events. It seems like I spend a lot of time and energy trying to not get upset by things that would make any rational person upset. That’s silly. If I just batten down the hatches at those points, maybe there will be “ok” in between.

Less than seven years. I have to be completely functional without any medication to help within seven years. If I can’t go for a year completely sober here then we can’t travel internationally. Sober sooner would be better.

I’m scared.

Looking for a therapist (still)

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(First: I didn’t mention getting new shoes and I worried blacksheep. Yes, I got shoes that work  better for my feet. No more ouchie.)

I sent out some emails to local therapists last night. When I do the modern equivalent of throwing a dart at the phone book I find that I am mostly interested in working with black women–apparently. If you search through all the people who are therapists in Fremont (and are listed online in a way I can find) only black women mention the important buzzwords for me: intense early trauma, “all stages of addiction”, incest, complex ptsd, ongoing anger issues, depression. Even when white people (or Asian or Middle Eastern [from what I see here]) try to say they work with trauma they are fussy and particular. They work with “change of life traumas” or “immigrant family issues”. Not really my problems.

“Hi, thank you for calling me back I have a few important buzzwords I have to run past a therapist before I can work with them: incest, bdsm, promiscuity, self-harm, attachment parenting, complex ptsd and queer. Let’s talk about them.

I don’t have a problem with educating an open minded therapist about alternative lifestyle issues. I am looking for a long-term relationship. I have two distinct needs with regards to therapy: first is that I go through periodic intense crisis periods. I have very little prediction of when they will happen outside of obvious anniversaries of trauma. Those are often very intense for me. I strongly prefer someone who has some experience in EMDR and CBT because I need occasional directed work. Mostly I see therapists because I do not have ongoing bonding relationships with very many people and I suffer intensely from this. Lack of attachment is one of the hardest parts of my life for me. I use therapists as surrogate parents and friends.

I need a therapist who will not flinch or overly react when I am all of a sudden telling you intense details about lurid rapes. I need someone who will not get overly indignant all the time–that’s not very useful. I am already angry. If you flinch or react or pull away when I talk about difficult things I will begin to look for patterns of disapproval. I will find them, I will project the fuck all over you and then I will disappear. I need to have a fairly blank mirror to talk to for a long time. That is hard for therapists. I am a fairly weird patient. You have to get to know me slowly.

I have been in therapy more on than off for 27 years. I have a few intense hot buttons due to these experiences: first and foremost is punctuality. If you do not respect my time you do not respect me. I will take note. I won’t be back. No I won’t try to “work it out.” I’m fucking paying for your time. I feel entitled to my 55 minutes. It is one of the few things in this life I feel genuinely entitled to: I pay for 55 minutes and I bloody well need to get them. I need you to be careful what you say to me. If something sounds like a promise to me and you don’t follow through I will disappear.

And seriously dude, all of my symptoms existed in well documented fashion for many years before I tried smoking pot. The fact that 99% of western medicine believes that my first problem is marijuana and I “should be sober before beginning treatment” means that I’m just not in a position to accept a lot of help. I’m not very open to western drugs right now. The side effects are far worse than the benefits of the drugs. They hurt me. Pot isn’t great but it is effective and less damaging to me than most of my other options. I’m not interested in being shamed because I’m trying to deal with a lot of stuff that isn’t my fucking fault.

I don’t take advice well at the beginning. I have to warm up to people. I have to know someone for a while and hear a series of shorter conversations before I begin to respect someones opinion. I do not respect people just because they want me to. I am very anti-authoritarian and I am very resistant to being directed towards giving up aspects of my self-determined identity. I have come a long way. I need to be respected for that. I do not need more people who are just assholes about how I’m not perfectly like a non-traumatized person so obviously I suck.”

And the next asshole who sends me a long letter about how what I really need is to say how helpless I am and turn everything over to “God” and go to AA/NA is going to get punched. Fuck you very much. It’s an approach that helps approximately 10% of the people who try it. I’m very unlikely to be in that small group.

It’s weird to me that I am doing very well and very poorly at the same time. I’m afraid that is going to be permanent. I have a lot of body memories from being raped. Most of my intense suicidal ideation happens around wanting to be away from those sensations. it hurts and I’m really tired of hurting in that way. Flashbacks and corresponding suicidal ideation seems to be a permanent fixture in my life. Managing that takes a lot of energy. It has been really bad since Shanna was about eighteen months.

I really hate my parents. If my father were alive I think I would enjoy killing him slowly by inches. I would take off one finger and toe at a time before I slowly started carving shapes out of other parts of his body.  I don’t actually want to hurt my mom–I suppose that’s good. But I don’t want to know her. I don’t want to act like everything is all hunky dory and fine now. I’m not fine. I’m a fucking wreck. You fucking assholes wrecked thirty years of my life so far. How much longer am I going to have to feel like this? Maybe forever? Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.

Mostly I feel very lucky that I get to have the life I have. I enjoy my kids far more minutes of the day than they trouble me, even including all the extensive work I do for them. I’m really happy to have them here as companions for my life. I do not begrudge them some work. But it is a lot of work. It’s hard to find enough energy for everything.

It’s not that my relationship with Noah is free from all frustration, but it is very affirming. Noah thinks I’m just a great person. I like being around him. He talks to me like I am smart. My house is a very good and safe place to be.

Haunted

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Running is getting harder. There are a few things going on. For one thing I am dealing with the cumulative of suddenly doing massive amounts of exercise when I have never done so before. It’s an experience. But mostly I am struggling because of how my body is changing. As I lose weight/change shape/harden/whatever I can feel the bones of my brother Tommy coming through in my face.

This is weird and hard to describe. The more time I spend looking at Calli and the more time I spend running the more conscious I am of how my skull resembles my brother. And my running gait is embarrassingly like his. Embarrassing because Tommy had a severe traumatic brain injury. He didn’t run. He lurched. He looked awkward and weird. It was a miracle he walked at all so folks considered it a real big deal.

One year, in Apple Valley, he was on a disabled kids sports team, softball. I remember how Tommy looked running the bases. I move like that. I feel weird when I run. I lurch awkwardly to the side. I have trouble figuring out how to balance my weight. I almost trip a lot. I kind of go back and forth on the side walk.

Except for sometimes when I hit my stride just right and I feel like I am flying. Then I feel Tommy. Then I remember how he would smile the few times he really managed to get going quickly. That wild ebullition on his face. I feel that way when I am running really fast.

I often wonder what my life would have been like if I had lived in one place. If someone had looked at me as a small child and said, “Running quickly makes you feel good. Let’s work with this.” I was told to go to my room with a book and shut up. So I’m pretty awkward when I run. I have run more this year than the entire rest of my life combined.

Tommy hated me. Before the accident he was nasty and mean, “No one wanted you. Why were you born? Can’t you die already?” After the accident he was brutal and vicious.

Tommy’s speech was very difficult to understand. He had trouble enunciating and an average sentence would take multiple breaths and minutes to deliver. He hated me because I could hear the first three words and finish his sentences. “You rude, stupid bitch.” He hit me a lot. A really lot. When I think of myself as “not being all that physically abused” what I mean is my mom gave me four really memorable beatings and that’s it. My siblings hurt me all the time. That “didn’t count.”

Once, Tommy was screaming at me. I don’t remember what I did. Maybe nothing. Maybe something. I don’t know. He got as far as, “You are” and I finished, “a stupid worthless bitch, yeah I know” and I didn’t even look up from my book.

I remember the sound of inhaled breath. Then I don’t remember anything until I woke up on the floor. He hit me in the head. I don’t know how long I was unconscious. No one paid attention or cared. I don’t think I was unconscious very long. I think I managed to scramble up and away before he managed the physical dexterity to kick me. Either that or he did it once before I was awake. Regardless I got away just as he was trying to deliver a hard kick. He fell down. He crawled after me screaming that he was going to kill me. He wasn’t going to deal with such a stupid bitch any longer. He should have killed me a long time ago.

That was why I spent a lot of time in the willow tree in the yard. He didn’t have the arm strength to climb any more. I love climbing trees. I still love climbing trees.

That was Tuesday.

Essentially what I’m saying is: having running be a constant reminder of my brother is a mixed thing. I kind of wish I knew what Jimmy looks like when he runs. I’m not sure I have ever seen him run. In high school he was a state finalist. He was quite good.

Running fast is a gene. You have it or you don’t. (Based on what I’ve read.) I don’t know if I truly have it or not but I know I have never tried. It’s not until you are an adult many years later that you can admit to yourself that as a kid you never tried. You never really gave it a go. You have to be honest with yourself.

The only time I ran was when someone was chasing me. I rarely got away. Usually I was caught and had the shit beat out of me.

I think I am afraid of Shanna getting older. She is so like me. I’m afraid she is going to be a lightning rod for people who want to beat the hell out of her as well. I hope not.

When I was nineteen I asked Tom to crucify me. We used rope instead of nails (I’m not that hard core) and we built a padded back board with a cross piece together. Even if you are just tied to a board, being suspended in that position with all of your weight hanging is rather intense. Especially if you stay up for a long time. I certainly got to the point of hallucination from insufficient air and blood circulation.

I saw Tommy and I saw my dad. At that point they had been dead for about three years. The hallucinations didn’t talk to me at all. They just looked at me kind of dispassionately. I am not theirs but I don’t belong to any one else. When I was nineteen I felt it was pretty clear that I was good for one thing–being hurt a lot. That was the one currency I had to buy affection. I can take a lot of pain. I can take a lot of degradation. It just feels normal to me.

I’m having this weird body experience as  I run. I can tell where my body is going to start siphoning energy from fat stores. I’ve watched the various fat pockets on my body (I have a lot of them) over this year. As I run the fat jiggles, quite a bit–really. On a scale of 1-10, 1 being you can barely feel it and 10 being “cut my leg off because it hurts so much” then my fat jiggling is normally in the 2-3 range. I can feel it but it doesn’t hurt. Except when my body is nursing from a given area. I can’t find a better way of thinking about it. We are actively stealing from that spot right now. When I can feel my body stealing from a spot that fat pocket starts hurting at more like the 4-5 level. It starts to feel like pain. Then a week or so later I notice that it is a lot smaller. It’s kind of weird. I didn’t know bodies did this.

I am doing a lot of compensatory eating. I’m a little more than ten pounds heavier than I was in March for the half marathon. I’m very depressed. I’m eating a lot of sugar and crying while I do it. I don’t want my body to be smaller. I hate that I feel more and more like Tommy. Fuck that. I’ll eat ice cream. There’s a lot of ice cream in this world. I don’t have to fucking feel Tommy’s bones coming through. Fuck him. Fuck him. Fuck him.

Yesterday was an eight mile run then the girls and I did a round trip three mile walk for the park. I’m sore and tired. But I’ll do five miles today. And eighteen miles on Saturday.

I’m not going to let Tommy take this away from me. I’m pretty sure he has hurt me enough for one life.

I don’t think that getting over my anger is the point.

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“Get busy living or get busy dying.”- Shawshank Redemption.

Sometimes it feels like life is about learning how to come to grips with your wasted potential. I could do _______ if only ___________. It’s a long series of conversations with yourself as you narrow down possibilities in life until the only path you could possibly take is completely obvious. Look, you’ve been working towards this all along. You did ______ and then you did _____ so obviously ______.

But believing that requires some underlying belief in a greater plan. Things are not inevitable. Things are changeable right up until the second they happen. It’s random. It has to be.

It has to be for me because otherwise there would have to be some specific reason I was picked out of a hat to suffer far more than other people. I’m sorry, there is no Kushiel looking out for my well being. I’ve read the Bible. I’ve read big parts of the Book of Mormon. I’ve read books by Martin Buber and St. Thomas (Aquinas, of course) and Sr. Thomas More and and. I did all the classes required for a masters degree in English. I got good grades. I read. I studied. I didn’t know I was supposed to be practicing handwriting. Whoops. Anyway.

I am educated. I have read what the masters think of the world. Sometimes I agree with them but often I don’t. I have had significant personal experience that disagrees with their beliefs.

I have two ways I can handle that. I can decide that they are right or I can decide that I am right.

Now, I like to hedge my bets. I have strong opinions but I’m willing to reconsider them given reason. It’s very rare that I bother to try, I am human after all. But when something challenges my belief structure I have to think about it very hard. I know I am not always right (really, D).

I kind of feel like I should stay off social networking sites for a while. I am feeling too many “shoulds”. I need to do what I am going to do and not worry about whether other people approve or not. Of course there are lots of people who don’t. Will I let that stop me? No. Then why let it bother me?

Because when people I love reject me in harsh ways it bothers me. When people I love tell people they think I am dangerous it bothers me.

Are they right?

I’m told I need to get over my anger. I’m not sure that it is anger I need to get over. I need to get over wanting things from other people. I need to really and truly not give a shit if a given person likes me or not. I know who my friends are.

As the legal next-of-kin I think I feel very reasonable about treating the God-Mamas as family. They take the kids every month. They have a very serious on-going relationship. They are invested and serious about it. That’s the last time I am going to do that to my kids. My family unit is closed. I can care about me. I can care about Noah. I can care about Shanna. I can care about Calli. I should not try to make sure there is stuff left for other people. Maybe there will be and maybe there won’t. My friends understand. They really don’t have high expectations of me–which should be depressing only it isn’t. They like me anyway.

Anger and anxiety are both emotions that are about energy flow. (In my opinion. I’m going to babble even more whacko than usual tonight. Sorry. It’s been a very long and very sober day and I’ve had time to sit with my anger more than I usually do.) I have a lot of energy. I have spent my entire life feeling like I am sitting with a burning wire of energy in the middle of my body. It churns my stomach. It constricts my throat and my lungs.

People are monolithic for me in a way that I don’t think most people understand. My life has always changed a lot. Every so often I up and move either geographically or in social sphere. As I age there is more and more overlap in communities. I’m having a harder and harder time going out. It’s scarier than I like admitting.

If I had been funneling my whole life towards what I am doing now the path would have looked different, don’t you think? It all depends on how you frame it. I’m a stay at home mom. I used to be a high school teacher. I’ve been married for nearly six years (anniversary is in a couple of weeks). I live less than twenty-eight miles away from my elementary school (well, one of them).  My middle and high schools (at least five of them) are slightly closer to me than that. I’m a hippie. I dress very conservatively most of the time. I don’t have a television or watch anything approximating television programming on a computer. I garden a lot. I homeschool. I do building projects.

I am angry. I stay home a lot because I am afraid and I am fucking angry that I am afraid. Today we went to the post office. It went fine. The kids started to get into things but were easily distracted. Nevertheless I spent the whole time feeling very anxious. I was afraid my kids would get yelled at. I was afraid I would get yelled at. I was afraid the woman helping me would be mean. Good freakin grief. It’s ridiculous. I started crying and hyperventilating and the woman helping me told me it would be ok. That’s god damn embarrassing. I’m a fucking adult.

You want to tell me I should just get over it again? Oh fuck off. But the whole episode was under a minute. It’s not like it is a big deal. Only it hurts. It hurts my stomach. It hurts my heart. It hurts my throat. It hurts my head. It hurts my lungs. I feel like I am dying. If I could just stop it I would. There is no magic drug for me. The only thing I can do is dope myself to get the panic to stop. Look at any psych drug on the market. That’s what they do. They do it in different ways, but whatever.

I don’t really see a point in trying to live a long life if I am going to spend a lot of time every day in pain because my brain doesn’t understand that I am not in danger. It’s not like she had the power to prevent me from sending my packages. If she was really bitchy I could have gone to UPS. (But I’ll say: the gruffness from the ladies in the Mountain View USPS is just a front. They are softies.) She had no power to hurt me. Someone feeling irritated by my kids in the fifteen minutes we are in the post office is really not my problem. Why do I care?

Oh wait. That’s called trauma. Sort of. Kind of. I’m not sure. At some point I have to get it through my fool head that there are assholes in the world who are going to be rude to me and mine. It’s not about anything I’ve done. Well, not necessarily. For an awful lot of people I just have to exist. I have to have the god damn audacity to open my white trash mouth. I am offensive.

People like it when you are afraid of them. It makes them feel protective. It makes them feel big. It makes them feel powerful. People like it. I have spent a lot of time afraid and I can see how people react.

I feel like I am searching, always searching, for what I supposed to be doing. How am I wasting my potential? I don’t know. I look for seeds in my life to help me tell the future but unfortunately the future hasn’t been written yet. I have to write it.

It means I’m not looking at right now. It means I’m scared. I’m angry because a lot of people want to tell me things that all boil down to being raped is a womans own fault because the only logical conclusion I can come to is those people believe I deserve to be raped. I cannot put my mind around that. No. I can’t. It’s not possible. No one is born to be raped. Just because I have a cunt that does not decide my destiny.

I am a stay at home mom. I am a stay-at-home-a-lot mom. Well, I like taking BART on outings. Then we can take the bus and I can be stoned all day. I can be calm. I can let the children go at their pace. I don’t feel anxious about being in other peoples way. I don’t feel guilty that I am sitting when obviously this more deserving person (like a guy in his 50’s) should be sitting. No. I have two squirming kids. I should be fucking sitting. Otherwise they will fall and hurt themselves. That’s just stupid.

But I worry. I worry about offending people. I worry about making other people feel annoyed by my physical presence. You’d never guess by how I write, would you? In the privacy of a room by myself I have the biggest cojones of them all. Please join me in a derisive snicker, right?

I have nothing to offer the world to justify the worth of my opinions. I am fairly unlikely to pursue further academic studies. At this moment in time that sounds like hell on earth. Which unfortunately may mean I do it some day. I’m stupid like that. Next time I will practice my handwriting. And it won’t be English. Fuck English.

I don’t think that I need to get over my anger. I need to find a way to use it. I have a lot of energy. When I decide to get going on a project I work like a demon. I get a very large amount done in a short period of time. But I’m a woman. It’s fairly unlikely to ever be noticed. It helps that I pick lame menial jobs because I think that is what someone like me should be doing. I think I never noticed that I stopped working at Boston Market. I still think I am an ignorant fool who cannot be right. Look, all these people tell me I am wrong.

Well, fuck them. I don’t like their system. There is no way for me to win in their system; I was born damned.

Before you tell me to stop being angry let me hit you as many times as I have been hit. Let me rape you as many times as I have been raped. Then I will put you into a culture that tells you it is all your fucking fault that it happened. Then we can talk about anger.

What else did you expect to have happen? Do you know how many people in uniform I’ve had sneer that at me when something inappropriate and illegal happens to me? I can’t really remember. For a while there I was put on drugs against my will when I was a teenager and I can’t remember that period so an exact number is truly beyond me.

I have been told to sit down and shut up and don’t get angry all my life. I don’t think that is a message I should listen to. I think that is a message that seals my doom. I’m not saying that everyone has to be angry with me. I’m saying that once you are marked as prey–once you are truly afraid they smell you. If I am angry enough I can drive them away. I no longer look like easy prey even though they know what I am. I finally got close enough to the herd to not be the weakest link.

And now that I am closer to the herd the mother fuckers around me are going, “Oh shit, who let her show up?” It’s interesting to watch. I just piss people off. I don’t even have to try. I just have to say what I think. I make people angry. Even if I wasn’t angry to start with. It’s interesting.

I make people angry when I speak to them. Maybe I should just stop speaking to them. I don’t mean become selectively mute, that’s a bit extreme. I mean that maybe I should stop setting the bar so god damn low on who I try to become friends with. I should act like I’m worth jumping through some hoops. People do it. They really do. It’s kind of weird.

I think I should stay of social networking sites for a while. Outside of my house there is nothing but bad. Inside my house I live in Wonderland. It’s really nice here. We sing and play games. We dance and should and run around. We paint and cook and garden. We grow up together. We learn how to do things together. We learn how to gently coexist with another human being. When someone slaps you in the face while you are sleeping it is perfectly acceptable to yell, “What the hell are you doing?!” before you are actually awake. (I am very articulate while mostly asleep.) It’s not ok to yell such a thing while fully conscious. We have Rules. No name calling. No hitting. You can’t put anyone down. Everyone deserves to have space but we need to be careful how our space effects other people. Every day involves “I love you” and “I am really glad I know you” and hugs and kisses.

But I know with every day that marches forward that two of these relationships are going to change. They are going to go off into the world. They are not going to stay with me and meet my needs. I have to do that for myself.

Some people can wait until the kids are teenagers to worry about it. My kid is about to turn two. Oh shit. I only have sixteen years to plan. I’m not sure that is long enough. I’m not sure that is long enough for me to finish growing up. I feel guilty because Noah is my provider. Because we have decided that his salary is good for both of. We don’t want another thing pulling from the available energy in our lives–probably ever. I feel like I am wasting my potential. I feel like I am letting down my feminism. I feel like I am setting myself up for a fall. I feel like…

I feel like I am waiting for the inevitable conclusion of the life of a girl like me. What terrible thing will happen next? How will Noah turn on me? Will he wait until a year or two after the kids are gone and say, “I just stayed for the kids.” I don’t think so. I don’t think he could fake that facial expression. He’s a good liar, don’t get me wrong, but not that good. Not with me. I know when that face happens. It isn’t in company. I’ve been watching this man for a while now. I intend to keep watching him. My very survival depends on him.

That’s the bit that is weird and hard to swallow. Basically because it is a crock of shit. Whatever. I wouldn’t necessarily like everything I had to do, but if I had to do it I would.

It’s not that I need to stop being angry. Anger happens. It stops when it stops. But I do really need to stop looking for it. I investigate the candidates before every election and beyond that I need to just live in my little bubble. I feel like we exist outside the modern world with the glaring exception of the glowing box I am staring at. Ok, not really outside the modern world–give me a break. But we do live with a shocking lack of popular culture. Of any kind, really. I suppose we listen to some music but certainly not every day. I would say not every week. Ok, that’s not true for me right now. I listen to music while I run. That’s a new hobby this year. I’m not sure how that will go long term. And my phone battery can’t play music through a whole long run so my phone is now annoying useless on runs. Bummer.

People are going to think I’m a trainwreck. To that I cock my head to the side and say, “Have you ever seen a train wreck?” Things have settled down in my life remarkably over the last few years. Cutting off my family was hard and caused a big bump, yes. I was abused as a child, yes. I haven’t been raped in more than five years? Something like that. That’s the longest stretch of my life. I’m waiting for the next thing that will hurt me. It is very confusing to my brain that I have this nice man in the house.

I would have been fine today if I was able to cut before going to the post office. Because when I start to feel panic I press on the fresh wounds and that keeps me level. It’s more reliable than any drug I’ve ever tried. But people get quite upset with me, so I stopped. I think that really I just don’t want to teach my children to do it. I don’t want them to learn my panic and fear and need for pain.

It’s not that those monolithic “them” are actually all bad. But I have no reason to go fishing to find out. It’s kind of freeing, really. I don’t have to care if people will want to do me ill or not if I don’t give them an opportunity.

What does it feel like to have distant community? I only sort of know. I get it somewhat in the Leather community. I really need some place I can belong with my kids. I’m trying to build places. We are consistent (mostly, barring various events like a washing machine flooding my garage). We have patterns. We have friends. We have relationships.

What is it I am supposed to get over my anger for? What is it that I am supposed to do? Ahhh grasshopper–what I should do is not make people feel uncomfortable. Sorry mate, that ship sailed. I’m going to make you uncomfortable.

I make plans. And I make plans. And I make plans. When you call the suicide hotline one of the first thing they ask you is if you have “a plan”. I laugh. I have plans. I have worked out so many ways to die that I can’t casually list them all. First I do this and then I do that and then I have to look at this and then… I know the dozens of steps involved in any number of ways to die. How accidental can I make it look? Where should I leave the consolidated list of passwords so Noah isn’t screwed? Where… etc.

But the point isn’t to stop being angry. Or really even to stop being afraid. That can’t be the point. If that is the point I will always fail. You can’t decide to stop something. You have to decide to do something else instead. I decide every day over and over. It’s exhausting. It’s hard. I have to sit here all day every day thinking carefully about what I say and what I do. You have read this far in my blog. Surely you think I am a psycho about to fly off the handle any moment now. I’m truly not. I’m pretty quiet. Sometimes I speak unexpectedly sharply. Sometimes my tone of voice is more harsh than seems appropriate to the topic. If I am alone with my family I instantly say, “Oh I’m sorry that came out harsher than I meant it. I’ll try again.” I expect my kids to do the same thing. I say, “Try again.” Shanna says it to me now. It’s interesting to negotiate.

My children are not in charge of me. My children are not responsible for me and they never will be. But they get to have preferences to. How do I sit back and very slowly learn someone like this? I don’t know. I’ve never done very well at close intimate relationships. I just know how to spend a lot of time alone in a room. But I’m trying. I get a couple of hours of sitting alone in a room every day or I feel like I am going to lose my mind.

I didn’t used to be this way. It feels like the anger is the war between my need for people and my terror of them. I don’t want to have any of the feelings I have about people and I can’t make them go away just by wishing and I am fucking angry about it. I hate that I cry over stupid things. I couldn’t figure out a form. It wasn’t a big deal.

The last time it was truly a big deal was when Denise said, “Have you ever had anyone close to you die.” I didn’t let her set the terms of my reality then–she doesn’t get to tell my my father and brother were not close to me–and I don’t think I should let random assholes on the internet. That seems kind of stupid and weak minded, don’t you think?

There is a lot of “you” tonight. I don’t think I do that very often. I don’t even know who I am writing to. I periodically rotate through various people in my head and no one fits. I’m not ranting at anyone. I’m ranting at the unseen you. The one who hurts me. The one whose plan it is. The one I don’t believe in.

I’m very angry at God because I can’t be an atheist. I have known things. I have to believe in my own experiences or I’m fucked. But I don’t think there is a plan. I don’t think it’s the Christian God. I don’t know what it is. But something knows I am here. I’m not sure it cares much one way or another. But it knows something more than me. I don’t know how much more. And it’s probably fallible. Isn’t everything?

I feel like I have no culture to retreat to. I am not Christian. I am currently upper middle class according to my bank balance. In attitude and behavior I am white trash. I don’t know how else to be. I offend people. I have always offended people. I have the audacity to be raped and complain about it. Don’t I know I should shut up?

Get it out of your head.

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None of what I am thinking is all that serious or big. Why are my emotional reactions so out of proportion? I don’t even know. That’s the trouble with brain chemistry. It’s not always reacting to real things in front of you.

I can’t start running yet. It’s too early. Yesterday as I was running I thought a lot about how I should leave my house earlier and run to Lake Elizabeth and swim out to the middle then stop swimming while it is still dark and no one will see me. I can’t start running yet. I can’t go out until people will see me. I can’t go out until I would be traumatizing other people to try and die in front of them–that’s not nice. I’m not allowed to do that.

Why isn’t it more important that I would destroy my children? They would never get over losing me. I know that. They would spend their entire lives wondering why their mother didn’t love them enough. I can’t do that to them. I love them so much. But I hurt. I want to cut. I want to do something that causes me a lot of pain. I didn’t yesterday. I cried. I curled up in the fetal position and sobbed but I didn’t self-harm. I even ate properly at all the appropriate times.

It is very hard to believe that I am worth taking care of. How could I possibly be worth any effort? But every body takes effort. Living in a body is work. You have to feed it and let it rest and treat it at least a little gently. I see how much effort bodies take because I care for two small ones. It’s a lot of forking work. Doing the work for them makes me feel so bad. Why didn’t anyone want to care for me? Why didn’t anyone love me?

I feel taunted every day by the way I lived. I feel angry and jealous of my children. Why didn’t anyone love me? Being nice to my kids makes me feel really bitter. I hate that I have to stop and make up what a good person would do because I don’t know. I see my children do things and what I see in my head are these still-frame pictures of what happened to me when I did the same thing. I know what happened to me was wrong but I don’t know what to do.

I feel over and over all day how bad I must be to deserve how I was treated. I feel like I am choking and drowning in how bad bad bad I am. I deserve to suffer. I deserve to be in pain. I deserve to be told to shut my fucking mouth. I shouldn’t speak at all. I should be seen and not heard.

I don’t want my kids to feel this way.

As an adult I feel so much shame for the things I don’t know how to do well. All those things that other people spent long hours on during childhood. I hid. I didn’t learn things. If I couldn’t get it out of a book by myself it didn’t exist. I had no way of going and learning skills or behaviors or activities.

I feel overwhelmed by how badly living in poverty was. I feel like I’m not over it. I don’t know how to be someone who is safe. I only know what it means to be unsafe and in danger.

I miss my mom. I miss my mom so much that I would like to curl up and die to get away from missing her like this. I love my mommy. I want my mommy. I miss my mommy. But my mommy would hurt me. I think if I let my mommy hurt me again I wouldn’t live through it. That’s a lot of why I don’t have contact with her any more. I was absolutely not going to be able to live through more. I can’t be who she needs me to be.

I feel like I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what possible worth I might have. I don’t feel very useful. But people aren’t worthy or not based on work, are they? I don’t know. I work very hard. It always feels like my work is inadequate. I am inadequate.

I don’t intend to die today. I have stuff to do. I need to finish the box for Jenny. I need to send the care package off to the MDC woman who is leaving her abusive husband. I do things that make other people feel seen and important and loved. Why don’t I feel that way? What would it take?

I have a truly amazing husband. I don’t understand why he loves me so much. He’s so patient and kind. He doesn’t yell at me very often. I think he raises his voice a couple of times a year and it’s only to be heard over ambient noise. Noah is so very nice to me. I feel so undeserving. Every so often I ask him if he is storing up bitterness over the things I make him put up with. I ask him if he wants to get even with me. He gets the most baffled look. He can’t understand why I would think he feels that way. Experience.

I don’t feel like I hold up my end of the bargain. I don’t feel like I really make his life better. Certainly not enough better to justify putting up with me. I am so difficult. So unpleasant.

I wish I could get these voices out of my head. I would I could cut my mother’s voice out of my brain. “Why do you have to be so unpleasant? Why are you so difficult?” I don’t know, maybe because I was being raped and beaten and malnourished and neglected? Maybe that is why I was difficult? It really doesn’t matter why. I shouldn’t be inconveniencing anyone.

I want this panic and hate in my chest to leave. I want it gone. I want to not feel like my heart is racing and any minute terrible things will happen to me. Any minute Noah is going to turn on me and declare that he is well and truly sick of me–get out.

Instead, when I come back from the bathroom at 4:30 in the morning he talks to me for half an hour or so. When he hears me walk in the room he lifts his head from the pillow and smiles as he reaches for me. Having me near him makes him feel happier. I don’t understand. How can I make someone happy?

Mental illness is a liar. My mother is a liar. My sister is a liar. The voices in my head are liars. They tell me I am bad. That I hurt people by existing. Everyone would be better off if I was dead. My sister used to tell me that. Everyone would be better off if you weren’t here. I still believe it. And that’s part of why I walked away from my family. If you are better off without me, fine be without me. That doesn’t mean I have to die.

I’m feeling slightly weird about a few different interactions in my life. I can’t talk about them. Going forward I need to carefully weigh, “Is this person my friend or is this person a relationship with my children” and if someone is more on the kid end I simply can’t bring up issues. When I bring up issues I drive people away. I can’t do that to my kids forever. I have to stop listening and stop caring about people. I need to ignore their behavior and avoid them myself while facilitating Shanna having access. Her boundaries are different from mine.

I can’t keep pushing people away from my kids. The list of casualties in my life is long. And that woman who sent me the nasty Dear Jane letter just popped up again. She wants to reconcile because she misses me and she doesn’t want to have a panic attack for two days every time she runs into me. I’ll try real hard to care about your fucking panic attacks you stupid bitch.

I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have Noah. I would be a lot more sad. I know that part. I don’t feel like I deserve him. I know he is better than me. He tries to convince me that I am more educated but I’m having none of it. I don’t have a degree higher than his. And his degrees are from an actually difficult university. I went to a state school so pathetic it no longer even has pride of place-name. Awesome.

I’m really tired. This week the running is getting to me. I’m sleeping but waking up feeling really bad. Yay depression? It doesn’t matter if I’m depressed or if what I am doing is hard. It has to get done. Life moves on. We go to Disneyland in less than eight weeks. My marathon is in eight weeks and three days. Eep. That’s a lot of fun to talk to Shanna about.

I have a lot of good in my life. I am privileged. I am pampered and kept safe. Why do I feel like I am still in danger? Why doesn’t my brain believe my current circumstances? I don’t know. But it’s fucking annoying.

Busy weekend

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I went up to work at Wicked Grounds this weekend. On Saturday I went up after running thirteen miles. I was tired but ebullient. BART was really full so at one point I gave up my seat so that an elderly person could sit. Even though I just ran thirteen miles, I am clearly in a better position to be standing.

When I stood up two elderly Latina women started making comments–ok, so only one of them was loud. They glared at me. The words are already fuzzy in my memory (ahhh blessed medication) but she called me trash. They expressed shock that I was that gross and a woman. Ew. I was wearing jeans, a t-shirt with the words “Rope Slut”, and a zip up hoodie mostly closed over my chest. And a dog choke collar closed with a padlock. I looked at her quite fiercely and asked, “Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” She turned bright red and looked down.

By contrast I ran around several blocks in San Francisco yesterday wearing a latex cheerleader outfit. It’s made with maroon and clear panels. One of the clear panels on the skirt is right over my ass crack. There is a deep clear vee in the front of the shirt. Now that I have ginormous mom nipples you can clearly see areola but not quite the nipple. It’s uhh festive. I had quite a few gay men tell me that I looked fabulous and they were proud of me for wearing it. It was… different.

Dore Alley is my anniversary. I got beaten by choice for the first time the night before Dore Alley in 2000. I was eighteen. It was my second weekend at the Power Exchange, a bdsm themed sex club in San Francisco. I had brought my sister the previous weekend and I was too afraid to play. I came back dressed in clothes I bought at Hot Topic and I asked a transwoman to beat me. I was afraid of the men, honestly. She flogged me very well.

I feel like Leather as an identity has changed a lot in the twelve years I have been part of the bdsm community. Even though I’m not active these days it still feels like my community. I have been there my entire adult life. I don’t have another community. There is no other grouping of people who will accept me for absolutely all of my fucked-up-interests.

I got to know a new person yesterday as a result of a massive faux pas. I used the wrong gender pronoun. I felt like a total fucking asshole. The woman-born-woman very bravely stayed near the cash register to tell me that I made a mistake when I said “he”. I felt so bad. (In my defense she is a very butch lesbian. Not that it excuses me in the slightest.) After that I ended up having a very long and protracted conversation with her.

It’s not every day I meet someone who says, “I know I am weird but it is because I was tortured as a child.”

Her androgynous gender appearance is the result of her father performing medical experiments on her from birth and trying to change her gender because she was born an identical twin and they wanted a boy.

We had a lot to talk about. We felt very comfortable together. We both found the bdsm scene at eighteen. She’s two years younger than me. I’m not sure how I have missed her for ten years. I do recognize her handle. I think I just have never been a San Francisco person. And City people don’t come south.

I got to sit down and have a surprise conversation with someone who I pretty much couldn’t shock. Do you know how often that happens to me? I’d put it at twice a decade. Normal people want to talk about their lives. From birth to eighteen I lived a traumatic horror show and when I turned eighteen I ran straight into the Leather community. I was embraced and adored. I still am.

I didn’t spend much time with anyone outside the Leather community for the four years I was with Tom. I was still close with Anna but Jenny and I barely spoke. We had very different lives even though we were both college students. I have rarely been like people my age. It was really amazing yesterday to find this person. I hope I can keep in touch with her. She feels like a gift.

The actual Up Your Alley Fair wasn’t very exciting. I felt pretty sad about how much it has changed. I saw far more latex than leather. Most guys were simply wearing underwear if they weren’t wearing pants. It didn’t look like a leather event. It looked like a bath house but outside with very little sex. I only saw three or four guys getting head. There used to be hundreds. I had the very strong impulse to ask the only really slutty guy I saw there (he had a line of boys) if he was willing to see if a mouth is just a mouth. I didn’t! I don’t do that any more! But I wanted to. I wonder if he would have let me. The fair felt uninspiring and if no one else was going to put on a show I might as well.

I really like this part of me. I want Noah to go to Folsom with me. Exhibitionism is big for me. I probably won’t have actual penetrative sex at Folsom but we will have to drive because I won’t be willing to make it home. The car can be put somewhere private.

I really like getting the shit beaten out of me while people watch and freak out. I like it. I really really like it. I like the energy of the crowd. I freak people out in dungeons too. I am on the far extreme edge of what is currently common. I wasn’t when I came into the community.

I found the leather community at the very beginning of the online era. People were still very paranoid about using the internet. It was harder to find parties because they weren’t advertised online. You had to get to know people still. We hung out in IRC talking all day and night together but we arranged the parties at munches. We had dungeons that were basically our community spaces. People spent a lot of time hanging around.

When I showed up as an eighteen year old it was very rare to see another person under thirty. The community was full of people who had already had full lives and then discovered something about themselves. They were people who made very conscious life choices to become the people they were.

Where I was there were a lot of older women who were very heavy masochists. Life has already made their ass hard. They have been getting hit for a very long time and they have leather  butt. They can barely bruise any more. Sadists like bruises. If it gets harder and harder to bruise you… well… I guess I’ll just have to hit you with something bigger.

I got to meet someone this weekend who grew up like me. She was intensely abused and ostracized as a child and then found the same Leather community. I know all of the people she was mentored by. I don’t know how in the hell I have missed her.

I really want to write more about sex but I should go in.

Sex and consent

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

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

We need another word.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any thoughts?

Parenting, anxiety and me!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s nice, dear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You are good. You are smart. You are kind.

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Noah agreed to be married to me for better or worse. I think he might actually mean it. I think that even though I’ve been miserable and mean and sick for almost five years he shows a remarkable resiliency in cheer. All I have to do is have sex with him and he’s suddenly good to go again. It’s kind of weird. I don’t have quite the same system. I need so much support in so many areas and I am deeply ashamed of that need. I feel like my need is a sign that I am pathetic and lazy. I feel like I am a failure because I cannot completely do every thing in my life by myself. I’m a stay at home mom. I don’t have a job. All I have to do is keep the house clean, the kids fed and clothed, and at this stage… play with them. It’s not exactly hard. Right?

It’s really fucking hard because it takes so much patience. I am not a very patient person. I am a very demanding and exacting person. I don’t like delays at all. I spend most of my days wanting to bash my head through a wall as a pressure relief. Instead I take a deep breath, count down from ten silently, then I try to smile and say, “Let’s try again.” That’s my fucking job.

I have always been very clear about the fact hat I behave differently “at work” than I do “in my life”. In my life I do a lot of things I have to hide from my work. When I was teaching I was not particularly “out” about talking about my queerness or sexual history. I didn’t talk about going to raves and doing drugs on the weekends–although I did. I think that being in the closet about those things was wise. It meant that when kids started talking about things I understood the language but I wasn’t their “buddy” because I wasn’t an obvious peer. I’m not sure I am phrasing this right–I need to make my mistakes past-tense. I can’t talk about them while I’m doing them because then I get muddled up and unable to be honest about my mistakes. I know that I am doing stupid shit but I can’t admit it yet because I want to keep doing it for a while. I didn’t need to tell students I did that.

Noah came in to talk to me so whatever train of thought I had was gone. As Calli likes to say, “Whoops!” She also spreads her arms and yells, “Ta da!” I can’t wait until she can really talk. End sidebar.

And a new day dawns. I still don’t know exactly where I was going with that train of thought. I’m going to keep going instead of hitting post because I don’t get comments anyway. So what if things are long and complicated. I’m apparently just writing for me. And Noah. He talks to me about my writing. That feels like a manipulative ploy but I don’t mean it to be. People talk to me about my writing when I can get them in person. I’m not subtle in asking for feedback. I really like finding out what my writing makes people think about.

My wonderful complication was over for dinner recently and she told me that she thinks about me. It was said in the context of, “I’m glad it is ok that we don’t IM very frequently because you just know I think of you.” No, actually I didn’t know that you think about me. Wait. You think about me? Oh shit. What do you think?! When I get to that point I am trying to learn to reference something I got from Ashley Judd “ I hold that it is none of my business what people think of me.”

That’s hard for me to wrap my head around.

I was taught that it is my responsibility to influence and control what other people think of me. I should be careful what I reveal. I should tell different people different stories so that I evoke the right reactions from people. It’s a lot of why I do large information dumps on people and then run away. I believe in the core of my being that I am “doing it wrong” and I am bad for what I am doing. It is bad for me to be rude and inflict my inner stupidity on other people. No one wants to hear about how pathetic I am. No one wants to read the same whiny bullshit year after year. Grow the fuck up already. Stop being sad. But I can’t. I can’t stop. I wish I could stop. I don’t know how to stop being sad. I am sad. I just am. And while I am sad I have to make believe that I am happy and cheerful and that we live in basically a good world. That’s my job.

I need to have some place where I can say over and over again that I was hurt very badly and it still hurts. I would give anything to make this pain go away. I would give anything if I no longer needed to sit in a room by myself and cry every single day because I am so fucking sad. I cry and cry until I am dehydrated. I drink nearly a gallon of water a day. I shouldn’t be able to get dehydrated. But that pee doesn’t lie. (See, there I go with the tmi.)

It hurts. I miss my mom. I’m horrified every day because I look at Shanna and I think, “I was out having oral sex with multiple children already.” My mother didn’t keep me safe. I look at Shanna and wonder what I would be like if I had been allowed to be innocent. What would I want in life? How would I feel about the world? How would I be different? And it bothers me. It bothers me all the time.

I feel like I am a dirty, bad, mean piece of shit. I’m really glad that other people tell me, often, that they do not have that experience of me. I feel pathetic and stupid for needing to be told that. I’m told that you have to say ten nice things to balance out every bad statement to a person. That’s kind of the way it affects your sense of self.

I spent my whole childhood being told I was stupid and bad and a whore and little bitch and worthless. I’m thirty years old and I still sit alone in a room and cry about it. Because it still lives in me. I was told those things so many times that I agreed. I thought they were true. If fucking everyone tells you the same story how can you believe anything else? If it walks like a duck and it sounds like a duck and it swims like a duck? It’s probably a duck–right? If one person tells me to buy horse shoes I’m going to look at him funny. If two people tell me to buy horse shoes I’m going to think about it. If three people tell me to buy horse shoes I am going to get moving towards the store; I probably need them, right?

I spent my whole childhood being told I was stupid and bad and a whore and little bitch and worthless.

It still hurts. I’m not a fan of that old saying, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” I have healed from every broken bone I have had. My arms work fine. My hand works fine. I have been hit with sticks. I have been hit with stones. Those things heal. I can forget that kind of pain. It isn’t important. I believe I am a worthless piece of shit. I believe I am dirty and bad.

Noah gave me shampoo and conditioner for Christmas. This is kind of funny because I haven’t used such products in years. Since my hair is hella short I’ve been using them because it really doesn’t matter if my hair frizzes. I’m discovering something I had forgotten when I switched to baking soda and vinegar. It doesn’t matter how many times I “soap” my hair it always feels dirty to me. Dirty in that way that indicates “not washed”. I feel like there is no way to get the dirt and the bad off of me. It is a physical feeling. I remember my mother complaining about my hair. The only way my mother liked my hair was about an inch long so that she could ignore taking care of it. She was very resistant to me having long hair even though she complimented me on how I looked far more when I had long hair. Hair has such a weird place in my life. My mother was always thrilled when I wanted to play with her hair. Sissy loved to have her hair brushed. I don’t like having other people care for my hair because no one ever wants to be gentle enough. It hurts when other people touch my hair. My mom and sister liked it when I did their hair because I was more gentle than them. I was taught to touch my head and hair roughly. To treat it like something gross. Because I am dirty. When I switched to baking soda and vinegar I had a feeling of at peace with the feeling of my hair. It didn’t feel “clean” but it did feel soft. It’s interesting to use shampoo and conditioner again. My hair feels rough and dirty again. Specifically dirty. And I think it is making my dandruff worse. See, more tmi.

I feel stupid because I want to talk about how bad I feel about being an animal and having hair and being dirty. I need to talk about this because I don’t want to teach my daughter to feel this way. My brother is a stupid moron because he thinks the way to break behavior patterns is to not talk about them and pray they go away. Yeah. That doesn’t work. Not talking about things creates a festering wound because GUESS WHAT?! It is still a wound. It still hurts. Just not talking about it isn’t working.

I have to work very hard every day to decide what I want to teach my children because what I was taught was that I am bad, dirty, worthless, useless, and a whore. I know that I must be something else. I must be other than just what I was taught to be. Somehow I did that. How did I do it? Where did I do it? What should I do instead? I don’t know what to do. You can’t deal with a problematic behavior by just “not doing ‘x'” you have to replace ‘x’ with something. You have to have some idea of what you are moving towards. I don’t know. I don’t have very many good examples.

I don’t get to watch other parents very often. When I do I spend most of the time thinking, “Oh they do ________ better than me.” Of course this means that I offer criticisms. Because I’m like that. I expect that they are judging me so I start first. Just to get this going. I guess. I need to hear peoples criticisms of me. I suppose this is why I am asking people for feedback in person. I don’t need to hear the random criticism of people on the internet who don’t know me or what I actually do. When you only know me through my writing you are hearing a very random sampling of things from my brain. It’s a poor example of my life. That’s the joy of mental illness. I can be totally fucked up in my head but life just keeps plugging right along. I’m doing my best to be functional at my job and how that works is going to change over time. I’m trying to figure out the right way to act. I’m trying to figure out my idea of the best mother for my kids. It’s not exactly like me. I’m having a very hard time figuring out how it will interact with my sex life. We have a lock on our bedroom door.

I feel disgusting for needing sex. I am developing more of a complex as time goes by. Noah is, understandably, not thrilled. This is going to be hard to work through. For some strange reason he seems to be willing to go through this with me. I ask so much of him. Far more than I should ask. I know that it isn’t ok to need as much support as I need. That doesn’t change the fact that I need it. And he is willing to give it. He says. We’ll see. I’m so scared. I hurt so much. I need so much. I know I’m not supposed to talk about it. No. That’s not true. I’m supposed to talk about it one hour a week in a therapists office and then be all better. Right?

I hurt so much. I cry so much. I am so fucking sad. But my personal time is long over. Really I’m being kind of an asshole to Noah right now. I need to cry though. I have to. I can’t not cry today. And I don’t like doing it in front of the kids more than necessary. They will see enough sadness from me this lifetime.

Attachment and set patterns

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I’ve been slowly working my way through the Wikipedia article on Attachment Theory for about a week. It’s a beast. It makes me sad for some very specific reasons. I’ll start at the beginning. Attachment theory mostly focuses on what happens during the infant/toddler stage. Babies require stable care givers who respond promptly.

“The set-goal of the attachment behavioural system is to maintain a bond with an accessible and available attachment figure.[16] “Alarm” is the term used for activation of the attachment behavioural system caused by fear of danger. “Anxiety” is the anticipation or fear of being cut off from the attachment figure. If the figure is unavailable or unresponsive, separation distress occurs.[17] In infants, physical separation can cause anxiety and anger, followed by sadness and despair. By age three or four, physical separation is no longer such a threat to the child’s bond with the attachment figure. Threats to security in older children and adults arise from prolonged absence, breakdowns in communication, emotional unavailability or signs of rejection or abandonment.[16]“

We went to our local breakfast place on Easter, partially just to see the waitress. We like her a lot. This time she had an excited story to tell. Her daughter, seven years into a relationship, suddenly called her mom out of the blue and announced she was getting married and would mom like to help with stuff? Obviously this made our waitress’ year. She was so happy. She got to buy her daughter a dress and get her a bouquet and take pictures. I spent the rest of breakfast crying. I’m very glad she got to have that experience. There are a lot of reasons why Noah and I got married in a room with a drive-in-style preacher and no one else. There isn’t a picture of us. We had a wedding pint of Häagen-Dazs. I ask Noah fairly often if he ever feels weird about how alienated he is from his family. He doesn’t have much more of a relationship with his family than I do but he doesn’t have any specific reasons like I do. He just didn’t bond there. It’s weird to me. For me to maintain relationships with my mother or sister would involve me choosing not to see huge problematic behaviors. Noah has a different situation. I don’t really understand it.

My parents divorced when I was three. Supposedly up to that point I should have had a reasonably secure attachment. My mother was a stay at home mom. She breastfed me for more than six months (only partially–I always had bottles too). I believe that she coslept with me early on and moved me to my own bed fairly late by societal standards. She’s a light sleeper and always has been. I can’t imagine her ignoring my needs.

As Ann said, “You were clean, well fed, and well dressed. What was there to report?” But my mom ignored the fact that my father was molesting me. If you go further into the Wikipedia article you find:

“The most concerning pattern is disorganized attachment. About 80% of maltreated infants are likely to be classified as disorganized, as opposed to about 12% found in non-maltreated samples. Only about 15% of maltreated infants are likely to be classified as secure. Children with a disorganized pattern in infancy tend to show markedly disturbed patterns of relationships. Subsequently their relationships with peers can often be characterised by a “fight or flight” pattern of alternate aggression and withdrawal. Affected maltreated children are also more likely to become maltreating parents. A minority of maltreated children do not, instead achieving secure attachments, good relationships with peers and non-abusive parenting styles.[9] The link between insecure attachment, particularly the disorganized classification, and the emergence of childhood psychopathology is well-established, although it is a non-specific risk factor for future problems, not a pathology or a direct cause of pathology in itself.[40] “

The specific behaviors in a very young child that indicate disorganized attachment:

“Stereotypies on return such as freezing or rocking. Lack of coherent attachment strategy shown by contradictory, disoriented behaviours such as approaching but with the back turned.”

I’m not sure why it uses the word “stereotypies” but whatever. I can remember rocking; I still do it when I am very upset. And I have always frozen upon return of the person I am most attached to. I hold back. I am terrified of touching them. I need to be approached. Noah comes into the house and comes to me for a hug and a kiss. It’s nice. I know that my mother talked about these kinds of behaviors when I was small. Yes, one shouldn’t self-diagnose. Whatever.

“Over the short term, the stability of attachment classifications is high, but becomes less so over the long term.[9] It appears that stability of classification is linked to stability in caregiving conditions. Social stressors or negative life events—such as illness, death, abuse or divorce—are associated with instability of attachment patterns from infancy to early adulthood, particularly from secure to insecure.[46] Conversely, these difficulties sometimes reflect particular upheavals in people’s lives, which may change. Sometimes, parents’ responses change as the child develops, changing classification from insecure to secure. Fundamental changes can and do take place after the critical early period.[47] Physically abused and neglected children are less likely to develop secure attachments, and their insecure classifications tend to persist through the pre-school years. Neglect alone is associated with insecure attachment organisations, and rates of disorganized attachment are markedly elevated in maltreated infants.[40]
This situation is complicated by difficulties in assessing attachment classification in older age groups. The Strange Situation procedure is for ages 12 to 18 months only;[9] adapted versions exist for pre-school children.[48]“

Since I’m an adult none of this is exactly relevant and I’m just pulling things out of my ass. Awesome.

“Significance of attachment patterns

There is an extensive body of research demonstrating a significant association between attachment organisations and children’s functioning across multiple domains.[40] Early insecure attachment does not necessarily predict difficulties, but it is a liability for the child, particularly if similar parental behaviours continue throughout childhood.[47] Compared to that of securely attached children, the adjustment of insecure children in many spheres of life is not as soundly based, putting their future relationships in jeopardy. Although the link is not fully established by research and there are other influences besides attachment, secure infants are more likely to become socially competent than their insecure peers. Relationships formed with peers influence the acquisition of social skills, intellectual development and the formation of social identity. Classification of children’s peer status (popular, neglected or rejected) has been found to predict subsequent adjustment.[9] Insecure children, particularly avoidant children, are especially vulnerable to family risk. Their social and behavioural problems increase or decline with deterioration or improvement in parenting. However, an early secure attachment appears to have a lasting protective function.[51] As with attachment to parental figures, subsequent experiences may alter the course of development.[9]…

One explanation for the effects of early attachment classifications may lie in the internal working model mechanism. Internal models are not just “pictures” but refer to the feelings aroused. They enable a person to anticipate and interpret another’s behaviour and plan a response. If an infant experiences their caregiver as a source of security and support, they are more likely to develop a positive self-image and expect positive reactions from others. Conversely, a child from an abusive relationship with the caregiver may internalise a negative self-image and generalise negative expectations into other relationships. The internal working models on which attachment behaviour is based show a degree of continuity and stability. Children are likely to fall into the same categories as their primary caregivers indicating that the caregivers’ internal working models affect the way they relate to their child. This effect has been observed to continue across three generations. Bowlby believed that the earliest models formed were the most likely to persist because they existed in the subconscious. Such models are not, however, impervious to change given further relationship experiences; a minority of children have different attachment classifications with different caregivers.[9]
There is some evidence that gender differences in attachment patterns of adaptive significance begin to emerge in middle childhood. Insecure attachment and early psychosocial stress indicate the presence of environmental risk (for example poverty, mental illness, instability, minority status, violence). This can tend to favour the development of strategies for earlier reproduction. However, different patterns have different adaptive values for males and females. Insecure males tend to adopt avoidant strategies, whereas insecure females tend to adopt anxious/ambivalent strategies, unless they are in a very high risk environment. Adrenarche is proposed as the endocrine mechanism underlying the reorganisation of insecure attachment in middle childhood.[46]“

I describe myself as being “bad at monogamy” not polyamorous. (Not anymore! Just monogamous.) I am not all that familiar with the music of Amy Winehouse (and I didn’t hear about her until well after her death) but I have had people push a few songs at me recently. In particular: You Know I’m No Good just seems relevant to me. When I try to talk about “what kind of girl I am” that’s a lot of what I am talking about: That. She is compulsive sexually and very self-harming. Crying on the kitchen floor because you feel disgusted with yourself for your behavior, check. Sex you don’t even really enjoy, check. But you owe these men. They understand you. If you don’t put out then you are being part of The Embargo and you are bad. It’s just my place in life. He wanted to get off. What was I supposed to do other than get him off? (This is when I wish I had a guest post by Noah explaining the Embargo for me. I would link to it even though I think being self-referential is kind of hilarious.)

Back to this Attachment Theory stuff. Being sexually assaulted by one of my primary caregivers from toddlerhood (or earlier, who knows) means that I was pretty primed for not-perfect-attachment. And things in my household were far more chaotic than they appeared to the neighbors because my father was a raging alcoholic and drug addict. I think it is reasonable to assume that I am on the problematic end of things. I don’t think I have Reactive Attachment Disorder even though it is uncomfortable to read.

I had so much repeated sexual contact with neighbors over the years because I went out looking for some attention and affection anywhere I could get it. It wasn’t safe for me to ask for affection or attention at home. My sister has issues with being touched like I do. If I approached her at the wrong time I would end up in a lot of pain. It would always be phrased as my fault or an accident. I wasn’t supposed to say out loud, “You hurt me on purpose” because then she would actually slap me to “show me the difference.”

My mother was always preoccupied. Always thinking about other things, other people. I’m sure Shanna feels that way about me. I make up for it by spending many hours a day focusing on the kids. I only let my thoughts wander at pre-selected times. It’s hard to control. Back to the Attachment Theory stuff. It has only been applied to adults in terms of their romantic relationships. The basics of adult styles are:

“Securely attached adults tend to have positive views of themselves, their partners and their relationships. They feel comfortable with intimacy and independence, balancing the two. Anxious-preoccupied adults seek high levels of intimacy, approval and responsiveness from partners, becoming overly dependent. They tend to be less trusting, have less positive views about themselves and their partners, and may exhibit high levels of emotional expressiveness, worry and impulsiveness in their relationships. Dismissive-avoidant adults desire a high level of independence, often appearing to avoid attachment altogether. They view themselves as self-sufficient, invulnerable to attachment feelings and not needing close relationships. They tend to suppress their feelings, dealing with rejection by distancing themselves from partners of whom they often have a poor opinion. Fearful-avoidant adults have mixed feelings about close relationships, both desiring and feeling uncomfortable with emotional closeness. They tend to mistrust their partners and view themselves as unworthy. Like dismissive-avoidant adults, fearful-avoidant adults tend to seek less intimacy, suppressing their feelings.[7][52][53][54]“

I really like to date dismissive-avoidant men. (love) I kind of go back and forth between being anxious-preoccupied and and fearful-avoidant. Which means this isn’t something I can self-diagnose well. Regardless of which of them it’s pretty clear I’m not secure if you know what I mean. There is hope though.

“Some authors have suggested that adults do not hold a single set of working models. Instead, on one level they have a set of rules and assumptions about attachment relationships in general. On another level they hold information about specific relationships or relationship events. Information at different levels need not be consistent. Individuals can therefore hold different internal working models for different relationships.[56][57]“

So even though I am pretty clearly fucked up I could probably, with enough time and effort, learn how to have a secure relationship with Noah. He keeps assuring me that as long as something has the possibility of success, even if it is a low possibility, keep trying. I don’t understand why he picked me. I make it as hard as possible to have a relationship with me. I ask him to do very hard things all the time.

A friend told me a cool analogy: trust is like water dripping into a bucket. When there isn’t much water in the bucket it is hard to spill water out if the bucket tips a little. If the bucket is full it is easy to dump water out.

Every so often Noah and I tip the bucket. I want to say more. But it’s time to go in.

Grief ritual

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I was surprised by how much crying I ended up doing for my family. It was different than I expected. I thought I was just here to mourn how shitty I was treated. Instead I cried and cried and cried for whatever happened to my different family members to cause them to become the kind of people who related to me the way they did. I cried for generations of women who were beaten and raped and told they had no alternative. They were to be seen and not heard.

I cried because my father must have felt a great deal of pain otherwise he wouldn’t have hurt so many people.  I had all these thoughts about his parents, whom I never knew.  What did they do to him as a child?  How did he come to believe that female family members were fair game for raping?  What I was told this weekend is each person has to deal with his/her family’s grief going back seven generations and what you incur in this life is going to be passed on for another seven generations.  Nieces/nephews count as the next generation.  Even if you don’t have children your karma can still be sent on for many many years.

I cried because my sister is so buried under her grief that she turned around and hurt her children.
Anger is healing and inspirational but if you don’t do something with the strength it gives you then you risk burning up in the flames.  Today I found a place in my heart for forgiveness for Denise.  I didn’t know I could do that.  It took me emotionally hitting a place where I realized just how young she was when she had different experiences.

According to the Burkina Faso traditions when someone in your life dies they hand you their spirit and life so that you can accomplish more.  They had you, essentially, a golden ticket.  Suicides are viewed as a very powerful way to grant someone else your spirit (my understanding is) because the person escaped great torment and brought that with them.  They learned a lot in the process and once they are on the other side of death they can help you better.

My maternal grandmother committed suicide when my mother was pregnant with me.  My paternal grandmother (whom I am named after) died a year or two before my mother had me.  My paternal grandfather died days before my brother Tommy was born.  If Orlando gave Tommy his spirit, maybe that is part of why Tommy was so fucked up.  My maternal grandfather died right before I saw my father for the last time at Jimmy’s wedding.  Right before I told my mother that she had to take my father back to court in order to get him to stop touching me.

When I was pregnant with Shanna I lost both my adopted step-mom and my beloved therapist to heroin overdoses.  Two of the women who were among my strongest bulwarks against the dark.  They both suffered terribly from their internal wounds.  They were not strong enough to fight back their demons.

Unsurprisingly I arrived at a place of deep anger.  I raged and screamed and started beating my fists on the floor.  The wonderful facilitator had someone put a thick cushion in front of me.  I would have cheerfully broken my hands to pieces and enjoyed the pain manifestation.  Later in the day I told her, “I have a habit of beating my hands and head against concrete floors.  I really appreciate that you put a pillow in front of me.”

Apparently the concept of “personal problems” simply doesn’t exist there.  All problems are problems of the community because if the community was functioning appropriately the problems wouldn’t exist.  That made me ache with loneliness for someone who would give a shit about me enough to want to actually help me with my problems.  Not just one person at a time.  I wish all of Lakeside School would gather to hold me in their arms and let me sob out my grief.  I wish they had stepped in and helped me instead of saying that people like me don’t exist.

It was interesting to think through the level of responsibility I bear for my niece and nephew being sexually assaulted.  My brother thinks it is enough for our generation to shut up and not talk about the incest.  He thinks that will solve everything.  Thus our grief has already passed on to the next generation.  We did not take responsibility for speaking the truth about our family.  Silence is consent.  If my understanding of the situation is correct I was twenty-one when my sister assaulted her children and taught them how to give one another oral sex.  I was living with Tom.  I had almost no contact with my family because I was not ready to have boundaries with them.  I never stepped in on behalf of the kids.  I didn’t tell my story to a CPS agent and get a case opened on my sister early enough.  There were already many HUGE issues at the time that would have been enough to open a case.  Maybe if Denise was being watched more closely it never would have happened.

I don’t know.  I will never know.

This is where the twelve step programs tell me to trust God.  Well fuck God.  No.  I need to let go of responsibility for my family.  I can’t save them.  I don’t have enough of me to give to fill their malicious black hole of need and pain.  They have to find a way out of that on their own.  If they come find me I don’t know what I will do.  I know one thing I will avoid doing: letting them develop a relationship with my kids.  My family doesn’t get to know my kids until my kids are adults.  If they want to go meet my family then I will drive them over.  I probably won’t get out of the car… but I’ll drive.

I grieved for my mother.  I thought about the smell of her and the comfort of her body against mine as we slept together.  I thought about how very much I love my mother.  I idealize my mother.  It always felt like she was so talented and wonderful and beautiful.  I will never compare favorably to my mother.  Only at the same time I think she was a weak monster.  I think she was shaped by ignorance and pain.  You don’t know what you don’t know, right?  I don’t think I can remain angry with my mother much longer.  I need to treat her as already dead.  I need to move forward in my heart to a place where I no longer desire vengeance.  She is my mother.  She carried me in her body.  She nursed me.  When I think of what my daughters mean to me I know that my mother is already in enough pain.  She has lost three of her children, two to desertion.  I’m sure she has already had enough pain this lifetime.

I feel so very sad for my mother.  She was abused and abandoned over and over.  Her father was a nightmare and he loathed her for the divorce.  Vernon treated my mother like a cockroach because she had committed the sin of leaving her husband.  Who cares what he does to the kids, right?  My mother was feisty and mouthy; her Mennonite family thought she should be taken down a few pegs!  See how it starts?  My mother used to come home from school as a child and have to clean up from her mother attempting suicide.  Again.  My grandparents fostered and my mother was never allowed to have any special toys because it “just wouldn’t be fair” to the transient kids.  My mother was never given a Christmas stocking until I was sixteen and I did it.

And I abandoned her too.  Even though I was supposed to be her comfort.  Even though I was the good and affectionate child.  I was so fucking devoted to my mother.  I can’t allow her to teach my children that they are small and bad and dirty and they deserve to be tortured.  I just can’t.  I was given a sacred trust by the God I don’t believe in to guard these people.  My only job is to raise them in safety and love. I’m not about to fuck up my job.  Not even for someone I have loved more than life.

I think the oddest part of today was the random older woman who came to join us.  She likes to just sit in on these rituals.  She was probably in her seventies with broken, missing, and severely discolored teeth.  Her hair was a mixture of grey and white and tied into a braid that went down past her waist.  She had these interestingly bright blue eyes.  She mostly looked like she was in a stupor, honestly.  But if you sat down next to her and looked at her with respect she came alive.

I don’t want to give her name because that seems like a violation.  We talked about anger.  She looked at me and she said, “Oh you are vibrating with anger.”  It was less obvious than usual, in my opinion, so it was both startling and not.  I felt calm and like I was in a decent mood.  Given how much time I do spend vibrating with anger I just said, “Yes.”  I can’t possibly remember the exact wording, today has been intense and full of new impressions, but she looked at me hard and didn’t ask any questions.  She volunteered these…I don’t want to say fortune cookie comments.  It’s kind of like reading the Horoscope.  Any of them can fit, right?  Only it wasn’t really that.  It felt more like she was getting something from me.  God I feel stupid talking about this woo woo shit.  She asked me if I was selected for suffering every time.  It’s not unreasonable for me to feel like that.  It’s not true any more, but it was.  She told me very clearly that I escaped because of my anger but now I have to be careful.  She said that there are two emotional experiences that come up completely unprompted: anger and laughter.  She said that I have gotten what I needed from the anger and now I need to laugh.

I cried.  I cried and screamed and ranted about how much I fucking hate them and I am glad they are dead.  I told him that if he wasn’t dead I would kill him myself.  I beat the floor until my arm muscles spasmed too hard for me to lift them.  I beat my head against the floor until I could no longer lift it from the pillow.  I lay there and cried and cried and cried for hours lying on my side because I could no longer hold my neck up because I was in so much pain.  People took turns sitting with me to share my grief.  Mostly I could not allow them to touch me.  There were a few specific women who felt safe.  Two.  I let them hug me.

I feel humiliated admitting that in this room full of people having this emotionally bonding experience I could let two of them (three including the instructor) touch me.  I feel like this distance that I keep is part of my problem.  I feel so deeply unable to allow people to love me.  I don’t know how.  That is not a skill I possess.

I understood more about my mother today.  I understand her scars and wounds in ways I didn’t before.  I love my mother so much.  I understand her frustrations and anger and thinly veiled violence.  I understand why she was so frantic when I misbehaved where anyone could see.  She told me constantly that people would judge her by my behavior so I had to not fuck up.  I understand now why she reacted the way she did to my unpredictability.  Now I have children.  Now I can think about her father and what kind of man he was.  Now I can think about Aunt Vonnie’s dark references to terrible beatings.

Sobonfu’s tradition believes that diabetes exists in the body because of an inability to truly accept love.  Vernon, my mom’s father, is the oldest example of that in my family I know.  And I know he treated his daughters like shit.  He never wanted their love; he wanted their silence and obedience.  Sound familiar? I was actually rarely hit as a child and my mother took flack from fucking everyone over that.  The whole family was ready to line up and beat me with sticks.  I have never been popular.  My mother defended me.  My mother defended me in so many ways.  She saw me as being like her.  We were both the youngest girl in families of four.  We were both raised very separately from our siblings.  We both felt like the black sheep.

This life business is complicated.  I’m starting to understand how compassion is part of this story for me.  I can have compassion for my mother and her suffering and still refrain from contact because my children deserve a childhood safe from people who are likely to tell them things they shouldn’t be told.  My mother likes to blame people for things that aren’t their fault.  My children will not learn shaming from their family.  They’ll have to figure that out somewhere else.

Part of my ancestral grief is our constant desire to have shit roll down hill.  We always pass the blame for our emotions.  I wouldn’t feel this way if you hadn’t made me.  This is why I cannot be angry with Calli for throwing my wallet out of the wagon.  She is a baby.  She is not responsible.  I should have bloody well put my wallet somewhere secure.  When Shanna is doing stuff that drives me nuts I have to ask her why she is doing something before I react.  9/10 times she has a reason that is totally fucking logical from her world view.  Her world view and mine have only occasional overlaps, mostly things like “ice cream is good” though we strongly disagree on how often we should eat it.

I don’t want to teach my children that they are to blame for my rage.  They aren’t.  I have a whole god damn book about why I feel so much rage.  I have no ability in any way to blame my emotional reactions on them.  That’s kind of annoying, actually.  In my family I was the scapegoat.  I wonder who is getting it now?  Someone is at the bottom, I promise you.

And I spent a long time today thinking about everything I know about my ancestors.  I can see why my family culminated in the horror that was my life.  I can have compassion for all of our respective victim-hoods.  I would kind of like to stop being a victim and they don’t even know enough to understand that it is an option.  That’s quite sad.  Today I thought hard about the fact that my sister wouldn’t do the things she does if she was in less pain.  She was harshly rejected by two fathers.  Her birth father rejected her before birth and then again in her thirties.  He didn’t want to know her despite the fact that she did 100% of the effort to have a relationship.  I pity her.

If the book pays off the editor I’m going to use that personal money to go to another grief ritual.  I have many more layers.  But I feel like I can perceive the beginnings of a path.  I think I am going to find somewhere to put an altar in my house.

It’s time to wash this grief off and go to bed.  I need to scrub my entire body with salt first.

Stop bitching.

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It occurs to me that I mean something specific when I say: stop bitching.  I think other people may mean different things.  It’s time to define terms.  In this post I talk about why people should compare abuse.  I need to elaborate more, I’m good with that.

I do not mean that people should suck it up and continue to be abused because things aren’t that bad.  Ever.  Never ever ever.  I mean that people should stop bitching and start acting.  Bitching, to me, is complaining about the same situation year after year without any effort to change things.  This is one of those areas where I’m not popular in Domestic Violence conversations.  Because people tell me at great length how hard it is to leave.  I may not be the best person to talk to.  There are other people who can be more sympathetic to that point of view.  I don’t want to stomp on people.  I’ve had strong experiences that color my voice.  If you at any point feel like I am telling you that you deserve what you are getting or that you should stay please know that it is your own insecurity.  I don’t think that.

But I do think you need to get the fuck out.  I think that planning is awesome.  To me there is a difference between bitching and complaining.  I complain a lot, I have no problem with complaining.  Complaining changes over time.  You aren’t still talking about the exact same behavior situation ten years later.  If you have been married to an abusive asshole for twenty years and you say the same things about his behavior over and over then you are bitching.  Change something.  If you don’t want to leave, put your fucking foot down.  The person you are in a relationship with has no impetus to change unless you force the issue.  They will not magically become nice some day out of the kindness of their heart.  If he’s verbally abusive and you are tired of hearing it start wearing ear plugs.  Seriously.

If you notice that you are saying the exact same complaints as you did five years ago it’s time to change things.  Seriously.  Take responsibility for your life.  It’s yours to live.  No one else.  If you are unhappy with your life what do you want it to be like?  I don’t mean lottery fantasies, though I have them.  I mean what are small sustainable steps you can take?  Where do you want to be in five years?

I think that lack of forward planning is part of the reason people get stuck.  They never get into the nitty gritty of what it would take to change their life.  It is hard.  Very hard.  Life is hard sometimes.  Harder for some than for others always.

I do not think that people should take abuse and shut up.  I think they should stop taking abuse.  If you choose to stay in an abusive relationship, that’s a choice.  Own it.  Figure out what you can do to make the situation work for you.  Find a way to come to peace with your choices and stop bitching.

Get involved with your community.  That is the most important piece for abuse victims, in my opinion.  If you know you are never going to leave your abusive piece of shit husband even though you should… go find something to do with your time.  Find a volunteer project.  Get out of your house and away from that man and find something to do that you can feel good about.

I walk around my neighborhood with trash bags cleaning up.  It’s a random thing.  It’s rare that people notice.  But it’s important to me.  It’s something that I am concretely doing that makes the world a better place.  I can go do it today.  I need no help from anyone else.  I don’t have to organize or commit.  But at the end I have this little feeling of goodness.  I know who and what I am.  No one can take it away from me.  I am a caring person.  I do things that are invisible to other people and I keep a tally in my head.  Ok fine, other people may not appreciate it.  I do.  It’s part of the bulwark of my self-esteem.

If you want to be able to talk about your shitty husband, at least change the complaints.  You need to grow and change as a person.  You can choose how you feel about situations.  You can develop internal bulwarks against abuse.  You can know in the pit of your stomach who and what you are without changing any part of your life.  This will also lead to a cessation of bitching.  Think very hard about what you actually do with your behavior.  Make lists.  Decide for yourself what kind of person you are.

If you are told you are worthless, go pick up garbage in your neighborhood.  It’s a thankless job.  No one will notice.  But you know that you aren’t worthless.  It’s a task that needs to be done and you did it.  You didn’t pass the buck until someone else was paid for it.  You provided effort into the universe.  You can go home and smile a little smile of joy to yourself.  Don’t tell people you did it.  They tend to look at you funny and ask why you bothered.  You know who you are.  No one can take who you are away from you without your permission.

Build yourself up.  Find a way to create an internal life that gives you freedom.  I don’t mean escapism.  I don’t mean drugs.  I don’t mean reading popcorn books.  I mean find a way to know that you are putting good energy out into the universe.  Do something that you feel proud of.  It will change how you talk about yourself and your life.  You will stop bitching.  You will stop bitching because you will feel less bitter.

I complain a lot.  It’s a bad habit.  I write similar stories about my family year after year.  Of course I try to justify myself a lot.  People are like that.  I am trying very hard to get to the place where I am not bitching about my family any more.  I talk about them.  I explore my feelings, but I’m not bitching because I have changed my perspective and how I talk about them and even what I say substantially.

I think people should talk about their abuse situations extensively.  I think they should examine their own experience as many times as they need to move on.  Moving on means changing your life and going and doing something else.  It means stopping the abuse.  Somehow.  I don’t feel like I’m a great person to give advice on how to stop abuse.  I have followed the scorched earth policy.  It’s not required in most cases. I don’t really know exactly what other people should do.  That’s not my story.

Noah told me once that if you couldn’t look back on yourself 18 months ago and say, “Man I sucked” you aren’t working hard enough.  That pretty much summarizes my approach to life.  In no way shape or form do I think people should shut up and take abuse.  People are too important for that.

mopey

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I wrote a lot on the book today.  So I’m kind of anxious and fussed.  I went over to Pinterest.  I like not having to read.  But the wedding ones get me.  Mostly the pictures of the happy brides with their fathers.  Why do I have to compulsively talk about being an incest survivor?  Because it impacts every part of my life.  This isn’t something that happened to me one time.  I have not lost the rest of my life because I was raped when I was seven or eight or nine or or or or.

I hide in my house because my father filled my head with poison.  He convinced me that I was a worthless piece of shit.  He convinced me that I should present myself to people as someone who should be raped.  That it was my destiny.  That is what my parent told me to be.  My father wanted me to grow up to be a whore.

You want to know why I don’t follow polite social rules?  Oh good fucking grief.  When in the hell was I going to learn them?  In one of the series of schools where I was brutally beaten because I compulsively talked about sex and made everyone uncomfortable?  Or I was cussing.  Or my handwriting sucked.  There were a lot of reasons for beating me.  At home?  With the rednecks?  My ignorant family?  From my father?  Ha.

I think it is hilarious that people think that American culture is apparent and obvious and easy to follow.  I don’t know what the fuck you people want.  Other than to not be uncomfortable.  Well then don’t talk to me.  I may or may not be able to accommodate you.  I would apologize only I’m not sorry.  I don’t think it is my responsibility to ensure that everyone is comfortable.  My responsibility is to say what I need to say in order to get through the day.  If I don’t say what I need to say then I get bitter and nasty and carping and desperate.  I start breaking things.  I start cutting.  I start doing all kinds of other festive things.

I’m sorry motherfucker but you get to feel uncomfortable for a few minutes.  It’s your fucking turn.

broken

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The last two days have been writing about my life up till the age of four.  I don’t like thinking about my family.  I don’t like thinking about how I was treated.  It’s weird to talk about systematic abuse.  Why did I believe that everything bad in the world was my fault?  Partially because little kids are dumb.  Mostly because I was actively told it was.  Over and over and over.  It was my fault things happened before I was born.

I don’t know how to shed this feeling of guilt.  This feeling that existing poisons the people around me.  Things with muse are a lot less smooth.  Welcome to crazy girl territory.  I feel like I should go home and lock myself in the garage for a few years.  Maybe Sarah can pass me food through the cat door.  I feel so dirty and polluted.  Like there is no redemption for someone like me.  Too much poison was put in me before I was even verbal.

I am just a hole.  I am nothing.  I have no worth.  No merit.  There is nothing in me worth acknowledging.  But I had better be willing to lie still and open my legs.  And shut up.  Just lie there.  Don’t move.  Because I am nothing.  Nothing.

I have had the Dixie Chicks song “Top of the World” on repeat for two days.  I can sing along with it in the background while I type and cry.  The last two days have been a lot of crying.  I feel like I won’t ever stop crying.  I feel like there is no end to this pain.  The pain of being absolutely worthless.

Why do I want to give away so much money?  I’m trying to find a way to do something in the world.  Something real that no one can take away from me.  Something I can point at and say: See!  I am not a dirty, worthless, bad kid.  I am good.  I do good.  I am good.

How do I teach my daughters to love themselves when I loathe myself with such intensity?  How do I teach anyone how to feel joy when I feel such despair?  I don’t know.  “Everyone is singing, we just want to be heard.  Disappearing every day without so much as a word, somehow.”  I feel like every day that I do not write, that I do not say what I believe to be true is a day that my family has effectively silenced me.  I feel like any time I do not stand up and scream at the top of my lungs that I am NOT FUCKING BAD, DAMNIT I am agreeing with them.  If I am not actively arguing I am agreeing.

I don’t know how to resolve that.  I don’t know how to just take up space and just be.  I have to aggressively take up my space and batter the people standing near me or I feel invisible.  There is no middle ground.  I am invisible and toxic or I am screaming and hostile.  I don’t want either extreme.  I want to feel like I am just ok.  That life is just ok.  That it is ok that things happened.  They are over.

Other than glimpses out my window when he was stalking me, I haven’t seen my father since I was 13.  17 years have gone by.  That’s most of my lifetime.  He’s been dead for 13 years, one month, and five days.  Not that I’m counting.

This hurts so much.  I wanted a daddy.  Why am I not allowed to have a daddy?  Why do I not get to have a mommy either?  The last time I saw my mother was when Uncle Bob died.  I don’t know if I will see her again.  “I wish I had showed you all the things I was on the inside.”  My family doesn’t know me.  Not really.  They know this construction of misery and pain.  It’s not me.

I am not this angry and bitter person.  But I am sad. I am so sad.  I am so sad for the little girl I was.  It was not my fault my father raped my sister.  It’s ok that I was born.  I did not cause my sister to be raped for three more years.  My father did that.  FYI: yesterday’s shirt makes a great hankie.  Squeamishness is for people who waste paper.

Sometimes I wonder why I am writing this down.  Why in the fuck does anyone need to know what a piece of shit my family thinks I am.  How is this making the world a better place?  Why do I need to write another 20,000 words about what a fucking piece of shit I am?  Why?  Technically another 24,000.  But that’s ok.  It’s only the 11th.

Speaking of which: thank you Veterans.  I was too chicken shit to do what you did even though I thought about it.

It’s interesting looking at the differing word counts for different years.  Some years I started and got 600 words in and just… ran out of things to say.  Some years I’ve produced 4,000 words in a day because there was so much to say.  This hurts a lot.  It hurts so much to look at all of this so fast and so hard.  I feel battered.  I feel weak.  I feel fragile.

I’m struggling right now.  I feel like I am beating the shit out of myself with how worthless my family thinks I am.  It’s so hard to be reminded over and over that my childhood was so miserable.  I feel like a ghost of a person.  I feel so thin I could blow away.

Why do I travel so much?  Because I’m running away from myself.  Why do I read so many books?  Because I want to be in anyone’s head but mine.  Why do I have sex with random people?  Because then I don’t have to deal with any of my emotional issues–I can keep them in a box.  When people start getting closer and they see the box I want to run.  I don’t want to even tell you how big this box is.

I don’t want you to know just how big of a box I need for my issues because I don’t want anyone to see how very small I am standing next to that box.  I am too much effort.  I’m not worth it.  Hell, Tom taught me that.  It’s not worth it to meet my needs.  The balance isn’t good enough.  I’m so glad I found Noah.  I didn’t know I was getting a knight in shining armor.  It was hard to notice through the tacky dry humping.

I have lived with Noah for five and a half years.  Longer than I have ever lived with another human being consecutively in my life.  Noah is my family.  It’s terrifying to even consider trusting someone beyond him.  It is so hard to trust him.  And he comes through so very very well.  I don’t deserve Noah, but I’m keeping him.

Soon I will have lived with my children significantly longer than my parents.  Shanna is 3.5.  That’s how old I was when my parents divorced.  When she turns four I will have lived with Shanna more than I lived with my father in my entire life.  And it won’t be much longer before I have lived with her longer than I lived with my mother in a stretch.  Calli will be my third longest live-in relationship.  Depending on how things go with Sarah, she will be the fourth.  That hurts a lot.  I’m 30.  This should not be my story.  This shouldn’t be anyones story.

But it’s mine.  And I can’t change it.  I can just tell it.

I need an off switch

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You know, if I change the song that is playing I get to change my mood.  It’s a handy trick.  Do you know why I’m willing… no… why I want to do the really scary painful things?

Noah is nicer to me than anyone has ever been.  He goes really far out of his way to make me happy.  I can’t believe how willing he is to go through a lot of effort for me.  I’m important to him.  He’s a complicated man.  When we do intense play I have to trust him.  I have to communicate about the physical limits of my body.  And I have to trust him.  The thing is there is a lot of gray area in between when it stops feeling good and when I actually can’t handle more pain.  I genuinely don’t understand why pushing someone to that place is erotic.  It doesn’t get me wet to top.

But oh man it turns Noah on.  I don’t have to understand why.  I don’t have to be able to feel the same feeling in my body to understand that it is important to him.  There is some part of him, something scary, that wants that.  I don’t think it is a need.  But he wants it.  He wants it a really lot.  He likes how I react.  When I’m in that kind of mood.  I don’t think he would enjoy how I would react today, so he isn’t going to hurt me today.

But when my body isn’t aching like this from going too far, sometimes I do want it.  There are brain chemicals attached to being hurt.  But I like being hurt a little.  Mostly Noah is happy to cater to that.  Mostly what I want is for someone to touch me fairly gently and tell me evil stories about hurting me far past what I can handle.  I like knowing that he wants to.  That he can.  That he has.  That he will.  But right now he’s being nice to me because he likes me a lot and he wants me to be a happy, healthy person and right now hurting me isn’t a good idea.

I like that he’s stared at me for a long time.  He hasn’t fucked up in a long time.  He reads my signals so well.  He knows what I want before I know.  All he has to do is grin at me and I want.  Maybe the problem is that when I go back through my roster I have the whole thought process over again about how they so aren’t Noah.  Maybe I need to stop reminding myself of why I stopped sleeping with these people in the first place.

I like the idea of poly.  Of sexual relationships that continue on casually through  time and get revisited.  Other people don’t evolve with me fast enough.  I feel angry at them for being exactly who they were the last time I slept with them because it wasn’t right then either.  That sounds weird.  I have sex with people to audition them in my head.  It decides a lot about how much weight I put on someones opinions later as a friend.  Like Chris.  (The awesome thing is, I have slept with quite a few Chris’ of both genders so using the name is totally meaningless.  Yay!)  I am really attached to Chris.  When I talk to Chris I listen harder than I do with other people.  I care a lot about his opinion.  When I’m really worried… I call him and ask him to weigh in on a topic.  Because when we had sex he looked at me and he actually played within my boundaries while finding out where they were.  Not very many people have ever done that.  They either blow right past what I can handle and enjoy or they never come close to pushing me.

Mostly though people don’t do that.  Mostly people are imperfect in one way or another.  At the end of an encounter I always have the thought, “Man I would work on ____”.  How long the list is decides how many times I come back.  If there are too many things, I can’t handle it and I move on.  I don’t discuss sexual incompatibility with people.  My issues are mine.  It’s inevitably something about the way someone is touching me.  The way it makes me feel.

Noah is the only person I have ever dated who has been able to have dramatically different “modes” of touch.  I don’t even know how to codify how he does it.  He reads me.  He learned me.  He studied me.  He studied me like a religion.  He learned how to coax things out of me.  When I feel like shit I want to stop feeling that way because it makes Noah sad.

Finding people to sleep with in a reasonably healthy way is hard.  I need to learn new screening procedures because mine are broken for my current set of needs.  That sounds like work.  But maybe the kind of work Noah would find fun.  Really, isn’t all of this for him anyway?  No.  But it sounds more fun to say it that way.

Because other than being in pain this much later, and having to tell him no that vehemently to unprotected sex (seriously? I have to yell at you that it’s not ok to fuck me without a condom? When neither of us have another form of birth control? Fuck no.  That’s not. Fucking. Ok.) it was hot.

And I think that the only reason he was able to fuck like that is because he’s the kind of asshole that really wants to push past all my boundaries.  I like that aggression.  This feels so dangerous.  I’m not attracted to passive men.  I don’t know how to flirt with people in a socially acceptable ways.  Do you know how I set up this tryst?  He posted on facebook that he was in town for two weeks and if anyone wanted tattoo work they need to get in touch quickly.  I responded and said, “So you’re saying that if I want to fuck you I have to hurry?”  He responded at midnight when he got off work with a voicemail.  We arranged getting together the next morning.  He’s staying with his mom.  Hotel room it is!

I loved the excitement.  I feel so bad that my response afterwards is so ungrateful.  There is that word.  Oh man.  That’s what this is.  I feel bad because I feel ungrateful.  He really went to a lot of trouble for me, and I enjoyed it.  And here I am bitching.  You see how I don’t fucking appreciate anything.

I want to cry, but it hurts.  It hurts to exist in my body.  I’m not grateful for this.  Sex does not have to be this.  Noah taught me that sex doesn’t have to feel like this.  I wasn’t raped.  Not in any way.  But I was brutalized.  And I feel like it is my fault because I somehow advertise that I want that.  Is it really so unreasonable to want aggression without being injured?  Does every sexual encounter truly have to involve people choking me until I get terrible headaches that last for days?  Is this really normal?  I have never been in an abusive relationship because I brag on the internet that I love to be choked so everyone does it and I never tell them to stop.

Even though I get these terrible headaches.  Even though when they lean on my chest choking me they bruise my bones and I hurt for weeks.  Even though I kind of wish that people would stop telling me so explicitly by their actions that they think it would be hot to watch me die.

I don’t want to be that kind of hot any more.  I am not expendable.  I am not an object.  It is not ok to risk my death just because you like how my cunt contracts when you choke me.  I am not actually a fucktoy, no matter what you call me.

And back the fuck off with acting like my hips are just supposed to get out of the way.

Shit.  Changing the music didn’t work, did it?  Well.  It’s a different flavor of whining.  I don’t understand why I am incapable of talking about this kind of thing in the moment.  Well, part of it is that I don’t know just how far past my fun-pain level things are at until later.  And very few people have ever had to deal with the consequences of hurting me this way.  Mostly I dealt with it in silence.  Noah has had to deal with it extensively and as a result he figured out how to have pseudo-rough sex with me.

I really like Noah.  I think I persist in sleeping with other people because I start taking him for granted.  I forget just how very exceptional he is.  Noah has made reading me his hobby.  It’s not that he’s made such a master study of sex, although he is far more experienced than most.  First he went after sex.  Then he went after me.  Because I’m enough.

Yeah.  I’ll heal and stop feeling angry.  Then I’ll let Noah hurt me again.  Because Noah will do it right.  And I want to see him smile.  Because I want to feel him vibrating with tension as he pushes himself and me right to the edge of me panicking.  Because he thinks it is funny.  Because he thinks it is hot.  It’s sometimes an abusive relationship.  But it has an off switch.  I think that makes it ok.

Privilege

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I’ve been thinking a lot about privilege since reading this blog and I think I hit on part of it this morning.  I was talking to someone recently and I was trying to explain the pressure of meeting new people and how it is better or worse depending on how much they will matter in the long-run.  Meeting Noah’s friends is stressful because I will have to deal with them for years… I’d better not fuck up.  Which means I inevitably will feel like I did no matter how I actually behave.  In the course of this conversation I said that I can’t handle the pressure to be “nice” when I meet someone.  She seemed shocked, aren’t I nice whenever I meet new people?  I actually laughed out loud.  Of course not.  I walk into every new association wondering if I am going to feel disliked because I am bad.  Whether this person will be “big enough” to overlook how fucked up I am and give me a chance anyway!  (This is said in a cheerleader voice.)

That shit gets old.  Privilege is feeling like you deserve to be breathing the same air as everyone else.  Privilege is growing up in a place that is safe and secure enough that you never freeze up in blind panic when your husband raises his voice the tiniest bit because surely this will be the time he makes you leave.  I believe there is no way that people could love me unless I change myself to meet their needs.  I believe that who I am, at a basic level, is wrong and I deserve to suffer for being wrong.  Because I cannot just “be nice” when I meet someone new.  I can’t do that.  In order to just be nice to other people I would have to first stop expecting them to be vicious to me so that I can stop feeling defensive.  Given what did happen to me I’m really glad that I was good and vicious in response.  It was literally a survival mechanism.

But how do you just stop feeling defensive and vicious?  It’s not as simple as anger management.  It’s not as simple as just meditating and staying in the here and now.  Not for me.  Because the point of all those techniques is to let you relax into the assumed basic training of being a polite person.  I have never had that.  No, that’s hyperbole.  That is not what I had as a child.  That is not my default at rest position.  I can actually get to a place where I feel calm and relaxed.  Sort of.  Briefly.  I can suppress my feelings with the best of them!  But then I am always paying in some way.  I’m hypersexual or asexual.  I’m binge eating or starving myself.  Privilege is thinking that “stopping my anger” will solve my problems.  No, it just moves the focal point of my current problem area.  I am broken and I have to figure out how to fix it.  Being quiet doesn’t work.  Being quiet means passing on broken patterns on to my children even if they are never abused.

Denise’s drug addiction would go in spurts.  She used intensely for a while then she blew up her life and was clean for a long period, or she used so minimally as to be functional.  My anxiety goes in hormonal spurts like that.  I can tell that I’m having totally irrational emotions.  If I can tell that they are totally irrational I can often talk myself through them.  When I suppress my memories and I refuse to work through them as they come up I am left sitting on a powder keg.  I don’t think it is actually reasonable to ask me to deal with as many triggers as I have by just meditating.  Give me a break.  That might work for someone else, fine.  It doesn’t work for me.  I just can’t.

I feel like white trash because as I move through the world something about my physical presentation makes people wince.  Not all the time, I can control it with enough effort, but often.  It’s something about my tone of voice, my looks, my word choice… I don’t even know exactly.  Even when I am not cursing. Even when I am “trying to be nice” people still jolt at me.  I don’t think I am actively yelling all the time. But people react visibly to me.  And it is common for people to comment on the fact that I have a lot of class markers of being poor.  It’s excellent.

That is my basic self image moving through the world.  Then I read news articles about finance talking about how Noah is in the top 5% of the country financially.  I feel this simultaneous shock and horror.  How in the hell can that be me?  I feel like now that I am in this different class I should suddenly know how to behave as if I am of this class.  But I don’t.  I feel awkward and uncomfortable.  I feel fake and deceitful.  How dare I come among good people when I’m obviously common trash.  As a result I am usually rude when I meet people because I have it so deeply ingrained in me that I am bad.  I don’t know how to be anything else.

These are the things I think about when I think about privilege.  Because I have the unimaginable privilege to sit here at my computer whining about my pain when at this point in my life I have it easier than the vast majority of people ever in the history of the world.  That’s perspective.  My problems are so small and so petty.  Why do I act like I’m important?  Because I have to.  Because everyone has to be concerned with themselves first and foremost or they have nothing to give.

Why aren’t I “nice” when I meet people?  Because I am white trash and I don’t know how.  No one ever taught me.

Dear Mom

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Dear Mom,

I hate you.  I hate you with a fury unseen since God wiped out Sodom and Gomorrah.  You are a worthless piece of shit and I hope you die slowly in a lot of pain.  Do you know what you did to me?  You beat me after I was raped.  You refused to help me when I was being raped.  YOU HUNG UP ON ME AND TOLD ME THAT I MADE MY BED NOW I HAD TO LIE IN IT.  You fucking stupid bitch.  How could you do that to your child?  Oh, of course.  You didn’t know.  You.aren’t.responsible.

Well guess what?  You are.  You are god damn responsible and I hope you rot in hell.  The thing is, you are already in hell.  You are pathetic.  You are a loser.  You are nonfunctioning because you know that you do not deserve to breathe.  You let your husband rape your children.  You continue to turn a blind eye to your daughter molesting her children.  You call me and tell me that I was not sexually assaulted as a little kid and I had better get my story straight.

Oh I have my story straight.  And you fucking know it.  You are fucking terrified of me.  And you should be.  Do you know why you should be afraid of me?  Because I know all of your dirty, shameful secrets.  I know all of the despicable things you have done.  It may take me the rest of my life but I will tell all of them.  You have no right to privacy any more.  You horribly abused me.  You are a monster.

You are just as bad as my father.  You spent my entire childhood ranting about how my father was evil.  AND THEN YOU SENT ME TO HIM SO HE COULD RAPE ME.  It’s not like you can claim you were surprised!  I don’t understand how you can stand to look in the mirror.

Do you know what he did to me, Mom?  Do you know?  Do you know that he used to finger me at any chance he could get?  Mom, he held a gun to my head and asked me if I deserved to live.  You know, because of how fucking badly you treated me I couldn’t even say yes.  I didn’t believe it.  You made me feel like I was worthless.  Less than worthless.  You made me feel like I deserved to be raped over and over and over.  You made me feel like I was a horrible person just by existing.  You are my mother.  Why did you do your best to destroy me?

You haven’t won.  And you never will.  I am stronger than you.  I am smarter than you.  And by golly, I’m meaner than you.  You taught me well you fucking cunt.  I know exactly how to get under your skin.  And I’m going to.  Oh man I’m going to.  I may even send you all your own autographed copies of the book.

No love,
your last born.

I hate Texas

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I hate Texas.  I hate Texas with a burning, flaming passion.  Someday I should get over hating Texas; it is stupid to hate a whole state for what happened to me.  Bad things can happen anywhere, but for some reason a lot of horrible things happened in the six months I happened to be in Texas.

I was seven and my mom and I shared a trailer with my sister and her husband.  My mom spent most of her time on the phone with my dad trying to talk him into allowing my brothers to come join her in Texas.  My parents have always played against one another to get custody of my brothers.  Neither of them seemed to ever care where I was though.  The boys were the significant ones.  Even if my mom had managed to get my brothers that time, where would they have slept, on the living room floor?  We didn’t even have a couch; mom and I shared a bed.  I hated my life and I hated just about everyone in it.   

     The son of the trailer park manager was named Michael.  I had an enormous crush on him.  He was cute, in that skuzzy “The Outsiders” sort of way.  I was angry at the world and rebellious boys appealed to me.  He was mean to me; I think I wanted him to pay attention to me so much because he treated me so badly and everyone in my family that I wanted attention from treated me badly.  I wanted to make him like me; make him want to be nice to me.  Maybe if I could get some kid to like me I would be able to make my mother like me and be satisfied with having me and not want the boys so much.  I would go over to Michael’s house and spend the afternoon waiting on him and whatever buddy was with him.  I was willing to do just about anything for attention.

 One day he and his cousin were playing video games and they started talking about sex.  Michael was 11 and I’m pretty sure he was exaggerating his experience.  His cousin was 14 and probably did already have some experience.  The cousin turned and looked at me, he asked Michael if I was a decent lay.  Michael said he didn’t know.  The cousin asked if I at least gave good head.  Michael said he didn’t know.  The cousin started mocking Michael at this point.  He told Michael that the only reason to let me stick around was if I was any good.  I knew what they were talking about and I was scared.  I was afraid to leave though.  This was probably the most attention Michael had ever really paid to me.  Most of the time he just ordered me to get something for him as I sat quietly in the corner.  In some sick way it was almost nice having him know I was in the room.  The cousin called me over and told me to kneel in front of him.  He pulled his dick out and told me to suck on it.  He didn’t even stop playing the video game.  I felt dirty and humiliated and I started crying, but I did it.

     I cried the whole time and I felt disgusting.  I thought I would throw up when he came in my mouth.  The cousin told Michael that now I was ready to be fucked.  So Michael put the game on pause and pulled me over to the bed.  He pulled my dress up and took my underwear off.  He didn’t touch me anymore than he had to.  Before he penetrated me I started begging him to not do it.  I was still crying and I started crying harder.  He told me to stop crying because I looked like a disgusting snot-nosed kid and I should be grateful he was going to do me; I just kept crying and begging him not to.  The first thrust hurt so bad I screamed.  He reached over and grabbed a handful of the sheet and shoved it in my mouth.  His mom walked in at about this time.  She looked at what we were doing, shook her head, and walked out.  I couldn’t breathe because I was choking on the sheet and crying so hard I couldn’t catch my breath.  When he was done I rolled off the bed and stumbled out the door.  I cried as I walked home and the whole lower part of my body hurt so bad I thought it would never stop hurting again.

     Michael and his cousin followed me home on their bikes.  They rode in circles around me taunting me.  They said I wasn’t a very good lay so they weren’t going to let me hang out with them anymore.  I didn’t know how to respond; I was so angry.  Finally I screamed, “Fuck you!  You fucking assholes!” and I ran the last way into my home.  My mother had been standing at the window and saw me scream at them.  She got really angry.  She yelled at me for swearing.  She picked up a flip-flop from the floor and started hitting me with it.  She yelled that she was not going to put up with that kind of language from me.  If I ever did it again I would get it even worse.  Her hitting me hurt, but not nearly as bad as the rape had hurt.  How could I tell her what had just happened though?  Was I supposed to tell her to please not beat me for swearing minutes after I had been raped?  Should I have told her that it was ok for me to cuss out those boys because they had just violated me?  I couldn’t say anything.  I lay there and took the beating.  She wouldn’t have understood, maybe she wouldn’t even have believed me.  I didn’t have the words yet to properly explain what had happened to me.

I felt like I was on complete meltdown for days afterwards.  I didn’t want to move around or do anything.  Between the beating and the rape my entire body hurt and ached.  My sister got angry with me and yelled at me for being so lazy.  I didn’t want to go to school because I would have to see Michael on the bus.  He told people that I asked him to fuck me.  He was patted on the back and told what a stud he was.  I was told that I was a complete whore and girls like me go to hell.  I didn’t know what to say.  How could I defend myself?  He was popular and I didn’t have any real friends. 

Not long after I started to recover from the rape I had a horrible dream.  I saw my brother in California get hit by a car in my dream.  I saw him go to the hospital.  I saw him lying in a bed for a long time with my mother sitting next to him in a chair reading.  I saw him in a wheel chair.  I saw him using a walker.  I heard him talking in this strange voice.  He sounded different than he ever had before.  His speech was slow and garbled and I could barely understand him.  People who are really drunk sometimes sound a little bit like he did—the really slow and careful speech.  When I woke up I felt really scared.  I told my mom about the dream.  She called my dad’s house and no one answered the phone.  For the next few days she couldn’t get a hold of anyone in California.  She finally managed to talk to my dad’s girlfriend and she found out that there had been an accident.  My brother was in a coma.  Things started happening very fast.  My mom got on a plane to go back to California.  She left me with my sister and her husband. 

My sister tried to explain to me what happened to my brother.  She said that everyone’s brain is like a tape recorder.  It records all the thoughts you have, all the experiences you have, and all the abilities you have and when you need these things your brain plays them back to you.  Our brother’s brain was erased.  He won’t remember things and he won’t be able to do anything—not even eat or go to the bathroom by himself.  I was really scared.  She said that it is like he is a baby again and has to start over doing everything from the very beginning.  Now I have a big brother who is like a little brother.  I didn’t want a little brother though; he was bad enough when he was older than me.