If you don't read Soggy in Milk I don't blame you but I wrote about sex tonight. I feel silly because I'm blushing. I haven't written about my sex life like that in a while. There hasn't been much to write about. I used to have very different sex. And I am showing great self restraint by not babbling this on facebook. My former coworkers don't want to know. gak.
Fairly explicit sex stuff. Read at your own risk.
Noah would like it if I could get it up tonight. Which means I’m trying to get in the mood. Right now my favorite song is Stuck on f*cken you. It makes me happy. I’ve been thinking about what stories I want to tell in the book. On one hand this is my version of exhibitionism; on the other hand I’m not just doing a gratuitous listing of the sex I’ve had.
I have been thinking about a woman I dated for a while when I first got into the scene. Technically I dated her and her master. I was already seeing Tom but we hadn’t decided to be monogamous yet. I was out having experiences that he didn’t really want to know about. I had an interesting time hearing them talk about doing drugs and playing. That was something forbidden in Tom’s corner of the scene.
I met all of these people through an IRC channel. There was a local room. I spent a lot of time there. When I was bored late at night I would periodically ask people what they were doing. Then I would meet up with them wherever they were. This couple in particular lived in San Francisco. She was a database administrator for
I remember visiting them in the office. She was babysitting something and couldn’t leave. I drove up from San Jose. She mostly worked but occasionally walked out for a fondle or a grope. The guy and I had a highly suggestive conversation. Of course we would be going to their place once she finished up for the night. While we were killing time the guy told me to walk over to the large windows at the front of the building. It was after ten at night in the financial distract–at least there weren’t many people around. When I was there he talked me through masturbating in front of the window. He was quite explicit in how he wanted to see it happen. Pull my skirt up. Move my panties to the side; don’t take them off. It’s nice seeing the cloth bunch up in the crease between my thighs. It’s dirtier. He had me fuck myself with my fingers for a while. Then I sucked them clean. I smiled when he asked me if I was a dirty whore. Only on my best days.
When we went back to their place it was interesting. The woman and I pretty much had to wrestle one another to decide who got to be in the middle. Who is more aggressive? It was clear that the boy was going to be giving most of the directions. Who had to be on the bottom of the pecking order?
Wasn’t me.
I hurt her. I hurt her a lot. I spanked her. I used a cane on her thighs. I beat her with her clothes on. He smiled and watched. They both knew I was new and he gave me occasional pointers. She was generous and accommodating with her smart ass comments designed to provoke me into hitting her harder. Eventually I got tired of pushing her around the living room and I grabbed her by the hair. I asked him where their bedroom was and he pointed. I half dragged half pushed her in an awkward position somewhere between being down on all fours and up on her knees down the hallway. I didn’t want her to get there in any kind of comfort or dignity.
We had our safety chat with her on her knees in front of me. STD prevention is important.
I lay back on the bed and pulled my skirt up and my panties off and she decided I was a low enough risk that she was happy to start licking my cunt without a dental dam. I have never managed to figure out dental dams. I feel like this is a failure in my sex life. Anyway.
After a few minutes of squirming I sat bolt upright and said, “Right!” Then I grabbed her by the hair and dragged her on to the bed on her back. I stopped and breathed a big deep breath and smiled slowly and deliberately. I knew this would be different. When I got her pants and panties off I smiled again.
“Nice clit, girl.”
She beamed at me. She glowed. She looked like it was her birthday and Christmas all rolled up in one. She bit her lower lip as she squirmed. I think she liked how I looked at her.
“How do you want me to touch you?”
She showed me.
I was fascinated. The point was not to get the biologically-still-a-penis hard and sit on it. What the hell do I do now? It was different. It was lovely. The point was making her squirm and moan. The point was alternating biting her thighs with gentle strokes on her clit. That made her fists clench and her toes curl and she had the best throaty growl/giggle.
After a while I started getting bored again but I wasn’t sure how to transition. Luckily she was a perceptive girl. “You want a dick, don’t do?”
I conceded that this might in fact be the case. She sighed deeply and reached over her head towards a drawer. I looked because I am nosy as hell. Out came a strap on harness and dildo. Oh my.
She was really good at fucking. This was back in my oh my god it all feels so good I think I’ll orgasm again, thanks stage. I miss that stage. We went through a variety of positions and eventually my head was buried in a pillow as she fucked me from behind. She alternated slamming her cock into me with slapping me on the ass to make me scream.
Her partner got tired of watching. I found this out when he grabbed her by the hair and yanked her off of me. I only knew that was happening because she cried out when it hurt. Then I felt him behind me. I reached back with my hand, felt a condom, and started saying, “Yes” over and over. He fucked really well too.
I like fucking people who expect to get a show. They both wanted big reactions out of me and they were quite happy to taunt me, ridicule me, hurt me, or be sweet and loving if they had to. But not for long before they want back to hurting me and fucking me. I liked them liking me. I felt really hot.
Sometimes with slutty people I think, “Ah! You have low standards” and sometimes I think, “Ah! You are highly sought out” and it’s more fun to fuck the second kind. With the first kind it feels kind of extra dirty in the less fun way. I still do it because I have low standards. See, this is why I don’t want to do that any more. I digress.
There is a particular kind of fame that comes from being able to do the fun-to-watch performative sex well. It’s very limited in scope unless you get into porn and then it defines your life in a different way. I have never been paid as a pornographic model though I have done it for free. It’s all about fuzzy lines. I’ve never been a sex worker.
The after cuddling was almost as fierce as the sex. There is an intense bonding from violent sex. You are orchestrating an experience together that is about skirting the line of how much pain can be doled out. It’s a complicated balance. In my experience I feel a lot of bonding emotion short term and I always maintain a little bit of a connection. Sex is intimate. With them there was a lot of relief all around at finding another person who gets us. Wanting to be hurt the way we all hurt one another isn’t common in the vanilla world and we were all young and fairly new to the scene. We still had the thrill of recognition of tribe.
She is the one who told me that I shouldn’t call myself bisexual. I asked her why not. She asked me if I wanted her to pick a gender and stay there or is she allowed to play somewhere in the middle. I told her that she can do whatever she wants. She told me then there isn’t a binary gender and I’m not “bi”. I asked her what I was and she told me queer.
I remember how she raked her nails down my neck. It hurt. It burned. It felt really good. It made me gasp. I like it when my breath comes short like that–with a little squeak. I like being surprised.
I watched them have sex next. I asked them to tell me why they like each other so much. It was quite sweet hearing what they each like about the other. The beauty they find in one another. I was just a visitor–what bound them together?
I had private reservations about some of the things they said but I decided that it wasn’t my life and I could be just supportive. I focused on the good sex. How can I help you two?
Eventually I passed out on the bed. I think I ended up in the middle. I love being in the middle of multiple bodies after sex. It feels comforting and assuring. Here are these people who like me and will be here to guard my dreams. If you have the intimacy of shared sleep after group sex it is a different experience, in my experience at least.
Your early experiences form who you are.
I run into her every so often. Him too. They aren’t together and haven’t been in a long while. Life has taken them very different places. When I saw her last I told her I didn’t feel like I was queer any more and she laughed at me. She stroked my face and told me that leopards don’t change their spots. Then she kissed me. I lurched towards her to kiss her back. I would have done pretty much whatever else she wanted too.
Now I’ll never kiss her again. I don’t feel very queer any more. It feels like my orientation is “not hunting”.
But when I masturbate sometimes I think of her. I think of touching her. I think of her smile and the way she sighed. I think of the taste of her. I think of how surprising it was to have her suddenly start fucking me. I think of how nice it was when it wasn’t a surprise any more and we had been fucking for weeks and we knew the rhythm and the height and the speed. She was really good at fucking. She taught me how to use a strap on. She bought me my first vibrator and taught me how to make myself come.
Eventually the guy kind of scared me and I stopped coming around. I didn’t like finding out he was on ecstasy while single tailing me after I had been made to bleed repeatedly. I would have made a different choice.
Once you say yes once your only way to say no is to walk. That’s my life experience. It makes it hard to have ongoing relationships. I have to be very careful what I say yes to.
Time to go think about this Noah person.
I don’t know what I was thinking. How did I think I would get through over-night without Noah and the kids yesterday? Ha. I came home for bed-time. I called and told Noah to let the kids stay up a bit late and wait for me. When I got home I felt better.
I crawled into the lower bunk between Shanna and Calli. I cuddled both of them. Shanna rapid-fire told me all about her day. I wanted to know. I wanted to know about every second I missed. I was sorry that I missed them. I was sorry she got hurt yesterday and I wasn’t there to kiss it. She survived, of course. Kids get hurt. It’s ok. It sounds like she figured out most of the “class” parts of ballet. No more telling the teacher no one else was present. Ha.
I spent the day working in a coffee shop. That’s tiring work. I worked from the minute I arrived until I left. I took one ten minute break. I was in the shop for seven hours. Then I left to find food because I was starting to feel mean. I can understand why people in the community tell me that they don’t come in because they don’t like the food selection. We don’t have filling food. We have snack food. Hm. And I don’t want to take food from the shop because we need to make money and I’m too stubborn to pay for my food there after working that hard all day. Complicated. Luckily my share of the tip money (which I didn’t expect to get–that was kind) covered dinner. Woo.
At the shop I am working with Noah’s former partner. The one he was dating when he and I originally met. It was quite smooth. She has a very cheerful professional “face”. If she has a problem with me it was totally absent from her training me for the job. I wouldn’t say I felt comfortable but there is no way that I can say that any discomfort I felt was her fault. I was really impressed with watching her as an employee. That woman works like a demon. She takes pride in where she works. (Not this whole Gay Pride weekend stuff.) If something needs to be done she up and does it. She doesn’t wait for anyone else. She certainly doesn’t wait to be told what to do. I’m quite glad the coffee shop has her. I doubt we would have made it this far this year without people who just up and do things like she does.
It was kind of funny. When I got there an employee I don’t know was the only one working. I introduced myself as one of the owners and asked what work needed to be done. She gave me tasks and it worked out. She kind of fished around for how I got involved. I told her I met R many years ago at Shibaricon and then I ran TNG4 with him. D and I knew one another in junior college–we met when I was sixteen. She expressed surprise. Oh! Then you do know these people. Because she has never seen me around it is hard to understand that I existed all that time. Ha.
I like talismans. I like fetishes (in the traditional sense not in the modern “kinky” version). “An inanimate object worshiped for its supposed magical powers or because it is considered to be inhabited by a spirit” Like that. Noah and I do not have a formal all-the-time d/s or m/s relationship. We play with power exchange occasionally but it isn’t a formal all the time part of our life. This means that I have strong feelings about collars.
In the bdsm world that I grew up in there are signals. Signs that help people understand how to relate to one another. Different collars are used in different ways. The thing is, this varies by person. I have seen patterns emerge but there are always people who break the pattern. Nevertheless I observe trends. I have given away most of the collars I shared with Tom. He wished that I gave them back so he could reuse them. I said hell would freeze over first. You are a rich guy. Fucking replace it if you care so much. No you may not use my god damn collars on your long-line of women. Just no. Anonymous people with little-to-no-connection can have them with pleasure. Enjoy them. I still have some collars we shared. I don’t think I will ever have them around my neck again.
When I am going out to a bdsm event and I do not want to be hit on I have to think about signaling. I have a Big Shiny Wedding Ring quite on purpose but in the poly world it doesn’t matter much. In the bdsm world many people are at least open to playing with many people even if they won’t have sex with them. If you represent yourself as property then you aren’t approached as much. People have to feel really fucking confident that it’s ok before they ask to play. And they don’t do things that are pushing my boundaries because they want to respect my partner. It’s hilarious. People don’t seem to care if they offend me but if I look like property they want to not offend my owner. Fuck all y’all.
So I wore a shiny padlock on my sternum. It’s a very simple, old fashioned sort of collar. Dog choke chains make a statement. It’s been a long time since I have gone out in public making this sort of statement. I notice that I have a different kind of wariness now. I assume I am invisible now. I feel like I have learned better camouflage as prey. I no longer feel hunted a large percentage of the time. The space I take up in the world has changed.
I have spent a lot of my life moving from place to place. I always meet people easily. Looking friendly and approachable was part of how I had friends at all. People see me from across the room and come over to say, “You look like a good person to talk to.” I can generally talk to just about anyone. I am quick with words. Part of this was because I was in the habit of scoping every room I was in for people to have sex with. It makes you look friendly. Seriously. You smile a lot. I don’t do it any more. I can feel my facial expression. I always look harried an frustrated. Ha. Harried and frustrated looks like it might bite your head off, not give you a pleasant chat.
I spend my life in a very small and secluded sphere. I live in my role of “mom” for the vast majority of my time. Even given how much time I spend on that role I give it a disproportionate amount of energy compared to any and every other thing I have done. I am no longer hunting. It’s quite simple, really. I am not looking for lovers but I’m also not looking for friends. I have a full roster right now and I don’t even feel the need to particularly seek out new acquaintances. People will wander into and out of places I am standing. I don’t feel the need to chase them any more. I don’t need to fill up idle hours of my life. I’d give anything to have more idle hours. Oy.
I have no interest in modeling m/s or d/s while my kids are little. I want them to see a partnership. I want them to think that women are bad ass, not obedient. I want my kids to see an actual long term partnership. Staying together is important to me. People get distracted and unhappy with one another and they turn to other relationships to keep things interesting. I want my kids to think that their parents find one another interesting. I want to spend a lot of time with Noah. I like him. Being near him and talking to him makes me feel far better than I have felt at any point in my life. There is no other person on this planet who is as willing to put a mountain of time and energy into me. I am special to him. If he took that energy and gave it to someone else I would know. It would be an active withdrawal. There is a limited amount of time and energy in this life. I have something really special. I want to nurture it, not ignore it.
I have learned a lot about being gentle from being with Noah. He is the only big-tough-guy I have ever dealt with who will actively tell me I am hurting him. He’s both extremely picky and not picky at all–meaning that he chooses when to talk about when he is feeling. He can endure things stoically like the next big-tough-guy. He just doesn’t do that with me. He thinks I shouldn’t hurt him. He doesn’t want to be hurt by me. So he tells me when and how I hurt him so that I can lean to do better. Mostly we don’t hurt each other any more. It’s rare to have a slip. I don’t even lick his nose.
I feel really glad that I get to model the relationship I have with Noah. Some day we will do more with other power structures because we want to. I really like that it will happen after many years of earning careful trust. In the modern USA “slavery” is kind of an ephemeral concept. It’s not real. It’s not binding. It’s a choice to have a conscious power structure with someone else. It’s just a consciously and specifically chosen relationship style. There are a lot of Father Is In Charge mentality left in this country, I’m not sure why people are surprised that people want to formalize this. The language is charged, yes.
Right now I am using all of the caring-for-other-people energy I have for my children. They will not always need it and some day it will be unhealthy for me to pour this much energy into them all the time. I will still have this energy. I had this before I had kids. Noah spends a lot of time massaging me. He went to massage school as part of his learn-to-pick-up-chicks training. He really did go to school for how to be a better partner for me. I win. He also did hypnotherapy training. I’m totally going to be able to make him sound like a freakishly good fit when I write about him. I’m thinking about dialogue. I think I am hilarious. This will be a very different book to write.
I’m thinking very hard about what slavery meant to me. What did I do with Tom? How did that relationship fill my needs? I was under contract for two years. He ended that part of our relationship in a couples therapy session wherein the counselor told me that our problems were all my fault because I was asking too much of him by saying that he should follow the relationship rules of the contract we both signed. Needless to say, I felt quite good about myself at that point, right? That was when I started hounding him about kids. I was nearing the end of college. I had told him that I had no interest in getting married before I graduated from college. There was the strong implication that I wanted to get married after. He prevaricated for a while and pushed me to consider grad school.
I decided I had two paths for teaching. If I was going to do the get married and have kids thing I should teach K-12 something. If I am going to “be a grown up” forever and build my life around the bdsm scene I should teach college so that I can be out. I decided to start the masters program first. Either way I didn’t feel qualified to teach much yet. I felt like there was some magical level of smart I would feel at some point and then I would be qualified to teach. I would know enough about a topic that I felt comfortable saying, “Yes! I know this!” It’s ironic that I failed the final test after years of getting good grades and being told I was good at this–writing, that is. Oh well.
I asked Tom if we could open our relationship in December of 2003. I didn’t technically have sex with anyone till January. I think I knew from the first person that I was hunting. I started the masters program first but I started the teaching credential the next term. I moved out of living with Tom in October about six weeks after I broke up with him. I started the credential and broke up with him at the same time. He would never answer the marriage and kids thing. So I disengaged. I threw that energy out into the world. I went hunting. I started dating Noah in February.
It’s going to be really fun to write about Noah. Knowing how this story goes it means that I am having an interesting time figuring out how to approach tone. This is going to be so different to write. How do I represent my time as a slave? What did I tell Tom? What kind of relationship was that?
I want to wear a lock on my sternum while I am working at Wicked Grounds because I want to announce that I am protected. I am wanted. Someone has already found me. When I was part of those communities I was always hunting. Always willing to say yes. It changed how I talked to people. In the past I have had issues with men taking liberties. I want to discourage it. Signaling is complicated.
I have been raped at a public sex party. I’m aware that it happens. A coffee shop isn’t a sex party. But I have had people casually touch my breasts. I have had people grab my ass. These actions aren’t “rape” but I’m kind of a ticking time bomb. One of these times I am going to break something on someones body as a result of them grabbing me. And it will probably escalate from there and be “all my fault”, right? I’m scared. I don’t like that I am scared. It is very hard for me to be in places I think of as hunting territory when I am not hunting. I feel physically sick. I feel scared. I am going to bring any fetish of protection I have.
Slavery is a way of acknowledging that someone is that interested in me. Different people do slavery differently. I’ll write more about that later. It’s time to start getting ready. Today will be a long day. I need to bring a water bottle and specifically drain it every so often. I think I was dehydrated yesterday. I know I was hungry. I ran five miles yesterday morning before working on my feet for seven hours making food and washing dishes. I ate a bowl of oatmeal, a thin slice of quiche… and that wall before dinner. By which time I was starving and had a raging headache. I think I should take better care of my body today. Today is supposed to be a “cross training” day. I hope this counts. I hope it will be fun. I had fun yesterday. It was fucking awesome to get to talk to people with a counter between us so they couldn’t touch me. I have serious issues. Whatever. It worked. I felt safe. I felt like I was doing something and I had a place and a purpose. I was using some of my caring-for-other-people energy on that community. Twelve years is a long time. I’m not gone. I’m on sabbatical. I’m training for my next relationship. It will be very different to use more of that energy on Noah. I feel specifically spooked.
And I should go take a shower.
I've had a few people ask me for a running update. Sure. I love requests. My attitude has been better while running. I am past the hump of it feeling "too hard" to do what I am doing. This week I am running sixteen miles. Next week is twenty. I'm not up to ten miles on Saturdays yet. Next month. Most days and most runs I've been maintaining 5.10-5.30 mph. Occasionally I crawl for a bit and come in just under 5mph but that is rare lately.
One of the things that I am disliking the most is my changing perception of my body.I've mostly been on the chubby side but I've never been all that big. My lifetime maximum weight was 212 while pregnant. Not-pregnant it was 208. I spend a lot of time hanging out in the 180's with occasional dips down into the 160's when my activity level goes up. That seems to be my "active" weight range. Occasionally in times of great mental/emotional distress I drop down into the 150's. I have usually had a lot of mixed feelings about these periods. On one hand they are by far the most psychologically unhealthy periods of my life on the other hand random people in public no longer stop me to tell me I should lose weight.
Lately I feel like I am bordering on body dysmorphia. I have always had an hour glass figure. That's just how my body looks. I have hundreds of pictures to prove it. I don't any more. Right now I'm doing the apple thing. I don't tend to feel hostility about other people having that basic body shape but right now I feel intensely bad about being shaped that way. I think about it a lot. I'm having to deal with the fact that my clothes don't fit at all the way I am used to them fitting and I feel angry and ashamed and bad because my body isn't looking like me. It's weird. I'm used to my waist being a size smaller than my thighs. Now my waist is at least a size bigger. I feel fat in a way I haven't ever felt before. I feel repulsed by the way I look. I think about it a lot. A really lot.
I watched the Harry Potter movies recently. At the very end there is this long panoramic pull back shot of Harry, Hermione and Ron. I was fixated on the fact that it looked like I could put my hand between her thighs and be able to hold my hand horizontally and barely touch skin on either side. Holy moly she has skinny thighs. It felt really dramatic. It looked very childlike to me. I'm used to women having thighs that touch. This isn't to say that all women have heavy thighs. There are lots of grown up women with thing legs. I know this–I still had this visceral reaction to Hermione in that shot. For the past few days I keep standing in front of mirrors and feeling very perplexed because if I stand with my feet directly below my shoulders and look in a mirror my thighs barely touch. Mine have touched full on down to the knees for most of my adult life. Now the top inch touches. I don't think my thighs will rub by the time I get to the marathon.
I feel weird in my body. I feel like I am borrowing a body. I am pretending to be an athletic person. I feel disconnected from my legs–like they represent someone else. They just don't fit the rest of me. I feel weird and bad about the baby belly. Like all of a sudden it is magically a problem. My body has always been proportional! I liked being proportional! Fuck you belly! Everything else is getting smaller what is your fucking problem? But I this attachment in my mind to not trying to lose weight. So I eat a lot trying to keep weight on. My belly is not getting smaller. Ahem.
Especially with my hair this short. Especially with how dark of a tan I have now. I no longer look pale and goth-like. I savored that pallor for many years. Now I garden and run and spend the whole f'in day in the park. I don't wear sunscreen. I don't burn so I don't see the point in putting cancer causing agents on my skin. Noah needs to wear sunblock. Oh man.
I feel very uncomfortable about my body. I don't recognize it. I don't know it. I have a lot of time understanding its pleasure sensors and food needs. I feel very disconnected. I'm not sure if I have always been this disconnected or if it is a recent change. But all of a sudden I feel loathing for my body I am not used to. I was fairly cheerful about being fat. I knew how to dress to look good. I was "friendly fat" so to speak. I had some size 18 clothing, but not much. Mostly I was in the no-womans-land between Misses 14 and Womens 14. I certainly was encouraged by society to feel bad about my size. I was told by the media that I was disgusting. I didn't feel disgusting. I liked my body. I thought I looked quite good naked and that was what I cared about.
I don't like how I look naked right now. I feel lumpy and floppy and disproportionate. I feel like my breasts and my hips look sad and deflated next to my belly. I don't like looking at my belly and yet I do it compulsively. I think this is just my lizard-brain looking for another way to self-harm. If I decide that my belly is my enemy and disgusting and I should do something about it while I am simultaneously training for a marathon I am going to hurt myself quite badly.
I'm afraid of a lot of the process of training for running. If I want to meet my goals I have to treat my body gently. I have to meet its needs. I'm not sure I even know what its needs are. I'm struggling with finding balance between needing to "work on my diet," because I do need to work towards more nutritious food, and not wanting to obsess and punish myself for being bad. It's hard when I realize that my approach to myself in my head is entirely punitive. If I breathe too loudly I should be punished. I'm taking up space in this world that wasn't meant for me. I am struggling with the size of the box in my head I am allowed to fill.
Right now my weight is hanging out in the upper 150's/lower 160's. My legs are thinner than they have ever been in my life. My arms thinned out in pregnancy. My face thinned out in pregnancy. My upper back thinned out in pregnancy. Now my upper body really wants to hang out in a size 8. My hips would probably be happiest in a size 10 or 12. My waist is quite firmly still in size 14. With muffin top. I feel like my body is taking up the wrong space. I am wrong. I am out of place. I am out of order. I tell the kids my belly is awesome. Shanna is very affectionate with my belly and I encourage and support that. But I feel distant from this body. I want her to have only positive associations with her mothers body. I talk to her about fat redistributing on your body at different stages and sometimes you have more and sometimes you have less. I keep it very value neutral. I am extremely verbally positive about heavy people being attractive.
And I look in the mirror and I see not my body. I feel gross. I feel like I am not right. I am bad. I am too big and I am too small. I am not me. I'm trying not to show any actual panic. I really am a good actor.
It's interesting and useful for me to think about this current set of obsessive thoughts just as this week's version of self-harm. I'm really enjoying Over the Influence. It's the book on Harm Reduction Therapy. If the goal is just to be always moving towards less harm then I can give myself a little bit of a break. I know how much less harmful this thought process is than most of what I've done. I can see that I'm trying to justify feeling bad. I know that really I just feel bad and I don't need a why. If I can talk to my Lizard brain about it a bit I can see where the need to feel bad lives.
I've been spending a fair bit of time in front of mirrors. I try to close the door so folks can't hear me. I look at myself. I say all of the things I wish that other people would say. I need to stop looking outside myself for validation. I can't have it. So I'm trying to give it to myself. I feel silly. I cry. But I say it.
You are good. You are kind. You are patient. You are generous. You are honest. You are trustworthy. You work very hard. You have come a long way. Your body is perfect. Your body made two of the most delightful creatures in the world. What could possibly be wrong with it? You are strong. You will get stronger. Keep working. You will be able to do all of the things you say you will. You keep your fucking word. You are gentle. You are smart. You are resourceful. If you do not find a way you will make a way. Keep going. There is a lot left to do and not a whole lot of time.
I am no longer defined by my sex appeal. I no longer need to worry about attracting attention the way I once did. I no longer particularly need to worry if my hip to waist ratio is appealing. It feels like I am getting a divorce from my body. I no longer live in it. I'm doing other things. I want to come back but I don't know this person. This person is invisible in different ways and visible for different reasons. I don't know how to handle it. I feel scared of this person. Not because this person will hurt me but because this person is vulnerable in ways I don't fully understand. I can't see the scope of it properly. I don't have much experience being this person out in the world. I have only been this person a short time. I'm still adjusting. I hear it takes four years to be properly past the postpartum period. My organs don't even know where they are going to live forever yet. What kind of home do I want them to live in? How much control do I have?
It's all quite terrifying, really.
I've been waking up at 3am and I can't get back to sleep. This would be worse if I didn't pass out at 8pm. As it is I'm getting some sleep. But my day feels off balance. I'm tired mid-day. I'm ready to be winding down for sleep around dinner. Tired. We are going to go learn about animals today. I feel tired before we leave the house. Needs to happen. Get up. Make food. Ugh.
The more I hear the message "just don't think about _____" the more I want to say, "Why? What are you hiding there?"
It's going to be a festive Thursday. Cheers.
Oh yeah. This is why Tom didn’t know I cried so much. He slept through it. I like to go to bed at eight and wake up between three and four and cry. I have hours available to me before anyone interrupts, not as many hours as I used to and that is probably for the best.
Today I was crying thinking about Noah. I get mad at him for his group associations. He represents a lot of problematic interactions for me. He doesn’t embody them. Noah is the only person I’ve ever met who has been not only tolerant but enthusiastic about me. He really likes me. He was the first sexual partner I had who was thrilled about me having slept with a lot of people. He likes the things I have done. He likes the person I am.
Noah is the only person who is willing to beat me about the head with the fact that he likes me. He will let me wake him up over and over every night because I don’t sleep well and I wake up and I want to be near him. He doesn’t get mad even though the kids wake him up over and over. Noah doesn’t get mad at me because I wander off from most parties and cry for a while. He comes and holds me while I sob.
I feel like I have been blessed at this point in my life. I have a wide variety of friends who tolerate my moods and writing about all kinds of hostile things. In person I generally behave myself. I have a hazy understanding of the fact that most people are guided by rules of behavior. I just don’t understand what they are, mostly, and when I do I actively want to do the opposite. Just because.
I’m told that I shouldn’t care what people think of me. I’m told that because Noah grew up one of those Gibbs’ in his town. The rich ones. He doesn’t have to care what people think. He has a fairly codified set of permissive behaviors that are tolerated from the rich geek. He knows how to behave. He knows when and how he has to care.
There is this unspoken set of behaviors that people follow. Mostly they have no idea what it means about them. If I follow the behaviors I was taught then it is patently obvious that I am still white trash. I curse regardless of who is around. Sometimes I dress in absolutely trashy clothes–to be fair I’m mostly eccentric and not “trashy” in my clothing style. I’m weirdly conservative. I have spent my entire life dodging the “you must have asked for it” line about being raped. I make sure no one can tell me it is my fault because of what I am wearing.
I have a carefully constrained life. The most important piece of my life right now is that I learn how to pass. I need to learn how to pass as a normal, stable member of the middle class. I need to learn how to not offend people. It’s harder than it seems. It’s easy for other people because they were taught to be unoffensive from when they were quite young. I was taught quite the opposite.
This weekend I spent time with a friend I have known for more than ten years. We met in a bdsm relationship class on protocols. It was a six week course on Dominant/submissive and Master/slave variations. It was more interesting than it sounds. What is protocol? I’m not going to steal the Lady Victoria’s class and tell you much about it. If you like such things, I recommend the extended classes. People find interesting things to say.
Anyway, I was hanging out with this friend. I met her early in the M/s portion of my relationship with Tom. I asked her if she was aware that I was depressed and cutting through my relationship with Tom. She said she had no idea. She is pretty sure no one knew.
I pass pretty well when I want to. But I don’t always pass as what I want to pass as.
I know how to be not-me. I’m not great at the fine tuning of what people really see. I have a nervous energy I get at parties. I giggle a lot. I’m scared shitless. I usually feel like I want to vomit on the floor. Being around more than two or three human beings triggers my hypervigilance and in my head I am rehearsing polite ways to deflect attention I don’t want and I’m praying for attention I do want. Long before I can try to get attention I have to decide the appropriate way to deflect unwanted interest. Or I get in trouble. My natural reflexes are not PC. When I am given truly unwanted attention my impulse is to be violent. I don’t hesitate. I have to defend myself and no one else will. Ever. Period. I live in a “polite” society, though. I am not allowed to be violent in defense of myself. I try hard to think of ways to “use my words”that won’t get me booted out. If there is a problem it will always be my fault. I’m sure that this guy who has raped other women (I hear the stories) could not possibly have done anything rude to me I am just over reacting. I’m the problem.
I know how to be not-me. I know how to pretend a certain level of passivity so that I can be tolerated on the fringe of society. I don’t know how to feel safe. I don’t know how to feel like I belong. I don’t know how to make friends with multiple people in a demographic. I tend to hold on to a few people from each community. I don’t know how to interact with large groups of people because I’m used to tailoring the things I say to one individual person. I can skirt the line of offensive more easily that way. When I’m around a group I feel petrified with fear because someone in the group is going to be an outlier in a different direction and someone will be snotty or aggressive or … something. Someone will behave in a way that I read as picking a fight. And I will have to walk away or bear the consequences. I can’t engage. I can’t respond at all. I will be the problem.
I don’t mean that I spend my life wanting to hit people. I mean that I don’t verbally spar with people. I shut up.
I have friends I can argue with. I have people I have known intimately I can argue with. Unless someone has been close to me at one time I am unlikely to take the chance of arguing with them. I don’t go looking for random arguments on the internet. If I bother to argue with you it is probably because I have years of pent up frustration I need to vent in your direction. You have been pissing me off for a very long time. Mostly I felt that I had to keep my mouth shut. At some point I will feel comfortable enough in the turf and I will fucking tell you how you have pissed me off. I can only do that with people who have shown a previous tolerance for me. It’s terrifying. I have to trust there will not be repercussions. I’m wrong, still. I go off on people and lose friendships.
I’m supposed to pass as a not-angry person. That is a mask if ever there was one. The same people who tell me to “be myself” are the people who tell me to not be angry. It’s a lie from the first breath. And I can’t point that out. And I can’t be angry about being lied to over and over.
There are a lot of things I have to pass as. I’m in the first truly stable period of my life. I have lived in this house longer than anywhere. I have to pretend I know what this feels like and I am comfortable here. I am so uncomfortable I am ready to crawl out of my skin. I want to move. I want to not have to feel scared when I leave the house. I don’t feel scared when I feel invisible. I feel so scared here because people have been seeing me around for a long time and they have expectations of me. I feel like I am going to let people down at any moment. Soon they will learn how very angry I am.
I feel very weird about the other ways I pass. I pass as straight. I am now in a monogamous relationship. We don’t have the time to be non-vanilla if we wanted it. Not really. I have to walk away from being the kind of freak I was.
Not everyone does. I can’t be part of an experiment to raise children in an “open” household. I can’t. I need more boundaries than that. I want my children to have a theoretical knowledge of my sex life. I don’t want them to see my sex life parading through the house. It’s different with their dad. We don’t flaunt our sex life. It isn’t obvious that I’m keeping him around for that. I do though. He’s great at sex.
I feel weird about the fact that I shouldn’t talk much about being queer. I certainly don’t tell the lesbian moms in the home schooling group that I’m queer. I don’t want to see rolled eyes. I have two options: I can shut the fuck up, or I can roll out my CV to prove I am the person I say I am.
It’s easier to pass.
It seems to me that queer is complicated. I can never take back the fact that I have had sex with a good thirty or forty women. I don’t know the number any more. Hard drive crash. But people don’t know that when they look at me. How could they? I have a much larger body count than most heterosexual men. How in the hell can I ever be not queer? But I don’t partner with women. I have too many issues with them. I have a hard time working things out with women. With a man I assume he won’t be able to figure anything emotional out so I’m ok with spelling things out in small, easy to digest words. With a woman I get incandescently angry that they are so stupid about figuring out my emotions and I just refuse to keep talking.
Women are scary in a way that men aren’t. My experience of the men I choose to get close to is that they are not passive aggressive. They are aggressive. They do it or they don’t do it. My experience of the women I get close to is that they are going to serve #1 first but they will actively lie to you and say that you are first, no really. When women speak I have this filter in my brain, “Are they lying to me” that I just don’t have in the same way with men. Men lie too, but generally about different things and in different ways. Men are easier to predict. Men feel less complicated. Women can smile at you and poison your drink. Women are like me. Women are terrifying. But hot. So there you go.
I loved Julia. I lived with her. I thought we could find a way to figure things out. She showed up one day out of the blue and said she was moving to Boston next week, uhhh bye.
I grew up in a house of women. Women aren’t going to do the bad things to you. They are just going to leave you. They are going to let you down when things are hard because they have been overstressed for a long time and they never told you and now they have to focus on themselves and you just aren’t important. My mom did that. My sister did that.
And I can’t be angry. Not if I want a shred of relationship left. Not if I don’t want to be alone. I’m telling you, though: I’m angry. I’m fucking angry. I have to pass as not angry. It will be a carefully constructed lie because I am no better than anyone else. Because I know that continuing to behave in my normal fashion won’t teach my kids how to have healthy relationships. I have to pass as someone who is capable of having normal, healthy relationships.
It’s hard. It’s a game I play every day. How to pass as a “normal” person. I’m not. Normal people didn’t go out and get a PhD in sex. I haven’t heard of very many things I haven’t tried. That was my hobby for the first twenty-five years of my life. It has been one of the largest parts of my identity. It decided my behavior. That is how I use identity. I decide what identity I want/need to have and then I align my behavior with it. I am not just Krissy. It’s all a game. Who and what I am varies dramatically in different situations.
I didn’t tell my dentist he was a fucking asshole when he told me that he wouldn’t recommend my book to people because it is too hard and people shouldn’t have to know about such things. Instead I just told him, “That attitude is why it happened. Because no one can bear to know I exist.” I hope he felt bad.
I have to pass. If I don’t then people don’t want to acknowledge that I exist. I have to have a presentable, tasty candy coated shell. I have to pretend to be good enough. I have to pretend to be of the class of the people I am talking to.
I’m god damn tired of being scolded because my manners are terrible. You have no idea. Go to hell.
Everything about the life I am choosing right now is a carefully constructed lie. See, I’m a good mom. I can play this role. I can be patient and kind. I can be tolerant and mellow. I can be careful what behavior I model. My children are not going to learn how to be a whore by watching me work. When I am in the mood to I can go pick up sex basically anywhere. There is usually someone willing if you know how to look. I’m trying to learn how to ignore those signals. I’m modeling the behavior that I believe a “good” woman would have. I’m a fucking fraud.
I don’t even make people buy me dinner before I fuck them and leave. I want to have physical contact, not intimacy. I don’t want my children to learn that. Not from me.
I think that my relationships with my children will be pretty much the most intense ones of my life. The most intimate. My mother treated me like an obnoxious burden. I don’t do that to my kids. My mom dumped me on people I didn’t know. My kids are getting to know a short list of people very well.
I will spend significantly more time with my children than anyone else. Far more time than Noah. Noah will take decades to catch up on time spent because he likes his alone time. I will have a good solid ten years of being with my kids before they start really trying hard to get away from me. I have to pass as a good mother.
What makes someone good or bad? I’m not sure. I’m told that you are bad if you do bad things. I’ve done a lot of very bad things. I guess that’s that.
After my experience with my girl friends a couple of weeks ago I remain convinced that I am not a dancer. If I am to be defined by my behavior I am not a dancer. I occasionally dance. I enjoy dancing. I’m not a dancer.
I am a mother. That will never be taken away from me. Nothing can change that. I think it is the most permanent part of my identity. Will I ever want to pass as not a mother? In order to act like a slut I would have to. I don’t want to. I want to have this permanent change in who and what I am. If it is possible to simply be another person I want to be. I want to figure out how to stop being bad. It’s not that I think that all people who have multiple partners are bad. The sex I like is the most high risk kinds there are. I just can’t model that to my kids. I can’t. I have to pass. I have to.
What does being queer mean then? How is that going to work in my life? Am I giving that up to? I was talking to a friend about passing this weekend. The Godmama. She said she doesn’t really think about being queer any more. It’s there but it’s not a conscious part of her life. I said, “You are trans and married to a woman. You don’t have to think about it to wear it on your face.” I am who those disgusting ministers point at when they say that you can get over being queer. I pass.
I tell my children that they grow up to love men or women or men and women. I tell them that the most important part of relationships is that you respect your partner and can trust them. Some day my kids will figure out that I know some really weird people. It’s probably going to take them a while. To them this will be normal.
Why do I want to consciously construct a heterosexual monogamous life and model that? It’s not the norm. Not really. Look at history. I want to model picking a life and really doing it. I want to not be distracted by all the could-be’s in life. I want to be creating something with a person. Noah and I have a lot of joint goals. We are building something together. It happens that he is a guy. It was a lot more convenient for that “having kids” thing I wanted. No woman ever wanted me the way Noah wanted me. That’s why I picked Noah. Not because I don’t like women. Not because I’m not attracted to them. No one ever wanted to take on the project that is my mental health. I don’t blame them.
My teenagers will understand that non-monogamy is a common, perfectly reasonable path that I do not choose. They will hear which people we know are doing it well (Grandpa J) and which people are not doing it well (name redacted). We will talk a lot about ethics. Heck, we already do.
Am I trying to pass as not depressed? Yes. I don’t want them to learn the physical behaviors of depression. I don’t want them modeled. I want my kids to grow up around productive people. It’s ridiculously important to me. It doesn’t matter how I feel. I have a place in my head that allows me to go through the rote motions of life. I may not be cheerful but I consciously work on maintaining a neutral facial expression and I god damn do everything I am supposed to do. I make food. I do chores. We go to the park on park day. I have a role to fill. It doesn’t matter how I feel. I can pass. I can do this.
Sometimes when I sit and think about what hard things I have done I feel confused. Like those must be the acts of a different person. Doing those things would make someone strong. I feel so weak. I’m trying to get stronger every day. I have to. Even if I have no interest. I have amazing willpower. My willpower seems to be inhuman. I have tremendously more control than I let on. That’s part of the game. That’s part of passing. You have to fake it until you can make it.
I have a picture of Jenny and her mom in my garage. I think about them and their relationship a lot. I try to puzzle out the has been from the should have been. I haven’t been able to stand near very many mother-daughter relationships. I don’t understand them very well. Jenny doesn’t have overly close relationship with her mother for a variety of reasons. I think about the lessons to be learned from the choices her mother made. Jenny’s mom was nicer to me than any other mother of a friend when I was a kid. It’s complicated in my head to set that aside and think of her from other perspectives.
When I’m trying to create this person in my head, the person I am supposed to “pass” as I think hard about my role models. I try hard to think through the long-term consequences of their behavior. I don’t want to adopt other broken models. That’s not useful. I feel scared. When I look around my life I see that most of the people who want to know me are people who also come from problematic back grounds. People would rush to say, “Not like yours!” but whatever. No, incest is not rampant among my friends group. But people who tolerate me probably had an emotionally unstable parent or close relative so they have coping skills. That’s kind of not great.
I feel afraid because I feel like I am trying to create a person who genuinely could not exist even under the best of circumstances. I know a handful of people who came from stable, happy, affectionate, appropriate families. They are oddballs. They know it. They are nearly mythical. At least in my head. I’m not trying to be Mary Poppins.
We live in a strange time. Through most of history people basically grew up to do what their parents did. Sure there were transition times when people left farms and came to cities, but then the family found a trade in the city. Mostly people did what their parents did. What kind of person do I want my children to grow up with?
On the subject of body wind: Noah tells me that farting is one of those things that tells you which class someone really is. Rich people ignore bodily functions. Middle class people apologize for them. Poor people laugh. I go back and forth between ignoring them and giggling. I feel anger over the idea of apologizing for them.
I am expected to follow all these stupid made up rules. They have no basis. They are regional. They don’t matter. That’s what you are supposed to do in “polite” society. How in the fuck am I supposed to teach this shit to my kids? My goal is to take them out of the country at formative ages so they understand exactly how irrational and arbitrary these rules are. But I don’t want them to feel the same anger I feel.
I don’t want my children growing up with the idea that getting angry all the time is normal and natural. That’s really hard on your body. It causes long term stress for the rest of your life. So I have to model not being angry. This is not a good cycle for me.
It’s ironic that I had two girls. It means I have to work on my emotional intimacy issues with females. Festive. When Shanna gives me a nasty look I respond with surprise. I say, “Oh gosh! Am I looking at you like that?” Then I rub my forehead to get rid of the deep lines of scowl and I repeat whatever I had said to her previously. I explain that I wasn’t feeling angry but I was thinking hard. She generally smiles and repeats whatever it is she is on about in a more friendly way.
I’m going to have a hard time with the homeschooling group. I don’t really like how often the topic is, “Obviously we love our kids more than working mothers.” I’m not yet in a position where I can sit and argue with people. I keep my mouth shut and my eyes on the ground. It’s horse shit. It’s self-serving dogma. You can’t measure love. You don’t take care of your kids a certain number of hours per day and compare it to a chart to see how much you love your kids. Not all mothers want to subsume their complete identity into parenting. Some people might call that healthy.
Not all homeschooling mothers subsume their entire identity into their children either. But they give up a much larger chunk. Either that or they drag their kids along into their identity. Is there or is there not a barrier between your children being full members of your life? For me there just isn’t a lot left they can’t be part of. I go to adult-only events sometimes but it’s rare. I have a lock on my bedroom door so that I can have a sex life. I write behind a closed door. I don’t smoke near them. That is all I do away from them. They are part of the whole rest of my life. I really enjoy the company. I really enjoy feeling seen all the time. I enjoy the fact that what I do with every minute of my day matters because I am going to be accountable to this person for the rest of my life for my behavior. This relationship is the opposite of temporary. This is the the most intensity I will ever have in my life. I want to really experience that. I want to drown in it. I want to find out what it is like to really and truly be responsible for another human being at all times. Yes, working parents are still responsible for their kids, but they delegate a lot of the day-to-day supervision. The ultimate responsibility is still there. Just wait till your kid steals a car. Ha. I did that.
I am integrating my children into my life. I am creating a life that is fully appropriate for them. Who do I want to be? What kind of person are my children likely to respect and trust as they grow up? What do I have to do to pass as respect-worthy and trust-worthy?
This is so hard. I was not taught to be this person. I am a judgmental bitch and I will say that I did not grow up around people with a strong work ethic. Most of my family survives on welfare of some kind. There is no impetus for working to better your life. You just have to learn how to hussel to fill in the cracks. Declare bankruptcy every so often. Let other people support you. Don’t pay your rent and get angry when your (relative) landlord tells you that you have to move because they need to make enough money to pay the mortgage. You are owed a living, aren’t you?
I grew up angry poor. The kind of poor that is surrounded by beauty and wealth which only emphasizes how terrible it is. My Uncle Bob and Auntie live down in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It’s beautiful. When you spend most of your childhood surrounded by the California Redwoods you travel and think, “I can see that they have nice bushes but where are the trees?” It’s a very wealthy area. Our neighborhood slowly gentrified during my lifetime. When my relatives bought in it was the cheap and cruddy area. The poor people lived there because it was what they could afford. The original mortgage more than forty years ago was $40,000. Last I heard the mortgage was several thousand a month and Auntie had to work full time to pay it. She was in her seventies.
Our house was the unsightly dump at the end of the road. Lots of cars on blocks. You know those big metal storage PODS people use? There were a few there as permanent instillations. Several big ramshackle barns on the property. It was a serious health hazard. Uncle Bob was a serious hoarder. He spent money like it grew on trees and never got rid of anything. So he could never find anything in he mess and would go buy new over and over. He was so bitter about not having… something. I never knew what.
I went to Los Gatos High School and I was on the free lunch program. There weren’t many of us. When I went to Lakeside, up in the mountains, it was different. There were always a few other poor, problem kids. A lot of fucked up people go hide in the mountains. Which isn’t to say that everyone in the mountains is fucked up. Anyway.
I wasn’t allowed into the nice homes. I was only invited to play with the other kids who had alcoholic parents. The other girls who watched their parents have sex. I had Brittney. That was it for a stable friendship in my life. Every family has issues, even Brittney’s family. I learned some bad things there as well. Mostly lying.
What do I want to teach my kids? How do I need to pass out there in the scary world? I would be less scared if the consequences mattered less. How do I not fail my children? How do I not teach them to grow up and act like they have an alcoholic parent? This is hard.
I feel like they shouldn’t have to deal with the fact that I am an angry person. Full stop. I’m not angry at them or about them so it isn’t their problem. I don’t give other people the same leeway. I’m not sure why.
Shanna and Calli are unabashed in their need. They still truly need me in order to grow up whole and healthy. I have to be a positive force in their life. Someone who makes them feel good about being themselves. That’s my job. It’s a lot of pressure, meeting their needs all the time. It’s a lot of work. In many ways it is unsatisfying work because they feel like bottomless pits of need and I never make a dent. But that’s not true. They are very happy people. Life is going well for them. They don’t have unmet needs. Even though I feel like I can’t I can’t I can’t I am.
I think about how their needs are going to change. How I have to be the bad guy sometimes. I have to be the mean mom. That’s part of the deal. I have to set limits. If I don’t then you won’t learn how to deal with them in the world. Everyone has limits. People who tell you that you don’t have to worry about what other people think are mostly lying. I want my kids to make the conscious choice of which opinions to care about. I hope they will respect me enough to care about mine. I don’t take it as writ.
How do I need to act in order to be someone they can respect? That feels like a lot of pressure. How do I need to change? How do I need to pass?
Yesterday I was angry all day. It is fairly rare for Noah and I to fight. And when we do we don’t raise voices much any more. We have quiet, intense conversations about things that are normally more emotionally intense for me than Noah. I assume. Based on the fact that I’m the only one crying.
It wasn’t that many years ago, I was an adult, when my sister snickered at me and said, “Still cry when you are frustrated, huh?” Yeah. I do. When I am frustrated tears flow down my face. I don’t sob, but tears come. It’s not real fun. I can halt the process but I have to find a place of coldness in my heart. I try not to live there.
Most of what Noah and I struggle with is the fact that I have a major chip on my shoulder towards many things he represents. It is hard to not take my anger out on him as a representative member of groups. I am really angry in a visceral way that most of the world (or at least my country) considers what I do with my time worthless or a waste of time but oh man… Noah is smart and high status. Because he helps make it possible for people to watch ESPN videos online over and over. Yeah. The world fucking needs that. It is sooooo important. I don’t object to him doing it. It pays the bills. But I resent like fuck the fact that I am shit when standing next to him. I am angry that I am discounted and unimportant compared to an engineer.
I have lost my feeling of impressed with engineers over the years. I see the ways in which they don’t function all that well. They just don’t seem as super human to me. I know what kind of slack-jawed morons sometimes graduate with engineering degrees. Mostly even the fucking morons treat me like they are much smarter than I am. They have a degree in something “real” not something lame like English. A language they are dubiously acquainted with even if it is their native language.
I deal with a lot of men who seem to think “engineer” means “always right”. Yeah, it doesn’t. If I want to get an opinion in your narrow little specialty, sure I’ll ask you. Otherwise I’m going to feel angry when you pull out that condescending “I know everything” tone. You aren’t my father, stop fucking lecturing me. For the record, Noah doesn’t lecture me like this any more. We have worked on that. But he is a representative member of a group I have a problem with. This gets complicated.
Noah has done very little maintenance on this house since he bought it. He did a few things right when he moved in and then just let things be. Things are degrading. Things are going to need to be fixed and/or replaced. Noah feels that such work is not something he has to do. Someone else should be paid to do it. But we don’t have the money for that. We won’t for ten years. With each passing year I watch the spread of the black mold in the bathroom and watch the chinks in the grout grow. I’m sure we are doing damage to the wall. I’m terrified of what I will see when I open the wall. This is going to be hard to fix. I’m scared. Luckily I have a great relationship with the local building department (they know me!) and they are happy to sit down and explain things to me for very long periods. I will find out what all the city codes are and I will do the job right. I will cry a lot in the process. That will be ok too.
I feel like part of my anger is anger that I mostly get the 1950’s ideal situation where I am the “little woman at home” only my husband doesn’t do yard work. Or fix things. That’s on me. I can do it. I’m god damn competent. But sometimes it feels like I’m getting the worst end of 1950’s living and modern relationships. I get all the low status and lack of respect but I am expected to way the fuck more. I am expected to be a massively competent individual while being treated like an incompetent child. No Noah, not you.
Noah doesn’t understand what it is like to move through the world with a different status. I run into men who talk down to me fucking constantly. I’m a mommy. I must be brain dead. He thinks I should just ignore it. It’s not important what those idiots think of me. It’s a broken and crazy system. That’s a really fucking convenient thing for him to say when he doesn’t regularly run into the problem of having to play the game or not be able to get shit done. I can’t always say, “Wow. You are a condescending jack ass. Can I work with your manager, please?” If I am curt in response to someone being demeaning I generally get a fat load of hostility and they don’t actually help me. I have to suck up to those assholes. How in the fuck can I just ignore them?
Noah doesn’t understand because if I send him then their tone of voice changes. He can’t see the problem. I must be imagining things. “If I can’t see it then I can’t judge it.” He thinks I am over sensitive. I think most people aren’t sensitive enough.
And then the Godmamas came over. Marcie asked me if I drill Shanna in numbers and I could feel the spout on the top of my head go off. I wanted to break something. She didn’t mean it like that. We had a tense few minutes as I explained that I had already been angry before they arrived and I was having a hard time listening after that word because I felt really angry. She clarified that she hadn’t really meant “drill” and she explained in detail what she did and how. We had a long conversation about educational stuff I do with Shanna. It was just tense. And I hate that I do that. I hate that I am so angry all the time.
I hate that I feel like I have no worth other than what I produce by “earning money”. To be fair most women in my position go off and find social status in other ways. They become the organizers or the ones who do the grunt work.
I’m in a bad spot. For the next fifteen years of my life I’m going to have to deal with the parent community. The parent community is kind of a nightmare for me. When the other parents start spouting off shit like, “Marriage is between one man and one woman” I can’t really say much. Because if I make those parents uncomfortable then they won’t let their kid play with mine. I can’t do that to Shanna. So I have to shut up and sit there.
When people tell me to find a different parenting group I laugh. It’s been nightmarish finding one as local as this. And it isn’t local. I don’t really relish spending many hours in the van with Calli screaming at the top of her lungs so I can find a more on-the-surface liberal parenting group somewhere more expensive to live. Every option carries advantages and disadvantages. I can consistently get myself and the kids to these events because they are close enough. That means I have to not talk.
I’m angry. I’m kind of tired of being shamed into silence by society at large. Most of my life experience revolves around sex in some way. I had a lot of sex. I can’t talk about most of my relationships or relationship structures. When I say that I am friends with my husband’s ex-girlfriends people look at me like I grew another head. What? Occasionally I am asked how I can be friends with someone my husband has had sex with. I am truly bewildered by that question. Uhhh if I thought people who were former lovers had to be shunned I would have to leave the state. And be careful which state I picked to move to. I never have been to Ohio.
Noah tells me to ignore what people think about me. But what people think about me will determine a lot of how they treat my children. No, I can’t ignore it. I truly can’t. For me to not care and do whatever I want whenever I want would be for me to teach my children a not particularly functional way to live. There are certainly people in the world who like me plenty. I’m god damn careful how I act around them. Very few people find out my unfiltered thinking. It’s not worth the hassle.
Everyone is socialized. I am a lot closer to being a wild animal than most adults. I wasn’t properly domesticated as a child. When Noah says that I shouldn’t think about what other people think it feels like lying. It feels like a manifestation of his god awful heap of privilege that he thinks I can get away with that. I can’t. I can be “out” in some ways at some times in some places. I have to mostly keep my mouth shut.
I can’t tell the women at the mommy group, “Gosh it seems kind of silly to worry about the people he has slept with when I have way more friends that I have slept with.” I care about who he sleeps with going forward quite a bit. The past? I have to let that go. That’s not about me. I’d like to lecture them about how ridiculous they are being.
The thing is, if I get in with the group and I keep my fucking mouth shut for five or ten years and they get to know me then I can “come out”. Then it will be fine. People will have learned how to tolerate me already. But I can’t fuck this up for my kids. I have to be quiet for a long time. I have to care what they think for a while.
I have to very carefully figure out what things I’m allowed to say. This is a homeschooling group. It’s diverse.
I think I am partially so angry right now because I have kind of gotten used to being talked down to by men. When I show up in a group of women and get the same shit I want to break things. I think I hate women (in large groups) more than I hate men. I’m fucking tired of being shoved down the pecking order.
That is not really it though. I’m mad at Noah and I can’t even figure out all of why. I think I am mad at him for not being able to rescue me from every hard thing. And honestly his advice on how to deal with them kind of sucks. I should probably take the other Godmama up on her offer to put me in touch with her mother. The godmama grew up with three parents in the house. That’s complicated.
Noah does things. Noah works hard. I seem to have this giant chip on my shoulder because he doesn’t do something that I have the expectation that he do. Unspoken expectations are bad news.
Noah appreciates me. He is nice to me. He is kind. He helps with a lot of chores. He tells me that he does the low status ones, like dishes. To that I think, “Scrubbing the toilet is much lower status.”
I’m feeling scared. If I have no worth other than what I do as my “work” then all I am is a mom. That’s not really a fair burden for my children. They should not be my entire prop of self-esteem. That’s not functional. That’s not healthy. I sure as shit am not going to keep having kids so that I can keep that role in my life forever. (Five kids! And counting! I’m keeping my mouth shut.)
When I was eighteen I bought a Hyundai Accent. I really liked that car. It gave me freedom and independence. I paid it off quickly so it wasn’t even that much of an on-going expense. I covered the back of it with bumper stickers. Things like “I’m the one your parents warned you about.”
I don’t know how to deal with being the kid that everyone was told to stay away from because I was dirty and bad now that I am the parent. I still have those behaviors that got me ostracized over and over starting at three or four. I don’t know how to do this. Joining groups is hell on earth. I have to care what these people think because I don’t want my kids to have the same life I had. I want them to have stability. I feel broken. I feel bad. I want to sit there saying “fuck fuck fuck fuck” at the park. Seriously. That’s what I want to do. I want to give everyone the heebie jeebies so they stay away from me and I don’t have to smile and nod when they go off on their bigoted bullshit.
I’m mad at Noah because even he is a liar. Even he is wrong. He’s not supposed to be. I’m supposed to be able to believe him. He is doing the best he can given his life experience. It is hard nearly every day. I have to stop and think really hard, “If I was a functional person what would I be doing?” Every day is a conscious choice to do a certain set of behaviors. I pick them as a compromise between what I want, what is best for the kids, and then I have to compromise between what I want and what other people will think.
I don’t wear my “badass as a honey badger” shirt when I am out with my kids. People would treat my kids differently. I don’t want that for them. It’s stupid shit. But it’s there. Always. I am rebellious and inappropriate. You have no idea what my unfiltered thoughts are. I am a very angry person.
Noah doesn’t understand because he has his “work persona” which is different from the rest of his life. But he doesn’t filter as much for random people. He doesn’t understand that my “the rest of my life” is my job. And I don’t know what the tolerances are on my behavior yet. I don’t have a good way to figure out the group.
Other than teaching I haven’t had a phase of my life that wasn’t centered around someone I was fucking in a social group. Not so much an option in the mom-group. Just sayin’. But that tension is there. It’s hard.
I went in and renewed my medical marijuana card. When I was talking to the doctor (who is starting to recognize me after so many times of seeing him) he asked me how I handled dealing with talking about pot with my kids. “There are only so many times you can tell them a skunk was in the back yard.” I told him that I don’t lie to my children. I tell them I use a medication because chemicals in my brain are kind of wonky. That happens sometimes. If you do not need a medication it can make you very sick so never take a medication unless you know for sure that you need it. That is what I tell my kids about pot. He said it was just like being age appropriate when talking about sex. I started crying.
I have to look up in books how to be age appropriate about sex. When I was Shanna’s age I was offering up blow jobs to the neighbor kids. I don’t know what “age appropriate” is. I truly don’t. In the pit of my stomach I know that what I know is bad. That’s all I know. It’s hard. It’s scary.
Shanna knows that her nipples, vulva and butt are off limits to other people. They are just for her. If anyone touches them she needs to let me know because it is my job to help her stay safe. Mostly she just doesn’t spend unsupervised time around people. Shanna knows that sex is for grown ups because kids have delicate bodies and they aren’t ready yet.
I feel scared because I am bringing up children in a country that is moving backwards. I’m watching my rights recede as ignorant men vote them away. I’m scared. I’m scared to travel because I have to submit to intimate touching that feels degrading. I’m scared that something will happen and I will have depended on Noah and then I will get screwed. Because I was stupid enough to think that his status transfered to me. I’m a low status person. I really don’t think I will ever cease to be white trash. That’s just going to be life for me.
How do I keep the filth off of my kids? How do I let Noah make them more like him than like me without feeling invisible and unimportant and stupid and wrong and bad. I don’t know.
One of my dear friends was talking to me this weekend about the whole mixer situation. She assured me that it really must be better to have one. I thought about this on my run today. The purpose in using a machine to do labor for you is so that you save time and energy. Or to do things you literally cannot do for yourself–like travel 600 miles in a day. You need a machine for that.
I made cupcakes on Monday. They are fabulous. It took me hours to make them because I was silly and I didn’t let the ingredients get to room temperature before I started mixing. It was basically impossible early on because I am simply not strong enough. Once I let things get to room temperature it was still noticeable work–my arms felt sore. It was hard but I could do it. I talked to Shanna about it as I worked. I talked about how this is quite hard for me now because I’m not used to doing it. If I practice it won’t be hard any more.
What lesson am I teaching if I say that stirring butter is too hard so we can’t have cupcakes? What a wimpy thing to say. I don’t want her to give up on things like that. I want her to say, “Gosh. This is hard now. I had better practice more so it gets easier.” Do you know how I teach her to say that? I say it. I say it a lot.
The other big argument is time savings. Uhm. You don’t know much about my life if you think what I need is more time. I need ways of filling hours. That sounds weird and bad. I feel like it is a ridiculous privilege. Noah would cheerfully support me sitting here and doing the minimum of work forever. I’m not sure why he is ok with that, but he is. If I didn’t do house maintenance until we had problems he would deal with that. If I did less cooking and baking he would live with that. He would probably buy Nutty Bars and call it a day.
I don’t want my family eating that way. What I have to give in this life is the labor of my body. I put a lot of effort into feeding my family food I feel good about. I buy very fresh ingredients and I start from scratch. It takes an enormous amount of time and energy. We would not be able to buy food of the quality I make. We couldn’t afford it. I would have to buy cheap shit.
In the process I am teaching my children about food. We talk about why we use the ingredients we do. We talk about flavor and vitamins and minerals and carbohydrates versus protein and and and. We talk about it all day long.
When it takes me many hours to make cupcakes we have in depth conversations about why it is harder to mix cold butter than warm. Shanna plays with it and learns. We make up games to amuse ourselves as we pass the time. We play with the ingredients and learn a lot more about how to handle them. How to clean up messes. We learn that when it takes so long to bake you can do most of the clean up during the waiting times and then it feels like a real pleasure when you sit down with your long anticipated dessert.
I don’t know how other people teach the lessons I am teaching or really if they are taught at all. I had to learn these things as an adult. I was not taught. Learning to eat a wider variety of food other than ramen, scrambled eggs, potatoes, corn, chicken, and beef has been hard for me. I was not taught to eat anything else. I knew absolutely nothing about nutrition until I became an adult.
I have spent a lot of my life cultivating idleness. Trying to find ways to do less work. It hasn’t by and large served me well. I want my children to understand that food starts out as plants and animals and it takes a whole butt-load of work to turn it into tasty meals. I want them to have a bone deep understanding that this is the process. I don’t have it. I feel fear. I am actually afraid of doing things wrong when I cook. Sometimes I cry. I feel so afraid of doing it wrong and being bad.
When I was a kid Auntie would occasionally try to introduce some exotic thing to the table like sweet potatoes. Some people ate it. The people who didn’t kept up a steady stream of invective as they protested the indignity of having it at the table. I’m afraid to make food that people might not like.
I was noticing the other day that foot fetishists would probably no longer be interested in my feet. Tom would recoil. My hands are rough. I have callouses. I have the darkest tan I have ever had in my life. I run in the sun for many hours every week. I work outside in the garden.
My life is not served by me doing things that encourage weakness. Pretty much all I have in front of me is more work. The stronger I am the easier it will be. The easier it will be to carry the load I have chosen for this life.
It’s kind of weird sometimes. I feel weird because I want to do so much manual labor. It feels effected or mocking or co-opting or something. I stay home and I do my work in privacy. It is one of the most important parts of my life, to me, and I don’t share it with people much. All of my work requires an ever increasing amount of strength and patience from me.
Mixing by hand takes strength and patience. Taking away practice time that is extremely low stakes seems silly. God helps those who help themselves. In order to help myself I need to be stronger. Next week, Noah wants a seed cake.
I finally found one of the threads in my brain I’ve been trying to turn into a full tapestry. Let’s see how this goes.
How much do other people think about status? I think about it a lot. I think about who has it and why. Status is far more important than people want to admit in pretty much every area of life. Dancers try to tell me they aren’t status whores but they have spent many thousands of dollars on costumes to be impressive. Really?
I’m status obsessed. I can say it out loud as well as in writing. I think about the potential status repercussions for my actions. I like to toil in isolation and show up with something cool. I don’t like being seen sucking. If I can’t do that, well, I guess I don’t need to come out of isolation.
I’m a weird place socially. I am not present in any community enough to be an Alpha. I know it. I accept it. I don’t really want to be a leader. It’s a lot of pressure. But I’m not really a group member. I suck at that. My experience of being part of the hierarchy is that I have to be on the bottom and shut my fucking mouth about it.
I re-watched the movie Whale Rider recently. The little girl was explicitly told she had to sit in the back and not participate while the boys were trained. Obviously she wasn’t as good as them. They had dicks. They are better.
That was really and truly how my childhood was oriented. If someone had a penis and he wanted to be “right” you had to let him. I certainly went off and lived that experience again with Tom. I don’t do that any more. I argue with Noah. I am kind of an asshole when I am right. I have a lot of years of bitterness around being told I am wrong. It’s not fair to Noah. He thinks it is a small sin in the scheme of things. I have gotten much more polite over the years.
Noah and I have long, complicated conversations about status. In terms of income we are in the top 10% of the country. In the bay area we are fairly median. We consciously choose to live in a smaller, cheaper house than most of our friends want to live in. Noah deals with a long commute so that he doesn’t have to spend way more money on a mortgage. This was what he could afford to buy ten years ago. I’m told we should upgrade now. My thought is, “Nah, I can remodel when the mortgage is paid off.” I won’t be able to buy a house that feels perfect. I’ll have to change it too. Why not just put all the effort into this house? Why leave my garden? I’ve done a lot of work here. This is my piece of dirt. I have changed it.
Because where I live is rather low status.
People snicker occasionally. You live in Fremont? I don’t really understand the sneering. Mother fucker my family is from Bakersfield. This is a step up. I promise. It helps that even my neighbors think we are on the low end of things. We don’t spend money in flashy ways. I think a month-long trip to Europe is a high status thing to do. I’d rather do that than spend more money on rent.
Noah was talking to me about how people want to be able to identify very high status people and very low status people and they don’t really want to think about the bits in the middle. That’s sticky. I’m in the middle these days. I have been on the bottom. I know very well what it feels like to be looked at and judged to be less of a worthy person just because of the things you don’t have. The rest of my family has standard poor-person-values in terms of wanting status symbols. You may live in a roach infested dump but damnit you have expensive shoes. Or a big car. Or something. I don’t want to have. I want to do.
Most of the people who inhabit my world are fairly bright. I know a lot of ivy-league-educated people. I live in that kind of place. I always know I am not one of them. I know that I am a social climber. I know that I really belong on the lower end of societies scale on most things. I spend my time around people who are demonstrably higher status than me wondering when they will look down on me. I didn’t go to CMU or Stanford or MIT or… They still talk about it all the time. Clearly it is a big part of their self-perceived status. If it is such a demonstrably large part of their perceived status it isn’t much of a jump to think that they therefore judge other people on the same criterion. All I have to say is that my university was named for a city when I went there. Now it’s just “East Bay”. Woo. That’s pride to have. Even the school isn’t proud of being in Hayward. Let’s try to pretend we have some relevance compared to places like Berkeley. We’re part of the bay area too! Ugh.
I forget that the ivy league educated people aren’t any smarter than I am. I feel intimidated by them. I never even took trigonometry. Obviously I am as stupid as a rock. At least that is the attitude the geeks have. In their little status hierarchy I am extremely low status.
I think I married Noah because, near as I can tell, he has a higher opinion of my status than anyone else. Even before marrying me. He thought my experiences and strengths add up to a person of considerable value. I think he married me because I look at him and see very high status. I can’t believe someone like him would want someone like me.
I crawled out of the gutter. I come from uneducated people with no work ethic to speak of. I come from drug abuse, alcoholism, and heinous abuse of various flavors. It feels like I am an untouchable. How could a trust fund baby from an ivy league see anything worth having? Status is a complicated thing. If you are sufficiently mobile you can trick people into only seeing your current life situation. If you do that then you can have some degree of social mobility in the middle. You will never be high status that way. Such assignments carry longer term consequences. They are for people who are fairly consistent in their life. You can carry low status with you. I feel like I am trying to outrun mine.
How much do I have to do? How much do I have to accomplish? What do I have to learn? What do I have to do to throw of the stink of being low status? I don’t know. These days it seems like the stench is only in my own mind. I have managed to learn how to pass. People don’t question me about my status unless I tell them I am white trash. Maybe that is why I do. I’m fucking tired of how these middle status people don’t want to honestly talk about what that means.
I’m in the middle. Probably lower than you. And sometimes I can’t help myself but I hate you for it.
I’ve had several nearly-fully-formed posts running around in my head for days. Now that I am at the computer? Nada. Typical.
I have been increasing the amount I socialize lately. That is a mixed bag. It means more dealing with people. That’s hard. Being around large crowds of people who are questionably friendly to me is exhausting. The funny part is, one of my default “I’m hiding how I feel” mannerisms is to smile and nervously giggle a great deal. It seems like other people can’t tell the giggling is nervous. So they think I am having a fabulous time. It’s a great cover and I have been working on it for a long time.
I went out dancing on Saturday night. I explicitly told the two friends I was meeting there, “I am here because you two will keep me from hiding in the bathroom and crying.” They were shocked to find out that was a possibility. I don’t have the heart to really explain that without them doing that it isn’t a possibility it is an inevitability. Getting to the dance event is hard. Once I’m there it’s not like I’m out of danger.
I asked two men who were strangers-to-me to dance. Both of them looked at me, kind of twitched, then said they were sitting this dance out and walked away from me quickly. After the second one I didn’t ask again. I danced with my two girl-friends, and three male friends who remember me and generally try to get in a dance with me when they see me. I was grateful for dancing at all. When I come alone, I don’t always get in 1/2 of the dances I did on Saturday.
Sometimes I picture that seem from The Cutting Edge (a cheesy partner ice skating movie) where the coach says about the bitch woman, “We should have been making her a singles skater.” I wish I liked more solo dancing styles. I kind of hate that I like partner dancing and thus I have to deal with other people. It doesn’t help that I will probably never get Noah past his innate feeling that dancing is horrible. A long time ago he tried the dance community and discovered that they are all liars. I’m not going to argue with him, not really. Dancers say that they are happy to see new people and dance with them. In practice this is not so much. They want to dance with the good dancers–the ones they see all the time. Their friends. It’s ok. I just wish they wouldn’t lie about it.
I’ve become cautious over the years. I no longer can act like my actions will have no long-term effects. I want to raise my children in this area. I really can’t continue to just act however I please. It has consequences. I’m left in this place where I don’t know how to behave. I’m afraid. I don’t know what I am or am not allowed to be without the consequences for my children being terrible.
Those same two girl-friends ran a 5k with me on Sunday morning. All three of us kept up a nice steady 5 mph pace the entire way without walking at all. I’ve never run that far without walking. It felt really good. Maybe I should pay more attention to pacing, eh? It seems to work fairly well. Normally I mix in sprints randomly and I have to walk after them to get my breath back. This felt really good. I felt like I could run forever.
And there was a handfasting this week. I got to see all the people who chat with me during the day (*wave*) as well as a lot of People I Kind Of Know. Which is to say, people I have seen around in communities for about a decade but I don’t really know them. I’m fairly certain people think I’m snotty but most of the time I don’t talk to people because I’m not interested in being criticized or told I am wrong. I’d really rather stare at the wallpaper, thanks. It feels like I already, long ago, figured out who would tolerate me and I just don’t talk to new people much.
I have to say that Sarah moving in renewed a bunch of tentative distant connections and they have greatly increased in intensity. I finally had a reason to get over the hump with a few people. That’s good. I’m trying.
It’s kind of weird how much time I spend around former lovers when I go out in public. That’s what happens when you fuck your way through every community. It’s harder to deal with them now. Monogamy is… different. I was “monogamous” with Tom. But girls didn’t “count” and he didn’t care about anything shy of a penis in my vagina. That’s not what Noah and I are doing. I’m no longer really supposed to sit on laps and wiggle. Kissing is out. It’s different. It’s a whole different way of thinking about relationships. I feel terribly uncomfortable. For the love of Christ what else do I really have to offer?
That’s the crux. I offer sex because I believe I have nothing else. That I am nothing else. The reality is I don’t have the time or space in my life to be that any more. I consciously chose to stop offering that. To stop being that. I’m left with not knowing what to do. I have been having sex by choice (rather promiscuously) for my entire life. I go out and find it. When I am not looking for sex and I try to deflect it I usually get raped. So I stopped deflecting. Going out in public is terrifying. I don’t know what to do now. It’s hard and scary telling men to desist in doing things that I used to tolerate. They protest–I like it don’t I? That means they should do it. Even though I said “no”. They know more about what I want than I do, right?
Poly gatherings feel like a meat market even when one isn’t at a sex party. There is a lot of frank appraisal in the gaze. People are hunting. They act available. It’s an undercurrent. When people are interested in sex I can tell. I used to feel like those people were looking for someone like me. Now I don’t. I don’t know how to relate to them any more other than to avoid them. There is no good to come of having to point out that they don’t want me. How could that help anything? Just don’t talk to them.
It doesn’t help that I like talking about sex. It’s one of my favorite topics. I know a lot about it and I like broadening what I already know. It makes life awkward. I have consciously sought out knowledge and experiences my whole life. I fell like sex is one of the strongest biological impulses I have and I like thinking about it and talking about it. I like talking about food, too. Why is one shameful and the other isn’t?
I feel like I am badly adjusting to the concept of having a private sex life. That must sound odd to people. Isn’t sex usually private? Well, not for me. Not really. I don’t want anything I do to be a secret. I used to write scene reports and send them in to mailing lists. (I should probably ask Marcie if I can access those archives and find the scene reports. I lost them many hard drives ago.)
I do not yet have a mental picture on what kind of person I will be in ten years. It’s kind of scary. I know that I will still be a lot like me. I hope I will be better. I hope I will have made progress I can feel proud of. Ending a sentence with a preposition is wrong. I want to feel pride in myself. I don’t want to be an asshole. I don’t want to brag. But I want to know that I can look around my life and see frequent signs that I am a competent human being.
Change topics. Food. I didn’t grow up around people who cooked. In my house dinner was taken out of the freezer and unwrapped before it was microwaved. That’s food. Or you just open a bag and eat. Sometimes you have to boil water first and then let the noodles “cook” for three minutes. No shit dude, top ramen was cooking compared to everything else I ate.
When my mom occasionally felt like she should do more it generally involved one step meat in the oven and opening a few cans of vegetables and microwaving them in bowls. No really, we didn’t cook. I don’t understand what that even means until I try to cook for my family. Yesterday was a great day. In the morning I put another trellis in the ground and yanked the blackberry shoots over so that they can start growing how I want. I spent a while trimming the rose bush. I’m not done because that sucker is huge. (Thanks, former housemates!) It’s an ongoing project. Then it started raining and I came in.
I took the bones out of the fridge and made stock. I put a whole bunch of spices and other vegetable remnants in the pot. I had to think really hard about what I was doing. I had to recreate in my head what I have seen other people do. I let that cook for hours. I started making cupcakes. It took me about two hours because the butter was cold and creaming cold butter by hand is kind of a nightmare. I kept covering the bowl and scooting it closer and closer to the simmering stock pot. Melt! Damn you! Eventually it worked out well. The cupcakes are awesome. I know because I ate four last night. I just couldn’t stop. Holy cow those are good. I don’t make cupcakes very often because four in one day seems a bit excessive. But on the first day, oh man. Have to.
Then I had to do a whole bunch of dishes. Then I immediately started the next few steps on making soup. I was in the kitchen processing food and dishes for at least six hours yesterday. To make cupcakes, stock, and soup. I did sit down in the middle and eat lunch. But that’s a full freakin job right there. No fucking wonder my family didn’t cook. They didn’t have that kind of time and energy to spare.
Cooking is so weird. It feels like an act that is either done from desperation because one is poor and can’t do anything else or it is an act of privilege. Only people have had to cook for a very long time. I don’t know why it feels this way. Why does it feel optional? Why does it feel non-mandatory if you can find a way out? I used to eat out a lot. Other people did my cooking. Cooking is low status unless you do ridiculous over the top stuff.
I feel so weird about food. It feels strongly related to class. It doesn’t help that I visit the kinds of playgrounds where people have to agonize for an hour over what they brought. “I know this isn’t good enough for ________ reasons but this other thing I brought is far superior to what that other woman brought. Can you believe she is letting her kids eat __________?” I don’t talk to other moms much. I read my phone or play with the kids. It seems for the best. They don’t want to god damn hear me tell them what I think.
It’s not that I never have those thoughts. I frequently have the thought, “Holy shit, that woman is letting her kid eat what?!” I’m ok with that. I don’t say it out loud where someone can hear me and feel scorned. I suppose that saying it on the internet isn’t really better. Doesn’t that make me two faced as well?
Women talk about that shit at the park so they can shame other women into getting into line. I talk about it because I want to decide what I want to do. Sometimes I think, “Holy shit, that woman is letting her kid eat what?!” and I decide that maybe I’ve been hyperventilating over something I can relax about. I don’t need to shame people into sharing my values. They might have perfectly fucking good reasons for what they are doing. My values tend to be so at odds with everyone around me that I don’t really want to talk about non-involved people. I can’t judge someone I’m not even in a conversation with. I will talk about my opinions with people, sure. I will share what I do and why. But I’m not going to evaluate a stranger and give them some kind of “score” to a third party. I see no benefit.
Today is park day. I’m feeling nervous. It will be fine. I doubt anyone will even know that I told that woman to take a hike. Lots of people show up once and never come back. I don’t think I am going to get into trouble. We’ll see.
Hm. I just had a thought that should be it’s own separate post. I’ll do that.
I found this from 2006. Don't ask why I was reading it.
If you had me alone…locked up in your house for twenty-four hours and I had to do whatever you wanted me to, what would you do with me? All posts will be permanently screened because it's a secret. Then repost this in your LJ- or don't. You might be surprised with the responses you get.
Ok, comments are screened.
My dad was really tall. He was 6’7″. He was the tallest in a fairly tall family. The one time I was in a room with a bunch of Archer women (they all have different last names now because they married out of the family so I don’t feel too bad about outing their name) I was reminded that I was tainted by lesser blood. “Your father did marry a short woman. I guess we should have expected a midget.” I’m 5’5″. The next shortest woman in the room was 5’8″. They Archers have a nose built for looking down on people. My sister told me when I was a kid, “It’s a good thing you have the Archer nose so that you can look down on people who are taller than you.”
My brothers were really nasty to me about my size when I was growing up. They were four and a half and eight years, respectively, older than me. Of course I was smaller than them. But they were mean about it. Jimmy called me, “Midget” and he didn’t have a smile on his face. He would “accidentally” smack me in the face with his elbows and then say he can’t be held responsible for not seeing a midget.
It’s kind of funny because on my mom’s side of the family I am the tallest woman in a few generations. I grew up around women who are all much smaller than me so they always talked about how unusually large I was. I really don’t have much perspective on myself. I don’t know if I am a big person or not.
Recently I was lucky enough to have two friends come over to see me on the same day. That was kind of an accident but it was nice. They both happen to be quite tall. Of course they got around to telling me that I am a midget.
I blinked. I don’t think my facial expression changed much. I was trying hard to control the urge to do something violent. I felt such a massive over reaction that I knew there was no way I could react at all. I could feel paralysis set in. Just blink. I’m pretty sure I bit my lip. I tried to control the tears.
I have always cried when I am frustrated. Tears just spring into action. I feel so much anger, so much intensity that I want to hurt someone or something. I know there is nothing I can do. I can’t make the feeling go away. I can’t change how anyone is going to treat me. I can’t do anything about anything. So my eyes well up with tears. These days I don’t feel exactly the same way. I can do things. But not when I am flooded. Not when I hear Jimmy in my head sneering “Midget”.
My therapist told me on Thursday that she needs to stop doing private practice because she has ten months left to complete things for her license and she needs to concentrate on that. I enthusiastically told her I support her doing that. I could immediately feel walls come up. I no longer felt like I had things I wanted to tell her. She was no longer going to be a carrier of my story. I feel like I have to pull back all of the energy I store up to give her and conserve it very carefully.
I’m not up for running out and finding a new therapist this month. Therapy is a relationship. I need space between them so I can regroup and really understand what my current need is in a therapist because things change. Sharon was great when I wanted EMDR to help me deal with the miscarriages and two people who were close to me overdosing on heroin in a short period of time. She was not a good long term therapist for me. My needs changed.
I will need to figure out what I should be looking for right now. There is a big part of me that wants to tell my current therapist that I will wait out the year and hope she comes back to private practice. The two former therapists I really bonded with are both dead. I don’t have very many people in the whole world who have listened to me actually tell my stories out loud. Many people have read them. Not many people have been interested in knowing this part of me. Finding a new therapist is hard.
In February I was told, “There are no personal problems they are all problems of the community.” I’m not sure I know what I need right now. I am going to take advantage of the unexpected budget win-fall and go see my acupuncturist. (See, I only used two c’s in the word instead of three. I can be taught. Eventually.) That will be good. I can get new glasses. Woo. These are more than two years old and I have a constant low level headache because they are out of date. No bueno.
It’s hard how much my current life is influenced by people who hated me. It’s decidedly inconvenient at times. I really wish I could get them out of my head.
Today I have washed (not folded) three loads of laundry. Cleaned the kitchen a few times. Went grocery shopping. Did yard work. Lots of other random picking up. I have to make multiple meals a day.
Why do I feel like I haven't done anything?
Life transitions are journeys. You don’t necessarily understand how long of a journey when you start them. I knew I was pregnant with Shanna when I walked into a sushi restaurant and nearly vomited on the lobby floor. Lavender hand soap was awful. Normally I quite like it. I have had multiple people tell me that my pregnancy was the most miserable they have ever seen. I lost eighteen pounds in the first five months. I could barely eat. My body ate itself. I sucked fat in from all of my extremities. My belly was enormous. My face hollowed out. I finally lost my baby fat. I have noticeable cheekbones. I look far more intense and older.
I regained the eighteen and added twenty two more in the last four months. I discovered acupuncture and like a miracle my nausea disappeared. I was starving. But I couldn’t handle cooking anything. If I cooked something that took longer than about five minutes my sense of smell would become overwhelmed and I wouldn’t be able to eat the meal I had been cooking. It made me vomit. I couldn’t keep it down. We ate out a lot.
I quit my job in the middle of the year at the semester break in January even though I wasn’t due till the end of May. My vice principal did not want to replace me for a whole semester. I feel really bad about the kids I left. My replacement was uhm… not good. My classes were front loaded with the most hostile to authority kids in the school. Because they will work with me in a way they won’t work with authoritarian people.
I was a good teacher partially because of the ridiculous boundaries I had with them. They did not get to know things about my personal life. I was not a peer. I am not your friend. I am your teacher. But I believe that in order to teach people you have to understand them. You have to know what kinds of things will motivate your individual learner.
Thus I had 8th Period Social Club. Otherwise known as academic detention. Anyone with a grade below a C had to come sit in my classroom for an hour after school every day. I talked to them. I got to know them. They had to make up the work and I sat there and talked to them about why they weren’t doing it in the first place. I learned what was happening in their lives.
I asked one of my favorite former students what I taught him. He said I taught him to like himself. I’m really glad. I met him in a period where he was officially Emo and very depressed and I loved him and bullied him and encouraged him and made him live up to really high expectations. I taught him in my first year. The one period I was paid to teach. I gave that class I lot of attention. Two of the kids wanted to be my aides the next year. He was one of them. He came back after he graduated and he did 75% of the physical labor to move me out of my classroom when I was pregnant. It would have been really hard. It would have made me cry and puke a few times. I had a lot of stuff on the walls. He just showed up. He had already graduated. He knew I was leaving because he dropped by every so often just to chat. I was a major support figure for him during a crucial period.
He is the most intense one. I had many others to slightly lesser degrees. My former students still talk to me. I think that is why I don’t like working with really little children. I can’t handle feeling like I will be forgotten. If I am only going to have one year of contact, I want it to be when they will really take the lessons to heart. I want them at the height of teenage angst and then I feel like it will help.
I’m struggling like mad with this young child thing. I’m realizing that these kids will bloody remember me. I have spent upwards of 75% of the entire hours of their lives with them. I am not away from them very often. Every memory will contain me.
One of these days I will think they are old enough and I will start being less super nice at all times. When it is developmentally appropriate for me to think they should bloody well be acting like civilized human beings I will stop tolerating a lot of shit. For now I’m biting my tongue and I’m trying to let them explore the world. I talk to them about why it isn’t polite to do things in different circumstances but I’m not punishing or acting angry at this time.
It’s weird to explain how arbitrary a lot of etiquette stuff is. It’s also interesting how much is about not soiling the laundry. In order to have real grace at eating you have to take your time and practice in a way that few people do. I grew up wiping my hands on the table cloth. Noah and other people keep yelling at Shanna for doing it. I don’t yell at Shanna for doing it but I tell her that when we visit a restaurant or someone else’s house people will think she is gross if she does that. And I wipe my hands on the table cloth.
I want to keep going but Noah has to go to work.
Living with Noah has changed how I think about computers. I don’t think of them as magic anymore. I think about them as the result of a large set of mathematical equations. I’m getting closer and closer to being interested in thinking about that. Right now my brain is pretty full.
I’ve been thinking about what the gardening represents for me. It’s a combination of learning biology, which feels like an intimidating “science” thing for me, and learning how to do manual labor. I haven’t done this sort of physical movement much in my life. Uhm. It’s hard. I feel like a tremendous loser because it is so hard. A lot of the time I feel frustrated and scared because I don’t even know how I should begin. I feel like I am doing it all wrong. I lost two plants this year. Well, I wanted a place to put yellow roses any way. Noah’s mother sent me $75 as a congratulations for finishing my book. I want to buy yellow roses with that money. It will make me happy. It will make me think of her gratefully when I am outside of my house. It will give me a reason to think of her positively.
I’m not going to have a relationship with Noah’s mother. Not really. Noah totally has an Oedipal Complex because he went off and married his mother. When he talks about his childhood it sounds like something I could easily do if I didn’t deal with my mental health issues. It sounds like it is hard to be his mom. Being in her head must hurt. She feels a powerful fear all of the time. I can understand that. I can’t have a relationship with that. I have too much fear as well. Neither of us has the ability to make the connection.
The one time I went out to meet his family his mother spent three hours telling Noah how inappropriate I was. We were already married. I am poor white trash and his mama knows it. We will never have a relationship. I was out fucking every kid in the trailer park when I was young. They don’t like my kind where his family comes from. Really, what mother wants a girl like that for her son?
So his mother and I will never have a relationship. There is too much fear between us. Too much judgment. Too much crazy. We are both wounded animals. I don’t know what wounded her and I really can’t care. I’m too busy tending my own wounds. But I want to plant yellow roses in my yard and think of my mother in law in Texas sending me a very lovely gift.
I hate the color yellow. I have since I was a kid. I had a yellow dress and yellow earrings and a yellow headband and my mama told me, “Oh God. You’re just like your father. You like yellow. Ew. That’s his favorite color.” I have had a hard time with yellow since. Occasionally I get yellow clothing as hand-me-downs.
I stopped dressing in hand-me-downs when I had kids. No one gave me adult sized clothes any more. Now I buy them. It’s weird. I feel like I am supposed to develop “taste” and I don’t know what that even means. I still want to dress like Punky Brewster. I want to go shopping each time and buy something weird and colorful and end up just… not… owning neutrals. I’ll look weird. That will be ok.
But it isn’t. Because I’m ugly and my mama dresses me funny. I was told that over and over and over and over.
Today isn’t shaping up so good. I have a lot of insecurities. It’s hard to access them one at a time. They are all interconnected. Why am I so afraid of rejection? Why can’t I let that woman be part of the park group? Because I can’t be near someone who is going to send of pot shots. I just fucking can’t. I don’t want positive comments from an insincere person. I want to be invisible. I’m really not invisible. I don’t want to become invisible so that I avoid comments.
I know how to dress in ways that will not attract attention. I’ve been doing it for a while. I wasn’t ok with that whole “I can touch you because you are pregnant” thing. So I can dress in ways that don’t attract notice. Why should I have to? Because I don’t want people to comment on me. But I like it. Oh fuck.
I don’t want to have to think about how my actions are going to effect someone else. I want to just do what I like. When I know I am going to be around someone who is quite happy to be vicious and spiteful in my direction I am immediately hypervigilant and I have to think about every fucking aspect of this interaction from what I wear to what I say. I pick my kids clothes out. They are neutral and subdued. Gender neutral, even.
My kids pick their own clothes out 99% of the time. They are not remotely subdued or gender neutral. They both like dresses in neon shades of pink. I think it is hilarious given that Shanna didn’t have them when she was smaller. I only had boy hand me downs for a long time.
I always liked wearing bright colors. I’ve always liked the casual, easy, positive interactions I get with value neutral people in public when I dress the way I like. I don’t like comments from people I know. I don’t want to have to store up in my head that they said something nice to me now I am expected to return the favor and next time I should probably start the nice exchange and. No. Just no. I can’t. I have no fucking interest in getting on the manners bandwagon at this stage of my life. I have to stay here. My kids get to grow up in one place.
It is challenging to manage my emotional needs as my relationships get longer and longer. I have to not expect anything from people in order to continue to know them over time. It’s a very hard line for me. If we are doing an activity together and have no outside connection it is easy. I have no expectations of people I see at an event. They don’t owe me a smile or a conversation. Friends are hard for me.
It is hard having people visit my house. Part of the reason I stress about housework is because I want to have a house that is “company ready” all the time. Not for them, exactly. My friends don’t give a shit. I’ve seen their houses. When my house is “messy” it’s really not bad.
My friends are busy. They have shit to do. They hold down jobs. They have vibrant social lives. I uhhh hang out in my house with my kids. We do go places. But it goes in waves and it’s rarely for more than four or five hours. We are here a lot. If I leave the house messy then I have to live in that mess. I have to work and think in that mess. I find it horribly distracting. I don’t go to Noah’s job and pick up all the stuff on peoples’ desks and throw it in the air. That would make doing actual work hard.
So I sit here and think. What is my job here? To educate my children. Basically. What do I want to educate them in? I want them to have the ability to have any kind of life they want to have. That means they need to start off in a whole lot of directions at once. Sure, we can do frilly princess and makeup. Her best (girl) friend is always the prince. They think role is about personal preference not about gender identity. That’s fucking awesome. But I’m not trying to bring up a little gender queer so I can have street cred in those communities. I need to not be invested in any results.
I’m teaching the kids that your body has to be active if you want to engage in a lot of activities. I want us to go work on farms for a year. It would not be a kindness to bring the average kid around here to a rural farm where they don’t speak the language. We have to be ready. We have to think about this in advance. What will that mean for our bodies? We should probably find a way to actually get ready. Which means that step one is for me to learn a whole lot more about gardening. Which is intimidating.
If you hadn’t noticed I’m flooded with a lot of stress chemicals. Being in that state makes it harder to learn. This is a lot of how I live my life. But I really want to do this. I don’t want to fail. I want to be able to be a productive and useful person on a farm. It’s important to me. When people talk about their “roots” well, working on a farm is part of most of our roots. You may have to go back a bit, but really. People have to eat. Food has to be provided.
I didn’t think about it very much until I had kids. I didn’t think hard about where my food came from. When I look at their bodies I want to give them food that will help them grow up as strong as possible. I want them to be able to handle anything that life gives them. I won’t be able to protect them forever. I have to do what I can now.
I don’t understand how blasé other people seem to feel about parenting. When I talk about feeling insecure or doubting myself people quickly tell me they don’t feel insecure. They must be lying. I can’t be the only insecure person. Give me a break.
I talked about feeling kind of insecure about unschooling the kids. I’m going to spend a lot of time revisiting that concept. I’m going to think hard about what that means to me. “Back in the day” people raised their children to be just like them. Uhm. I don’t want to raise my kids to be just like me, thanks. I want my children to live with fear like I do. Bad things happen. Then you move on. Normal people don’t get caught in these loop tapes. Normal people have some normal to fall back on. Some sense of themselves that was formed during the long stretches of their lives without trauma. Depending on how you think about consensual bdsm I haven’t had a period of my life without traumatic events. Hell, even having my second kid almost killed me. Woo.
I live in stress chemicals. They are all I know. I’m trying very hard not to teach that. The problem is, living in stress chemicals makes it hard to learn. All I am doing with my life right now is helping my kids prepare for life.
So I was looking at the California Content Standards for grade K. If I’m going to prepare her for being part of this society part of that includes having a vaguely similar knowledge base with her peers so that if anything happens she can transition back into a schooling environment. Things happen. I could have to work some day. Within the next two years (because she isn’t old enough for kindergarten anyway) she has to learn hygiene and how to stand in line. She’s otherwise pretty much there on the kindergarten standards for my subject. She has letters, morphemes, basic introduction to syntax, grammar… Math she isn’t quite there yet on all of it. She’s halfway there with two years to go. Obviously I have not failed her horribly so far.
Part of my weird social anxiety is that I really like being a teacher. That feels good to me. I don’t like being didactic with peers so I feel like I have nothing to say. I don’t know how to have conversations among peers. I can be a student or a teacher. That was, really, the primary positive relationships I had. That was my “normal” period that could be good. I had a lot of teachers who liked me. I had a lot of teachers who hated me.
There is a feeling I have when teaching. I am allowed to have intense bonding conversations within that format. I know there is a time limit on it. I know that the exchange is limited to what we are doing. I have no further expectations.
I get into a lot of trouble when I have expectations of people. I have to keep them further out at arms length. I can’t handle being told “no”. So I just can’t ask. I think the intensity with which I feel this is somewhat higher than average but there is a constant component of it in my head. I have to keep in mind that I can’t ask people for things. If they freely want to give me something I can take it, but I can’t ask. It’s hard to ask people to come over for this reason. I wouldn’t want to insult something I have worked so hard for by having a messy house. I have no idea why I have picked this standard of measurement because I am otherwise a specifically crappy host.
I don’t want my house to broadcast my social class. I want people to be continually surprised when I talk about how bad it was. That means I am living right. In my head I can’t separate out the messy house from the overall neglect and abuse and poverty. In my experience my friends who have decidedly messy houses have issues with their mental health and/or control. That’s not a nasty statement. *wave hand in friendly way* Whether people want to admit it or not, your perceived social class has distinct influence on your life. I am a stay at home mom. If I didn’t clean my house that would have social class implications. There is still a very strong element of “What the hell do stay at home moms do anyway?”
The point here is to teach them to be functional adult. If you have your house so messy that you constantly have to buy new things to replace things you have lying around somewhere and you don’t have the money to really support this behavior then you aren’t functional. That’s broken. It’s not a huge broken in the scheme of things but it’s a behavior I specifically don’t want to model or teach. We don’t have the money to be callous with our things. We can’t just go out and replace things right now. I mean we have money in savings but we don’t have any spare money in our set budget. It is not a responsible or mature decision to be callous with our things. We don’t have extra any more.
When you live in a messy house you break things and lose things. Ask me how I know. I don’t want to teach that. I really don’t. That means modeling doing things differently and not being a preachy asshole about it.
Now I’m just ranting. Ugh. My stomach hurts. Time to go look for food.
Noah asked me why I am letting this woman have so much power over me. She responded to my first email with a short thing basically saying, “I was nine months pregnant when I sent this to you. Maybe I could have had more compassion. Can’t you forgive me?” I ranted back. I explained that I am going to spend every minute I am near her terrified that I am going to have another panic attack in front of her. I’m afraid of how nasty she will be next time because apparently I go through “chances” without ever having any idea I am doing something wrong. I told her I don’t really want to deal with that given that it took me a year to have the courage to leave the house because I was afraid of running into her.
Why am I so afraid of her? What does she represent to me? Noah pointed out that I’m creating my own self-fulfilling prophecies here. I say that people hate me and reject me foreverrrrrrr I will be aloooooooooooooone foreverrrrrrrrrrr. Ahem. Or something like that. She apologized, why don’t I accept the apology?
If she had sent some kind of an apology spontaneously instead of because she couldn’t ignore me any longer I would have had a different reaction. She didn’t want to apologize. She doesn’t think she did anything wrong.
Why does she have so much power? Why does her disapproval matter? Because I spent about a year telling her intimate things. It didn’t feel like the break up of a “friendship”. This was as emotionally intense as a romantic relationship. Since I had kids I have been bonding a lot more strongly with women. I am getting too attached too quickly, apparently. I told this woman extensively about my mental health issues and more specifically about my life. Then she shamed me.
I don’t like someone deliberately shaming me. I shouldn’t care what she thinks. I don’t have anything invested in her opinion. She is not going to be part of my life again if I can help. She responded to my last rant saying she left the Meet Up group.
She’s right that it will be hard to avoid one another given that she lives twenty minutes away. I get to ask her for space once. Past that she really doesn’t have to give me any room. She gets to live her life as well. She lives around here and there is a finite number of kid things. I can’t keep her out of all of them. That’s not cool to her kids. But I can ask her to stop showing up at my gosh darn park day, once.
There were four of us. We spent over a year hanging out together at least once and up to four times a week. When we got together we would spend at least five hours, sometimes up to nine hours. We did a lot of long-term talking about things that our kids would do. We spent holidays together. Then I got told that I was out of chances completely out of the blue after I had a panic attack.
I was punished by the removal of two peoples love because I was bad. Because I am crazy.
So what happened was I was on edge to start with. I was at the beginning of the unravel I had last year. Shanna was in a brief hitting phase (it lasted less than a month). She hit this other little boy twice and I pulled her into the bedroom and told her that if she did it again we would have to go. It was not nice to repeatedly hit someone in their own house. That’s just really over the line for me. She was two. No she didn’t “get it” but if children never have consequences for their actions they will never “get it”. Of course she hit him again. And right as I was telling her in a ranty voice that if she hits people we have to leave Calli had a dirty diaper. I tried to get Shanna to sit still while I changed it because she lost the privilege of playing. We walked out with me repeatedly saying in a louder-than-necessary voice something to the effect of “It’s not ok to hit people. When you hit people there are consequences. Get your butt out to the van. No, don’t play. You are in trouble. It’s not ok to hit people.” I never called her a name. I wasn’t demeaning. I wasn’t insulting or nasty. My tone of voice was really harsh and loud. I couldn’t breath and my heart was racing. Dealing with both kids in that moment was hard and over whelming.
That night I received an email telling me that she didn’t want to know me any more because my behavior is over the top and I am mean to Shanna. I don’t have age appropriate expectations.
Uhm, I expect my two year old to hit people. I think it is then my job to enforce consequences so she can have some idea that it’s not a great plan. I don’t hit my kids. I don’t call them names. I don’t put them down. But I do separate them from their friends when they can’t play nicely. I guess that’s not “age appropriate”.
I feel defensive and angry. I feel like for some reason she has the power to cause other people to share her opinions. I’m scared that she would join this play group and people who currently tolerate me would no longer want to because she would sit there and gossip about my faults. I’m worried because the “Attachment Parenting” community is very harsh and dogmatic. They absolutely encourage shunning people who do not completely follow the party line.
I have mixed feelings because I wonder if her nastygram was a good thing. I wonder if I really am a mean nasty person. Shanna really is a strange mini-adult. I don’t tolerate a lot of “age appropriate” behaviors most of the time. I set really firm boundaries around them. Am I somehow robbing them because I expect manners? Obviously I am insecure.
I believe deep in my heart that I am nice to my kids. I get angry, yes. My anger is bigger than a lot of peoples, yes. My kids are going to have to deal with being my kids. I have mental illness. That’s just a fact. I may always experience panic attacks. I don’t know. I have no crystal ball. My kids have to be near me. It isn’t possible for me to make my panic attacks completely invisible and silent to them. I talk to them a lot about how they aren’t responsible for my emotions and my behavior.
Awhile ago I was having a panic attack and angry with Shanna over something. She started crying. I looked at her and asked her if she was afraid. She told me yes. I sunk down to the floor and put my head down. I told her that I was doing something wrong then. Kids shouldn’t be afraid of their mothers. Mothers are never supposed to hurt kids. I sat up and pulled her into my lap. I asked her to explain what she understood about why I was upset. She did a good job. I explained the rest of the back story on why I don’t want her doing _______. I told her that I was sorry I scared her. I didn’t mean to. She hugged me and said that she would try not to do _________ again. I thanked her.
But I’m a terrible person, right? It’s not ok to ever raise your voice. It’s not ok to ever be angry.
Wait, what? Oh good grief. Why do I give this idiocy so much power over me? Partially because it feels like the drumbeat for my stage of life. It’s not as if this woman is the only one presenting that image. I spent way too much time on Mothering.com.
She was just an echo chamber for what I feel society as a whole wants from me. The vast majority of the time if I express any anger near anyone there is some comment on it. “Don’t hold back, tell me how you really feel.” “My son is an empath so you can’t get angry near him.” “You get angry really quickly.” I suppose that depends on how you look at it.
Why does she have so much power over me. Because she is able to smile and spew poison. Because I am very susceptible to girl games. Because I was taken down many many pegs. And now she has come and joined my new hierarchy. Those kinds of status things feel extremely transitory. I don’t really want to get a sudden demotion.
When I transferred to Leigh High School during my freshman year of high school I started going by a nickname derived from my middle name. After I was there for a month or so someone leaved over a teacher’s shoulder and said, “Wait. Your name is Kristine? Like Krissy? Are you Krissy Archer? That Krissy Archer?” I had sex with multiple people at my previous school. It was part of the reason I ran. I didn’t want to deal with that reputation when I moved. Abruptly I had someone calling me a whore in every class.
And women are vicious in a way that is far more hurtful. They don’t just insult you and call it a day. They get close to you and then use withdrawal of love as a weapon. They talk to your friends. They lower the general opinion people have of you. Often by repeating half-true stories. The more they smile at you while they are doing this the more problems you will have later.
My kids need a fucking stable group of friends. I really don’t want to play the social status game. I only kind of interact with the other parents. I really need for my behavior and relationship with my children to be judged based on the things we actually do. Not the things people speculate that we might do because they witness some of our worst interactions. Everyone has their worst interactions. If mine involve my tone of voice being ranty and harsh while I say things that are otherwise fairly reasonable I will live with that and consider it a life well lived. I don’t rant very often. It’s quite rare. And Shanna is quick to tell me that my tone of voice isn’t ok and I need to change it. I don’t think she is a beat down child.
Why have I set her up as a judge and jury I have to defend myself from? Because most other people don’t pay enough attention to me for me to feel like they would bother judging me? And yet mob mentality is very real. I am weird. I am reminded over and over again in a variety of ways (parenting books like this try to make it a joke) that for me to be weird is a problem for my kids. They will suffer for it. It will be my fault and that’s bad. I should be trying to blend into the crowd. That book in particular stressed how it is ok that you know you don’t fit in but you have to learn how to fake it so your kid isn’t punished. It’s true if you are in a public school. I don’t want it to be true at our home school group.
It’s kind of like playing Plants Vs. Zombies. She’s a double pea shooter walking towards me. She’s going to kill me. She feels like she can poison my environment. She was certainly good at having me like her and think well of her. Until she turned on me abruptly and was really nasty. Oh shit I don’t want that kind of poison in the well. It’s just a bad idea.
Why does she have so much power over me? Her brand of poison is pretty powerful. I believe she mostly liked being friends with me. But I’m one of those polarizing figures. She liked me a lot but the things she didn’t like she disliked a lot. I don’t need to have someone who is good at making me like them but who occasionally tells me I am a terrible person in my life. That’s kind of my crack. What’s our favorite game, Noah?
I don’t want her in the group because all of a sudden park day becomes a whole different beast for me. I no longer have to think of whether I’m up for all of the basic things. I have to think about how secure I feel that I can sit off to the side quietly and not get into a conversation that might trigger a panic attack. Because it absolutely not ok to have a panic attack with that woman nearby. Oh God. Poor Shanna might lose more friends. And it would be All My Fault.
I’m not planning to move. Shanna is stuck here. She has to make friends here. I have to not fuck this up.
Why does she have power over me? Because I’m not good at taking it back once I give it to someone. Why the fuck do I care what Tom thinks? Why in the fuck do I care what my mother thinks? Because I do. Because I love them. Because I wish with every part of me that they thought I was good. Because I am very used to people who profess to love me telling me that I am horrible. I have a magnetic attraction to this cycle. I like people who have more control than I have who tell me I am bad for not having it. It’s really pretty fucked up and self-loathing of me.
Why does she have power over me? Because in my experience, other than the people I live with, people don’t give other people second chances. Not really. She has a bad opinion of me. I’m supposed to try and prove that I am worthy of a second chance. Now she has told me that I am going through chances so I can be held to it.
Noah thinks I should just think of her as a stupid person and move on with my life not caring how she feels about me. He has a point.
Even though I feel wicked uncomfortable about having done so I created a socially safe place for me. I hope. I don’t think I will have a perfect experience without her there. But I’m not going to be judged on something half remembered from a long time ago.
I’m not at this group to make friends. I am cordial. I participate in conversations enough that I sort of look like part of the group. Mostly I play with the kids or run. People probably either think I am aloof or shy. I’m ok with either. I have told more than one person that I have horrible social anxiety. That’s as personal as I have gotten.
Where is this space in our life for acquaintances? For community? For people who are around but with whom you don’t have a personal connection? If I keep people out at arms length then they can be out at arms length forever. What they do has very little effect on me. If I let someone in closer they have to be shoved much much further than just arms length away when they hurt me. It’s not a very forgiving system. My problem is I assign too much intent to behaviors. People aren’t trying to hurt me. They are trying to express their emotions.
She felt intimidated by me. So she attacked. Normal. The person who sent the recent accusatory letter? He’s not really upset because of my actions. He’s upset about things in his life and I’m a good target. He at least thinks he is doing a good thing.
It’s not about me. Don’t make excuses. Don’t apologize. She apologized to me. Shouldn’t I take that at face value? What I should do is get off my butt and go eat a banana. Then get dressed. Then go run. Today my wonderful friend Taylor is coming over. That guarantees a good day. I’m going to stop thinking about her. I asked her to leave the group and she did. I may run into her again some day and then I will have to revisit this emotional experience. That time I won’t get to ask her to leave a group. She lives here too. It’s not ok to make her pay for the rest of her life. That’s really not cool. Hell, in a few years I may suddenly grow up and decide I don’t give a shit. Folks either like me or they don’t and I will have been part of the group long enough that it really won’t matter.
But I’m not there yet. My skin is not that thick. It’s too raw. It’s too scary. I have a hard time getting out of the house. If I knew she was going to be there I wouldn’t be able to go. I wouldn’t be able to put my kids through the experience of dealing with my panic attacks. That’s not fair.
I’m going to go now.