Category Archives: breaking cycles

If you build it, they will come?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perspective is everything.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anything is possible

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Tonight I’ve been working on editing the book.  Reading this makes me feel like I have been kicked in the stomach.  It’s hard to wrap my head around these things happening to me when I am not sitting very still and concentrating on the story.  I dissociate so well.

Sometimes Noah says things to me that really bother me.  He said that it isn’t actually surprising that things started so bad so early because otherwise I never would have adapted.  If you are treated well at all you can’t handle being hurt like I was when I was older.  You just don’t have the instincts for it.  I feel rather mixed.  Ok, that’s not what he said word for word.  But that is as close as I remember.

As I’m editing this book I’m thinking hard about what the next book will be.  I think it should be a children’s book.  I want to find a way to explain me to my kids in a way that is appropriate for very young children.  Sometimes My Mommy Gets Angry is a good book, but it doesn’t feel all that applicable to my kids.  If I want them to have a story I think I have to write it.  I want to find a way to introduce the issues around my anger and defensiveness in a way that clearly lets them know it is never their fault and never about them.  It really isn’t.  I have issues.  That happens sometimes.  How do my kids grow up understanding that not everyone is like me?  Mostly they will meet lots of people and just notice on their own.  I don’t want to excuse my behavior.  But I do want them to have a chance of understanding.

I don’t take it for granted that I will have a relationship with any of the people I know today in twenty years.  Not Noah, not my kids, none of my friends.  I am still in contact with very few people I knew twenty years ago.  B.  That’s it.  Our contact is kind of tentative and nebulous and often absent for months or years.  I hope I deserve to still have a relationship with my daughters in twenty years.

I’m struggling emotionally with the vast array of things I have no control over.  Right now I am appreciating my therapist.  She’s good at kind of smirking at me in a way that lets me know that I am over-extending my desire to control.  There is so little I have actual control over in this world.  It’s hard to admit that out loud.  It’s galling.

I’m not sure if I am getting sick or if I am just having physical symptoms of stress.  I fell down today after a lovely dizziness episode.  I wish I hadn’t done it outside on a gravel bed, but oh well.  After that my abdomen was so sensitive my pants felt horribly tight.  I felt like I was very pregnant trying to wear too-tight pants.  That feeling seems to have stopped.  I have had a blinding headache since yesterday.  The muscles in my neck are locked up tight and spasming.  Good times.  I think I’ve been remarkably chipper.  I won’t be taking the kids to Fairyland tomorrow by myself.  Holy moly am I not up for that right now.  I didn’t even run today.  I’ve been managing three days a week of running pretty well but I am having a nasty transition to running four days a week.  I also feel kind of weird about my continued weight loss.  Today I dropped below 150 pounds.  That’s thinner than I thought I could maintain while actually eating food.  As I sit here about to polish off half a box of cookies… I’m just not concerned.  I primarily eat locally raised organic vegetables and fruit, local pastured meat, and a mildly excessive amount of noodles.  It’s ok that I eat cookies sometimes.  I’m dropping weight like I made a New Years resolution.  I swear I’m not trying to lose weight.

I feel really weird about how my body is changing.  I feel like I have lost any right to ever talk about my body experiences as a fat person.  I’m not fat any more.  I can’t use the terms for myself I am used to using.  I have been this thin as an adult.  The last time I was this weight my stomach was concave and you could count my ribs.  That isn’t at all what I look like this time.  I don’t understand bodies.  I’m not even eighteen months postpartum.  I still have a fair bit of belly, though it shrinks by the day.  I have had these firm beliefs most of my life that I simply couldn’t be a thin person.  My German-peasant-stock body just wasn’t going to do that.  I was wrong.  Apparently it just takes 10+ miles of running a week.  No wonder I never bothered doing this before.

I am finally getting to the point where I can attain runners high.  I’ve never pushed myself that hard before.  It’s an interesting experience.  I don’t think I am going to ever be passionate about running.  I’m doing it because I want to know that I ran in the same race as my brother.  I did it.  I can do this with him.  I am really and truly part of that piece of shit family.  It hurts to feel like you are never going to be allowed to think of yourself as part of the family.  Even though I don’t want them.  Even though I am going to avoid contact with my family for the rest of my life.  I love them and want them so much.  I wish they wanted me.  I wish they saw me and were proud.  I wish that at the end of the marathon my brother would smile at me and hug me.  I’m not going to hold my breath.

My brother believes that the only way for people like us to be good parents is to keep our fucking mouths shut and just not pass on the trauma to the next generation.  I disagree with him.  I think that part of being a good parent is talking about things.  I also think that part of being a good parent is going out and doing very hard things and showing your children that it is possible.  Anything is possible if you want it bad enough.  Even though I feel like a piece of shit now, I can change that.  I can find a way to have worth in my own eyes.  Eventually I will be able to feel like I am a good person.  Anything is possible if you want it bad enough.

Ok, I actually only ate two cookies.  But they were hella good.

second chances

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long-term friendships.

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I was talking to a chick I met when I was fifteen yesterday.  She’s one of my closer friends.  We met while we were each hot for the same guy.  She initiated the conversation yesterday because she wanted to tell me the results of some personality test thing she did in a grad school class.  It ranked her best attribute as the ability to *be* loved and to inspire love.  It was kind of funny to explain to her that it really is a skill and one I am singularly bad at.  When people love me I tend to be quite hard on them and not permit them to love me.  I will hold up your faults to a mirror as often as I can and tell you, “Can you really love me while doing _________.”  The results are mixed.  I expect people to put a lot of thought and energy into making sure their words match up with their actions.  So I’m pretty hard to love.  I’m effort.  And not an especially fun kind.

I told her that she is easy to love.  We still know each other because she is easy to love.  Not because I am so worth loving.  She is blessed with a thick skin, short memory, and the rock solid belief that people only say harsh self-improvement things with the best of intentions.  Yeah, we can stay friends.  Because you believe that when I point out bad things I’m doing it because I love you.

Yesterday I was talking to her about a different conflict in my life.  One I’ve written about.  One I very carefully write about.  I was telling her a different side to the story.  Being the girl she is her response was, “Whoa.  That’s a much bigger thing to feel ________ about than everything you have written.  The fact that this is going on makes me think this is the real issue.  And the fact that you won’t write about it… that’s big.  Yeah, this is probably the real crux of the issue.”  My jaw actually dropped.  I’m not completely sure she’s right, but she’s mostly right.  That was interesting for me to note for several reasons.  First and most importantly, holy shit she can play me.  I have deep respect for that in my friends.  That means they have paid attention.

I have had several big issues with my “chosen family” in the past year and a while.  I found the breaking point.  I have an increasingly interesting thought process around the things I used to put up with and things I am willing to model putting up with in front of my kids.  I’m having a hard time with those differences.  I don’t want my kids growing up with the idea that its ok to use me, everyone else does.  I’m not a fan of being the one who does all the work for a bunch of semi-grateful people.  I don’t get off on that.  I get nothing but exhaustion and anger that no one fucking helped.  Again.  But I want to see people.  Apparently if you want to see people it requires doing a lot of work.  Fuck that.  I’d rather not see people.  Attempting to put my foot down on this issue is not going well.

Most of my best friends are hoarders who need people to sit around and tell them how awesome they are.  I could go down a list.  It’s actually pretty funny.  If someone is not a hoarder who wants me to come clean their house for them we probably won’t build a friendship.  What can our friendship be based on if not my work?  Or there are the guys I fuck.  I have one or two fierce women friends I pretty much exclusively talk to online and I don’t clean for them.  But I don’t see them either.  Maybe once a year.

If people are hoarders who need me to clean up after them I have a pattern for that.  I have a whole broken dynamic I picked up in my family of origin around this issue and I moved it forward.  It’s interesting to think about.  I’m not sure if I’m an enabler or what if I come over and force them to get rid of a bunch of shit so it can’t be as big of a mess for a while.  My organization systems usually last at least months if not years.  They just put new shit around what I organize.  It’s hilarious to watch.

All of them remind me of my family.  If I speak of the hoarders as a collective I can come up with: charming, manipulative, lying, alcoholism, drug addiction, severe avoidance issues, agoraphobia, racist, sexist, cheating, everything is always someone else’s fault.

Once we had some former students over (that’s actually happened a bunch–they are great people) and we were all drunk and Noah got a bit overly intense when he was explaining to one of them how she was helping to create abusive relationships over and over.  He was outlining how her behavior correlated with stuff that is known to be a problem.  She was visibly uncomfortable and I made him stop.  But I do that.  I’m ridiculously codependent.  I don’t have the energy to care for more people and I have no desire to do so in the first place, but I really wish I had people in my life.  I only seem to make friends with people who want me to do a lot of work for them.  I am having a hard time changing this pattern.  And in the process I seem to have to put some dynamite in my chosen family and find out if anyone is still around in a few years.

So far it looks like unless I call and make invitations I won’t see some of them.  I’m sad but not surprised.  That is the pattern.  Others have changed the dynamic.  We are trying to find a balance.  I need support and have none to give.  They are trying to work with me.  It’s hard to accept help.  It’s very uncomfortable.  Times up.  Gotta go start kid time.

D– don’t you admire how I still avoided that one issue?

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

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

Mostly parenting babbling

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I’m trying something different this morning, my wonderful daughter Shanna is cuddled up next to me on the couch watching Fraggle Rock.  I’m going to see if I can usefully write with her in the room.  I’m not sure.  I feel very self-conscious about how often I cry in the process of writing.  Often I’m sobbing the whole time.  I’m kind of weird about crying around my kids.  I do it sometimes, but I go to great lengths to avoid it because I feel so terrible about my moodiness.  I wish I could manage consistency.  I think the only baseline I could have would be anger.

That is what I am having so much trouble with.  I feel guilty that I will never be able to be a placid, mellow, just happy mom.  That’s not an option this lifetime.  I am often happy.  I am sometimes mellow.  But I am also quick to anger.  My anger burns hot.  I get very sad.  I may be one of the only women I know who isn’t bothered by the term “hysterical”.  Even though I know it has nothing to do with my uterus, I really do get a kind of freaked out that men don’t get.  At least not in places I can see.  Sometimes it seems like I am the example of what is wrong with women.  I should try to be more stable.  More like the men in my life and all.  Because the women in my life are more stable than me, but not by much.  I’m sure that’s not a nice thing to say.

I’ve been really enjoying reading Austen novels lately.  That’s funny because I avoided them like the plague when I was in college for that English degree.  I’m enjoying seeing how very slow their lives are.  It feels like it is giving me permission to strive for less.  If I want to be a developed and accomplished person I need to have a lot of time spent in my house just improving myself.  If I am running around with too many things I am obliged to get done in a day I will spin my wheels in place and not improve much.  I’ll be too angry and frustrated to get the lessons from things I want to get.

Writing with Shanna here is different.  I’m being vague and that’s funny because she can’t read yet.  I’m not trying to spare her.  If I want Shanna to grow up reading I need to read in front of her.  If I want her to grow up being curious and interested in everything she can reach her hands out and touch I have to be free to walk with her and talk about the things she sees.  I have to be non-distracted enough to focus on her questions.  If I’m busy then I snap at her to leave me alone.  I don’t want that to be our relationship.

I want my daughter to be one of the blessed few.  I’m not striving for a “normal” childhood.  I don’t think I could create one if I wanted.  But she will grow up in this cocoon of love and acceptance and constant education.  That’s why I am drawn to Unschooling.  We really do sit and talk about things happening all day long.  I’m learning how much I know as I talk to her.  I know a great deal more about biology than I would have guessed.  I am thinking about getting a few books so I can learn more.

Now I am in the garage.  Calli called for me after that last paragraph and I spent an hour nursing and cuddling.  I got to sit and think about how weird and defensive I feel right now.  I’m often not sure what I am writing about until I am done.  Randomly: last night I was thanked for writing the post about admiring women.  I was weird and awkward and I almost cried.  But I didn’t.  Self control!  I have it!

I don’t think I know how to be a mother, exactly.  I’m not sure I know what that means.  But I do know how to talk to my children as if they are humans-in-progress and someday, not that long from now, they will know everything I know and more.  I tell Shanna every day that my job is to teach her everything I can so that she can be any kind of grown up she wants, regardless of my preferences.  I talk to her constantly about how different people have different things they like and she gets to decide how much she will agree with my opinions.  I feel weird about how often she wants to be like me.  It feels like a lot of pressure for me to think hard about why I have the opinions I have.  I don’t want her to have opinions based on my ignorance and bigotry.  I don’t want her to become an angry person because I am angry.

I feel like there is a certain level of anger that is normal and occasional and everyone gets to have.  I have no idea what that line is because I am often derided for any show of anger about any subject.  There doesn’t seem to be a consistent scale.  Or, whatever the scale is, it is also combined with the rule “And you are never to express any anger where any one else can hear you.”  I missed the rule if it exists.

I often feel like it is perfectly appropriate for me to be angry, but I should probably max out at seven when I express it and I seem to read to other people as much higher than that.  What am I teaching?  The funny thing is, I don’t have much desire to change this behavior pattern of mine for the sake of the relationships I’m missing out on because people are uncomfortable with my anger.  At this stage of my life I really and truly have to just be ok with making people uncomfortable, period.  I don’t want to teach my children to do the same thing though.  Or, rather, I want them to be able to make a decision for themselves.  I want them to have an understanding that I may get intensely angry but most people don’t and most people dislike it.  They get to have their own lives and figure out if they are angry or not.

Calli is at a different stage of development.  She has grown increasingly cuddly and desirous of physical contact with me.  She is starting to imprint pretty rapidly.  She is absolutely copying my physical movements, facial expressions, and tone of voice.  I have to stop yelling.  I don’t actually want to live in a house where yelling happens so quickly and constantly.  That places it on my head.

I’m dealing with a lot of my sources of anger.  I am going to decide by the end of today if I think I am willing to do the books for the business.  The answer is probably.  I would like to have a way to be involved with the community.  The owners and managers would become people I communicated with more.  I would be able to go visit when I wanted.  I was told that it isn’t reasonable for me to spend my only off-time doing more dishes.  I feel valued.  Thanks D.

I am figuring out my limits with regards to house cleaning and how I will manage that.  I can’t live in a big mess and Shanna was born messy.  When I make sure that Shanna and Calli are the only ones I’m cleaning up after, it’s a different conversation.  This is my job.  This is what I am doing with my life.  I am caring for my children.  That means I do have the entire obligation for the tornado.  I’m talking to Shanna about why I clean.  I show her how I do it.  I am increasingly asking her for help.  Often she is told, “I will clean up everything but _________.  If you want to go to the park today, you need to help me clean up.”  I work hard at encouraging her to play with one thing at a time and clean it up when you are done.  But that’s not how Shanna plays.  When Shanna plays the whole damn house is part of the game and every item of clothing and block and blanket and item of furniture is part of the story.  It’s amazing to me that she really and truly has an explanation of what everything is doing.  It’s not that she’s messy.  She is highly creative.  She needs to interact with a lot of items in order to fill her need to manipulate things.  I’m trying very hard to talk to her about cleaning in a neutral tone of voice.  I only manage when I’m alone.

When I’m not alone I’m angry that the other adults aren’t helping and it creeps into my voice.  When I’m alone with the kids I don’t expect any one else to be doing anything so I don’t have a reason to be upset.  I’m just muddling along doing my job.  I care about doing my job well.  When I worked at Ross Dress for Less as a teenager I was a ridiculously good employee.  I kept my areas spotless and I always covered more area than I was technically assigned.  I knew they weren’t giving me enough work because they were assigning work based on how much other people could get done.  I have never been able to tell if I have much more energy and ability to work than other people or if other people are lazy.  I think that most of it is that other people just aren’t as invested in (thing of the moment) as I am.  I was told over and over and over, “If you are going to do a job, do it right.”  And I consider so many parts of life, and therefore work, not optional.  If it’s not optional and you have to do a job right… that means you put 100% of your energy into everything you touch, right?

This is hard to sustain.  I feel like I am deficient as a person if I leave a job half done.  I do it sometimes but I beat myself up for a long time.  I’m learning how to put the housework into categories for myself.  Right now the living room is a disaster.  It looks like it hasn’t been cleaned in weeks.  The entire house was completely spotless and I vacuumed and dusted and swept and mopped yesterday.  I just can’t get upset.  I have times of the day where I am supposed to get up and clean until the house is clean again.  Then I am supposed to stop at a certain time.  The house always has areas I could be doing more in.  I need to deal with filing again, for example.  Right now I am trying to not worry about those things because I have (deleted future stressful event) coming up.  Lots of feelings.

But it’s time to get back to where I was before I dropped my basket.  My kids are getting easier to care for.  Calli is still a baby, but barely.  She’s very nearly a kid.  I realized this week that I need to get my sign language books out.  She’s not going to match Shanna’s early learning curve so I need to teach her more signs.  She wants to learn them but I haven’t been modeling them this time.  That is something I should do.  Calli clearly has opinions and wants to communicate.  I haven’t been giving her enough scaffolding for being able to do that.  I get the impression that her tantrums would disappear if she could just bloody say what she is thinking.  Development is an interesting thing.

I’m developing an increasing appreciation of having two girls.  I think I would have been the kind of asshole who thought they had boys and girls figured out because they have one of each.  Calli is emerging more by the day and I find her so fascinating.  She moves like me.  By which I mean, she moves like my mother.  I see so much family resemblance in her.  I see my brothers.  I don’t remember what my father looked like, not really.  I don’t see my sister.  She strongly resembles her biological father.  But Calli has the same skull shape as me.  I have a picture of me at thirteen months up on the wall in the hallway.  Right next to Calli’s six week pictures.  It looks like it could be the same kid.

Part of the reason this feels weird is because Shanna has always felt like a mini-me.  But Shanna and Calli don’t share any of the things that make Calli feel so very startlingly like me.  It feels like a strange split personality situation.  They each took very different things from me.  Shanna has a lot more of my personality.  Shanna acts like me on my very best days.  She is friendly and empathetic and eager to bring joy to people.  Calli looks and moves like me but is much more reserved.  She is very clearly going to be an introvert.  She’s seventeen months old and she needs alone time.  It’s funny because I have only started to recognize how clearly I need that as an adult.  So Calli then feels like more a reflection of my moody and difficult days.  That terrifies me.

I have a friend who has a very troubled relationship with her teenage daughter.  I’m terrified.  I’m terrified of how I will manage to get through the next two decades of trying to impersonate a stable and good mother so that my adult children will want to know me.  I don’t exactly take that as a given.  When I talk about my fears it’s funny how people always say, “Your kids obviously know they are loved.”  My mommy does love me.  She just couldn’t take care of me.  And when she didn’t take care of me she told me it was my fault bad things happened to me.  I’m not afraid of my kids not knowing that I love them.  A lot of the reason that incestuous families are so intense is because there is just so gosh. darn. much. love.  I’m not worried about my children knowing that I love them.  I’m worried about my children only being exposed to age appropriate things.  I’m worried about my children being told that they are to blame for circumstances beyond their control.

My children are bright and curious and indulged in activities that encourage both.  That means they are going to fuck up a lot as they figure out how everything works.  I get to decide what their experience of fucking up is.  Do they grow up learning that perfectionist attitude of: if I ever fail I am a Failure?  I think not.  Everyone makes mistakes.  Kids and grown ups alike.  Shanna broke a glass yesterday.  I can’t remember the last time she broke a glass.  I think it has only happened once before.  I didn’t yell.  I didn’t shame.  I didn’t say anything nasty.  I said, “Ah man!  Ok, that’s why I ask you not to set your glass on the edge of the table.  Can you look around and see how far the glass shards went?  Don’t get off your chair!  I’ll get the broom.”  Then we talked about what it means that we have broken glass on the floor.  We talked about safe clean up.  We talked about where glasses are supposed to sit on the table.  And she got a hug and a kiss and a hope that I got all the glass shards up because I don’t want my sweet girls getting cuts on their feet.  I did it right.  I don’t do that every time.

But isn’t teaching interactions one of those things I’m supposed to be teaching?  Ok.  So I don’t do it right every time.  How badly do I fuck up?  How often?  I don’t know.  How badly do I fuck up?  Not very.  Not really.  How often?  Enh, depends on what you mean.  How often do I use a tone of voice I regret?  Daily.  How often do I say something I regret?  That’s hard to measure.  It goes in bursts.  I’ll have like five of them in two days because I’ll feel guilty and off-kilter after the first one.  Then I won’t have one for a long time.  How often do I do something I regret?  Very rarely.  I don’t spank not because of some crunchy ideal but because I don’t think I could use it appropriately as a consistent tool and there are much more effective tools out there.  My big punishment is three minutes of time out.  I lost my temper and kicked things where the kids could see once.  And then I dealt with the consequences.  If it happens again then there can be a reevaluation of my monster status.  Everyone gets to fuck up once.

Right now I feel like I am drowning in my feelings of obligations.  I can’t have interactions with people unless I am working to earn them.  I’m not sure exactly what the mechanism of this is for me.  But I sure treat it in-my-head like I am required to always work in exchange for someone tolerating my company.  I must be paying for the effort of dealing with me.  I’ll make dinner.  I’ll wash your dishes.  I’ll do the driving even though you are a single person and this is going to be a nightmare for me with my two kids.

I have friends who have helped me massively.  I now have this huge feeling of guilt.  I have been in this needy phase of life for a few years now and I feel terrible that I require so much help and I can give so little.  I will never discharge this guilt though.  And I don’t want to pass it on.  I don’t want to feel it.  I feel so much less deserving of help than other people.  Other people don’t have to rely on their friends so much.  Other people have families.  My family wouldn’t really be able to help me even if they wanted to.  Sure, they could provide “babysitting” but it would be in a neglectful and abusive environment.  No thanks.  I feel so much jealousy and rage that other people have families and I don’t. To that end I’m supporting Noah’s fledgling efforts to introduce our kids to his family.  They aren’t perfect, but they are something.  And they want to love the girls.  I don’t want my kids to grow up like me.  I don’t want them to grow up knowing that there are all these relatives but none of them have any interest in them.

All these feelings around housework and obligation and love and caring for people and physical limitations and support and abandonment… it’s all one big mess.  I’m going to be an asshole for a minute and say that acts of service is probably my primary ‘spoken’ love language.  Having someone see that I am tired and offer to carry my load?  That is a lot of what lets me feel loved and seen.  I’m not invisible.  Yes, I am happy to do all this work because I love you.  But I need to be coaxed too.  I need to be coddled too.  I am tired too.

Noah spent a while last night laying out his timeline on burdening me.  We talked about how it has gone in the past, how it is currently, and how things will go in the future.  Noah went down a long list of reasons explaining why he thinks he needs to just step up and do a bunch of things right now.  Noah specifically talked about the things I have done for him and why he wants to turn around and help me.  I can’t ask for that help.  I can’t direct it.  I don’t know why.  I know that is a failure on my part.  Noah explained in detail that he has learned over time to notice a variety of signs that my difficulty level is much higher than I am expressing.  On one hand it feels kind of weird being decoded and on the other hand I didn’t know how much I was apparently hiding or lying about or something.

Yesterday I found out that one person recognizes that I am past my breaking point and I am going to get help.  In the past week I have made it such that I am not going to be providing much help to anyone but the kids any more.  It feels needlessly extreme, but it seems to be necessary for me.  I can’t be one of the modern women who gets everything done for everyone.  I don’t want to figure out how to rescue an unproductive day.  I want to revel in days where we spend all day lying in the sun talking about all the things I see.  I talk about plants and clouds and buildings.  I talk about how people behave.  I talk about how things are made.  I talk about metal and plastic and rubber.  I talk about what it means to be responsible.  Unproductive days mean I am too busy enjoying what I am doing.  I can live with that.

I want my daughters to learn that for everything there is a season.  Some day they will work.  I will almost certainly work at some point.  I’ll get bored without something to do.  But for now what we are doing is learning together.  I have to spend all the time that I can with my kids learning about the world because there is so much to learn.  How will we get it all done?

I have let Shanna have basically unfettered access to the iPad.  She watches a lot of Fraggle Rock, Thomas, She-Ra and then she has her movies.  She is increasingly playing with games.  She is doing the letter tracing.  She’s fascinated with youtube and what she can learn there.  I uhhh don’t know how she found nail polish and makeup tutorials, but she has had fun playing with those.  I don’t let her have access to youtube on the iPad.  That has to be used with an adult because bad links pop up.  I feel comfortable with this now because she uses it for a variety of things and she is incredibly physically active.  She likes to go on multiple mile walks with me.  I keep telling Calli that iPads are three year old toys.  We’ll see how long that goes.

So much is in my head and so much of it I can’t write about.  Life is really complicated.  I keep telling myself that everything will be okay in the end.  If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.

From here on out Noah is the person I have lived with the longest of anyone in my life.  With the exception of Jenny and our other housemate, I don’t have contact with anyone I have ever lived with.  Ok, sometimes I run into Tom, but our lives have diverged.  Noah is the only carrier of my story.  Noah is the only one I have to worry about being appropriate for.  Wow.  That’s actually an interesting thought.  When I’m having my ambient feelings of guilt for my behavior, Noah is the only one I will really have to worry about.  I have the kids for ~17 more years and then they are adults.

That’s a lot more pressure than it seems like.  A specific kind of pressure I don’t do well with.  I feel I owe my children a decent childhood.  I brought them into a world they didn’t make.  I have obligations to them.  I have a very different relationship with Noah.  I owe him nothing but what I choose to owe him.  Yet in every way that matters I would be a fool to not see Noah as “rescuing” me.  I feel like he took a chance on a stupid gutter kid, and this is how I repay him?  By being needy and whiny and incompetent and angry?  I feel like he is getting a bad deal.  And that makes me feel savagely angry that all I have to give is a bad deal.  I am a bad deal.

I was certainly a bad deal for Sarah.  I failed her.  I need far more help than she can give and I can’t help feeling angry about it.  That’s not her fault.  That’s not something she is actually to blame for.  She’s not doing anything wrong.  But I feel it.  And I take it out on her.  And that’s wrong.  I am wrong.  I don’t know why I need so much help.  It doesn’t seem like other mothers I know get even as much help as I get.  They don’t seem to fail as often.  They seem to be able to handle getting things done in a lot of different places.  I can’t track it.  I need to have my responsibilities all lie pretty close to one source.

There are a lot of things I don’t know or understand.  Right now I know that the sun is up and the sky is a beautiful blue.  The clouds are all drifting out of sight.  It’s been raining for a few days here.  For once I don’t hear a bunch of people whining about rain.  Almost everyone who has commented on the weather has been grateful for it.  I feel like for one storm we are all collectively breathing a sigh of thanks.  We need the rain.  The drought is ongoing.  I hope the clouds come back.  We need more rain.  Besides, when it rains I don’t have to go outside and water.  I’ve made a bunch of progress on the front yard recently.  Now that the rain washed all those obnoxious white rocks clean, I should probably take pictures.  It’s looking more like a garden.  I don’t know when I will get the playhouse made.  I screwed up billpay and we had some unexpected expenses.  The house part of the budget is overspent for many months.  I’m sad about that.  Oh well.  It just means I have more time to dream about it.  My kids are getting the house and yard I would have enjoyed growing up in.  I hope they like the experience.  I’m trying to not be oppressive about it.

Time to go inside.

The specific incident

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

family roles

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When I was in middle school we moved up to Redwood Estates.  My aunt and uncle bought a new house and left some of the family behind at the old house and took some of the family with them to the new house.  Eventually all but their middle child ended up living in the new house while the old house was rented out.  When I say “all” I mean their two other children.  And my male cousin had a girlfriend who had three kids.  My girl cousin had a kid.  My sister and her two kids.  My mother and me.  That’s what I mean by “all”.  It was a five bedroom house.

We lost our driveway in an El Niño storm.  I have a lot of respect for nature.  We were stuck in the house for two weeks without running water, electricity, or phone.  We could hike up the mountain to get to roads so we did get help and what have you.  Eventually they brought in this awesome massive bridge and drove the cars over the pool onto the neighbors driveway.  Then we parked down in this little cul-de-sac and had to walk up a hellacious stair case to get to the house.  The stairs were unevenly spaced, very awkward to walk on, and really shitty to fall down.  They were also slick all year long from the water on the moss.

In losing our driveway we mostly lost the ability to get heat in the house.  Propane couldn’t be delivered.  They didn’t have the money to fix the driveway for years.  We just dealt with the stairs.  When we wanted to move someone in or out (that happened all the time) we would just open the gate to the neighbors driveway and hope she wasn’t home.  She hated us and if we used her driveway much she made our life hell.

One of my strongest memories during my childhood is coming downstairs from my bedroom to see Aunt Vonnie slowly walking into the kitchen with her arms full of grocery bags.  I asked her if there was anything left at the bottom.  She said yes but told me she needed to rest for a minute before going to get it.  Aunt Vonnie is older than my mom by a good ten years.  My mom was thirty two when I was born so Auntie is ~forty two years older than me.  I must have ben thirteen or so.  Let’s call her sixty.  So my sixty year old aunt was trudging up these treacherous stairs with her haul from Costco while most of the family sat in the living room watching tv.  There were children ranging in age from three to thirteen, most of them on the older end.  And several adults.  All of whom have health issues, sure… but so does Auntie.  And she’s the oldest one present.

I went around the room slapping everyone, regardless of age, and told them to get off their fucking asses and get down to the car right now.  If you want to fucking eat, you get that food into the house.  Auntie isn’t your fucking servant.  Go.  Now.  They listened, grumbling all the while.  I pushed and pulled them down the hill then loaded them up and sent them back up the hill.  I carried the heaviest load even though I wasn’t the oldest or strongest there because he was a lazy piece of shit.  As usual.  I think he grabbed the roll of toilet paper.  When we got to the top Aunt Vonnie thanked me.  I knew that I was the only one who was going to lighten her load.

It always appalled me the way she was treated like a dog.  She worked from the time she woke up till she finally fell into bed far too late at night.  She cooked and cleaned and did all the shopping and worked and raised many many children.  When my sister makes comments about how she will be the matriarch after Auntie dies she doesn’t understand what that means.  She has no idea how much effort it is.  Aunt Vonnie is the matriarch because she is the only (semi-)effective person there.  She is the one who maintains a roof for everyone.  She is the one who ensures there is food.  She hosts because she does all the work and has a stable home.

The last Christmas I invited my family to my home my sister sat here and informed me how it was going to be hard on mom to be passed over as matriarch because it was clearly going to be my sister because she was the one who does all the work.  I blinked.  I looked at her.  I sat there thinking about how many of the holiday meals I have hosted over the years.  My sister hasn’t done it once.  I thought about how much money they have all asked me for.  I thought about how often I have been asked to save their asses.

I don’t want to be Aunt Vonnie.  I am not going to walk around for the rest of my life muttering about how there is no point in saying anything because nothing ever changes I just have to do all the work for everyone.  I have too many anger issues to take that role.  It is not a fit for me.  I will break too much of my house.

I was told over and over how much everyone was sacrificing “for me”.  It was my fault that they had to spend money on me so that I could live.  I owed them for their sacrifice.  Not right away, of course. But they always knew that I had the annuity money coming.  Comments were made.  Selfishness is one of the biggest sins you can be accused of in my family.  It’s kind of funny.  It was never being selfish when it came to discussions about Aunt Vonnie’s share of the work load.

Part of the road to Noah

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This fine morning a friend asked me about a link on Facebook about Mansplaining.  It lead to an interesting conversation about whether men or women (sexist language abounds.  I’m going to do an aside to say that there is a really odd mixture of statistics on whether rape is a female problem or a problem that is closer to equal than anyone can handle admitting.  I am defaulting to standard sexist language because that is my experience base.  I do not mean to say that my experiences are universal–they are not.  Carry on.) bear responsibility for rape.

I’m going to call myself out for being an asshole, because I was, but I was a persuasive asshole.  I said, more or less, “Oh reeeeeeeeeeeeeeally?  How much responsibility do I bear for being raped?”  I then proceeded to go through a list of the times I have been arguably raped as an adult when I should be responsible for my ability to pick “safe” people.  I decided it was time to tell the story of Dan Morgan.  I haven’t before.  Not really.

On December 18th, 2005 I posted this in my livejournal:
I am about to climb out of my head with wanting sex. But I still don’t want casual sex. I feel kind of lame. It has been just over three weeks and I am already going batty? Damn the time is going to pass slow… This is longer than I have gone without sex in… oh god… uhhhhh… two years. For the record: I have really enjoyed how much sex I have had in the last two years. *sigh* Thank you to all the lovely people who have made the last two years so much fun. 🙂 I was asked on Friday if going back to casual sex would be better than waiting for more meaningful sex. I told the person that I am coming out of a relationship where I have had the best sex of my life and going back to more mediocre sex would be a serious let down and I am not quite ready to do that yet. I think a lot/most of what made that sex so awesome was I was more present for it than I usually am. I asked Puppy for what I wanted in ways that I have never been comfortable asking before. Other than the actual technical amount of time spent having sex I got exactly what I wanted pretty much when I wanted. There was also a variety that blew my mind. I kind of feel like I rediscovered vanilla sex. And it can be GOOD. 

I miss every part of sex. I miss having his body over mine. I miss the scary intensity of having him slide into my ass. I miss feeling a cock in my throat. I miss feeling his tongue on my clit. I really miss having a cock in my pussy. The discerning reader will notice the change in possessive pronouns in the previous statements. There are some sex acts that were very specific to him that I miss him for. There are some that I am just missing in general right now. He is the only sex partner I have ever received regular anal or oral from. 

I didn’t mention this part to the person who asked, but I actually don’t really want to go back to casual sex because I don’t want to go back to the fanaticism I have when I am being a slut. I don’t particularly like getting STD tested every three months. I don’t particularly like condoms. I really really really like unprotected sex–which is a scary and dangerous thing. I can’t have it casually because I am not willing to risk my life. I am still on the pill. The first time he tried to break up with me I asked him if I could maintain booty call rights. I think I have it in the back of my mind that waiting a couple of months until I am less emotionally attached is a good thing, but eventually having him as a booty call would be a good thing. Although this is just mental masturbation. I really think that in order to not hurt myself emotionally it would have to be 4-6 months before I would be able to have sex with him and not cry through the entire event. And yeah. I am well aware that I technically can wait that long to have sex but I really don’t have to and I won’t go back to unprotected sex with him if I sleep with someone else. Ethics are annoying.

Right now, all I know is that I have a stronger desire right now for being beaten, for being held down and fucked unmercilessly than I have had in a very long time. I want to be slapped and taunted with how very horny I am right now. I want to have someone revel in my lustiness and appreciate the fact that I can wear someone out right now. I want to have someone fuck me until I beg them to stop because I am so sore. I want to be restrained and hurt and threatened. I want… sex.

The person I had been talking to on Friday was Dan Morgan.  I don’t know how we started talking.  I’m sure we met through Dickens Fair.  No!  Tribe?  Was it Tribe?  I don’t remember for sure.  That sounds right, though.  We were having these really awesome long conversations over IM about fun kinky sex stuff we were interested in doing.  I was adamant about casual sex meaning condoms.  He didn’t like that bit.  He told me quite a bit about how condoms were annoying.  My response: tough.  No cover, no entry.

Our first date was on Christmas Day in Disneyland.  I uhhh kind of bought his ticket in.  He was really broke and said he couldn’t afford the trip if he had to pay for theme park tickets, though he had friends he could go crash with who would go with him to the park if I got him in.  I didn’t have a problem with this.

We had a really fun date.  Involving upsetting his friends when Dan fingered me in the Tiki Room.  We were shit-faced drunk from the bar in downtown Disney.  Disneyland as an adult is very different. Other people go and treat it very differently than I do.  Anyway.

He went off with his friends and I went off with mine.  On December 27th I posted:
Disneyland is still cool.
First dates… are interesting.
Still not up for sex even though I am crawling the walls.
I went to the gym and I am proud of myself.
I haven’t made one itty bitty movement towards cleaning my apartment.
I have food now.
Tomorrow I have three netflix movies to send back.
My cat is hella clingy.
My family sucks even more than usual.
I am really drunk.
I told Puppy that he is an elitist piece of shit tonight.
I am tired of planes.
I am really tired and uninterested in sleeping for some strange reason… I think I am going to lose that battle in the next 10 minutes though.
I missed country music.
Zzzzzzzzz
sleep. 
I love my friends.

And then on December 29th I posted:
Tiki Bar TV

London Fogcutter, episode 8. That is the reason for my hangover.

I didn’t bother to mention that the real reason for my hangover was because Dan came over.  We had a pleasant afternoon together.  We dealt with a motorcycle gear acquisition for him.  There was a good store near me.  We tried to get to know one another.  By evening he said we should start watching the show.  He started making drinks.  He made more and more.  Dan is a really serious alcoholic.  I don’t drink much and never have.  Alcohol makes my stomach hurt.  He kept topping up my glass.  “Oh come on.  You don’t want to get behind now, do you?”  He was very antagonistic towards me trying to get me to drink more.

I wanted him to like me.  I will freely say that.  I thought he was shiny.  I’m sure there was an element of star-fucking in it.  He seemed well-liked.  Maybe if I stood next to him I would feel like not-poison for a while.

I woke up at about 3am in my bed confused.  I couldn’t remember anything past Tiki Bar TV.  And I don’t know that I remember more than two episodes of it.  I reached down between my legs and felt a lot of wet.  I rolled out of bed (because I had no other way of getting to the floor) and crawled into the bathroom.  There I proceeded to vomit until I thought I would die.  It was awesome.  This was when I was living in San Jose by myself for the only time in my life.

Puppy dumped me on Thanksgiving day.  Noah asked me to marry him in March.  Dan was right in the middle.  Of-fucking-course I said yes to Noah.

Anyway.  When I stopped puking I looked for my phone.  I sent Dan a text message asking where he was, when he left, and uhm, did we have sex?  He said he was at home.  He had left at 2.  Yes, we had sex.  I sent back another message saying: …unprotected sex?  He said, “Well you are on the pill so it doesn’t matter, right?”

I said basically nothing about this event to anyone who knew me.  It wasn’t exactly rape, right?  Only legally it was.  Regardless of whether I intended to have sex or not, once I was passed out drunk it wasn’t ok.  I had text evidence that I wasn’t interested in unprotected sex.  And I bloody well thought about the fact that I could go in for a rape kit and it would be bloody obvious that we had unprotected sex.

I was afraid of people saying that I was having second thoughts.  I was afraid of people saying that I was stupid or that I deserved it.  I believe that unprotected sex is a disease vector.  At that point in my life I was still really focused on the fact that I wanted to have children.  I didn’t risk any more disease than I had to.  I already have herpes and I’ve already had an hpv outbreak.  That damage was done long before.  I did the best I could with the information that I had.

Do you know why I was so afraid of going to the police?  Well.  That’s another story.  I can’t give you a name because I honestly don’t remember it.  I don’t really want to.  I wouldn’t remember Dan’s if he wasn’t a trusted member of my extended community I thought was safe.

The summer I was 18 I was drunk with the sexual power of being a woman.  Finally, for the first time in my life what I was doing and mine to decide about.  I finally had the legal right to consent.  It did actually matter to me.  It has always bothered me that my early partners could have gone to jail for what we did.  It feels like an unfair balance of responsibility.  Anyway.

So when I was 18 I was on match.com.  Don’t judge.  I was hanging out in the chat rooms a lot.  I met up with several people.  The first was a guy who was in the Coast Guard.  He lived in Alameda.  Anna was housesitting for a family way the heck up Summit Road.  The other side, not the same side as Redwood Estates.  Way up in the fancy-pants part of the mountains.  The house was beautiful.  I can’t remember if there were three or four stories.  Elaborate wine cellar (like a huge vault that was about 1/3 the size of the bottom floor of the house), sauna, steam room, exercise room, pool, hot tub… everything.  The family was having a lot of work done on the house.  They gave Anna permission to have me stay up there with her.

I know they regretted that.  It was all my fault.  Anna had worked for them successfully for years at that point.  I ruined a very profitable relationship for her and I still feel bad about that.  That is part of what I mean when I say I am poison.  Anna bore a lot of the brunt of the backlash for this.  But I’m getting ahead of myself again.

We invited a couple of my theater friends and this random guy from match.com up to the house for a party.  It wasn’t that wild because my theater friends were young and sweet and inexperienced.  I think back on them with this really nostalgic color.  They were really awesome and I didn’t know how to stay one of them.

Of course there was drinking.  Unless I snuck off behind Anna’s back she said I had three shots of tequila and then I begged off because my stomach hurt.  Everyone else kept drinking.  I don’t remember much after the second shot.  I woke up in the morning feeling fierce and disgusting.  I couldn’t remember any sex and I was kind of sad.  I was confused though because I couldn’t remember much of anything, really.  But I had to hurry up and get moving.  I was working at Pride in San Francisco.  I was working a booth for the Same Sex Marriage organization.  It was awesome.  I met people and did things I’m really glad I did.  In between doing all of them I had to run to Port-A-Potties to vomit.  I did that all day long.  When I went back up to the house in the mountains I took another shower and curled up on the bed.  I happened to lean over and look in the trash can.  There were three used condoms.

Funny.  I didn’t remember having sex.  I asked Anna what happened.  She told me about the party and said that eventually I stumbled back up to the room with the help of this guy.  I asked her how I looked and she said, “You looked really out of it.”  I nodded.  I told her that I think that what happened technically qualifies as rape.  I called the Sheriff.  She was dubious.  She was right.

The particular officer who showed up is one I have met before.  When I was 11 Al Smith, my next door neighbor at the time, asked me if I would have sex with him.  Our other neighbor overheard the whole exchange and reported it.  That’s why the officer came to my house when I was 11.  When I was 11 he told my family I was crazy and that I needed help.  He wouldn’t prosecute Al.

When I was 18 he told me, “What did you expect when you bring a boy up to a house to drink?”  He took the (outrageously expensive) sheets as “evidence” and then told me he was not going to fuck up the life of some nice Coast Guard boy for a girl like me who gets cold feet after the fact.

The fall out was really bad.  The family had to be told why we disappeared their sheets.  We would have been better off lying.  Given the response of the sheriff it looked really bad and hysterical.  It was even worse because I had gone skinny dipping in the pool and flirted with the guy painting the house. I was obviously horrible.  The family was really angry with Anna for bringing someone like me into their house.  They told her if she wanted to know people like me they didn’t want to know her.

Years later I was behind their car on the freeway.  The license plate has their last name on it.  I felt such a sickening wave of shame.

Why didn’t I call the police after Dan fucked me without a condom?  Uhm…. good pattern recognition skills?  Every time someone tells me that women bear some of the responsibility for being raped I want to scream.  I HAVEN’T EVEN BEEN ALLOWED TO GIVE CONSENT WHEN I WANTED TO SO SHUT THE FUCK UP.  Rape is an abuse of power.  Rape is putting a body part into someone else when they have not consented.  That is not something that is about mutual responsibility.

That asshole when I was 18 raped me.  I could not consent by the time he had sex with me, but at least he used condoms.  When I was 24 I was raped because having unprotected sex with me after I had it in writing many times that I don’t do that is illegal.  And I was too chicken shit to say anything because I am well aware that no one in power gives a shit what happens to white trash whores like me.

And then Noah showed up.  I would have been manifestly stupid and crazy to continue the life path I was on without him.

monogamy

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Monogamy.  It’s a weird concept for me.  I need to spend the rest of my life learning how to have relationships with people without having sex with them.  I think that will be good for me.  Weird and awkward, but good.  What does that mean though?

I hesitate to talk about this.  I don’t want to eat crow later.  Mmmmm crow.  Never say never.  I remember a friend of mine, years ago, telling me, “Of course I don’t like that he plays with other women.  But I want to play with other men so I shut up and put up with it.”  I think I’d rather not play with other people than feel like I have to bite back my actual opinion.  I don’t want to have to learn masking behavior that I use only at certain times.  That feels like lying.

Noah playing with other people makes me cry.  It reminds me that I don’t ever get to be special.  Which is stupid, right?  He married me.  He didn’t marry anyone else and he is not going to leave me.  Why isn’t that enough to convince me?  Sex is so mixed up for me.  Near as I can tell most people have enormous sexual hang ups without having to be abused starting in toddlerhood.

I don’t want to feel like I have to have sex with people in order to be interesting and I do.  I really do.  I don’t like that part of myself very much.  I feel rather disgusting, really.  This is bordering on a lot of things I’m deeply conflicted about.  I am an exhibitionist.  No one reading this is surprised.  I’m not sure how that ties in with a lot of my need-to-feel-available.

I think I want to find out how forever feels.  I want to realize that I’ve probably kissed someone else for the last time.  Really.  He’s it.  Forever.  I’m kind of excited.  I should decide that I deserve to be touched only by someone who wants me enough to actually want all of me.  Not just that piece of me.

How am I going to connect with all the people I want to connect with?  It’s kind of terrifying, really.  What do I have to offer?  I don’t know.  I have spent my adulthood with people who believe that monogamy is terrible and limiting and to be avoided at all costs.  I feel kind of ashamed that I want to keep Noah all to myself.

I feel like I am doing something wrong by joining the Embargo and refusing to sleep with anyone ever again.  It’s not fair that all these guys want sex and I won’t sleep with them.  This is not a guilt I should carry.  It should never enter into my mind that it isn’t fair that this nice guy isn’t getting _____ need met.  Life isn’t fair.  I bear no obligation to anyone but Noah for sexual needs.

That’s complicated too.  I think in some ways monogamy is terrifying because it means that we will both have to be a lot more honest about what we want.  If we want to get our needs met, really met we have to talk about them even when it is hard.  Even when he’s afraid to say it to me.  Even when I’m afraid to say it to him.  I do not need to agree to do more than I do in order to be GGG.  I need to say “no” a lot more and have more ownership of my body.  We need to find a way to meet our mutual needs without me biting my lip and doing things that feel bad.  I can’t hold Noah accountable for the consequences of his actions if I withhold information.  I can’t decide it is proof that he doesn’t care when he doesn’t notice.

I can’t relax and enjoy this relationship while I feel like I am constantly preparing to be paranoid about Noah running off to fuck someone else.  And that is how I feel in an open marriage.  It feels like every day is just a count down until he gets to do that again.  I feel like I am always doing something wrong by wanting to spend time with him.  I should be giving him lots of time away from me to go do and be lots of things away from me because obviously he wants to reserve a lot of himself away from me.  He is waiting for someone better than me to give that part of himself to.  I don’t blame him.  I constantly feel like I am waiting for him to go find someone more understanding than me to go talk to.  Someone who is entirely on his side.

I have signed on to be completely dependent on Noah for the next twenty years.  No, I am not going to relax my hypervigilance as long as I know that is coming some day.  It means I have to steal myself that whole period until that day comes because I will not be able to bear the loss otherwise.  I have to create a big hole in my heart and leave it that way and never let you touch it or come near it.  Because that is where I will have to go when you are fucking someone else.  It’s the same place I go when I sleep with other people.  It is a space outside of me, outside of my life.  I don’t really bond with casual sex.  I have an experience.  It is outside of me.

I’m afraid of monogamy because Noah really likes to take it to 11.  If I have clamped down so hard on him that he isn’t allowed to go play with other people, how much will I egg him on to do because I feel guilty?  I don’t know how to do this in a way that is good for me.  Nonmonogamy gives me the eternal out that I can say, “Fine you have this part of you that I can’t deal with… take it somewhere else.”  I never have to deal with my own actual limits that way.  I never have to deal with telling him, “Fine but no really you have to stop at 8 because my jaw hurts.”  That’s harder.  Telling him no is a lot easier than having to figure out what I can do.

I’m afraid because I think we are going to have some difficult periods and a lot of crying over sex.  I think this is going to be hard.  I think we will both have to do a lot of forgiving one another for mistakes and that’s hard to think about.  It’s weird to be discussing monogamy after five years of marriage.  We really know what we are getting into, you know?  Only we don’t.  Because things will be very different in twenty years.  We will be very different people.  Can I really require that he never again touch anyone else intimately?  I’m not going to do poly-anything.  If he is going to follow my boundaries well, I feel weird about that.

I feel very pressured as the gate keeper.  It’s weird to feel so conflicted about this.  On one hand I feel uncomfortable with the idea of keeping him from having sex and other hand I’m not thrilled about feeling required to have sex absolutely as much as he wants forever.  I don’t have any idea what my limits are.

I don’t like the way I dissociate rather than deal with feeling uncomfortable during sex.  I have a hard time dealing with my anxious feelings in the moment.  It’s hard to say when I really don’t want to be pushed.  He likes pushing so much.  It’s so weird to me that he worries about me wanting him.  I worry about wanting him so much that I break myself trying to meet needs I can’t meet.

Because the thing is, I don’t actually think there are needs of his I can’t meet.  Because I think that if he picks the right days, I probably can actually meet all of his needs.  I like to go to 11 too.  I feel scared that he isn’t going to be willing to walk around the cracks.  I really do like the image of myself as a mosaic.  My picture was broken so long ago and put back together so clumsily that it is an entirely new picture.  On even median days I like me.

I don’t think he can really just learn a “set of triggers” and avoid them.  It’s quicksand.  And it moves.  I want to find out how it moves.  I want to be able to try things many times and know that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.  I want to be brave enough to not be angry when I say, “Ok not tonight.”  I’m not failing if I say that.  I’m not failing if my body is not up to something on a given day.  I am not failing if sometimes I need to be held instead of hit.  It’s hard to admit that I’m not instinctively automatically in the same place as Noah.

It feels like I don’t deserve him.  Because I cannot do that.  Because I cannot just accept whatever he wants to do whenever he wants to do it.  I feel like I cannot require monogamy because I will never be good enough to satisfy him.  I will never be enough.  I will always fail.  I’m scared.

I’m terrified to believe him.  I’m so afraid that I will believe him that he wants to be monogamous.  Only in twenty years things will be different and I will be expected to just understand.  People evolve.  Needs change.

I know that I will want to sleep with people.  That’s just a fact.  I’m not actually in denial about that.  I will want to do it a lot.  It will feel compulsive for the rest of my life.  But I’m going to choose not to do it.  I don’t think that I am actually served by following my pointer through life.  My compass is broken.  I need to think about the long-term and understand that sleeping with other people does not feed any of my needs (ok hyperbole for effect but the problems outweigh gains) and does not meet any of my goals.

Ok, maybe the hookers in Vegas.  Because I can get behind you being motivated to attain that salary.  Especially because the deal was always that they would be there in case I wore out.  You haven’t done it yet.  I don’t safeword.

That’s why.

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This morning I had an important thought.  If I stop smoking pot now I am going to start cutting frequently.  The Ativan is not a choice that works as well.  I’m not willing to be on a daily pill, even though I probably should at this point.  My mood cycles have been horrible in the last two weeks.  Pot levels it all out and makes me cheerful and just barely stupid.  I am in a great space to sit and play with Play Doh for hours.  I can build with Lego’s all day.  I’m noticing what things I didn’t get Shanna that I probably should have.

I’m enjoying how cuddly and affectionate Calli is… when I’m stoned.  When I’m sober it bothers me and I want to get up and walk away.  There is something wrong with me.  When I am sober it hurts.  She bangs her head on me, she scratches, she steps on me awkwardly or knees me or or or or…  I kind of hate it.  When I am stoned I just mumble, “oooph, gentle with Mommy”.  I’m so glad to be near her that I don’t mind her rough antics.  She doesn’t mean anything by them.  She’s just a baby.

My body isn’t a good place to be lately.  I have to spend a lot of time dissociated if I want to function at all. It’s hard.  Most of my body hurts most of the time.  My stomach hurts terribly from stress, pot also levels that out.

Pot allows me to put aside my grown up concerns and worries and just be present and happy in the moment with my kids.  Most of the day is really quite pleasant.  I only think about things that are relevant to what is in my line of sight, quite deliberately.  That’s how I manage to be a good mother.  I think only of our immediate house and my kids most of the time.  I don’t divide my energy well.  I can work on house stuff like cleaning with the kids around, but that’s the limit.  Sometimes they let me read.  They hate the computer and mostly I have to be in a different room on a break in order to use it.  That’s when I smoke pot.

I go think about grown up things for brief periods behind closed doors during the day.  That is what having Sarah here gives me.  Time to walk away from the kids when my thoughts become intrusive.  When I am starting to feel edgy I can ask for a break.  I’m trying to have the breaks be as effective sober and they just aren’t.  My emotions are too intense.

I have ridiculous self-control and ridiculous patience… within small tight boundaries.  My kids will grow up being told frankly that I smoke because I need the medicine in the plant and there isn’t a better way to get it out for me.  Why do I need the medicine?  Because of something that was broken when I was a little girl.  They won’t be broken in that way so they won’t need the medicine.  It’s rather unpleasant to do, so I don’t recommend it.  Shanna will cheerfully lecture anyone within hearing on how disgusting and unhealthy smoking is.  Yay California.

But sober, I’m edgy and raw.  I cry a lot.  I can’t stand to let anyone touch me and when my kids grab me my entire physical reaction is to want to shake them off like a dog.  I loathe being touched.  It feels like such a disgusting and horrible incursion into my body.  Every touch feels bad right now.  Everything hurts.  The most gentle of caresses feels like a slap.  I can mostly dissociate away when sober, but not enough to smile or pretend I am enjoying it.

I don’t want my children to grow up with a mother who flinches away from them constantly as if they are terrible people for wanting to touch her.  I think I should get stoned instead.  It doesn’t really matter that I feel bad about doing it.  It doesn’t matter that the stupid bitch at PAMF looked at me like dirt because I have a medical card.  It allows me to be a good mother.  I feel so ashamed of myself for needing it.  I guess this makes me an addict?  Officially?  I don’t know.

It seems to me that most of life is about walking a series of thin lines.  I am more ashamed of cutting than I am of smoking pot.  The specific reason I think it is worse is because I will be more strongly judged and censured for cutting.  I don’t know a lot about tribal cutting, I’ve never bothered to find out.  I can imagine there being places in the world where my desire to cut myself to deal with my emotional experience would be viewed differently.  If I were to lose my fear of judgment, I would be able to represent myself in a way that would feel more honest.  I am a person who has experienced a lot of pain. But I did it in a way that is invisible and hard to ignore.  There are scars all through my vagina.  I think the scars should be on the outside so that other people can see them.  I think that marking yourself in proportion to the pain you feel is a way of identifying yourself so that you can find other people to talk to who can hopefully give you relevant advice beyond, “Just cheer up!”  Yeah, fuck you too.

Pot keeps me from feeling suicidal.  I’m just not desperate enough.  It really pisses me off that I can never really be a martyr for any cause ever in my life because if I go in a way that is not completely fucking random people will assume I killed myself.  It’s just got to be the base assumption forever.

I’d really like to kill myself.  But in my personal hierarchy of needs it is far far more important that I never give my children the experience of parental suicide.  Jimmy thinks that just not talking about things and not doing the same things will break the chains and he’s wrong.  The only thing that will break the chains is consciously talking about what we are doing and then choosing to do something else.  It is hard to be a different person.  It doesn’t happen by sitting back silently and hoping it happens.

Who do I want to be?  I want to be someone who doesn’t need to be apathetic all the time in order to function.  This stage of processing won’t last forever.  What do I need to change about my life in order to not get back to feeling this desperate and hurt?  Can I change enough?   Is this just something that is part of me because of my previous trauma?  Will I always find a new trigger somewhere down the road?  I don’t know.  I really don’t.

I’m just bitchy and mean and bored and antsy and angry and touchy when I am sober.  I feel so dissatisfied with everything in life.  I hate that in myself.  And when I’m stoned I’m fine.  No really.  I am doing exactly what I said I would and I do enjoy it when I can focus on it.  There must be something wrong with me if I need pot to focus.  That’s not very functional, only it is.  I’m functional, I really am.  I beg the internet to believe me.  Why do I care so much?  Why do I feel like I constantly have to prove that I have some value.  I am not just a worthless piece of shit.  Even if I do smoke pot.  Even if I am just a disgusting whore.

I think I’m ordering more pot today.

Thinking about forgiveness

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Do you know what not forgiving means?  It means dying alone and angry no matter who is in the room.  I don’t want to die alone.  I don’t want to die afraid.  I don’t want to be angry that after all this misery all I get is death.  I don’t want that.  I want to die knowing that I have honest to fucking god made the world a better place.  I helped other people be happier, better, stronger, wiser.  I want to die smiling.  I want to know that I did exactly what I was supposed to do and I helped as many people as I could.  I want to feel peace.   Some day I want to know peace.

As long as I am angry like this there is no room.  I have nothing to give.  Being angry takes up so much of me.  I don’t want this.  I don’t want this to be my life.  I don’t know the path and I am so afraid.

Every marriage involves different compromises.  Different accommodation of irritations.  Different forgiveness.  Because the human condition is that we bump each other funny sometimes.  Thank you to all the women who wrote me to tell me that you are angry at Noah too.  It actually made me feel better.  I felt like the anger wasn’t just mine.  And that’s complicated too.  Life is long and life is hard.  Noah really fucked up.  But he has never done anything to break my trust like this before.  He has carefully in pre-negotiated ways pushed me right up to the edge of my limits and off a cliff.  But that’s not the same thing as breaking trust.  He has never broken trust before.

That does have to count for something.  He knew he was being a raging dick.  He didn’t mean to do what he did.  I have never seen him cry before.  He says it hasn’t happened since junior high.  He probably already feels bad enough.  Beating him down isn’t a way to have a happy marriage.  It really isn’t.

I will never again bear a child.  That is a decision I have made for myself.  I want to spend my life with the only person I will ever really completely join my body to.  I want to.  And he’s going to fuck up some times.  And I am going to get very very angry with him.  But I keep my promises.  I promised him a lifetime.

What does forgiveness even mean?  It means telling him how I feel about sex with other people and watching him cringe.  It means filling in the dots for him on some of my broken.  It means telling him that I don’t want to have sex with other people any more.  Even though taking that hit on my identity is going to be massive for me.  I am going to feel compulsive.  I am going to want it.  And I think I shouldn’t do it any more.  It’s not actually a good decision for me any more.  Given who I am I don’t think it will actually be a healthy thing for me to do with other people ever again.  I think this broken is too deep.

It’s time to try something else.

Bonding

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I think a lot about why I want to overshare my emotional experience while hunting.  I think that part of it is, I don’t know how these things go for other people.  Does everyone waffle like me?  Noah says he doesn’t.  Does anyone?  I don’t know.

I feel like my whole life has been a weird balancing act.  I have to do enough hard things to balance out the easy things.  I’m not really even sure what that means.  Why do I feel utterly compelled to promise elaborate sex acts to strangers?  I can’t do it with people I know very well because then I feel like I have to live up to that promise all the time.

Last night I did well.  I closed.  Three times.  Excellent.  It helps that this was one of the rare times when I have taunted this person in real life previously.  He was ready for some follow through.  I feel giddy that I managed.  It’s like checking a box on a treasure hunt.  w00t.  Inspired hot sex three times in one night.  And he didn’t finish quickly.  Excellent stamina.  I feel like women are judged this way, why shouldn’t men?

Why shouldn’t I talk about sex as if it is a perfectly respectable hobby?  Excepting religious reasons… no really, why should anyone care?  Granted not everyone wants to hear about it, but I don’t want to hear about golf either.  So?  Why are most hobbies morally neutral but sex is bad?  Why am I bad because I like to feel this way?

It’s not like I have devoted my entire life to it.  I’m doing a few other things as well.  Like writing about it.

Sarah is taking Shanna to Arizona tomorrow.  I will miss them.  It’s always hard for me when Shanna visits people without me.

I have a date Thursday night.  I need to go to bed early on Tuesday and Wednesday if I want to be in the mood.  If it was for tonight I would cancel.  I’m burning too hot.  I’m using too much energy and way way too much at night.  I’m so tired.

I feel the kind of tired where I am emotionally raw.  This is how I always came home feeling.  And my mother would pick a fight.  When I feel vulnerable like this I am sensitive and I easily feel shamed and unwanted.  It doesn’t always happen after sex with new people and it can happen with Noah.  When I feel like I am breaking taboos this sometimes hits.

I feel really bad about telling the guy last night “Maybe” when he asked for a second date.  I feel like I made promises I don’t intend to keep.  I kept my mouth shut about things he said or did that were complete relationship deal breakers for me because oh man is that not a battle I’m interested in.  I’m not trying to hurt him.  I think he is a fine individual.  Just not someone I want to be in a relationship with. Oh the sex was hot though.  If we run into one another at a sex party… maybe.  If I’m in the mood.  He certainly did most of it just right.

It feels like as a slut/whore/whatever word you want to use having those kind of preferences is kind of mean.  I’m supposed to just take people as they are and like them.  Mostly I do.  But there’s always one thing… I know it would drive me batty.  I go home and thank God that Noah doesn’t have/do/think/whatever the thing was.

This is why I don’t feel polyamorous.  Not really.  Only I have my boys.  I do feel a connection to them.  It is pretty much always more intense on their side.  I have a date scheduled with my shaman.  We haven’t been on a date in about six or seven years?  And it was a four or five year gap between that and the previous set of dates.

I have a long cycle sometimes, apparently.  It’s interesting to learn that about myself.  I’m glad I didn’t stay with Steve because I would not have had the room to grow to be the person I am now.  I like who and what I am.  He wouldn’t have stood next to me for this journey.  He wasn’t my partner.  Not like this.  Tom didn’t want to have kids with me.  That is why I left him.  Having children was more important to me than being with him.  I made the right choice.

I am strongly dyadic in my bonding.  I do very intense one on one bonding.  And then it scares the piss out of me and I run away.  Noah is the only person I have ever met who can really match my intensity in an on-going way.  We take breaks occasionally when we are escalating, but we always come back to a topic.  We can always finish talking about something no matter how hard it is.

I have never had a person in my life who will do that.  I would follow him off a cliff because no one will ever make me feel seen the way Noah does.  I’m protective of this space.  I feel terrified of it being encroached on.

That’s why I only go on first dates.  I have no interest in finding a new bond right now.  Fuck you all.  You all suck compared to Noah.  I’m not going to go on a second date and start dealing with the fact that you can’t have conversations the way I want to have them.  It feels like a waste of my time.  I’m not interested in sitting through multiple dates where I have to silently roll my eyes and put up with shit that irritates the fuck out of me.  Everyone irritates me.  Everyone.  But I can turn around and tell Noah what he is doing that irritates the fuck out of me.  I can’t do that with anyone else.

It’s very stressful being around people and being polite.  I’m really not very polite in my head.  But I want polite children.  I have gone most of the way towards creating polite children.  When they start behaving in a way that irritates me it is because they are mimicking something I’ve done.  If I want to change their behavior the first thing I need to do is identify where I am behaving in a sub-optimal way and change it.  I put a lot of pressure on myself right now.

But people seriously irritate the fuck out of me and I’d like to yell at them a lot.  I don’t.  It’s not personal.  I’m sorry I feel this way.  But I do.

I don’t go on second date because that one little thing that irritated me?  I left thinking about it.  I constructed a story in my head about that little personality tic becoming part of my life.  Oh god that would require a lot of patience.  Can’t do it.  I’m sorry.

I’ve done a fair bit of recycling old hits in my head, lately.  I’ve gone on dates with several old flames, with mixed success.  I’m interested in seeing how things have changed with my shaman.  I feel weird about the fact that he is ok with being available for me whenever I want him over the course of more than a decade.  That’s… holy shit that’s commitment.  I love him.  But I’m not and I never have been “in love”.  It’s dramatic that I now have Noah to compare everyone to.  He changed the whole scale.

I like inspiring people.  Really good sex can change your world view.  There are so many good chemicals.  The aftermath of goodness can be bittersweet.  I like inspiring people to feel better about themselves.  I want them to feel affirmed for the one gift I am willing to accept from them.

I’m tired.  I’ve had a week of bad sleep.  I feel guilty that I avoided conversation last night by falling asleep.  He woke me up after an hour and a half to put me on bart.  Fucking slick, Krissy.  I feel bad.  It’s not like I did it on purpose.  I’m really tired.  But uhm, that shouldn’t be part of the first date.  Kind of poor form.

Noah is trying to schedule a date for Thursday.  I have extra impetus to not cancel.  Bother.  This is the kind of thing that inevitably happens around him dating.  If I cancel it gets weird.  He’s just as (or more) twitchy than I am at this point.  He acts like he should be kicked.  I have a hard time when Noah puts his head down and looks like he is in pain.  Like I have already been berating him… just because he feels guilty.  I haven’t said anything.  It makes me angry.  And then I’m going to say things.

This is a bad cycle.  Mostly in our life he acts like my ambient anger isn’t about him.  He goes about his life being cheerful and dandy and on his own time.  This is a good thing.  When he feels like he is to blame for my anger the dynamic changes.  I feel like an abusive asshole because he starts flinching.  It’s hard because it feels like my anger isn’t much higher than normal but all of a sudden I am bad for feeling it.  WTF?  Why do I have to be Miss Susie Sunshine on this sacred topic above all others?  I’m a cranky person.  I just am.  Why is it surprising around this topic?

Why am I only not allowed to feel feelings about this.  You are fine with them on every other topic.

I’m going back and sleeping with my friends because I have already been fierce and aggressive and they have proven they really like me.  It’s weird to show up and let them surprise me with how they actually want to touch me.  It’s weird finding out what is on the other side of the brick wall I build around myself.

First date sex has a certain loneliness to it.  That’s the bittersweet part.  You know that this person doesn’t really know you.  When you plan to disappear in the morning you hide behind that knowledge.  You carefully don’t present yourself at certain times.  It’s not worth finding out how this person feels about ‘x’ controversial topic.  For me to carefully censor what I’m saying…

This feeling.  It’s like what I had as a child.  When I was being sent to a new place.  I desperately wanted to please them.  I wanted to be liked.  Not being liked was so bad.  So very bad.  When people don’t like me they tend to loathe me.  They feel free to say the nastiest, meanest things possible.  They do this because I reveal a lot of intense personal feelings quickly and then other people bond to me.  Then when I reject the bond, because it was ephemeral for me, something that was completely true in the moment and not true later, they know personal things.

I’m being vague.  There is no way for me to recount the people and ways I have been told I am disgusting for the kind of sex I like to have.  I had a good night last night.  I don’t want to do it again soon because of my own issues with being patient with people.  He did nothing wrong.  He’s awesome.  My shaman is wonderful.  I feel much more connected to him than I do to most people.  I only want to go out on approximately a dozen dates over a decade.  It’s not because he has done something wrong.

I feel like running away from intimacy this hard is a sign that I am deeply broken.  If people cannot be everything and perfect then I have no space for them in my life.  And I judge everyone against Noah and find them wanting.  I’m lonely.

A lot of the impatience is just that people feel weird to me.  I never feel comfortable.  I always feel fake and like I have to be thinking very hard about not saying “the wrong thing” because inevitably someone will blow up at me.

Talking about sex and relationships feels especially charged and fierce.  People always feel weird to me.  I’m not very adaptable.  I have times where I can do it, but it’s hard.  I’m always poised for inevitable rejection.  Some woman who wrote me a nasty dear Jane letter felt the need to go back and change her RSVP to a no for an event I had in 2010.  Uhm.  Wow.  Thanks for letting me know, again, that you still dislike me.

I feel inadequate to the task of living my life.  I feel like I keep writing checks my body can’t cash.  I haven’t run in a few days.  I’m too physically exhausted.  Shanna and Calli and I did help shut down the port yesterday.  That was a walk.  I was impressed with Shanna’s tenacity.  I gave her multiple opportunities to wuss out when she got tired.  She said, “No!  I can do it!  I’m buff!”  My strong girl.

I feel a vague desire to probe her for why she introduces herself as She-Ra.  But that’s people hacking and she can’t consent.  So instead when she does it I just smile along.  I don’t know what to say.  Why should she feel more attached to the name I picked out?

I’m teaching her to be kind of weird.  I feel bad about that.  I’m very good at talking to strangers… if I initiate it or if they follow a pattern of questions I recognize as “valid”.  I can answer some questions easily.  Other times I freeze up and feel really dumb and walk away muttering about my inadequate social skills… she notices.

Today there is a park day trip to the park where I used to meet the above mentioned Dear Jane woman.  It’s a great park.  The homeschool group is going.  I keep thinking to myself that I’m not there to make friends.  I’m there to let Shanna make friends.  I don’t know that I can do it.  I can’t sleep in, ok fine.  I need to start going to bed earlier at night.  I’m so tired I can’t function.  This is not useful.

This is part of what I mean when I say I can’t date.  I don’t regulate my energy well.  Right now I’m trying to do too many things.  I can’t do everything.  Time to drop some balls.

I love country music.

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I was feeling mopey thinking about my early childhood and I had the Dixie Chick’s song So Hard on in the background.  It’s nominally about fertility problems.  It’s not hard to ignore about three lines and generalize it to other topics.  I’m just saying.  I’m having a hard time with this whole parenting gig sometimes.  I know my reactions are wrong.  I know when I sound like my mother.  I don’t know who else to sound like.  I don’t have very many people I feel comfortable around.  People make me feel tense.  I get edgy.  And bitchy.  And shit still rolls down hill.  I’m minor compared to everything I knew.  I know that.  But this isn’t who I wanted to be when I grew up.

If I’m not satisfied with my behavior I need to change it.  It’s hard right now because Calli is in the last throes of babyhood before becoming a talking person.  I’m having a very hard time waiting for that jump.  It came so early with Shanna.  I’m not a fan of the pre-verbal phase.  I still think Arwyn said it best.  I feel triggered when I spend a lot of time with my kids if I have to do anything else at the same time.  As long as I can be idle and just focused on them I can handle them.  They are not too much stimulus under those circumstances.  The problem comes when I am trying to get something done (like making breakfast) and it isn’t happening fast enough for Calli.  She starts screeching and it hurts my ears.  I start feeling anger.  It’s hard to tamp it down.  I have so much anger rolling around in me right now.

Reading through the whole story yesterday made me see spots where I have new perspective on why my mom and sister acted the ways they did.  Being a parent changes my point of view.  Funny, that.  But writing my story down means I can’t retreat to the sanctity of the parents point of view, either.  I stand there feeling bad for Calli that life is so hard.  She really and truly can’t have what she wants very much of the time.  She wants to be able to touch me any time she wants any way she wants.  She feels like she needs that from me.  But I can’t take how rough she is.  Oh gosh she is rough with me.  I get really angry.  I’m tired of being hurt.  I’m so. fucking. tired. of. being. hurt.  It’s so hard.

But she’s in the last throes of babyhood.  Soon it will be gone forever.  I don’t want my kids to remember me being angry all the time.  That is not what I want them to have as their story.  I don’t want them to remember me retreating with dramatic explosions.  Even though I’m not insulting any one.  Even though I’m just stomping my feet and huffing.  I don’t want to be that person.  How do you just decide to be someone else?  I was someone else with Shanna.  I narrowed my world to just her.  I gave her every single scrap and ounce of patience I had for any and everything in the whole world.  It was a nice year.  I couldn’t do that with Calli.  It’s so hard being a younger child.  You never ever get your needs fully met. You are short changed from birth.  Says the self-pitying youngest of four.

But then the song changed.  Best Days of Your Life by Kellie Pickler.  And I got a very nice email.  Right that minute.  My chest exploded with this moment of Oh My Fucking God.  When I’m feeling upbeat and I think about my life once I became an adult… well.  I’m pretty fucking cool.  I’ve done a lot of really neat things.  And I’m going to do a lot more.  As much as I possibly can.  And part of that is going to involve me figuring out how to be the person I want to be.  I will make mistakes and I will have bitchy days.  But when I do I tell my kids, “God I know my tone of voice sucks.  I’m really sorry.  It’s not you honey, I’m fussy about other things.”  I don’t think I was ever once told that.  Every bad mood that happened within a three block radius was my.fucking.fault.

Maybe I have already changed.  It’s hard on days when the kids want to test to see if I love them.  I do.  But I also have limited patience these days.  It’s time for the pendulum to swing back to them.  I think we should go out and play today.  And I’ll play the upbeat country songs.  The ones that make me feel like hot shit.  Because I rock like that.

Irrational feelings

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Noah made the comment that our nonmonogamy rules are based on polite fictions.  I did not yell or scream or hit or punch or any of the things that went through my impulse queue.  He just called me a liar.  But he did it in one of those civilized ways you can’t really argue with.  He can get away with it.

He’s not calling me a liar.  He’s pointing out that my emotional experience and the actual real experience often differ and we planned for my emotional experience.  He’s kind of a fucker that way.

We originally said we wouldn’t date until Youngest Child (whoever that would be) was five.  We think that little kids need a lot of attention from their parents.  I’m starting to realize that I overestimated how much I would be able to give to my kids without getting anything for myself.  I planned on seven to ten years of me not getting any attention.  Maybe that was poor planning.

Noah points out that I’m being unfair and dishonest about how I’m representing the breakdown of our respective time off.  Maybe.  I’m not going to say yes to that yet.  I have too many years of him having a lot more time and space than me.  I’m still dealing with being completely overwhelmed and unable to function.  I’m trying to figure out where the happy medium will be.

The class he signed up for?  The one we thought was six week?  It goes till March.  So much for carefully figuring out how our reserves of energy will be spent over the next few months.  Not how I have been planning.  Ok.  I can regroup.  That’s fine.

Noah is going to want to go out on a date.  I don’t know when.  Not this year.  It will probably come up some time next year if I’m even vaguely honest with myself.  With how much time I have spent on okcupid lately I understand why women will line up to date my husband.  I don’t like feeling like part of a group.  I have trouble with being out with my family of five sometimes.  If I wasn’t so clearly a huge needed constantly necessary part of the group I wouldn’t be comfortable.  Parties are hard.  I feel like I never fit in.  If I go to a party and I feel awkward and uncomfortable from the time I arrive but Noah looks like he fits in I feel like I should leave.  I should let him have this space he is comfortable in.  It’s his.  Not mine.

That’s kind of how I let Tom have the south bay bdsm community.  If I am attached to someone and they disengage from me in any way when we are out with a group I feel the instant need to panic and leave.  I can’t be there.  I’m not wanted any more.  I have no place.  No identity.  I’m nothing.  I vanish once the identity I have in the group leaves.

I can’t be one of Noah’s girls.  If I am one of Noah’s girls I don’t exist when he is not with me any more.  I feel like I am watching someone else live my life.  Someone else gets to be Noah’s partner.  I guess that means I stop existing as his partner.  When he was dating W. I sat at home crying and cutting.  I didn’t tell him about the cutting much.  Everyone knew about the crying.  I wanted to have as much physical pain as emotional pain.  I wanted to see how big of a wound I had inside.  I couldn’t tell.  I couldn’t tell how big, how destructive the pain was until I saw how much of my leg I had to sacrifice to it.  I had to know how big it was.  Do you know why I stayed?  It was never more than a two or three slice date.

I think I’m done with writing about when I started cutting, for the book.  I haven’t continued to bring it up because it seems weird to do so.  For about seven years I cut more days than I did not.  Do I really need to say that over and over through the story?  Should I talk about the fact that I learned to measure my emotional pain by how many cuts it took to get me to calm down?

I am nonmonogamous and deal my intense jealousy and emotional break downs around Noah dating because it is only a two or three cut activity.  That’s not that bad.  I didn’t need to cut every date.  I established how much pain it was.  There were times when I used to make cross hatches on my thighs that were five or six inches long.  I would make hundreds.  Two or three cuts that are only an inch or so long?  Psh.  This really isn’t so bad.

It’s hard when Noah says that are rules are based on fictions.  What he is saying is that I was making up a part of me.  Or making up what I thought I should say.  I was lying.  I don’t want to be a liar.

I don’t want to be a liar.  But I can’t figure out how to explain what is going on with me.  I’m saying the closest thing to the truth I can at any given moment.  Sometimes, when I’m dealing with my emotional experiences, the truth is like water.  It flows wherever it wants to paying no attention to previous course corrections.

I’m dating.  I shouldn’t lie about it.  I haven’t found a boyfriend, but I’m dating.  Maybe I should stop trying to set rules about how long we have to endure any given state of life.  I keep fucking up my guesstimates.

I said five years because I was hoping that by then I would feel secure enough with Noah that I wouldn’t feel so threatened every time he looked at another woman.  So scared of losing him any minute.  I don’t think time is really going to give me that though.  I would feel just as paranoid in twenty years.  And I can’t seem to be monogamous.  I’m not ok with being a hypocrite.  That’s a lot higher in my personal scheme of sins than almost anything.  I’m acting like a hypocrite.  Shit.  I don’t wannnnnnnna stop.

I didn’t ask for monogamy as part of our marriage.  I specifically excluded it from our wedding vows.  I knew I didn’t want it.  I have to let Noah figure out what he wants without dealing with temper tantrums.  It’s not fair.  It’s not the kind of marriage I want to have.  I can’t freak out in front of the kids when he is out, either.  Luckily it will be a smooth transition for them because they already don’t see him several nights a week.

Speaking of appropriate topics, I won’t be able to make fresh references to Noah’s whores.  That uhh won’t go over well.  Maybe I’m going to have to work on that whole thought process a lot over the next few months.  I doubt he would try before the end of the class he is working on.

I’m weaning at eighteen months.  I’ve decided.  That’s the end.  I’m gradually working her down.  I’m only allowing her to nurse twice a day right now.  It will be once a day for the last while.  There are things I want to do with my body that I don’t want to do while nursing.  It’s time to stop.  I want to be able to make choices based on what I want rather than on what I have to do.  Do I get tossed out of the crunchy mom club for not doing child lead weaning?  I’m not making it to two years either.  Calli is fifteen months tomorrow.  I feel like I will lose my mind in the next three months.  I hate nursing.  That’s all I’ve got in me.

I’m going to try stopping the pot in December.  I am going to start actually training for running.  I need to stop coughing.  Eek.  I’m nervous.  I’m going to talk to my psych about that and using Ativan more than I am.  I was given six pills for a month and I still have two left.  But I’m still smoking pot every day because of the writing.  I’m going to stop writing on the 30th.  I’m going to switch to using Ativan instead.  With the goal of not needing anything at all in the next few months.  I’m already cutting the Ativan in half and I may need to cut them into quarters if I use them more.  Right now they make me fall asleep.  I really and truly am not safe to drive within four hours of taking one.  That limits my life.

So I need to be able to cope if I want to go off and do the things I want to do.  It’s time to get off the crutches.  That’s going to be explosive for a while and I’m scared.  I smoke pot because I have a temper problem.  Because it’s hard for me to be calm and patient 24/7.  I just don’t have that naturally.  I’m going to need to find other ways of dealing with my anger.  Running is going to be a lot of it.  But I also seem to be using dating to fill a lot of my energy input needs.  I feel deeply conflicted about it.  But I am.

I fucking need something.  I don’t want to just sit here and eat and try to convince my brain that I’m happy that way.  It’s a false association.  Being fatter doesn’t actually make me happier even though I have this really strong self-belief that it is true.  My weight is pretty irrelevant but the other circumstances in my life matter.  I have usually been happier while I was fatter.  It wasn’t because of the weight though.  I need to stop feeling bad about not being fat.  Yeah, that convoluted.

I’m bigger than my mother.  I’m not fat.  I need to let go of her endless lectures about what a cow I am.  I’m not.  I’m a fairly average sized woman.  My mother is extremely petite.  Let it go Krissy.

Tonight we are going to spend money we really shouldn’t be spending this month on an over the top luxury meal with my lovely Complication.  She’s worth it.  I’m going to enjoy every fucking minute of it.  Later I will have a panic attack at the AmEx bill.  Then I will stop, breathe, think of the sight of my Complication eating good food and pay the bill without complaint.

That’s what you do as a rich person.  You facilitate life being good.  For yourself.  For other people.  Because you can.  Because why the fuck not.  There is no deserve.  There is no “right” to these things.  I’m not bad for spending this bonus money on an over the top good meal.  I’m not wasting it.  I’m enjoying it.  I’m enjoying every bite.  I’m enjoying every minute that I can of a life that is full of a lot of ups and downs.

When you have much greater lows than normal it only seems fair that you get to have better highs, right?  I’m about to go to the French Laundry for the second time in two years.  I am a lucky bitch.  I have a husband who loves me tremendously and is willing to spend most of his spare time on figuring out how to earn more money so he can pamper me more and more.  Because he wants to.  Because he thinks I deserve it.  Because he thinks it is great that he can do that for me.  Because wanting to give to me makes him want to go out and conquer the world so that he can give it to me.

I think I will need to be ok with him sleeping with other people once in a while so he can come back and appreciate me more.  I really am unique.  When I sleep with other people I come back and tell Noah what they did wrong.  He does the same.  It’s a very bonding experience for us that we match perfectly for pretty much every part of sex.  The rhythm is ideal.  No one else quite gets there.  Those other people are fun and awesome, don’t get me wrong.  But Noah is home.  And I am that for him.

These irrational feelings are hard.

One of the problems with polyamory

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I don’t know if other people sit around in their off-time listening to songs and trying to place them onto various relationships.  Particularly, today I am listening to Adele’s Someone Like You.  The way she talks about the song in this video is striking.  It has dramatically altered my hearing of the song.

I miss Steve and Tom.  I think I would be able to be the kind of person Steve could be friends now.  I think I have changed my reactions to some of our patterns.  I didn’t like how I treated Steve, but I liked Steve.  I would have broken him if I had stayed with him.  Instead I ran away.  I didn’t just break off dating him.  I stopped going any place he might be.  I avoided his friends like the plague.  Anyone who knew us both lost me after the break up.

I walked away from my life.  I broke all ties.  I changed my major in college.  I dropped out of college.  I broke up with Steve just a few months before our wedding and then I evaporated like a drop of water.  But there were a lot of reasons I wanted to marry him, you know?  He was a really amazing person.  I miss him.  I miss the things he brought into my life.  I don’t want to have sex with him, that part didn’t work well for me.  But I miss him being my close friend.  I dated him before I had ever told anyone the full story of my abuse.  Before I was out publicly as a rape survivor.  I could still name every single person I had ever had sexual contact with.  I had two lists.  One of girls, which was very long.  I didn’t tell people about that list.  And the boys, which was long but not frightening because I don’t count my rapists.  Oh wait, there was a third list in my head–the rapists.  I could still count my positive boy-sex experiences on my fingers with Steve.  Steve was the first boy who ever gave me an actual orgasm. I faked it before that.  Uhm, sorry people from high school.

I miss Steve a lot.  He was passionate about things the way Noah is.  I love basking in that kind of joy in the simple act of attaining knowledge.  Steve liked to learn.  He was inspiring to be around.  He isn’t book smart, and it was by choice.  He came from a highly educated family.  He was a self-didact though.  He knew how to do an amazing array of things.  And if he didn’t know how to do something he would figure out how to learn.  Nothing daunted him.  I miss that.  I didn’t know how to deal with it when I was 18.  I didn’t know how to explain to him that things were harder for me than him because I didn’t have this loving background telling me I could accomplish things, I had to move slower than him sometimes.

Enh, I don’t remember the particulars well enough to analyze it.  Whatever.  That’s not the point.  I would really like to know what kind of man he has become.  I’m pretty sure I was right back then when I knew that I wouldn’t enjoy living with him long-term.  But I think I could be his friend now.  I think I would know how to listen to his interests without bashing him over the head with my issues.

I ran from Steve to Tom.  In a straight line.  Jumping on a few nice people along the way.  I was 18 and living with a lonely old lady who wanted company and I wanted to be surfing the internet looking for sex.  As soon as I became involved with him I started using his house as a base.  I was there a lot when he was at work because I didn’t have anywhere else to be.  His internet was paid for, he didn’t seem to care.

I’m not sure he understood how much time I was there.  How much time I spent auditioning a life in that house before our relationship got all that serious.  I picked him.  I wanted him.  I didn’t have to look around the local community for more than three months before I was damn sure he was the only person in that lot I wanted to seriously pursue.  And I did.  And on our first date he told me that he was looking for the One.  The One he would marry and have children with.

I am not going to get into it much right now.  That’s too big of a story.  I can’t do that today.  I can’t write it down today.  But I can sit here and listen to Adele sing.  And I cry.  Because I can’t write that story yet.  I am in the middle of another one.

I date Puppy because I was trying to replace Tom.  Puppy was the most abusive relationship I have had as an adult.  If he had not ended it when he did I think he would have hit me.  He was escalating in his violent displays when I didn’t react how he wanted.  I wasn’t good enough for him.  His family hated me and picking me would have meant ostracizing his family.  Or having to have relationships with them that involved no discussion of his life with me.  He didn’t think I was worth it.  He was a nasty piece of shit to me trying to get me to break up with him.  When my response was to cry for a while then try to problem solve he freaked out.  He wanted me to do something nasty so he had justification for his behavior.  I feel like my relationship with Puppy absolves me of my guilt for treating Steve so badly.  I learned how to control that anger.  I’m really sorry I fucked up like that at 18.  But I learned.  I changed.  Some people never do.  I’m proud of myself.

I am too angry with Noah.  Almost none of it is directed at him.  I’m not angry because of anything related to Noah.  I’m just angry.  At so many stupid things I remember and can’t let go of.  So many things that I’m trying to write down and be done with.  Puppy left me with a nasty email about how I will end up bitter and alone.  Just. Like. His. Mother.  Yeah, that’s about me?  I think not.

I don’t need to feel bad for my part in that any more.  That was a shitty relationship.  I don’t think it escalated to abuse but it wanted to.  It didn’t partially because I learned to control my temper.  That’s pretty cool.  I needed to do that.  It was essential in helping me be a good teacher.  And oh boy is it more important as a mother.  I’m sorry I hurt Steve.  But I forgive myself.  I had good reasons to be angry.  The more of this book I write the more I understand why people in authority positions widen their eyes when I tell my stories.  I should be exploding with anger.  I should be standing on top of a tall building with a machine gun taking my rage out on all of humanity.  That’s what a wounded animal as smart as me would do.

For all that people tell me I’m an angry person, I’m not.  Not really.  I was.  I’m sad.  I’m afraid.  Writing my story down all in one block and thinking about how many years of my life I have spent alone in a room is hard.  I don’t know how to have a real live actual family.  I’m scared.

I dated Tom for more years than I lived with my brother Jimmy after the age of three.  I lived with Tom for almost as many years as I lived with Tommy.  We were very close.  But he could never decide if I was really worth so much effort.  He wasn’t interested in getting married and having kids with me.  I think that given his life priorities, he made the right decision.  I’m not the right kind of girl for him.  And that still hurts.  I wanted to be.  I tried so hard to be what I thought he wanted.  Oh so many things I want to say.  They come over me in waves, these memories.

But I don’t think I can be friends with Tom.  We were too much.  I want too much.  I miss too much.  I want too much of him still.  I don’t know if anything could ever actually work.  I’m not going to let myself think about it.  I can’t.  I ran away.  I slammed the door on that part of my life pretty hard.  It has taken many years for me to figure out that some people in that community can be my friends because they aren’t actually interested in being his friend.  I didn’t have to ask them to pick a side!  They came pre-picked!  I’m a shallow piece of shit.

No, I have problems with boundaries.  I don’t think I would be able to have any if I spent extended time with Tom.  Once again, I don’t know that it is even sex I want.  I want to crawl back into his head.  I want to once again hear him tell me about the most intense parts of himself.  I want to watch him enjoy driving.  I want to be tied up.  I wouldn’t mind it being non-sexual.  I miss being enjoyed for just being there to look at.  That’s something that’s hard to communicate about objectification.  It means that someone doesn’t have to know all of my dirty stupid little secrets, they can enjoy looking at me.  Maybe I am beautiful.

Maybe if I write about what I really miss in enough detail I can find a way to get those specific needs met in other ways.  It’s worth a try.  But not today.  Maybe someday I will find someone like Tom.  Maybe I will be able to figure it out.

Daydreaming is weird.  Because I have these thoughts.  I have them a lot when I’m driving.  Polyamory means that I can have my Bridges of Madison County track in the back of my brain and know that I am not being disloyal to the people in front of me.

I feel sad that Noah does the same thing.  I don’t know that he does it exactly the same way I do.  But he has similar yearnings to not feel like doors are closed.  There is one girl he is kind of bitter about.  I handled it badly.  He really was falling in love.  It felt like watching my chance at stable happiness leave every time he went on a date.  I don’t trust that anyone else can love more than one person at a time.  My family couldn’t do that.  One kid at a time was “special” and whoever wasn’t in the center… well… when my brothers weren’t at the center it was because they weren’t there.  Sometimes when my mother and I lived alone somewhere I was the center.  That was wonderful.  Anytime there was anyone else around I was ignored.  She had missed those kids the whole time she had me.  She had talked about that endlessly.  She didn’t talk about me in glowing terms the way she did them.  She didn’t idealize me.  She lived with me.

I don’t want to be that for Noah.  I’m scared.  It is so hard to trust him.  It is so hard to trust anyone.  There is no one else in the world I would even bother to try to trust like I trust Noah.  I can’t.  I’m not capable.  And that hurts.  Once people have been close to me like that, if they fuck up even slightly then I have to completely and totally evaporate from their lives.  I can’t handle being demoted.  When Noah starts paying attention to someone else I feel demoted.  I go from being the wife to being part of the harem.  Now I’m “one of Noah’s girls”.  I feel disposable.  It’s not true.  I know Noah doesn’t feel that way.  Not even slightly.  But that’s what I feel.

You know.  Once I get the problem nailed down this specifically it’s time to talk to the California Mindfucker.  I like NLP.  It’s a convenient tool.  I keep hitting this same wall.  And it’s not rational.  I can explain it 50 more times and they will all come down to the same thing.  I want to change my irrational feelings and I’m not managing on my own.  There are tricks for that.

Different facets.

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Today is hard because I have already been a friend, a lover, and a therapy client.  Any second now I need to be a mother.  I need to be a partner.  I need to be a wife.  I need to be a boss.

It’s hard to be these different parts of me.  They feel like they don’t add up to a person.  I’m not sure if they are less or more than a person, but not really a person.  A host with many guests.  I hurt.  I hurt inside my heart.  I am all these things and more and it feels like a terrible thing I am doing.  I am supposed to pick.  Ok, probably not one.  But just two or three.  Fine, I can be a mother and a therapy client and a wife.  Those are supposed to be my priorities, right?

But I really enjoyed being a lover today.  Today I felt beautiful.  Noah tolerates a lot of my derogatory self-talk.  Well, he ignores me.  He tells me I’m beautiful.  He tells me he likes me.  Today my Daddy made me stand in front of a mirror and he touched me and made me look and told me that I am beautiful.  I feel like I can still barely lift my head.  I can’t look up at someone saying that about me.  I’m not.  I’m so ugly and mean and bad.  You don’t know how bad.

Maybe.  There are parts of me that are ugly and mean and bad.  I have done things I am ashamed of.  I have hurt people.  But maybe this isn’t an ‘or’ situation.  Maybe I’m ugly and I’m beautiful.  Maybe the most beautiful thing I have done in my whole life was standing up to my family and prosecuting my father and preventing him from ever victimizing another person.  I did that.  All by myself.  My father was a serial rapist.  He had molested many people from childhood to adulthood.  I. Got. Rid. Of. Him.  As sure as if I put a gun to his head.  I made sure he could never hurt anyone again.  Ok, so I didn’t expect him to kill himself, not really.  I was surprised.  I was devastated.  I knew it was a risk.  Everyone thought he would put a gun in his mouth.  But he didn’t.  He sat, like a chicken shit, in his garage and ran his truck.  While he sat there he wrote notes of hate to me and my mother.  I burned that note many years ago after Tom urged me to.  It ate at me.  He told me, essentially, that he was committing suicide because I was an evil liar and he didn’t want to go to hell for the sin of murdering me because I murdered my brother.  Did you follow that?  His grammar (and spelling) was worse.  But the hate was god damn obvious.  What a piece of shit.  He sent that note to his daughter.

It’s not like he could tell himself that he was innocent.  Give me a break.  He didn’t want to go to prison.  He was too fucking chicken shit to accept the consequences of his actions.  I’m not.  My father is dead.  I’m glad.  I made the world a more beautiful place by effectively killing him.

But I am still what he made me.  I still thrill to the touch of my Daddy.  Maybe I can find a way for that to be ok.  Maybe that’s just one way that my friends can love me and touch me and heal parts of me I can’t reach by myself.  Every man I call Daddy has been in my life for a long time.  Specifically, Dad has been active in my life for nearly as many years as my biological father.  I stopped seeing my biological father when I was thirteen.  I have known Dad for eleven years.  I have spent considerably more time in Dad’s company than I did with my father in my entire life.  Dad is also a really good grandpa to my kids.  He loves them.

And Daddy?  Well, he sure knows how to make me come.  And he is ok with me waking him up in the middle of the night when I need to talk.  He has been for more than seven years.  I have done so, whenever I needed to, for over seven years.  And I’m crazy and bossy and difficult and he loves me.  It was really nice to come home to my Daddy today.  I am feeling pretty shocked by how this feels.

Maybe the only kind of love I have ever known how to get from a dad will be met.  And it will be met in a way that allows me to be healthy and whole.  I’m not a hole.  My Daddy may be a big slut, but I’m special.  I always have been.  And Dad?  I’m his first daughter.  He introduces me that way, which is funny because he has a biological daughter.  He’s had several girlfriends after me who are also “daughters”.  But everyone knows it’s different with me.  I’m not a girlfriend and I never was and I never will be.  He just takes care of me when I don’t know how to do it for myself.

I feel very little.  And happy and sad at the same time.  I feel like I am holding the hand of my best friend at the funeral of a very bad person.  I am safe now.  I will never be hurt by my dad again.  I may be single tailed by my Dad.  I may be fucked by my Daddy.  But my dad will never hurt me again.

Maybe I’m not over the incest thing.

What I just sent off to my GP

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Dear Dr. S,
            I apologize for the length of this message, I am not good at being brief and your office visits aren’t really long enough for me to come in and talk to you in person. 
            I went in to see Dr. Sastry as you recommended.  I will not be working with her.  I can explain that by telling you her parting line to me: “You have two major ways you deviate from the norm, breastfeeding and smoking pot.  I won’t be working with you until you stop them.”  She expected me to wean my daughter and quit smoking in a week.  Or she wouldn’t work with me.  Well, that week is over.  At no point in that week did I feel like a relationship with Dr. Sastry would improve my life so I cheerfully ignored her recommendations.
            She wanted me on an anti-psychotic, and she encouraged me towards upping the dose quickly.  She told me she was putting that I was bipolar on my medical record.  Even though I very firmly believe I am not bipoloar.  I have GAD and complex PTSD.  They are treated differently.  I don’t believe it is appropriate to medicate me as if I am bipolar.
            Instead I am paying a ridiculous amount of money to a Harm Reduction specialist.  I went in and talked to her for an hour and a half.  At the end I left with a prescription for Ativan.  Six pills for a month.  To be split in half.  I’ve had them almost two weeks and I’ve taken a pill and a half.  I have cut my smoking to almost nothing.
            Dr. Sastry had no interest in finding out what I have legitimately done to deal with my issues.  She wanted to medicate me into a coma to stop my sexual acting out.  I don’t appreciate her agenda.  When I talked about the recent periods of going without sleep for days she refused to believe me that I wasn’t also sexually acting out.  She wanted them to be manic cycles.  She would not accept that I wasn’t manic.  I wasn’t manic.  I was hyper-vigilant and experiencing flashbacks of being raped.  I wouldn’t let my children touch me let alone anyone else.  Yes, I am ethically non monogamous with my husband.  I don’t harm my life.
            I would encourage you to not sent patients to that woman if in any way they “deviate from the norm”.  No one needs to be shamed while they are in the process of receiving medical care.
Secondly, I am worried that some aspects of my health have been badly managed and it’s complicated to explain.  I saw a homebirth midwife through both pregnancies.  My first labor I did 40 hours at home before transferring and I delivered at Valley Med because they are the most friendly to transferring homebirths.  I actually think they did a fabulous job of dealing with me as a person who “deviated from the norm.”  The vast majority of the staff was really kind and effective and I appreciated that.  The delivering doctor asked me out of the blue if I wanted my placenta since I was a transferred homebirth.  When the delivering nurse said I couldn’t have it the doctor said, “We don’t know where it went.”  I will be grateful forever.
Neither of my pregnancies went well.  I was horribly sick.  I lost 18 lbs by the end of the second trimester with Shanna.  I had a lot of really intense long-lasting early labor scares.  I lost two babies in between Shanna and Calli.  I lost the first the day before Shanna turned one.  That pregnancy was about 9 weeks along.  I guesstimate that because I went up to Portland right after that and they have an exhibition showing the size and development of a fetus every 2-3 days through the pregnancy.  I found out I miscarried because I found the baby.  I thought I was just having my first postpartum period.  This was rather traumatizing.
We used condoms for two months and tried again.  We got pregnant immediately.  I lost that baby  at seven weeks.  The reason I knew I was pregnant again is because I have instant full body horror symptoms.  Pregnancy is awful.  My whole body treats it like a toxic experience.  I became pregnant again without a period.  That’s Calli.
I was in labor with her for nine days.  At about day four I started feeling like I was leaking fluid.  I called my midwife to talk to her about it.  She told me I was on a 48 hour clock.  I had to deliver the baby by then or I had to go to the hospital because I risked infection.  Technically she knew she was only supposed to give me 24 hours.  But she knows that I really didn’t want to go to the hospital.  Every home get-it-going-thing we did.  I had contractions every 3-10 minutes for so many days.  I couldn’t get them to stop. 
I ended up at Washington Hospital.  I had a rude on-call doctor and a sanctimonious on-call nurse.  They lectured me horribly and treated my like a recalcitrant child.  At the very end of the visit he swabbed me and said, “It’s not amniotic fluid, go home.”  When my midwife filed out he gave me this long nasty lecture about how I was going to kill myself and my baby if I stayed home.  He was almost right.  I still wasn’t going to go back to him.
I hemorrhaged really badly.  I couldn’t stand at all for days because I lost so much blood.  I had to crawl to the bathroom for weeks.  My midwife told me point blank about 20 minutes after my daughter was born, “If you close your eyes you won’t open them again.”  My midwife didn’t really do much about the hemorrhage.  I was told to eat blood thickening food.  I didn’t move from bed for two weeks because I couldn’t stand.
I have lost 1-2 lbs a week since then.  I often have trouble eating.  My stomach hurts all the time.  A lot of it is my mental health stuff, I’m aware.  But I was on a medication years ago through a different PAMF doctor, Dr. -.  It was for stomach acid.  I don’t remember what it was.  I am curious about pursuing something for my stomach acid again.  I get up in the morning and I smoke pot so that I can settle my stomach enough to handle eating.  If I don’t smoke I can’t eat more than about half a piece of toast before I’m in violent stomach pain.
I wake up every morning to an hour or more of painful burning diarrhea.  I can’t believe this is normal.  This hasn’t happened my whole life but it has been happening for months.  I’m not sure how many months.  I’m working on getting my mental health stuff in order.  I truly am.  I can’t keep waiting forever on dealing with these other aspects of my health.  My thyroid appears to be no longer functioning normally.
I feel like this all should have a lot more attention paid to it, but I don’t know what that will mean.  I’m tired of my body acting like I am in full crisis all the time.  I need to find a way to make the stomach acid stop destroying me from the inside.  I think that will help.  It might actually help me to sleep as well.  I wake up at 4 because I have to go to the bathroom.  Then I spend an hour having burning diarrhea.  Then I can’t sleep again.  Maybe this isn’t just about my mental health, you know?

I need an off switch

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You know, if I change the song that is playing I get to change my mood.  It’s a handy trick.  Do you know why I’m willing… no… why I want to do the really scary painful things?

Noah is nicer to me than anyone has ever been.  He goes really far out of his way to make me happy.  I can’t believe how willing he is to go through a lot of effort for me.  I’m important to him.  He’s a complicated man.  When we do intense play I have to trust him.  I have to communicate about the physical limits of my body.  And I have to trust him.  The thing is there is a lot of gray area in between when it stops feeling good and when I actually can’t handle more pain.  I genuinely don’t understand why pushing someone to that place is erotic.  It doesn’t get me wet to top.

But oh man it turns Noah on.  I don’t have to understand why.  I don’t have to be able to feel the same feeling in my body to understand that it is important to him.  There is some part of him, something scary, that wants that.  I don’t think it is a need.  But he wants it.  He wants it a really lot.  He likes how I react.  When I’m in that kind of mood.  I don’t think he would enjoy how I would react today, so he isn’t going to hurt me today.

But when my body isn’t aching like this from going too far, sometimes I do want it.  There are brain chemicals attached to being hurt.  But I like being hurt a little.  Mostly Noah is happy to cater to that.  Mostly what I want is for someone to touch me fairly gently and tell me evil stories about hurting me far past what I can handle.  I like knowing that he wants to.  That he can.  That he has.  That he will.  But right now he’s being nice to me because he likes me a lot and he wants me to be a happy, healthy person and right now hurting me isn’t a good idea.

I like that he’s stared at me for a long time.  He hasn’t fucked up in a long time.  He reads my signals so well.  He knows what I want before I know.  All he has to do is grin at me and I want.  Maybe the problem is that when I go back through my roster I have the whole thought process over again about how they so aren’t Noah.  Maybe I need to stop reminding myself of why I stopped sleeping with these people in the first place.

I like the idea of poly.  Of sexual relationships that continue on casually through  time and get revisited.  Other people don’t evolve with me fast enough.  I feel angry at them for being exactly who they were the last time I slept with them because it wasn’t right then either.  That sounds weird.  I have sex with people to audition them in my head.  It decides a lot about how much weight I put on someones opinions later as a friend.  Like Chris.  (The awesome thing is, I have slept with quite a few Chris’ of both genders so using the name is totally meaningless.  Yay!)  I am really attached to Chris.  When I talk to Chris I listen harder than I do with other people.  I care a lot about his opinion.  When I’m really worried… I call him and ask him to weigh in on a topic.  Because when we had sex he looked at me and he actually played within my boundaries while finding out where they were.  Not very many people have ever done that.  They either blow right past what I can handle and enjoy or they never come close to pushing me.

Mostly though people don’t do that.  Mostly people are imperfect in one way or another.  At the end of an encounter I always have the thought, “Man I would work on ____”.  How long the list is decides how many times I come back.  If there are too many things, I can’t handle it and I move on.  I don’t discuss sexual incompatibility with people.  My issues are mine.  It’s inevitably something about the way someone is touching me.  The way it makes me feel.

Noah is the only person I have ever dated who has been able to have dramatically different “modes” of touch.  I don’t even know how to codify how he does it.  He reads me.  He learned me.  He studied me.  He studied me like a religion.  He learned how to coax things out of me.  When I feel like shit I want to stop feeling that way because it makes Noah sad.

Finding people to sleep with in a reasonably healthy way is hard.  I need to learn new screening procedures because mine are broken for my current set of needs.  That sounds like work.  But maybe the kind of work Noah would find fun.  Really, isn’t all of this for him anyway?  No.  But it sounds more fun to say it that way.

Because other than being in pain this much later, and having to tell him no that vehemently to unprotected sex (seriously? I have to yell at you that it’s not ok to fuck me without a condom? When neither of us have another form of birth control? Fuck no.  That’s not. Fucking. Ok.) it was hot.

And I think that the only reason he was able to fuck like that is because he’s the kind of asshole that really wants to push past all my boundaries.  I like that aggression.  This feels so dangerous.  I’m not attracted to passive men.  I don’t know how to flirt with people in a socially acceptable ways.  Do you know how I set up this tryst?  He posted on facebook that he was in town for two weeks and if anyone wanted tattoo work they need to get in touch quickly.  I responded and said, “So you’re saying that if I want to fuck you I have to hurry?”  He responded at midnight when he got off work with a voicemail.  We arranged getting together the next morning.  He’s staying with his mom.  Hotel room it is!

I loved the excitement.  I feel so bad that my response afterwards is so ungrateful.  There is that word.  Oh man.  That’s what this is.  I feel bad because I feel ungrateful.  He really went to a lot of trouble for me, and I enjoyed it.  And here I am bitching.  You see how I don’t fucking appreciate anything.

I want to cry, but it hurts.  It hurts to exist in my body.  I’m not grateful for this.  Sex does not have to be this.  Noah taught me that sex doesn’t have to feel like this.  I wasn’t raped.  Not in any way.  But I was brutalized.  And I feel like it is my fault because I somehow advertise that I want that.  Is it really so unreasonable to want aggression without being injured?  Does every sexual encounter truly have to involve people choking me until I get terrible headaches that last for days?  Is this really normal?  I have never been in an abusive relationship because I brag on the internet that I love to be choked so everyone does it and I never tell them to stop.

Even though I get these terrible headaches.  Even though when they lean on my chest choking me they bruise my bones and I hurt for weeks.  Even though I kind of wish that people would stop telling me so explicitly by their actions that they think it would be hot to watch me die.

I don’t want to be that kind of hot any more.  I am not expendable.  I am not an object.  It is not ok to risk my death just because you like how my cunt contracts when you choke me.  I am not actually a fucktoy, no matter what you call me.

And back the fuck off with acting like my hips are just supposed to get out of the way.

Shit.  Changing the music didn’t work, did it?  Well.  It’s a different flavor of whining.  I don’t understand why I am incapable of talking about this kind of thing in the moment.  Well, part of it is that I don’t know just how far past my fun-pain level things are at until later.  And very few people have ever had to deal with the consequences of hurting me this way.  Mostly I dealt with it in silence.  Noah has had to deal with it extensively and as a result he figured out how to have pseudo-rough sex with me.

I really like Noah.  I think I persist in sleeping with other people because I start taking him for granted.  I forget just how very exceptional he is.  Noah has made reading me his hobby.  It’s not that he’s made such a master study of sex, although he is far more experienced than most.  First he went after sex.  Then he went after me.  Because I’m enough.

Yeah.  I’ll heal and stop feeling angry.  Then I’ll let Noah hurt me again.  Because Noah will do it right.  And I want to see him smile.  Because I want to feel him vibrating with tension as he pushes himself and me right to the edge of me panicking.  Because he thinks it is funny.  Because he thinks it is hot.  It’s sometimes an abusive relationship.  But it has an off switch.  I think that makes it ok.