Uncomfortable conversations about current sex issues I have is causing me to see direct paths to things that happened in kindergarten. I really wish that I didn’t have so many decades of sexual issues to deal with.
The last two days have been writing about my life up till the age of four. I don’t like thinking about my family. I don’t like thinking about how I was treated. It’s weird to talk about systematic abuse. Why did I believe that everything bad in the world was my fault? Partially because little kids are dumb. Mostly because I was actively told it was. Over and over and over. It was my fault things happened before I was born.
I don’t know how to shed this feeling of guilt. This feeling that existing poisons the people around me. Things with muse are a lot less smooth. Welcome to crazy girl territory. I feel like I should go home and lock myself in the garage for a few years. Maybe Sarah can pass me food through the cat door. I feel so dirty and polluted. Like there is no redemption for someone like me. Too much poison was put in me before I was even verbal.
I am just a hole. I am nothing. I have no worth. No merit. There is nothing in me worth acknowledging. But I had better be willing to lie still and open my legs. And shut up. Just lie there. Don’t move. Because I am nothing. Nothing.
I have had the Dixie Chicks song “Top of the World” on repeat for two days. I can sing along with it in the background while I type and cry. The last two days have been a lot of crying. I feel like I won’t ever stop crying. I feel like there is no end to this pain. The pain of being absolutely worthless.
Why do I want to give away so much money? I’m trying to find a way to do something in the world. Something real that no one can take away from me. Something I can point at and say: See! I am not a dirty, worthless, bad kid. I am good. I do good. I am good.
How do I teach my daughters to love themselves when I loathe myself with such intensity? How do I teach anyone how to feel joy when I feel such despair? I don’t know. “Everyone is singing, we just want to be heard. Disappearing every day without so much as a word, somehow.” I feel like every day that I do not write, that I do not say what I believe to be true is a day that my family has effectively silenced me. I feel like any time I do not stand up and scream at the top of my lungs that I am NOT FUCKING BAD, DAMNIT I am agreeing with them. If I am not actively arguing I am agreeing.
I don’t know how to resolve that. I don’t know how to just take up space and just be. I have to aggressively take up my space and batter the people standing near me or I feel invisible. There is no middle ground. I am invisible and toxic or I am screaming and hostile. I don’t want either extreme. I want to feel like I am just ok. That life is just ok. That it is ok that things happened. They are over.
Other than glimpses out my window when he was stalking me, I haven’t seen my father since I was 13. 17 years have gone by. That’s most of my lifetime. He’s been dead for 13 years, one month, and five days. Not that I’m counting.
This hurts so much. I wanted a daddy. Why am I not allowed to have a daddy? Why do I not get to have a mommy either? The last time I saw my mother was when Uncle Bob died. I don’t know if I will see her again. “I wish I had showed you all the things I was on the inside.” My family doesn’t know me. Not really. They know this construction of misery and pain. It’s not me.
I am not this angry and bitter person. But I am sad. I am so sad. I am so sad for the little girl I was. It was not my fault my father raped my sister. It’s ok that I was born. I did not cause my sister to be raped for three more years. My father did that. FYI: yesterday’s shirt makes a great hankie. Squeamishness is for people who waste paper.
Sometimes I wonder why I am writing this down. Why in the fuck does anyone need to know what a piece of shit my family thinks I am. How is this making the world a better place? Why do I need to write another 20,000 words about what a fucking piece of shit I am? Why? Technically another 24,000. But that’s ok. It’s only the 11th.
Speaking of which: thank you Veterans. I was too chicken shit to do what you did even though I thought about it.
It’s interesting looking at the differing word counts for different years. Some years I started and got 600 words in and just… ran out of things to say. Some years I’ve produced 4,000 words in a day because there was so much to say. This hurts a lot. It hurts so much to look at all of this so fast and so hard. I feel battered. I feel weak. I feel fragile.
I’m struggling right now. I feel like I am beating the shit out of myself with how worthless my family thinks I am. It’s so hard to be reminded over and over that my childhood was so miserable. I feel like a ghost of a person. I feel so thin I could blow away.
Why do I travel so much? Because I’m running away from myself. Why do I read so many books? Because I want to be in anyone’s head but mine. Why do I have sex with random people? Because then I don’t have to deal with any of my emotional issues–I can keep them in a box. When people start getting closer and they see the box I want to run. I don’t want to even tell you how big this box is.
I don’t want you to know just how big of a box I need for my issues because I don’t want anyone to see how very small I am standing next to that box. I am too much effort. I’m not worth it. Hell, Tom taught me that. It’s not worth it to meet my needs. The balance isn’t good enough. I’m so glad I found Noah. I didn’t know I was getting a knight in shining armor. It was hard to notice through the tacky dry humping.
I have lived with Noah for five and a half years. Longer than I have ever lived with another human being consecutively in my life. Noah is my family. It’s terrifying to even consider trusting someone beyond him. It is so hard to trust him. And he comes through so very very well. I don’t deserve Noah, but I’m keeping him.
Soon I will have lived with my children significantly longer than my parents. Shanna is 3.5. That’s how old I was when my parents divorced. When she turns four I will have lived with Shanna more than I lived with my father in my entire life. And it won’t be much longer before I have lived with her longer than I lived with my mother in a stretch. Calli will be my third longest live-in relationship. Depending on how things go with Sarah, she will be the fourth. That hurts a lot. I’m 30. This should not be my story. This shouldn’t be anyones story.
But it’s mine. And I can’t change it. I can just tell it.
John 6:51 I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.
I’m not enjoying the experience of writing about what it was like to grow up in an incestuous family so I’m going to take a break to think about something more pleasant since I did 2,000 words today. So I’m going to write about Occupy.
The only thing we have to give in this world is our energy. Our devotion. Our time. Our resources. Something that people don’t understand is that time has nearly as much utility as money. If you go and perform labor that makes someone else’s life better… you have done a better thing than just handing them money. I don’t mean Volunteer! I mean, what the fuck are you doing with your life. How are you working towards being part of a better system? How are you speaking up when you feel compelled? How are you putting your direct democratic self forward? What the fuck are you doing with your time?
Surviving. That’s what people are doing. Because we have a weird closed system where everyone is struggling to meet their own needs. It’s nearly impossible to do. How do we find more to give…give..give. Everyone is on empty. I’m at a stage of my life I have to ask for help a lot. It feels really humiliating. My children require adult companionship 24 hours a day. That’s honestly kind of intense pressure. We don’t have families. Well, we don’t have anyone local. I have nothing. I don’t know what Noah has. That’s kind of between them.
It’s between them because I don’t seem to be able to do the family thing on any terms other than my own. That’s sad for everyone involved. I’m sorry for it. But I really can’t. So much for an intensity break. This writing is hard. I don’t want to talk about the earliest reasons I am so very fucked up. It hurts. I don’t want people to know how I was treated because then they will look at me differently. I feel so very dirty. I feel like that monster ripped out my soul and filled the cavity with tar. I will forever tarnish everything I touch.
Fuck him. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world. I have things to give. I have resources. I have myself. I have my time. I have my energy. I share it in many different ways. I want to make other peoples lives better. I want to be 80 and know that millions of people have been made better by my existence. Maybe then I will believe that my soul is not black.
October is over in ~20 hours. I went to bed at 7 last night and Calli woke up at 2. Festive. It’s going to be an interesting night tonight. I’m meeting my TA (torrid affair) tonight at a sex party in San Francisco. Plan A is for him to fuck me without saying a word. I’m nervous. I really wanted NRE (new relationship energy) and it’s happening fast. I spent all day yesterday talking to him. Mostly we are talking about sex, let’s be clear. I’ve been looking at his profile pictures a lot because I’m trying to get a sense of what he is going to feel like in person.
I’m being pursued. And I’m pursuing. I haven’t had this… since … Daddy? I think that was the last time I was really pursued. Puppy and Spot were both guys I pushed. Neither of them really wanted me in the same way. I started dating Daddy on October 1st 2004. It’s been a while. Of course I’ve had Noah for most of this time, but it’s different feeling. I’m really glad I have Noah.
He asked me what kind of D/s I like the most and I soaked the chair. I told him that I probably want something that feels kind of Daddy/little girl but I’m not interested in the direct incest play right now. I want to be coaxed into doing all these hot, dirty things I want to do anyway. I really want to be taunted with how very very very very much I want to fuck him. I really want to be taught how to properly suck his cock. Preferences vary and I want to figure his out. He really likes pushing girls around until they stimulate him properly. I can’t wait.
He has no interest in hitting or choking me. I feel this odd mix of relief and disappointment. I feel nervous and timid. Will I be interesting enough if I’m not putting up with that kind of play? Will he be impressed enough for a torrid affair or will he fuck me once and leave and that’s that? Butterflies. Scared.
Either way will be ok. Truly. I’m enjoying my last morning of not writing the book. If he decides to bail I have queries out to friends to spend some time together this month. We’ll see how that goes. November is ridiculously scheduled. It’s ridiculously scheduled so that I get to do things like go out on Saturday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of this week so that I can have some fun. I miss fun.
I really miss getting to know new people. It’s so exciting. He’s a music teacher. I can talk shop with him. That will be really fun. It’s going to be thrilling to fuck a teacher. After the sex party tonight (which I am technically going to as Noah’s date) I have a date with TA tomorrow. We are going to Occupy Oakland together. He wants me to make sure that my inner most layer is extremely slutty and will make him want to fuck me. I think I can work with this.
Instructions. He said that he likes to control speech. He likes to only let people say ‘yes’ or ‘no’. I think that’s hot. I think that’s hot because he is interested in reading my journal. So he wants to get to know me and control how and what I say at the same time? That means he will let me speak when it matters. Which means it’s a pretty safe bet to trust him this way. I miss those kinds of rules.
M/s rules I miss and don’t talk about: I miss having to ask permission to sit on furniture. I liked sitting on the floor at my Owners feet. He gave me a pillow to sit on because he was magnanimous. I miss having to wait for permission before I began eating. I miss being slapped in the face with a hard cock. It’s not really Noah’s thing. It doesn’t hurt. But it’s hot and dirty and slutty and fun.
He says he doesn’t orgasm during sex much. That’s an old hangup. But he likes coming on people. That’s going to be new. I’m… timid. I don’t know what that will feel like right now. I know it was hard with Tom. (Tom didn’t come *on* me much. He just didn’t orgasm with me in almost any capacity.)
I don’t want to stop thinking about him. I have a month. I don’t actually want to record every idiotic emotional surge so this may be mostly the last I write about him. Unless he tells me to. We’ll see.
Letters to my Daughters. I’m trying not to really get started today. I want to. But I want to be mostly true to NaNoWriMo. 🙂 I’m thinking about it. But that’s ok.
I actually went off and wrote about something else for an hour there. But I stopped and came back because I had an irresistible urge to look at pictures of my TA again. (that sounds like teachers assistant and creeps me out) He has distinctive hair I’m not allowed to describe online. I just noticed randomly that he is “less aggressive” than the guy I met at Mission Control (with whom I did not have sex–just sayin’). That’s probably a good thing. That guy was uhh intense in weird ways.
This is a different kind of anticipation than I have had recently with the friends I have slept with. With both of them, I knew mostly what to expect. That’s good and bad. It’s good because there is increased comfort and safety and it’s less scary. It’s bad because I already decided they were not good on-going partners for me. Mostly I stop sleeping with people when it starts to seem like it’s not a good idea anymore for a myriad of reasons. Those reasons often don’t go away. So the whole repeat partner thing is complicated. Most of those reasons are basic compatibility things, not huge You Are A Bad Person things.
The thing is, I do kind of fall in love easily. I love a lot of people with great fervor. I don’t know what that is going to mean this month. I still can’t have a boyfriend. I need to be paying more attention to Calli than that as pissy as that makes me. I get a month after four years of no new people. My husband is a generous man.
You know how magazines sometimes have those weird fold out pages in the middle and it’s usually a big picture? Like centerfolds. I feel like this affair is one of those. It’s this weird awkward fold out thing in the middle of my life. It is only supposed to take up two sheets of paper but really it’s like six. I hope that is how it turns out at least. I hope that by the end of the month I will be very sad about the ending of my TA. I hope I maintain a friendship with him. I certainly have with Daddy. That was a three month relationship.
Affair. Just the word is tantalizing. Affairs “don’t mean anything” only they do. They mean that I am alive and full of energy. They mean I am exciting. They mean that someone caught a glimpse of me out of the corner of their eye and decided to look much more closely. And liked what they saw. Liked what he saw so much that he wants to touch me. And kiss me. And lick me. And fuck me. And teach me how to fuck him.
I really like the word fuck. It’s one of my favorites. Sex is generic. Ok fine. You had sex. I don’t know if that means he climbed on top in the missionary position for three minutes or if you fucked for four hours straight and he came in every hole. Kind of different. The phrase making love is strangely growing on me. I outright refused to use it when I was younger. I was aware I wasn’t doing that. I do with Noah. It’s kind of neat how sometimes when he makes the shift to thinking about sex. His eyes start glittering and his face goes soft. I like it when he gently strokes my cheek before kissing me. That’s making love. He sees me and feels love and wants to touch me. He is making his love for me manifest. It’s wonderful.
But I want my TA to fuck me six ways from Sunday. Who knows, maybe the last time we have sex there will be some serious emotion present but I’m not going to count on or worry about that. Tonight he is (hopefully) going to fuck me. It will be emotionally messy in the sense that I’m already obsessed with him. He knows to alternate calling me good girl. He figured that out already. He can taunt me about being such a dirty little whore and follow it up by telling me that I am good. Dangerous. Dangerous. Dangerous.
I don’t know why I love the word whore so much. Say it out loud a few times. Whore. Say it in an exhale of breath with very little force behind it. Hiss it. It’s gorgeous. That’s an awesome word. It’s almost as evocative as fuck. Whore makes my cunt throb. It reminds me that not only do I have a lot more sex than most people but I really really like it. I want more. I want more of this feeling. Yes. I’m a whore. But only for the right people.
This uhm, isn’t one of my standard operation sex tactics. It’s pretty rare to find someone who wants to play like this. Someone who wants to talk about how much I am enjoying it in great detail while they fuck me. Someone who wants to tell me explicitly how to move my tongue. I win. It’s not that I never take initiative during sex, far from it. I’m not really a pillow princess. But I only want to do things to people who really want me to do things to them. And I don’t know what people want unless they tell me. Bossy, controlling, dominant men tell me what they want.
It’s time to masturbate again.
I think that the okcupid boy is going to decide I’m not worth the fuss. Which is fair, I don’t think I am either. Uhm, yay for confirmation? I am asking for a ridiculously specific thing that isn’t very fair. I feel weird saying it, but I’m kind of sad. I think I added him to my mental script of November a bit fast. It would have been a very exciting month. It was a nice dream.
Instead I will work a lot harder on getting ready for the 5k and I’ll write the book and I’ll try to settle into more peacefulness in the house instead of trying so hard to get out of it. Apparently right now I’m not meant to be getting out. That’s ok.
That means that some of my friends will say, “Hey come to Friday Night Waltz!” or (insert event here). You guys don’t understand the energetic cost to me of getting out of my house right now. Large group events suck. They aren’t worth the price of admission. When I went dancing with my friend, ok that was worth it. He was a good friend-date. That was nice. Those still don’t give me that big jolt of energy that I want. They make me tired. Those are work. They aren’t building me up in the same way. They are a much more pleasant diversion than most of my life, I’ll say that. But they are a physical cost. I can’t do very much of that. I can’t get consistent enough child care and I don’t want to be away from the kids every night.
I am really sad that I don’t get to have an affair. I honestly think it would cause a few unfun conversations with Noah because I would neglect him. Only I wouldn’t. Because I would come home every night and he would wake up with my mouth on his cock. He would miss me a lot. Heck, I think the fucker could stand with a little missing me. It might increase his enthusiasm during the time he has me. We are so tired. Uhm, I say “the fucker” with great love and affection. Just so it’s clear.
Noah has made great strides in his career during our marriage. I have given him a lot of time and space for that. That is something that builds him up and makes him cocky. I like that in him. He likes me to be built up and cocky. I haven’t felt that way in a very long time. I feel beat down and exhausted. I feel worn out. I feel fucking boring. I feel awkward. I feel unpleasant. I feel like no one will ever want to pay a lot of attention to me again. It’s existential angst. I know. It’s pathetic.
That’s the problem. That dismissal right there. I have a lot of this because of the repercussions of trauma. And when a doctor prescribes a drug intended to cure mania, what that means for me is the medical profession thinks I need to stop working so hard. Because I don’t think there is a reasonable way to describe me as truly manic. In times of crisis I work a lot harder than most people have any interest in working. I’m not manic. I don’t fit the diagnostic criteria. Unless of course, you count my promiscuity. Which uhm, yeah. Or the fact that I did have that lovely drug experimentation period. Uhm, only I’ve never done anything that has harmed my life.
That’s the crux. I like my life. I think I have made mistakes, yes. But I wouldn’t take any of them back. In my opinion mania is reserved for when you impetuously do a whole bunch of things that are really bad for you. When I was a small child I engaged in a lot of sex play because I was surrounded by sex and I was acting out what I had been programmed to act out. It wasn’t mania. As I got older it got more complex and emotional, but I don’t allow my sex to negatively impact my life. I’m not riddled with disease or unwanted children. I have *also* had a lot of really fun sex with some interesting people. I’m glad I’ve done that. I’ve gotten the affair thing right a couple of times and it’s been life changing. I have fucked up in looking for what I want and I’ve had a lot of bad days dealing with feeling bad about how I didn’t negotiate properly.
This is why the doctor says I have an omniscience problem. Because I believe it is possible for me to negotiate well enough to get exactly what I want. And I’m ok with fucking up along the way as I learn how to do it. She seems to think this isn’t a good plan and she was constantly trying to figure out how my “sexual acting out”, seriously–she brought this up at least three different times during the hour we were together, “And did you act out sexually during that time too?” whenever I talked about other major symptoms of anxiety. She’s trying to figure out if I go fuck people every time I get upset. No, I really don’t. Bitch. That kind of judgment pisses me right the fuck off. I’m friends with the vast majority of people I have had sexual contact with. Of the people I no longer know, only one is actively acrimonious and that’s a joint issue. I have been very safe in terms of disease risk and pregnancy… what’s the problem? Oh wait, I forgot. I’m just not supposed to do those things because they are amorphously bad. Well fuck you too.
Err, anyway. This is my long rant about why I’m not interested in an affair because I’m manic. I’m interested in an affair because I’m really bored and I don’t know another way to get that really intense bonding and attention I want. I’m doing it in a way that is entirely on the up and up with everyone in my life. Why is this a problem? Who will be harmed? Why do I need to be medicated away from this? No. This is not the approach I want. I learned a lot about what I need to say on the next visit. That’s good.
But what I really want is a month of sneaking out after hours to be the crazy super hot girlfriend. I want it so bad. I want someone to be obsessed with me. I do I do I do. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH He’s not going to want me. *beat head on floor* (I’m kidding Ali! I won’t do it. I’ll just shake my fists in fury. It’s… not the same.)
I would love to be distracted from my thoughts so here, I’ll spill the beans on my latest distraction. Noah likes to tell me that the way to get really good at things is to make a lot of mistakes. So I’m still hunting. That lets you know how I feel about this process at this point. I don’t know why in the fuck I am beating my head against this wall.
Only I do. I’ve kind of abandoned all of the truly casual possibilities that appeared immediately via the internet already. I’m not interested in that and I know it. I want to have an affair. If I could logistically make it happen with Noah I would, but I don’t see a way to find that kind of time.
I really want to feel exciting and interesting and seen. This really isn’t healthy. It makes me so sad that I want this so much. If I’m honest with myself what I want is to go break my heart. I want to have a relationship that reminds me of how awesome Noah is. Because I think I’m taking him for granted. I feel like I’m not seeing him.
I don’t see people very well unless I see contrasts to them. And even other casual friendly interaction is just not the same. I want to have a reason to really appreciate the fact that I can whisper a few words: youngish but not innocent, she really wants it, out in the woods, three boys… go. He will then improv a whole story for me. He only has to think for a minute or two. And sometimes it feels like Noah can read my mind. He just knows what to say. I don’t need porn. I have Noah.
And as of last night, Calli is sleeping in Shanna’s room. I can’t arrange an affair, but we can have sex in our bed more. That will be nice. It will be nice, but it won’t be an affair. Because we will be here and trying hard to not talk or make noise. We will be trying not to be interesting because then the kids want to join in. Ah, parenting.
In the meantime there’s this guy; I’m not going to post a link to his profile because even I’m not that crass. I asked him to have an affair with me and he’s trying to decide if he wants to. From the heart-stoppingly-awesome emails I can tell that he is a lot more interested than he wants to be. That’s interesting. According to okcupid we are a frighteningly good match. I don’t think he is Noah competition because he sounds too cynical. But he sounds really really fun. He sounds like someone I can fall in lust with and then be stupidly wistful about. Kind of like Chris. A different Chris than the last time I said Chris. I kind of love being a slut. It’s frightfully useful at times. Anyway this new Chris and I had an on and off affair for multiple years before I had kids and now we are very cordial when we run into one another without wanting each other. I think. Err, he lost a lot of weight. I feel really self conscious when I outweigh someone. I’m … ok that’s a different ramble. Back to the hot guy.
So he’s uhm a lot more conventionally good looking than I am generally willing to hit on. I don’t know where I found the nerve. On paper I sound like his dream girl err, or I would if I was single with no kids. Ouch. The thing is, an awful lot of guys have thought I sounded like their dream girl on paper. That just kind of happens when you are poly and kinky and you want to get married and you want to have kids. It sounds like the holy grail to an awful lot of guys. They don’t recognize that I’m not just those labels.
So really what I’m saying is I think he’s a Bonder and I’m feeling kind of guilty about the fact that I might be jaunting merrily towards breaking his heart. And if there is a shred of honesty in my soul… I’m not sorry. I’m nice to my exes! I really am. Well, no… I’m not. Shit. Mostly I am? When they deserve it I am? Oh that sounds awesome. But it’s true. I will only say something rude to you if I think you deserve it. Uhm, or I’ve gone absolutely off the bed and then I will apologize profusely. It’s not actually charming.
Really I think it is the caption on the early-morning-need-coffee-picture. Yeah. I think I could handle looking at that first thing in the morning. He really has a beautiful smile. I think that’s my thing. If someone doesn’t have a compelling smile, it’s over. I like one that is full of mischief. Oh shoot. I’m totally trying to find out if there are actually men other than Noah in the world who will really find me interesting right now. That’s a damn dirty lie. I want to be seduced by someone who is really sexy and smarter than me. That’s fucking hard to find. I want someone who wants to learn me. And oh shit do they need to be smarter than me.
I feel really sad about the fact that one of the reasons I’m upset with my friend about the unfun sex is that in between eating lunch and getting back to sex he turned the tv on and watched appallingly bad television for about fifteen minutes before telling me to put my mouth back on his dick. I want to prove to myself that there are people out there who want to be nicer to me than that. Who might believe I deserve better than that. I’m scared. I fell off the horse and I want to jump back on. But oh god this is complicated.
The days are counting down fast to NaNoWriMo. I really do need to spend more time running than I am. I’m doing a fuck ton of walking and only a little running. I’m having a hard time with being in the in-between space of waiting to work on the book. I don’t want to over think it. I feel like I’m settled on what I’m doing. I’d really like to have an affair while I’m writing the book because I’m going to want someone with a bunch of Bright New Shiny Stories to excite me and bring me back to the here and now. I feel really bad for thinking about doing that away from my home. But if I’m going to do it I’m going to talk about it. The only sin is something you are ashamed to talk about.
I’m pretty sure that this psychiatrist today insisted on labeling me as bipolar because of my promiscuity. She asked a lot of leading questions about it. I am more incensed by the hour. That fucking bitch. Like, when we were in Paris and London and I wasn’t sleeping because I was in near constant panic attacks and I was a nervous wreck she asked me if I started acting out sexually then. I said no. I barely even had sex with my husband because we don’t do that in the same room with our kids unless we are really really really desperate. It squicks me the fuck out. And Shanna is starting to get old enough that it’s going to bother me more. So no, we weren’t having much sex. And I didn’t have sex with anyone else. She grilled me for multiple minutes about how intrusive my sexual thoughts were during that period.
I’m sorry lady as I paced the garden of the hotel in Inverness and beat my head against the ground to get the terrible feeling that I was a despicable terrible person who did not deserve to live out of it… I wasn’t trying to pick anyone up. Fuck you too. With your smug little grin telling me you know all about the neurochemistry of trauma victims. You’ll bring me in line with the norm. You’ll give me this nice little pill (but I have to stop breastfeeding because after all at this point it’s only comfort for me anyway–right?) and all of a sudden I will be TOO FUCKING SLEEPY to go do anything inappropriate. How lovely.
I can’t help but think that if I found a relatively sane guy to have an affair with for a few weeks who would pat me on the head and let me go my way by the end of November it would do just as much to calm me down as that pill. And I wouldn’t be asleep. But that coping mechanism is bad. I’m bad if I do it. There are whole diagnostic manuals that say I am bipolar because I think it is perfectly ok to break my cycles of irritability with sex. Well God Damn Me. There is this vast societal wide conspiracy that says it is far far better for me to take a pill every day and go through life like a zombie than have sex with someone I’m not married to.
Really people? Those are some fucked up priorities. No, I’m not even supposed to need the pills. But I’m allowed the pills if that is what it takes to get me in line.
I hope he decides to say yes. I want him so bad I am weak in the knees. He is sarcastic. He likes bitchy snarky strong women. He likes women who argue with him. We have a startling array of similar interests. He clearly wants to save the world. He likes women who are emotionally variable. I swear to God his whole profile is littered with catnip. Catharsis through motorcycling or sex. (I’m letting Noah get a motorcycle again some day when the kids are older.) He wants people to message him if they are very serious or very casual but nothing in between. And be specific about what you want.
God I want him so much. His profile is wickedly good. Do you know why it is good? He represents himself as a challenge. He’s really specific about who he is. He just rambles about himself. He is good at representing his voice. He sounds moody and broody. He correctly used the word boorish, what is not hot about that? Heh. Do you know what he sounds like? He sounds like he would be perfect for me if I really and truly wanted monogamy. I don’t. So he would be a shitty primary for me. Ha.
I’m going to have to let Noah have an affair some year. It’s going to suck. Ah well. I made my bed, right? That sounds more bitter than I really mean it. If Noah didn’t insist on that right he wouldn’t be so hot, would he? I absolutely love knowing that other women lust after my husband. I’m a total bitch. I think that’s fucking awesome. Ha ha I got him. That’s one of those things you aren’t supposed to admit, right? It’s weird to admit out loud that I feel really proud of myself for having landed Noah. I managed to get this very good looking, well positioned career-wise, rich guy who is happy to treat me like his high priced mistress in terms of indulging my little fancies? Oh man. I fucking win. I really don’t know how this is my life.
And I want to fuck it up by having an affair. But if I didn’t have the affair I wouldn’t really work like a high priced mistress and it would all be a sham. I have to keep up my sexual skills. Sorry right wing people, if you want to actually be a good lover you have to work at it. Sex is a physical activity. Like every other physical activity, you get better at it the more you do it. I really can’t make space for more of what I want to be practicing in my house. And it’s hard to do it with Noah.
Party sex is different. Party sex always involves the dynamic of acknowledging the crowd. That means it is about showing off what I know, not really about struggling through the rudiments. But the thing is, the slow struggle through the rudiments is what is so enticing. Learning. Growing. New. Shiny. Shit. It really does have to be a new person. This is much more complicated than I should be thinking about right now.
Bah! Humbug.
You know, if I change the song that is playing I get to change my mood. It’s a handy trick. Do you know why I’m willing… no… why I want to do the really scary painful things?
Noah is nicer to me than anyone has ever been. He goes really far out of his way to make me happy. I can’t believe how willing he is to go through a lot of effort for me. I’m important to him. He’s a complicated man. When we do intense play I have to trust him. I have to communicate about the physical limits of my body. And I have to trust him. The thing is there is a lot of gray area in between when it stops feeling good and when I actually can’t handle more pain. I genuinely don’t understand why pushing someone to that place is erotic. It doesn’t get me wet to top.
But oh man it turns Noah on. I don’t have to understand why. I don’t have to be able to feel the same feeling in my body to understand that it is important to him. There is some part of him, something scary, that wants that. I don’t think it is a need. But he wants it. He wants it a really lot. He likes how I react. When I’m in that kind of mood. I don’t think he would enjoy how I would react today, so he isn’t going to hurt me today.
But when my body isn’t aching like this from going too far, sometimes I do want it. There are brain chemicals attached to being hurt. But I like being hurt a little. Mostly Noah is happy to cater to that. Mostly what I want is for someone to touch me fairly gently and tell me evil stories about hurting me far past what I can handle. I like knowing that he wants to. That he can. That he has. That he will. But right now he’s being nice to me because he likes me a lot and he wants me to be a happy, healthy person and right now hurting me isn’t a good idea.
I like that he’s stared at me for a long time. He hasn’t fucked up in a long time. He reads my signals so well. He knows what I want before I know. All he has to do is grin at me and I want. Maybe the problem is that when I go back through my roster I have the whole thought process over again about how they so aren’t Noah. Maybe I need to stop reminding myself of why I stopped sleeping with these people in the first place.
I like the idea of poly. Of sexual relationships that continue on casually through time and get revisited. Other people don’t evolve with me fast enough. I feel angry at them for being exactly who they were the last time I slept with them because it wasn’t right then either. That sounds weird. I have sex with people to audition them in my head. It decides a lot about how much weight I put on someones opinions later as a friend. Like Chris. (The awesome thing is, I have slept with quite a few Chris’ of both genders so using the name is totally meaningless. Yay!) I am really attached to Chris. When I talk to Chris I listen harder than I do with other people. I care a lot about his opinion. When I’m really worried… I call him and ask him to weigh in on a topic. Because when we had sex he looked at me and he actually played within my boundaries while finding out where they were. Not very many people have ever done that. They either blow right past what I can handle and enjoy or they never come close to pushing me.
Mostly though people don’t do that. Mostly people are imperfect in one way or another. At the end of an encounter I always have the thought, “Man I would work on ____”. How long the list is decides how many times I come back. If there are too many things, I can’t handle it and I move on. I don’t discuss sexual incompatibility with people. My issues are mine. It’s inevitably something about the way someone is touching me. The way it makes me feel.
Noah is the only person I have ever dated who has been able to have dramatically different “modes” of touch. I don’t even know how to codify how he does it. He reads me. He learned me. He studied me. He studied me like a religion. He learned how to coax things out of me. When I feel like shit I want to stop feeling that way because it makes Noah sad.
Finding people to sleep with in a reasonably healthy way is hard. I need to learn new screening procedures because mine are broken for my current set of needs. That sounds like work. But maybe the kind of work Noah would find fun. Really, isn’t all of this for him anyway? No. But it sounds more fun to say it that way.
Because other than being in pain this much later, and having to tell him no that vehemently to unprotected sex (seriously? I have to yell at you that it’s not ok to fuck me without a condom? When neither of us have another form of birth control? Fuck no. That’s not. Fucking. Ok.) it was hot.
And I think that the only reason he was able to fuck like that is because he’s the kind of asshole that really wants to push past all my boundaries. I like that aggression. This feels so dangerous. I’m not attracted to passive men. I don’t know how to flirt with people in a socially acceptable ways. Do you know how I set up this tryst? He posted on facebook that he was in town for two weeks and if anyone wanted tattoo work they need to get in touch quickly. I responded and said, “So you’re saying that if I want to fuck you I have to hurry?” He responded at midnight when he got off work with a voicemail. We arranged getting together the next morning. He’s staying with his mom. Hotel room it is!
I loved the excitement. I feel so bad that my response afterwards is so ungrateful. There is that word. Oh man. That’s what this is. I feel bad because I feel ungrateful. He really went to a lot of trouble for me, and I enjoyed it. And here I am bitching. You see how I don’t fucking appreciate anything.
I want to cry, but it hurts. It hurts to exist in my body. I’m not grateful for this. Sex does not have to be this. Noah taught me that sex doesn’t have to feel like this. I wasn’t raped. Not in any way. But I was brutalized. And I feel like it is my fault because I somehow advertise that I want that. Is it really so unreasonable to want aggression without being injured? Does every sexual encounter truly have to involve people choking me until I get terrible headaches that last for days? Is this really normal? I have never been in an abusive relationship because I brag on the internet that I love to be choked so everyone does it and I never tell them to stop.
Even though I get these terrible headaches. Even though when they lean on my chest choking me they bruise my bones and I hurt for weeks. Even though I kind of wish that people would stop telling me so explicitly by their actions that they think it would be hot to watch me die.
I don’t want to be that kind of hot any more. I am not expendable. I am not an object. It is not ok to risk my death just because you like how my cunt contracts when you choke me. I am not actually a fucktoy, no matter what you call me.
And back the fuck off with acting like my hips are just supposed to get out of the way.
Shit. Changing the music didn’t work, did it? Well. It’s a different flavor of whining. I don’t understand why I am incapable of talking about this kind of thing in the moment. Well, part of it is that I don’t know just how far past my fun-pain level things are at until later. And very few people have ever had to deal with the consequences of hurting me this way. Mostly I dealt with it in silence. Noah has had to deal with it extensively and as a result he figured out how to have pseudo-rough sex with me.
I really like Noah. I think I persist in sleeping with other people because I start taking him for granted. I forget just how very exceptional he is. Noah has made reading me his hobby. It’s not that he’s made such a master study of sex, although he is far more experienced than most. First he went after sex. Then he went after me. Because I’m enough.
Yeah. I’ll heal and stop feeling angry. Then I’ll let Noah hurt me again. Because Noah will do it right. And I want to see him smile. Because I want to feel him vibrating with tension as he pushes himself and me right to the edge of me panicking. Because he thinks it is funny. Because he thinks it is hot. It’s sometimes an abusive relationship. But it has an off switch. I think that makes it ok.
I spend a lot of time feeling very mixed about what I write here. I honestly usually forget what I have written almost as soon as I hit post and I don’t reread things very often. I use this space to dump the thoughts that are intrusive into the rest of my life. They are the harshest things I think. I’m aware that I am “mentally ill”. Whatever that means.
It’s hard to not feel ashamed of myself for putting these things out publicly. You are supposed to put these kinds of thoughts in private journals you later burn. You don’t want to taint the world with any of this. I worry about some of the processing I do here. People don’t like finding out how deep my rage is. It makes them uncomfortable. I am going to, once again, alienate people. Not everyone. Not the people who matter. But I will lose people who are only casual distant social contacts at best.
It’s weird to know that I have to live with the consequences of my words, for better or worse. I say a lot of very harsh things. I’m trying to walk a fine line between talking about the emotions I experience and why I have them and blaming other people for upsetting me. I know I’m crazy. I know I’m having a reaction that is out of proportion to our exchange. But I’m still having it and I have to deal with it somehow.
Just doing deep breathing exercises is ineffective at managing my rage. Writing works. And so I will write about things that make me very angry. And people will get upset with me. I’m pretty sure this is an unavoidable fate. Given what I’ve read today I feel like I should be braced at any moment for a death threat. On one hand that makes my paranoia sky rocket. Because do you know who is a credible threat to my life? Pretty much anyone in my family. Hello illegal connections. Not to mention that the whole lot also has serious mental health issues and lots of guns!
Awesome. I really and truly believe that my brother would never come after me. I think he wants to believe he is above such things. And his wife is awesome and balances him really well. He married a really good woman. The only credible threat is my sister. She has threatened to beat me up in public in the last few years. If I publish there is a very real chance she will show up on my doorstep out of the blue with a shot gun. She’s pretty insane. And she has done a lot of very bad for your brain drugs for a very lot of years.
Even though I want to puke on the floor thinking about that… I’m going to keep going on writing. And internet threats seem so very non-threatening. So laughable. Really. Does some wanker on the internet think that they can hurt me more than my family? More than my father raping me? More than my brother beating me, arranging to have other children beat me, and sexually assaulting me repeatedly?
I don’t think I will lose sleep over emails. I’m already up. Bah. That’s a snotty ass thing to say. I’m in a really bad phase right now in coping with my shit. Some day I will go back to not dwelling on being less than. I think. At those times I will be vulnerable. And it will make me lose sleep. But I don’t really think there is much that can be done to cause me to stop writing. Not anything in writing, anyway. Not from fear. I think I am kind of looking forward to that first burst of adrenaline. I do love a good threat.
I don’t know if it is ok to talk about things that hurt other peoples feelings. But I’m not sure I can help it.
Seasons changing. So much changing. Uncertainty. Mood shifts.
It’s getting closer but not fast enough. I never think things have happened fast enough. It will be ok.
I have been talking to a lot of people about writing. It’s astounding to me to wander around to my friends and have them tell me resoundingly that they think I have several books in me, and they want to read them. I feel this impending sense of doom. Of course I will fail everyone. I don’t have anything to say.
I do. I have things to say. I have a story to tell. It’s just as worthy of a story as any other.
If I started writing the book today it would be the story of why I divorced my family. I don’t know if that is what it will be by November. It’s morphed a lot over time. I don’t think that is the right book though. That’s a mood.
Do you know what will last? I will write the story of me for my mirrors. My husband, my Sarah, my kids. Friends who love me. I tell this story because if I died tomorrow my story would be gone. My children would know very little about me. There aren’t very many people who would or could step up to tell them about me. The only two people I am still close to from childhood, Jenny and B, they didn’t see almost any of my life. They can’t tell anything about me.
I only talk about the abuse. Like that is all that made me. It’s not though. No one is that simple. Everyone is more complicated than that. But other people grow up with people who see them and help make them for decades. I didn’t. No one remembers pithy little stories about what I did in school. No one remembers that great mission project in fifth grade. We made it out of cookies and used frosting for glue. The inside was supported with Lego’s. It was epic. No one knows that I spent six weeks doing a mini lesson on aeronautics and could never make a paper airplane fly. I’m pretty sure I have still never done it successfully.
Do you know what keeps me up at night? The fear that I don’t exist without my family. Without the people who do have positive memories of me. They know every good thing I did as a child and they loved me. I miss my mommy. I miss my mommy so much. I was always a mama’s girl. I was so clingy. I begged for her.
I can’t let her do to my children what she did to me. And I need to explain exactly what that was. Not really for anyone else, for me. I need to forgive myself for my choices. I need to explain them. I want to. I want to know that at any point in time my children will have access to all the stories I can give them about myself. They will never have to deal with the loss I am dealing with.
I know very little about my mom. I know basically nothing about my father. I know absolutely nothing about anyone further back in my family.
I am alone. My brother hates me. I should not be telling these stories. He wants them to die. I don’t think he’d mourn much if I died too. He would probably think I deserve it.
I don’t. I want to explain why. I shouldn’t be dead. It’s demeaning to me to say I should be dead when you hear about my life. I’m tired of being told to kill myself. I’m tired of being told that someone like me should fucking give up.
I don’t want to. I want to watch my babies turn into children. I want my daughters to invite me to their fucking weddings. I don’t want them to run away from me. That means I want to examine what my mom did that drove me away. It was there. It was there from very early on. Conform or leave. It’s always been clear. And I don’t conform much.
I’m scared to really do this and I’m terrified of not doing it. I want to create the space and do it right. I am going to tell this. It will be a book. I don’t know if it will be worth reading. I don’t know why anyone will care.
This week a former coworker told me I should write the book. He will read it. He thinks lots of people will want to read it. Why do people write? Because they have something to say? Because they have such an overweening ego that they neeeeeeeed to have strokes from random people? Because I just want to be loved. I want to feel like, whether anyone agrees with me or not, I explained my side. It’s not really a debate. Only it is. I’m not having a debate with anyone else. I’m debating with myself. I’m deciding whether or not I want to forgive me.
I want forgiveness more than just about anything else in the world. I need it from me.
I asked my favorite student what I taught him. He smiled at me. That quirky, gorgeous smile. I think he had a crush on me. He told me elaborate stories about sleeping with his 35 year old boss when he was 18. Ahem. He told me that I taught him that it’s ok to be yourself. And to like himself.
I want to teach me, too. Maybe that is the book. Why I should like me. I don’t know. I am kind of afraid that I am going to write out thirty years of anecdotes and not know how to make it a story. A story needs a point. Well, Stephen King tells me otherwise. I’ll figure it out as I go. I am so going to need a good editor.
It’s weird to be present with this project. There are different sorts of things to think about. There are the later mechanics of dealing with a book looming. I’m scared. I’m trying to mostly not worry about that till February or March. Mostly. Periodically I read short things and freak out. I’ll have to think about that later.
When do I write? How do I create space to do that reliably? Ack. Complicated.
I’m also going to run a 5k with a friend at the end of November. Oh this fall will feel different from the summer. I feel like I have to tell the stories all in one big go. Then I can stop this frantic refrain of hiding in the garage and crying because no one knows them. Of course I will leave things out. Life is like that. I can’t remember everything. Many of the stories of me are gone. I don’t really know much about what I was like as a baby. I know that when I was 14 months old I toddled into the bathroom and said, “Kissy go pee pee” and like that I was potty trained. I know that my mother told me that.
Given that Shanna was in diapers till she was thirty-twoish months.. holy moly. And I think of Shanna as being advanced. Psh.
That was my funny voice.
I don’t want to spend my life dealing with overwhelming flashbacks of abuse as Shanna grows up. I’m kind of hoping to circumscribe that by doing it at speed in November. God help me. No, I’m not going to do a lot of drugs. That’s hard to control. I’ll have to be soul achingly bare. Ew. I’m worried about being stable the rest of the time.
I’m getting really bitchy and picky. I feel like I am. I need… something. I need to break a rule. I need to do something I’m not supposed to do. I am holding too many balls in the air. Something has to give and give hard. Right now I’m doing that in the wrong direction. Too much of it comes out in snippy stupid comments to Sarah. I need to find an outlet. Soon. That’s a really dangerous line of thought right now… wait.. a very pleasant thought just went through my head. I’ll be in my bunk.
Noah has kind of a chip on his shoulder about munches. I understand why. They tend to only be welcoming towards someone if large numbers of people in the crowd want to fuck the new person. I think that Noah would walk into a munch now and be catnip. When he was in his early 20’s… not so much. That’s how it works for guys though. I showed up at 18. There is no meat tastier, than fresh meat.
When I talk about the culture of bdsm I was raised in, it was defined primarily by the munch group I hung out with. It took a long time before I really understood in the core of me that kink communities are completely different from location to location because the local members create something different in each place. I feel kind of like a moron for that. In my location it didn’t matter what race, age, gender you were… the desires were all pretty similar. I didn’t understand that we chased away the people who weren’t exactly like us.
We had a high bar for entry. You had to be willing to devote a huge chunk of your life to doing bdsm in order to count as a “real” pervert. There was a lot a strange overlap with guns, cars, and computers. You had to be fairly passionately into one or more of those in order to fit in at our munch. Most of the crew is Libertarian, though basically sane people. I learned a lot sitting at their knees. This is decidedly where I formed most of my political opinions because they gave me ways to be uppity towards my family.
I don’t even know how to write about them. Stephen King would want to whap me with a newspaper for that. You can’t reach that point as a writer. Ok, what do I think of when I think of the munch? I think of a sea of happy faces. I remember being the pet/mascot. I was an indulged child for most of my early time there. Mostly the crowd is married. Mostly the crowd is mostly monogamous. There was a lot of puppy pile bdsm. I don’t know how common that is in other areas.
The Saturday parties were interesting because we all spent so much time together that there was a lot of cross-play amongst friends. Things like bondage and skilled SM arts were treated like commodities to be shared because there weren’t enough partners to go around. There was a lot of implicit, “Well you played with so and so and I want to be next.” The play was kept non-sexual because then it wasn’t about whoring yourself out. It was sharing skills. It’s a hobby. It’s really not much different than getting together a whole group of friends at a commercial kitchen to share ingredients as you make batches of cookies. Having that kind of intimacy that is not intimate is kind of weird for me. I do it very well. I sometimes wonder if that place at that time was just the only way I felt safe getting touched. For all that they were “perverts” they were remarkably safe people.
A lot of the thing was the whole crowd was focused on exhibitionism. Play parties would often involve a couple playing in the middle of the living room while everyone laughed and commented and decided the tone of the play. There were quite a few heavy masochists in the crowd so the play could be intense physically while still being entirely lighthearted. This was not an environment for serious edge play or psychological play. Except when it was. There were always the ability to steal away and do something more intense. We did, often. Knives were quite popular amongst the group. Not cutting, but scratching and threatening.
It’s hard for me to convey how convivial the atmosphere was. The crowd was more men than women, but it wasn’t that unequal feeling to me. The men were more intensely regular. The women came and went. So if you showed up at the munch on a random week it might be 90% men, or it could be 50/50 because all the girls came. That felt ok to me because the women were there most of the time. It was always safe. No one else was under 30. Many had kids. Some of them–I never ever met their kids. They kept their children 100% separated from most scene people. You had to earn access to their kids over many years of good behavior. I fucking respected them. Notice how I never earned access to their kids? I was not good at good behavior.
I was indulged universally in my inappropriate acting out. Some of the women tried to tactfully mentor me on how to get along better in life but I ignored it. The guys encouraged me heartily. It was all pretty harmless shit. I liked to sit on laps and snuggle. I did a lot more grinding than was strictly appropriate. No one minded one little bit. We would do mini-scenes in the coffee shop. We shouldn’t have been doing it in public because there were random people there. It was fun. I don’t feel very guilty. I do, however, feel like I don’t know how to interact with those people very well without falling into those behavior patterns. If I want to stop acting like that… I can’t talk to those people any more.
When I broke up with Tom all of a sudden I started getting a different kind of interest. Actual serious interest. I ran like a scared rabbit. All of a sudden these weren’t the gentle friends I had been doing light social play with. They were potential sex partners and that scared the shit out of me. I didn’t want to have to have sex with all of them. So I left the group. From the cheap seats I see that not one of those men would have pressured me for sex. They would have asked, once, and forever more tried to make due appreciating what I was willing to offer freely. By and large they are timid men.
When I think about my assholes with great affection it is funny how many of them I met at the Wednesday munch. This is where I learned geek culture. It isn’t much like the geek culture Noah talks loudly about. They talk about computers, sure. But they spend equal amounts of time talking about guns, cars, and politics really. But the politics are interesting so I tend to leave it out of my bitching. I probably ranted more than a hundred times how tired I was of hearing about guns, cars, and computers. So in order to distract them from boring conversations I would remind them that they were at a bdsm munch now talk about something more interesting. I would end up being passed from lap to lap as they talked about what they would do to me. It was great fun. A very predictable game.
Except when it wasn’t. I learned who was safe and who wasn’t. I felt like Tom gave me a layer of protection. The whole group was tortured by not having sex. Only a few of them were more desperate acting in how they dealt with that. In all the years I hung out there we never had any whisper of actual abuse. In retrospect I believe that this group of people really did find a safe and supporting environment to be kind of weird. Sure we all egged each other on, but we didn’t do extreme things mostly. There was a lot of encouragement to find where your actual limit was.
Bdsm was something to treat as an enthusiastic physical hobby. You practiced your skills by yourself to hone them early on. You were expected to take it seriously and do it well so that you could have something to be proud of. In tangent Tom and I were part of the national convention circuit. It feels kind of funny to say that, but it’s true. We traveled to a lot of events and did spectacular public play. I was very young and he was in his 30’s and doing well in business. We were a striking couple and we had a lot of fun together. Our play was show stopping. In public we did suspension whenever possible and took over as much space as we could. Tom was constantly on the search for hard points higher than our ceiling. Ostensibly the reason we did it in public so much more than in private was because it isn’t as fun to only barely get off the ground. Fetishists are weird.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m the one who negotiated access to mumblemumble so that we could do a suspension that got me 75′ off the ground. We did do things in private if they had enough brag value. There are lots of pictures. What play we did in private was done mostly so that it could be photographed. So he could look at/think about it while masturbating. Did I mention we didn’t have sex much? I really struggled with that. My sexuality was constantly being used in a way that didn’t involve me. I was getting off–Tom masturbated me constantly. But I didn’t get to have intimacy with my orgasms. I just got off a lot. I’m not sure if I miss it or not. I can’t do it any more. Orgasm is hard now. I often can’t.
A large portion of Tom’s sexuality was exhibitionism. It was about being seen doing those things. The girlfriend before me made him go private and that was brutally hard for him. He needs to have a community of fellow “perverts” where he is totally accepted. That’s ok. I have spent the last seven years trying to figure out how much of it was his exhibitionism and how much was mine. Because I have some, don’t get me wrong. I like having sex and/or doing bdsm in front of people. I like knowing that I am what people think about when they masturbate. My munch friends told me that I was. It was almost like being a porn model only my adoring fans were my friends. It worked.
There was a pretty strong D/s contingent in our little community. Not absolutely everyone practiced D/s (Dominance/submission) but it was common enough that everyone knew everyone else’s roles and treated people differently based on their chosen role. It was “respecting that persons self identity”. Hilarious. But it was all in good fun. People drifted away when life or work got busy. It was remarkably Cheers like. I miss it, but going now isn’t the same.
I have blissfully forgotten most of what I could once rattle off about guns, cars, and computers. Noah is a software guy, it’s a different kind of conversation. I was used to hardware boys. Hardware boys that wanted me to dress them up in full latex then tie them up in mostly comfortable positions. Then they would struggle while I playfully sat on them. It wasn’t all that sexy because I was not willing to make it all that sexy. I did touch them and cuddle them though. I talked to them. I verbally played out their fantasies. I felt like a force for good.
I keep having a Lady Gaga line go through my head, “In the most Biblical sense, I am beyond repentance/ Fame hooker, prostitute wench, vomits her mind.” I tattooed on my back that I want to forgive myself. I want forgiveness. I want forgiveness for everything I do. Everything I am. I feel intense conflict about writing the things I write because other people have different perceptions. Someone else can be part of a conversation with me and remember totally different things and come away with a different impression. I don’t think either of us are “wrong” but we are shaped by our experiences. We hear the things that affirm our view of the world. There is a strong attitude that if someone is doing something only meaning the best then it’s ok. They didn’t mean for anything bad to happen so they aren’t responsible.
No one at the munch did anything bad to me. They were good friends, actually. But it was a continuation of the idea that I had to be available sexually. It’s not what they thought. It’s what I thought. I was surprised how many of the munch crowd came to my birthday party. In a flash as the song switches to Hair, oh man. They would all love to still be my friend. All I have to do is figure out how to spend time with them. They like me. They really like me.
Why am I sitting at home crying to Lady Gaga instead of out seeing my friends? What am I so afraid of? I’m afraid my children will misbehave and people will think I am a bad parent. I’m afraid that people expect me to be sexy and I can’t be right now. I’m afraid that if I go out I will feel uncomfortable and bad and I will sit in a corner and no one will talk to me because I have made myself invisible. I’m afraid that I don’t know how to have friendships without sex. I’m afraid that I don’t know how to listen. I am a bad listener. I can listen well when there is one other person in the room. I can’t listen in a crowd. I am too distractible. I feel like being a bad listener in a crowd makes me a bad friend. I don’t hang out with anyone enough to be able to do comfortable casual party conversation. I feel awkward.
I sit in my house and invite one person at a time. We have intense conversations. I get the impression that the intense conversations at my house are slightly traumatic to some of my friends. I feel like that when we invite the sensitive, quiet introverts over.
Maybe I should invite some of my guns, cars, and computer boys. I miss them. I’d kind of like to know more about them. I’d like to ask them what they experienced ten years ago. I’m willing to bet their memory is different from mine. I bet they didn’t think of me as being available sexually. The thought actually makes me laugh. I was so nasty with them. I learned how to taunt. I felt vulnerable and I showed that vulnerability. Then I let them know that I am absolutely full grown and here are my steel toed high heels, mother fucker. I was absolutely one of the nastiest sadists in the group.
Years ago I asked one of them why he never asked me to play again. He laughed out loud and said, “You are kind of intimidating, you know.” I think that is so funny. I’m intimidating because I go through life in terror that at any moment someone will hurt me or betray me. I don’t think I should be intimidating. Let me rephrase.
I don’t want to be intimidating. I want my boundaries to be clear. I like being easy to get or impossible to get. I don’t want to feel like I am required to sleep with anyone who asks. I like feeling like it’s ok for people to ask. I go to spaces where that sort of asking is ok. I don’t go on the nights I don’t want to be asked. I don’t understand why I am so intimidating when I show up quaking like a scared rabbit. I like being able to say, “I am really enjoying our flirting, but I need to be clear that this isn’t going anywhere.” Sometimes when I say that people get angry with me. One person told me, “Now you ruined everything.” He hasn’t flirted with me in years. I guess he was more interested than me. I meant that night. I probably would have been open to being asked out on an actual date. But sometimes I’m not up for going home with someone after a group social event. I didn’t get adequate personal attention during our brief heavy breathing sessions in a dark corner. It’s a faux pas to be clear.
I’m afraid that I don’t know how to talk to people. I’m too blunt. I can’t observe social niceties. I’m afraid that the things I say are unacceptable. I write because these are the things I think about and I can’t talk about them. I want to invite two or three people from the munch era over to my house and ask them to talk about their impression of that time. I want to know what other people saw of me and my life. I missed fewer than twenty Wednesdays in four years. I spent a lot of time around these people. More time than I have spent in any other social group in my life. I often know people for longer than that, but I rarely spend a lot of time with people. I have been alone in a room for most of my life.
Fisher Middle School was the only school I ever attended for two consecutive years as a child. We moved three times, but I stayed in the same school. Before I was 18 years old I never had a group of friends for more than two years. Ever. I was part of the theatre community in college for almost two years but I ditched them after I broke up with Stephen. Stephen was already working all over the local community college scene and I knew that staying in the theatre world would mean that I would keep doing the make up/break up thing with him. I left theatre because I couldn’t deal with seeing Stephen and not sleeping with him.
After we broke up I pierced my nipples. He hadn’t let me while we were together. He also hadn’t let me shave my pubic hair. I did that too. I uhh went over to visit with him once. I don’t remember why. I taunted him with the fact that I had done these things. He wad interested. I showed him my breasts. He decided it wasn’t all bad. I didn’t sleep with him but it was a close and creepy thing. Me breaking those taboos was a serious turn on for him. He’s a minister’s kid. He was repressive with me because he was encultrated that way. He probably could have been more corruptible than I thought he was. But I didn’t want to be the corrupter. I wanted to be corrupted. So I ran off into the bdsm world. And found this weird hobbyist sexuality.
I don’t think I really understand this sex business. I go back and forth in my brain between, “Dude my dad raped me” and “I kind of wish that one guy had asked me to sleep with him…” and “I’m as free as my hair.” I think I look like shit as a blonde. I should get more blue dye. I really like the blue.
I’m weird. I have these things in me that make people uncomfortable. I blurt things out inappropriately. And gosh darn it. People like me. I think I kind of miss guns, cars, and computers.
I’m going to do NaNoWriMo this year. I’ve never done it before. I’ve always been too intimidated. I want to write honest to goodness fiction. But because I’m me it will be creative non-fiction instead. 😛 I want to rewrite my life. I want to take the time to play in my head with some of the “might have beens” in my life. Stephen King says that if you want to write a book you have to do it in private, so the blog will see very little traffic in November. I sort of feel like October is necessarily my time to do more of a run through of what happened for real and all. Mmmm writers block. I remember your sweet smell. You always bring cookies.
I feel really weirdly conflicted about what I am trying to do, what I am trying to say. Why does it have value? Why does it have worth? Why do I need to justify my life choices? What am I doing? Why am I important enough to talk about? At this point I have to do it and get it over with because I have several hundred friends on facebook and even if only ten of them actually read the announcement, come hell or high water at the end of November I will have a book done. I have been talking about doing this all my life. Some day I will write down my life story. It will be a terrible book. I want to get past the terrible parts of my life so I can enjoy the parts that are really pretty wonderful.
I believe in the pit of my stomach that there is a story in me waiting to get out that many people will want to read. Millions. I’m afraid that I am too afraid to write it. I am afraid that I am going to look for evasions. I’m afraid I am going to instead write 3 million blog posts full of unuseful and misleading digressions. I have something to say. It will take a lot of words to do it. But there is something useful in it. It matters. I tell myself that when I have insomnia at 5 am at least. It’s hubris. But I want there to be an awful lot of people who will cry when I die. That will give me a reason to keep fighting. And I’m too fucked up to have that as something I can deal with much in my day to day life. So I have to keep people far away from me.
Viktor Frankl says that people can survive anything, anything, if they just have something they are living for. People survived Auswitch because they wanted to find their mates, children, etc. I didn’t survive torture. But I did survive a pretty ridiculous amount of trauma. When I talk to people about my life they react with horror, pity, disgust, sadness, and unfortunately sometimes empathy. The degree of their reaction usually depends on how much detail I offer. When I say, “I was abused” I get a lot of “Me too” from other people. Then I keep talking. There have only been a few women in my life who have met me head on and looked me full in the face while I have related anything like details. I think Noah and Chris are the only men. My story is too disgusting to tell.
That means that all the people who spout platitudes about how abuse sufferers shouldn’t compare trauma because people process things differently are actively damaging me. I can not figure out how to go about living my fucking life because I’m told over and over again that abuse is abuse it is all the same and people tell me to just meditate and all my troubles will be over but the worst thing that happened to them is that their daddy touched them once through the sheet when they were 13. I’m sorry. My brain doesn’t work like yours.
I’m not coherent enough to delve into medical research, but I know that the research is there. Trauma rewires your brain. I am different from most people. I think differently. Throughout my entire life I have had issues in just about every place I go because my opinions are always off from the majority of the group no matter what group I am in. I am discordant. I don’t do it on purpose. People tend to strongly dislike the discordant energy I bring. Some of this is my imagination, some of it is true. Being this kind of person is what allowed me to get away from my family. It is why I am not wallowing in poverty with the rest of them continuing the abuse on to future generations. Why the fuck should I have to feel bad because I think things other people don’t?
I survived. I survived being raped over and over. I survived being raised in a family with rampant drug addiction and alcoholism and my big problem is that my one year old and three year old trigger flashbacks so I anesthetize myself with pot so my time doesn’t wander. I barely drink and it can’t be a bigger factor in my life because it hurts me physically too much. Harder drugs just aren’t appealing because I don’t have the recovery time. I’m turning to marathon running, which will require not smoking and dear god I don’t know what I will do.
This is what an honest to god healthy life looks like. This is what the 95% have. This is what normal people experience. People like me don’t get here. And I’m only kind of here. I can’t be part of the 5%. Because any time I chat with my neighbors I have to be very careful not to mention my sex life or my childhood. Because even with our weird ass house… we are probably still normal, right?
If I write a book as good as my hubris tells me I can, my neighbors will figure something out. Seriously. And that means that when people walk by my house they will whisper about me. Oh bullshit. They will talk loudly so I can hear it. There will be people who think I am disgusting. My children will have to face that. Right now in this minute my friends who love me tell me that isn’t true. I tell you it depends how many people read the book. It depends if I actually get published. If the book is published, I think it will sell. If fucking lame ass Elizabeth Wurtzel can publish Prozac Nation… Good God. At least something actually happened to me that vaguely justifies my whining. *ahem*
Who would I be if my life had taken different paths. I don’t think that most people have as many wildly diverging options as I have had. I can even imagine a fun, less self-destructive, path that would still lead to Noah. I should write that tangent down. Done. That’s if I want to play with the idea of my One Twue Love. He is pretty spiffy and all. I don’t think I could do better no matter which rabbit hole I wander down.
As I’m thinking about how to write this book I realize how much my choices are influenced by the people who are standing closest to me. I’m trying to think about what kind of people could have come into my life to lead it in a very different direction. Like that girl I was friends with in Whittier. When I lived in Whittier that was one of the darkest periods of my life, to use a Shamus Young phrase, and there was a girl who was my friend. I can’t even remember her name. She was the daughter of missionaries. Her family was staying in a shitty house the church organization rented for them in between over seas placements. She is the one who introduced me to books like A Wrinkle in Time; Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry; The Secret Garden; The Island of the Blue Dolphins; Sideways Stories From Wayside School and biographies like Anne Frank and Helen Keller. I was in 4th grade and I was in a serious rut. I read nearly exclusively The Babysitters Club and I could read a new book in 20 minutes. The other options in my house were pornographic romance novels. I moved around so much that libraries weren’t really an option. If you only stay in one place for three months as a young kid you don’t get around enough to go to libraries. My mother didn’t consider such activities necessary. That makes me think I should add the library to our weekly activities schedule. Anyway.
So this one little girl, who happened to be the only other white kid in my class, talked to me. She introduced me to classic childrens literature without knowing what she was doing. She was just being near me. I didn’t know many kids like her. She was quiet and introspective. Because of her upbringing she was unfailingly cheerful and big on advocating for Jesus, but that was worth the price of admission.
The first time I was invited over to her house after school was the last. She stopped talking to me at school after that. I went back to sitting on the edge of the playground alone. I lived in that house for 18 months. That was one of the shittiest periods of my life. Third and fourth grades. Tommy lived at home with us after he was released from the hospital. He spent a lot of time trying to either kill me or rape me, he would probably have been happy to do either or both. I bet he would have kept fucking my corpse.
The other kids at school taunted me about my “retarded” brother. He would do things like run down the street naked. He tried to attack kids. Oh man. I haven’t explained what Tommy was like after the accident. Tommy was hit by a car May…something…1989. He was in a coma for five months. I was brought back to California by family friends (we had been living in Texas) because my mother flew out in advance to sit by Tommy’s bedside. Because that is what you do when you are destitute and you have other kids to provide for, right? You sit distraught next to one off-springs bedside and you completely abandon the rest of your obligations.
We lived with a lot of different people taking whatever hand outs were available. When we got back to California it was a while before we found the house in Whittier and Tommy moved in with us. I don’t know how much my dad paid but my mother eventually found a job. I’m not sure how long we were homeless between Texas and Whittier. My mom would try to claim we weren’t homeless, but we were couch surfing with friends and family. I was watching my mom fuck a series of men to earn the shelter over our head. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t want me to admit that out loud. But that was my role model. My mom went from guy to guy in between periods where she tried to feebly provide for herself and her kids and invariably things went badly. She couldn’t earn enough money to make ends meet. Only a couple of the people we stayed with were guys she was sleeping with (one was an old childhood sweetie and come on if you can’t leave your abusive second husband and run away to your old childhood sweetie, who can you run to?) but the other one I remember distinctly is my uncle–my father’s brother. So it wasn’t incest. But it was awkward. My fathers family appeared to me to have a pretty strict code that if a man was present it was the responsibility of whatever woman is present to fuck them. My brothers expected it of me. My father expected of me, my sister, and my mother even after they divorced. My uncle traded sex for a roof for my mother and I.
These things are more complicated than they sound. “My brother was in a horrendous accident so we stayed with my uncle for a while because his house was closest to the hospital.” That sounds fine. It doesn’t sound like we didn’t have anywhere to live. Our stuff wasn’t with us. I didn’t have my belongings and I was living out of a suitcase. My mom was fucking my uncle and they weren’t quiet. There was a lot of drinking. My uncle kept his screwdrivers premixed in the fridge and that is the first place I got drunk. When I was seven or eight. No one noticed or cared. For every age and stage of my life there is this easily apparent level of fucked up, and then there is all the stuff that happened in private.
I’m not doing that though. For all that I am obsessed with transgressive sex… my kids sure don’t know anything about it. Our conversations about all things sexual have so far been limited to things like, “Don’t put your finger in your anus or your vagina if it is dirty. Go wash your hands first. You don’t want to stick dirt inside your body because it will get itchy and painful. And wash your hands afterwards because bodies have germs in different places that are supposed to stay in that place and not get spread around to other body parts.” That’s ok, Jack.
How did I learn to be this? I’m weird, to be sure. But despite the incessant words in my brain, I’m not bad. Not really. I like to play at being bad. I like doing things that are bad for some people or are bad in some ways. But I always skirt a line. I flagellate myself horribly if I feel I have gone too far over the line. I kind of feel like hypervigilance is kind of the antithesis of being comfortable with your choices and uhm… I’d like to stop feeling it. I want to be just comfortable in my skin. That means accepting that some people are always going to dislike me. I honestly feel like a lot of it is just because I smell funny. I smell like not-them. It’s not an actual odor, mind. It’s a feeling that I am not part of their tribe. That is the best way I can explain it.
I was institutionalized for doing something that broke societies rules. Suicide is just another taboo. I have been suicidal for as long as I have memory of knowing that my life could end. When I found out about the concept of death my response was, “That sounds great, sign me up.” Relief from thinking and feeling and being me.
Fast forward, I’m not actively suicidal this week (yay!) but I have my days. I move on to other taboos. It is not irrational for me to fear reprisal for breaking taboos. It is not irrational for me to think that people might harm me and do considerable damage to my long-term emotional health in the name of getting me to conform. It has already happened. Given that I am now an adult married to someone who is enthusiastic about my taboo breaking I am much less likely to get into a situation where I can be harmed for my taboo breaking. So magically I am supposed to be able to stop that bone deep fear. Now it is magically irrational and I should stop feeling that way.
If anyone has a pill that can do that, I’ll buy it. I don’t exactly enjoy the fact that my heart has been racing almost continually for the past 24-ish hours. I don’t enjoy the feeling that I am one ill-timed grab from my child away from beating my head against the concrete floor because I need something that powerful to overcome the intensity of my feelings. I need something that can break through the screaming in my head. I’m smiling. I’m interacting with the kids a little, but mostly I’m just sitting and staring into space in between trying to figure out chores. I timed it this morning and if I get up and start moving fairly quickly I can get all my daily/weekly chores done on Monday by 9am. Not bad. Now if only I knew what I wanted to do with the day.
We are going to go sign Shanna up for swim lessons today. And we will go to the park. But it’s almost 11 and I’m still scared and sad. It’s hard to be around. People don’t want to pussyfoot. I understand. It is a lot of work. I don’t like doing the work I require either. It seems kind of ridiculous to need this kind of extensive negotiations and fuss about boundaries. It would be so much easier if I could just not fear irrational things. It would be so much more fun for everyone if I could just be ok with however they behave because they don’t mean anything.
This is what this crazy girl looks like. I will tell you up front, “Hey once you cross this line into this other category in my brain you can’t be around my kids any more.” That isn’t about anyone else or their behavior. I would think that the way to potentially soften that boundary would be to rigorously follow it for a very long time without the slightest deviation to prove that you understand that this is a real boundary and very serious for me. I’m sad. I guess I did fail. I thought I was communicating clearly and I didn’t.
This is why I am not interested in polyamory. All of a sudden I am supposed to emotionally caretake for more people. I can’t take care of myself. If you want to stand near me emotionally you have to have a very thick wall between you and me. You have to understand that sometimes I am going to freak the fuck out and that doesn’t mean you did something wrong it means I was triggered. You have to be a willow tree that is flexible with the winds of my moods but isn’t really affected. Noah is my mate because Noah can hold me while I sob and cry and am hysterical and he doesn’t take it personally. I can scream at him on the internet and talk about all the most intimate parts of our life and relationship and he knows that at the end of the day I cannot change him. He just is. He decides his behavior based on his best guess at my mood because some days things go well and some days they don’t. But it’s not his fault. It’s not about him. When I am angry about something that Noah has done, part of it is his acceptance of responsibility.
Noah has raped me. That’s a boundary violation beyond all others in an intimate partnership. I know that he can do that to me. It’s not an irrational fear. It’s a healthy respect. At this point I have to simply trust that he will never do that to me again. Do you know why I trust him enough? Because he rigorously, fanatically, slavishly observes my boundaries. If I tell him he can’t say the word “the” to me today he will do it. He will say: “I think that is an irrational boundary and I am not thrilled about it, but I will endeavor to follow your rule.” And then he would. He would make this overnight weird work around in his vocabulary. Because even though it’s irrational and weird and makes his life hard… I’m worth that. This would be why I can relax boundaries over time and we can take turns being the one who gets the most focus. I trust him.
Other people don’t understand my boundaries. They think it is about them. They think they are threatening. They think they are the problem. That’s not it. This is just what the crazy train looks like. I make ridiculous demands. Outrageous demands. But I spell them out in advance and give people the opportunity to say yes or no. The awesome part is when people say they understand and my demands are reasonable… until I follow up. Then I’m doing something… I don’t know. Mean?
It’s probably the stunt cock comment. I have rewritten this section over and over. I think there are two kinds of people. For the purpose of this explanation I am going to call them bonders and non-bonders. Just for this conversation. When bonders have sexual contact it increases their feeling of wanting to spend time together. When non-bonders have sexual contact they continue to want to decide if spending time together is wanted based on completely unrelated factors.
I kept myself distracted this morning doing chores until I ran out of “needs to be done today” that felt unstressful and I ran out of physical energy. Then I sat down and realized how fast my heart was racing and I wanted to puke and I started shaking… because I have to get up today and go register Shanna in swim classes. I have to do that. I am freaked out because today I am not going to be able to take both kids with me, watch them, keep them safe, get information about the classes (not everything is on their website), wait through whatever lines we incur, stay calm even if Shanna acts out, try to remain calm as Calli beats the shit out of the back of my neck while I stand in line, have a coherent conversation with another adult while I am completely overwhelmed by noise (this is a pool building–they are loud), and I’m already having massive panic attacks and hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
I can’t date anyone. I don’t have a spare five minutes in my day to give a shit if someone is upset about what kind of time I can or can’t give to them. Fuck anyone else’s needs. I did not sign on for anyone else’s fucking needs. I said that I wanted to be a dirty whore and step out on my life. Dirty whores are not sensitive and new agey. I said I wanted a stunt cock who would be nice to me. Apparently I don’t actually know what that demographic looks like. Noah tells me a lot that the only way to get good at things is to try and fail a whole bunch of times.
This is why crazy people look like drama. I have in my head the interaction I want to have. The kind of relationship. That wasn’t it. I probably need to hunt outside the poly community. Hrm. But then I will be dealing with men who are cheating. Shit.
What does it actually look like? Well, I want someone who understands that it isn’t personal, I don’t want my lovers over at my house socializing with my kids. It makes me have feelings I don’t like. So I correctly identify the cause of the fuss and I try to eliminate it. If I invite you to a big party at my house where there will be 30+ people and I won’t be interacting with you much… that’s different. But I want my kids to meet my lovers as distant people in a vague community of people they gradually get more exposure to as they age. My lovers aren’t invited over for dinner. My lovers don’t get to ask about toys. That makes the pit of my stomach claw and retch. It’s not personal. It’s not a rejection of anyone in particular. It’s not that any of them are bad people. I don’t think Tom is a bad person but I honestly don’t want him hanging out with my kids. That’s not something you are supposed to admit out loud.
I don’t want people around my kids who cause me to feel more unstable. I have to monitor and manage my moods. That is a simple and literal fact of my life. It will always be true. I have to minimize my stress. The obvious solution here is that I should simply be monogamous because then I don’t have to worry about meeting other peoples needs. Ugh. That’s not really going to work long term. I want to have that part of me off existing. But really, I can’t date. I can’t be responsible for someone else’s happiness. I just can’t. I am not able to provide that for anyone. I have nothing left to give.
This morning I had to go wake Sarah up to help with the kids because I desperately needed to smoke and write. When I started this I wasn’t able to stop crying any more. My stupid momentary frustrations were adding up. Shanna hasn’t done anything wrong. But she did throw crumbs all over the garage after I asked her to not bring food out of the dining room. We have serious problems with bugs. I am in a constant battle to confine food to the kitchen because otherwise I have ant infestations that send me into horrifying panic attacks. And I have to keep my mouth shut and not obviously react and clean up the fucking ants no matter how I fucking feel because I am the fucking mom and I have to shut the fuck up and just do it. So you know that overdosing thing when I was 15? Yeah. Ants. That was my hallucination. I constantly fight ants in this house. It is this low level of stress thing for me that I can’t seem to get rid of. It keeps my stomach hurting. I find ants in my bed. That honest to god scares the shit out of me and not screaming hysterically constantly is a heroic act. I have learned to master that phobia. But it’s really hard and it takes a lot out of me.
So Shanna didn’t do anything terrible or wrong or bad. But I asked her to please keep the food on the linoleum. She ran, giggling, and threw herself on the big ugly chair clutching the last of the delicious cinnamon raisin bread a dear friend gave me for my birthday. We’ve been hoarding it out to savor it. When she got up I noticed that she had smeared the bread and crumbs all over the chair seat, back, arms, in the seams, and all over the floor. I had sudden images of ants. The ants that are going to crawl on me next time I sit in that chair. And then I have to calmly ask my wonderful sweet baby girl to take the rest of the bread back to the kitchen, you can see how there are crumbs everywhere. If we spread crumbs we will get ants. Have you noticed the ants we have in the dining room? I want to keep all the food in there please, thanks. Then I got to clean it up. While I was in the garage cleaning up that spill Shanna decided that this is a great time to practice pouring.
Do you really want me to continue? It’s not that a little water spilled is that bad. It’s that there were crumbs all over the floor from the bread and now it’s a soggy mess. It’s that it’s on the table, multiple chairs, and the floor. It’s that she took containers out of the thrift store box to play with and now I have to dry them off and put them back in the box. I should probably also hurry up and take it out to the van because HOLYFUCKINGSHIT will she just empty it in the next five minutes if I don’t. And I need to stay calm. And smile. And be enthusiastic about her exploring the world. And teach her how to clean up after herself–which is way the fuck harder to be patient while doing when I am in the middle of a panic attack.
Do you know what a panic attack feels like? It feels like a heart attack. And that’s been happening for over 24 hours now. I’m not seeing a doctor because dude, I am probably doing this because I am going to see a doctor and I am freaked the fuck out. For me to go talk to a doctor about the extent of my acting out and self-harm and transgressive behavior is for me to risk commitment. I would not be able to tell a doctor with a straight face that I am not suicidal. Because even though I haven’t thought about it this week… the minute someone asks me about it I will crumble and admit that yes I really kind of wish I could be selfish enough because this fucking hurts and I am so very very tired.
But I woke Sarah up. Because I was getting to the point where keeping the mask on was resulting in me spontaneously crying. Because when I’m that frustrated and I’m not allowed to show anger at all I start crying. My sister used to taunt me with it. Soon I have to go nurse Calli. She is obviously getting done with me having a break. It’s time to go let her nurse to sleep.
Yes I want a fucking stunt cock who keeps his messy emotional shit away from me. I have nothing to fucking give anyone.
I had a brief panic attack as I looked through the referring URLs for my blog. Lots of looking for porn searches. I thought that was kind of amazing. I really felt invaded and horrified by that. That was hard to feel for a few minutes. You see, there is this nice blogger who happens to be a chick. And I don’t know about you but I find that people are way less heated about business building than sex. This woman hasn’t done anything sexual in a public way, but she is denigrated sexually quite viciously. I’ll tell you flat out, universe, that makes me feel like I should probably figure what I am: a sex blogger or a mommy blogger and never the twain shall meet. Because if Naomi Dunford is getting death threats I need to prepare myself for the possibility that some day I might too. I don’t think I can stop myself from posting on the internet. It’s pretty compulsive.
I’m not so good at this sleeping thing lately. I’m thinking a great deal about my role models. People who are alive, people who are dead, people who were dead before my birth and people who have lived only in the mind. I spend a lot of time feeling like I should apologize for who I am and what I do. Not because I really believe that I am wrong. But because I feel like I do not have the right to make choices that differ from the people around me. The thing is, everyone does things differently and that’s how it is supposed to work.
Ok, I’m beating around the bush. A while back I had a conversation with a friend/former lover in which we both kind of nudged the other to test the waters. Nothing came of it that day and that’s ok. He brought up a really important point though. He breaks condoms. Due to a wide variety of factors (size, piercings) he has an above average number of breakages. He *is* careful. He has had multiple accidental pregnancies because of this. Uhhh… my baby factory is closed. After careful thought about how much I loathe everything about being on duty 24/7 for an infant I never want to have another child. I love my children. I’m fucking done. So I’m thinking about permanent birth control. Not in the next three months or anything, but I think it will be done soonish. I want to never have to worry about that again. The thought of pregnancy fills me with revulsion and horror. I’m done.
I have then been thinking a lot about safer sex. It’s complicated. What does one mean by “safer” sex? Blah blah blah. Near as I can see it there are a few reasons to use latex (or equivalent) over all contact between bits: disease, pregnancy, or show of good faith. Most everyone is pretty loud about the disease one and I agree with it. I have been pretty rigorous throughout most of my sluttery with barriers. It’s important! I drank that kool aid. I think it’s a good flavor. I’m going to deal with that pregnancy bit forever. Then there’s the good faith bit, and that’s tricky.
If you are a slut you are supposed to tow the party line about doing it safely at all times in all ways. SSC is based on that. used as a battering ram by people who claim that is what it means. What an awesome history piece. The opening of the RACK definition mentions my historical associations. I guess I was ignorant. It’s interesting how often that is coming up lately, my ignorance. Anyway. I’m avoiding again.
I’m thinking about how I feel about unprotected sex with people other than my husband. I haven’t done it. This is still hypothetical in the future. I’ll tell you that the sticking point is the word husband. I have been told that baby making sex is husband sex and at this point unprotected sex = baby making sex. I’m a big fan of two forms of birth control. If I am sterile and a guy is sterile then pregnancy is such a low possibility that I’m willing to risk it. I’ll say that flat out. I’m brave enough to trust two surgical operations. Then comes disease risk. Unless you believe that diseases manifest out of nowhere, there are ways to ensure that people are not carrying diseases. It’s really simple actually. You just go down to your local clinic before engaging in activities and voila!
But oh man. Then there is that party line. I probably don’t mean it in the way you think. However you think it. I worry about not representing the “right kind” of promiscuous sex. I’m pretty defensive about my behavior and all. I worry that sex with Noah will feel less special. I don’t honestly think it will. I’m pretty base about such things. I’m pretty darn sure that I will think it is hotter than the sun to come home after sex with someone else. Uhm. Yeah. I actually really like that idea. I think that idea is so fucking hot that I am going to take a break to masturbate. I’ll be in my bunk.
Thanks to the internet I know that lots of other people feel the same way. Either that or one person has been very prolific at writing stories. This is a fairly basic biological urge. Evolution programmed me to think this is hot. Why should I carry shame for enjoying it? Seriously. At this point it is still hypothetical and I already feel guilty. Ridiculous. I’m a smart girl. I want to lead a long and healthy life. I promise you, oh internet, if I sleep with someone without using a condom I will do my preparation work. I will ensure that the person in question is not a disease risk and I will prevent pregnancy at all costs. And then I will decide if it will add more drama to my life to use or not use a condom.
It’s fairly reasonable to ask why I don’t just default to using condoms because that’s a good idea and all. There are some downsides to being raped repeatedly throughout your childhood. And bodies were designed to glide on other bodies, not on a piece of rubber. Condoms hurt and I am at a point in my life where adding any more pain to my body is repugnant. I have had tearing and resultant burning for over a week with each time I’ve used a condom recently. It’s almost enough to make it not worth having the sex. Dilemma.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my position as a sexual outlaw. I use that mockingly because I have never done sex work and I’m pretty sure it is considered part of the deal. But I break laws with sex. I have sex in public places. I am always very disappointed when I have a partner who isn’t up for it. I suspect that one of Noah’s biggest appeals is that he really and truly is up for doing anything and everything I want from him sexually. That’s useful. But there are parts of unlawful sex he cannot help me with by definition.
The thing is they are crimes because if someone accidentally finds us then we have harmed those people by engaging in the act we are engaging in. Which makes what we are doing dirty. You know that scared nervous feeling you get when you make out with someone just out of sight of people? Doesn’t everyone do that at some point when they are young? Ok, the geek boys will smack me and shout that not everyone spends time making out when they are young. Whatever. I can’t explain exhibitionism but I presume I don’t have to. If what I am doing is perfectly fine behind closed doors then it is probably more exciting for me to do it in public. It’s a wiring thing.
So yeah. Unprotected sex. Public sex. Taboo sex. I really miss the part of me that is willing to take very calculated risks with self confidence. I take fairly big risks. Kind of. Not really. I take risks that sound really bad but aren’t once you listen to the details. I’m very logical about the risks I take. Which is kind of hilarious. “Don’t knock rationalizations. I don’t know anyone who could get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations. They’re more important than sex.” But what happens when my rationalizations are trying to make it so I can have sex?
So I’m up late at night thinking about how I can feel more comfortable in my skin with the decisions I make. Even though I’m not making choices that would be right for other people, I’m making choices that are ok for me. There isn’t a One Twue Way. My personal religion seems to be formed around a bastardized notion of gnostic sin I got from Noah. Something is only a sin if you are ashamed to talk about it. He told me it was the basis for his open relationship with a previous partner (*wave*). I’ve been thinking about it a lot.
I’m thinking about the possibility of unprotected sex with men other than the one I am married to. My husband (within certain parameters) is fine with it. Why am I worried about breaking the sanctity of my marriage in this one more way? Partially because I’ve been told quite clearly that it would be bad. I would be bad. That’s dirty. I would be defiled. Just go read a message board anywhere. Oh man. But I wouldn’t be. That’s the thing. No one would know unless I told them. I would still be just me. With upgrades. I think this is what being an adult actually means. I get to make decisions. I get to make choices amongst a dizzying array of options. I am not at the mercy of my fate. I do not have to do what people “do” just because it is “done”.
The trick is to do it and not feel shame. The shame is poison. If you feel shame about what you are doing you should not do it because shame gets into the water and the soil and the air and it is poison. I feel shame because other people tell me that my choices are wrong. “Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” Dr. Seuss told me that. I worry because anxiety was taught to me. I’m supposed to be afraid of what people think of my actions.
And here is where the fun part goes away: my sister raped my brother almost thirty years ago. My sister allowed her husband to rape her son almost ten years ago. My sister taught her daughter to perform oral sex on her son about ten years ago. I have no idea what she has been up to since then. It scares the shit out of me. According to my brother he hasn’t told people that she did it. Until me. And I have told the whole damn internet. My father spent decades raping his daughters and no one stopped him.
I am very good at putting on my public face and having my public persona. But with the intense pressure to behave “appropriately” comes this simultaneous backlash of anger that makes me compulsively want to break rules. I have broken some pretty big ones. I stole borrowed my mom’s car when I was 15 before I had a license because I promised someone a ride and I couldn’t back down. Want to know how I got caught? I uhhh forgot to put my headlights on as I pulled out of a lighted parking garage after Rocky Horror. And the registration was expired. That incident is why I couldn’t get a license until I was 18. You see, I gave my mother the money to pay the fines and she bounced the check. Once you do that the fees go up and I was well aware my mother would just bounce the second check. I had to put on the public face of not acknowledging the fact that my mother was literally stealing from me.
If I said anything about it I would endure a tirade of hysteria about how I blame everything on her even though she is the victim in life. I see that pattern emerging for me with Shanna. I don’t vocalize it, but I think it. But I’m not the victim any more. I now hold absolutely all of the cards. I have all of the power. Do I want to use my power for good or evil?
At this point in my life I am neither a victim nor a martyr. I’ve made choices to end up where I am. I’m pretty fucking thrilled with my life, actually. I’m still slowly trying to sort through the house. I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m trying as hard as I can not to hurt people. Sometimes that isn’t good enough and I’m sorry for that. I really like fucking multiple people. I’m going to keep doing it. I’m going to make my decisions about safer sex based on actual risks not perceived status around said decisions. And I’m going to let go of feeling bad because I’m breaking this taboo.
And what is up with this shit about me feeling like I don’t get to consider myself a sexual outlaw because I’ve never been paid. Oh man. I spent years in a relationship that was pretty extreme trying to keep up with the bad asses. But I’ve never liked actual pain all that much. It’s kind of funny. I want to be an edge player. I don’t want to be in a lot of pain. It’s a competitive thing. I can cop to that. Not many people eroticize things like being suspended 75′ off the ground. I learned to orgasm only with permission and on command. I have been hog tied in a bath tub and tied so I could barely breathe. We did a lot of breath play. I have been well hanged. With pictures to prove it. Because without pics it didn’t happen, right?
There is this idea in my head about absence of self without a consistent mirror. That’s convoluted. I don’t exist if I can’t see me in other people. In other words, whatever group I am standing near I will try as hard as I can to conform. When I notice that I am really different from the people around me I feel as though I was just publicly shamed. Because there will be people who disapprove of me in any group. There’s a lot to disapprove of, yo. So I run away. Because I cannot conform to the norms of any group I have ever been part of and I don’t know how to feel like it is ok to deviate from the norms. I assume people dislike me despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
So coming back to this idea of gnostic sin. I’m very certain that I am not hurting anyone right now. And if no one is getting hurt (physically or mentally) then I think the activity is ok. I do not participate in any formal moral structure that judges any of my actions. My only judge and jury is whether or not I can look at myself in the mirror. Have I done right by the world. Have I done my best to make this world a better, happier place? Then I’m ok. And there is no cookie anywhere in the world big enough to make me feel like I have the external validation I need. I have to just accept that I am going to do what I am going to do and it’s ok. In 100 years no one will remember or care. So why not?
My body’s talking to me
It say,’Time for danger’
It says ‘I wanna commit a crime
Wanna be the cause of a fight
Wanna put on a tight skirt and flirt
With a stranger’
The problem is finding balance. And the first towards balance is sleep. Night.
The super frank way I handle my sexuality is not appropriate for children. The way I talk about it. The way I pursue it. Not. For. Children. The way I handle my sexuality makes a fair number of adults extremely uncomfortable. How do I raise kids who can have a more “normal” view of sexuality? I don’t have a normal view of it. Growing up it was pretty clear that my options were celibacy (my mom and mostly Aunt Vonnie–it was a running joke that she didn’t put out) or being the kind of whore who ruins my life regularly with toxic men (go Denise).
The idea of not knowing what sex is till 10 or so really weirds me out. I don’t know what it will be like to grow up with children who are ignorant so long. I taught my niece and nephew how to use condoms way before then because it was necessary information in our family. And no one else would talk about diseases or contraception at all. I have books on what age appropriate sexuality is, but it’s still a weird concept.
You see, because I’m the kind of person who wants to host sex parties. Let me just take a moment to say that hosting a sex party is very complicated. There are a few other layers of things going on that make everything way way way more complicated. Because really what I want to do is have a woo woo sex magic ritual and that’s an even more specific kind of event. That kind of event requires rather a lot of thinking, planning, discussion, etc. But I have these little kids around. At this point in time I’m aware that some day soon Shanna is going to turn around and ask me point blank what a sex magic ritual is. As I sit and think about it right now I think my answer should be, “Sex is something you do once your body is physically mature and you want to. Magic is a way of thinking about what you want really hard. And a ritual is where you think really hard about something you want with other people helping you focus more on what you want so that you think about it harder than you can alone.” That’s an ok answer, right? Because I don’t believe there is any chance we will just stop talking about it at all.
And holy shit. How do I feel about my child growing up knowing that her parents are into sex magic rituals? No, she doesn’t have a clue what it is about now. We aren’t graphic in the slightest. We talk about people and emotions. We don’t talk about sex acts. Shanna is going to grow up hearing a very odd therapy sort of talk. I mean, we sit around and talk about the people who are involved in the ritual and what their various potential levels of involvement could be (nothing graphic) and try to get a sense of what to expect. A lot of what is going on here is that I can’t be in control of everything in the world. But I can be in control of this very small setting on this one day. I can be in control of who comes. And that has been a rather fraught process. I may have lost a friend over it and that makes me sad. I have had to deal with the overwhelming guilt and shame that I went from in-my-head having a fairly ordinary party to these increasingly complicated layers of intention and want and overlapping needs.
I didn’t realize up front that I was doing a sex magic ritual. It wasn’t until I did extensive negotiations with most of the people coming that I realized I was trying to set the stage for that. I have only done sex magic explicitly with one person. I think of him as my personal shaman. Our relationship has gotten very complicated over the more than 10 years he has been in my life. Some day I should send a thank you message to the woman who connected us. Ok, done. I kind of like reflecting when and where I walk away from writing in the blog to do other things. I don’t know if it is ADD or what but I really can’t finish something in one go. I just can’t. I peck at everything. I don’t think it is perfectionism because it’s not that I’m trying to be perfect. I just have to think about the next step before I can have it.
I’m going to be a big judgy bastard. I think there is a big difference between people who are sex positive and people who actively hunt a lot for new partners. I know people who hunt. I don’t like how they parent. There. I said it. I like the children of monogamous households. Which really this is selection bias. I don’t know very many children who have grown up in poly households. Very very few. I know a few adults who were children in poly households. They are neat. But uhm… I like the children of monogamous parents because I feel more comfortable with the kinds of acting out they do. Which is to say that in the far less than 500 hours I have been around “children of poly households” in aggregate over my entire life I had feelings of discomfort and I blamed them on the kids.
And that is the kind of judgy bastard I am. Ok, fine I’ll deconstruct this again. Why do I have a problem with poly parents? Because I think my sexuality is something that should always be on the side of a closed door from my children. I do not flirt in front of my kids. I cannot be a sexual person in front of my kids. I cannot hunt. I do not want my extra “partners” around my kids because I am uncomfortable having that energy around children. I have felt really uncomfortable when I am dating someone and they want me to hang out around their children. In almost every case (with one huge exception and I really respect him) there was more hand holding and hugging and PDA type behavior than I found appropriate.
Where is the line of what is ok to do in front of your kids? Or even where in my house? When I am interested in sex I want to have a lot of very heavy groping in my life. It’s awesome and fun. I am very uncomfortable with the prospect of trying to be secretive about it around my kids. That’s not a good feeling for me. I have been secretive about my sex life since I was two years old and I shouldn’t have had a sex life to be secretive about.
When I am otherwise doing well emotionally I get off on every part of being sneaky about sex. I fucking love that I am the chick who sneaks off at parties. And yet that is clearly acting out behavior and there are places I am not welcome because of it. Awkward. Shouldn’t I have to give up on that kind of acting out now that I have kids? Large swaths of society thinks I am inappropriate for doing that. I could even link to a very old blog post with a poll about it. Fully 1/4 of my friends thinks that is not an ok thing to do. And these are the people who are open minded enough to be friends with me in the first place. Let’s not ignore that incredibly high bar here.
25% of my friends (who responded to that poll) disapprove of a very consistent part of my behavior. That’s absolutely a high enough percentage to make me go into convulsions of shame. Because that (to me) means if that was more of a general humanity sort of poll it means more like 80% of people will think I am disgusting. Cue bad self talk tape I don’t want to play today.
Why do I feel I have to be celibate because I am a parent? Oh let me see. Maybe because the parts of my sexuality I enjoy the most are the parts that push the boundaries of what society considers acceptable. Silent quickies on the couch are really shitty. I’m fucking tired of them. If that is all my god damn sex life is supposed to have for the rest of my life you can take this job and shove it. Cue running away and engaging in acting out behavior.
But how did I act out? I went to an adult only party. Where people were already naked. And heavily indicating that they like extra marital sex. And I went to a former partner (who has loudly stated he is still interested) and I suggested running off because I hardly ever get to be in an environment where there are no children so I never enjoy sex.
I feel like a dirty disgusting whore. And sometimes that is really hot and sometimes it makes me cry. I feel so much shame for wanting sex the way I do. I feel like I am obviously dirty. I am contaminated. I must be sick for wanting this the way I do. And then I won’t let anyone touch me in any way because I feel like they will be made dirty by touching someone who wants sex the way I do.
So I kind of want to have a sex magic ritual. I kind of feel like there might be some worthwhile emotional work to be done in this area. Kinda. And on one hand I feel like I should only be saying this to the very short list of people I feel comfortable engaging in this kind of party with. But on the other hand, continuing to believe that I should be ashamed of talking about this part of my sex life is a lot of the point. Let me restate: I have already lost a friend over this party.
Why do I feel like I have to be celibate to be a good mother? Oh man. Because being queer and kinky and poly means not only that I have sex with my husband (I feel ashamed of almost any touching around my kids so our marital sex is rather limited right now) and I occasionally sneak out in a way that I can completely hide from my kids and keep secret (limited primarily to heteronormative behavior because casual sex with women is way more complicated than I have time for, men can get it up on demand if you select carefully) but I am being flagrant to the world about things that I feel I have to hide.
The closet sucks. I do talk about being queer, kind of, in front of my kids. It really doesn’t come up. I have friends who are queer, so obviously my children see examples of it. But I don’t engage in any behavior that would look queer to them. Kinky is something that I have put on hold 100% until my kids are older and can be left alone longer. I don’t feel ok having that in my house and I get very little time off. Poly? Dating feels like the same thing. I don’t want to take that much time away from my family.
It’s not that I don’t want these things in my life. But I have massive issues around my kids seeing any of it because I feel ashamed. It feels like I am supposed to. When I make the decision to take people off the guest list because they do not feel safe enough to have a sex magic ritual in front of I lose friends. It really really feels like I should be ashamed of having these things in my life. If I am doing something at all, ever that some people won’t like then I am bad.
Why do I think I have to be celibate to be a mother? Oh I don’t know. Maybe because I can’t be satisfied with the limited shitty sex other people want me to have so it is easier to just shut the whole system off. And just not be me.
It’s interesting. People keep asking me how I am doing, that’s predictable (and appreciated!). I’m not sure what to say a lot of the time. “Well, I’m behaving as if I feel more cheerful. I am less explosive. I am not nearly as angry. I also feel completely dead sexually. When people touch me I feel my skin crawl. But I’m way more calm with way less time in time out!” Is that a win?
A number of people have expressed how impressed they are that I can simply suppress these memories. I can stop having flashbacks. I can black the body memories. But it comes with a price. I don’t get to really be me when I’m doing this. I’m just a shell. You see, my therapist is on vacation till August 1st. Perfect timing. I don’t really feel up to seeing a new person right now. I’m… yeah. I’m just not up for that. I miss people and I miss going out but I am so happy to be home that I’m kind of afraid to leave. I haven’t even been up to Oakland yet to see the friend I normally see at least once a week because leaving the house is insurmountable.
Why is leaving the house insurmountable? Because I only have so much patience right now and at home I can ask Shanna to do a very limited number of things so we have a limited number of fights. Once we leave the house all bets are off. We might have a great experience; we might have a horrible time. By “horrible time” I mean that she will pick a fight in front of other people and I will feel intense shame and humiliation that my child is such a brat. And I will end up yelling at her with far more intensity than the situation warrants because I am feeling shame and humiliation. So I would rather not take her out. It’s not that I never yell at her at home, but it’s far less. And when I can tell that I am starting to internally escalate things that don’t need to escalate I can safely separate us until I calm down more and can talk. It’s seamless and non-dramatic at home. Well, three year olds are dramatic.
I’m experiencing a lot more sympathy for why other people give in to their kids to stop the freaking constant whining. I still won’t, but my alternative is to send her to her room until she can talk in a tone of voice that doesn’t sound like nails on a chalk board. I don’t have that when we are out. Oh it feels like pressure. It feels like overwhelming-I’m-drowning-where-is-the-air pressure. It’s not a rational reaction. It is, in fact, completely irrational. I am comforted by books that tell me that three is just like this. Get through the year and it improves. Please G-d.
At home we do ok! Really! We have have far more good days than bad. Even our bad days at home aren’t that bad because I am way more liberal with “room time” than any “real” crunchy parent would be. What the hell is gentle discipline anyway? I don’t hit her. I do my best not to yell. But oh man I need space and the only way I know to get it is to tell her that she has two options: she can be civilized and polite, or she can be in her room. It’s not that all expressions of emotion are uncivilized or impolite. However, if you have to reach volumes that are harming my ear drums in order to express yourself you can do that outside the main room, sorry. No, I don’t think that children deserve to terrorize everyone around them as they develop emotions. And I cannot sit down and patiently let her do everything she wants to do. Sometimes things have to get done. I’m almost sorry. But mostly because it means that not only do I have to do an avalanche of work, I have to argue with her all day about whether or not she will let me do it without being a whiny brat because she wants me to do nothing but pay attention to her. Ugh.
I swear to G-d I do things with her. I play games. I teach her gardening stuff. We play on the swing. I read to them. I bake with her. Et cetera. Nothing is enough so I need to just say that I’ve had enough. My needs matter too. And she needs to deal with that disappointment because life is going to hold a whole lot more disappointments in it.
I think that is what the current rash of articles on over attentive parenting is saying. I feel like I am trying (and failing) to meet all of her needs because my needs were so extensively ignored and unmet. But there is a happy medium. My family didn’t know how to meet my basic needs and Shanna is not in that position. Shanna never has to wonder if she will have a place to live, food to eat (that is palatable), if she will see her mother or father or sister, or if she will get several hours of positive attention every day, or if she will be abused. Shanna is safe. Shanna really and truly is getting the basics that I didn’t have.
It impacts the whole rest of your life to not have those things as a child. That is why I still identify as white trash even though I feel guilty given the extensive privilege I enjoy now. I still feel like I’m not sure I will have a place to live or palatable food (this is a serious issue at this point in my life). Noah went to great lengths to create a family trust and he put all of his separate property I was previously not entitled to, all the inheritance stuff, into community property. No really, all stay at home moms are not created equal. I am not taking the risk that other people take. He truly can’t screw me, no matter what. I will never be destitute again. But I still go through periods where I am afraid to do things in the house because I think I will get in trouble. I angst and dither over doing things because I fear that everyone will be mad at me and make me go. This is not rational. This is in my bone marrow. This is why I feel like white trash. I feel like a dirty little imposteur and at any moment I will be made to go away from decent people. I’ve been told I wasn’t welcome before.
I was asked to leave the Seventh Day Adventist church when I was a kid. As an adult I would say that a small minded bully with no actual authority told me that she didn’t like me… but that’s not how it felt at 12. I was pushing to do a lock-in with the youth group. I had been to one at my friend Yvette’s church and I really wanted to do it again. A woman in an authority like position in the group took me aside and told me how offensive and inappropriate that was. It was disgustingly sexual and then she told me that I would feel more comfortable in a place that was less Godly.
So I went and fucked Sean. That’s pretty much the timeline on that. Super Bowl Sunday was a few weeks after that. I went and visited family friends who were not making great life choices. Lots of drugs. Lots of risky behavior. My family thought it was great for me to go stay with them! They were also hosting a different family friend for the weekend. He also happened to be their drug dealer. On Superbowl Sunday I told him that I wanted him to do something to me. He asked what. I said I was too shy to say the word. He asked me what letter it started with. I said “F”. He started saying the predictable ones: fondle, feel, finger… then he got to fuck. I said yes.
He turned all the lights off. He did basically no foreplay. He didn’t use a condom. I lay there and physically did all the things I “knew” I was supposed to do. All the things I had learned from years and years of reading porn romance novels, and stealing my uncle’s pornography. But I cried while I did it. I kind of thought that was just how it was supposed to go.
Apparently I unsuppressed some memories. I don’t want to be dead inside. I don’t want to feel like I am buried under the weight of all of the bad things. If I suppress them I say that they are unimportant. Not worth looking at. But it is important that these things happened to me. Maybe it is only important given the whole scope of my life, but that’s ok. Maybe it wouldn’t be the end of the world story for someone else to say that the cried through losing their virginity. It’s kind of a different story for me. I was told over and over from when I was a baby that my only value was in having sex. At 12 I felt like my attempts to be good and I really and truly was trying, resulted in being kicked out and told that God didn’t love me. So I turned around and fucked a 25 year old drug dealer–without a condom. That’s why mental health professionals think I should be dead. If I started off making choices like this when I was 12? 12! Oh my fucking god. I always thought I was so adult. That I was so mature. Everyone agreed that I was precocious, advanced, remarkably adult… No. I was heinously abused. It’s different.
When I kick myself over and over for sending my daughter to her room because screaming when you dislike something is not an option… I feel like I am crushing her spirit. I feel like I am abusing her. I feel like I am not just on a slippery slope, but rather everything I do is inherently abusive because I am an abuser. No matter what you do as a parent you can find someone to flog you and tell you that you are ruining your children. I insist that she not yell at me, not use a volume that causes me physical pain, and that she not hit or kick anyone. Ok, let’s tack on pestering. I really don’t allow pestering. Pestering is given warnings. If you cross these lines, that means you need some time to see if you like being alone more than you like being polite to me. No no no no. I AM NOT ABUSIVE BECAUSE I HAVE BOUNDARIES. I’m not. I’m not. I’m not. I feel like me asserting myself is bad. Like I don’t deserve to do it. Like when I inconvenience the people around me for my own comfort, “Shanna you don’t get to play the screeching game inside” I am doing something terrible. If I have to physically carry Shanna outside or to her room because she has decided to grab onto furniture and get louder? Well… I still don’t think I have crossed the line of abusive at that point either. I’m not going to be chased from room to room in my house by a screaming child. Just no.
Let me break to say that I don’t think she is being malicious. She’s enjoying the feeling and trying to get a rise out of me. I still don’t have to like it or tolerate it. But I worry about my reactions when we are out. Like on the train when she wants to get to me the easiest way is to start getting loud. She knows that it is a huge hot button. So I picked her up and carried her to the vestibule area. So far still ok. But then she wouldn’t stop screaming and I wouldn’t stop yelling either. So I made her stand in the corner. Which she didn’t want to do and she fought me. Thankfully Noah interceded because it wouldn’t have been pleasant for either of us if he hadn’t. I got my back up over something stupid. That was not the hill to die on because I had no method of enforcement that was appropriate and safe for all concerned. So I was going to lose no matter what. But the real problem was that we hadn’t given her proper breakfast and she was hungry. And that’s all our fault. And the real solution was to be more patient with her when we had inappropriately taxed her physically. But instead I hissed unpleasantly at her “You are in public and you need to be quiet. No. You don’t get to make the people around you miserable. That’s not ok.” Over and over. That’s not an acceptable reaction. That reaction is coming from my own intense fears about being looked at. That is me being told that I was never allowed to talk about the abuse or unpleasant things in a way that would make people look at me. I’m passing on that abused feeling.
I think that “abuse” makes you feel smaller, weaker, and less than. Abuse is being told in some way that you are a less than person. I feel like I don’t deserve to take up space in the world. That’s a lot of my suicidal feelings. I feel like I am a toxic force. Like I am a toxic waste dump that should be eradicated for the good of the herd. That’s how I feel about myself. No, I don’t have the expectation that I will be “nice” when I meet new people. I expect that I will feel awkward and uncomfortable and I will act out in some way because I am just that kind of stupid fucked up loser and I always make bad first impressions because I am just bad bad bad bad.
I don’t know that I’m going to have a good day. Who knows. Maybe I will purge my bile on the internet and then go on with my day. It could happen. I’m hoping that purging my bile works. Noah is home and my no-t-twin is having a house warming. Maybe we could have a good day and go after nap time. That would be really nice. I can do two things at once when I am out in public. I can watch one child and interact with an adult or I can watch two children. That means that socializing in public is hard. But life is hard and this is really a first world problem. Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean you stop doing it.
I’m watching the sky. I’m torn between disappointment and elation. Lately the mornings have been feeling like a beach summer. It’s slightly humid but very chilly. It’s uncomfortable to move around the house in summer clothes. But it’s summer, damnit! And I keep wearing my summer clothes with layers because I am so eager to strip down to as little as possible. I miss warmth. I want it on my skin and I almost never feel this way. It’s really bothering me this year in a way it never has before. So the thing is, I want it to be warm in the morning so that I feel comfortable moving around and doing my work and then I can have the afternoon sloth to lie on the couch or play with the kids. I do most of my big chore jobs in the mornings because the children have more patience and I’m tired of having freezing cold toes. It’s freaking July. What the heck. Right now it is 57 degrees. That’s pitiful! (I’m working on the distracting part of suppressing. The kids will wake up soon.)
I spend a lot of time thinking about why I feel the need to process what I went through the way I do. It’s not exactly the most pleasant thing to do. At this stage of my life I feel like I am not in a position to take up a spiritual leader because I would need an intense cult… and yeah. Like that’s a good solution. I don’t want a religion to give meaning to my life. I am not a glory to anyone else. I can’t come up with any way in the whole fucking world to talk any kind of good about a spiritual practice that does not tell me to pick up a big stick any time someone from my family comes near me. No, I don’t need to turn the other cheek. And I’m not in a place where there is enough value there for me to deal with my current issues with organized religion. Really. In the cost benefit analysis, I lose. Just no.
But there has to be some fucking meaning in this story. Something. Some reason I did this and survived. I have to find something worth knowing in the mess. I have to find a way to believe that being me and existing is a right and good thing. That I am the right kind of me. Because being a mother is not going to cut it forever. I have to be alive and living in my body for me. And I don’t know a way to be me other than to tell my stories.
The part of me that I like the most is the part of me that looks at my behaviors that I dislike and I try to figure out why I do them so that I can either figure out how to stop doing them –and for real stop doing them, with accountability–or change my opinion of doing the behavior. In some way it is kind of awful. I’m developing situational ethics. But I am trying to reframe it as, “I want to do this, but it is at priority level 9 and right now 3 conflicts with it. Ok. Well… shit.” Because then I have reason to examine my options more carefully on how I am doing 3. Sometimes I am going to feel like a terrible person and feel a lot of guilt because… 9 is still a priority and I’m failing. I’m bad. I’m terrible. I deserve all manner of evil and badness rained on my head. That my friends, that is the crunchy guilt for me. If I do something in a less-than-crunchy way… say only use a plastic bag once and then throw it away. I have horrible anxiety and terrible self thoughts. If I only cared more… Ugh. There isn’t enough time in the day for me to handle my mental health shit and my crunchy guilt. Ha.
Talking about these things in the ways that I do is part of being me. I need to stop feeling like I should be silent in public; it’s not like I ever really followed that rule anyway. Rather I need to stop feeling guilty for taking up space. Other people are just going to have to deal with their own feelings of shame when I talk about their actions. That’s not my responsibility. If you feel ashamed of the things you did to me when I was a child it is right and just. I get to be that judge and jury. I’m the only one who experienced it. There will be people who agree with me and there will be people who disagree with me. That’s life. And in order to be me and find my own reason for living, I have to learn how to live with that. I have to stop feeling terrified of the fact that people will disagree with me and dislike me. I hide at home because I am white trash. Because I am dirty. Because I am low class in public. I explode and yell. I never can make my children look clean and put together. I can’t look clean and put together without professional help. The less said about my husband the better. *ahem* (I’m kidding! I like my husband! It’s just kind of rare for him to shave.) We all fit in well together. We are all similarly messy looking.
That was anxiety producing for me in the UK. The only time I saw a family that kind of resembled my mental picture of mine in terms of being messily put together they were… very attention grabbing in obviously low class ways. I had to stop and breathe for a moment as I realized that I shush my children in public and try to talk very quietly when I’m out because I don’t want to be that any more. I experience so much shame when I feel like people are looking at me the way I look at that woman. That was my experience of growing up. My sister was the loud “mother figure” bossing everyone around in this over the top domineering voice so that she could “sound like the boss”. She’s got a complex. Oh wait! She is probably acting like my dad. I was never really around him so I actually don’t know. I don’t know what my dad sounded or acted like around people. I don’t think I saw it more than a few times. I can’t remember living with him. So yeah.
My journey is really about finding balance between sharing the stories and working on my behavior while still having control when I need to have control. Which is pretty much all the time right now. Rats.
And of course the first thing I do is plop myself down in the middle of a big thought process around priorities. I’m thinking about my priorities in life because right now I have to start acting on them in terms of living my life. I no longer have a brick wall event coming that forces a reordering into crisis mode. How do I actually want to live? Priority number one: deciding my priorities needs to not become an obsessive thing that disrupts my life. (Here I will make a side note: I have already had multiple funny asides I wanted to make but I can’t remember the code for how to create a footnote and trying to think about how to make them is derailing my thought process. I’m annoyed. I may have finally found a motivation for learning how to code.)
It is 10 pm and my entire family is asleep. Seems quite reasonable. Only… the kids and I went to sleep at 1pm. We are going to have an interesting adjustment from jet lag. I’m up thinking about the patterns of our days and unschooling and my mental health and getting the house ready for Sarah and food and gardening and…
So I am thinking about priorities. Sarah will be in our house within 20 days. I am so excited I can barely sit still. But that’s not a hard dead line in any negative traumatic way for me. I don’t have to have the house to a certain “readiness”. She could move in today and it would all be handled. I can do work before then that will make the integration process easier, and I’m doing that. But it’s not an emergency. It can happen or not in whatever time or order I want. I’m done with the scary bits of that project. I just get to anticipate having Sarah here. Everything else is gravy. So right now I really am at the place where I get to sit down and think about how I want my life to look just because I get to start making it real now.
While I was on the trip I spent an obscene amount of time on Mothering.com because I was stuck in hotel rooms. I don’t have any idea how much I posted and I don’t want to think about it. I also wandered around the net looking at other parenting websites. I learned that I need to stay on MDC. I do not have the time or energy to go find a new forum. My story is long and complex. And I can’t tell people little comfortable sound bites that ensure that they feel comfortable enough with me for me to say things without being attacked. I have a long posting history on MDC. Folks recognize me. It feels like a community to me. I have noticed it becoming more close knit after the recent mass evacuation. A whole bunch of people have reached out to me during the decline of the site. I feel increasingly seen there and I like it. I suppose that means I am moving up the hierarchy of the clique? But in a war of attrition I will lose. I have too many other things to do and I am going to go do them. I don’t want to prioritize the kind of time it takes to stay popular on MDC. I have a life to live.
I started this blog because I wanted a place to feel accountable to so that I could document my life. I am not good at staying productive in a vacuum. I need a boss. Which isn’t to say that I think I owe accountability to anyone specific on the internet. Y’all can kiss off. (said with love) But I am choosing an unorthodox path for my family. I want to prove to myself that I am actually doing what I say I am doing. I don’t know another way to give myself the motivation to keep working without trying to produce some result. I want to talk about what I’m doing. I miss the camaraderie of having a job. Raising my kids is my job. And sweet sony Jesus don’t make this into a stay at home mom versus a work out of the home mom thing. That’s not what I mean. I mean that I have decided to not only stay home, but I am educating my kids. That’s a separate job as well. I am responsible for preparing them for the world. Every parent is responsible for raising their children, and we all get help along that process. Each parent chooses a different amount of help. There is nothing wrong with that and I’m not judging how much “time” people spend with their kids. I’m really not. I’m trying to figure out what parts of raising them, educating them, preparing them for the world, entertaining them, etc. I actually have to do on a day to day basis and what parts of that can I and/or should I farm out? There is no need for me to be a martyr.
My other job is being me. Being me is high maintenance. Being me (near as I can tell) is a lot more work than it is to be someone else. I can’t get good trade in value, so I’m sort of stuck with being me. If I want to be me well I have to put a lot of work into that. I am trying to get to the point where I respect and like myself enough that I feel good about all the time and effort I put into me instead of feeling ashamed that I require so much effort. That is complicated. Since we got home I have been doing a lot of emotional eating. I can tell. I can feel it. I can look at what I am eating and see why it is making me physically feel bad. But I can’t seem to motivate myself to deal with it because of all the complicating factors around being exhausted from the trip. But tomorrow we have a local farmers market. And I’m working on giving myself permission to make specific choices that are short term suboptimal in favor of preparing for the marathon. It’s weird.
I don’t know if I am making any sense. I am also, once again, able to medicate for my anxiety. Thank you California for recognizing that I should be able to have control over whether or not I have to feel that upset all the time. I haven’t yelled since we got home. And my stomach isn’t hurting all the time. I’ve been able to slowly start stretching out the muscles in my head and neck and I no longer have a headache. I had that headache for a month straight. I’m fighting with my guilt to allow me more than the absolute bare minimum to be not full of rage. It’s 10:23 and my kids are likely to wake up in the middle of the night. So I will be on duty and that requires being mostly sober. But then I will get edgy. Ah fuck it. It is better for me to ensure that my stomach stops hurting. That requires more than the amount that takes the edge off of my anxiety. Tonight, that is the right decision.
I worry about putting things on the internet because I worry that I will only put the bad things. Or only the bad things will be true. I need to get back to a place where I am loudly doing the good things too. That’s the only thing that will allow me to feel safe. And in order for me to feel like I am doing the good things loudly… I need to figure out what doing the good things are so I can know if I am actually doing them. Seriously. Do other people have to stop and think about this stuff? Do you just know? Ugh.
I don’t think that today’s noodling counts as a binding agreement. Just so it has been said. But I want to give my boss a status update. I’m like that.
I think that it’s time to set priorities. What things actually matter to me. And I need to act like I really do believe my priorities. And if I can’t act like I believe them… I need to decide how I feel about not believing them anymore because I need honesty. I can’t deal with hypocrisy. But it’s complicated because sometimes it isn’t about hypocrisy, you just aren’t meeting ‘x’ priority because you are still stuck on ‘g’ and it is more important. I want to be very clear with myself about when and where I am stuck on g and when I have simply stopped believing that x is important.
For example. The local food thing. Wait, no… I want to back up. I want to start at the beginning. It’s my story.
So I spent a lot of time on MDC during the trip. One of the best things I got out of it (and the side track over to Trolls With Wooden Spoons) was to examine some of the ways in which I really did drink the Kool Aid at MDC. And some of the things I have gotten from the experience have been good for me and I’m thrilled, and others suck. But I’ve been forcing myself to take it as a package deal. It’s not. No matter how rabidly people on the internet berate me for not meeting one specific point on a checklist… dude. Really. I’m not failing at life if I stop doing something perfectly. Uhm… not that I have been perfect at any step on this journey. I think I need to stop making perfection a goal or part of the conversation. I just need to figure out what it means to be me and do that. How pretentious is that?
I feel about as self-involved as an adolescent. Shanna and I are at the same space in development, and in some ways that’s true. As I am discovering myself on the journey to recovering from incest, I really am starting in about the same place Shanna is. I am reparenting myself. But I’m far harder on myself than I am on Shanna. Maybe I should be a lot more gentle with both of us. My daughter is already a shining example of vitality. I need to stop acting like I need to feel guilty for neglecting her. I’m not neglecting her. I am treating it like my only job is to educate her and she’s blossoming. Ok, she’s weird… yes. But she’s trying things out. None of what she is doing is for keeps. Geez, she’s only three. But why can’t I have the same latitude? Why can’t I be just figuring out who I am too? That’s also my job. I didn’t get that when I was a small child the way normal kids do. I was too busy keeping secrets and trying to be the person other people wanted me to be.
The thing is, part of who I am is a responsible adult. I need to ensure that I am meeting the specific priorities that actually matter to me and to the people and community around me. I am quite literally responsible to and for the people and things around me. I have obligations. I have no interest in walking away from my obligations. I really don’t want to leave. I have a wonderful life. But it is work. I have many jobs there. I have been hiding at home for a long time because I haven’t been up to the work of being in a community and being me and being a parent all at the same time. I’ll be frank and say that I worry about that decision. I worry about that decision partially because I know that I describe my life on the internet in ways that make some people worry about my children. I want witnesses. That sounds awful. I want there to be no way in the world for me to get away with doing anything bad to my children. I want there to really and truly be no way at all I could hurt my kids and it would be invisible. And that means a blog is not the whole answer. That means people who interact with my children a lot and watch them.
Side note: this blog post about being queer just made my day. I struggle a lot with queerness as an identity. I feel pressured to engage in homosexual sex in a way I don’t feel pressured to engage in heterosexual sex. It’s self-imposed. But that is part of me figuring out who I am. So maybe this isn’t a side note after all. I’m crying because I know I am begging for permission for spending time on thinking about myself. I want to believe it is ok for me to take up as much space as I need to take up in my day. That’s part of my job! Damnit!
Another side note: the more I think about Lady Gag’s The Edge of Glory video the more I think that woman is a fucking genius. In most of her videos she hands you a fully fleshed out STORY and you are not allowed to project your own stuff. There is no room for you in her stories. She is sharing her fantasy. Not this time. In this one there is a lot of room for the argument that she isn’t presenting a story at all. For once… she’s just … on the edge of a story with you. And this time you get to tell it. “I think that at this point in the video I would do…” And yet you can’t get away from the fact that it is a Lady Gaga video because even when she is downplaying all the stuff that is her normal trademark she is still so very her. So in this video she is inviting collaboration. I don’t think she made this video so simply because she is a cheap bastard. I think she wanted to give her fans a place to project themselves into a relationship with her. I think she is that willing to be vulnerable. And that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Seriously. This video is a love song to each and every fan. She didn’t want it to be a big dance number song. This is how she feels about every person and she wanted it to be one on one. This is how she wants to fuck every single one of her fans. I think she is a genius. She wants to feel like she is in love with each person. She is Mother Monster and she wants to be lover as well. I really think I should take the trouble to learn more about her and become more of an actual fan. Because only in talking to other fans will avoid sounding like a lunatic. ha.
I need to not focus on what other people should or shouldn’t be doing outside my family. That needs to drop off my priority list entirely. So when I notice at 11:22 that I am no longer able to coherently write I need to go to sleep instead of trolling the internet.
Noah and I tend to read different things. Sometimes he sends me a link that I find really interesting. Today’s link is about Introvert/Extrovert stuff. I’m shocked by the fact that according to his definitions:
Everyone goes through life with a picture of his or her self. Sometimes these pictures are elaborate paintings, sometimes they are stick figures, sometimes they are swirls of color. People vary. What is consistent is the sheet of glass over the picture that is protecting this core of self. For most people, when they are children their parents carry this picture for them. That’s the purpose and work of parenting. It’s to protect this tiny little person as they go through the early parts of life. My parents dropped my picture. Many times. They shattered the glass. They did their best to scatter it to the winds so that I had no protection left.
On my bad days I feel like I am on my knees in the Sahara frantically digging, looking for the lost pieces. There are some very large shards missing and I don’t know what to do about them. My picture isn’t protected. I’m not protected. I’m scared. I’m vulnerable to being destroyed.
On my good days I look at the missing pieces and I think, “Well… all I’ve got is a five gallon bucket of dry wall putty. It’s not really the best thing to use to fix glass, but it’s what I have. Maybe if I add some neat Rit dye it will at least look interesting.”
I don’t know who I was meant to be. Yes, that hurts. I often wonder what I would have turned out like if I had been loved and protected appropriately when I was a child. But that’s a door forever closed.
Today my Jenny told me that if she can read my story and feel bad so that I can feel a little better, it’s worth it. Because I’m worth going through some pain for. I’m not sure how to believe that is true. How could it ever be ok for other people to hurt because of me? How in the world could I ever be worth enough that other people should suffer just to lighten my load? My brother made it very clear that I was to shut my mouth because it is more important that other people not hurt. I have no right to make other people hurt by telling my story. The therapist I saw once before this trip told me that I have to be very careful about sharing my story because sharing stories like this traumatizes the listener and I shouldn’t do that to people. It’s why she is completely against support groups.
Shouldn’t I just shut up? Shouldn’t I try to pretend I’m just like everyone else? Isn’t that the right thing to do? Thing is, I have these really big pieces of my protective coating missing. I’m not like everyone else. It is harder to know me than it is to know other people.
And I’m not sure how to believe that is ok.