#34: Girlfag: A life told in Sex and Musicals by Janet Hardy.
I erm, hadn’t finished the last ten pages from when I started it a long time ago. I’m counting it anyway. It is a neat book.
#35: The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
Well, it was very validating.
The person I approached and asked for a public apology just posted it on fetlife. I feel shocked. I am grateful for his phrasing. I feel gobsmacked.
Someone just publicly said that they hurt me and it was a wrong thing to do. That’s big. I’m going to go have some feelings now.
It isn’t that I think my kids are bad or anything. They are just excellent boundary pushers. I want them to push boundaries. I flat encourage them in that direction. I want children who are tenacious, stubborn, and sure that their idea is A Good One. But. But sometimes I wish I could say, “I know I’m willing to argue/negotiate with you all day every day but can I please have a friggin break on my birthday.” They just aren’t old enough to understand.
We did have good moments. I feel really bad that it seems like all I do is complain. Doesn’t anything make me happy? Am I ever satisfied? Is there any point in reaching for satisfied or is that just not something I can feel? I feel really guilty for not being able to turn this into a fun trip. It should have been a fun trip. I hate that I am such a downer all the fucking time.
But it felt really bad getting yelled at for what I wanted to order for lunch. I fucking told them four days in advance, “On my birthday I want us to have gumbo and papas fritas and beignets for lunch. That’s what I want.” They were enthusiastic and supportive until we got to the park. Then I was a mean and terrible person for not letting them have popcorn for lunch. Or ice cream. Or a Dole Whip. Or…
My kids rarely have extreme cases of the gimme’s. I don’t buy them things all that often on our outings and I’m kind of nasty about being pestered to buy stuff. Holy.Fucking.Shit. This trip was the most gimme-gimme-gimme I think Shanna has ever been. She actually sat on her ass in the middle of the store and started yelling at me because I wouldn’t buy her a FUCKING SECOND MUSIC BOX. SHE HAS ONE AT HOME THAT SHE BOUGHT WITH HER ALLOWANCE ON OUR LAST TRIP.
I almost lost my shit. If we had been within an hour of home I would have left the park fifteen minutes into the day.
The really funny thing is the DMV portion of the trip was the best natured and happiest all three of us were on the whole trip. We played games and met people and it was a really enjoyable 3.5 hours. Hell, I’m talking to a lady via email after that. She’s nice.
I think it is that whole kicked puppy thing. I was acting like a kicked puppy. I was begging them to please let me have a turn. When you act like a low status person you get kicked like a low status person. So my kids kicked me (only literally a few times figuratively much more often) all day.
It all feels like my fault. If things go badly it is because I planned wrong or anticipated wrong or… something.
Having them both scream at the top of their lungs that I was mean and nasty multiple times before 10am felt really hard. I know this is a current tick. I know that the best way to handle it is to not engage. At this point in time I am having trouble not bursting into hysterical tears or hitting them. I have strong impulses to do both. I’m not doing either but I want to.
Just breathe. This moment will pass.
I have spent ~15 hours over the past week and some working on scheduling. I’m getting close to knowing the shape of my days all the way through the end of the year. If I stick with my schedule. Ha.
In order to make it so that I can potentially accomplish what I want to accomplish I need a schedule with a lot of rest time scheduled. I need to not be booked all day every day. I have to have multiple days in a week where what I do is hang around the house and putter. I need to have scheduled “sit on the couch and read books and snuggle” time with the kids just about every day.
I have to run more. I just have to. Not running is feeling a lot worse than running. Which is hella funny. We have gone out all four of us a couple of mornings in a row. We hope to get the kids used to going for a morning jog. Noah and I take turns doing sprints up the block and back to the family because the kids are a lot slower.
Outrunning Suicide is starting to take shape. I have mostly written several chapters. I have a skeleton. This one is very different than No Secrets. The entire writing process feels different. This will feel more like a collection of essays than a story, but there needs to be some sense of story in it as well. I am trying as hard as I can to be conscious of the fact that I want this book to be appropriate for twelve year olds. Even though the mothers of twelve year olds will say that it is too mature. The mothers are wrong.
I need to start working on painting in the back yard. All of the stuff that was built this year needs to be painted so it doesn’t rot quickly. Oh man.
I don’t want to go out very much over the next few months. I want to get work done. I want to home school my kids. I need to stop looking outward for a while. We will go to park days. I will continue to try to make time for Noah’s friends who have all had kids and the few people I have hanging on who had kids.
I need to stop looking for new people. I don’t have the bandwidth. My monkey spheres are full.
I like having a lot of… I’ll call them third tier friendships. People generally don’t want to think of themselves as third tier, but oh well. At this point the only person I have near daily contact with who I don’t live with is K. Thank goodness for her. That is the first tier. Second tier are all of the people who have kept contact with me for long-stretches of time and they know real things about me and I know real things about them. These are people who very consciously schedule with me and make sure that I know that they think about me. The third tier are the people I don’t see a lot of and they know very little that is real about me but I want to feel acceptance and love so I try very hard to maintain Appropriate Behavior around them and I know there are consequences if I slip up.
The third tier is where you get into the idea of Community. These are people I want to know. They add value to the world and to my life in particular but I don’t think they actually like very much about me so I have to carefully construct what they see or I will be shunned again.
I can’t overload my second tier. When I overload my second tier then I see the ending of nearly-decade-long relationships and the backlash hurts me for years.
The third tier is where I spend most of my time. I carefully dole out just small bits of my personality to people. It all tends to feel very artificial. I know I need to be careful not to be too real. I need to not saying things that will upset people. Good fucking luck guessing who is sensitive to what.
Why is the third tier so important? Because I have absolutely stressed the first and second tiers to the limits of their ability to support me and if I have free-floating miasma of need and I get it met in bursts of random kindness from the universe. I depend on a lot of Pay It Forward. Mostly this has worked out fairly well. Humans in general are loving, kind, and they want connection.
But then we get to this punishment thing. I think that most people have trouble understanding that they are punishing people. I know that I struggle with understanding how and where I punish people. I do it but it is hard for me to understand the mechanism of it. It is hard for me to understand that I have the power to punish people. I don’t feel like I have such power. I feel weak and powerless.
My second tier has worked very hard to step up since I had kids. As much as I am still in a place of great hostility towards the idea of “chosen family” (given that most of the people who have emphatically told me that I am their family no matter what no longer speak to me I think I get to be hostile to this concept) I… feel conflicted. Clearly I have friends who have moved into family roles.
I feel like I am understanding how other peoples limitations work better as the years go on. Like, I’m not inviting people on trips. It isn’t that anyone wants to hurt me (I don’t think that the desire to hurt me played any part in people not being able to go on the trip–major health concerns came up for everyone) but I am still here hurting. How do I move towards hurting less?
I have been asking for help with things where I can’t handle the answer “no”. That is always where I get into trouble. This is consistent for me. I wait until the lack of support will be crippling then I ask for support then I get told no because other people don’t have the bandwidth and I crumble.
I need my life to require fewer spoons. I need to not need help.
Having children has been humbling and humiliating. The amount of help I have needed has been really hard. Things like going to the doctor for an ultrasound of my abdomen. That turned into a huge long lecture at Kaiser about how I need child care or I can’t get health care. I understand why my dentist pushed me to get the dental implant I needed while I was pregnant even though the pain meds aren’t optimal because “Mothers don’t take care of their teeth when they have children under ten.”
It is kind of weird and hard to talk about but since having children I am more house bound than I was before simply because of how my bathroom habits changed. I have always had a small and urgent bladder (common problem with early childhood sexual abuse) but after the kids my life-long diarrhea problem became urgent and explosive too. And then there is how my periods have changed. Having a body sucks.
Having kids is hard but I did not anticipate the specific ways this would be so hard. I anticipated getting sick of laundry and wiping up poop and being screamed at. I didn’t understand that after having children it would be a rare thing for me to be able to handle three hours between bathroom trips–I get a few freak days once in a while. I normally go to the bathroom every half hour or so. I don’t think I would physically be able to teach right now. I used to have 110 minute class periods. I can’t hold my bladder that long any more. And it is illegal to leave in the middle of a class to use the restroom. I did it anyway but you aren’t supposed to and there are severe potential punishments.
You want to know why I have so much anxiety about neglecting my children when they are playing in another room and I can’t see them but I can hear them? Because I went through teacher training and discovered just how much trouble I can get in if I don’t “properly supervise” other peoples kids. Apparently properly supervise means sit on top of the child and physically prevent them from ever breaking the rules. Good luck.
I swear this all ties together in my head.
I have historically depended heavily on the third tier. Why do I consider them third tier? What I can ask of them is much smaller and more limited and I have to be careful of watching how often I ask. The tiering is how much of my need they have demonstrated an ability to handle. It isn’t about me judging them negatively or thinking they are bad people. I’m intense. I hurt people without trying. I need to be careful to notice when I am hitting stress points for people and withdraw so there can be a next time. If I push third tier people too hard they eject me from their lives.
With children this is different and difficult. At this point I feel like a user if I ask people for anything. I try hard to bully K to let me come do work at her house because I feel like such a user all of the time given how much support she gives me. It isn’t actually a better dynamic.
I have a hard time knowing that at this point in my life I need more support than I give. It has been true for years. Maybe for all of my life. This totally plays into being financially dependent. I feel ashamed of myself. I look at the women in my life who are not dependent and I feel pathetic. This is part of that defining myself by being not-like other people. It isn’t good for me or anyone else.
I don’t feel like the things I do are good or worthy. And yet I really really really want to do the things I am doing. With fervor and intensity I want these things in the world and I don’t think anyone but me will do them. I take that as a sign they probably aren’t worth doing and I am just a waste of resources.
Part of the problem with an extensive third tier is someone always needs help. People are always struggling and I wish I could help more. I wish I had more to offer. I wish I had more energy. I wish I had more time to give them.
But instead I will stay home and weed my garden and write a book and paint. I am selfish and small. My life is limited and unimportant. I totally struggle with that Gen Y thing of, “But I am SPECIAL”. No. I’m really not. I don’t have anything unique and special to offer the world.
But sometimes I feel like I do. Sometimes I feel like I am good at helping people see their own value. Because I think so little of myself I view basically everyone in the world as higher status as me. When I explain to people all that I see about them that is good and wonderful they tend to be surprised. They are not able to see themselves that way. Isn’t that ability good and useful? Is that enough? What is enough? Enough of what? Enough for what?
I don’t know.
But I need to pull back into my little shell. I need to count my spoons and carefully lay them next to tasks. I want to read more books this year. I want to look out my back window on New Years Eve and see a rainbow castle. I want to finish writing the book that I really needed to read when I was twelve. I want to teach my children the daily habits of picking up after themselves. Even though it is hard. Even though you would rather do it later. If you do it now then you are free to go do anything you want on a whim. It takes practice to learn these habits.
I want my children to think that physical activity is just part of life. So I have to model it every day.
I want to not be fucking screamed at. I have already made a lot of progress on my own screaming. I will figure this out. It is going to be hard and it will take patience. We will figure this out. Without anyone getting beaten. There may be a fair bit of time out in our future.
I don’t think that anyone did anything wrong per se on my birthday. But I think that at this point my birthday is such a thing that I’m not sure anyone can do right. I don’t think it is anyone else’s fault at this point.
Rope bridges last a long time but eventually decay. You aren’t doing anything wrong by jumping up and down as you go across a rope bridge. Sometimes a log may break and you could plummet to your death. No one actually did anything “wrong” but there are still end results that suck.
I don’t know how to feel special. I want that feeling so bad. I want to feel loved and appreciated and like people are really really glad I am alive. I don’t feel that way. I feel like people tolerate me so long as I can fill their needs and not be too annoying. I know that people don’t actually feel that way about me. I don’t think I offer enough trade to actually justify that belief.
It isn’t that I believe that Noah and Shanna and Calli secretly hate me. It is clear that they all love me with great intensity. But something inside me is broken. It is like pouring boiling water into a tank of liquid nitrogen so that you can warm it up. That just isn’t going to work how you hope.
I feel raw. I know I am “over sensitive”. I know I “shouldn’t take things so personally”. But I am. I just am. Maybe I shouldn’t be. Maybe I shouldn’t exist. But I do. And this is how I feel. And I can’t make it go away just because it is inconvenient for me or for other people. The only thing I can do is try to stop being in a room with anyone else on my birthday so that it is very very clear that this problem is in me and not because of anyone else.
My birthday is really hard for me. I’m afraid it always will be. I desperately desperately want a kind of feeling loved and cared for and appreciated that I’m not getting. I don’t know what it is or how to get it. Everything I have tried so far has failed miserably. I really and truly have tried to change this pattern.
I wish I could stop feeling like it would be better if I was dead. Then I wouldn’t be so fucking inconvenient.
I know it isn’t “true”. I had kids so that I would know beyond the shadow of a doubt that my labor is necessary for a few decades. Nothing would be better right now if I was dead.
But I don’t know how to feel loved. I feel despised. I feel unappreciated.
Which is ridiculous. Noah couldn’t work harder than he does. And he clearly is doing it for me–he didn’t work like this before me. My Owner was a workaholic. Noah was kinda lazy when I met him. He was certainly unfocused–that is probably a better word than lazy. He works like a dog, largely because he is doing it for me. He wants to make all of my dreams come true.
And I reward him by crying and crying and crying and feeling like a worthless piece of shit. He is very confused. If I knew what to ask him to do he would do it. I don’t know. I don’t know how to stop feeling this way.
I mean, in the abstract I know how to deal with this feeling. Feel it. Cry while you have it. Wait. It will end.
That’s the awesome thing about feelings. They change.
Sometimes I do feel that Noah loves me. Sometimes I do feel that my kids love me. But somehow when it comes to my birthday that is broken. There is this big brick wall. I don’t feel attached. I don’t feel love or loved. I feel worthless and stupid and pathetic and bad and mean and unwanted and like I should just die.
And god I miss my mother. I miss my mother so much I want to curl up into a ball and never eat again. I am not worthy. I dishonor the woman who bore me. I am a piece of shit. I am not protecting her and taking care of her. I know she needs it. She has always needed it. She has always needed to be taken care of more than I need it.
And I think my kids need more taking care of than I need. Except for one day a year. Where I think I am going to need to have different boundaries.
I have started grieving really hard for the apology I was told I would get and I didn’t get. That guy in the scene I went and talked to who said he would write an apology. I’m sorry I made myself vulnerable to that.
I’m even more grateful for talking to the guy who made me uncomfortable at the wedding.
I know that I have to keep trying with people. Every relationship is unique. Every dynamic changes over time. I need people to jump over hoops for me. I need it. I’m pretty clear and direct about how and where I need it. I try not to be too demanding of any one person. But I do ask people to jump through hoops for me.
I want people to show me with their actions that I am actually as important as they verbally claim I am. I want my body to matter. This is a really dangerous kind of validation to want. Because I am not going to get it. People will say they will do ______ and not do it.
Do you know what makes people happy? Giving help to other people. Do you know what makes people feel shitty? Needing help. I hate my neediness as much as other people resent me inflicting it on them.
The kids are slightly sick. Runny nose on elder child, both are coughing. Younger child keeps telling us she needs a bucket but she isn’t vomiting. I’ve been crying so much I don’t know if I am sick or not. I scheduled a potentially light weekend because I am S-M-R-T.
I am looking forward to fall and winter. It will feel really nice after the frantic work pace of spring and summer. It is a puttering kind of day. I will go grocery shopping. I should wash the windows. Then they can color on them again. Ha. Right now they are too full to be fun.
I should stop typing. Annnnnnnny minute here……
I learned a few things on this trip. I will never again plan a trip around someone coming with me. I need to assume that I will be alone and I need to make my spoons cover the whole time I will be there. If I plan around not being the only adult and then I am stuck being the only adult things don’t go very well.
We were gone for 60 hours. I drove for 14 hours (traffic was heinous). Slept for 16 hours. ~6 hours of the kids yelling at me at the top of their @#$#%@#% lungs that they want to go into Disneyland NOW when they wake up 3 hours before the park opens (times two days–see how that works?)
3.5 hours in the DMV. That was entirely my fault for not doing better planning.
So that leaves ~20 hours to be in our hotel or in the parks. We made dinner in the room each day. The kids were very angry with me that I would not take them swimming at the exact same time as I was cooking dinner. It turned into two hours of Shanna yelling at me about how it wasn’t ok to bring bathing suits and not use them.
I think this is the worst set of behaviors I have ever dealt with during a short period of time from my kids. By the end of the trip I felt no love at all. I cried for five hours on the last day including about three hours of the drive home.
My kids were not nice to me. They both screamed a lot. I got hit multiple times when I said no to buying things. I don’t know what the mother fuck happened.
Well, I asked them to please let me pick what we did for one day. Please, just one day. Apparently that wasn’t reasonable to ask for. (The developmental books talk about all of their shit being right on target. Calli is right in the middle of the stage where my FAVORITE AUTHOR EVER says, “Put them in daycare and get a lot of babysitting because no one likes their kid at this age.” It is a rough stage. I remember it with Shanna. She outgrew it. She is currently in a different annoying phase but it is very very different. Give them credit and all.
But it was a rather shitty trip. A long ass time ago when I thought I was going alone I planned for five days in a studio. (Not a lot of points and I would get three days in the park without driving.) Because I asked people to go with me I ended up booking a one bedroom for three days because other people have obligations. Then I got cancelled on. Then I hunted hard for another person and got cancelled on. Then I asked dozens of people and was told, “How about the week after?”
I don’t think I will schedule with other people any more. I keep hoping that I will have the kinds of friendships where I can do that kind of thing. I don’t have them. Wanting them is hurting me very badly and I need to stop wanting that. I need to stop thinking I will ever be someone who is part of a group.
I feel pathetic for how jealous I feel of the big families at Disneyland. I’m not that jealous. I understand that a family that size comes with a dogmatic religion I don’t want to follow. But it looks so nice to have a bunch of people who love you and want to do things with you.
I need to assume my travel is alone and just for myself. This is a tree I have to stop beating my head against because I just flat don’t handle it well when people back out. Then I’m stuck with a reservation that I can’t handle very well. I didn’t plan around my spoons. I planned around someone else’s spoons. I shouldn’t have. That was stupid.
Most of the drive home pretty much all I heard in my head was how stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid I was for thinking that the trip would work out and be fun. Instead I spent the whole time being yelled at and feeling like I was about to burst into tears because no matter how much I do for my kids they yell at me and scream at me and tell me I am mean and nasty for not doing EVERYTHING they want RIGHT THIS VERY SECOND. I know it is developmental and all. I think I deal with it ok most of the time.
It sucked golf balls through a tennis ball to have that happen on my birthday at Disneyland. At one point in the day when Shanna was being really snotty I started crying. Then she backed off. She said, “Oh, is this a big deal? I guess I don’t need it.”
I didn’t do very well with having to be the heavy mean person. I just wanted to be allowed to decide what we did on one day. My kids steer the vast majority of our days.
Next year I have every intention of waking up alone on my birthday and spending the entire day alone. Preferably hundreds of miles away from anyone I know so that I have no expectation of anyone being nice to me so that I won’t be disappointed.
Every year after my birthday I feel sad. It always feels like this sadness is all my fault. If I just chose to be happy everything would be fine. It is all my fault I am sad. Shut the fuck up you self-involved, pretentious, selfish bitch.
It really doesn’t help that driving down I-5 is a trip through my hellish past. “I was raped in that town. I was sexually assaulted but not raped in that town. I was beaten up every day by a group of six kids in that town. I was raped in that town. That is the town where my father held a gun to my head after raping me. That is where I was born and where my father started raping me.”
I don’t especially enjoy driving that freeway. It is very innately stressful for me. I have so much bad history there. And it all feels like my fault. If I hadn’t been so stupid…
I really don’t have a lot of respect for my intelligence right now. Right now it feels like there are lots of nice people in the world who like me and things don’t work out better for relationships because I am stupid and I want inappropriate things and I don’t know how to be nice enough so I just flat don’t deserve to have better relationships with all those nice people.
I want to cut so much. Still haven’t. Still not modeling it as a coping method.
People said happy birthday to me and I appreciated it. Thank you. I don’t actually think that “no one likes me”. I think my friends share what they have to give. Unfortunately sometimes I try to cobble what they have to give into what I need and it falls short. It isn’t my friends fault. I’m a black hole. I’m not sure there is “enough” anywhere in the world. So I have no right to complain about any of my friends.
But I’m still a black hole. And it hurts. It hurts.
I don’t know how to stop feeling like I should die because then the world would be better for everyone else. They wouldn’t have to hear about me and my stupid whining. I would finally shut the fuck up.
Assuming I will ever be anything but alone is stupidity. It is hubris. Stop being stupid, Kristine.
I’m not alone. I have Noah and the kids. But you know what… for the life of me they don’t seem to have much collective interest in being nice to me on my birthday.
I think that next year being literally alone is the right call. Less disappointment. Less being reminded that no, I’m not remotely special and people have absolutely no need to be nice to me on my birthday. It’s just another fucking day.
I have a lot of thoughts. Mothers and daughters. Re-parenting. Drugs. Vulnerability.
Instead of writing about them I have decided that I’m going to stay off the computer until after we get back from Disneyland. I’m not even going to bring the iPad to Disneyland. We need a screen break.
Adios.
I sat down yesterday at my computer intending to buy three tickets to Texas for December. I said to Shanna, “You understand that I’m not going, right?”
Her eyes got as wide as saucers. “But you have to go. I can’t go meet new people without you. When I am talking to people I don’t know well and you are there I am brave because I know I am wonderful. When you aren’t there I am scared and I can’t do it. I need you.”
“If I went with you to Texas and I stayed in the hotel with you but you had to go to your grandmothers house with just your dad and sister would that be good enough?”
“Yes. That would be good enough.”
I’m going to Texas in three months, apparently.
I’m fucking serious about not setting foot inside that woman’s house again. Maybe I will go visit the great grandmother or great aunt instead. Or I will sit inside a fucking Starbuck’s.
I can be nice in letters–I think I am very fucking nice in the letters I send. I sent five to seven page letters about the kids a few times a year. I’m all neutral but upbeat and such.
I want my kids to know them. I want my kids to have a family. But I’m aware that they will never be my family. Such is life.
The whole rest of the year is travel heavy. So much for a save year. My end of the year reckoning on Mint is going to involve some head hanging with shame. It’s a good thing Noah is earning money at a faster rate than planned for. I’m not making every savings goal. But I do have a god damn fabulous back yard now. It’s a trade off.
We leave on Monday for Disneyland. It will be me and my girls. We will have fun together. Since Calli’s birthday Shanna has been drawing me picture after picture because she wants to decorate for my birthday. I think I will bring a stack of them and scotch tape and put them up on the windows in our hotel room. I am so fucking glad I get to be their mom.
I haven’t been sleeping well. Lots of mom stuff. The last three nights have been pretty bad. It’s lead up to my birthday so I’m not surprised. Six days and counting. I think that knowing that I will be alone with the kids is both helping and hurting. On one hand, I feel sad. But I don’t have the anticipation of waking up in my house with having it just be one more shitty day when I should do laundry and scrub the floor. (Not that my days are shitty–I like my life and I like my job. But man I’ve got this birthday thing.)
I don’t give very many birthday presents any more. I want to spend time with people on their birthdays (or near their birthdays) but gifts aren’t the thing. Only if I find something that seems talisman-like. That’s hard to just decide to find.
I have things scattered throughout my house. Talismans. I’m loved. I should keep writing. People want to know what I am thinking.
Connection. Multiplicity. Embrace plurality. So many things to think about. How to not be scary.
I feel like over the last year or so I have had to realize that all of those hours I spent during my childhood practicing my “scary” expressions worked. Becoming non-intimidating is taking a lot of conscious work.
I feel like I am walking this razor thin line. If I am intimidating then I run off the people I want to love. If I am not intimidating… well I know how that goes.
Better to be undefended and on the verge of death at any moment. That makes people like you more. Then you aren’t scary.
Maybe being scary is just one of those important parts of life. I’m pretty sure my kids aren’t actually afraid of me. When I ask them they emphatically say they aren’t scared. Shanna says, “Sometimes you startle me. But that’s not the same thing.” But I am scary to other people. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen the fear.
Speaking of fear, I bought a bicycle. One that can have a kid trailer thing on the back. First I need to take Shanna out on her bike. After she feels comfortable riding then we will get the trailer for Calli. The bike store fellas told me I can’t have a kid being pulled and a kid on my handle-bars. Just one or the other. Bah humbug. I bet it would have worked two years ago. They are a lot heavier now. I went on a five and a half mile bike ride. I haven’t done that since high school. I only felt like I was going to die for 75% of the time. Hopefully that goes down.
People in my family get hit by cars while on bicycles. It happened to both of my brothers and my dad. My mom and sister were smart enough to stay off of fucking bikes. Now I’m stupid. And risking my kids. Oh god.
September and October are probably as fully booked as I want them. November is probably already as booked as I want it. In December we will be out of state for nine days. I will probably not do very much other than travel in December. If I don’t decorate for Christmas in November I won’t do much beyond a tree. So realistically I have the next three and a half months scheduled. I won’t be bored. I have a lot to do.
It’s time to write Outrunning Suicide. I want it done before New Years. I have a rainbow castle to paint. (This sucker is huge.) I have to install a bunch of hardware for the swings in the back yard.
Not to mention educating my children. That is probably enough to do for the next three months.
Disneyland, two camping trips, over a week in Portland and a weekend in Texas. So much for 2013 being a light year.
I can’t go to Disneyland next year. (No time share points) I think the only traveling I want to do in 2014 is a half marathon in Portland with two of my very favorite ladies in the whole wide world. I hear I already have buy-in from the spouse of the one who will have to travel. This is a good sign.
I’m wussing towards encouraging the home schoolers who live within five miles of me to start thinking along the lines of a Free Democratic School. Driving is a real issue for everyone in the bay area. Having to drive 40-50 miles round trip in order to hang out for a few hours is prohibitive on a long-term basis. If you look at history a lot of who people know is based on who lives near them. It isn’t about “who is best“. Life is about making the best of who is there.
I think that part of the reason I am doing the stuff to my house that I am doing is because I think of future parties and events. I am not good at going out into the world. I am not good at feeling like the world wants me very much. If I make this a good place to be, people will come to me. That is just the nature of how things work. I feel like a spider spinning a web. Err…only I don’t want to eat anyone.
I want to know lots of kids and watch them grow up. I want to have them love visiting my house. So I build a playground. And I paint murals. And I provide endless quantities of fruit, vegetables, and cheese. I only rarely make guests eat ramen.
The part that makes me feel like a spider is how I know that I have to sit and wait. I’m not actually ready for the kinds of relationships I want to have with growing up kids. I don’t mean that my house isn’t ready–though it isn’t. If I went and grabbed people now and tried to fill my house with people… well… my kids would rapidly learn a lot of things I don’t want them to know. My kids are not yet ready to have their reality fucked with.
I’m fairly aware that I go through life with a big reality distortion bubble around me. (I think everyone does to a greater or lesser extent–you see the world from your point of view and not from an objective point of view.) Right now I am carefully crafting the reality my children will have as “baseline” for the rest of their lives. Based on everything I have read about child development and psychology this is important.
Most people don’t seem to think about this much. They just live their life and their kids share it and that is how reality is created thankyouverymuch. My childhood had no consistent reality. I moved more than fifty times. I got to see that every “reality”, every set of rules that people lived by were totally arbitrary.
That means that if I want to I can sit down and make up the rules for reality for my children in any fashion I want. There is no right way. I personally believe there are a lot of wrong ways but not any particular right way. What is right is so individual based on personality and inner strengths.
How I behave with my children is a carefully constructed little universe that isn’t a lot like how I am with the rest of the world. How I am with my children is how I am without defenses and without fear. I do not have the ability to extend that beyond my front door at this point in time.
I feel so lucky that I get to be alone with them so much. I feel so glad that we get to spend a lot of time in an environment where I set the rules. Pam says I am a permissive authoritarian. I think that will shift a lot with time. After a while it won’t be my place to set the rules with such fierceness.
Only I think in some ways I will get much more fierce. I told Shanna flat out one day when she was being very rough with me, “This is not an acceptable way to treat my body. If you continue to treat me this way as you get bigger I will eventually start hitting back. I am not your punching bag.” She stopped hitting me. She hasn’t tried to punch me over and over since.
I have no idea how this will go over the years.
I want my children to believe in the core of their body that they have the right to beat the living shit out of someone who crosses their physical boundaries. I want this to not be a question in their mind. It is just simple fact. We are animals and sometimes we have to defend ourselves. Yup. That’s part of how it works in the world.
But here in Wonderland we don’t hit. We don’t scream. This is a safe place. The violence needs to stay out there in the world. We do not hit our family members. Well, until they are clearly beating on you then go ahead and defend yourself. It needs to take a lot of provocation though. Don’t. Hurt. Your. Family. We are in this together.
I make a big deal out of this being a conscious creation because this is not like anything I have ever known. I was taught to expect people to hurt me. I was taught to hit people as a sign of affection. I was taught that the way to make yourself feel bigger is to hurt the people around you as much as possible.
It is hard for me to change. It takes so much conscious effort. But my children show me the fruits of my labor every day. It is worth it. They are worth it. This life is worth it.
I think about my mother a lot. I think about what she taught me and how she taught me. And sometimes when Calli moves her head just right I see my mother so clearly it is like she is in the room. I have no idea how this will all go.
In medias res. We are always in the middle of the story. There is no beginning and no end. My children have to go to Texas. That is part of their story. I get to choose how much disappointment mom delivers when. I will never be enough to meet all of their needs. That just isn’t how life works. But I have choices about how many needs I meet and when and which particular things I want to skip.
I have so. much. privilege.
All I’m doing right now with my life is hanging out and being available to meet their needs. This is surprisingly exhausting. And sometimes I pick up a side job or two. Mostly if I am not available to meet a need of theirs it is because I bloody well choose to not do it right now.
I sent Shanna to Texas once without me. Sending both seems different. And Shanna is a lot more sure she wants me to go. Some day she will want to do things I will not be up for doing. Then she will go without me. I can understand her wanting to stand near my reality distortion field. I am what she has always known and I have been really good to her. Other people are less predictable. She has figured that out already. I am always ready to smile at her. Other people… not always.
I will focus on this hurting me in my writing though. This is a choice. I’m not a victim here. But I’m making a choice that is questionably right for me. I don’t feel very good about having a relationship with Noah’s abusive mother after walking out on my abusive mother. I don’t know how to describe the kind of betrayal that represents.
My sister told me over and over and over “Abused children are the most loyal.” She said that consciously to tell me not to talk about what I saw in our house. I broke ranks. I broke fucking ranks. I can’t now go silently put up with someone else’s abuse. That’s just not ok. No. I’d rather punch the fucking bitch in the face. And it’s not really cool to fly from California to Texas in order to punch your mother in law in the face so I just won’t set foot in her house. I understand my triggering mechanism. I’m rather realistic all things considered.
“Just be nice” isn’t useful advice for me. Part of the reason that I don’t want to go is I know I have a rather lot of latent rage and she’s a nice safe not actually threatening target who likes to act like people are kicking her all the time. I’ve met me. If you stand in front of me and whine and cringe and cower as if I have been kicking you for hours… I will start kicking you. I understand this impulse only too well. I try to avoid kicked dogs for this reason. My experience of Noah’s mom is that she is a kicked dog.
I am a kicked dog. That is how I went through my childhood. I recognize it very well in others. Being a kicked dog is part and parcel with being a bully. You assume that people are mean to you so you push them towards being mean to you–you antagonize on purpose. Kicked dogs are the meanest little curs.
It’s a vicious cycle. I try to stay out of vicious cycles these days. I try very hard to stay in virtuous cycles.
A virtuous cycle, for the purpose of this essay, is one in which my positive behavior towards a person is rewarded by positive behavior and so on. I believe that kicked dogs need love too but they usually can’t get it from one another. They need to go find someone who isn’t a kicked dog, best if it is someone who is kind of bewildered by the experience, who will react in non-patterned ways.
Patterns are the problem. Patterns are how it keeps going. Vicious cycles. If you snap at someone and they snap back then it goes from there. If you snap at someone and they blink at you and say, “Are you ok?” well… that’s just not a similar sort of pattern. If you snap back it is obvious that you are a fucking asshole and that’s not good. Don’t do that.
Virtuous cycles involve people who are able to look at you and say, “You are having feelings. They are not about me. Would you like to talk about them?” Vicious cycles are more like, “You are clearly having feelings ALL ABOUT ME AND NOW I AM GOING TO YELL AT YOU ABOUT THEM.” Well, other people have other vicious cycles. But the ones I’m thinking about right this minute are like that. There are lots of other cycles. Don’t mistake me here as being the source of information about vicious cycles. Oh man.
I am home schooling my kids so that as they go through life they always have someone standing near them who will smile back. In my lofty experience there is always someone in the world who will smile back. Even if you happen to not be standing near that person right now. It is hard for me to keep faith in that belief sometimes. For most of my life it has been just a faith not unlike most peoples faith in G-d. Someone will smile back.
A while back I read some article about “computer face”. If you turn on peoples cameras secretly they all have the same slack jawed expression. I very consciously work on smiling the majority of the time. I try hard to have my muscles assume that position by default.
I have very deep grief lines. I turn thirty-two next week. If I am not careful I will be a very stern and unapproachable and lonely old woman. I know this to be true. If I want to have my future be the way I want it to be I will have to work hard on every aspect of my character. It feels so daunting.
I had children so I would have a permanent motivating force to change and get better. So I’m going to fucking Texas. I’m not going in the house. My reality distortion field is big enough to extend that far. Yes, Shanna. I will go so you know you are wonderful.
In the end, she won’t remember it much. I’m only kind of sort of doing this for her. I’m doing this so that I know I made all of the choices about creating space between us for reasons I feel ok about.
Recently I was talking to a mother who was not feeling happy about her day care experience in one relatively confined way. Mostly she was satisfied so she said, “I just had to decide that when you are paying someone you have to accept that they are doing their best and let it go.”
That, in a nut shell, is why I cannot put my kids in day care. I would do it if I had no choice and I had to work because I needed the money. But that is why I have made the choice to stay home. (That and ridiculous financial privilege, let’s be clear here.) I don’t want to just put up with the best that someone else feels like giving me.
I need to know that when they are eighteen and I send them off into the world (really I doubt it will be that long) I need to know that my kids have had all of the experiences they need to have in order to be competent at handling themselves. I can’t live with trusting someone else to “do their best”. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I’m glad that other people have such loving trust. I think it is quite healthy.
I don’t know anyone I trust enough to have the charge of my kids like that.
I trust the Godmamas enough that I send my kids there unsupervised and I have legal documentation saying they are the next of kin. But I still don’t want them setting reality for my kids. I love them and I want their influence… but as an add on or in case of critical system failure. Err, I’ll be a dick and say I think that I will do better. But they will be getting traumatized kids and I can’t think of anyone in the world I would trust more to adequately and lovingly raise traumatized children who started out being raised by me. They will be the most gentle adjustment to not-Krissy reality of anyone in the world. So I don’t pick them to be like me. I pick them to love the results of being like me. It’s kind of a different metric.
But geezus on toast I don’t want someone else teaching my kid how to be a kid for eight hours a day. I don’t want my daughters going through life not sure if someone will smile back.
There are a lot of gifts I can’t give them. I don’t mean financially–I mean in terms of spirit and family and community and sense of place. I can give them Wonderland. Where they are wonderful to me. We do go out into the world lots. And they are doing more and more things away from me.
I’m going to Texas because I had to rock myself to sleep crying for my mother too many times. I need to be there. Just in case. She won’t always be little. I won’t fucking do this for a twenty-five year old I shit you not. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t do it for a fifteen year old. This trip will hurt me. This trip will hurt a lot. This trip has the high potential to be miserable. I have to go through airport security. I probably should not fly with pot. Alcohol makes my stomach hurt and that makes my temper shorter. I do have trusty-dusty Lorazepam! I will have to cut the pills up substantially more to take them during the day. I take 1mg at night and that knocks me straight out. (Not every night. Thirty pills lasts me for four to five months.)
Texas really hasn’t been good to me. I don’t like going there. I must like these kids a whole lot. It won’t be very long. I will be there for moral support. I will read a book. Maybe five. Maybe I will spend a lot of quality time in coffee shops writing Outrunning. That would be kind of funny. Not ha ha funny. Just funny.
Time for breakfast. I have missed you, internet. I shouldn’t make a habit of this for a while. The book is going to eat my hands.
I do a lot of defining myself in negatives. I don’t just mean that I am derogatory towards myself. I mean that I think of myself in terms of, “I am not like _____; I do not do _____” It is one way of making yourself different. Not a useful way. It means that you are constantly placing how other people are as primary. I’m not like you. People take it as a rejection or as a negative statement about them. Going out and creating an identity without negatives is much harder. It takes tremendously more emotional and psychological energy to go create something from scratch rather than just reject everything that walks by as being “not you”.
I was asked how the party went. Well. Where in my stress cycle should I answer that question from? I think that most people had fun. I absent mindedly made a minor social faux pas early on and never stopped hearing in my head how stupid, rude, domineering and offensive I am. When everyone finally left I cried for hours because I felt so guilty for offending someone.
If you are going to move through life being an asshole but you cry every time someone lets you know that you are crossing their boundaries… you aren’t giving people a way to have a relationship with you that is not basically subservient. If I don’t want subservient relationships (I don’t) then I can’t keep doing this bullshit. It’s not ok to cause other people to feel guilty for having boundaries. They need to have them. I need to take my wrist slap and move on. That is the adult way to handle such things. That is how you have relationships.
This is why my therapist wants me to stop socializing for a while. I spend a lot of time examining all of my interactions with people and looking for reasons that person is very likely to walk away from knowing me any minute for a long list of good causes. I know that I push my luck every day and in every way. When will people be sick of my shit? I get that a lot. My paranoia is not baseless. Is it paranoia to watch for tornados in tornado country?
But the paranoia drives people away as surely and as quickly as if I was chasing them away with a fire hose.
On my last day of teaching English at the Hindu temple one of the kids brought up suicide. A kid from their school jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge last year. They are all still thinking about it. I talked to them about how hard it is to get help when you are mentally ill. It wears people out. They want you to hurry up and get better already so that you don’t inconvenience them. What do you do if you can’t just snap out of it and behave the way other people want? Either you can put up with being punished for being how you are or you do what you can do to get away from the pain. Sometimes that is suicide. Not that I know exactly why that girl jumped. There are as many reasons to do it as there are people who do it.
Walking on eggshells means trying to place someone else as the primary character in the story and not being sure what your lines are. “What do I say so that this delicate and sensitive individual is not upset?” Can’t be done. As soon as you are reacting from that place you have already assumed that offense is likely and just assuming that means that the offense is already communicated. Game over. You lose.
Sometimes people snap at my social faux pas because they are not feeling patient today but they feel patient on other days. I am probably similarly obnoxious on both days but the difference is not about me. If people try to pick their behavior towards me based on my mood they will mostly pick wrong. It drives me batshit. You can only act how you feel like acting. Faking it will make neither of us happy. And acting like you have already been kicked makes people want to kick you. Really hard.
Some days I am going to wander off and cry if someone blinks too hard in my direction. It isn’t about someone letting me know that I crossed a boundary. When I have been crying two, three, four hours a day for over a week… my emotional reaction is not about you and I’m sorry that I’m standing near you when it starts such that you will feel responsible. You aren’t. My feelings come from inside me. The kind of shame I feel isn’t something that people I know now put on me. It is about old tapes.
I don’t keep people in an ongoing way if they seriously shame me. I don’t fucking think so–I don’t need that crap.
I think very hard about every person who is in my life. If I invite you to my house (even if you think you are one of the casual people) I have spent many hours thinking about you. I have mulled over every piece of data I have ever acquired and I have carefully weighed it. I know you because I want to know you. I don’t have accidental friends any more. I have people in my life because I choose them out of a long list of ever rotating acquaintances.
I am mercenary. I do not see any benefit to being less than frank about this. I don’t pick my friends based on them being able to wait on me or do work for me or babysit or give me social status. I pick my friends based on them having character traits I desperately admire and want to be able to watch develop more closely. I don’t understand. I want to. Please let me stare at you until I understand.
I don’t think that most people in my life understand this. I want you near me because I want to figure out how and why you do _________. This is something I want to understand in this lifetime and I don’t know another way of accessing this information. I want to know why you want to do the things you want to do. I want access to your motivations. I’m trying to hack my own motivation system. What makes you do the things you do? It isn’t that I will use your motivation to do exactly the same thing as you, but clearly you have learned some neat tricks I don’t know.
I never really understand what I have to offer though. That end of the deal keeps me up at night. I see what I get out of knowing people. I see clear value. I don’t understand what I have to offer. I don’t understand why anyone bothers to know me. I don’t see how the unpleasantness of my company could possibly be balanced by anything I know or do.
I can understand that Shanna and Calli are tied to me. Children need their moms. I get that. I can certainly understand how Noah finds enough value in the trade. Past that… I don’t really get it. I think that is part of the reason I read as mean. I am sad and bitter that I have nothing that is worthy of trade for a relationship. I feel broken and angry about it. I don’t know how to build people up and make them feel happy about being themselves while standing next to me. I know how to make people feel angry and irritated and like they don’t want to stand next to me any more. It is a self-fulfilling prophesy. I do this a lot.
I can’t be perfect in order to not annoy people. I can only be. I have to accept the rebuffs when someone lets me know I am crossing a boundary without turning that into a federal case or people won’t feel comfortable communicating boundary incursions and they will just stop talking to me. No one likes drama. No one wants to feel guilty for having boundaries.
Not everything is about me, yo.
I woke up early because I have to get my crying over early before a busy day. Not many left before I hit “vacation” for a couple of weeks. I’m looking forward to this. I need to get my stress levels down to the point where I am not crying for multiple hours a day as a way of avoiding beating the shit out of people.
I cry partially from frustration. I don’t know how to let the intensity of my emotions defuse without doing something. I used to cut. I like being beaten. I have punched holes in a lot more walls than I should admit. These days I feel like I live in a glass cage. If I hit anything it will break and I will be in a shower of shards. So I cry. And cry. And cry. I don’t know if it is healthier or not but it is certainly less violent. Progress?
See, this kind of thing is actually huge progress. I don’t know that I would give myself much credit for it without writing. I have progressed past hitting other people constantly to deal with my frustration through punching walls to crying. I have progressed past cutting myself into letting other people hit me in consensual and pre-agreed ways into crying. Progress, not perfection? I am moving in a less self-hating direction.
Now I cry over someone pointing out that I said something four times. (Which is annoying. I know.) You know… at least it is much better than my previous coping methods of hitting her or cutting myself would have been much more inappropriate. Both are ways that I would have dealt with that interaction in the past.
Most of my friends have social anxiety to some degree or another, I think this commonality increases their patience for me. But it means that some days my anxiety runs into their anxiety and then things just get worse. Neither can break the cycle. Awkward.
In my life the only thing I have found that really and truly breaks the stale mates and allows relationships to continue is time. If you both continue to spend time together despite acknowledging sometimes feeling awkward… you continue to have a relationship. Not every relationship is comfortable every moment. If you choose to have the relationship then you look for ways to spend time together even if it is kind of weird. Even if you do have some defensive conversations.
I need to get my stress levels down. It is a physical limitations thing. I can only monitor my social behavior so closely if I am doing a lot of major physical work. I have been using my body unusually hard for the past few weeks. The mural and the backyard work have both used a lot of muscles I’m not used to moving. They have both taken a lot of patience I didn’t actually have going spare.
I need to figure out what it means to do projects as a parent. I’m still not handling the energy allotment thing very well.
I feel scared a lot of the time because I can’t control what other people do and I am worried about driving people away from relationships with my children. I do not want to isolate them. But it seems pretty awful for me to expect people to put up with me being an asshole just so they can help take care of my kids when no one but me and Noah owes my kids anything.
My kids are neat. They will be more neat if they know people like you. You are neat. This is all stuff that floats around in my head making me vulnerable and scared all the time. I feel my children deserve relationships that I do not have or know how to create.
I don’t think my kids want to see their grandparents because they want to hurt me. I think that one or both of them will decline to go when they finally understand that I’m not going. I will do my best to not share how I feel about the trip. What they need to know is that they have grandparents who love them and a mom who loves them and their mom is very happy to help them pack and I will kiss them goodbye and tell them to have fun. That is more or less the end of the story in our house.
But I am still going to cry when they are gone. I am still going to be very sad that it has worked out that I just don’t get extended family this lifetime. I’m grateful that I managed to get a nuclear family thing. I get to be sad about this. I get to grieve about that. It doesn’t hurt my kids if I spend my alone time crying.
If I describe visiting their grandparents… I don’t have to sell it or try to make it sound fun in a fake way. When they go see their grandparents they need to remember a bathing suit because they have an indoor pool. They need to remember clothes appropriate for riding a horse because they have horses. Not to mention cows and I don’t know what other animals. There is a whole floor of a house that is just toys. You and your dad and your sister will stay on an apartment by yourselves and you will be able to go play with the toys probably anytime you want while you are visiting.
I mean, shit dude. I don’t talk about the people much or try to predict how the relationships will be. I don’t know these people. I say that her aunts and uncles all play music–maybe she should bring her uke so they can teach her cords.
I think my daughters are very lucky to have connection to a lot of rich, talented people. She should take advantage of the fact that she was born into that family. She should go meet the old Great Aunt who has traveled all over the world doing whatever the fuck she wanted for most of her life. She’s a neat lady. Maybe if she met Shanna and Calli she would be more enthusiastic about coming to California for visits. So far she is kind of lazy. I’ve asked.
My children will not have my story. My children will not grow up without a family. They have connections. My children have people in the world tracking them and caring. I am not going to do anything to make that network smaller than I have to. I cut my family off because I don’t think my family is going to stop passing on the incest without some kind of intervention I don’t know how to do. So I’m keeping my kids the fuck away from them. I feel very sad that this is required but it is. It just fucking is.
Whenever someone tells me that I should forgive my mother because she won’t live forever I see my adult nephew breaking down as he told me about his rape experiences. No. No. No. No. My children will be kept away from them. All of them. I don’t think it is their fault that it happened to them but we haven’t had someone avoid incest in a few generations. I’m keeping my kids away from all of them.
When people tell me to just “get over it” and “stop thinking about it” I think “That shit is why it keeps happening generation after generation.”
I think about my mom a lot. I miss her. It doesn’t help that my Leather Mom is going through a lot of strife and I’m not helping very much (partially because of my limitations partially because she is telling me no). My Leather Mom and my birth mother share a birthday. I find that thinking about one or the other of them brings up a lot of really strong feelings.
Why do I think about my mom so much? Because everyone else gets to talk to me about their moms all the time. It’s just normal conversation. So I think about my mom and try to stay silent. I feel bad. I feel like a dirty terrible person.
One of the last things my mother said to me was that she would kill herself if I took my kids away from her. I keep checking on the internet and she isn’t dead. I guess that is just one more broken promise.
Broken promises are a big thing right now. What does it mean to say, “I will do _____.”
Relationships are about choices. Sometimes they are uncomfortable. Often that discomfort comes from inside me and is about the fact that I am thinking three hundred painful things all while I’m trying to have a relationship. When I can get those three hundred thoughts under control and actually focus on the person in the room I am grateful to have that relationship. I am glad it is still there. But it feels like I’ve been phoning it in from somewhere else for a while. I never understand what benefit there is to other people in putting up with me.
I am scheduled to be at Dad’s for Thanksgiving. How long is this going to continue? I have had him in my life more or less for going on fourteen years. We have a fairly distant relationship but honestly I do better with those. I have a hard time with being good-enough when people are around more often. I am able to behave perfectly appropriately for my target audience when I only see people once or twice a year. I feel ashamed that I can’t keep up the game with people I see more.
It makes me wonder if I have my anxiety as under control as I think with my kids. Some of my recent frustrations have made me realize that I need to start writing names on the white board in our room. I don’t want to discuss my relationship fluctuations in front of the kids any more. Shanna is starting to sorta follow and have her emotions influenced. I’m having to do a lot of backpedaling and defending of people with her and that’s… awkward.
I don’t want my kids to share my emotional experiences of people. My children are having different experiences. My experiences are my problem. My experiences are distinctly shaped by having an anxiety disorder. I do not want my kids learning my emotional dysregulation. If they develop their own later I don’t want it to be clearly my fault.
This is part of what I like about Unschooling. I have to pay attention to what I am doing, all DBT like. I have a bad habit of loving and hating people. My kids don’t need to hear about it. I don’t need to teach them to obsessively over analyze every conversation before and after it happens. So far they seem pretty good at talking to people.
I went to a book club meeting yesterday. I need to update my reading list, I’ve added three or four. Book club always turns into a small scale therapy/support group. I find it interesting how the folks who are consistent are unschoolers who come from abusive backgrounds. Other folks come and go. Not that I’m consistent enough to actually say that. Maybe my few attendance points are flukes. I should probably keep that up. My therapist wants me going out and doing stuff without my family. Book club is not terribly threatening. Most of the places I would choose to go involve fending off sexual advances and I’m not in the mood.
What the hell else do people do?
I wish that my successes outweighed my failures in my mind. They don’t. If I say something stupid early in the day I don’t ever stop thinking about how stupid I am. I shouldn’t have done that. I didn’t really mean that how it came out. I was distracted and not really concentrating on the conversation so I did it wrong.
Then I spend the rest of the day wishing I could be in my room crying. When everyone leaves I go ahead and do that for hours.
I don’t think that other people make their choices because they are trying to hurt me. I think they are making their choices based on what is best for them. I have a hard time not paying attention to the fact that what is best for them hurts me. I write about it. I try not to talk about it. I know it is my problem and not anyone else’s.
Maybe I am not good enough at this relationship thing to keep trying. I’m not sure what right behavior even would be. Whatever it is I’m apparently not doing it.
I haven’t been able to turn my anxiety down in a while. The higher my ambient anxiety is the less I am able to actually be reacting to what is happening to me today. I am not really part of “today”. I’m just part of the ongoing story of what a stupid piece of shit Krissy is. It’s a long story. It goes on and on. I don’t know how to get out of it. I don’t know how to stop doing everything wrong.
I’m not doing “everything” wrong. But it feels like I do more wrong than right.
Today I feel lucky to have so many people who love me even though I am so broken and so difficult. High Maintenance they call it.
My husband is going way above and beyond the call of duty lately. He has broken concrete, made breakfast every day, made dinner most days, swept and mopped the house, and moved over 500 lbs of sand so I didn’t have to. These are all things he doesn’t especially like or want to do. But he is helping me. And he did all that outside of his work hours, where he earns enough money to support me in a lifestyle I never previously imagined. (Jenny said she would show she loved me by paying someone to do this labor rather than doing it. It’s a love language thing. I can’t pay someone to do work how I want it done–this is something I learn over and over again. Having Noah just help me do it is really a big thing for me.)
I do not feel like I deserve this. I’m grateful anyway.
Many of my friends are finding ways to hang out and talk to me or be supportive. I am grateful that people stare at me hard enough to say, “You are clearly in a depressive state. I can tell based on ____ and _____ and ____.”
Holy shit. You care. That’s… that’s… whoa. Ok.
It is hard to believe that I am a piece of shit and have people treat me this way. It feels wrong. It feels like I should hurry up and do something awful so they recognize that helping me is the wrong decision. I am not worthy. Self-sabotage is kind of my MO.
That’s part of why my therapist wants me to stop socializing for a bit. When I bounce between lots of people I feel like I am supposed to be trying to figure out how to please all of these people and that takes a lot of thinking and emotional energy. When I am consumed by feelings of worthlessness it is much harder to figure out what is “appropriate” behavior.
Yes. I have to work on my behavior all of the time. You have no idea how much profanity and nastiness lives in my head. I consciously choose what I say or I say things that are really mean and critical. Even if I like something very much I can always tell you 4,920 things that are wrong with it. Whether that is a person, a place, or a thing. Or an idea. Just to cover all the nouns. It doesn’t matter how strongly positive my feelings are there are still more negative things I could say. I have to consciously choose to not be like that. It’s hard.
Right now my friend is reading to my kids. I’m going to have a hard time when she leaves California again. I know she loves me no matter where she is but having her nearby feels like such a blessing. I don’t have to try to please her. I can sit still in a chair and she pays attention to my kids and loves on them and I don’t have to worry about my behavior.
I feel grateful for friends who put up with how loud we are. I know that the volume in our house is very challenging for a few of my friends. (Oh.Forking.Man. The last place we went for a playdate [K-babysitting is different] had hardwood or tile floors throughout with very high ceilings. I no longer think my house is loud. My house is awesomely sound dampening. YAY MY HOUSE. I no longer want hardwood floors or high ceilings. I would lose my fucking mind. I like my house more with every year. <3
I need to go out back and tack down the landscaping fabric. Then I will fill the sandbox. Then I will take a shower and get ready for teaching. After teaching I need to come home and start preparing food for the party tomorrow. Oh man.
I feel very lucky to have the people I have in my life now. I know that I am crazy and all, but not everyone has as many people who love them fiercely as I do. Even if I don’t feel loved I know that I am. I see the actions of the people who show up in my house.
I’m trying to see you for who and what you are instead of the projections from my broken brain. I’m trying. I’m trying.
Tomorrow will be a kick-awesome party. Just sayin’. Not many kids coming, this is the “grown ups who show up to see the kids all the time” party really. Calli listed the people she wanted to invite. Only one person who visits regularly isn’t coming and that is because he doesn’t like the noise much. He and his wife were invited but not pressured to come. They don’t like crowds.
It is really neat finding out who Calli feels attached to. She has a varied and dear family whether I understand it or not. I’m really glad that my daughters feel so loved in this world. I’m doing something right.
My therapist told me to cancel everything I can cancel in the next two weeks. I won’t be able to get the crying under control any other way. That’s probably true. I like to keep my crying at under an hour a day. When it creeps up over three hours a day it really cuts into my ability to work.
Atypical depression is normal for PTSD. It doesn’t manifest in the “normal” ways and it can’t be cured by the “normal” drugs. Isn’t that all very helpful to know. If I am depressed, what should that mean in terms of my behavior? How come I can go move over 8,000 pounds of concrete but I’m “depressed”. Psh. I’m not depressed. I don’t get depressed. I just cry and cry and cry while I work. Oh. That’s not normal?
Well I move the concrete but I sometimes go and collapse on the couch and am unable to move for an hour. I’m not exactly asleep–I think I can hear the kids the whole time. I’m just not able to move. That doesn’t usually last more than about 90 minutes. I mean… I can move. When someone shows up and knocks on the door I can stagger to the door.
Really it doesn’t matter how shitty I feel. That’s irrelevant. There is work to be done.
My therapist thinks this might be an unhealthy thought process and one I should work on. She thinks that when I’m spending many hours a day sobbing I should probably change something.
It isn’t that moving the concrete is the problem. Moving concrete doesn’t make me feel depressed. Heavy physical exercise is generally something that is one of my most intense mood elevators. It isn’t that doing the work is a problem. It is that I don’t rest. I don’t drink enough water. I don’t eat enough. My calorie needs are probably much higher than usual right now–I’ve been doing a lot of fairly heavy work for a couple of weeks. But I’m barely eating.
Noah, I leave the breakfast dishes on the table so long because I usually barely finish eating breakfast by lunch. I eat a few bites at a time as I can. My stomach hurts too much to eat faster or larger quantities.
A lot of the day I feel dizzy and nauseated. My neck and hurt have hurt continuously for a few weeks. I’m sure my continual dehydration since I stopped drinking carbonated water isn’t helping. (pause to drink water.)
I’m thinking about my mom wicked hard. I’m trying to figure out how I am patterning off of her right now because I think that I am doing that and it isn’t serving me and I don’t know what I should be doing. I’m having a horrible time figuring out what I should be doing at any given moment.
I stop, literally dozens of times a day for the past few days, and have intense overwhelming panic attacks because I am absolutely sure I am working on the wrong thing and I should be working on something else (I don’t really know what) and I am not doing the right thing and that means I am bad bad bad and I should be punished.
This is really exhausting. I’m also not sleeping well. I wake up and then can’t get back to sleep because I cycle through various memories of times in which I was clearly bad and how it is a good thing that those people have shunned me so that I can never hurt them again and I should just stop fucking hurting everyone all the time already. Will I ever stop being such a fucking cunt?
So… yeah. My therapist told me to figure out a way of having one hour every week of having someone outside my family do something for me. Like, actually do what they say kind of do something for me. She told me to cancel all of my social stuff that I can in the next two weeks and not make more plans for a week or more after that.
I have so far maintained control in all of my social setting obligations. That is not something that I can bank on forever. My stress levels are just too high. If I want to avoid screaming at people for some stupid trivial reason, if I want to avoid having a panic attack in public and having to deal with all the horrible after effects… I need a break.
I can’t be what other people need from me right now. I just don’t have it to give. I’m sorry. I know that this is an inadequacy in me. I am sorry that I am so pathetic. But I am. If I want to still have friends in years to come I need to not blow up at people. They don’t want to hang around and let me abuse them. I agree with that basic premise. No one should hang around and let me abuse them.
I wish I was different. I wish that I wasn’t so god damned mean. But then again I’m pretty glad that I’m alive at this point. I like what I get to do during the day. I like the people in my life.
The kids started in on me this morning. They wanted to go to Fairyland after therapy. I collapsed to the floor crying. I told them that I’m sorry I can’t go do all the fun things they want to do. I’m sorry I’m so tired. I’m sorry I haven’t finished all the work yet. I’m sorry I am not able to be the mommy you want to have. I’m sorry I’m not the fun mommy.
I feel guilty that this resulted in my kids comforting me and telling me that it’s ok–I do lots of fun stuff with them. It’s ok that we can’t do it today. I *am* a fun mommy.
We were later than I intended to be because I sat there and couldn’t stop crying for about ten minutes. After a few minutes Shanna asked me why I was still crying. I told her that I was thinking about the fact that I will never be able to meet all of her needs and I feel very sad about that. I told her we were going to come up against this over and over in her life and I may cry about it a lot. But it’s just true. I can’t.
She hugged me and told me that I do my best and that’s good enough.
My therapist says that my children are “parentalized” but given that I do not allow them to do actual care taking of me and I *am* responsible for getting my shit done this is probably not a problem. I feel conflicted about this. I tell my children all the time that they are not responsible for me. I don’t know if I am in denial about my behavior though.
Every parent has behavioral expectations of some kind. I don’t try to make my kids act in a certain way to control my moods or emotions. If I’m having an off day I tell them that if I am snappish it isn’t personal and I apologize for my tone of voice if I am too harsh.
I feel very guilty for the fact that Shanna is becoming my inside voice. This is happening because I instruct her in whatever it is I’m talking about and she repeats things back to me at moments when I am err in need of similar direction. Like managing feelings. I talk to her about how to manage her feelings and she uses the same words back at me when I am having feelings. I generally thank her for her input and then I step off to go manage my feelings because she is not a grown up. I don’t talk to her about what is in my head. It is just hard to hide all the crying.
So yeah, I worry. I worry if what I am doing is ok all the time. I don’t sleep much at night for worrying if existing in a space with me will create irrevocably fucked up adults and I should not have created these poor innocent children for me to abuse.
I don’t think I abuse them. I don’t think I neglect them. But my starting standards are so fucking low that I never feel like it is possible that I am doing enough. I feel that it isn’t possible for me to do something that is good enough. I am tainted. Both of my daughters have gone without sexual contact longer than I went. Have I already won the parenting contest?
Having absolutely no standard to judge against is freeing and terrifying. I talked to a guy recently who told me that he hopes that American society will not be judged by history based on our popular culture. I said, “Uhm, what else do you think they will have to judge on? Give me a break.”
I can read books and watch movies about so-called “happy families” but the truth is I have never been in the vicinity of a happy family for more than a few hours. Near as I can tell every family becomes less happy the longer I am standing near them so even families who are supposedly just fine the whole god damn rest of the time will manage to have a huge blow up when I’m there.
I’m just that unpleasant.
I know these things aren’t actually “my fault”. It’s all just a bunch of coincidences. But I was talking to an autistic guy about shunning recently.
It doesn’t matter if it is my fault or not. The end result is that I make people uncomfortable so it is better for everyone else if I am not there. That doesn’t feel good. That doesn’t give me a lot of reason to think I should keep breathing. If just existing makes things worse for other people… that’s not good.
I am so afraid of still being alive in fifteen years. I kind of hope that my kids won’t read my book until then–the first one anyway. At some point I do actually specifically want my kids to read it. Even though it will be upsetting. Even though it will be terrible. Even if it is “traumatizing” and that makes me a selfish piece of shit.
Just once. I want you to understand your blood and why I am the way I am. You don’t need to change anything about how you treat me. But please. I hope that being nice to you and taking care of you and teaching you that your body and opinion and voice matters entitles me to you reading that one book. I doubt I will force you to read any other book in your life. Please. I need to have someone who is related to me read this book and believe me and take my side. Please. Even if you go on to have a relationship with my mother and my sister and your cousins and whoever else is still alive… please be on my side. Please tell my family that even though you love them it was right to not meet them until adulthood.
Please. I hope I am making the right choice. I don’t have any way of knowing for sure and I am so scared of doing this wrong. I am so scared. I am so fucking scared that I feel like I am going to be beaten because I was bad. Divorcing my family is such a disgusting, terrible, selfish piece of shit thing to do. But it isn’t. It is the only way I know to keep my children safe. Maybe someone else would be able to find a different way but I am limited by my abilities.
I don’t actually think I will force my children to read it. I don’t think I would ever do that to anyone. But I hope. I hope without telling them about that hope.
I don’t tell them what I’m thinking about. I don’t expect them to comfort me. I don’t require them to walk on eggshells in order to not set me off.
I think I am doing all that I can do. I feel so terrible that I cannot do more. But I’m at my limits. I either respect that or I fuck up in a way that will haunt me for years. Ok. Go to ground.
My nephew turned 24 two days ago. I’ve been thinking about him since. I wonder how he is doing.
I feel intense sorrow that I am not doing more to support my friend who just lost her life partner. She hasn’t asked for more, but I think I should be there and I’m not. I feel very ashamed of myself.
I feel like a petty, pathetic, moron for caring so much about how clean my house is before a party. But I’m still forcing everyone in my family to clean.
I’ve had sex twice this month and I don’t know that we will be doing that again. I don’t really feel good about sex right now. Being touched makes me freak out. This is a huge slump and I feel really bad about it.
People are being very nice and soliciting spending time with us. I feel like a piece of shit because I am staying home and working on cleaning up my yard. I feel vapid, narcissistic, and stupid. But I don’t want anyone to get hurt and there has been a lot of debris. I wish I didn’t feel so bad about doing this work.
Construction is always stressful. I don’t know anyone who has construction on their property without stress. It is almost over though and all of the work is beautiful. I am going to be very happy with my yard for the rest of my life. That is nice anticipation.
I feel like I am failing on homeschooling lately. I have too many hours of the week booked. I’m just requiring my kids to entertain themselves while I work. That said, they are incredibly helpful. And because I have not been reading to them much Shanna has been “reading” to Calli a lot and that is really cool on its own.
I continue to feel waves of shame over yelling at my neighbors for being racist. I feel like there should have been some constructive way to deal with it only I am a nasty harpy bitch. And yet… I’d much rather be a nasty harpy bitch than keep my mouth shut when someone says things I believe are wrong. I feel very guilty about choosing to be this person. I’m not nice.
The goody bags are packed for the birthday parties. Not that all of the kids have RSVPed. I should probably email those two moms and find out if the kids are coming.
Cakes are ordered. We will be delightfully cake-ified.
Today we have a playdate with some folks who invited us over to their house before I started canceling everything this week. I don’t feel that guilty about canceling group participation but when someone invites me over to their house I try like hell not to cancel. If I invite myself over I’m ok with rescheduling when something comes up… but not if I’m invited. I know how hard it is for people to invite. I don’t want to fuck that up.
I miss the Leather community. Noah doesn’t understand why. The flaming perverts don’t hold within them the potential to make my life very hard for the next few decades. I’m painfully aware that I can’t fuck things up with people who are involved with my kids. The Leather community is not about my children. If I fuck up there it is something where only I have to pay the penalty. That sounds so freeing right now. I miss having only me pay for being me.
I’m so grateful that my children wake up every day ready to jump into my arms and exclaim that the missed me last night! They are ready for some snuggling!
This is the best period of my entire life. I am so grateful I get to be here. I’m learning that “being wanted” isn’t something that you necessarily feel. Because I am wanted. My children and my husband want me fiercely. And I still don’t feel it. That’s not their fault. I’m trying.
I shouldn’t be typing. But I feel so lonely and sad. I’ve been crying on and off for days. I miss my mom so much. I wish I could stop missing her. I’d give almost anything to not miss her anymore.
I don’t have it in me to pretend I have social skills. I’m bad. I’m stupid. Everything is all my fault. I will just stay home.
I’m having a lot of intense feelings. Oh well.
Today I will go order cakes. (Multiple birthday girls = multiple cakes. I think people who ask kids to “share a birthday party” and who then make them share a cake aren’t very nice. I mean, I get it from a financial point of view… but I have birthday issues.)
I feel intense anxiety about letting Calli pick the guest lists. She kept stuff very small. She doesn’t like lots of people around. When I asked her do you want to invite ____ she said, “But we have too many people! We can’t play when there are too many people!” Standing her next to my oldest child it is hard to understand that they have the same DNA. Calli likes to interact with about five people at a time and she defends that boundary with very sharp sticks. Shanna wants to invite half the western hemisphere over to hang out.
Part of adapting to them is letting Shanna have big parties and then I have to get over my guilt at not inviting everyone we know to Calli’s parties. She started listing kids to invite on her finger and when I asked about additional grown up names she said no. I have to not feel like I am slighting people. It’s hard.
We will also pick up more lumber. Looks like the playhouse will have all but the final shade covering and paint by the end of today. That is thoroughly exciting. 🙂
Today wonderful people are coming to my house to make the big pile of concrete and debris go away! My yard will be dramatically less dangerous in only 24 hours! YAY! I worry a lot about inviting children to construction zones. My kids get hurt a lot. We’ve had many bloody feet from stepping on screws and nails. Luckily this experience has taught them that when mom says, “This is an important place to wear shoes” they have stopped arguing. The cuts were worth it. Ha. (I am normally very tolerant of being barefoot. I only break out shoes for a reason.) But I don’t need all of our friends-who-are-children going through the same right of passage at my house. 🙂
I wanted to go visit my friend’s baby today. Instead I will fill buckets with tiny little chunks of concrete and carry them from the back yard to the front yard to the big pile. The more I get out of here today the less I have to deal with later.
Today I will hang up the swings for the kids in the back yard. I am unlikely to hang the adult swing today. I am told it involves blocking the original structure and whereas I’m not an idiot and I could cut wood and do the blocking I have only hand saws so I kind of wait for the dude with the power saw to cut all the wood. Lazy woman.
Every year or two I decide to do home improvement projects. I basically always have a party scheduled as a deadline or I just..never…quite… finish… It is effective but stressful. In the future I need to remember that I should be the only one racing a time clock. No one else wants that stress.
I have September and October on the board. Neither are all that scheduled. I think I am going to deliberately not schedule more. I need to regroup. I need to think hard about who is likely to still be in my life in twenty years. Who should I be handing my energy resources to? Where will it have long-term pay off? It is mercenary, selfish, and the only way I will make it to the end of my life without hating everyone in the whole world.
For most of my life I have indiscriminately helped anyone who needed help. If someone I barely knew needed help moving I was there. Things like that. I’m not saying I have a lot of help to offer. I’m saying I have specific resources. When I hand them to people I will not have an ongoing relationship with I get a little boost but mostly a big drain of energy.
Mostly I like doing a lot of anonymous paying-forward of good things. I think that is what makes the world go round.
I’ll get back to it. It is important to me to help people I don’t know. It is a spiritual thing. But I have limited ability to just do that. Right now what I am trying to do is build community. Most people join a mostly-existent community and then try to fit in. I can’t. I am wholesale constructing my own. It is slightly different. It is a more conscious thing. It’s more work.
Taylor asked why I don’t write about him more. Because he is so deeply entrenched in my life at this point that if I accidentally hurt him by processing something in front of him then the repercussions are bigger than I can handle. I have had evolving opinions of his wife. (Never bad–I have certainly not thought DTMFA or anything.) I recognized her as disabled years before he was willing to say so out loud. That means I need to keep my fucking mouth shut because it isn’t my body or my life being impacted. My view of her is irrelevant and may make her or her husband angry.
The lines around who I can talk about and when and why shift dramatically. Mostly I find out the boundaries by no longer having friends. I get fired a lot. I’m used to it. Other people tell me that I should stop writing then if I am so rude and offensive and I want to have friends.
When I stop writing I substitute cutting and other forms of self-mutilation. I write because this is the closest I can come to convincing myself that I am important enough to not be in pain. I can see patterns and understand things when I write. I can also drive off all the people who don’t actually like me any way. It’s a double win?
I am not smart enough, clever enough, fast enough, whatever enough to deal with my emotions without writing. Well… I can. I can force myself to be silent. I can not, however, at this point, actually keep all of my pain to myself. Maybe that makes me whiny, self-absorbed, and stupid. I have to live with that. I have to live with the fact that the only people whose opinion I give a shit about would rather be offended by my writing than count my scars. They don’t need to see the growing evidence of my stoicism.
If I could cope in a different way I would try that. I have tried lots of things over the decades. Cutting and writing are the last bad coping methods still standing. I try to tell myself that my writing isn’t that bad. I worry about the future. I worry about getting to a place where I know that my writing just upsets everyone and it is all my fault for being such a bad stupid bitch. I will stop writing then. At that point I don’t think anyone will ever be allowed to see me naked again. I want to move on from cutting my thighs so much. That was how I hid it as a teenager. Now when I am upset and I think about cutting I flirt with hurting my breasts and my belly over my ribs and my calves and… I’m pretty sure that if I go down that path there is only one way for it to end.
What would it take for me to stop believing that I should die in order to make everyone else’s life better? I don’t know. But I’m not there yet.
My phone is on the fritz. SMS rarely goes through but sometimes does. I no longer get alerts from email or IM. I have restarted it and such but it has been dropped a lot. A really lot. And at this point the factory-standard cover is broken in many places so I’m not shocked or anything.
If I ignore you it isn’t personal.
PS- I already replaced the arm braces. Ahhhh. That feels better.
I should take a break from typing. I’ve been doing a lot of work over the past few days that is wearing my arms out. I’ll be back. Don’t know when. It should be more than a few days. I need to get new braces. I lost one at Disneyland. In May. I haven’t replaced it yet. I’m awesome.
I told Shanna that we are going to Portland for Thanksgiving to stay with my Dad. (An adopted parent–not the man who raped me.) Her response was, “But I want to go see my Grandmother.” Meaning Noah’s mom.
So now it seems that Noah and the girls are probably going to go to Texas for a weekend in December.
I can’t stop crying. I will probably now spend the day trying to hide because I don’t want to be asked why I am crying.
Because I hate that I am not part of your family. I’m not. I never will be. They don’t want me. I have no family. And near as I can tell the only person I have to blame is myself.
I am part of a family inside this house. Outside of this house I am nothing.
I don’t want to be asked why I am crying because I don’t want to lie and I don’t want to make my kids feel like me. I want my kids to want to know their grandparents. I want my kids to believe they have family.
I can’t fuck that up.
“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” – Jim Rohn”
Noah, Shanna, Calli, Kira, Taylor. I must be made entirely of awesome. And why aren’t I better at giving massage? It does explain why I am much better at cooking than I used to be.
Looks like I won’t be putting together sex ed. *phew* When people ask me to do things I have a hard time saying no. Much like some other people I know. Do I want to be on the hook for teaching other peoples kids sex ed? Maybe? Not sure. I’m glad I don’t need to think about it any year soon. I’m glad I have less work to do.
I’m still coughing but the fever is over. Progress.
Today will be gardening and cleaning. I’m actually really looking forward to it. I get to talk to the kids a lot on this kind of day. I have been flat shocked by how much Shanna has developed the ability to be actual help recently. I know some people start chores at three or four, I didn’t. I started at five. So she’s catching up on progress that could have been made more slowly, I suppose? I just know that I didn’t think she would actually clean up her toys yesterday (she had like six different sets all dumped on the floor at once) and it took her half an hour.
I feel scared a lot of the time that I am doing everything wrong. I am going to ruin their entire lives. I am going to make it so they can’t have normal lives. It will be all my fault.
But I enjoy them so much. I enjoy spending time with them. I want to hang out with them all day talking about why different plants do different things. Huh, what is similar about these kinds of flowers? What is different? Why do you think they are different like that?
I have never had a time in my life where I haven’t been afraid and completely sure that I am bad and wrong. I have learned to kind of ignore that feeling. But sometimes I am bad and wrong. It is hard to figure out where the difference. How can I tell when I am legitimately doing something wrong and when I just feel self-hating? I don’t know very well.
My kids seem happy and like they are making progress. I’m pretty sure if I was doing it “all wrong” that they wouldn’t be blooming quite so well. Which isn’t to say that anyone else’s way is wrong. But if my kids are happy and growing and learning maybe I don’t need to feel like a steaming pile of shit.
No one is perfect. There is no platonic ideal. Not everyone would like my kids as much as I do. I have a number of friends who would probably feel like my children were a curse instead of a blessing because those folks are sensitive to noise and my kids bring as much volume impact as a ten piece brass band.
The volume bugs me and yet I want little girls who think the world needs their voice. The social consideration is an older persons game. I want them to just feel in their bones that they have a right to take up space and make noise with it. I know that isn’t a trait universally preferred among parents. That’s ok with me.
In many ways I let my children cross a lot of “rudeness” boundaries because I have never understood them. I have never agreed with them. So I don’t enforce them.
Pam told me that I was a weird mix of permissive and authoritarian. Yup. I set the boundaries. Within the boundaries I stay out of most things. They have to make mistakes. They have to do things that annoy me. For the love of Crisco I am not trying to raise little people who will “not annoy me”. Ha. If you don’t annoy me you aren’t being enough of a kid. Keep trying.
But they are going to hit the wall of other people. I can’t soften it and I can’t make it easier. The world is what it is. I can prepare them and then I have to just let them bear their own consequences. Other people have different opinions and if you want to deal with other people you have to deal with their opinions.
I don’t want to teach my kids to put people in boxes the way I do. I went to a funeral this weekend. He was a remarkable man. Partially remarkable for the sheer variety of different skill-sets he mastered in different communities. And he compartmentalized everything and very few people knew almost anything about his extensive connections. Everyone there was surprised by how he touched so many other communities. He seemed busy enough in the community I knew him in!
I have levels of trust and like and tolerance. They are all different. I wish that I trusted men more, but I don’t. I trust some men in particular ways. Even a large number of men who totally believe they have already “jumped through hoops” to prove they are safe are people I won’t be in a room alone with.
I don’t care if it hurts your feelings. I can’t. I have my own feelings to worry about. Find someone else to validate you. Someone with a lower rape count.
Women aren’t easier. Women want to nurture. So they bury their own feelings until they can’t any more. Women look trustworthy until they really really really aren’t. Whereas men tend to start out looking untrustworthy and slowly work their way up.
But my past experiences with specific people should not be a good enough reason to damn the other people I meet. Only that is how I ended up having so many problems. I kept trying to trust.
I believe I would be able to trust people more if I weren’t someone who bothered people so much. I believe that a big part of the reason people break trust with me is because I make people feel so wildly uncomfortable.
People won’t remember what you said or what you did. People remember how you made them feel. (Isn’t that Fitzgerald?) If I make people feel uncomfortable every where I go… that is what there is to remember. I am uncomfortable to be near.
Noah doesn’t feel uncomfortable. Shanna doesn’t feel uncomfortable. Calli doesn’t feel uncomfortable. They like me. They have to be enough.
I mean, what am I complaining about anyway? Everyone makes me feel massively uncomfortable. Such is life.
There is a part of me that would like to hide away from all people, basically forever. There is a part of me that wants to start opening my house once a week. But I don’t think people would come. I live in an inconvenient place. It really isn’t worth the effort.
I don’t know how to build community. I am not able to maintain the effort of showing up at a hobby to produce community. I just don’t have it. I feel pathetic, but there it is. I’m not going to get my community through any of the fair(e)s. I am not going to get my community through something I show up at once a week and pay my entrance fee.
I don’t think I am psychologically capable at this point. I get to the door, look around, note that no one here needs me and I turn around and go home.
I’m not a joiner. If I’m going to sit by myself watching other people have fun I can do that in my front yard for free without having to go any where. My neighbors are outside a lot. I don’t need to pay for dance events so that I can go cry in the bathroom.
And yet it isn’t anyone else’s responsibility to show me a good time. It is my responsibility to have a good time or not. So I don’t go. I’m not very good at “having fun”.
So I make progress on my house. It doesn’t effect anyone but me. No one else cares. But I do. I may not feel like I have community, I have friends, but it seems different. I don’t know.
I have at least two people I can call in an emergency. Depending on the emergency I could potentially go down a list of other people who could help. The last time I asked anyone but K for help it didn’t go well.
I worry about asking anyone for help too often. K saves my ass a lot. She has been the reason I can see a therapist, or do other major health stuff if I can’t work around Noah’s schedule. The kids still visit their Godmamas once a month. I hire people to do some work sometimes.
But the last time I called someone who told me “Call if you need anything” I was told no. I won’t call again.
If you can’t handle hearing the answer “no” then you shouldn’t ask. Most of the time I can’t handle being told no. So I don’t ask people for things. Hell, I’m starting to feel like I shouldn’t be inviting people over so much.
I’m afraid of letting my kids get used to having friends in their lives when I know that no one stays in my life very long. I’m afraid that if I invite families over for my kids to get to know that my kids are just going to have to get used to the disappointment that the moms are going to decide they don’t like me after a while and there go their friends.
It is hard believing that if there is a social problem it is probably all my fault. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it maybe isn’t all my fault but man isn’t that the most convenient scapegoat. I’m a great scapegoat. Everything is my fault. If I weren’t such a fucking asshole I wouldn’t have so many problems.
That thought is one that makes me want to swim out into the ocean as far as I can go.
If I weren’t so fucking bad I wouldn’t have all these problems. But it is too late to change that now. So now what?
More gardening. More cleaning. I’m pretty sure I know how to do those bits without fucking up my whole life. No promises on any other topic.
What is community any way? Are they the people you see when you randomly show up somewhere? Do they spend time with you? How much time is needed before you qualify as “community”? I’m not sure.
I think there are allowed to be weird solitary people who are not the linchpin but they still matter.
Look on the bright side. Even if I don’t feel loved it is not anyone’s fault (I’m certainly not saying that I’m not loved–just that I don’t feel it). It is a broken switch. I know that people act in ways that demonstrate affection. I try to ignore the switch.
I think that part of the reason that my writing has been hostile lately is I feel scared all the time. I am about to get in trouble. I am trying to defend myself. But no one is attacking me.
I am sick, so we didn’t go hang out with the home schoolers today. My fever broke around dinner time so I’m not going to the park tomorrow. You should be clear for 24 hours before you go in public. (It is polite!)
Instead I did house work and yard work. I tried to not work too hard or too fast. But I transplanted the pumpkins, (maybe they will forking grow now) and added lettuce and flower seeds. I took out all the dead corn stalks. I weeded. I folded laundry (three loads!). I cleaned the kitchen and destroyed it again. I finished sorting through my neighbors hand-me-downs and got them put away.
I chose having two parties for Calli because she said she couldn’t handle having very many kids over at once and I figure divide up the people who will only go on the weekends with the people who will only go during the week. That way the crowd never gets too loud. She’s sensitive.
I’m feeling stupid for it. I picked the weekend before her birthday because I didn’t want Labor Day weekend (this will be a thing forever) but that means… oh man. Just stuff. I kind of wish I had bumped it back. Oh well. 🙂 It will all work out. Somehow. Like magic. Noah will be outside working this weekend even though that is Not His Thing.
The blackberry bramble is dealt with. Tomorrow I will deal with transplanting the broccoli and watermelon. I need to clear out the 4 o’clocks. I need to go pick up those damn stumps from my neighbor’s yard. I don’t even know where I should put them yet. Decisions, decisions, decisions. Probably back yard. I shouldn’t tempt all the random neighbor kids to crack their skulls. You should have to know us before you get that invitation. I also mailed the invitations for the second birthday party.
Finish party planning. What to eat or drink. Make scavenger’s/treasure hunt. I won’t be able to do that till I get the yard more settled because I will have to figure out where to put the clues and such.
I have only three more weeks of English teaching. Only two more weeks of swimming. 47 days till a time traveling camping wedding. 53 days till the home school camping trip. If I don’t get sick again.
I’m trying to make my schedule look less crowded. I’m tired. I need a slower pace. I need to not feel bad about that. I’ll be nicer.
I am pleased to report that the evil gunk I am coughing up from my lungs is a nice pale green with no black at all. The more I read about chronic bronchitis the more I think I am just screwed. My mom was a really heavy smoker. I have had coughing problems all winter from the first sign of cold for as long as I can remember and I didn’t smoke pot for that long. (roughly four years of consistent smoking in my late twenties into thirties) I’ve been off smoking for a while and the black stuff in my lungs has cleared out. But I am probably never going to stop coughing all winter.
Did you know that chronic bronchitis can kill you? I am curious what I will die of some day. Suicide has its down sides, but it also assigns a certain dignity compared to dying because my airways just close. Enh. We’ll see.
I’ve been thinking a lot about suicidal ideation as a concept as opposed to having suicidal ideation. What function does that hold for me? Is it relief? Is it company? Is it safety?
If I believe that at the end of the day *I* get to decide if I have to face tomorrow… that’s some power. It is most of the power I have ever felt a had.
At this point, whereas it is hard to control, I can manage to switch some of the tracks of my brain to other things so I can still “function” even while the imagery is happening. Earlier in my life that wasn’t true. On days when the multi-plex went live I just had to hide in a closet to avoid getting in trouble because I would inevitably get in a lot of trouble those days. I don’t value myself or my body so I pick fights. I’m just looking for the next person who will hurt me. I assume that is the only reason I am here anyway. Someone has to be at the bottom of the shit hill.
A friend asked me how I was doing yesterday. Other than hacking up a lung I don’t have a lot of room for complaint. I mean, could I talk about things that are bothering me? Sure. Could I list all my stress and anxiety? Sure.
I am exactly where I want to be doing exactly what I want to do. I have so much privilege it blows my fucking mind. I get to be independent and secure because I have a provider. It’s… kind of weird.
Most people developed their early sense of security from their parents. Mine couldn’t take care of me. Not in any way. My mom sent me off to live with other people who could take care of me and my father said that providing support for me wasn’t a worthy enough thing to do–he needed trade in the form of sex with my mother or I didn’t deserve support. Even after the divorce.
I haven’t had sex with Noah in a while. I’m not sure what all is going on. July we went slightly over quota. But for the last week I have felt numb. I just can’t have sex right now. I can’t open my legs and provide the trade that keeps a roof over my head. I can’t. I can’t believe that is the only reason I am allowed to stay.
Noah didn’t really know what he was getting into. To be fair, neither did I.
I don’t know how to tell Part 2. I don’t want it to be a continuation of the first book, exactly. I’m doing plot outlining and thinking about the evolution of my relationship with my Owner. Am I telling a story about being trained as a slave? About becoming an adult? About the bdsm community? About the psychopathology of sadists? I’m not really sure. Figuring that out will determine a lot about the book. And how graphic should it be? It’s not like I actually had all that much sex with my Owner. He wasn’t interested. I will need to describe the bdsm and that is graphic enough. “Then he placed the noose around my neck. He said, ‘Well I hope you don’t die’ then he walked over to the pulley system and tugged on the rope that lifted me off my feet while I tried to relax and go limp so it would hurt less. Then I waited to find out if he would kill me or not.”
I mean, is that x rated? It is uhm… festive? I don’t know.
The suicide book also wants more work. Sigh.
I spent an hour and a half working on curriculum for sex ed for home schoolers. Yes yes, I’m “unschooling” my kids and all. Sorta? Maybe? Am I even physically capable of thinking about things as an unschooler? So what I’m doing is putting together what I think they should know and why. Then I’m trying to figure out how to present the information.
I won’t provide them with a one-size-fits-all curriculum. I know all the kids I have been approached about teaching. (Moms have asked at the park. Ok, some moms have also explicitly said “You won’t be teaching MY kids.” Ok, not a problem. It isn’t as if I am so desperate for things to do that I need to chase down other peoples kids for more work.)
I feel weird about putting this together. I was asked to. By multiple people. Other people emphatically don’t want me near their kids. Uhm, ok? That’s fine?
I hear Davy Crockett. Be sure you are right and go ahead. I believe that sex education is important. I believe that all human beings should have access to sex education. I also believe that parents have the right to set culture for their own children. That means that “sex education” will be done in a variety of ways by a variety of people. For example, I will not a teach a sex ed that says, “Boys have a penis and girls have a vagina.” I will say, “People are usually born with genitals. Most of the time people grow up believing that they have the right set of genitals for them and they are happy with who they are. Sometimes people feel like they do not feel comfortable with what they were born with in some way. Some people grow up and reject being called a man or a woman and choose no gender. All while having a penis or a vagina. So it isn’t as simple as it might appear.”
It is ok with me that some people do not want their children hearing this message. I believe that parents have a right to shelter their children. I just do. I believe that whether or not a parent wants to shelter his/her child is ok in as far as that parent does not try to pretend that the outside world and the different opinions in it are ALL BAD. I like “They are fine like that, we just aren’t like that.”
-It will probably take me a week or two to put together the sex ed curriculum with materials. (Estimate 15-30 hours [I’m not shitting you. Being a teacher is work.]) Not sure I will get to this before the birthday parties.
-Must grade and set syllabus for remaining English classes at Hindi temple. (Estimate three hours of work)
-Must clean house and yards for upcoming birthday parties. (Estimated 40 hours. Let’s be real here. It may go up from there. I will cap it at 50 hours because then I will just be crying.)
-Decorate for parties (including figuring out treasure hunt. I was told there MUST be a treasure hunt. Sigh.) I should AT LEAST put the invitations in the mail tomorrow. (Estimated 15 hours)
-Must get over being sick, thus should consciously choose reduced work load. Shit. Really should limit body to six hours of WORK per day. (No pretending that “writing isn’t work” or “taking care of kids isn’t work”.)
-There are more Home Depot trips in my future. Sand. Glorious sand. (2 hours at least.)
-Not to mention reading to the kids, taking them to the water park, taking them to home school outings, not to mention swim classes, and not to mention cooking. Because I can’t wrap my head around the timing of all of this.
For the record, I do not judge when other parents have messy homes because keeping my home clean is a full time job and I don’t expect people with other full time jobs to be able to also do the same full time job I do. And acting like it should be easy for someone to do what I do in addition to a job is highly insulting to me. I work my fucking ass off and my house is nothing resembling spotless. Cleaning is work.
I think I spend too much of my life preparing for parties. They occupy a huge space in my brain. They are my way of trying to build community. They are pretty much the only way I get into a group of people without being convinced that more than half the people would merely step over my corpse if I dropped dead. So I like hosting. When I host I know the people are there because they like ME ME ME. It’s a good thing.
I wrote this yesterday and didn’t finish. I can’t reread it with helpful folk around. The end.