Category Archives: adult-only

Published in the adult-only category

Long-term friendships.

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I was talking to a chick I met when I was fifteen yesterday.  She’s one of my closer friends.  We met while we were each hot for the same guy.  She initiated the conversation yesterday because she wanted to tell me the results of some personality test thing she did in a grad school class.  It ranked her best attribute as the ability to *be* loved and to inspire love.  It was kind of funny to explain to her that it really is a skill and one I am singularly bad at.  When people love me I tend to be quite hard on them and not permit them to love me.  I will hold up your faults to a mirror as often as I can and tell you, “Can you really love me while doing _________.”  The results are mixed.  I expect people to put a lot of thought and energy into making sure their words match up with their actions.  So I’m pretty hard to love.  I’m effort.  And not an especially fun kind.

I told her that she is easy to love.  We still know each other because she is easy to love.  Not because I am so worth loving.  She is blessed with a thick skin, short memory, and the rock solid belief that people only say harsh self-improvement things with the best of intentions.  Yeah, we can stay friends.  Because you believe that when I point out bad things I’m doing it because I love you.

Yesterday I was talking to her about a different conflict in my life.  One I’ve written about.  One I very carefully write about.  I was telling her a different side to the story.  Being the girl she is her response was, “Whoa.  That’s a much bigger thing to feel ________ about than everything you have written.  The fact that this is going on makes me think this is the real issue.  And the fact that you won’t write about it… that’s big.  Yeah, this is probably the real crux of the issue.”  My jaw actually dropped.  I’m not completely sure she’s right, but she’s mostly right.  That was interesting for me to note for several reasons.  First and most importantly, holy shit she can play me.  I have deep respect for that in my friends.  That means they have paid attention.

I have had several big issues with my “chosen family” in the past year and a while.  I found the breaking point.  I have an increasingly interesting thought process around the things I used to put up with and things I am willing to model putting up with in front of my kids.  I’m having a hard time with those differences.  I don’t want my kids growing up with the idea that its ok to use me, everyone else does.  I’m not a fan of being the one who does all the work for a bunch of semi-grateful people.  I don’t get off on that.  I get nothing but exhaustion and anger that no one fucking helped.  Again.  But I want to see people.  Apparently if you want to see people it requires doing a lot of work.  Fuck that.  I’d rather not see people.  Attempting to put my foot down on this issue is not going well.

Most of my best friends are hoarders who need people to sit around and tell them how awesome they are.  I could go down a list.  It’s actually pretty funny.  If someone is not a hoarder who wants me to come clean their house for them we probably won’t build a friendship.  What can our friendship be based on if not my work?  Or there are the guys I fuck.  I have one or two fierce women friends I pretty much exclusively talk to online and I don’t clean for them.  But I don’t see them either.  Maybe once a year.

If people are hoarders who need me to clean up after them I have a pattern for that.  I have a whole broken dynamic I picked up in my family of origin around this issue and I moved it forward.  It’s interesting to think about.  I’m not sure if I’m an enabler or what if I come over and force them to get rid of a bunch of shit so it can’t be as big of a mess for a while.  My organization systems usually last at least months if not years.  They just put new shit around what I organize.  It’s hilarious to watch.

All of them remind me of my family.  If I speak of the hoarders as a collective I can come up with: charming, manipulative, lying, alcoholism, drug addiction, severe avoidance issues, agoraphobia, racist, sexist, cheating, everything is always someone else’s fault.

Once we had some former students over (that’s actually happened a bunch–they are great people) and we were all drunk and Noah got a bit overly intense when he was explaining to one of them how she was helping to create abusive relationships over and over.  He was outlining how her behavior correlated with stuff that is known to be a problem.  She was visibly uncomfortable and I made him stop.  But I do that.  I’m ridiculously codependent.  I don’t have the energy to care for more people and I have no desire to do so in the first place, but I really wish I had people in my life.  I only seem to make friends with people who want me to do a lot of work for them.  I am having a hard time changing this pattern.  And in the process I seem to have to put some dynamite in my chosen family and find out if anyone is still around in a few years.

So far it looks like unless I call and make invitations I won’t see some of them.  I’m sad but not surprised.  That is the pattern.  Others have changed the dynamic.  We are trying to find a balance.  I need support and have none to give.  They are trying to work with me.  It’s hard to accept help.  It’s very uncomfortable.  Times up.  Gotta go start kid time.

D– don’t you admire how I still avoided that one issue?

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I don’t feel like I have a good grasp on normal.  I’m a freak and I’m going to raise little freaks.  I’m sorry for that only I’m not.  My demographic doesn’t need to fade out of existence.  We aren’t bad.  We are just weird.  On the internet when people bandy about numbers I have seen the figure 1 in 17 men are rapists.  I usually see that put right next to the figure that 1 in 6 women/girls will be sexually assaulted.

You know at least one rapist.  No matter who you are.  No matter what you think you know.  Unless you know fewer than twenty men, you probably know a rapist.  How do you live with that?  How do you account for that?  Do you think you are safe?  I never understand why other women have the hubris to feel safe.  I hope that I am never raped again.  I’m not going to put money on it.  I understand that part of the human condition is the need to play power games and at some point I may have the misfortune to be in the room with someone more powerful than me.  Or maybe I will be attacked while running some day.  Who knows.
Short of staying in my house and never associating with anyone again, what choice do I have?  I can do all of the little “avoid being raped” tricks that they pass around but in that last vital moment… really… there isn’t all that much I can do.  Some day I will have to depend on the kindness of a man to not rape me.  Really I will have to depend on it over and over.
Recently I was spending time with a good friend/former lover.  He suggested Watercourse Way, which is a hot tub place.  From the minute he suggested going there till when we left there was a part of my brain and body that was on high alert.  I was really afraid he was going to push physical boundaries.  He didn’t.  He has proven to me before that when he’s told to not touch me he is likely to stay 12′ away from me so there is no muddy area.  But I was taking a risk.  A fairly big risk.  He’s a big man and if he wanted to over power me it wouldn’t be hard.  I’ve known him for twelve years.  When I spend time with him I worry and I keep escape routes in my mind.
The guy who came over for dinner?  I don’t worry about that kind of thing as much.  When someone is going to be with me and my kids I’m far less worried about what they will try to pull.  Shanna’s speech is prodigious.  She speaks like a nine or ten year old.  If someone came over and tried to do something sleazy with me and Shanna in the room I am very aware that we will be one anothers witnesses.  It would be hard to over-power both of us at the same time and we could both speak to police later.  Right there it becomes a less powerful situation for anyone.  There is more than one person on my side.  It’s interesting to me that other women don’t see their children as a resource in the same way.
Sexual assault primarily happens among people who know one another.  Stranger assault is somewhat uncommon.  Most of the reason for this, in my only-slightly-educated-opinion, is because rape is about power and it is very difficult to assess the power of a stranger.  You pick victims you know because you know how to get past their boundaries.  A guy I barely know isn’t going to push his luck to hard because he will come up against my massive social hostility.  I do not appear weak on first blush.  You have to get to know me a little before you see the chinks in my armor.  From what I hear, on first blush I am often terrifying.  I’m really not concerned about shy gamer geeks coming over for dinner.  
Noah feels a little weird about the fact that I am still thinking about why nonmonogamy is a bad idea for me.  He thinks we have made the monogamy decision, ok those reasons are done–move on.  I don’t do that.  Monogamy is going to be a behavioral choice for me.  It’s not really a relationship choice.  I need to stop picking up sleazy men.  Some of my former lovers may read this.  I love you dearly.  You scare the shit out of me.  I am far more afraid of my former lovers than I am random men I don’t know.  
If someone I don’t know touches me physically in an even barely intimate way, say stroking my arm, I am extremely likely to haul off and hit them.  I’m rather reactionary with such things.  If someone starts touching me in a way I don’t like but I’m worried about preserving the relationship… I’m in trouble.  Because there is a battle in my head between, “Do I mind this boundary incursion enough to risk fucking up my relationship?”  Part of the problem with my anger issues is I don’t have softball defenses.  If you put a toe over my boundary line I can’t drop a beanbag on the toe.  I’m going to throw an anvil at your head.  It’s hard to survive being in my inner circle.  People don’t seem to make it much longer than a decade.  I’m glad Jenny is in another country.  Maybe she will manage to stay one of my intimate friends for life that way.
There are a lot of ways I am deeply broken.  I don’t ask for help well.  And I don’t defend minor boundary incursions well.  I don’t ask for help until I am in serious trouble and I should have had help an hour or a week ago.  For someone to waffle or hesitate or decide slowly what part of it they want to help with… I can’t stay and watch that.  I laid bare my need to you and you didn’t say, “Oh let me help” fine.  Fuck you.  I’ll fucking figure it out by myself.  That’s not very useful.  And minor boundary incursions are ignored until there are a bunch of them and then I explode.  Because I decided along the way that the relationship was more important than pointing out all those nit-picky things… and then by the time I build a list the relationship isn’t more important any more.  I feel bad saying that.  But it’s true.  Avoiding saying it doesn’t make the situation better.
Near as I can tell a rather large percentage of “rape” is sex that is coerced and unwanted but the woman never says no or actively resists.  We just shut up and take it.  I wish that I had another word for sex I don’t want but I never said no to.  I often or usually said no or resisted during many of the times I was raped.  How wishy-washy can I be.  I know that right now I don’t want to go through my list of rapes in my head but when I casually think, “Did I resist or say no?” I can think of multiple times I know I did.  I’m only seeing a few though.  And I’m tired and fuzzy headed and I don’t want to try and examine if that is close to the full list.  That hurts my heart.
I have a lot of shame around my sexuality.  I have a lot of shame around the fact that I have used fantasies of my father to fuel most of my masturbatory life for most of my life.  I don’t do that any more.  My orgasm response is nearly entirely gone.  I can’t help but feel that I put a graduate-degree level of work into learning my body only to decide that everything I knew was bad and I shouldn’t have ever wanted it and I’m disgusting for having ever done any of it.
Learning to feel horrified by that part of me feels inextricably tied to being a parent.  I am one of those loathsome people who shouldn’t be allowed near children.  Oh my god.  The idea that someone would allow a person from a sex community to meet their children is horrifying and disgusting.  What about when the parents are from that sex community?  Why do I have any morally superior ground?  Because I dropped some crotch fruit?  Oh give me a break.  I am the youngest child in an incestuous family.  It went on for generations.  I do not believe that being a parent means you are more likely to be safe.
Do you know what I like the best about the sex community?  The gossip.  Your reputation will make you or break you.  Having deviant sex requires finding deviant people who are willing to trust you.  Folks like to talk.  If you step out of line in the community, often word gets around.  It’s not infallible. But it’s fairly effective.  I depend on that network for a lot of my baseline assumptions about people.  Like: should I let them in my house or not.  Past that I tend to rely on the fact that I am twitchy and aggressive to get rid of most people.  Only people who are willing to deal with me loudly and aggressively dealing with them come multiple times.  It’s interesting to see how it shakes out.
But I’m not stupid.  I am well aware that the danger isn’t in the first few times someone comes over.  Who might pick me as a target?  Lots of people.  But going forward I have the hard and fast line in my head.  I’m monogamous.  It’s a behavior choice.  It changes a lot of how I talk to people.  When I am hunting people often mistake me wanting them.  I’m a chick and breathing and willing to fuck anyone–that means them, right?
Lately I spend a lot of time examining my behavior choices.  I don’t want to send mixed signals.  How do I physically hold myself when I am hunting versus when I when I am not looking for prey?  That kind of “being nice” is bad for me system wide because it fucks up my boundary defenses everywhere.    I’m having a very hard time with keeping my boundaries so active with everyone else and not with Noah.  It feels all or nothing for me.  Either I don’t get to say no to sex, with anyone, or I’m just not interested.  I think it is a lot more useful and productive for me to work through this than to try and deal with the issues around nonmonogamy.
I want to be with Noah for the rest of my life.  Some day I will probably have to deal with him dying.  I have some attachment issues.  I’m worried about being flighty and scared and unable to commit.  I’m worried about breaking us.  Nonmonogamy brings a whole series of big rocks into our lives for us to throw ourselves against.  Monogamy brings much smaller rocks.
The past few weeks since writing the book I have had some fairly frank conversations with myself about the level of trauma I went through.  I understand more of why people say, “I don’t understand how you survived.”  Because I did.  Because I got back up every day and I kept moving.  I don’t know how many of those I have left in me.
There is a song out on country radio right now, by Martina McBride.  It’s about surviving cancer.  I’m fairly terrified of the future.  I’m well aware that life has no obligation to be kind.  I need a partner.  I know people tell me that I am strong enough to be alone if I need to.  Yes, I suppose I could survive that.  But I wouldn’t really live through it.  Noah has the biggest piece of me of any one on this planet. It’s only going to grow by the year.  I can’t do this and keep my awareness up for big rocks.  Things will happen that are unavoidable.  Things we can’t ignore.  Things we have to deal with.  They have to be things that I can completely and totally have the right to be surprised by.  I can’t keep my expectations of life low enough for nonmonogamy.  I can’t expect to be kicked that hard on a regular basis.  I won’t be able to keep surviving.  
It feels like a melodramatic asshole thing to say.  Other people do just fine with the fact that their partner wants to give part of themself to someone else.  I’m not as fine with that.  Noah is a bonder.  I only kind of am.  I’m just fine with the scorched earth policy in life.  There are always people still standing.  There are always people standing because there will always be people who are genuinely innocents in this life.  They haven’t done anything to me or anyone else.  I try my hardest to be nice to them.  They seem to be able to forgive me for a lot of temper.
My approach of scorching earth when someone has transgressed enough on a close relationship is problematic.  A lot of the reason I blog the way I do is because I am releasing these words onto the open internet.  I can’t really come back later and deny doing it, now can I?  I need to have that accountability.  I need to have it so that I can’t become a liar.  I was pushed hard towards sociopathic behaviors.  I don’t come close to being a sociopath, but I certainly know how to manipulate.  I certainly know how to lie.  I don’t want to.  I want to tell the truth.  I want to be consistent.  If I make a record of my real and true beliefs I can’t end up being a liar, right?  
I don’t know how to communicate about the small things in a useful way with most people.  Luckily Noah seems to be able to handle the conversational equivalent of an anvil to the head.  When I am upset with Noah I can write about it as much as I want and he doesn’t feel slighted.  With other people I worry about discretion.  I don’t know how to handle that.  When I can’t write abou things I feel like I shouldn’t even be thinking them because they aren’t nice.  Then in order to feel justified in defending my original boundaries I have to over-defend them.  Because not am I dealing with whatever the original boundary is, but it was hard for me to buck myself up enough to say, “Hey!  I deserve better.” Because I feel like someone treating me like shit is pretty normal and par for the course.  It’s hard to believe otherwise.
And that leads neatly into something I’ve been observing in my social circle lately.  Has anyone else noticed how many of the geek boys who grew up being taunted and abused have gone on to be nasty bullies?  Some of the girls too, but I see a lot of the worst nastiness from guys.  I don’t get out much so I don’t pretend my experiences are the only ones.  I think about it because I know that by the time I try to defend my boundaries I sound and look a lot like a bully.  I’m trying to figure out how I want to deal with that.
Being a parent is teaching me who I want to be.  Shanna’s facial expressions lately are always angry.  She’s patterning off of me.  I don’t get to decide who she becomes.  But I get to decide who she has to put up with today.  I want my children to remember a stable, happy life.  I want my kids to remember parents who were enthusiastic about life–not people who put their head down to sludge through the misery.  I don’t want to show my kids that I am strong enough to survive any misery dumped on me.  I want to show my kids how to change your life so that you have fewer problems.  That means making different choices.  That means learning how to say that something isn’t working for me without having to scorch earth.
Parenting is really complicated.  I’m having a hard time being the person I think I should be.  Given the people I know and how they parent I don’t think anyone else has it easier.  My mother did her best for me.  It wasn’t good enough.  I am trying to figure out what my best would be for my kids.  I don’t have the assumption that I can muddle through and whatever I do will be good enough.  I know that the economists tell me it is.  But I can’t.  I have to have to actually change in order to be my best.  Otherwise I don’t know what will happen.  I don’t know how I will pass the cycles on.  The children of Adult Children of Alcoholics act like they grew up with a drinker in the house.  It’s about behavior patterns.  I don’t want to recreate the family that I had.
Who do I want to be when I grow up?  Well, I will be someone who invites people from sex communities over to my house for dinner.  Because I know how to keep the conversation G rated.  People who have sex are regular people too.  I do a lot of gardening.  It’s getting to the point where I am starting the beginnings of plans that are going to take me twenty years to finish.  I guess this is my forever house.  It’s a good thing it will be paid off in ten or so years.  Some day it will have more light.
Who do I want to be when I grow up?  I think that deserves ten minutes of writing on its own.  I want to be the gentled version of me.  I want to be someone who feels safe.  I want to be someone who experiences joy in my body.  I want to feel like I am a decent person to know, even if you met me at a sex party.  I want to feel like I am not a dirty little secret.  I want to be someone who is allowed to be complicated because there is far more good than bad.  I want to be someone who has a company-ready house every day.  I like making last minute plans with people and I have a lot of shame issues around house cleaning stuff.  I keep my house neat-enough.  Lots of people see it covered in toys and I barely shrug.  But I did mop and vacuum that day so it was perfectly neat at some point.  I clean a lot.  I think that is going to be part of who I am as a grown up.  I like things to be shiny and I need to just put that into my morning routine as something I do for me.  
Oh that’s pathetic.  Who do I want to be when I grow up?  I know I would like to talk about sex stuff again.  I don’t know in what capacity.  SFSI already turned me down.  I’m not very good at round table discussions.  
I will always be a person who likes to teach and who likes working with groups of people who are learning.  I don’t know what shape that will take when I grow up.  When I grow up I will feel a lot more comfortable with living in the town I live in.  I will have been here longer than anywhere else.  I am training for a marathon here.  I am learning these streets intimately.  I am meeting my neighbors.  I will be a person who knows a lot of people here.  I’m going to be that crazy lady down the street with the weird yard.  The one who used to dye her hair funny colors but then she shaved it.  They do recognize me and take double takes.  It’s pretty funny.
When I grow up I won’t seem weird.  I’ll just seem like Krissy.  I will be comfortable in my skin and I will make people near me feel comfortable in their skin.  Because it’s just as ok for them to be them as for me to be me.  Yeah, I’m not much like other people.  But that’s not actually weird.  Once you know me it makes sense that I am how I am.  It works really well for me.
That’s who I will be when I grow up.  I will have fucked up over and over and changed as a result.  I will learn how to actually live instead of just surviving.  That is who I want to be when I grow up.  I want to be someone who travels and meets people and has stories to tell.  I don’t want to be overwhelmed by how hard it is just to do the basics to survive.  I want to thrive.  I want to know that I have extra energy lying around for random people phoning and telling me they have to drive past my house, can they stop for dinner.  
I want to be someone who lives.  I want to be someone who loves.  I want to be someone who is safe and knows it.  I want to know that if some day I am raped again in a chance encounter it will be something that does not make me want to jump off a bridge.  I want to be someone who is actually attached to the people standing near me and they can actually give me support.  That is going to be a big change.  I don’t think I can be alone with such things any more.
I think that’s the line.  I’m strong enough to just survive and put my head down and get through everything that happens to me, no matter what.  I am a dumb animal and I have a strong will to live.  But I can’t do that and really live.  I will be so bitter.  So angry.  The hurting has to stop in order for this to change.  I know that happiness is a state of mind and not a circumstance.  I know.  I know I could just change it.  But I don’t know that I can by myself.  It’s too hard.  I need to stop hitting rocks for a while.  I can’t change my response pattern if I am constantly in flux.  It’s too hard for me.  I’m sorry.

Those sick perverts

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“I’ve been following your blog for awhile, I never comment. However I couldn’t not comment on this. I’m not judging you by any means but I couldn’t pass saying this. 

How can you bring someone to your house who you admittedly barely know and met through adult sex venues at that, and let him meet your daughters? That is truly scary. I think a mother should be extremely selective who she brings in the house and to top it all off lets meet the kids. Just my 0.02 cents. “



First, I’m not mad at you.  It’s your opinion and you are welcome to it.  I met this guy probably eight years ago.  When I used to attend BaGG he was a regular there and we had a number of nice conversations, but I wouldn’t say I am close to him.  He used to be housemates with one of my girlfriends.  I’ve known her for 14+ years and she lived with this guy for years.  This guy is also good friends with my ex-boyfriend Spot.  He’s not exactly a complete stranger though I understand how it sounds that way.

He was in my dining room for less than two hours with my children.  We talked about She-Ra and raising kids and the fact that his mom walked out on him when he was a toddler.  Both kids kept their clothes on.  We talked about our social anxiety.  We talked about what things we do to try and talk to people without feeling dirty and gross and bad.  I felt quite comforted by his presence.  He’s a nice person and I’d like to get to know him more.  I feel completely comfortable with the fact that he won’t challenge my monogamy.  

But he’s one of those sick perverts.  And I shouldn’t let him in my house.  I’m really not better.  I guarantee you that if I trotted out my kink résumé it is a lot more offensive than this guy’s.  But he is suspect and probably gross.  Because he’s a man.  And kinky.

I feel tainted and like I shouldn’t ever be alone with my kids.  You know, I’m one of those sick people too.  I’ve done some pretty disgusting things.  I have gotten off on some really disgusting things.  Obviously I am too dirty to be here.

I wonder when someone is going to figure out that people like me are just inherently bad and shouldn’t be around children.  It should probably happen soon before the irreversible damage is done.  I’m sure it is inevitable.  It’s not like I’m going to ask this guy I don’t know to babysit.  But obviously there is something wrong with me if I think it is ok to let a raging pervert in my house to talk to my daughter about cartoons.  

I’m not mad.  But I do feel like I am going to be wrong forever and ever amen.  I should never speak to anyone again.  Do you know how many people I am close to who have never been to an adult-only-sex-venue?  I can probably count them on my hands.  I guess that means I shouldn’t ever let my kids meet anyone at all.  You never know what they do on Saturday night.

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Oh gracious.  Someone is coming over to dinner.  Someone I barely know through adult-only venues.  And I’m going to put him in the hot seat of meeting the girls.  Oh goodness.  This probably isn’t a nice thing to be doing to him.  I’m asking him to dinner because he expressed that he liked what he knew of me but he has social anxiety issues so he never really talked to me.  By golly that sounds like someone I can talk to.  We’ll see how it goes.

Today both of the girls are actually asleep for naps.  It’s been an interesting few days for sleep.  And moodiness.  Lots of moodiness.  Well, different moodiness.  More sadness.  My over all anger level is much lower.  There is still a lot of unfinished business and I never like limbo.  Patience, Grasshopper.  Uprooting takes time.  Not everyone uproots in less than forty-eight hours at the slightest provocation.  (I’ve done that multiple times as an adult.  And I can’t count how many as a kid.)

I’m learning a lot about my life during my childhood.  I have a different perspective on interactions now.  I struggle endlessly with my inability to grant forgiveness.  I am trying to understand that people now are not people then.  I can forgive everything that has been done to me as an adult.  I think that is why I generally do not think of my adult less-than-consensual sex as rape, fully.  Because I do not shun the men.  Because I understand their point of view and I know that I did get in over my head.  I courted danger and I let my guard down at the wrong time.  My bad, right?  But now I understand that no one wants to be the bad guy in their own story.  Except for me.  I don’t seem to want to be anything else.

What does it mean to not be the bad guy?  I think I have been an asshole.  I think I have been volatile and threatening.  I have lost my temper in front of people in ways that scared them.  Effectively I lost control.  That makes me the bad guy.  I was telling Shanna just the other day that bad guys can be girls too.

I want to be something else though.  I don’t want to be the bad guy forever.  I hear this involves learning to “let go”.  I’m never sure what of.  They certainly don’t mean of control.  I don’t know what people want.  What does it take to be a good guy?  Damned if I know.

Today both of my children napped.  Tonight someone is coming over to supper.  I’m going to actually cook.  Using ingredients I grew in my yard.  That’s so fucking cool.  I need to go start figuring out food.

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I left off there yesterday.  I’m resuming for no reason beyond I don’t think I have enough mental energy to really write again today.  I feel slow and stupid and sad.  I’m pretty sure this is chemical depression.  I’m trying hard to not get too far mired in the idea that I am a tremendous failure at everything in life.  Just because I can’t do everything that doesn’t make me a failure.  It’s not all or nothing.  Today that is hard to believe because I’m grieving.  My body aches and feels heavy and weary.  It doesn’t really matter how I feel though.  I have chores to get through.  Then I really need to take the kids out of the house.  I’m thinking Discovery Museum.  We are all cooped up and frustrated.

I think I am at the limit of what I can do.  Now I wait.  I wait and feel this creeping sadness.  I failed.  I failed.

I feel like I should be tracking the running…

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Today I did 3.37 miles on the treadmill.  According to my rough scheduling I only need to do 3 miles today but Born This Way came on right at the 3 mile mark and that song is good to sprint to.  I alternated between going 3-3.5/mph and sprints of faster for a minute each.  I can't sprint for much longer than a minute yet.  Most of my sprints were at 6mph but during the last song I did sprints at 7mph and 8mph.  When I'm running at 8mph I have to flap my hands to deal with all the energy in my body.  I feel like I am flying.  I felt like my entire body wanted to keep running like that forever, only my heart would explode.  Only my weak heart is holding me back from being able to fly.

Normally I don't know how fast I am going because I think if you are going to run a marathon outside you need to train outside.  I wussed out today and went to the gym because it is cold and raining.  I figured that was better than not running at all.  

Because I was playing around with incline and I did a lot of walking I was on the treadmill for 50 minutes.  I really wasn't going all that fast, but it was fun to experiment with different strides and see what different speeds really feel like.  The machine told me I burned 385 calories.  I just came home and ate and drank that back again.

I weigh 154 lbs.  My waist is 32.5".  That's 6" smaller than it was a year ago.  My bust is 38" and my hips are 41".  I should start doing nekkid pictures once a month like when I was pregnant.  Bodies are hella weird.

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I’m having a party by myself.  It’s my first time off from the kids since my long shift up at the café.  I opened a bottle of champagne and I’m watching movies.  First 10 Things I Hate About You and now The City of Lost Children.  This is a fairly visual one, so my rate of typos may go up.  I’m sorry for that.  I know I will be too lazy to really edit.

Today has been an interesting day.  Emotionally.  I think it is influenced massively by the fact that I started my cycle today.  I’m still getting used to that.  The post-children body experience is quite different for me in ways I have trouble getting my head around.  The first time I bled after Calli I cried in the shower and played with the clots.  I said goodbye to the children I will never have.  I haven’t done that since but each time I bleed I feel increasingly like I am shutting the door on my biological desire to breed.  I don’t actually want more children.  My body does.  But I don’t.  I have to deal with my whole emotional experience there.  My body clearly wants more children.  It yearns for more.  If Noah’s vasectomy failed I would rejoice in the gift of another child.

That’s actually one of the things that I am really thrilled about with the cessation of nonmonogamy.  I don’t have to go pursue a back-up form of birth control.  I’m really ok with the idea that Noah and I are done but for the intervention of G-d and I haven’t actually decided against further children.  My body wants more.  I don’t mind at all that we won’t have more kids.  I wouldn’t want to clean up after them.

This is the weirdest forking movie on the planet.  But Noah likes it a lot.  I’m trying to understand more of what he likes about it.  It is incredibly creepy.  Everyone is a caricature of a person.  Often literally.  Weird mutants and clones abound.  Sadness and despair is the stuff of life, isn’t it?

I can’t write about this movie.  I can’t see me in it.  I suppose that is vain.  My horrors are different.  Not better, but different.

Mostly parenting babbling

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I’m trying something different this morning, my wonderful daughter Shanna is cuddled up next to me on the couch watching Fraggle Rock.  I’m going to see if I can usefully write with her in the room.  I’m not sure.  I feel very self-conscious about how often I cry in the process of writing.  Often I’m sobbing the whole time.  I’m kind of weird about crying around my kids.  I do it sometimes, but I go to great lengths to avoid it because I feel so terrible about my moodiness.  I wish I could manage consistency.  I think the only baseline I could have would be anger.

That is what I am having so much trouble with.  I feel guilty that I will never be able to be a placid, mellow, just happy mom.  That’s not an option this lifetime.  I am often happy.  I am sometimes mellow.  But I am also quick to anger.  My anger burns hot.  I get very sad.  I may be one of the only women I know who isn’t bothered by the term “hysterical”.  Even though I know it has nothing to do with my uterus, I really do get a kind of freaked out that men don’t get.  At least not in places I can see.  Sometimes it seems like I am the example of what is wrong with women.  I should try to be more stable.  More like the men in my life and all.  Because the women in my life are more stable than me, but not by much.  I’m sure that’s not a nice thing to say.

I’ve been really enjoying reading Austen novels lately.  That’s funny because I avoided them like the plague when I was in college for that English degree.  I’m enjoying seeing how very slow their lives are.  It feels like it is giving me permission to strive for less.  If I want to be a developed and accomplished person I need to have a lot of time spent in my house just improving myself.  If I am running around with too many things I am obliged to get done in a day I will spin my wheels in place and not improve much.  I’ll be too angry and frustrated to get the lessons from things I want to get.

Writing with Shanna here is different.  I’m being vague and that’s funny because she can’t read yet.  I’m not trying to spare her.  If I want Shanna to grow up reading I need to read in front of her.  If I want her to grow up being curious and interested in everything she can reach her hands out and touch I have to be free to walk with her and talk about the things she sees.  I have to be non-distracted enough to focus on her questions.  If I’m busy then I snap at her to leave me alone.  I don’t want that to be our relationship.

I want my daughter to be one of the blessed few.  I’m not striving for a “normal” childhood.  I don’t think I could create one if I wanted.  But she will grow up in this cocoon of love and acceptance and constant education.  That’s why I am drawn to Unschooling.  We really do sit and talk about things happening all day long.  I’m learning how much I know as I talk to her.  I know a great deal more about biology than I would have guessed.  I am thinking about getting a few books so I can learn more.

Now I am in the garage.  Calli called for me after that last paragraph and I spent an hour nursing and cuddling.  I got to sit and think about how weird and defensive I feel right now.  I’m often not sure what I am writing about until I am done.  Randomly: last night I was thanked for writing the post about admiring women.  I was weird and awkward and I almost cried.  But I didn’t.  Self control!  I have it!

I don’t think I know how to be a mother, exactly.  I’m not sure I know what that means.  But I do know how to talk to my children as if they are humans-in-progress and someday, not that long from now, they will know everything I know and more.  I tell Shanna every day that my job is to teach her everything I can so that she can be any kind of grown up she wants, regardless of my preferences.  I talk to her constantly about how different people have different things they like and she gets to decide how much she will agree with my opinions.  I feel weird about how often she wants to be like me.  It feels like a lot of pressure for me to think hard about why I have the opinions I have.  I don’t want her to have opinions based on my ignorance and bigotry.  I don’t want her to become an angry person because I am angry.

I feel like there is a certain level of anger that is normal and occasional and everyone gets to have.  I have no idea what that line is because I am often derided for any show of anger about any subject.  There doesn’t seem to be a consistent scale.  Or, whatever the scale is, it is also combined with the rule “And you are never to express any anger where any one else can hear you.”  I missed the rule if it exists.

I often feel like it is perfectly appropriate for me to be angry, but I should probably max out at seven when I express it and I seem to read to other people as much higher than that.  What am I teaching?  The funny thing is, I don’t have much desire to change this behavior pattern of mine for the sake of the relationships I’m missing out on because people are uncomfortable with my anger.  At this stage of my life I really and truly have to just be ok with making people uncomfortable, period.  I don’t want to teach my children to do the same thing though.  Or, rather, I want them to be able to make a decision for themselves.  I want them to have an understanding that I may get intensely angry but most people don’t and most people dislike it.  They get to have their own lives and figure out if they are angry or not.

Calli is at a different stage of development.  She has grown increasingly cuddly and desirous of physical contact with me.  She is starting to imprint pretty rapidly.  She is absolutely copying my physical movements, facial expressions, and tone of voice.  I have to stop yelling.  I don’t actually want to live in a house where yelling happens so quickly and constantly.  That places it on my head.

I’m dealing with a lot of my sources of anger.  I am going to decide by the end of today if I think I am willing to do the books for the business.  The answer is probably.  I would like to have a way to be involved with the community.  The owners and managers would become people I communicated with more.  I would be able to go visit when I wanted.  I was told that it isn’t reasonable for me to spend my only off-time doing more dishes.  I feel valued.  Thanks D.

I am figuring out my limits with regards to house cleaning and how I will manage that.  I can’t live in a big mess and Shanna was born messy.  When I make sure that Shanna and Calli are the only ones I’m cleaning up after, it’s a different conversation.  This is my job.  This is what I am doing with my life.  I am caring for my children.  That means I do have the entire obligation for the tornado.  I’m talking to Shanna about why I clean.  I show her how I do it.  I am increasingly asking her for help.  Often she is told, “I will clean up everything but _________.  If you want to go to the park today, you need to help me clean up.”  I work hard at encouraging her to play with one thing at a time and clean it up when you are done.  But that’s not how Shanna plays.  When Shanna plays the whole damn house is part of the game and every item of clothing and block and blanket and item of furniture is part of the story.  It’s amazing to me that she really and truly has an explanation of what everything is doing.  It’s not that she’s messy.  She is highly creative.  She needs to interact with a lot of items in order to fill her need to manipulate things.  I’m trying very hard to talk to her about cleaning in a neutral tone of voice.  I only manage when I’m alone.

When I’m not alone I’m angry that the other adults aren’t helping and it creeps into my voice.  When I’m alone with the kids I don’t expect any one else to be doing anything so I don’t have a reason to be upset.  I’m just muddling along doing my job.  I care about doing my job well.  When I worked at Ross Dress for Less as a teenager I was a ridiculously good employee.  I kept my areas spotless and I always covered more area than I was technically assigned.  I knew they weren’t giving me enough work because they were assigning work based on how much other people could get done.  I have never been able to tell if I have much more energy and ability to work than other people or if other people are lazy.  I think that most of it is that other people just aren’t as invested in (thing of the moment) as I am.  I was told over and over and over, “If you are going to do a job, do it right.”  And I consider so many parts of life, and therefore work, not optional.  If it’s not optional and you have to do a job right… that means you put 100% of your energy into everything you touch, right?

This is hard to sustain.  I feel like I am deficient as a person if I leave a job half done.  I do it sometimes but I beat myself up for a long time.  I’m learning how to put the housework into categories for myself.  Right now the living room is a disaster.  It looks like it hasn’t been cleaned in weeks.  The entire house was completely spotless and I vacuumed and dusted and swept and mopped yesterday.  I just can’t get upset.  I have times of the day where I am supposed to get up and clean until the house is clean again.  Then I am supposed to stop at a certain time.  The house always has areas I could be doing more in.  I need to deal with filing again, for example.  Right now I am trying to not worry about those things because I have (deleted future stressful event) coming up.  Lots of feelings.

But it’s time to get back to where I was before I dropped my basket.  My kids are getting easier to care for.  Calli is still a baby, but barely.  She’s very nearly a kid.  I realized this week that I need to get my sign language books out.  She’s not going to match Shanna’s early learning curve so I need to teach her more signs.  She wants to learn them but I haven’t been modeling them this time.  That is something I should do.  Calli clearly has opinions and wants to communicate.  I haven’t been giving her enough scaffolding for being able to do that.  I get the impression that her tantrums would disappear if she could just bloody say what she is thinking.  Development is an interesting thing.

I’m developing an increasing appreciation of having two girls.  I think I would have been the kind of asshole who thought they had boys and girls figured out because they have one of each.  Calli is emerging more by the day and I find her so fascinating.  She moves like me.  By which I mean, she moves like my mother.  I see so much family resemblance in her.  I see my brothers.  I don’t remember what my father looked like, not really.  I don’t see my sister.  She strongly resembles her biological father.  But Calli has the same skull shape as me.  I have a picture of me at thirteen months up on the wall in the hallway.  Right next to Calli’s six week pictures.  It looks like it could be the same kid.

Part of the reason this feels weird is because Shanna has always felt like a mini-me.  But Shanna and Calli don’t share any of the things that make Calli feel so very startlingly like me.  It feels like a strange split personality situation.  They each took very different things from me.  Shanna has a lot more of my personality.  Shanna acts like me on my very best days.  She is friendly and empathetic and eager to bring joy to people.  Calli looks and moves like me but is much more reserved.  She is very clearly going to be an introvert.  She’s seventeen months old and she needs alone time.  It’s funny because I have only started to recognize how clearly I need that as an adult.  So Calli then feels like more a reflection of my moody and difficult days.  That terrifies me.

I have a friend who has a very troubled relationship with her teenage daughter.  I’m terrified.  I’m terrified of how I will manage to get through the next two decades of trying to impersonate a stable and good mother so that my adult children will want to know me.  I don’t exactly take that as a given.  When I talk about my fears it’s funny how people always say, “Your kids obviously know they are loved.”  My mommy does love me.  She just couldn’t take care of me.  And when she didn’t take care of me she told me it was my fault bad things happened to me.  I’m not afraid of my kids not knowing that I love them.  A lot of the reason that incestuous families are so intense is because there is just so gosh. darn. much. love.  I’m not worried about my children knowing that I love them.  I’m worried about my children only being exposed to age appropriate things.  I’m worried about my children being told that they are to blame for circumstances beyond their control.

My children are bright and curious and indulged in activities that encourage both.  That means they are going to fuck up a lot as they figure out how everything works.  I get to decide what their experience of fucking up is.  Do they grow up learning that perfectionist attitude of: if I ever fail I am a Failure?  I think not.  Everyone makes mistakes.  Kids and grown ups alike.  Shanna broke a glass yesterday.  I can’t remember the last time she broke a glass.  I think it has only happened once before.  I didn’t yell.  I didn’t shame.  I didn’t say anything nasty.  I said, “Ah man!  Ok, that’s why I ask you not to set your glass on the edge of the table.  Can you look around and see how far the glass shards went?  Don’t get off your chair!  I’ll get the broom.”  Then we talked about what it means that we have broken glass on the floor.  We talked about safe clean up.  We talked about where glasses are supposed to sit on the table.  And she got a hug and a kiss and a hope that I got all the glass shards up because I don’t want my sweet girls getting cuts on their feet.  I did it right.  I don’t do that every time.

But isn’t teaching interactions one of those things I’m supposed to be teaching?  Ok.  So I don’t do it right every time.  How badly do I fuck up?  How often?  I don’t know.  How badly do I fuck up?  Not very.  Not really.  How often?  Enh, depends on what you mean.  How often do I use a tone of voice I regret?  Daily.  How often do I say something I regret?  That’s hard to measure.  It goes in bursts.  I’ll have like five of them in two days because I’ll feel guilty and off-kilter after the first one.  Then I won’t have one for a long time.  How often do I do something I regret?  Very rarely.  I don’t spank not because of some crunchy ideal but because I don’t think I could use it appropriately as a consistent tool and there are much more effective tools out there.  My big punishment is three minutes of time out.  I lost my temper and kicked things where the kids could see once.  And then I dealt with the consequences.  If it happens again then there can be a reevaluation of my monster status.  Everyone gets to fuck up once.

Right now I feel like I am drowning in my feelings of obligations.  I can’t have interactions with people unless I am working to earn them.  I’m not sure exactly what the mechanism of this is for me.  But I sure treat it in-my-head like I am required to always work in exchange for someone tolerating my company.  I must be paying for the effort of dealing with me.  I’ll make dinner.  I’ll wash your dishes.  I’ll do the driving even though you are a single person and this is going to be a nightmare for me with my two kids.

I have friends who have helped me massively.  I now have this huge feeling of guilt.  I have been in this needy phase of life for a few years now and I feel terrible that I require so much help and I can give so little.  I will never discharge this guilt though.  And I don’t want to pass it on.  I don’t want to feel it.  I feel so much less deserving of help than other people.  Other people don’t have to rely on their friends so much.  Other people have families.  My family wouldn’t really be able to help me even if they wanted to.  Sure, they could provide “babysitting” but it would be in a neglectful and abusive environment.  No thanks.  I feel so much jealousy and rage that other people have families and I don’t. To that end I’m supporting Noah’s fledgling efforts to introduce our kids to his family.  They aren’t perfect, but they are something.  And they want to love the girls.  I don’t want my kids to grow up like me.  I don’t want them to grow up knowing that there are all these relatives but none of them have any interest in them.

All these feelings around housework and obligation and love and caring for people and physical limitations and support and abandonment… it’s all one big mess.  I’m going to be an asshole for a minute and say that acts of service is probably my primary ‘spoken’ love language.  Having someone see that I am tired and offer to carry my load?  That is a lot of what lets me feel loved and seen.  I’m not invisible.  Yes, I am happy to do all this work because I love you.  But I need to be coaxed too.  I need to be coddled too.  I am tired too.

Noah spent a while last night laying out his timeline on burdening me.  We talked about how it has gone in the past, how it is currently, and how things will go in the future.  Noah went down a long list of reasons explaining why he thinks he needs to just step up and do a bunch of things right now.  Noah specifically talked about the things I have done for him and why he wants to turn around and help me.  I can’t ask for that help.  I can’t direct it.  I don’t know why.  I know that is a failure on my part.  Noah explained in detail that he has learned over time to notice a variety of signs that my difficulty level is much higher than I am expressing.  On one hand it feels kind of weird being decoded and on the other hand I didn’t know how much I was apparently hiding or lying about or something.

Yesterday I found out that one person recognizes that I am past my breaking point and I am going to get help.  In the past week I have made it such that I am not going to be providing much help to anyone but the kids any more.  It feels needlessly extreme, but it seems to be necessary for me.  I can’t be one of the modern women who gets everything done for everyone.  I don’t want to figure out how to rescue an unproductive day.  I want to revel in days where we spend all day lying in the sun talking about all the things I see.  I talk about plants and clouds and buildings.  I talk about how people behave.  I talk about how things are made.  I talk about metal and plastic and rubber.  I talk about what it means to be responsible.  Unproductive days mean I am too busy enjoying what I am doing.  I can live with that.

I want my daughters to learn that for everything there is a season.  Some day they will work.  I will almost certainly work at some point.  I’ll get bored without something to do.  But for now what we are doing is learning together.  I have to spend all the time that I can with my kids learning about the world because there is so much to learn.  How will we get it all done?

I have let Shanna have basically unfettered access to the iPad.  She watches a lot of Fraggle Rock, Thomas, She-Ra and then she has her movies.  She is increasingly playing with games.  She is doing the letter tracing.  She’s fascinated with youtube and what she can learn there.  I uhhh don’t know how she found nail polish and makeup tutorials, but she has had fun playing with those.  I don’t let her have access to youtube on the iPad.  That has to be used with an adult because bad links pop up.  I feel comfortable with this now because she uses it for a variety of things and she is incredibly physically active.  She likes to go on multiple mile walks with me.  I keep telling Calli that iPads are three year old toys.  We’ll see how long that goes.

So much is in my head and so much of it I can’t write about.  Life is really complicated.  I keep telling myself that everything will be okay in the end.  If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.

From here on out Noah is the person I have lived with the longest of anyone in my life.  With the exception of Jenny and our other housemate, I don’t have contact with anyone I have ever lived with.  Ok, sometimes I run into Tom, but our lives have diverged.  Noah is the only carrier of my story.  Noah is the only one I have to worry about being appropriate for.  Wow.  That’s actually an interesting thought.  When I’m having my ambient feelings of guilt for my behavior, Noah is the only one I will really have to worry about.  I have the kids for ~17 more years and then they are adults.

That’s a lot more pressure than it seems like.  A specific kind of pressure I don’t do well with.  I feel I owe my children a decent childhood.  I brought them into a world they didn’t make.  I have obligations to them.  I have a very different relationship with Noah.  I owe him nothing but what I choose to owe him.  Yet in every way that matters I would be a fool to not see Noah as “rescuing” me.  I feel like he took a chance on a stupid gutter kid, and this is how I repay him?  By being needy and whiny and incompetent and angry?  I feel like he is getting a bad deal.  And that makes me feel savagely angry that all I have to give is a bad deal.  I am a bad deal.

I was certainly a bad deal for Sarah.  I failed her.  I need far more help than she can give and I can’t help feeling angry about it.  That’s not her fault.  That’s not something she is actually to blame for.  She’s not doing anything wrong.  But I feel it.  And I take it out on her.  And that’s wrong.  I am wrong.  I don’t know why I need so much help.  It doesn’t seem like other mothers I know get even as much help as I get.  They don’t seem to fail as often.  They seem to be able to handle getting things done in a lot of different places.  I can’t track it.  I need to have my responsibilities all lie pretty close to one source.

There are a lot of things I don’t know or understand.  Right now I know that the sun is up and the sky is a beautiful blue.  The clouds are all drifting out of sight.  It’s been raining for a few days here.  For once I don’t hear a bunch of people whining about rain.  Almost everyone who has commented on the weather has been grateful for it.  I feel like for one storm we are all collectively breathing a sigh of thanks.  We need the rain.  The drought is ongoing.  I hope the clouds come back.  We need more rain.  Besides, when it rains I don’t have to go outside and water.  I’ve made a bunch of progress on the front yard recently.  Now that the rain washed all those obnoxious white rocks clean, I should probably take pictures.  It’s looking more like a garden.  I don’t know when I will get the playhouse made.  I screwed up billpay and we had some unexpected expenses.  The house part of the budget is overspent for many months.  I’m sad about that.  Oh well.  It just means I have more time to dream about it.  My kids are getting the house and yard I would have enjoyed growing up in.  I hope they like the experience.  I’m trying to not be oppressive about it.

Time to go inside.

I’m going to run out of steam

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I’ve been thinking a lot about this whole “having limits” thing.  What does it actually mean?  Does it mean that I have pushed myself so far that I end up in a hospital?  I’m not sure if something is going to have to go wrong internally or if someone is going to over rule me on putting me in a psych hospital some day.  I suspect that part of the reason I put off finding a therapist last year until I did was because I had to get past the lowest point on my own because a professional would have made different choices.

What life am I choosing and how do I want to live it?  I wanted to give the money to Occupy and be done with it.  I knew I didn’t have extra spoons.  Instead I was asked to invest in a company that exists to support a community I am only kind of attached to any more.  And now I am a business owner.  And now I have Responsibilities.  And simultaneously I have also discovered that I was inappropriately depending on help from some sources.

Lately Shanna is increasingly cranky.  Some of it is her age and normal development.  A lot of it is me.  I can see my facial expressions and I can hear my tone of voice.  I am teaching her to be an angry person.  I am teaching her that life is overwhelming and not something that can be done to ones satisfaction.  I am teaching her that life is a series of failures and let-downs to be bitter about.  On one hand, not everything works out and learning to roll with that is part of life.

I don’t think that I can truly be accused of not coping with the things life throws at me.  I do it.  But I’m not a nice person.  When people promise me things and then don’t deliver I am so angry I can’t function any more.  Part of that is I am over-scheduled and over-promised as well.  When someone lets me down I have to either suck it up and find a way to do even more with less or I have to let someone else down.  A large number of my biggest fuck ups in life have happened because I was terrified of letting someone else down.

My children are 17 months old and 3.5 years old.  They must be supervised 24 hours a day.  When I am trying to figure out what I can accomplish in a day the very first thing I have to account for is watching my children.  Once again it is me and Noah.  Noah is working from home one day a week now so that I can continue to see my therapist.  That means he is down to being unavailable for ~55 hours/week.  That is better than it was.  If I am going to go anywhere during any of that time I have to pay someone to watch my children.  I don’t have enough money in the budget to pay for a date night with my husband once a week.  I am sure as shit not going to pay a babysitter so I can go work for free.  I can’t.  That’s a hobby I can’t afford.

Because of how much our income has been reduced my driving is severely curtailed.  I get to put about a tank and a half of gas in the van every month.  That’s it.  And my kids deserve to still go to homeschooling activities.  Sorry, that’s basically all of my gas money.

I get $100/month to spend on all of my personal entertainment.  My extra commuting money comes out of that and means I don’t get to do anything fun.  This fund also has to buy my running shoes and running bra (that I still don’t have).

I have less than two hours a day where the children are guaranteed to be ok-to-ignore.  That’s only if they nap at the same time.  That happens most week days, but certainly not all and Shanna is trying hard to drop naps entirely and Calli really wishes I would move the start time of nap-time up by 2 hours.  But then I would be in the house having to keep kids (alternately) quiet for four hours and never get five minutes off.

I am of the opinion that my children are rather freakishly independent and able to entertain themselves.    Unfortunately Shanna’s favorite game is still, “Let’s dump every drawer, shelf, item of bedding, toys, and anything else I can find all over the floor!”  She has been a force of destruction all day every day since she attained mobility.  I refold every item of clothing in their room multiple times a week.  Often multiple times a day.  Now that Sarah has moved out I think I am going to give them a sleeping room and a play room.  The sleeping room will have about five toys in it so that during quiet time Shanna can’t rip them all out.  Her clothes can go in a different damn room.

During the day I have to deal with the fact that if I am absorbed in something I am doing (delete details I am not allowed to give in public about something very hard to learn that requires a lot of training, education, and higher learning thinking) Shanna is probably going to decide that when she pees she wants to use the little potty.  And she wants to be helpful and dump it into the toilet herself.  In the process she sprays half of the god damn bathroom with pee.  Do you think this is an isolated incident? Oh god no.  It’s worse when she shits.

You have to supervise children.  You can’t ignore them to go do adult things at these ages.  You just can’t.  It’s not ok to do.  They get into trouble.  And when they get into trouble guess what happens?  I get angry.  And then inevitably I say something I shouldn’t.  I don’t name call.  But I’m louder and fiercer and more blaming than is appropriate.  “It’s your fault I have to do ________ and I don’t want to.”  Whereas it’s true that I wouldn’t be doing whatever I was doing if not for her making the mess the blame is on me for not supervising my freaking three year old.

I can’t have so many adult things requiring a lot of my time and attention.  It doesn’t work.  I know it is the modern way that people have to be multi-tasking at all times but multi-tasking means I do everything badly.  I have to supervise my children.

And the second most important priority in my life has to be sleep.  If I don’t sleep I get physically ill and my emotional problems go through the roof.  The single most important piece of holding my mental health together going forward is probably going to be sleep.  Not sleeping makes me crazy and suicidal.  The strain of feeling that way makes me incredibly difficult to live with.  I’m quite sorry I wake up as early in the morning as I do.  I would give just about anything to change that, but I can’t.  If I go to bed at 8pm I get enough sleep.  That is just how my life has to be for a while until my body decides to allow this to change.

Those are some pretty big limits to have in this life.  If I was more able to deal with sleep disruption or change my sleep schedule I would have a lot more options.  But I really and truly can’t.  This is the make or break of me getting to be sane.  No one can ask me to give that up.

That does still leave me some wiggle room.  Not a lot, but a little.  I could start using Noah-home time for business related stuff that I can do from home.  There is a fair bit of that.  I am not going to give up the marathon training, but that doesn’t use up that much time yet.  I’m not happy about it.  I think I shouldn’t.

I wanted to donate the money to a cause I believed in not get tied to something that was going to steal what little down time I have.  I’m not sure how this is going to work.  But I think I am going to have to push really hard and really fast for limits on what I am giving.  We need to find a way that will make it work or walk away.  I’m not killing myself for a business I can’t set foot in because I am stupid enough to be a breeder.

I don’t want to be angry at my children because they need my attention.  And I don’t want to be doing tag team parenting so that I can go put in more work for someone else.  That’s not something I can support right now.  I’m not getting anything other than the knowledge that other people get to enjoy it. Fuck that.

I’m not being effective.  I’m spinning my wheels and focusing on the wrong things.  I’m not thinking like Sebastian here.  I’m acting like my time doesn’t need to be treated as valuable.  That’s really not an approach to life that is going to work for me long term.

Keeping this business would mean giving up writing.  There just isn’t enough time in the day for me to do both.  I’m not going to do that.  I think that’s another limit.  If something is going to cut in on my time to such a degree that I can’t write… I should strongly consider just not having it in my life.  Writing is how I find my way through this life.  I decide things and think things while I am writing.  I can’t do the same thing any other way.

When I am going through the day working I can’t finish my thoughts.  I can’t make connections.  I have to be in the moment responding constantly.  I have to have time to finish my thoughts or I feel increasingly angry all the time.  I am not going to get much socializing out of this business experience. I’m not going up there to schmooze I’m going up there because we need someone to fucking wash dishes and we can’t pay people right now.  And the smell of coffee makes me want to vomit.  I’m not going to learn how to barista.  Having to wash the dishes is disgusting enough.

I gave the money to this company because I was willing to walk out front and dump the pile of money on the ground and light it on fire if I thought that would do something in the world I cared about.  That doesn’t mean I have the energy to go get a job.  I don’t.  That’s a big difference.  Ok.  I’ve been negotiating wrong so far.  I need to change my approach if I am going to get what I want.  It’s time to go inside.  Noah is going to work soon.

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Yesterday we took advantage of our date night to shave my head.  First Noah used the clippers, then a straight razor.  I discovered that straight razors hurt a lot more than safety razors.  This is the second time I shaved my head.  The first time was when I was 17.  I shaved my head around three weeks after my father killed himself.  It was time for a new beginning then.  It’s time for a new beginning now.  From 17 until now I have made most of my decisions about my appearance based on the opinions of men.  I feel kind of ashamed when I write that.  It’s not the “me” I’m supposed to be.  I’m supposed to only care about pleasing myself.  You don’t amass a body count like mine by only trying to please yourself.

I’m taking more comfort from monogamy than anyone but Noah knows.  I don’t have to hunt any more.  I never have to leave the house wondering if I look good enough for someone.  Well, I’ll still dress in stuff Noah likes occasionally.  But I’m done trying to find people who are willing to fuck me.  It’s a different approach to life.  Non-monogamy is fairly all-consuming for me.  I don’t have many non-hunting periods.  I didn’t hunt during the breeding period.  I didn’t hunt much for a couple of the years I was with Tom.  Tom had me jumping through enough hurtles that I was content.

Noah is different.  Noah is happy to have sex with me at any time.  No factors beyond, “Are the kids occupied and safe and fine on their own?” matter.  He looks for child care or sleep.  Then he’s good.    I think he’s enjoyed the various colors and he’s finding something to like about every length of my hair.  Today the tiny cuts no longer sting so I bet he’s going to touch it a lot more.  It is neat feeling.  Last night it still hurt and the pillow was annoying so I didn’t want him to touch much.

I put a body stocking on after we shaved my head so that I could stay warm.  The plan was to tie me up and mess with my head being different.  That didn’t happen.  Instead we talked about the way our sex life is causing me to feel unsafe.  The way our sex life is dramatically increasing how much I dissociate.  We talked about the fact that every time he rapes me there is serious long-term damage.  How much damage am I really expected to bear this lifetime?  How many of these does he think I can handle before I jump off a bridge?  I have been sexually assaulted over and over for nearly thirty years.  I think I need at least a few years off.  At the very fucking least.

This is something I struggle with.  It seems like most of my appeal is that I am someone you don’t have to care whether I am interested or not.  If you want to fuck me, sure go ahead.  It seems like that usage is really the only purpose for my life, so why not?  That doesn’t increase my ‘bonding’ feeling during sex for some reason.  It means that pretty much all sexual contact has to be treated as potentially unpleasant and I have to learn to block out all of those sensations, forever.  Because that way I can survive being repeatedly raped.  I won’t feel it any way.  I can’t work on getting back to the place where I can orgasm.  If I do that, how will it be used against me or withheld from me?  How will I be hurt in exchange for being stupid enough to present more vulnerability in my body?

It’s time to start new.  For the first time in my life I never have to give in to that compulsive feeling again.  I never have to earn my social admission with my cunt.  I no longer have to advertise that I am there to fulfill sexual needs other people have.  It’s not my problem.  I am no longer the designated whore.  I don’t know what else I could be.  What else am I good for?  If I’m not going to be that, just generically, I think I am tired of being raped too.  I think it’s time to say that my husband should really start to respect the word “No.”  I should be allowed to be in control of my body.  I deserve it.  I have carried this body around for thirty years.  No one else has the knowledge of it that would allow them to treat it with respect.  Just me.  So right now no one treats it with any respect.

I need to change that or I am never going to stop feeling like I am one push from jumping off a bridge.  Life is harder than advertised.  Life hurts.  That doesn’t mean I should accept with resignation the idea that I have to tolerate being raped for my entire god damn life.  No.  Even though so many people obviously think that is what I am good for, they show my by continuing to rape me, I am done thinking that is all I am good for.  I don’t think I am strong enough to keep getting up afterwards.  I don’t think I have many more rapes left in me.  I think my body is nearing its limits.  I have already been taken down all the pegs I can be taken down.  If you put me any further down I’m going to fall off the board.

I go through the world in the body of a woman.  I don’t think it works like this for men.  Every day, whether I put time or energy into my appearance or not, I have to be braced when I am out in public.  People feel quite free to comment on how I look and act.  Most of the comments are nice.  I get told ridiculously often that I have a nice smile.  It’s one of the reasons I am completely uninterested in braces.  My smile is special and unique to me.  It is nice enough that random strangers tell me they are happy to see it when I walk around by myself.  I think what God gave me was good enough.  Even though my teeth aren’t perfectly straight.  Even though they aren’t very white.  I didn’t discover teeth brushing until I was twelve and I started noticing that it was really gross when boys didn’t brush their teeth before kissing.  I decided that applied to me too and I started brushing my teeth.  I have a lot of legacy damage from poor dental care.  I have an ass-rapingly-expensive dental implant.  Oh wait, did I just make a rape joke?

Of all the people in the world, shouldn’t I take it more seriously!  Don’t I know that this topic isn’t funny?!  I have been raped far more times than I can count.  It is just part of life.  I’m going to joke about it.  Otherwise I cannot live with the constant effect it has on me.  I know that other rape victims feel differently.  I’m sorry if what I say offends you.  We are all just trying to get through the day.

I am almost out of pot.  I will either run out today or tomorrow.  We have $29 left for this month in the health budget.  I plan to see my therapist one more time and that will be $150.  I don’t think I should buy more pot.  This is already going to be dinging next month.  Budgets suck.  I am *only* going to be able to pay for therapy next month.  Nothing else.  I need to start saving room in that budget because soon I will want to buy another massage package.  The massage probably is more important given the current strain my body is under.  Intimidating.

It’s time to start again.  The only way I know to be a parent is to be the kind of adult you think your kids should respect.  I want to be worthy of respect.  I want to make choices that are actually good for me instead of being a less bad form of self-harm.  Sex is often a form of self-harm for me.  That’s one of those things I will only admit on days when the wind is right.  I have as much denial around that topic as everyone else.  Having to be available to basically anonymous men is a form of self-harm.  I’m putting myself at enormous risk.  For the thrill of hopefully having judged right and the sex doesn’t hurt this time.  Maybe instead of trying to figure out how to write just the right personal ad I should tell my husband I want him to stop choking me and raping me.  Please can our sex life not be something that hurts me.  I don’t want to perfect the art of asking other people to stop hurting me.  I want to just close that book and walk away from it.  There is no point in pursuing that story.  I don’t want to keep upping my body count.  It’s not a goal any more.  Whatever there was to get out of that activity I did it long ago.

I know, everyone else who is non-monogamous will now tell me how they want to have connections and I’ll tell you that fucking me is one of the fastest ways to ensure that I am going to avoid you in the future.  You want more of those connections in your life?  I can have boundaries and keep myself safe if I treat the people as disposable so I don’t have to care what they want.  It is excruciatingly hard to tell Noah about the results of his (occasional, rare) actions because I already feel like I am letting him down.

He wanted a poly marriage.  He wanted to have a life where he got to be a highly individualized person.  He wanted a lot of time to himself to keep having other people and things in his life.  He wanted to continue on being a cheerful sadist.  He wanted to be allowed to do the things he imagines.  And I am not only backing out on being the recipient of his urges but I’m telling him that he shouldn’t do them with anyone else either.  I feel like the worst kind of double crosser.  I am a piece of shit.  I am changing the deal.

I can’t handle being raped anymore.  Maybe ever again.  This hurts so much.  The cost is too high.  I cannot live with someone who really likes it when I don’t enjoy our sex in any way.  Well, that’s too harshly worded.  I can live with him.  But I can’t keep doing that.  I’m tired of barely being able to feel my vagina.  I’m tired of rearranging furniture in my head during sex.  I’m tired of feeling scared in my home.  I never get to be safe anywhere in the whole wide world.

But Jesus-H-Christ.  I am now a partial owner of a bdsm coffee shop.  I am going to have to figure out how to negotiate those kinds of worlds knowing that I will never really feel all that much like I belong.  I don’t want to be hurt any more.  Nor do I want to hurt anyone else.  I don’t want to be raped any more.  I don’t want to fuck everyone who is kind of hard up.  What good am I then?  I don’t know.  But maybe it is time to find out.

I did’t shave my head to make me ugly.  I don’t think it does.  But I did do it to remove the distraction of trying to be appealing.  I don’t want to actually be pretty right now.  It is hard figuring out how to let guys down gently in a way that doesn’t result in me getting nasty treatment.  I have to instead figure out how to just not attract them.  Because if I am attractive it is my own fucking fault and I’m just an asshole cock tease if I don’t follow through.

I went to a friend’s party on Saturday.  I spent my time clinging to the few people who have come to my house.  I only had one conversation that was not me clinging to someone who has proven they like me.  The one-off was about babies.  And someone rapidly left the group when I talked about my labor experience.  I felt like I should just get up and leave the party.  Everything I have to say is repulsive and depressing.  My experiences are things people don’t want to hear about.  I’m not pleasant enough.  My life isn’t pleasant enough.

I think I need to learn how to just stop speaking at all.  Can you pick up selective mutism as an adult?  Probably not.  But I need to appear happy and perky.  I need to smile.  I need to be polite (whatever that means).  I need to look and act like I had a different life than I had.  That is what people like.  Those are the people who are liked.  I’m not nice.  I’m harsh.  I’m abrupt.  I sound angry.  I’m unpleasant and difficult and prickly.  I swear a lot.  I have no idea what manners most people follow.  I am bewildered in every social space because I am inevitably wrong and I don’t know why.  I don’t understand and I don’t think I ever will.

I own a business now.  I don’t have a choice about going out into the world.  I have a specific format that interaction is supposed to revolve around.  I have a job and I’m perfectly capable of behaving myself at work.  It’s time to try again on leaving my house and interacting with people.  Even if I’m not the biggest bad-ass bottom in the room it’s ok.  There is no where else in the world I can talk about the intensity of my sex play without people running in horror.

Just because I don’t want to be raped any more that isn’t truly going to send me screaming into the closet.  Once your sex life is as weird as mine it just morphs.  It doesn’t really contract.  There have to be other avenues to pursue.  Surely not everyone in the world is hurt constantly during sex.  They wouldn’t have so much of it.

It’s going to be a good day.

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I have stress erupting all over my life right now.  But I finally hit a moment this morning where I realized that I am truly doing everything I can to fix all of the situations I am standing near and all that needs to happen is time passing.  It will all get easier and better.  We really have gotten through most of the worst bits.

I get to choose what kind of day I am going to have.  Today is Sunday.  Today my wonderful Noah is home.  I get to spend time with him and our awesome kids.  Sunday is a rest day.  I don’t clean on Sundays.  (Yes, yes I know that you are supposed to rest on the Sabbath not on Sunday, but I’m a heathen.)  Today my husband is going to shave my head.  Eek.  I need to be in the right mood for that or it would be wasting the experience.  I’m not having him shave my head because I want to be bald.  Clippers would be fine for removing the color.  He wants the experience.  He has a whole constellation of experiences he would like to have around this.  I can either decide to have a good day and get my shit together and go have really good experiences with my husband… or I can be a pissy, whiny bitch.  What a joy.  So it’s probably time to put my big girl panties on.  I sent all the emails I am probably going to send today.  I am thinking about a lot of things.  It’s time to stop thinking about them and think about other stuff.  It’s time to go have flow experiences.  It’s been a while since we have really played.  This is going to be interesting to be challenged right now.  He wants me to give him something of mine.  He wants part of me.  Part of me that I have never shared with anyone in my life.

I kind of have to be present for that.  It wouldn’t be just to be otherwise.  I think my phone will stay in the garage on vibrate.  I will probably check it at some point, but I have a date today.  I’m busy.

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I now own 1/6 of Wicked Grounds.  That's pretty f'in cool.  If you want to know what it is you can shove the name together and put a www in the front and a .com on the end and you will see the nebulous new website. 🙂

How you spend your days is how you spend your years.

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I don’t see very many people.  In many weeks I only speak to the people I live with.  Soon that is going to narrow to a pool of one adult again.  I have a friend who is wonderful and amazing and has been coming down to visit me for years.  He’s been one of the thin threads holding me to the world sometimes.  I got to see him yesterday.  The visit was wonderful.  There was one line in particular that tickled my fancy: “It seems like monogamy is so… hasty.”  He’s not the first friend to tell me pretty much exactly that.

Non-monogamy means that for the rest of my life I need to think about what I have to do to be attractive to people other than Noah.  That sounds a lot like work.  Not to put too fine a point on it.  Non-monogamy means having to think about my boundaries a lot as they shift.  I have to figure out how to explain where I am to new people.  I have to always expect that after new-sex I may be in pain for days. I can find lovers who don’t hurt me even slightly (thank you Daddy) but it’s rare.  And scheduling with those people is a constant drain and stress.  Or I can stay home and fuck Noah.

I can’t express what it is like for me to have a partner who is interested in sex any and every time I look at him.  Monogamy with Noah is not signing myself up for years of deprivation.  It is a different situation.  My previous experiences of monogamy were that monogamy mostly meant “celibacy”.  I am rabidly against getting myself into that situation again.  This isn’t that situation.  If we had adequate childcare we would find a way to have sex three times a day every day.  It’s different.

I have sex with lots of people because that is the only way for a woman to have control over how much sex she is having, in my experience.  My experience is that men are just as big of withholders as women supposedly are.  I think the Embargo is kind of a crock of shit because guys tend to like the idea of a woman who wants sex all the time but they turn nasty if you say, “Again” before they want it.  They can’t handle the pressure.  It emasculates them.  Monogamy with Noah is not as hasty as it sounds.

The only thing standing between Noah and the bondage abilities of my dreams is me developing the patience to teach him.  Noah is ok with being bad at things before he is good.  I’m not ok with bad experiences.  I am too cocky because I spent so long as a bottom I didn’t need much time to get good as a top.  Noah is interested in keeping me happy.  He puts great effort into doing so.  I didn’t know a man could feel that way about me.

Most of the men I have dated put very little effort into me.  There are some that are better at putting up with a lot of me, but they are not interested in changing for me.  They are just mellow guys who can ignore the difficult parts of women and enjoy the good parts.  Good for them.  I’m really glad they exist in the world.

Noah is the only person who doesn’t tell me that I am too angry.  Noah asks for clarification if my anger is about him.  If it is, we try to fix it.  If it isn’t he just goes about his life and acts like it is perfectly fine for me to feel that way.  Ok, he doesn’t talk much when I rant.  But he genuinely thinks it is ok I feel that way.

It’s really hard being told you are too angry all the time.  I was just barely angry enough to save my life.  I threw my fiancé against a wall when I was eighteen; that’s a lot of why I ran away from that relationship so hard.  I have kicked holes in drywall at least five times over the last fifteen years.  This week I kicked the cabinet doors.  The 1/4″ screws in the hinges didn’t appreciate that.  I punch things like trees more often.  I punch metal things so that I can’t break them.

That’s the whole extent of my acting out as an adult.  Other than that I just yell.  I don’t even yell all that much.  I just have a nasty tone of voice.  I was interested in the fact that people with Borderline Personality Disorder are known for their loneliness and it seems to be tied to growing up neglected and sexually abused.

Do you know why I feel lonely all the time?  Because I was angry as a child because I was being continually sexually assaulted and no one believed me.  No one had any interest in protecting me or stopping the assault.  When I lived in a house with twelve people I was told to stay in my room alone while everyone else had dinner downstairs because “no one wanted to put up with my mouth.”  When people constantly tell me I am too angry… fine.  I’ll just leave.  I know that no one wants to put up with my mouth.

I’m told I should just stop being angry and learn to be “nice”.  Be pleasant.  Don’t ruffle feathers.  I’d rather stay home.  I lost a friend this year because I got to a point where I could no longer be nice about behavior that was bothering me.  I was told adamantly that he was never sexist, racist, and he has absolutely no privilege at all.  I am just wrong.  There is nothing wrong in his behavior.  I disagree.  It is to the point where spending the afternoon together and having dinner is too much time because by the end I am so enraged at your casual dismissal of all experiences that differ from yours drives me insane.  I cannot sit near someone so encased in his own world he refuses to even acknowledge that other people are allowed to have different experiences.  I can’t do that any more.

I just stay home.  Not very many people visit and I think that will trickle away when Sarah stops inviting people over.  I don’t know how to have friends.  Apparently it involves feeling something I don’t feel: lack of anger.  I’m stressful to be around.  It’s really not worth it.

When I’m alone with the kids that’s just not part of what is going on.  Ok, I’m overly huffy as I move around doing chores but when I have the schedule down I’m not even real huffy.  I clean for 1-2 hours every morning.  I have a circuit I do.  I go check the white board and I do my chores.  Part of what appears “huffy” is that I am concentrating really hard because I am trying to figure out how to make the process go faster.  Where are the pieces where I can develop faster coordination (folding laundry) and where are the pieces that I have to go slooooooowly or it is pointless (vacuuming) etc.  When I am alone with the children they get up and help with a chore a day.  It’s different from day to day.  Sometimes they want to “help sweep”.  Sometimes they want to “help vacuum”.  Shanna is actually helping occasionally.  There are tasks I can trust her to do.  I stand there and watch her and talk to her about it.  She beams.  I thank her and tell her I’m so glad I get to have a little girl who wants to help me.

These things fall apart when someone else is here.  As soon as there is another adult in the room watching me work the children stop asking to help.  It is culturally normal to sit and watch the work, not do the work.  That’s what I grew up with.  When I lived alone with my mother, we worked together. When she was off at work I learned to take care of house stuff for her.  When she got home we read or watched tv together.  We were partners and buddies.  I could clearly see how my efforts resulted in her having more time and energy to devote to me.  And she did.  She had no one else.

When we lived with other people there was always something wrong with me and I should go away.  Groups are so terrifying to me.  I’m well aware of how it goes when one person dislikes you.  Soon there are two.  Then three.  After all, I am so angry and difficult.  Aren’t things much smoother and nicer and more fun when I am gone?

When I stay home with the kids alone we schedule fun.  We go to museums and parks and the zoo.  We go for walks.  We make big elaborate snacks together.  I know that I am solely responsible for providing all amusement.  Except when I’m not.  And my kids are ridiculously good at entertaining themselves while I do other things.

When I know that I am the only responsible one I make sure I am balancing their needs.  We need to do “learning type” activities.  I’m pretty vague at this point.  Mostly that means that when I read aloud I talk about letters more than normal and I sound words out and talk about phonics a little.  Like two sentences.  But my kid knows that there are two ways to learn words.  You can either memorize the whole thing, like Daddy, or sound it out, like Mommy.  I told her that Daddy actually has way more words in his head than I do.  But I get to sound just as smart because I can sound them out anyway.  She deemed that a neat trick.  She still isn’t interested in learning to read.  She is adamant.  That’s ok.  Even though it feels like pulling teeth I initiate art activities and sit and do them with the kids.  I am drawing.

I actually think that the next book I put together should be a childrens book.  I told my story in an adult way.  What can I say to my children to help balance out the things I do that are broken?  How do I make them understand that warriors are sometimes grumpy because they do hard things.  Warriors can be anyone–even Mommys.  It’s not about kids.  Kids didn’t do anything wrong.  Sometimes warriors are just grumpy.  You can choose if you want to be a warrior or not.  There are other paths available.

I don’t know how to explain to my children that my battles are just in my head at this point.  I actually already won.  I just don’t know how to believe it.  I don’t know how to feel safe.  I never have.  I don’t know how to learn that feeling.  I’m trying.  Part of how I am trying is monogamy.  I am deciding that from this moment forward I never have to worry about pleasing anyone other than Noah and myself.  It gives me a lot of freedom to try things.  And if people don’t like my anger, fine.  Don’t come over.  But I should invite more people over.  I don’t think it is truly that no one likes me.  I don’t exactly extend invitations.  I’m sure people feel like they would be rudely inviting themselves over.

True story: on Monday a friend showed up for dinner.  We uhm, were supposed to have dinner together, out, on the following Monday.  Instead he showed up right as things were tense and hard and uncomfortable with Sarah.  Because telling someone that moving is in their future is a god damn unpopular thing to say.  We had plenty, because Sarah is awesome like that.  I keep going back and forth between saying in my head, “Oh no!  What will we eat now?!”  And trying to acknowledge to myself that I am actually a good cook.  It’s just not my favorite chore.  We will eat just fine.  Like we did before Sarah moved in.  I was getting it done.  Just not with as much good cheer as Sarah.  That’s going to have to be ok.  It has to be ok to be me in my house.  I can’t spend the rest of my life apologizing for my tone of voice.  I need to figure out how to raise children who can know in the pit of their stomach that I am truly not angry with them when I have a negative tone of voice.  I need to figure out how to raise children who can love me for who I am and love themselves and know they get to choose whether they are angry or not.  So do I.  I choose to continue being angry.

There.  I’ve said it.  I don’t see much point in pursuing this “nice” that other people espouse.  I’m always terribly unhappy.  I always feel stepped on and kicked and ignored and… No.  That doesn’t work for me.  However, I want to be effective.  I choose to not try to give up anger.  I don’t see a point.  I think that instead I should look very carefully at where I am angry and why.  Then try to change that situation instead of trying to change my feelings about it.  How about if for five fucking minutes in my life I acknowledge that my anger is generally in service of my overall well-being.  It truly is.  It burns so hot because I spend a lot of time actively damaging my well-being.  I don’t think the problem is my anger.

In order to feel ok with myself when I am out dating I don’t say “no” to many activities.  I’m well aware that “asking for vulnerable sexual acts is harrrrrrrd and people need to be supported in doing so.  Well, that’s fine and all but I’m not new any more.  There is this major thing in the bdsm community around fetishizing “newness”.  Everyone wants to be the first one to tie up, spank, flog, whatever the fresh meat.  I’m an experienced bottom.  My first time getting suspended was nearly twelve years ago.  My ex specifically was very into “firsts”.  That’s a lot of why I am so bitter.  Once he had done something with me once or twice he had no interest in doing it with me again.  He wanted to go find someone else who was new to do it with.  Do you know why that is?  (In my judgmental opinion.)  When you are playing with someone new they have few preconceived notions.  They will take what you give them and say thank you.  When you play with someone experienced they say, “You know, every time you put a rope across my right shoulder like that I end up with pain in my arm for days, how about if we move it like ____.”  That’s uhm, harder to feel like a stud with.

I long ago exhausted Noah’s repertoire of standard tricks.  He’s had to go find new and exciting ones for me.  He’s had to adapt.  And in the process he has learned things about my body that no one else bothered to learn.  Even when I try to tell other people, they don’t really listen.  They want to do what they want to do.  They don’t actually have that much interest in me having the kind of experience I want to have.  No thank you.  I’m really ready to move into a period of my life where I only have sex with someone who thinks I am worth all the effort in the world.

Maybe monogamy is hasty and maybe it isn’t.  I think that after five years of marriage we actually know what we are getting into.  I’m ready to stop being angry with Noah for pursuing other women.  I’m ready to stop being angry that I am not good enough for him.  Yes yes, I should just work on getting over those feelings so we can both continue to grow separately and change.  I’d rather put all that effort into working to grow together.  I think there will be more pay-out.

I have spent a lot of time living in an individualistic subgroup in an individualistic society.  I want to be part of something.  The only thing I will ever really have in the whole world where I know unconditionally that the other people truly want me to be there is my marriage to Noah.  I sincerely doubt I will ever feel accepted and loved the way I do by him by anyone else.  I will always be just wrong for other people.

I’m sure this is codependence.  I’m ok with that.  I do have friends.  They just generally live far away or they are very busy or they are chronically ill.  I talk to them online as we can.  It’s kind of like way back in the day when people lived on more isolated farms.  I do see people occasionally.  But mostly I’m just going about the business of living with my family.  We are a fairly self-contained little unit.  We can figure out how to do this together.  I can’t figure out how to do this if I am feeling the whole time like what I want is wrong to want.  I don’t want to be pressured to be poly.  Do you know what pressure to be poly means?  It means that everyone else thinks I have no business closing my legs either.  I’d really like to set a high bar of entry for the rest of my life.  I am worth so much that the only person who gets to have sex with me is someone who was willing to marry me.  You have to be forever and ever madly passionately in love with me.  But I guess wanting that is too hasty.  I should leave room for the fact that in the future I will probably be in a different headspace.  I will feel compulsive.  Why should I shut down that compulsion?  Maybe because it isn’t worth the cost.

If I want good sex I have to deal with the fact that it means major communication with Noah.  Not just lots of words.  But specifically saying the hard things I usually try to avoid.  Ew.  I can avoid talking about those things forever if I just go through a series of new partners hoping to strike gold and just find someone to “meet my needs” that Noah isn’t meeting because he doesn’t understand what they are or how to do so.

I don’t want to be a complete individual.  I want to be part of a whole.  I want that with every piece of my soul.  I am tired of always fighting to stay separate.  Fighting to keep parts of me away from whoever I am talking to because they will criticize or tell me what I “should” do or tell me I am too angry or tell me “don’t hold back, tell me how you really feel” or they will seem perfect and then in the middle of the marathon sex they will take a break for thirty minutes and watch tv and ignore me until they decide they want to fuck again.

No.  I want to know what I am going to get in my life.  I want to know what kind of support I can actually expect.  I want to know how much effort someone thinks I am worth.  I want to know that someone is really doing everything in his power to make my life good and wonderful and this is the limit and please-God-let-it-be-enough.  So far in my life it hasn’t been enough.  I feel like that is a failing in me.

Noah has put more effort into accepting me for where I am than anyone else ever has in my life.  I will not get better than him.  Every day for the rest of my life I want to sit next to him.  I want to talk to him.  I want him to be the one I spend my time with.  I don’t really want to have a whole separate life.  I spend time away from him because there are things that have to be done.  But I’m happier when I’m doing my work in the same room as him doing his work.

Other people don’t have to live like me.  Other people don’t seem to need this kind of scheduling.  This kind of isolation.  This retreat into the safety of being alone.  I don’t feel lonely when I am with Noah.  Well, that’s not true.  When I think too hard about the fact that I will never have a family because they think I am a liar and a terrible person for saying that my father assaulted me and pressing charges and forcing him to die and forcing them to know about it.  That makes me feel lonely in a way that nothing can ever repair.  Mostly I just don’t think about it.  It is easiest to not think about it when I am with Noah.

Only now he is realizing that his childhood wasn’t what he thought it was.  And the kind of hole I have in me is something we will create in our kids if we completely keep them away from his family.  The kids need to know they are loved and wanted by many people other than just me.  Although I would give anything to know my mother really wanted me in a way that allowed me to be safe.  My kids will at least start off with that.  Hopefully it is enough to keep them safe from being like me.  Apparently being like me is just about the worst thing in the world.  I certainly feel like I can’t leave the house without people commenting on some part of me that is unacceptable.

I don’t even know if it is true or not.  I don’t know if it happens or not.  But Noah likes me and wants me and thinks I am worth a ridiculous amount of effort.  And a ridiculous amount of catering to.  Noah wants me to do whatever I want with my house.  And he wants me to have hobbies that make me smile.  And he is trying very hard to learn how to say and do things in a way that works for me.  He is trying to learn how to communicate in a way that promises only what he means to promise.  It means that some things need to be black and white because the gray is just too hard.  I don’t think it is too hasty to decide that monogamy is a good idea.  I think it is a good way to decide that neither of us enjoy dealing with my emotional tumult around him being non-monogamous.  We could spend a lot of time saying there is something wrong with me because I have those emotional issues and I need to get over them.  Or he can say, “It hurts you.  I’ll stop doing it.”  That isn’t healthy at all to do with everything.  He does still play video games and go see his friends and have time off and… He is very carefully picking his battles.  What are the things worth fighting for and why?  Fucking other people isn’t worth the effort.  The payoff is way too low for the amount of effort.

I like the rhythm of days where we manage to work together and play together.  Noah likes to be told “Do this list of chores by x time.”  He will wait till the last five minutes and rush.  I like to be given a really long period of time and I will space the work out so I get to rest in between.  That means I tell him, “On Thursday at 7pm I would like you to _______” not “Some time this week could you ____”.  Because if I tell him “some time” he may not get it done till Friday at 9pm I will be angry at him.  He was shooting for Saturday evening.  Whoops.

I don’t especially enjoy being angry.  I dislike the body load intensely.  But I think I’m done feeling upset with myself for being angry.  When I’m angry that means something is going on that I need to change.  I need to pay a lot more attention to that than trying to “stop feeling angry”.  That’s telling me to learn to dissociate more so that I just can’t feel it.  I don’t need that.

How can I build things that are just for me into my life while spending all my time with my kids?  I think this is going to be an interesting learning curve.  With every person who tells me that I shouldn’t want to be monogamous, that it’s too hasty, that it’s too… something.

I know that I have strong mood swings.  I do significantly better when I take as many of the “reasons” for those mood swings as possible in my life.  Having to always sit around and wonder when my husband will get the itch to step out on me… it’s not worth the cost.  Because the paranoia and fear can surface at any time because I really don’t know when it will happen or have any control over it.  (Yet another) Tom told Noah that his incentives are not in alignment with his goals right now.

Time to go do something else.

I kept myself company while watching a movie.

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I’m thinking about escapism and loneliness.  I’m thinking about destiny and choice.  I’m watching a terrible movie so how could I think about anything less lofty?  King Arthur is the choice of the morning.    I’m watching movies about people who lived long ago and I’m wondering… what did they do with their time?  How did they while away the hours until death?  Did they really work all. the. time?  No, they couldn’t.  No one can.  But I look at the meaningless gestures in movies (dude smashing a pot just out of frustration) and I think, “Holy shit.  Someone would have to remake that by hand.”  I think of the things I have to repair when I break it in frustration.  It’s different.

I live in a small, constrained world.  I don’t have anywhere in my life I can go pick a fight with impunity.  I don’t have anything that wants my aggression.  I am supposed to be pleasant or at least neutral basically all of the time.  The running is one of the better coping mechanisms anyone can come up with and I’m doing what I can at this point.  I’m working on it as fast as I can and be good to my body.  Really.  Probably faster, in fact.  I am impatient.  I really should be stretching more.

Neutral or pleasant requires a lot of concentration and thinking about my demeanor.  It mandates a lot of silence on my part when I cannot be certain what my tone will be.  That’s a lot of concentration.  I think about how much freedom there would be in a place where sudden outbursts of violence were tolerated more because everyones life sucked.  Life was simply brutal.  You had to just expect that one or more of your children would die.  You were lucky if all of your children lived to adulthood.  It meant you were special.  God must have favored you.

Now we think that if your child gets a scraped knee it is because you weren’t working hard enough to protect them at every moment of the day.  And we must also ensure that they are entertained in a suitably educational environment for as many days a week as possible.  And activities!  It is no longer enough that you keep them from starving and keep them warm and clothed.  Now you must also provide for their entertainment and benefit constantly.  I think we make parenting a lot harder than it has to be.

I think of how very little survival is entailed in my life.  Is that why I feel free to create my own torment?  Is that why I start cycles of self-harm?  I believe that I should be hurt, that I deserve to be hurt.  And then I look around at pop culture for escapism from my non-hurts and see these glossy pictures of the only exciting two hours and twenty minutes that happened over a span of decades.  Seriously?  Wow.  Ok.  That’s a lot of shitty time to just gloss over as if it isn’t part of life.  I think that is the part that is missing in the cycle right now.  No one wants to put their head down and do the hard, shitty, brutal parts of life.  Brutal is so relative, you know?

I have been physically safe for the vast majority of my life if you judge by minutes of danger.  That is not true of most people throughout history.  If you look back, not that far, people had a lot more danger in every minute of their life.  Not too long ago you had to worry about a measles epidemic meaning you lost one or more of your kids.  We have gone so far in the other direction that people believe the benefits of survivorship outweigh the costs.  That we have somehow lost something by not culling the herd in that way.

If it was not my responsibility to live as long as possible, how would my actions be different?  If I were more likely to possibly die of starvation?  If I had real fear of disease?  I really and truly laugh at increased cancer risk warnings sometimes.  Because we have to die of something.  I have a pretty lame life if my only risk is increased cancer risk because I am carefully meting out my self-harm in ways that won’t really shorten my life but will make my time here less pleasant.

Anyway.  Kids like me used to be able to get in a lot of fist fights.  By the time you were an adult you had either gotten your shit together or you ended up in relationships where you hit and were hit often.  Honestly if I hadn’t been told and told and told and told that I deserve better I would be able to live that comfortably forever.  It would feel right.  I’m trying to figure out what I can do with the desire to be put in my place.

I feel like I don’t want to be the boss because the only boss I know how to be is an abusive one.  I can’t mete out tasks.  I can’t be in charge of that.  But Noah and I went round and round until I finally got to the point where I was keeping the house as “clean” as he thought that meant.  It was a process.  I am not good at turning around and dictating to other people how much work that means because apparently I do a lot more work than other people are inclined to do in a given period of time.  I can’t give someone the incentive of $30 an hour to work as hard as I work on my house.  That’s an experiment I can’t afford to repeat.

Having children in the house all day means destruction and food spills all day.  One right after another.  Going out is a different set of stressors.  It’s all a balance.  I don’t have time to think right now.  There are too many things I need to actually focus on.  I need to start learning Quickbooks.  Looks like that is going to work out after all.  I don’t know how I am going to make it work.  I’ll find a way.  And maybe if I have more to get done I will discover that I have less time to sit and think about how wretched my life was a long time ago.  That’s the essence of “getting over” PTSD, right?  You have to get on with your life and stop being distracted by things that are no longer happening.

It’s interesting how we seek to recreate cycles over and over again.  We want to do the things we are comfortable with.  That’s kind of the definition of insanity, yo.  What does it mean to do something different?  What should I be doing with my mind instead?  That’s what actual “coping” means.  It means successfully using up all of your time on thinking about other things.  It means finding a way to while away the hours until death doing things that bring you joy instead of things that irritate you.  That means you have to look at the things you are doing pretty carefully.

So far my method of parenting seems to be training them by modeling behavior.  I limit my world to things that can include them.  The more of the outside world I have to deal with and the more adult thinking I have to do the harder this is for me.  The shift is not automatic.  And I have to know my chores are done or I can’t relax.  I just can’t.  I recognize that not everyone agrees with my fanaticism.  I try to keep my chores to such that I can do them in two or three hours in the morning and be done for the day.  It seems like a reasonable amount of time.

I think I hide in the garage for three hours a day because I think that Noah needs to have individual time with his kids every day where he is also responsible for life stuff because they have to work out how to be around each other and this is the only time they can.  I just wish it left more hours for us to all be together.  If I go in there then it ends up being “kids are distracted at all times so they never have to entertain themselves”.  No thanks!  I am alone with my children for a very large number of hours a week.  They need to have steady time with people other than me.  It’s important for them to not grow up thinking I am the sole model of adulthood.

But I need to think a lot harder about how I am doing this and how much work I can handle doing in an ongoing way.  I think it will be ok.  I’ll find a way.  And I have to do it in a way that allows me to feel like I am enjoying my life.  What can I do that will help me enjoy my life more?  And it has to be pretty nearly free.  Excellent.  On one hand I feel like the answer is, “I have a whole library here of books I haven’t read.  I should read them.”  There are reasons I haven’t read the books I haven’t read.

Maybe I need to sit in one place and learn to think about things that are not my favorite.  Maybe I need to learn about a few more things.  I’ll have more time later.  The kids won’t need me so much later.  I’m not going to be in a place where my life is genuinely hard, maybe ever again.  I feel like such a whiner.  Isn’t that what mental illness is about?  Being upset by reality is kind of silly.  Perceived risk is such a strange thing to be afraid of.

I am not ever required to do something that is too hard for me again.  I can say stop.  It’s hard to adjust to and I feel ungrateful.  And I suppose that is my freeform response to watching this silly movie.

Inadequate to the task

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I feel like a failure.  I feel like I have harmed my best friend.  It’s true.  I have.  I told Sarah that I can’t continue to live with this level of unreliability.  I don’t think there is any chance that I can get my anger under control while I do.  I really and truly cannot handle having to ask another adult to do their chores. I can’t.  I know that is a failing on my part.  I know I should be able to learn to communicate better.  There are some battles to improve I can win and there are some I am going to lose.  I will never be able to handle micromanaging someone else in my house.  I’m trying to do less and less of it with the kids.  I’m sure I’m failing, but they are quite young.  I have time to figure out how to do that as it is necessary.

I cannot unlearn a lifetime of bad habits fast enough to be a civil person for Sarah to live with.  It’s not fair to her to put up with my temper tantrums and nastiness.  She is doing the best she can.  She really is.  I feel like this isn’t working because I don’t care enough.  Because I’m not trying hard enough.

The truth is, I’m out of support to give.  Sarah needs a lot of it.  And she needs to be able to drop in and get it how and where she wants while giving the support she can when she can.  I can’t do this.  I don’t have enough of me.

I think that more than the work I was depending on Sarah to be someone I could hand off being reliable on a schedule.  It’s not working because Sarah’s health is difficult to predict.  Sarah’s body is not mine.  When Sarah is sick she has to rest.  She really and truly does have to or she will pay for a long time.  When I am sick I have to keep going or I get so far behind that catching up is a problem and I’m even nastier and more bitter.  It’s very hard for me to give Sarah the space she needs.  I don’t get it.  I feel very bitter that I am supposed to be providing this privileged space to someone else and I don’t get it.  I am very petty and I’m sorry.

The thing is, I am this petty.  I do feel used.  I do feel like I am working as hard as I can with all of the hours of the day I am physically able to work.  I don’t work more because I haven’t gotten enough sleep in years and my body hurts and I’m exhausted most of the time.  I have nothing more to give.

When I have Sarah here I plan as if there is another adult to take the hand off.  This means I have too many days where I burn through all of my energy by 1pm and then I’m done.  I’m tired.  I hurt.  I’m impatient.  I’m exhausted and frustrated.  Then I have to deal with wondering if Sarah is going to do her “chores” on time or if I’m going to have to go ask her to do them.  No one woke up this morning and gave me a list of chores to do.  I know what they are and I have to just do them.  I can’t turn around and delegate.  I’m not the boss.

That was the problem with the domestic help, too.  I don’t really want to be the boss.  I want to one time sit down and negotiate with you what you want to be responsible for and have you just do it.  I can’t keep telling you.  You volunteered.  I asked for your input from the beginning and this is what you said you would do.  I can’t keep asking.  I can’t.  I don’t know why that is broken in me but it is.

Which is to say, Sarah is asking for reasonable prompting.  But I can’t give it.  That is a failure in me, not her.  This is an incompatibility, not a grave personal sin.  But it becomes harder and bigger while living together.

I don’t know if this will wreck our friendship.  I hope not.  I love Sarah so much.  I just can’t keep doing this much work.  I can’t keep depending on help that only mostly appears.  That’s not something I can live with any more.  It’s not her fault.  I don’t want to be angry with her all the time because she has health issues she can’t control.  It’s not her fault.  But I still have to do the work.  And that’s hard.

I feel like this is proof that I don’t deserve relationships.  They take work and I don’t have enough to give to do it.  So I don’t deserve relationships.  I can’t earn them.  I can’t do what they take.  I failed.  Again.  Because I am inadequate to meet the needs of my partner.  As usual.

I went to see my psychiatrist yesterday and she told me that I don’t need a pill I need a reduction in stress.  She told me that I need to ask my friend to leave and spend several months of staying home and actually getting my stress under control.  I’m trying too hard to do too many things.  I’m spread too thin.  That’s not what you expect from a psychiatrist, you know?  If anyone wants the recommendation for a psychiatrist in San Francisco I would recommend Ann Barnes.  Just sayin’.  It’s really nice when a pill-doctor says, “There is no pill that can fix this.  You need rest.”

I’m going to try.  I’m afraid of the loneliness.  I’m so afraid of having Sarah move out.  I don’t want her to go.  But I can’t keep doing what I’m doing.  I’m breaking.

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I feel like a failure.  I feel like I have harmed my best friend.  It’s true.  I have.  I told Sarah that I can’t continue to live with this level of unreliability.  I don’t think there is any chance that I can get my anger under control while I do.  I really and truly cannot handle having to ask another adult to do their chores. I can’t.  I know that is a failing on my part.  I know I should be able to learn to communicate better.  There are some battles to improve I can win and there are some I am going to lose.  I will never be able to handle micromanaging someone else in my house.  I’m trying to do less and less of it with the kids.  I’m sure I’m failing, but they are quite young.  I have time to figure out how to do that as it is necessary.

I cannot unlearn a lifetime of bad habits fast enough to be a civil person for Sarah to live with.  It’s not fair to her to put up with my temper tantrums and nastiness.  She is doing the best she can and she’s

The specific incident

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So that’s the problem.  That other post.  Then there is trying to figure out why I want Sarah here so much.  After she explained to me yesterday that she can’t live with my explosive anger because it is too much like her mother I went over to my friend Wikipedia.  Borderline personality disorder.  Oh that is so me.  Yeah.

Thing is, I have been absolutely over my stress point for a long time.  I don’t know how possible it is for me to get my anger issues under control without getting my stress levels under control.

So what happened is once we got home and I saw the kitchen in that state I walked into Sarah’s room and she was asleep.  I stomped into the kitchen and started cleaning.  I did so with a lot of banging and slamming.  I basically threw the asparagus pot into the cabinet and in the process I broke a glass pan.  Sarah says she cleaned that up for me.  I then slammed open the other cabinet door and clipped Calli’s fingers because she was closer than I thought.  It barely touched her, but it scared the crap out of her.

I honestly can’t remember the next sequence of events very well but I exchanged words with Sarah and she responded with hostility because she didn’t feel she deserved my anger and I kicked the cabinet doors off the wall.

Full stop that isn’t acceptable behavior.  I need to never do anything of the kind again or I should probably not be alone with my children.  I don’t believe in pie crust promises.  You don’t say you are going to do something and then just carry along with your life.

I have to lower the stress in my life.  One of the things that Sarah provides for me is that she has lived with an emotionally unstable mother and I feel very uncertain about the amount of time that Noah is gone.  I feel worried about how I will be later.  And yet having Sarah here makes everything harder and makes me feel constantly closer to the edge than I did before she got here.  There is so much more volatility with her here.  Because either I have to nitpick and remind her of everything or I have to do it or it doesn’t get done.

Is it getting better?  Is she noticing more and doing more?  Well… yes… but she is about to go from being home pretty much all the time to having two days a week where she is voluntarily on campus for 12 hours.  And she’ll still have a meds day.  I anticipate a sudden and dramatic drop in what she does around the house.  And I’m going to either have to nitpick her or roll with it.  I’m feeling very trapped.

It doesn’t help that part of the reason I feel ok doing Noah’s share of the work is because we have specifically negotiated things around the fact that he bloody well supports me in a life of lavish luxury by my standards.  I feel a lot of gratitude for that.  I’m fairly happy to do extra work for someone who provides me with a life this good.  I don’t have such an attitude towards Sarah.  I feel like I am working myself this hard for nothing.  So that she doesn’t even have to send me a text message saying that she isn’t feeling well or ask when should dinner be ready.

And yet, I kicked the cabinet door off.  No one should live with that.  My children should not be exposed to that.  I’m going to buy a punching bag.  I have a powerful need to hit and there are appropriate ways to deal with it.  I need to just do it.

It was interesting reading the BPD article.  This part near the end was interesting to me:

The features of BPD include emotional instability, intense unstable interpersonal relationships, a need for relatedness and a fear of rejection. As a result, people with BPD often evoke intense emotions in those around them. Pejorative terms to describe persons with BPD such as “difficult,” “treatment resistant,” “manipulative,” “demanding” and “attention seeking” are often used, and may become a self-fulfilling prophecy as the clinician’s negative response triggers further self-destructive behaviour.[102] In psychoanalytic theory, this stigmatization may be thought to reflect countertransference (when a therapist projects their own feelings on to a client), as people with BPD are prone to use defense mechanisms such as splitting and projective identification. Thus the diagnosis “often says more about the clinician’s negative reaction to the patient than it does about the patient … as an expression of counter transference hate, borderline explains away the breakdown in empathy between the therapist and the patient and becomes an institutional epithet in the guise of pseudoscientific jargon” (Aronson, p 217).[84]
This inadvertent counter transference can give rise to inappropriate clinical responses including excessive use of medication, inappropriate mothering and punitive use of limit setting and interpretation.[103] People with BPD are seen as among the most challenging groups of patients, requiring a high degree of skill and training in the psychiatrists, therapists and nurses involved in their treatment.[104] While some clinicians agree with the diagnosis under the name “borderline personality disorder”, some would like the name to be changed.[105] One critique says that some who are labeled “Borderline Personality Disorder” feel this name is unhelpful, stigmatizing, and/or inaccurate.[105]

Sarah and I are each working through our mother-issues.  I don’t know how to work through mine without writing.  And that’s not always a fun experience for people standing near me.  My mother denies all blame or responsibility for everything that happened during my childhood.  She was always quick to blame other people for what happened.  I have inappropriate coping mechanisms around that. Because if I got angry as a child I could get people to do what I needed them to do for a while.  Yeah, it was the whole walking on egg shells thing.

That’s not very useful as an adult and it isn’t what I want to teach my kids.  What do I want to teach my kids?

I don’t know.  But not what I am doing.  And before people provide me with a list of “stop ____” admonishments… the problem is you have these coping methods for a reason.  You need to find a different way of coping, not just stop what you are doing.  My methods have been steadily increasing in intensity for a while here.  I need to express a whole lot of limits and see how that lands.  I have to stop hurting myself so that I can let people encroach on me in ways they don’t even know they are doing.

It’s really easy to feel like the whole problem is my fault.  If I only did _____ everything would be fine.  But that’s not true either.  I really can’t fix everything.