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Parenting babble

I was reading parenting stuff yesterday. I’m far on the end towards cooperative living/consensual living… the terminology largely depends on who you ask. Unschooling, for me, is about building relationships instead of training a child to be a specific way. I understand that most home educators do a lot to adapt to their children–I’m not trying to imply that school-at-home is shoving kids into a mold.

But I’m really struggling internally with some of the things that go along with the parenting philosophies. I don’t believe in “no punishment”. I think that isn’t how the world works. I think my kids need to understand what happens when you push right past where you are supposed to be. It isn’t fun finding out the consequences from a police officer in the middle of the night on the side of the road as a teenager.

Mostly I think that things like biting/hitting your sister will have self-imposed punishment. I talk to the kids about how “If you are mean to your sister she won’t want to be your friend when you get bigger. As home schoolers that will be pretty lonely.” Mostly these days I separate them when things get hysterical but I’ve been letting them do a lot of fighting things out. They have to learn how to resolve conflict and always having an adult intervene doesn’t help.

I feel err, like I fall away from the unschooling pack/cooperative living pack when we get to the idea of chores. Many people in that camp think that if I chose to have kids I get to clean up after them until they are basically grown or I should just step over the mess because “they live here too and I should not subject them to my need to control.”

I uhm well I’m going to diverge from the pack and not give a shit. My kids get to clean up their own shit. Otherwise they just don’t need to have so much of it. Historically children had 1-5 toys. If we got down to that point I wouldn’t worry so much about the bloody mess. But I’m going to break my neck if they never clean up at all. Or I will never do anything else. And fuck that noise.

I think that my needs have to matter as well or I am not raising functional adults I am raising little entitled assholes. No thanks. I am not under the delusional impression that I am going to be able to create order Muppet’s out of them but my children will bloody well have the experience of picking up after themselves. I’m pretty sure no one will be irredeemably scarred by the experience.

That said! I did take careful note about the bits about tone of voice. I think that I share the opinion that if it would not be ok for Noah to talk to *me* in a given tone of voice I probably shouldn’t use it with my kids. But I’m really an asshole. A big one. Like, mean as fuck. So my tone of voice is… variable. I’ve worked really hard on sounding nice. Years and years and years of practice. I have actually sat down and worked with voice recordings trying to sound perkier.

For me most of the tone of voice arguments come down to the simple fact that the human brain is designed to shut down when you are feeling attacked or scared. It isn’t a choice. It is a protective device. The average child is literally incapable of learning when they are being screamed at. They may be capable of reacting in the moment but they are not learning whatever lesson you are attempting to teach. Instead they are learning that you are a big scary asshole.

Is that what I want to teach?

I believe that human beings are born with incredible potential and it is mostly whittled down as you learn to live in the environment you get stuck with. No one gets to choose their early environments. I try as hard as I can to have an environment with almost no restrictions. I want my kids to think they are allowed to just act upon the world. If they have an impulse it is ok to follow it. Neat things happen!

But this is hard to live with because small children are essentially wild animals. The messes are incredible. The waste is overwhelming.

So I take several deep breaths and I have to stop and think really hard which lessons I really want to teach. What are the best ways of teaching them? I more or less have to start lesson planning in my head, “Ahh. Obviously we have not mastered this skill yet. What do we need to work on over the next few weeks?” I’m constantly going through these check lists in my head.

One friend has told me to get Calli evaluated for potentially being on the spectrum. I don’t see it but I believe that mothers are often the worst people to make such a judgment so I am looking into it. Another friend is concerned about Calli’s speech because she still doesn’t enunciate perfectly. I am aware of the sounds she doesn’t make well and we play sound games but I’m really not worried. Many three year olds are almost entirely incomprehensible to people outside their family. Calli was noticeably later on speech development than Shanna. I think she has a lot more physical trouble with forming sounds. We will work on it… but I’m just not worried at this point.

So this parenting business is a lot to think about. Or some people don’t think about any of it. They put food in front of the kid and provide clothes and they just figure the kid will grow up. We don’t do that here. We are uhhhh over-thinkers.

I think of every single thing as a skill to be learned. I think in terms of schemas and scaffolding. How do I provide the base layers for later learning? What are all the kinds of exposure they should have? How do I eliminate the fewest number of futures for them? What do I do to broaden the path?

I have no idea what kind of adults they will be. I can’t assume they will be like me. Shanna goes from wanting to be a doctor to a firefighter to a jewelry maker to a dressmaker to a rock star. I don’t know what to teach that kid. Calli is even more amoeba-like but I think she will be involved somehow in finer details of making something work. She seems very detail and organization-focused. Who knows.

I tell Shanna frequently, “The main thing standing between you and whatever you want to do is thousands of hours of practice. I don’t know what you want to do. You will have to figure it out and just do it over and over. You have to understand that everything is hard and frustrating sometimes. You have to keep working even when you feel discouraged. Success comes after thousands of failures.”

It is super cool that she can open the peanut butter and jelly jars now. I feel kind of upset with myself for not noticing. She had to tell me. Even though she abruptly stopped yelling at me, “Moooooooooooooooom. I’m making a sandwich! Come open my jars, please?!” How could I have not noticed that change. I didn’t catch it for three days and she had to freakin tell me. “I don’t think you noticed. Not this time and not last time but the time before that I learned how to open the jelly jar and the peanut butter jar all by myself.” That’s my girl.

Calli likes to have a goodnight kiss and cuddle. She will shove the top of her head under my chin and nuzzle into my throat. She always says, “I love you and I will never let you down.”

I usually feel like my throat is about to close. Oh baby. I know. You won’t let me down. You amaze me every single day. I think you are so interesting.

I have a seriously bad attitude about doing all the supporting painting work. I tried to talk myself into heading outside to paint for hours before I managed yesterday. I knew I would have to do all the prep and I felt grumpy and bitchy and I just didn’t feel like fucking doing it again. The kids keep bringing piles of mud up to the second story of the play structure. My phrasing is, “Ladies is there any chance I can persuade you to play this game AFTER I finish painting? Scrubbing the mud off every day we come out to paint is really annoying.” After Shanna spent about half an hour on her hands and knees trying to scrub the mud off the floor she agreed that maybe this game won’t be a good one until we are done painting. I won’t CARE then!

Calli is a really neat painter. Even when she “knows” that she is painting a solid block of color she still invents things she is painting at the time. I say, “Make sure that you put an even coat of paint over this wall. See the drips? This is how you smooth them out.”

She says, “I am making Princess Celestia. And here is her castle. And look at allllll the bushes. And over here there is a cloud.”

But she’s doing it all in flat purple paint. She’s not trying to actually paint shapes. She’s just telling a story as she paints. It is fun to listen to her. I mean, her paint job looks like a three year old did it. It is gloopy and lumpy but it works just great. This is her bloody play structure. Shanna has done a surprising amount of painting so far. She is covering a lot of wood and doing a good job. She can’t handle doing just a single color on a given board. She’s putting stripes and polka dots all over the place.

It is really fun knowing that my children are just growing up with the idea that paint is something you can use at will to change your environment. You get to decide what you want to see in the world.

I like unschooling because we are learning vocabulary words and schemas as we paint. What is a streak? What is a drip? What does “drape” mean? (Dropcloths) Why are we painting? What happens to wood when it gets wet? What does the paint do for the wood? Why does it matter if the paint fully covers the wood? How do you physically learn to move your hand so you can create the images you want to see? How do you understand the scope of a job? How much paint will we use up today? (Important because when you are using several colors at once you don’t really want them all sitting with the tops off for hours and hours. Here’s another vocabulary word: scum!)

We talk about how to take care of your tools. We talk about why all of the supporting work is necessary. We talk about why you have to carefully clean the wood before you paint. We talk about anything and everything we can come up with. And while we work Shanna makes up songs for me.

I feel these waves of gratitude while we work together. Thank goodness I have children who want to be near me. Thank goodness I have children who enjoy working with me. Thank goodness I can manage to be patient and loving and introduce things as fun tasks rather than drudging unfortunate work.

I am very aware that I set the tone for our house. If I have a bad attitude I am teaching that as the default way of seeing the world. If I am angry I am teaching anger. I mean, they aren’t just mirrors. They have their own interpretation and experience. But trying to act like the adult doesn’t set the tone is bullshit.

When Calli gets upset with me I try to stop what I am doing and ask why she is upset. Often I have done something unthinking and rude. I wasn’t trying to bother her but I did any way. I have to act like my existing impacts people in ways I intend and in ways I don’t intend.

Recently I told the kids that something wouldn’t be happening and Shanna kept asking. I told her, “If I cave then you will learn that I don’t keep my word. What is more important to you: a mom who bends to your momentary whims or a mom who does what she says she will do?” She thought about that for a few minutes. Then she sighed deeply and said, “Ok. I guess you are right. But I don’t like it.” I managed to restrain my laughing for which I deserve a medal.

And the kids are up. Was that enough kid babble Pam? I’m reading your emails. I love you. I miss you. Outside of food I’m not sure I want anything from Taiwain. 🙂 (Not that they don’t have neat stuff… I’m just not sure that I need anything and it’s not like you can buy me clothes. Ha.)

The tier thing.

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A really nice girl recently told me at the tail end of a conversation, “And I don’t even care what tier I am on.”

I think you are awesome-sauce. I am going to detour hundreds of miles to see you.

The tier thing isn’t about my emotional investment. It isn’t about how much I like you. It is about amount of need I can thrust in a given direction. It is about people being able to handle me suddenly freaking out and needing something fairly intense from them. I don’t in any way think negatively about people who are not up for my random bursts of need. It isn’t anyone else’s problem.

I’m a 32 year old woman. I don’t need a hero. I don’t need to be rescued. I don’t need anyone else to fix me. But I still have a lot of needs. Trying to manage that is *my* problem and not anyone else’s.

People love me. Ok, not everyone or anything, but I have some really excellent friends. I am lucky. I understand that the amount that someone loves me is in no way correlated with how much of my need they can handle. These are just simply different scales and they are in no-way related. I don’t judge other people based on how much of my need they can or can’t handle. It isn’t a negative thing.

But it is a real thing and something I have to manage. The second tier is a lot more stressful. It is a lot more work. It isn’t fair to expect that of people who are not eagerly signing on for being a major source of support for me. I don’t expect it from people. I don’t ask for it.

I carefully eke out how much need I put in any given direction as I learn where the walls are.

I love my third tier with wicked intensity. Remember, strangers are more out at tier five or six. My third tier gives what they can when they can. I appreciate them. I value them. I need them. But I need to not hand them more than they can handle or they will feel bad and I will feel bad.

People feel upset when I hand them a bunch of needs and they can’t meet them. It is hard all the way around. It feels bad having to tell someone, “Sorry I can’t help you.” I try very hard to not push people into having to say that to me. I understand that everyone has limits. I try like fuck to ensure that I always stop asking before I get to the limit of where someone else will have to tell me “no”.

No hurts. It shouldn’t. I know I should brush it off and keep going. Sometimes I can. Sometimes I can’t. “No” from a second tier person hurts a lot more than a “no” from a third tier person because it is about my belief system. I very carefully screen people over years before thinking of them as second tier. “This is someone who consistently goes above and beyond what I think I can expect and shows great eagerness for more closeness.”

It isn’t about me liking them more or less. It is about me understanding their stress load and what they can handle. People frequently move back and forth between tier two and tier three in my mind. I’m trying to manage how stressful being near me is for other people. I know it can be really hard to be around me. I try to make it as pleasant as possible while knowing that it is just hard for people.

A lot of being on the second tier is me trusting that if I freak out about my shit it won’t cause someone else to feel bad about themselves as a person. It isn’t their fault I am freaking out. I need to be able to trust some people to help me without making it personal. I am not actually freaking out about you. Even if you “triggered” me. I am still just freaking out while standing near you. It isn’t you.

Third tier people are not as good at knowing that my shit is my problem and they add their anxiety to my anxiety if I overshare and then I can’t cope any more. I understand it to be my problem. I should not have shared in the first place. It wasn’t something they could deal with. That’s ok. That is part of life. I’m not upset, bitter, pissy, any of those things.

But I am here. I am still breathing. I am still drowning in need and I have to manage that. I try to do so with as little damage to the people around me as I can. The tier system is a lot of how I have learned to reign in my over-sharing. I hurt a lot of people talking about things I shouldn’t be talking about because they can’t handle it. I don’t mean to. It is really hard figuring out what is “ok” and what isn’t.

I don’t want to hurt people. But I do. Sometimes I hurt them by over sharing and sometimes I hurt them by stating that I need to have boundaries around them or I will accidentally hurt them. I just can’t win.

This should all be silent and invisible so that people don’t feel judged or found wanting. I’m not finding you wanting. I’m finding that you are a human person with limits and I need to respect that.

It seems like the only way to be respectful is to figure out how to manage all of this without ever commenting on it. I can’t manage that. I’m doing less collateral damage than I used to but I’m not sure if being near me will ever be a happy or healthy thing for people.

So I use the tier system in my head. Don’t hurt people. Don’t hurt people. Don’t hurt people.

I think that I like autistic people so much because they don’t take me freaking out personally. They are totally clear that my crazy is in my head. Heh. And yet when I say, “Hey when you do _______ I feel _______” and then they can decide if they want to continue doing it or not. (I try not to be a controlling asshole. But I can express preferences.)

I can love you and think you are a fascinating and drop everything for the chance of a visit with you while knowing that I cannot dump a bunch of shit on you. That makes you tier three. Not because I lack feeling for you. Because I want to make sure that you continue to like me and you don’t feel overwhelmed by my needs. They aren’t your responsibility. Not yours. Not yours. And not yours either. But I’m still learning how to be responsible for them.

The tier system is a lot of how I manage that.

And when I get to the point of being absolutely terrified that if I press you for any more support you will walk away entirely… I may abruptly drop away. I don’t want to force people away. I stop asking. I stop pursuing. It isn’t that I don’t care. It is that I care too much. I don’t want to hurt you and I don’t want it to be all my fault that I lost another friend. Better to do a slow fade. At least then I can pretend that you just got busy and it isn’t a pointed rejection.

Stuff to think about.

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I started slow. I didn’t really get moving until eleven. That’s unusual for me. I painted for three hours. It is coming along.

The girls and I got along very well. The painting is a lot of fun for them. They are frustrated with the fact that painting requires work outside of the painting stage.

We went to sushi for dinner with a friend. I ate my standard chicken teriyaki.

After dinner we talked about body language stuff. Clearly if I get hit on as much as I do (and I really do–it is flattering and scary at the same time) there is something I am doing to encourage people in some way. Apparently I should stop making eye contact. I’m told that I do it in a very overly intense and flirtatious way. I’m told that the length of time I hold eye contact is just as intimate to a total stranger as a hug.

I’m dubious.

But if eye contact is part of why people think I want to have sex with them then clearly I should stop making eye contact.

Hrm. Thinking.

Good day

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I write because when I am all done writing I feel empty and soothed and more calm. It is like taking an ice cold bath when you have a fever. I have a better day when I write. Maybe it is like taking a hose to the dirty screen.

Yesterday I cleaned the house. The older I get the weirder I feel about how much I love cleaning the house. At the end of the day when I walk through the house and everything is all orderly and sorted I feel so much better about myself. I feel like I am now free to start any project I want because I AM CAUGHT UP, MOTHERFUCKER!

I like the feeling of being done with what I was doing. I’m an asshole towards Noah about cleaning the kitchen. He has particular parts of cleaning the kitchen he cares about (mostly the dishes). So sometimes he will come to me and say, “I cleaned the kitchen” and I get snarky and snotty and say, “Then why do I need to spend an hour cleaning the kitchen?” We clean differently. We are bothered by different things. (Ok, I don’t actually say much about the kitchen any more beyond thank you. It’s nice when he does things and I appreciate the help and I try to not be an ungrateful bastard.)

The kids didn’t help much and I did not act like an asshole. That’s important to me. If cleaning is my thing then I need to be nice to other people while I do it.

Some day my wonderful children will be all grown up and off. My house will be clean. I don’t need to be an asshole to my kids right now as they are also living in the space. I’m glad they are here. I’m glad they are making a mess. I’m glad they are taking up space. I want them to take up space.

Shanna is always going to be a chaos muppet. There is merit in her style of creativity. I just hope I can teach her the balance and usefulness of order. You don’t have to always be ordered, not everyone cares. But it is important to be able to create order.

I understand that my need for order is about me. I don’t think it is morally right. I think I feel out of control and scared and having a neat house makes me feel less out-of-control. That doesn’t mean it is “right”. It just is.

Today the girls and I will work on painting their play structure. The kids feel really proud of doing the work. It is wonderful to watch. They are very studious and careful and yet still so uncoordinated. I think they are adorable. I like working with them. They force me to carefully consider whether I care about the process or the result of a given task.

That’s really important to how you teach something. Do you care about the process or the result? It makes such an impact.

It is fun to talk to the kids about painting. “Ok, where is your drop cloth? You must stand on the drop cloth. You can’t step off of it while you are wielding your paint brush or you will drip on the dirt. Look for drips as you spread the paint around. See how it is much thicker right here than anywhere else? Can you smooth that out? Yes! Just like that.”

I like talking to them about how to pick what colors they want. I like talking to them about what they want to see. I like finding out what they like and what they don’t like. They are so distinct from me–we don’t have similar impulses. I like having to stop and wait while they do what they want to do. I feel surprised by what they pick. Oh. You like… that? Well… ok.

I like moving slowly with the kids through tasks. I like talking about what I’m doing and why. I appreciate that they want to talk about everything. I am so glad that I did not end up with taciturn children. That would have been a real struggle for me. Thank goodness they are talkers.

After spending seven hours cleaning I took the kids out to dinner. (We got coupons in the mail. Whoo hoo.) We went to Home Town Buffet. The kids were quite excited. They like getting to pick from a wide variety of things. Hilariously the biggest hit is always the jello.

While we were there one of our neighbors came in. One of the elderly people who walk around and stop to talk to us. We haven’t seen him in a bit. It turns out he doesn’t live in our neighborhood anymore. His girlfriend of 34 years had to move into hospice care due to Alzheimer’s. She owned the house and emphatically did not want to get married because she had a previous messy divorce. So now he is living in an apartment on his own. He lived in the house for 21 years.

I didn’t tell that man anything even remotely sad about myself. I didn’t tell him one negative detail. Well, he asked why I moved around so much as a kid. (He was talking about moving a lot.) I said, “Enh sometimes it happens when you are poor.”

I spent the conversation trying to figure out if he is taking advantage of support systems because he isn’t doing very well emotionally or spiritually right now. He’s feeling very hopeless and sad. His son is sixty so he feels well past any point of usefulness. He spends one hour a day with his girlfriend in hospice and he said he is just waiting till she doesn’t remember him because he knows the day is coming and he doesn’t know how he will keep living when the most important person of his life can’t remember him any more.

I didn’t need to play poor-me with him.

It was kind of weird that he spent a lot of the time telling me about how wonderful it was to have someone like me move to the neighborhood. He said that walking by my house and seeing how it changed and progressed made him feel inspired. He said that seeing me with my kids gives him hope for the future. He’s glad to see people like me who exist loudly in creative ways because they inspire everyone to think bigger. (He hasn’t even seen the mural because he moved out of the neighborhood just before I painted it. I told him to come check it out.)

I didn’t go fishing for compliments. He just walked by every day and saw us outside. Shanna shared fruit with them as they walked around.

I’ve started asking the senior citizens in my neighborhood point blank questions about food security. I feel kind of anxious and like I am over-stepping but I know that a few of them don’t have kids nearby checking on them. I think that in the next few months the kids and I should figure out some kind of way to get involved in helping provide food. I know there is a local service who brings food to folks fighting cancer. That might be a good first starting place.

I was talking to the kids about classes–what they want to take next, what they are enjoying about the classes they are in right now. I don’t think I will end up with dancers. They get to take two PE classes at a time. Right now they have creative dance and gymnastics. They both say that at the end of this session they want to drop dance and go back to swimming but gymnastics can stay because it is awesome. So I hear. Near as I can tell they both want to be in swimming until they can just head out into the ocean. I told them that is still a bit off. You need to be able to swim in a pool without a life vest.

Shanna emphatically wants to start music of some kind in January. I haven’t been finding a lot in our area for five year olds so I’m not sure what she will start with. We own two ukeleles (thanks to Noah’s family) but I can’t find a local teacher who will teach a five year old. The local ukelele teachers are all unwilling to work with kids under eight. We’ll see. Hunt harder.

I wanted to start martial arts with the kids next year but I don’t know that Shanna will be willing to give up gymnastics or swimming. So I may start on my own. I haven’t decided yet.

I’m watching Walk the Line for the second time in two days. I will be sending it back to Netflix today. It is interesting thinking about what it takes to create a specific image that you must maintain under pressure. What kinds of ambient stress does that create? How do people break down when they have to be able to pretend upon demand that they are happy and cheerful?

What does it mean to find someone who is a good partner for you?

What kind of support do you need? What kind of support do you want?

Noah wants me to encourage him to do new things. He wants me to listen to him talk through his subject material in order to help him figure out how to teach it better. I may not be good at programming but I understand what it means to teach someone a new subject. I know how the brain learns. I know how to get peoples attention and hold it for at least an hour. I know what tends to make people remember things. I’m not good at everything. I’m good at sticking in peoples minds. People remember things I say. I’m not even entirely sure why but it is something that people comment on regularly so I think it is true.

Noah likes that I organize him so he doesn’t have to think about it. Noah likes that I do a lot of background work so he can do the last-fill-in-the-gaps with his subject matter knowledge.

I don’t think Noah would be pursuing teaching the way he is if he didn’t have someone at home to bounce ideas off. I get the impression that he is scared. I help him deal with that feeling. I believe in him enough to fill in the gaps where he doesn’t believe in himself enough.

I hope that living with me is nice. I hope that it is nice to live with someone who thinks you can accomplish just about anything provided you have a detailed enough plan, enough sleep, and enough rest.

If Noah had a different partner he would probably be more focused on the money. Long-term I don’t care if we are rich. I want a specific pre-planned level of safety and then I don’t need a lot. Money for travel. That will be the big long-term expense. Even having enough money to be safe is something that not everyone manages. What does it even mean to be safe? What is safe enough? I know that Noah has the potential to make a lot more money than he does but it would involve even more working than he does. I don’t want that trade.

I feel guilty that I don’t lighten his load enough. I feel like the burden of my financial need is unfair and unbalanced. Surely it doesn’t even out in terms of effort even if I do fold his fucking underwear. (I think folding underwear is stupid. He wants his folded. I fold it.)

I think life is about trade offs and choosing to be happy with what you have. If you defer happiness “I will be happy when I get _____” you will find that mostly you never reach happiness.

I am not a happy person but it isn’t about my life circumstances. I am trying to be a happy person. I believe with all my heart and soul that I have every reason in the world to be ok right now if not very happy.

I know a lot of people who can’t count three people who love them. I have three people who love me and hug me and tell me I am wonderful every day. We are really big on words of affirmation in this house.

We wake up to, “I am so glad to see you again.” We go to sleep saying, “I had a great day. I was glad to be with you today. I am so glad I know you.”

I smile as much as I can make myself smile. I know I am lucky. I know that not everyone gets to have people who are as nice. I get to have this mostly because I am creating it. My kids are nice to me because I am nice to them. I have to be consistent. I have to make this environment. If I don’t make the environment it won’t exist.

Speaking of environment, Calli has been bringing me books and saying, “Can you read this to me? I LOVE reading books. I think books are the best thing ever!” My kids see me read all day long. I talk to them about what I am reading on the computer. “I am reading a blog article. It is talking about ______.” They see me pick up a variety of books. I’m reading several non-fiction and a couple of fiction books at the same time. Every so often I sit down for a few minutes and plug away. Then I talk to them about the chapter I just read.

Right now one of the books I am reading is A History of the World in 100 Objects and the kids are really enjoying hearing me talk about the history. They ask a lot of questions. “Who were those people? Where did they live? How were they different from us?”

I like that my kids believe the world is to be questioned. Everything is worthy of a question. Sure it makes them less than convenient sometimes but I don’t want convenient children.

I feel proud of myself when I look at my kids. I have nothing else in my life I want to point at and say, “This is what I want to be judged by.” I fuck up everything else too much. But I haven’t fucked up my kids. My kids are happy, healthy, sure of themselves, and smart as can be. Not that I think that children must be “smart” in order to induce pride. But my kids are my kids and Noah’s kids. They are really smart. They figure things out. I like standing near them.

I want kids who are infuriating because they take everything apart. I want kids who want to understand the world so much that they have trouble containing their curiosity and destructive urges. Even though it is hard to live with. My kids now come to me and say, “Hey mom! I want to do an experiment so I’m going to make a mess in the kitchen. Is that ok?”

Sometimes I say, “No problem.” Sometimes I say, “Well… let me come check your set up and make sure everything will be easy to clean up; this might be an outside experiment.”

I feel sad that I am not better able to be a nice person under pressure. If you can only be nice if everything works out exactly right and you are in total control then you aren’t really a nice person, now are you?

But it isn’t true that I make everything about me. I talk to people without saying anything about myself often. I feel scared that I will screw up other peoples day so I try to pretend I am mostly just an audience.

I think that most people feel alone. I manage to find the vein of sadness that pretty much everyone is trying to hide. I can find that and I can tap into it. I wish to be seen. I wish for support. I wish for love. I think that most people have things they are hiding. Ways they need support. I think that hardly anyone gets enough love.

I like looking at people. I like seeing them. Seeing other people makes me feel like I am actually doing something. It makes me feel like I have value and purpose and a reason. I am good at doing something that people desperately need and most people suck at doing. Ok. That’s a reason. That can be enough.

Shanna expresses frustration sometimes for being where she is. “Why am I not better?” “Well, have you noticed how you started doing this two weeks ago and you are comparing yourself to someone who has been here for years? Uhm… yeah. Things happen in stages. You have to practice. You have to suck. You have to be frustrated or you won’t learn and you won’t get better.” “But this is frustrating.” “Yup. Life is. Keep plugging.”

I like that I can point out which things they can do now that they couldn’t do a week ago. I like that I can detail how they are growing and changing. I like that this is allowed to fill up so much of the space in my head. I like that I don’t have to things that matter to other people. I’m glad I don’t have to care about the priorities of a company. I am so grateful that I don’t have to fret about money.

I feel so unworthy of the life I have. This kind of safety should belong to people who can properly appreciate it and relax into it. I am wasting the security. Only I’m not. My kids will not be like me. My kids will not shake with fear for the majority of their lives. My children are able to move between many different environments comfortably and pull off “appropriate” behavior in nearly any context because they believe that they can do it. That is the main hurdle that people have to get past in life. You have to believe you can do what you want to do.

I believe that my daughters are capable of adjusting to any circumstance because some human being has done so at some point in time. I tell them so. Thus they believe it too. I coach them, “This is going to be different from most of the places we go. In this space I need you to _____.”

I’m very specific. Why will it be different? How will it be different? What do you need to do? What will other people be doing? How should you react? How do you tell which people want to talk and which ones don’t? How do you figure out what body language means ‘I want to socialize’ and which body language means ‘Go away’?

Most people in the world want love. They may not want it at this second from you but they want it. How do you convince them that maybe… just maybe… you might be a good person to be loved by.

Lately we are working on the fact that you don’t get to touch people just because you want to. Hell fucking no. Everyone gets to decide for themselves if they will be touched or not. Your body had better be respected. You have the right to defend yourself when someone touches you in a way you don’t like even if they think the touch is “mild”. It is always best to start defending yourself with your words but if you have to then escalate. Defend yourself. You matter. You matter so much.

How would I be different if I had thought I mattered?

I will never know what might have been for me. I feel so lucky that I get to watch my kids. I’m so glad that they just know that they are worthy of defense and love.

I am here. There is no right. There is no deserve. I am loved. Today will be another good day. My children and I will work together. Hopefully we will finish painting the play structure today. I’m ready to take a break until the new year. I need to finish Outrunning and that is going to be all my brain power for the next few months outside the daily rush.

So much to do and so little time.

I’m making Noah slow down his rate of work in late November and December. I think that both of us should have a few weeks of not doing extra projects near the end of the year. We are both tired. We both need to spend some time together. I love touching him. I like the cuddling we do. I like that we can touch one another a lot without it having to be sex all the time.

I’ve dated a lot of people who wouldn’t let me touch them unless it was leading to sex. They wanted their space. Noah doesn’t have a lot of interpersonal boundaries with me. If I want to flop on top of him and just lay there for an hour he’s ok with that–provided of course he has no specific reason to get up. He likes touching me too. I don’t think I have ever been around someone who makes me feel like they like looking at me the way he does.

It was really weird with my Owner. He wanted a fetish item. He liked the shoes and the clothes and the production of being the current woman in his fetish items. He passes the clothes and shoes from woman to woman. He picks us because we fit into what he already owns. Of course he does make/get new stuff for each new girl too. He took thousands of pictures of me. I should have felt like he wanted to look at me.

In a lot of the pictures I made sure my face was averted. I was aware he was taking a picture of the shoes and not me.

He wanted the pictures because he wanted the reminder that he had seen someone in those shoes. It wasn’t about him liking me. I mean, I think he did like me. I’m not hard to look at. I’m not ugly. I’m just… I just wasn’t very important to him. He didn’t care about me. He didn’t want to know me.

Noah wants to look at me. Noah asks me questions and listens to my answers and demonstrates that my answers impact his behavior.

I have never felt this important in my life. I try to appear happy because I know I should be. I know that I would be if I wasn’t broken. I have every reason to be happy. If only I could stop feeling scared.

Attachment

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Somewhere else on the internet someone asked someone other than me why they are still so angry about being abused as a child. Just get over it, right?

This weekend I spent a while talking to a woman in her 60’s. She told me about the dissolution of her 25 year marriage. They walked away when the kids were old enough to be independent and she said they haven’t spoken since. After 25 years. Her comment was, “I haven’t even missed him. Is there something wrong with me that I never emotionally attached to him?”

I’m not the person to ask. I am trying as hard as I can to feel attached to Noah and my kids. I can never tell if it is working or not. Sometimes I feel these flashes of love so intense that I feel like I can barely breathe. Mostly I know that I would be capable of turning around and walking away if things were bad enough. I know that I could leave. I hope I never become that person.

I think I chose to stop sleeping around because I want to have less pull towards leaving. I’m afraid of what I might do. I’m not a very nice person.

How you act is a choice. How you feel is less under someones control. I understand that meditation seems to be the route forward.

My therapist asked me how I have been getting through the periods of intense anxiety lately. What “coping methods” am I using? I told her that mostly what I do is close my eyes and try to breathe and not think until I am more calm.

It feels pathetic how hard it is to not scream at people. It feels pathetic how hard it is to consciously choose to be nice to people. I don’t want to be nice to anyone. I want to scream explitives at the top of my lungs while breaking everything I see. Sometimes. Not all the time. Not even all that often. But often enough that it feels hard to forget that I feel that way. It hides on the edges of my consciousness, this entirely consuming rage. I feel so much hate that sometimes I feel like I am about to burst into flames.

I “could” say this is my family’s fault. But at this point I am past fault. No one in my life is to blame for my feelings. I think I am past the point of usefully pointing to my family. At this point this is just my brain functionality.

What do I do now that I am this way?

I homeschool. Because obviously I am one of the best people to hang out with children alone all day. Duh.

I appreciate the fact that my five year old (after my last therapy appointment) is reminding me that yelling is not the best way to teach them. If my voice starts coming up she looks up and reminds me, “Mom, do you need a minute?”

My kids believe that they have the right to demand that people talk to them in a respectful tone of voice. They certainly demand it of me. It’s not ok to badger them or shout at them or demean them. And they will bloody well tell you so.

You have the right to be treated well. If people don’t know what that means then you need to tell them. Otherwise they will do it wrong out of ignorance and probably not malice.

It doesn’t matter if I am deep down a nice person. It matters if I can play one on tv. Or on a daily basis, rather. What matters is if my children believe they are well treated or not. So far my kids are very happy with their life.

I asked Shanna one more time how she feels about skipping kindergarten. She said, “If I would have to not be with you all day it sounds pretty awful. I’ll learn here. I’m good.”

I don’t really understand “attachment” in the way that other people feel it. I keep a wide path between me and most of my former lovers. I think that retraining them isn’t worth my effort. I don’t tend to teach people how to treat me. I pay attention and then if I don’t like it I walk away and never talk to them again. I don’t think that people have any interest in being nice to *me* I think people just want to be validated for who they are and how they act. I don’t really do that.

I don’t validate people much. You have to validate yourself. I mean, I can talk about commonalities of experience. I can talk about patterns that are common. I can talk about cycles. I don’t have much ability to say that how someone else exists is the right path. I can’t grant that. I don’t know. I don’t know enough to judge.

So when I feel unsure I leave.

I think I have proven in my life that I am a bad judge of character. I am drawn to problematic people. I’m quite certain it is all “my fault” or something.

But Noah isn’t really much like most of the people who have been interested in me. Most of the people who have dated me wanted me to change. They wanted me to accommodate them and do as they imagined someone would do in my role. Noah seems to not have a lot of expectations. Instead he waits to see what I will do and then expresses pleasure that I would do that.

I’ve never had anyone notice me like this before. Even my friends have never paid attention to me like this. I tell myself he notices me about as much as a good parent would notice their child.

Like the painting shit. I don’t think I would have had the nerve ten years ago to ask to paint a mural on someone else’s property. I would have been completely sure that I could not accomplish such a task. But Noah tells me to do things that I have the impulse to do. He’s quite pushy.

Because I am a realist I have about fifteen plans in place for when Noah dies. Or if he leaves me. I have back up plans and back up plans for my back up plans (depends on how long he lives, yo) because life is scary.

I think that Noah is going to be my window into real attachment this lifetime. I mean, being a parent is different. I am attached to them. I would readily stand in front of them with a full armament and shoot anyone who came near intending harm. Them continuing matters more to me than thousands of other people. I don’t give a shit if that is selfish. That’s the law of the jungle, baby.

But Noah is different. Part of my attachment to the kids is the feeling of obligation. I believe with all my soul that if you choose to have unprotected sex you must do it in full consciousness that you may be entirely responsible for another person for at least ten years and closer to twenty. That is just the deal. If you don’t want that deal use some fucking birth control. We are not in the dark ages where people are blindly a victim of fate.

I think abandoning your kids so you can focus on having fun is one of the most despicable things a human can do. The kids didn’t ask to be born you self-involved piece of shit.

You give your kids their twenty years. Then go do whatever you want. They aren’t a forever obligation. It is a period of time. Either you go all in or don’t go there at all. It does too much damage to be an absent parent.

So this attachment feels different. When My kids are 23 and 25 I am not going to be terribly willing to place their day-by-day happiness above my own. Go figure your shit out.

I haven’t decided how I feel about long-term generational living. Before having kids I was fairly certain I would be holding a broom behind their asses at 18 telling them to get out. Now I’m less sure. I understand the benefits better. I chafe at their presence less than I assumed I would. I just like them more than I thought I would. Now I think that as long as I get a sound-proof room at some point it will all work out. As time goes by I am thinking that I will get back to heavy masochism. I will need somewhere to scream without bothering anyone. You have to not scare people.

I was talking to Noah last night about masochism stuff. I’m not your typical masochist. I’m the opposite of a stoic. Most people who spend a lot of time involved with bdsm as heavy bottoms (people who are hit very hard) are pretty quiet as they process. It is an internal experience. It is a lot easier for a lot of tops to hit them. I’m a screamer. I don’t like being hit very much and I make it plain. If you want to hit me you have to be very sure that you want a sobbing, pathetic mass on the floor.

It takes a much higher degree of willing to live with knowing you are a bad person to want to hit me.

I don’t let people think, “Well this is just intense sensation! We are sharing an intense sensation experience!” When people hit me they have to work through their own emotions about hitting someone who has clearly been hurt a lot in bad ways. Most masochists are without serious abuse histories. Most of them had fairly normal, happy lives. They just happen to thrive on intense sensation.

I’m not like that.

I make both a good and bad demo bottom. Good because I am highly verbal no matter what is happening. I can talk about the relative differences between different strokes of the cane in detail no matter how hard I’m crying. I may have to scream in between sentences but I can go back to talking like nothing happened. Not many people can do that. But I scare newbies. Clearly things happen to me that aren’t so awesome. People worry that they have to be beaten like me. Oh goodness no.

Play where you feel comfortable, happy, and safe. Err, if that’s your thing.

I don’t want to feel comfortable, happy, or safe while I’m playing. That’s part of the point. I don’t think that life is very comfortable, happy, or safe. I think that life is terrible. I think that life is about a series of very painful experiences that you have to learn how to manage.

Having nice people hit me very hard so that I can really get through a period of hysterical sobbing is helpful for me. I feel more calm for days or weeks afterwards. Brain chemistry is an interesting mix. I don’t really do the light fluffy sensual stuff. Not because I think there is something wrong with it–it just give me what other people get from it. I get annoyed and fight back in ways that make it not a fun scene for the top.

I go through periods of feeling empty and like I don’t have a lot of emotional attachment. Not to Noah and not to the kids. I feel like I don’t know how to care about people. I just want to hide in the closet and not talk to anyone. I don’t want to be responsible. I don’t want to fix one more fucking meal. Surely it won’t hurt you that much if I skip a few meals. Most of the world does it on a regular basis.

Err, I don’t hide in the closet and I don’t cause my kids to skip meals because of my mental health. The latest a meal has been has been two hours and that much variation is often just that we had a bigger than usual breakfast and don’t get hungry as quick. That isn’t a problem.

But man I worry. I worry because I know I am going through the motions. I am playing the role of mother. I am pretending that this whole caring for other people thing is something I care about and I am good at. I’m not sure if I am playacting well enough.

I have no one in my head I am trying to copy and that scares me. I don’t head out on the non-beaten path very often. I am always aping people. I don’t know anyone who is parenting how I want to parent.

(Err, in no way is that an insult or a put-down. I know a lot of perfectly dandy parents. But I don’t want to be like you. Not because you are all doing it wrong or anything. We just have very different personalities and tool boxes and such.)

I don’t know anyone who parents really well with my degree of mental illness. This doesn’t make the people in my life defective. It just means I don’t know many people who are like me who are doing what I want to do.

I met a couple of women in the support group I went to for a while who were close but they are making very different life choices.

I’m not even sure what it is I want so bad. I just know that I look at all the parents I know and think not that. I don’t know why. I genuinely don’t think any of the relationships I see are wrong. This is unusual for me. Most things I’m happy to copy people. Not one person entirely–I usually take small elements from lots of people. Not on parenting.

I have a very firm picture in my head. It isn’t what I see other people with. That’s ok. I want it. I want it. I want it and want it and want it.

This is attachment? I think? This feeling of must do this this way! I must treat these people in the way I see in my head. I must give them the things that felt so devastatingly missing for me.

We are always solving yesterday’s problems. And my yesterday was different from your yesterday. So you are solving different problems. That’s why we parent differently. And we have different kids. I would parent differently with different kids too.

You know how the DSM keeps changing? Every so often people vote. What is now bad and what is now ok. They get to just decide.

I feel like that degree of people voting on what constitutes problems in other people… man that makes me think that most psychiatric diagnosis aren’t much more useful than Enneagram or Myers-Brigg.

I spoke with a special ed teacher last weekend. He said he has a hard time dealing with the fact that kids have different diagnosis from year to year. “Autism one year. Bi-polar the next year. Oppositional Defiance Disorder the year after.”

Yeah, that’s because all of the disorders are kind of bullshit. Mostly they mean “This fucker doesn’t do as (s)he’s told. What the fuck.”

Sometimes I wonder about the whole attachment disorder thing. I think about my family. Am I attached to them? If my sister came near my kids I might hit her with my car. It doesn’t matter that I love her. It doesn’t matter that I think about her. It doesn’t matter that maybe in the abstract in the universe I kind of hope she can experience an ending of pain because holy shit she has had a horrifically bad life.

I would still not give a shit. My kids come first you fucking cunt.

Why? What is that about?

And yet sometimes I know that I could walk away from the kids. I think I am capable. I choose not to. I don’t think it would be good for them. On the days when I’m freaking out it comforts me to understand how much this is a choice for me. I am absolutely self-involved enough to be able to leave. Sure. I could do that. I’ve walked away from almost everyone else. I could do that too.

But not yet. Not now. Not while they are helpless. I would never forgive myself for abandoning helpless people.

I don’t know how much attachment I will have to the adult bodies of my children. In my subconscious mind taking care of them while they are helpless is the closest I can come to repairing the damage I experienced through not being cared for when I was helpless. There is nothing else in the whole world I can do to repair this broken.

Yeah, I’m broken. Just because something is broken that doesn’t mean it is beyond repair or usefulness.

I’m broken but I’m not helpless. I’m not hopeless. I don’t think that acknowledging the truth makes me unable to do something. I think that understanding that I am broken is inherently useful because if I stop acknowledging how broken I am then I may well wander off thinking I’m just fine. I see how well that goes for people.

It is too hard for me to get out of bed. If I try to pretend that this should all be fine I wouldn’t be able to muster the strength to do what I want to do. I don’t want to do almost any of what I do with my days. Not really. But I want it done. Thus I operate almost entirely on plans.

If you ask me what I want to do on a given day there is a better than even chance the answer would be hide in bed and cry. But that isn’t an acceptable life for me to look back on. So I don’t spend many days in bed crying.

I don’t feel very attached to people though. I don’t come out of bed because I want to see people. I don’t get up because I like so-and-so and them-and-them. I can’t. I assume that those people either don’t like me or will only like me for a little while so I can’t base whether or not I get up today on seeing them. Because they probably won’t be there in a little while.

I was recently told that folks in the poly world are still actively bitching about me taking Noah’s dick out of circulation. To this I say: move on. If you are attached to him being available in order to be happy then you aren’t going to have a happy life.

Just like I can’t be attached to having any friends. Or even Noah. I don’t know how long I will get him. I have to keep part of me away from him or losing him would be too hard. It is hard knowing that there will always be pieces of me I just don’t share with him for a wide variety of reasons. I become more compartmentalized by the year. I understand better and better what it means when I overload people. It isn’t very nice.

I’m a needy piece of shit. I’m not sure that will ever change. But only I am responsible for meeting my needs. I wish I could know that in the pit of my stomach without feeling sad and kind of bitter. That is probably the normal state for a great many humans. I’m not a special snowflake.

It is weird thinking about how symbiotic my relationship with Noah is.

I have stronger and stronger opinions about marriage as I get older. The point of having a help meet is to have a partner who has the qualities you lack so you can balance one another out. “Eve was not designed to be exactly like Adam. She was designed to be his mirror opposite, possessing the other half of the qualities, responsibilities, and attributes which he lacked.”

Ok, first… I don’t “believe in” the Bible. But it has a lot of fantastic allegories.

In marriage you need to have different kinds of people because there are a lot of different kinds of tasks that need to be done. I don’t think these things need to happen along gender lines. I know a lot of couples where the man is the stay-at-home domestic person and they are very happy. But balance is important.

I feel like part of learning to feel attachment to people is learning to feel more entitled to the help they provide. With Noah I have access to things I just don’t have without him. I don’t even mean the money. I mean that I would feel less confident homeschooling if I did not live with someone who has a maths degree. I would feel less like “We can definitely handle everything that will come up pre-puberty.” Which isn’t to say that his degree is actually going to matter. He has the knowledge I lack so that he can step in if I am doing something wrong.

Noah cooks more than I do. I do the shopping and preparation and planning. I strongly dislike the physical act of cooking. Not entirely sure why.

And it is really important in marriage to find some kind of compromise on physical compatibility. I’m really happy I found someone to marry who is sexually compatible. After my experimentations I know without a doubt that I am a hard person to match sexually. Not because I am so awesome… I’m weird. Everyone is weird.

It has only been recently that I’ve been thinking really hard about what it means to be in a sexually compatible relationships. The lack of pressure for hunting. The excitement of knowing that if I am in the mood for something all I have to do is ask. Given that we have a five year old kid we haven’t had a lot of sexual adventures in a long time. I’m out of practice for asking.

The seven years of our marriage are the most consistent of my life. And each year has been very different from the previous year. I’m doing almost entirely things I did not do previously.

What is attachment? What is love? Is it a feeling? Is it a set of choices?

I feel like I love my mother with an unholy passion that is much greater than what I feel for my children. I feel like my affection for my children is a candle next to the forest fire of how I feel about my mother. But I walked away from her.

I hate this ghost feeling. Disconnected, like I’m looking at the world through a dirty screen.

I think about the people I “love” and I think about what it would mean to lose them. I don’t know that any of them would increase how much I cry. I feel weird about that. I don’t think I am capable of carrying more grief. It is like taking too much vitamin C. Eventually your body just flushes it. I can’t feel more grief. I’m too numb.

I’m thinking about this because it was weird camping with people last weekend. And I have another camping trip with a different group next weekend. Being near people for that many hours feels physically uncomfortable. That is a lot of why I nod my head and say, “Yup–broken.” It shouldn’t hurt that much just to stand near people. Especially when a significant number of the people there are expressing approval, love, and affection in my direction to the degree that I permit them. Many would have given more if I had not abruptly turned and walked away.

I don’t feel that I objectively being given messages about how bad or terrible I am. I don’t think that I have had a situation that should effect my self-esteem in a long time. I could even rustle up some righteous indignation to defend myself in some of the more historical issues.

But I still feel like it is better for everyone if I spend very small amount of time around anyone so that I don’t fuck up and do something terrible and unforgivable. It could happen any second.

I can’t want to be around you. I can’t. If I want to be around you a lot them I will feel sad when you aren’t with me. Then I will lose focus and I won’t be able to concentrate on my priorities. Then I will feel empty when you aren’t with me. And I don’t believe you will actually be around me very much or for very long. So I just can’t want you.

Heck, I feel way less attached to my current therapist than I have felt in a long time. I’m starting to view therapists as being not the most stable part of my life. That’s different.

The depersonalization feels a lot more intense since I switched to edible pot. The feeling of being behind a dirty screen. I am not part of reality. I really dislike this part of the edible experience. Smoking is not this intense. Smoking gives me more of the “happy” part of the buzz and less of the numb.

With eating the pot I often feel kind of like a zombie. I feel like lifting my arm off the bed is as hard as moving hundreds of pounds of concrete. Without it I shake and cry randomly and can’t really control my physical actions very well when I get frustrated. My body gets jerkier and harsher. I accidentally knock into people and that’s bad when I’m around small, delicate people all day.

What does living mean?

This is a more disjointed-than-most-post. Neiner.

Depression! That’s maybe the name for this round of blah-enh-meh. But I don’t know that such details matter all that much. I wander up and down such a spectrum.

Do you know that people who are depressed are actually not pessimistic, instead they are more able to accurately predict how things will work? They are realists. Most of life is shitty and bad and doesn’t work out. If you are full of hope that everything will be great you are pretty delusional.

It depends on what you mean by “everything will work out”. Some people will live. Some people will die. Some people will be happy. Some people will be miserable. That will all work out. Well… everyone will die eventually.

But what does it mean to be happy in the meantime? I don’t know.

It would be nice if I thought people liked me.

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I think it went well. I think being there for just shy of 24 hours was the right amount of time. I saw a lot of people I used to know. Some of them expressed intense desire to see me sooner than five or six years from now when I deign to camp with them again. Why do I still walk around feeling like everyone hates me? This irritates the shit out of me.

I ran into five people I have had sex with. Only three remembered my name. I left the party in the evening when a drunk semi-dressed guy came up and said, “I don’t remember your name but I remember you from RWB….” He was standing very close to me. At RWB I used to do a lot of ecstasy and have sex with anyone who asked. So I said, “Oh! Well, hi. I’m Krissy. What’s your name? Oh. Ok. Have a nice night!” Then I fairly abruptly turned and walked back to my camp ground to bed.

It seemed prudent. Do I have any idea if he wanted to have sex with me? No clue. I just know that I am spectacularly bad at managing other peoples expectations.

I have a lunch date with a female friend for a nice long walk though. That will be nice.

Embrace the discomfort

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What does it mean to be broken? To be bent beyond repair? Is that item useless or does it just need to be reshaped and repurposed.

Are you talking to an American or someone living in Africa? I think you would get different answers. I want to find out.

No one lives because they are just so awesome. People live because they were born on accident because two people had sex. That means that none of us are all that special. We all come from exactly the same roots.

At least one person wanted to have sex.

That’s it. Nothing bigger. Nothing more important.

But once you are here what do you do? Do you consume things that other people make or do you make things? Do you pass on the hurt you have experienced or do you stop hurting people?

How do you stop hurting people? How do you change?

I read that the personality is mostly set by age five or six. I also read that there is no such thing as a personality trait you are stuck with–you can change anything if you want to badly enough.

That is one of the amazing things about human beings. More so than any other species I know of we can just decide to be something different and… do it.

I mean, we can’t just decide to be tall or short or fat or skinny or black or white or brown or yellow or red. You can’t change those things so much.

But you can decide if you want to be aggressive, assertive, or passive. You can just decide to change what you started out as. You can pick something. You can design something in your life and move towards it.

We are unique in this ability. Some individual people possess more natural talent in this arena than others.

Resiliency is about deciding that even though bad things have happened you aren’t dead yet so what the fuck are you going to do now? Resiliency means always looking for a new path. A new reason to keep walking.

Delayed gratification. I have a lot of delayed gratification fetish in my life. I am banking everything on future happiness. I have been doing so for as long as I can remember and I can remember almost thirty years now. By and large this has been a good proposition. My life when I was 18 was better than 17 was better than 16 was better than 15 was better than…

There hasn’t been a clear linear progression. There were up and down periods in each year, of course. And post-18 is becoming more and more of my life. I’ve been out for more than 14 years now.

My life is not always improving. Sometimes I get hit hard by something. If you continue to stay alive bad things will continue to happen to you. If you love other people then you will continue to have trauma. That’s just the price. Either pay it or shut the fuck up.

I know I will be hurt again. I know I will love people with great intensity and lose them. People will die on purpose and on accident. People will be hurt. My body is frail and I am clumsy. I will be hurt.

That is just life. Trying to avoid pain is trying to avoid life.

Lean into it. Yes. It hurts. Yes, sometimes you feel like you are insanely trying to climb the walls like a rat trying to escape an electric floor. There is nowhere to go to get away from the pain. It is every where.

So get used to it. Breathe it in. Take it deep within you and decide that this isn’t going to kill you.

Not today. You aren’t dying today. Even if it hurts.

Then all of a sudden it doesn’t hurt quite as much. You still know that injury is there, there is nothing you can do to make it go away.

But you aren’t dead yet. That’s enough. That is all there is, really.

Just keep walking. Keep wanting. Keep hoping. Even though it hurts. Even though it makes you cry.

That crying is part of life too. If you try to keep yourself from crying you are trying to keep yourself from feeling.

That feeling is life too. If you want to be alive, if you want to truly live then you have to feel. All the bad. You can’t have the good without the bad.

Just give me a reason. A little ones enough.

Put on the mask. Today you are going to a big party. Today you show that you are part of a community. Even though you don’t feel like it. Even though you feel like a visiting monster you aren’t.

Go find an outlandish costume. Dress up. You are a time traveler. Who do you want to be today? You can be anyone. You don’t have to be you. I promise.

Why does your three year old bite? Because she knows that she is allowed to get mad and she isn’t sure yet how to deal with it. That is part of the process. She isn’t bad. She’s young. She will learn. It is very hard to deal with the learning process sometimes.

Why is your five year old so bossy? Because children learn through modeling and she has one of the bossiest mothers in five counties. No shit she is bossy. Especially at five children latch on to being like their moms. Apparently this is the most bonded-attached-obsessed age. I’m going to be sad when she grows out of it.

I love that my children give me a chance to love myself. We are always solving yesterday’s problems. I can read child development books that go through the normal physical, emotional, and inter-relational development of children and see that my children are entirely within the normal curve and they are doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing. They are right on schedule. It is what they are supposed to do.

I did what I was supposed to do. I wasn’t a predator. I wasn’t trying to hurt anyone. I did what I was taught to do exactly on schedule. I have books. I could point out the paragraphs that explain that I was a very good girl. I did exactly as I was told.

How do you decide what to tell your kids? Do you tell them what your parents told you?

I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.

Just give me a reason. I will be a good-enough mother. My children will have an age appropriate experience. My children will make it to 18 knowing that their body belongs to them and no one else. If I have any luck at all they will not be sexually assaulted as children. I can’t promise them a whole life of safety–I have no such hubris. I don’t know that I can teach someone how to have that without locking them in a cage.

I don’t want my children to live in a cage. I want my children to feel calm and safe and sure that they can handle themselves. I also want them to have the ability to break several bones if someone attacks them. I want them to understand that this is a world where sometimes you have to seriously hurt someone else in order to love yourself and that is ok.

But don’t bite your sister. She’s not that kind of attacker. Unless she is. Then bite her until she god damn stops.

So my kids are going to have a problem with mixed messages.

“Treat your sister the way you want her to treat you. Do you want her to hit you? No? Then don’t hit her.”

I can’t teach “Don’t hurt anyone”. I can’t. I think that is tantamount to putting a bulls-eye on their foreheads and I can’t do that. Fuck that stupid notion. Sometimes you need to hurt people.

But might doesn’t make right. How do you decide when to hurt people?

You have to be very mercenary about evaluating whether or not someone is hurting you. Whether or not they are doing it on purpose doesn’t matter. That is irrelevant. How much hurt are they causing you? You have to decide. It doesn’t fucking matter if someone else thinks that is a perfectly acceptable amount of hurt. They won’t be the walking wounded.

How much hurt can you bear? How much hurt do you want to bear? Do you want to allow this person to hurt you in this way? Sometimes it is worth putting up with your mom hurting you just a little in an annoying way (like bugging you to go make grand kids) because the over all picture is so good and the hurt is so small. Sometimes the trade just isn’t worth it.

Every relationship involves trade. Every loving relationship between two people involves one person feeling more love than the other. The person who feels more love has less power. They will accept more hurt in trade for the love they feel.

It isn’t nice but it is true. Thinking about this balance in a mercenary fashion allows you to see that you hurt people all the time. You do it casually without paying any attention. You do it with your choice of words, your tone of voice, and how much time you choose to spend with someone. People never take your impact on them impersonally.

I mean, there are people who don’t feel much emotional connection so they don’t take it personally or care. But if they love you a whole lot then they feel more rejection than you notice. That’s just how it works.

I stay home because I don’t want to hurt people with my words and my tone of voice. People take my avoidance as rejection of them and a sign that I do not think they are worthy of my time or attention.

It’s a really nasty double bind.

I carefully manage my third tier. I know that I am only good at managing how I put out my neediness into the world if I manage how I spend my time. I know that most people can handle very little of my neediness. They can handle knowing that it exists and that I need to have people who kind of stand nearby pack-like and lend a supportive presence. They provide interactions for my children. They give me vague hand-wavey reassurance that makes both of us feel a little better. Not a lot better, a little better. But if you get a whole lot of a little better it does add up. It does matter. It is part of the process.

I manage the second tier carefully too. Most everyone on the second tier I only talk to a few times a year. I can say more painful and difficult things to them but I have to carefully limit their exposure to that intensity. No one lasts long if I overload them.

The first tier I just look at with terror because I know that this won’t last forever. I will lose this someday. I don’t know how or when. I know I will fuck up and lose that. I just never keep it very long. I hurt people too much. Brittney, Anna, Alex, Sarah, Grant, Elan. I think those are the ones I hurt the most. Those are all the people who have been first tier who don’t talk to me any more. I don’t know what is happening with Sarah. Life is very confusing.

Most of the first tier people probably fell out because I entirely walked away from those communities after they told me they didn’t want to ever see me again. I will see Sarah.

I very carefully make it so that people never have to think of me as one of those detestable people who are part of a community just because they can’t make me go away. If you hardly ever show up then people never develop that degree of dislike. I’ve watched this cycle a lot. Manipulating it is hard but can be done.

Bouncing between lots of different communities is hard. Pre-kids it was easier because I could maintain my behavior patterns between different communities was easier. I had fewer modes and they were less intense feeling.

Being around my kids takes so much of my attention that I have a very hard time acclimating up and down to other peoples comfort level. My finesse is all used up on people who cannot yet look at my boobs with a straight neck.

I feel like having children is teaching me a lot about rape culture. My kids think they have every right in the world to grab my boobs. Oh my fucking god. I have to teach them differently. It has to be a conscious decision if I am going to teach them that everyone gets to have their own body.

And I have to do it without blowing up or freaking out because then they miss the point of the message. Normal children can’t tune out random explosions of anger in order to learn a point of culture. They learn anger. Anger isn’t something that is learned in a highly specific and focused sort of way.

If I freak out and yell at my kids when they grab my boobs I am not teaching them that breasts are personal and you should ask permission before you touch them. I am teaching that sometimes mom is mean and scary and they really won’t understand what was so bad because they didn’t even do it on purpose.

It is really weird looking at them and knowing what I know about their stage of brain development.

I was punished so often for being “malicious”. I was told specifically that I was malicious all the fucking time. People were always telling me that I did things on purpose when I had no idea what they were talking about.

You don’t have to do something on purpose to do it. No one likes feeling blame though so people want to say, “But I didn’t do anything” whether they did anything or not. Then you can argue about lying. And nothing is solved.

Teach people how to treat you.

Why am I so loud about my boundaries? Because they are big and strong and have barbed wire all the way around them. I had to do that. I understand that you have not had to do so but we have had different life experiences and maybe you could think that I am like me because of my life rather than because of you?

Someone on the PTSD forum asked what people say when they are asked why they have PTSD. Most everyone responded that they are very defensive and private and they tell people that it is none of their business. My response? “As usual I go against the crowd opinion. I’m out. If someone asks me why I have PTSD I tell them that a lot of very bad things happened to me. Then I ask if they want details and 9/10 people back away slowly.”

I learned to be aggressive. I didn’t start out this way. I’m very curious about this whole “personality is set by five” thing. Do I feel such constant anxiety partially because I know that I am not “naturally” as aggressive as I act all the time? I want to hide under my bed. I come out harshly because that is what happens when you have to push so hard to say anything at all.

When people say, “Oh I couldn’t just walk up and talk to someone” I think “Well you could. You choose not to.” But I can’t say that. They think, “But I would be too scared.” I think that I go through a lot of my life shaking with fear. So what. It doesn’t matter that you feel scared. You still have the ability to force your body to move.

Bravery doesn’t mean you don’t feel fear. Bravery means you keep performing to spec even though you are terrified.

You learn how to keep performing to spec by practicing in low-pressure situations over and over and over and over until you have the muscle memory to carry you forward. But you can’t get stuck in feeling like you should hide and practice.

The best practice is to fail. In public. You will learn more. You will learn so much faster if the stakes are higher. Fail in front of people who don’t matter. Go try in public somewhere that you never have to see these people again. Travel. Talk to people you will never have to be responsible for knowing.

Make shit up.

Just try something different. Pretend to be someone you are not. If you were someone who could do ________ how would you act? If you send random emails to people who share your hobbies and interests there is a remarkably high response rate. Well, I’d say somewhere between a 3-7% response rate. Which is remarkably higher than 0! So send a few hundred emails. Personalize them. No form letters. Form letters = doom.

If you want to learn things and know things and grow you need help. You need to see the path. But the problem is you are making up the path as you go along. No one else knows what you need to do. You probably don’t even know until five minutes before you need to do it.

And yet. You have some ideas. The more plans you make, the more habits you work on the better off you will be in the future. Maybe you today will not benefit but tough shit. There is no use crying over spilt milk.

Today is the first day of the rest of your life. Who do you want to be?

It doesn’t matter how many times you have failed. Wait… no… that’s a lie. It does matter how many times you fail. You have to go fail thousands of times or you will never get anywhere. That is one of those things they don’t tell you very often.

Do it wrong. Just do it. Do it. Just… don’t sit in your house crying. Anything is better.

But you have to stop yelling. It isn’t nice. You have to treat people how you want to be treated.

I don’t want people to yell at me any more. Just like I don’t want people to hit me any more. (Husband excluded by pre-arrangement with specific sets of permission.)

I used to hit people a lot. Frequently. Almost every time I felt irritated. I don’t do that any more. I got tired of people flinching reflexively when they saw me. It made me feel bad about myself. I was acting like a bully. When you scream at people you are still acting like a bully.

And you can’t avoid being a bully just by finding a group of yes-men and staying there. That’s not a good answer either.

How do you consciously, always, de-escalate conflict? How do you do that while absolutely being prepared to break the face of someone who attacks you?

I want to live in that place.

And man I don’t think that is ok.

I don’t think it is ok because I am afraid that I am not good enough at knowing which attackers are a problem and which aren’t because my brain is pretty broken. My kids pretty frequently feel like attackers when they jump on me at the wrong moment and they are getting heavier and more triggering by the year.

I have to teach them how to treat me. I have to use my words. I have to do it while being nice and polite and calm or it won’t work.

When I know I have a problem to work on with my behavior I want to hide and practice. I want to stay home.

I can’t stay home. We are going fucking camping. Oh man. I freak the fuck out when I’m in unfamiliar environments where I have very little control. I can admit this. And I’m going to go hang out with Burners. I’m less confident in them being kid-appropriate than some people.

But I’ll stand next to my kids and I’ll smile. I’ll model appropriate group interactions. I won’t let anyone touch me too familiarly. More than likely I will run into someone who will. I have to be prepared with what I am going to say if I don’t want to freak out.

I was talking to Noah about the over-thinking every social interaction thing. I told him I’m not sure where I started that. He said, “You learned it because you were always fighting older and more experienced people. If you follow the default path you will get caught because they know how to manipulate the default path. You have to be able to out-think them and surprise them.”

Yeah, that.

I live in a world and in a place where if you want to be allowed to have body autonomy you need to be able to verbally and sometimes physically defend yourself. I didn’t make the system I just know what I experience over and over.

And it isn’t because I am that hot. Give me a break.

But now that I have kids I feel a lot more like the whole world is just full of people who haven’t been taught yet. And if I want them to know how to treat me I need to teach them. People learn best when you use a calm and civil tone of voice. I understand that

defensive

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I need to climb out of this cycle. I’m having a hard time. Generally the more I focus on a cycle, the more I feel the desperate need to control my emotions the harder it is. I can only walk out of the main room into a different room to get control over my face and tone of voice so many times before I’m not actually in the main room I’m just hiding in my bedroom so I can cry.

We had a milestone this week. Someone described Shanna as a bitch. It was inevitable and all. She is female and she has strong opinions. I still feel sad. It wasn’t said in an attacking way. Calli keeps biting Shanna. The proposed reason is that it is because Shanna is a bitch to Calli. I…

I compare Shanna to my big sister and I have a hard time with using the word for her. Shanna *is* pushy. She *is* bossy. But when Calli turns around and yells, “You are not the boss of me” Shanna backs off and says, “Oh, you’re right.” Given the interactions I had with my sister I can’t think of Shanna as a bitch. She will have to get a lot more malicious before I will think that fits.

That is like 3% of my fuss today. Maybe only 2%. But it’s there. And it’s a milestone. I like to write those down.

Mostly my fuss isn’t about anything happening. That’s the point. I haven’t had anything really bad happen in a while. Which means that every part of my body is starting to vibrate with anxiety because surely something terrible is going to happen any fucking second.

Who is going to decide that I am too much trouble?

I am looking at the calendar and thinking that I should hibernate through most of November and December. Maybe if I hibernate then people will forget how unpleasant I am and when I come back in the spring people will be bored and lonely and less likely to reject me just because they are tired of my shit.

Sometimes it is very hard knowing that I have to consciously parcel out really small doses of me or people don’t set their own boundaries well until they tell me they don’t want to know me any more.

I tried to explain this to some of the homeschooling moms and I think I upset them. Shit.

I have to keep people on the third tier at a distance or they decide they don’t like me any more. If I try to get too close to people then they don’t want to know me anymore. I have to monitor how annoying or difficult or over-sharing I am being. I have to make sure I don’t overwhelm people because it is all my fault don’t you know. If only I would shut my stupid mouth people wouldn’t have to be so mad at me.

I’m sorry that I’m bad. I’m sorry I hurt people just by talking.

I am really fucking antagonistic when I feel this way. I was at someones house and she said that the kids couldn’t go outside because they were sick. I uhhh challenged that.

I didn’t challenge it because I think she isn’t allowed to set those boundaries. I asked because I have been working really hard on telling my kids the difference between, “I don’t want you to do this for health reasons” and “I don’t want you to do this for various grown up reasons that you don’t care about and I do.” Which is to say that I’m trying to not lie.

I have read a lot that the sick/cold connection is a myth. She clarified that once you are already sick being cold lowers your immune system and makes it harder to get well. Oh. Ok. I don’t think I have read about that part but it seems more or less logical.

People don’t like it when you question what they are saying to their kids like that. But I don’t like feeling lied to. I didn’t like it as a kid and I hate it with the fury of a thousand suns now that I am an adult and I am not subject to the random fucking whims of an adult.

Which isn’t to say that I thought this other mom was lying. But what she said contradicted what I had in my head. I know I am not always right so I asked. My tone of voice was shitty though. I think there must be a nicer way of asking for more information.

I don’t think it helps when I say, “I’m totally ok with telling my kids that I have made an arbitrary decision that them doing ________ would be a lot of work for me so no you are not allowed to do it right now.” Because then it sounds like I think that what other people are saying isn’t acceptable or correct and that isn’t what I mean at all.

Other people are allowed to parent however they see fit. Lots of parents lie to their kids all the fucking time. Sometimes they are just passing on their own inaccurate beliefs so the parent doesn’t feel like they are “lying”. Sometimes the parent knows and doesn’t give a shit.

I don’t think I will ever be good at just shutting up and letting other adults say things without asking questions. I am just that fucking annoying.

So I should stay home, right? I think other people are allowed to do whatever it is that they do. But I ask questions. And I have a really annoying tone of voice. It is way sharper and more confrontational that usual lately. All the self-hatred and denigration I hear in my head all day wears off the closest I have to soft edges. I should be able to ask my questions in polite and neutral ways. I often can’t. I can either sit there silently or I will sound like a fucking bitch.

I’m sorry. It isn’t your fault. It isn’t because I actually think you are a liar. If I were having a more socially suave day I could ask and not piss anyone off. But I’m not socially suave right now. Right now I feel like a mean and hateful monster.

Today we go to a camping wedding. Oh god.

Clearly a lot of people like me. In order to hibernate I have to turn down invitations. I turn down invitations nearly every week because I am fully booked. I can’t go to ____ because someone is coming over in the mid-morning and someone else is coming over in the evening.

But I don’t like me. That kind of trumps everything. I don’t like me much at all. I don’t think I am kind enough. I think I am a hateful, nasty person. I think that even when I haven’t said anything other than “Good morning” and “Good to see you.” I think that someone as unpleasant as me should not be allowed to freely inflict such fucking misery on every one in the world. I should die and make the world a better place.

But clearly other people do not agree with my assessment. Thus the invitations to weddings and birthday parties and other such festivities.

At some point this cycle will shift. I will stop hating myself with such vigor. I will stop hearing a cacophony of screaming voices telling me that I am a stupid bitch and no one likes me and why don’t I just go play with the cars on the freeway already because no one wants me to stay. I hear my mom and my sister and my brothers and my uncle and I don’t know how to make the voices stop.

I don’t have multiple personalities. I have overly strong memory abilities. I am too smart for my own good. I don’t forget things. I remember things so strongly and so clearly that other people are shocked. I can sit down and concentrate hard and tell you about the sequence of events on days that happened when I was two, three, four… I can’t remember every single day of my life with perfect recall but I can remember most of it. Almost all of it. It is all stored somewhere in my database and if I rattle it back and forth I can find what I need.

The problem is when I don’t get to control what is actively replaying. I have all those screens in my head. Luckily when I get into the place of hearing all the screaming this is sans-video. This is just an audio track. Thank goodness for small mercies.

I go back and forth between ringing my hands with “I don’t know what triggers these cycles” and “I’m just like this”. When I feel this way it is hard to understand or believe that I ever feel differently. I have lots of good days though–I objectively know it is true that I go through many days of my life without all the noise and hatred. I know it happens because I can pull out a reel of tape of some other day and replay it and know that the day was fine.

But I can’t find the mute button. I can’t find a volume control. I can’t just decide I want this to stop today. It has to stop on its own.

I used to ask my Owner to beat me when I felt like this. Noah and I have a different relationship. He does give me the occasional spanking (only when I ask very nicely and then wiggle my ass just right) but it isn’t extreme. I think that at this phase of my life I have completely moved the “edge” that I am willing to play at. I no longer need to be the most psychotic bottom in the room. I’m good. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.

I feel this way because of chemicals in my brain. I could take more drugs. Ha. I could do other things to disrupt the chemical levels in my brain. I have found few things in life that are more system-wide influential on my hormones than pain.

I believe I am supposed to be in pain. I believe it is the natural result of existing when you are such a piece of shit.

For the record, not all masochists feel like me. Most don’t. I have only met a couple of other people who talk about using bdsm the same way I do to deal with a pervasive sense of low self-esteem. People are masochists for a lot of reasons usually totally unrelated to being abused. The mean voices in your head thing is very non-standard.

Cutting would quiet the voices in my head. It would start other rounds of self-shaming but it would get rid of these voices. These voices want me to be punished. They don’t really care how. They just know that I am bad and should be hurting.

There is a very large part of me that wants to violently fight back. Fuck you. No more hurting me.

I think that is part of the reason that this is so hard to ignore. It makes me so angry that I feel this way about myself all the time. I feel so mad that the people who were supposed to love me and teach me to love myself were instead nasty, hateful people who taught me that I deserve suffering and death.

I don’t feel capable of being a nice person. I feel like that is a ship that has sailed. I am just a mean, nasty bitch. That is just how it works. But I want to be a nice person. I want to be someone who deserves relationships. But I don’t know how to earn them. I don’t know how to be good enough.

I need to just understand that if I am stupid enough to spend a lot of time with someone that there will be problems and eventually the person will want to go away and never talk to me again because I am terrible and mean and bad and annoying. It is appropriate for people to have these boundaries with me. It wouldn’t keep happening if I didn’t deserve it.

I have to keep people at a distance because people have relationships with me to meet needs of their own. I need to not think that relationships are about meeting my needs. My needs are cavernous and beyond the scope of anyone. I need to shut up. Shut up. Shut up you stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid bitch.

I’m not very good at that part.

I really liked that my Owner liked to keep me in a muzzle and hit me a lot. That just seemed appropriate. It was pretty hard for me to be bad in that circumstance. Near as I can tell that was the only period of my life where I didn’t feel like I was on the verge of being punished for being bad.

I was good. I was doing the right things. I was silent when and how he wanted me to be silent. He kept gags in my mouth a lot of the time. He thought it was “hot”. I still have jaw pain. I can’t do it any more. I feel like a failure.

I liked feeling like even if the inner core of my personhood was rotten and disgusting my outer shell could still please someone. Even though I deserve to die I was still amusing and worth keeping around for a bit longer.

No wonder my Owner didn’t want to talk to me about my mental health at all. That was Not His Problem.

Really my mental health isn’t any ones problem but mine. Shut the fuck up already you self-absorbed twat.

I’m afraid that if I stop paying attention and I stop arguing with the voices and I stop trying to figure out how this works that everything will get worse. I’m afraid that if I stop trying to track this that I will lose the ability to tell what is real and what isn’t. I’m afraid that if I stop trying to keep track of the fact that these are irrational voices–unrelated memories just jumping out–that I will believe that this is all that is true in the world. I’m not sure how long I will live if I give in and allow these thoughts to just be “true”.

That antagonistic, “Why did you say that?” That’s why I’m still alive. I know my tone of voice is shitty. I know I “should be” more gentle in my tone. I know. There is no excuse for me treating people badly just because I have mean things in my head. I know. I know. I know.

Do you tell someone with diabetes that everyone else wants donuts for breakfast and if they can’t eat it that is their own fucking problem?

My tone of voice is antagonistic because I am always speaking over hateful voices in my head. I sound so difficult not because I think you are doing something wrong but because I think I am bad. I am so very sorry that there is collateral damage.

Just hide. Don’t talk to any one. But I can’t. There is a wedding to go to. Life just keeps happening whether I am ready or not. And people tell me they want me there. I want to believe them. I want to believe them so much I shake with longing.

I want to not be hated. I want to believe that I am worthy of something other than being hated. But I’m such a bitch. Bitches deserve hatred, right?

Book lists

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Ok Pam here is one list:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkbU6vaLw4dWdHpoU245Y3I5WHROaXRxSWJIMGJKVUE&usp=sharing

The Young Adult books now have a spreadsheet. I’ll get to everything else. This will take a bit. And it’s not like I have any other work to do or anything.

Thank you for bringing books to my house and thank you for wanting a list so you don’t bring me duplicates.

Post-therapy

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Bad. Bad. Bad. Bad. I’m hearing that in my head a lot. It makes my tone of voice sharper and nastier.

In therapy we talked about me yelling at the kids. She pointed out that there have been two incidences in the past month. That means I have to start putting stop-measures in place earlier. That is not an acceptable pattern. I’m probably still not in the “abuse” range but I’m sure not being a nice person. I’m not being a good parent. I’m not modeling the behavior I want to teach. I am teaching my kids to be assholes like me.

I have a lot of internal conflict around “walking away” during a fight. I had a lot of severe neglect issues so being screamed at was 300% better than being ignored. My kids are not me. My kids do not need what I needed.

My therapist wants me to start getting up and walking away as soon as my kids start yelling at me. Put the lid on the paint can and go in my room for a while. She said it probably isn’t a good thing to even try to talk about it right now. *I* am too emotionally volatile.

I’ve been riding the “Krissy is evil and should die” train for a while and that makes it a lot harder to be patient. It makes it a lot harder to be nice. It makes it a lot harder to respond in a loving way when someone screams at me.

But kids scream. Kids don’t have self control. Adults have self control for them.

I was asked how I know that I am mentally ill. Well, a wide variety of sources tell me that it isn’t normal to spend a large portion of the day fighting off tears because you know you are bad and you should be punished. Half the time I have no idea what I could have done wrong recently but I still feel like I should be in trouble right now.

It’s irrational and not anyone else’s problem. Only it is my childrens’ problem because they have to live with me. I’m so sorry.

I have to stop raising my voice at all. I have to start walking away. I think that my terror about walking away (it’s not a very rational sort of reaction–I am completely freaked out about just walking away from them when they are having feelings) makes it so that I am not capable of reacting appropriately.

When they start yelling at me that I am mean I feel like it is right. I feel like I am mean. It’s all true. I am terrible. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.

But that’s not any more useful. And I know I don’t want to teach that either. So in my head I start going through these panicked defenses, “No I’m not mean. I did _____ and ____ and ______. That means I’m not mean.”

But those things actually have nothing to do with being mean. They are tangential at best.

I don’t think I am actually “mean” to my kids in the scheme of things. But I don’t want to compare my parenting to my mother’s parenting and declare anything I do a win. That’s not high enough standards.

I did EMDR this week. Focusing on the panic and the screaming. When I start screaming at my kids it is usually because I feel scared and trapped and like I am being unfairly punished again only I know I deserve to be punished for other things so I have a huge guilt complex and I think the punishment is right and then I just want to crumble. When I feel that way I get really really mean.

This is all a bad cycle.

EMDR, for me, involves a lot of free association. When I did the EMDR this and I was focusing on the somatic (physical) experience of being scared right before I started screaming and then what it felt like to scream at the kids.

The thing that kept surfacing in my head was, “If you do this you will lose Calli.” I think that Shanna would be able to jump right on the destructive merry-go-round with me. I think she would learn to tolerate a honeymoon cycle-scream-forgiveness cycle. I don’t think Calli would. Calli is different. She has a sense of self and a sense of self-worth where that kind of shit just won’t fly. If you yell at her when she doesn’t deserve to be yelled at she will yell right back. Right fucking on.

But it means that yelling at her is the opposite of an effective punishment/behavioral correction device. I have to find a different way of dealing with her. She won’t be cowed. That’s good. It means I have less leeway to be a bully.

Sometimes I feel like I am drowning in guilt because I do not feel bonded with Calli the way I do with Shanna. I love her. I like her. But it’s different. I dreamed about the Shanna who would more or less be my reason for living from when I was twelve. I dreamed about my son for many years. Calli is a wonderful surprise in every way. She wasn’t part of my original picture of my life but man I like her.

I feel like Calli is going to make me actually earn a relationship. Shanna likes me enough to put up with inappropriate shit. Calli doesn’t. Calli thinks I had better fucking be nice to her. She has really strong boundaries around how she wants to be treated and she doesn’t hesitate to hurt people who are bothering her. (She’s three. It’s not awesome that she is this aggressive but it is age appropriate.)

I will not be held responsible for how I feel. I will be held responsible for how I act. I can’t yell at the kids any more. I just can’t. I am not doing it in a reasonable or appropriate way. I’m being a nasty bitch. They don’t know or care about the cacophony of noise in my head. It isn’t their problem.

It is their problem when I start screaming. I have to stop. It doesn’t matter that I’m feeling thin. That is not the point. That is irrelevant. That is not important. How I feel really doesn’t fucking matter.

How I act matters a lot. Ok, irrational fear of rejecting children must be over ruled in face of less irrational fear of irreparably damaging children with anger.

Well, it’s the only plan I’ve got. Probably time to start working on it.

Discrimination sucks.

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This isn’t about me. As I get older I experience less and less discrimination. But every day I read on the internet someone or other saying that _______ is the last acceptable form of prejudice. “It’s ok to hate fat people.” “It’s ok to discriminate against the mentally ill.” “THE LAST FORM OF TOLERATED BIGOTRY IS AGAINST TRANS* PEOPLE!!!”

Err. The fact that I have read three posts like that in the last hour means there probably isn’t “one remaining form of prejudice.”

The older I get the more privilege I have. I don’t think it works this way for everyone but it does for me.

When I read about how every year a person should expect to not have more money than last year because of the terrible financial position the country is in I think… but my finances have steadily improved every year since I was eighteen. Not always because of my own hard work–let’s be clear.

I no longer think of myself as a boot strapper in the slightest. I’m not and for me to claim such status is disrespectful.

I had a settlement. That provided all of my early financial security (my income went up every year after eighteen because I did part-time work in college and then went into teaching which was much more money than my mother had ever made–I felt filthy rich). Now I have Noah. His ability to earn money blows my mind. He’s just doing it.

I’m trying to figure out how to write to twelve year olds about the fact that every twelve year old has it shitty without sounding like I am propping up the system. Some twelve year olds have it worse than others but almost no twelve year old is capable of understanding that or evaluating what it means or how it works.

All discrimination sucks. There is not “one last” form of discrimination. There are as many kinds of discrimination as there are people with a stick up their ass. You couldn’t possibly list all of the things people are discriminated over.

But I feel kind of cranky about fat white women being very sure that they have it worse than anyone because prejudice against fat is the LAST REMAINING THING IT IS OK TO PICK ON PEOPLE FOR.

Err, haven’t you noticed that there are more black men in prison now than were ever slaves in this country? Maybe you aren’t at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to discrimination. Maybe.

I get that it sucks to be picked on. I really do. I don’t understand why people need to justify that their experience is shitty by saying that it is the shittiest thing ever.

I don’t think my life was the shittiest thing ever. I really don’t. I meet people all the time who are much worse off after their respective lives. I had a lot of bad things happen to me. I also had a lot of good.

I have a lot of privilege. I always have. The older I get, the more cemented it gets the more I can see the tendrils of it stretching back into the beginnings of my life.

I was *always* tolerated for interrupting class when I was a child. I was massively disruptive in almost every single one of the twenty-five schools I went to. It was tolerated. I wasn’t sent to special ed for bad kids the way the black or hispanic boys were. They were *not* more disruptive than me. The biggest difference between me and a lot of the boys I knew over time was that I knew the right answer in class.

I’m brilliant. Now that I’m an adult and I’m not worried about people beating me up if I say it out loud I can accept it. I’m brilliant. I just understand things faster and more easily than other people. It’s a gift. I’m not a better person, but school was a fuck-ton easier for me than it is for people who need slow and careful explanations. I got punished less because I was smart.

I don’t believe there is any “one last” discrimination left. As long as there are billions of people alive there will be way more things to discriminate about than that.

I feel really sad when I see people who are like me (I have been a fat white woman for most of my adult life–I’m not fat at this point but I expect I will eventually be so again) thinking that they have it the worst of the worst. First that makes me sad because the individual person feels that bad about themselves and their life. Second it makes me sad because that person has such a limited view of the world.

Have you read anything about children in Afghanistan lately? No one in America gets to talk about the “last acceptable discrimination”. We just don’t. We can talk about being unhappy about how we are treated–totally reasonable. That’s ALWAYS OK.

But the hyperbole bothers me. It erases so many people.

The older I get, the longer I stay alive the more I recognize how very lucky and blessed I am. Sure, I’ve had bad things happen to me but most people do. Life is just like that. Bad things happen. It isn’t about deserving. It just happens.

But every morning I wake up in a house that is warm or cool as I see fit to make it. I have a husband who wakes up and makes me breakfast just because he loves me. I have little girls who wake up and the first thing out of their mouth is, “I’m so glad to see you again!” because that is the first thing they have heard every day of their lives (Godmama weekends excepted).

I am lucky. I am safe. I was reading about food insecurity yesterday. I really need to figure out what the hell I want to do with my life. I’m bothered by how many people in my neighborhood are statistically hungry right this minute. I think ignoring those problems is not ok. It makes me feel bad about myself as a person.

I know what it means to not have food. I know what severe malnutrition feels like. I live with a lot of the long term effects and they suck. But I have medical insurance so I can go to the doctor when I have problems now because of what happened to me a long time ago.

I am so very lucky.

(I don’t leave comments on other peoples blogs because they don’t need to know that I am irritated with them. My sandbox, my rules.)

Yay babies.

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The people I know are having more kids. Somehow this feels like a step in the right direction for the world.

If people this rad are having kids, surely things will improve? *cross fingers*

Talking over

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Yesterday Noah was kind of annoyed because he was trying to talk to me and both kids were trying to talk to him at the same time. He expressed some frustration.

I said, “Do you understand why I don’t try to force them to wait their turn?”

He said, “No, I don’t. Why?”

“Have you ever noticed how the people at work who “wait for their turn” just never speak? I want our children to grow up into the kind of adults who are pushy and bossy and who think their ideas are worth pursuing. You can’t get that way after a lifetime of being told to shut up and wait your turn.”

“Oh. That’s a good reason.”

“I think so.”

find gratitude

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1. I’m grateful for the visitor we had yesterday. It was lovely to hear about another planner on the journey to parenting.

2. I’m grateful that my joints do not hurt any more. Apparently my new early warning sign for my period is that all of the joints in my body explode with pain–the pain started the day before the bleeding. By day four of my period the pain goes away.

3. I’m grateful that my house is clean. It makes it a lot easier to be patient. And I hadn’t vacuumed the garage in months. Go me.

4. I am grateful that I have not one but two upcoming camping trips because I simply know too many neat people.

5. I am grateful that despite the evil voices in my head telling me that everyone in the world hates me and I am bad and I should die… clearly people keep coming over. I can’t be the Anti-Christ because I’m not quite that popular. I’m a nice healthy in the middle kind of popular. I have a few friends. That’s a good level.

6. I am grateful for how hard my husband works. I have a lot of self-involved very expensive dreams for the future. Most people in the world will never have enough money to do the things I want to do. I will because of someone else’s labor. That is humbling and kind of awkward. I don’t deserve any of the money I will have access to. It will just be there. Privilege is weird.

7. I am grateful for having two children. They astound and delight me in different ways. I’m glad I get to see more than one way of being a child. I totally understand the impulse towards having lots of children. I rather wish I could see more little pieces-of-me.

8. I am grateful that my husband stated his boundaries quite clearly and went straight on to the vasectomy when he was sure he was done having kids. Or I’d be begging. Pleeeeeeeeease one more baby. I don’t have a son…. Sometimes that is life, lady.

9. I am grateful for the rain. Rain means life.

10. I am grateful for the variety of people in my life. I know good Christians and I know sex workers. I know good Muslims and I know Adult Babies. I know from personal experience that the kind and variety of people in the world is dizzying and intoxicating and wonderful. I am very lucky.

Not proud.

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In my continual efforts to not have secrets about which I feel shame, yesterday we had kind of an incident.

I had to dismantle the slide. An adult friend who was far above the weight limit decided to take a ride. It broke. No fucking shit. It ripped some of the bolts through the plastic and fucked up the wooden support under the slide. So it had to be taken apart. I could fix it with much larger washers, but it was a pain in my ass.

The entire time I was working on the slide, ok that isn’t fair–the first half of the time, the kids were not very happy with me. I tried to patiently explain what I was doing and why. I explained every tool and piece of equipment I was using. I showed them the damage and told them why I had to dismantle it in order to fix it.

The kids stood there and YELLED at me that I was mean for breaking their slide as I took it apart. Even though I had explained why and showed them how I would put it back together.

I fucking lost it. They have been yelling at me that I am mean a lot lately. Basically every time I do not instantly comply with their demands.

I turned around and started screaming at them that if I am so fucking mean go in the fucking house and leave me the fuck alone while I do this fucking work for your fucking play structure.

I don’t feel proud of myself.

I am not sure what the right thing to do there would be but I wasn’t capable of turning around and being nice. I just couldn’t. I am so fucking tired of being yelled at that I am mean while I am in the middle of doing demanding physical labor for someone else’s benefit. I just can’t sit there and tolerate that. I fucking can’t.

But I should figure out how to handle it without yelling “fuck” at children. On one hand I feel bad. On the other hand, wow have I never yelled fuck at my kids like that before. That was special. I’ve been remarkably good for me about swearing over the past few years.

I called K to calm me down. These days it feels like she is the only stress relief I have. The Godmamas are overwhelmed by familial need (that happens) and Noah is working a lot. A lot. A really really lot. He works his primary job, comes home for an hour or so then goes in the garage to do different work. This weekend he’s at a conference.

I used to get 3-5 hours of not-parenting every day. These days I’m under two hours. I do all of my work while managing the kids. Which isn’t something I deserve pity for. I wanted this and all. But it is hard to have enough patience for everything.

We did another hour or so of painting on the play structure. Calli has painted most of the stairs by herself. I was very impressed. I “helped” by doing a last few smoothing strokes on each board but she put the paint down and mostly spread it around by herself. Her paint clothes are now solidly covered in paint because she sat in it while she was painting. It was totally adorable.

Shanna painted the kid-side hand rail mostly on her own. I came along and did a little edging of the parts she had trouble seeing. That’s ok. There were a lot of little corners. Those are easy to miss.

I’m working on the rainbow. It’s a pain in my ass. But it’s coming along. I have used three fucking ladders in order to reach everything. I could have gotten away with two ladders if the thing was about three inches shorter. But it isn’t. So I needed a third ladder. C’est la vie.

I’m starting to have trouble sleeping again. Once I get six or so hours of sleep I feel like my sleep gets lighter–I come up to a lighter sleep cycle and then I just can’t really rest more. I get up to use the bathroom and then I fret. And fret. And fret.

Do you know what makes me feel worst about yelling at Shanna like I did? She came back to me and apologized for yelling at me about an hour after I yelled at them. I apologized to her too. I told her that I was sorry for yelling “fuck” at her because that isn’t very nice or respectful or loving. She said, “Well, we weren’t being very nice to you.”

I said, “No you weren’t. But you are kids. Kids push grown ups. It is my job to be the grown up and hold boundaries. It isn’t very cool of me to scream at you for being a kid.”

She told me she forgives me.

I don’t know how to be a better mother than I am. But I feel she deserves better. She is such a wonderful kid. It is kind of funny that I feel like I am mean to them. But never for the things they yell at me about. Those things are never the mean things. They yell at me that I am mean when I am doing nice things. If they yelled at me while I was actually being mean I think I would just nod and agree.

I think that when they start yelling at me I need to immediately separate us whenever possible. Not because they are “getting in trouble”. If you have feelings like that go express them somewhere else. You are allowed to have them. You aren’t allowed to yell at me like that. Hell, I barely yell at them the way they feel free to yell at me.

My kids are so fucking not abused. The cocky little… oh man. Clearly not abused. Abused children aren’t this god damned demanding.

I haven’t made progress on the book this week. I am thinking about it a lot. I know what I want to say. I just haven’t sat down to write. The minute I sit down the kids jump on top of me and demand that I do _________. (The list is long.)

I feel like we have phases where I can do independent work (like the mural on the fence) and then I just can’t for a while because they feel clingy and upset about being ignored and they won’t allow me to focus on anything. Right now I can’t do the dishes without them bugging the shit out of me to entertain them in some way.

I spend a lot of time saying, “It is not my job to entertain you. Go entertain yourself.” Sometimes it works. Sometimes not so much. That’s the process.

This is hard. I absolutely understand the impulse to just “put them in school”. I feel like there is stuff here to learn. There are lessons in this learning-to-put-up-with-people that I have to learn. I need it. NEED.

When I am an old woman I hope I will be proud of myself for doing the things that I knew were things *I* needed to do. I don’t in any way think that other people should mirror my path. I need to figure out how to be with kids.

When I lose it, which doesn’t happen very often–I do record pretty much all of them–I feel like I am proving that my children deserve to be removed from my care and given to someone who could treat them better. Only when I talk to so-called-“normal” (not diagnosed as crazy from a young age) mothers most of them spend a lot more time screaming at and/or punishing their kids. There is no way in hell I could treat my kids the way I hear/see other mothers doing it. I would not be able to look at myself in the mirror.

But I don’t think they are abusive. I don’t think their kids are damaged or fucked up in any way. So why do I feel so strongly that if *I* behaved that way I would be an abusive monster?

Is it the slippery slope argument? I can’t scream at my kids frequently because screaming just makes me more and more angry (being the one to scream means I am the one to escalate) and I have a really hard time controlling my urge to hit when I get too angry. And when I start screaming I am more or less incapable of screaming without cursing every other word. That is just part of the whole dynamic for me. I see other mothers who are able to scream or discipline and they don’t have to chant fuck fuck fuck over and over.

Right now my kids are sleeping in the cutest way possible. Shanna is “normal” direction but curled up in child’s pose. (Now I get why that is named that way.) Her nightgown is rucked up around her waist and she didn’t wear panties to bed. So she’s mooning the hallway. Calli is also in child’s pose but her head is firmly up against Shanna’s side so they are at a 90 degree angle to one another. They make a T.

I love how connected they are. They fight more now. But holy tomato they are attached to one another. They want to be near one another. Even when they are mad they don’t like separating. They do play in different rooms sometimes (Calli is very willing to run her own games when Shanna is being too bossy) but mostly they don’t like being away from one another.

Shanna keeps telling me that when she is a grown up she is going to go find my big sister and teach her how a big sister should act.

I tell my kids a lot, “How you treat your sister teaches her how to treat you. If you hit, pinch, kick, or shove you are saying that it is ok to do to you. I will not intervene until you get to the point of serious injury. You need to learn how to be nice.”

It is really interesting how Shanna is starting to take responsibility for “I am older and have more self control so I have to teach my sister how to act.” She frequently tells Calli, “Oh Calli! Please stop pinching me. It is hard to not pinch you back when you do that.” Once in a while she does pinch back. Then Calli wants to cry foul. I play at being deaf.

Today is a weeding day. The front yard is really bothering me. I haven’t weeded all summer. My pansies are getting choked out and fuck that noise.

The asparagus are growing like mad. I had no idea they looked like that. They kind of look like fennel as they grow up. It’s really neat. No one believes me that they are asparagus.

Tomato season is (thank goodness) nearly over. I will probably get another 5-10 lbs this year. One more batch of sauce. I’m ready to stop processing.

I am learning a lot about how I feel about food preservation and eating from my yard. I don’t know where I am going to put more raised beds in the future (maybe my roof?) but I think that long-term I will mostly want to figure out how to eat what is in season and do staggered planting. Like putting lettuce out to start every three weeks. Eat it as it comes ripe. We tend to not preserve a whole lot of fruit from the yard so far. Partially this is just current production size but partially it is that we gorge when things are in season. It feels nice. Then we have a break and that feels nice too. Preserving and eating the same things all the time causes me to get really bored and not want to eat at home.

I am sorta keeping to the schedule I drew up. That makes me feel good. I haven’t worked on Outrunning this week but that is the most serious deviation.

I’m having a hard time writing. I think that I’m actually feeling writers block about the book. I’m scared. I’m scared of really and truly committing to what I think a 12 year old should know. That feels like a heavy responsibility. I don’t want to do it wrong. I don’t want to give too much information and push kids towards making bad decisions.

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot is that no one wants to seriously think about how much power they have. People don’t like acknowledging to themselves who and what they really are in the scope of things. People either under or over rate themselves. It’s hard to be accurate.

I don’t know how much influence I might potentially have and that is really scary. If Torque (the guy who publicly apologized to me and who gave me specific permission to use his handle whenever I talk about him) had understood how much it meant that he publicly say, “I screwed up and I am sorry” he would have done it ten years ago. If he had been willing to actually deal with me, what difference might that have made in my life?

Sure, he was a softball sized trauma. He violated my consent in a painful way. But he didn’t have sex with me. He didn’t rape me. He did beat me… but I had asked him to so it is a really weird thing to figure out how upset I am allowed to get about the whole situation.

I asked him to do a scene. Scenes are potentially fraught. Everyone has to be responsible for themselves or they SHOULD NOT ENGAGE IN BDSM. If you need to be taken care of then you are not someone who should engage in bdsm. Period.

But he did stuff I told him not to do. And when I screamed “no” and “stop” he ignored me until I said “red” even though I had negotiated not using safewords. But I did have a safeword. I did make it stop.

Recently I was thinking about the last rape. What I really really really hope will be the last rape.

I gave permission in advance for a rape scene. I didn’t understand the difference between compliant rape and a rape I would actually fight against. I never fought before that. I was trained to not fight from when I was a toddler. I was literally physically taught to not fight against being raped from when I was a toddler. When I was twenty-five I finally fought back.

I still lost.

I still got raped. Even though that time I didn’t want it and I was upset enough to fight and I fought as fucking hard as I was physically capable of fighting.

I haven’t ever done that before. I always give. I always know that it is right that I lose. I know I deserve to be raped. I know I deserve to service the needs of people around me because I am a whore and that is what whores are for.

But that last rape was different from all the others. That is the only time I can look at and really believe in my heart, “I was not able to stop that.”

Every other time I acted like it was like the scene with Torque. If I knew the safeword I could stop it but I don’t play with safewords so mostly I will eventually go limp and try to not die.

I don’t say “no” to sex. Well, I do now. Rarely. Barely. I started in pregnancy. I made Noah promise in advance that if I decided to not have sex from the date of conception to three months after delivery that he wouldn’t divorce me. I knew there was the non-zero possibility. I know that happens for some people. I was really scared. I made him promise because clearly he picked me because I am sexually compulsive and at that point we were still non-monogamous and I was pretty scared that he would wander off and not come back if I cut him off.

He didn’t.

I went and did a lot of bdsm because I wanted to find out what it felt like to believe you were allowed to say “stop” and have it work. When that mechanism failed me…

I don’t say “no” much. I learned how to say “stop”. Barely. It took a lot of effort and work. It took really consciously trying to do it. My Owner worked with me. He did a lot of very dangerous things where I HAD to say stop or he might end up in jail for manslaughter and we don’t want that now, do we?

It is kind of funny because outside of sex I say “no” more easily than almost anyone I’ve ever met. I’m pretty happy to add a “and go fuck yourself while you are at it!” But that sex button thing is old.

Lately I’ve been waking up in the morning and looking in the mirror and saying repeatedly, “You will not be held accountable for your feelings; you will only be held accountable for your actions.”

I have big feelings. I have mean feelings. I have sad feelings. I have hateful feelings. I have painful feelings.

I’m not hurting anyone else by having these things inside of me. If I control my temper and manage to not lash out (screaming that I am not fucking mean for fixing the fucking slide aside) then I am not hurting people. If I am not hitting anyone I am not hurting anyone. If I control my tone of voice such that I do not sound mean or hateful then I am doing fine. It’s ok that I am playing a game.

That’s the point. It is all a game.

No one is against you. They are for themselves. Don’t take it personally.

You will only be held accountable for how you act. I don’t know how you feel. I can’t know. That is forever a shut door. I just know how you act. I care about how you act.

That is comforting and very disturbing.

Find gratitude

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Noah left the house right around 6am. He got home at 7:50pm. Right when he walked in the kids begged for reading and he immediately sat down to do it.

I don’t think I would be able to do that after a long day. I’m really grateful that he is so nice to us.

don’t lie

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Today is going to be all jagged. I didn’t sleep enough. We were out late at the ER. Calli shoved an almond up her nose. Whoops. Most of what was done to get it out was I blew into her mouth hard enough to pop her eyes. Then the ER doctor could reach it to fish it out. It was rather gross. She was a trouper. She didn’t cry. She had trouble holding still at first, but she’s three and they were shoving a big plastic stick up her nose. That seems reasonable.

I am shaking with anxiety. My body hurts. I feel so disgusting and bad.

In other news, I got my first one star review for my book. Apparently I don’t take enough responsibility for my childhood. Ok.

I had a lot of social time yesterday (and four hours of driving–traffic was horrifying all gosh darn day) and I think that not socializing for five or six days is a good idea. Everyone was nice to me. Everyone was wonderful. I still feel like I was put across a cheese grater. It isn’t any one else’s fault I feel this way. I just do.

It’s kind of funny because people keep spontaneously volunteering lately that I look so relaxed and happy. I feel strung as tight as a bow string.

I’m just a really good liar.

Identity crisis

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I went to a wake on Sunday. I would say the day was euphoric. I went up to San Francisco dressed in full leathers. I wore a black leather strapless ballgown that reaches the floor. Over it I wore a white and black leather corset. Apparently I looked good enough to stop traffic because I did.

I went to a munch first (because it was happening when I happened to walk into the coffee shop). The erotic hypnosis munch–the particular topic was on edge play. How do you hypnotize someone so that you can make them think you are doing something more dangerous than you are doing. Like if you hypnotize someone then fuck them with a butter knife but the bottom believes you are using a sharp knife.

I made everyone in the room startle when I said, “Err, why don’t you just use a sharp knife?” “But that would be dangerous!” “Errr, I’ve done it. Well…. more accurately I’ve had it done to me and my pussy isn’t cut in half.”

It kept going from there. When I went to the wake I saw a lot of people I haven’t seen in almost ten years. I was flat shocked by how fondly I am remembered. But apparently I am remembered as a big scary edge player.

“Don’t dare Lenora to do something. She will do it. And you will be sorry.”

“If there is work to be done Lenora will not stand around waiting.”

“Uhhh I wouldn’t keep pushing with her. She’ll win.”

That was just a few of the comments that kind of stand out in my head. Wait… what? Oh. Ok. At least one of those was said by a big scary man who has used his big scary boots to stomp my skull into concrete. More than once. And *I’m* the one who will make people sorry?!

People who knew me introduced me to new people and told them in detail why the new people should listen to me because I know what I am talking about. I repeatedly said, “(S)He’s lying. I don’t do anything interesting any more. I just stay home. I know nothing.” I got some looks for that.

Of course I ran into play partners and former lovers. I was uhm remembered fondly. “Do you remember that weekend before Pride? Ohmyfuckinggod that was the hottest thing ever.” Err, yes. Yes I am that hot.

I left feeling built up. I worked very hard for my standing in that community. I submitted to brutality that literally shocks people because I wanted that standing in that community. I wanted to be one of the most intense people in any room. Now I find out that most of the people I was sort of “competing with” in my head think I am past them. That’s… oh. Really?

It was kind of weird to be at the wake. I know there was way over 100 people there, probably more than 200 people. There were representations of EVERY leather organization within reasonable driving distance. Every gay male only, every lesbian only every every every leather group was there. Because Iain touched all of them and made their lives better.

I was one of the few people to speak (Angela asked for people to talk and share memories) who did not enter the scene through Iain and Angela’s classes. Only a few of us knew them “before”. It was wonderful seeing how many lives they have made better.

I really felt like part of a community. The man who wrote the apology for putting a cattle prod on my cunt was there. I cried with him for almost ten minutes. He apologized a few more times and told me that if he had understood what this meant to me he would have done it ten years ago. That was intense.

People who knew me exclusively as a masochist had a lot of questions about my being a parent. They were shocked that I like it so much. Why do I want to home school? Oh wow. You care so much? Yes. Yes I do care so much.

Then by mid-way through Monday I kind of recognized that all of these things that are part of my “standing” in that community are things that if people find out about them I could end up with a lot of punishment.

The park on Tuesday with the home schoolers was really hard. I sobbed the whole way there and had trouble not bursting into tears the whole time I was there. I know I am dirty and disgusting and not the kind person that people want around their kids. Shut up you stupid nasty bitch. Don’t talk about what you’ve done. Shut up shut up shut up.

I am very afraid of my children being ostracized because of who their mother is. I’m not very good at being in the closet. I’m not very good at keeping my mouth shut. I’m not very good at being appropriate. I’m not very good at keeping only to topics that other people like.

This morning one of my closest friends was trying to be loving and supportive. In the context of a larger conversation she said, “You get back what you give to the world.” I said, “Fuck you. Who did I rape first?”

She wants me to think about how to be happy. She wants my life to improve. She wants me to think I have the power to change how my life goes. She wants to believe that I can adopt privilege from people who love me and no longer be a person at the bottom of the ladder.

I say that the kids who were born the sixth child of alcoholic and drug addicted parents in a trailer park are probably not getting from the world what they have given. And it is not a very nice thing to imply that they are.

Some people have good lives. Lucky them. It isn’t about getting what you deserve. There is no deserve. Fuck you to anyone who says there is.

I feel scared as I write Outrunning. I know that a lot of people are going to be extremely angry with me for consciously trying to talk to 11/12 year old kids the way I am. They will think it is all my fault if their kids go out and do drugs and have sex. No, it isn’t my fault. It really isn’t. But hopefully I can help your kids understand the risks they are taking so they can make conscious choices. It isn’t my fault your kids want to do what they want to do. I swear to god I am not responsible for people being interested in drugs and sex.

I made everyone at the park bug their eyes out. One mom is interested in me doing sex ed with her kids. I said, “Do you understand that I will tell your kids that masturbation is awesome and phone sex and cyber sex are the safest kinds of sex in the world?” “But what about older men?!” “That’s a different part of the conversation.”

I feel scared. I feel bad. I know I believe things that are “wrong”. I know that lots of other people seem to think that sex should be some special magic potion you only get once you are married. I think it is my birthright. I get to have sex. As much of it as I want. Just because I bloody well can. I don’t think that anyones mother (not even my own) gets to decide where and when and what kind of sex is right for me. I have to decide for myself.

Just like all these other people need to decide for themselves. I believe my kids will have sex some day. I think they will more than likely start as teenagers given where and when they live. (I’m praying for the far side of 16 with a partner who is within two years of their age.)

Until you are READY for sex… masturbation is AWESOME. Do it by yourself. Do it with a “friend” in the room. Don’t let them touch you. This is about watching and handling yourself and learning what you like.

And boy howdy will I talk about birth control. Much easier to prevent a child than raise one.

I feel scared that my existing and having the opinions I have is going to go very badly for my children. I feel so scared.

I was asked why I care so much about what other people think of me. Uhm because I have had to deal with people throwing a lot of literal rocks at me because disgusting people like me deserve to be stoned. I’m afraid for my children. If I don’t think about what people think of me my children my pay the price.

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#36: Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman

#37: Kids of Kabul by Deborah Ellis

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I keep writing partial posts and not putting them up. I feel out of context. I feel like explaining things is too hard. I feel like saying what is in my head is bad and dangerous.

Even though I have a lot of good things happening. I’ve had some very validating experiences.

I feel like I should be hiding. I’m not responding to many emails. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m so scared. I know I’m burnt out on my kids needs right now. We didn’t get a Godmama weekend this month (for good reasons) and I’m more irritated with my kids as a result. It isn’t their fault.

But Noah is working more. He is unavailable for a solid 55 hours a week. I know that other people have spouses who work more than that. I just…

Just hide.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Category Archives: adult-only

Parenting babble

The tier thing.

Stuff to think about.

Good day

Attachment

It would be nice if I thought people liked me.

Embrace the discomfort

defensive

Book lists

Post-therapy

Discrimination sucks.

Yay babies.

Talking over

find gratitude

Find gratitude

don’t lie

Identity crisis

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