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Category Archives: adult-only
Last night I went out and did something that may have been stupid. I got rip roaring drunk. I had three mixed drinks (rum and coke, whiskey and coke, whiskey sour) and two jello shots. Over ~4 hours. That is more alcohol than I have had in an evening since before I had kids. I am very sick today. I had somewhere around two hours of sleep. Oh man.
But you know what? I had fun. I’m not going to drink like that, maybe ever again. But I went out with the intention of finding trouble because I was feeling self destructive. I got blanket permission to do anything I wanted with anyone I wanted. So I made out with a fun, cute girl. And when I started to have bad tapes in my head I told her that I was ready to stop and I did. There were a number of other implied offers. I looked at each of them and decided that I didn’t want to be that kind of self destructive after all. It’s kind of weird that I am getting closer and closer to flat out monogamy now that I feel better and more secure about the idea of poly.
An eventful life.
I think it is a good idea for me to give new therapists a time line. When I did this one I was kind of startled. Do most people have this much happen in their lives?
3- Parents divorce, first memories of sexual behavior with other children
4- Memories of father molesting me
5- 5 kindergardens, big acting out sexually behavior
6- Moved to Oklahoma/Texas, Uncle Bob hurt Tommy
7- Tommy’s accident, Michael raped me
8- Denny was born, come back to California, started cutting
9- Tommy moved in with us, my father raped me
10- Jeremy raped me, Tommy tried to kill me
11- Tyra was born, tried drugs, escalating acting out behavior,
12- Moved to LG mostly permanently, asked a 25 year to fuck me, dated other 25 year old, grandfather died
13- tried to do the “normal person” thing
14- dated Airforce Michael
15- Patrick raped me, Justin tried to rape me, attempted suicide, psych hospital stay
16- dropped out of high school, Tommy killed himself, group home, 6 months in Bakersfield, speed experiment
17- started West Valley, my father killed himself
18- given date rape drug , found bdsm, started dating Tom,
19- left W.V., lots of moving around and couch surfing, growing awareness of safe sex, trip to Australia
20- pretty sure this is when I started blogging,
21- graduated college, started grad school, trip to London/Paris
22- started dating Noah, broke up with Tom,
23- broke up with Noah, did lots of drugs with James, started teaching, dated Puppy, trip to Ireland
24- Puppy dumped me, married Noah (7 days before my birthday)
25- rape scene with Noah
26- Had Shanna, failed out of grad school
27- Miscarriage, therapist overdosed, Francesca overdosed, trip to New Zealand
28- Miscarriage, Had Calli
29- Uncle Bob died, outed my whole family, wrote ¼ of a book, remodeled my house
This list doesn’t convey how often I moved (more than 50 times), that I went to 25 schools before dropping out. I then went on to attend five colleges in the pursuit of higher education. I have very few consistent friends. I also don’t mention the extremity of my promiscuity here. I don’t know how many people I have had sex with. I had an Excel spreadsheet up into the 70’s then I had a hardwear crash. I know I am in the triple digits but I have no idea where. It is not possible for me to recreate the list because I don’t remember most of the people or their names. This also makes me sound like a heavy drug user and I’m not. Previous to my recent usage of pot for anxiety in the last couple of years I did things occasionally at parties. I didn’t consistently use or use daily, ever.
And then the wind changes
I realized today that we leave for Europe in 17 days. Oh no! That’s very soon! I don’t have clothes that fit! I haven’t even started looking into what the climate will be like so that I know what to pack! And just like that, it’s time to go something else for a while. Something that requires that I have tons of energy and focus. I want to perfectly plan how to run out of food before we go. I want the house ready for Sarah to move in… and I haven’t even finished painting her room. Excellent!
Now we’re talking. I love planning.
Therapy introduction
I have two upcoming appointments with different therapists. No shit y’all, I’m serious about trying to find someone. I’m still asking for other recommendations for people you think I might get along well with. 🙂 But I need to have a starting place, so I’m going to ramble for a bit and see if I find it.
Dear New-to-me-therapist,
Hi! I’m Krissy. Depending on which stories I tell I’m a plucky, energetic feisty member of the local bdsm/poly communities. Mostly on hiatus for the breeding thing, but I’ll be back. I’m a former teacher, so I place a high value on formal education. I’m a hippy future-homeschooling parent. I’m an incest survivor. I was raped many times by many people before I hit puberty. I was taught that I am supposed to have sex with people when they want to have sex with me whether I really want to or not. I am a highly functioning person with a wide and intensely devoted friends network.
How I’m learning to marathon
It occurs to me that I am using this space intermittently to track my progress of how I’m becoming a marathoner in this life stuff (and the running sense too, ironically) but I’m not being explicit about why I’m doing that. Most of the time as I browse around the internet I see people documenting stuff in their life that is obviously the one and only corner of their life they are willing to let people see in that much detail… only I don’t put it together like that. What I see is, “Look at how together these people are, aren’t they better than me!” I’m really competitive. It’s why I hate playing games. I can’t handle seeing my constant life struggles made fun of. Losing feels traumatic. I feel like I just got punched in the face. I have thrown the board at people, decks of cards…
My mom. My mom and I played gin rummy for years and years. She gloated a lot when she won. Not in a severe way. It was subtle. I don’t have a clear memory to explain why it bothered me so much but it really did. I was the loser at absolutely everything in my family. I’m tired of always being the one to be the pathetic one. The one who fails. The one who loses. So when I see these blogs all over the internet from these Perfect Attachment Parents! Who are doing everything Right! I feel like shit. I feel like a failure as a parent. I feel like obviously I am this horrible abuser and my children will be damaged and fucked up and traumatized… only they aren’t. My children are wonderful. Everyone who speaks to them marvels about how they glow with life and vitality. “They just seem more…aware than most children!” I am truly not a bad parent, even though I yell sometimes. In fact, I am a good parent. And sometimes even a good parent says stupid things like, “If you do that again I am going to hit you. No I am not because hitting is wrong. But dangit Shanna I am going to scream until I feel like my eyes want to pop out of my head and then you will cry and I will fell bad just please stop doing that!!!!” And then she stops doing it and apologizes and I apologize for losing my temper and we hug.
Yeah, I do have anger issues. But in the process of becoming a marathoner I have to acknowledge them. I have to know that I am making progress on dealing with them. I have to know that I am actually proving, beyond the shadow of a doubt that I am a better mother than I had. Even if I can’t make 200 cookies for Christmas.
My mother was a sprinter. She went from huge project to huge project. Sprinting isn’t just about wanting to move, though that is a component. My mother, DOES CHRISTMAS. She makes pans and pans and pans of cinnamon rolls to give out as Christmas presents to every Tom, Dick and Jane she knows. Even people she frankly dislikes because she needs to be “fair”. When I was younger the time to make this many pans of stuff to give away dominated a lot of my life. My experience of Christmas was my mother working and having nothing to do with me.
Just like I’m doing with my kids and documenting on this stupid blog. I don’t think I am actually a Narcissist at all, but I think that if I have no formal documentation I don’t know how to keep myself accountable. I love my sprints and sometimes I can do them in ways that are healthy for everyone. And sometimes I can’t. And it is obvious in my writing when I can’t. If I am in here writing that means I am making no progress on my side projects because I am spending all of my other time with the kids and trying to keep the house at a hygienic level.
I don’t think I am addicted to substances, though I do use them to help me work (mostly sugar and caffeine). I am documenting my sprints here. Y’all don’t know that I didn’t start blogging about the gardening stuff until I had done massive amounts of work to get it to a level where I don’t feel too pathetic starting off. And the remodeling stuff… you’ll notice I haven’t posted pictures lately. That would be because I am not willing to put my pride on the alter and show you how messy it is. I want to show final product but I am running out of time. You aren’t seeing pictures because I am consciously choosing to spend my time in the house with my kids. I am lowering the stress in my life by resting after my sprint. I am hibernating with my babies.
We are playing and doing tons of arts and crafts. I’m taking pictures. We are learning and growing and talking and exploring. We are back to two movies a week: one on Monday, one on Friday. We have been getting out into the community in small quiet ways. We have been making a point of going to the local breakfast places more and settling in as regulars. We haven’t driven down to San Jose just for breakfast in a while. But I love that Donna, at the local Original Pancake House, lights up and yells “Shanna!” and runs over as quickly as she can. Donna’s grandsons live across the country and she doesn’t get to see them much. She adores Shanna. Randy at the building department went and found his card and told me to call and email with any house owning questions I ever have. He thinks his job as a civil servant is to help the community. I am getting to know my building inspector because I have the same guy every time.
I have small one on one interactions like that and I manage them. There has been a plumbing fiasco, but that will be fixed soon and I am dealing with resolving it bit by bit. I can’t handle it in big chunks or my stomach acid production goes through the roof and I am suddenly nasty and yelling. So I am learning that if I have to call the plumbing company I medicate first. Now that we have reached the point of impasse I am writing them a letter and I will mail it as a registered overnight letter so that I don’t have to speak to them on the phone again. I am going to schedule the work for the weekend so Noah is home and I am going to sit in my room. It’s not rational, but I have ridiculous fear right now. So even though it is irrational I will ask my husband to handle it and I won’t be macho because I would start a fight. I would escalate tensions. Noah will passively observe work being done.
That’s how you become a marathoner. Right now I have to walk very very slowly through life. I catch up on work and lightly jog a little through the day playing with the kids and doing dishes. Mostly I’m resting. The sprint with my incest stuff is too fresh and if I try to be macho right now I will injure myself metaphorically. It’s just not worth escalating my stress levels like that.
This being a grown up thing sucks. Which is to say Liz, yeah. I think you are right.
Real life carries on
While I have been processing loudly here I have also been continuing to slowly make progress on the house. It has been going at a turtle’s pace lately because I am just not up for frantic right now. Low stress is awesome. Yesterday we had a birthday party for Shanna. I asked her who she wanted to invite and she listed the people she wanted to come and I asked them over. It’s interesting because she did not invite everyone I would have invited. But I realized that I am trying to project my “family” bonds with people onto her. If I believe in Chosen Family, then Shanna gets to choose her own. She is not stuck with mine.
We nursed for the last time. I asked a friend who is an amazing photographer to come over and take pictures. Shanna and I have been talking for several months about how it was the last time. Previously I was committed to child led weaning, but now I am committed to not abusing my children. I will ensure I reach my goal by lowering my physical expectations of myself. I have body issues with too much contact. This “touched out” thing is painfully anxiety causing for me. And Shanna’s mouth has changed. Nursing hurts. So every time she wants to nurse I experience this rush of panic because it will be painful. Calli seems to have improved her latch a bit, but I think Shanna is kind of beyond fixing. Biology says she needs to stop. This is why other animals wean by kicking their children away from them. I’m not going to kick her, but I am going to pick the weaning date.
Shanna astounds me. Her verbal precocity is odd to live with. I obsessively do research about “age appropriate” topics because she asks me questions that lead to topics more appropriate for a 10 or 12 year old. I’m not sure if I am doing her a service or not in how I am raising her, but holy cow is she an awesome person so far. I really like my daughter. I love that when we are having a snippy day she can turn around and tell me, “Mom that tone of voice sounds mean. It hurts my feelings when you use that tone. Can you please ask more nicely?” And I say the same thing to her and when either of us say it the response is, “Oh! I didn’t mean it that way! Let me try again.” And we do. And there is a hug. And we move on with our day. She is excruciatingly aware that I am not ever trying to hurt her, sometimes I just sound harsh when I don’t mean it. Thank you God. Thank you for letting my daughter feel in her soul that I never want to hurt her.
Which isn’t to say we don’t have stormy days. I talk to her about hormones. I talk about the fact that you have these chemicals in your brain and some times in your life they are more active so you have big big strong emotions that are hard to learn to deal with. I told her that this kind of thing will happen again at puberty. It’s ok to have these strong emotions, you just have to learn how to handle them. Sometimes handling them means looking at a clock and realizing you are probably over tired or over hungry and that is why you are having them and dealing with those problems so you can go back and solve the original problem. She likes to ask for a handful of nuts right before going to sleep because then she wakes up a lot more cheerful and I think that is a fabulous work around. I’m glad she figured it out.
It’s amazing watching her grow. Right now she is in that phase where she is putting concepts together. Like she will all of a sudden observe that an object is brown plastic. Then she will wander around the room labeling the materials and color of all the other objects. She just noticed that “things” are made of other “things” and those other things have names! It’s neat. She knows so many words that daily she uses dozens of words that shock me.
Her play is very intensely imaginative. She uses characters from her favorite movies, primarily, but also themes from all the books we read to fuel these intense stories that can go on for days. She is just starting to construct play fort type things. This year will be rad. She loves going swimming in the hot tub. She is lack luster towards sand. Mostly she wanders around the yard from hiding place to hiding place telling her story games. I am deliberately trying to create ways to have wild “hidden” places in the yard. Unfortunately that will take a few years to come to perfect fruition, but somehow I doubt this urge will go away. 🙂
All of a sudden she has discovered intense fear. That is new. She has always, at least occasionally, had nightmares, but these are different. She told me yesterday that she needs her nightlight back because her room is terrifying in the dark. To be fair, I’m not sure she understands that terrifying is more intense than spooky. This of course lead to a conversation about how the nightlight left her room because she ripped it out of the wall and did drywall damage… so don’t do that again.
I live with this vague terror that I am a bad mother, but my daughter shows no signs of it. She really is a shining example of humanity. Her empathy and intuition and verbal abilities combine to make an uncanny kid, but in a way that makes you believe in past lives. She doesn’t feel like a three year old. She feels like an adult who just isn’t up to speed yet. But I guess that is how I talk to her. I am teaching her how to be an adult, not how to “be a kid”. I think that kid culture in America is brutal and nasty and I hope she misses it basically entirely. Because right now it is obvious that nothing bad has actually happened to this child. Even her stormy days are marked by her lack of trauma. When she is truly upset and sobbing about my treatment of her what she says is, “It hurts my feelings when you tell me to go play.”
I’m doing pretty well.
(Picture copyright: Denise Cicuto)
Just in case anyone wonders
I’m doing a lot better. I am stepping down my medication daily because I have to go to Europe for a month in 2.5 weeks. Woo! Luckily I get to walk away from most of my sources of stress. 🙂
I am sad, but I’m not lost in my head. I am participating fully in my life again. And that’s what life is about, right?
What does it mean to be an addict?
So I’ve been tossing and turning lately about the whole “addict” thing. It plays in with incest families because most of the coping mechanisms are similar. Everyone is fucked up in similar ways, just to greater and lesser extent. Pretty much everyone I know who was raised around addicts/abuse/fucked up shit all seem to have anxiety. Anxiety is horrible to live with. It can really ruin your day. All day. Every day. To greater and lesser extent influenced by a huge array of factors. But anxiety is useful. Anxiety is energy. If you get good at it, you can learn to channel that anxiety into enormous energy surges and you can accomplish great things.
I’ve done this a lot in my life. That’s why I wait until the last minute to do work. This is a common thing. Lots of people work better in sprints rather than marathons. But if you look around the world, many things have to be done by people who are running a marathon, not a sprint. I’m a mother. Raising children is one of the most grinding marathons in life. And I’m a sprinter. I love to sprint. I love to have big dramatic hard periods where I accomplish a lot of work and then I go hibernate. I really suck at work/life balance.
When I talk to people who are marathon runners they tell me to learn to meditate or “heal” so I can “find peace” not realizing that what they are telling me to do is to stop being me. They are telling me to remove the energy that has sustained my life. That is part of the problem. I’ve never thought about it quite like that before. I get very very fussy about advice. That’s a huge hot button for me. I am very particular about who I solicit advice from. And if I sit here and go down the list I can sort people into marathoners or sprinters and I can straight down the line predict how and where their advice is useful. I’m half tempted to make a list and explain the people and see if anyone can guess. But naptime isn’t that long.
There has to be some kind of balance. There has to be a way to help a race horse pull a plow. Mostly what we do (as far as I am aware, in America) is medicate them. We have so many drugs for this it isn’t funny. I cannot function right now in the day to day grind without some form of help. With help I am patient, kind and attentive. Without help I pace all day pissed off about the work I want to be doing that I can’t do because my children have needs. That really doesn’t make for a good day for anyone.
But the problem is, I really like being a sprinter. If I medicate so that I can be a marathoner when my kids are awake and I need to be more level, that doesn’t go away the rest of the time. It’s pretty difficult to find any kind of medication that you can fine tune enough by itself for that kind of anxiety suppressant. So if I want to feel like me and have that nervous energy I need to medicate again. And there’s this cycle. And I have really strong feelings about it. I feel very upset about doing this. I feel like I am a completely horrible person. I am a terrible mother.
Yeah. Guess what my fucking uppers are. Sugar and caffeine. Yeah. So I do medicate down (legally/medically and everything) because I feel that is the most important thing for me to be doing. But then I eat crap and eat a caffeinated mint and I get up and I start Working! But why am I really better than someone who uses speed responsibly? (Breastfeeding issues aside)
And then it comes back around to, but I don’t want to be an addict. I don’t want to be addicted to energy cycles in my body. But the thing is, if I don’t medicate at all… I’m a sprinter. Not a marathoner. That’s really not fair to my kids. I am not going to be putting them in daycare for a laundry list of reasons I should never have to enumerate! Why in the fuck do I feel like I have to defend the fact that I WANT to be home with my kids! Ugh. But I’m a sprinter, not a marathoner.
So is my mom. My mom pulled me hither and yon following her sprints. I actually plan to do a fair bit of that with my kids later. When they are older. When they can have a say in where we go and what we do and opt out if they really don’t want to. I want my children to have a safe community of people who see them. People who are tracking their growth and progress so that even if I do lose my shit and completely start abusing them (very unlikely) there will be people who notice. I want my next door neighbors to know that my daughter is this bright, passionate, exceptionally precocious child. If she stopped being willing to talk to them it would be really a big deal. Shanna adores them and goes over to visit whenever she can. I want there to be people in my daughter’s life who will be ask questions on her behalf. That won’t happen if I sprint.
I think it was enormously damaging to me in every single way that I have no idea what it feels like to have people in your life. In about a year I will have lived with Noah longer than I ever lived with my mother continuously. Wow. That’s really sad. I lived with my ex-boyfriend Tom longer than I had ever lived in one place before. That was just over three years. I have now lived in this house longer than I have ever lived anywhere else in my life. That’s quite daunting.
A comment said that someone doesn’t love me or hate me. She’s trying to get to know me. That actually freaked me the fuck out. I am absolutely the sort of person who bonds or doesn’t and just runs away. I keep friendships with the people I bond with. I have many many friendships that have lasted 10, 15, almost 20, and 30 years. Ok, only one (nearly) 30 year friendship. But oh man do I keep people. Thing is, I keep them in my head and my heart. Sometimes I keep in decent touch on im. But I don’t see people. I am alone and very lonely. I don’t know how to have community with people I am not living with. I’ve never ever had it. I don’t even know what it looks like.
But I’m trying to find out. Today is Sunday. At 4 Alex and Yani will come over for Family Dinner. I still don’t know what we are eating and first we have to make Shanna’s birthday cake. She wants vanilla this year. I think I scored big. There’s still so much to do and I want to do it. And that means settling in for a marathon. I want this life. I want it so much that I lose my breath with terror as I make my contingency plans for what to do in the various circumstances that could come with it ending.
I have to have those contingency plans. I’m a sprinter. If I fuck this up I have to run and I have to run hard. But I have the plans. And I know what to do. So now what I have to do is settle in and not fuck up. Because I really want my life. And so I medicate. I medicate and worry about health risks and the psychological risk to my children if I don’t. Maybe I am an addict and I just never knew it. But I don’t think that’s true. I’m not an addict. I’m a sprinter who isn’t allowed to run so I’m frustrated as all hell. I will get back to a stage in my life where that is appropriate and I will stop medicating and I will run like hell. It will be glorious and beautiful.
It’s hard living with the guilt of medicating though. I think I should be at ease with the decision but I really have the internalized message of shame. For me to need help of any kind in any way means I am a weak and worthless human being. But honestly all of the versions of “strong” I’ve ever seen don’t look very appealing. I don’t want to medicate because I do not want to feel like an addict but if I do not medicate I am making a choice that is bad for my kids because I am a nasty bitch. So don’t be a nasty bitch. But I’m a nasty bitch because I am a sprinter not a marathoner. So become a marathoner.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
As I was lying in bed trying to put Calli to sleep I let my mind wander. For a while I thought about a friend and her relationship with her family. Automatically I started trying to find a way to put a dysfunctional relationship on my thoughts. Of course they are fucked up, right? But they really aren’t. I mean, there are a few family scandals but enh. Overall they are just good people doing good things as they lead good lives.
Pretty much my entire extended family would turn a blind eye to me being raped. They have. Repeatedly. I suspect they would do so again tomorrow. Well, to be fair… after the last two weeks I don’t blame them. But say I had been raped a month ago, before the uproar. If I had shown up for a visit at my aunt’s house and one of their neighbors had held a gun on me behind a closed door and forced me to have sex with him… I would automatically be the one lying. It would be a continuation of my insane stories.
Even though my father confessed.
Ideas that I don’t have time to follow through on right now.
So people keep mentioning that I have great ideas for CSI or SVU. Thing is, I did prosecute my father. He was arrested and interrogated for something like 72 hours. He confessed to everything. The detectives said it was one of the most horrific things they had ever heard. But then he killed himself before the trial started. The very morning, in fact. So that confession isn’t really public record.
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Years ago I was on a public mailing list. I had a really big mouth and I spouted off about a lot of shit I didn’t understand. I came out of my family environment at 18 feeling like I had been a real and true adult for at least six years. I had opted in to sex six years previously. I started working when I was 15. That sort of stuff. So by the time I came and found the bdsm community… well that was interesting.
There were a couple of individual people from the community at that point in time who weren’t fond of me. If I am even vaguely self aggrandizing, I was the darling. Except when I wasn’t.
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Being fixed and conformity. I sent a non-hysterical closure type of email to the therapist I just fired and I really didn’t like her response even though she meant entirely well. I realized why after talking to Sarah. My old therapist saw “so much potential” and she wanted to help me “heal”. Uhm. What the fuck does that mean anyway? Oh, she wants me to go to a Reiki practitioner and she wants me to cleanse my chakras and go to meditation retreats and learn more about Wicca and…
uhm. Have you fucking met me? I am not going to be a nice gentle healed person. Ain’t. Fucking. Happening.
Years ago I was on a public mailing list. I had a really big mouth and I spouted off about a lot of shit I didn’t understand. I came out of my family environment at 18 feeling like I had been a real and true adult for at least six years. I had opted in to sex six years previously. I started working when I was 15. That sort of stuff. So by the time I came and found the bdsm community… well that was interesting.
There were a couple of individual people from the community at that point in time who weren’t fond of me. If I am even vaguely self aggrandizing, I was the darling.
How you become brave
Last night Shanna had a nightmare. The rat from Lady in the Tramp, yo. She was really freaked out. So I explained to her that the pictures in your head that look like movies when you are sleeping are called dreams. I told her that in her dreams she gets to practice saying and doing brave things because when you are dreaming you can be as big and powerful as you want. I told her it was how you learned to defend yourself. Because when you are a kid you are small so you have to dream about being big and powerful. If you do lots of practicing in your dreams, when you grow up you will know how to be big and powerful.
But the most important part is knowing that if something upsets you, do something about it. Tell me to delete the movies. Talk about your feelings. Because that is how you fix the problem. And she told me she needed some water first. So I got her some water.
When I came back with the water I asked her what things make her smile. She started telling me about some of them. I told her that if she falls asleep thinking about the things that make her happy and strong she will have better dreams. She didn’t wake up again.
I had a day in the world
Today a friend came over and I stayed out all day. She watched the kids while I dealt with the plumbing permit situation at the city. I have to say, Randy at the Fremont Building Department is one hell of a nice guy. I think he is just a shining soul and I’m glad I met him today. He answered a lot of questions and he took a personal interest in me. He gave me his email address and told me to feel free to contact him any time I need to. He told me that he believes that as a civil servant it is his job to do anything in his power to help people. I think that’s magnificent.
And because we had fussy children we came home and made tea sandwiches and cookies and tea and Shanna had a scone. We played in the sand. We painted. I made a nice little dent of progress in the garage moving stuff around.
My friend and I talked about my stuff a little. But mostly we talked about other things. I was ok. Shanna is interested in pushing my buttons so of course I was frustrated a few times but it felt normal. When I act like I have been acting for the last few days I feel like I am in my mother’s body. I move more like her. I process this as experiencing the emotions she had when she did those movements but of course I don’t really know. I’m not sure if it is true or not, but I suspect that I feel so alone in the world because I am incest survivor. Because I was raised in a house that was broken so deeply and so completely that other people really can’t imagine my perceptions of events. I have a big issue with transference. I constantly try to work through my family relationships in other arenas in my life. That means that if people respond in ways that I perceive as the potential sign of abuse I run away from the whole group immediately. I don’t know how to be part of a group. I cannot figure out group dynamics. It really doesn’t help that one of my default methods of getting to know men is to be sexually aggressive. I’ll tell you, I’m popular. Well, with men. Women often dislike me intensely. Or they love me. Women don’t tend to have neutral reactions to me. I cannot count how many times people have told me long intricate stories about how much they hated me when they met me. I usually blink and wonder why they are telling me this. Eventually they get to the part where they tell me how much they respect me and I am so god damn honest and Holy Shit! It’s remarkable how consistent the story is from different people. Do you know what I get out of that exchange?
People hate me as soon as they meet me. Pretty much every time I get one of those stories I hightail it away from the group and never talk to the woman again. I’m awesome. Or something. It’s really weird that people grow to respect that I have strong opinions and I am intense… but I make people uncomfortable. They don’t really want to be around me. This is my story about this. I can come up with a long list of reasons why I think I am disliked by most everyone from every community I have ever been in. Sure, I make a few friends in each group and I hold on to those people tightly. Mostly though, I’m convinced people think I’m a piece of shit.
That’s what I was told over and over. If I was having a good day and I started singing along with the radio my brother Jimmy turned around and sneered, “What did you do with the money?”
“What money?”
“The money for singing lessons.”
Badump. If I complained I couldn’t take a joke and I was a whining baby. I was sent to my room. My family viciously disliked me. I have never been willing to be the person they want me to be. They have a few roles they would like to offer me and I can have my pick, but I have to pick one. To be fair, they do like to pass the roles around. I could do my time as the pathetic weakling coming back from my fall from grace (my sister in AA after she let her partner rape her son) then after a few years of being “clean” I could start slipping up again. I could start just letting things slide. Hey! I’m only human! We all mistakes, right. I’m just trying to live a little. Sober people are so boring. (Depends on which sober people. To be fair, the sober people in my family tend to be really fucking boring.) So then after a while you start going down hill again. You have some “bad luck” due to the fact that you haven’t held a job in years because you’ve been too busy at home doing drugs. (ouch. That’s close to home.) Normally the drug usage starts to escalate a lot at that point. Then everything else starts to escalate. Then you rape a little kid behind closed doors. Then… for some reason you end up in AA. For some reason. Like when you arrested and do time for being a drug dealer. And you are required to go to rehab as a condition of parole. So then you start your cycle as a pathetic weakling…
That’s my sister’s path. I could do that with her. Sort of. Not really. Because you see… I’m not the one who does that. If I disagree with what anyone else says then I’m crazy and mean. If I go along with stuff and I am passive and invisible and accept all of the abuse then I will be tolerated. I’m at the bottom of the heap. I’m the baby of the family and I just need to accept that I will get shit on for the rest of my life because I am just not competent. Even though I am the one who should go work and support everyone. Right. And I should never question their repeated “loans” which WILL BE PAID BACK!!! Only they won’t be. If you say, “Dude. Tell me this is a gift and I will give you the money and never say a word. If you tell me this is a loan you god damn better pay it back.” Then I am a terrible mean hateful person for bringing up the money later. After all, I’m rich and she’s poor and she deserves a little luxury.
Do you know I have serious issues around eating single serving foods? If I have yogurt in my fridge in individual servings it is a conscious act of talking myself into believing I am allowed to eat them. I cannot tell how much food I have thrown away because I wasn’t allowed to eat it. In my fridge. That I bought with my money. I was never allowed to eat those things as a kid because they were for my mom’s lunch. I’m quite certain that’s not how she remembers it. And there was other food. But I didn’t like the other food. So I didn’t eat. I went hungry as a kid fairly often. Sometimes it was because I refused the gross food I was offered (at this point I’m pretty sure I have sensory processing issues, I really have problems with food textures) and I wasn’t allowed to have anything else.
After I write that I feel kind of mixes. My story is that my mom was very tolerant of my limited list of foods. She was willing to let me eat only them at meals. But outside of Ramen she didn’t cook any of them much. Interesting. I don’t think I will come to the truth about that one. I don’t think I remember and I can’t ask her.
But I have some not so awesome food issues. Because it’s all about control. Incest is all about control. My father’s mind games continued running my family. My family claims they are out of those cycles. They have moved on. But my sister hasn’t worked in years and she sits at home doing drugs and babysitting the children of her children’s teenage-mom friends. My sister claims all of these children as her grandchildren. I wonder how many of them she will rape. That’s why I need to finish the book. That’s why I will eventually get the court records of my father’s testimony. I want to have them in my hands as a magic talisman as I go forth to do battle for the souls of children I will never know. My sister is a rapist and she should be in jail. At the very least her house of cards needs to come down before she rapes another child or allows another boyfriend to rape a child.
I think I just found my purpose in life. Well, one of them anyway. But that will motivate the book. The children she is raising are slightly older than my daughter. In my family abuse seriously escalates at about seven. I don’t have a lot of time.
Time to go back to the world.
Earlier today I had 16,000 words on my front page from the previous two days. My hands hurt. I’m still jagged but it’s settled. It’s time to go do something else again. It’s time to go back to figuring out how to do this day in-day out life thing. It’s time to start just doing the life thing. As much as I love my garage, I’m feeling trapped and unhappy about it. Next week my daughter turns three. I don’t want to be doing this on her birthday.
I think this is the biggest freak out I’ve had in a very long time. I’m not sure how I feel about it yet, it’s too close. All this stuff is still muttering in my head. But my body is exhausted. I need to get off the internet for a few days and just be present with my kids and my house. I’m fixating and that’s not what I want for my life.
I want to live.
Guilt
I just kind of realized what I need in a therapist. I need someone who will sit back and let me tell the story. The whole fucking story. Sit through years and years of me babbling till I can get through all the horrific under layers because it will take forever to sift through it. And I need a therapist who knows that me telling the story is how I talk myself through figuring out the solution. It isn’t until I tell these stories out loud to someone else with zero judgment that I can get to the end and say, “That wasn’t a good childhood, huh?” and have them respond, “Nope” without much emphasis. Just matter of fact. Yeah. That sucked. And I am a god damn mother fucking courageous person for getting through that. And no matter what, anything I did as I flailed around and tried to survive was ok. I was a child and they were trying to kill me.
And then I need the therapist to not give me suggestions as to how to get better. I need the therapist to learn when I am evading and call me on it. I need a Noah who is more objective. I need someone who can crawl inside my head and find out why I am doing the things I am doing because until I can deconstruct why I have no idea how to fix it. Other people do great and fine with other short term things with treating symptoms instead of problems, but that isn’t my story.
My story is that I have no idea what “normal” is and I don’t know how to find out. I need to explain every single fucking day of my horrifyingly twisted childhood and have someone go through with me why I did things right and where I did things that were maybe not the absolute best, and ok I can apologize for how my flail landed if it makes me feel better, but it’s still ok. I’m still ok. I am the right kind of me. I do not need to change who and what I am to make any one else happy.
I am a writer. I need to write about the things in my head. I need to express them. The noises and the voices are drowning me and when I get them out I find peace. I need to say that my childhood was not ok a few thousand times because I have to say it for every time I was raped, molested, abused, made to feel invisible, hit, called names, and told I was worthless.
I need to find out that it really isn’t normal for a 12 year old girl to ask one 25 year old man to fuck me then date another 25 year old and accept jewelry from him after going down on him the first time. I was well on my way to a bad life. My first chosen lover was a 25 year old drug dealer named Sean David Segura. He fucked me without a condom. He fucked me without foreplay. It hurt and it sucked. But I thought I just had to get used to it. I dated a DJ from KRTY. His real name was Rick Rood but he went by the name Glen Richards on the air. We only dated for like a month. But my mom seemed to think it was just fine that I was dating him. At least he was a nice guy? Who liked to have 12 year olds suck him off. He was also a singer. I went to watch him perform at the county fair. Uhm. He sang childrens music. Right.
And these are the things in my story that my family points at. These are the things that i have done that they use as evidence of why I am bad and dirty and crazy. The thing is… this is what happened when I was 12. It was really kicked off a few years before that.
I was 7 when Tommy was hit by the car. My whole world exploded. Everyone turned and looked at Tommy. I was very invisible. I started acting out really hard. To be fair, I was raped not long after his accident and before I saw him and it became real for me. So the accident tripped things off. Then Michael raped me and my mom beat me. Then my mom up and disappeared for months and left me with my sister. My sister was 20. A drug addict trying to abstain because she was pregnant (but she would not receive prenatal care because she was afraid of drug tests) so she was a nasty fucking bitch. Oh she was awful. She was horribly abusive a lot of the time. From my current point of view I feel like she was probably actually doing pretty well all things considered. But that wasn’t how it felt at the time. And then I was sent home with a family I only kind of knew. By home I mean I drove home with that family in their minivan from Texas to Southern California. It was a horrible trip and I was terribly traumatized and everyone expected me to just buck up.
We bounced around Southern California. I can’t tell you what happened then because I have nearly no memories. I know that eventually we were with my Uncle Larry for a while (my brother has since filled me in that my mom was fucking him for rent–nice, huh?) and Uncle Larry liked to premake his screwdrivers and just leave the pitcher in the fridge and I got very drunk. And my mom and I stayed up on New Years watching horror movies. It was really pretty awful. I was obsessed with horror movies and my mom let me watch them all the time. Some day I should stop and look at the movies I watched: The Gate, Poltergeist 1, 2, 3, and the Nightmare on Elm Street series again. I bet I could come up with recovered memories that way. Derail!
After that I’m unclear until we lived in Whittier. That part of my life was very bad. We lived there for 18 months. So many things happened then. I know that is the part of the story I need to get to right now but I am dissociating hard. It’s actually hard to maintain eye focus. This is scary. I keep being pissed off because people aren’t posting enough on facebook. Please god, isn’t there something in the universe that can distract me from this pain? I want to go play with my children to avoid this. Right this minute that would be a derail and I know it. Fuck.
My instinct is to call it the darkest part of my childhood. Because then I can go off on a digression about whether it really was or not. But that’s not the point. It was god awful horrible horrible horrible. We lived there with Tommy during the brief time they tried to have him live outside a facility. It wasn’t good. My mother and my sister were not prepared to deal with the kind of care that a brain damaged disabled kid needs. My sister was trying to get her life together. She was trying to go to college and she had a good GPA and she was smart. But her husband dumped her after my nephew was born because he wasn’t interested in being a dad. That man deserves to rot in hell for what he let happen to his son. I hope he has nightmares every night. Bobby is a selfish, self-centered son of a bitch. He was more interested in being a kept pretty boy than in caring for the son he made. My sister went off birth control without his permission but he didn’t want to bother with condoms. He helped make the baby, he deserves responsibility for how my nephew turned out.
Anyway. But my sister was dating Tom. Who was a drug addict, alcoholic loser. She claims she actually decided to get pregnant with my niece, which is really an interesting statement. Wow. You wanted to have a kid with that man? You wanted to ensure contact with that man forever? oooooook. You are baby mama number what? Ok, and now is when I look like a classist bitch.
And that’s ok. Because wanting to not be that, to be something different saved my life. Denise’s boyfriend Tom came on to me over the years. It was subtle and I encouraged it. I own that. I thought that was what I was supposed to do with him. After all that is what my sister was doing with him right in front of me. Closed doors are for prudes! Only prudes wear clothes! I strongly suspect she was drunk and/or on drugs through that whole period but I was totally unaware of the drugs.
You see, my mom and my sister thought that as long as they didn’t tell me what had happened to my sister and they didn’t do drugs *in front of me* that I would be ok. They would break the chain. They would free me from the cycles of abuse. And that is what my brother thinks will work too.
But the problem is that they continue to hold abusers to their bosom and permit them their “mistakes” because after all, everyone is human. We all make mistakes. Right? Look, I lay before all you anonymous people on the internet that just like the rest of my family I too am a rapist and a molester. I will tell you the atrocities I have committed and I do so because this is how I figure out where I end and they begin. This is where I explain that I feel like I am a rapist because I sexually aggressed when I was a very young child. I will explain the circumstances in which I crossed boundaries for people and I don’t want people to tell me it is ok and I am still a good person. That is a dark spot on my soul and I will carry it till I die. No one can absolve me of it and trying to do so minimizes my pain. I have to live with that guilt. I can learn to have compassion for myself as I do, because I was a child. And I was just flailing around like a trapped animal trying to survive.
But I still did it and I still need to hold me accountable.
Just like my sister and my mother need to hold themselves accountable for what they did to me. I am not interested in granting anyone mercy in this game of life. If you grant mercy then you allow poison to spread. I am not going to be part of the sickness. And god it sucks to see how I was when I was a child.
But I’m not going to turn around or find Wicca or go do Reiki and cleanse my chakra as a way of absolving myself of guilt. Fuck that. I think that’s the fucking easy way out. I’ll have my husband beat it out of me. It will be awesome.
Perceptions of reality. I feel like my mother made it very difficult for me to perceive reality. She told me over and over throughout my childhood that I was mean, unpleasant and no one liked me. That no one ever would. There is the strong implication that at least my family wouldn’t dessert me because family stays with you NO MATTER WHAT. Here, I’ll show you a message from my sister.
“So I keep preaching to my kids that the number one thing you HAVE to do in order to really be part of a family is to forgive, and the second thing is to tolerate all the crap you really don’t want to tolerate, because love means forgiveness and tolerance more than anything.
So, whatever it was, I don’t care. Whatever it may still be doesn’t matter half as much as the fact that I still miss my nephews enough to cry over it.
I know this; if you’re a hard ass all your life, you’re probably gonna die hard. I’ve learned a lot.
Relatives are people you put up with at Thanksgiving in order to make family happy. Family are people that will rescue you in the middle of the night even if they really don’t appreciate it, want to, or like you very much. I am blessed to have a very LARGE family, and I’m actually well thought of. I don’t NEED more family to have a full, busy life. But I do need to let go of all my anger. Unforgiveness is like a poisen you take expecting the other person to get sick. And frankly, if you were to get sick, I’d take it back anyway, so it’s a pointless endeavor on my part.
We may not have ever hung out, and you may not even like me, but you’re my mother’s son. I changed your diapers too (You were the only one with cloth diapers I remember). Me and mom did all the things you do for your boys, and the fact that you can’t speak to us really tears us up.
For me, I’d prefer you go talk to mom. Just you. Just talk to her Jimmy. She’s not getting younger, and you are not going to have forever to rethink your position. It has come to be my belief that life is hard, and every person that loves a child adds value to that child. If for no other reason, they have someone else they can call when they break down in the middle of the night. You won’t always be able to be there for them…. That’s life man. And there’s going to be at least one of your kids that you just don’t get. Are you going to end up not forgiving them too? I can’t do that. I can’t let my kids go, and you’re my baby brother. I know YOU don’t remember that shit, but I haven’t forgotten.
I wish you could remember more of what she said. Not the stuff that pisses you off – she’s good at that too, but the stuff she was always teaching every step of the way as we grew up. She spoiled 4 kids at once, and did it successfully. You of all people should know what kind of effort that requires.
So for what its worth, you’ve always had my love, even when you didn’t have my understanding. I don’t have to LIKE you to love you. Mom taught me that. But I forgive you – and I ask you to please grow the fuck up sometime before I die and forgive me back. Cuz you’re my brother, and like it or not, I’d still pick your sorry ass up if you got stuck somewhere in the middle of the night. *shrugz* I love you man. I love your kids. And even though I don’t know her really, I respect your wife.
So that’s it. I wish you and yours peace, love and prosperity.”
My sister sent that to my brother on January 28, 2010. There is no mention in there of, “I bet you aren’t talking to me because I raped you but you need to get over it.” Because that wouldn’t be kosher. WE DON’T BRING UP OLD STUFF IN THIS FAMILY. IT JUST HURTS PEOPLE NEEDLESSLY. Because it doesn’t hurt me at all that the people who claim that they will do anything in the whole wide world for me will do anything accept say out loud that they are rapists and child molesters. They will not say out loud that they are disgusting vile people who need some very serious help. No. they lie. They point the finger at me. I have distant relatives sending notes like:
“Ok this has gotten out of hand i belived you when u talked about your father but this is enough! my family is trying to get over a very important person dying and all u want to do is start shit and make shit up r u serious with the things u are saying. You go do ur recovery and leave me and my family alone. this really is enough from u!! I am blocking you from facebook and i dont ever have anything to say to you again. II mean do you really understand how you can hurt with that shit!!!!!!”
and
“You have serious mental problems. I really feel sorry for your children. Please, Please get professional help before you do damage to those poor babies that can not be reversed. OMG I can not believe the vile things that you make up. I really do feel sorry for you and hope that you get help. Do not write anymore of your vile lies to me or Nicole. You have hurt her enough as it is.”
Does anyone else feel like my family is acting a bit strongly if they have nothing to hide. I am not keeping this shit in private for any of you assholes. Fuck off and die. I hope that god damn mountain shakes you all straight to hell.
Asking for input
I know people are reading. My stats page is shocking the shit out of me. Thank you. A few minutes ago I put together a paragraph and stopped and reread it a few times. It feels real, but not true. And I’m not sure why. If anyone has a few minutes to babble a comment at me about what they think about it, I’d like that.
I had to see how bad my life is now compared to how bad my life was then and how bad my life is compared to their life now. I want my life. Staying like them is so completely horrible to me that I physically reacted. So I turned around and I hit them just about as viciously as I could. And now I’m trying to make peace with the fact that I feel like it makes me an abuser when I tell people that I was sexually assaulted repeatedly with collusion from my mother for almost 20 years. That’s hard.
Why I had to fire my therapist
I have a hard time with the fact that I want to pick people to be in authority and have them dictate who I should be. I transfer around who has this power a lot. A lot of the reason that Noah is such a wonderful mate for me is because he shares nearly zero of my interests and he has a lot of interests of his own. He wants time to go do his thing. So he is shoving me towards independence with all the subtlety of an atomic bomb. I need to go try a bunch of things and fail a bunch. I need to go figure out what I actually like to do. That’s what this identity crisis bullshit is about.
I had to fire my therapist because she doesn’t have crystal clear boundaries. I’m not actually sure many people have clear enough boundaries. I’m ridiculously empathetic and I can usually see what people want from me as clearly as if I am reading a book. It’s uhm, kind of weird to admit out loud, but I’ve actually received several proposals of marriage. I don’t tell people that. Because I always brush them off as not serious and the guy must be crazy and just saying that because I just got them off. Whatever. Normally I run from those guys immediately. Those are the nice guys. Ew.
I think the reason that my relationship with Noah works is because he is a cocky son of a bitch. At least long enough to make me hot. The rest of the time he’s plodding and quiet and he keeps his head down so I don’t blow up at him. It’s an odd mix. Why am I fixating on this now. Because I am freaking out because I don’t know how to have boundaries. I don’t know how to be normal. I had to fire my therapist because she expected me to have to defend my boundaries in therapeutic space instead of her doing it for me so I was not safe. She did not hand me a clear framework of what to expect and then follow it to the letter. She was flexible. She was ok with me sending her obsessive text messages. That’s not ok. Because then I fixate. Then I begin to feel like she wants me to do that because she thinks I’m that kind of crazy. When a group leader establishes that we will be spending the next six weeks on sharing our stories and person a will go this week and person b will go in two weeks… That has to be what happens for me.
I need people to help me police boundaries because I really can’t do it all on my own. I don’t know where they are. I have to tell people over and over and over what happened to me because people expect me to be able to keep my shit together in situations where I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I need to learn to recognize that there are situations I can’t be in because they are simply too stressful for me. I am special. What happened to me was freakish and unusual and I need to stop acting like I can do everything all the time the way everyone else can.
Sometimes. And sometimes I have my shit together and I monitor my boundaries easily and it’s ok. This kind of sadness isn’t even all that common. It is something I cannot avoid doing when I am around my family though. I need to just accept that as part of me. There are places and people who make me into a sick person. I start lying and doing bad things in private.
When I was in kindergarden I pulled a little boy behind the book cart and talked him into letting me give him a blowjob. When I came back to the school in sixth grade he told people I had raped him. I called his mother and denounced him as a liar. Today I found him on facebook and told him:
“When we were kids at Lakeside I acted out inappropriately towards you and years later you told people I raped you. I stormed and raged and called your mother.
I need to apologize to you. What I did to you when we were little kids wasn’t ok. I am really sorry I brought that into your life and I did. And when you talked about the fact that it had been a problem for you I lied and shamed you in public.
I am so sorry. I hope you have been able to find people to talk to about what I did to you. I am not excusing myself for what I did. I was a very messed up kid and it is only now that I am stopping to start to think about what I did and why.
You are one of the people I hurt and I am so sorry. I have been sorry for 20 years.”
And I went and found the boy who tried to rape me in high school and I said:
“I need to say this to you. It’s going to seem completely out of the blue. I’m not sure if I want you to respond and acknowledge me or if it is better for me that you not respond. Either way I don’t get to control what you do. Anyway.
Right now I am going through a really rough period because I am stopping to think about all the ways in which I was sexually assaulted in my life. I’m trying to figure out all the ways that I was hurt by people so that I can get a grip on how much therapeutic work I have left. I’m pretty daunted. I was really horrifically raped and assaulted repeatedly for a long time.
And you were part of that. You got drunk and you didn’t want to hear my no. Cameron had to pull you off of me. That was an attempted rape, Justin. And that is what sent me running scared from Los Gatos High School and that friends group. I went and found a lot of ways to get hurt after that because I thought every single person in the world wanted to do that to me.
I think you were a stupid, drunk kid. I don’t think you are evil. I am almost certain that you don’t think of yourself as a rapist. But I am still very hurt by your actions almost 15 years later. I need to say that out loud. I need it to not be invisible that people did this to me. And that includes you.
Please for the love of god if you have an ounce of compassion in your soul please don’t call me a liar. It happened. I have so much evidence of these things happening to me. In some cases I have court proceedings and my family is still calling me a liar.
Even if you ignore this message. Even if you hit delete and you never think about this again. Please don’t call me a liar.”
If I don’t say these things I feel like I am concealing evil in my soul. I feel like I am perpetuating the shame and abuse that made the people who molested me. I will not abuse my children. I will figure out the boundaries. I will ask for help figuring out the boundaries. I will say my guilt out loud. I will come to peace with the things I did when I was helpless. I will look at what I am doing now that I am not helpless and I will not be merciful. I have to do this right.
Because if I fuck this up. I might create kids who hurt like me. And I can tell you right now that I am not going to be that kind of failure. Fuck that shit. I can’t keep my kids from hurting. But I can keep them from feeling like they are on the outside of a glass building looking at people who love them because their mother abused them heinously. I don’t have boundaries because my mother had no boundaries. And I kind of wonder if that is worse than raping me. Seriously. My mother did not prepare me to live in the world and she started neglecting me and leaving me to my own devices when I was a toddler. I have a story about sneaking out and trying to walk to the grocery store when I was three. My mother was asleep because she worked the night shift at Denny’s. My sister was supposed to be watching me, but instead she was out fucking people and doing drugs.
I had a pocket full of pennies and I was going to buy Barbie cards at the grocery store. I started to watch Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farms yesterday. When I saw the little girl declaring “I’m self reliant” I freaked out and had to shut it off. I couldn’t bear to see some happy go lucky little kid declaring how awesome she was for being neglected and abused so I turned it off. Ugh. The joke in that movie is, of course everyone knows she shouldn’t be talking like that because she isn’t self reliant at all. She’s a child. She is completely dependent.
But I hold myself responsible for things that happened when I was a child because my mother refuses to acknowledge her own responsibility and guilt. I don’t have good boundaries because of this. And that’s the part my family won’t see. That is why they are closing ranks. They hold me 100% responsible for the things I did as a very small child while simultaneously not ascribing any real responsibility to my mother. That’s really broken.
And thinking about how broken they are is a waste of thinking time. Because they are. Even though I’ve been telling myself lately that they aren’t so bad, they are. They really and truly are.
Being normal.
I will always have periods where I freak out and can’t cope for a while because coping is an active choice at pretty much every minute. That is a lot of stress and work. I cannot sustain it permanently without relief.
And that is why I won’t shut up. Because I am not going to be the sacrificial lamb suffering in silence. Fuck that shit.