Somewhere else on the internet someone asked someone other than me why they are still so angry about being abused as a child. Just get over it, right?

This weekend I spent a while talking to a woman in her 60’s. She told me about the dissolution of her 25 year marriage. They walked away when the kids were old enough to be independent and she said they haven’t spoken since. After 25 years. Her comment was, “I haven’t even missed him. Is there something wrong with me that I never emotionally attached to him?”

I’m not the person to ask. I am trying as hard as I can to feel attached to Noah and my kids. I can never tell if it is working or not. Sometimes I feel these flashes of love so intense that I feel like I can barely breathe. Mostly I know that I would be capable of turning around and walking away if things were bad enough. I know that I could leave. I hope I never become that person.

I think I chose to stop sleeping around because I want to have less pull towards leaving. I’m afraid of what I might do. I’m not a very nice person.

How you act is a choice. How you feel is less under someones control. I understand that meditation seems to be the route forward.

My therapist asked me how I have been getting through the periods of intense anxiety lately. What “coping methods” am I using? I told her that mostly what I do is close my eyes and try to breathe and not think until I am more calm.

It feels pathetic how hard it is to not scream at people. It feels pathetic how hard it is to consciously choose to be nice to people. I don’t want to be nice to anyone. I want to scream explitives at the top of my lungs while breaking everything I see. Sometimes. Not all the time. Not even all that often. But often enough that it feels hard to forget that I feel that way. It hides on the edges of my consciousness, this entirely consuming rage. I feel so much hate that sometimes I feel like I am about to burst into flames.

I “could” say this is my family’s fault. But at this point I am past fault. No one in my life is to blame for my feelings. I think I am past the point of usefully pointing to my family. At this point this is just my brain functionality.

What do I do now that I am this way?

I homeschool. Because obviously I am one of the best people to hang out with children alone all day. Duh.

I appreciate the fact that my five year old (after my last therapy appointment) is reminding me that yelling is not the best way to teach them. If my voice starts coming up she looks up and reminds me, “Mom, do you need a minute?”

My kids believe that they have the right to demand that people talk to them in a respectful tone of voice. They certainly demand it of me. It’s not ok to badger them or shout at them or demean them. And they will bloody well tell you so.

You have the right to be treated well. If people don’t know what that means then you need to tell them. Otherwise they will do it wrong out of ignorance and probably not malice.

It doesn’t matter if I am deep down a nice person. It matters if I can play one on tv. Or on a daily basis, rather. What matters is if my children believe they are well treated or not. So far my kids are very happy with their life.

I asked Shanna one more time how she feels about skipping kindergarten. She said, “If I would have to not be with you all day it sounds pretty awful. I’ll learn here. I’m good.”

I don’t really understand “attachment” in the way that other people feel it. I keep a wide path between me and most of my former lovers. I think that retraining them isn’t worth my effort. I don’t tend to teach people how to treat me. I pay attention and then if I don’t like it I walk away and never talk to them again. I don’t think that people have any interest in being nice to *me* I think people just want to be validated for who they are and how they act. I don’t really do that.

I don’t validate people much. You have to validate yourself. I mean, I can talk about commonalities of experience. I can talk about patterns that are common. I can talk about cycles. I don’t have much ability to say that how someone else exists is the right path. I can’t grant that. I don’t know. I don’t know enough to judge.

So when I feel unsure I leave.

I think I have proven in my life that I am a bad judge of character. I am drawn to problematic people. I’m quite certain it is all “my fault” or something.

But Noah isn’t really much like most of the people who have been interested in me. Most of the people who have dated me wanted me to change. They wanted me to accommodate them and do as they imagined someone would do in my role. Noah seems to not have a lot of expectations. Instead he waits to see what I will do and then expresses pleasure that I would do that.

I’ve never had anyone notice me like this before. Even my friends have never paid attention to me like this. I tell myself he notices me about as much as a good parent would notice their child.

Like the painting shit. I don’t think I would have had the nerve ten years ago to ask to paint a mural on someone else’s property. I would have been completely sure that I could not accomplish such a task. But Noah tells me to do things that I have the impulse to do. He’s quite pushy.

Because I am a realist I have about fifteen plans in place for when Noah dies. Or if he leaves me. I have back up plans and back up plans for my back up plans (depends on how long he lives, yo) because life is scary.

I think that Noah is going to be my window into real attachment this lifetime. I mean, being a parent is different. I am attached to them. I would readily stand in front of them with a full armament and shoot anyone who came near intending harm. Them continuing matters more to me than thousands of other people. I don’t give a shit if that is selfish. That’s the law of the jungle, baby.

But Noah is different. Part of my attachment to the kids is the feeling of obligation. I believe with all my soul that if you choose to have unprotected sex you must do it in full consciousness that you may be entirely responsible for another person for at least ten years and closer to twenty. That is just the deal. If you don’t want that deal use some fucking birth control. We are not in the dark ages where people are blindly a victim of fate.

I think abandoning your kids so you can focus on having fun is one of the most despicable things a human can do. The kids didn’t ask to be born you self-involved piece of shit.

You give your kids their twenty years. Then go do whatever you want. They aren’t a forever obligation. It is a period of time. Either you go all in or don’t go there at all. It does too much damage to be an absent parent.

So this attachment feels different. When My kids are 23 and 25 I am not going to be terribly willing to place their day-by-day happiness above my own. Go figure your shit out.

I haven’t decided how I feel about long-term generational living. Before having kids I was fairly certain I would be holding a broom behind their asses at 18 telling them to get out. Now I’m less sure. I understand the benefits better. I chafe at their presence less than I assumed I would. I just like them more than I thought I would. Now I think that as long as I get a sound-proof room at some point it will all work out. As time goes by I am thinking that I will get back to heavy masochism. I will need somewhere to scream without bothering anyone. You have to not scare people.

I was talking to Noah last night about masochism stuff. I’m not your typical masochist. I’m the opposite of a stoic. Most people who spend a lot of time involved with bdsm as heavy bottoms (people who are hit very hard) are pretty quiet as they process. It is an internal experience. It is a lot easier for a lot of tops to hit them. I’m a screamer. I don’t like being hit very much and I make it plain. If you want to hit me you have to be very sure that you want a sobbing, pathetic mass on the floor.

It takes a much higher degree of willing to live with knowing you are a bad person to want to hit me.

I don’t let people think, “Well this is just intense sensation! We are sharing an intense sensation experience!” When people hit me they have to work through their own emotions about hitting someone who has clearly been hurt a lot in bad ways. Most masochists are without serious abuse histories. Most of them had fairly normal, happy lives. They just happen to thrive on intense sensation.

I’m not like that.

I make both a good and bad demo bottom. Good because I am highly verbal no matter what is happening. I can talk about the relative differences between different strokes of the cane in detail no matter how hard I’m crying. I may have to scream in between sentences but I can go back to talking like nothing happened. Not many people can do that. But I scare newbies. Clearly things happen to me that aren’t so awesome. People worry that they have to be beaten like me. Oh goodness no.

Play where you feel comfortable, happy, and safe. Err, if that’s your thing.

I don’t want to feel comfortable, happy, or safe while I’m playing. That’s part of the point. I don’t think that life is very comfortable, happy, or safe. I think that life is terrible. I think that life is about a series of very painful experiences that you have to learn how to manage.

Having nice people hit me very hard so that I can really get through a period of hysterical sobbing is helpful for me. I feel more calm for days or weeks afterwards. Brain chemistry is an interesting mix. I don’t really do the light fluffy sensual stuff. Not because I think there is something wrong with it–it just give me what other people get from it. I get annoyed and fight back in ways that make it not a fun scene for the top.

I go through periods of feeling empty and like I don’t have a lot of emotional attachment. Not to Noah and not to the kids. I feel like I don’t know how to care about people. I just want to hide in the closet and not talk to anyone. I don’t want to be responsible. I don’t want to fix one more fucking meal. Surely it won’t hurt you that much if I skip a few meals. Most of the world does it on a regular basis.

Err, I don’t hide in the closet and I don’t cause my kids to skip meals because of my mental health. The latest a meal has been has been two hours and that much variation is often just that we had a bigger than usual breakfast and don’t get hungry as quick. That isn’t a problem.

But man I worry. I worry because I know I am going through the motions. I am playing the role of mother. I am pretending that this whole caring for other people thing is something I care about and I am good at. I’m not sure if I am playacting well enough.

I have no one in my head I am trying to copy and that scares me. I don’t head out on the non-beaten path very often. I am always aping people. I don’t know anyone who is parenting how I want to parent.

(Err, in no way is that an insult or a put-down. I know a lot of perfectly dandy parents. But I don’t want to be like you. Not because you are all doing it wrong or anything. We just have very different personalities and tool boxes and such.)

I don’t know anyone who parents really well with my degree of mental illness. This doesn’t make the people in my life defective. It just means I don’t know many people who are like me who are doing what I want to do.

I met a couple of women in the support group I went to for a while who were close but they are making very different life choices.

I’m not even sure what it is I want so bad. I just know that I look at all the parents I know and think not that. I don’t know why. I genuinely don’t think any of the relationships I see are wrong. This is unusual for me. Most things I’m happy to copy people. Not one person entirely–I usually take small elements from lots of people. Not on parenting.

I have a very firm picture in my head. It isn’t what I see other people with. That’s ok. I want it. I want it. I want it and want it and want it.

This is attachment? I think? This feeling of must do this this way! I must treat these people in the way I see in my head. I must give them the things that felt so devastatingly missing for me.

We are always solving yesterday’s problems. And my yesterday was different from your yesterday. So you are solving different problems. That’s why we parent differently. And we have different kids. I would parent differently with different kids too.

You know how the DSM keeps changing? Every so often people vote. What is now bad and what is now ok. They get to just decide.

I feel like that degree of people voting on what constitutes problems in other people… man that makes me think that most psychiatric diagnosis aren’t much more useful than Enneagram or Myers-Brigg.

I spoke with a special ed teacher last weekend. He said he has a hard time dealing with the fact that kids have different diagnosis from year to year. “Autism one year. Bi-polar the next year. Oppositional Defiance Disorder the year after.”

Yeah, that’s because all of the disorders are kind of bullshit. Mostly they mean “This fucker doesn’t do as (s)he’s told. What the fuck.”

Sometimes I wonder about the whole attachment disorder thing. I think about my family. Am I attached to them? If my sister came near my kids I might hit her with my car. It doesn’t matter that I love her. It doesn’t matter that I think about her. It doesn’t matter that maybe in the abstract in the universe I kind of hope she can experience an ending of pain because holy shit she has had a horrifically bad life.

I would still not give a shit. My kids come first you fucking cunt.

Why? What is that about?

And yet sometimes I know that I could walk away from the kids. I think I am capable. I choose not to. I don’t think it would be good for them. On the days when I’m freaking out it comforts me to understand how much this is a choice for me. I am absolutely self-involved enough to be able to leave. Sure. I could do that. I’ve walked away from almost everyone else. I could do that too.

But not yet. Not now. Not while they are helpless. I would never forgive myself for abandoning helpless people.

I don’t know how much attachment I will have to the adult bodies of my children. In my subconscious mind taking care of them while they are helpless is the closest I can come to repairing the damage I experienced through not being cared for when I was helpless. There is nothing else in the whole world I can do to repair this broken.

Yeah, I’m broken. Just because something is broken that doesn’t mean it is beyond repair or usefulness.

I’m broken but I’m not helpless. I’m not hopeless. I don’t think that acknowledging the truth makes me unable to do something. I think that understanding that I am broken is inherently useful because if I stop acknowledging how broken I am then I may well wander off thinking I’m just fine. I see how well that goes for people.

It is too hard for me to get out of bed. If I try to pretend that this should all be fine I wouldn’t be able to muster the strength to do what I want to do. I don’t want to do almost any of what I do with my days. Not really. But I want it done. Thus I operate almost entirely on plans.

If you ask me what I want to do on a given day there is a better than even chance the answer would be hide in bed and cry. But that isn’t an acceptable life for me to look back on. So I don’t spend many days in bed crying.

I don’t feel very attached to people though. I don’t come out of bed because I want to see people. I don’t get up because I like so-and-so and them-and-them. I can’t. I assume that those people either don’t like me or will only like me for a little while so I can’t base whether or not I get up today on seeing them. Because they probably won’t be there in a little while.

I was recently told that folks in the poly world are still actively bitching about me taking Noah’s dick out of circulation. To this I say: move on. If you are attached to him being available in order to be happy then you aren’t going to have a happy life.

Just like I can’t be attached to having any friends. Or even Noah. I don’t know how long I will get him. I have to keep part of me away from him or losing him would be too hard. It is hard knowing that there will always be pieces of me I just don’t share with him for a wide variety of reasons. I become more compartmentalized by the year. I understand better and better what it means when I overload people. It isn’t very nice.

I’m a needy piece of shit. I’m not sure that will ever change. But only I am responsible for meeting my needs. I wish I could know that in the pit of my stomach without feeling sad and kind of bitter. That is probably the normal state for a great many humans. I’m not a special snowflake.

It is weird thinking about how symbiotic my relationship with Noah is.

I have stronger and stronger opinions about marriage as I get older. The point of having a help meet is to have a partner who has the qualities you lack so you can balance one another out. “Eve was not designed to be exactly like Adam. She was designed to be his mirror opposite, possessing the other half of the qualities, responsibilities, and attributes which he lacked.”

Ok, first… I don’t “believe in” the Bible. But it has a lot of fantastic allegories.

In marriage you need to have different kinds of people because there are a lot of different kinds of tasks that need to be done. I don’t think these things need to happen along gender lines. I know a lot of couples where the man is the stay-at-home domestic person and they are very happy. But balance is important.

I feel like part of learning to feel attachment to people is learning to feel more entitled to the help they provide. With Noah I have access to things I just don’t have without him. I don’t even mean the money. I mean that I would feel less confident homeschooling if I did not live with someone who has a maths degree. I would feel less like “We can definitely handle everything that will come up pre-puberty.” Which isn’t to say that his degree is actually going to matter. He has the knowledge I lack so that he can step in if I am doing something wrong.

Noah cooks more than I do. I do the shopping and preparation and planning. I strongly dislike the physical act of cooking. Not entirely sure why.

And it is really important in marriage to find some kind of compromise on physical compatibility. I’m really happy I found someone to marry who is sexually compatible. After my experimentations I know without a doubt that I am a hard person to match sexually. Not because I am so awesome… I’m weird. Everyone is weird.

It has only been recently that I’ve been thinking really hard about what it means to be in a sexually compatible relationships. The lack of pressure for hunting. The excitement of knowing that if I am in the mood for something all I have to do is ask. Given that we have a five year old kid we haven’t had a lot of sexual adventures in a long time. I’m out of practice for asking.

The seven years of our marriage are the most consistent of my life. And each year has been very different from the previous year. I’m doing almost entirely things I did not do previously.

What is attachment? What is love? Is it a feeling? Is it a set of choices?

I feel like I love my mother with an unholy passion that is much greater than what I feel for my children. I feel like my affection for my children is a candle next to the forest fire of how I feel about my mother. But I walked away from her.

I hate this ghost feeling. Disconnected, like I’m looking at the world through a dirty screen.

I think about the people I “love” and I think about what it would mean to lose them. I don’t know that any of them would increase how much I cry. I feel weird about that. I don’t think I am capable of carrying more grief. It is like taking too much vitamin C. Eventually your body just flushes it. I can’t feel more grief. I’m too numb.

I’m thinking about this because it was weird camping with people last weekend. And I have another camping trip with a different group next weekend. Being near people for that many hours feels physically uncomfortable. That is a lot of why I nod my head and say, “Yup–broken.” It shouldn’t hurt that much just to stand near people. Especially when a significant number of the people there are expressing approval, love, and affection in my direction to the degree that I permit them. Many would have given more if I had not abruptly turned and walked away.

I don’t feel that I objectively being given messages about how bad or terrible I am. I don’t think that I have had a situation that should effect my self-esteem in a long time. I could even rustle up some righteous indignation to defend myself in some of the more historical issues.

But I still feel like it is better for everyone if I spend very small amount of time around anyone so that I don’t fuck up and do something terrible and unforgivable. It could happen any second.

I can’t want to be around you. I can’t. If I want to be around you a lot them I will feel sad when you aren’t with me. Then I will lose focus and I won’t be able to concentrate on my priorities. Then I will feel empty when you aren’t with me. And I don’t believe you will actually be around me very much or for very long. So I just can’t want you.

Heck, I feel way less attached to my current therapist than I have felt in a long time. I’m starting to view therapists as being not the most stable part of my life. That’s different.

The depersonalization feels a lot more intense since I switched to edible pot. The feeling of being behind a dirty screen. I am not part of reality. I really dislike this part of the edible experience. Smoking is not this intense. Smoking gives me more of the “happy” part of the buzz and less of the numb.

With eating the pot I often feel kind of like a zombie. I feel like lifting my arm off the bed is as hard as moving hundreds of pounds of concrete. Without it I shake and cry randomly and can’t really control my physical actions very well when I get frustrated. My body gets jerkier and harsher. I accidentally knock into people and that’s bad when I’m around small, delicate people all day.

What does living mean?

This is a more disjointed-than-most-post. Neiner.

Depression! That’s maybe the name for this round of blah-enh-meh. But I don’t know that such details matter all that much. I wander up and down such a spectrum.

Do you know that people who are depressed are actually not pessimistic, instead they are more able to accurately predict how things will work? They are realists. Most of life is shitty and bad and doesn’t work out. If you are full of hope that everything will be great you are pretty delusional.

It depends on what you mean by “everything will work out”. Some people will live. Some people will die. Some people will be happy. Some people will be miserable. That will all work out. Well… everyone will die eventually.

But what does it mean to be happy in the meantime? I don’t know.