Category Archives: being seen

I love getting mail. Sometimes.

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Yesterday I got a letter. Normally I am thrilled by such instances. In this case I believe the person sent a letter because if he sends a letter I can only respond on his terms. If he sent an email he knows I would just argue with him and refuse to let him set the terms of the conversation. As is, I don’t feel like this letter deserves a letter back of its own so I’m just going to ignore it. Well, maybe “ignore” is a bit strong. I’ll stew about it but I’m not going to respond to him. I hear he has me blocked all over the internet. Hallelujah.

I would like to say in public that I am under the care of a licensed psychologist, psychiatrist, and I do actually have a general doctor as well. The folks who “take care” of me are professionals in good standing in their various professions. They all agree that I should be on some kind of psych med at this stage and if pot is working, why bother replacing it with something that has more side effects. Does that make it an addiction? Is someone who takes thyroid medication an addict? It’s an interesting question.

I certainly need pot. I feel a grotesque amount of shame about that. I’m aware the 12 step folks want me to get off it entirely. Obviously that would make my whole life better. Given the magnitude of my mental health issues I would need to turn to western medicine and pills. Seriously, they make everything worse. But obviously I am a disgusting low life addicts. Obviously.

And because I am obviously I am an addict, that means I am bad and abuse, right? I have anger issues. I’ve had anger issues for a long time. I must be addicted to anger, right? It totally makes sense. I’m comfortable in that emotion so I default to it and if nothing happens for a while to make me angry I’ll go find some moron on the internet to argue with. Since I was eighteen I have kicked holes in drywall twice and punched a hole once. I kicked the cabinet doors off. That is the entire extent of property damage done in my life. That is manifestly an anger problem. I don’t hit people at all any more under any circumstances. I don’t do that “girl” thing of whacking people when they are irritating. I married someone who finds it offensive so I stopped. I’m not going to be doing bdsm play with anyone else again so I don’t think I will ever hit a person again in my life. It’s kind of weird to think about.

But obviously my anger is running my life. I’m angry all day every day, right? No? Wait. What?!  You mean the gross assumptions about me might be incorrect? I spend all day every day in a mellow and cheerful mood. I am edgy and anxious when new people come around and I feel uncomfortable. I have this constant fear that people are judging me (but I get a letter ever year or so from someone telling me that I am disgusting and abusive so I think that isn’t a paranoia on my part) and it makes me more prone to fight with people I think don’t like me anyway. The best defense is a good offense. If you strike me as someone who is likely to shame me and put me down I am going to attack you and be on offense from the beginning. It isn’t always perfect. But then I get letters like yesterday and I’m glad I have that approach.

I’m not going to do what people tell me and then they get butt hurt and *I’m* the one with the anger problem. Right. Obviously if I don’t want to do what he says when he says it I am in denial.

I am not at a place in my life where I can start going to a bunch of meetings in San Francisco. Not even to make other people feel better about my “sobriety”. I can’t bring my kids and telling me that I could get childcare from someone who thinks I am disgusting is hilarious. I would rather drop my kids off to play in the park alone. They would be safer.

A lot of the reason I have no contact with my family isn’t because I am paranoid about them sexually assaulting my kids during an Easter Egg Hunt. I don’t allow my children around my family because my children don’t need to sit and listen to people talk shit about me. I’m far from perfect and I deal with that. My 19 month old and my nearly four year old don’t need to be in the house of someone who feels quite free to put me down and talk badly about me. Hell fucking no. That is a hostile environment for me and mine. Calling it “support” is pure hypocrisy and it sickens me. No you don’t want to support me. You want to shame me and insult me. I’ll pass.

Anger is absolutely the monkey on my back. I deal with it by trying to figure out why I am angry and changing the part that feels like an attack so I can stop feeling defensive. There isn’t a chance in hell I am going to go visit the house of someone who has shamed me up one side and down the other and not feel angry. Then he will take that as more confirmation that he is right. No thanks. That is a lose/lose situation for me. Shaming isn’t love or concern.

That’s the part that matters. When people come to me in love and concern to “talk about my behavior” (it happens) I try to meet them where they are and listen. I don’t think I am perfect. I listen to advice when it is given appropriately by people I respect. Someone who sends me a nastygram letter unsolicited where he recommends that I go stay in a residential rehab facility because I smoke pot?  Yeah. Kiss my ass.  I’m fairly unlikely to smoke for the rest of my life. But it is a drug I need right now. I guess I’m bad for that. I guess I should abandon my children to the mercy of people who think I am bad and head off to a place that will cause me massive panic attacks as soon as I walk in.

And after I walk in I won’t be able to go to the bathroom when I want. And if I don’t draw pictures when they tell me to draw pictures all hell can break loose. Oh wait. I’m just being paranoid. That doesn’t happen to people. Oh wait. It happened to me. Uhm, no. No thank you. I don’t think there is a chance in hell that residential treatment would improve my life. I think that would be the thing that sent me over the bend and I would never be released because they would be pumping me full of frightening chemicals just to get me to stop screaming. I will never go back to a treatment facility. I would rather kill myself. My therapists know this. They don’t think I need to go to rehab. My therapist thinks that rehab would be an entirely inappropriate place for me because I am not hurting my life. I am appropriately using a medication that my body apparently needs right now so that I can go on to be a (mostly) happy, highly functioning adult. What is the problem?

The problem is that someone is mad at me. He has shit going on in his own life that he is upset about and he wants to vent his spleen on someone. I’m a convenient target. This is what being the scapegoat means. This is how such patterns continue on and on in life. He acted like the bringer of truth.  “You’ve surrounded yourself with friends who don’t see you(sic) addictive behavior as anything unusual, and with a husband who is a hard core enabler.” Yes. I have chosen to surround myself with people who are nice to me and who do not send me nasty letters. You illustrate nicely why I do that. You are not right. You have an opinion.

I’m addicted to anger, cutting, sex, and drugs. Apparently. Sure. Why not. All of these “addictions” spring from the same basic place of feeling unsafe and like I deserve to hurt. I’ve been looking into the treatment for these issues for some time.  Guess what the first step is?

Safety. Safety, for me, includes not talking to people who are going to send me long letters about how bad I am. Whether I have issues or not it is not the job of anyone to send me nasty letters about my issues. This isn’t how you help someone. But it is how you contribute to the surrounding feeling of unsafe. I guess I shouldn’t let go of that paranoia of people sitting at home thinking nasty thoughts about me. I have yet more evidence.  Shit dude. He felt motivated enough by his hostile judgment to print out a letter, find an envelope and put three stamps on it! That’s commitment! It wasn’t even an off-hand email in a bitchy moment. He put effort into it. He didn’t open a dialogue about, “I’m feeling worried about you. Are you open to talking about some of the stuff that is going on for you?” He has no interest in my consent. He’s just interested in telling me how bad I am.

“A while back you wrote about how outraged you were when you discovered that there were adults who knew that you were being abused as a child and didn’t do anything about it. Another time you wrote something to the effect that at least your kids were not being brought up by totally fucked up addicts, they were being brought up my(sic) a high functioning addict. I like Shanna a lot, and if we ever meet when she is grown up, I don’t want her to be able to say to me, “If everyone knew my mom was an addict, how come nobody did anything about it?”

This is for Shanna.”

Bam! That’s class A perfect color shame. He’s not telling me these things because he is a judgmental asshole!  No!  He’s doing it for Shanna. He thinks it would be far preferable to be on western meds so that I can sit on the couch and stare at a tv and not do anything self-destructive and recover from my “addictions”.

I feel the love in every line. Don’t you? I was raped over and over. I was moved more than 50 times. I was not allowed to develop any normal attachments in life and I’m bitter about it. Obviously he needs to step in because I am a stoner. It’s the same thing as rescuing me when I was a kid. I’m just as bad.

I’m sure I am not reading this is the best possible light. I hear that 80% of all things read in text are read with the wrong tone. I guess it is too bad that this person didn’t have the respect for me to ask to talk to me in person, you know, if he was serious about wanting to help me. Instead he sent an aggressive and hostile letter (you can’t miss that even if you tone down my paranoia) and I’m supposed to just… what? Smack myself in the forehead and say, “You must be right! How have I lived without such sage advice commanding me how to get my life together!”

Why do I write about these things? Because if I didn’t write about it I would mutter under my breath all day. I would slam cabinets. I would be pissed off as fuck because this fucking asshole just god damn ruined my day. But if I come and write about it I can let it go. I went through all the thoughts. Now I can stop talking about when the kids are around.

There are always going to be people who dislike me and disapprove of me. If I let that ruin my day I can just go kill myself and get it over with. There are enough of those people for every day, forever.

In the best light I can see this letter as him trying to say that he misses having me as a friend and he won’t hang out with me until I get treatment so please hurry because he misses me. There is definitely a way to see it that way if I’m generous.

But this is a whole lot of shaming. I don’t need people in my life who shame me. I don’t need to be made to feel bad. That’s not ok. That’s not an acceptable thing to do to a friend. If he wanted to talk to me about these things he could have. He didn’t. He wanted to sit on high and give me judgments and orders. Well who died and made you the king of anything?

Don’t worry. I’ll tell Shanna you sent me a nasty letter trying to protect her. I’m sure it will make her feel much better.

If someone actually wants to talk to me and offer polite conversation about their concern, I promise I won’t write a hostile blog post about it. If you treat me like a reasonable person I’ll treat you like one. If you send me shaming text, I might print the whole thing verbatim and I might keep it private. You are taking a roll of the dice. I don’t keep secrets very well.

The half-marathon.

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Three hours and eight minutes. I only went over three hours because I had to stop and wait in a huge line for a bathroom break.  That took quite a while, it was ridiculous. I did not enjoy yesterday. It was definitely one of my shittiest running days ever. I felt like I was at the wall the whole time. My body just felt off the whole time. I felt sad and lonely. I resented the hell out of the fact that most people (that’s pretty much a lie, but I’m going to ignore reality for a bit) were in groups and had supporters. I felt isolated and alone. I don’t feel alone when I go running most of the time. I feel like I am running and no one in my life can do that with me so ok, I happen to be alone right now. Thank god I don’t have to listen to their chatter.

When I am running in a big group of people it feels different. I feel like there is a glass wall between me and other people. I feel like they are on the other side, where people are loved and supported. Then there is me. Alone. Again. It’s really idiotic and self absorbed. There were a lot of other people there alone. A few of them talked to me!

My feelings seem out of place with my reality. Ok, I was alone at the race. I felt sad that no one came to watch me run. I mean, dude. It was in Oakland. It’s not like it is inconvenient to a large percentage of people I know. Someone could have. It’s always complicated, you know? Yesterday I felt like this running thing is a bad idea.

I like how I feel when I run by myself. When I run by myself I feel like I’m not trying to compete with anyone else. I’m just doing my thing. When I run with other people I see how our paces match up and as I drop back and back and back in the crowd… that makes me feel lame. Then I start feeling shame. This is pretty ridiculous. I have been running for less than four months. I don’t need to feel bad that I am not a better runner. It would not be particularly good for my body to try and insist that I be a faster runner right now.

I think I want to run the marathon because I am hoping I get to see my brother one more time. I’m not going to continue training so I can do it again. I saw my mother and my sister and my nephew and my aunt and my cousins once more before I broke ties. I haven’t seen Jimmy in a long time. I know that he looks like my father. I feel like I am already losing the picture in my mind that I have of what that part of my family looks like. I feel unspeakably sad. I feel like there is a weight on my chest. I’m still grieving.

I’m told that grief is kept in your lungs. Shallow breaths keep the grief inside you. Running certainly makes me breathe more deeply. I cried as I ran. I missed my family and I longed for them so much it hurt. My family is the kind of family that is intensely good and intensely bad. I miss the good. I can’t stay because of the bad. I’m really struggling with continuing to believe it is the right decision. I feel so much guilt. I feel so bad that I am keeping my kids away from my family. My mother lives in downtown San Jose. And she has never seen Calli. I feel so bad. I am a terrible person who is hurting my mother.

And I thought about that as I ran past all the cheering people on the sidelines. They were there to support someone they loved. I have driven off the people who would do that for me. And then I have a pity party about it. How pathetic. So I cried a lot while I ran. It was a very hard run.

I felt weird because I didn’t see anyone else eat. I start eating between mile three and four. I take two or three handfuls of trail mix every other mile after that. I run hanging on to my little baggy. Sometimes I feel lazy and I put it in my pocket for a while. In the race environment I felt like the country bumpkin come to town and I’m doing it all wrong. I don’t have sleek running gear. I’m not sure I’ve ever been that close to so much spandex in my life. And I ran in a cotton sweatshirt. I was given a lot of funny looks.  What? It’s what I own. Everyone else was advertising a cause or showing off former marathon shirts. This is also, not true; I wasn’t “the only one” but there really did seem to be a uniform and we were weird. Those of us who weren’t wearing the uniform were quite odd. Oh, and then there were the ladies who ran in tulle skirts. They were cute.

I feel weird running next to people for long periods and not talking to them. It feels awkward and uncomfortable. It feels like a lot of pressure to come up with something to talk about. If I don’t I feel gauche. And that distracted me from running, and them. I think that it is because people train at different paces. When you are in the group of people who are collectively running around fourteen minute miles that means there is a lot of walking. But people mix in their walking in different ways. It also felt like some people ran at a slow jog without really having to pause to walk. But they never went very fast. I’m a very impulsive runner. I run at the speed of the song on my headset. I have a lot of slow songs on purpose so I don’t try to sprint forever, but I do sprint. Mostly the songs are the latest albums from Lady Gaga, Adele, and Katy Perry with a few older songs I like mixed in. It’s a whole bunch of songs that cause me to sit and think about different relationships in my life. I like how I wander through different topics as time goes on. I’m not stuck thinking about the same person in the same way every time I hear any particular song.  It’s a slow journey through different situations.

If I try to run without the music I can’t do it. I can only kind of stumble along. I don’t have anything telling my body it is time to move. I don’t want to run. Not really. I rather hate how it feels some days.  But I don’t have another way of seeing Jimmy. I don’t really care if that is pathetic. I’m not magnanimous. I’m not sure that is a healthy reason. I need to see what Jimmy looks like. It won’t be true, but I will reconstruct a memory for myself of my father. It will be the only picture I will have.

I’ve been watching more movies than usual and recently I heard the line, “You never stop needing your parents.” As I was running part of the reason I was crying was because I realized how far ahead of me Jimmy will be. I realized he will probably leave the race grounds long before I finish. Unless I spot him in the vast zoo of five thousand people right before the race I don’t really have a chance of seeing him. And I will spend that whole race hoping to see him at the finish line. I’m going to cry a lot. I kind of wonder why I do this to myself.

Why does every activity have to be viewed in the most self harming way possible? Why do I always have to have a tale of loss and woe? When will something I am doing be about something, anything other than grieving? My therapist, God bless her, heard that line and looked straight at me and told me that I will never stop grieving. When you were hurt like I was as a child you never stop feeling pain for very long. It feels like a cross between a harsh sentence and great comfort.

I don’t perceive reality very well. I feel isolated and alone when I stand near people. The fact that people are apathetic towards me hurts my feelings because I feel constantly reminded of the apathy I experienced as a child. It caused me a lot of damage when I was a child. The fact that people are apathetic towards me makes me not want to stand physically close to them. Running through the crowd was occasionally terrifying. I don’t like being near large crowds. I consider them dangerous and I’m not even sure why. I feel like I could all of a sudden have some need and people would run past and not care and I would feel devastated. The impending loss of trust feels overwhelming. Like if I fell and was injured. I feel like people wouldn’t stop for me. I feel like this mass movement of uniformed lemmings all run in pursuit of a time goal and that is what they are there for and please get out of the way. It’s not even slightly true. I look around at people and judge faces and there were a lot of people who looked like they would probably be the sort who stop. For someone else. Someone who deserved help. It’s not that I think that other people are deficient in being willing to help good people. It’s that I think I am the kind of person you step around on the side walk because of course this loser is on the ground again.

I don’t know how to change this feeling that I am a terrible person who does not deserve any human compassion and people are going to know that and treat me accordingly. I don’t know how to stop feeling dirty.

I’m glad I get to look forward to six months of running by myself. I need the time alone again to apologize to my knee for running according to trying to keep up with people. I wasn’t listening properly and that was rude. We’ll work it out. I need to figure out how to stop trying to run with anyone else. How do I have blinders on and ignore the people around me. I was seriously spooked by the crowd. I spent a lot of time looking at the spectators and feeling sad that I never saw people I knew. At least I won’t have that distraction in Long Beach. I will be just running to the finish line. I know the spectators aren’t for me and I can ignore them more comfortably.

I’m still not sure how to deal with pacing off of other people. That didn’t work out. And I think I should look up what “interval training” is. People kept asking me about it. I don’t understand why. Google is so cool. Hm. Five minutes on Google tells me I don’t think I will ever answer those questions. That’s not a kind of runner I want to be. Excellent!

I feel like I am feeling like I must run a fast marathon and I shouldn’t have that as a goal. If it takes me six hours that is ok. If I seriously feel compelled to go too fast I will hurt myself. I’ve never run long distances before. I don’t want to injure myself and prevent going to the race. That would be stupid. And I don’t want to find out about how much help my fellow runners would be willing to provide if I injure myself at the race. Both of those sound like Bad Plans.

It’s hard to actually stay on my pace but I need to learn how to do it. That is a lot of what I learned from this race. I am too distractible. I need to not feel hurt by the apathy around me. People aren’t mean, they are concentrating. I should be concentrating too. I did start singing along by mile ten. People smiled at me. It’s a lot of how I measure my running speed–how well I can sing along. I measure my heart and lung workload that way. I don’t have a good silent method. I suppose I have six months to practice, if I want. Or I can just sing along and let people smile. It’s not like I’m doing something terrible. I’m not singing loudly.

Time to stop whining and go inside.

It’s an interesting week

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This has been a freakishly social week.  I’m thrilled.  It’s like I’m not a parent again, only people are coming to my house because I’m a parent.  It works.

I’m recovering from bronchitis. I didn’t appreciate it when the urgent care doctor told me I would have been better off with pneumonia because that would have healed quicker before the half marathon I am running in four days.
I’ve been thinking really hard about the ways in which I feel alone and unconnected, which is slightly ridiculous given that I’m fueling these thoughts with stuff people tell me when they come to my house because they like me. Last night my friends were telling me about their marathon experience. They ran with Team in Training to raise money for cancer research. They both have experiences in their backgrounds that made it a very poignant, specifically relevant thing for them to do. My grandmother, the one I am named after, died of cancer. I don’t know what kind.
I wouldn’t be able to train for the marathon as part of a group. It’s not really just the timing issues. It’s because I’m not running a marathon for anyone but me. I feel like a selfish piece of shit. I know a lot of people who are very outward focused in the “why” behind them doing things. I can’t be. I feel so very self involved. I want to run a marathon to prove to myself that I can. I want to run a marathon because I want to show my brother that I can even though I don’t particularly want to speak to him at the event. I’m actually terrified of running into him and I hope the crowd of 5,000 people will be enough to hide in.
I want to run a marathon for the same reason I wanted to be hanged by the neck. To prove that I can survive doing things that are too hard for most people. I feel like I shouldn’t admit that out loud. I don’t want to be part of something bigger than me because I never will. I will always feel like I am there on a temporary pass and I’m not really part of it. I don’t know how to feel connected to people.
Yesterday someone told me that for a very young child to be overly affectionate with people they don’t know is a sign of an attachment disorder. I did that. I went to anyone who was even vaguely affectionate towards me. The problem is that most people don’t keep coming around and the result is that I have learned to be bitter and not try to join anything. 
I have been trying to let my lungs heal this week so I have not been smoking pot. It is remarkable what that does to my mood. I’ve had a lot of suicidal thoughts. I’ve had a lot of intense feelings of worthlessness. I will never actually be good. I will never be someone who contributes in positive ways. I will always be a drain. I will always be unfit and unworthy. I’m not even sure what I am unworthy of.
A friend said something to me this week that I have always felt but not had the nerve to say out loud: my story is mostly remarkable because it happened to a white girl.  There are many tales of horrific incest and abuse from women of color. White girls either don’t experience it or don’t talk about it. I’ve never known how to feel about that. I’m very aware of my privilege. I’m very aware of the fact that I would not have gotten the help I have gotten if I hadn’t been white. I don’t know how to feel about that. I never have known. It’s not like I think I understand the black experience, I’m not that stupid. But I am often only willing to accept advice from people who aren’t white. Advice from white people often feels irrelevant to me. Either they didn’t ever live in the gutter so what the fuck do they know or they didn’t really crawl out.
My experience of advice from black women has been intense. They aren’t going to give me a pass for suffering. Everyone suffers. Black women have to live every day with the fear that their son might be murdered for having the audacity to walk home from a convenience store with a bag of Skittles and an iced tea. That is honest to god fucking fear. That is real. 
I told Noah this morning that the current debate about abortion in this country scares the shit out of me. It scares me in a visceral, personal way. The reason it scares me so much is because Noah has had a vasectomy. My intention is to be monogamous. If I ever get pregnant again it will probably be the result of being raped. I don’t have the hubris to think that won’t happen to me. Instead I have the life history where I feel like I should never leave my house again if I want to avoid that possibility. I should only see people I carefully prescreen and invite to my house. That is the only way I won’t have to deal with the potential consequences of a child I would not be able to raise with love.
I have had a transvaginal ultrasound. It wasn’t pleasant. The doctor was a stupid bitch and I didn’t want to do it and she insisted and I was stupid and didn’t feel like I could really say no. It was when I was pregnant with Calli. I got pregnant the cycle after a miscarriage. There was the potential that the previous miscarriage was a twin loss and I needed to know that information. That could have been determined by blood tests. She insisted up one side and down the other that I allow her to check with an ultrasound. I knew I was less than a month pregnant and she wouldn’t be able to see anything any other way. Even with the transvaginal ultrasound she couldn’t see much of anything because Calli was still about the size of a pea. I left the building crying because I hadn’t wanted that woman to penetrate me. Unfortunately I’m not very good at saying no when people want access to my crotch. I don’t ever feel like I really get to.
I know that right now I am feeling unstable. I know that this is why I am “mentally ill”. Because even though I have a great life and I “should” feel safe I don’t. Is this really mental illness or is this simple pattern recognition? I don’t feel like I even know.
I’m working on part two. I’m thinking about who were the important pivot people in my life. I’m thinking about where I learned different ideas. Where did I learn that I was supposed to exist for other peoples entertainment, not my own fulfillment. I’m thinking hard about how I was shaped. And this time I want it to sound like a story not a bare recitation of facts. I’m scared shitless of writing dialogue. How do I characterize these relationships? Oh god.
I’m really glad people are coming to visit me this week. That’s why I argue with myself about my “value”. Obviously people do see value in me. Obviously they think I am worth putting in some effort–they have already done so. But why? What value could they possibly get from knowing me? That’s what is interesting about writing part two. It’s not just thinking about what people have done to/for me. I have to acknowledge what I have actually done. How I have been a person that others want a relationship with. Unfortunately being sober means I feel like I should just write over and over and over about how all people want is access to the hole between my legs.

I’m not resting my arms.

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I have so much going on in my head and I am alone a lot.  If I don’t type then I just don’t express anything. My friend who was supposed to come over yesterday was sick so he cancelled.  (Good!  Take care of yourself!) That was going to be my first sit down and really talk to an adult other than Noah this month.  Today another friend wants to come over but I don’t think she should because Noah, Shanna, and Calli are all pretty sick and she’s 29 weeks pregnant.  Don’t come over and get sick.

So I released the book and then… sat at home.  Alone.  Thinking.  I’m really grateful that a number of people have called or messaged me to tell me that they read the book.  There are a few different pieces of this that I’m focusing on.  First: it was readable, right?  I’m kind of insecure about my writing style.  I’m worried it is difficult to follow.  I’m rather abrupt.  Second: I really am curious which parts of the story bother people the most or stick with them.  Third: I am curious what people think about their own lives as a result.  I’ve had two conversations in particular where people used the book as a springboard to talk about a lot of stuff from their childhoods.  I felt my heart soar.  I made them think.

I had a good therapy session this week.  I’m glad I got to go this week.  We spent a lot of time talking about how becoming an adult involves a lot of shitty work no one wants to do.  You are an adult once you learn the systems involved in surviving and you can do them without thinking or complaining.  Because as long as you still don’t know what you are doing, you are a child.  And if you are complaining?  You still aren’t an adult.  These things simply have to be done and complaining about them is pretty ridiculous.  Who am I going to bitch at because I have to dust?  Really?

We talked about how I have areas of my life where I have strong beliefs about what makes a good person and they make it kind of hard to actually be a good person.  I give other people more slack than I give myself.  I have these really strong beliefs because of the circumstances of my life.  I would have different strong beliefs if I had different circumstances.

I have had a hard time learning the tasks of being a house wife.  The repetitive nature is daunting.  How do you actually get to the point of having a system?  Of knowing how and when all these tasks should be done?  Once upon a time girls were trained in how to do these things, I wasn’t.  I just have to kind of guess.  I am happier in a tidy house because then I spend less of my time hunting for things.  Less time tripping and hurting myself.  Less time breaking things because it is impossible to be careful in a mess.  It’s not a moral judgment, exactly.  I have a lot of anger built up around people being able to say, “Well I can’t find it so I don’t have to deal with it.”

Last night Noah tactfully didn’t point out that I want him to do more and more work while being cheerful.  Maybe I shouldn’t be so fussy that I have to do more and more work while being cheerful.  That’s what being a grown up means in this house.  It means that there is a lot of work to be done, and you do it, and you need to be a pleasant person while you do it.  None of this work is a personal affront. None of it qualifies as an indignity or imposition.  At this point the house is really forking tidy.  It’s not much work to keep clean.

I care a lot about tone and attitude.  My kids are going to learn their entire approach to life from me.  I am keeping them home from preschool and elementary school.  I am teaching them what it means to be a mother and an adult and a citizen.  I don’t want to teach them to stuff their feelings or hide their emotions and pretend to be happy.  I want to model what it looks like to build a life where you are genuinely content.  No, not everything is ever perfect.  But I’ve picked my burdens in life, it seems like even a bit more so than most people.  I really went out hunting for what I wanted.  And I have it.  It’s a good life.

My beautiful Shanna is on my lap right now.  She is engaging and fun.  She’s trying to talk me into letting her put the NaNoWriMo bumper sticker on the wall.  I think I’m going to decline.  She makes me smile.  I have begun to notice that the lines on my face do not easily settle into smiling.  That feels sad.  I want to work on that.  I have so much to smile about.

I grew up going between living in truly isolated circumstances and Auntie’s house.  Auntie’s house was always busy.  There were a lot of people coming and going.  I miss people.  I miss feeling like part of a hive.  I live a very quiet life.  I hang out with my kids and that is pretty much it.  It’s hard figuring out what conversations are appropriate for Shanna.

Yesterday she asked me if my mother is dead.  I told her no.  She asked why we don’t see my mother.  I told her I would explain more when she gets older.  I don’t know how to have this conversation yet.  My mother lives thirty minutes away and you can never see her because she will tell you that small stupid things are your fault because you deserve to suffer.  I don’t want Shanna to grow up thinking she is bad or to blame for adult matters.

Part of the reason I am alone so much is because I allow other people to have inappropriate influence over me.  I try and try and try to do what they want, long after it is bad for me to try.  I’m not actually good at boundaries, no matter what I try to claim.  I keep my boundaries by keeping my front door shut.  I only have to worry about the people and things inside this house.  I don’t have to bend to anyone else’s needs or whims.

One of my high school boyfriends told me yesterday that I was always good at boundaries.  Ha.  The reason I stopped talking to you was because I continued to feel like I had to have sex with you because you wanted to have sex and it’s not very nice to tell people they can’t have what they want.

Noah doesn’t really want to talk about monogamy anymore.  He agreed to it under duress and he’ll do it, fine.  But he doesn’t want to talk about it.  I feel scared.  I feel like at some point in my life someone is going to tell me that they want to and I won’t feel like I get to really say no.  People like me don’t get to say no.  I rehearse in my head, “I’m in a monogamous marriage.  I don’t have sex with people any more.”  I pray to god I never get in a situation where saying that is ignored.  I’m afraid it will.  I’m afraid to ever be in a situation where I might be vulnerable to someone asking.  I’m so scared.  Because I’m afraid that I will say no once and it will be ignored and I will do what I do and I’ll put my head down and shut up and try not to cry and just get through it.  And afterwards I will talk about it like it was consensual and I deserve all the damage done.  Because I do.  Because I always deserve what I get, right?

I’m afraid that part of the reason I stay home so much is because I can’t control what happens to me when I leave home.  Bad things happen and there is nothing I can do about it.  Even stupid shit like losing my wallet.  I feel like being out in the world is dangerous.  Maybe it is for everyone.  Maybe I’m just stupid and I deserve what happens to me.  This is part of what I worry about passing on.  Other people don’t seem to be terrified that if they go out they are likely to be hurt.  I feel like I don’t have a lot of resiliency left.

The cease and desist letter feels kind of like a punch to my stomach.  It didn’t come from someone I outed as abusive in any way.  He’s more of a neutral-to-positive sort of character.  And he still wants to silence me.  I should just shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up.

How you spend your days is how you spend your years.  I keep a tidy house.  I garden.  I run.  I play with my beautiful daughters.  I’m teaching them about the world.  I’m teaching them about how all of life is a process.  There are steps you can skip and steps you can’t, the trick is finding out which is which.  I read about twenty pages out of The White Trash Mom’s Handbook yesterday.  From the title it seems like the perfect book for me.  It’s not.  It’s all about how to stay within the system and look successful while taking short cuts.  I suppose for someone who wants their kids to be “successful” in public school it is full of valid points.  I don’t want children who are successful at public school.  I want children who are successful at life.  Very few of the really successful people in our country went to public school.  Think about that.  It’s a broken system.  It manages to turn out most of the cogs in the machine but it doesn’t turn out people who know how to run the system by and large.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with people putting their kids into preschool and public school.  I think it is the norm in our world.  I’m not very good at fitting in with norms.  I would not be able to “pass” enough for my kids to have a successful public school experience.  As I read that book I noticed over and over how the author keeps saying that you have to “play the game” or your “kids will suffer”.  It’s true.  My kids would suffer because I am their mom in public school.  I would do things wrong.  They would be punished.  They would almost certainly be weird and different and public school is not kind to such children.  My children will most likely never appear normal.  They are wonderful and great and awesome, but they will always be quirky.

For all that I whine about being alone, I have found a life and a space that fits me.  When I am feeling self-confident I have places to go.  I have friends.  Lots of people like me.  I stay home because *I* have issues.  And because I’m shitty at managing my kids and doing anything else at the same time.  At home I can be all “free range” and not feel guilty.  My kids and I are working hard at learning how to coexist.  How do I get my work done while they have their own work to do?  How do we all get along?

From my daughter I learn that it is better to say, “Hey, will you please help me find the ipad?” rather than “You didn’t put the ipad on the table.”  Because I sit here and listen to her talk all day long I am learning where my manners are disgusting.  I’m learning where I am very rude.  I’m working on it because I don’t want to hear it from her.  I think it is good for me.  It’s the least judgmental feedback I have ever received.  I just have to sit around and listen to her ape my tone of voice and attitude.  It’s humbling.  There is no one in the whole world I can blame anything on but myself in this house.  My daughters have me for an influence.  And Netflix.  Thank goodness for Netflix.  Shanna is learning how conversations go.  It’s dramatic to see how this is working for her.

I’m trying to understand better what my social needs actually are.  I’m looking forward to the Storytelling at the end of the month.  So far I have had one person tell me absolutely yes (yay!) and several others are strong maybes.  I’ll take it.

We are also going to a sex party at the end of the month.  I’m intimidated.  I don’t think anyone will inappropriately push me (the host would kick anyone out who tried) but I think I will feel awkward and weird.  What am I there for anyway?  What business do monogamous people have being out in the sex communities?  What is the point of going?  Because that is my community, for better or worse.  Even if I never have sex again in my life the alternative sex communities are mine.  I belong in them.  I am sexually deviant.  But am I?  I don’t know.

I feel like I don’t know who I am or what I want.  I feel scared.  I feel isolated.  I feel like I should never do anything other than garden, hang out with my kids, run, and clean again.  This is my life now.  I chose it.  I should stick with what is safe.  I have never been this safe before in my life.  What is wrong with me that I want to shake things up?  What is wrong with me that I get bored?

I still don’t feel safe.  I feel like this could all be taken away from me if people knew how disgusting and broken I am.

Do you know why I keep my house as clean as I do?  Because I live in terror of a CPS visit.  I kicked cabinet doors, obviously I am an unfit mother.  I have kicked holes in drywall (years and years ago).  I yell.  I get so very angry.  Obviously I am unfit.  I do not deserve the goodness and safety I have.

I should go somewhere sleazy and unsafe and become inebriated and unable to say no coherently and forcefully because that is what girls like me do, right?  Is it even possible to hang out with people and do anything else?  I don’t know.  I feel like I don’t know anything at all.

I am never going to fit in.  I am never going to be “normal”.  And I mourn that.  I mourn that I can’t give my kids that because I don’t know what it looks like.  Instead what I’m giving them is a very structured environment where we work all day long on communicating with one another in polite tones.  How do you ask people to meet your needs in a civil tone of voice?  We’re working on it.  We do a lot of “try again”.  Because here I get a lot of chances.  Once I walk out of the front door I give up my right to be able to try things over and over till I get it right.  I’m not practicing anymore.  That’s the real world.  I’m not ready.

I have approximately fifteen more years to learn how to be a functional, polite grown up.  Now that I’m thirty that doesn’t sound like nearly enough time.  I haven’t managed yet, what hubris do I have to think I can learn in the next fifteen years?  I have fifteen years to focus on how to teach my kids what they need to know in order to move off into the world.  It doesn’t feel like enough time.

So far I have made ~$140 on the book.  That’s about half of what I spent on ISBN and it doesn’t even begin to pay for the editor.  I have to figure out how to promote the book or I won’t be allowed to leave the house to do anything fun until November.  All of my spending money is pre-spent.  I’m not sad though.  Even though this is an expensive hobby it is one I needed.  And I have eight more spiffy ISBN numbers.  (You can buy one or ten and print vs. ebook needs two separate numbers.)  I guess that means I should keep writing.  I can’t decide what to work on next.

I’m supposed to be resting my arms.  But I’m so lonely.

Broken promises

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My mom likes to make promises she can’t keep.  Oh she always intends to do it when she says it.  She just isn’t very good at taking stock of what things are realistic and possible in life.  And she rarely has the willpower to deny herself something in favor of a later pay off.  It’s all stupid shit, right?  She promised she would take me to Magic Mountain every year from when I was eight on.  My siblings grew up with season passes and I heard the stories and I felt envious.  I went by myself when I was twenty-one.

One of the talents my mom has is sewing.  She’s a fairly talented seamstress.  I still have things she made from me and I wear them when I get the chance.  I have a Snow White costume and an Ariel (from The Little Mermaid) dress–you know the one when she comes down to dinner and brushes her hair with a fork?  That one.  My dress is awesome.  And my mommy made it for me which makes it extra special.  She made my Dickens costume.  I wish she hadn’t told me to buy the pattern and material for three separate Dickens costumes because then in the long run I feel bitter that (as usual) she doesn’t follow through completely on what she says.  I should just be grateful she did one.  Usually she doesn’t get through one.

I focus on the fact that in everything she said to me there was always a lie.  I always had to be careful not to get my hopes up when she said anything.  I would say I had less than a 50/50 chance of her following through.  That wears on you decade after decade.  I wish she had promised less.

“I’ll pick you up from school” was one of those ones I wish she had promised less of.  I would not be able to add up all the hours I sat around waiting to be picked up.  I understand.  She always had a reason.  It’s not her fault.  Ever.  It is always someone or something else’s fault.  Always.  Always.  Always.

I hold the people in my life to a higher standard of truth telling because of this.  Approximations are not good things.  Over-promising is the worst thing you can possibly do.  I try very hard to keep my expectations and hopes very low.  Too many people are fucking liars who are too self absorbed to even admit to themselves that what they are doing is lying.

There are sins I forgive easily and barely notice; there are sins that cause me to feel like I have to smite someone from the earth because they are hurting me.  The real solution isn’t to smite anyone.  I’m terrified that the solution is simply to never trust a word that people say unless they prove over years that they aren’t a liar.  Unfortunately I tend to trust more than I should.  I get lied to a lot.  Oh of course it is never a lie it’s just that people don’t think they need to have a lot of integrity in what they say.  They feel no need to be impeccable with their words.  Close enough is good enough.  And I die of a thousand paper cuts.

I don’t want my children to have this hostility and rigidness around promises.  I know it isn’t healthy.  It is isolating.  I certainly can’t hang out with people much.  I’m trying to figure out how much I can handle really having steadily in my life.  I want there to be a predictable pattern.  I want to have a pattern, damnit.  I’m really struggling because nothing else in the world wants me to.  Stupid life just keeps happening.  I really do want to see people and so far that has to be a flexible thing.

It is hard to be this lonely and angry at the same time.  I know that I have to be careful not to get too angry when other people are around.  I manage this with the kids by not talking at all.  It’s hard to do that with adult visitors.  Then they become discomfited and I have to try to knock it off.  I can see the visible discomfort spread over people and I feel a wash of shame.  Yup.  That’s me.  The angry one.  Then I feel so much self loathing that I am always the angry one that I just feel more anger.  I’ve been told a lot of times that feeling that angry around people is basically abusive.  I’m a monster no matter what.  I just am.  It doesn’t matter what I do.

Ok, I kicked the cabinet door off the wall.  I suppose that is something terrible and horrible.  Because more shame really makes everything better.

I have had trouble running since the grief ritual.  I feel so overwhelmed with anger that I can barely see straight and it makes me stumble so I am running more slowly and carefully.  I don’t want to injure myself; I truly don’t.  I don’t want running to become my latest method of self-injury.  I want to find joy in my body.  It’s hard to do in the dark and cold.  I miss the afternoons.

I feel stuck in this anger.  I am so frustrated and anxious.  I need to go proofread six more chapters back from my editor and that’s scaring the crap out of me.  I am so tired of reading this story.  I want to avoid it and I want to get this done and over with.

When I say I follow the scorched earth path I mean that I will forever say anything I want about someone and shun that person from my life.  I will be as harsh as I feel the need to be.  I can be a very harsh person.  It is obvious when I am truly done.

I am struggling with some things in my close personal relationships.  I don’t want to regret the things I write, ever.  I want to always know that I am writing a truth I feel comfortable standing behind.   Right now I am having a lot of very strong irrational emotions.  I don’t know how to deal with them.  I am already saying things that are impossible to take back.  Dear sweet Jesus at least I will keep them off of my blog.  I’m struggling.

How can I talk about what I am experiencing without giving any information or judgment.  hm.

I feel unappreciated and used.  I feel like I am getting the realistic version of an impossible situation.  I feel tightness in my throat.  My neck aches.  My shoulders ache.  My lower back aches and I can feel how bad my posture is right now.  All right, I made a few chair adjustments and that is slightly better.  I feel empty and drained.  I feel abandoned and untrusting.  I feel exhausted in a way that isn’t going away with more sleep.

Recently I heard someone describe it as being “pregnant” with her book and I kind of feel like that.  I’m getting a lot of harsh physical symptoms and emotionally I feel like I am living on the memory of fumes because I ran out of gas long ago.  I am at a time and place in my life where I feel like I need an endless stream of support but I am too ashamed to ask for it.  I don’t have a family and people like me have to just figure it the fuck out because we are too unpleasant to be around.  I feel so pathetic and needy.  I feel so very lonely.  But I don’t feel like I get to talk about that because it is my own damn fault that I am so fucking unpleasant to be around and that’s why I am alone.

Sometimes I wonder what it is like to be part of an extended family.  Thinking about it makes me cry.  What would it be like to have people who know me and want to spend time with me?  I have friends, yes.  But my friends go see their families on holidays.  I notice.  I tend to feel like it isn’t possible for me to stop being angry so I should stop attempting to spend time with people at all because no one should have to deal with my fucking mouth.

It’s probably a good thing I see my therapist tonight.

Grief ritual

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I was surprised by how much crying I ended up doing for my family. It was different than I expected. I thought I was just here to mourn how shitty I was treated. Instead I cried and cried and cried for whatever happened to my different family members to cause them to become the kind of people who related to me the way they did. I cried for generations of women who were beaten and raped and told they had no alternative. They were to be seen and not heard.

I cried because my father must have felt a great deal of pain otherwise he wouldn’t have hurt so many people.  I had all these thoughts about his parents, whom I never knew.  What did they do to him as a child?  How did he come to believe that female family members were fair game for raping?  What I was told this weekend is each person has to deal with his/her family’s grief going back seven generations and what you incur in this life is going to be passed on for another seven generations.  Nieces/nephews count as the next generation.  Even if you don’t have children your karma can still be sent on for many many years.

I cried because my sister is so buried under her grief that she turned around and hurt her children.
Anger is healing and inspirational but if you don’t do something with the strength it gives you then you risk burning up in the flames.  Today I found a place in my heart for forgiveness for Denise.  I didn’t know I could do that.  It took me emotionally hitting a place where I realized just how young she was when she had different experiences.

According to the Burkina Faso traditions when someone in your life dies they hand you their spirit and life so that you can accomplish more.  They had you, essentially, a golden ticket.  Suicides are viewed as a very powerful way to grant someone else your spirit (my understanding is) because the person escaped great torment and brought that with them.  They learned a lot in the process and once they are on the other side of death they can help you better.

My maternal grandmother committed suicide when my mother was pregnant with me.  My paternal grandmother (whom I am named after) died a year or two before my mother had me.  My paternal grandfather died days before my brother Tommy was born.  If Orlando gave Tommy his spirit, maybe that is part of why Tommy was so fucked up.  My maternal grandfather died right before I saw my father for the last time at Jimmy’s wedding.  Right before I told my mother that she had to take my father back to court in order to get him to stop touching me.

When I was pregnant with Shanna I lost both my adopted step-mom and my beloved therapist to heroin overdoses.  Two of the women who were among my strongest bulwarks against the dark.  They both suffered terribly from their internal wounds.  They were not strong enough to fight back their demons.

Unsurprisingly I arrived at a place of deep anger.  I raged and screamed and started beating my fists on the floor.  The wonderful facilitator had someone put a thick cushion in front of me.  I would have cheerfully broken my hands to pieces and enjoyed the pain manifestation.  Later in the day I told her, “I have a habit of beating my hands and head against concrete floors.  I really appreciate that you put a pillow in front of me.”

Apparently the concept of “personal problems” simply doesn’t exist there.  All problems are problems of the community because if the community was functioning appropriately the problems wouldn’t exist.  That made me ache with loneliness for someone who would give a shit about me enough to want to actually help me with my problems.  Not just one person at a time.  I wish all of Lakeside School would gather to hold me in their arms and let me sob out my grief.  I wish they had stepped in and helped me instead of saying that people like me don’t exist.

It was interesting to think through the level of responsibility I bear for my niece and nephew being sexually assaulted.  My brother thinks it is enough for our generation to shut up and not talk about the incest.  He thinks that will solve everything.  Thus our grief has already passed on to the next generation.  We did not take responsibility for speaking the truth about our family.  Silence is consent.  If my understanding of the situation is correct I was twenty-one when my sister assaulted her children and taught them how to give one another oral sex.  I was living with Tom.  I had almost no contact with my family because I was not ready to have boundaries with them.  I never stepped in on behalf of the kids.  I didn’t tell my story to a CPS agent and get a case opened on my sister early enough.  There were already many HUGE issues at the time that would have been enough to open a case.  Maybe if Denise was being watched more closely it never would have happened.

I don’t know.  I will never know.

This is where the twelve step programs tell me to trust God.  Well fuck God.  No.  I need to let go of responsibility for my family.  I can’t save them.  I don’t have enough of me to give to fill their malicious black hole of need and pain.  They have to find a way out of that on their own.  If they come find me I don’t know what I will do.  I know one thing I will avoid doing: letting them develop a relationship with my kids.  My family doesn’t get to know my kids until my kids are adults.  If they want to go meet my family then I will drive them over.  I probably won’t get out of the car… but I’ll drive.

I grieved for my mother.  I thought about the smell of her and the comfort of her body against mine as we slept together.  I thought about how very much I love my mother.  I idealize my mother.  It always felt like she was so talented and wonderful and beautiful.  I will never compare favorably to my mother.  Only at the same time I think she was a weak monster.  I think she was shaped by ignorance and pain.  You don’t know what you don’t know, right?  I don’t think I can remain angry with my mother much longer.  I need to treat her as already dead.  I need to move forward in my heart to a place where I no longer desire vengeance.  She is my mother.  She carried me in her body.  She nursed me.  When I think of what my daughters mean to me I know that my mother is already in enough pain.  She has lost three of her children, two to desertion.  I’m sure she has already had enough pain this lifetime.

I feel so very sad for my mother.  She was abused and abandoned over and over.  Her father was a nightmare and he loathed her for the divorce.  Vernon treated my mother like a cockroach because she had committed the sin of leaving her husband.  Who cares what he does to the kids, right?  My mother was feisty and mouthy; her Mennonite family thought she should be taken down a few pegs!  See how it starts?  My mother used to come home from school as a child and have to clean up from her mother attempting suicide.  Again.  My grandparents fostered and my mother was never allowed to have any special toys because it “just wouldn’t be fair” to the transient kids.  My mother was never given a Christmas stocking until I was sixteen and I did it.

And I abandoned her too.  Even though I was supposed to be her comfort.  Even though I was the good and affectionate child.  I was so fucking devoted to my mother.  I can’t allow her to teach my children that they are small and bad and dirty and they deserve to be tortured.  I just can’t.  I was given a sacred trust by the God I don’t believe in to guard these people.  My only job is to raise them in safety and love. I’m not about to fuck up my job.  Not even for someone I have loved more than life.

I think the oddest part of today was the random older woman who came to join us.  She likes to just sit in on these rituals.  She was probably in her seventies with broken, missing, and severely discolored teeth.  Her hair was a mixture of grey and white and tied into a braid that went down past her waist.  She had these interestingly bright blue eyes.  She mostly looked like she was in a stupor, honestly.  But if you sat down next to her and looked at her with respect she came alive.

I don’t want to give her name because that seems like a violation.  We talked about anger.  She looked at me and she said, “Oh you are vibrating with anger.”  It was less obvious than usual, in my opinion, so it was both startling and not.  I felt calm and like I was in a decent mood.  Given how much time I do spend vibrating with anger I just said, “Yes.”  I can’t possibly remember the exact wording, today has been intense and full of new impressions, but she looked at me hard and didn’t ask any questions.  She volunteered these…I don’t want to say fortune cookie comments.  It’s kind of like reading the Horoscope.  Any of them can fit, right?  Only it wasn’t really that.  It felt more like she was getting something from me.  God I feel stupid talking about this woo woo shit.  She asked me if I was selected for suffering every time.  It’s not unreasonable for me to feel like that.  It’s not true any more, but it was.  She told me very clearly that I escaped because of my anger but now I have to be careful.  She said that there are two emotional experiences that come up completely unprompted: anger and laughter.  She said that I have gotten what I needed from the anger and now I need to laugh.

I cried.  I cried and screamed and ranted about how much I fucking hate them and I am glad they are dead.  I told him that if he wasn’t dead I would kill him myself.  I beat the floor until my arm muscles spasmed too hard for me to lift them.  I beat my head against the floor until I could no longer lift it from the pillow.  I lay there and cried and cried and cried for hours lying on my side because I could no longer hold my neck up because I was in so much pain.  People took turns sitting with me to share my grief.  Mostly I could not allow them to touch me.  There were a few specific women who felt safe.  Two.  I let them hug me.

I feel humiliated admitting that in this room full of people having this emotionally bonding experience I could let two of them (three including the instructor) touch me.  I feel like this distance that I keep is part of my problem.  I feel so deeply unable to allow people to love me.  I don’t know how.  That is not a skill I possess.

I understood more about my mother today.  I understand her scars and wounds in ways I didn’t before.  I love my mother so much.  I understand her frustrations and anger and thinly veiled violence.  I understand why she was so frantic when I misbehaved where anyone could see.  She told me constantly that people would judge her by my behavior so I had to not fuck up.  I understand now why she reacted the way she did to my unpredictability.  Now I have children.  Now I can think about her father and what kind of man he was.  Now I can think about Aunt Vonnie’s dark references to terrible beatings.

Sobonfu’s tradition believes that diabetes exists in the body because of an inability to truly accept love.  Vernon, my mom’s father, is the oldest example of that in my family I know.  And I know he treated his daughters like shit.  He never wanted their love; he wanted their silence and obedience.  Sound familiar? I was actually rarely hit as a child and my mother took flack from fucking everyone over that.  The whole family was ready to line up and beat me with sticks.  I have never been popular.  My mother defended me.  My mother defended me in so many ways.  She saw me as being like her.  We were both the youngest girl in families of four.  We were both raised very separately from our siblings.  We both felt like the black sheep.

This life business is complicated.  I’m starting to understand how compassion is part of this story for me.  I can have compassion for my mother and her suffering and still refrain from contact because my children deserve a childhood safe from people who are likely to tell them things they shouldn’t be told.  My mother likes to blame people for things that aren’t their fault.  My children will not learn shaming from their family.  They’ll have to figure that out somewhere else.

Part of my ancestral grief is our constant desire to have shit roll down hill.  We always pass the blame for our emotions.  I wouldn’t feel this way if you hadn’t made me.  This is why I cannot be angry with Calli for throwing my wallet out of the wagon.  She is a baby.  She is not responsible.  I should have bloody well put my wallet somewhere secure.  When Shanna is doing stuff that drives me nuts I have to ask her why she is doing something before I react.  9/10 times she has a reason that is totally fucking logical from her world view.  Her world view and mine have only occasional overlaps, mostly things like “ice cream is good” though we strongly disagree on how often we should eat it.

I don’t want to teach my children that they are to blame for my rage.  They aren’t.  I have a whole god damn book about why I feel so much rage.  I have no ability in any way to blame my emotional reactions on them.  That’s kind of annoying, actually.  In my family I was the scapegoat.  I wonder who is getting it now?  Someone is at the bottom, I promise you.

And I spent a long time today thinking about everything I know about my ancestors.  I can see why my family culminated in the horror that was my life.  I can have compassion for all of our respective victim-hoods.  I would kind of like to stop being a victim and they don’t even know enough to understand that it is an option.  That’s quite sad.  Today I thought hard about the fact that my sister wouldn’t do the things she does if she was in less pain.  She was harshly rejected by two fathers.  Her birth father rejected her before birth and then again in her thirties.  He didn’t want to know her despite the fact that she did 100% of the effort to have a relationship.  I pity her.

If the book pays off the editor I’m going to use that personal money to go to another grief ritual.  I have many more layers.  But I feel like I can perceive the beginnings of a path.  I think I am going to find somewhere to put an altar in my house.

It’s time to wash this grief off and go to bed.  I need to scrub my entire body with salt first.

If you build it, they will come?

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I have one of those cats who are fairly stand-offish.  Yet for the past month or so she has started demanding the right to sit on my lap while I type.  She hasn’t been on my lap much, ever.  She prefers to sit next to me but I’m on a chair where she can’t.  I feel like we had a multiple year hiatus where we just didn’t cuddle; now all of a sudden she is massively affectionate.  She is fourteen so I am humoring her as much as I can.  I won’t get to have her forever and I won’t forgive myself if I shun her last wave of affection.  Even though it is a pain to type around her it is a sacrifice I’m willing to make.

There is a lot of work to do and I’m not getting it done and I am struggling emotionally with that.  Finishing the book is like pulling teeth.  I’m on the last page but the kids are up and I can’t concentrate.  I have to leave the house in two hours and I won’t be home until after bed time.  I really do treat my kids as my first priority.  Shanna cuddled up next to me watching a movie on her iPad and Calli is having fun banging things together.  I can blog with less than half a brain.

I’m tired and empty feeling.  I’m struggling with feeling avoidant.  I wish I could hide in a cave for a month or three.  If I am supposed to feel happier after the relief of grief I’m not there.  I feel so tired.  I feel like I have seen the beginning of a long journey.  The ritual is being held at a small college in San Francisco.  Most of the people there are students who will write an academic paper about this experience.  Uhm.  Wow.  That’s actually fairly cool but it means that they are all building a community together because they are all students together.  I’m an outsider, as usual.  Above and beyond that I live an hour away; I’m just not going to come to an event in San Francisco that starts after 7pm on a regular basis.  I don’t handle lack of sleep well and I can’t sleep in.  I have a really strong internal clock and I’m going to be awake by 5am.  It hurts.  The running takes too much out of me.  I can’t go without sleep.

I think I want to start hosting a survivor discussion group at my house.  I’m thinking once a month at first because weekly hosting would freak me out.  No one else wants to meet early in the day and the only way I can handle being at an event that starts at 7:30 or 8 is if it is in my garage.  It’s a sad fact of my life but a fact never-the-less.  I’d be thrilled to hear input on what day of the week people could make it here. If I want to be able to talk about my experiences maybe I should start with the people who are willing to come to me and are already broken in by knowing me.  If you already know me in real life you will probably be able to handle me saying what I’m going to say because I already do.  Ha.

I’m never going to be able to go find a community to join.  I’m not that kind of girl.  I may have to make my own.  That’s what Sobonfu told me.  I feel very tired thinking about how much work that sounds like.  I am not good at being the work horse any more.  I feel far too resentful and I have no energy to spare.  I want to live my life and invite people to join me in it in a way that doesn’t actively drain me.  The things I have been trying… well… holy crap.  I need to get past feeling weird about inviting people over for dinner.  I need to be brave enough to just do it.  It’s frightening.  I expect that people always have something more interesting to be doing.

The big parties are hard.  Having a housemate was too hard.  Hosting family dinner was too hard.  Why does it work out better when someone comes randomly on a night?  I don’t seem to feel resentful about the fact that one more body on a given night doesn’t mean much extra work.  I tried too hard for family dinners.  That was a lot of the problem.  I wanted it to be a “nice meal”.  It was stupid.  I have a very bad habit of making things too hard for myself and then feeling overwhelmed and unable to enjoy the result.

I don’t really do that when one person comes over for dinner in the middle of the week.  I’m distracted and distant because I don’t talk much while cooking but I work on my attitude while the kids are around. I will just not speak if I am feeling testy.  My bad attitude is not because of my children and I try to keep it away from them as much as possible.  This means that if I am in a terrible mood and I am thinking horrible and nasty thoughts I smile and nod and listen really carefully because I need to keep the conversation off of me.  It is a mixed bag because I really enjoy the way I am getting to know people.  But I need venting space.  I’m curious how it will work to have a specific “Hey! Let’s Support Each Other!” night.  I’m wondering if that will be a format I can formally recognize as support and stop feeling so lonely.

I’m not alone.  I have a ridiculously widespread community of people who love me intensely.  I just feel like I can’t see them.

frustrated

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I feel like I haven’t been blogging much lately.  There are a bunch of things happening I feel like I can’t talk about.  I’m really bad about that.  If I have to censor what I say and speak carefully I don’t see much point in talking at all.  If I have to do those things then my point of view isn’t actually desired and I’ll just shut up.  It’s part of why I don’t follow social conventions much on “appropriate topics”.

Life involves an awful lot of work.  I can only do so much and feel good in my body.  There needs to be a balance of different kinds of work: mental, physical, emotional.  Without balance it all falls over.

I’m trying to edit the book.  I have 13-14 pages left.  I’m struggling.  I’m feeling a lot of tremendous anxiety about the end of the book.  How do I ensure that all the right elements are in place to honestly lead to the rest of my life?

I’m thinking hard about the foreward.  Ok fine, I wanted to write this.  Reasonable, fine.  Why do I want to publish it?  Why do I want other people to know this story with me?  Because I’m tired of being alone with it.  I’m tired of having people giving me entirely inappropriate advice because they assume my life was like theirs.

Other people grow up with families who pass their stories on.  People know what “Bob” acts like; you can tell because they say things like, “Well you know how Bob is.”  No, I don’t know.  I have never been around long enough to find out.  And people haven’t really been around me long enough to understand me either.

No one can ever know these things about me unless I tell them.  I have spent my entire life feeling isolated and alone and scared.  Once this story has been set down there is no fucking way I wouldn’t publish.  I want to be known.  I want to be seen so much it makes me ache.  I’m publishing because I want to.  Because it is an interesting story and I want to share it.  Because people will finally understand my vague allusions.  When someone wants to give me advice I can ask them if they’ve read the book and then let them say what they want.  I don’t have to follow the advice.  But I get to know that this isn’t some random passerby who doesn’t know shit about me.  This is someone who cares enough to go read the backstory so that (s)he can be part of my life.

That feels really different.  Most of my family will be shocked if they ever read the book.  They have no idea about most of it.  They don’t know me and I savagely resent them for this.  I savagely resent that god damn everyone in my family will get to say, “But we never knew!” and be telling the truth.  I think that is what I can’t forgive them for in the end.  They managed to silence me such that I was never able to get proper help from all that psychiatric care for fifteen years.  They can’t silence me forever.  I want to tell my story.  I want to get very clear about what happened to me and I can’t do that in private.

That’s strongly related to why I am upset about some other things in my life.  I’m not happy about how I am being treated and I feel like I can’t talk about it in public and I don’t have anywhere else to talk.  I am talking in therapy and to Noah about this situation but that’s the limit of my talking to people.  I literally just don’t do much else of it lately.  All of my IM buddies have disappeared.  Fuck you all.  (I’m kidding. I love you and miss you intensely while you are having Real Lives.)

It’s time to go parent.

Countdowns

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Next weekend (so in 6 days) I will be going to a grief ritual.  It is going to take all weekend.  The book and packing Sarah both want to be done/finished in the next 18 days.

I also didn’t put carrots in the ground yet and I need to get on that.  I’m not going to feel bad about skipping parsnips.

6 weeks till the 1/2 marathon.  8 months till the full marathon.

Just keep running, running, running.

Perspective is everything.

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Jenny’s father is dying.  It’s at a somewhat unexpected time because he isn’t that old but he had a weird injury and it wasn’t treated and… that’s how life works.  There is nothing I can do to help her with this.  This is her own journey of grief.  I imagine what it would be like to lose a father at this age after having had a relationship with him, having lived with him, for so many years.  I can’t imagine that.  Not really.  It’s going to be bad when my mom dies.  I will feel so much guilt.  I don’t even know if I will be told.  For all that Jenny isn’t close with her family she has never broken contact.  She has always treated them appropriately and with respect.

Everyone has a complicated relationship with their parents.  It’s a difficult relationship.  I understand it more from the side I am on now.  It seems to me that parenthood is a relationship based on temporary, stored power.  Right now I have incredible power over my children.  I get to decide pretty much everything about their lives.  In fifteen years Shanna will be an adult.  My power over her will be limited to the amount of influence she chooses to allow me.  It will depend on how well I have earned that respect.

Yesterday I spent my off hour reading/watching videos about Steve Jobs again.  I like his Stanford commencement speech and his sister’s eulogy is gut wrenching.  I also watched a few random videos about happiness because D sent them to me.  What does it mean to live?

When we were up in Portland I broke a large relationship rule.  This is part of why I say I am not good at monogamy.  Noah was right next to me and handed me the implement so he’s not as angry as he could be.  What happened is we were at Dad’s birthday party (non-bio dad) and I got to talking to one of my sisters-in-perversity.  Dad has a whole harem of daughters you see.  The one in question is the youngest in terms of being newest to the family but she is a year older than me and thus technically the oldest of us.  I refer to myself as the senior daughter for clarity.  He adopted me first.  We like to ignore the one he adopted second.  She’s not my favorite sister.

I don’t keep in close contact with this sister most of the time.  Her life is in a very different place than mine and we are both busy.  It’s not a slam or a negative judgment.  It’s nice to catch up when we can.  At this party I heard a lot about this guy she had fairly recently broken up with–see, there he is.  She spent a lot of time watching his scene with another woman.  Her heart was on her sleeve.  One of the things that breaks my heart faster than anything is seeing a woman I love pining over a piece of shit man.  And from what I saw of this guy… yeah… he’s a piece of shit.

I don’t like men who pursue mastery to be degrading to women.  If you only want to own women you can insult then I have a low opinion of you.  I don’t mind that you want to use those names sometimes, but if that is what you think of your partners I think you have a personality disorder you fucking piece of shit.  You are not better than women.

My sister managed to kind of get involved in the scene.  She really wanted to play with him.  The girl he was playing with was slightly less extreme of a bottom than my sister and my sister pretty obviously wanted to show off.  The guy demurred.  He had been using his belt as a whip.  He gave it to his slave/submissive/bottom/partner/whatever her chosen identity label thing is.  He then taunted and forced her to hit my sister.  She did, but it was lackluster and obviously not that intense.  It was a giggly good time.  The guy started encouraging fairly random other people to hit my sister.  One got her in the eye because he didn’t know what he was doing.  I felt like I was watching a train wreck.

I nudged Noah and told him to give me his belt.  He did.  See how it feels kind of fuzzy for him to get mad at me for doing it?  But I’m not supposed to play with people any more.  It didn’t feel like a scene, exactly.  I sure didn’t do it for my sexual gratification.  I did it because I didn’t want to listen to those asshole men tell her that she was a dirty whore.  They didn’t mean anything nice by it.

My sister has had times in her life when she needed to feed her kid and she didn’t have a job.  She has sold her body to put food on the table.  I felt such an explosion of anger when he was picking on her for it.  They dated.  He knows her history.  He was explicitly picking on something that is a mixed circumstance in her life.

I changed the intensity of the scene.  I only used the belt and I stayed on her thighs: the fronts, backs, and sides.  I hit her hard and I hit her fast and I forced her emotional reaction towards panic as hard and fast as I could.  And while I did it I started a litany to her.  You are not bad.  You are good.  You are strong.  You are brave.  You are fierce.  You have survived things that would take down lesser people.  You are strong.  You are good.  She tried to interrupt me and tell me that she was a whore.  I paused long enough to hold her face in both of my hands and tell her that even if she has had to prostitute her body to survive she isn’t a whore.  You are not defined by what you do.  She is a bad ass mother fucker.  She sobbed and clung to me.

Bdsm is rarely about sex for me.  That is not how I grew up in the scene.  I made every top who was kind of sort of leaning in to get in on the hot available action flinch and back off.  I was not going to be one more person starting a pile up on a poor girl.  I was nastier and meaner and harsher.  I kind of like being the visiting bad ass.  This wasn’t a game.  It was very serious business.

I do bdsm because it is one of the best ways I know to force the body to get rid of the excess energy that poisons people.  There is atonement and release and a journey to find the core of yourself.  When you are in the middle of a very intense scene you can’t hide who you are.  You react from the animal core of yourself.  I am a vicious animal who will strip you down to the bone and show you what it looks like.  I will tear the flesh from your body so that you know that I can see all the way through you.  I see exactly who and what you are.

And you are beautiful.  Your strength amazes me.  That you can allow me to do this to you amazes me.  I worship you.  I adore you.  I love you.  Thank you for showing me this fierce core of strength and intensity that other people simply don’t have.  It takes a warrior to experience pain like that over and over and over.  We don’t have a good place in our current world for people who have to suffer.  Even being a soldier is more about being a cog in the machine.

I see in my sisters-in-perversity a desire to be made clean through suffering.  Not all people in the bdsm world are after the same thing.  But I know my sisters when I meet them.  I see the same need in men, but I am less able to address it.  It has long felt like a flaw in me.  I can’t offer the same experience to men.  I am too locked in being afraid of men.  I can’t look at them the way I can look at a woman.  I can’t identify in the same ways.  I have always believed that is a grave failure.  I’m sorry for it.  There is a part of me that understands men as other and I don’t know how to change that.  I see a specific wildness in women.  I see women in bear traps thrashing about.  I understand their feelings.  I don’t have to know all their feelings.  I don’t have to really know everything about their lives.  I know that trapped.  I know that desperate need for release.

I know how to rip someone down until they can no longer stand nor defend themselves.  I know how to make them cry and hurt and wish they could do anything to get away from the pain.  The pain I am giving is just a stand in for all those things they can’t change in their lives.  All the things that hurt and hurt.  All those other things make you feel worse about yourself.  Because it hurts and you can’t stop it.  It weakens you over time because no one can stand up forever under an onslaught.

My beatings are short in duration.  And the whole time you are taking it you are being coaxed and reassured and told that what you are doing is impressive.  You are showing your mettle.  You are proving how very strong you are and I will delight in building you up with it.  By the end you know that you are an intensely strong person and you can go do fucking anything.  Anything in the whole world.  Most people are cowards compared to you.  Not very many people will permit a beating like I give.  I only hit the girls who can’t say no.  They have outrageous pain tolerances.  Other people want warm ups and I’m not here for that shit.  I’m here to prove that I can take you apart but it will be a lot of hard work for both of us because you are so god damn intense.

I always stay in contact with my sisters-in-perversity for a while after a visit.  It seems important.  They see a part of me I don’t reveal much in life.  It’s interesting for me to get perspective on how we are changing over time.  I learn a lot more from brief flashes of my wounded warriors than I do from dozens of conversations with people who have never been hurt.  This is the part I hesitate to say because it sounds so awful.  I learn what mistakes are there for me to make.  When I see my wounded warriors I see There But For The Grace Of God Go I.  In their struggles to perceive themselves as valuable I see what could happen to me if I had a lower opinion of myself.  I know that I was brought up to be one of them.  I was quite literally brought up to be competitive about being able to take more pain during sex.  Thank you, Jim.  You were an inspiring father.

I have been binging on sugar for the past few days.  It’s kind of obscene.  I came home from Portland and both girls are acting out in various ways.  I feel trapped and angry and frustrated.  My life fucking sucks.  But my life only sucks because I have a bad attitude.  I look at my sister-in-perversity and I have to understand that my life is quite cushy in terms of me having everything I want when I want it.  Sure, I have to do it with my kids along.  That just means I need to figure out how to work with my kids.

Someone on facebook linked to an article about why French parents are happier.  Apparently in French they do not have the concept of “discipline” the way we do here.  They constantly think that they are educating their children.  My entire life right now is an education to my children.  What am I teaching them?  Dissatisfaction.  The funny part about sitting in the garage as I write… it’s a constant reminder that I get work done with my children around.  I didn’t have child care when I insulated the walls and put dry wall up.  I didn’t have child care when I painted a mural.  I had help sometimes.  I had friends who did it with me.  But my children were around and under foot and I cared for them.  I had help for all the stuff that was genuinely beyond my ability to do it alone.  I could not have done the drywall without the consistent and reliable help of T.  He saved my ass.  I’m going to owe that man for a few lifetimes.  He doesn’t understand what he is to me.

I have been struggling for a long time with feeling trapped.  It’s been a lot of … well… all of it.  I have a lot more freedom than most.  More than most people for all of history.  I am somewhat unique in being financially secure in a tumultuous period of history.  Yes, we could be hit with disaster.  For now I am going to continue with the fact that I am ridiculously safe.  I have a lot of options.  Even as Noah and I fuss back and forth about the fact that we have to carefully budget… we have a lot of options.  Noah only  gets $600 to spend on a weekend trip with his buddy.  Cry me a river.  We have a really good life.

In every relationship I have in my life there is a mixture of uplifting and wearying.  I need to start thinking a lot harder about the uplifting or I am never going to get out of this muck.  I have a marathon to run.  I can’t be hanging out in the muck.  It’s too tiring.  I will injure myself.  I have to run five miles today.  You know–just get up and do it.  And tomorrow I’ll run three miles.  On Saturday I will run seven miles.  Next Saturday eight miles.  So on.

When I run I feel strong and capable.  What I used to get from getting my ass beaten.  I don’t know how to get it from getting my ass beaten any more.  Now I’m always mad that Noah isn’t doing _______ exactly how I would.  It’s kind of sick.

I don’t know how to be a follower right now.  But we don’t have room for much else in our relationship and I don’t know how to guide us.  I don’t know how to guide Noah.  That’s an interesting thought.  I resent being the guide for more than a couple of minutes.  I’m impatient.  I want to be lead.  There are journeys Noah simply can’t lead me on.  He doesn’t know how to get there.  I’ve had kind of this dawning horror around this topic recently.  I have some ideas.  I’m not ready to spill them yet.

I don’t know what the future will bring.  I hear that if you spent more time focusing on the positive you can change your life.  You can actually make things better.  I am fairly uniquely positioned to do so.  Dr. Frankl taught me that if you have something you are burning to do you can get through any circumstance.  Some dude on a Ted talk yesterday brought up the idea that everyone desperately wants to live.  Then I listened to Steve Jobs talk about how much he wanted to live.

How does one go about finding their own path?  Well, I think by definition I can’t ask anyone else.  Whatever it is they did or would do will be wrong for me.  That’s why I’m not fond of advice.  I do like hearing stories though.  I like finding out what other people have done and why.  I’ve been reading a lot more recently.

When I feel fussy about what I am doing I need to decide what I would rather be doing and do that.  That’s part of the binge eating of sugar.  The kids are pestering me for sugar.  We have a lot in the house that we don’t normally have.  I am tired of fighting the kids off of it.  I’m tired of being whined at for it.  I’m eating it with them them till it is gone.  Then we don’t get dessert unless you can talk me into making some with sweet behavior.  I like doing it when I have a cheerful house to do it for.  I won’t do it for whining.  It has worked for me in the past.  I think we ran out of chocolate last night.  Now the sweet snack in the house is fruit.  When the answer is, “We don’t have any chocolate in the house; would you like an apple?” The response is more positive than you think.  And then we just don’t think to buy it at the store.  It works out.  One of these days she will remember to ask for it at the store.  That will be figured out later.

I’m getting defensive already.  That’s lame.  I felt cheerful through most of the writing.  I’m tensing up as I think about going in.  The family is awake now.  The girls are extra clingy right now.  I will miss these days.  It’s a lot of physical contact for me.  I feel bad about how difficult it is for me to handle physical touch sometimes.  I wish I liked it more.  This is part of my feeling of inadequacy.  I’m not sure why I feel inadequate though.

I’m supposed to think about three things I am grateful for.  I’m always grateful for a white wall in my house.  I like thinking about how I will paint it.  I think I should paint it next month after I get the book edited and up on Amazon.  We’ll see.

I’m grateful that I get to raise two daughters in an environment where I am not under ridiculous stress all the time.

I’m grateful for stories to think about.  Something is bubbling in my head.  I’ll think about it on the long run today.  I’m going to run to Lake Elizabeth.  It is just over five miles roundtrip.  I hope it warms up soon.  I have to leave by nine.  Noah is having a late start day.  I should probably go see him for the time I can today.

Visitors

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I fucking love the stats page.  It shows me that mostly I am just the best Google search return for the phrase “my father raped me” which is kind of problematic.  I’m sure I often get people looking for porn. But I also probably get people who are confused and scared.  Many many people read that story every day.  I sincerely doubt they are all spammers.

There is something about the fact that my family has accused me of lying despite the fact that my father confessed.  It haunts me.  The detective who interrogated my father let me know that he had never heard anything more extreme in his career.  My lovely father set the bell curve on disgusting atrocities to children.  And my family thinks I am lying.  I don’t know what to do with that.  That sort of basic dishonesty is probably the basis for a lot of personality issues right there.  My humanity has been assaulted from babyhood and I’m not allowed to experience it as real.  I am told to forget because I just made it up anyway.  Who wouldn’t go crazy?

Only I’m not really crazy.  I am.  Certifiable.  But I’m not.  I’m complicated and I’m difficult.  I’m not crazy.  I am hurt.  I am sad.  I have terrible anxiety.  I have a hard time perceiving people liking me.  That isn’t crazy that is good plain sense.  I had to grow up disbelieving people who told me they loved me.  People who love you are not a party to child rape.  Sorry.

I think about the people who visit this blog looking for that phrase.  Some of you have stories that would make me cry.  If people say they love you but disbelieve you were raped, that’s dangerous to you.  Don’t let them convince you that you deserve what you got.  You didn’t.  I don’t give a shit who you are.  If your father rapes you, you bear no blame.

You get to decide how you move forward.  Even if you never make waves in your family because you can’t for some reason, never let them define you.  Don’t become their crazy person.  You aren’t.  They are liars and trying to take away your truth.  Your truth lives inside of you.  No one can take it.  I write mine down because I can’t live with it being only inside me.  My family denies my reality.  Well, I picked the scorched earth policy.  You don’t have to follow me.  It hurts a lot.

If you are raped by your father you do not deserve it.  You did not in any way encourage it.  Your father did something terribly wrong.  He took advantage of the most power he can ever have in his life.  He is entirely to blame.  That is a relationship with a one way stream of responsibility for sexual contact.

I’m trying to learn to stop hurting myself because I am the kind of person who deserves terrible things.  I hope you don’t hurt yourself either.  You deserve better than that.  I’m not sure yet what better than that looks like.  If you find out, let me know.

I’m sorry

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Today isn’t starting off well.  I think these physical symptoms are stress not “sick”.  That doesn’t make them better.  We kind of sort of tried to have sex today and Noah finally stopped when he noticed how much I was flipping out.  He’s a kind sort.

I started thinking about how much Noah really wishes he got to go from girl to girl.  He wants that so much.  From the outset, with that want, I can never be enough.  No matter what.  I can’t be multiple people.  I can’t give him that thrill.  I could stand there and watch (or not) him have it.  I can’t give it to him.  Given how much trouble I’m having with sex right now it feels like I have completely cock blocked him in every way.  He didn’t promise celibacy.

I feel like such a failure.  I’m feeling eaten away by stress and failure and all the things I will never be good enough for.  This morning as I was crying at Noah I told him that whenI was a kid I would say: “I’m sorry”, the response was: “Yeah, you’re sorry.  You are the sorriest piece of shit ever born.”  I’m realizing why I don’t notice that I am expressing contempt.  I don’t know much else.

This book is very hard to read.  I don’t really want to think hard about the fact that this is my life.  How can I have these experiences and come out anything but a piece of shit. An angry waste of air.  Yes, yes, happiness is a state of mind, not a circumstance.  I don’t know how to forget everything that happened and just go on to be happy.  I’m hopeful that some day other people will know the story.  Enough people will tell me that I’m not bad that maybe I will believe it.  I still feel like I deserve everything that happened.  It wouldn’t have happened to a nice person.  Someone who was good.  Someone kind.  Someone who wasn’t a piece of shit.  Instead it happened to me.  That must be how it is supposed to work.

Today is going to be kind of rough.  I had planned to take the girls to Fairyland.  But I’m dizzy and weak.  I don’t think that is a good idea.  I wish the stupid place was open during the week.  I’ve been taking sleeping pills for almost two weeks.  I’ve gotten 7.5+ hours for almost that many nights.  I wish my body felt better.  Everything hurts.  I remember my stomach hurting like this when I was a kid.  This was usually my reason for staying home from school.  My mom would always yell at me that I was a hypochondriac or a liar.  At least she let me stay home anyway.  I’m scared.  I’m so very scared.

I just sent an email to some of my co-owners in the coffee shop.  I guess that money is going to be a donation after all.  I asked to have my name taken off the ownership paperwork.  I don’t want the stress going forward.  I bought it when I thought I had more help.  Things change.  If they could give the money back some day that would be great but I won’t be holding my breath.  I wasn’t looking for that.  I wanted to do good in the world.  I hope I did.

I want to be someone who can take care of a lot of people and fix a lot of problems.  Unfortunately I only seem to be able to fix knots in capes.  I can clean up toys.  And three people is the absolute physical limit of how many people I can take care of.  I wish I didn’t know that for sure.  I wish I hadn’t hit that wall.  I wish I got to still have the fantasy of being very competent.  I’m very competent on my best days.  I don’t have best days very often.  I have to plan my life around my very worst days.  Because I have to determine what I can truly carry on my own.  Because I have things I have to carry no matter what.  I have to take care of my family.  I have to.  There is no one else to do it.  No one else is available to just come take care of my kids.  I tried to see if it was possible.  It’s not.  Well, I could pay someone but that would require getting a job.  No thanks.  Once you start upping the ante like that it isn’t figuring out how to adapt my life it is going out and getting a whole new life.

I like my life.  I like hanging out with my kids.  I like writing.  I’m even quite house proud.  I like looking around and seeing the things that bring joy to me.  I’ve created my house very intentionally.  I didn’t pick it but it’s mine.  Maybe the only house I will live in for the rest of my life.  I want it to bring me joy.  I’m pretty selfish.  Luckily Noah doesn’t seem to worry too much about what I do.  For some odd reason he trusts me.  Or he just doesn’t care.  Either way.

Noah told me that he isn’t sure what to say.  I’m convinced I have no value.  He disagrees.  I told him that I’m afraid he is lying.  I am.  I’m terrified.

I don’t feel much pride in myself.  All I see are my failures.  It’s interesting how differently Noah and I view failures.  He tells me often that you learn more from doing things wrong.  It feels like such a privileged thing to say.  It may be true, but only some people keep getting second chances.  I think that’s part of it.  Noah rarely fails at anything that matters.  I do.  When I fail I have to once again deal with the consequences of the fact that I am a piece of shit and everyone is going to leave me in the end for being a nasty, angry, bitter person.  My mistakes in the past twelve months have cost me three friendships.  I run people off.  My mistakes mean that I spent seven years in graduate school but I have no degree to show for it.  Yes, I learned things.  That’s still an awful lot of time and money to spend.  I’m glad I was able to pay off my student loan debt so fast.  If I was still paying for it I would be much more bitter.

Only time will tell how I am as a mother.  I’m afraid.  The stakes are so high.  Even if some day I manage to run Noah off, which I think is more possible than he gives me credit for, I really am afraid that I won’t deserve my children.  It was decided so long ago that I am bad.  What hubris do I have to think I can change that?

Today I hate me.  And I’m sorry.  So very sorry.

second chances

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There are a bunch of people I “should” email right now but I’m not going to.  I don’t have a lot of time free today and I have stuff in my head I want to get out.  Maybe I’ll respond to emails later.

I have screwed up a lot of money stuff this month.  I’m experiencing a lot of anxiety around that.  It’s all stuff that will even out and be ok in the long run.  I feel stupid though.  I feel wasteful and inattentive and bad.  I think it might be harder that Noah isn’t mad.  I spend a lot of time feeling like I don’t deserve someone who will be this nice to me.  He really is just plain nice.  I feel like this nasty bitch he got saddled with.  I can’t understand why he would take pleasure in the company of a miserable harpy.  That’s what I feel like when I get to the point of being able to loudly put my foot down about my boundaries.  I don’t know how to do it in a friendly and loving way.

I ignore things until I blow up.  That’s not useful.  I’m handling things badly with Sarah because I don’t know what to do.  I’ve said my part of things, badly and with hostility because I’m a piece of shit, and now I wait.  There is nothing else I can do.  I’m not good at waiting.  Waiting makes me edgy.  Waiting makes me feel like someone doesn’t think I deserve to be answered which escalates my fuss.  I feel ignored and unimportant.  Ignoring a situation I am heavily involved with means that I feel ignored.  And that makes me angrier and harder to talk to.  It’s not a great cycle.

I’m reading a book about successful marriages.  I’m generalizing a lot of the advice to other areas of my life.  I’m not very good at a lot of parts of relationships.  That makes sense.  You learn how to have relationships by watching the people in your family.  I’m worried about my explosive anger because even if I never do anything that qualifies as textbook abuse to my kids I’m still teaching them how to be an adult.  I’m still teaching them how to have relationships.  I feel quite guilty that someone as fucked up and pathetic as me is their example.  I’m sorry I’m not better at this.

When I was pregnant with Shanna a long time friend told me that she thought someone with my emotional problems has no business being a mother.  I don’t think I will ever get that out of my head.  I feel like such a horrible person.  How dare someone as pathetic and awful and broken as me think they have the right to pass on how to be a person.  It seems like such a horrible offense.  It can never be taken back.

It’s hard knowing that I’m not the only person who thinks I am a piece of shit.  I’m not the only person who thinks I am awful.  I’m not the only person who thinks I am bad.  I don’t really want my children to grow up knowing beyond the shadow of a doubt that someone like them deserves to be looked down on and loathed.

One of the things I fucked up this month was billpay.  I sent extra checks to the maid who quit in December.  I sent her emails asking her to not deposit the money.  She deposited the money and told me it was all my fault and I brought it on myself.  I investigated my options.  I probably can’t get the money back.  She is currently in a homeless shelter.  I could press charges and make it so she can’t get a decent job.  She graduates from college in February.  I can’t have that on my soul.  I can’t take her life away from her over this.  She broke the law.  She committed a crime.  But I think she committed the kind of crime I can’t judge her for.  She is trying desperately to survive.  I can’t turn around and make that harder for her.  The deck is already stacked against her in every way.  I can’t live with having ruined her life.  Yes, she brought it on herself.  I still get to decide what kind of person I am.

I don’t want to be angry.  I don’t want to go after vengeance.  Justice, sure.  Not vengeance.  I can’t get justice by ruining the life of a twenty year old homeless girl.  That’s not justice.

I have a hard time feeling like I’m a sucker.  I’m doing this because when I was fifteen the police officer told me very clearly that he should arrest me for grand theft auto.  Instead he called my mom.  That was a time and a place where punishing me wouldn’t have improved my life.  If I had been “held accountable” for my actions it probably would have prevented most of the good that came later.  I was given a chance.  I was told very clearly what the consequences of my actions should be.  Then he let me go home and sob and cry and feel like a terrible person.  I have never fucked up that big again.  From that day forward it wouldn’t be a mistake again.  It wouldn’t be a fuck up.  It would be a choice to not care about how my actions affect other people.  I can’t live with that on my conscious.

It’s going to be hard to stop reacting to Sarah in angry ways but I need to do it.  I need to do it for me first and foremost.  Sarah is one of my closest friends and I don’t want to lose her.  I love her very much.  The fact that I can’t handle living with her does not make her a piece of shit.  It just means I can’t live with her.  I’m having a hard time because with my family in order to keep myself safe from them I have to be actively angry.  When something isn’t working for me I don’t know how to stop it other than this extreme anger.  I have to feel like my personhood is being insulted.  But Sarah isn’t insulting me.  She isn’t trying to hurt me.  She is trying to get through her life as best she can.  Sometimes her ways don’t work for me.  If I manage to remove the franticness from my longing for family I can feel ok with the fact that I just can’t live with Sarah.

Sarah is amazing and wonderful.  She is talented and kind.  She is patient.  She is also not me.  Her priorities are not mine.  That’s probably a good thing.  As I am going full-speed-ahead on my life I can’t expect someone with wildly different priorities to be able to just do the things I want done.  It’s not reasonable.  A lot of why I am so angry is because I wanted this to work so much.  I feel so much disappointment.  I don’t react to that well.  That’s on the long list of things I need to improve on and fast.  I have already done major damage to our relationship.  If I don’t want to be responsible for ending our friendship I need to get my shit together now.  Sarah will not be able to survive my hostility.  She doesn’t have that in her.  If I want to still have her in my life in ten years I need to grow the fuck up.

What do I want from a relationship with Sarah?  Instead of being so angry about the parts I don’t want it is time for me to figure out what I really get from the relationship and work towards that.  There is so much good there.  I’m really not in a place in my life where I should be pissing all over a good thing.

Breakfast is ready.  Cinnamon bread french toast.  My husband loves me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I kept myself company while watching a movie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inadequate to the task

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The specific incident

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First world problems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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