Category Archives: breaking cycles

The American Dream

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The media is telling me constantly that the American Dream is dead.  That no one can better themselves.  That no one can succeed.  I feel so confused.  Then how did I go from being the kind of kid who stole food to the kind of kid who gives people thousands of dollars when they are in a car accident just because I like them and otherwise they won’t be able to pay rent.  How did that happen?  Noah.  I married up.

I feel weird guilt and shame over having access to Noah’s money.  I feel bad talking about anything related to class because I am no longer poor.  I will never be poor again.  Noah comes from the 1%.  He isn’t there himself… yet.  But from everything I understand about human development and financial success, Noah will probably get back there.  People who grow up with that kind of money learn how to make it.  They learn how to be the kind of person who has it.  And I’m just desperate and needy and I have a broken compass.  I don’t have the ability to tell when something is “enough” sometimes.  Not money, drugs, sex … Even though I’m not an “addict” by the classic definitions I still have a broken compass.  I don’t know how much is enough or too much sometimes.

I don’t have very many friends who are willing to live like Noah and I do.  We live really far away from everything.  We live in a house that is much smaller and crappier than we could technically afford.  We live here and we will continue to live here pretty much forever because I’m not willing to spend more money than the astronomical amount already spent on this house.  Noah mortgaged over a quarter of a million dollars on this house.  I think that’s insane.  But it’s really cheap for a house here.  It will be paid off before I am 40.

I got lucky.  I married Noah.  That was kind of sort of how I reached where I am.  But I also went to college and worked.  It’s not like I would have been this wealthy as a teacher, but I would have done just fine.  I still would have felt like I made the American Dream.  Because my goals would have been smaller.  I got out of poverty.  I became the first one to be educated (high school diploma, BA, teaching credential, and 7 years of MA work).  To me that feels like I am done.  I reached the American Dream.  I went to college and I’m not in debt!  I paid it off within a year of being done with classes.  Because I was married to Noah and when I was working and he was working we had an obscene amount of money.

This is the part that is odd to me.  Noah doesn’t make more money than our friends.  Most of our friends have combined househole incomes that are much higher than ours.  We live in the bay area.  Our friends are the ones who went to fancy schools and became computer people.  But no one else I know thinks they are filthy rich.  People complain about not being able to do everything they want or having to compromise on things.

I feel so confused.  I have to wonder if my compass is the broken one.  What do people think the American Dream means?  Do you think it means everyone gets to retire at 35 to free health care forever?  Permanent jobs with a high chance of retirement?  I don’t consider it part of the American Dream that people have to own a house or make a lot of money.  I consider the American Dream to be the willingness to change your stars.

Everyone is born with a future that looks like it is obviously theirs.  They can take it if they want.  Or they can go make their own future.  They can be whoever they want to be.  They can rise in the world.  It doesn’t mean that everyone will be filthy rich, but people who hustle can improve their lot.  I’m told it doesn’t work that way for everyone.  That I am a fluke.

I get told that a lot.  Everything about me seems to be a fluke.  Why did it work out for me then?  Why do so many things work for me that other people say cannot be made to work ever ever ever ever?  For me this is part of feeling invisible.  I never know how to respond when I read things that say it is not possible for me to have done what I’ve done.  Do you want me to burst into flames?

Whenever I think of the American Dream I think of teaching The Great Gatsby.  Gatsby wanted Daisy.  He wanted to be rich too…. but mostly he just wanted Daisy.  He got rich because he was trying to earn Daisy’s love.  Noah seems to feel the same way about me, which is odd.  It’s weird living with someone who thinks he has to earn me.  I’m shit, aren’t I?  Why would someone want to earn me?  Does that mean you try to coat yourself more heavily in flies?  Of course not.

Noah sees me as high status.  That is the American Dream, really.  It is the ability to change your social status.  I don’t understand for the life of me why anyone would associate me with being high status.  Ok, I have access to a hefty bank account.  I didn’t have that before Noah, though.  Why does that raise my status?  Why do I magically become a better person?

Why will people look at me when I am dressed nicely.  Why will people talk to me more now, even though I look increasingly weird?  Sometimes it seems like there is an aura that comes along with financial safety.  And other people recognize it.  It is a relieving of anxiety.  It’s practically a difference in smell.  As if people who have to worry more have a more acrid body odor.  I don’t think that’s literally  true or real.  But there is some strange wall.

The idea of the American Dream mixed with being white trash is the crux.  It’s about being told that I can’t do things that I already have done so fuck you very much.  It’s about feeling like it’s not ok to be who I am because I am weird.  Because I have done things other people haven’t, for good or bad.  Because I am just plain different and I don’t know why.  It is hard to talk about difference without making it sound like being superior or better or aggrandizement.

Some people like chocolate.  I don’t.  I like vanilla.  For variety, maybe peppermint.  Does that mean that vanilla is truly qualitatively better because I like it more?  Demonstrably not.  I don’t think I am a better person than most other people.  Better than my sister, yes.  Better than mom, probably.  Other people?  Enh, not so much with the comparison.  I don’t know what road they walked.  I don’t know who tried to knock them down or how.  I’m not better.  But I have done different things.

I want to understand why I make different choices.  I want to understand that about myself.  I want to be able to hack the system.  I have big life goals.  If I want to reach them I am going to have to work very hard for a very long time.  I cannot believe the attitude that it is hopeless.  I can’t.  I can’t have the feeling about myself that seems to be common for my generation.  I think I can do fucking anything.  I already have.  I don’t identify with deserving anything.  I don’t think I deserve universal health care.  I think that when I needed insurance I had to find weird jobs that would offer insurance that I didn’t really want to do.  But I had different options.

I benefit from enormous privilege.  I’m sure that most of the reason I was able to succeed is just because I am white and slightly above average in attractiveness.  I’m not stunning.  I’m not gorgeous.  But I’m cute.  And I’m bubbly.  And I’m a hard worker and a people person.  I had advantages.

I talk about being white trash because I don’t think it is possible for someone of color to do the same things I did because I see how the deck is stacked against my friends.  They are fighting different wars.  They have to fight at all times covertly because they are watched.  They can’t directly cause fights the way I can get away with.  I feel deeply uncomfortable with this knowledge.  That as I sit here in my smug pretention of “Well I succeeded!” Yeah… I did because of an intersection of lack and privilege.  I don’t know that any part of my life is relevant to anyone else.

Who the fuck am I to talk about succeeding when I had the dog bite settlement that paid for an awful lot of my life.  When I smugly talk about cobbling together insurance I honestly feel kind of sick to my stomach.  I did it.  But I always had $14,400/year to live on.  Ever since I was 18.  Because I was attacked as a kid and half my face was ripped off.  I had a good lawyer.  I think I only had a good lawyer because I am white.

The girl who was born across the street from me.  B.  Her father was my lawyer.  He was my very best friends father.  B wasn’t hanging out with the non-white kids on the street (her New York Jewish parents moved her out of that neighborhood when we were four).  He is an excellent lawyer.  I don’t even think he took his full fee out of my settlement.  It was less than $100k in settlement but he invested it well for me.  I took that money and I changed my whole life.

My brother Jimmy was hit by a car when he was a kid and got a settlement when he was 18.  He spent the money on a raised truck, a killer stereo (that was stolen a couple months later), and a lot of drugs.  It was gone in a few months.

My brother Tommy was hit by a car when he was a kid and got a settlement.  Technically there is $6,000 left of it somewhere.  I’m thinking about claiming it as my father’s dependent.  As an inheritance. Jimmy calls it dirty money and says he doesn’t want it.  I think that money is fucking useful.

I suppose at this point my dream is to stop feeling so angry.  I want to be able to talk and think without being so full of bad feelings.  My stomach hurts.  I’m really tired of my stomach hurting.  I’m not special. I’m not better.  But I did things that other people couldn’t do.  I feel like I should be proud of myself.  And I simultaneously feel like being proud of myself is somehow wrong or bad.  I should be ashamed of myself because I think I have done anything worth noticing.  What kind of self absorbed bitch am I?  Who the fuck am I to look down my fucking nose at anyone else?

I’m not looking down my nose.  I’m trying to figure out why I made different choices.  I wish I understood better when the choice moments were.  I am not responsible for where I ended up entirely.  It’s accident as much as planning.  But if I wasn’t in this house right now having a good life I would be in a different house having a good life.  My teaching job would still be stable financially even if the work was shitty.  I lived in an apartment I could afford on $20k/year and by now I would be making about $60k.  It would have taken a while, but I probably would have bought a house in cash in ten years.  About when I’m going to pay this one off instead.

Because somewhere, at some point I crossed a line.  I will never be poor again.  I have lost the habits.  I make different choices.  I can be broke.  It feels like a difference in attitude.  Do you know why I am not worried about my ability to succeed?  Because I walked into my first real job interview and said, “I know I am the first person you are interviewing and you have three days of interviews to go but if you don’t hire me today I am not available.  Sorry.”  I was offered the job an hour later.  I take a lot of pride in that.

Because the only time in my life I have ever failed at something I wanted to do was passing the MA final exam.  And really I probably psyched myself out so bad that I’m not surprised I failed.  Ugh.  It’s obvious I know the material but I can’t write enough for academia.  I never wanted to be part of academia, not really.  Having an MA would change my life.  I didn’t want it bad enough to make that change.  That is how I feel about it.  Almost like the lit MA was wrong for me.  It would have changed my life choices in a way that would have been ultimately less helpful.

I’m starting to wonder if someday there is social work in my future.  That would be a different MA.  Ugh.  I’m not sure I can handle more school.  Ever.

I feel weird because I am alive during a Revolution.  These are interesting times.  And I don’t feel like I have much to say as part of the Revolution.  That’s weird and uncomfortable.  It’s not like I’m watching Fox news or agreeing with them.  But I don’t agree with a lot of the politics I’m hearing lately.  My opinions are just different.

I want to stop being so narcissistic and notice that other people aren’t as similar to one another as I project.  I’m not a special snowflake.  I’m not more different.  But I think I am.  This is where the hubris comes in.  How can you believe with intensity that you are different without believing it is superior?  Do I think that other people should try to be like me?  No.  Things that work for me won’t work for most other people.  I don’t think other people would be ok with the amount of intense emotion my life contains.  I get the impression other people are more calm.

I feel like the American Dream was always a sham.  Look at Death of a Salesman.  Right there.  He believed that who you know and charisma will get you where you need to know.  It won’t.  I only occasionally have charisma, mostly I alienate the shit out of people.  But I work fucking hard.  I work hard and I know how to game the system.  I wish I could teach other people the rules of the system so they could game it as well.  I don’t think this should be a unique ability.

As crazy, as unstable, as difficult, as confrontational as I am… I do know how to shut up when necessary.  I just don’t think it is necessary nearly so often as other people do.  I, in fact, think that everyone should make a lot more waves than they do.

I don’t think I have “figured things out” or done things in some magical right way that other people don’t do.  I think there is a way of developing your intuition so that you learn which choices are really not safe.  I avoid the unsafe twinges.  I kind of wonder if that is how I survived.  I was afraid at the right times.

I don’t think that people necessarily understand that rage is often, at least for me, the flip side of terror.  I spend my life horribly terrified that something bad is going to happen to me again.  I am genuinely scared.  I shake.  It makes me angry that I feel this way.  That I am so scared of everyone and everything in the world.  I don’t like that when people say things that make me feel invisible I want to hit them.  Obviously I don’t do so.  That would be problematic in a whole new exciting way.  But I’m often not nice.

Nice.  There is that word again.  I wish I was unoffensive.  I wish I was nice.  Somehow it is magically better to be nice.  There is that American Dream again.  You are supposed to be a nice, quiet, middle class person.  But I’m not.  I’m loud.  I’m brashy.  I’m aggressive.  I’m trashy.  I like loud upbeat country music.  And Lady Gaga and Pink.  I like Steel Magnolias unapologetically.  I grew up rural and don’t know city manners.  I really don’t understand why my city gives a shit if I grow vegetables in my front yard and I think they can fucking sue me if they want me to stop.

Being nice feels like lying.  It feels like constant low level lying.  It means you never tell the full truth because the full truth is often uncomfortable.  You always leave stuff out so that other people never have to feel bad.  I FEEL BAD MOST OF THE TIME.  Why shouldn’t I tell people the truth about how I feel?  Why should bad feelings be hidden?  Should they?  Is that what people want?

Let me tell you, if there is a time and a place where it is appropriate to sit around and tell stories about incest I’ve never found it.  Even therapy is only kind of sort of the place.  Because just sitting around and telling the stories seems to be un-useful.  But I sit around and drop those mentions into casual conversations.  Because that is what is in my head.  And it alienates people.  It’s my truth.  It’s my story.  I’m not actually hurting anyone by letting people know it exists.  But it feels not nice.

It is because I think my mental health is more important than other people feeling comfortable that I describe myself as white trash.  There is a self absorption that I witnessed in my family.  A way of seeing yourself as the central figure in this terrible tragedy.  A way of acting like everyone in the whole world is out to get you and everything bad that happens to you is part of this giant conspiracy.  Everyone is out to get us!  They all hate us!  They think they are better than us just because they have money!  Well fuck them!  We at least have pride!

It’s weird and kind of sick.  There is an abnegation of responsibility for everything that happens to you that I don’t understand.  Sometimes I want to slap my sister and say, “Ok so our dad raped you.  Time to stop dating men who are drug addicts because you are trying to get daddy to love you.”  That.  That is a lot of what this comes down to.

Do you know how I survived?  Do you know how I attained the American Dream?  Because people told me that I was shit and I didn’t deserve it.  And my response was to fight back.  It’s not that I think I deserve anything.  I don’t think I have stuff because I deserve it.  I have stuff (college education, money, no car loan) because I made them my top priorities and I didn’t let anything stop me.  I want to say that nothing catastrophic happened to prevent it, but that’s a lie.  Tommy’s accident.  All the rapes.  Going to 25 schools before dropping out of high school at 16.  I did have catastrophic things happen to try and stop me as a kid.  But you just keep getting up and doing things.

And then some day you are 18.  And you leave.  And you never look back.  And with every choice I make I think, “What would my sister do?”  Then I do the opposite.  That’s not actually true, but it’s kind of funny to think about.  I did get out.  Do you know what my family gave me for high school graduation?  Pots, pans, a crock pot, towels.  They wanted me the fuck out.  They wanted me to go.  Because I was different.  Because I caused problems.

I don’t even really feel like my family is white trash, per se.  When I’m being an asshole I include them in the collateral damage.  Mostly they don’t want to be like me though.  They have other dreams.  They are hick and redneck and poor.  But they aren’t white trash.  Mostly they don’t have my aggression.  My sister does.  I would say without reservation that she is also white trash.  Not my aunt or my cousins.  They are just standing too close to evil, manipulative people.

So maybe being white trash is relegated to being an incest survivor?  That’s not really it, but it factors in. It’s so many things all at once.  It’s not one thing.  When people feel defensive and try to tell me that my qualifiers aren’t the right ones because they also fit those qualifications… Oh gosh.  I’m not trying to make you feel defensive.  I’m not trying to be not nice.  I don’t know that at the end my definition of white trash will ever be useful for anyone but me.  I’m not sure it is applicable.  Ok, for my sister too.  But past us?  I can’t know enough of someones story to judge.

I say I am white trash because I am always going to say things about myself that offend the shit out of the people around me.  They will always feel hostile about me saying the stuff I’m saying.  I can only control whether I say it or not.  And sometimes I can’t control whether I say it or not.  I don’t really understand why trauma has affected me in these ways.

I listen to Adele singing Someone Like You a lot lately.  I’m scared that some day my mom will show up on my doorstep.  I’m afraid she won’t.

“I hate to turn up out of the blue uninvited
But I couldn’t stay away, I couldn’t fight it.
I had hoped you’d see my face and that you’d be reminded
That for me it isn’t over.”

The problem with having PTSD is that it is never over.  I have to deal with what happened to me forever.  It will never be over.  I will never be over being a survivor of incest.  I will never get over being a dirty little street kid.  I will never be over being moved around constantly as a child and being prevented from properly bonding with people.  I will never be able to have that stop being true.  I will always have this part of me that feels empty and bad and like I am shit.

It’s not over for me.  And it spurs me.  It makes me angry.  It gives me wings.  And I flew away.  For all that it isn’t over, it is.  I have this husband who thinks I hung the moon.  I have wonderful children who love me and adore me.  I have already made other peoples lives better.

But as I watch the sun come up I question what this American Dream was meant to be anyway.  It’s not the house that matters.  It’s not the money.  The freedom I have is the freedom to say, “No.  You cannot invalidate me.  I exist.  I am different from you.  My life experiences have shaped me.  And I’m ok.  I do not need to change.”  I’m white trash and I’m proud of it.  I’m proud of my ability to fight and over come adversity.  I’m fucking proud of myself.  I think I’m bad ass.  Noah thinks so too.  Does it really matter if anyone else does?

No.  But that’s my American Dream.  I don’t abandon my self label with my change in financial status because that would be too convenient for everyone around me.  They would like to pretend that people like me don’t exist.  I feel like most of the people who are big parts of my life are fairly sheltered people.  Even the ones who were abused tended to grow up in mostly safe, stable places.  They had dads who were emotionally abusive assholes.  That kind of thing.  But they had consistency.  They still only know people who are mostly like them.  Except for me.

I still have to say that I am white trash because people try to excuse my behavior as being some sort of byproduct of unavoidable trauma, the poor dear.  People love me and want to comfort me and tell me that things that happen to me aren’t my fault.  I’m a victim.  Well, sometimes.  But an awful lot of my current problems are my fault.  They are my fault because I choose to be aggressive and hostile.  Because I choose to remain white trash instead of catapulting to being middle class.  It’s kind of a choice and kind of not a choice.  I’m not middle class anyway, I’m nouveau riche.  I skipped the middle class.  That is kind of weird in and of itself, isn’t it?

When I try to think about what I want from my life I’m pretty happy though.  Everything I want is something that I could have.  I want to write and grow.  I want deeper friendships.  I want to have hard conversations with my friends about class.  I love my friends.  I want to find the ability in myself to feel like I have enough.  Like I am not still yearning.  Really, there isn’t much left that I have to do.  Write.  Publish.  Wash.  Repeat.

But first, I have to go cuddle my perfect daughter.

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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.

Choosing life

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What I like the most about Harm Reduction Therapy is that you start with the basic premise that you don’t want to die.  If I really and truly wanted to be dead, I would be dead right now.  Instead I have chosen life, over and over.  Just over a year ago I had a chance to die peacefully in my bed holding my last precious gift to the world.  It would have made for a touching movie and all.  But I wasn’t ready.  When my midwife said, “If you close your eyes you won’t wake again” and I practically asked for toothpicks to keep my eyelids open.

Most of the time I struggle with ensuring there is more than 50% of me that wants to live.  It’s hard to explain what this feels like.  When you experience a fight or flight reaction in your body because you are afraid, one of the first things it does is cause digestive problems because your digestive system gets put into a holding pattern while your body focuses on other things.  It’s quite brilliant, actually.  But it’s uncomfortable after years of daily, continual small startles that shut off my digestive system.  One of the ways this manifests for me is burning, awful diarrhea.  Cheers.

I want to stop startling.  I want to stop being afraid.  I want to stop being in pain.  I’m not entirely sure how to go about the whole thing.  On one hand I have 30 years of establishing this pattern.  On the other hand, it’s not like it’s been all the time in a long time.  I just have a little bit of reducing my stress levels left.  The parts where you stop feeling where your friends hate you and want to attack you.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the gaslighting article I read recently.  And this one about how “citation needed” is not actually an argument.  I spend a lot of time with agressive geek boys.  I spend a lot of time with my stomach hurting because I feel very uncomfortable with the level of agression I need to display in order to be comfortable around many of my male friends.  They expect me to rise to their leve of sarcasm and snottiness.  Sometimes I do.  Often I feel attacked instead.  It’s not exactly a gentle friendship approach.  I feel weird because I don’t know how much space in this area it’s actually ok to demand from a friend.

I am currently having a hard time with a friend because his casual conversational gaslighting makes me so angry that I can’t handle being around him without spending most of the time screaming at him that he is an asshole.  I don’t go through most of my life feeling angry and screaming at people that they are assholes.  I truly don’t.  There is more than one person in the world who causes me to feel this way, but it’s probably far less than 10% of the population.

Why do I feel so guilty about getting angry with how they treat me?  I don’t like the way that I am treated.  I’m allowed to get angry about it.  Why am I so closed off to the idea that it’s ok to be angry?  I’ve had a lot of people mention in my life that they think I am angry person.  It’s never said with a tone of approval.  Many of my friends have casually told me they think I am really angry.  It comes up.  I don’t know that there is judgment intended, but I get told a lot that my reactions are irrational or overly sensitive.

I’m kind of ready to tear down the rational tree and use it for firewood.  I’m starting to feel like the obsession with “rationality” is just one way of manipulating people.  If you didn’t have the experience in front of other people in a verifiable way then your lifetime experiences should not be relevant if they are outside the common pool.  Freak.  Why don’t you act like everyone else.

Because I haven’t met very many people who can sit down and trade me story for story.  I have never met anyone who has a lifetime total of more weird traumatic shit happening to them.  I don’t say this in pride.  I set the bell curve on weird, apparently, for the people I know.  I have to believe that there are people in the world who survive as many or worse things.  I have to have faith that people have survived worse than me.  That gives me a path to follow.  There have to be people who have as much right to be angry as me.  I am angry.  I am very angry.

I think it is right that I am angry.  I am right to be angry about the things that were done to me.  I’m right to be angry when a friend says something rude but covers with, “It was just a joke.  You are too sensitive.”  Actually my level of sensitive is exactly where it should be.  You are a fucking asshole.  But how do you say that to your closest friends?  They have sensitivities of their own.

How do you have a conversation with someone who was bullied as a child and say, “You learned some of those behavior patterns a little too well.”  I’m really tired of being at the bottom of the shit hill.  As a child I was taught that the way to get out of from being at the bottom of the shit hill was to find someone lower in status and dump all the shit on them.  That was my role in my family.  I’m tired of playing that role with my friends too.  I’m tired of feeling like I have to shut my mouth and put my head down because I am too angry and I should stop being angry and learn to just accept people as they are.  Fuck that.

I think I’m ready to say that gaslighting isn’t ok.  I consider it abuse.  It is crazy making.  I’ve had enough god damn crazy making.  I get to say, “Actually you don’t get to decide for me whether or not I get to have an opinion.  You are not the judge and jury on “rational””.  It doesn’t matter if my side of an argument is “rational” if it is true.  Many things are not rational and still true.  Pi is irrational and you don’t see anyone trying to banish it.

Whether or not my feelings, reactions, thoughts, etc are rational is not a useful part of the conversation.  And derailing the conversation to whether or not my feelings are acceptable to have derails the conversation from whether or not someone else’s behavior is reasonable.  Obviously opinions will vary.  Where do I get to set my lines though?

I think that next time I go see my friend I have to be in my own car.  Instead of getting angry when he dismisses me I think I will get up and leave.  I’m done with accepting that in my life.  I’m done with biting my tongue when someone who “loves” me tells me that I am over reacting and I need to chill.  I’m done.  I choose to live.  It isn’t living to be angry like this.  It isn’t living to feel like I have to carefully monitor every single fucking word out of my mouth so that it is all coded in strong enough language so that I am not dismissed instantly by someone who thinks he is just smarter and better than me.

That codependent chicklist I was looking at?  That’s my relationship with this friend.  I can’t be in control all of the time and I don’t want to be.  I want to stop feeling like I have to control our friendship in order for him to stop talking to me like I am shitty and stupid.  I want to stop feeling like I have to carefully pick my words to ensure that the evening goes how I want it to.  I want to stop feeling like I have to restrict the conversation to like three topics or I will feel like shit at the end because I am tired of feeling berated.

I have done the cooking and cleaning and serving and tongue biting thing to preserve this relationship for a long time.  I’m not sure why.  Because I feel an emotional connection.  I feel an emotional connection with my mother too, I’m not talking to her.  I think it is hilarious how people tell me that our chosen family bonds are strong enough to weather anything.  I always want to snicker.  It’s really cute that people trust me like that.  I’ve already walked away from my entire biological family.  There are at least a dozen, probably more, people in the world who are my actual “family”.  And I don’t believe those ties are important.  Why do my friends think they are in a different position?

I’ve read a fair bit about how severe trauma makes it more difficult to bond.  I could move away from the bay area tomorrow.  I’d miss people, sure.  But I would be able to find other people for the level of friendship I have here.  I’m confident.  Especially if I took my household with me.  I don’t see other people much.  I could cut contact.  I don’t want to.

If I want to have healthy relationships with people.  If I want to have a healthy life… it involves committing to relationships and situations.  That is what keeps people balanced and here.  That’s what choosing life means.  I choose my friends because they make me think and work at being a better person.  What should I do when a given friend is not encouraging me to be a better person?  What do I do when a friend wants me to stay the same person I was when I was 19.  I’m kind of tired of the sarcasm, bitterness, and constant verbal sparring.  It’s not my culture.  Yeah, I married a geek.  He adapts.  Noah doesn’t bait me and he is only sarcastic in very gentle ways.  He’s nice to me.  I can live with Noah day in, day out and never be made to feel smaller.

Noah doesn’t want me to feel smarter than him.  He doesn’t crow when he is right, which is a good thing because I would get nasty fast.  You see, he’s right a lot.  Probably most of the time.  I rarely argue a factual point with him.  I hate being proven wrong.  However, in with his being-rightness, he has a lot of humility.  He doesn’t think he is a better person because he knows things I don’t.  That’s the difference between him and most of the geeks I know.  That’s why I married him.  He doesn’t think he is better or smarter than me, even though I think he is.  I usually feel like men look down on me, especially when they know a lot of things I don’t.

Noah believes that I have equally valuable knowledge in areas he doesn’t.  He trusts me.  When we are talking about a topic where I have more subject knowledge than him… he might ask probing questions about the nature of the support of my knowledge… but that’s it.  Even when he tells me I’m wrong it is very clear he is challenging an opinion not me.  I feel respected.  I feel like Noah married me because he wanted an equal partner to go through life with.

That’s not how it feels with other people.  It feels like a constant jockying for “who is right”.  Not all people, of course.  My assholes.  I’m vacillating about how to communicate this best.  It’s mostly my assholes but most everyone does at least a little of this.  My assholes are really bad.  They bait everything.  You can’t say the sky is blue without them challenging it… why?  Just to be funny?  It’s not funny.  It makes you look like a dick.  And I’m sick of it.

I’m getting kind of tired of being baited.  I’ve had enough this lifetime.  I’m tired of ending my time with my “friends” angry and hostile.  If I feel like that after spending time with someone… it isn’t fun.  And I should stop doing it.  I am not ok with constant dick contest challenges to everything I say.  I get enough of that with Shanna.

Then it comes down to the guilt of holding boundaries.  If you hold boundaries people will get mad at you and tell you that your boundaries are in the wrong place.  I can promise you that the person I am talking to will get upset if I just up and walk out ten minutes into our next hanging out time.  The hanging out time that I haven’t scheduled.  Because I’m not over being mad about the last hang out.  It was almost a month ago.  This isn’t good.

I feel like staying on this merry go round isn’t choosing life.  It’s getting derailed.  But I’m kind of tired of walking away from people who love me.  Everyone fucks up.  I can’t give up on everyone, right?  Isn’t this what battered women feel?  I love him but I feel bad when we are together.  I love him but I’m tired of him making me feel small and stupid with his casual comments about how irrational I am.  I am tired of being brushed off because obviously my opinion is worth less because I was traumatized as a child.  It’s a great dismissive tactic.  “Oh you are just over reacting because you had trauma as a child.”  No.  I am not over reacting you gigantic piece of shit.  My reaction is totally appropriate.  You are an asshole.

I’m tired of feeling like I have to come up with extensive justifications before my feelings magically transform into being “ok” because *you* agree with them.  Who died and made you in charge of rationality?  I don’t think I actually expect people to do only what I say.  Noah sure doesn’t.  Sarah doesn’t.  Shanna doesn’t.  Calli doesn’t.  I love them and let them go about their day.  Because them going about their day never makes me feel small and bad and stupid and inconsequential.  If my friends make me feel that way (yeah yeah no one can “make” you feel anything) then maybe I shouldn’t hang out with them.  Maybe the word “friend” is misapplied.

How do you decide if behavior is too much in a friendship?  How invested do you have to be before you will put up with anything because he means so well.  He’s convinced he is being friendly and that kind of mocking/joking/baiting is awesome.  I disagree.  Does my opinion matter?  Do I get to have any influence over his behavior?  No.  I can’t control him.  But I can walk away.  I kind of feel like that has to be my next step.  I have tried hard to control his behavior and make it “ok” for me.  It’s not.

The next time I see him I am driving.  I am not going to try and control his behavior.  I’m not going to continue the endless begging I have done for ten years to try and get him to stop being nasty.  I’ll just get up and leave.  It doesn’t matter if I’ve been there for 2 minutes or 2 hours.  I’m done talking to him about this.  That is what choosing life is in this situation.  I can’t “make” him be nice.  I can’t.  But I can get up and walk away and say it isn’t my problem.  If he considers his behavior jim-dandy that’s fine.  I don’t.  I can control whether or not I listen to it.

Honestly that would probably be a good approach for him too if I am a jack ass and start bitching at him like a harpy.  I don’t pretend I’m innocent.  I’ve done my share of bullying.  I’m ready to stop though.  I can’t push him into being what I want him to be.  He’s there or he isn’t.

It’s hard reaching this point of resignation.  He is obviously committed enough to the friendship that he is making grandios statements about how nothing could end our friendship because we are so close.  It’s like he’s never met me or listened to any of my stories.  I can end any relationship if I don’t think it is good for me.  I do not actually feel life long compulsion to maintain relationships “just because”.  Everyone else was raised with that.  Not me.  I wonder how sociopathic that is.  I don’t feel like I have to stay with Noah.  I want to.  I could leave.  Easily.  I don’t want to.  I like him.  I like being around him.  He makes me feel good about myself.

If my friends don’t make me feel good about myself, maybe they aren’t such good friends.  Where is that line though?  Where do I get to say, “Well obviously he still enjoys my company and gets positive from this interaction… but I feel drained and angry.  I have nothing to spare.  I’m done.”

I don’t exactly have a lot of spare energy or patience in my life.  I need my friends to be easy.  My kids require all the patience I have in life.  I barely manage to be civil with Noah and Sarah with their (patient, gently worded) requests and conversation on many days.  Why in the fuck should I turn around and have a social engagement that fills me with rage and frustration for over a week?  I don’t believe that is all my fault.  I don’t feel that way with very many people.  Just my assholes.

I can’t be at the bottom of the shit hill anymore.  I’m done.  I’m tired of nasty comments and casual put downs.  I’m tired of being made to feel less-than.  If you spend your whole god damn life in a dick contest trying to prove that you are smarter, better, more knowledgable… and you are going to prove it by making everyone else look dumb then you aren’t a man.  You are an obnoxious little boy and I’m sick of it.  I’m done being patient with adults who won’t grow up and learn to be civil.  If you want to stay with the good-ol’-boy network that tolerates that shit from guys, fine.  I’m done.

Choosing to be alive means consciously trying to avoid pain.  I’ve spent a lot of time being angry about this friendship.  I don’t want to just dump him.  There is a bond there.  But I need to keep it very distant.  And I need to just get up and walk away from him when I’m getting angry.  If I don’t he will never believe that I am serious.  He’s gotten away with this shit for over ten fucking years.  No wonder he thinks it is ok.  You don’t convince someone that their behavior is a problem by biting your tongue and putting up with it.

The thing is, I’m not an innocent victim.  He hasn’t abused me.  We have a mutually broken dynamic.  It’s not his fault and he hasn’t done anything terrible.  It doesn’t have to be abuse and terrible for me to say no more.  I’m allowed to do that at any point.  Truly.

Anxiety, spike.

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Today I am going to go see a psychiatrist.  The medical group I work with made it very difficult to get this appointment.  I was interrogated by multiple people and it was very obvious that if I didn’t answer in a way they liked I was going to be locked up whether I like it or not.  Self-harming is illegal, you know.  It’s pretty terrifying to me that I have to be careful in how I word things or I won’t be coming home today.  The terror is enough that I kind of want to cancel the appointment and continue to hide in my house forever smoking pot.  At least right now I don’t have to worry about someone else deciding they know what is best for me and forcing my lock-step through their program again.

For me the institution and the group home and public school were all pretty much cut from the same cloth.  Obviously there were degrees of seriousness for how they slapped people down for stepping out of line.  For the whole god damn rest of my life “help” means people doing things to me against my will.  That is what help is.  It doesn’t matter if I am crazy or sane, it doesn’t influence how people treat me.  Do you know what does influence how people treat me?  How much they actually listen to me before they start acting.

I don’t know how to make any part of my life or experiences or needs or whatever into brief little sound bites that keep me out of trouble.  That is a lot of what other people seem to have that I don’t.  It’s not that no one else had anything shitty happen to them.  It’s that no one else seems to have diarrhea of the mouth and the compulsive desire to tell everyone in the world, “My dad raped me and I still can’t sleep at night because of it.  It’s not so bad really.  I can’t imagine what it would be like to live in a world where I don’t wake up at 3 am unable to go back to sleep because I am no longer stoned and I can’t bear the nightmares.  Luckily I went to bed at 7 last night.  I got in a lot of sleep.  It seems to be the only way to hack the system.

I am afraid that if I tell the truth today I won’t be coming home.  I have responsibilities.  I have people to care for.  An institution isn’t a “break” it is a horrible rending and tearing of not allowing me to have contact with the few people in the world who love me and are nice to me.  Please God, I never want to be in an institution again.  Never.  Never.  I am really afraird of talking to a psychiatrist today.  I know that if I’m honest about how I have been since April they will talk to me about my “options” by which tell me what they are considering forcing me to do.  Because the minute I walk into this doctors care I no longer get to have the final say about my mental health.

I feel like I am about to puke on the floor.  I have six hours of terror to get through until I meet this doctor.  How this goes depends on the psychiatrist I see.  If this is an open minded person who believes there are many roads to an acceptably good life, I might get some actual help.  If this person believes that all people must be like _____ or they need “help” I might be walking into an actually dangerous situation for me.  And I don’t know in advance what kind of person this is.  And dear god the power she will weird.  I’m actually more scared because it is a woman.  Despite the fact that every sexual assault was perpetuated by men, I still feel much more terrified of women.  Women are meaner.  Women hurt other women and girls just so they get the rush of feeling bigger.  I have some issues with women.

I am aware that the most likely result of today is that I will come home with a prescription of some sleep and/or anxiety medication.  I’m willing to bet money that the doctor will be fine.  That I will talk about my horror story of a life, say that I self harm in limited ways because of a life of horror and right now the pressure is simply too much for me to cope with “healthy” coping mechanisms on my own and I need help.  This doctor would probably be ok with drugging me into a zombie state for the rest of my life if I need that to stop being angry all the time.  I don’t want that either.

What do I want?  What do I hope for?  If I don’t know I can’t ask.  I want to sleep better, longer, and in the middle of the night rather than through the evening.  I miss Noah on nights I go to bed with Calli.  I want to be able to control my anger.  I want to not hide at home because I am terrified people will dislike me and be mean to me.  I am so afraid of people being mean to me.  Sometimes I think I have picked the wrong friends groups.

People I know hurt my feelings a lot.  I’m really over sensitive.  I try hard to keep it as just my problem because I know I am over sensitive.  But that means I don’t go out.  Because people hurt me casually without noticing.  I notice.  I stop going out.  This is the flip side of “blunt”.  An awful lot of things that people say attached to the phrase, “I’m just being honest” are awful.  Awful.  Awful.  “I don’t think you are a bad person or anything, I just think it is a sign that you have no respect for yourself if you have slept with so many people.”  I don’t think that is true.  If it was true, thank you for telling me that you think I treat me like a piece of shit because I don’t have the same attitude about sex that you have.  Obviously us whores are lower life forms.

I do speak negatively about women who have sex with the guys I sleep with.  Not to put them down, but rather I refer to us collectively as whores.  I’ve noticed lately that I am inadvertently thinking negative-ish things about women I really have no negative thoughts by.  Especially over the past three years, I just don’t have negative thoughts about the women Noah sleeps with.  D is not a whore.  She’s a very nice lady who sometimes sleeps with my husband when the idea of sex makes me cranky.  The only exchange is stress relief.  That’s not being a whore.  It’s being an unconventionally awesome friend.

I have some mixed feelings about sex.  I can’t imagine why.

That last sentence makes me smile.  People like to talk about the things that are important to them.  Most people seem to find books, movies, their kids, their jobs, and their hobbies to be the extent of what they do with their talking.  I’m important to me.  Trying to figure out how to hack my system and behave how I want to behave is my hobby.  Other people seem to not have the road blocks to existing that I have.  I can get things done.  I can be productive.  I can even seem happy.  But I have to rig the game.

I can visit with friends.  I can deal with all the stuff that needs to be done to keep two little kids growing like weeds and healthy.  I can’t go meet new people by myself.  I can’t handle things that feel high pressure.  New people are terrifying.  New people represent this constant low level risk of nastiness.  Either I will be stupid enough to say something about myself and they will be disgusted and not like me or I will be stupid and comment on their life choices in a way that is inappropriate.  The internet is not doing wonders for my social skills.

There is a local meet up group for home schoolers.  Sarah tried to go to one of their events yesterday and missed them in the crowd.  The organizer sent me this email asking if Sarah is…. part of my family?  Because then she can just be accepted into the group instead of being a provisional member.  They’ve met me and the kids and if she’s attached to us she is obviously not a predator or creepy person.  They don’t have to meet her first if she is attached to us.

That honestly makes me feel weird.  I told her, “Yes Sarah is part of our family.  I’m sorry we don’t get to more events.  That is when the baby naps.  We are hoping that now that she has crossed into toddlerhood that naps will drift and we will be able to come to a lot more events.”  That’s a good way of not sounding like a crazy fuck up.  “Actually I usually skip your events because there is this one cunt I am afraid of meeting up with and it keeps me at home shaking with terror.”  You know that friend who dumped me with the nasty dear Jane email?  She’s active all over the bay area with anything vaguely crunchy and parenting.  I don’t really want to run into someone who will tell me that I am such a bad parent she doesn’t want to know me.

All of these things are related and combined in my head.  People are terrifying.  At any random moment people who are staunchly my “friend” will turn on me and start telling me how bad or gross or wrong or… something.  I’m inappropriate.  I should be kept away from decent people because I am so bad bad bad.  That’s why I am so afraid of the institution.  It feels like just one more way that society wants “people like me” to be eliminated.  If I can’t control myself well enough to pretend that I am just like everyone else they are going to put me in a place where I will god damn get control.

It’s hard to explain to people what the institution was like for me.  You can’t go to the bathroom without permission.  You can’t eat without permission.  When food is put in front of you, you are required to eat all of it or you get punished.  A lot of the girls in psych wards are there for eating disorders.  As a result every person there is given the same food and you have to eat every bite whether you like it or not.  I was told very clearly that if I refused food I would be strapped to a table and a feeding tube would be inserted.  That was what I was told when I said I didn’t want to eat the scrambled eggs because they were too soft and I thought they tasted bad.  All of my life I have hated scrambled eggs that were too soft.  I like them burned.  I like them absolutely hard.  The institution made them really runny and slimy in a huge batch.  They wouldn’t even microwave the fucking things for me to cook them more.  The employee told me that I had to eat all of it or I would be forced to eat through a tube.  When I started eating with tears running down my face and I was actively fighting my gag reflex… the employee smiled and called me a good girl.

That’s fucked up.  I’m sorry.  That is not about helping me be “better”.  That is about helping to break my spirit and force me to conform to someone else’s idea of being a good person.  Seriously?  My mental health is related to me being able to choke down under cooked eggs?  Why in the fuck was that important?  Why was that a battle?  Why did I have to eat or risk more invasive medical procedures?  Why should I believe anything other than Western Medicine is Evil.  Giving that much power to people is wrong.  No one should have been able to do that to me.

I’m sorry, but suicide and self-harming should not be punished the way they are.  Do you know why people are punished this way?  Because it is disruptive to society for people to be unpredictable.  People who commit suicide or self-harm are likely to be different and cause waves.  We certainly must stomp that right the fuck out.  No disruptions of routine.  Everything.Must.Flow.Like.Clockwork.  Or you are bad.  And we will force you back into line.

You can’t eat when you want to.  You can’t go to the bathroom when you want to.  You can’t sleep when you want to.  You can’t play games when you want to.  You can’t listen to music when you want to.  You can’t decide who you talk to.  You can’t decide what you eat.  You can’t decide what clothes you wear.  You can’t decide how to treat your body–your decisions are substandard.

That’s what an institution is like.  You are expected to slowly shuffle from activity to activity (eating is an activity) exactly how and when they say.  You cannot question anything.  You cannot have a body that likes to eat every four hours instead of eating at 6:30, 12:30 and 6:30.  You cannot have any privacy in your head.  If an employee (it probably is only supposed to be the therapists, but the orderlies are assholes too) decides to start interrogating you about what you are thinking you had better have an acceptable answer.

When I was institutionalized the story was that I had a rough life but no one knew what that meant.  They knew I moved around a lot.  They knew that my brother had been hit by a car.  There was some vague talk that maybe some sexual abuse had happened.  I hadn’t told anyone about being raped.  Not by anyone.  I went into the institution and was told to lay out all my secrets on a table for them to judge and decide about.  Of course I didn’t tell them shit.  They were forcing me to eat runny eggs and walk from room to room under their command.  There was no safety.  There was no room for me to exist at all.  I’m just glad it was only two weeks.

I can play the game if I have to.  Of course I can.  I wouldn’t be alive and outside of jail if it wasn’t true.  But I break the social contract in a lot of ways.  A lot of ways that are easy to ignore when I am at home by myself in the garage.  No one will hurt me here.  No wonder Alex’s therapist said I am like the crazy ass Vietnam vet who stockpiles food and ammunition.  I don’t think our larder is especially bursting with stores and I don’t own a gun.  But I do very careful limit how much I deal with people.  I only invite a few people to my house and I don’t go out often.  You never know who is going to be nasty to you.

I remember not caring about the fact that people judged me badly.  I mean, I can deal with the random public and I do.  I go to the grocery store and have pleasant interactions.  I can take my kids to the zoo or museum and we do fine and have fun.  I can’t go to a big party with a bunch of “friends”.  I can’t go meet a medical practitioner because this person will abruptly have “authority” over me.

I’m tired of feeling like I am wrong or bad just for existing.  For saying the things I say.  For taking up the space I take up.  Even if I do go to an event I feel this constant pressure to sit in a corner and not say anything awkward or uncomfortable.  This is hard.  If someone says, “So what have you been up to lately?” it’s a huge anxiety bomb.  Well I’ve spent most of 2011 having a mental breakdown and I wrote about it on my blog extensively.  Want to hear about my long list of rape experiences?  No, no one wants to hear that.  But it’s what I want to talk about.  So I stay home by myself and I write.  I can’t offend anyone if I am writing alone in a room.

Cue chorus of snickers.  Ok, if people are offended by what I write when I am alone in a room I don’t feel much responsibility for that.  Stop reading then you stupid asshole.  No one is dragging you to a computer and chaining you there until you read all my inane drivel.  My whining.  I’m not feeling good about myself today.  I’m really afraid of this doctor.  I’m really afraid that this doctor has the power to say, “You know how hard you are working on being a stable mother?  Well… someone like you shouldn’t have had kids and we are going to protect your kids from you.”  I have to be careful what I say in front of this doctor or I risk CPS.  I’m afraid that it doesn’t matter that I only self harm behind closed doors away from my children.  I’m afraid I am going to be told that someone like me is too toxic to share the same air.  It’s for everyones good that I be removed from the home.

I was often taken away from my family as a child “for my own good”.  I was always sent back after a while because there aren’t enough tolerance for me anywhere else either.  Difficult.  That’s me.  Always have been.  Always thinking I get to have an opinion and preferences.  Always thinking that it matters what I want.  Stupid me.

There are few things in my life more terrifying than the institution.  I know it would be a different one this time.  A “better” one.  It wouldn’t really be better though.  It would just be the system trying to convince me that as long as they don’t force me down on a table we are all doing what we want to do.  It’s a lie.  Me doing what I want to do involves hiding in my house and beating my head on the concrete floor when I can’t handle the anxiety.  Ok, that’s not really what I want to do.  But I prefer beating my head at home to beating my head in the institution and I wouldn’t stop just because they told me to.

In fact if a group of doctors told me I had to stop or else… all of a sudden my skull would be covered with scabs because I would do it a lot harder.  Or else what?  What are you going to do to me that is going to be worse than what has happened to me?  Do I really need more people hurting me?  Do I really need more people trying to impose their will upon me?  That is how to make me a healthy person? For yet more people to try to control me when they don’t know what happened to me?

Coping mechanisms can be good and useful and necessary at one time and become less good over time.  Self harming has kept me able to function and go about life.  It *is* a stress relief.  I have done a lot of good in my life.  Why is any of it negated because I had to self harm in order to have the focus to work? Why?  I can see telling me that there is a better way and offering me other options.  That’s awesome.  I want to have other fucking options.  I’m tired of my head hurting.  But I can’t just find this self control out of thin air.  I’m out of will power.  There isn’t enough lemonade in the world.

I don’t self harm every day.  Unless you count pot, which is kind of a weird thing for me.  On days when I am stoned I don’t self harm at all.  I haven’t beat my head against the floor in almost a month, actually.  Not since the day of the party.  That morning I lost it and I haven’t since.  Having all those people come over was… challenging.  It went well and everyone had fun.  I still spent most of the time freaked out waiting for something awful to happen.

Since then I say, “Sarah I need to tap out” and she says, “Ok!” and I go sit down and smoke and think for thirty minutes.  Then I’m cheerful again.

I want to work with a psychiatrist because I don’t know much about mood stabilizing drugs.  I need to learn.

I got a question!

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Picture me doing my happy Snoopy dance.  Ahem.

I’m afraid that I don’t know how to talk to people. I’m too blunt.

Do you prefer that other people interact with you in this way? Directly, I mean; sometimes that comes off as blunt. Personally, I find it easier than guessing most of the time, but I weigh that against the discomfort of saying/asking right out. What do you think?

The honest answer is I want people to be blunt with weird verbal ticks where they remind me that they are being blunt so I shouldn’t over react emotionally.  What I mean is, when Noah is about to hand me my ass he says: “I don’t have a good way to say this.  So I’m going to use a bad one and I hope you can understand what I am getting at.”  That’s my cue that he is about to say something that sounds like an attack but he honest-to-goodness doesn’t mean it as an attack so please don’t freakin yell at him.  At least that is what I hear.  When he says that I cock my head over to one side and listen intently and I can be rational no matter how much I am freaking out.  It’s handy.

But yes, of course I want people to be blunt.  I like it when people randomly announce what they are thinking, because most of the time I am honestly curious.  I wish like hell I could sit inside someone else’s brain for a day and listen to the random things that go around.  It’s great when people tell me.

If people have expectations of me, you’d better tell me what they are in blunt ways or I will miss it.  I have all the subtlety of a falling anvil.  So yes, I would say.  Blunt is generally always better than it’s opposite, which I consider to be misdirection.  Don’t be vague or passive agressive.  Tell me what you want.  Then I can decide if I want to give it to you or not.  I like yes or no questions.

And I’ll tell you, as much as I felt pissy in the moment… I’m glad Sarah greeted me with, “The last few days has been over my threshold for alone time with the kids right now and I need to have help with them for a while.”  Because now I know for absolute certain she is monitoring her ability to be safe with the kids and now I know what the wall looks like.  I can work with a wall.  If I’m honest I know that if Sarah had been kind of twitchy but hadn’t said anything… I probably would have ignored her twitching.  I’m a jerk too.  I have to treat my needs like they are important enough to push for.  No one is volunteering the stuff that fills my needs.  I need to push for more space.  Knowing how far I can push is really important.  I don’t want to be a chicken shit and short change myself because I’m afraid that I will ask too much and she won’t tell me and start to resent me.  I don’t want to live with that fear.  I want to push her to her boundaries so that I can have allllllllllll the space available to me.  Damnit.  She said she is ok with that.  I have to trust her.

Have I mentioned how hard trust is?  I have been struggling like mad since I had kids because I am no longer reliable.  It makes my stomach clench with frustration.  If my kids start melting down as I am trying to put them into the car when I am off to do something social I freak out.  I get into these cycles where I’m convinced that I am going to go to the event and the kids will be assholes and I will feel social pressure from all my anti-kid friends to deal with my little brats and I will then be angry with my kids because they are kids.

My kids are not assholes.  My kids are not brats.  They do push limits because they are trying to find out where they are.  When Shanna feels the wrath of God she backs off of a limit.  But oh boy she likes to find that limit.  Given that the wrath of God mostly involves me breathing hard because I am really angry and trying not to speak and I point to her room… she goes.  But it takes until I am ready to punch her in the face before she backs off.

I’m torn between consternation and delight.  That’s MY girl!  I honestly don’t want her to stop.  Even though it drives me insane.  I want her to be that person.  I want her to have the courage to push people.  What I mean by the wrath of God is that I want her to go through life rarely having to deal with my minor displeasures.  Mostly I do a lot of disclaimers about how awesome she is and I’m not upset with her I’m upset because blah grown up thing is happening and I’m sorry if I’m short tempered.  I try to buffer my irritation levels as much as possible.  Sometimes she crosses the line and I really don’t care that it upsets her when I am fucking pissed off.

Lately she has decided that an awesome game is to hit me in the face with sharp objects, basically as hard as she can.  One can understand why I might object.  After the last time she did it I picked her up ubruptly and moved her off of me while roaring in pain.  It scared the shit out of her.  She started wailing about how I hit her.  I did a lot of rolling my eyes.  I’m sorry kiddo, but picking you up and moving you far enough away that you cannot injure me again while otherwise not touching you and getting my hands off of you as fast as possible is not the same thing as hitting.  I told her that I had not intended to scare her when I yelled but I wasn’t going to apologize.  Hitting me in the face isn’t ok and I am very upset about it.  Don’t do it again.

Then I stomped off.  To me, that’s a Wrath of God moment.  It made a huge impression on her.  And I’m glad.  I think parents are allowed to just be human beings.  When someone hits me in the face I get to yell at them to stop it and I don’t have to apologize for hurting their feelings.  I did not sign a fucking piece of paper giving up this right just because I had crotch droppings.  I get the feeling from the AP and Gentle Parenting folk that it is bad that I did this.  Yelling Is Violence, they say.

I have to say that I think they can bite me.  I do my utmost to not make yelling a regular habit because it’s a really annoying thing to have to live with.  I think that having to live with someone who yells a lot sucks.  It’s unpleasant.  I try very hard to keep my volume at a reasonable level.  Yelling when you are in pain is not the same thing.  It’s allowed.  It’s allowed.  It’s allowed.

My dad used to make me be quiet.  I got in trouble if I made noise or moved while he was hurting me.  He would play painful games and the goal was for me to sit as still as a stone while he did it.  That wasn’t part of the sexual abuse.  That was casually sitting around in the living room when he visited.

I never have to be silent and take it when someone hurts me again.  I don’t.  It doesn’t matter that they are kids.  I get to defend my body.

That said, Shanna got lots of cuddles afterwards.  Obviously I am still feeling defensive.  You see, my actions square with my values.  I think that was a reasonable natural consequence of hitting someone in the face.  But I can find people on the internet who would tell me that I am an abusive monster for doing that.  Let me tell you, whenever people accuse me of being an abusive monster I chuckle.  I know what that actually looks like and the pompous windbag who is talking to me doesn’t.  I’m afraid of being like them, but I do rationally know that I’m not.  My kids will not have anything like the abuse I received.  Defending yourself when someone hurts you is not abusing them.  It’s letting them know that they crossed a big boundary in a way that is a serious problem.  Shanna hasn’t done it since.  We kiss and cuddle lots and I’m pretty sure she’s confident in my regard for her.

So anyway.  Shanna likes to test boundaries occasionally.  It’s pretty clear that she is doing it in a scientific way and there is no malice in her heart.  She is, however, a wild little savage and her scientific experiments frequently suck for me.  When we are out in public reams of people turn and stare.  I feel completely self conscious and judged.  I have no idea what they are thinking.  If people volunteered helpful little thoughts like, “Dear God you have the patience of Job” then I know that people aren’t judging me because it does bother me.  I do get nasty little comments about how if I can’t control my brats I shouldn’t take them out.  Uhh… do you really think I should have complete control over my children?  How do you think that will go for them in life?  I want autonomous little people, thank you ver much, and that means that they have to figure out how to interact with the world.  That means hitting some brick walls of social taboos.  She will need to find out What happens when I whack someone in the face?  That’s how she will know not to do it later.  And then she went off to school and on her first day a boy kicked her in the face.

I have to tell you… I wasn’t very upset.  I told her, “These things happen.  So, what did you say to him when this happened?”  People hurting your body in ways you don’t like just happens.  You have to learn to navigate it.  This seems to be something that my child-free friends were never taught or have forgotten.  When a careening child falls out of orbit they act as if they have been assaulted with acid.  Get over yourself, people.  No, she is not yet a masterful member of the social sphere.  She’s fucking three, give her a break.

All that to say, yeah blunt is good.  And maybe I’m ready to go to a kid friendly dance event.  I’ll have to find one that is within an hours driving range.  Hm.

Guns, cars, and computers

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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.

Running away

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I do a lot of abandoning social groups.  I was nearly raped on the last day of school my sophomore year.  I didn’t go back to that school.  I couldn’t deal with facing him.  He was one of the most popular boys in our social group because his parents were the richest.  I stopped hanging out with theater people when I broke up with Stephen.  That’s his world.  I stopped hanging out at bdsm events when I broke up with Tom.  I stopped going to the public sex community after Nathan raped me.

Nathan raped me when I was 24.  I was teaching already.  I just stopped going out.  I won’t go to an event unless I have someone going with me.  Apparently I’m not safe alone.

I return heavily to this idea that I’m not safe.  I’m not safe.  I’m not safe.  There are pieces of my brain that tell me this fear is irrational.  There are much bigger parts of my brain that laugh hysterically at the idea that it is irrational for me to feel unsafe.  I have been proven unsafe so many fucking times that it is no longer an irrational fear.  It is a justified, rational, reasonable fear.  I hate myself for having it.  I feel like I am a coward and a wimp.

I let these men chase me off.  I felt like I couldn’t exist in the same space as them any more once I stopped fucking them.  I was no longer worthy.  Or something like that.  Don’t shit where you eat.  Don’t sleep with too many people in a social group.  It goes badly.  So I leave.

I assume that most awkward conversations are my fault because I am such an asshole.  If I was just nicer I would magically get along with people and I would stop having this constant stream of awkward moments.  I would stop feeling like I am harming people by existing near them.

There are parts of living with Sarah that I haven’t written about much yet.  Sarah is disabled.  A fairly large percentage of why I pushed for this to happen right now is because it isn’t safe for her to live alone any more, in my opinion.  And she loves me enough to move to a different state and deal with living with me because my opinion matters to her.  I’m not sure that she believes she is at the state where she can not/should not live alone, but I pretty much am.  She needs help. I need help.  This seems like a marriage made in heaven.

I have lived with people who were disabled before.  I have a very firm mental concept of “There are things you can ask them to do and there are things you simply can’t ask.”  We are dancing around that.  We are trying to figure what I can ask for how, how often, at what intensity…  It’s hard.  Because I hit Sarah’s limits.  And then I feel surges of anger, guilt, shame, overwhelm, and then I settle on being bitter because everyone except for me gets to have limits.

Of course this is hyperbole.  I have limits.  These days I’m even announcing when I approach them and I no longer have to grit my teeth till they crack.  It’s fucking nice being allowed to have limits.  But Sarah’s are in different places than mine.  So are Noah’s.  I am the only one in this house who can just handle the kids all the time.  I can do it 24/7.  I’m not nice, but I can do it.  I’m not sure Noah could do it for long without hitting someone.  Sarah can’t do it because she’s on medications that make her too groggy to be the only responsible adult at times.

So I have to step in.  I don’t know why that makes me angry.  I want to be the Mom.  I want to be the one who is the most important person ever.  I love that my kids are so attached to me.  (This is when I want to do a string of MDC smilies to indicate that truly, I do like my kids.  Those smileys are dangerous.)  I, however, don’t like that I feel I have to justify liking my kids.  Why do I assume that people will think that I secretly hate my kids?  I get frustrated with them.  I need long breaks in order to be patient enough because Shanna is in a hitting phase.

I feel bad because sometimes I feel like I want to run away.  Yesterday Noah and I went out on a date.  Sometimes it feels like time away from the kids just makes me resent coming home to them more.  I’m not done having fun.  Why do I have to stop having fun so that I can come home and start doing laundry and dishes and picking up the floor.  Fuck all of you.

I’m starting to have trouble with the amount of cleaning.  I think that I will sign up for SitterCity today and send out messages to people.  There are folks looking for housekeeping jobs who are ok with doing some nannying at the same time.  If I’m going to be a rich person, I might as well use my resources.  I can’t keep up with the five of us and be a nice person.  I resent everyone too much.  I spent hours yelling at Noah yesterday.  He has stuff.  He occasionally leaves it in piles in places that feel random and cluttery to me.  He doesn’t have much stuff any more.  He doesn’t leave that many piles.  But dear god did I flip out because one of them was in the wrong spot and I am sick of having to fucking move his shit around so that I don’t feel bothered by the visual clutter.  Of course, Noah is less than 10% of the picking up I do.  He’s fairly tidy.  He does a lot of dishes.

Who else can I yell at though?  I really am at maximum capacity on how much I yell at Shanna to clean. I should probably back off.  Calli, well, even I’m not that stupid.  Yelling at Sarah feels patently unfair because on the days she feels well she works all.damn.day.  But she has a lot of days where she doesn’t feel well and she doesn’t get much done.  I really can’t turn around and shame her because she has physical limitations due to a disability.  In my little constellation of sins harassing someone who is disabled because they don’t do more is like walking over to your neighbors house and kicking the dog to death because you are sick of barking.  It’s just not ok.  Not in any way.

But it doesn’t stop me from getting angry that I have to do the work.  I’m sure this is complicated by old stuff.  We babied Tommy.  There were a lot of things he “could” do for himself that he out and out refused.  As his baby sister I was expected to just do it.  I had nothing better to do, I should therefore be on call to help him as needed.  Right?  That didn’t go well.

For all that I kind of vaguely canonize Aunt Vonnie, it’s not like she parented in a way that produced happy healthy people.  All three of her children are financially dependent on her due to health issues.  Her oldest has Lupus and just hasn’t done much of anything for over a decade.  Her second child was in a motorcycle accident.  He’s a paraplegic.  Her youngest has diabetes and stomach problems and mental problems and he lets his girlfriend (finally wife!) support him.  She has for 20 years.  I’m not sure how she manages given that she periodically has brain tumors and can’t function for long periods because she’s not doing so hot.

I’m used to people who cannot do work because they are “sick”.  In my family there are a lot of disabled people.  They don’t take care of themselves well.  They dump all of the work in their lives on people around them even in ways they could manage.  I have decades of pent up anger around being forced to serve people who can fucking well do it for themselves.  Nearly anything can touch this off.

It’s not ok for me to be mad at Sarah all the time.  I’m not, but I don’t want to start being.  I don’t want to be angry at Sarah 40% of the time.  Not really even 20% of the time.  Sarah works as hard as she can all day long.  She is not a shirker.  She feels horrible guilt for the ways in which she is incapable of being more help.  I don’t need to shame her.  I get the impression she does it to herself.  I don’t need to be one more voice in her head being an asshole.

But it’s hard to have to do all the work.  Our pediatrician asked if it was better or worse with a disabled adult in the house.  It’s an astute question.  There is a balance.  I told her that it is immeasurably better, even with the extra work.  One of the biggest things Sarah does is she makes dinner 5/7 nights.  One night we eat out.  Noah and I balance the other night.  I no longer have to make it through every stressful day and start a big messy difficult for me to think about project right when the kids are melting down.  I cannot express what a difference this makes in every single day.

And even on Sarah’s worst days she can handle giving me thirty minutes in the garage.  I get to rest now.  I get to have personal time fairly randomly.  I get to take off and “go get something” from the store without loading the kids every single time.  And Sarah does clean.  It would be an asshole move to not mention that loudly right now.  She does clean.  But not 1/3 of the household cleaning, you know?  I don’t know what percentage she does, but I don’t split the work evenly with Noah and Sarah.  I’ll say that.  I was never truly intended to.  They have other issues on their plate.  It is appropriate that I do the lions share of household chores right now.  I am the person who is in the house the most who is most physically able to do it.

This is when I wish I was a socialist instead of a libertarian.  I wish I felt happier about the whole, “Everyone works according to their ability and takes according to their needs” thing.  I fucking resent it. I feel like I’m carrying the whole world.  I’m not.  And things will improve dramatically when Shanna gets over her current throwing phase.  But then Calli will move into it.  Sigh.

I was taught that running away is a good solution to most problems.  I no longer believe that.  I believe that the good solution is to find some kind of balance in my life so that no one in my family feels inappropriately burdened.  There is a lot of work to be done in life.  Shared work is light work.  I’m trying to change my attitude and I’m only moderately successful.  Bugger.

If I got to pick how I felt about housework it would be resignation.  I will have to do 1-2 hours of housework every day for the rest of my life.  It’s not because I’m oppressed.  It’s because there’s a lot of work to be done in a family.  It’s hard being the Mom.

When I get angry about housework it centers in my stomach.  All of a sudden I feel like I swallowed a bubble of acid and all of a sudden it breaks.  My whole stomach clenches and my torso burns.  It doesn’t really even just feel like my stomach.  It feels like the anger, stress, and frustration I feel is consuming me from the inside.  I’m really tired of feeling this way.  I’m tired of the Anger Stage.  

I’m tired of my mental health costing us over a thousand dollars a month.  It feels so very wasteful.  How in the world can I be worth this constant oceanic current of money?  Wouldn’t it just be cheaper to run away?

And we come full circle.

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I’m starting to pay more mental attention to the things that feel off-limits to blog about.  I’m trying to decide where the boundaries will be.  I have been very erratic for a while.  That’s hard to deal with.  There is damage from that.  I will have to deal with it in the days and years to come.  I get to make a choice though. I get to decide if me talking about my shit leads to drama.  I decide that, not some mystical other person.  It’s hard to live with that.  People are going to get mad at me during life.  I am going to fuck up.  Being a responsible adult with a mental illness means that when I flip out and hurt people I live with the consequences in a mature and respectful manner.  I feel like it falls outside the bounds of “don’t air your dirty laundry” and instead falls into the category of strategic planning.  I have to live here.  You don’t shit where you eat.

That means that when people are upset with me for my behavior I have to nod and say, “Yes.  I did that.  You are right to be upset with me.”  And nod.  And know that I did whatever thing it was I did with the absolute best intentions and hope that some day things will heal.  I have a long life ahead of me.  I don’t really want to burn any more bridges.  I can’t afford to poison the well of my social community.  I don’t have anything else in the world.  It’s a complicated thing.

That is what it means for me to choose life.  I have to learn to swallow my pride and deal with situations that are hard because I god damn need a community.  I can’t alienate my friends more than I already do.  It’s hard being the kind of person that is hard to live with.  I try.  I think there is some bone deep knowledge of how to have long-term relationships that I lack.  I have fucked up a lot of important friendships in my life.  I try to tell myself that the people who have stuck around are the people who want to stick around.  They are the people who are willing to deal with the fact that I severely fuck up sometimes.  I worry about people being willing to put up with me.  I worry about being the monster I am occasionally accused of being.

Maybe if I continue to write about what is happening in my head I will get to the point of knowing beyond the shadow of a doubt that when someone is angry with me it is not about me doing something outside my moral code.  If someone else doesn’t like my actions… that’s a different issue.  I can’t control whether or not other people forgive me or want the same things I want.  That’s life.  I don’t know how it works for other people, but conflicts with people I feel close to generally instill a lot of panic in me.  I try to strategize how best to deal with the situation.  The thing is, sometimes the right answer is to just sit back and let someone else decide if they are ok or not.  Because I am ok.  Even though I am sad about whatever conflict is happening at the moment because it’s awesome when things work out such that I get absolutely everything I want, I’m not really interested in changing my situation.  I did what I needed to do.  Ok.

Ok.  I can set this down and walk away now.  It’s time to think about something else.

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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.

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I have a secret.  I carried a balance on my credit cards last month.  Almost $10,000 (it is more than that now).  I did it on purpose because I knew that I would be able to pay them off now.  I just got my last annuity check.  Every month since I turned 18 I have received a check for $1,200 every month completely tax free.  I was attacked by a pit bull when I was a child and my friend’s father represented me.  I think he did a fabulous job of handling my settlement.  On my 30th birthday the payments end with a $36,200 check.  (Last monthly payment + $35,000 pay off.)  I’m so thrilled about how much cash I have in my bank account that I’d kind of like to take a screen shot and frame this.  Before the credit card payments go out this month I will hit $50,000 in cash for about a day.

I’ve been talking to Sarah about this a lot.  I’m not sure if someone who grew up in a safe, secure home can understand the kind of elation I feel right now.  This is so much safety and security.  It’s freedom.  If I was truly feeling like I could not handle my life right now I could bail.  I’m not going to.  But right this minute I have all the means I need to disappear if I want to.  I don’t want to.  I choose to be here.  This is what I want.  That’s a weird feeling.  I am not a victim of anything in my life because I choose it.

Right now I’m having a lot of strong mood swings.  I’m doing a lot of hiding from the kids.  As a result the kids are extra-super-clingy.  Which cycles my moods faster.  It’s really nice to have this money appear right now to smack me in the face right now that I really and truly want to be here.  Even with the things I miss about going out.  Even though I miss friends and communities… I can never get this time back.  I really want to be here with my kids.

I’m struggling with the fact that I will no longer be supplying $14,400/year to the household.  I am, in fact, increasing how much I take out of the pool because I am going to do less work (hiring a maid) instead of working more and contributing money as well.  It’s hard to feel like I have enough worth to be in this position.  I find it rather odd to be trying to live more according to Noah’s principles than mine.  You see, I didn’t grow up with intellectuals.  I grew up with stupid, uneducated people.  Not all stupid people are uneducated and not all uneducated people are stupid.  But my family is both.  The idea that any mental work I am doing has value?  That’s odd.  If I have not done substantial physical labor I feel guilty all day.  I’m not supposed to rest.  People like me have to earn rest and there is no chance I have worked enough lately.  I’ve been lazy all week!  Well, sorta.  This is all vague.

Noah believes that me reading, improving myself as a person, writing, and interacting with other adults in intellectual ways are actual priorities.  He wants there to be time in my life for these things.  He does not think I should be working all the time.  It’s weird.  Those are not pastimes I was raised to appreciate.  I have always done them, but it was furtive and hidden.  Shameful.  My secret life.  But what if it isn’t a secret?  What if I get to sit out here in my personal Wonderland and write.  What if that is totally ok?  How about if I learn how to write while sober so that the kids can wander in and out so they don’t feel cut off from me?  Enh, that may be a stretch.  Hm.  I should think about scheduling.  The problem is that I don’t generally smoke on a regular schedule so I have ebbs and flows of how effective it is.  This is why I’m thinking about scheduling things.  I can’t believe I am thinking about scheduling my life so I can be a more effective stoner.

I’m weird, Sir.

Just another day

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My shrink doesn’t think I should find stronger anxiety meds.  As I was leaving her office today I asked her about her opinion about what I should tell a doctor.  What part of my current shit is the most physical in origin and what is likely the best thing to do about it.  She thinks I should talk to the doctor about my stomach hurting and probably something for sleep.  As much as the smoking isn’t great for my lungs she thinks that having to go spend thirty minutes away from the kids is better than taking stronger meds so I can endure more pressure.  She may have a point.  As much as I have this inner resistance to it, I kind of think I may need to make a schedule for us and stick to it.  We could all use the predictability.  I need to have breaks from the kids most days.  Luckily, we now have a Sarah.

Is it really nerdy that I am going to make a big graph and highlight things and move them around?  I need to figure out something though.  I hate smoking.  It feels shitty.  I want to not need it.  Plan A right now on getting my shit together involves ridiculously scheduling my life so that I can try to find a way to balance my moods.  It feels like a New Shiny Neurosis.  If I want to stay off meds I need some way of reacting to my bio-chemical stress loads.  I don’t know another way.  What do I need in order to feel like I can stay calm.  I feel very weird about the fact that my therapist considers marijuana significantly superior to other potential anti-anxieties for me.  I suspect it is partially because of my ridiculous conflict around what I’m doing.  I won’t use it if I have to drive.  I am very careful about proper supervision of the kids, etc.  If I had pills that I could use when I was out I would probably end up trapped somewhere feeling unable to drive and get hysterical.  I suppose this way I always make it home because I don’t bring pot out of my house.  I’ve tried bringing it with me a few times and I never have the nerve to sneak off and use it.  It’s pretty funny.  Even if I am sitting amongst a group of people passing a pipe… I just can’t bring myself to smoke in front of people.  I have problems.

Today I told my therapist about the second time I broke my arm.  I was 12.  I had to call my mom at work to come home and take me to the hospital.  She worked 90 miles away in City of Industry.  She screamed at me a lot about how I had better not be lying.  I was scared shitless my arm wasn’t actually broken.  I had to endure a lot of pain before I was willing to call her and ask for help in the first place, but I didn’t have other options.  It was broken.  And to put the icing on the cake when I went back for the actual cast I told her I wasn’t feeling well.  She told me I was a hypochondriac and a whiner.  I vomited on the floor in the waiting room.  The hospital staff was really nice to me as I sobbed my apologies for making a mess.  My mom yanked me by my unbroken arm away and told me how disgusting I was for making the mess.  Sometimes I wonder if I am more fucked up by my mother or my father.

Now as an adult I get why my mom was so harsh with me.  She was walking a tightrope financially and she truly couldn’t take time off frivolously.  I was sick a lot (I’ve had stomach problems since I was a child) and Tommy needed a lot of time off.  His care would have been a full time job.  It was for more than one person, actually.  It’s interesting thinking about my mother now that I have children.  When I think of the things my mother didn’t know about me… I wonder what things I will miss in my children.  I’m absolutely confident that I am already a better mother than my mom though.  That’s kind of a weird thing.  I have already provided my children with more stability, security, attention, and kindness than my mother showed me.  In less than six months Shanna will have lived in this house longer than I have ever lived anywhere else.  This house, this life that I am building with my family… this is the only stability I’ve ever had.

Every time I move I mostly change friends groups.  I change everything about my life.  And I have done it every 3-18 months from age 3 till I was 19 years old.  Then I stayed at Tom’s for three years before moving around several times in two years before moving here.  I’m getting the feeling this is my forever home.  We may add a second story some day.  I’m trying to meet most of the neighbors on our street.  I am floating the idea past all of them for a block party.  So far everyone has indicated that they would try to come.  For better or for worse this is where my children will grow up.  These people will be their community.  I get a lot of say in how that works.  I want a Leave it to Beaver style community where everyone knows everyones business.  I guess I had better start meeting people and learning their business then.  It’s frightening to consider.  They will see me go through stages.

I am having trouble with this whole 5% thing.  I can’t shake the feeling that it is bad.  Like I should be culled from the herd for daring to deviate.  I’m trying to decide how and where I will deviate from the norms in my home and in my community because it isn’t fair for me to alienate people.  My children have to live here.  I am weird.  I know it.  The thing is, why am I so convinced that everyone will hate me?  Yeah, yeah… polarizing figure.  I’ve mellowed with age.  I’m a lot easier to be an acquaintance with.  I think.  It’s really hard to go meet my neighbors but Shanna thinks it is easy.  I’m trying to remember that part of me that sees every person as a potential friend instead of a potential judge.  Most people don’t care enough about me to bother to judge me.

In completely other news, Sarah is preserving food for winter.  I have succeeded in my way of being a provider for my family.  I win.  At the rate these tomato plants are going we might be able to eat a tomato based dish (pasta, chili, stew, etc) a week for almost a year.  That’s really cool.  We haven’t really gotten to eat much of the other veggies I’ve grown.  I think the cabbage is too tough to eat now, but I watched the full growth cycle and that has value.  It was neat to see these plants emerge.  I feel like as a science experiment it was a fabulously productive summer.  I failed on most of it in terms of providing food (with the huge exception of the tomatoes), but that’s what I was supposed to do.  I was learning what to do and not do.  I have to learn at some point.

Random feedback question, oh those who read this blog: I tend to keep a window open and add to it for a few days.  Are more frequent little posts easier to read?  Would you like visual breaks so you know when I walk away and come back because it’s often a very different thought?  Do you not care because my verbal diarrhea is hard to follow anyway so it might as well be a huge blob?  Feedback welcome on that topic.  Solicited, even.

It’s my birthday now.  Noah made me breakfast and let me sleep in.  Him making me breakfast is actually an every single day thing.  That’s one of the things that makes me feel loved.  He gets up every day and thinks about how to feed me.  Food = love.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Mo’s post on submission.  It’s kind of funny because I don’t play much these days.  And I haven’t been in anything like a D/s or M/s relationship in eight years.  Not really.  It’s weird to think about because I don’t think people recognize how deeply ingrained my impulse towards service is.  I go clean my friends’ houses.  I always have.  I always feel like I must do physical labor for people I love.  Shared work is one of the quickest ways to bond with me.  I don’t bond well in party situations because I’m not one to relax while sitting in a room with people who have the ability to stop and stare at me.  They have to be distracted and looking somewhere else so that I don’t feel tense.

This is a problem mostly because I have this simultaneous issue that if I am the only one working I am a martyr and no one loves me.  This is a problem because I am much more bothered by visual disarray than anyone else in my house so I am constantly working and they truly can’t do that with me.  I am at an unhealthy place with my level of getting upset over doing house work.  I don’t like to feel taken for granted.  I need a lot of acknowledgment.  Even if I am the only one working, if I get frequent, sincere comments on my work I feel seen.

I think that I have been working in my head towards how to feel like my position in my family is one of submitting my work to the common betterment of my family.  That sounds really stupid and weird.  Ok, bear with me.  I “grew up” in a weird generation of perverts and I have all this bullshit about slave hearts going round and round in my head.  I miss the stillness I got in my head and in my heart when I was a slave.  I was able to shut off my background chatter of negative self talk and just work because that was my place and my job.  I was to facilitate Tom’s life.  It would be fair to think of it as dehumanizing me, or at least minimizing my importance in life.  I did everything with the specific goal of pleasing him.  It took enormous focus and energy.  I could lose myself in it.  I could stay present in the moment in a way that eludes me these days without enormous physical output.  Rototilling the yard keeps me in the same head space.  It’s probably what other people attain through meditation.  I can’t meditate for shit.  But I like bringing that calm focus into my work.

In the bdsm community you can spend a lot of time and money going to classes to help you learn how to cultivate a relationship where you can dictate the narrow limits of your life to allow you that kind of focus.  No matter what your side goals are: making money, buying a house, having kids… the only real goal is pleasing your Dominant/Master.  It’s a much more immediate thing to check up on.  Handy in the immediate feedback sense.  Easy to get obsessive with.  I was certainly obsessed.  I ate, slept, and breathed Tom’s happiness.  It is intriguing to think about that level of intensity.  I like to think that Noah is a great person to have an affair with.  When he turns the full power of his gaze on someone… it’s intoxicating.  I know some of his ex’s read this, you had better be nodding.

Noah is a crack boy.  He’s easy to get obsessed with.  Part of the reason is that it is always clear that there are big chunks of him that are simply not available to me.  I can never fully understand him no matter how many years I stare at him.  If someone is too available to me emotionally, I don’t pursue.  I have nothing to chase.  It’s terrible, but I don’t see a point in lying.  I like complicated people.  On the day Noah asked me to marry him he told me he also wanted me as his slave.  Neither of us really knew what that meant then.  I’m not sure I do either.  But I’m thinking about it.  I need an obsession.  I really do.

I have nothing to keep my brain from dwelling all day on how it is not fucking fair that by Shanna’s age I was giving out blow jobs to neighbor kids.  My parents were divorcing.  I had already been raped.  Very soon we were about to be homeless.  I think of those things and I look at my wonderful girl, who if anything is getting bored with how safe her life is, and I feel rage.  I’m burnt out though.  I’ve had all the rage my body can take for a while.  I desperately need a distraction that won’t fuck up my life.  My therapist is right that I should not try to get stronger meds so I can be more of a zombie all day long.  That’s not really the solution.

So I’ve been thinking about my wonderful husband.  I’ve been trying to deliberately think in terms of serving his life.  What would actually serve his life better.  It’s kind of funny that phrasing it in that way changes a lot of the discussion for me.  If I drop my set of living-life-expectations… it’s weird.  I should call a cleaning company tomorrow.  I should never dust again.  It makes his life worse because I don’t have the physical body load to do as much as I am doing and be in a good mood.  The reason I am so beat down is because I am trying harder and harder to take the shit work off of Noah because I need him in a good mood.  I need to make Noah happy.  I have to.  If I don’t I am failing at this life and Jesus H Christ I am the biggest piece of shit ever.  Not that he thinks that.  But as much as I love my friends, Noah is the only person on the planet I am going to see every day for the rest of my life.  Not my kids.  Not anyone else.  I want a happy marriage.  I really do.

So whereas we are not in a place where we can get the M/s thing to work right now I’m thinking about the future.  For the record I have changed some of my opinions.  I no longer go by Lenora, that was an in-the-closet-while-teaching thing.  How’s that for crossing the streams?

Anyway, I’ve been obsessing about Noah during my time off lately.  It seems the most benign and cheerful way for me to pass a little time while letting my body rest.  The last few years have been hard for him.  Any effort at all is pleasing.  I’ve already been reading more.  I’ve already read two books this week and I have a couple more I am working on.  He likes it when I am really on for verbal banter.  Oh man does that require more rest than I am getting.  It’s really nice for me to realize that some of the best things I can do to serve him and make him happier is eliminate as much work as possible from my life so I can sit around and read and pamper my body so that my interest in sex returns.  I’ve had a few glimmers lately and that’s been comforting.  But it’s not really back yet.  Next on my desk is Les Liasons Dangereuses and I really need to read The Prince again.  And I should probably review a rhetoric book because my arguing skills are shitty.  If I’m going to keep up with Noah I need to get crackin’.

Luckiest girl in the whole world

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We kind of ignored our fifth wedding anniversary.  We were busy.  I’m not actually sad about that because the party was fun.  Last night I was told extensively how much I have changed since marrying Noah.  I agree.  For the first time in my life I know what it is like to have someone unreservedly like me.  It’s a novelty.  And Noah doesn’t just like me.  Noah is kind of obsessed with me.  We have spent hundreds of hours talking about my life and history and psychological health.  There are not enough hours in a day for me to tell him more about the inner workings of my brain.  I was informed that is not normal.  Ok.

It’s weird to live with someone who likes me but has no compunction pointing out where I am doing something badly.  It’s refreshing.  After five years together, I even prefer his voice in delivering criticism.  When he’s consciously trying he’s good at being gentle with me.  We have a lot of verbal conversation short cuts that help with my layers of emotional baggage.  That was hard to build.  It is amazing that at this point we can have these massively intense conversations because we can reference this long history of conversations.  I’ve never really had that before.

It’s weird how this relationship is really my “college” education in the sense that most people have them. Noah has encouraged me to learn about things I actively shunned.  He has read books to me and articles and blog posts and comics and we have watched movies together.  We have built this weird unique little subculture just for us.  I imagine this is what growing up in a family is like, because we include the kids whenever we can.  This will be their weird little subculture.  I think about that.  My children will never have normal.  My children will be in the 5%.  Probably.  Maybe.  I hope.  I hope they know that the 5% exists and that they have the courage and fortitude to do anything they want to do.  I want children who are so courageous that there really isn’t much chance they will meld into the crowd.  I have that already.

Noah encourages me to feel really happy about being me.  He thinks I should grin when I think of something clever I said.  It’s kind of an odd feeling.  He likes it when I am cocky and arrogant.  But then I later collapse in private and have to breathe through my panic attack.  Noah is definitely a mixed bag for my personal development.  Sometimes I wonder if part of what makes me so uncomfortable when I go out into the world is the fact that I know that no one has ever liked me how Noah likes me.  I feel like other people dislike me in contrast.  It’s not true.  But it is true that I am starting to run into conflict with friends because Noah has influenced my behavior.

I have Noah at home telling me that conflict is an ok thing.  It’s hard to believe him.  It’s hard to believe that getting better at arguing is really going to earn me more friends.  Noah is trying to convince me that it will absolutely chase off some of my current friends but it will earn me friends who actually like me more rather than what they are projecting on to me.  I think that is what he is trying to convince me of.  I could be wrong. There is no way for me to remember everything we talk about with super concrete details.  I am out of tapes.

Why is being avaricious in a woman so threatening?  I’ll tell you flat out that if Noah gets to the point where he is offered $250k/year in salary, hell yes I’ll do anything he wants.  That kind of power and influence is highly erotic to a dirty little street kid like me, what can I say?  He can have a weekend where I do anything he wants.  And the current potential ideas are the kinds of things nice normal housewives should be degraded by.  I should feel devalued and lessened.  Cheapened.  Instead my response is: hawt.  It gets me off to think about it now and it will really get me off to do it.

My marriage wouldn’t work for everyone, but we’re having fun.  I can’t really see another way for me to deal with my class issues, really.  I could pretend they don’t exist… but they do.  We like looking at things head on.  I don’t see the value in pussyfooting around my stupid little landmines.  If I’m going to set them off, let’s go kablooie.  Why not do it in a way that maximizes the fun.  Seriously.  I don’t consider that a real question.  This is work I need to do in my life.  I need to deal with my class issues.  Mostly I talk about them in therapy, on the internet, with friends, with Noah, and I think constantly about them.  Ok, not constantly.  But they come up and I address them.  And every so often I go and play some dramatic game about sex exploitation.  So what?  I think that giving my husband a weekend for sex that we will both find really hot is a pretty reasonable reward for him being a fan-fuck-ing-tastic provider.  I don’t really care if anyone disagrees.  (Then why am I writing about it on the internet.  *sigh*)

I want to try to explain how I see Noah.  I really do.  I don’t have the words this morning though.  He’s such a big concept in my mind.  I watched this bad bad movie recently about 20’s relationship angst and the big whore butch dyke finally settles down into a monogamous relationship because “You hold my interest.”  I like the fact that sleeping with other people reminds me that I married the right person.  I enjoy it.  I want to do it again.  But I married the right person.  Never before in my life has anyone cared enough about me and my happiness to change their behavior for me.  That’s the part that other people don’t get.  That’s why I keep them at a distance.  They think I have to just “learn to accept them”, which means that I have to change to suit them.  Noah looked at me and thought that keeping me and making me happy was worth making dramatic bone deep change.

I am the luckiest girl in the whole world.  He has absolutely changed for me.  Yes, I’m going to change for him too.  Because I want to validate the important parts of him that much.  Because I think he is worth it.

Bad decisions

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In life there are trade offs.  You only have so many resources at any given point in time.  I feel like an awful lot of the problems in life are because of the fact that there are insufficient resources.  And I don’t mean oil–I’m talking about time and attention.  I’m talking about the fact that I don’t keep up with my friends as well as I wish I could because I cannot handle the fact that I am already touched and pawed at all day long.

A friend else-net got very drunk last night.  She’s at a hard spot in her life and she wanted to drink to forget.  Of course she now believes this has destroyed her value as a person.  On the kind of nights where you drink to forget you tend to believe your value was gone before you started.  I make bad decisions.  I don’t want to add an adverb describing when or how often. Because the reality is I probably make bad decisions about as often as average and maybe less.  Do you want to know why I say that?  Because something being a bad decision or not depends on your perspective.

Getting shit faced drunk and passing out seems like a bad decision.  Until you realize that the alternative may very well be ending your life.  When you realize that choosing to get shit faced drunk so that you can make it through the one bad night is actually a good choice.  At the crisis point, get drunk.  That’s ok.  Really.  It’s not a bad decision.  If that is how you are going to still be alive in the morning it is a good decision.  It’s a bad decision to do it every night.  It is a bad decision to make it a lifestyle.  Anesthetics have their place in life.  I believe it is ok to self-medicate.  But be very careful.

Does that mean it is the safest choice?  Of course not.  Drinking until you pass out is dangerous and I don’t really think people should be doing it.  Much like cutting.  It’s not a great thing to do.  I don’t recommend it as a coping strategy for people who are looking for new tools.  Sometimes people do make mistakes while cutting and accidentally die.  It is not beyond the realm of possibility.

A lot of my friends point out that their lives “weren’t that bad” so they shouldn’t be upset.  I honestly don’t know a lot of people who experienced more abuse than me… and I still don’t feel entitled to be upset.  Not really.  To me that means that it doesn’t matter whether I am entitled to the upset or not.  I am upset.  I need to not worry about whether or not I should be.  I need to not focus on how my being upset affects other people.  I need to look at how being upset affects me.  It’s hard because for all that I have been talking constantly about being narcissistic… I’m truly not.  I have a hard time paying adequate attention to myself.  I worry constantly about the happiness of those around me.  I work extensively to build up other people.  That’s just an insecurity.

It’s just as true for everyone else though.  Ok, there are people who are actually narcissistic.  Most people are just existing though.  You get upset.  It’s ok to deal with being upset.  If that upset goes on for weeks, months, years… you use up your resources.  When you are low on resources sometimes you hit the bottom of the barrel.  It’s ok.  That’s why it is there.  It is still a tool.  The bottom exists for a reason.

Why am I babbling about this.  Because I can say this emphatically when I am speaking with my friend in my head.  When I picture my beautiful, wonderful friend who is going through a very hard time and there is nothing I can do to help… that feels like I am failing in my life.  I don’t want my friends to suffer.  I want to take it away and make everything better.  I want to help build my friends up so big and so strong that they cannot be hurt any more.

I’ve been reading more in TCTH (The Courage to Heal–I’m sick of typing it out.)  I think it is funny that every time I read it I get to a few pages past where I feel emotionally that day.  When I come back and catch up I get to read on the page these testimonies from all these women describing their emotional processes and I could have written them.  It feels really hilarious and predictable.  This experience of going through this book is ensuring that I know I am not a special fucking snow flake.  Ha.  It’s nice though.  I now have this invisible group of women who know what I have been through. Healing from incest is a fairly predictable path.  I’m not lost and wandering and doing it wrong.  I am working the steps.  I really and truly am doing something that is worth doing.  As hard as this is sometimes, as bad as some of my mistakes are… I am improving.

My momentary bad decisions do not negate the fact that I am a good person.  That it is worth getting up every single day and continuing for as long as my body will let me because I add good to the world.  Far, far, far more good than bad.  I haven’t been sleeping enough and my emotions are very close to the surface.  I feel very upset when I see my friends self-flagellating in ways I also do.  It hits home for me what I need to start working on doing and that’s hard.  I kind of don’t need more pressure to work, you know?  I’m very tired.  I feel so flawed.  I feel like I will never be good enough.

And TCTH tells me that is part of the process.  It will pass.  This day will end.  Today I will get good and stoned and I will wander around the house puttering and singing and talking with my babies.  If I just putter around absent mindedly all the rest of the cleaning will magically happen.  But I have to be very stoned.  Or I will be a stress monkey and twitch and be unable to complete tasks and cry and probably scream at both kids.  I have a choice, right this minute.  I can continue to distract myself with the internet because I believe smoking marijuana is a bad choice and I am a bad person for doing it, or… I can shut up and do it.  And have a really nice day.  Bye y’all.

Can’t.Get.Out.Of.Head.

6 Replies

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.

Suppression has limited usefulness.

2 Replies

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.

This is why I sprint.

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I’m tired.  I am bone weary.  I am exhausted to the marrow of my bones.  I feel like I can barely stand.  I’ve been up since 1:15 this morning.  It’s a long story.  I should start at the beginning.

Yesterday was Family Dinner.  I asked Alex to cook because I spent all of yesterday painting and Noah is really fried as well.  The first problem is that he showed up nearly an hour and a half late.  That’s a big hot button for me.  I ask them to come over at 4 because that way we eat around 5:30/6 and the kids get to play after dinner before bed.  That’s a good routine for me.  If we vary from that we have a hard time.  But Alex usually eats dinner at 10pm.  You can see where there is an issue here.

So there is a basic conflict of schedules there.  And then you add on that we are all human beings with big quirks and not-so-awesome coping mechanisms.  Well, that just leads to trouble.  I will say that I grabbed a granola bar when they arrived.  By the time it was 7 and we still didn’t have dinner I did sit quietly on the floor whining at Yani, but I didn’t hurt Alex’s feelings.  He was trying.  He went really far out of his way and comfort zone for me and I need to respect that.  I need to love him for how hard he tried, not yell at him for how much he inconvenienced me.  That’s hard when my stomach is hurting because I am hungry.  If I am asking Alex to make dinner maybe I need to assume that my whole family should have a noticeable snack at 3:30.  That is probably the right choice for how to solve this.  Alex is not going to be able to shift his rhythm to a 5:30 dinner.  Maybe some day, but not right now.  He has shit of his own.  And I need to love him enough to make that accommodation.  Because I do love him that much.

Dinner went well though.  Once I started eating I was ok.  I fell asleep on the couch before they left.  heh.  I used to do that in high school.  I had similar disordered sleeping habits then.  This way of sleeping makes me feel on edge and ready to snap all the time.  But last night Noah woke me up when he went to bed.  Normally that is something I like.  I’ve asked him to do that.  But right now I’m having major insomnia issues; if I wake up I can’t get back to sleep.  Noah woke me up at 1:15.  See the problem?

I realized at some point in the night, thanks to medication, that I was done with my mandatory work other than packing.  I have a whole bunch of things I want to do, but if they don’t get done it’s not the end of the world.  If I want I can sit on the couch all day and play with my kids while watching movies.  See, this is my privilege.  I am this lucky.  I can do this today.  I’m not up for dealing with the world today.

So I decided that instead of acting like a martyr I would look at the needs of my family members.  Noah is also struggling with sleep issues because of stress.  I yelled at him a lot in the middle of the night because he woke me up and disrupted my sleep.  But he was trying so hard to be kind.  That’s how things have been around here lately.  Because I’m brittle and snippy.

I thought about this for hours and I decided that the right decision was to let Noah sleep as late as he was able to given work constraints and treat that like personal time.  He’s bloody well entitled to time off.  I decided by fiat that he should have some today in the form of sleep.  That’s what I can provide to him to relieve the pressure on him.  And my pressure just dramatically lifted.

That’s how you learn to marathon, right?  And I needed to get so tired that I can’t be frantic right now if I want to.  Maybe if my house was on fire.  Maybe. 🙂

How I’m learning to marathon

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It occurs to me that I am using this space intermittently to track my progress of how I’m becoming a marathoner in this life stuff (and the running sense too, ironically) but I’m not being explicit about why I’m doing that. Most of the time as I browse around the internet I see people documenting stuff in their life that is obviously the one and only corner of their life they are willing to let people see in that much detail… only I don’t put it together like that. What I see is, “Look at how together these people are, aren’t they better than me!” I’m really competitive. It’s why I hate playing games. I can’t handle seeing my constant life struggles made fun of. Losing feels traumatic. I feel like I just got punched in the face. I have thrown the board at people, decks of cards…

My mom. My mom and I played gin rummy for years and years. She gloated a lot when she won. Not in a severe way. It was subtle. I don’t have a clear memory to explain why it bothered me so much but it really did. I was the loser at absolutely everything in my family. I’m tired of always being the one to be the pathetic one. The one who fails. The one who loses. So when I see these blogs all over the internet from these Perfect Attachment Parents! Who are doing everything Right! I feel like shit. I feel like a failure as a parent. I feel like obviously I am this horrible abuser and my children will be damaged and fucked up and traumatized… only they aren’t. My children are wonderful. Everyone who speaks to them marvels about how they glow with life and vitality. “They just seem more…aware than most children!” I am truly not a bad parent, even though I yell sometimes. In fact, I am a good parent. And sometimes even a good parent says stupid things like, “If you do that again I am going to hit you. No I am not because hitting is wrong. But dangit Shanna I am going to scream until I feel like my eyes want to pop out of my head and then you will cry and I will fell bad just please stop doing that!!!!” And then she stops doing it and apologizes and I apologize for losing my temper and we hug.

Yeah, I do have anger issues. But in the process of becoming a marathoner I have to acknowledge them. I have to know that I am making progress on dealing with them. I have to know that I am actually proving, beyond the shadow of a doubt that I am a better mother than I had. Even if I can’t make 200 cookies for Christmas.

My mother was a sprinter. She went from huge project to huge project. Sprinting isn’t just about wanting to move, though that is a component. My mother, DOES CHRISTMAS. She makes pans and pans and pans of cinnamon rolls to give out as Christmas presents to every Tom, Dick and Jane she knows. Even people she frankly dislikes because she needs to be “fair”. When I was younger the time to make this many pans of stuff to give away dominated a lot of my life. My experience of Christmas was my mother working and having nothing to do with me.

Just like I’m doing with my kids and documenting on this stupid blog. I don’t think I am actually a Narcissist at all, but I think that if I have no formal documentation I don’t know how to keep myself accountable. I love my sprints and sometimes I can do them in ways that are healthy for everyone. And sometimes I can’t. And it is obvious in my writing when I can’t. If I am in here writing that means I am making no progress on my side projects because I am spending all of my other time with the kids and trying to keep the house at a hygienic level.

I don’t think I am addicted to substances, though I do use them to help me work (mostly sugar and caffeine). I am documenting my sprints here. Y’all don’t know that I didn’t start blogging about the gardening stuff until I had done massive amounts of work to get it to a level where I don’t feel too pathetic starting off. And the remodeling stuff… you’ll notice I haven’t posted pictures lately. That would be because I am not willing to put my pride on the alter and show you how messy it is. I want to show final product but I am running out of time. You aren’t seeing pictures because I am consciously choosing to spend my time in the house with my kids. I am lowering the stress in my life by resting after my sprint. I am hibernating with my babies.

We are playing and doing tons of arts and crafts. I’m taking pictures. We are learning and growing and talking and exploring. We are back to two movies a week: one on Monday, one on Friday. We have been getting out into the community in small quiet ways. We have been making a point of going to the local breakfast places more and settling in as regulars. We haven’t driven down to San Jose just for breakfast in a while. But I love that Donna, at the local Original Pancake House, lights up and yells “Shanna!” and runs over as quickly as she can. Donna’s grandsons live across the country and she doesn’t get to see them much. She adores Shanna. Randy at the building department went and found his card and told me to call and email with any house owning questions I ever have. He thinks his job as a civil servant is to help the community. I am getting to know my building inspector because I have the same guy every time.

I have small one on one interactions like that and I manage them. There has been a plumbing fiasco, but that will be fixed soon and I am dealing with resolving it bit by bit. I can’t handle it in big chunks or my stomach acid production goes through the roof and I am suddenly nasty and yelling. So I am learning that if I have to call the plumbing company I medicate first. Now that we have reached the point of impasse I am writing them a letter and I will mail it as a registered overnight letter so that I don’t have to speak to them on the phone again. I am going to schedule the work for the weekend so Noah is home and I am going to sit in my room. It’s not rational, but I have ridiculous fear right now. So even though it is irrational I will ask my husband to handle it and I won’t be macho because I would start a fight. I would escalate tensions. Noah will passively observe work being done.

That’s how you become a marathoner. Right now I have to walk very very slowly through life. I catch up on work and lightly jog a little through the day playing with the kids and doing dishes. Mostly I’m resting. The sprint with my incest stuff is too fresh and if I try to be macho right now I will injure myself metaphorically. It’s just not worth escalating my stress levels like that.

This being a grown up thing sucks. Which is to say Liz, yeah. I think you are right.

I had a day in the world

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Today a friend came over and I stayed out all day. She watched the kids while I dealt with the plumbing permit situation at the city. I have to say, Randy at the Fremont Building Department is one hell of a nice guy. I think he is just a shining soul and I’m glad I met him today. He answered a lot of questions and he took a personal interest in me. He gave me his email address and told me to feel free to contact him any time I need to. He told me that he believes that as a civil servant it is his job to do anything in his power to help people. I think that’s magnificent.

And because we had fussy children we came home and made tea sandwiches and cookies and tea and Shanna had a scone. We played in the sand. We painted. I made a nice little dent of progress in the garage moving stuff around.

My friend and I talked about my stuff a little. But mostly we talked about other things. I was ok. Shanna is interested in pushing my buttons so of course I was frustrated a few times but it felt normal. When I act like I have been acting for the last few days I feel like I am in my mother’s body. I move more like her. I process this as experiencing the emotions she had when she did those movements but of course I don’t really know. I’m not sure if it is true or not, but I suspect that I feel so alone in the world because I am incest survivor. Because I was raised in a house that was broken so deeply and so completely that other people really can’t imagine my perceptions of events. I have a big issue with transference. I constantly try to work through my family relationships in other arenas in my life. That means that if people respond in ways that I perceive as the potential sign of abuse I run away from the whole group immediately. I don’t know how to be part of a group. I cannot figure out group dynamics. It really doesn’t help that one of my default methods of getting to know men is to be sexually aggressive. I’ll tell you, I’m popular. Well, with men. Women often dislike me intensely. Or they love me. Women don’t tend to have neutral reactions to me. I cannot count how many times people have told me long intricate stories about how much they hated me when they met me. I usually blink and wonder why they are telling me this. Eventually they get to the part where they tell me how much they respect me and I am so god damn honest and Holy Shit! It’s remarkable how consistent the story is from different people. Do you know what I get out of that exchange?

People hate me as soon as they meet me. Pretty much every time I get one of those stories I hightail it away from the group and never talk to the woman again. I’m awesome. Or something. It’s really weird that people grow to respect that I have strong opinions and I am intense… but I make people uncomfortable. They don’t really want to be around me. This is my story about this. I can come up with a long list of reasons why I think I am disliked by most everyone from every community I have ever been in. Sure, I make a few friends in each group and I hold on to those people tightly. Mostly though, I’m convinced people think I’m a piece of shit.

That’s what I was told over and over. If I was having a good day and I started singing along with the radio my brother Jimmy turned around and sneered, “What did you do with the money?”

“What money?”

“The money for singing lessons.”

Badump. If I complained I couldn’t take a joke and I was a whining baby. I was sent to my room. My family viciously disliked me. I have never been willing to be the person they want me to be. They have a few roles they would like to offer me and I can have my pick, but I have to pick one. To be fair, they do like to pass the roles around. I could do my time as the pathetic weakling coming back from my fall from grace (my sister in AA after she let her partner rape her son) then after a few years of being “clean” I could start slipping up again. I could start just letting things slide. Hey! I’m only human! We all mistakes, right. I’m just trying to live a little. Sober people are so boring. (Depends on which sober people. To be fair, the sober people in my family tend to be really fucking boring.) So then after a while you start going down hill again. You have some “bad luck” due to the fact that you haven’t held a job in years because you’ve been too busy at home doing drugs. (ouch. That’s close to home.) Normally the drug usage starts to escalate a lot at that point. Then everything else starts to escalate. Then you rape a little kid behind closed doors. Then… for some reason you end up in AA. For some reason. Like when you arrested and do time for being a drug dealer. And you are required to go to rehab as a condition of parole. So then you start your cycle as a pathetic weakling…

That’s my sister’s path. I could do that with her. Sort of. Not really. Because you see… I’m not the one who does that. If I disagree with what anyone else says then I’m crazy and mean. If I go along with stuff and I am passive and invisible and accept all of the abuse then I will be tolerated. I’m at the bottom of the heap. I’m the baby of the family and I just need to accept that I will get shit on for the rest of my life because I am just not competent. Even though I am the one who should go work and support everyone. Right. And I should never question their repeated “loans” which WILL BE PAID BACK!!! Only they won’t be. If you say, “Dude. Tell me this is a gift and I will give you the money and never say a word. If you tell me this is a loan you god damn better pay it back.” Then I am a terrible mean hateful person for bringing up the money later. After all, I’m rich and she’s poor and she deserves a little luxury.

Do you know I have serious issues around eating single serving foods? If I have yogurt in my fridge in individual servings it is a conscious act of talking myself into believing I am allowed to eat them. I cannot tell how much food I have thrown away because I wasn’t allowed to eat it. In my fridge. That I bought with my money. I was never allowed to eat those things as a kid because they were for my mom’s lunch. I’m quite certain that’s not how she remembers it. And there was other food. But I didn’t like the other food. So I didn’t eat. I went hungry as a kid fairly often. Sometimes it was because I refused the gross food I was offered (at this point I’m pretty sure I have sensory processing issues, I really have problems with food textures) and I wasn’t allowed to have anything else.

After I write that I feel kind of mixes. My story is that my mom was very tolerant of my limited list of foods. She was willing to let me eat only them at meals. But outside of Ramen she didn’t cook any of them much. Interesting. I don’t think I will come to the truth about that one. I don’t think I remember and I can’t ask her.

But I have some not so awesome food issues. Because it’s all about control. Incest is all about control. My father’s mind games continued running my family. My family claims they are out of those cycles. They have moved on. But my sister hasn’t worked in years and she sits at home doing drugs and babysitting the children of her children’s teenage-mom friends. My sister claims all of these children as her grandchildren. I wonder how many of them she will rape. That’s why I need to finish the book. That’s why I will eventually get the court records of my father’s testimony. I want to have them in my hands as a magic talisman as I go forth to do battle for the souls of children I will never know. My sister is a rapist and she should be in jail. At the very least her house of cards needs to come down before she rapes another child or allows another boyfriend to rape a child.

I think I just found my purpose in life. Well, one of them anyway. But that will motivate the book. The children she is raising are slightly older than my daughter. In my family abuse seriously escalates at about seven. I don’t have a lot of time.

Guilt

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I just kind of realized what I need in a therapist. I need someone who will sit back and let me tell the story. The whole fucking story. Sit through years and years of me babbling till I can get through all the horrific under layers because it will take forever to sift through it. And I need a therapist who knows that me telling the story is how I talk myself through figuring out the solution. It isn’t until I tell these stories out loud to someone else with zero judgment that I can get to the end and say, “That wasn’t a good childhood, huh?” and have them respond, “Nope” without much emphasis. Just matter of fact. Yeah. That sucked. And I am a god damn mother fucking courageous person for getting through that. And no matter what, anything I did as I flailed around and tried to survive was ok. I was a child and they were trying to kill me.

And then I need the therapist to not give me suggestions as to how to get better. I need the therapist to learn when I am evading and call me on it. I need a Noah who is more objective. I need someone who can crawl inside my head and find out why I am doing the things I am doing because until I can deconstruct why I have no idea how to fix it. Other people do great and fine with other short term things with treating symptoms instead of problems, but that isn’t my story.

My story is that I have no idea what “normal” is and I don’t know how to find out. I need to explain every single fucking day of my horrifyingly twisted childhood and have someone go through with me why I did things right and where I did things that were maybe not the absolute best, and ok I can apologize for how my flail landed if it makes me feel better, but it’s still ok. I’m still ok. I am the right kind of me. I do not need to change who and what I am to make any one else happy.

I am a writer. I need to write about the things in my head. I need to express them. The noises and the voices are drowning me and when I get them out I find peace. I need to say that my childhood was not ok a few thousand times because I have to say it for every time I was raped, molested, abused, made to feel invisible, hit, called names, and told I was worthless.

I need to find out that it really isn’t normal for a 12 year old girl to ask one 25 year old man to fuck me then date another 25 year old and accept jewelry from him after going down on him the first time. I was well on my way to a bad life. My first chosen lover was a 25 year old drug dealer named Sean David Segura. He fucked me without a condom. He fucked me without foreplay. It hurt and it sucked. But I thought I just had to get used to it. I dated a DJ from KRTY. His real name was Rick Rood but he went by the name Glen Richards on the air. We only dated for like a month. But my mom seemed to think it was just fine that I was dating him. At least he was a nice guy? Who liked to have 12 year olds suck him off. He was also a singer. I went to watch him perform at the county fair. Uhm. He sang childrens music. Right.

And these are the things in my story that my family points at. These are the things that i have done that they use as evidence of why I am bad and dirty and crazy. The thing is… this is what happened when I was 12. It was really kicked off a few years before that.

I was 7 when Tommy was hit by the car. My whole world exploded. Everyone turned and looked at Tommy. I was very invisible. I started acting out really hard. To be fair, I was raped not long after his accident and before I saw him and it became real for me. So the accident tripped things off. Then Michael raped me and my mom beat me. Then my mom up and disappeared for months and left me with my sister. My sister was 20. A drug addict trying to abstain because she was pregnant (but she would not receive prenatal care because she was afraid of drug tests) so she was a nasty fucking bitch. Oh she was awful. She was horribly abusive a lot of the time. From my current point of view I feel like she was probably actually doing pretty well all things considered. But that wasn’t how it felt at the time. And then I was sent home with a family I only kind of knew. By home I mean I drove home with that family in their minivan from Texas to Southern California. It was a horrible trip and I was terribly traumatized and everyone expected me to just buck up.

We bounced around Southern California. I can’t tell you what happened then because I have nearly no memories. I know that eventually we were with my Uncle Larry for a while (my brother has since filled me in that my mom was fucking him for rent–nice, huh?) and Uncle Larry liked to premake his screwdrivers and just leave the pitcher in the fridge and I got very drunk. And my mom and I stayed up on New Years watching horror movies. It was really pretty awful. I was obsessed with horror movies and my mom let me watch them all the time. Some day I should stop and look at the movies I watched: The Gate, Poltergeist 1, 2, 3, and the Nightmare on Elm Street series again. I bet I could come up with recovered memories that way. Derail!

After that I’m unclear until we lived in Whittier. That part of my life was very bad. We lived there for 18 months. So many things happened then. I know that is the part of the story I need to get to right now but I am dissociating hard. It’s actually hard to maintain eye focus. This is scary. I keep being pissed off because people aren’t posting enough on facebook. Please god, isn’t there something in the universe that can distract me from this pain? I want to go play with my children to avoid this. Right this minute that would be a derail and I know it. Fuck.

My instinct is to call it the darkest part of my childhood. Because then I can go off on a digression about whether it really was or not. But that’s not the point. It was god awful horrible horrible horrible. We lived there with Tommy during the brief time they tried to have him live outside a facility. It wasn’t good. My mother and my sister were not prepared to deal with the kind of care that a brain damaged disabled kid needs. My sister was trying to get her life together. She was trying to go to college and she had a good GPA and she was smart. But her husband dumped her after my nephew was born because he wasn’t interested in being a dad. That man deserves to rot in hell for what he let happen to his son. I hope he has nightmares every night. Bobby is a selfish, self-centered son of a bitch. He was more interested in being a kept pretty boy than in caring for the son he made. My sister went off birth control without his permission but he didn’t want to bother with condoms. He helped make the baby, he deserves responsibility for how my nephew turned out.

Anyway. But my sister was dating Tom. Who was a drug addict, alcoholic loser. She claims she actually decided to get pregnant with my niece, which is really an interesting statement. Wow. You wanted to have a kid with that man? You wanted to ensure contact with that man forever? oooooook. You are baby mama number what? Ok, and now is when I look like a classist bitch.

And that’s ok. Because wanting to not be that, to be something different saved my life. Denise’s boyfriend Tom came on to me over the years. It was subtle and I encouraged it. I own that. I thought that was what I was supposed to do with him. After all that is what my sister was doing with him right in front of me. Closed doors are for prudes! Only prudes wear clothes! I strongly suspect she was drunk and/or on drugs through that whole period but I was totally unaware of the drugs.

You see, my mom and my sister thought that as long as they didn’t tell me what had happened to my sister and they didn’t do drugs *in front of me* that I would be ok. They would break the chain. They would free me from the cycles of abuse. And that is what my brother thinks will work too.

But the problem is that they continue to hold abusers to their bosom and permit them their “mistakes” because after all, everyone is human. We all make mistakes. Right? Look, I lay before all you anonymous people on the internet that just like the rest of my family I too am a rapist and a molester. I will tell you the atrocities I have committed and I do so because this is how I figure out where I end and they begin. This is where I explain that I feel like I am a rapist because I sexually aggressed when I was a very young child. I will explain the circumstances in which I crossed boundaries for people and I don’t want people to tell me it is ok and I am still a good person. That is a dark spot on my soul and I will carry it till I die. No one can absolve me of it and trying to do so minimizes my pain. I have to live with that guilt. I can learn to have compassion for myself as I do, because I was a child. And I was just flailing around like a trapped animal trying to survive.

But I still did it and I still need to hold me accountable.

Just like my sister and my mother need to hold themselves accountable for what they did to me. I am not interested in granting anyone mercy in this game of life. If you grant mercy then you allow poison to spread. I am not going to be part of the sickness. And god it sucks to see how I was when I was a child.

But I’m not going to turn around or find Wicca or go do Reiki and cleanse my chakra as a way of absolving myself of guilt. Fuck that. I think that’s the fucking easy way out. I’ll have my husband beat it out of me. It will be awesome.

Sexual abuse

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Right now my extended family is closing ranks against me.  I am the problem.  Right.  I shouldn’t have said anything because I have hurt people who didn’t need to be hurt.  Wow.  Because it’s totally my fault that I was raped as a kid.  But they think it is my fault.  And I can explain!

I have been a sexual aggressor since I was a small child.  I was taught to give blow jobs and to be obsessed with sex.  When I say that my mother and my sister participated in my sexual abuse, sometimes my violent sexual abuse I don’t think people are picturing the right thing.  English is kind of useless that way.  I am not claiming that my mother or my sister ever touched my cunt.  There.  That’s been said.  But when my mother violates court orders to send me to my father over and over, and when she ignored frantic phone calls to pick me up… she is just as much to blame as my father.  She chose over and over to leave me in situations that were very dangerous.  She refused to accept parental responsibility.

Most of the people who know me now probably think of me as being sexually adventurous in an at least mostly healthy way.  Some people have their doubts, but I think that overall people think I’m not still acting out constantly.  Seeing as I’ve mostly been vanilla and monogamous except for a few very brief, very safe forays for almost five years means that I feel like I am probably past the dangerous choices.

I don’t even know how to tell this story.  I want to show what it was like to grow up being brain washed that I was supposed to have sex any time any one else wanted.  I wasn’t supposed to consider my needs.  But part of it overlaps with Tom and I feel kind of bad combining those stories.  Ok Krissy, just start.

From when I was an infant I was constantly exposed to people having sex.  I have independent verification that I was shown a lot of porn and many adults flagrantly had sex in front of me as a toddler.  After the intense conversations with my brother I think that my father was already touching me, but it was the least of my problems.  I remember my father touching me from my earliest memories.  He wasn’t extreme early on, but he liked to uhm, make sure things were developing ok.  This would be why I can barely handle wiping my daughters when they have a poopy diaper.  When they pee mostly I change without looking or touching because I don’t know what an appropriate level of touching is.  I’m afraid to keep tabs on what is happening with their labia.

Anyway.  I grew up in an atmosphere that breathed sex.  Adults (who were on drugs) would have sex on the couch while watching porn.  While the kids played in the living room.  That is what my baby/toddler experience was like.  Why did I start giving blow jobs at 3?  Because 3 year olds mimic what they are shown and I was constantly shown that girls are supposed to go down on boys.  It was talked about in front of me like, Oh of course!  That is what you do.  And when I said things that were considered less than acceptable, like if I said I didn’t want to… I was hit or sent to my room.  My mom isn’t going to remember it that way.  Because my mom was the adult and my mom exerted no control.  My mom refused to set the boundaries.  She numbed her pain (because there is no fucking way she thought this was ok) and checked out mentally so that she wouldn’t have to be responsible for anything.

I’m not real interested in granting her that grace.  My mother has spent her whole life trying to evade responsibility.  And so I tried desperately to pick up responsibility as a child.  My mother would do the same shit I am doing.  She would get locked in her memories and start blurting out inappropriate things.  My mom would tell me intense scary stories about my father raping her.  My mother told me from when I was very little that I was the product of rape and if she hadn’t been Catholic she would have aborted me.  That wasn’t a common thing.  She didn’t say that a lot.  And to be honest she usually had to be pushed to say it.  When I was fishing around to figure out what the fuck happened in my parents marriage, because nothing was talked about in a straight forward way, she would drop in little bits about how horrifying things were.  And he is a monster.  And he did all these terrible things to her.  Then she would cry.

Then I had to be the adult and comfort her.  I listened to her stories.  They became my stories.  When my Aunt Vonnie tried to outlaw Sweet Valley High books for being too graphic my mother turned around and let me read graphic historical romance novels that talked explicitly about pony play, sodomy, rape, harems, incest…  My mom thought those were perfectly appropriate reading for me at 7/8.  And she didn’t talk to me about what I read.  She just had the books all over the house and she ignored me reading them.

That wasn’t ok.  That was my mother abdicating responsibility for me.  I was a child.  I should not have been reading pornography.  My children will not be allowed to read books that are primarily pornography before they hit puberty.  I just don’t fucking think so.  But she feels like she did nothing wrong.  I was a reader and that was all we had in the house.  It wasn’t her fault.

My sister brought men to our house.  Basically all of those men propositioned me in some way.  Many of them explicitly.  My sister would say it is my fault!  Because when those men came over and my sister had sex with them with the bedroom door open… I watched.  My sister talked to my about anal sex when I was really little.  She would talk about how awesome it was when he was fucking you really slow and gentle and he pulls all the way out and pushes back quickly and oops it switches holes and it hurts but it feels so good that you don’t mind that he’s hurting you.  That conversation happened in the downstairs bathroom of my Aunt’s current house.  My sister lived in that apartment when I was in the 11-15 range.  That was a sick thing for her to tell me.  I mean, it’s true.  But she should not have told me that when I was a child.  She gave me extensive stories about her sex life and the drugs she took.  My sister was thrilled that her tubes were tied because she had no interest in using birth control.

This was the environment I grew up in.  I acted out.  In kindergarden I took a little boy behind the book cart and I gave him a blow job.  When I came back to that school in sixth grade I found out that little boy told people I raped him.  I called his mother and told her that he was a disgusting liar.  I am a sexual predator too.  I was raised to be.  I was taught to push everyone near me’s sexual limits.  I was the aggressor with my high school boyfriends, most of whom were virgins when I met them.  Pretty much all of them quickly backed away from me because I was too intense and scary.  I wasn’t having sex because exploring sex was fun and exciting and new.  I was having sex because otherwise I was invisible and I felt like no one in the world loved me.

Which is to say, an awful lot of my youthful encounters can be read as sexual assault.  Either me doing it to other people or them assaulting me and me not saying no.  I feel sad and scared.  For my first 20 year I acted out the programming my family gave me because I didn’t have much choice.  How much responsibility should I hold for what I did?  Well, I tracked down the guy I went down on in kindergarden.  I told him that what I did to him was wrong and I was a very messed up kid and I desperately hope he has found someone to talk to about it.  I am so sorry I hurt him when I was flailing around from being hurt.

I am a monster too.  And I have to live with that.  Apparently my brother’s wife has been begging to adopt a daughter for years but he doesn’t want to have a girl in his house.  His plan is to wait a few generations and then the taint will be gone.  But it doesn’t work that way.  I have to look at myself in the mirror every day.  I did these things.  This legacy is not over by me not molesting my kids.  It’s deeper than that.  I have to learn where I end and other people begin.  I have to learn how to hold the right boundaries for my kids.  The right answer isn’t locking them in their rooms till they are 18 so they are safe.  The right answer isn’t even sheltering them completely so they are safe.  The right answer is asking questions and not volunteering information that is too adult and inappropriate.  The right answer is exposing them to many many kinds of people and talking to them about what they see so they learn how to evaluate people.  My daughter’s will not know how to spot a sexual predator when they see one.

But I do.  And I need to teach them how to be safe without teaching them to be afraid or teaching them to go looking for danger.  That’s hard and scary.  That is the last hurdle preventing me from emailing my friends and saying not to come today or tomorrow because the crisis is over.  I do not yet feel like I have control over my mouth.  I had more than one day where I was terrified I would hit my kids.  Right after seeing my mother and my sister and having them do the “We are such a great family” act I freaked out and wanted to come home and beat the shit out of my children.  That is why I freaked out so badly this time and went to such a deep, horrifying place.  My family is that toxic to me. So the pain of staying broken, of keeping contact with my family became much much harder than blowing everything sky high and saying, “Ok mother fucker!  You want to start cycles with me!  All right!  Let’s talk about some cycles!”  I am not going to step blindly into what they are doing any more because I am able to step out.

But right this minute that used all of my reserves and I don’t know how to maintain boundaries with my babies.  Because my boundaries with my babies are different than my boundaries with my family.  And never the twain shall meet.  With my family I have to be loud, aggressive, angry, and borderline abusive in order to prevent them from hurting me.  I’m sure people will think I should find a better way.  But I survived being raped, beaten, molested, and thrown into houses alone with sexual predators.  I needed every ounce of righteous fury in the world to know that what they did to me was wrong and I should not have gone through it.  My family would love it if I killed myself so they could point to me as a victim of my father’s abuse and canonize how I went down in the struggle but look!  They are so much better off than me.  Fuck them.

Instead I will take a couple more days to blurt things out inappropriately.  Then I will get around to scrubbing my bath tub (it’s pretty gross) and I will take a long bath.  And I will recite my memories to myself because I don’t want to forget them.  As weird as that sounds to everyone else, they are part of me too.  If I try to forget them or act like they aren’t important I am negating most of what shaped me.  I am not a strong vibrant person in spite of what happened to me.  I am a strong vibrant person because I went through just about the most horror a white person in America can go through as a child.  And my response was to say, “Fuck all of you.  I’m going to go do better.”  And my family is rotting on a mountain top.

And I am free.  Now I just need to stop talking about my hurt in front of my kids.  And I will.  But not today.  That sounds like I am talking about my stuff in front of my kids now!  Oh man.  That’s the wrong impression.  I sort of am.  I come out and I talk to my friends about things in chunks.  But my friends are watching me and listening and I am watching me and listening.  When I start to get intense I just walk away.  Because that is what I can do when memories are hitting me this strong.  Suppressing them really isn’t a good idea at this stage.  It’s rare for me to have this much.  But I’ve had a bad week, you know?  And this week will end.  And next week is Shanna’s birthday week.

I can’t be broken on Shanna’s birthday week.  That would be placing my needs above hers and I’m not going to be like my mother.  My children deserve better than that.