Category Archives: adult-only

Published in the adult-only category

Better reason than usual for staying up late.

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So last night was just a mellow, low key Saturday night.  We stayed in and did a bit of Gestalt therapy.  You know, casual.  Noah explained a bit about it and using the two chair strategy for getting parts of my brain (in this case my ‘little girl’ and my ‘adult’ personas) to talk to one another.  A lot of my recent anxiety feels exactly like being a scared little girl no matter what I am anxious about.  It took several back and forth experiences before I got the hang of “changing the chair” to move back and forth between the mindsets and then it worked really well.

Part of what is upsetting my ‘little girl’ (not all of it, we know we didn’t get to the bottom of the situation, but we skimmed the top layer well) is stuff with Noah.  As we go through this kid-raising thing we are both changing how we behave dramatically.  Noah is tired and kind of withdrawn–almost like he is under a lot of stress or something.  I am experiencing his behavior as being like my mother’s behavior rather that is true or not.  But things are hard and stressful with the kids right now and he is withdrawing.  So I am reverting to pattern in my childhood and I am acting out to get attention and I am doing so largely in potentially self-destructive ways.  I don’t know how to do this “safe” thing.  I don’t know how to just settle in to a place and be there and do that thing on repeat for years, maybe decades.  My life completely explodes every few years and I start over again doing something else.  That’s what I am comfortable with.

So I had this moment where I realized that I am subconsciously baiting Noah.  I want him to get mean to me and nasty.  I want a reason to think of him as my abuser too.  That is the role I know best and I am freaking out because I’m not in it anymore.  How do people do this stable, happy marriage thing?  My only model for life involves relationship-retarded people who are horribly unstable.  My ‘little girl’ part of my brain recognizes that I am trying to kill this.  Trying to provoke him.  And my ‘little girl’ is completely terrified of when he is going to turn around and backhand me for being a smart ass/nasty/difficult.  Noah has (in my mind, not in reality) kind of an aura of simmering rage sometimes.  I feel like he is frustrated and about to snap.  One time early in our marriage he slapped a wall in frustration.  that is by far the furthest and most extreme expression of anger I have ever seen from him.  But in some awful way it feels like a potential entry into his psyche where I can poke him and get reactions that I know how to handle.

To be clear, my ‘little girl’ is mostly upset with *me*.  Not with Noah.  My little girl knows what I am doing and my ‘little girl’ knows it is bad.  I am far more upset with me than him and it’s not about his behavior.

This is what breaking the cycle of abuse looks like.  This is what I have to do right now.  I have to stop and try to tease apart where I am reacting to things that I really need to react to (being molested as a small child is a big deal and I need to work through that) and where I am trying to blow things up so I know how to handle the pattern.  Because both things are going on simultaneously and overlapping.

I realized recently that part of what is both freeing and frustrating is looking at just how much privilege I have.  I really have the luxury of teasing apart the layers of what is going on in my brain slowly in a safe environment.  For all that I’m trying really hard to turn my husband into a monster, he isn’t one.  He’s outrageously patient with me.  He really will keep me safe.  Because of my husband’s job I have ridiculously good credit and I probably have $70k available on credit cards.  If I really wanted to be self destructive and stupid I could get us in a lot of money trouble very quickly.  The interesting thing is how freeing that is.  When my self-destructive impulses start kicking up there is a part of my brain that does lean towards retail therapy.  But when I start going there I follow the path through all the things I would like to buy and what I would do with them.  Because I literally, truly know that I could walk out and buy 99.9% of what I want, today, and it’s just no big deal… there’s no thrill to it.  Ha.  Because it wouldn’t hurt me to buy any of the small impulsive things I ‘want’ I don’t need to buy them.  It’s kind of odd.  I know I won’t incur any difficulty so it’s not worth doing.

Brains are odd.

Ongoing project list

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My Sarah is moving in with us!  This is wonderful!  But I have to do a bunch of house renovation stuff before that is possible.  In no particular order:

sponge clouds on the ceiling in the garage
put up blackboard paint
draw the mural with pencil
paint the mural
paint  remaining walls
order carpet for the garage
install the vent for the dryer
paint Sarah’s room
paint Shanna’s room
move furniture to garage
seal garage door
install door frame on door to side yard
put up curtain over garage door for additional insulation
paint kitchen/dining room door
install screen door on back door

and that doesn’t include the stuff I want to do in the yards.  I have till August 1st.  Oy! 

gym!

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I don’t go to the gym that often. Kids are complicating factors. However I went this morning! And it was glorious! I felt lame because I used to bust out 5 sets of 30 crunches and barely breathe hard. I got through 2 sets of 20 and wanted to die. Ugh. This will be a long road. Alright abdominal muscles, your four year vacation is over.

In other news there was a beautiful older Sikh man across the room from me on the elliptical. He was wearing a Bright Neon Fuck-You-I’m-A-Sikh Turban. He had to have been in his mid 60’s (I couldn’t tell this till the end.) I watched him throughout my workout because his body was poetry in motion. He was so obviously powerful. Me being me, I felt skeezy and creepy because I stared for almost an hour. So I went over and introduced myself. I told him that I was sorry for staring, but he is in such amazing shape that it is inspiring. He smiled and asked me about when I like to come to the gym. I told him it was random because I have young children. He smiled again and told me he hopes he sees me again. 🙂

Not as planned, but good

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Yesterday I thought we had a doctors appointment at 10 and a friend coming over for dinner at 4:30. I felt stressed about finishing all the chores I wanted to get done and I was anxious. But it turns out I wrote the date wrong on the doctors appointment (I looked at the card again and it is really hard to read) and that’s the 7th. And the friend who was coming over to dinner forgot. So I got everything done and had time to write a long blog post and a long email to my lady friend! That was way better than I hoped for.

It also looks like the shed and motorcycle ramp will be leaving my yard this weekend. Woo!

I’ve been snapping at Noah like 345% more than I should. I kind of feel like he is the last man standing in terms of people I can take my foul temper out on. It really isn’t awesome. 🙁 On that note, I’m going to go put pants on and go to the gym. Hopefully I can run out some of this aggression. Wish me luck.

The best things in life are free

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There has been a lot of talk lately ’round the old homestead about what we want from life.  We have been coasting.  This is a hard phase and we need to just ride it out until things improve.  But that’s not happening fast enough and I need some kind of change.  I need to be growing towards stuff.  GOALS!  Necessarily this promotes conversation about what kinds of goals to set.

What I am beating around the bush to say is, Noah wants to be rich.  But that doesn’t really tell you much, does it?  What does rich really mean?  Does it mean rivaling Bill Gates?  Does it mean getting to sit down for a chat with Warren Buffet?  Not so much.  Our goal is for Noah to have to work 20 hours or less for us to maintain our current lifestyle.  In my opinionated opinion our life is rather comfy.  Our life is rather comfy because he earns a lot of money.  The important thing to remember is that we are just beginning with this goal.  Most likely we will mess up in several big ways (already have once) and I’ll talk about those here too.  I think there is no value in trying to make us sound better than we are.  Ok, on to figuring out what we have.  This may take more than one posting.

Right this minute we have three checking accounts (long story[1]) and one savings account.  The sum total of cash in them is $7,439.28.  This wouldn’t sound so bad if our current credit card balances didn’t equal $6,223.43.  That is the closest petty cash:debt ratio in the course of our marriage.  Typically our buffer is much higher than that.  But ok fine.  We’ve had an expensive couple of years with having two kids and replacing our roof and such.  That’s ok!  Not to fear.  This is less dire than it appears because we are… privileged people.  Oh good grief are we privileged.  Soon we will be getting cheques from a wide variety of sources.  And not just in the, “Oh I swear” kind of way.

I think I will start by examining our spending for the past 15 months that I have been using Mint.com.  Now you will see how ridiculously extravagant we are.

I first looked at 15 months of financial history on all of our credit cards.
Total spending: $68,660[2]
Average monthly: $4,577
Lowest month: $1,968[3]
Highest month: $8,540[4]

That’s a rather significant variation there. (Keep in mind that this is credit card spending and doesn’t include things like our mortgage, another rather sizable [5] payment each month.) Oof.

Then I went on to looking at our largest expenses which are unusual and/or not likely to be repeated unless we choose to.  So for example, I will not be having another child.  I will, however, continue to need sudden and unexpected medical and/or dental treatments for goodness knows what in the future.  And my children will have accidents.  So I did not include most medical items.  I also excluded house repairs, vehicle repairs, computer purchases, and the ongoing maintenance fee for the time share.

This left me with (on credit cards):

Travel: $9,654
Turek: $3.250 [6]
DVC: $7510
French Laundry: $1,053
Therapy: $750 [7]

The largest unusual purchases out of our checking account were:

NewsLabs: $12,734 ($25,000) [8]
Toyota: $24,694 [9]
Home Birth: $4,000
Lawyer: $2900

Travel is the most obvious thing to cut, only we haven’t even started traveling for the year.  My second oldest friend in the world is getting married in Scotland.  And I really love travel so realistically this isn’t something I want to suspend long term.  Luckily we don’t have to plan for another vasectomy any year soon.  I won’t buy into another time share.  I promise.  I’m thrilled with the one I have though.  French Laundry isn’t something we will be doing again any year soon so that can come off.  The investment money for NewsLabs came out of stock so isn’t really part of my budget.  The van was part of the refinance so doesn’t really count for this.  And I don’t think we’ll be needing to pay for another home birth nor to do that kind of intensive legal work.

That means I am trying to convince myself that $18,713 is fairly unlikely to happen again and are the result of an unusually expensive year.  This is what I tell myself, right?

If I subtract $18,713 (the truly unusual stuff) from $68,660 (the total) that gives me $49,947 or $3330/month.

That’s an interesting number to me.  Most months one paycheque pays mortgage stuff and the other paycheque handles the credit cards.  Previously Noah was taking home ~$2900/paycheque.  Noah has since gotten a different job with an increased salary.  I kind of love this valley.  Hm.  I am not sure where to go with this now so I’ll let this be.  I will come back to this topic though.  I want to figure out how to get to the point where passive income is sufficient. 

1. Ok, short-ish version: One bank account I have had since I was 18.  That’s where my annuities are deposited.  It is a pain to change anything with the annuities because I have to do it through the mail and everything requires visiting a notary.  They will stop coming in September of this year and that is the only activity in that account.  The second bank account was our failed attempt at a higher interest checking account.  E*trade sucks.  It is being phased out.  The third checking account (and the savings too) are now with a local credit union.
2. Yes I’m rounding.  I’m lazy.
3. Second lowest was $1,974 so not a complete fluke.
4. Second highest was $7,520 so this is an unusually high month.
5. Is anyone sick of the footnoting yet? Noah just taught me how to do it and I’m excited. And our mortgage payment is $2164/month but I pay $2300/month.
6. Noah’s vasectomy; worth every penny.
7. Therapy is a new-ish category because while I have gone intermittently for a while I need to be going regularly for a while and that is a new $600/month expense.
8. Our first attempt at Angel investing. We did better than median (lose everything) but we only did that because the company folded so fast they didn’t have a chance to blow all the money. Right. I hear that some of the other companies we saw that day (none of whom wanted our money) are doing very well.
9. We refinanced our house and took out some equity to pay off the van because it had a ruinous interest rate and our new mortgage is 4.375%. It was a rather good trade.

smks: deep deep gulp

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“May I please have a sip of your water (torani syrup added to sparkling water)?”
“I don’t think you really want a sip.”
“I do! I want a tiny little sip!”
“Don’t you mean you want a gulp?”
“No! I want a tiny little sip!”
“Ok…” Hand off bottle.
*teeny tiny sip* Hand back bottle.
“Thank you for the teeny tiny sip. It was delicious.”
“I’m glad you enjoyed it.”
Sly look… “Now may I have a deep deep gulp?” Huge smile!
“Sure.”

Fake it till you make it?

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Today I feel compelled to wear a belt because I am tired of yanking my jeans up all day long. I consider this a neutral to positive thing. I’m getting smaller slowly. I am not calorie counting in the slightest and I don’t want to. I’m mostly eating what I want. I’m trying to substitute a small amount of fat for large amount of sugar when I know I am comfort eating and that seems to make me feel ‘satisfied’ better. But when I wear a belt with these jeans I have a bulge above and below the belt. Because regardless of my overall size, I had a baby 7 months ago. My belly is very saggy right now. And I feel like I should try to hide that with some big tent-like shirt because I know those instinctive style rules. I know how to ‘slim’ my line. But I want to wear the bright purple shirt with ruffles. And it’s pretty fitted at my current size/shape.

Fuck ’em. I’m wearing the shirt.

Checking in

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Thank you for the phone calls. I really appreciate my friends. I’m trying to keep a more firm line in how much I talk about my shit with Shanna standing nearby. The last couple of times I have really unloaded about what was in my head repeatedly in a day she woke up with night terrors. Today I had the one outburst at my mom on the phone outside in the yard. Then I had one ~15 crying thing immediately following. Then I was calm the whole rest of the day. And Shanna didn’t have a night terror. That, to me, means I erred on the correct side of freaking out. I did a lot in the midst of my mom actively treating me like shit, but I did it outside and away from the kids. I did a little bit in the house with the kids nearby. Then I stopped. I was probably slower than average for the rest of the day, but I kept it together.

Mostly I did this because my friend, K, was due to come over in the morning anyway because she was coming over to babysit my kids while I went to therapy. Handy. Mostly at Jenny’s suggestion (Ack! Two Jennys! My brain is overloading and I will figure out that situation later.) I asked K to drive me down to therapy and they hung out in the park right across from the office. By the way, I’ve realized I’m going to have to do some work on my feelings around unsolicited advice. If I’m going to really do the blogging thing then I’m going to have to just deal with it. Oh man. That will make me twitchy.

And I’m up in the middle of the night trying to figure out what to think and feel about this latest development. I’m trying to decide how many cycles in my brain it gets to have. It doesn’t get as many as it wants right now. I have already decided I need a break from processing this kind of stuff right now and my mother does not have the right to override my decision making process. She doesn’t get to ruin my life anymore. I am on a semi-manic upswing right now. I am trying like hell to get upward momentum started. I can’t stop to obsess about this. Today I need to just get into my head that my mother is doing this to me because she is acting out the story in her head. She is not interested in doing the hard shitty work to break the cycles she has established. That’s not my problem. I am interested in doing that hard work. I am doing that work. Part of doing that work is stopping and telling the quiet, scared little girl inside me that she can’t actually hurt me anymore. Never again will she be allowed to send us to a monster. Tyra’s childhood was ruined too, but Shanna and Calli are escaping. My brother’s kids are escaping. One of my siblings absolutely continued the cycle but I have hope for Tyra. The way forward can’t be me staying up all night obsessing and it can’t be me feeling distracted and apathetic all day with the kids. That’s not acceptable. My life is good, wonderful, and I have all the possibilities in the world. I am not yet 30 years old. My life isn’t over yet. I get to grow up and be anyone I want to be.

Ok. I think I’m going to follow a few random paths for a while as I try to figure out which direction I want to grow in. But that’s ok. I have time.

A fairly major interruption

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This morning as I was plugging along on my merry way I received a phone call from my mother. One might think was a positive event if you didn’t know me. However this was pretty heinous. My mother called me to tell me that I was not sexually molested as a young child and she wants me to get my story straight. Right. That’s why I have been nearly continually in therapy throughout my lifetime. Excellent. Thanks for clearing that up. By the end of that phone call I was very nearly hysterical. Thank all the stars in the heaven that a friend was due to arrive very soon after. Today was therapy day. Excellent timing, Mom. My friend helped me get through the day. When my beloved eldest child woke up before I was ready for her nap to be over I was decidedly unthrilled. I really need the alone time to think right now. Luckily I have the most delightfully manipulative child. As we cuddled together in the rocking chair she perked up a bit and tilted her head to the side ever so charmingly. A lovely lilt moved into her voice as she said, “I know how to make your life better!”
“Oh, really? And what would that involve?”
“I think it would involve watching your very favorite movie, Ponyo. I think you would be soooooo happy that you would be able to remember all of the rules for a while.”

So much for a non-screen kid. So much for not watching the same movie on repeat. Today I fail at crunchy. But, I win at being a parent because every single person in my house is physically safe, emotionally safe, and doing what they want to be doing. At least the day might end well.

Oh my fucking god.

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Tyra told my mom everything I said. My mom called me to tell me she wants to go see a mediator because I am lying about her and she wants to get the story straight. She swears up and down I was not molested when I was little.

I feel like I am losing my mind. I’m crying. I screamed at her on the phone that she has no fucking right to tell me I wasn’t sexually assaulted. This is my body. These are my memories. How fucking dare she lie to my face. I am shaking and so upset I can barely breathe. But I have to drive in 40 minutes to see my therapist so I can’t do anything to help me calm down.

I want her out of my head. I called Tyra and said that if she ever does anything again to cause my mother to call me and harass me that I am done and she will never hear from me again.

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So my first living on less challenge for myself. We have Easter coming up and I would like to host a brunch for some friends. I think it sounds like fun. Because I am a huge dorkwad a lot of what I want to do is get my back yard to a place where it would be fun to be in. I need a short-term goal to reach. I want to spend no more than $50, to be taken out of our entertainment budget. How am I going to reach this goal? There are many things to figure out. How many people would I like to host? In particular, Shanna and I are both excited about the upcoming egg hunt. I’m not sure if our friends-with-small-kids will want to come over though. Well, you have to ask if you want things so I’ll figure that bit out. We’ll have to decide what kinds of foods to serve and decorating. On $50. It’s a good thing I have some time to plan.

Luckily I already have someone coming (hopefully today) to take the shed out of my back yard and I found a table/chair/umbrella set on freecycle a couple of weeks ago. That’s the first big step towards making the backyard more fun for a party. I also need to go find some free fill dirt for some of the fuss in the yard. That’s going to be exciting. But! This can be done!

I would like to have some decorations as well. I wonder what Shanna and I can make. 🙂

And the next phase begins.

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This weekend didn’t quite go as expected. I didn’t know I was standing on the edge of a precipice about to fall in as fast as possible. I’m ready for my life to be different. I’m ready to go find some new dreams. I realized a while ago that I was feeling frustrated by the limited scope of my life, but I wasn’t sure what to do about it. We are stuck, right? We have these little kids and we made agreements about how we wanted them raised so now I am stuck with those decisions (and this situation) forever. Or at least till the kids are older.

But isn’t life dynamic? This situation is untenable. Something–or, rather, a whole lot of things need to change. So we got to talking. We got to talking about what our lives could look like if we were luckier, or richer, or more determined. We talked about the extremes of what we would each like to have. We tried to figure out how our separate passions and interests can work together. The odd part has always been that we have tremendously different focii in life, yet we manage to be obsessed with one another and we get along far better than I’ve ever gotten along with anyone. Ok, if we are going to be very different people on very different paths, we need to find a way to hold hands at least from our separate paths. I can do it! I can reach out and hold on to the most important man I’ve ever had in my life.

Noah’s dreams are his to share, so I’ll let that rest for the time being. But as for myself, I need a change. I need to be more than a lactating, cleaning, cooking machine. No thanks. I want to have things that I do that are interesting to me. I want to *complete* projects. I want to grow and develop ambitions of my own. Some of the ways I want to grow do actually involve working–but not necessarily for someone else and not necessarily for money. I have to learn how to value me and my time appropriately. I’ve had good reason to think about that lately.

So I’ve been trying to determine what my dreams/goals can be. In what areas of my life do I want to stretch my wings and fly? The first and most important thing to me is realizing that it’s ok to be weird. That must sound odd to anyone who knows me. I experience a lot of anxiety around being odd. Especially in some particular ways. I’m totally ok with making financial choices and living with the results of those decisions. Unless the results make me look like my vision of poor white trash. There, I said it. I have class issues. I grew up being driven around in ugly, old trucks–often that had been “modified” with a blow torch (like my uncle’s truck that had been an RV and he used a blow torch somehow to take most of the RV shell off and leave a weird almost pick up truck from the RV shell). No thanks. I have to discover the difference between having shit because you can’t afford any better and having shit because you want to fly to Europe instead. Not that any part of my house actually qualifies as “shit” and I sold Noah’s ugly truck already.

I live in a small, not especially nice home. There isn’t much I can do about that other than change my attitude and possibly my decor so that I actually like my house. There are always going to be limitations to living here–it really is a small home and the layout is not the best–but I can work on changing things about this house so that I like it here. I am in this house at least 16/24 hours 7 days a week. Lately, much much more time than that. Why shouldn’t my house be someplace that makes me happy? So I am going to change things. I’m nervous about where I will find the money. I think that house projects need to become my big ‘entertainment’ budget and I should stop buying my children clothing to fund it. I’m kidding. Mostly. It is lucky that we are set for clothes for pretty much the rest of the year.

Right this exact minute we are nearly in a financial place that gives me hives. We are running out our buffer. We are doing so for quite a few good reasons and the money will be replaced this year–but I’m scared. I can feel the terror of being poor. It’s hard to convince my lizard brain that we are not on the verge of poverty. This would be because of vehicle maintenance and property taxes. Ugh. But it is temporary because the checks to fix it are on their way. I’m just over-sensitive. You see, I have panic attacks if we drop below three months of salary in savings. And Noah makes a lot of money. But! It’ll be ok. It’s probably a good thing for me to be cautious with money. Noah does want us to get rich.

Comedy.of.Errors.

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It feels like everything is hitting speed bumps today. My plans for today were: drop van off at mechanic, go home and paint. I woke up at 5am. It seems like that’s not an outrageous list of things to do.

Well. The van has uhm a few more issues than anticipated and I have been on the phone with 3 mechanics, my cousin 3 times, and the guy at the Toyota dealership 5 times. It also involved extensive web searches because holymotherfuckingshit do I not want to pay that many thousands of dollars on repairs today. My cousin, who has been an active mechanic for better than 40 years, says I am getting a good deal and I really really need to do those repairs today or I will be sorry. He has yet to steer me wrong so I’m taking his advice. Even though I want to cry about how expensive this is. Did I mention that tomorrow we have to drop the Prius off for maintenance? 🙁

I ran out of paint after an hour of painting because I didn’t take into account that this is drywall with one coat of primer. It’s thirsty. Noah brought home more and I haven’t been able to touch it because I’ve been busy with other things. Working on the ceiling with Calli on my back made my head, neck, and back hurt so much I want to cry.

We let Shanna help. Of course in the first three minutes she stuck a finger full of blackboard paint (it’s grainy) into her eye necessitating lots and lots of eye flushing while forcibly holding her down as she kicked and screamed. Yeah, that makes my whole fucking day. 🙁 But it was really important. Then we cuddled for a bit to kind of recalibrate.

I have gotten over hungry more than once today and that does really bad things for my mood.

I figured out why our garage is flooding! I thought I had already fixed the problem, but today’s torrential downpour is showing me way more about the problem. Noah and I both worked in the rain trying to get it so that it stops actively flooding Right Now but I have many days of dirt moving ahead of me and I want to cry thinking about it. I will not be painting that wall or ordering the carpet until this problem is truly *fixed*. Ugh.

Calli is teething and whining. And clingy. So.Very.Clingy.

And I’m sober. Sober fucking sucks. My adrenaline is through the roof because of stupid little shit going wrong all day.

And this is with help. This would be why I haven’t started any of the things alone. 😛

Good parenting.

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I asked on MDC what makes good parents and someone turned around and asked me if I would like to have me as a parent. Yes. I really would. I would so love a mom like me. I am empathetic, strong, dependable, mostly consistent with my behavior even though my moods are unpredictable, I am fun! I like to play. I like doing all kinds of neat things and I think, “Why not?” is a great answer to questions like, “Can I cover my entire body in finger paint?” I am fiercely protective. I fight through my touch issues to be incredibly snuggly with my girls. I think that everyone needs to scream sometimes–just not in the house. I think that everyone has bad days and they do not in any way reflect your value as a person. I am loyal. I am honest. I am kind. I am considerate. Loving! So! So! Loving. I pay so much attention to my kids. As people. I like to stare at them.

So it seems that I am a great supporting character. (Like I was a good secondary.) I’m not that great at being the main character. Maybe I should just like me more. Maybe then I would do better at being the important one in my life.

Also, really thrilled about the push to recognize Shanna’s behavior as Not About Me. We’ve had a really great day and a lot of it is when she starts pushing on something I am stopping to think how it relates to her and her needs instead of mine. *That’s* good parenting. 😛 Thanks for telling me to do it, blacksheep.