Category Archives: coping mechanisms

Being a pleaser

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As I sit here alone in my thoughts.  I realize… I don’t think I’m clear on who I am.  One of my problems is that I am ok with any ‘x’ part of myself as long as it is the part that is ok given my current relationship, and I don’t even just mean romantic relationships.  Whoever I am talking to defines my current behavioral approach.  My neighbors only meet one side of me, know what I mean?  Because even when I leave the house in latex, I dodge the questions.  I had this huge long thing in my head while I was nursing Calli to sleep.  Let’s see if I can recreate it.

I came into the bdsm scene when I was 18.  It’s only now that I am understanding exactly how self absorbed I am and I am shocked and horrified by the crap people put up with.  My friends were very tolerant.  Anyway.  I came into the scene and immediately hooked up with one particular group of people.  We went to the munch together every Wednesday and on the second Saturday there was a play party.  Yes, you all know who you are.  We were a very tight knit community.  There was a lot of hanging out together on other nights of the week as well.  I was absolutely brought into a set bdsm “community” and enculturated.  That sounds pretentious.  I only think of it as a culture now that I am completely outside of it and I can examine how I changed my behavior because of it.

I started dating Tom three weeks before I turned 19.  He changed everything.  It didn’t have to be him, but it was.  In my head we had more than one relationship and I never learned to reconcile them.  I was never comfortable.  I took that out on him.  Before I say anything else, our relationship was consensual from start to finish.  He never did anything to me that broke relationship agreements.  Our relationship agreements were non-standard.  For two of the four years we dated (lived together for the last three and some) in the middle we had a 24/7 Master/slave relationship.  What that meant to us changed a lot over time.

Tom was 30 when I met him.  He had been in the scene for ten years.  Now that I look around and think about taking on a protégé I have a lot of different thoughts about him.  He followed the camp site rule but he was a heavy player.  I’m not sure that was really and truly what I should have been doing.  Now I know why Femme Car condescendingly told me that she didn’t think anyone should be in the scene at 18/19 and they should go have regular sex first.

I’m not very good at regular sex.  I’m not very good at allowing people to touch me gently.  I feel bored by gentle touching largely because I am so dissociated from my body that it takes a nasty whallop for me to notice.  I also prefer for my sex to be fast with very little foreplay.  It’s not really all that intimate of an act.  It’s about getting off.  I do it with such gusto and vigor that folks tend to feel positively about the experience.  I guess.  I don’t know.  But bdsm gave me a way to learn how to touch people.  It gave me a way to have physical connection with another body.  Tom doesn’t have sex when he plays much.  They are totally different.  It’s not that he can’t but at least at that time, they were different animals.  Most of the people he played with were not lovers.

I could play with Tom and get my needs for physical contact met without having to deal with the pain of sex.  I am hemming and hawing about saying this because it feels like an invasion of his privacy but I explicitly asked for permission.  He said he is ok with anything I write about him.  I think that is the thing he gave me, both then and now, that prove beyond a doubt to me how much he loves me.  He lived me with me long enough to know how I write.  He’s ok with the possibility of feeling public humiliation or condemnation because of things he did.  He is ok with who he is.  He knows that he never crossed any lines.  And he trusts me to talk about the things we did.  My Daddy still loves me.  Ok, end of digression.

I didn’t understand for years that we had a basic mismatch of sexual desire.  I naturally default to wanting sex 4-15 times a week.  I like sex a lot.  Thus a lot of the quick and dirty.  When you are having sex that much, it’s about the continual short burst you get from orgasm, not from the long-lingering looks you get during foreplay.  Tom… well… he masturbates every day.  That’s part of getting up.  Which always confused me, but hey.  For the first year we probably had sex 2-4 times a week.  Then it dropped to once a week.  Then I finally relented on condoms.  We had sex with condoms for years because he refused to get an STD test.  I finally decided that he would be my life partner and relented and bam, I had HPV.  He told me, “Oh yeah.  I guess I never told you I had a wart.”  When he told me that I was rocking on the bed sobbing about how I am dirty and I brought this home to him.  You see, this virus can live in your body for years and I thought I must have caught it from one of the people who raped me.

We had very different relationships.  We never learned how to communicate with one another.  He could not volunteer information and I did not know the right questions to ask.  At this point in my life I am capable of managing much more complex negotiations because of what I learned.  The HPV killed our M/s relationship slowly and then quickly.  I began acting out and he refused to punish me because he felt guilty.  From this comfy chair I project that me freaking out the way I did was fairly traumatic for him.  I began a quick descent into depression.  He didn’t know how to pull me out of it.  He told our therapist that he didn’t want to do M/s with me any more because it was too much work.  Which I interpreted as, “Holy shit!  I wrote these contracts where I promised that if she did ‘x’ I would do ‘y’ but I was just kidding.  She was supposed to do ‘x’ without me ever having to notice again and it’s not fair that she’s trying to make me work.”  I had it on god damn paper that he agreed!  God!  Fucking!  Damnit!  I don’t think I ever trusted him again and I began baiting him.

But that’s another story.  I’m talking about the sex.  Or I was.  I’m going to talk about my list.  What was my actual introduction to sex.

I count AJ as my first sexual encounter.  That was the blow job when I was three.  I skip the rapes.

The next was Jasmine.  She was a kid in the canyon where my aunt and uncle lived.  She was a year or so younger than me.  We spent hours and hours and hours lying around licking each other.  That was most of what we did.  Some digital penetration, but mostly that heavenly licking.  Ok, sometimes we would lie face to face with our thighs between one another.  I was… five, six, seven, eight?  I didn’t live there all the time.  We were both outcasts at Lakeside.  Last I heard she ran away from home when she was 13 to be a prostitute in Santa Cruz to support her drug habit.

Oh god.  I can’t do the full list.  It’s making my body shake.  I’m getting really scared when I try to think about what consensual sex I had starting around eight.  Where did I live.  Hmmm.  Oh, well it’s probably because I don’t want to admit how much sex play there was with Michael.  If I skip my rapist then I’m a liar.  That’s the problem with telling the truth.  It tends to not make you look how you want to look.

I don’t remember any sex play other than Jasmine until we moved to Texas.  The trailer park in Texas was honestly one big orgy.  It was really fucked up.  There was a lot of incest.  There was a lot of blatant sexual abuse.  And parts of it I absolutely joined willingly.  Little kids growing up in that atmosphere re-enact what they are experiencing.  It is part of life.  I feel it as a jolt every time Shanna yells “Stop it!”  Every time she yells that at me I feel this pang of horror because it reminds me of re-enacting my sexual abuse over and over and over with all those little kids.  Because I did.  I don’t know how to count that as part of my list.  I never have.  I feel very confused by it.  This is where I have issues with sex positive culture.

I want my kids to only have their early experience to sex be that some day when you are a grown up you will like someone soooooooooo much that you want to do that with them.  It will be a special and private thing.  It’s kind of weird and physically awkward but some day you will be so interested that you will be willing to be brave and talk about it so that you can figure out how to do it in a way that feels good.  Because if it isn’t feeling good then you shouldn’t be doing it.  You should stop and talk about how to make it feel good.  Really.  You deserve that.

I don’t have that.  Not really.  And I want her to.  And I want to learn how to have that.  I’m not topping from the bottom.  I am trying to allow my poor battered body some fucking rest.  I want to be allowed to feel good.  I’m tired of trying to be the heavy bottom so that I can be appealing.  That was what I was enculturated with in that little circle of bdsm people I talked about up there.  I do have a point tonight.  Hopefully I’ll get to it.

Starting when I was 18 years old I joined a little intense subgroup that focused on bondage, heavy pain, and D/s.  There was very little mention of sex.  Almost none of it happened at our “sex” parties.  And Tom and I weren’t having much of it off stage despite the fact that I have a really high libido and want really frequent intercourse.  I had to get my touch needs met in other ways.  I tried really hard to sublimate them into Tom’s needs.  (Want to know what is fucking awesome?  I came up with the word sublimate instinctually but then I second guessed myself and looked it up to make sure I am right.  That’s what reading does for you, folks.)  I wore those fucking high heels and suffered for him even when he wasn’t home.  I sat around our house tying myself up and masturbating while covering myself in clothespins.  I was going fucking insane from not fucking.  He never asked me to be monogamous.  I don’t think he wanted me to be monogamous because I bugged him constantly.  But it made him hot that I was denying myself something that I wanted that much.

Oh, and early on we learned a hypnosis party trick where you can train muscle response with hypnotic suggestion.  Have you caught on yet?  He taught me to orgasm on command.  I had an involuntary muscle spasm on his order.  He thought that was great.  Eventually I had to ask permission to orgasm.  At one point I was allowed, even encouraged, to masturbate all day but I wasn’t allowed to come without his permission.  And it really wouldn’t have been ok for me to call him all day.  Sometimes he would be nice and give me permission for more than one.  It was an odd dynamic.  Chastity play was something we did.  Yeah.  It was hot and I was engaging in such a constant amount of sexual stimulation that I really could orgasm that easily.  I needed the freaking release.

But actual intercourse became increasingly rare and increasingly painful.  Why does one always leap to animal metaphors when trying to describe a penis?  Ahem.  Tom has the cock of a porn star.  He liked to repeat the line, “You know how there are growers and showers?  One time this girl was getting ready to go down on me and she said, ‘Oh… you’re a shower, huh?’ and I said ‘What are you talking about?!'”  Hyuck hyuck.  But it was accurate.  Flaccid he is noticeably larger than a lot of men I have slept with have been while erect.  I have not missed his cock.  I’m kind of the anti-size queen.  Noah’s cock is just about dead average and I wouldn’t mind if it was smaller.  Thank god.  You all wanted to know that.

But it actually is part of the picture.  Tom was probably something like #32 on my body count list and you can see that it is a pretty generous list.  I was seeing adult penises regularly starting from when I was seven and living in that trailer park.  At 18 years old I knew I wanted intense sex all the time.  And I picked Tom.  In some ways it was a really good thing.  I did a lot of bdsm play in a very short period of time.  A lot of it alone in a room, which is about as safe as it can get.  I would really like to find out what foreplay is like.  I have trained myself out of it.  This is a digression again.

I didn’t know how to get my needs met in that relationship.  When I was his slave I tried to get my physical needs met through bdsm play because he sure as shit wasn’t fucking me.  When he withdrew emotionally because he felt guilty for giving me a disease that involved scarring part of my cervix… which might have caused problems with the children I was so intent on having… I acted out and broke our M/s contract.  I didn’t feel I had other avenues available to me for getting the attention I needed.  Asking wasn’t working.  He was at his job constantly.  When he ignored me breaking the rules of our M/s contract I became a hellcat.  I was nasty to him and I started acting out in fairly public ways.  He didn’t want to have to control me.  When we stopped doing M/s we morphed into a Daddy/little girl relationship and that actually did a lot to heal how we had treated each other.

The problem is that when you grow into being Daddy/little girl… some day the little girl has to grow up and be a partner.  We couldn’t do that together.  He didn’t want to be responsible for carrying me as a burden and I don’t blame him.  He could never commit to being there for me.  It was too much work for me and a for better, for worse relationship really has to have enough of a balance to be worthwhile.  Tom never decided that my better was worth my worse.  Sometimes that is hard to live with because I worked so hard at that relationship.  I made that relationship a goal and I feel like I failed at reaching the goal.  That’s kind of a funny thing to realize.  That’s what I did.  I think I knew more of Tom than anyone ever had before I met him.  That might be hubris, but I doubt it.  I like to poke into people and we spent a lot of time alone.  He’s a good man.  He really is.  But he didn’t want me enough.

I chased him till I was done and then I left.  I left quickly and abruptly despite us having negotiated this long-term I could still live with him while I worked on school thing.  I couldn’t be in his house.  It hurt too much all the time to have it rubbed in my face that I wasn’t good enough for him.  It was the whole white trash thing.  I couldn’t fit in with his older, settled, more educated friends.  Or so I thought.  It took a lot of years for me to be ok with the kind of friendships I have now with his friends.  It’s a totally different relationship now.  They are people I used to know.  I care about them and they periodically reach out to me in ways that make me believe they care about me.  But life is busy and the monkey sphere is only so large.  I don’t fit in their culture and I rarely visit.  They consciously and specifically rejected mine.  It’s not a judgement.  They just didn’t want it.

It’s not even that, really.  I never learned how to integrate my sex community friends because I have never mastered how to navigate my different conversational/behavioral quirks and pitfalls.  I have a rather lot of them you see.  When I think of mixing the stream of people I know from different communities I have an adrenaline shot so intense that I start to hyperventilate and I get very angry because that is a really lot of energy for me.  Trying to stay present and focused in a conversation when I feel like I am supposed to be shifting my affect back and forth drains me and makes me feel like a deceptive and disgusting person.  I feel like I don’t know how to just be in the room.  I am supposed to be performing for the room and I don’t know what role I am in so I am reading two scripts at once and I start to panic because that means I am going to fail and then I feel abject terror because oh my fucking god here is more proof that I am a fucked up piece of shit I can’t even interact with two people at once oh my god I hate me so much and then I am angry.  I’m sorry for the run-on.  Once I hit that point of feeling angry with myself I instantly feel my face flush and I feel the need to start yelling at whoever is nearest to me.

Yesterday was a hard day.  And yes, it is all connected to the relationship that started when I was 18 and it’s all connected to that orgiastic trailer park.  I’m pretty sure I’ve never fully explained the extent of what I did in that trailer park, not even to Noah.  It was remarkably kinky.  In packs of children.  Oh what did we do.  Lots and lots of glorious oral sex on everyone.  Mostly this was a bunch of little girls ranging in age from 4-ish on to about 12.  Boys were around occasionally and when they were it tended to look just like a harem scene from a bad romance novel.  We competed to learn technique.  We knew what we were supposed to be doing.  It didn’t matter if we felt awkward.  It didn’t matter if we felt gross or bad or uncomfortable.

Most of it felt like shit.  I don’t count any of those kids on my list.  I felt degraded and nasty.  Most of them were dirty and smelled.  They had terrible hygiene and it grossed me out to perform oral sex on them.  Have I ever mentioned that Tom did not see a dentist during our relationship and he only brushed his teeth a handful of times when I specifically asked him to because the smell was bothering me so much?  We didn’t kiss.  I felt repelled by being too close to his face.  This is probably a big factor in our lack of intimate sex.  I didn’t want to face him.

Part of our M/s relationship centered around me doing his hygiene for him.  No really.  I bathed him.  I shaved him.  I cut his hair.  I trimmed his finger and toe nails.  I dressed him.  I shined and polished his shoes and boots.  Really the whole personal valet thing.  I picked someone with remarkably bad hygiene and made it my job to keep him decent enough for me to have sex with.  That’s really pretty fucked up, yo.  When I trailed off on doing the hygiene I expected him to just keep it up.  He didn’t.  I wasn’t very nice about his descent into being a slovenly disgusting… I don’t know… geek?  Who the hell did I think I was dating?  And then we look at Noah.  Ha.  I’ve given up on trying to clean him up.  I try to just not notice anymore.  I do pester him to get hair cuts because I think he should be looking vaguely more professional.  That’s it.  It’s kind of weird to not have control over his bodily functions.

It was this really weird enmeshed thing.  I truly had control over Tom’s body in ways that adults don’t normally have control over other people… and yet I wasn’t in control.  It was weird.  Now as a 30 year old who has been married for five years I understand some of the bdsm we did.  I can see how doing some of those things with Noah would build intimacy if done as a one time special occasion thing.  Or even as something it is ok to ask for once in a while. But it was my job with Tom.  It was my job to care for his physical body the same way I now care for my children.  It was a fucking pain in the ass.  But it was intimate.

A kind of weird false intimacy.  One emotionally distant pillar of the community asshole told me, “It’s good that he got you young.  This way you can be trained right.”  All the older people chuckled.  I got so angry I wanted to beat the ever-loving-shit out of all of them.  I felt completely enraged.  I wasn’t very interested in being trained.  I was interested in being appreciated for the things I did and acknowledged for the ways I behaved naturally.  I enjoy caring for people.  Ok, periodically I go through these periods where I feel enraged by the pointlessness of my life… but that’s a different issue.  There has to be balance.

I like caring for people and I like teaching people to be self-sufficient so that if my care is withdrawn for some reason they are able to carry on as if I was never there.  I like to get things on a well ordered clock. This is why I normally retreat to a room alone and refuse to interact with anyone when I’m having rage issues.  My rage issues arise because I am all of a sudden confronted with how little control I have over the people around me.  Someone is standing in front of me with a stunned deer look.  I should say, “May I get by” if I want to get through an entry way.  Instead I glare in silence as frustration and anger build and then I stomp off on in a different direction.  It doesn’t matter who the person is.  I do this no matter who is here.  I swear to god it isn’t personal people.  I get just as angry with the refrigerator.  I feel so overwhelmingly powerless to control the stupid, small annoyances in my life.  I feel like I am required to submit to the whims of anyone who demands from me because… after all… I enjoy caring for people–right?  It has to be all or nothing, right?

Haven’t you ever noticed that the men show up for a dinner party and sit on the couch to chat while the women walk into the kitchen and ask to help?  That’s true in some cases but not for all.  There are awesome men who always offer to help.  They aren’t in the majority.  And even the ones who offer to ask will stop asking if they are told no a few times.  Women tend to continue to pester.  They know that I am a lying sack of shit when I say I have everything under control because they know they don’t either.  Every woman needs more help than she is getting but getting help is sometimes a lot more work than doing it yourself… so we say, “I’ve got everything under control!”  Have I mentioned how much Sarah has improved my life?  I fucking hate cooking.

That’s not even true.  I hate long-term monotonous tasks that have to be done according to other peoples schedules.  I’m fucking sick of having to feed my fucking kids eleventy billion times.  It’s fucking boring.  I have have prepared and fed probably 70% of Shanna’s meals at this point.  The percentage is dropping fast.  The only reason it is so low is because Noah has been cooking breakfast for a long time.  Shanna eats four-five meals a day.  And it’s not just snacking.  I can’t believe how much that child eats.

So my intimate life with Tom became about me caring for his hygiene and enduring as much pain as I possibly could while complaining as little as I could manage.  While still being entertaining for the people who were watching because he really only wanted to play when people were watching.  I was his slave, not his girlfriend.  We supposedly had a concurrent girlfriend/boyfriend relationship… kinda…  We certainly did some vanilla things together and had fun.  We traveled but I’m a shitty traveling companion.

I could both see and not see Tom.  It’s only now that I understand that I feel like it was a failure because I was trying to be prescriptive of our relationship rather than descriptive.  I couldn’t just be in a relationship with him.  I had to name it and write out a long document of how it would go and we both had to live up to it or it wasn’t a real relationship.  We failed at doing what we said we were going to do.  That’s hard to live with.  We tried so hard to grow past the end of our M/s but we couldn’t.  He wasn’t a good match for me as a partner.

That is a lot of why I put Noah on the pedestal I do.  I dated Noah through the last six months of my relationship with Tom.  He even spent the night and I slept between them.  I couldn’t do it.  I couldn’t deal with the increasing separation from Tom.  He didn’t want to marry me.  He didn’t want to have kids with me.  What did he want?  He wanted me to wear horribly uncomfortable shoes and allow him to cause me pain while I smile for the rest of my life.  Uhh, no thanks.

It’s actually kind of nice to think of it as a role I was auditioning for and I rejected it.  It wasn’t right for me and he didn’t think I was worth much without that.  Ouch.  I think that’s what I grieve.  For years he called me One.  Because I was that special.  He had finally found the right one.  I would have let him do anything to me to prove how devoted I was.  I could not come up with scenes that were dirty or painful enough or dangerous enough to quench the need I had to prove that I loved him.  Being there wasn’t enough.  I wanted him to constantly test me.  I demanded that he do so.  He got sick of it.  He’s a good guy.  He can only abuse his girlfriend so much before he wants to go do other things, you know?

If he could have handled switching to having sex all the time we could have had a chance.  But only having sex eleven times in the last year meant it was a no-go.  That’s ok.  Noah is awesome.


 I want to explain more about how that little bdsm group shaped me.  There was a gentle constant pressure to behave submissively.  We had a lot of puppy-pile bdsm and a fairly rigorous lack of switching at an event.  People were expected to be one way all the time, even if they switched elsewhere.  Or when Tom and I switched in public… it was always understood that I was his slave giving him physical sensations he wanted to experience because it was my job to please him.  An awful lot of it I didn’t enjoy.  It was my absolute responsibility to be gung-ho and do what he wanted and perform sexual enjoyment to fulfill his fantasies.  I’m not turned on by cross dressed men.  I’m just not.  I don’t think there is anything shameful about it.  I don’t think it’s bad.  I can think it is fun to put makeup on someone.  But seeing a man in a dress does not inspire me to have sex with that man.  Tom is actually quite into cross dressing and being “forced” to do things.

Even the sex that was available to me was sex I frankly wasn’t interested in.  It’s kind of remarkable the store of guilt I have for not enjoying more of our relationship.  I forced myself to stay in it and stay enthusiastic long after it was apparent we weren’t a match.  I learned to do that.  I was specifically taught that sex was something fairly unpleasant (hygiene, specific activities that hurt) but parts of it feel good and you are required to be available for it at all times with anyone who asks.  I’m very angry with myself for the amount of time I have been demanding that guys perform in a set specific way because that is how I trained myself to get off.  I refined it with Tom.  Because the way that I push people to treat me is often fairly unpleasant.  But I egged it on.  It was my initiation.

Why do I keep insisting on having sex that hurts me.  Maybe instead of looking for a medical assist on not tearing vaginally I should start with foreplay.  It sounds obvious, doesn’t it?  But it’s not really an option in my life right now.  If sex lasts longer than about ten minutes it becomes really painful because we don’t have a good place to have sex.  I want to get it over with too.  I think that Noah is kind of tired of my mixed messages that I am upset about not having foreplay but I push him really hard to just get it over with already because my body hurts.

I’m tired of having my body hurt.  I’m tired of being hurt.  I want to be touched gently and that means modeling it for my wild animal children.  It’s very hard that they hurt me all day long.  They don’t mean to.  It’s hard to control all those pointy little joints.  They love me so much that they want to cuddle me all day long and climb on me like monkeys.  Mt. Mommy is the best ever.  And I sit there and with every jab of an elbow, every kick, every knee dug into me… I’m tired of pretending to be happy while I am being hurt by people who love me.  So tired of it.

Then I hide and feel guilty.  Wanting to be away from my children feels like a sin.  Like I am abandoning them.  Like I am the thing that their whole fucking world is pinned on…  For most of my life my mother was the only consistent person.  I lived with her more than I lived with anyone else but I moved constantly and I wasn’t always with her.  I had to constantly adjust to new rules and new expectations of me.  If I didn’t perform appropriately, instantly, I was punished.  It was for my own good.  I had to learn.  I wanted so badly to learn and perform and be a good girl.

I really wish fewer of the lessons had been about sex.  I wish fewer of them had come from new neighbors.  When I would go over to play at the houses of my new friends in Texas I would wander by the bathroom door.  One of the step fathers spent a lot of time in there supposedly peeing while sitting down.  Most of the time he was masturbating and waiting for us to show up.  We helped.  He smelled really bad.  His hair was dark.  He probably shaved about once a week because he was pretty shaggy a lot of he time.  His breath was foul.  I remember him asking me, “Here, won’t you touch it?”

I wanted to vomit from the smell, but I stepped in and did it.  I don’t think it occurred to me until much later that I could have said no.  I was seven.  I didn’t believe I was allowed to say no when someone dropped their pants and told me to do something with what I found.  That step father only ever had us masturbate him with our hands.  He didn’t touch us.  It barely even counts, right?  I don’t consider him a rapist.  I don’t really consider myself his victim.  We were just fucking around, right?

If someone did that to my daughter I would castrate him.  I think that is why I need to have my lovers not interact with my children.  Noah has a good healthy respect for me and a bone deep understanding of me that frankly freaks me out.  I trust him because of this.  I do not trust the men I have transgressive relationships with.  I just don’t.  They’ve already proven that they have no respect for the rules of society, why exactly should I trust them around my kids?  They have proven to me only that they have a moral code that is transgressive… not that they have a moral code that aligns with me.  The only way to prove that you have a moral code that aligns with mine is to absolutely only behave in ways that you agree in advance to behave.  Tom didn’t do that.  Do I think Tom would hurt my kids?  Oh give me a fucking break, no.  Not in a million years.  I don’t think Tom has it in him to hurt a child.  Most perverts are actually pretty helpless people.  They are so petrified with guilt and shame for the things they want to do that they have to go construct this little other-life where they get to be their “real” self.  It’s not integrated into your whole person.

Unless you want to be really socially transgressive and rude about the fact that you like kinky sex.  You want everyone in the fucking coffee shop, including the five year olds, to hear about it.  No thanks.  I don’t want that in my life any more.  I need to start monitoring myself better.  I’m just as guilty about this as other people.  I take on that persona when I am out with that kind of group.  Now, I want to specifically say one thing.  It’s not about clothes.  I don’t care much about someone wearing clothes that are explicitly “adult” where children might see them.  That is something a parent is supposed to help their child learn to navigate.  I actually think that is healthy.  There is a range of human expression out there and kids have to learn to navigate it.

But I think that should be done much more slowly than other people do.  That’s ok.  As I’m dealing with the intensity of my feelings about this topic I realize that I will be fine with my kids “overhearing” those conversations in coffee shops once they hit 11, 12, 13… whenever they are obviously starting to have hormonal surges.  Because then we can talk about them and I can present my values.  I don’t want people out in the world to really change.  But I do want to be very very careful about who I bring around my kids when they are little.  I don’t want to be asked what porn is yet.  I love my friends, but I never associated with them in contexts where they watched their mouths.  So I don’t believe they can.

Most of this is because when I am around those friends I bring it up.  I am so desperate for adult conversations and flirting that I will take it any chance I can get it.  And then I feel like I am crossing lines.  And then I flagellate myself for days.

I hope I had a point somewhere.  It’s time to go have breakfast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m weird, Sir.

Just another day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bad decisions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sex is complicated

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The super frank way I handle my sexuality is not appropriate for children.  The way I talk about it.  The way I pursue it.  Not. For. Children.  The way I handle my sexuality makes a fair number of adults extremely uncomfortable.  How do I raise kids who can have a more “normal” view of sexuality?  I don’t have a normal view of it.  Growing up it was pretty clear that my options were celibacy (my mom and mostly Aunt Vonnie–it was a running joke that she didn’t put out) or being the kind of whore who ruins my life regularly with toxic men (go Denise).

The idea of not knowing what sex is till 10 or so really weirds me out.  I don’t know what it will be like to grow up with children who are ignorant so long.  I taught my niece and nephew how to use condoms way before then because it was necessary information in our family.  And no one else would talk about diseases or contraception at all.  I have books on what age appropriate sexuality is, but it’s still a weird concept.

You see, because I’m the kind of person who wants to host sex parties.  Let me just take a moment to say that hosting a sex party is very complicated.  There are a few other layers of things going on that make everything way way way more complicated.  Because really what I want to do is have a woo woo sex magic ritual and that’s an even more specific kind of event.  That kind of event requires rather a lot of thinking, planning, discussion, etc.  But I have these little kids around.  At this point in time I’m aware that some day soon Shanna is going to turn around and ask me point blank what a sex magic ritual is.  As I sit and think about it right now I think my answer should be, “Sex is something you do once your body is physically mature and you want to.  Magic is a way of thinking about what you want really hard.  And a ritual is where you think really hard about something you want with other people helping you focus more on what you want so that you think about it harder than you can alone.”  That’s an ok answer, right?  Because I don’t believe there is any chance we will just stop talking about it at all.

And holy shit.  How do I feel about my child growing up knowing that her parents are into sex magic rituals?  No, she doesn’t have a clue what it is about now.  We aren’t graphic in the slightest.  We talk about people and emotions.  We don’t talk about sex acts.  Shanna is going to grow up hearing a very odd therapy sort of talk.  I mean, we sit around and talk about the people who are involved in the ritual and what their various potential levels of involvement could be (nothing graphic) and try to get a sense of what to expect.  A lot of what is going on here is that I can’t be in control of everything in the world.  But I can be in control of this very small setting on this one day.  I can be in control of who comes.  And that has been a rather fraught process.  I may have lost a friend over it and that makes me sad.  I have had to deal with the overwhelming guilt and shame that I went from in-my-head having a fairly ordinary party to these increasingly complicated layers of intention and want and overlapping needs.

I didn’t realize up front that I was doing a sex magic ritual.  It wasn’t until I did extensive negotiations with most of the people coming that I realized I was trying to set the stage for that.  I have only done sex magic explicitly with one person.  I think of him as my personal shaman.  Our relationship has gotten very complicated over the more than 10 years he has been in my life.  Some day I should send a thank you message to the woman who connected us.  Ok, done.  I kind of like reflecting when and where I walk away from writing in the blog to do other things.  I don’t know if it is ADD or what but I really can’t finish something in one go.  I just can’t.  I peck at everything.  I don’t think it is perfectionism because it’s not that I’m trying to be perfect.  I just have to think about the next step before I can have it.

I’m going to be a big judgy bastard.  I think there is a big difference between people who are sex positive and people who actively hunt a lot for new partners.  I know people who hunt.  I don’t like how they parent.  There.  I said it.  I like the children of monogamous households.  Which really this is selection bias.  I don’t know very many children who have grown up in poly households.  Very very few.  I know a few adults who were children in poly households.  They are neat.  But uhm… I like the children of monogamous parents because I feel more comfortable with the kinds of acting out they do. Which is to say that in the far less than 500 hours I have been around “children of poly households” in aggregate over my entire life I had feelings of discomfort and I blamed them on the kids.

And that is the kind of judgy bastard I am.  Ok, fine I’ll deconstruct this again.  Why do I have a problem with poly parents?  Because I think my sexuality is something that should always be on the side of a closed door from my children.  I do not flirt in front of my kids.  I cannot be a sexual person in front of my kids.  I cannot hunt.  I do not want my extra “partners” around my kids because I am uncomfortable having that energy around children.  I have felt really uncomfortable when I am dating someone and they want me to hang out around their children.  In almost every case (with one huge exception and I really respect him) there was more hand holding and hugging and PDA type behavior than I found appropriate.

Where is the line of what is ok to do in front of your kids?  Or even where in my house?  When I am interested in sex I want to have a lot of very heavy groping in my life.  It’s awesome and fun.  I am very uncomfortable with the prospect of trying to be secretive about it around my kids.  That’s not a good feeling for me.  I have been secretive about my sex life since I was two years old and I shouldn’t have had a sex life to be secretive about.

When I am otherwise doing well emotionally I get off on every part of being sneaky about sex.  I fucking love that I am the chick who sneaks off at parties.  And yet that is clearly acting out behavior and there are places I am not welcome because of it.  Awkward.  Shouldn’t I have to give up on that kind of acting out now that I have kids?  Large swaths of society thinks I am inappropriate for doing that.  I could even link to a very old blog post with a poll about it.  Fully 1/4 of my friends thinks that is not an ok thing to do.  And these are the people who are open minded enough to be friends with me in the first place.  Let’s not ignore that incredibly high bar here.

25% of my friends (who responded to that poll) disapprove of a very consistent part of my behavior.  That’s absolutely a high enough percentage to make me go into convulsions of shame.  Because that (to me) means if that was more of a general humanity sort of poll it means more like 80% of people will think I am disgusting.  Cue bad self talk tape I don’t want to play today.

Why do I feel I have to be celibate because I am a parent?  Oh let me see.  Maybe because the parts of my sexuality I enjoy the most are the parts that push the boundaries of what society considers acceptable.  Silent quickies on the couch are really shitty.  I’m fucking tired of them.  If that is all my god damn sex life is supposed to have for the rest of my life you can take this job and shove it.  Cue running away and engaging in acting out behavior.

But how did I act out?  I went to an adult only party.  Where people were already naked.  And heavily indicating that they like extra marital sex.  And I went to a former partner (who has loudly stated he is still interested) and I suggested running off because I hardly ever get to be in an environment where there are no children so I never enjoy sex.

I feel like a dirty disgusting whore.  And sometimes that is really hot and sometimes it makes me cry.  I feel so much shame for wanting sex the way I do.  I feel like I am obviously dirty.  I am contaminated.  I must be sick for wanting this the way I do.  And then I won’t let anyone touch me in any way because I feel like they will be made dirty by touching someone who wants sex the way I do.

So I kind of want to have a sex magic ritual.  I kind of feel like there might be some worthwhile emotional work to be done in this area.  Kinda.  And on one hand I feel like I should only be saying this to the very short list of people I feel comfortable engaging in this kind of party with.  But on the other hand, continuing to believe that I should be ashamed of talking about this part of my sex life is a lot of the point.  Let me restate: I have already lost a friend over this party.

Why do I feel like I have to be celibate to be a good mother?  Oh man.  Because being queer and kinky and poly means not only that I have sex with my husband (I feel ashamed of almost any touching around my kids so our marital sex is rather limited right now) and I occasionally sneak out in a way that I can completely hide from my kids and keep secret (limited primarily to heteronormative behavior because casual sex with women is way more complicated than I have time for, men can get it up on demand if you select carefully) but I am being flagrant to the world about things that I feel I have to hide.

The closet sucks.  I do talk about being queer, kind of, in front of my kids.  It really doesn’t come up.  I have friends who are queer, so obviously my children see examples of it.  But I don’t engage in any behavior that would look queer to them.  Kinky is something that I have put on hold 100% until my kids are older and can be left alone longer.  I don’t feel ok having that in my house and I get very little time off.  Poly?  Dating feels like the same thing.  I don’t want to take that much time away from my family.

It’s not that I don’t want these things in my life.  But I have massive issues around my kids seeing any of it because I feel ashamed.  It feels like I am supposed to.  When I make the decision to take people off the guest list because they do not feel safe enough to have a sex magic ritual in front of I lose friends.  It really really feels like I should be ashamed of having these things in my life.  If I am doing something at all, ever that some people won’t like then I am bad.

Why do I think I have to be celibate to be a mother?  Oh I don’t know.  Maybe because I can’t be satisfied with the limited shitty sex other people want me to have so it is easier to just shut the whole system off.  And just not be me.

I am not toxic.

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Sometimes I do things that would be very bad things for other people to do.  Most people shouldn’t head out to a non-sex party and pick up sex.  For a variety of reasons this is true.  Other people have different relationship agreements.  Other people have a different emotional attachment to having sex and would be damaged long term.  I feel more cheerful than I have been in literally years.  Other people would be required to figure out how to get their mojo back in some other way.  I don’t have to.  I can go pick up a fuck.  It is a coping mechanism.  It is one that can be very broken for a lot of people.  I’m not hurting anyone.  I picked a marriage where my husband not only thinks it is ok, he thinks it is super hot.  I found someone who wants to cheerfully enable me in that coping mechanism.

But I feel like I shouldn’t do it!  It’s bad!  Bad!  But it’s not.  I didn’t hurt anyone.  Good golly, both me and the man I picked up went home and enjoyed our partners all the more for the diversion.  We are equally as good of friends now as we were a week ago.  My kids were not impacted in the slightest.  Where is the harm?

I sometimes break the law in ways I will not enumerate online.  *ahem*  I do them with great forethought and planning.  I do it by very carefully weighing my options and the weight of different factors.  I then make a decision for myself.  I don’t think that other people should make the same choice just because I do.  I truly don’t.  I don’t think that other people should use me as a role model.  I think people should live vicariously as I do things they kind of wish they could do and ignore me when I do things they don’t want to do.  But it’s never that simple.

Who am I to say that anyone else is wrong?  Who is anyone else to say I am wrong?  I don’t know.  I know that my feelings of defensiveness come from reflex shame not any actual reservations about my choices.  I think my choices are bad because I think I make bad choices.  If that makes sense.  I think that another person doing it might be making a good or bad choice and it depends on a lot of different factors.  I hate meta shit.

Sometimes my friends can join me on journeys.  Sometimes they can’t.  That doesn’t make them my friend or not.  If friend was defined as someone I could do absolutely everything with… that would be kind of odd.  I think.

Suppression has limited usefulness.

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It’s interesting.  People keep asking me how I am doing, that’s predictable (and appreciated!).  I’m not sure what to say a lot of the time.  “Well, I’m behaving as if I feel more cheerful.  I am less explosive.  I am not nearly as angry.  I also feel completely dead sexually.  When people touch me I feel my skin crawl.  But I’m way more calm with way less time in time out!”  Is that a win?

A number of people have expressed how impressed they are that I can simply suppress these memories.  I can stop having flashbacks.  I can black the body memories.  But it comes with a price.  I don’t get to really be me when I’m doing this.  I’m just a shell.  You see, my therapist is on vacation till August 1st.  Perfect timing.  I don’t really feel up to seeing a new person right now.  I’m… yeah.  I’m just not up for that.  I miss people and I miss going out but I am so happy to be home that I’m kind of afraid to leave.  I haven’t even been up to Oakland yet to see the friend I normally see at least once a week because leaving the house is insurmountable.

Why is leaving the house insurmountable?  Because I only have so much patience right now and at home I can ask Shanna to do a very limited number of things so we have a limited number of fights.  Once we leave the house all bets are off.  We might have a great experience; we might have a horrible time.  By “horrible time” I mean that she will pick a fight in front of other people and I will feel intense shame and humiliation that my child is such a brat.  And I will end up yelling at her with far more intensity than the situation warrants because I am feeling shame and humiliation.  So I would rather not take her out.  It’s not that I never yell at her at home, but it’s far less.  And when I can tell that I am starting to internally escalate things that don’t need to escalate I can safely separate us until I calm down more and can talk.  It’s seamless and non-dramatic at home.  Well, three year olds are dramatic.

I’m experiencing a lot more sympathy for why other people give in to their kids to stop the freaking constant whining.  I still won’t, but my alternative is to send her to her room until she can talk in a tone of voice that doesn’t sound like nails on a chalk board.  I don’t have that when we are out.  Oh it feels like pressure.  It feels like overwhelming-I’m-drowning-where-is-the-air pressure.  It’s not a rational reaction.  It is, in fact, completely irrational.  I am comforted by books that tell me that three is just like this.  Get through the year and it improves.  Please G-d.

At home we do ok!  Really!  We have have far more good days than bad.  Even our bad days at home aren’t that bad because I am way more liberal with “room time” than any “real” crunchy parent would be.  What the hell is gentle discipline anyway?  I don’t hit her.  I do my best not to yell.  But oh man I need space and the only way I know to get it is to tell her that she has two options: she can be civilized and polite, or she can be in her room.  It’s not that all expressions of emotion are uncivilized or impolite.  However, if you have to reach volumes that are harming my ear drums in order to express yourself you can do that outside the main room, sorry.  No, I don’t think that children deserve to terrorize everyone around them as they develop emotions.  And I cannot sit down and patiently let her do everything she wants to do.  Sometimes things have to get done.  I’m almost sorry.  But mostly because it means that not only do I have to do an avalanche of work, I have to argue with her all day about whether or not she will let me do it without being a whiny brat because she wants me to do nothing but pay attention to her. Ugh.

I swear to G-d I do things with her.  I play games.  I teach her gardening stuff.  We play on the swing.  I read to them.  I bake with her.  Et cetera.  Nothing is enough so I need to just say that I’ve had enough.  My needs matter too.  And she needs to deal with that disappointment because life is going to hold a whole lot more disappointments in it.

I think that is what the current rash of articles on over attentive parenting is saying.  I feel like I am trying (and failing) to meet all of her needs because my needs were so extensively ignored and unmet.  But there is a happy medium.  My family didn’t know how to meet my basic needs and Shanna is not in that position.  Shanna never has to wonder if she will have a place to live, food to eat (that is palatable), if she will see her mother or father or sister, or if she will get several hours of positive attention every day, or if she will be abused.  Shanna is safe.  Shanna really and truly is getting the basics that I didn’t have.

It impacts the whole rest of your life to not have those things as a child.  That is why I still identify as white trash even though I feel guilty given the extensive privilege I enjoy now.  I still feel like I’m not sure I will have a place to live or palatable food (this is a serious issue at this point in my life).  Noah went to great lengths to create a family trust and he put all of his separate property I was previously not entitled to, all the inheritance stuff, into community property.  No really, all stay at home moms are not created equal.  I am not taking the risk that other people take.  He truly can’t screw me, no matter what.  I will never be destitute again.  But I still go through periods where I am afraid to do things in the house because I think I will get in trouble.  I angst and dither over doing things because I fear that everyone will be mad at me and make me go.  This is not rational.  This is in my bone marrow.  This is why I feel like white trash.  I feel like a dirty little imposteur and at any moment I will be made to go away from decent people.  I’ve been told I wasn’t welcome before.

I was asked to leave the Seventh Day Adventist church when I was a kid.  As an adult I would say that a small minded bully with no actual authority told me that she didn’t like me… but that’s not how it felt at 12.  I was pushing to do a lock-in with the youth group.  I had been to one at my friend Yvette’s church and I really wanted to do it again.  A woman in an authority like position in the group took me aside and told me how offensive and inappropriate that was.  It was disgustingly sexual and then she told me that I would feel more comfortable in a place that was less Godly.

So I went and fucked Sean.  That’s pretty much the timeline on that.  Super Bowl Sunday was a few weeks after that.  I went and visited family friends who were not making great life choices.  Lots of drugs.  Lots of risky behavior.  My family thought it was great for me to go stay with them!  They were also hosting a different family friend for the weekend.  He also happened to be their drug dealer.  On Superbowl Sunday I told him that I wanted him to do something to me.  He asked what.  I said I was too shy to say the word.  He asked me what letter it started with.  I said “F”.  He started saying the predictable ones: fondle, feel, finger… then he got to fuck.  I said yes.

He turned all the lights off.  He did basically no foreplay.  He didn’t use a condom.  I lay there and physically did all the things I “knew” I was supposed to do.  All the things I had learned from years and years of reading porn romance novels, and stealing my uncle’s pornography.  But I cried while I did it.  I kind of thought that was just how it was supposed to go.

Apparently I unsuppressed some memories.  I don’t want to be dead inside.  I don’t want to feel like I am buried under the weight of all of the bad things.  If I suppress them I say that they are unimportant.  Not worth looking at.  But it is important that these things happened to me.  Maybe it is only important given the whole scope of my life, but that’s ok.  Maybe it wouldn’t be the end of the world story for someone else to say that the cried through losing their virginity.  It’s kind of a different story for me.  I was told over and over from when I was a baby that my only value was in having sex.  At 12 I felt like my attempts to be good and I really and truly was trying, resulted in being kicked out and told that God didn’t love me.  So I turned around and fucked a 25 year old drug dealer–without a condom.  That’s why mental health professionals think I should be dead.  If I started off making choices like this when I was 12?  12!  Oh my fucking god.  I always thought I was so adult.  That I was so mature.  Everyone agreed that I was precocious, advanced, remarkably adult… No.  I was heinously abused.  It’s different.

When I kick myself over and over for sending my daughter to her room because screaming when you dislike something is not an option… I feel like I am crushing her spirit.  I feel like I am abusing her.  I feel like I am not just on a slippery slope, but rather everything I do is inherently abusive because I am an abuser.  No matter what you do as a parent you can find someone to flog you and tell you that you are ruining your children.  I insist that she not yell at me, not use a volume that causes me physical pain, and that she not hit or kick anyone.  Ok, let’s tack on pestering.  I really don’t allow pestering.  Pestering is given warnings.  If you cross these lines, that means you need some time to see if you like being alone more than you like being polite to me.  No no no no.  I AM NOT ABUSIVE BECAUSE I HAVE BOUNDARIES.  I’m not.  I’m not.  I’m not.  I feel like me asserting myself is bad.  Like I don’t deserve to do it.  Like when I inconvenience the people around me for my own comfort, “Shanna you don’t get to play the screeching game inside” I am doing something terrible.  If I have to physically carry Shanna outside or to her room because she has decided to grab onto furniture and get louder?  Well… I still don’t think I have crossed the line of abusive at that point either.  I’m not going to be chased from room to room in my house by a screaming child.  Just no.

Let me break to say that I don’t think she is being malicious.  She’s enjoying the feeling and trying to get a rise out of me.  I still don’t have to like it or tolerate it.  But I worry about my reactions when we are out.  Like on the train when she wants to get to me the easiest way is to start getting loud.  She knows that it is a huge hot button.  So I picked her up and carried her to the vestibule area.  So far still ok.  But then she wouldn’t stop screaming and I wouldn’t stop yelling either. So I made her stand in the corner.  Which she didn’t want to do and she fought me.  Thankfully Noah interceded because it wouldn’t have been pleasant for either of us if he hadn’t.  I got my back up over something stupid.  That was not the hill to die on because I had no method of enforcement that was appropriate and safe for all concerned.  So I was going to lose no matter what.  But the real problem was that we hadn’t given her proper breakfast and she was hungry.  And that’s all our fault.  And the real solution was to be more patient with her when we had inappropriately taxed her physically.  But instead I hissed unpleasantly at her “You are in public and you need to be quiet.  No.  You don’t get to make the people around you miserable.  That’s not ok.”  Over and over. That’s not an acceptable reaction.  That reaction is coming from my own intense fears about being looked at.  That is me being told that I was never allowed to talk about the abuse or unpleasant things in a way that would make people look at me.  I’m passing on that abused feeling.

I think that “abuse” makes you feel smaller, weaker, and less than.  Abuse is being told in some way that you are a less than person.  I feel like I don’t deserve to take up space in the world.  That’s a lot of my suicidal feelings.  I feel like I am a toxic force.  Like I am a toxic waste dump that should be eradicated for the good of the herd.  That’s how I feel about myself.  No, I don’t have the expectation that I will be “nice” when I meet new people.  I expect that I will feel awkward and uncomfortable and I will act out in some way because I am just that kind of stupid fucked up loser and I always make bad first impressions because I am just bad bad bad bad.

I don’t know that I’m going to have a good day.  Who knows.  Maybe I will purge my bile on the internet and then go on with my day.  It could happen.  I’m hoping that purging my bile works.  Noah is home and my no-t-twin is having a house warming.  Maybe we could have a good day and go after nap time.  That would be really nice.  I can do two things at once when I am out in public.  I can watch one child and interact with an adult or I can watch two children.  That means that socializing in public is hard.  But life is hard and this is really a first world problem.  Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean you stop doing it.

I’m watching the sky.  I’m torn between disappointment and elation.  Lately the mornings have been feeling like a beach summer.  It’s slightly humid but very chilly.  It’s uncomfortable to move around the house in summer clothes.  But it’s summer, damnit!  And I keep wearing my summer clothes with layers because I am so eager to strip down to as little as possible.  I miss warmth.  I want it on my skin and I almost never feel this way.  It’s really bothering me this year in a way it never has before.  So the thing is, I want it to be warm in the morning so that I feel comfortable moving around and doing my work and then I can have the afternoon sloth to lie on the couch or play with the kids.  I do most of my big chore jobs in the mornings because the children have more patience and I’m tired of having freezing cold toes.  It’s freaking July.  What the heck.  Right now it is 57 degrees.  That’s pitiful!  (I’m working on the distracting part of suppressing.  The kids will wake up soon.)

I spend a lot of time thinking about why I feel the need to process what I went through the way I do.  It’s not exactly the most pleasant thing to do.  At this stage of my life I feel like I am not in a position to take up a spiritual leader because I would need an intense cult… and yeah.  Like that’s a good solution.  I don’t want a religion to give meaning to my life.  I am not a glory to anyone else.  I can’t come up with any way in the whole fucking world to talk any kind of good about a spiritual practice that does not tell me to pick up a big stick any time someone from my family comes near me.  No, I don’t need to turn the other cheek.  And I’m not in a place where there is enough value there for me to deal with my current issues with organized religion.  Really.  In the cost benefit analysis, I lose.  Just no.

But there has to be some fucking meaning in this story.  Something.  Some reason I did this and survived.  I have to find something worth knowing in the mess.  I have to find a way to believe that being me and existing is a right and good thing.  That I am the right kind of me.  Because being a mother is not going to cut it forever.  I have to be alive and living in my body for me.  And I don’t know a way to be me other than to tell my stories.

The part of me that I like the most is the part of me that looks at my behaviors that I dislike and I try to figure out why I do them so that I can either figure out how to stop doing them –and for real stop doing them, with accountability–or change my opinion of doing the behavior.  In some way it is kind of awful.  I’m developing situational ethics.  But I am trying to reframe it as, “I want to do this, but it is at priority level 9 and right now 3 conflicts with it.  Ok.  Well… shit.”  Because then I have reason to examine my options more carefully on how I am doing 3.  Sometimes I am going to feel like a terrible person and feel a lot of guilt because… 9 is still a priority and I’m failing.  I’m bad.  I’m terrible.  I deserve all manner of evil and badness rained on my head.  That my friends, that is the crunchy guilt for me.  If I do something in a less-than-crunchy way… say only use a plastic bag once and then throw it away.  I have horrible anxiety and terrible self thoughts.  If I only cared more… Ugh.  There isn’t enough time in the day for me to handle my mental health shit and my crunchy guilt.  Ha.

Talking about these things in the ways that I do is part of being me.  I need to stop feeling like I should be silent in public; it’s not like I ever really followed that rule anyway.  Rather I need to stop feeling guilty for taking up space.  Other people are just going to have to deal with their own feelings of shame when I talk about their actions.  That’s not my responsibility.  If you feel ashamed of the things you did to me when I was a child it is right and just.  I get to be that judge and jury.  I’m the only one who experienced it.  There will be people who agree with me and there will be people who disagree with me. That’s life.  And in order to be me and find my own reason for living, I have to learn how to live with that.  I have to stop feeling terrified of the fact that people will disagree with me and dislike me.  I hide at home because I am white trash.  Because I am dirty.  Because I am low class in public.  I explode and yell.  I never can make my children look clean and put together.  I can’t look clean and put together without professional help.  The less said about my husband the better.  *ahem*  (I’m kidding!  I like my husband!  It’s just kind of rare for him to shave.)  We all fit in well together.  We are all similarly messy looking.

That was anxiety producing for me in the UK.  The only time I saw a family that kind of resembled my mental picture of mine in terms of being messily put together they were… very attention grabbing in obviously low class ways.  I had to stop and breathe for a moment as I realized that I shush my children in public and try to talk very quietly when I’m out because I don’t want to be that any more.  I experience so much shame when I feel like people are looking at me the way I look at that woman.  That was my experience of growing up.  My sister was the loud “mother figure” bossing everyone around in this over the top domineering voice so that she could “sound like the boss”.  She’s got a complex.  Oh wait!  She is probably acting like my dad.  I was never really around him so I actually don’t know.  I don’t know what my dad sounded or acted like around people.  I don’t think I saw it more than a few times.  I can’t remember living with him.  So yeah.

My journey is really about finding balance between sharing the stories and working on my behavior while still having control when I need to have control.  Which is pretty much all the time right now.  Rats.

I’m baaaaack

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And of course the first thing I do is plop myself down in the middle of a big thought process around priorities.  I’m thinking about my priorities in life because right now I have to start acting on them in terms of living my life.  I no longer have a brick wall event coming that forces a reordering into crisis mode.  How do I actually want to live?  Priority number one: deciding my priorities needs to not become an obsessive thing that disrupts my life.  (Here I will make a side note: I have already had multiple funny asides I wanted to make but I can’t remember the code for how to create a footnote and trying to think about how to make them is derailing my thought process.  I’m annoyed.  I may have finally found a motivation for learning how to code.)

It is 10 pm and my entire family is asleep.  Seems quite reasonable.  Only… the kids and I went to sleep at 1pm.  We are going to have an interesting adjustment from jet lag.  I’m up thinking about the patterns of our days and unschooling and my mental health and getting the house ready for Sarah and food and gardening and…

So I am thinking about priorities.  Sarah will be in our house within 20 days.  I am so excited I can barely sit still.  But that’s not a hard dead line in any negative traumatic way for me.  I don’t have to have the house to a certain “readiness”.  She could move in today and it would all be handled.  I can do work before then that will make the integration process easier, and I’m doing that.  But it’s not an emergency.  It can happen or not in whatever time or order I want.  I’m done with the scary bits of that project.  I just get to anticipate having Sarah here.  Everything else is gravy.  So right now I really am at the place where I get to sit down and think about how I want my life to look just because I get to start making it real now.

While I was on the trip I spent an obscene amount of time on Mothering.com because I was stuck in hotel rooms.  I don’t have any idea how much I posted and I don’t want to think about it.  I also wandered around the net looking at other parenting websites.  I learned that I need to stay on MDC.  I do not have the time or energy to go find a new forum.  My story is long and complex.  And I can’t tell people little comfortable sound bites that ensure that they feel comfortable enough with me for me to say things without being attacked.  I have a long posting history on MDC.  Folks recognize me.  It feels like a community to me.  I have noticed it becoming more close knit after the recent mass evacuation.  A whole bunch of people have reached out to me during the decline of the site.  I feel increasingly seen there and I like it.  I suppose that means I am moving up the hierarchy of the clique?  But in a war of attrition I will lose.  I have too many other things to do and I am going to go do them.  I don’t want to prioritize the kind of time it takes to stay popular on MDC.  I have a life to live.

I started this blog because I wanted a place to feel accountable to so that I could document my life.  I am not good at staying productive in a vacuum.  I need a boss.  Which isn’t to say that I think I owe accountability to anyone specific on the internet.  Y’all can kiss off.  (said with love)  But I am choosing an unorthodox path for my family.  I want to prove to myself that I am actually doing what I say I am doing.  I don’t know another way to give myself the motivation to keep working without trying to produce some result.  I want to talk about what I’m doing.  I miss the camaraderie of having a job.  Raising my kids is my job.  And sweet sony Jesus don’t make this into a stay at home mom versus a work out of the home mom thing.  That’s not what I mean.  I mean that I have decided to not only stay home, but I am educating my kids.  That’s a separate job as well.  I am responsible for preparing them for the world.  Every parent is responsible for raising their children, and we all get help along that process.  Each parent chooses a different amount of help.  There is nothing wrong with that and I’m not judging how much “time” people spend with their kids.  I’m really not.  I’m trying to figure out what parts of raising them, educating them, preparing them for the world, entertaining them, etc. I actually have to do on a day to day basis and what parts of that can I and/or should I farm out?  There is no need for me to be a martyr.

My other job is being me.  Being me is high maintenance.  Being me (near as I can tell) is a lot more work than it is to be someone else.  I can’t get good trade in value, so I’m sort of stuck with being me.  If I want to be me well I have to put a lot of work into that.  I am trying to get to the point where I respect and like myself enough that I feel good about all the time and effort I put into me instead of feeling ashamed that I require so much effort.  That is complicated.  Since we got home I have been doing a lot of emotional eating.  I can tell.  I can feel it.  I can look at what I am eating and see why it is making me physically feel bad.  But I can’t seem to motivate myself to deal with it because of all the complicating factors around being exhausted from the trip.  But tomorrow we have a local farmers market.  And I’m working on giving myself permission to make specific choices that are short term suboptimal in favor of preparing for the marathon.  It’s weird.

I don’t know if I am making any sense.  I am also, once again, able to medicate for my anxiety.  Thank you California for recognizing that I should be able to have control over whether or not I have to feel that upset all the time.  I haven’t yelled since we got home.  And my stomach isn’t hurting all the time.  I’ve been able to slowly start stretching out the muscles in my head and neck and I no longer have a headache.  I had that headache for a month straight.  I’m fighting with my guilt to allow me more than the absolute bare minimum to be not full of rage.  It’s 10:23 and my kids are likely to wake up in the middle of the night.  So I will be on duty and that requires being mostly sober.  But then I will get edgy.  Ah fuck it.  It is better for me to ensure that my stomach stops hurting.  That requires more than the amount that takes the edge off of my anxiety.  Tonight, that is the right decision.

I worry about putting things on the internet because I worry that I will only put the bad things.  Or only the bad things will be true.  I need to get back to a place where I am loudly doing the good things too.  That’s the only thing that will allow me to feel safe.  And in order for me to feel like I am doing the good things loudly… I need to figure out what doing the good things are so I can know if I am actually doing them.  Seriously.  Do other people have to stop and think about this stuff?  Do you just know?  Ugh.

I don’t think that today’s noodling counts as a binding agreement.  Just so it has been said.  But I want to give my boss a status update.  I’m like that.

I think that it’s time to set priorities.  What things actually matter to me.  And I need to act like I really do believe my priorities.  And if I can’t act like I believe them… I need to decide how I feel about not believing them anymore because I need honesty.  I can’t deal with hypocrisy.  But it’s complicated because sometimes it isn’t about hypocrisy, you just aren’t meeting ‘x’ priority because you are still stuck on ‘g’ and it is more important.  I want to be very clear with myself about when and where I am stuck on g and when I have simply stopped believing that x is important.

For example.  The local food thing.  Wait, no… I want to back up.  I want to start at the beginning.  It’s my story.

So I spent a lot of time on MDC during the trip.  One of the best things I got out of it (and the side track over to Trolls With Wooden Spoons) was to examine some of the ways in which I really did drink the Kool Aid at MDC.  And some of the things I have gotten from the experience have been good for me and I’m thrilled, and others suck.  But I’ve been forcing myself to take it as a package deal.  It’s not.  No matter how rabidly people on the internet berate me for not meeting one specific point on a checklist… dude.  Really.  I’m not failing at life if I stop doing something perfectly.  Uhm… not that I have been perfect at any step on this journey.  I think I need to stop making perfection a goal or part of the conversation.  I just need to figure out what it means to be me and do that.  How pretentious is that?

I feel about as self-involved as an adolescent.  Shanna and I are at the same space in development, and in some ways that’s true.  As I am discovering myself on the journey to recovering from incest, I really am starting in about the same place Shanna is.  I am reparenting myself.  But I’m far harder on myself than I am on Shanna.  Maybe I should be a lot more gentle with both of us.  My daughter is already a shining example of vitality.  I need to stop acting like I need to feel guilty for neglecting her.  I’m not neglecting her.  I am treating it like my only job is to educate her and she’s blossoming.  Ok, she’s weird… yes.  But she’s trying things out.  None of what she is doing is for keeps.  Geez, she’s only three.  But why can’t I have the same latitude?  Why can’t I be just figuring out who I am too?  That’s also my job.  I didn’t get that when I was a small child the way normal kids do.  I was too busy keeping secrets and trying to be the person other people wanted me to be.

The thing is, part of who I am is a responsible adult.  I need to ensure that I am meeting the specific priorities that actually matter to me and to the people and community around me.  I am quite literally responsible to and for the people and things around me.  I have obligations.  I have no interest in walking away from my obligations.  I really don’t want to leave.  I have a wonderful life.  But it is work.  I have many jobs there.  I have been hiding at home for a long time because I haven’t been up to the work of being in a community and being me and being a parent all at the same time.  I’ll be frank and say that I worry about that decision.  I worry about that decision partially because I know that I describe my life on the internet in ways that make some people worry about my children.  I want witnesses.  That sounds awful.  I want there to be no way in the world for me to get away with doing anything bad to my children.  I want there to really and truly be no way at all I could hurt my kids and it would be invisible.  And that means a blog is not the whole answer.  That means people who interact with my children a lot and watch them.

Side note: this blog post about being queer just made my day.  I struggle a lot with queerness as an identity.  I feel pressured to engage in homosexual sex in a way I don’t feel pressured to engage in heterosexual sex.  It’s self-imposed.  But that is part of me figuring out who I am.  So maybe this isn’t a side note after all.  I’m crying because I know I am begging for permission for spending time on thinking about myself.  I want to believe it is ok for me to take up as much space as I need to take up in my day.  That’s part of my job!  Damnit!

Another side note: the more I think about Lady Gag’s The Edge of Glory video the more I think that woman is a fucking genius.  In most of her videos she hands you a fully fleshed out STORY and you are not allowed to project your own stuff.  There is no room for you in her stories.  She is sharing her fantasy.  Not this time.  In this one there is a lot of room for the argument that she isn’t presenting a story at all.  For once… she’s just … on the edge of a story with you.  And this time you get to tell it.  “I think that at this point in the video I would do…”  And yet you can’t get away from the fact that it is a Lady Gaga video because even when she is downplaying all the stuff that is her normal trademark she is still so very her.  So in this video she is inviting collaboration.  I don’t think she made this video so simply because she is a cheap bastard.  I think she wanted to give her fans a place to project themselves into a relationship with her.  I think she is that willing to be vulnerable.  And that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.  Seriously.  This video is a love song to each and every fan.  She didn’t want it to be a big dance number song.  This is how she feels about every person and she wanted it to be one on one.  This is how she wants to fuck every single one of her fans.  I think she is a genius.  She wants to feel like she is in love with each person.  She is Mother Monster and she wants to be lover as well.  I really think I should take the trouble to learn more about her and become more of an actual fan.  Because only in talking to other fans will avoid sounding like a lunatic.  ha.

I need to not focus on what other people should or shouldn’t be doing outside my family.  That needs to drop off my priority list entirely.  So when I notice at 11:22 that I am no longer able to coherently write I need to go to sleep instead of trolling the internet.

More introverted than I think

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Noah and I tend to read different things.  Sometimes he sends me a link that I find really interesting.  Today’s link is about Introvert/Extrovert stuff.  I’m shocked by the fact that according to his definitions:

Introverts
  1. require a minimum period of isolation every day to survive psychologically
  2. are energized by weak-link social fields, such as coffee shops, where little interaction is expected
  3. are energized by occasional, deeper 1:1 interactions, but still at arm’s length; no soul-baring
  4. are energized by such 1:1 encounters with anyone, whether or not a prior relationship exists
  5. are drained by strong-link social fields such as family gatherings
  6. are reduced to near-panic by huddles: extremely close many-many encounters such as group hugs
  7. have depth-limited relationships that reach their maximum depth very fast
Extroverts
  1. need a minimum amount of physical contact everyday, even if it is just laying around with a pet
  2. are energized by strong-link social fields such as family gatherings
  3. like soul-baring 1:1 relationships characterized by swings between extreme intimacy and murderous enmity
  4. are not willing to have 1:1 encounters with anyone unless they’ve been properly introduced into their social fields
  5. are made restless and anxious by weak-link social fields such as coffee shops unless they go with a friend
  6. are reduced to near panic by extended episodes of solitude
  7. have relationships that gradually deepen over time to extreme levels
From the Introvert list I have: 1, 3, 4, 5, 6.  From the Extrovert list I have: 3, 6, 7.
What does that make me?  I have always thought of myself as an extrovert and yet, I tend to feel like larger groups don’t like me.  I don’t feel safe when I have to figure out how to relate to more than one person at once.  I used to love big groups.  I was good at them.  Not anymore.  Anxiety has pushed me towards isolation and it really sucks.  I often feel better connecting briefly with a stranger because I don’t have to worry about offending them.  I don’t have to worry about them learning to be disgusted by me.  I’m trying to cobble together a mental support team without overly depending on any one person.  Because if I depend too much on one (or three) people I will exhaust them, they will get sick of me, they will move on.  If I can get bits and pieces from many, many people, I can pretend that is enough.  
I think that a lot of my conflict with Noah is because I swing hard between the sort of energetic transactionalism this essay talks about.  What an interesting thing to consider.  I can’t decide if we should have one “bank account” or separate accounts.  I suppose it makes sense that I gravitate heavily towards folks with Aspergers and I am absolutely terrified of being codependent.  I would rather learn Aspie coping mechanisms because they make me feel safe.  They make me feel less vulnerable.  I wish every single day that I could take my extrovert needs and burn them out of me with a poker.  It has been the work of a lifetime to stop being an extrovert.  Being an extrovert is dangerous.  It’s not safe.  I can’t depend on people.
I can go weeks without talking to people I don’t live with.  Most of the people I depend on heavily rotate in and out of my life.  My friends all have their own mental health issues and they will go radio silence for months or years.  I poke at them every so often to see if they are still around, but almost none of them come back to me.  I’m too hard.  When I lose contact with people it is because *I* stop forcing a relationship.  That hurts.  That hurts a lot.  I don’t have many people who reach out to me unless I post excessively on the internet about how I may not make it to tomorrow.  Otherwise people just don’t have room for me in their lives.  I’ve never been able to figure out what to do about that. 

This is why I sprint.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does it mean to be an addict?

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So I’ve been tossing and turning lately about the whole “addict” thing. It plays in with incest families because most of the coping mechanisms are similar. Everyone is fucked up in similar ways, just to greater and lesser extent. Pretty much everyone I know who was raised around addicts/abuse/fucked up shit all seem to have anxiety. Anxiety is horrible to live with. It can really ruin your day. All day. Every day. To greater and lesser extent influenced by a huge array of factors. But anxiety is useful. Anxiety is energy. If you get good at it, you can learn to channel that anxiety into enormous energy surges and you can accomplish great things.

I’ve done this a lot in my life. That’s why I wait until the last minute to do work. This is a common thing. Lots of people work better in sprints rather than marathons. But if you look around the world, many things have to be done by people who are running a marathon, not a sprint. I’m a mother. Raising children is one of the most grinding marathons in life. And I’m a sprinter. I love to sprint. I love to have big dramatic hard periods where I accomplish a lot of work and then I go hibernate. I really suck at work/life balance.

When I talk to people who are marathon runners they tell me to learn to meditate or “heal” so I can “find peace” not realizing that what they are telling me to do is to stop being me. They are telling me to remove the energy that has sustained my life. That is part of the problem. I’ve never thought about it quite like that before. I get very very fussy about advice. That’s a huge hot button for me. I am very particular about who I solicit advice from. And if I sit here and go down the list I can sort people into marathoners or sprinters and I can straight down the line predict how and where their advice is useful. I’m half tempted to make a list and explain the people and see if anyone can guess. But naptime isn’t that long.

There has to be some kind of balance. There has to be a way to help a race horse pull a plow. Mostly what we do (as far as I am aware, in America) is medicate them. We have so many drugs for this it isn’t funny. I cannot function right now in the day to day grind without some form of help. With help I am patient, kind and attentive. Without help I pace all day pissed off about the work I want to be doing that I can’t do because my children have needs. That really doesn’t make for a good day for anyone.

But the problem is, I really like being a sprinter. If I medicate so that I can be a marathoner when my kids are awake and I need to be more level, that doesn’t go away the rest of the time. It’s pretty difficult to find any kind of medication that you can fine tune enough by itself for that kind of anxiety suppressant. So if I want to feel like me and have that nervous energy I need to medicate again. And there’s this cycle. And I have really strong feelings about it. I feel very upset about doing this. I feel like I am a completely horrible person. I am a terrible mother.

Yeah. Guess what my fucking uppers are. Sugar and caffeine. Yeah. So I do medicate down (legally/medically and everything) because I feel that is the most important thing for me to be doing. But then I eat crap and eat a caffeinated mint and I get up and I start Working! But why am I really better than someone who uses speed responsibly? (Breastfeeding issues aside)

And then it comes back around to, but I don’t want to be an addict. I don’t want to be addicted to energy cycles in my body. But the thing is, if I don’t medicate at all… I’m a sprinter. Not a marathoner. That’s really not fair to my kids. I am not going to be putting them in daycare for a laundry list of reasons I should never have to enumerate! Why in the fuck do I feel like I have to defend the fact that I WANT to be home with my kids! Ugh. But I’m a sprinter, not a marathoner.

So is my mom. My mom pulled me hither and yon following her sprints. I actually plan to do a fair bit of that with my kids later. When they are older. When they can have a say in where we go and what we do and opt out if they really don’t want to. I want my children to have a safe community of people who see them. People who are tracking their growth and progress so that even if I do lose my shit and completely start abusing them (very unlikely) there will be people who notice. I want my next door neighbors to know that my daughter is this bright, passionate, exceptionally precocious child. If she stopped being willing to talk to them it would be really a big deal. Shanna adores them and goes over to visit whenever she can. I want there to be people in my daughter’s life who will be ask questions on her behalf. That won’t happen if I sprint.

I think it was enormously damaging to me in every single way that I have no idea what it feels like to have people in your life. In about a year I will have lived with Noah longer than I ever lived with my mother continuously. Wow. That’s really sad. I lived with my ex-boyfriend Tom longer than I had ever lived in one place before. That was just over three years. I have now lived in this house longer than I have ever lived anywhere else in my life. That’s quite daunting.

A comment said that someone doesn’t love me or hate me. She’s trying to get to know me. That actually freaked me the fuck out. I am absolutely the sort of person who bonds or doesn’t and just runs away. I keep friendships with the people I bond with. I have many many friendships that have lasted 10, 15, almost 20, and 30 years. Ok, only one (nearly) 30 year friendship. But oh man do I keep people. Thing is, I keep them in my head and my heart. Sometimes I keep in decent touch on im. But I don’t see people. I am alone and very lonely. I don’t know how to have community with people I am not living with. I’ve never ever had it. I don’t even know what it looks like.

But I’m trying to find out. Today is Sunday. At 4 Alex and Yani will come over for Family Dinner. I still don’t know what we are eating and first we have to make Shanna’s birthday cake. She wants vanilla this year. I think I scored big. There’s still so much to do and I want to do it. And that means settling in for a marathon. I want this life. I want it so much that I lose my breath with terror as I make my contingency plans for what to do in the various circumstances that could come with it ending.

I have to have those contingency plans. I’m a sprinter. If I fuck this up I have to run and I have to run hard. But I have the plans. And I know what to do. So now what I have to do is settle in and not fuck up. Because I really want my life. And so I medicate. I medicate and worry about health risks and the psychological risk to my children if I don’t. Maybe I am an addict and I just never knew it. But I don’t think that’s true. I’m not an addict. I’m a sprinter who isn’t allowed to run so I’m frustrated as all hell. I will get back to a stage in my life where that is appropriate and I will stop medicating and I will run like hell. It will be glorious and beautiful.

It’s hard living with the guilt of medicating though. I think I should be at ease with the decision but I really have the internalized message of shame. For me to need help of any kind in any way means I am a weak and worthless human being. But honestly all of the versions of “strong” I’ve ever seen don’t look very appealing. I don’t want to medicate because I do not want to feel like an addict but if I do not medicate I am making a choice that is bad for my kids because I am a nasty bitch. So don’t be a nasty bitch. But I’m a nasty bitch because I am a sprinter not a marathoner. So become a marathoner.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

The first step.

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I feel like I spend most of my life lately saying, “It’s complicated” because no matter what subject I am looking at there are many different things that could be combined/fixed/told.  And I don’t know how to begin.  Luckily I have the internet, and friends who are awake.  My friend Peter pointed me towards the class where I met him.  There is material there.  And he’s right.

My first semester of graduate school was in 2003, before I met Noah, right after Tom ended our M/s relationship.  Before Tom and I were poly I started grad school.  Naw, that’s not even true.  That’s when I applied to grad school.  I started spring semester so I started grad school in January of 2004.  I met Noah in late February.  So this story is going on concurrently to me starting to tell the story of my abuse out loud in the context of my relationship with Noah.

I went to a fiction writing class.  Honestly I picked it based on when I wanted to be on campus.  Always the best selection criterion, I tell you.  I did write some fiction for the class but all of the fiction I chose to wrote was borderline pornographic (or very explicitly pornographic depending on which story) or I wrote creative non-fiction.  I didn’t tell the class that I was writing about my own childhood abuse.  I did not explain that the horrific, gut clenching story about a 7 year old being raped was my story.  I kept distance there.  Most people in the class responded just fine and they gave me very valid feedback on my writing.

But there was this one woman.  Liz?  I think her name was Liz.  She didn’t like me much.  She didn’t like my stories.  She didn’t like my attitude.  She was one of those out and proud lesbians who acts like all heterosexual sex is rape.  I doubt she would have actually said that, but that’s pretty much the place she was in.  Now, like 7 years later, I can see why she was the way she was.  Then she just felt mean.  She picked on me when I shared my stories.

What do I mean by that?  I mean that when I was visibly upset when people were workshopping the story about my rape she was very hostile.  She specifically said, “This story is ridiculous because this kind of thing doesn’t really happen to people.”  Now I kind of wonder if she was denying her own abuse.  Her response was really hard for me.  I brought stuff that was too intense to class and I felt like I got screamed at for it.  To be perfectly clear, the professor was awesome.  I’m quite sure he had strong suspicions about me because he gave me great writing feedback and he gingerly patted me on the shoulder and told me I would make it.  Men like him have been the rock I have built my life upon. Women rarely manage that kind of support properly.

But oh man.  I’m not over Liz.  How dare she tell me that my story was unrealistic?  That’s not fucking writing feedback.  We had a guy in class writing stories about people who were kidnapped by aliens!  She chose to tell ME that my story was unrealistic!  Ok.  Fuck her.  I feel like she is part of the great evil cabal that wants me to kill myself instead of speaking because she doesn’t want to hear about my pain.

But I’m in a lot of pain.  And that’s a hard thing to talk about.  How do you express your pain properly without hurting anyone else?  I mean, the problem with Sharon and Liz is that they feel I am overstepping their (or someone elses) boundaries and I don’t have the right to do that.  Thing is, I don’t have any clue whatsoever where boundaries are supposed to go.  I flail and I fuck up.  Sometimes they are really far away from me and no one can get close enough to have a conversation and sometimes they are in so close that I can’t defend myself when someone rapes me.  I do not know what healthy boundaries feel like to naturally have them for ones own body.  I don’t.  I pretend.  I try to make it up. My boundaries shift depending on time of day, how many people are around, how recently I have thought about my family, what I’m eating, how often I sleep…

And that’s not cool for the people around me.  That’s messy and abusive.  Because then I go off on people for correcting my grammar.  I saw that I know it is a little thing, but it felt abusive.  It felt over the top.  It felt like you were trying to publicly humiliate me and make me look small and stupid and you look big and powerful.  Thats not what was happening, but that’s how muddy my boundaries are. I can KNOW things and not feel them.

I hate being sober.  I can’t tell the stories.  See how I am dancing here?  But Sharon made a crack about the marijuana and how I should stop using it and go on psych meds.  Despite the many many many years of problems I had trying to get psych meds to work.  Despite the fact that the people who are in my house with me monitoring my behavior tell me adamantly that marijuana is the right decision right now in this crisis point because it is clearly helping me and it does not have the miserable side effects.  But someone in authority, someone I feel “knows more than me” told me that I should stop.  So I am not smoking this morning.  Even though I am going round and round in circles and winding myself up.

I don’t know how to get past the anxiety and look at the stories without it.  My brain is too effective at shutting down those avenues of thought.  When I try to sit here and think about being raped when I was 7 years old my stomach starts to hurt, my neck hurts.  I feel tense.  I am breathing fast and rapid.  If I were trying to speak out loud I would be doing it so fast and so quiet that people probably wouldn’t really be able to hear me.  I’m scared.  I’m small.  And I have no real voice.  Even if I could start rattling off the facts, I was 7 years old when a neighbor raped me.  There was a witness in the room and another witness (his mother) came in and saw what was happening and then walked out leaving it to continue.

Many many people saw my story.  People were there watching it while it happened.  People actually physically saw me being raped and didn’t stop it.

Why shouldn’t I be angry again?  Why in the hell is it surprising that I have rage issues?  Why in the hell should I learn to tell my story in a small, inoffensive way so that other people don’t have to be hurt by my story?  Why is that my responsibility?  I didn’t do anything.  All I am doing is telling the truth.  All I am doing is saying, “Hey I was a little kid and people hurt me” and people then react to me as if I am a monster.  They want me to shut up.  They want me to be little and silenced.  They want me to make my story palatable.

Well fuck you, none of this is palatable.  This is disgusting and horrible and I had to live through it.  How fucking dare people tell me that I don’t have a right to speak.  How dare people tell me that I have to make my story palatable.  I had no choice.  I was raped.  I was raped over and over during my formative years.  I was programmed to think that my value was in sex and I should be silent the whole rest of the time.

But I am not that person.  I am loud.  I am here.  I have a voice.  And I’m not going to stop using it.

In May of 1989 my brother Tommy was hit by a car.  My entire childhood is told in relationship to that event because that is the Big Obvious Date that I can remember.  I turned 8 in September of 1989. Tommy was in a coma for five months so he woke up in October.  When he was hit by a car we were living in Texas.  I dreamed about the accident and woke up and told Mommy that I saw Tommy get hit by a car.  She told me it was just a dream but couldn’t get a hold of my dad for three days to find out how Tommy was.  I have no idea how long this lasted, but my mom was there for a bit before rushing back to California to sit at Tommy’s bedside.  She left me with Denise (my sister) who was pregnant and her then husband Bobby.  I was raped after my mom found out about the accident but before she left.  So I am pretty sure I was 7.

This is how it works with all of my memories.  I have to stop and think of all the collaborating details or I am afraid I am making it up.  I have to be able to list off long, extensive lists of things that happened the same day to prove that I was alive and I had that day and I saw those things and other people believe me about all the other things (often these details are verifiable) so therefore they will believe me about the abuse.  But people don’t.  People tell me that I am lying or exaggerating.  That my stories cannot be real.  But they are.  My stories are real.  I am real.  This was my experience of the world.  It is bad and scary and hard.  But it happened.  Dirty things were done to me but I am not dirty.  I am not bad.

His name was Michael and I had quite the crush on him.  I followed him around.  I was desperate for any sign of love and affection.  I was willing to do anything he wanted me to do.  I don’t think I told that part in the story in class.  This event wasn’t the first time Michael and I had sexual contact, it was just the last.  One day when we were in Michael’s room and he and his cousin were playing video games in between saying degrading things to and about me.  I can’t tell the whole story right now.  Not right.  Not the real thing.  I can’t.  I want to but I don’t feel safe.  I feel like if I tell the whole story again someone will be nasty, and they might and I can’t control that.

I feel like it is my fault Michael raped me because I put myself in the dangerous situation.  I went after him.  I pursued him.  I am in the phase of recovery where I can’t tell the story from the point of view of a victim.  I am the monster.  Right this minute I want to tell the story as a bragging story.  I want to talk about how I am so into sex that I knew when I was a little girl that I wanted it.  That I picked a boy I wanted and I went after him.  I didn’t let any obstacle get in my way.  And I fucked him.

That’s all I want to say.  I want to sound tough and bad ass and brave.  I want to sound like I had choice.  I want to sound like I was active player.  I wasn’t a victim.  I wasn’t abused.  I wasn’t raped.  I was just ready for sex earlier than other girls.  Do you know how many times I have told that story?  More times than I can count.  That is how I survived.  That right there.

I have been raped so many times in my life I’m not sure I can count them any more.  The vast majority of the sex I had was only consensual in the sense that I got into a situation where a guy wanted sex and I didn’t believe I was allowed to say no.  I wanted to be touched.  I wanted physical contact and I knew no other way to get it.  When I was a toddler and I sat on my fathers lap he would put his hands under my panties and slip his fingers into my vagina.  That was love.  They showed me porn.  My mother started giving me tips on blow jobs when I was 11.  It was my fault, of course.  I brought it up.  I asked.  She didn’t initiate that conversation so she feels like she is innocent.

But my mother gave me advice on better blowjob techniques when I was 11.  That’s not ok.  She needed to hold that boundary.  That is how she continued the cycle.  That is why I do not trust her.  My mother does not know what kind of boundaries other people have either.  But she is in her 60’s and she still doing things that are that kind of inappropriate and if you call her on it she goes into this long explanation of why she isn’t responsible for her behavior.  Bullshit!

I am responsible for my behavior.  Me.  Not God.  Not my father.  Not my mother.  Not my sister.  Not my therapist.  Not my husband.  Not my children.  Me.  Me.  Me.  At the beginning of the day, at the middle of the day, at the end of the day… I am with me.  I always have been.  I always will be.  I am not looking to be any one else’s ideal of the right person.  I’m afraid that right now I am at the point where I have to stop relying on anyone else.  Maybe I can find the right therapist if I keep looking but it will really and truly have to be the RIGHT therapist.  Sharon isn’t it.  Sharon wants to make me into her image of the perfect post-abuse mother.  No.

Why do I want to recover these memories.  Why am I doing this to myself.  This is horrible and I am beating myself over the head with it.  I am very good at forgetting.  I was told I have to forget.  I was told to be quiet about what I do remember.  But instead I am completely structuring my life right now so that all I can do is look at these memories.  But I’m letting the memories control me.  I am letting personal time become all the time.  Why.  That’s a big thing to do.

I’m afraid that if I let myself have these memories fully, if I really examine them I will become the people who hurt me.  When the people around me react with horror I feel silenced.  I feel like I am driving myself insane.  I have to say these stories.  I have to tell them in all their tear filled agony and I cannot bear to see peoples reactions.  I think that officially makes me a writer.  Right now Noah is making breakfast and my babies are playing and singing with him.  I am not allowing my rage to destroy my family.  My family is beautiful and strong as I am beautiful and strong.  Most of the time I bear my burdens lightly.  I do not feel weighed down by the weight of incest.  I know the right road for me and I am on it.  I don’t want to change who I am.  I really like me.

I want to feel like it is ok to be me.  I want to feel like who and what I am is right.  I want to feel like it is ok that I am different from everyone else.  I want to feel like it is ok that I am special.  That sometimes I need to say, “Hey can people use gentle voices with me even when I try to escalate things” and have the people around me understand that saying that is humiliating and embarrassing and I feel like a disgusting person for saying it.  I need it to be ok that I talk about my past.  I need to get to a place where I know in my heart what the right amount of information to give my children is.  I do not want my children twisted by my legacy of shame.  I want my children to continue to grow in the absolute safety I have provided.  My children are a strange mix.

So here’s my thing.  My daughter is verbal.  Astoundingly verbal.  Exceptionally verbal.  Who knows what that will mean in terms of her overall achievement in life.  That’s not the point.  It’s not about competition and I don’t know how to talk about it without it sounding like I am being an asshole.  So I don’t speak about this problem.  This is a problem.  I am having a very hard time with how verbal Shanna is.  Shanna asks me questions and she mentions things in off-hand ways that sound like they might maybe be questions and I don’t feel like I know what the appropriate amount of information to give her is.

Shanna wants to know why I am sad.  Shanna is acting out being sad and I feel horrible about it.  So far I have told her that I am sad because bad things happened to me a long long time ago and I think about them sometimes and that’s hard for me.  I have described my anxiety as “I have a lot of work to do.  And you know how you feel when you are tired and really hungry?  I feel like that all the time when I am trying to do this much work.”  I have no idea if I am doing this right.  I honestly think that I am freaking out so much because I feel like I have to hurry up and get over feeling like this because otherwise my kids will grow up with someone like me who just checks out for a while.

And I have a lot of shame about that.  That is what my mother did.  My mother was on so many drugs to numb her pain it was absolutely ridiculous.  She popped so many pills it was unreal.  That was normal.  I grew up convinced that I wouldn’t do that.  And I have such an aversion to taking pills that prenatals were nightmareish for me and I have now stopped taking them because I simply cannot do it even though I should take them as long as I am nursing.

Instead I am smoking pot.  I’m not drinking.  I’m not taking pills (and I won’t), but I’m smoking pot.  I am having a hard time with that.  I am not a lifelong pot smoker.  I really don’t enjoy doing this.  I’m not enjoying how it feels.  But it keeps me level.  It keeps me from snapping while I can’t get the memories under control.  It is making me go flat line.  And while I am doing it during the day I have people here watching my kids for me.  That is the difference between me and my mother.

I cannot meet all of my children’s needs by myself right now.  I am having a crisis.  But I am dealing with it.  I am dealing it with it in a way that is safe for me, for my children, and for the people who are offering help.  I am not stepping on anyones toes.  I am not doing something bad by asking for help.  I am not imposing.  I am not hurting anyone.  I am weaker than normal and I cannot carry my load.  People with room to spare, people who love me are helping me.  I am doing the right thing for me.  I am.

Believing that is the first step to recovery for me.  That’s it.  Right now, for this moment of this crisis that is my step.  I have to believe it is ok for me to be weak and need help.  I have to believe that it is ok for me to ask for help.  I need to feel like I can allow other people to help me.  I need to actually accept the help.

Baby steps, people.  I see several of the offers and I love you and I want to respond and I can’t right now.  That is too big of a step.  I don’t yet believe I am allowed to take it.

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Right this minute I am stone cold sober.  I slept for more than 9 hours.  I am trying to get through some thinking before the kids get up.  An online friend mentioned that when you go through stuff like this you want to harm the people who hurt you.  Your body gets all of this energy so that you can fight off an attacker.  But no one is attacking me.  No one is hurting me.  But my body doesn’t know that.  My body feels like I am a tiny child and people are horribly abusing me.  It’s a weird kind of regression.  My children are major triggers right now because little kids are rough.  They crawl all over you heedless of sharp elbows and knees, they pinch and grab, and just generally they act like I shouldn’t have feelings.  Like I am invisible.  Kind of like my dad.  When he paid attention to me he brutalized me.  When my mom paid attention to me she complained that I wasn’t doing enough work.  Yeah, I have some anger.

I fired my therapist yesterday.  After an exchange that made it sound like very different approaches to healing I decided that I need to find someone who is more like me.  I don’t do well in the nice clean office in the nice part of town with the nice upper middle class woman who wears pearls.  I think I have a nasty attitude before I walk in.  That’s my shit and my baggage and stuff I can mostly deal with most of the time.  I don’t think I can right now.  Right now I need a therapist who is used to dealing with addicts and people who don’t have their lives together even slightly.  Because right now I am reverting to shit with my family and no matter how many high fallutin psychology “experts” you can quote long passages from, if you don’t know what a seriously abusive family is like… I don’t think I can talk to you right now.

My therapist had fuzzy boundaries.  She made a big deal in group about how it is specifically illegal for her to share her story… but then she dropped details.  She is not rigorously accurate with her word.  She thinks it is ok to say, “Ok, person A will go tonight and person B will go in two weeks” and then something happens in the intervening week and she decided that person B wouldn’t go in two weeks.  I was person B and she didn’t tell me that she decided that we should do something else on Monday.  That’s why she didn’t give me room to speak.  Because she didn’t understand that I was clinging to the ability to speak.  That was the only reason I crawled my way out of my house shaking and upset.  And then she expected me to sit there and listen to everyone else process and only take my short turns and be appropriate for the group.

I can’t do that right now and the fact that she acts like I am a problem because I can’t?  Yeah… not a good fit.  Most of the time I am highly functioning.  Most of the time I can sit there and explain why she is totally right.

I have been awake for ~40 minutes now and I’m sober.  The longer I think the harder I shake.  I’m scared because I know that I do have rage issues.  I know that I am angry with my entire family.  I think that is why I am sitting out here shaking.  Someone HAS to be in a lot of pain as their punishment for me hurting so much.  And the only people here are my kids.  This is how the cycle goes on through generations.  I am not able to hurt my father because he is dead.  I have cut off my mother and sister and quite frankly the only damage I was able to do to them was to refuse to keep my silence.  That is the only tool I have.  This therapist does not understand that being able to speak my truth regardless of how or where or how appropriate it is, that’s what is keeping me alive right now.  The fact that I am allowing myself to express what happened to me.  The fact that friends are coming out of the woodwork to listen?

Maybe I can’t walk into a group and find the support I need.  Maybe I am too broken.  This isn’t the first group I’ve terrified.  But if I am too broken to go find a group because the people in a group are too broken to support me… it’s hard.  I get good support from my friends.  Sometimes I feel like it is better than I deserve.  But I don’t have people in my life who were abused like me.  I actually just sent an email to a woman I used to be close with.  She has a horrifying background of sexual assault, prostitution, drug abuse, etc.  I hope she responds.  We’ve kind of lost contact.

I know why I am afraid to be cold and why I keep my house so warm.  When I get cold I start shivering and I feel like I am going into shock.  When I feel like that I have a harder time keeping the memories at bay.  I used to sit in our house in the mountains under a pile of blankets and think about my abuse.  My mom and my sister went back and forth between telling me I was an abuse victim and saying I was just a whiner.  The story was always that what happened to me wasn’t as bad as what happened to my sister.  So I shouldn’t complain, because look!  She’s fine!  Only she’s not.  She can’t hold down a job usefully.  When she manages to get into a relationship with a nice guy she destroys their life until they stop dating her and go off and fix the damage.  She is a very broken person.

So I keep my house warm so I don’t have to sit here and shiver and feel scared.

A few minutes ago I had to break and go nurse Calli for a bit.  Of course I felt like I was a better mother because I was sober.  But there is this thing that happens when I nurse, I don’t know if it’s common and it’s weird body tmi.  Nursing makes me have to poop.  For the 5am nurse, if things are timed badly, I sometimes lie there in agonizing pain trying to not shit the bed because I need Calli to go back to sleep and she won’t let go of my nipple so I can go to the bathroom.  During this time period, honestly it’s only like a 2-3 minute of crisis feeling, I sit there and visualize the ways I want to hurt Calli in response to her hurting me.  Because I feel like it is her fault that I am in so much pain because it hurts only when I’m nursing her.

Maybe the right answer is to let her scream and get up and use the bathroom.  Today what I did was I told Noah that I was in a lot of pain because I have to use the bathroom and she won’t let go.  And Noah stayed up late last night so I didn’t want to bother him and I was feeling really upset about the fact that I was in pain and wanting to hurt my baby because of it.  Noah told me, “It was my choice to stay up late.  I’ll take the baby.  Go.”  I love him so much.  He is so good at giving me permission and space to have whatever feelings I need to have.  I don’t know what I would do without him.

So I have some rage issues.  Ok.  When folks like Sharon (or my ex-boyfriend) tell me that I am destroying my life with rage I feel confused.  I get the impression I feel way more rage than other people.  But I don’t really see how it is destroying my life.  I have bad periods where it puts my life on hold.  I am out in the garage right now and I am absolutely not part of my life right now.  It’s sad.  I’m not happy about it.  But I don’t see how I am destroying my life.  I am stepping out of my life for a little while and I am having my rage issues come out by myself with a computer in the garage.  No really, that is about the best kind of control anyone can ask of me.  The alternative is to tell me I’m not allowed to feel the rage at all.  Excuse my language, but fuck off you fucking cunt.  Don’t tell me that rage is destroying my life because it isn’t.

Rage is causing me to sever the bonds with an abusive family.  Rage is causing me to admit out loud that my father raped me.  Rage is causing me to have the strength to stand up and say that my mother and my sister are evil.  That they are child molesters.  That my sister is a rapist.  I need to say those things and I do not have the courage to say them without this level of rage.  Not really.  But given that I am surrounded by people who love me and support me, and given that I am extensively checking in about my mental situation (I feel more than a little uncomfortable with the fact that I am live blogging my breakdown, and yet… I feel like I am being very accountable so I know that I am not crossing any lines) I don’t feel it is in any way shape or form appropriate to say that I am destroying my life.  To be clear Sharon said, “Your rage is going to burn you and your family alive if you don’t get some support.  Expressing the rage is fine for a start, but you can’t sustain this level of fury on a moment-to-moment basis forever.”

Forgive me for laughing as I think about the idea that maybe I should get some support.  I have many many people checking in with me as I do the hard work.  Maybe I’m just doing it in a way that doesn’t work for her.  But I am doing it.  I’m tired of feeling invisible.  I cannot see a therapist who sees no value in the way I am processing.  The way I am processing has allowed me to have a very good life and very good friends.  I am no longer in an abusive situation.  At this point in time I am surrounded by people who love me to distraction who want to give me every ounce of help they can.  And I’m letting them.  People are coming over and caring for my kids and doing my laundry.  People are showing up with food.  People are calling and leaving comments and texting me and emailing me and…  I have support.  I am not past (See Ali, I do listen) the crisis yet.  But I will get past it.  I will.  I have done it before.  I’m not sure if this is the darkest place I’ve been, but it’s pretty bad.

Let me state this pretty clearly.  I am not dead because I will not do that to Noah or my kids.  My will to live is a flickering flame right now.  But god damnit I am going to get through this.  Those mother fucking pieces of shit aren’t going to kill me.  They aren’t powerful enough.  But I’m still scared.

I think I should fall down the rabbit hole and tell stories.

This is the bottom.

5 Replies

Right now I feel so desperate that I feel like if I back away from any part of recovery work, any part of speaking my story that I will hit bottom.  The only place I see to go from here is to beat the shit out of my kids so I can prove that I am a monster.  Until this crisis passes I need to not be alone with my children.  As humiliating and pathetic as I feel.  That is what I need.  I need help.

I have friends coming to spend time with my kids while I hide in the garage.  I should contact a few more people.  This is very hard.  But I have support and I will figure this out.  But it’s really hard.

The difference

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I should have been removed from my family of origin because I was not safe.  No one protected me.  That is a failure on the part of my entire extended family and the system.  The difference between what happened to me and what is happening to my daughters is I know I am in a place right now where I am not competent to care for them as they need so I asked for help.  I went out and I admitted out loud that right now I need other people to care for my children so that they can come out of childhood unscathed. I may be fighting demons but they don’t need to get hit in the cross fire.

That is what my family doesn’t understand.  My sister and my mother have gone through these periods.  I’ve seen this from the kid side.  But what my mother and my sister did was scream at me, bring people home and have sex in front of me, basically they did anything to prove that they were bad.  But they didn’t start out bad people.  They started out good people who were making mistakes.  They became evil because they kept doing it.  Because they shame their victims and require silence about what they did.  I have that potential in me.

I feel the urge to harm them.  I visualize how I should do it.  I have detailed pictures in my head of what I should be doing to them.  And that is why I am freaking the fuck out.  The images are getting more intense.  I am fucking terrified of hurting my children and I don’t feel in control right now.  This is the cycle.  That is what is going on.  This is what my mother and sister were to weak to do.  They were too weak and to stupidly prideful to say, “I am weak and broken and I need help.”  So they perpetuated the abuse on to the next generation after me.  In the approximately 6 years since my brother broke contact with the family I have had conversations with my niece and nephew where they detailed their own sexual abuse history.  My nephew was raped.  That’s not my story to tell but I’m not keeping silent any more.  I was told I have no right to reveal his pain.  But I do.  Because he was abused by the same people who abused me and I have the right to stand up and say that my sister is a disgusting monster and she should be shunned.  She should be in jail.  She is not a good person who makes mistakes.  She is a child molester.  She is filth.  She deserves every bad thing in the world.

And my family is siding with her.  And I sit here and freak out with these pictures in my head.  I want to abuse my children the way I was abused.  And I pray that my friend drives very very fast on her way to care for my children today because I am very close to the edge.  I am not going to fall over it.  I can hold out long enough.

Because that is how you stop this.

And I’m glad I didn’t hit send.  Because I went in there and I dressed my baby more warmly because she was slightly chilly and I nursed her and I put her to bed and my older daughter asked me a bunch of questions and I answered them and then she told me to go away again because she likes watching her movies in private.

Why do I believe I am a monster who is going to harm them any second?

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Last night I went to my support group.  It was more or less “my turn” to share my story but that was not given support or space.  I was expected to give short sound bites in ways that didn’t scare the horses.  But I don’t have that kind of story.  It’s hard when the act of speaking my story traumatizes people around me.

This is more of that “what to say” thing.  When I get up the nerve to say these things out loud, with my voice, it is a big deal.  I don’t do that.  As loudly as I trumpet Radical Honest Damnit!  I don’t actually describe these things out loud very well.  And I need to.  Ok, maybe not every incest survivor needs to, but I need to be able to speak about what happened to me.  It is not fair that I have to continue bearing this in silence.  Silencing me means telling me that I am wrong for talking about myself.  Silencing me means that I am invisible.  Silencing me means I deserve it.

When I finally get to the point of sharing my story I need people to look right back at me like I am still clean.  Like I am still worth seeing.  That’s why I want people to talk to me about my story.  I leave details out every time.  Often on accident.  But when people ask me questions I realize what pieces I am conveniently telling and what pieces I am conveniently leaving out.  I figure out a lot more of what scares me.  But people have a limited capacity for that.  I can only ask the same people to listen to the same stories so many times.  But I have to tell them.  I can’t be quiet and nice about it.  I can’t keep my voice silent so that other people can ignore that horror exists.

The family members who are upset with me?  The ones who sent me long and impassioned, or angry and defensive messages?  Yeah.  They don’t get me and they can’t.  My niece sent me a message saying she hopes I can get over my father some day and return to the family and she doesn’t understand why I am hurting her so much because of things that happened before she was born.  My cousin is saying, “All of that shit happened before I was born and now you are being mean to me so fuck you.”

I am not allowed to have my feelings and processes.  It’s not ok that I view my mother and my sister as culpable.  I am supposed to “let it go” which means forgive and forget and move on with the victimization stuff.  How do I tell my niece that I have to cut her off because of the ways her mother sexually assaulted her and her brother.  Because I need to ensure that people like my niece, who have been pretty badly sexually abused, are not an influence.

I just did a nasty thing.  I sent my niece a response and I shouldn’t have.  I told her that this, right now, actually has very little to do with my dad.  This is about my mother and my sister sent me off to be raped and my sister participated in the rape and molestation of her own children.  As long as people continue to talk to my mother and sister like they are normal people I can’t stand near any of them.  Because they are acting like my mom and my sister ate good people who made a mistake.  I’m sorry but systematically sending your daughter off to be raped means you are not a good person.  You lose the chance at good person status for this lifetime.

And I told my niece that as long as she wants to continue to act like her own abuse didn’t happen and she can go about her normal day to day life with her mother and my mother acting like they are ok reasonable people… I can’t know her.  Because she obviously feels like that kind of abuse is ok and she continues to take whatever people dish out.  And therefore I don’t want her interacting with my daughter because she will pass on the feeling that girls deserve that treatment and you should keep your mouth shut when it happens.  Not my fucking babies you pieces of shit.

I am frantic, scared, and angry.  And I feel like it’s not ok to say what happened to me.  I feel very unsafe.  I feel very attacked.  Even here, within my family in my home.  In my sanctuary I still feel like someone will show up at any second and do horrible things to me.  Want to know why I feel that way?

Because I am in a place where emotionally I am a small child.  But I have small children.  And they have needs.  And small children don’t give a shit about anyone but themselves.  Small children want to be protected and to sit and stare and dream and become.  I can’t be the grown up right now.  Thank god I don’t have to.

As I sit here and spin my wheels getting more and more upset with that group and my niece and my cousin and…  I realize that I am trying to look around me for unsafe people and then getting mad when they are unsafe.  My niece isn’t even close to going through recovery.  She’s too close.  And I need to leave her alone because sharing my story in the way I am is kicking her.  Maybe she doesn’t deserve to have me take on the abuser role too.  I do think I’ll be able to long term live with myself though.  I didn’t say that Tyra was bad in and of herself.  I said that as long as she associates with them she will accept their reality and it is broken.  She doesn’t get to pretend that they are not monsters with me.  With everyone else, fine.  Not with me.

Now I’m drifting off into thinking about my kids.  I need to have chats with my friends.  As much as I am a raging pervert, I’m also the victim of incest, rape, and molestation.  I need to not have sex stuff around my kids.  I need that to not be part of their existence in any way.  And people think Shanna isn’t listening.  It’s not ok.  I have been interrupting people for a while, but I need to take a more proactive stance.  I need to talk to people before the conversation gets going about what is ok in my house.  Because that is how you break cycles.  My daughters will not learn what a blowjob is at this age range.  That will not be part of their world.  And when my daughters do learn about blowjobs it will be because we are having an age appropriate discussion about sex with our clothes on and there will be no porn to demonstrate.  I am not going to lock up my books about being a survivor of sexual abuse but I want to get through this awful period of recovery so that I can stop talking about it around them.

My children cannot support me.  It does not matter that I feel like a small child right now, I’m not.  And my children should not have to support me in any way.  That is not the role of a child.  I’m hurting but they cannot fix me, nor should I in any way ask them to try.  I’m not going to an extreme so don’t get paranoid.  I’m not going to be able to help the fact that I cry randomly sometimes.  But what I say is, “I’m thinking about stuff that happened a long time ago.  I should probably start thinking about you though because you are awesome.”  Then we run off and play.  But I can’t do that today.

Today I am too small.

I’m on vacation.

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That’s what I call it when I go behind closed doors and don’t really respond to requests.  I’ve already done once since becoming a parent and I kind of expect it to continue.  I’ve been through these kinds of super intense freak outs before.  I did a few while I was dating Tom.  And I wrote about them then.  I need to go read my archive again.

Everything is all jumbled up right now.  I’m sad about my uncle dying.  I’m sad that I didn’t know it was time to say goodbye because no one thought to tell me.  I’m sad that my mother used his death as a chance to ambush me so that she could try to get her own needs met.  I’m proud that when my mother called me I told her she needs to go to therapy and say out loud many times that she sent me to my father so he could rape me.  She did that.  She has to say out loud, “I sent my daughter to her father so that her father could rape her.”  She has to say that.  If she doesn’t say that, there is nothing.  Ever again.  I cannot acknowledge that she is alive.  Until the day my mother can say, “I allowed my daughter to be raped” I have nothing to say to her.  It is her fucking fault.

I called my mother in the middle of a horrific sexual assault and begged her to come get me and she told me no.  She bears the burden of that guilt.  I want to punch her in the face.  I want to run her over with my car.  That fucking horrible disgusting repulsive excuse for a mother.  I think she should be dead.  I hate her so much.  My mother sent me to my father over and over.  The custody agreement said he should NEVER BE ALONE WITH ME.  And I was.  Repeatedly.

My brother told me that our father didn’t explicitly say it but he made it very clear it was perfectly ok for my brothers to have sex with me if they wanted regardless of whether I wanted it or not.  Let me say that another way.  My father told my brothers that it was ok to rape me.  My brother told me that it was very understood in the household that if my mother wasn’t up for sex my dad would fuck my sister.  If my sister wasn’t up for sex… guess who that leaves.  Me.  I was three years old when my parents divorced.

What the fuck happened to me.  I can’t remember it very clearly.  I was too little.  There is court documentation of my fathers confession.  The detective on my case told me that my father confessed to far more than I remember and he was horrified by what my father said.  Let me say that again, a professional police detective who works on many many many abuse cases.  That is his job.  He was horrified by what happened to me.  But I don’t remember it.  It scares the shit out of me.  What the hell other memories are lurking in my body and in my brain.  When I am 75 years old will I wake up and say, “72 years ago my father raped me and I’m not over it.”

I am so fucking pissed off at my mother.  She wants to deny that it happened.  She doesn’t want to admit her guilt.  It is her fault.  She was my mother.  Her whole job was to ensure that I reached adulthood in relative safety and she failed.failed.failed.  I get to be angry about that.  I get to take her to task for that and no one gets to intervene.  No one, including my co-dependent, enabler, abusive sister, get to tell me that I have to change how I feel about my piece of shit mother.

Abusive.  My mother told me that if she hadn’t been Catholic she would have aborted me.  My sister told me that my mother was packed and ready to leave my father when my mom turned up pregnant with me.  There was always the very clear implication that it is therefore my fault that my sister was raped for three more years.

Maybe that is why that stupid, worthless piece of shit never said anything about my mom sending me off to my father’s for the weekend.  Maybe she just thought it was my turn.

My father raped me

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Edited to add: this post is about to hit 6,000 views. If you are looking for pornography, please keep looking. Heck, you can even look around this blog. I write pornography sometimes. This post is not about pornography. This is my life. I was a brutalized child. Please don’t beat off thinking about my father raping me. I don’t mind in the slightest if you kind of imagine that kind of thing in abstract, please have enough respect not to use my actual trauma.

If you are a rape survivor there are much better posts here for you than this one. This one just makes you sad.
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Oh fuck.  I remember.  I remember how it happened.  After he gave me the milkshake that tasted funny, I’m sure it was spiked, and after he took me to bed and made me sleep naked and fingered me and after I got up to throw up in the bathroom…

I remember and I wish I didn’t.  He came to get me.  He asked me why I was sniveling in the bathroom.  I told him I had been sick.  He made me clean up.  Then he told me I needed to apologize for making a mess.  He walked over and sat down on the couch.  He sat down and then I noticed a gun in his hand.  He set it down pretty obviously on the seat next to him.  He told me to crawl to him.  I did.  He told me to apologize while I was sucking his cock.  And I did.

And I’m not allowed to feel anything about this memory right now.

But now I am because it is 2:30 am and I just sent Noah to bed.  I forced him to hammer out with me what memory was surfacing right now, why is it triggering me so hard, and how can I get through it a bit faster, damnit.  I am now re-reading The Courage to Heal and mocking myself for how very classic my pattern is. Yes this is a spiral, and yes I am in recovery, Chris.  I am the survivor of incest.  Tonight I said out loud to my husband that my father raped me.  I am pretty sure that is the very first time in my life I have ever said that out loud.  And oh my fucking god now I feel about it.

This feels overwhelming and horrifying and awful.  I am drowning.  This hurts so much.  My father held a gun to my head and told me to suck his cock.  And I was supposed to get up the next day and go to the amusement park with him.  I asked him to take me home instead because I was sick from the alcohol poisoning he had given me.  I couldn’t tell him that.  And that is why my stomach hurts so bad if I have much alcohol.  The sensation scares the ever loving shit out of me.  When I was 18 years old I was given a date rape drug by someone I was out to have a one night stand with.  I intended to have sex with him anyway but I doubt he knew that.  I sincerely doubt he knew I was a sure thing.  I’m pretty sure he thought I was the normal sort of stupid 18 year old who invites a guy up to a drinking party in a secluded mountain house and intends to say no.  You know, one of those stupid women who have never been repeatedly raped from toddlerhood.

Right.  You can see the problem there.  And you can see how I can get away from this feeling.  There are a lot of fucking valid reasons I want to derail from going where my head is heading right now.  That’s a god damn terrifying place to be.  I am trying to talk myself into releasing into the horrible body memories of my father raping me.  And maybe I will have to pause and I will have to tell Puff about it.  Maybe if I quiet my fingers I can find my voice.

Oh my fucking god.  My mother told me that she breastfed me longer than any of her other children because, “It was the only way to keep them off of me.”  I think she means my father.  I think my father started actually raping my sister after I was born and that is why she resents me so much.  But that’s a story I’m making up and I have no reason to think it is true.  That’s trying to explain her actions with motives that make her actions justified.  No.  No.  No.  I am not to blame for my father molesting my sister.  It is not my fault that my mother stayed as long as she did.  Women in domestic violence situations often have to try leaving several times before they manage to get out.  Even once they get out there is a ridiculous legacy of guilt and shame to deal with around allowing your FUCKING HUSBAND TO RAPE YOUR DAUGHTERS YOU PIECE OF SHIT CUNT.  I don’t have to be diplomatic here about my mother.  I don’t need to find a way to excuse the fact that she is the most disgusting, pathetic, worthless example of mothering I have ever fucking seen and I think that if she dies in a lot of pain it is exactly what she fucking deserves.

I called her on the fucking phone and begged her to come pick me up.  She told me that I made my bed so now I have to lie in it.  That was a consistent theme, sadly.  I was often left with my father in a way that was phrased as me deserving him because I was a little kid and I asked to see my daddy.  When I asked to see him she dropped me on his lap and said, “Fine!  You want the bastard!  Fuck you then you little bitch!”  No really.  My mother said that to me, verbatim.  That was how she sent me to my father’s house.  And then he molested me.  And I called her and asked her to intervene because I was a god damn outrageously precocious child and I knew that what was happening to me was wrong and my mother told me that I made my bed now I have to lie in it.

Then my father raped me.  And then he wanted me to get in the car the next day and go to the amusement park with him so he could show the world what a good dad he was.  I’ve told the story about him insisting on me wearing short dresses with zippers so he could molest me in public, right?  Yeah.  And on the car ride home he screamed at me for being an ungrateful, pathetic, useless bitch because he already had the theme park tickets and he fucking wanted to go and now I’ve ruined everything and it is all my fault for being such a horrible, selfish, stupid bitch.

That is my story.  That is the tape I hear in my head.  I want to start listing off when… but I’ll only list the times that make my story seem better.  But it’s totally fucking random.  Sometimes it’s at times when it’s convenient and sometimes it is a nightmare.  To continue setting the stage, it is now 3:00am.  I took ~5 minutes off to visit the restroom, find carrots for mindless eating that will allow me to focus without contributing to my negative self esteem issues, lots of water, and I’m now out of excuses for not going down the rabbit hole.  I’m sitting in my little corner under the cave next to the flowers.  It’s not ready yet… but I’ll post a picture tomorrow.  I hadn’t even realized what I was building until I typed it in this paragraph right now.  I have a pretty sledgehammer like subconscious, don’t you think?

Oh my god.  Why is that the first thing I say when I think of my father raping me.  Why do I cry out to god to save me?  Am I searching for that higher power?  My therapist clearly thinks so and she’s pushing me loudly towards Wicca.  (I saw what you did there, Sharon.)  Which is a very clear choice.  I was systematically told throughout my childhood that I was evil and bad by every one around me and I didn’t realize how blatant it was until Noah listed it off tonight.  I don’t realize it until people express shock and horror that I don’t just know that my childhood was off the charts brutal.

My father gave me an alcoholic milkshake then penetrated me vaginally while rubbing himself vigorously against me.  And right now I have the most overwhelming urge to masturbate it isn’t funny.  I feel like I cannot continue telling this story because I have to go masturbate because it is so fucking hot that he did that to me.

That is why I am a disgusting piece of shit.  That is why Femme Car does her stuff.  Ha.  Enh, Or maybe that’s me projecting my story onto other people I don’t know.  That’s the annoying part of this introspection stuff.  I am realizing that I don’t even know my friends.  Most of the people I have been bonding with lately are big, physically intimidating men who were themselves hurt as children.  I am solely interacting with people who identify as survivors.  I am testing people out, slowly, one by one, seeing if they understand my language.  Because only other survivors know what I’m talking about.  And I’m text book.  And that bothers me.

I feel offended by the fact that I am a text book incest survivor.  God damnit don’t I think I am more special than that?  Oh shit now I’m trying to get nasty with myself rather than feel this.  See how this goes?

I’m going round and round in circles because I don’t know if I am actually breaking cycles or if I just moved them somewhere else.  I’m desperately looking for proof that I am not like my family.  I have to trot out these long list of examples of horrible exchanges.  They aren’t horrible (uhm, mostly) in and of themselves if any of them had been one thing in my entire childhood.  But it’s kind of a …  wait.  What the fuck am I saying.  No.  They were god damn horrible.  I was heinously abused.  I was horrifically, over the top, ridiculously abused.  I was blamed for events that happened before my fucking birth.  I have confirmation of this from my brother.  He said it once, I can never ask him for that validation again.  Now I have to just go on with my life believing my side of the story.

But first I have to hate my mother for a while and that’s hard.  I love my mother a lot.  I desperately wish that I got to be in a relationship with her right now.  I want support desperately.  No, let me rephrase this.  Right now I am in a period of intense stress.  Culturally I was brought up to believe that when you are in periods of intense stress and you need to ask for help you should first ask your family.  Only my family would respond to my response for help by bringing the Titanic over and dropping it around my neck.  And saying it that way makes it sound like I don’t care about their suffering, and I do.  But nothing I do can fix their suffering and standing near them will allow them to hurt my children.  So they can fuck off and die.

Earlier this week I was losing it with the kids.  I was not in control of my emotions anymore.  As the book calls it, I was in the emergency phase and I needed to call in as much help and childcare as I could. And I did.  Before I picked up the book even, go me.  And by losing it with the kids I mean that I got a bit ranty when Shanna was standing in the door way screaming at me because she wanted me to stop working but I was trying to paint.  You can see how the conflict of needs here could feel intense.  Maybe.  Or maybe you think I am fucking nuts.  But you are going to be in one of three camps.  Either you will understand because you have also seen something hard and you have that monster somewhere inside of you and you are afraid of it, or you do not understand and you think that having that kind of monster inside of me makes *me* a monster, or you are a fairly empathetic person and you extrapolate from your own childhood (which was whatever it was) and you then react to how extreme my life was compared to your own life.  I think most people are in the third category.

And that means that no matter what, forever, my discussion of my abuse has to be a private journey.  Because it doesn’t matter where someone is in that trifecta of approaches, they can’t help me.  Only I can.  And my mom and my sister have to help themselves.  And this is the 12 step talk stuff that I pick up in the water living in California.  It’s just here.  People talk about them as if they are things that everybody just knows.  What does it say about me and my friends and my life that absolutely all of them know the 12 step language?  All of us are in abuse cycles.

And I’m getting off topic and I’m getting tired.  But this is something.  This is a start.  My father raped me.  I don’t seem to be ready to feel it yet, but I will get there.  And I feel in this moment like I have no choice but to recover the body memory of that.  Why do I feel like I must go through intense personal discomfort (I was planning to stay up ALL NIGHT) in order to force myself into a weak enough physical state where I could no longer fight off the terror of feeling abused.  My throat closed while I was typing.

And I had to pause right there to go check facebook and see for myself that the person who said he would come back and help me paint tomorrow responded and yes he really will be coming back.  And the friend whose birthday party I am skipping said she understands.  And I believe her.  I don’t think she is lying and secretly fuming.  I think she is probably sad for me that I am in a place where I am hurting like this.  Why do I want to think she is mad at me?  Because I want to start the cycle where I am begging people for reassurance.  I feel like it is ok for me to ask for small amounts of reassurance constantly from the people I live with (We say “I love you!” multiple times a day and that counts), but not big displays.  I need to keep that to a minimum.  I seem to feel like it is ok for me to ask for help from the community in a big open way where anyone who wants to come shows up and does whatever kind of help they kind of halfheartedly get done because I feel bad directing them.  I feel like I shouldn’t be bossy.

I get to the point of having panic attacks when I think about directing people right now.  Dude.  I taught high school.  If anyone can direct large groups of people it’s me.  Only I can’t.  And I’m not sure how I feel about that.

I am sitting at home feeling upset that my friends are out at a dance event, or rather just getting home, and I’m sitting here obsessively writing on the internet about how broken I am.  My father raped me.  Not saying that out loud is ruining my life.  I guess I need to start saying it then.  After I go to sleep.

Stalling on the house.

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I set myself a rather ambitious schedule for house renovating.  It was going to be very difficult for me to accomplish.  I would have to keep up my energy and motivation through quite a bit more hard work.  Right now I can’t do it.  At this point I feel like the schedule was going to not be met anyway, or if it did… barely.  With my uncle dying there is no way.  I am spacy and unfocused.  I am crying.  I have no more patience left.  I am on edge and brittle.  I have to stop the big work.

Which is to say I need to finish puttering in the garage organizing stuff.  But that’s not stuff that other people help with very well. 🙂  So I am going to get everything into the garage, install a grown up level lock on the door so Shanna can’t get into trouble, and I’m going to get it done slowly before my birthday.  As much as I wanted to get this done so I could put pictures up and feel proud of myself… I’m not there.  And I’m not going to be able to get there for a while.  I’m having too hard of a time functioning.

I need to spend time with Shanna doing Shanna stuff for a while.  I need to get her off the movies that turn her into a serious brat.  Oh I cannot stand her behavior when she is watching a lot of movies.  I need to get the sugar that I have been binging on out of the house.  I was very deliberately using sugar and caffeine to fuel my ability to keep working.  But my body feels like shit.  Shanna is whinging and demanding sugar all day long.  It needs to get out of my house again.

I need to come back to the center of what my life is right now.  What am I actually doing at this stage of my life?  I am raising my babies.  I am trying to create a space where they have freedom to play without getting yelled at.  I’ve been missing the mark on that one lately.  I want to put a lock on the garage because I want her to be able to have a “yes” environment most of the time but then there is an adult space in the house where we can go to practice civilized behavior when I am up for it.

Right now I just can’t direct any more people.  It takes energy, both physical and mental, that I don’t have.  It is amazing to me that as wonderful as it is to have people come help, I still have a lot of work to do when they are here.  And all of a sudden I can’t do it.  Even though I wanted to.  I’m so sorry I canceled on people.