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Discretion is the better part of valour

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I feel like the search for appropriate discretion is one of my more difficult journeys as an adult.  It’s one of the only ones I necessarily conduct in private.  That is just not my way, you know?  I have been having issues with Sarah.  This isn’t good.  I think that Noah tolerates me saying so many negative things about him in writing because he knows it is the only way I can give feedback.  I can’t say out loud the things I write.  I seem to be nearly physically unable to.  I simply cannot usefully communicate about them.  But I can write them down.

I am having trouble with the fact that Sarah is forgetful because of medication and then will adamantly swear up and down that I only said something once so she can’t be held accountable for the fact that I am so mad.

No one is to blame for the fact that I am “so mad”.  My inappropriate escalations are absolutely my fault.  Yes.  That is true.

But I can’t deal with how often promises are reneged on without any communication at all.  You just don’t show up and I have to roll with it.  I thought I was getting a coparent.  But you aren’t responsible.  You very clearly don’t think you are responsible because you don’t show up and do your job.  You want me to follow you around telling you what to do and reminding you about all the many things you aren’t getting done.

I don’t want that.  No.  I am not going to follow you around asking you to clean up after yourself all the time.  Do I seriously have to ask my adult house mate to put her crafting supplies away?  Really?  That’s my job?  Because you don’t notice.  Then I have to remind you.  How are you supposed to know I want it done?  And yet you come down pretty harshly on Shanna for leaving a mess.  That seems like “do as I say, not as I do” and I’m not interested in parenting like that.

I am so angry because to me the way you teach children how to be an adult is you act like one in front of them.  I’m fairly ashamed of how I have acted in the last few days.

So.  We went up to Davis on Saturday.  We had a good visit early in the day with a friend.  But I said something judgy and pissy and then she called me on my anger.  It was all done very appropriately.  But I felt really bad.  It felt like more evidence of what an inappropriate asshole I am.  Then we went directly to see Noah’s aunt.  It went fine, but I feel really stressed out and pissy when dealing with his family.  It’s really hard.  Then Noah and I had a fierce nasty argument for a lot of the drive home.

And I walk in at 4:50 to a kitchen that is a mess and no sign of dinner.  Even though it was Sarah’s day to make dinner.  We sat down just last week and made the new schedule.  She was in bed.  She had a migraine with aura on Friday night that involved diarrhea and vomiting simultaneously (thus the only semi-cleaned up bathroom I found on Saturday morning) so that is why she wasn’t responsible.  And besides I hadn’t clearly communicated what time I would be home so how is she supposed to know that I expected dinner at five she planned to start when I get home and it only takes thirty minutes and that is within her “window” of acceptable time to serve so there is no problem.  Right?

I didn’t bother to mention that I have had issues during my tenure of parenting where I was in ridiculous pain and projectile vomiting while shitting.  I cleaned up after myself and parented solo.  I got dinner on the table basically when it is supposed to be on the table.  The reason that happens is because my kids don’t eat flexibly.  They get upset and cranky and nasty if they are not fed on schedule.

Schedule slips with food effect the behavior of every single member of my family in negative ways.  And I’m supposed to just roll with whatever happens whenever it happens because hey, that’s just how life works.  You wouldn’t understand how dramatic those behavior shifts are because they have not been eating consistently any more.  Everything has been disrupted ridiculously because I’m trying to roll with it.  And things are so much harder.

If you want me to communicate in a way that adequately explains how important things are to me that means long ranty blog posts.  That is the only way I have found to really get my thoughts together.  Some rational person would say, “Why don’t you write it and send it privately.”  Because then it will be ignored and I will feel ignored and angry and unheard and like my reality is being denied.

I’m having a very hard time with how little housework Sarah does.  Being a body in a house creates mess.  I was overwhelmed before she got here and it has only gotten substantially worse for me.  I’m sure someone else would think that the solution is just to get used to living in a dirtier house.  Only then Noah comes home from work and starts helping.  He and I have specific deals about how clean the house has to be so that he gets to relax when he’s home.  It’s not ok to move another adult into the house who makes my job significantly harder and just absorb that load.

This is hard to talk about because Sarah does contribute.  But I can’t depend on her.  She helps and does work when she can.  When she has a migraine I can’t expect dinner to be on the table because she might be asleep or medicated and not really communicate about that fact.  I have to just roll with it.

But a big part of why I am so angry is Sarah has consistently pushed to be more responsible because she truly wants to be a coparent.  But then I have to put up with her being responsible with great flexibility around when and how things are delivered.  And I have to do a lot of micromanaging telling her to clean up her craft supplies within two weeks of using them because the children are spreading them all over the floor and I’m fucking sick to deal of cleaning this shit up.  Or I can just carry it to her room for her.  She may or may not say thank you.

She’s not aware of the mess.  She doesn’t scan the room for things that are out of place that need to be put away because she doesn’t treat it like her job.  I don’t have any interest in living with someone that I have to micromanage them cleaning.  I don’t want it.  I have said that loudly from the beginning.  The problem with the domestic-help-that-is-no-more was usually that she had no initiative.  I had these really long in-depth conversations with Sarah about that.  How much I dislike having to tell someone what to do all the time.

So we negotiate on the board for time.  Sarah has ten hours of solo-parenting time per week scheduled.    I have to cover all of the hours Noah is at work or working on his side project stuff.  That’s around 60 hours per week.  Five of Sarah’s solo-parenting hours are so Noah and I can have a date night once a week.  Most of Sarah’s other solo-parenting hours are when the girls are asleep during naps so that I can run.  I have another floating five hour block that I am allowed to schedule as out-of-the-house social time.  And previously I had a three to five hour window for therapy once a week.  Noah is now covering my therapy time.

I am running out of cope.  I thought I was getting more help.  Sarah is going to be basically scheduled “off” this coming term for 3.5 days every week.  She will be responsible for providing dinner four nights a week.

And we are also having a hard time figuring out money stuff.  That’s hard.  I talk about my finances far more openly than most people.  Right now I have long lists of things I want to be talking about.  But it would be hard to talk about in a way that didn’t sound really nasty.  We haven’t sat down and had a conversation about long-term financial planning.  That’s a serious issue.  I don’t feel like our goals are in alignment.  Not about anything.

I’m feeling really scared because even though I have had to go clean garbage that was sitting around for months out of Sarah’s house more than once I somehow thought that with a little support she would figure out how to at least do maintenance level stuff.  I unpacked her, organized her stuff, found a home for everything… all she has to do is put things away when she is done using it.  But she doesn’t.  And I’m supposed to follow her around and ask her to.  Because she’s not aware that it bothers me.  She’s not even aware that she left it out.

I don’t feel like I have a good response.  I am completely unwilling to micromanage her.  That’s not my job.  No.  No.  No.  No.  No.  No.  I do a very large chunk of the kitchen cleaning (more than half).  I do 90%+ of the dusting, sweeping, mopping, vacuuming, picking up, laundry (no one even has to fucking sort their own laundry), dealing with bills and finances, and I could go fucking on and on.  And I am supposed to remind her to clean her own blood off the toilet seat because how is she supposed to know it is happening.  The same way I know.  Because I have had to clean my blood up in the past.  I check the toilet seat carefully before I leave, even in the middle of the night.  No I’m not ok with having to teach you that.  I’m not your mother.

Sarah is responsible for ten hours a week of solo parenting with up to ten hours of carefully negotiated flex time.  We get a weekend off in February that I am going to have to pay for because she will do far less for many days in a row before and after “saving up spoons”.  And making dinner four times a week.  Other than that she does what she can when she can.  And it’s not a lot.

It’s important to say that I don’t ascribe malice to Sarah.  I don’t think she’s being lazy.  But I’m drowning.  I’m supposed to know which things to ask her to do on the right days.  Because if I ask her on the wrong day or at the wrong time she gives me a sleepy, “I’ll get to it” and then forgets the conversation happened.  She’s on a lot of meds that cause memory problems.  And then I just have to roll with it.  And keep reminding her.  And make a lot of lists.  I have to be responsible for writing everything down, which frankly makes it far more stressful and difficult than just doing it myself.  Because first I have to deal with writing it down and then I have to deal with remembering to show you the list.  And then I just have to just suck it up because it may or may not address the problem.

Sarah is doing the best she can.  I’m still drowning.  I thought that a coparent would be more help and less work.  I knew she was disabled.  I knew that in advance.  She made it sound like she would take more initiative with things on her good days.  Instead she does her own projects.  And leaves the mess for me to clean up.

I am not actually a tidy person.  I drop stuff wherever I am standing.  That’s why I do sweeps through the house over and over all day long.  That’s the only way I can have a tidy house.  I had to learn how to do it.  I am trying to teach my kids how to do it.  Things have been steadily improving for a long while.  I have made it so that Noah doesn’t drop stuff (he puts his shit away when he gets home from work) and I clean up after myself and I’m teaching my kids how to clean up after themselves.  Now I have a really messy housemate.  Who is so messy partially because of personal inclination and partially because of disability.

Teasing these two things apart is hard.  And I’m thinking very hard about whether I can handle having Sarah here if it adds to my physical work load this much.  My options are: take responsibility for having to ask her to clean up after herself all the time, do the work, or deal with the mess.  Those are the only options I have.  Or I can ask her to leave.

I don’t think I am negotiating my expectations very clearly.  I hired domestic help in October/November/December and spent way way way too much money on it because I was trying to find a way to get more help in the house.  I was trying to find a way to get things done to my satisfaction.  That was fairly disastrous.  Oh well.

Yeah, I am not ok with living in a messy house.  I’m dealing with helping my kids learn to be tidier.  I cannot fucking deal with having to live with a messy adult.  I can’t do this.  I have spent my whole life having to deal with the collateral damage and I can’t do it.  It sends my anger issues through the roof.

It’s going to be challenging to deal with the fact that Shanna is probably going to go through a period of having a tremendously messy room.  It is probably going to be one of her biggest forms of rebellion towards me.  My response, as the adult, needs to be to ignore it and say, “That’s nice dear.”  She’s going to have to rebel against me and she’s not going to be with me many more years by the time that’s a big issue.

I can’t live with a messy adult.  I am teaching my kids what it means to be an adult and have a tidy space.  I am unwilling to teach them that it means having to follow the other grown ups around asking them to pick up after themselves.  Hell fucking no.  I’m not doing that.  I’m not ok with it being my responsibility for communicating the fact that it bothers me that you leave shit out.  How are you supposed to know it bothers me?  Uhm.  By being in my house for more than five minutes?

And yet, Sarah has lived alone for a long time and it takes a long time to adjust and I’m not the boss of her and how dare I expect her to move in here and automatically start doing a bunch of work she hasn’t had to do and so on and so forth.  There are absolutely two sides to this story.

I have communicated to Sarah in the past that I cannot be responsible for assigning her constant chores.  And if she agrees to do something she has to be rock solid because I am constantly out of cope myself and when she lets me down at the last minute I have a really hard time adjusting.  Because my entire life right now is functioning on out-of-cope.  To co-opt her language I have been running entirely on spoon deprivation for a really long time.  Oh well.  I have to suck it up and adapt and get shit done.

And my entire family gets out of whack when we aren’t eating on a schedule.  It’s really dramatic.  But if I don’t write long ranty posts I don’t seem to be able to provide enough background information to explain why something is important to me.  Or it gets forgotten.  Or Sarah just doesn’t have enough spoons to do more than she is and I have to just deal with that.

I’m not sure how much cope I have left.

family roles

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When I was in middle school we moved up to Redwood Estates.  My aunt and uncle bought a new house and left some of the family behind at the old house and took some of the family with them to the new house.  Eventually all but their middle child ended up living in the new house while the old house was rented out.  When I say “all” I mean their two other children.  And my male cousin had a girlfriend who had three kids.  My girl cousin had a kid.  My sister and her two kids.  My mother and me.  That’s what I mean by “all”.  It was a five bedroom house.

We lost our driveway in an El Niño storm.  I have a lot of respect for nature.  We were stuck in the house for two weeks without running water, electricity, or phone.  We could hike up the mountain to get to roads so we did get help and what have you.  Eventually they brought in this awesome massive bridge and drove the cars over the pool onto the neighbors driveway.  Then we parked down in this little cul-de-sac and had to walk up a hellacious stair case to get to the house.  The stairs were unevenly spaced, very awkward to walk on, and really shitty to fall down.  They were also slick all year long from the water on the moss.

In losing our driveway we mostly lost the ability to get heat in the house.  Propane couldn’t be delivered.  They didn’t have the money to fix the driveway for years.  We just dealt with the stairs.  When we wanted to move someone in or out (that happened all the time) we would just open the gate to the neighbors driveway and hope she wasn’t home.  She hated us and if we used her driveway much she made our life hell.

One of my strongest memories during my childhood is coming downstairs from my bedroom to see Aunt Vonnie slowly walking into the kitchen with her arms full of grocery bags.  I asked her if there was anything left at the bottom.  She said yes but told me she needed to rest for a minute before going to get it.  Aunt Vonnie is older than my mom by a good ten years.  My mom was thirty two when I was born so Auntie is ~forty two years older than me.  I must have ben thirteen or so.  Let’s call her sixty.  So my sixty year old aunt was trudging up these treacherous stairs with her haul from Costco while most of the family sat in the living room watching tv.  There were children ranging in age from three to thirteen, most of them on the older end.  And several adults.  All of whom have health issues, sure… but so does Auntie.  And she’s the oldest one present.

I went around the room slapping everyone, regardless of age, and told them to get off their fucking asses and get down to the car right now.  If you want to fucking eat, you get that food into the house.  Auntie isn’t your fucking servant.  Go.  Now.  They listened, grumbling all the while.  I pushed and pulled them down the hill then loaded them up and sent them back up the hill.  I carried the heaviest load even though I wasn’t the oldest or strongest there because he was a lazy piece of shit.  As usual.  I think he grabbed the roll of toilet paper.  When we got to the top Aunt Vonnie thanked me.  I knew that I was the only one who was going to lighten her load.

It always appalled me the way she was treated like a dog.  She worked from the time she woke up till she finally fell into bed far too late at night.  She cooked and cleaned and did all the shopping and worked and raised many many children.  When my sister makes comments about how she will be the matriarch after Auntie dies she doesn’t understand what that means.  She has no idea how much effort it is.  Aunt Vonnie is the matriarch because she is the only (semi-)effective person there.  She is the one who maintains a roof for everyone.  She is the one who ensures there is food.  She hosts because she does all the work and has a stable home.

The last Christmas I invited my family to my home my sister sat here and informed me how it was going to be hard on mom to be passed over as matriarch because it was clearly going to be my sister because she was the one who does all the work.  I blinked.  I looked at her.  I sat there thinking about how many of the holiday meals I have hosted over the years.  My sister hasn’t done it once.  I thought about how much money they have all asked me for.  I thought about how often I have been asked to save their asses.

I don’t want to be Aunt Vonnie.  I am not going to walk around for the rest of my life muttering about how there is no point in saying anything because nothing ever changes I just have to do all the work for everyone.  I have too many anger issues to take that role.  It is not a fit for me.  I will break too much of my house.

I was told over and over how much everyone was sacrificing “for me”.  It was my fault that they had to spend money on me so that I could live.  I owed them for their sacrifice.  Not right away, of course. But they always knew that I had the annuity money coming.  Comments were made.  Selfishness is one of the biggest sins you can be accused of in my family.  It’s kind of funny.  It was never being selfish when it came to discussions about Aunt Vonnie’s share of the work load.

First world problems

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Life is what you do while you are killing time until you die.  Really, that’s all it is.  Maybe you’ll die soon, maybe it will take a long time.  Maybe you will know lots of people.  Maybe you will spend all of those years alone; lonely is strictly optional.  Happiness is a state of mind, not a circumstance.  And yet, we expect people who are financially secure and stable and married and _______ to be happy.

Seeing my shaman was a good choice.  I have a lot of oppositional defiance response to people.  To him, in particular.  Oh man he triggers all of my, “No no no no no no no” buttons.  And no matter how frustrated I get with him I will always go back for more because I learn so much about me being with him.  I learn more about the shape and size of me.  I learn where I need to push back because I really truly believe something.  I know something is true no matter what his opinion is.

He tried to tell me that I have previously been just fine with Noah dating.  Uhm… no.  I have written records.  See, this is why I write.  I was fine with Noah dating other people during the first six months we were dating and I was living with someone else.  That’s true.  But I was poly and Tom was monogamous because I couldn’t stand him being intimate with anyone else.  He wasn’t real motivated to go find another sexual partner either.  He wanted companionship more than sex and I still provided that.

Noah has different needs.  No, I’ve never been happy about him seeing other people.  I’m not shy with that information.  I have tried to accept it as part of him.  But I measure his dates in cuts on my legs.  I don’t actually think it is good for our marriage for us to do nonmonogamy.  If something hurts me that much, he really shouldn’t be doing it.  I am totally fine with it in theory.  I don’t have a problem with other people doing it.  But knowing that my partner would rather be doing that with someone else rather than me?  Yeah.  That bothers me.  I don’t say no.  Ok, I do.  But it’s pretty rare.

My shaman contends that the real solution is for me to just work on being bothered until I’m not bothered anymore so that Noah can keep doing what Noah wants to do.  To be fair, he thinks that I should work on it because I also have trouble with monogamy.

I think it is more useful this lifetime for me to work on other parts of my life that are causing me strife. I only have so much time to spend beating my head against walls of shame and terror and anger and hatred.  It’s going to come up around other issues whether I like it or not.  Nonmonogamy is complicated.  It takes a ridiculous amount of time and energy.  I don’t have it to spare.  And I won’t invest in this relationship fully if I know that I am just waiting for when he is going to pull away from me so that he can give a big chunk of himself to someone else.  Fuck that shit.  I guess I’m a selfish piece of shit but I think I deserve better than that.

The thing about first world problems is: they still hurt.  And you still have to live with them day in and day out.  No one expects anyone to be cheerful about third world problems.  But you are god damn expected to just suck it up for first world problems.  I certainly expect people to.  I will probably die like my grandfather having a heart attack out in the yard while working.  He was in his 80’s.

Ok, I’m going to take the first world/third world out of this for the next part because it sounds dismissive and snotty and I don’t mean to be.  I’m talking about my perception of the difference between rich problems and poor problems.  I’m using the phrases first world/third world reflexively because it is a common dismissive thought process.  But I should be better than that.

When I was a kid surviving was different.  The life I lead with my mother was different.  Being alive day by day was different.  Now that I am an adult I have a completely different situation in life but I am still the same person.  Surviving my childhood took a very different skillset than … what am I supposed to say about adulthood?  I won’t survive adulthood.  Ha.  What am I going to do with my adulthood.  How is the pattern of my days going to look in comparison to all I know.

What I know is a disjointed life.  What I know is work that comes and goes.  Unending sorrow and bitterness.  Trauma.  That’s not all I know though.  I know how to work with my hands.  I know how to build things.  I know how to build people.  Shit dude, I made two of them.  That’s pretty fucking cool if you ask me.  I’m defensive about being a good parent because that is my primary job.  I feel like I have to be judged on something and apparently that means I will some day be judged on whether or not my children are… I don’t know.  Appropriate?  Kind enough?  Successful enough?  Smart enough?  Uhm.  Yeah.  I have no control over those things.

How do you talk about these subjects without blame?  Happiness is a state of mind, not a circumstance.  Uhm, yes.  But if I had been happy during my childhood I wouldn’t have gotten out.  My niece is as smart as me.  I’m worried she won’t be able to get out.  And my nephew won’t get out.  At this point simple economics will bind them all together.

I feel I have satisfied any debt I owed my mother for the care she gave me as a child.  I have given her thousands and thousands of dollars, often to my own detriment because she was stealing my pay checks.  I don’t owe her anything.

I am angry this morning.  So angry.  I woke up so angry I feel like the top of my head might come off.  I am still just me.  But I cancelled my therapy appointment.  I feel very defensive about that.  I know I need to continue therapy but I don’t have anything I want to talk about in therapy today and is that relationship about meeting my needs or is it something I am doing so that I can check of check lists of what crazy people like me have to do on a set schedule for the rest of my life?

Today the opportunity cost of having to drive for two hours and spend about $18 in gas on top of $150 for the privilege of talking to my therapist… that’s too high of a bar for what I will get out of it.  On many days it is the right choice and I shut up and just do it.  But today what I will get out of the session will not be worth the opportunity cost.  Why is that something I feel guilty about?  Because I feel like I have to be accountable to other people in order to ever be right.  I don’t feel like talking to my therapist today.  So I’m not going to do it.  And I feel angry about having to defend that.  I really feel like I have to go down a long list of justifications about why.  Because I don’t want to isn’t good enough because I am crazy and bad and I need to go talk to a therapist.  Uhm, yeah.  That’s fucking useful.

Do you know what I’m mad about right now?  The price of juice.  I don’t need to go talk to my therapist to find my way down the rabbit hole of why that pisses me off.  I am even tactful enough to not write the story on the internet because such things actions are kind of tacky given why I am mad about the price of juice.  But I am going to go inside and tell my family the story.  And then I can stop being angry.  I don’t need to pay someone else $150 to listen to the story so I can stop feeling angry.  Once I explain it to my family we will figure out what we can change so that I can have help changing the feeling of anger.  I can do something about my problems.  That’s what makes it a first world problem?  My problems are all things that I can solve or out wait and they will go away.  I have short-term temporal problems right now.  Life is harder than advertised and all that.

Right this minute Calli is crying.  I have no idea why.  Noah is on duty.  I feel like I should stop what I am doing and go try to solve whatever is happening.  She would probably settle down more with me.  But she would demand to nurse.  I’ve already nursed her once today.  When she is upset like this she is especially rough.

These are problems that will go away.  Calli is already done crying.  I can hear her playing.  Maybe I don’t have to fix everything.  Having Sarah here feels different than I thought it would.  I didn’t know I could have another adult in the house so much and still feel so lonely.  Sarah has a lot of health issues and keeps a very different sleep schedule.  To be fair she has made remarkable progress towards being more in-synch with the kids.  We keep very different schedules.  And she has spent a lot of time by herself.  She’s used to being silent in her room all the time.  It’s different.  Sometimes it feels like we talked more when we were both on IM a lot.

I had a really exciting November.  I went out a lot.  I got to have a lot of really intense conversations.  It was wonderful.  I had a lot of interesting experiences I can sit and think about for a while.  That’s not my life though.  My life is quiet, mostly.  There is a lot going on–don’t get me wrong.  But it’s house work.  And laundry.  And gardening.  And taking She-Ra to swimming.  And being home from the zoo/park/museum in time for nap or all hell breaks loose.  And laundry.  And trying to make sure Calli doesn’t nap too early in the day or we will all pay.  And more house work.  And laundry.

I only make breakfast occasionally if I feel the desire to.  Like, a couple of times a month.  I make maybe four lunches a week.  I have to come with dinner three or so nights a week.  It doesn’t get to be take out any more.

I don’t get to be bitter about my problems because they are of my own choosing.  Why am I choosing to be bitter about the life I am choosing that no one else is forcing me to have?  Let’s be clear here.  Noah is not pushing us towards saving.  He pays no attention and I could financially ruin us and he wouldn’t notice for years.  Instead he is tolerating me forcing him into an ascetic life ridiculously cheerfully.  I am choosing every part of my life.  From how much I clean to how often I have friends over.  Why am I bitter?

I feel like I am not really choosing it.  I feel like it is forced on me because no one else wants it.  That’s true and not true.  Sarah and Noah are both willing to do more when asked.  And when I stop working hard things keep going the house just isn’t as clean.  I’m cleaning to please myself.  Ok, I feel upset that I have to work as hard as I do to have a house that looks the way I see my house in my head.  That’s an interesting entitlement.

I was never really allowed to play.  I was a reader because I wasn’t really allowed to have toys.  My mom always gave my toys away because she didn’t want to clean them up.  She went through my room with trash bags several times and just got rid of everything.  I don’t build attachments to things very easily.  I can’t.  Things are easy come easy go.  I’ll forget about it eventually, except those weird pangs some day.  When I realize that there is very little evidence of my life.  Only my sketchy memory and the random shit my mother chose to save.  Items that are essentially meaningless to me because I will never know the story attached to them.  I am invisible to myself because I have no reflection.  I have no one to tell me what they saw.

I have a lot of guilt around the fact that I make Noah and Sarah and the kids get rid of things.  I don’t let them keep all of the things they have sentimental attachment to.  I can’t.  We don’t have room.  And really should not have a storage unit with stuff we will never use again that was important or fit or was relevant a long time ago.  No.  That’s money that needs to go elsewhere.  It’s not rational.  But the push back is that I require the house to be easy to clean.  That means we really have to limit how much stuff we have in our house and everything must have a clearly defined home or it must not live here any more because the clutter builds and builds and then my life is a nightmare.  I won’t let anyone else make my working environment hostile.  I don’t go take a shit on your desk at work, thanks.

But then you have to figure out how much space should belong to each person.  It’s hard to define.  I feel like my day and life will be better if I stay home and save money and instead talk to Noah and Sarah about the stuff we can have some effect on.  I can figure out actual compromises and do actual work instead of just telling more stories about my mom.  Today, maybe just for today, I don’t really want to talk about my mom.  I hate that most of my stories about her are so awful.  She’s my mom.  I love my mother.  Irrationally.  Completely.  Intensely.  Why was my mama so mean to me?

Because my mother had problems.  She didn’t choose to handle them well and the collateral damage was massive.  That happens sometimes.  At this point my actual problems are all fairly small and easy to isolate.  I have a lot of lasting damage, but I feel like it’s maybe time to start leaving the scab alone.  Maybe just for today.  That’s good enough.

Why am I choosing to be monogamous?  If I reach down in the pit of my stomach it is because I don’t want to be a free person off living my life.  I want to be part of an intense dyad.  I want to be one with Noah.  I don’t want him to be a free person off living his life either.  I want us to be sharing this life.  That’s why I married him.  I have an easier time collaborating with him to do elaborate role play situations about pretending to sleep with other people than I do finding extra curricular sex that doesn’t make me feel like shit in some way.  The opportunity cost is so very high.

I don’t think I want monogamy because of ideals, necessarily.  I want to be able to stop thinking about this part of my broken.  I don’t want to have to deal with keeping a tight leash on my compulsive behavior and only meting it out in small carefully considered not-quite-destructive doses.  God it’s a lot of work.  I’m tired of doing it.  I am so very conflicted about sex.

My shaman told me that broken is a component of whether or not you have a range of emotions and a range of intensity within different emotions.  Like if you always go from 2/3 to 9/10 and you stay in only two or three emotions you are probably in a broken place.  If you have a range of emotions and a range of intensities… sure.  That’s how you feel.  Why not.  It’s not broken it’s just where you are.  I like how he alternates challenging me and affirming that I am already fine just how I am.  It means I get to pick how I grow.  Well, that’s part of why it didn’t work as a closer romantic relationship.  I couldn’t deal with how much I would have to push back.  It’s very hard for me.

Sometimes I wonder if my shaman has consciously created a personality for me.  He speaks about his multiples fairly frequently.  Fairly casually.  I know that he alternates between very distinctive approaches in how he talks to me.  It’s part of why I like him less around other people.  He is so very different.  He really is a different person, one I don’t know or like as much.  He can listen to me and not challenge me and go down a laundry list of points to affirm that who I am and how I am is working well in every way.  At the same time he can absolutely force me to speak in detail about all the specifics of why I am doing any of the things I am doing.  It’s hard to be honest enough to be worthy of the conversation.  I can’t do it very often.  It is too hard to be present with him as intensely as I am present with him.  Maybe that is why I don’t like him around other people.  I am also attuning to the other person instead of him.  Hm.  Interesting.

It’s probably time to go in and start working on my first world problems.  It makes me really happy that I know I can walk in the door and explain what I am upset about and talk about the root of why I am upset about it and have people be sympathetic and give a shit.  Then we can figure out how to solve it.  Because we will.  This life thing will happen.  Today will end and tomorrow might be anything.  Some of my first wold problems won’t be solved yet, but they will.  All I’ve got is time.

Just life

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Yesterday I had a weird realization.  I read back a bit in my blog and I noticed that for all I discuss my mental state (obsessively, constantly) I say very little about my life.  This was interesting to me to note as I also got to a place where I had to talk to Sarah about my plans for the yard.  They are connected, bear with me.

I get up every morning and I look at the stats page here on blogger.  I feel lame admitting that.  I can tell which traffic sources are probably just spam and I sigh.  But I look at the other ones.  The numbers are growing.  Every day I close my eyes and I smile and say thank you.  Even though these people are not talking to me, even though they feel no motivation to contact me in any way… someone sees me.  I’m not invisible.  It’s hard to admit how visceral and important that is to me.

How often do you call your mother?  How much do you resent talking to her?  I think about my mother every day.  I think of the things I would like to tell her.  I think of the off-hand comments I would like to make about my daughters because my mom would understand them.  Most of the time I just bite my lip.  I know that her responses would vary from completely on the same page to shaming and horrified.  She has always reacted like that to me.  I last spoke to my mother in May.  It had been many months since the previous contact.  I have barely spoken with her at all in twelve years.

What is my life actually like?  I clean a lot.  It’s a lot of how I deal with my compulsive tendencies right now and given the ever-present terror of losing my children for being an unfit mother.  I think I read MDC too long.  I worry that if I have a basket of laundry sitting out I’m screwed.  I read books to the kids.  I play a lot of Lego’s and blocks and Play Doh and I draw and I dig in sand.  I haven’t been gardening recently.  Running has been taking most of my physical strength.  I’m doing more of it than I post on facebook. I always want to put a smiley when I am being defensive and I have a firm commitment to myself that this journal will be smiley free.  It’s awkward relinquishing that desire to appear friendly.

I don’t mean to be as harsh as I sound most of the time.  I spend a lot of time apologizing for my tone and I worry about that, actually.  I hate that I apologize for speaking so much.  I speak quickly and directly, why is that so bad?  I’m not attacking.  I’m really not.  I’m left feeling like there is nothing I can say that will be taken well so I should just shut up.  It’s not my favorite.

I’m glad that Sarah is here now.  I’m not alone.  I have had people ask me, when I’m discussing issues I have with Sarah, if Noah would allow me to make Sarah leave.  I thought that was hilarious.  Sarah is mine, not Noah’s.  I don’t know what Sarah is to me, but she’s mine.  And that’s that.  I don’t know what that is going to mean going forward.  She has an awful lot of needs I can’t and won’t meet.  Life is complicated.  Right now we are just trying to raise these babies.  We’ll see what the future holds.

It is interesting that for me “closeness” is out of sight and out of mind with some people and not with others.  I feel betrayed by the fact that people didn’t make an effort to see me when I was a child.  That I went all those lonely years without continual on-going relationships.  I would meet people once or twice and then maybe never see them again.  I barely saw my brother Jimmy.  I rarely saw my father.  Aunt Vonnie and Uncle Bob were weirdly intermittent, hell–so was my mom.

I have been sitting here working on my running schedule for two days.  I am going to be ready for a marathon in October.  Damnit.  It’s just a matter of making the schedule and then doing it.  Once the schedule in place it’s just fill-in-the-blank.  This was part of teaching that I loved.  I love knowing what I am going to do on so many days in the next year.  I love that I don’t have to wake up and decide.  I’m going to make up another hidden calendar for housework.  I’m going to start tracking it and schedule it more.  If I have a schedule and I’m just keeping my schedule I don’t feel resentful.  If I have to look around the house and think, “Well what’s a mess now?” I feel pissy.  I feel angry.  I feel god damn sick of cleaning up after these fucking people.  When I’m just keeping my schedule and doing the job-of-being-me I don’t mind.  It’s a mind-trick.  It mostly works.  Until I slack on my schedule and then I resent the schedule and then I stop following it and instead I am resentful of the housework.  Cheers.

Life is what happens when you are killing time on your way to dying.  Being suicidal means not wanting to kill the time anymore because it is so unpleasant.  If you have something to do instead of killing time you are building something you feel proud of.  I really did pay attention Mr. Frankl.  Thank you for giving the world your insights.  It’s not just about building something like a building.  What are you living for?  What is your purpose?  “The meaning of life is to find your gift.  The purpose of life is to give it away.”  That’s from a picture on facebook.  I don’t know who actually made it and it’s been reposted so many times I’m going to admit that I’m a lazy fuck and I don’t know who started it.

There is such a high burden in conversation these days.  Every single fucking thing you reference must have a citation.  I don’t think that we would have ended up with T.S. Eliot this way.  Maybe that’s a good thing.  Maybe I’ll start a revolution.  When I’m not trying to prove a specific point and instead I’m babbling I’m allowed to just say what is in my head without worrying about who said it first.  Maybe I’ll just start adding little things at the bottom of all posts: I plagiarize at will but since I make no money or fame off it I don’t care.  I won’t bother.  But I should.

What is my life like?  Noah makes me breakfast most days.  It feels really sweet.  My kids climb on me and love me and scream at me (volume control is a few years away) and run around in circles around me.  My life is quiet.  My life is slow.  I feel like I alternate between getting very little done in the greater-good-sense and periods of intense productivity where I remodel the house or do a bunch of yard work.

Now I have scheduled running into forever.  It’s time to start thinking about how I will balance my energy load.  I am going to build a playhouse for She-Ra (we have capitulated to her requests) and Calli this month.  It will be cute and little and very rough and rustic.  Simple plans mean I can follow through.  Excellent.  It’s time to break ground outside and start prepping for this year.  I need to talk to Sarah.  She is going to be doing starts in the house.  I have no idea how much work I’m signing on for.  But given that we can’t spend any money, why the heck not?  We can’t go elsewhere and do stuff this year.

This is going to be a save money year.  Even stuff like gas really is significant when we go anywhere.  So it’s time to stay closer to home for a while.  We’ve been gallivanting a fair bit.  I’m thinking about my financial goals for the year.  I should say “our” and pretend this decision involves Noah and/or Sarah but I suppose that just means that this is my opinion and our actual household decision may or may not look like this.

Right now I have the budget set such that we can save $1470/month.  It’s not a very friendly budget but it does have perks and fun money in it.  It’s not oppressive by any measure.  I would like for us to get to $2,000/month in saving.  But that’s where it starts feeling oppressive.

And it feels like every single day just involves more things we “should” buy.  Why do I want to save this much money every month?  Because it is stupid not to if we can.  Because we didn’t fund the college savings last year and that’s really not ok.  Because I didn’t pay off DVC with the annuity fund and it needs to go away.  Because we own a house and eventually we will have to do major repair work again and we have almost no buffer.

Really, if I save $24,000 next year this year it will be not even close to as much as I should have saved/paid off last year.  I’m behind in my long-term goal reaching.  Damnit.  And it’s because we had a really fabulous trip to Scotland, I gave away a lot of money, etc.  It was a really expensive year.  If I want to do the things I say I want to do long-term I need to stop bullshitting around and start doing them.  The first step is to stop spending so much money.  That means that we don’t get to have everything we want.  Far from.  It means doing without things that might be convenient or nice because we don’t need them.  I will say as diplomatically as I can that Sarah and Noah tend towards “Let’s throw money at this problem” in ways that give me hives.  I love them both.  We can’t keep spending money and that means choosing to simply not think about the wide variety of under-$5-things that “could” make our life better.  What makes our life better is not spending money.  Really.

We want to have $100,000 per kid for college.  We need to be saving a lot faster if we want to get there.  We have fifteen years until we need to have most of that ready.

We want to travel the world for a year in less than ten years.  We have to get ready.

We want to pay off a $19,000 loan this year so that we don’t have to pay more interest on it.

We want to remodel this house some day, maybe.  We have to do prodigious maintenance whether we like it or not.  That’s really expensive, every year.

We really need to save money.

But I was writing about my life, not future goals.

Right now my life is about going in and playing with the kids.  Bye.

Part of the road to Noah

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This fine morning a friend asked me about a link on Facebook about Mansplaining.  It lead to an interesting conversation about whether men or women (sexist language abounds.  I’m going to do an aside to say that there is a really odd mixture of statistics on whether rape is a female problem or a problem that is closer to equal than anyone can handle admitting.  I am defaulting to standard sexist language because that is my experience base.  I do not mean to say that my experiences are universal–they are not.  Carry on.) bear responsibility for rape.

I’m going to call myself out for being an asshole, because I was, but I was a persuasive asshole.  I said, more or less, “Oh reeeeeeeeeeeeeeally?  How much responsibility do I bear for being raped?”  I then proceeded to go through a list of the times I have been arguably raped as an adult when I should be responsible for my ability to pick “safe” people.  I decided it was time to tell the story of Dan Morgan.  I haven’t before.  Not really.

On December 18th, 2005 I posted this in my livejournal:
I am about to climb out of my head with wanting sex. But I still don’t want casual sex. I feel kind of lame. It has been just over three weeks and I am already going batty? Damn the time is going to pass slow… This is longer than I have gone without sex in… oh god… uhhhhh… two years. For the record: I have really enjoyed how much sex I have had in the last two years. *sigh* Thank you to all the lovely people who have made the last two years so much fun. 🙂 I was asked on Friday if going back to casual sex would be better than waiting for more meaningful sex. I told the person that I am coming out of a relationship where I have had the best sex of my life and going back to more mediocre sex would be a serious let down and I am not quite ready to do that yet. I think a lot/most of what made that sex so awesome was I was more present for it than I usually am. I asked Puppy for what I wanted in ways that I have never been comfortable asking before. Other than the actual technical amount of time spent having sex I got exactly what I wanted pretty much when I wanted. There was also a variety that blew my mind. I kind of feel like I rediscovered vanilla sex. And it can be GOOD. 

I miss every part of sex. I miss having his body over mine. I miss the scary intensity of having him slide into my ass. I miss feeling a cock in my throat. I miss feeling his tongue on my clit. I really miss having a cock in my pussy. The discerning reader will notice the change in possessive pronouns in the previous statements. There are some sex acts that were very specific to him that I miss him for. There are some that I am just missing in general right now. He is the only sex partner I have ever received regular anal or oral from. 

I didn’t mention this part to the person who asked, but I actually don’t really want to go back to casual sex because I don’t want to go back to the fanaticism I have when I am being a slut. I don’t particularly like getting STD tested every three months. I don’t particularly like condoms. I really really really like unprotected sex–which is a scary and dangerous thing. I can’t have it casually because I am not willing to risk my life. I am still on the pill. The first time he tried to break up with me I asked him if I could maintain booty call rights. I think I have it in the back of my mind that waiting a couple of months until I am less emotionally attached is a good thing, but eventually having him as a booty call would be a good thing. Although this is just mental masturbation. I really think that in order to not hurt myself emotionally it would have to be 4-6 months before I would be able to have sex with him and not cry through the entire event. And yeah. I am well aware that I technically can wait that long to have sex but I really don’t have to and I won’t go back to unprotected sex with him if I sleep with someone else. Ethics are annoying.

Right now, all I know is that I have a stronger desire right now for being beaten, for being held down and fucked unmercilessly than I have had in a very long time. I want to be slapped and taunted with how very horny I am right now. I want to have someone revel in my lustiness and appreciate the fact that I can wear someone out right now. I want to have someone fuck me until I beg them to stop because I am so sore. I want to be restrained and hurt and threatened. I want… sex.

The person I had been talking to on Friday was Dan Morgan.  I don’t know how we started talking.  I’m sure we met through Dickens Fair.  No!  Tribe?  Was it Tribe?  I don’t remember for sure.  That sounds right, though.  We were having these really awesome long conversations over IM about fun kinky sex stuff we were interested in doing.  I was adamant about casual sex meaning condoms.  He didn’t like that bit.  He told me quite a bit about how condoms were annoying.  My response: tough.  No cover, no entry.

Our first date was on Christmas Day in Disneyland.  I uhhh kind of bought his ticket in.  He was really broke and said he couldn’t afford the trip if he had to pay for theme park tickets, though he had friends he could go crash with who would go with him to the park if I got him in.  I didn’t have a problem with this.

We had a really fun date.  Involving upsetting his friends when Dan fingered me in the Tiki Room.  We were shit-faced drunk from the bar in downtown Disney.  Disneyland as an adult is very different. Other people go and treat it very differently than I do.  Anyway.

He went off with his friends and I went off with mine.  On December 27th I posted:
Disneyland is still cool.
First dates… are interesting.
Still not up for sex even though I am crawling the walls.
I went to the gym and I am proud of myself.
I haven’t made one itty bitty movement towards cleaning my apartment.
I have food now.
Tomorrow I have three netflix movies to send back.
My cat is hella clingy.
My family sucks even more than usual.
I am really drunk.
I told Puppy that he is an elitist piece of shit tonight.
I am tired of planes.
I am really tired and uninterested in sleeping for some strange reason… I think I am going to lose that battle in the next 10 minutes though.
I missed country music.
Zzzzzzzzz
sleep. 
I love my friends.

And then on December 29th I posted:
Tiki Bar TV

London Fogcutter, episode 8. That is the reason for my hangover.

I didn’t bother to mention that the real reason for my hangover was because Dan came over.  We had a pleasant afternoon together.  We dealt with a motorcycle gear acquisition for him.  There was a good store near me.  We tried to get to know one another.  By evening he said we should start watching the show.  He started making drinks.  He made more and more.  Dan is a really serious alcoholic.  I don’t drink much and never have.  Alcohol makes my stomach hurt.  He kept topping up my glass.  “Oh come on.  You don’t want to get behind now, do you?”  He was very antagonistic towards me trying to get me to drink more.

I wanted him to like me.  I will freely say that.  I thought he was shiny.  I’m sure there was an element of star-fucking in it.  He seemed well-liked.  Maybe if I stood next to him I would feel like not-poison for a while.

I woke up at about 3am in my bed confused.  I couldn’t remember anything past Tiki Bar TV.  And I don’t know that I remember more than two episodes of it.  I reached down between my legs and felt a lot of wet.  I rolled out of bed (because I had no other way of getting to the floor) and crawled into the bathroom.  There I proceeded to vomit until I thought I would die.  It was awesome.  This was when I was living in San Jose by myself for the only time in my life.

Puppy dumped me on Thanksgiving day.  Noah asked me to marry him in March.  Dan was right in the middle.  Of-fucking-course I said yes to Noah.

Anyway.  When I stopped puking I looked for my phone.  I sent Dan a text message asking where he was, when he left, and uhm, did we have sex?  He said he was at home.  He had left at 2.  Yes, we had sex.  I sent back another message saying: …unprotected sex?  He said, “Well you are on the pill so it doesn’t matter, right?”

I said basically nothing about this event to anyone who knew me.  It wasn’t exactly rape, right?  Only legally it was.  Regardless of whether I intended to have sex or not, once I was passed out drunk it wasn’t ok.  I had text evidence that I wasn’t interested in unprotected sex.  And I bloody well thought about the fact that I could go in for a rape kit and it would be bloody obvious that we had unprotected sex.

I was afraid of people saying that I was having second thoughts.  I was afraid of people saying that I was stupid or that I deserved it.  I believe that unprotected sex is a disease vector.  At that point in my life I was still really focused on the fact that I wanted to have children.  I didn’t risk any more disease than I had to.  I already have herpes and I’ve already had an hpv outbreak.  That damage was done long before.  I did the best I could with the information that I had.

Do you know why I was so afraid of going to the police?  Well.  That’s another story.  I can’t give you a name because I honestly don’t remember it.  I don’t really want to.  I wouldn’t remember Dan’s if he wasn’t a trusted member of my extended community I thought was safe.

The summer I was 18 I was drunk with the sexual power of being a woman.  Finally, for the first time in my life what I was doing and mine to decide about.  I finally had the legal right to consent.  It did actually matter to me.  It has always bothered me that my early partners could have gone to jail for what we did.  It feels like an unfair balance of responsibility.  Anyway.

So when I was 18 I was on match.com.  Don’t judge.  I was hanging out in the chat rooms a lot.  I met up with several people.  The first was a guy who was in the Coast Guard.  He lived in Alameda.  Anna was housesitting for a family way the heck up Summit Road.  The other side, not the same side as Redwood Estates.  Way up in the fancy-pants part of the mountains.  The house was beautiful.  I can’t remember if there were three or four stories.  Elaborate wine cellar (like a huge vault that was about 1/3 the size of the bottom floor of the house), sauna, steam room, exercise room, pool, hot tub… everything.  The family was having a lot of work done on the house.  They gave Anna permission to have me stay up there with her.

I know they regretted that.  It was all my fault.  Anna had worked for them successfully for years at that point.  I ruined a very profitable relationship for her and I still feel bad about that.  That is part of what I mean when I say I am poison.  Anna bore a lot of the brunt of the backlash for this.  But I’m getting ahead of myself again.

We invited a couple of my theater friends and this random guy from match.com up to the house for a party.  It wasn’t that wild because my theater friends were young and sweet and inexperienced.  I think back on them with this really nostalgic color.  They were really awesome and I didn’t know how to stay one of them.

Of course there was drinking.  Unless I snuck off behind Anna’s back she said I had three shots of tequila and then I begged off because my stomach hurt.  Everyone else kept drinking.  I don’t remember much after the second shot.  I woke up in the morning feeling fierce and disgusting.  I couldn’t remember any sex and I was kind of sad.  I was confused though because I couldn’t remember much of anything, really.  But I had to hurry up and get moving.  I was working at Pride in San Francisco.  I was working a booth for the Same Sex Marriage organization.  It was awesome.  I met people and did things I’m really glad I did.  In between doing all of them I had to run to Port-A-Potties to vomit.  I did that all day long.  When I went back up to the house in the mountains I took another shower and curled up on the bed.  I happened to lean over and look in the trash can.  There were three used condoms.

Funny.  I didn’t remember having sex.  I asked Anna what happened.  She told me about the party and said that eventually I stumbled back up to the room with the help of this guy.  I asked her how I looked and she said, “You looked really out of it.”  I nodded.  I told her that I think that what happened technically qualifies as rape.  I called the Sheriff.  She was dubious.  She was right.

The particular officer who showed up is one I have met before.  When I was 11 Al Smith, my next door neighbor at the time, asked me if I would have sex with him.  Our other neighbor overheard the whole exchange and reported it.  That’s why the officer came to my house when I was 11.  When I was 11 he told my family I was crazy and that I needed help.  He wouldn’t prosecute Al.

When I was 18 he told me, “What did you expect when you bring a boy up to a house to drink?”  He took the (outrageously expensive) sheets as “evidence” and then told me he was not going to fuck up the life of some nice Coast Guard boy for a girl like me who gets cold feet after the fact.

The fall out was really bad.  The family had to be told why we disappeared their sheets.  We would have been better off lying.  Given the response of the sheriff it looked really bad and hysterical.  It was even worse because I had gone skinny dipping in the pool and flirted with the guy painting the house. I was obviously horrible.  The family was really angry with Anna for bringing someone like me into their house.  They told her if she wanted to know people like me they didn’t want to know her.

Years later I was behind their car on the freeway.  The license plate has their last name on it.  I felt such a sickening wave of shame.

Why didn’t I call the police after Dan fucked me without a condom?  Uhm…. good pattern recognition skills?  Every time someone tells me that women bear some of the responsibility for being raped I want to scream.  I HAVEN’T EVEN BEEN ALLOWED TO GIVE CONSENT WHEN I WANTED TO SO SHUT THE FUCK UP.  Rape is an abuse of power.  Rape is putting a body part into someone else when they have not consented.  That is not something that is about mutual responsibility.

That asshole when I was 18 raped me.  I could not consent by the time he had sex with me, but at least he used condoms.  When I was 24 I was raped because having unprotected sex with me after I had it in writing many times that I don’t do that is illegal.  And I was too chicken shit to say anything because I am well aware that no one in power gives a shit what happens to white trash whores like me.

And then Noah showed up.  I would have been manifestly stupid and crazy to continue the life path I was on without him.

5 best memories

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1. Walking down the road with Jenny in Inverness.  I am so glad that she now has memories of me in her home.

2. Finishing NaNoWriMo

3. Angela's surprise party.

4. Calli and Shanna dancing and kissing.

5. Looking at my family on Thanksgiving and Christmas.  

An LJ kind of meme

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First (few) line(s) of each month's posts:

January: End of year schtuff: 

It's been a year! I have completed the breeding period of my life. 

February: If Noah hadn't gotten the all clear from his doctor I would be peeing on a stick right now.

March: Today my therapist said something very interesting. When I am meeting new people I should basically have it in my head whether I am facilitating Shanna having friends or am I looking for friends for me.

April: Cleaning did help. But not enough.

May: I'm just starting to get back into masturbating. 

June: Right now I want to go down a long list of self incriminating things.

July: Day one was yesterday, I was too busy being happy to post.

August: "I suppose that is something I hadn't considered about marriage. For the rest of my life it isn't that you smell like apple cider vinegar. It's that apple cider vinegar smells like you."

September: Yesterday I turned 30 and realized it was now half my life ago that I was institutionalized.

October: Today I went down to the school where I used to teach to hang out with an old co-worker and a former student.

November: You wanted follow up DSH? Well, here's the email I'm hitting send on

December: Every so often I don't want to say something on blogger.

I kind of feel weird doing this with just lj posts because there are more interesting posts on sim.  

Shorter and shorter.

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I’ve been pulling at my hair for an hour in that way that means I will cut it again today.  I have Hair on repeat.  Really if you think about it, Lady Gaga singing about hair is somewhat ironic.  She wears wigs.  As she says over and over, “I am my hair” she is saying that she is something that is external.  She has so much control over who she is that she decides differently on a daily basis.  Does that mean that people who have abrupt changes in their appearance are changing who they are?

This is all too angsty; I know.  I love semi-colons.  Damn you, commas.  Jenny likes to remind me that the “rules of writing” were just randomly invented by some twat one day.  Ok, that’s not exactly what she says.  But it is what I hear.  It makes me smile every single time.  Because if some twat just made it up one day I don’t need to feel bound to it.  I can do whatever I want.  It’s a fun kind of rebellion–normally invisible.

Along with my hair getting shorter I notice how my field of vision is shortening.  I’m not responding to emails or text messages unless I have seen the person recently.  Recently as in seeing them within the last month.  People I haven’t seen in many months… I don’t know.  I just never seem to remember when I am at the computer.  Or it is something like right now where I am actively avoiding.  I don’t know why I am actively avoiding.  I do.  I don’t want to say why I am actively avoiding.

I’m not at ease in my skin right now.  I feel not-ok in a way that I can’t ignore.  I feel like a thousand monkeys are jumping on my chest.  It hurts just behind my breastbone.  Right now I don’t feel like I can look people in the eye.  I feel dirty.  Small.  Less than.  It’s not anyone else’s fault.  At this point in time I don’t think there are very many people who know me even casually who think that of me.  Not really.  Sure, there are people who dislike me.

Outside of my family I don’t actually believe that people wish me ill.  And they all feel very guilty for wishing me ill.

I am trying to see my shaman on Thursday.  Since our babysitter quit I’m not 100% sure that is going to happen.  And I may have to reschedule with him because of a meeting in the city anyway.  It feels kind of like the universe doesn’t want me to see him.  I want to see him.

I’ve got my bangs too high that I don’t stand a chance.  I think I need to ask my shaman to shave my head.  There.  That is the compulsive.  Why don’t I ask Noah?  Why do I want to keep this away from him?  Why is my shaman more appropriate?

Well didn’t I just fucking load that question.  What does ownership mean?  I don’t know.  I really don’t.  I am very much like a wild animal.  I run off and do things by myself sometimes.  I can’t accept having everything in my life have to come from Noah.  Right now there is so very little in my life that isn’t for him.  That plays a part in why I was dating too, I think.

Noah doesn’t have the same wounds in identity because of his appearance.  I don’t see the deep fractures in his soul from feeling bad about how he looks.  My shaman has spent a fair bit of time being upset with his physical body.  Even my use of male pronouns is part of that fight.  I feel like it is a failure in me that I cannot default to gender neutral pronouns.  They all feel wrong, false, not grammatical.  Not allowed.

Does that mean that people who are not easily labeled by one of those correct pronouns do not exist?  It certainly feels that way.  I suppose that since the dominant name and label is generally male it is close enough.  That is awkward to say and write about.  I feel like I am jumping on the crazy train, but who am I kidding?  I was already here.

I want to see my shaman.  I want to talk to him about my shifting sense of self.  I want to talk to him about feeling so very bad about existing.  I don’t have a church.  I don’t have a congregation.  But I do have a shaman.  I’m not sure how these things happen.  How does a life get built, anyway?

The part of me that is fighting with my compulsion admits that I want to use sex to get close to my shaman.  I want to feel connected with him.  Given our history I know it wouldn’t work in the way I wanted it to, anyway.  We have an odd time connecting that way because we go at very different speeds.  We are not a match or it never would have fallen off.  But I feel like I should do it anyway.  I love him so much.  I feel like I have to earn the honor of his regard.  I have to prove to him that I do want him.  I do love him.  There is nothing else I have to give that has any value or worth at all.  Absolutely never is the pleasure of my company a possible exchange.  I know there is no pleasure in my company.  I am too mean.  Too sharp.  Too vicious and unpleasant.

I take comfort in getting to explain to him that I am not allowed to have sex with anyone else anymore.  It’s not my fault.  I’m sorry I am changing the deal.  I’m sorry.  I’m so sorry that I will never meet that need again.  Please, please don’t reject me now.  He won’t.  But I feel absolutely terrified anyway.  Hell, he doesn’t remember the last time we had sex.  I was not pleased when I figured that out.  Butthead.  Apparently he doesn’t value me based on the things I think he does.  He doesn’t even remember the parts that I think are the most important thing I have to give.

What the fuck is it that he is getting then?  I need to ask.  I need to go to him and talk to him about starting to dye my hair when I first started pulling away from my mom.  The colors have gotten increasingly bolder and more odd and aggressive as I have felt angrier and angrier with my mother.  The bleach is kind of a bitch though.  I had a temper tantrum while trying to comb my hair one day because I couldn’t get the knot out.  I cut it out.  I did a bad job.  It was fun for several days to try to even it out and giggle because with the curls and the weird dye job (I think five colors in splotches) it really doesn’t matter much if it is “even”.

But I’m tired of going out in public and hearing the comments.  I smile at the children who ask.  I frown at the boys who snicker “clown”.  It’s like fucking junior high all over again.  I’m done.  I’m not hunting. I’m done.  I feel like that part of me is gone.  I miss my hair.  I miss being able to turn my head and get a curtain to hide behind.  It was part of how I dealt with my vast discomfort in public.  I lost my veil.  I feel exposed in a way that feels deeply uncomfortable.  I have nothing to hide behind except my eyelids.  They do not feel like adequate cover.

I feel like me shaving my head will happen like all the cutting.  In the bathroom by myself.  I know my shaman doesn’t keep up with my blog.  He frankly tells me he doesn’t have the time to read my ever-increasing flood.  That’s ok.  It means I can talk about him all I want.

I feel like part of what is going on with the less-than is I feel so very weird about my place in the social hierarchy lately.  I don’t feel like I am behaving.  I fit nowhere.  It was a true thing I said when I told my therapist that the only way I will ever fit into a group is if I leave Noah and am a poor single mother.  They just don’t make groups for me any more.

What does that mean?  I guess that means this is the American Dream then.  Solitude.  More of it.  I don’t understand why.  I’m not sure where I got broke and I don’t know how to fix it.  I don’t fit.  I feel wrong. I feel like everything in me is wrong.  I still feel bewildered by my lack of anger.  I don’t have that energy right now.  Anger is normally a big spur to me getting off my fucking ass and getting shit done.  It’s one of the things I use to fuel my productivity and I don’t care if that’s healthy or not.  Everyone dies, right?  I could very carefully never ever use my body harshly.  I don’t think I would be very proud of my life.

What am I proud of?  I kind of want to go ask my shaman to bait it out of me.  He drives me insane.  He says irritatingly true things.  One right after another.  It’s hard to not hate him sometimes.  I would ask him to take the last of this shame from me when he shaved my head.  But I don’t think I am going to ask.  Because this is one of those things I have to do alone.  He can’t take shame from me.  Not really.

Shame is something that I own all by myself.  I have to learn to wear it or I have to take it off.  I don’t know how to take it off right now.  I feel stuck.  I feel too little and small.  I haven’t done anything to really be proud of.  I have done things that other people do and I expect far more support for it.  I am small and selfish and petty.  I am weak.  Really?  Am I?  Maybe.  Yes?  Of course?

I recently saw this picture, one of the canonical “starving children in Africa” pictures.  I feel terrible describing it that way.  But these pictures are used as bludgeoning tools.  You can’t ignore the fact that seriously, right this minute a small child is starving to death in another part of the world.  While you wear big fur boots and lots of makeup and talk about how pathetic they are.  It’s kind of an American trope, this guilt.

If I ever feel bad for myself I am supposed to remind myself that I am at least not a starving child in Africa and go on about my life.  Well doesn’t that just support the status quo.  I don’t much like the status quo.

The thing about guilt and shame is they aren’t useful.  They are paralyzing.  They rarely spur people to much action beyond denial.

When the children hiss hostile words at me I hear my mother telling me that all the people in the world think I look stupid.  Everyone thinks I am ridiculous.  Why?  What have I done?  Why is it ridiculous to play with your appearance?  Why is it expected to be a set thing that doesn’t modify as time goes by?  Why can’t I change?  Why am I to be mocked?

But you know what?  I’m a fucking grown up.  My triggers are mine to manage.  I am not going to get all the children in the world to stop making fun of me.  They are little assholes.  They can’t help it.  So are their parents.

I have a lot of interesting feelings emerging as my hair gets shorter and shorter.  My mother liked my hair short.  She wanted me to look like a boy.  She commented openly on it.  I’m really intrigued by how harsh my face appears with short hair.  I’m not sure how I feel about that as a lifestyle choice going forward.  I am going to have an interesting time as it grows out.  I want my veil back.  It’s interesting knowing that if I want long hair going forward in my life I have to stop doing anything to it.  I’m stuck with baking soda and vinegar for the rest of my life.  I will have gorgeous hair again.

It’s weird learning what self-care means.  It’s weird thinking about learning to take care of my body.  It’s weird learning what it means to be gentle with myself.  It’s happening in unexpected ways.  I don’t feel bad about the cutting.  I hope I don’t do it again because the marks aren’t fading fast and I don’t want my daughters to learn it as an appropriate coping mechanism.  It means I need to figure out what to do.  I don’t know right now.  So far the answer seems to be, “Don’t hate yourself.”  I’m not sure what that actually means as something to teach my kids.  How do I do that?  For the love of shiny green apples, how can someone like me teach anything other than hating yourself?

I’m going to a homeschooling meet-up tomorrow with the kids.  We will be doing Sharpie tie-dye.  I won’t shave my head before then.  They deserve to know what they are getting into with our family.  We are weird.  Get used to it.

The party (fiction)

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She sat on a chair in front of the mirror.  Her husband had bought her this vanity early in their marriage.  His comment at the time was, “I’m sure you will only spend more time applying this shit as you get older; you might as well be comfortable.”  At the time she had been a young bride and she thanked him for his thoughtfulness and kissed him on the cheek.

Now she looks at her face and wonders why she bothers.  She traces the deep lines in her skin.  The vertical line between her eyebrows that says she has spent much of her life scowling.  The horizontal lines on the forehead that is part of her doubting look—she rarely believes anything the first time she is told.  She uses her fingertips to follow the lines.  She traces the grief lines, separate from the laugh lines.  She wishes there had been less grief.
It’s time to get moving and she just can’t seem to manage.  She knows that it is her job to sit here putting on paint until her actual face is invisible.  This is an important party, after all.  Her husband needs her. 

He always needs her.  Sometimes it feels like she is married to a fucking 13 year old.  “Mom, where are my socks?”  Sometimes he slips and calls her that too.  It turns her stomach.  This isn’t what she wanted from life.  Every time she thinks that her eyes slam shut and her stomach hurts.  What did she want, anyway? 
She wanted to have one of those lives where people end up with lots of laugh lines and no scowl lines.  She wanted to be a happy person.  Is bitterness something that everyone feels?  Money can’t buy happiness, they say.  She laughs and thinks of her own selfishness and lack of charity.  Who is she to complain about her life?  Her husband doesn’t beat her or run around.  He has just grown more infantile over the years.  She micromanaged him until there was no him left to run.  Just a puppet waiting for his next move.
Yet he seems to be able to perform on command.  She knows she should be proud.  They offered him partner this year.  She thought it was hilarious that the senior partner in the firm called her yesterday to ask about some of the specifics.  Everyone knew who was actually the brain in this family—but appearances must be preserved. 
She looks at her face and thinks, “This is what the captains of industry are supposed to look like, not their space-cadet wives.  I look wrong.  I grew up to be the wrong person.”
What is right?  What is wrong?  Sometimes it seems like there is no coherent difference.  She firmly believes that it is wrong that her husband has a job and she doesn’t.  Her husband is one step up from a slavering imbecile.  Her job is to sit here and make sure she looks pretty.  It’s too late for pretty.  That boat passed.  That boat left her behind with her childbearing days.  It’s incredible how much not sleeping for half a decade will age you.
She thinks back to that period, when the lines and the gray appeared.  That was when her husband bought her the vanity.  When her youngest was about a year old.  She had a day when she was frantically trying to apply makeup in the bathroom while holding the screaming baby.  He brought home the vanity less than a week later.  He watched her blind panic and had no idea that she wasn’t putting the makeup on to look pretty.  She was just trying to feel like there was some part of her that the little brat didn’t control.
Now she feels compelled.  This is what she is supposed to do, right?  She has this apparatus, no point in not using it.  After all her husband is right, she is supposed to look pretty.  She stops looking at her face and switches to her hair.  Oh she has beautiful hair, everyone says so.  Strangers on the street stop to tell her that she has beautiful hair.  It’s a curse and a blessing. 
When people tell you that you are pretty as a woman you are supposed to take note of what you were doing, saying, and wearing at the time.  You are supposed to remember exactly what makeup you had on and what hair style you had.  Then you just hit repeat forever because of course pretty is the only important part of your life.  No one ever told her what she was supposed to do once pretty was gone irrevocably.  There is a point at which striving for pretty is fairly ludicrous.  She is striking.  She is still attractive, of course.  But there is an intensity there that prevents prettiness.  She knows it and it weighs heavy on her.  Just last night her husband says, “It’s like you don’t even try to be pretty any more—don’t you care if I find you attractive?”
Just like everything else all these years she didn’t say anything negative to him.  She may scowl, she may be doubting, but she keeps her mouth shut.  She put her head down and just said, “I’m sorry I have been so lazy.  I will try harder.”
She feels like she is choking on the bile.  She is choking on this unexpressed rage.  She doesn’t know for sure why she feels so much rage.  Her life really hasn’t been that bad.  She’s been safe, comforted, and cared for as much as anyone can hope to experience.  It came at a high price though.  Sometimes she thinks the price was too high.
Pretty.  The word makes her mouth tighten.  That is all she should be.  Not smart.  Not important.  Not decisive.  Not effective.  Pretty.  She kind of hates herself.  She wishes she had more courage.  She always did the safe thing.  There are women in the company.  She has spent half her life listening to the asshole men who work there talking about the women in the company.  They are never viewed as real and complete people.  They are still evaluated solely on whether or not they are pretty.  Ugly, mannish women.  They have to work because no man would want them, so I guess we can tolerate them working.
She looks carefully at her face in the mirror.  Is it too late?  Is she even capable of pretty any more?  Her face is hard.  She stares intently wondering if she has any worth left at all.  Her hair is still pretty.  Her beautiful waist-length hair.  It has never gone gray.  It is still a gorgeous light blonde.  From the back people still mistake her for quite young.  Then they see her face.
Finally the staring takes on a different intensity.  Impulsively she stands and pulls her robe off of her body.  She looks in the vanity mirror at her body.  She dresses very carefully these days.  It’s not that her body is bad, for a 45 year old she is extremely hot.  The gym will do that for you if you work hard enough at it.  And starve yourself enough.  Every time she thinks about all the years of denial she has been through she feels sad.  She looks in the mirror and sees the hollowed out stomach.  It is still soft and malleable after having children.  She never wore a two-piece again.  Her husband let her know how repulsive her post-children body was.  If she wanted to be pretty she would have to dress very carefully.

She looked at her body and she looked at her face.  They looked at odds.  Her body was clearly still trying to follow all the rules.  She obviously thought there was a standard of beauty she was required to maintain, other than pregnancy she had never been fatter than a size 6.  Her mother told her as a teenager that if she gained weight her husband would leave her for a more attractive woman.  She remembered that.
Now she looks at a body that is emaciated and stringy and thinks, “This is the end result of all that work?  I look like a too-old-to-eat-chicken.”  She realizes that there is nothing pretty about her any more.  Except for her hair, of course.
This is an important party.  This is the gala celebrating her husband making partner.  She had to look pretty.  All of a sudden her face lit up.  Actually, she doesn’t have to be pretty any more.  All of her work all of these years has been about getting Hank to this position.  Now he is there.
She had a sudden thought and bit her lip.  Would he ever forgive her?  She hurried to her dresser and pulled on a pair of jeans and a shirt.  Her shoes were next to the door, she wondered if she would be able to get out without notice.

She arrived home a scant 45 minutes before the party.  She would have to race upstairs and throw clothing on and leave.  There was no more time to fuss about pretty or makeup or hair.  It didn’t matter anyway.  She would no longer need to play that game.  Her husband was no where obvious so she assumed he was hanging out in his study.  He rarely came out unless he had to.
She knocked on his study door five minutes after getting home and softly said, “Honey, it’s time to leave.”  She stepped back and smiled at him.  “I’m ready for our next step together, darling.”
His mouth dropped in horror.  For his beautiful wife all of a sudden had a military style buzz cut.  He couldn’t quite catch his breath.  He saw the look of battle come into her eyes.  He knew in that moment that it wasn’t worth an argument.  This would be one he lost.  Besides, she got all that obsessive pretty crap from her mom anyway.  He caught his breath, reached out with his hand to turn her head from side to side. 
“You have such beautiful bones.  It’s nice watching you age.”
She closes her eyes and feels tears appear.  Damnit.  Really?  That is what he says?  When she opens her eyes again and looks at him he is smiling.
“I love you, Kate.  Let’s go.”
  

monogamy

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Monogamy.  It’s a weird concept for me.  I need to spend the rest of my life learning how to have relationships with people without having sex with them.  I think that will be good for me.  Weird and awkward, but good.  What does that mean though?

I hesitate to talk about this.  I don’t want to eat crow later.  Mmmmm crow.  Never say never.  I remember a friend of mine, years ago, telling me, “Of course I don’t like that he plays with other women.  But I want to play with other men so I shut up and put up with it.”  I think I’d rather not play with other people than feel like I have to bite back my actual opinion.  I don’t want to have to learn masking behavior that I use only at certain times.  That feels like lying.

Noah playing with other people makes me cry.  It reminds me that I don’t ever get to be special.  Which is stupid, right?  He married me.  He didn’t marry anyone else and he is not going to leave me.  Why isn’t that enough to convince me?  Sex is so mixed up for me.  Near as I can tell most people have enormous sexual hang ups without having to be abused starting in toddlerhood.

I don’t want to feel like I have to have sex with people in order to be interesting and I do.  I really do.  I don’t like that part of myself very much.  I feel rather disgusting, really.  This is bordering on a lot of things I’m deeply conflicted about.  I am an exhibitionist.  No one reading this is surprised.  I’m not sure how that ties in with a lot of my need-to-feel-available.

I think I want to find out how forever feels.  I want to realize that I’ve probably kissed someone else for the last time.  Really.  He’s it.  Forever.  I’m kind of excited.  I should decide that I deserve to be touched only by someone who wants me enough to actually want all of me.  Not just that piece of me.

How am I going to connect with all the people I want to connect with?  It’s kind of terrifying, really.  What do I have to offer?  I don’t know.  I have spent my adulthood with people who believe that monogamy is terrible and limiting and to be avoided at all costs.  I feel kind of ashamed that I want to keep Noah all to myself.

I feel like I am doing something wrong by joining the Embargo and refusing to sleep with anyone ever again.  It’s not fair that all these guys want sex and I won’t sleep with them.  This is not a guilt I should carry.  It should never enter into my mind that it isn’t fair that this nice guy isn’t getting _____ need met.  Life isn’t fair.  I bear no obligation to anyone but Noah for sexual needs.

That’s complicated too.  I think in some ways monogamy is terrifying because it means that we will both have to be a lot more honest about what we want.  If we want to get our needs met, really met we have to talk about them even when it is hard.  Even when he’s afraid to say it to me.  Even when I’m afraid to say it to him.  I do not need to agree to do more than I do in order to be GGG.  I need to say “no” a lot more and have more ownership of my body.  We need to find a way to meet our mutual needs without me biting my lip and doing things that feel bad.  I can’t hold Noah accountable for the consequences of his actions if I withhold information.  I can’t decide it is proof that he doesn’t care when he doesn’t notice.

I can’t relax and enjoy this relationship while I feel like I am constantly preparing to be paranoid about Noah running off to fuck someone else.  And that is how I feel in an open marriage.  It feels like every day is just a count down until he gets to do that again.  I feel like I am always doing something wrong by wanting to spend time with him.  I should be giving him lots of time away from me to go do and be lots of things away from me because obviously he wants to reserve a lot of himself away from me.  He is waiting for someone better than me to give that part of himself to.  I don’t blame him.  I constantly feel like I am waiting for him to go find someone more understanding than me to go talk to.  Someone who is entirely on his side.

I have signed on to be completely dependent on Noah for the next twenty years.  No, I am not going to relax my hypervigilance as long as I know that is coming some day.  It means I have to steal myself that whole period until that day comes because I will not be able to bear the loss otherwise.  I have to create a big hole in my heart and leave it that way and never let you touch it or come near it.  Because that is where I will have to go when you are fucking someone else.  It’s the same place I go when I sleep with other people.  It is a space outside of me, outside of my life.  I don’t really bond with casual sex.  I have an experience.  It is outside of me.

I’m afraid of monogamy because Noah really likes to take it to 11.  If I have clamped down so hard on him that he isn’t allowed to go play with other people, how much will I egg him on to do because I feel guilty?  I don’t know how to do this in a way that is good for me.  Nonmonogamy gives me the eternal out that I can say, “Fine you have this part of you that I can’t deal with… take it somewhere else.”  I never have to deal with my own actual limits that way.  I never have to deal with telling him, “Fine but no really you have to stop at 8 because my jaw hurts.”  That’s harder.  Telling him no is a lot easier than having to figure out what I can do.

I’m afraid because I think we are going to have some difficult periods and a lot of crying over sex.  I think this is going to be hard.  I think we will both have to do a lot of forgiving one another for mistakes and that’s hard to think about.  It’s weird to be discussing monogamy after five years of marriage.  We really know what we are getting into, you know?  Only we don’t.  Because things will be very different in twenty years.  We will be very different people.  Can I really require that he never again touch anyone else intimately?  I’m not going to do poly-anything.  If he is going to follow my boundaries well, I feel weird about that.

I feel very pressured as the gate keeper.  It’s weird to feel so conflicted about this.  On one hand I feel uncomfortable with the idea of keeping him from having sex and other hand I’m not thrilled about feeling required to have sex absolutely as much as he wants forever.  I don’t have any idea what my limits are.

I don’t like the way I dissociate rather than deal with feeling uncomfortable during sex.  I have a hard time dealing with my anxious feelings in the moment.  It’s hard to say when I really don’t want to be pushed.  He likes pushing so much.  It’s so weird to me that he worries about me wanting him.  I worry about wanting him so much that I break myself trying to meet needs I can’t meet.

Because the thing is, I don’t actually think there are needs of his I can’t meet.  Because I think that if he picks the right days, I probably can actually meet all of his needs.  I like to go to 11 too.  I feel scared that he isn’t going to be willing to walk around the cracks.  I really do like the image of myself as a mosaic.  My picture was broken so long ago and put back together so clumsily that it is an entirely new picture.  On even median days I like me.

I don’t think he can really just learn a “set of triggers” and avoid them.  It’s quicksand.  And it moves.  I want to find out how it moves.  I want to be able to try things many times and know that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.  I want to be brave enough to not be angry when I say, “Ok not tonight.”  I’m not failing if I say that.  I’m not failing if my body is not up to something on a given day.  I am not failing if sometimes I need to be held instead of hit.  It’s hard to admit that I’m not instinctively automatically in the same place as Noah.

It feels like I don’t deserve him.  Because I cannot do that.  Because I cannot just accept whatever he wants to do whenever he wants to do it.  I feel like I cannot require monogamy because I will never be good enough to satisfy him.  I will never be enough.  I will always fail.  I’m scared.

I’m terrified to believe him.  I’m so afraid that I will believe him that he wants to be monogamous.  Only in twenty years things will be different and I will be expected to just understand.  People evolve.  Needs change.

I know that I will want to sleep with people.  That’s just a fact.  I’m not actually in denial about that.  I will want to do it a lot.  It will feel compulsive for the rest of my life.  But I’m going to choose not to do it.  I don’t think that I am actually served by following my pointer through life.  My compass is broken.  I need to think about the long-term and understand that sleeping with other people does not feed any of my needs (ok hyperbole for effect but the problems outweigh gains) and does not meet any of my goals.

Ok, maybe the hookers in Vegas.  Because I can get behind you being motivated to attain that salary.  Especially because the deal was always that they would be there in case I wore out.  You haven’t done it yet.  I don’t safeword.

Time for the next step on the book.

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Well this is a banner morning.  I sat here trying to come up with something I was angry about.  I went through a few of my pet topics in my head.  I’m not sure if I feel resignation or sadness or rather I just feel resolute.  I think I am at a place where I have satisfied enough Whys for now.

I left stuff out of the book.  I left people out of the book.  It was an accident.  On one hand I feel the need to go back and add those people in.  On the other hand, no I need to edit what is there, not add material.  I can add a forward and that’s it.  I can’t stay mired in that part of my life.  If something comes up in a conversation I can say it or I can add stuff to the blog but that book is done.  I need to stop thinking about that part of my life so much.  It is over.  It’s time to close that book.

But what do I do about all the damage?  There are often unintended consequences to actions and they can last a lifetime.  Who do I want my children to remember?  It’s time to stop feeling angry all the time.  Not because I have to, because I have actually given that run of my life a good long serious look.  I don’t feel like I left anything unsaid I need to feel bad about not saying.  It’s ok that people can’t really and truly get the accurate body count number of my sexual partners in the book.  It’s really embarrassing how many people I left out of the book.  I wasn’t talking about the parts of my life that included them.  There was so much to tell.  The threads just fell out of the story.

I’m mostly through Bastard Out of Carolina.  I read Trash about a week ago.  I’m really grateful a friend handed them to me right now.  I can stop fretting about this book.  No Shame, No Secrets, No Silence is done.  I’m thinking about emailing it to my editor right now, in fact.  Done.

"Go see a therapist"

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You go see a therapist when you are stuck in some way and you can’t change by yourself.  Otherwise you just change by yourself and save the money.  Therapy is expensive, yo.

Who do I want to be when I grow up?  What patterns am I actually stuck in and which patterns can I change if I think about them?  What is a happy life?  What do I want to do with my time and my life?  That really is the crux of it, isn’t it?  The way you spend your hours is the way you spend your years.  I think I am saying it wrong but someone had something like that as a sig line on MDC.  Where is my Zen place?  What is it that I should be doing for my spirit to be in alignment with my body?  (By the way I don’t use the word Zen in a way that is associated with any actual definition or official usage.  I am a co-opting piece of shit.)

I told Noah this morning that I don’t feel like I am having sex for me and I don’t like that feeling any more.  I am having sex so that I can continue to be this construct in my head.  I am not really getting off much these days.  That’s a big change.  Sorta?  It started with pregnancy.  It kind of came back and then it seems to be gone again.  I can get close and I have all these nifty hypnosis tricks in place so I can trigger muscle spasms in the appropriate way such that I suppose it feels like an orgasm, kinda.  It’s like eating soft serve.  It’s just not ice cream even if it looks like and is presented as the same thing.  Even with sprinkles.  It’s not ice cream.

You aren’t supposed to say that on the internet, right?  The way we are having sex isn’t working for me.  I don’t want to be this right now.  I’m not saying never again.  I am saying I need something other than what I have right now.  This is hard to write about because I am trying very hard to not represent what Noah wants.  I don’t think I really know or understand what Noah wants.  It’s not his fault, but I think we are operating with a lot of unspoken assumptions and I should only speak for me.

I’m sitting here thinking and thinking and thinking.  In these arguments I always get stuck with this huge load of rage and I scream that I don’t want to spend the rest of my life doing laundry.  Dude.  The rest of my life will involve laundry.  Shut the fuck up already.  Why does this become such a sticking point?  I could dissect it.  I could start having the other adults in the house do the laundry; they would if I required it.  Really and truly, they would.  But it would require reminding and fussing and then I would never be satisfied with the results.  They would fold the damn shirts wrong.

This isn’t about laundry.

I don’t have very many pictures of my mother.  But in several she’s doing laundry.  I remember the sighs.  The long tirades about how much she hated having to clean up after me.  I remember her bitterness at having to go out and earn money and come home to the messes I made  It’s honestly one reason I don’t want to have a job.  If I had a job I would resent the ever loving shit out of my children for having the audacity to live in the house and make a mess when I wasn’t there.  It offends my dignity.  Oh God help someone who breaks a dish when I’m not home.  I’m completely unreasonable.  But if I’m standing in the room and not the one who does it?  My reaction is, “Thank God it wasn’t me!”  And I’m not mad.  Mistakes happen.

I don’t forgive slights that are done when I’m out of sight.  I’m not sure what is up with that.  Hunh.  Ok, that’s actually a big one.  I’m going to have to think about that one for a long time.  I resent having to be a support network for a life and for happiness I won’t get to share.  It really bothers me.  It makes me feel angry that I spend ‘x’ hours of week doing extra work so that Noah gets to have ‘y’ hours of time completely alone.  Because the hours aren’t equal.  Not in my head.

There is a tally.  He doesn’t understand it or track it.  It is totally invisible to him if I do it right.  Sex is part of the tally.  Part of the things I “have to do”.  The tally that “should be” invisible to him.  Which means the cost should be invisible as well.  I’m having trouble writing a coherent sentence about this.  If I don’t explain the tally system he can’t change his behavior based on the different costs.

For the whole rest of my life Noah will have more effect on me than anyone.  Dealing with him is effort because he is a human being and that’s just life.  That’s ok.  That’s more than ok.  I want to put a lot of effort into him because I like him sooooooooooo much.  If he doesn’t understand where I am putting effort and why… it’s kind of silly, you know?  I don’t know that I am using my effort to good effect.  I don’t know where I am spinning my wheels and trying to do things to please dead people.

Who do I want to be when I grow up?  What would I be like if I had grown up believing that my body is mine and people should only do things to me that I want them to do?  I wonder if she is more or less fierce than I am?

Obedience.  What is it?  Obedience to what?  To blind ideals?  To stupid short-sighted goals?  To instant gratification with a high opportunity cost?  What cost can I bear?  Honestly–a high cost.  I really can.  But where should the cost be spent?  I don’t think that decision should be made in a vacuum.  Years ago Noah offered me an abusive relationship with off-switch.  What does it mean to be off?  What does it mean when it is turned on?  I’m not afraid of Noah, not really.  Noah told me flat out this morning that he doesn’t believe me when I say I won’t leave.  He’s a smartie, that one.  The part that I don’t think he understands is I wouldn’t be able to stay gone.  I can never actually walk away from him.  He is the father of my children.  Until his death he will be in my life.  That is complicated.  Noah doesn’t actually know what it means to talk about a broken home.  I do.  I want a home.

Even if it is soft serve, it’s home.  That sounds terrible.  Even if I am nothing exciting you will still stay.  Even if I am a poor imitation of what a wife should be.  Even if I am not anything like advertised.  I feel like I am ruining Noah’s life by being so conflicted about sex.  I don’t think Noah’s sexual performance has suddenly gone down hill.

Who do I want to be when I grow up?  I don’t think a therapist can just fix me.  I need to figure out who I want to be.  No one else can tell me that.  What would I be like if I could move through the world without the sure knowledge that if someone asked me for sex I am essentially required to say yes, or at least only say no to a very small number of people in specific categories.  Anyone in category A should be good enough.

People are not interchangeable.  They really aren’t.  And I don’t fucking owe anyone anything.  The Embargo is not my fault.  It really doesn’t matter what my father told me.  I don’t have a cunt so that I can get as many dicks as possible.

hair cutting

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No one really knows what the boundaries are for another person.  You have to speak for yourself, only, always.  I decided to stop hunting and I cut all my hair off.  In the bathroom with nail scissors.  And now I’m going to feel like a fucking schmuck for years.  Something broke.  I think if I believed I could get away with wearing a burqa I would.  I feel like a melodramatic, stupid, immature moron.  Not to put too fine a point on it.

Ok, so what really happened is I was in the process of trying to leave the house one day and I couldn’t comb through the snarls.  I lost my temper and badly cut the knot out.  I have been compulsively going into the bathroom to fix it ever since.  It’s rather short.  My hair is not ok with bleach.  I have a fairly ridiculous amount of shame around the fact that this is not the first time I have stopped hunting and shaved my head.  I should tell that story.  I don’t know if it is in the book or not.

I was seventeen and at West Valley.  I was hanging out with Praveena.  It was towards the end of our time hanging out together.  I was on the tail end of one of my whoring-around-phases and feeling really bad about myself.  I was getting to the point where I noticed that everyone who fucked me ditched me really soon after.  I was at Praveena’s house and we were having a conversation about the fact that it bothered me that people no longer wanted to be my friend after we had sex.  She thoughtfully looked at me and said, “Then why don’t you find out if they want to be your friend before you have sex with them?”

I started shaking.  You don’t understand.  People don’t spend time with me very often.  Sex was how I got people to look at me.  I moved around so often that I knew that I had to get attention quickly or I wouldn’t get it at all.  I know what I’m supposed to act like.  I know my “role”.  I couldn’t verbalize any of that at the time.  I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to be near me.  I just sat there shaking.  I had been cutting my hair at home compulsively for a while.  It was probably three or four inches long.  I asked her for shaving supplies.  She was kind of confused as to why I wanted to shave my legs right then but she got them.

I went out in the back yard and shaved my head.  She watched in wide mouthed horror.  She had hair almost to her waist.  She was a gorgeous Persian girl with super thick luscious hair.  She sputtered and gasped and tried to talk me out of it.  I remember the look of squick on her face.  I laughed.

My mother didn’t laugh.  To put this in larger context, this happened in October of 1998.  My father had killed himself a couple of weeks earlier.  Tommy had killed himself in June.  My mom said a lot of very rude and nasty things to me about my looks.  She pointed out that my head was exceedingly lumpy.  She pointed out that given how fat I was, my head looked especially small and stupid.  I need that big bushy hair to balance out my fat ass.

I was invited to go to a ‘formal’ dinner related to the haunted house event I volunteered at.  My hair was only a few millimeters long at that point.  I covered my head in glitter and wore a tight black velvet dress.  My mom didn’t say anything, but she shook her head and grimaced.

At the time I felt awkward and stupid and barely spoke to anyone.  The reality is that people were perfectly nice and civil to me.  The people who knew me at all were friendly and strangers went out of their way to be nice.  I never went back to that organization.  My mother extensively talked about how stupid I looked and how she bets they would be making fun of me behind my back.

I’m not really cutting my hair because I think it makes me look ugly.  When I feel ugly I feel compelled to cut my hair.  I really do have beautiful hair.  My hair is lovely enough that someone who feels and acts the way I do should not have that much camouflage to look “normal”.

I can’t possibly explain my mothers furious disgust at people who dye their hair “funny colors”.  Oh my god.  Anyone who would do that is disgusting.  They are lesser, dirty people.  They are not normal.  Above all we must be normal, right?  I don’t even know what that means.

I really and truly did dye my hair because I thought it was fun.  I have enjoyed catching glimpses of myself in reflections and seeing the shock of color.  It makes me smile.  Unfortunately my hair is quite fine and the bleach destroys it and it gets shorter and shorter and… yeah.  It’s time to deal with letting it grow out again.

And that represents so much internal conflict of self-expression and self-identity.  It’s ridiculous that it matters so much.  As I listen to Lady Gaga sing about her own hair experience I feel trite and ridiculous and like I am such a product of my generation.  Of course I dye my hair odd colors and cut it myself in ridiculous ways.  I’m Emo, right?  I guess I never got over high school.

This is part of what I mean when I say I don’t fit.  I don’t really know the rules.  Do you want to know the main reason I’m cutting my hair myself?  Because it really doesn’t matter if I pay someone to do this.  Pretty soon I’m going to just buzz it because it’s time to start fresh.  There really isn’t a point in paying someone to do that.  I’ve been looking extensively at our budgeting.  I’m going to continue paying for Noah’s haircuts because I like them.  Enh, I’m just done paying for them for a few years.  It makes me twitch to pay that much money on hair care.  Curly hair is very forgiving and it’s not like I’m trying to impress anyone.  That feels bad to say.

I have fun cutting my hair.  I like trying to figure out the shape of my head.  I get compliments from random people when I am out so I think I do a reasonable job.  I’m not ugly.  I don’t really think that having short hair makes me ugly.  I don’t think that other people with short hair are ugly.  But when I am feeling ugly I compulsively cut my hair.  I’m trying to change what I see in the mirror.  I want to have more control over what I see.  I don’t want to go pay someone else who will try to make me look like some mainstream idea of beauty.  Whatever it is that society values and requires of women I am not it.  Let’s get the advertising straight.

There are fifty sides to every story.  I like cutting my hair.  I think it is fun.  I think it is weird.  I think it is a slightly self-harming behavior but fairly harmless so it’s ok.  I think it is an obsessive compulsive tick when I am overwhelmed with my sexuality.  I think that other people will judge me badly for being the kind of person who will do this.  I don’t know why I care.  Thank goodness we are through picture season.

I need to let the roots get a bit longer before I decide how short to get.  Until then I get to cut off bits and pieces every time the urge strikes.  I think it is kind of funny that I do this during cold weather.  I guess I’ll just have to wear my Cheshire Cat hat all the time for a few months.  That’s subtle.

I told Noah some truth last night.  I wonder how that will work out.

That’s why.

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This morning I had an important thought.  If I stop smoking pot now I am going to start cutting frequently.  The Ativan is not a choice that works as well.  I’m not willing to be on a daily pill, even though I probably should at this point.  My mood cycles have been horrible in the last two weeks.  Pot levels it all out and makes me cheerful and just barely stupid.  I am in a great space to sit and play with Play Doh for hours.  I can build with Lego’s all day.  I’m noticing what things I didn’t get Shanna that I probably should have.

I’m enjoying how cuddly and affectionate Calli is… when I’m stoned.  When I’m sober it bothers me and I want to get up and walk away.  There is something wrong with me.  When I am sober it hurts.  She bangs her head on me, she scratches, she steps on me awkwardly or knees me or or or or…  I kind of hate it.  When I am stoned I just mumble, “oooph, gentle with Mommy”.  I’m so glad to be near her that I don’t mind her rough antics.  She doesn’t mean anything by them.  She’s just a baby.

My body isn’t a good place to be lately.  I have to spend a lot of time dissociated if I want to function at all. It’s hard.  Most of my body hurts most of the time.  My stomach hurts terribly from stress, pot also levels that out.

Pot allows me to put aside my grown up concerns and worries and just be present and happy in the moment with my kids.  Most of the day is really quite pleasant.  I only think about things that are relevant to what is in my line of sight, quite deliberately.  That’s how I manage to be a good mother.  I think only of our immediate house and my kids most of the time.  I don’t divide my energy well.  I can work on house stuff like cleaning with the kids around, but that’s the limit.  Sometimes they let me read.  They hate the computer and mostly I have to be in a different room on a break in order to use it.  That’s when I smoke pot.

I go think about grown up things for brief periods behind closed doors during the day.  That is what having Sarah here gives me.  Time to walk away from the kids when my thoughts become intrusive.  When I am starting to feel edgy I can ask for a break.  I’m trying to have the breaks be as effective sober and they just aren’t.  My emotions are too intense.

I have ridiculous self-control and ridiculous patience… within small tight boundaries.  My kids will grow up being told frankly that I smoke because I need the medicine in the plant and there isn’t a better way to get it out for me.  Why do I need the medicine?  Because of something that was broken when I was a little girl.  They won’t be broken in that way so they won’t need the medicine.  It’s rather unpleasant to do, so I don’t recommend it.  Shanna will cheerfully lecture anyone within hearing on how disgusting and unhealthy smoking is.  Yay California.

But sober, I’m edgy and raw.  I cry a lot.  I can’t stand to let anyone touch me and when my kids grab me my entire physical reaction is to want to shake them off like a dog.  I loathe being touched.  It feels like such a disgusting and horrible incursion into my body.  Every touch feels bad right now.  Everything hurts.  The most gentle of caresses feels like a slap.  I can mostly dissociate away when sober, but not enough to smile or pretend I am enjoying it.

I don’t want my children to grow up with a mother who flinches away from them constantly as if they are terrible people for wanting to touch her.  I think I should get stoned instead.  It doesn’t really matter that I feel bad about doing it.  It doesn’t matter that the stupid bitch at PAMF looked at me like dirt because I have a medical card.  It allows me to be a good mother.  I feel so ashamed of myself for needing it.  I guess this makes me an addict?  Officially?  I don’t know.

It seems to me that most of life is about walking a series of thin lines.  I am more ashamed of cutting than I am of smoking pot.  The specific reason I think it is worse is because I will be more strongly judged and censured for cutting.  I don’t know a lot about tribal cutting, I’ve never bothered to find out.  I can imagine there being places in the world where my desire to cut myself to deal with my emotional experience would be viewed differently.  If I were to lose my fear of judgment, I would be able to represent myself in a way that would feel more honest.  I am a person who has experienced a lot of pain. But I did it in a way that is invisible and hard to ignore.  There are scars all through my vagina.  I think the scars should be on the outside so that other people can see them.  I think that marking yourself in proportion to the pain you feel is a way of identifying yourself so that you can find other people to talk to who can hopefully give you relevant advice beyond, “Just cheer up!”  Yeah, fuck you too.

Pot keeps me from feeling suicidal.  I’m just not desperate enough.  It really pisses me off that I can never really be a martyr for any cause ever in my life because if I go in a way that is not completely fucking random people will assume I killed myself.  It’s just got to be the base assumption forever.

I’d really like to kill myself.  But in my personal hierarchy of needs it is far far more important that I never give my children the experience of parental suicide.  Jimmy thinks that just not talking about things and not doing the same things will break the chains and he’s wrong.  The only thing that will break the chains is consciously talking about what we are doing and then choosing to do something else.  It is hard to be a different person.  It doesn’t happen by sitting back silently and hoping it happens.

Who do I want to be?  I want to be someone who doesn’t need to be apathetic all the time in order to function.  This stage of processing won’t last forever.  What do I need to change about my life in order to not get back to feeling this desperate and hurt?  Can I change enough?   Is this just something that is part of me because of my previous trauma?  Will I always find a new trigger somewhere down the road?  I don’t know.  I really don’t.

I’m just bitchy and mean and bored and antsy and angry and touchy when I am sober.  I feel so dissatisfied with everything in life.  I hate that in myself.  And when I’m stoned I’m fine.  No really.  I am doing exactly what I said I would and I do enjoy it when I can focus on it.  There must be something wrong with me if I need pot to focus.  That’s not very functional, only it is.  I’m functional, I really am.  I beg the internet to believe me.  Why do I care so much?  Why do I feel like I constantly have to prove that I have some value.  I am not just a worthless piece of shit.  Even if I do smoke pot.  Even if I am just a disgusting whore.

I think I’m ordering more pot today.

training

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When I was 18 I started dating a man who was 11.5 years my senior.  His friends made a lot of jokes about how it was important to catch them young so you can train them right.  It’s far truer than I like admitting.  At 18 I started dating someone who has a fairly low appetite for intercourse and a very high appetite for watching women suffer.

That partner has a very hard time orgasming.  In my opinionated opinion there are several factors at play there.  The first and most important thing contributing to that is too many years of extremely rough masturbation.  Boys, please be gentle with your junk.  But nearly as important is the fact that he was kind of freakishly huge and I think his circumcision was made too tight.  Just my opinion.  He had issues and I think they were related.  All the pro-circ people in the world can tell me there is no relationship and I won’t believe them.  That’s fine.

But when I was 18 I hooked up with this guy who was freakishly endowed who was almost impossible to get off.  I made it my life’s mission to get him off.  It really didn’t matter what I had to do.  45 minutes of intensely elaborate oral sex, sure no problem.  Hours and hours of intercourse, sure no problem.  You want to tie me up, sure.  You want to hang me from my neck, sure.  You want to break my arm, sure (ok, that was an accident–but it happened in the first six weeks we were dating and it didn’t slow me down).  We egged each other on.  No matter what he could come up with that was embarrassing, humiliating, or painful… I could suggest worse and beg him to do it.

It’s fairly unusual for me to ask someone to stop what they are doing to me.  I whine and I complain and I give suggestions and I cry and I scream.  I don’t ask people to stop.  Ok, I did “safeword” when someone used a cattle prod on my genitals when I was 19.  I honestly can’t remember if I have tapped out any other time.  People tend to not push me hard.  I don’t have to ask people to stop, they stop because they are afraid of my crying.  They stop because they don’t feel comfortable ignoring my less-than-subtle suggestions.  Not very many people notice that I don’t ask people to stop.  Most people take it as written that suggestions mean stop.  But sometimes people notice.  Then I’m in trouble.

I didn’t take much responsibility for my needs in my relationship with my Owner.  Instead I elaborately wrote contracts with him and tried to get them met that way and it didn’t work.  I think that a fair bit of the problem was, I needed far more sex than him and being pestered for sex, especially sex where you have to put a lot of energy into hurting someone… that’s hard.  My Owner didn’t actually want to hurt me as much as I wanted to be hurt.  He wanted to do some of that, sometimes.  But not the way I wanted.  He couldn’t keep up the steady stream.

But I did learn how to make him orgasm.  I did gain enough trust to have that with him.  Not every time, of course.  But I learned how to go about putting in enough effort to get that result.  It took a long time.  In some ways he was kind of the ideal partner for me–he represented a real challenge that I had to work on my skills for; but in other ways he was rather a nightmare because he represented nearly-constant failure at the thing I work hardest at in life.  It’s kind of embarrassing to admit that I work harder on being good at sex than I do at being good at anything else.  I think about it harder.  I think about it more.

I think that is a lot of why I think I can not be a good person.  Good people aren’t this obsessed with sex. Good people don’t think this hard about being used and hurt.  Good people don’t orgasm on command after being called a whore.

I’m thinking really hard about the forward to the book.  This story requires one.  Why did I write it?  What tone do I want to set?  Needless to say I’m feeling kind of mixed on what I want to say.

Earlier this year I woke up and realized that if I got hit by a bus there is no one to tell my children about my life.  No one who knows the pieces.  No one they will know even can.  They don’t know the people who populated my childhood, and that’s something they will need to know some day.  Some day they will want to know why I have no family.  Why they have no family.  They will want to know why I am so harsh sometimes.  Why I cry sometimes.  They don’t need to know the specifics of my life when they are young.  It’s totally irrelevant to their life at this point.  But some day they deserve to know.  I will do things during their lives I will have to apologize for.  I hope that I always apologize immediately and in the ways that they need.

I have it in me to do irreparable damage.  Damage that can never be apologized for.  I know that edge.  I know why I could do such damage.  I know that I walk a tight line.  You wouldn’t know it if you met my children.

I surround myself carefully with people who were wounded by too-harsh mothers.  They give me feedback.  My children are joyous examples of the species.  They have not been hurt by my too-harshness.  I have successfully balanced giving them far more positives than I give negatives.  Even if I do feel too dirty to touch them.  Even if I do feel undeserving.  I know it isn’t about me or what I deserve.  I give to them all the love I wish I was given.  I tell them over and over that they are good.  They are wonderful.  They are sweet.  They are kind.  They are thoughtful.  They are strong.  They are brave.  They are allowed to ask for help.  They are children and not yet responsible for themselves, but some day they will be ready.  I hope in telling them all of these things I hear them about myself.

Sex is a good and wonderful thing between people who care about each other.  It is affirming.  It is bonding.  It is loving.  It is friendly.  It is compassionate.  But it can be twisted.  I was taught that my only value was in getting men off.  I was told I am responsible for getting anyone off who wants to get off, no matter how I feel about it.  I never really believed it.  I always knew there were limits.  I knew I wasn’t supposed to be getting my brothers off.  I knew I wasn’t supposed to be getting my father off.  But I sure listened and believed that it was true of any other man who was willing to agree that I should.

My daughters will not grow up believing that promiscuity is a required part of life.  They will not be taught how to get men off before they hit puberty.  They will not believe that it is their job to dress like whores.  I don’t care if we have to be weird creepy shut-ins who are not part of normal society.  I “slipped through the cracks” and got this message over and over in so many different places.  It won’t happen to my children.  I will god damn prevent it.  My children will not be brought up to be like me.  My children will be brought up to believe that their body is theirs and they can use it as they choose.  I hope that my children never feel like they owe sex to any one.  I want them to feel like they can say yes and I want them to feel like they can say no.

I don’t want my children to move through this world with the sure knowledge that any man at pretty much any time might rape them.  I do.  If I am going to be alone with a man I very carefully weigh how I will respond if/when they initiate sex.  Normally I simply avoid being alone with people if I don’t want to have sex.  I know that I am not really able to say no in the moment.

It’s hard admitting to my friends that if they pressed me for sex in person there is an extremely low chance I can say no.  Unless they approach me as a submissive man expecting me to do the work.  That I can say no to.  Laziness trumps everything.  If someone is willing to just show up and fuck me?  Yeah.  I don’t say no.

That’s a lot of why I think I should stop sleeping with people.  I do it compulsively.  I do it because I feel this really strong internal push to do it regardless of dithering or reasons I shouldn’t.  I feel compelled.  Not absolutely all the time, obviously I don’t go out fucking people constantly or the internet would hear more of it, but every few years I go through a phase.  And my sprees can be prodigious.  I think it is safer that I just try to wear out Noah.

It is dangerous liking rough, harsh, use-me-like-a-whore sex.  Not very many people can do that and still treat you like a perfectly nice individual later.  Things bleed.  It’s hard to have boundaries.  In order for people to think about you and treat you like that… they have to cross some line in themselves.  I like to do things that people are normally told not to do.  That makes it really hard to understand that there are still boundaries.  It’s even harder to guess where they are or what they might be around.  That’s a lot of why I tell people not to worry about my triggers.  They aren’t where you think they are any way.

What is a “healthy relationship” anyway?  My emotions in my day-to-day life are far more stable when I get the extremes out during sex.  Ridiculous amounts of sex.  Painful sex.  Degrading sex.  Noah is very polite to me outside of sex.  That sounds underwhelming.  Noah is a truly amazing husband.  And he does nasty terrible things to me so that I feel safe with him.  I have a lot of conflict around that.  I kind of wish that all of the healing-from-sexual-abuse books stopped telling me that as a compulsively sexual person I really should be celibate.  Maybe not forever, but at least for a while.  I am not going to do that for a wide variety of reasons.  Whether or not I should.

I’m just about out of pot.  I don’t think anyone would be able to live with me if I also stopped having sex.  I would not be a nice person to live with.  It’s time to make running just about daily.  It’s time to edit the book.  I’m scared.  I’m going to go through and do another pass to see if I’ve left out any glaring omissions.  Then I will send it off to my editor.  I can’t do the paring down.  I really can’t.  Oh gosh.  This is frightening.

Life just keeps happening.  Sometimes whether I like it or not.

aftermath

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I told Noah that I would be fairly ashamed to tell people how we are moving forward.  According to my personal religion that means I am committing a sin.  It’s mixed.  Mostly I would say we are getting along very well.  I’m not starting fights or insulting him or picking on him.  Noah is his usual polite and adoring self.  It’s like nothing happened except we have massively increased how much sex we are having and how degrading our sex is.

We have spent a lot of time talking about how compulsive I am about sex.  About how that works in my head.  We have spent a lot of time talking about how impulsive Noah is about sex.  So far we seem to be at the point where we are both acknowledging that we qualify as “sex addicts” by any reasonable definition but maybe if we stick with each other we won’t cause too big of problems?

Apparently the task of the week is to see how much sex we have to have before Noah can’t handle any more.  So far we have managed three times a day every day.  Then I fall asleep.  I feel mixed about this.  He knows I feel mixed about this.  Hell, I’m writing about feeling mixed about this–everyone will know.    It’s hard talking about the actual needs that casual sex meets for me.  I can meet some pretty fucked up needs without telling anyone what I am doing.  I never have to tell my partners what my internal dialogue is.  I don’t have a very high opinion of myself and my voracious need for sex.

I don’t have a very high opinion of the fact that my preference is for most of the sex I have to be quasi-consensual.  Noah is well aware that a large percentage, possibly “most”, of our sex involves me not being in the mood at all.  It doesn’t really matter if I am interested in sex.  I am interested in being a good whore.  That means I will do what I am supposed to do.  I feel manifestly uncomfortable admitting that.  A large percentage of the sex I have I only have because I feel like I am required to do so.  That is what someone like me is good for.  That is what I am supposed to do.  And I’m really good at it.  And I fucking live for the post-sex adulation.  People I fuck tend to be willing to tell me at great length how good I am at sex.  I try very hard to make sure I work far harder at sex than most women.  I really really want the approval I get after sex.

I feel like something is broken in me.  That I chase this so hard.  Noah and I have been talking a lot lately.  I don’t think I am going to sleep with other people any more.  Regardless of what Noah ends up doing for the rest of his life, I need to stop buying affection with sex.  I need to stop begging my friends to like me by proving that I am better at sex than anyone they’ve ever slept with.  It’s not really a strategy that is working for me.

I like to pick other sex addicts and go have multiple hours of sex with them.  Most of the time they are so shocked by finding a woman who is also as motivated by sex that they are willing to tell me pretty much anything I want.  It’s broken.  I have a partner at home who is willing to do the Jekyll/Hyde thing with me.  He will degrade me and talk about me being a whore during sex.  He will tell me that if I am so motivated by cock I am required to show up at 5am every day and wake him up with my mouth.  And he’s pretty nice to me the rest of the time.

I feel worried by the duality of our relationship.  Most of the time in most ways he really is an amazing partner.  He is a good, stable provider.  He is kind.  He is great with our children.  I have been able to push him towards mutually agreed upon improvements in behavior over the years.  He’s very willing to accommodate me in just about every part of life.  He bends over backwards for me in nearly every way.  He will even call me names and hurt me tremendously during sex if I tell him I want him to.

There is this mythos in my head that slaves and masochists should experience no internal conflict over what they do.  I have massive internal conflict.  I am still upset that Noah lied to me.  And my response is to tell him more and more complex stories that I am terribly ashamed of.  Things that hurt me very much.  And I ask him to use them against me.  I want him to agree that I am just a dirty whore.  There isn’t much else that someone like me is good for.  But I want him to gift wrap it in a package where I don’t have to be at risk going forward.

For me to keep having the kind of casual sex that I like is for me to risk my life.  It really won’t be much longer before I go back for hunting for rough, dangerous sex.  Sure I’m being all loud and snotty this round of hunting because I want vanilla sex right now.  That would fade.  I would go back to wanting people to do dangerous things to me.  I’ve already had a broken bone in the pursuit of good sex, what else will happen?

It is a lot safer to stick with Noah.  He will be able to hurt me as much or more than anyone else.  He doesn’t flinch from doing so.  Noah has not yet inflicted as much pain on me as a small handful of other people, but he has every intention of doing so.  I get the impression that some day he will be the one I have done my most intense play with.  That kind of terrifies me.  Because he has a high bar to reach.  I have already done things that were a really bad idea.  I’m sure I will do more.

If I do this instead of cutting or sleeping around or drugs or whatever other self-harming behavior I can dream up… is that better?  I don’t know.  I don’t know how this life thing is supposed to work.  I hear I am just supposed to magically decide that I shouldn’t be harmed any more, not by anyone.  Not by me, and not by random guys, and not by my husband.  But I need this.  I am so used to feeling shit on.  I require it so much.

Noah has been nice and patient for a long time.  We haven’t done intense or painful or degrading sex in a long time.  He’s been more respectful than that.  So I got bored and went out and slept with other people.  And the thing is, it’s not enough that he does these things to me.  I need people to know that these things are part of my life.  I need for people to know that I am this person.  I can’t have this done in secret.  I can’t keep secrets.

It would be a sin if I did these things and kept them private and secret.  I believe that.  That is something that I have to hold on to in life.  Something is only a sin if I am ashamed to talk about it.  If I am talking about this now, does that mean I am released from the power of it being a sin?  I don’t know.  I worry about needing what I need.  It’s mixed.

I can point in a straight line from events in my early childhood to what I do now.  Come March, other people will be able to do so as well.  Noah already can.  And he stomps all over me with that knowledge.  Only in ways I find hot, of course.  Is that the difference?  Is that the line between what we do and some amorphous “abuse”?  If I tell Noah to stop doing something on a given day he does.  Except by prior arrangement.  Except that I know that I just don’t bother to say no when I’m not in the mood.  I figure out how to let it happen.  I figure out how to permit him the access he wants whether I want it or not.  I don’t generally bother to communicate whether I am in the mood or not.  If he tells me to do something, I do it.

It’s interesting when people talk to me about how self-assured I am.  How self-possessed.  How willing to stand up for myself.  Ha.  Only sometimes.  Only in some ways.  If a sexual partner is telling me to do things I frankly don’t want to do I have limited ability to communicate my wants.  It depends on how I am doing emotionally and it depends on how much I am invested in the partner.  I have casual sex because I can have boundaries with strangers.  I have repeat sex with long-term friends because I have beaten them down in non-sexual settings and they don’t push real hard out of fear of a backlash that will never come.  I don’t have boundaries with my long-term partners.  I barely communicate anything about my limits beyond telling them what buttons will get them the biggest reaction today.  “Today is ____ anniversary so why don’t you hurt me by doing _________.”

It’s not a sin if I talk about it.  I don’t know what it is, but it’s not a sin.  I have decided this for my own personal pantheon of beliefs.

These needs all predate Noah.  They are not because of him.  Most of them are not really about him at all.  These are things that were broken in me as a child.  But he frankly enjoys many of the ways I am broken.  He feels no shame whatsoever in enjoying what I became as the direct result of years of sexual assault.  Well, maybe he feels a little shame.  But not much.  Not enough to prevent him from trying to behave in ways that will keep me from getting bored in the future.  Not enough to lessen his enjoyment of what this deep feeling of shame causes me to do during sex.  His favorite part lately seems to be that I’m really ok with him fucking my throat until he causes me to vomit.  I have a fairly reactive gag reflex.  I consider vomiting to be just part of serious blow jobs.  I don’t think that is normal.  It never feels like it is really a good time to say, “Could you back off on the deep throating?”  I don’t get to set terms like that.  I get to accept.

In about ten minutes I have to get up and close the computer.  I will walk across the house and I will do what I was told to do.  Do I want to?  Enh.  Not really.  My throat and cunt are sore.  I could use about a week off from sex to recover at this point.  But I draw comfort from the fact that I have confessed so I go forth without sin.  I will smile.  I will encourage him.  I will beg him for more, in fact.  It doesn’t really matter that I’m sore.  That’s beside the point.  I don’t think I should go have sex with other people any more.  I don’t think that is a good decision for me.  He says he is going to be monogamous as well.  No, let me be clear.  He will be as monogamous as I am.

I fell compelled by my shame.  I told him he would be allowed to sleep with whomever he wanted, forever.  I promised him that.  At no point did I tell him I would like it or feel happy about it.  I feel like I did a bait and switch.  I feel like I owe him for all the sex he will never get to have because he was stupid enough to marry someone as insecure and selfish and possessive as me.  I feel guilty that I seem to have tricked him into monogamy.  In turn I fell compelled to say, “Ok fine, I guess I can’t be monogamous either–go have fun.”

I sincerely believe I should stop having sex with other people.  I should not act on feeling compelled to earn love and affection with sex outside my marriage.  It’s bad enough that I do it with Noah.  I don’t actually think I should go out and find a harem of men who will cheerfully call me a whore during sex.  I don’t need that.  I do enough of that all by myself.

I feel so broken.  I seem to have absolutely internalized that anyone who fucks this many people is kind of disgusting.  And all I want to do is increase the number so I can increase just how many people will think I am disgusting.

But Noah doesn’t care.  He doesn’t care at all what I’ve done or what I might do in the future.  He wants me.  He takes great pride in me.  He loves me and adores me.  He bends over backwards from me in pretty much every part of life.  Except when he’s being impulsive.  Oops.  His friend told him, “The problem with your situation is it’s hard to know when you are cheating.”  Maybe if the rules are clearer then it will be easier to figure out what to do?

I feel like I have taken something away from him.  He was poly when I met him.  How dare I take that away.  I seem to be the epitome of what Dan Savage and Mistress Matisse warn about.  That evil double crosser who promises poly and can’t hack it.  I’m sorry I am so broken.  I really am.  I wish that I could encourage Noah to do anything he wants with anyone he wants.  Hell, I do encourage him.  But it hurts me when he does it.  I’m sorry that is true.  I really am.

No buying for a year.

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We have all the furniture, kitchen gadgetry, and linens we could possibly need for many years.  Shanna and Calli are (I think) set in their next respective sizes.  I’m still shifting sizes dramatically and I will need to buy clothes.  I think I should limit it to no more than $25/month and only at thrift stores.  I started off 2011 wearing size 16.  Right now I am on the smallish size of a 12 and every sign of getting smaller as I increase running.  I will really and truly have to acquire new clothing.  I’ll try clothing swaps and such first.

We have to buy food of course.  I’m not going to ask us to commit to a year of not eating out.  Ew.  But Noah and Sarah–I think we should have a really low amount we are allowed to spend per week.  What do you think is fair?  Right now we generally squeak by with $400 when I’m trying to keep us from going out.  Do we have to stay at this level?

Groceries absolutely have to be under $1,000/month.  Just… yeah.  We eat too well.  What are our actual priorities?  Raw milk at $16/gallon?  Eggs from chickens who had a great life at $7/dozen?  Probably.  What else will we have to cut instead?

It’s probably not the best idea in the whole wide world but I think I will be on a hiatus for a while from therapy.  I don’t have it in me right now to go chase a new person.  I am going to save the money and maybe get other things done health wise with that much smaller budget.

Thinking about forgiveness

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Do you know what not forgiving means?  It means dying alone and angry no matter who is in the room.  I don’t want to die alone.  I don’t want to die afraid.  I don’t want to be angry that after all this misery all I get is death.  I don’t want that.  I want to die knowing that I have honest to fucking god made the world a better place.  I helped other people be happier, better, stronger, wiser.  I want to die smiling.  I want to know that I did exactly what I was supposed to do and I helped as many people as I could.  I want to feel peace.   Some day I want to know peace.

As long as I am angry like this there is no room.  I have nothing to give.  Being angry takes up so much of me.  I don’t want this.  I don’t want this to be my life.  I don’t know the path and I am so afraid.

Every marriage involves different compromises.  Different accommodation of irritations.  Different forgiveness.  Because the human condition is that we bump each other funny sometimes.  Thank you to all the women who wrote me to tell me that you are angry at Noah too.  It actually made me feel better.  I felt like the anger wasn’t just mine.  And that’s complicated too.  Life is long and life is hard.  Noah really fucked up.  But he has never done anything to break my trust like this before.  He has carefully in pre-negotiated ways pushed me right up to the edge of my limits and off a cliff.  But that’s not the same thing as breaking trust.  He has never broken trust before.

That does have to count for something.  He knew he was being a raging dick.  He didn’t mean to do what he did.  I have never seen him cry before.  He says it hasn’t happened since junior high.  He probably already feels bad enough.  Beating him down isn’t a way to have a happy marriage.  It really isn’t.

I will never again bear a child.  That is a decision I have made for myself.  I want to spend my life with the only person I will ever really completely join my body to.  I want to.  And he’s going to fuck up some times.  And I am going to get very very angry with him.  But I keep my promises.  I promised him a lifetime.

What does forgiveness even mean?  It means telling him how I feel about sex with other people and watching him cringe.  It means filling in the dots for him on some of my broken.  It means telling him that I don’t want to have sex with other people any more.  Even though taking that hit on my identity is going to be massive for me.  I am going to feel compulsive.  I am going to want it.  And I think I shouldn’t do it any more.  It’s not actually a good decision for me any more.  Given who I am I don’t think it will actually be a healthy thing for me to do with other people ever again.  I think this broken is too deep.

It’s time to try something else.