Category Archives: adult-only

Published in the adult-only category

Dreaming of travel.

I don’t feel well today. My body is very uhm attached to the porcelain god. Such is life.

When I feel shitty the kids destroy the living room around me and I talk to them about travel plans. They have vetoed the idea of visiting the Disney Vacation Club resorts that are not part of a theme park during the 2015 trip. I thought it would be nice to just go to the beach. They say uhmmm not so much. So we will be at Disney World for a very long time. We will be switching hotels a lot.

As of my spreadsheet for today we will be arriving at Disney World on 9/2/15. We will bounce between seven hotels and eventually leave the area on 10/8/15. I have every expectation that I will be completely sick of Disney by the time we leave. That will be using what is left of 2014’s points, 2015’s points, and basically all of 2016’s points too. I can live with that.

I’m still playing with how far I think I can handle driving on the driving days and how long I want to set up camp in various places. I more or less run my life with the expectation that even 48 hours of my presence is often distressing and unpleasant for other people. I’m looking at maps and trying to decide about visiting various people across the country. I need to figure out my spoons for managing the kids, wrangling food, driving, and still being acceptably mild in my interpersonal interactions that I never make other people upset so that we have to move on before I am physically ready.

I feel sad that I am so hard for people. I don’t want to ruin any more friendships so I have to be very careful how I dole out time with me. I wish I was better able to just act right. I try, but I mostly just seem to keep failing.

Altogether (right now) it looks like we will be leaving California on 7/8/2015 and arriving home on 11/18/2015.

Maybe could extend or shrink if we want to cut off spending time with people on the ends. Or if I wanted to have fewer rest days and more driving days. On that schedule I would have 31 days of driving spread out. I would only drive more than 400 miles in a day 4 times. Those legs don’t have good cut-up-spots. Most days I will drive fewer than 300 miles. I would prefer to be actively driving for less than four hours in a day.

Shanna says she votes for more hiking/nature/camping and less time in cities. I’ll do my best but if we are going to go allllllll the way out to Ithaca to see a friend then I will force her to submit to a little bit of New York City. Neiner.

Incidentally, there are some people scattered throughout the country whom I already assume we will see because I have long standing “I will come see you some day” exchanges with people. (Aunt Mitty, DA, Shalyndra, my ex-internet girlfriend from MDC, some folks in North Carolina, Pittsburgh unschoolers) Those are the folks who have expressed enthusiasm and hope that I will inflict my distinguished personage upon them. *cough* If you think you are not on my list and you want to be on my list you should speak up or I will go about my life assuming people don’t want to see me. Like I do.

It’s interesting thinking about the planning stuff now. I think that if I am going to be medicated then I will need to find some way to beg/borrow/rent a vehicle that will allow us to sleep behind locked doors. That would eliminate about 90% of my paranoia about sleeping alone in a tent with two little kids while I’m stoned. If there is a locked door then there will be enough noise and movement to wake me up.

Must work on that stage of the plan. Less than 18 months to go now. That’s in actual planning stages…

Dreaming of privilege

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I miss being really stoned. I hate my dreams. I’m edgy and tense and on the verge of being really snotty.

So recently a friend was talking about food stuff. When he was a kid he was forced to sit at the table until his food was all consumed. He could sit there for hours. Sometimes, if his mom was feeling really nice, she would rewarm things. If after multiple hours of sitting there while getting yelled at didn’t get him to eat his food she would wrap it up, put it in the fridge, then serve it for breakfast.

He describes his early life of being a time when the fear of hunger haunted everyone. Sometimes grocery stores did not have enough of what you wanted so you had to eat the gross stuff.

I contrast this with my own childhood. I wasn’t told to clean my plate. Well, that’s not true. I would occasionally bop through a house that had that rule but I was never there for more than a few weeks. I don’t feel like I have lived with a “clean your plate” rule.

Instead I made my own ramen every meal. I started when I was too young to even use measuring cups. I had a particular pan and I knew the water level was supposed to get close to the screws for the handle. I usually ate out of the pan so that I didn’t have to wash two dishes.

Then I sit down to breakfast with my kids. A breakfast *I* requested because I didn’t yell at all yesterday. I wanted Brussels sprouts because I haven’t been eating enough vegetables in the past few days and I feel kind of off. The meal was rounded out with mozzarella, prosciutto, and scones. Cause I’m nice about the scone bit. Mostly, I ate the Brussels sprouts. (I wonder if I ever would have grown to like them if I hadn’t first eaten them at blacksheeps.)

When I say I “made my own ramen every meal” that is kind of misleading. I made it when we had it. Sometimes I had to walk to the store alone and steal some if I wanted to eat. We rarely lived within a mile of a store so I was walking alone when I was 5, 6, 7.

I look at my daughter and I think, “There is no fucking way in hell I would allow you to walk the 1.4 miles to Safeway alone to steal your own food.”

But my friend doesn’t believe in privilege and I beat my head against a wall trying to find a way to explain to him that I don’t care if he “gets it” I need my daughters to get it. I need for my kids to understand that not everyone has someone to take care of them. I won’t always be here to take care of you.

You have to be prepared for life. It is a privilege to have someone around who teaches you what you need to know.

My friend can cook and prepare a wide variety of vegetables even though he usually won’t eat them on principle because now he is an “adult” and he “doesn’t have to”.

But his lifestyle choices have resulted in diabetes and he isn’t treating it very well. And he refuses to change how he eats. So I’m sad but I don’t expect him to be in my life for that many more years. I’m not going to bother arguing with him about privilege. I’m going to lose that battle and turn my sights on younger people. The people who have a chance of making things substantially different.

I talk to my kids about privilege. I’m very aware of it because I’m handing them a whole train load of privilege I never had and I notice all the time.

My kids expect to be fed good, nutritious, healthy food 3-5 times a day. If you don’t present such food on demand they are incredulous. WHAT DO YOU MEAN I CAN’T HAVE A SNACK AND I HAVE TO WAIT UNTIL LUNCH?! I think my kids have more indignation over being denied a snack than I have over large scale social problems. They have a lot of indignation left to spread around.

Food security is a huge privilege. When someone grows up with always having a sufficient quantity of food but it isn’t always of high quality or good tasting it is a very specific kind of privilege.

I’m aware that I ate a lot more consistently than many children in third world countries. That is terrifying to me. Between the ages of 3 and 12 I probably only missed 3-5 meals a week. That’s not starvation hunger. Sure, I also had a lot of malnutrition because I ate *no* vegetables and very little meat, but I ate.

Privilege is not a binary scale where you have it or you don’t. Privilege is about understanding the good you have gotten from your unique set of life circumstances and knowing that other people may not have that advantage.

I ate enough that I was still able to learn. I was still able to go to stupid schools where they taught me very little and get straight A’s. That’s not true. I never had straight A’s. I always had a D in homework because I refused to do extra work at home. If I can pass your fucking tests leave me alone. Err, and I usually had a bad grade in PE. My body has hurt all the time throughout my life. I was an incredibly unfit child. Now I understand what that means.

I don’t have to care if some of my rich white male friends “believe” in privilege. Their “belief” or not is going to have no impact on my behavior or my beliefs.

It is really easy to deny the existence of privilege when you’ve had so much of it. I’ve been up and down the ladder so many times that I can’t unsee what I have seen. It stays with me.

I grew up with people for whom it was a major life goal to be able to eat out every meal because “cooking is lame”. So they eat at McDonald’s, Taco Bell, and 7-11 because that is what they can afford. They then have severe health problems (it doesn’t help that they are completely sedentary) and can’t figure out why.

At this stage of my life I believe that understanding nutrition is a privilege. It’s about education and not everyone has access to early enough education that can shape their lives. It is not *necessarily* tied to wealth because a great many poor people can tell you to eat your greens. Privilege is not *only* about wealth. Privilege is about access to education and teachers and I don’t just mean Teachers Who Are Paid.

If you had a grandmother who taught you how to cook your collard greens you have access to one kind of privilege.

If you had a grandfather who yelled at you to get off your ass and move your body around so you can be healthy you have access to one kind of privilege.

If you had an aunt who would whisper to you about sex and how to keep yourself safe then you have access to one kind of privilege.

If you had an uncle who would teach you sports then you have access to one kind of privilege.

Community, family, education all of these things are tied up together to make privilege. Have you ever noticed how of the top Ivy League schools in the country (which have the potential to be pretty homogenous) instead have extremely different sets of skills they turn out? Cal Tech, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, and MIT don’t turn out identical programmers. They each have different styles and flavors. Because people are shaped by their environment and in turn they shape the environment around them.

My old technical director told me that my college had a “golden period” of about six years where there were an unusual number of students who were all passionately involved in the theatre department. We did bigger shows than usual. We had more community than usual. We had a lot of outside adventures together. We grew up together.

Where you are in the country decides a lot about what kinds of bdsm you can learn to do. You learn from the teachers who are near you. Sure, if you have boatloads of money you can travel and learn from all the big names all over the country, but most people have to just learn within their local communities. Which means that some jackasses who have no business teaching become teachers anyway. To fill the void.

Right now West Virginia is having to deal with some crazy pollution in their water. It means that some people in the United States are finally dealing with some of the insanity our country usually pushes over seas. Go do some research on what Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola do to local watersheds in their overseas plants. It’s horrifying.

Access to clean water shouldn’t be a privilege. But it is if you don’t have enough money to keep the polluters the hell out of your water.

California’s governor has declared us officially in a state of drought and he asks everyone to cut water usage by 20%. So–am I still “gross” for not flushing the toilet every single time I pee? Give me a break.

I have these conversations in my head even while I’m asleep.

What is privilege. How do you talk about it. I get that a great many people use “check your privilege” as a short hand for “shut up white man” but just because people use a worthy phrase in ways I don’t like that doesn’t mean I’m going to get rid of it. I’m not giving up feminism for the same reason. Just because some people who share my label are icki that doesn’t mean I will let them have it.

How do I teach my children to be aware of the fact that their life experiences are unusual and exceptional and they need to think hard about leveling the playing field.

Just because you are a special fucking snow flake getting lots of privilege that does not make you better than anyone else. It’s an accident. You got lucky. What can you do to make your “luck” more of a right for other people? Every child should get to be educated and safe. That isn’t happening right now.

Being able to go through your childhood without being sexually assaulted is a privilege denied to a great many children, regardless of gender.

Being able to go through your life without being the victim of violent crime is another. It’s a privilege and it god damn shouldn’t be. Transsexual women of color are the single most targeted population for violent crime. That makes me cry.

I don’t want to just move the target. I don’t want to say, “Ok, how about if we just talk people into hating the white men instead. Or the brown men. Or the white women. Or the red women or the…”

No. The violence needs to stop. How do we do that?

How do we teach people that violence isn’t the answer? How do we teach awareness of privilege without playing the Oppression Olympics?

Yes, into every life a bit of hardship has to come. If your hardship was getting beaten up in grade school maybe it’s time to stop hating everyone in the world because your life was sooooooooo hard. Yes. It was hard. I don’t deny that. Have you been beaten up in the last twenty years? No? Then can we maybe focus on getting the people out of danger who were beaten up yesterday and who are probably going to be beaten up tomorrow instead of sitting around talking about poor you?

I am not the center of every conversation I have. Sure I’m the center of most of my blog posts (that is the nature of writing and all) but I am not the most important person in almost any conversation. I understand that my life was weird and on the fringe and in many ways privileged beyond my comprehension regardless of the ways I was not privileged.

Now that they hate me I can be more frank about the fact that I probably wouldn’t have gotten my dog bite settlement if I hadn’t been white. The neighbor who defended me didn’t let his pwecious widdle baby girl hang out with the brown kids in the neighborhood.

I am more in favor of a guaranteed income as I get older. I had one. I had $14,400 to live on for the first twelve years of my adult life. It changed everything for me. It’s not a lot of money but it was enough for me to squeak by and more importantly it was GUARANTEED. I didn’t have to feel fear every month about how I would get things paid for. I didn’t have to try to work extra shifts or cry when my shifts were cut. I had my money.

I feel like that was one of the most important things that has happened to me in the whole story of my life. I’m so glad that pit bull attacked me. (I swear I didn’t antagonize the dog so I could get a settlement. It wouldn’t have entered into my mind.)

Having two parents in your home who love you and are kind to you every day is a privilege. It gives the gift of a settled nervous system. It gives you the ability to be calm. It gives you the ability to work out problems without being hurt unduly by mistakes.

Having parents who “force” you to learn to clean up after yourself is a privilege. It allows you to be more able to care for yourself as you become an adult. You won’t thrash and fail because you are unprepared. Having parents who educate you about how food works and how your body works is a privilege. Having parents who insist on you being physically strong is a privilege.

Having people look at you and say, “You are incredible. You could do just about anything you want to do. You are going to have to have to work really hard for all of it because all the worthy things are hard work” is a privilege.

Having access to toys that shape your learning is a privilege.

Having….

No, these aren’t just “differences”. These are about advantages. These are about the fact that humans don’t learn in a vacuum. Humans can learn as much and as fast as we can because we aren’t all starting from scratch with a bunch of sticks. We build on the collective knowledge of those who are around us and those who have come before us. The more access to that collective bunch of knowledge a person has the more they can do. Period. Yes, it’s a privilege.

Today should be quiet. Good. I want away from my dreams for a bit. I hate sleeping.

Thinking about stuff else-net.

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Sometimes I look at the way people “ask for help” and I think “you don’t actually want help. You want to be pissed at people for failing to help you.”

It is easier to see it when someone else is doing it in front of me. I’m pretty sure I do that sometimes.

I’m struggling with the line between “I want to help EVERYBODY” and “Well, I don’t want to help you because you annoy me.”

It’s a good thing I don’t have a lot of spoons left to hand out any way. This person is clearly more interested in being pissed off about the stuff that happened a long time ago than in doing actual healing.

Healing from trauma is messy, painful, and inconvenient. If you expect therapy to “make you feel all better” without any messy or painful bits then you can keep dreaming. And keep firing therapists. You can say that it is all the fault of all 50 of those therapists that you aren’t better.

But you know what? You are responsible for you. Not anyone else.

I’m responsible for me. If I want to be “better” I have to first define what “better” means and then I have to do every single step of walking to get there. No one can do it for me. It’s hard. It’s life. I can’t make someone else have an easy journey. I can’t make me have an early journey.

Sometimes life is just hard. And on that note I am going to stop beating my head against the wall with this person. I can’t fix him. I will never even know who he is. He can’t be a project of mine.

I have too many projects going already.

Find gratitude

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I’ve had a lot of time over the last few days to think about my husband and our relationship. Before we had kids I sat down and read a bunch of stuff about divorce and custody and I forced him through some terrible conversations. I was very blunt about what each of us would have to do in order to be reasonable co-parents because it really doesn’t fucking matter how the grown ups feel, you have to show up for your kids. We made some firm agreements about behavior.

I feel grateful that I am married to someone who doesn’t have a lot of intense emotions. I’m enough crazy for this house. It makes it a lot more likely that I can predict his behavior. On the flip side I’m glad he puts up with my frequent hysteria and over reactions. I’m aware that I over react to most things, at least as first. Noah says it isn’t too bad to put up with because I state “I’m over reacting–give me a bit to calm down” and then I can react in a more rational way; I just need to be given space for my explosion of emotion.

I feel so grateful that I get to have this experience.

Noah tolerates my explosions of emotion the way I tolerate them from my little kids. “Wow. You are having some feelings. What actions do you think could solve this? Want to wait a bit till you are done with the feelings? Ok. I’ll just sit here. If you want a hug I’ve got some to spare.”

It’s a whole reparenting situation. I am so grateful.

I think that the reason things go as well with Noah as they do is because neither of us expect to do 50% of anything. We both expect that we’ll get dumped with way the fuck more than our share of whatever and we are grateful when it doesn’t happen. The secret to happiness is low expectations. This is what my husband tells me.

Sometimes, for many days in a row, my husband wakes up and makes breakfast then goes to work. Then he comes home and cleans up from breakfast and lunch and then he makes dinner. Then he cleans up the clutter in the living room. Then he reads to the kids and brushes their teeth and puts them to bed. Because sometimes I just flat need him to do that. Some days I look pretty fucking useless. But I didn’t yell at the kids! That was my goal for the day!

He’s ok with that being the only goal I hit in a day. Even if it does mean he gets shafted with a whole bunch of extra work. I’m grateful that he believes in the same priority list I believe in.

But on the flip side, when I’m on he won’t have to clean or do any night time cooking for weeks and rarely even a month in a row. Sometimes he can go many weeks in a row only hanging out with the kids at home without doing any chores. I try to take breaks from draining projects so I can make his life easier sometimes too.

Balance is important. I try to watch how fried he is getting. If he is more and more tired and worn out looking I try to up my game for a bit. Sometimes I’m even nice enough to cook him breakfast. He’s usually pretty grateful and sweet.

Every day at breakfast and dinner the non-cooking parent effusively thanks the cooking parent. That is just something I think should be modeled every single day. Every day the non-cleaning parent comments on how nice the house looks and thanks the cleaning parent. Doesn’t matter who cleans, they get thanked.

Every night at dinner we talk about our favorite part of the day. We share what happened and who we saw and the gist of what we talked about. I read that the most “successful and happy” families know a lot about one another. I’m starting to ask more often about peoples least favorite parts of the day. That matters too.

I feel so grateful that I found a partner who is on board for the wacky unschooling journey. I feel so grateful that I found a partner who will cheerfully send me off on long trips without him. He doesn’t have that need to wander that I have. (At this stage I have grown to understand that I can’t use gypsy ever again because it is a racial name, but I have never heard a better name for my inability to sit in one place forever. I have to move. I have to see new things and meet new people. Any better words? Anyone?)

I grew up moving all the time. I’m grateful that Noah is happy to go off and earn boatloads of money so I can afford the travel I want to do. Talk about privilege and luxury. I’m grateful that Noah gave me a place to put down roots but he doesn’t want to take away my wings.

Noah doesn’t want ALL of my attention (I think he would drown or go mad) and he’s pretty happy to send me off into the world so I can come back with cool stories. Ok, so they won’t be sex stories anymore… that’s ok!

Mostly I’m grateful I found someone with the same attitudes about child rearing as I have. Or rather, someone who is happy to listen to me go on and on and on and on and on about the research I read and mostly agree to the things I put forth.

We are a non-hitting household. If you want children to learn to manage their emotions you have to model it and not scream at them to stop screaming. Attachment formation and relationship building are mandatory things to do even when you aren’t in the fucking mood. You say goodbye and give hugs and kisses to everyone who wants them EVERY time you leave the house. You have no idea when you will be hit by a bus and we are not parting this life on bad terms. No matter how mad I may be. (I’m the one who would stomp out in my family.)

I feel grateful that my mistakes are responded to with patience and kindness and love. I make a lot of mistakes. Big mistakes. Huge mistakes. Sometimes mean mistakes. I am forgiven for the first and only time in my life. No one else has ever been able to really consistently forgive me for my mistakes.

I am so grateful.

I feel grateful that I have a partner who will call me on my shitty behavior and ask me to do better because he believes I am capable. He knows it is a slip and not a lack of caring or lack of desire to be good/kind.

I need you.

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Those three words make my heart start racing like I just completed a sprint. You need me? OK! What do you need?! I CAN DO IT! This morning my baby woke up scared and needed to cuddle me. Easy peasy. I have a firm policy of waking up with a smile if my kids wake me up saying “I need you”. Ok. It’s my job to be there when you need me, so yes ma’am.

Do you know why my kids have good manners? Because I say yes ma’am and no ma’am to them for just about everything. If my kids scream at me I raise an eyebrow and say, “Try again” in a calm voice. If they scream a second time I say, “Do I respond well to screaming?” Then they visibly shake themselves off and calm down enough to ask for what they want.

Based on the dozens and dozens of books I’ve read about early childhood development the first 5-7 years of life should be spent on socialization, attachment formation, and learning to manage your emotions. I have gone through my life crippled by my inability to manage my emotions in times of stress and that is largely because I was not taught how to deal with my body. If I grew distressed I was punished.

I don’t let my kids have a lot of screen time because screen time is shown to increase emotional dysregulation. I feel it would be counter productive to hand them a bunch of emotional dysregulation during the period of their life when they are poorly regulated and struggling for basic control. I mean, they are pretty good and all… but they are 3 and 5. They are good for their ages and that means they have a lot of work left to do.

I think about this because when I babysit for other kids I learn that the short cuts I’ve worked on with my kids don’t work as well. My kids respond to “Try again”. “Will that work?” is enough to stop the vast majority of tantrums. “So what is your goal here?” is another favorite I lean on extensively. I talk them through how to get what they want without using methods that will result in escalation of conflict. That’s what I spend my days doing. I hang out with them and help them manage their emotions as they are doing what they want to do.

Other peoples children kind of look at me blankly if I just say “Try again” and that’s hard at this phase. I have to turn around and manage my own frustration and emotional dysregulation because my short hand didn’t communicate what I wanted it to communicate and so I am left struggling to find phrasing that will work which means a bunch of quick thinking. I shouldn’t complain. But man I am grateful I have been able to train my kids the way I have.

Yup, I’ve trained my kids. And it’s awesome.

I feel a lot of guilt for not actually having the control I wish I had. I feel a lot of shame for the fact that if my children were less well trained I would have a much harder time being nice. It is hard for me to be nice to other peoples kids who don’t respond to the training cues.

I *do not* yell or scream or shame or respond badly to children not understanding my cues. Instead I take a deep breathe and smile and out comes a whole flood of words that explains why I’m asking what I’m asking and I give them a whole bunch of suggestions for how to solve whatever problem is coming up.

But it’s hard. It wears my body out to emotionally flood that many times in a short period of time. I believe that the children deserve the respect so I’m going to deliver it even if it means I cry the whole way home because my body feels like shit and I’m tired and worn out. My stomach hurts so bad.

Sometimes my physical comfort is not the highest priority in my life. That’s hard. Sometimes my friends need help and I’m the one who could show up and supply the necessary help and I believe in Pay It Forward like I believe It Takes All Kinds. I HAVE to step up when friends have nowhere else to look for support. If I don’t then the ship will go down and it will be partially my fault.

No, not really. Other people having problems in their lives isn’t my fault. But if the reason I choose not to help is because it is hard and it makes me feel bad and I cry for an hour or two afterwards because of stress… that’s not a good enough reason to choose not to help in a crisis. That’s a good enough reason to not sign up for four home school outings in a week. That’s a good enough reason to not sign up for helping once a week indefinitely. But it’s not a good enough reason to refuse help in a crisis.

Which leads back to spoon management with my kids in my life.

I have to leave enough slack all the time to absorb occasional bursts of spoon excess in one area or another. This is part of why I’ve been reading so much lately. I’m trying to build slack into my spoon usage. There are times when all of a sudden I use extra spoons on a project or on driving or on helping other people and I have to be able to continue delivering the same quality and quantity of care to my kids.

Taking care of my kids is hard but worthwhile. I’ve been doing really well post-Christmas. I am staying more level. I’m responding in the right tone of voice and I’m responding in a timely fashion instead of sometimes choosing to let them fight it out because I can’t intervene in a timely fashion in the right way. (I don’t let them physically fight things out but sometimes if they want to have a screaming match over something I will tell them that they can scream at each other in the back yard.) Mostly I try to help them work things out. It’s exhausting to be a referee all day.

So given that my focus is on socialization, attachment formation, and emotional regulation it’s kind of funny when a friend says, “So how about their academics? When do you do that?”

Err… I don’t. Not really. I mean, I read to them a lot. I read to my kids for 5-15 hours a week depending on the week. Noah reads to the kids for an additional 5-10 hours a week. As often as possible I sucker my friends into reading to the kids.

I get workbooks when Shanna is given her “school allotment” and she goes shopping and says, “I think I should practice shaping letters so let’s get a workbook”. I never indicate that she should get out a workbook and practice. But the suckers are being used steadily. I feel kind of confused by her choosing to do worksheets, but whatever makes you happy kiddo.

That said: if you go through the kindergarten standards (Which I do–quite regularly) you would find that Shanna was more or less competent on the full curriculum before the start of her “kindergarden” year. Given that the state now believes children should be fluent readers in first grade she is *not* through the first grade curriculum but I think the state is on crack for expecting that anyway.

(I mean for science: one of the many things kids should know why different kinds of plants grow in different environments. Shanna can give you long lectures on the evolution of plants and animals. We watch a lot of documentaries and I feel pretty surprised by what she knows. She designs structures so she can talk about what things work better and why. Sure a lot of her structures are meant to be froofy princess shit, but whatever. I don’t care if you are building a castle or a space station–you are building. It works.)

I will confess that I need to get my hands on a globe so we can play with a flashlight and talk about the seasons more. We’ve talked about it representationally on flat maps… but that’s not the same. I need to get off my butt.

We work on the PE skills in malls all the time. How do you learn to be aware of your body? How do you move through crowds without bumping people? How do you decide which objects you can go under or over in a public place? Or must you go around them on the side? This is what kindergarden PE teaches. We play catch and kick ball. They do yoga and go on three mile walks a few times a week. (I’ve been better lately.) Sure, Calli gets piggy back rides for over a mile of the walk… but she’s hella short. She’ll get there.

I will confess that my kids are not fully versed on the “triumphs of American history” but they do know a lot about racial issues through the history of this country. Shanna call tell you about segregation and Jim Crow laws and why Rosa Parks was important. I’m going to keep doing things my way instead of talking about how awesome Paul Revere was. (I mean… really he was a patent thief and an asshole and there was a girl riding the alarm the same night as him but HISTORY IGNORES HER. Ahem.)

Given that all of the kindergarden reading/language arts standards are “With prompting and support” yes, Shanna can do all that is expected of a five year old. She can tell you about myths from different cultures. She can tell you that a poem rhymes and a narrative tells a story in plain English. She can identify the narrator and she understands “what’s the point” as “tell me about the plot”. She can count to 100 (and beyond, I think) and add and do basic subtraction. She understands the beginnings of numeral placement. She knows her shape and can talk about what is necessary for each kind of shape.

And no, I don’t spend time on academics. I’m not going to waste her time. But what I mean when I say “I don’t spend time on academics” is I don’t ever sit down with a curriculum written by someone else and say, “Ok now it is time for school.”

We talk about cylinders as we are putting dishes away. We talk about the difference between a square and a rectangle when we build raised beds in the back yard. We do addition practice in the car because she starts it.

I do not direct her learning much. I don’t pick the whack job documentaries she watches, though I try to watch with her. She can talk to you about generations of animals dying out–whole species! She’s fascinated by the way animals change over time. She’s pissed off that evolution doesn’t happen fast enough for her to really watch it in her lifetime.

I talk to my kids all day long about everything I see. “Why do you think they made this bench out of wood and this other one out of metal?” “What is this made out of?” My kid can tell you the merits of using different kinds of spatulas to cook different foods.

We do science by cooking and gardening. We talk about history all the time. I’m fond of saying, “We study history because humans have been alive a long time. Almost every mistake that you will want to make has already been made by someone else. You can learn a lot if you just read about people and their choices.”

My kids are growing up in a house where “hacking” DOES NOT MEAN following directions on a kit that some forking grown up made for you. No. That’s not how life works. You are not going to spend your life just following directions that someone else makes up. You are going to have to make your own directions. How do you do that?

If you want to learn to sew (which Shanna does) I can show you the basics and I can provide you with materials, but no I’m not going to do it while you watch and I’m not going to stand next to you and micromanage you doing it perfectly. You are going to mess up and feel frustration. You are going to have to learn how to rip out your own seams and try again.

I can’t make things easy for you. I wouldn’t even if I could. Life isn’t going to be easy.

My job is to help you learn emotional regulation and help you feel like you matter in the world so that you won’t spend your life wanting to kill yourself because you believe you are a worthless piece of shit.

Everything else you can learn as you go. I promise.

At the end of kindergarden they wanted to hold me back because I wasn’t mature enough. I’d been to five fucking kindergardens, no I wasn’t as “advanced” compared to the kids in the tiny school I was in last that year. The teacher thought I was stupid because I couldn’t read yet. I picked up reading in first grade and by second grade I was testing at the 10th grade level.

I’m not worried about early asymmetrical growth. Don’t you understand that the standards were created by bureaucrats and *not* educational specialists? (Go ask education specialists. You will find a few who endorse the standards but mostly they don’t like the idea of a national curriculum–people don’t work that way.)

“The things that are the hardest to learn are often the most rewarding once you master them. You have to keep trying even when something makes you mad.”

That’s what my kids hear over and over. A far cry from “I guess I can’t do math because I’m a girl.” That’s what I believed as a child. Because I was told that math was hard for me because I was just a stupid girl. Word for word. Over and over.

When my kids try to do something that is way too hard for them they say, “Whoa. I think I need to learn a bit more before I understand this.” I almost fell out of my chair laughing when Calli said that. She was confused but delighted that she made me laugh.

I think my saving grace with children is I don’t expect them to do much or support me. I understand that the support is a one way street. I do the supporting. That means I never get disappointed and lash out at them for not helping me when I want/need help. I have internalized so thoroughly that it isn’t their job.

That said they have more and more chores. Shanna unloads the dishwasher, clears the table, and keeps her stuff tidy. When she has to clean up her toys she often says, “What am I, your maid!?” I tell her that until I start forcing her to do laundry for the whole family and do the sweeping and mopping and vacuuming she doesn’t get to claim maid status. I’m teaching her to clean up after herself which means she is being her own maid… not mine. She generally doesn’t argue much.

And now I have a wonderful girl on my lap. She says she wants to watch The West Wing with me. heh.

Weird kid.

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“What do you want for lunch today?”

“Broccoli!”

“Uhm, anything else to go with it?”

“Nope. I’m just hungry for broccoli.”

Sure. Why the hell not. Just because I didn’t eat broccoli till I was 19 that is no reason to think you shouldn’t eat lots at 3.

Online usage

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The only reason I can use twitter is because I have an iron-clad policy of not arguing. I am not capable of arguing in 140 characters and knowing that about myself saves me a lot of blood pressure spikes.

Someone told me they “take issue” with the word “allow” with regards to people being sex workers. (Specifically I said: #FeministSolidarity means allowing women to choose any kind of work that is appropriate for them–including sex work.)

I mean, by allow, that there should be no laws obstructing people. Someone says I should have said “support” so that I don’t sound “paternalistic”. But uhm, I don’t “support” people going into the medical field or into computer programming so why in the hell should sex workers be special?

I think it should be a legal career. Just like all others. But no I’m not going to support people in it any more than I support my local plumber (uhm, other than when I hire him/her of course). If I feel like hiring a sex worker for uhh services then OF COURSE I should help support that person by paying the appropriate fees. Otherwise, nope I’m not supporting them.

But I will stay the fuck out of their way and give them a big thumbs up.

And that is the end of my argument and I’m not linking this random person to my blog because that sounds like an unending rain of shit.

I feel fairly weird about the fact that 2014 is starting off very well for me (because I’m not doing much or going many places–I sit at home and read) but many of my friends are having spectacularly bad starts to the year. So far I’ve finished twelve new books and I’m in progress on two more. I’m really enjoying reading lately. I feel like this is the most ready frenzy-ish I’ve been since before graduate school. I’m so glad that graduate school did not kill my love of reading forever.

I’m doing the stretches the doctor recommended. Not sure I’ve seen that much progress yet. I am glad the radiating burning pain in my neck disappeared when he dug into my skull with his hands.

As soon as my contract is up I’m going to give up data on my phone and try to get a non-smart phone that is hopefully harder to smash to pieces than my current Android. I wish I could go back to the clamshell I had when I first got a mobile phone. I bought a paper day planner and I think I may be mostly done with giving my information to Google. I’m not very happy that they are following Facebook into giving peoples information up more and more. I don’t want everything I do on the internet made public to anyone who wants to look whether I like it or not. I may need to pursue other email options.

Not that I think I will ever have real privacy on the net. I’m not stupid. But I’m angry at companies who want to sell me without my consent. I like to be asked before such activities occur.

I think I am going to cut back my internet usage dramatically. I’m not in a period where I am accessing research journals. I’m spending too much time reading shit I don’t care about because I am killing time. I should do that with books. My kids don’t understand the purpose of computers. If I’m on a screen they want a screen and for them that means watching a few select shows over and over or playing games. I don’t object to them doing some show rewatching (Yay West Wing!) or playing some games but they should not have screens on for many hours every day. There is no good reason to do so and some reason to think it isn’t good for you. So I have to model.

Plus what I’ve seen for research says that the more screen time you have the harder it is to control your behavior. It’s probably best for me to limit that.

I have used the computer a lot for years as how I connect with people. I discovered computers in high school for AOL chat rooms. Then I went to IRC. Then I went to G-Blog. Then I went to Livejournal. Then I went to Mothering. Then I went to Facebook. Now I’m kind of in limbo hell. I’m not hanging out with my friends online. I’m … I don’t know voyeuristically noticing the lives of people I don’t know and will never know? Time to do something else.

Time to try and have relationships with people in real life. Right now that means my kids. Maybe some day I will stop alienating other people and figure that out.

I feel scared that the next 15 years of my life will involve a lot of me “hanging out with people” I can’t talk to about anything I really think about because most of the home schoolers are not people I will talk to about personal or real things. I have to Be Nice so my kids can have friends.

The trouble is that I’m not very nice.

I suppose I had better learn how to fake it better.

pictures

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This coming weekend we are having family pictures taken. I’m going to have a specific picture taken of Calli to match a picture taken of me when I was three. It’s the same dress. The thing is, that picture of me was taken to match a picture of my mother in the same dress. Her grandmother made the dress for her.

I keep going back and forth in my mind about whether it would be cruel or kind to send a copy to my mother. I don’t know if it right or not. But Calli is her blood and Calli looks like her and me.

I don’t want to hurt my mother any more than I already have.

Depression vs. Boring Adulthood

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I’m having a conversation with someone about what constitutes depression.

If you are exercising, making food three meals a day, cleaning your house, playing with your kids, writing books, and reading a wide variety of topics… it’s kind of hard to call you “depressed”. Maybe you’ve just hit Boring Adulthood.

I think that people who grow up with dysfunction expect a level of “excitement” from life that isn’t healthy or happy. Sometimes when we settle down we want to call it depression and “liven things up a bit” with some well placed drugs (often given by doctors).

I’m not sure this is depression. If you are getting All The Things done then I’m not sure you should be on medication for depression. Maybe this is just a boring phase of life. Those happen and they are healthy and appropriate.

Maybe not being able to plan for the future is more about your current life being unpredictable. One is not always in a space to be able to predict the future. Sometimes if you work too hard on preparing for the future you will waste resources you can’t afford to waste as you prepare for things that will never happen.

Sometimes you have to just let the days flow by and trust that things will change. Sometimes that is the right thing to do. I don’t have to be Preparing For The Future! every second of the day. Some days I’m just doing my chores and hanging out with the kids. That isn’t always the same as depression.

Depression is when you are too sad/lethargic/empty feeling to be able to function. When you can’t think. When you can’t process the basic parts of keeping the boat afloat. When you HATE everyone in your life for requiring you to make three meals a day.

If you feel ok but kind of bored… that’s probably not depression. Maybe ennui. Sometimes learning to live with even those uncomfortable bored feelings is where you are. It’s part of life too.

I’m definitely in Boring Adulthood. I have gone from using about 10% of my previous amount of pot to more like 25% of what I had been using. I’m struggling with nightmares. At this level of pot usage I’m not getting stoned I’m just barely taking the edge off of my anxiety. At this level I no longer have that lovely fog to block out my dreams. Instead I have some nightmare every night.

I’ve done well with the kids for the past week-ish. I haven’t been yelling let alone screaming. I’ve been patient and “happy” seeming. We are getting along well.

I’m afraid of the future. There are things I can plan for (mostly this means: save money) and things I can’t. I can’t do any big projects any time soon. My body hurts too much. I need to just… be. But I exercise and do my chores and get my shit done. Sometimes that’s life.

Dr was…

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Well, I didn’t leave wanting to set his car on fire. I am not as hopeful as I could be. But he did manage to get the radiating fire from my neck to calm down.

We’ll see. I’m suspicious of people who want to spend half an hour telling me how awesome their teacher is and then how they “invented” stretches. Uhhh… whatever.

Suicidal ideation

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Suicidal ideation is what happens when your brain experiences too much pain and doesn’t know how to cope any more. In many ways it is the “lazy” way out. The more suicides happen close to a given individual the more likely that person is to see suicide as a reasonable response to a given set of circumstances.

My grandmother, father, and brother all committed suicide. Overdose on prescription meds, carbon monoxide poisoning, and self-immolation being their respective choices.

When I was going through my laundry list of traumas on top of the fairly severe neglect I experienced during crucial developmental stages I was not allowed to cry about what happened to me. I was required to be stoic. If I cried or exhibited obvious signs of sadness I was beaten. “To give me something to cry about” because clearly what had already happened to me wasn’t enough to deserve tears.

I regret that this set of life experiences led me to the point where as an adult it is very hard for me to cope with psychological distress without suicidal ideation.

I know it “isn’t an option” at this stage of my life. But luckily I have a husband who understands that there is a very high likelihood that when this phase is over that ban will not be in effect any more. It means a lot to me that there is at least one person who understands and says he won’t be mad at me. He will be sad, of course. But if some day I do that at least I won’t have the karmic debt of betraying him.

Fifteen more years.

Yesterday while we were walking Shanna made a comment about how it was her fault that I was mean sometimes. That led to a long and intense conversation where I said over and over again that *I* am the only one responsible for my behavior. Not anyone else. It is never EVER a kid’s fault if a grown up does things that a grown up shouldn’t do. She said, “But the chemicals in your brain make it harder for you and then I’m not nice so it is my fault.” NO NO NO. Yes, the chemicals in my brain do make it harder for me. That’s true. But it is still my responsibility to work as hard as I need to work in order to be nice to my kids. If I slip and do something mean it is ALL MY FAULT. It is never a child’s fault when an adult does something mean. Never. Never. Never.

I told her it is like when Calli bites her and she doesn’t bite back because she wants to show Calli how to be a good sister. Sometimes Calli makes a mistake. Being a good big sister means that you tell her it was a mistake and you try to show her how she should be acting, not that you turn around and do the same mean thing.

I told Shanna that it goes double and more for grown ups. Grown ups don’t get to blame bad behavior on children. If a grown up blames a kid for their behavior the grown up is doing something wrong and immature and inappropriate. We can all only be responsible for our own behavior.

Just like if Shanna or Calli do something I don’t like it isn’t all my fault. They made a choice. I don’t have to like it.

I was raised in a world where shit rolls downhill and it is always the fault of the youngest person in the room when something happens. My children will not grow up in such a world.

I’ve been having a pill a day for a few days now. That is smoothing out a lot of the rough edges, but I’m not stoned and controlling my behavior and ideation is really hard. In order to just get rid of the pervasive negative thoughts I have to be pretty stoned.

I don’t know how I am going to find balance on this. I think there is the non-zero possibility that I will find a way to earn money of my own over the next few years and eventually just be ok with being extremely stoned for most of the rest of my life. That may be the way I avoid killing myself. I’m trying to feel ok about that but I’m not there yet. I still feel disgusting and like I should be shunned and punished for being so dirty.

A woman I don’t know posts a lot of porn on her tumblr page. I’m cool with that. A lot of it is really hot. Yesterday she posted a picture that was one of those animated gif things. (I find them kind of creepy.) When I looked at the picture I could tell that other people would be fixated on what was happening with the genitals. I looked at the woman’s face, like I do. Her lips appear to be saying, “Please stop” over and over and over with that frenetic animation that gif’s have.

I am extremely supportive of adults wanting to do consensual rape play. Many healthy and whole human beings have the desire to role play rape and I think that is normal and acceptable.

But rape play done as pornography where people can end up with a singular shot from the scene that looks… entirely like rape instead of like rape play makes me feel very sad.

I feel very sad about how rape is normalized in the world. It’s just a valid way for guys to get off. But thanks to not being very stoned in weeks I get to wake up to horrible dreams of being raped. Now in my dreams I like to cut the throats of rapists. It doesn’t actually improve my mood when I wake up that I am now just as much of a monster as any of them in my head.

I feel small, selfish, and bad.

Suicidal ideation is very selfish. It is about looking for a way to stop hurting.

I used to do bdsm as a way of looking for catharsis. When someone is beating me I’m allowed to scream and cry and process some of what I store in my body. (I’m a big fan of Babette Rothchild’s work on trauma–The Body Remembers.) I have a lot of physical and emotional pain stored in my body that I have never been allowed to cry about. I have never been allowed to deal with the physical reality of all the things that happened to me.

After a while I stopped thinking that bdsm was a valid way of attaining the catharsis I need. Too many DMs stop my scenes because they don’t like the screaming. Public play spaces are for people who are doing light, fluffy sexy things. Not for people who want to genuinely experience awful things and scream about their pain.

I mean, I have been crying for years but I haven’t been crying for decades yet. I didn’t start really crying about these things until Uncle Bob died. Before that I would have bursts of crying randomly that weren’t very soothing or cathartic. They were the smallest increments of blowing off steam I could manage in order to not kill myself that day. I have always cried from stress. My sister spent my entire childhood being nasty to me for crying out of frustration. It wasn’t very cathartic.

After Uncle Bob died I finally had a time and a space where I was *allowed* to cry and cry and cry and cry for hours upon hours for days. Thanks to my friends showing up to take care of my kids for a week. Even when I went to Jenny after my father and brother died I cried a little, but not like I’ve been crying for the past few years. Not in a looking for catharsis way.

Suicide is about being overwhelmed with pain that you can’t handle. I’m scared about how much pain I carry around. I put a brave face on it, mostly. Most of the people who know me will see anger more than they will see sadness or pain. I do that on purpose.

Being vulnerable is scary. Most of the people I have ever tried to be vulnerable with are… gone. It’s my fault and I know it. If only I hadn’t been so intense maybe they might have wanted to keep knowing me. But I’m too much of an asshole. I have no one to blame but myself.

That doesn’t really leave me feeling like there is a lot I can do other than die if I want to stop hurting people. No one else is to blame for my reactions or emotions or behavior. It’s my fault. If I am scary or violent it is my fault.

It doesn’t matter how much people lie to me. They are “doing their best” and it isn’t ok for me to react with anger. I am allowed to withdraw and that’s it. And if I withdraw it is my fault I don’t get to have relationships with people. I chose to back out because I couldn’t handle the trade. That is about my failure, not anyone else’s.

I would rather be disappointed by the truth than lied to. The truth is that no one other than Noah is ever going to show up and want to be supportive of me with all my conflicting, complicated, layered issues. I’m a lot of work to know. It isn’t worth the trade for anyone else. Even Noah has distinct limits about what he can and can’t do or handle. I have to respect those limits. If I have more needs than he can handle that is my problem and not his.

People who get support are people who were born into a support network I don’t have. It’s not their fault they get it. It’s just luck. Do you know who “gets over” PTSD? People who have a large support network to help them process their grief and trauma and pain. People who validate them and tell them that it is absolutely right for them to have the feelings they have. Do you know who doesn’t get over it? People who are told to get over it.

Life is pain, Highness. But the way you process it and move on is by acknowledging it and thinking that it is pain and you need to process it.

Maybe if I had more support to give I would be able to find people who would be able to give me more support. But I’m empty.

I will raise my kids. They will hopefully internalize my many lectures about how other peoples behavior is not their fault. They are not my support units even though they are starting to do more chores. That’s pretty cool.

I need to find a way to be enough for myself. That may mean giving absolutely nothing to anyone outside of my house. I have a lot of need. It isn’t anyone’s fault any more it just is. I have to bear that whether I like it or not. It just is.

Less than six hours to a doctor appointment. I hope this will result in less pain in my body. I hope that less pain in my body will result in less suicidal ideation.

Hope springs eternal.

Dr tomorrow

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So I should figure out what to say. This isn’t a Kaiser appointment so I have more than 15 minutes. Hurrah!

I’m thinking I should start at my head and work my way down. I get severe headaches. Usually I think of them as “eye strain” but I got new glasses last year and it didn’t help the way it did in previous years. These headaches center around my temples and mostly streak back towards my ears. That throbs in the 2-5 pain range pretty much daily. The whole muscle group that supports my skull has been unhappy and fairly crampy since I had kids. My entire skull hurts all the time.

I have vertigo off and on. I used to be prone to blacking out but that hasn’t happened in years. I go through periods of extreme tinnitus.

It is difficult for me to breathe through my nose. If I try I end up gasping for breathe through my mouth.

Before I move down from the head it is important to note that a large part of the reason I am going to the doctor is because I have PTSD and GAD and depression and I am having a hard time controlling my behavior when my body is in this much pain all the time. My PTSD symptoms include hypervigilance, flashbacks, avoidance, heightened startle reflex, extreme anger, repetitive intrusive negative thoughts, nightmares (when I’m sober but pot controls these), suicidal urges, self-harm urges, and early wake up time.

In a few months I will be at the point where I have been in therapy on and off for 30 years. It has been court ordered and paid for by the state for a lot of my life because my traumas were considered extreme. Society has an interest in making sure I don’t climb a bell tower with a loaded gun. I have “tried” every school of therapeutic approach I could as I went through 21 therapists. At this point I do cognitive behavior therapy (cbt), acceptance and commitment therapy (act), eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing (emdr), prolonged exposure therapy, and I use cannabis with a medical card. I have tried a wide variety of big-pharma medications including anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, and anti-anxiety meds. I had severe side effects from everything that made it impossible for me to actually live while taking the meds. I am more functional without those medications.

As a result of life experiences I have a great deal of difficulty working with doctors. When I was a child my mother spent a great deal of time telling me I was a “hypochondriac” because my body always had problems but a brief 15 minute visit to a doctor always resulted in them saying “nothing was wrong with me”. Which lead to hours or weeks of being screamed at and berated and sometimes I was beaten if my mother was under enough stress in her life. Later I had other negative experiences with doctors. I have extreme difficulty in learning to trust people who might be able to help me with my help. My experience is they really don’t care about me.

Ok, now to continue down the body. That neck is still a nightmare all the time. I do not have full range of motion through my neck.

My shoulders have been in pain since my first pregnancy. Sleeping on my side for years has caused me to develop a lot of pain all the way through my shoulder muscles. I have several specific big knots that are dull notes of pain all the time with occasional spasms. This pain area stays in the 2-6 area. Mostly down at a 2 with spasms that absolutely hit a 6.

My arms are getting worse by the year because I type too much in bad positions. I’m a writer. I will always type too much. I have muscle pain and tingling up and down my arms and into my hands. I can point at a few specific unhappy spots. I have been specifically diagnosed with tennis and golf elbow.

I have experienced back pain from early childhood. The severe back pain started after a specific trauma at around age 9. I have low grade back pain (4ish) all day every day with times that I have spasms in my lower back that spike up to the 8-9 range. When the spasms happen I have to lie on the floor and cry and wait them out. I get the spasms irregularly. I have fewer spasms when I exercise more so I suspect that it is related to weakness in the muscles but I’m not sure. I have seen a chiropractor in the past and it made the pain less intense but did not eradicate it. I get irregular massages to help with my muscle pain and they can generally bring my entire body down at least one or two levels of pain.

In the front of my body I have a lot of digestion issues. I have had chronic diarrhea for all of my life that I remember. I was probably malnourished through my childhood because I had multiple years where I ate nachos for my free lunch at school and ramen for every meal at home. We were poor and I was alone and unable to cook more advanced food for myself. I was alone most of the time from about four years old. I could boil water for ramen. I didn’t have much more talent than that.

I worry that I have food intolerances or allergies but I am not sure. I know that the diarrhea and abdominal cramping is highly related to stress but I have never managed to detect other true signs of allergies. Wheat and dairy combine to make more than half of my diet and sometimes I have symptoms and sometimes I don’t. So… I’m not sure what that means. If I eat too many raw vegetables I will be in extreme pain. Cooked vegetables are better but I still have pain from them sometimes.

I have had periods of extreme stomach pain for my entire life. That’s where I hold my stress.

I had two hard pregnancies and two rough labors but I don’t intend to have children again. Yay!

I have an area on my lower abdomen where I occasionally get a throbbing feeling. A doctor can verifiably feel the throbbing sometimes but the first test looking for a hernia came back negative and I have not been psychologically able to pursue follow up testing as to why I still have that throb in my belly. My husband suggested aneurism. I don’t know.

I figured out a while back that carbonation causes me extreme pain. I no longer ingest it.

My hips are tight despite me doing a lot of stretching (I do yoga at home by myself–I have a book) but they aren’t what I would consider “painful”.

I used to get a lot more pain in my vagina than I do at this point. I had a lot of internal scar tissue but luckily child birth seems to have dealt with breaking up the scar tissue. At this point I have only occasional pain during sex.

My legs go in and out of pain but that has all been since I started running and it feels like good, healthy muscle soreness. It isn’t like my shoulders or back at all. I get occasional escalation of soreness near my knees but if I try to watch my running form more carefully for a bit that goes away. I am happy to report that my feet only hurt after long distances of running.

That’s all I can think of right now. Have I missed anything I bitch about frequently?

irony.

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I don’t miss the irony in my feeling suicidal as a reaction to worrying that my children have no where to go if I die. It’s a coping method that developed a long time ago. Changing it is very hard.

All honey badger like.

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I was thinking about what triggers the suicidal urges. Because I need to control them. There are lots of triggers but some are more predictable than others. Gaslighting is a pretty sure fire way to cause me to psychologically recoil and believe that the only option is checking out.

Gaslighting is, more or less, when you try to make people mistrust their own perception of reality. When you tell someone to depend on you while avoiding emails for months. “I’m there for you” while flipping someone off. That’s very minor gaslighting.

“People tell you what they think you want to hear because they don’t want to disappoint you.”

When it comes to the potential safety of my children I need to deal with the absolute cold, hard reality of life. I can’t just pray that “everything will work out”. Lots of people try to tell me that my life worked out just fine because I’m not dead yet. Fuck you.

I have to believe actions. I have to. I have to watch what people do and extrapolate from that.

I “know” I am not actually “alone”. I have friends. What I don’t have is a safe haven for my children. That attacks all of my core sense of self, all of my core sense of safety.

I get what people have leftover after they take care of the things that actually matter to their lives. I bloody well know that.

That’s not good enough for my kids.

I think it is weird that I’m willing to throw down that as a boundary for my children and not for myself. I think I get more than I deserve from most of my friends. I think my friends are patient and generous with a crazy bitch they owe nothing to in this world.

My children are not crazy bitches and they do not god damn deserve to go through their lives learning that they get what other people have leftover and they had better smile and be sweet or people will decide they don’t even deserve that.

I know I shoot myself in the foot a lot with this whole “lack of gratitude” thing. I don’t just say “thank you”. I say, “Uhm… you showed up with $1 when you promised $6,203. Where is the rest?”

My kids deserve that. I don’t know why but they do. Because everyone should deserve that. I sure as fuck wish I did.

I’m scared. I feel really bad that until my children are adults I will live in terror that they will get shunted off to a bunch of rapists or a crazy lady who has beaten every other child she’s had.

I’m scared. I am not omniscient. I cannot make sure my children will be safe. That makes me feel very bad about myself. That is the most important task I have ever or will ever have. I can keep them safe as long as I’m alive and that’s it.

I “understand” that many parents are in similar positions. They didn’t have a childhood like mine to look back on.

Everyone seems to want their children to have “better” than them–whatever that means to the individual parent. I want my children to actually be wanted. I want my children to never feel like they are an unpleasant burden. But unfortunately when your mother is a crazy bitch you aren’t very wanted by other people.

I’m so sorry.

Disclaimer: No one in my life has called me a crazy bitch in a long time. I haven’t been called crazy or a bitch by anyone other than myself (to my face at least) in at least ten years. This is simply how I live with the shame and guilt of so many friends breaking off contact. If you have the same problem over and over again… it probably isn’t someone else’s fault. It is probably your fault.

It’s my fault.

Not good.

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I think I’m up to a solid four hours of crying so far today. I cried for hours before we went to the home school event. Then I dropped the kids at the Ikea daycare for a while so I could cry more. Then I cried the whole way home.

I feel like a worthless piece of shit. The whole drive home I cycled through various ways of dying.

But I keep coming round to the fact that Noah really couldn’t handle the kids alone. And no one else wants them. (Ok Jenny–not true. You want them. But you live in another country and the US government wouldn’t let you have them.) Just like no one wants me.

I feel so guilty for having kids. Someone like me had no business doing so. I do not have a family to give them. I don’t have a place in the world to offer. I am nothing.

lying

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(I’ll get back to that longer piece.)

My therapist said to me yesterday, “When people make a commitment to you they *completely mean it* in the moment. They aren’t lying. They truly mean that they want to support you. But later as they go through life they want to keep all of their options open, regardless of commitments to you. That’s not lying. It’s like an astrological difference. To *you* if you make a commitment it means you are stuck with it. Not everyone works that way.”

Yeah. Some people say they will do something and mean it. Some people don’t. I shouldn’t perceive it as “lying” because they “meant well”.

*snort* If at the end of the day I’m carrying a load by myself that other people swore up and down they would help me carry I can’t perceive that in a positive way. I think that if I try to give them the benefit of the doubt at my own expense then I’m a stupid piece of shit with absolutely no self-worth.

Maybe I shouldn’t be so “dramatic”. Whatever.

The only conclusion that I can draw from this is I am a stupid fucking moron if I *ever* believe anything that people say to me.

Parenting, research, privilege, and gender.

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I read research studies as a hobby. This has been true for many years. I read studies about a wide variety of topics. I have read just about everything written on the topic of incest that was available as of the time I last sat down with databases to search (I haven’t gone looking for research studies on incest in the past four years so I’m probably out of date now). I read about PTSD, parenting, child development, race, vaccines, breastfeeding, other more general mental illness issues, among many random one-off topics that aren’t normally part of my obsessive researching.

I confess that I do not bother to keep a running bibliography of all the studies I have ever read. I do not read these things so I can impress anyone else. I feel incredibly frustrated that so many people believe that if I am going to write about what I know then I must footnote everything.

Guess what? That’s an incredibly idiotic thing to demand of people who are not writing for an academic journal. Have you noticed how I have shunned academia? Yeah, fuck you too if you think I must cite everything I know or it is invalid.

I read studies that agree with my points of view and studies that argue with me. I can almost always sit down and present bullet point lists of the pro and con arguments if I’m asked to do so. No, I can’t fucking remember the name of the schmuck who did the study. That’s not how my brain works.

What is more important? That I be able to cite a small list of studies so I can win internet arguments or that I read absolutely everything I can and come to my own conclusions?

Have you ever read meta-research? The vast majority of studies that exist are unsound, inaccurate, biased, or otherwise not all that appropriate for basing your life around. Most studies are done on populations and every single thing that is true for a population can be disproved on an individual level. Which means to my jaundiced way of thinking that they aren’t all that valid.

Kind of like looking at you BMI as an indicator of health. Like Brad Pitt being deemed “unhealthy” if his BMI is too high. Err, his BMI is high because he has muscles and if we’re dinging people for that our “health standards” are kind of broken.

Just about all of science works that way when you go read study after study after study after study.

So no, I’m not going to spend the rest of my life carefully footnoting everything I write. Give me a break. I’ll do it for books. I’ll do it if I ever decide I want to participate in academia. Otherwise: bite me.

Saying that someone must cite everything or it isn’t valid is kind of like saying, “People who have only read one or two studies and they have memorized them are way more important to listen to than someone who has so much information in their brain that they are now uncertain what started from where.” Well, uhm… ok. Have fun with that.

I don’t mostly write because I am trying to convince people of anything. Have you noticed how I’ve never gone out and tried to write in a general forum addressing lots of people? I write to clear my head and figure out what I think. If that’s useful to other people, great. If it isn’t–don’t fucking tell me that I have to cite studies in order to prove what I think. Just ignore me and move on with your life.

That said, man do I wish I got to be the boss of other people. I really do.

I read about parenting because I have spent my whole life knowing that what I saw of “parenting” was bad and I need to understand what “good” parenting means.

Mostly what I find is that gender essentialism is a problem for everyone. When you look at research, depending on who does the research, you either find that it doesn’t matter what gender the parents are (kids from queer parents do great thankyouverymuch) to finding out that “men have a unique role”.

Men are supposed to teach kids how to rough house. Learning to rough house is how you learn more about your body’s physical boundaries and the boundaries of people around you. When a child is very young they climb all over you and you ignore a baby. They can’t help hurting you. As they get heavier, parents have to teach them how to be non-hurtful.

Kids are not born knowing that if they shove their knee into your belly it hurts. They just don’t know. They have to be told hundreds or thousands of times.

If I cared more about research I would be tapping my foot and looking at Noah with impatience.

Instead I look at the combination of things I learn and think “Hey–I think these people “proved” that fathers must teach these things because that is what they wanted to prove. That doesn’t mean it is TRUE.”

So I rough house with the kids I know. I rough house with my kids and I go to the park and wrestle with the home schoolers. I get the impression I am more rough with the kids than their fathers’ are in general. We live in Silicon Valley. Our fathers are mostly computer geeks. They aren’t rough and tumble brogrammers either. I am blissfully surrounded by men who are not so physical.

So I am instead. I brought the power tools into my relationship. If there is something to be fixed in my house we don’t wait for “father to come home” I fucking do it.

I do, however, think that parents play very different roles for children. I don’t think that is any more gendered than it has to be.

I believe that parents have responsibilities to their children because the parent of a given child has a unique ability to help that specific child.

Your kid is a mixture of you and another person. That means your kid is going to have some personality and/or physical traits like you. What have you learned about the world in your tenure pre-children? What did you learn about how to manage your personality in the world?

Your kid isn’t going to be exactly like you. What you teach them about your experience is about guidance, not requirements. You should not expect them to handle everything exactly how you would because they are also like their other parents. Presumably you mated with someone who had at least some traits that are different from yours, right?

Parents need to teach their kids what to expect from the world. If you are an asshole to your kids then you teach them the world is like that. They will never unlearn that point of view.

Daughters and sons who have fathers who think they are unimportant go on to find more people to treat them like they don’t matter. People want the world to make sense. Even if that means they pick dysfunctional relationship after dysfunctional relationship.

It matters how you treat your children. And some of how parents treat their kids is about gender and it is about privilege.

No one should scream at their kids. Not mothers and not fathers. That’s pretty well shown to be true. Screaming elevates cortisol and adrenaline and the more time you spend with those chemicals racing through a developing brain the worse time that kid will have becoming a calm, functional adult.

Fathers are often, but not always, bigger and stronger than their wives. Whenever you are standing next to someone who is much smaller than you then it is important that you consciously not be scary.

It isn’t fair that a large man is more inherently scary to a child than a woman but it is mostly true. Women have to work much harder to be scary compared to men. Men are often terrifying if they don’t consciously work to not be.

If you go look at history that made more sense. Men have often been more brutal than women. I’m not saying women aren’t brutal–far from it. I’m aware of how scary and nasty women can be let me tell you.

In any given family a mother might be more scary than a father but in general children spend more time with their mothers and they are more acclimated to the mother so she is more familiar and “normalized” than the father.

If a father stays home and the mother works then this seems to reverse. It’s not actually about gender. It’s about familiarity and acclimation. We have just had a long period of

And I’m going to stop there because I have two forking kids asleep on me. fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. I’m feeling oppressed and bitter lately. My attitude fucking sucks.

Ok if I’m going to have children fucking climbing on me from 4 fucking 30 in the fucking morning I’m going to need pot today. fuckfuckfuckity.

I apparently have strong priorities.

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I have some really bad habits. To start with: I like working out what I will do by talking to other people. Then in the process I discover my boundaries/priorities because I get explosively angry at the nice people who I am talking to when they suggest something that isn’t what I want to do. I hope I didn’t bite anyone’s head off yesterday. I tried to end conversations when I felt myself wanting to scream. Thank you so much for talking to me.

I wish I could figure out what I think without feeling the need to scream. I didn’t scream. Not once. But there were many hours of crying and feeling upset.

I cancelled the grief ritual registration. I’m trying to build community with the home school group and I don’t go out with them much. The group in general spends a lot more time with one another than my kids spend with them. If I weren’t going with the group I wouldn’t bother to go to Cirque right now anyway. I wouldn’t have bothered paying for tickets. And it was bought in a group package so I don’t think it would be easy to exchange.

I agreed to the Cirque trip months before I thought of the grief ritual for this year. Apparently I don’t like the idea of flaking on my original plans just because a better offer showed up.

I keep flaking on the nice lady who is point on the group trip. Canceling would be a lot like flipping her off and saying her effort wasn’t important because I found something better to do. People do that to me a lot. I don’t want to turn around and hand that down.

I’m sad about missing the grief ritual for a variety of reasons. I don’t have a whole lot of catharsis in my life. A nice lady said, “Do you even have grief left?” and I didn’t yell. *pat self on back* Yes. I have a lot of grief. I feel like I’m drowning in it.

I used to process by doing bdsm until I could scream/cry it out. A long time ago. Then play spaces changed and these days it isn’t ok to play in public the way I used to. These days you have to be careful to “not scare the newbies” so really brutal/loud beatings are considered inappropriate. I’ve had a lot of Dungeon Monitors (I kind of hate DMs) interrupt my scenes to tell me to be quiet. I just won’t try for heavy scenes in public any more. And I don’t have a sound proof house and I know all my neighbors.

I used to get kind of impatient with people who said they couldn’t scream in their home because they didn’t want to bother the neighbors. Ha. Things change.

I miss Castlebar. No one cared how much you screamed because we were in an industrial neighborhood at night near a freeway. No one could hear it or care. It was great. Ok, only having three walls so you froze all winter kind of sucked… but I still miss it. I liked it better than the fancier spaces where you have to be quiet to play. I’m not quiet.

Many people suggested exchanging the Cirque tickets and just going at a different time as a family. It’s not a bad suggestion. But it’s kind of like if your family was all going to Disney World and I said, “Well you don’t need to be there with them. Just go a different time.”

Of course you could, but then you would be missing the family trip.

I want to go see S and O and A as they experience Cirque. I’m trying to be a grown up who is consistently in their lives. My kids are growing up with them. I’m trying to find experiences my kids get to share with other kids. Mostly they are just stuck doing things with me when I can handle doing them. They don’t get to do a lot with other kids. They don’t have five days a week where they are with other kids.

I really do appreciate that people helped me figure out my priority list. It isn’t anyone’s fault that I do that by getting angry about suggestions that won’t work for me. I’m sorry.

I don’t think I actually yelled at anyone. I just had surges of emotion. I think I squashed them. I think I was appropriate. I am never sure though. I’m always afraid that my nice friends will talk to me then I’ll be a cunt then they won’t be my nice friends any more.

I lose a lot of sleep worrying about this. I’m sorry I get so angry over things I shouldn’t get mad about.

In other news I continue to not use much of my apathy enhancing drug. Holy shit does that mean that every emotional reaction feels like it is turned up to 11. I’m doing well at not screaming at the kids. I’m barely even yelling. I seem to be getting a point almost every day and I try to comfort myself with the idea that I’m barely raising my voice and I tend to cut it off mid-sentence… I still get a point for the AHHHP. The check mark thing on the wall is helping me. I feel humiliated when I have to give myself a point so it is getting easier to remember.

I can’t just “not yell” but I can avoid shame. It’s weird.

I really appreciate that people talked to me through my annoying hand wringing and crying. I’m sorry that my process works this way. I wish I were “calm and rational” but I’m not always.

What is more important to me–catharsis with mostly strangers, or bonding with kids I want to know through their childhoods?

Not a decision anyone else can make for me. People don’t understand what it means to me that I didn’t get to do the group activities as a kid. I did things alone. I never had a group because I moved all the time. Even when I did things ostensibly as part of a group I didn’t know anyone so people wouldn’t talk to me. They wanted to hang out with their friends. I want my kids to get to be friends with S and O and A. It’s a big fucking deal to me. I feel incredible guilt that I only get off my lazy ass and join the group for one activity a week.

I just can’t handle the driving most of the time. The home school group goes pretty far afield and just about all of their activities are a minimum of a 30 minute drive each way for us. I can’t do that every day. I freak out and have no spoons left for getting anything else done.

I have strongly internalized that home schoolers don’t stay home. They are out in the world. But our world is largely bound by the limits of our ability to walk. My kids are buff. I need them to be able to do heavy manual labor in less than seven years. I don’t think that the standard American kid raised in a car can turn around and just do that without a lot of pain and awful.

My kids will always be pulled out of the group a lot. Next year we will be gone for 4-6 months. I haven’t decided yet. The bare minimum will be 4 months but there is so much I want to see (so many people) that it may stretch out. That’s a long time to just be gone from their friends.

I need to provide them with time with kids. I just have to. That is more important to me than me getting a weekend of catharsis. It is inconvenient that there isn’t a convenient other ritual coming up. (There is one in Sacramento in a few months. On Shanna’s birthday. Sigh.)

I don’t think I can explain what being in a supportive environment while I cry feels like. I have spent my entire life knowing that it isn’t actually “ok” that I cry all the time. It is shameful and annoying and I need to shut the fuck up because I bother people.

I know.

My problems are my personal problems and they don’t belong to anyone else. I know. That’s an awful lot of why it feels like I need to just die when I feel overwhelmed. It isn’t ok to let my issues spill out and contaminate other people.

So going and meeting a woman who believes deep in her belly “all problems are problems for the community” is… intense.

The thing is, this kind lady isn’t available to be anything to me at any point after the ritual. She can tell me how it is in her village in Africa for people who grew up there. She’s busy and travels a lot and doesn’t live near me and she has no bandwidth to spare for random ritual attendees.

So my problems are still mine. Even though some people don’t have to bear their problems alone forever.

I struggle so much with bitterness.

The whole “Bank of Mom and Dad” isn’t really about the money. It is about having people who are deeply committed to helping you and supporting you through your life. They are invested in you being ok.

I don’t have that. I didn’t ever have grandparents. My aunts/uncles mostly abandoned me when my parents divorced because I went with my mother and no one liked her. My mom grew up in my position in her family. The unwanted child everyone hated. I don’t think she was the product of rape but no one ever liked her. I feel so sad for my mom. Then she grows up and her kids hate her too.

I fear that I’m on that road.

I have friends who have genuinely lost their mothers. How dare I feel so bad about choosing to cut off ties.

I had to. There is no other way to ensure that my kids don’t grow up in the same cycles I did. From when my niece was very young my mother told her that things were “all her fault”. So by 17 my niece was working at In-N-Out and supporting her sibling and mother out of guilt. She felt overwhelming pain at the idea of Auntie having to work in her 70’s because she (my niece) was the reason my Auntie spent her retirement money and now she (Auntie) doesn’t have any left.

What bullshit. Auntie had to work because Uncle Bob was a sonofabitch who spent money like it grew on trees to deal with his bitterness at having his wife’s family around. That is not my niece’s fault.

It’s just not and my kids will not grow up in that kind of fucking environment where kids are programmed to think that being born was a terrible burden on everyone around them and they should spend their life apologizing.

Just no.

I am experienced enough to know that people who think they can maintain their connection with family and “shield” their kids from the worst of it usually end up finding out twenty years later about horrible abuse that happened just behind the corner of a room. I know too many cases where children were raped in the few minutes it took to go get a toy from a room.

My children will not be spending their lives around recidivist rapists. I don’t fucking think so.

So I get to live with this grief. Doing the right thing doesn’t usually mean doing the easiest or the most comfortable thing. It means doing the right thing.

I chose to bring little people into this world. It is my responsibility to keep them safe during their childhood. I don’t think many people know better than me how fast things can happen when you are near evil people.

I have two wanted children. They are loved and a blessing. That is all they will fucking hear in their childhoods.

And they won’t have to miss out on doing things with their friends because their mom is selfish. They’ve been hearing about Cirque for months. Telling them they don’t get to do it with their friends would make me a selfish asshole.

I’d like to believe I am better than that. Maybe I’m lying to myself but I’ll keep trying anyway.

My friends gave me the advice they gave me largely because they believe I have the right to be the main character in my life. They believe I have the right to place my needs as the most important.

And I get mad at them for that. What does that say about me?

I’m not really “mad” at them. But my body does angrily reject the notion that I should be the only important person in my story. I don’t think I am more important than my kids. I don’t think that my preferences matter more than theirs. I don’t think I get to just selfishly usurp their life all the time. I do too much of that as is.

I’m not sure I’m right. I’m not sure there was a ‘right’ decision here. Ultimately I kind of decided “I’m going with the commitment I made first.” That may be faulty logic.

Thank you for talking to me. I wish I were less of an asshole.

Double booked. Shit.

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The home school group is going to Cirque. We bought tickets. Without checking dates I also scheduled going to a grief ritual. They overlap. Also that weekend I have a massage scheduled.

It is not physically possible to do all of these things. I can do Cirque and the massage or the grief ritual. The grief ritual is all day and in San Francisco.

I have about two days to decide what I’m doing and get a refund on the grief ritual. Or I could decide I’m doing the grief ritual and find someone to take my Cirque ticket and help Noah with the kids.

This decision has left me crying for hours. I don’t like feeling left out of family outings. That ties into all of my “I’m not welcome to be part of a family” stuff. I also spend a large portion of my life crying and trying not to cry because I know it isn’t “appropriate.” The grief ritual is pretty much the only place I have ever really been allowed to cry in front of people the way I need to cry.

I’m feeling really upset with myself for this decision. I feel like I have only lose here.

no time.

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I haven’t been waking up early enough to blog. I feel cranky about my kids being in my face from 15-30 minutes after I wake up until I fall asleep. This is challenging.

I have writing work I want to do. I am not sure when I will do it. I’m feeling some feelings about the life I choose.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Category Archives: adult-only

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Parenting, research, privilege, and gender.

I apparently have strong priorities.

Double booked. Shit.

no time.