Category Archives: having limits

Thank you, hormones, that’s better.

I participate on a support forum for PTSD. I was just refreshing my memory of how PTSD effects body stress levels and coping. It is hard not to feel ashamed of being broken in the ways I am. It isn’t my fault though.

I haven’t thought about killing myself in over twelve hours. I track these things not to make other people nervous but rather because I have to believe there is enough of a pattern that I can make sense of it over time even if it never makes sense to anyone else.

My friend K has talked me through some blow ups with the kids over the past few days. She came and spent Wednesday with us because she was worried about me. I appreciate her a lot. She talked to me about how it is actually ok to have consequences with your kids and I’m not a meanie head. Life has consequences. Not punishments–that’s a horse of a different color–but there are sometimes unfortunate results to your actions. Bummer.

Having to be the heavy significantly depresses me. It is a fat load of stress and it feels terrible. I prefer it when my kids just kind of go along and do as they are told. Ha. Specifically at 9am the house was clean and I said, “Ok, remember that when you play with stuff you have to put it away when you are done. We are leaving in about three hours for an event and I do want the living room neat when we go.” I went to take a shower in the last half hour. Apparently Barbie needed a pixie cut. And some confetti. And and and and and and and. When I walked out and nearly had a heart attack my dear daughter smirked at me and said, “This is too much for me to clean up. I guess you are going to have to do it.”

We didn’t go to the event. Once she had the consequence and we talked about it and I had the few minutes of being mad while I did indeed clean up the mess we talked about responsibility and consequences we had a better day. It was like we needed to have a blow up. Then we got along. I don’t mean she did what I said for the rest of the day. (Cue hysterical laughter.) I mean that getting to say, “No. If you ignore your responsibilities there are consequences” made me more patient with the other boundary incursions all day. I got to put up one brick wall. This is a line. I WILL DEFEND IT. Then I felt better for the rest of the day. I could be more gentle.

We were sad to miss our friends. I think that was actually a lot of why the day went well after that. We did a lot of commiserating about how much we miss our friends and how sad it was that we didn’t get to visit with them yesterday. We were “on the same team” about being sad about not going. We had another chat about who is responsible for doing what in this house. “No actually it isn’t my job to follow you around all day picking up after you. It is your responsibility to clean up after your stuff. If you can’t clean up your stuff clearly you have too much and we should get rid of a bunch of it. What would you like to start with?” I do a lot. And often I am happy to help with stuff that isn’t “my job” just because I’m a nice lady–do not take advantage of me. I won’t be real friendly.

Alright, confession time. I left the room where the kids were and I put another dent in the drywall yesterday after I came out and saw the Barbie hair everywhere. (Really child. If you are going to give a haircut STAND STILL AND DON’T WALK AROUND THE WHOLE LIVING ROOM WHILE YOU DO IT.) I didn’t mean to. I was barefoot and I didn’t actually feel like I was kicking with force.

We went to Home Desperate and got drywall patch. I fixed the new one and the hole that has been in the wall for about five years now. While I fixed the holes I talked to Shanna about consequences. See, I have consequences for my bad behavior too. I have to fix the holes. It is a very bad idea to put holes in your wall. I am not being very responsible when I do it. I have to fix them now and that is annoying and inconvenient. But–better walls than people. Walls are easier to fix. You never never never kick a person when you are angry. Or hit a person. Walls don’t have feelings. It isn’t good to hit or kick them but better than a person. I waked into the wrong room.

I have been trying not to walk into the garage every time I get upset. The punching bag is in the garage. Unfortunately pot is also in the garage and the associate me going in the garage with smoking and I don’t want them to think that every single time I get upset I smoke. I don’t. It’s hard having this feel like an image problem.

I think that having kind of a scene was what broke the suicidal ideation this time. I don’t like that as a pattern. I don’t need to blow up at my kids in order to convince myself that I shouldn’t die. To be fair I don’t think it is a major pattern at this point. That hasn’t happened many times–specifically blowing up at the kids to deal with being suicidal, I mean.

But I do need some kind of stress-clear-the-air thing sometimes. How can I do that and preserve my relationship with the kids? So far they don’t hold a grudge against me for getting angry. It doesn’t happen all that often and it always blows over quickly and I don’t hold a grudge against them. I don’t stay angry with my kids. That’s a big thing for me.

Right before dinner I asked if the kids were upset with me for not going out. I was told that they missed their friends but they weren’t upset with me. Consequences happen. Both of them said it. I understand that they are at an age where sucking up to me is a survival trait. I hope I am not teaching them to squash their anger or upset because only I am allowed to have feelings. I comforted them when they were sad about not seeing their friends. We talked about when we will get to see them soon. We talked about how to ensure that we don’t have to miss out on seeing our friends again.

I also didn’t let them have the screen. We did have dessert and all other privileges. I don’t want to be too over-kill. But if you get in so much trouble you can’t go play with your friends I’m not going to give you the iPad to distract you with. Hell no. I talked about how I have to create my own entertainment and so does their dad. They have to learn how as well.

I don’t feel ashamed of how I handled it overall. That’s good. No, I’m not perfect. There is always room for improvement but I did ok. I have to understand that given how hysterical I was on Tuesday during the EMDR that my mood on Wednesday and Thursday was close to unavoidable. It will happen again. Welcome to deep trauma work. It has consequences.

How do I apply the principles of harm reduction to this new stress? Well, I’m only seeing my shrink twice a month because I can’t handle more. I feel like doing as much EMDR and as much group work as we have done is causing me to feel really emotionally guarded with my shrink. I feel besieged. I am very used to client directed talk therapy. Therapist directed EMDR heavy therapy is… different. I’m having a hard time adjusting to this whole, “Here. We’ll do this EMDR on you for basically all of our time together because that is a magic button that will fix you even though we don’t have a relationship.” It feels a lot like a fuck buddy, really. Here, let’s get together to do ____ together because even though _____ is fun on your own it is more fun with someone else! Now go away because I don’t actually want to talk to you afterwards. Err, maybe I don’t think about processing like other people do.

Just keep swimming, right? I’m busy. I’m keeping very busy. Only a few people have RSVPed for the Easter party even though I have had a lot more people get excited in person. I don’t know if people are coming or not. Maybe we will end up with ten pounds of sugar for five kids. That would be scary. Could be up to thirty kids. I guess I’ll find out the morning after a hellish drive. Ha. I’m pretty stupid. (Yes, 1/3 of a pound of sugar per kid is still a lot but I figure the parents will steal some as well.)

Today is my last full work day at home before I go to Portland and before the Easter party. That’s kind of intimidating. I am technically capable of doing work on days when I have other obligations but if I want to be nice to my kids I keep it to a bare minimum. It will all work out.

Drywall patching. Laundry. Clean the kitchen. Put out Easter decorations. Make lunch and dinner. Fill eggs with candy. Clean bathroom (really). And I’m sure my kids will want me to read to them and play with them and snuggle them. That sounds like a full day. I’m already tired. I haven’t slept well all week. I feel bad when my discombobulated cycles coincide with Noah having a rockin sort of week (he was interviewed by this internet business guru guy and he’s selling a lot of books) because then he feels guilty.

I don’t want Noah to feel bad about being successful because I am a loser. That’s not a healthy dynamic. I specifically and directly benefit from him maximizing his awesome. I don’t want that to be a fuzzy thing.

And all of a sudden I am having a full stream of words in my head for the wedding ceremony in May. I’m going to close this window and go work on that.

Suicidal ideation

4 Replies

I love getting eight hours of sleep by 3am. It makes my whole day better. It makes my whole life better. Then I am more cheerful and enthusiastic about what I have to do. I consider it the first thing I must do in a day in order to have a good day. The second thing I must do in order to have a good day is get more than 75% of my chores done by 9am. I have a thing in my head.

I participate in a variety of online support groups–or rather I have over the years, not so much at this second–and it has been a fairly big thing for me over the past ten years “I am more productive by 9am than a great many people are all day.” It’s a thing in my head. I work very hard on it. That way I feel I have the freedom to do with the rest of the day as I please.

Pretty much every online support group has strict rules about talking about suicide. Really, pretty much everyone everywhere believes it isn’t ok to talk about–especially if you are seriously thinking about it.

My furnace dries out the air terribly. I’ve spent all winter coughing and hacking and feeling unhappy about it since I moved into this house. Now my kids join me. So they’ve been waking up a lot at night. It means I have a lot of time in the middle of the night to think about them and to think about suicide and for me to think about what happiness means.

There are a lot of parenting books on the market that will tell you that you are bad bad doomed if you have children because you want to give yourself a reason to live. BAD. DON’T DO THAT! That’s what the books say.

To that I say: becoming a parent is always a selfish decision. Why is my selfish decision worse than yours? I have promised myself and my kids that I will absolutely not kill myself until they are adults because they require care and I am the one who has to give it. I have to say that it gets easier by the year. I’m learning what happiness feels like.

I know a lot of people who work very hard to ensure that they don’t have to “deal with” their kids in the middle of the night. Gosh that is my favorite time. I love feeling like my mere presence keeps the monsters at bay. Because I do. In Calli’s mind and in Shanna’s mind if I am in the room then they are safe and life is good. That’s just the end of the debate.

That feeling is better than every drug I have ever taken and I’ve tried a really lot of drugs. A lot. A really lot. Ha. But I did the vast majority of my drug taking (other than this stoner thing) in under two years after I was a college graduate. Let me get on my pulpit for a second to lecture anyone younger than me about how you should wait until your brain is done forming before you use drugs. Wait until your brain decides which connections it wants before you break sections. Just do. I’m serious. You have a long fucking life in front of you. You don’t need to try everything in the first twenty years. Good grief.

I have never believed that I had a long life ahead of me. I have wanted to die since I was seven years old. For the past twenty-four years I have wanted to be dead more than I have wanted to be alive. Well, I would say that the percentages kind of rock back and forth staying in the 40’s and 50’s. I wanted to die a lot and I didn’t want to live very much but actually killing yourself is harder than it looks sometimes. I did not overdose as a teenager as a cry for help. I simply vomited up the drugs and was found before I could finish dying. Different.

Now I’m really glad I’m not dead. I feel like getting to sleep with my little girls, with their faces pressed to mine as they mumble over and over while falling asleep, “Mommy love you so much. So much. Sooooooooo much” this is the reason that people live. This feeling of love and happiness. This is why people stay alive. The hope of this. The belief that some day they will get to have this feeling. This is the increased joy that parents have that non-parents don’t get. That is one of those things they find in studies. Over a lifetime parents have more joy than non-parents–a shitload more stress too… but it’s worth it.

I never thought I would actually experience having someone love me like this. I believed this would always be for someone else. I’m very concerned that I not alienate my children… ever. I have to behave appropriately in order to deserve a relationship with them. But I’m not very good at acting appropriately.

Sometimes I feel like the biggest fucking hypocrite in the world when I get mad at my kids for breaking rules. Ha.

I told Shanna, about the stealing candy thing, it is my job to teach you the rules of society. I get angry because I feel afraid. If you steal as an adult there are serious consequences. I have to teach you that it is not a good thing to steal or the rest of your life will be harder and you will have a lot of very unpleasant experiences. I don’t want you to suffer. How can we work on you not doing this? I told her that I really don’t know “how this should be taught” because when I was a child the way I was taught was to be hit. I don’t want to hit her and I’m not really sure what the other options are and I feel kind of overwhelmed sometimes as I try to deal with it. I’m sorry I scream so much. I know it is annoying or scary depending on the day.

I asked her if she knew that how much I love her is completely unaffected by whether or not she perfectly follows the rules. I do not perfectly follow the rules and I hope she will always love me. She told me that somewhere else there are kids who always do exactly what their mothers say and they never break rules. I laughed and said those must be the most boring, uncurious children on the planet and how sad for their mothers’. She looked very confused.

I have not thought about killing myself in a bit. Certainly weeks. But I was asked to reaffirm that I understand and will follow the rules of forums and I WILL NEVER POST THAT I AM FEELING SUICIDAL. Thus I am thinking about the concept though I am not experiencing it. I have felt shamed and bad for being suicidal for pretty much my entire life. I’m aware that people are uncomfortable with the fact that I feel this way and their discomfort is the most important thing here.

Talking about it, or not, has not even slightly increased my self-harming behaviors. Over time my self-harming behaviors have kind of melted away. I’m not hurting myself anymore, I’m really not. It was a process I had to go through. I had to be whiny and angsty and I had to really process how much I wanted to die. This process is simply part of being alive for me. I understand that other people don’t like it. I feel very uncomfortable about being told over and over and over and over that because I make other people feel uncomfortable when I talk about it I shouldn’t talk about it.

Well, how much do you enjoy being surprised by someone offing themself? Wouldn’t you have preferred a warning? Dude, seriously.

P!nk has a song on her new album about drinking and doing drugs and running away and I feel suicide is strongly implied. I really appreciate it when people admit in public that this struggle is part of their life. The song is The Great Escape and I listen to it a lot right now. I’ve been thinking about how I understand this whole “creation of something new” thing now that I didn’t understand before. I have a family now. I have never had one before. Oh wow. This is how they are supposed to look? I’ve been thinking about having something to live for.

It’s really interesting watching how the percentages change. Feeling suicidal vs. wanting to live. That’s a ratio I’ve been actively tracking for most of my life. I have visualized it a lot of different ways over time. These days I think wanting to die falls into the teens. I’m very happy about that. That’s a ridiculous amount of progress for me.

But I’m not supposed to talk about it. I’m not supposed to be graphic about my ongoing struggles to not kill myself. Someone else might feel uncomfortable. Welcome to my sandbox, motherfucker. Here the rules are that I get to talk about whatever gets me through the night. If I am sitting here and writing something then I am not cutting. I am not hitting my body against a large blunt object. I am not soliciting some piece of shit to hurt me. I am not offering up sex to people I don’t know just to get through the night without having to be alone.

I’m not alone. I really love that my kids need me in the middle of the night because I need them in the middle of the night. I need to feel love in the middle of the night. I need to feel wanted. I need to feel like it matters that I not die.

The passion and the pain are going to keep you alive someday. I honestly don’t know how someone in my position would work through this without children. I can understand putting off the decision to die because you still have things you want to do–that is more or less the path I was on pre-kids. I made deals with myself, “I want to do ____. ____. and ____ then it doesn’t matter.” I was very selfish and random about the deals over the years and that’s ok. It was a deal with me about how much pain I have to endure.

That’s the plain and simple reality behind my suicidal ideation. Do I or don’t I get to decide how much pain I have to be in? Am I or am I not in charge of this decision? I think this is where I make the jump to atheism entirely.

I want to be the one who decides when my pain ends. I hold that right. I consider it one of my basic rights. Other animals do the same thing. It is natural just like infanticide is natural. It exists in every species. In America there are approximately thirty seven children killed by their parents every week. You don’t see headlines very often. Every fucking week.

Parenting is hard but I fucking guarantee you that no part of this journey has been remotely as difficult as what came before it so I’m still coasting. My second labor was nine days long followed by a blood hemorrhage that left me unable to walk to the bathroom for weeks. I crawled. Otherwise I simply did not leave my bed. But my friend K delivered enough food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for three weeks. It was a calm but peaceful period. I learned my baby. I didn’t mind the work. It was nice.

Life is about work. Life is about creating and the things you want to do. I freakin love Richard Scarry. Everyone is a worker. All the work must be done. Some of the work is not more honorable than anything else. There is a hierarchy in pay–that tends to exist because some jobs can be done by many people and some jobs can be done by smaller and smaller groups of people and when you have to compete for the talents of a small group… you have to pay a lot of money.

You have to think about those people. The ones who are so selfish. Wait… that’s my husband. He has spent our entire marriage working his ass off to increase his income. Isn’t that selfish? He didn’t do it until he had a reason to. He didn’t care enough to bother. He wasn’t driven by love of acquisition on its own. But now he has this wife with really expensive travel interests and uhm he has decided that he wants to provide for me. He knew that was who I wanted to be before we married.

He doesn’t want me to spend time wanting to die. He wants me to have a list of things I want to do that is really long and complex and it’s ok if it is also expensive–he knows I am overall frugal and I am providing for our long-term safety before I take travel money out. It’s cool. He told me so. Explicitly. He reminds me every few months. It’s weird but really cool. I appreciate how explicitly my husband wants me to be happy.

He wants to keep me. He thinks that the likelihood is higher if I have a sandbox where I can say whatever I want and not get kicked off a support forum for it. He gives me resources I don’t have to have in my head.

I feel like both of us really changed when we got married. We have someone to work for and that is a powerful motivator for both of us. It has been interesting to see as a progression. We get better and better at not hurting one another as we make mistakes and learn how to talk about them. We really don’t keep making the same mistakes over and over. We make new ones! heh

So, to continue on the P!nk trend: Slut Like You is fun. When you are looking to ensure that you don’t have to be alone tonight it dramatically changes how you act. The stakes are different. You’ll worry about tomorrow tomorrow. You have to get through tonight in order to get there.

I’m trying to figure out what mental hurdle I have to working on the books right now. I know I’m overwhelmed by life. I think that I’m just too tired to think. I need to have some reason for a deadline so I can plan around it. I’ll figure it out. I need to decide how much I want to have done by December so I can backwards plan.

I need to feel like I am moving towards what I want to be moving towards. Right now I feel pretty out of control of my schedule. I’m not sure how to change that. Well no. That’s a big fat lie. I know how to change it. I am changing it. This is a process. The schedule will be back to being shaped how I need it to be shaped in about another two weeks. Then we leave town for a week. See how this goes? Oh man.

Portland, we are practically doing a drive-by. March 25th we drive north towards Eugene. We are sleeping there because the kids will be sick of the car. We are aiming to arrive at Dad’s house at 6pm on Tuesday the 26th. We are spending the day with Aunt Cookie, a truly delightful woman. I have an intense interest in hearing stories about Noah’s family. They shape my story now. I don’t have many sources of information.

Wednesday during the day we don’t have plans and we will probably want to go do something fun. Not sure what yet. Wednesday we should hang out with Dad. Thursday and Friday we are hanging out with A. Ha. I haven’t even emailed her to confirm that yet. But she offered it to me. I’m taking it. (pause. email sent.) We will spend Thursday and Friday nights walking around Dad’s neighborhood talking to him and playing with kids. On Saturday we drive allllllll the way home. With four kids who have had a long week and who will not be happy about being in the car. Thank goodness for iPads. Ha.

What we ask of our children is not natural. How we have to deal with the constraints of their lives is not natural. But beating them isn’t a better option. Sometimes you can’t let them have the pace of travel that is appropriate for them. You have to just get there. It is hard but life is that way sometimes.

Once upon a time travel involved physical exertion… even sitting in a wagon is fairly labor intensive compared to a car. We provide these children padded worlds of strapped in boredom. I am not capable of being entertaining for a twelve hour drive. Not even in shifts because then my “off” shift would be driving and I would have a stroke from road rage. That is not in anyone’s best interests. No, my kids can’t entertain themselves for that long. I understand that this is a tragic failing. Never the less… we are going to use them. They can’t use them for the whole trip so there will be other entertainment involved. It’ll work out. It will be one long day of our lives. No big deal. I’m trying to psych myself up for the trip. I’m trying to lay out in advance how much energy I am going to need for various stages. I’m trying to figure out how I will do it without getting punchy about having to teach my kids new situational manners over and over and over for a week solid. It’s a pain but worth it in the long run.

I need my kids to understand how to evaluate for situational manners. I need to consciously talk about how I am evaluating everything around me for clues about how I should behave. I do this every time we travel. It’s a lot easier at Disneyland because there are a lot of “let loose” places. We are going to be moving between environments that will have wildly different “grown up” rules that are going to feel unfair or inappropriately constricting because they aren’t used to those rules. I’m going to be tested over and over. It’s going to be fun.

But this is the whole process of life. I want to teach them how to do this while smiling. I want this trip to be a happy and joyful memory. Shanna is probably going to actually remember this trip for a long time. We will take pictures. She may eventually remember the pictures more than the day but she will have the same kind of connection to these people that I have to Brittney, the little girl who was born four months before me across the street from my family. I was set in my baby carrier next to her in her baby carrier. I have pictures of us when we are two and three and four and seven and and…

I want my kids to have that. I hope they never lose it.

I didn’t think I would lose Brittney. It is hard finding out how unforgivable existing is. Oh, that’s not true I would be told. I am allowed to exist. But I must be silent so no one ever has to actually find out the specifics because oh man that is over the line. The book. The fucking book. I’m having trouble going back through and editing. This is why I paid an editor. Unfortunately after reading the Kindle edition I am entirely unsatisfied with the job she did and I feel fairly back at square one. I thought I was getting an editor but what I got was a copyeditor and that’s a different job.

I wanted technical editing. I wanted someone to give me feedback on flow and let me know where I am being vague and random. I wanted someone to look at it as a work of art to be made better with a few tweaks. Ahhhhh. I get it now. I did get that. That’s what I asked for. She didn’t make many suggestions for changes. She treated it like it was sacrosanct as a poor incest victims story. It was allowed to ramble and be weird.

Ack. But then people don’t want to buy it and it isn’t actually telling the story I want to tell. I can’t always see when I’m doing that without this ridiculous analytical reading that is really hard to do. A page takes me multiple hours. Actually reading something and dealing with the errors is god damn fucking hard work. Why do you think the overall production values of everything in the everything has gone down? (And why I make no promises about my blog entries. These are not polished pieces, yo.)

But the book was supposed to be. And it so clearly isn’t. I feel kind of morally offended by that. In order to motivate that kind of interest you either need a True Fan or someone who is going to make money off the writing. I had neither. Such is life. I’m slowly progressing on editing. It’s hard. I need to set specific goals and plow through it though. Bleh. Yuck. Bleh.

I am running. I’m tired and I’m switching my days for workouts around like crazy but I’m getting through everything. I have a 10k at the end of April. So far my standard for 5ks has been “I pray for under forty minutes”. I’m hoping to do the 10k in eighty minutes.

That means maintaining a standard pace just barely faster than 1km in eight minutes. That means .62 miles in eight minutes. That means I’ll have to run at least 11:50 through the whole damn race. That is way way way faster than I did the marathon. (My marathon average was 15:40/mile. I’m serious when I say I walked a marathon. I’m still hella proud.)

This pace is going to be a huge stretch for me. My race partner may have a different set of goals and staying together is more important than time to me. Additionally: I’m all for wimping out at mile five and crawling the last mile if I feel bad. Flexibility.

What is the goal: the method or the result? Let’s be clear that when it comes to crossing six miles of distance speed vs. just reaching the finish line is a very different set of goals. I no longer fear not reaching the finish line physically… unless I push myself too hard. I am not in amazing physical shape. I’m in good shape. But I’m not an experienced athlete. I have ramped up at a pretty reasonable rate all things considered.

Every body is where it is. You can’t be too hard-lined about “goals” because progress not perfection kind of trumps any stuck on points. It is quite possible I’m not physically capable of running that fast for that long… yet. I may have to work longer before I reach that goal. I sure as fuck would not have been able to do the marathon at that pace. Not given the conditions (high eighties in temperature, high eighties in humidity, really terrible air quality, I started my period at mile thirteen along with horrible cramps). I just couldn’t expect different from myself that day.

I have to still be alive tomorrow to try again. I have to make it to today. If the pace is more important than anything else I might injure myself and then there won’t ever be another try no matter what. And maybe the rest of my life will be a lot harder. Because I was stupid and careless because I don’t care very much if I continue to stay alive.

I really can’t do that any more. Not if I want to be here for more nights of “I love you soooo much”. I want that more than I want anything else. So I will learn how to be good to my body. So I can have as many of those nights as I can.

The passion and the pain are going to keep you alive some day.

I should probably go start breakfast.

No one ever knows the long-term value of what they do. That knowledge is given to no creature. If I want to be a character that has existed then there must be record of that. Only I care to create that record. Noah is invested in supporting this branch of growth on his family tree. He sees it as vital to his long-term success. I’m not sure how I snow balled him.

I think that talking about suicide is something I need to be able to do. My grandmother killed herself. She overdosed. She had been trying for decades. My mother has stories of cleaning up blood after she got home from school because her mother was cutting her wrists again. My brother killed himself. He left the residential care facility where he lived because he had a severe brain injury and would never be able to care for himself again. He walked to a gas station and bought a can of gasoline. He went behind a local grocery store and lit himself on fire. My father sat in the garage with the motor running.

Have I mentioned that I have turned my garage into a really nice room? Ok, technically I have done nothing permanent because city ordinance says it must be able to hold a car at all times and my response would be “give me three minutes and a person to help me move furniture”. That’s not a permanent room. But it’s a really nice place to hang out. There are not likely to be cars in here.

Harm Reduction means being honest about the patterns of behavior in your life. It means setting specific goals and working to reduce the harm you are inflicting on yourself. Usually you are inflicting the harm (hair pulling, cutting, biting your nails, drinking alcohol, picking at scabs, doing most recreational drugs including pot, any obsessive repetitive damage to your body really) because you are trying to relieve stress from some other place in your life.

Noah said he read an article claiming that the first person likely to live over a thousand years is probably alive today. Think about mortality. It’s changing. The brackets are shifting. Where do I want to be on that scale? I don’t want to live a thousand years. That sounds like work. I would rather just live. But I have a rather lot of decades of work in front of me.

What am I going to do when I grow up? I will probably experience an unprecedented to my species amount of freedom after my children are adults. I will still be married to this guy who thinks I am the best thing since sliced bread. I know the deall: there is some travel he wants to do and otherwise I have to do it alone and not be gone too long or too often. Too long is going to be tested a lot over the years as we figure out what that means.

Statistically speaking I am extremely likely to die by my own choice. Sometimes just sitting with that in the pit of my stomach is very hard. You know what they say about statistics? There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.

I believe in self-fulfilling prophesies. I believe the only thing that ever can or has changed the world is someone deciding they want to do it. Yes, of course coalitions are awesome and all… but it takes individuals having a specific vision. A dream, if you will. Otherwise there is no call to exit one’s torpor and do anything. If you are not living up to your vision of yourself… what are you doing instead? Why is there a discrepancy? Are you realistically going to change your life?

Then either change or decide to be happy, right? Happiness isn’t about getting what you want it’s about enjoying what you have. I think I saw that on Pinterest recently.

I want security. I want to have roots. I want a place to come back to. I want community. I want to be allowed to exist without carefully following the rules about what I am or am not allowed to talk about. I like fully informed opt-in relationships.

Now I’m just procrastinating. It was nice to write. I haven’t spent this much time on it in a while. Sometimes it is funny to me the way that writing is one of the most purely satisfying activities I do. I have thought. There. Evidence. Ha. Take that Universe. I have taken up space. In a technological world I have taken up a space smaller than a pin head. Whoop.

But we never know what our impact will be. We have to just exist. And get out of our houses. That’s important whether you like it or not. To be honest I don’t like it very much but I try hard not to take my dislike out on the people who are randomly unlucky and happen to be standing next to me. It isn’t dislike of the people. It is dislike of being out of my house.

It took me a long time to understand that and really fully feel it. I enjoy my work here. I enjoy feeling like I am doing things to work towards my long-term happiness. I am enjoying the physical work and when I am older and less able to work hard I will get to sit in my garden in the shade and enjoy a lifetime of work. Hopefully while babysitting for grandkids who will visit a lot so that I get to know other children deeply.

Now I get it. Now a lot more things make sense to me.

But I have other things I need to do first. Like breakfast. Ugh.

Playing house and thinking about destiny

1 Reply

I have to say that typing my name into the url spot feels good. It’s like I finally have an online home. It’s my god damn sand pit. Excellent.

I have been enormously busy. In the past two days I finished the play house (well, I haven’t attached the planters and I haven’t got climbing plants established–but wood is done), built and mostly installed a raised bed. Started 36 plants indoors and I have a few new food plants coming up in front from the seed spread a few weeks ago. I never label when I do that so I have no forking clue what is growing until it’s done. It’s SCIENCE!

Inside the house I have kept up with the kitchen (doing so requires 2+ hours of work/day between cooking and cleaning), washed and/or folded seven loads of laundry. Cleaned up the whole floor so I could vacuum. I swept the kitchen and the kids scrubbed the linoleum for me (their idea–I swear) and after wiping up the big puddles with a towel the floor is as clean as with mopping so I’m happy.

I also took Shanna to dance class and I have spent 3-4 hours reading aloud over the past two days. I’ve watched three episodes of The West Wing and an interesting documentary called Whore’s Glory (it’s available instant on Netflix–this is how I get movies). If you don’t think white privilege exists go look at what it means to be a woman of color. They don’t have the same options for getting out.

In this country and in Europe prostitution can be a choice. The kinds of scenarios that exist in other countries isn’t enacted here in the same way.

White prostitutes by and large choose it. They may not make the choice with happiness and glee… but it’s a choice.

My great- grandmother was a prostitute and had an illegitimate daughter. My grandmother got “out” of that profession and into a marriage because she was able to blend into society and not be tarred by the brush of her mother.

In some countries if you are a whore you are locked into a ghetto. You are not allowed to leave that slum. Your children are raised there and aren’t really allowed to leave either. None of you have enough money to go anywhere anyway.

My mother was knocked up in high school. She graduated pregnant. She found someone to marry her weeks before the baby was born so that she wouldn’t really be a bastard. Even by 1969 it wasn’t a great situation. Much better than in the 1920’s when my great-grandmother did it.

My sister got married at seventeen had a baby at nineteen was divorced at twenty. Then she had another baby at twenty-two with “guy of the moment” because she didn’t want her kids spaced too far apart and she didn’t want just one. Then she was strongly admonished that she “should” have her tubes tied and she consented. No one in the hospital told her that the procedure wasn’t covered by the state medical plan. It took her more than ten years to pay for that surgery. My understanding is the main benefit has been that she has been able to have a lot of unsafe sex.

People do what they are taught and what they are allowed to do.

I was born into a family where I was not allowed to say no to sexual contact. It was beaten into me.

I am trying to create a family where no one has to do things they don’t want within reason. Like, if Shanna has ballet… sorry Calli you have to go too. Even though you don’t wanna. I understand. I’d like to stay home too.

So there has to be some compromising. But I want them to learn how to be very conscious and deliberate about those compromises. Your opinion matters and the only person who can advocate for you is you.

But there are a lot of boundaries. If you want to scream, that’s fine. Go outside or in the playroom with the door shut. You are not allowed to hurt me by screaming in my face.

It’s weird. I feel like I am negotiating all the time. And I constantly have to put a pause on the whole maelstrom in my head to go mediate some dispute and I have to act completely calm and fair and not scream and be matter of fact and… bleh.

But being able to deliver that consistently… that’s what the pot does.

I don’t know how to describe what it feels like to live in constant heart stopping terror as I go about my daily life because I don’t really think I have ever consistently not felt this way enough to tell the differences.

Sober I have many panic attacks in an average day. I can slow my heart rate through sheer force of will and breath control if I concentrate on it really hard but it makes me seem spacey and kind of dazed. I have to be really selfish and think about my body and it makes me snappy and impatient with everyone else. I often am heard to say “Just leave me alone” even though I know it’s not a good one. I need to develop a better script there but managing panic attacks is really fucking hard. They usually happen out in public where I have none of my usual coping methods.

My kids don’t need to have to learn to live their life around my agonizing stomach cramps. It doesn’t matter to them that I may vomit any minute if I’m not careful. I swallow a lot of bile because I don’t want to admit what is happening. Long-term it’s just not their problem.

The noise is a lot of it. When they get older we can have different discussions about noise but I’m really worried. Our house is loud all the time. We all like to talk. Hilariously, sometimes all four people will be in separate rooms shouting to be heard. I am having a really hard time with how we handle noise. And yet when I lower my voice Noah gets louder and I cringe more and my stomach hurts more and… ugh. It goes better if I try to match his excessive volume.

And the kids are very young and their volume control issues are normal and they are progressing in a completely normal developmental fashion and I need to just be nice about it. This is why people like the part about handing their kid off to another caretaker for most of the day. The noise is unbearable. Sometimes I make my children play out back. We live in California. Even in winter this is a reasonable thing to just go do in underwear. Vitamin D is good for you. And no I don’t put sunblock on any of us. I haven’t in years and I think I can count the number of times I’ve put sunblock on my kids on my fingers. Most of them in New Zealand for playing in the pool. That was necessary, dangit.

And last night I ran 2.67 miles in 31:08. I felt pretty happy about that. I am training for a 10k with my running buddy. We don’t live near one another so a lot of this training is separate but we will be able to practice together a few times. I’m looking forward to it.

I like feeling like getting and being stronger is something that I just do. So our 5k this month was 39 minutes. That means for our 10k we probably should pray we can <80 minutes. But it would be really fun to do it in <70 minutes. That would take actual work towards getting faster. Something I have traditionally been (ironically) steadfastly against. But the goal is different. We have ten weeks. That’s not shaving off a lot of time. If we took it seriously we could.

But it would mean treating out bodies like racing animals. It would mean meal planning for optimal nutrition. It would mean spacing out our exercising as it feels right for our body not for our schedule and hahahaha we will get it in when we can. It means consciously getting stronger alongside the running. Something I struggle with.

And it’s not like I have anything else on my mind at all. Or anything else to do. Why the hell not. Let’s just go with OCD thinking about my body again. CAUSE THAT LEADS TO LIFE BALANCE. Excuse me while I hack up a hair ball.

And my friend? She’s the kind of busy that makes it kind of seem like, “Hey stay at home mom… what is it you…do… all day?” Not that she is like that. But her life is very busy. She has a lot of balls in the air. Way more than I can handle. That’s ok! She’s not me. So it feels kind of extra special that I am getting so much of her attention for this period. Muahaha. I monopolize you for exercise motivation. I’m only kind of a loner. I get lonely.

I get to see Tay today. It’s going to be a great day. I have a life of ease and luxury. It is an accident that I have it this good. I really like having multiple days in a row where I don’t have to drive. I feel so much more physically relaxed. Being in the car is such a high stress load that it really doesn’t leave me with much on the other end. That feels pathetic. But I’ve gotten to stay home. I haven’t been in a car in over twenty four hours! It’s like a miracle. And I have worked. Things came into the house. They are finally resettling again. I get the general impression other people don’t get rid of things at the rate of 2-5 large garbage bags every month. It isn’t because I buy so much. We have generous grandparents. And a lot of old stuff. And figuring out how things work is a gradual process.

Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the stuff in my life. Why do I have any of it again? If I ask myself too often things disappear really fast. February is already a two bag month and I’m looking at things that are on top of the book shelves because I have nowhere else to put them and I’m feeling fussy. I don’t like looking at all the crap. Grrr Waaa kerflumph.

Tay is coming today and we have swimming. We might walk depending on how moods are going. And we aren’t going anywhere tomorrow. We might get to have three full days without the car in a row. It is really weird to think about. Children and adults need to exercise. The only reason to drive to swim practice is because it’s about 1.8 miles away and sometimes I don’t leave enough time to let the kids walk there. I really should just always plan my day around walking. That’s what their body needs. Mine too if I’m honest.

I have two choices right now. I can either be at the nursery when it opens and get work done before Tay arrives. Or I can take advantage of Noah being home and go to the gym for a dance workout class thing. I honestly think I will be happier with the dirt. Is that weird? This is why I don’t identify as a dancer. I do actually really joyfully describe myself as a gardner these days. I find it kind of ironic that in terms of time spent gardening is probably going to outpace theatre in a few months. I have already been semi-serious about gardening longer than I was really active in the bdsm community. I wonder how many years it will be before I have spent more hours of my life gardening than having sex. I think that will take a while longer. I’m actually looking forward to it.

I’m looking forward to being on the other side of a lot of these little clocks in my head. I am not quite counting the months until my father has been dead for more of my life than he was alive but almost. In three more years it will balance.

I think I’m going to go get myself some dirt. I’m feeling pretty grateful for my mother-in-law money right now. I just deposited one last Christmas check from my grandmother-in-law. $300. Today is the day I’m buying yellow roses. I have today and tomorrow to get them planted. It’s going to be a wonderful day.

I’m almost ready to take pictures. Almost. I’m not sure why I’m feeling so vulnerable about sharing but I am. My house is increasingly beautiful to me. Even the problems are things that I am looking at differently than other people. And I know what I will get to do round about the time I hit fifty if everything goes according to plan. And you know how life is about shit like that.

I don’t care if my words are judged. If anyone says anything mean about my house I will cry.

I don’t think group therapy is working out.

3 Replies

My kids are 2.5 and 4.5. Saying that they frustrate me sometimes is like saying, “Hey! They’re still breathing!” They are very developmentally appropriate–I read lots of books to check. I am extremely clear that my anger over their behavior is about control not really about them. And for a couple of months here I have managed to over schedule us. It was an accident–I swear. We will ride it out and change our approach after February.

The first thing to go will be group therapy that I have to drive a cumulative more than two hours for. I don’t need to spend $50 and I don’t know how much on gas so I can listen to three people talk about their lives in that kind of detail. Yesterday I listened to a twenty minute recital of the fertility history of this woman’s dentist. I watched the god damn clock. I understand that she was trying to place context on how this story overlapped with her life and all but man. I’m an asshole and I don’t give a shit how many times your dentist has done IVF and how many failed adoptions have happened. I mean, in the vague sense of the ether “I’m sorry and that sucks” but I don’t need the specifics.

And we had another twenty minute digression about whether the extra-sexin lover of one of the group members should tell her new boyfriend that she is lovers with the group member now that she is *pregnant*. So far the plan was for the boyfriend to just not know that the good friends who hang out together three times a week are…. just friends. They don’t have sex regularly what’s the big deal?

I flat said, “This woman is now pregnant with this guy. She will know him for the rest of her life. This kind of thing comes out. The only ethical option is to tell him now and deal with it. Otherwise your friend is a lying liar.” I don’t think you are obligated to tell every fling about every other fling in your life. Once you are procreating the rules change. If you don’t like that maybe you shouldn’t be having such risky sex.

The kicker was when I got to my turn and I relayed a few of my frustrations with parenting that have been keeping me on edge lately. The advice was obviously well meaning. A lot of it was “Hey! You should use ______________ service!” that does not exist within a thirty minute drive of my house. If I have to drive more than an hour round trip it’s no longer a good resource because my stress from driving outweighs the half hour of not really being “off” I would get in trade for the discount childcare.

If I lived in Oakland or Hayward I would be closer to my networks of support. I would have a lot more other resources as well. So my therapist said, “I know you have painted the walls and all but why don’t you just sell the house and move.”

That was the point when my neck muscles locked and I literally screamed, “This is not up for a fucking committee consensus.”

As if moving is that easy. From the word “go” moving would cost us around $70k in realtors fees. Do I have an extra $70k sitting around I don’t mind losing? Not so much. I kind of have a life plan. Being $70k behind all of a sudden would put rather a big crimp in my plans. That’s a lot of forking money to come up with all of a sudden. That’s *if* we could find a house in our price range to make a lateral move. I doubt it. Given how small and unimpressive our house is I don’t anticipate us being able to buy a better property for cheaper so we are going more into debt either way.

No. No. No. No. That interferes with pretty much all of my plans. And I’m furious with the therapist for acting so off-hand about it. I miss my last therapist so much. She is no longer listed as being involved with any organization I can find online. I’m not sure this therapist is working out.

She isn’t interested in encouraging me into working things out on my own. She wants me to bring my life to the committee so they can vote on which approaches they feel are most appropriate. Half of the group has DID. The remaining woman is extremely non-functional in life. They are nice people. I like them. But I honest to god don’t want to be like them. I am not going to be fifty and still chasing the next easy lay.

They keep telling me what I “should” do as if they had any idea of what would be best for me. Fuck them. Fuck them with a fucking two by four. How in the god damn hell do you think you are even vaguely capable of advising me. How do you dare to have such hubris as to feel you understand what is best for me. You don’t fucking know me.

And as we were walking out I was invited to walk the lake with them. It’s four miles around–a nice distance. Usually I would say yes. But I wore the wrong shoes. I looked down and said, “Enh, I can’t. If I try to walk long distances in these shoes I will limp for three days because my knee will hurt.” And the fucking response was “Oh come on. It will be fine.”

Cue head explosion.

I’m ok with saying, “I’m too big of an asshole for group therapy.” I can live with that if it is true. I have lived with knowing much worse things about myself. I get the general impression that the group facilitator is trying to turn the women in this group into a family because they are all very lonely and isolated. I am not going to move to Oakland so I can start hanging out with them. That isn’t going to make my life better.

And someone acting like the six years of hard labor I have put into my house and yard are no big deal? Oh man. I feel pretty insulted. I shouldn’t feel any attachment to the fact that I have put so much of my time and energy and soul into my property. It doesn’t matter right–it’s just a house. Move on.

I have moved and moved and moved and moved and moved and fucking moved. Don’t try to fucking tell me what moving is like. This is the house where my children were conceived. My daughter was born here. I have painted several murals so far. I intend to paint more. I have planted trees. We have a heavily fruiting orange and young apple, cherry, and plum. I have a blackberry tangle to make you weep with jealousy. I have grapes. I’m starting asparagus amongst other wonderful additions in the front yard. I do a lot of cooking with the sage and rosemary in the yard.

“I know you have painted the walls and all but why don’t you just sell the house and move.”

*explode*

This is my home. This is the home my husband gave to me. He has worked very hard to pay for it. He has been very supportive every step of the way with me changing it to suit me. Sure, it isn’t all that large but such is life. It’s a size I can keep clean. It’s a size of yard that keeps me busy but doesn’t overwhelm me.

Just up and sell my fucking house. Maybe I should get a shotgun so I can stand around declaring “Over my cold dead body.”

I’m not sure when it happened. When did this go from being Noah’s house that I am camping out in to someplace that I mortally offended when someone tells me to treat it casually. This isn’t just where I live. This is the first place in my life where it has been ok for me to behave how I want. This is the first place I have been safe. I have lived in this house longer than I have lived anywhere in my life. When I am an old woman my yard will be wonderfully fruitful and I won’t have to do a lot of work any more. But I will get to look out at the things I find beautiful forever.

I think I will always have weird niggles of feelings about the ghosts in the walls–the ghosts of time before me. But by the day that time recedes further and further into the past. I’m just left with all the wonderful memories I make every day.

“Gud mownin! I mithed you. I wuv you.” I need to get a video made of her speech impediment. It is the cutest fucking thing in the history of ever. She is currently lying next to me. I’m not sure why Noah is sleeping on the couch (we aren’t fighting or anything) so Calli asked if she could climb in next to me. Of course baby. I’d be happy to feel you heavy against my side while you sleep. I don’t think there is much in the world that can make me happier.

I was told I need more down time. Tell me something else new. This phase of life is not forever. I feel like that was a lot of the problem with the group. Never once was I asked why I have arrived at the bizarre combination of factors I have right now that is freaking me out. They just jumped straight to telling me what I “should” do instead of what I am doing. Because of course there isn’t a careful thought process behind what I’m doing. I should just up and change so that I can be more suitable to them.

Geez. Why am I so resistant to change.

February is non-stop.

4 Replies

Life has been feeling too busy to even stop and catch my breath. Leaving the house with the kids uses up a very large amount of my daily “oomph”. Kids resist putting on clothing, they scream and hit me and tell me they don’t want to leave, they resist putting on carseats (while screaming directly in my face and trying as hard as possible to kick me in the face).

Leaving the house is something that I figure we will do more of once my kids are older and have an interest in where we are going. Only I’ve been feeling a lot of internal pressure to “get involved” and I don’t actually think I am doing us favors. So far in February we haven’t had a day at home and I cancelled on next week’s park day because if I don’t then we won’t have a day at home until my dead-brother’s-birthday. And even on that day we still have to leave the house for ballet.

I’m freaking out and feeling brittle. Someone commented both, “You look like you’ve had a hard morning” and later, “Oh you found your smile!” My terse responses of, “Yes.” and “I know what is fucking expected of me whether I like it or not.” Her third response was, “OOOOkay…”

Being nice to people is hard. I understand it is for most people. I get so scared. I know if I’m in a bad mood I’m going to say the wrong thing. I am tired of making people hate me. But I can’t be “engaged in the community” if I am silent. It’s a Catch 22–even though I’ve never read the book.

I would love to spend more time stoned. That would help a lot. But leaving the house every day means that my pot consumption has dropped massively. I can only smoke a little at the end of the day (lately I’ve only been getting twenty minutes before the pounding on the door and “I need you” starts) so I’ve been very sober this month.

Let me recount the reasons I wish I was stoned. Why, at 3:43 am I would really like to go get absolutely hammered. I have time! I have freedom! I have… therapy in a few hours in Oakland and I have to drive. Shit.

My stomach hurts. I keep crying because I’m just waiting for everyone to hate me. I don’t know how to stop feeling so anxious. A lot of it is that I am in an unprecedented part of my life experience. I have never gone this long without being hit or sexually assaulted in the rest of my life. My body knows that relaxing is dangerous and stupid. But it isn’t. Normal people don’t get assaulted as often as I do. I don’t have to be afraid all the time.

But then I would lose my pattern recognition skills-right? I have learned skills that kept me alive. Maintaining them is killing me.

Right now this feels tied to how much I am going out of the house. Every morning I wake up with a cup of patience. If I have to take the kids out of the house I have to strongly limit how many other things I ask of them or I will end up angry in a way I can’t get back from. Well, not till the next day when my patience re-ups.

I know that “normal” people have jobs and get their kids out of the house 5+ days a week without whining like me. I don’t think I could do it and be a nice person. I could do it–but I think I would be a very harsh and demanding figure as opposed to my current laissez faire approach to life.

I wish I had the nerve to cherry pick people from groups (I would rotate so I can get to know everyone) and reduce how often I go out of the house to three days a week and have one day a week when our house is “open” and folks can come play. Then I could have a socialization without the surrounding unpleasant.

But I don’t feel comfortable doing it. I don’t know why. I worry about offending people. I worry about finding out that people won’t come. I feel like it is ridiculous the way I want people to come to me but I don’t want to reciprocate. I feel like a user. There are things I would like to do, simple things. I don’t think anyone would be mad at me. But I’m too scared to ask. Knowing people is so hard. I don’t understand what they want.

Part of it is, other people seem to be very different about their houses. We don’t get invited to peoples houses much (my kids want to touch everything) and it feels rude to want to be the one who doesn’t have to travel.

In the bay area who is willing to travel where is a big thing. I have a huge chip on my shoulder after decades of having people in San Francisco or Oakland tell me that it isn’t worth going to my house–I should come to their house. I have had a lot of relationships that required me to do a minimum of forty-five minutes of driving each way. With how my kids feel about driving I would rather shove rusty nails in my veins than continue to maintain these relationships. As far as I can tell–none of those folks actually give a shit about me. The journey is too hard in my direction but it is somehow magically easier in their direction?

So I don’t invite people over often. I feel like it isn’t a good idea. It’s selfish. It’s stupid. It’s presumptuous and self-involved. No one else with kids gets the advantage of home court so I should have to deal with the fucking park like everyone else.

Why can’t I just be a weird recluse and people have to come to me? I know that historically such people exist. But doing that requires either the balls to just be alone all the time or the ability to usefully invite people over. I’m scared. I don’t think I have enough social capital to be interesting enough to travel for. Thus I work on my house. I’m not interesting but if you are under eleven my house is pretty rad. I have a wide variety of plans to make it more interesting. I just need to stay god damn home in order to build it all.

Leaving the house like this means I make no useful progress on writing. My brain is too full of petty idiocy.

What do I want my life to look like? I may have to clamp down again. I have to say no to things. Even though I fear that every turned down invitation is a closed door that will prevent people from ever being able to like me.

Too much going on. I keep crying. And I really can’t handle sex. I’m kind of trying because that’s one of the long-list of things I’m “supposed” to do. I feel so empty. I don’t want to have sex with Noah when I feel like a worthless whore. I don’t want to have sex with him when I feel like I can be all but unconscious and he doesn’t care–a hole is a hole. I don’t like feeling this way. I don’t know how to change it today. I’m acting like I don’t believe it is true. But mostly when I’m home I’m watching re-runs of The West Wing because I’m too tired to be working hard at home and dealing with going out. It’s one or the other. I wish I felt more competent.

Early Childhood Sexual Assault, Anger, and Parenting

3 Replies

Another one found me. My tribe. She asked a bunch of questions and I don’t want to directly lift her message because I didn’t ask permission first and she was all polite and stuff.

How do we deal with this anger? How do we teach something different? Are we doomed to teaching our daughters to be screaming harpies just like us? How do we get out of bed in the morning and manage to not kill them all? Yes, yes they are the reason we keep living so of course we don’t really want to kill them.

First and foremost if you are a survivor of ECSA you should almost certainly be in therapy for the entire time you have children living at home and maybe for the rest of your life. You were taught bad things for your brain and body during the formative period of your existence. Overcoming that is a conscious choice every fucking day for the rest of your life. Sorry.

Ok, maybe someday it will be unconscious but I kind of doubt it.

What do we do with the anger? In my opinion step one is examining your anger. Why are you angry? Anger is a signal that something is crossing one of your boundaries? How does that work for you?

I’ve done a lot of work on my anger. I’ve written a lot here about that over time. What I mean by “done a lot of work on my anger” what I mean is I understand when I am getting angry because I feel trapped and helpless because in the past I was trapped and helpless. I have learned that I get to say, “I don’t like how you are touching me, please stop.” I have learned that I get to say, “When you speak to me in that tone of voice it sounds to me like you are angry–am I hearing you correctly or am I over reacting?” And “Right now I’m having a lot of big feelings and I need to go feel them for a few minutes before I can talk to you.”

I get mad at my kids. I yell at my kids. I do more of it than I want to and I feel fear about the future when they you know… actually talk back. Parents yell at kids because parents feel out of control. I have a lot of control issues. The primary reason that I am making a lot of the parenting decisions I am making is because I am doing my best to lower the number of places in our lives where I feel like I “have to” make my kids do something. I don’t have to make them get up at a certain time. I don’t have to make them eat. I don’t have to make them do their homework. I don’t have to make them… whatever.

When I yell at my kids I try to cut myself off in mid-screech and apologize and leave the room. Me yelling is not about them. That’s the first step.

If you are yelling at your kids because they are doing something you don’t like it is your fucking problem as the adult to apologize for losing your temper and being an asshole.

Seriously. Yelling won’t solve a fucking thing and it just makes you an asshole.

Should I say that again? I’m an asshole. Sometimes I yell at my kids because I’m an asshole. I don’t yell at them because they are bad. I yell at them because sometimes I am an asshole.

Ok. Now that I’m clear on that part. In any situation where a child has done something that bothers me I need to first examine why I’m so pissed off. What boundaries feel intruded upon? Why do I feel the need to scream? Am I inconvenienced because I don’t want to clean up a mess? Am I upset because I feel they wasted something (like throwing food all over the floor or if they cut up expensive clothing [it happened]) I need to first think, “Do they have any schema in their brain for understanding why I would care about this?”

Most of the time… maybe? Not really? But my kids are little. They are two and four. As they get older this will be different and more of a struggle.

Once I figure out why I’m freaked out I need to figure out how to fix it. Usually I need to be in a room by myself for a few minutes to calm down once I’ve started screeching. Then I come back and talk it out.

“I’m sorry I screamed. I felt surprised and overwhelmed by how much work I anticipate having to do. Yelling wasn’t the right answer. Were you doing an experiment? How did this come to be? Ok. We do need to clean this up. Will you please fetch _____?”

I try to have a calm conversation as we are going about the clean up process. I HAVE BIG CONTROL ISSUES AROUND MESSES. I said that in capitol letters because I understand that it is my issue and not everyone shares it. I’m kind of standing on the table and reminding myself that my issues are not anyone else’s problem and I get to do that in my journal. So there.

But my kids have to live with me. So I have to teach them how to be respectful about public spaces. I also have to calmly, politely, and with great fucking patience teach them step by step how to clean up after themselves. If I huff and do it myself then they are not capable of doing it in the future. That’s just plain bad planning. If I’m all nice and shit to my kids while they are little I hear it pays off.

Kids fighting. This is something we are just starting to get to. I confess that I am going to have a very hard journey through sibling rivalry. You know that expression, “I hope you die in a fire” as a way of expressing that you hate someone and want them to suffer? Well, that’s how my brother died. He covered himself in gasoline and lit himself on fire because I prosecuted my dad for raping me. Ok, not because. But it was in the five month period between when I pressed charges and when my dad killed himself the morning the trial was to start. I found out about both deaths through a screaming hysterical phone call from my oldest brother as he told me both deaths were all my fault and he hated me. My sister encouraged me to be a whore, take drugs, and submit quietly to being raped by the guys in my family.

I’m going to have an awkward journey through sibling rivalry with my kids. I’m just saying.

Lately my oldest has been in a phase where she constantly wants to play “let’s race” then she will circle the other player for a while chanting, “I’m the winner and you’re the loser.” Of course this is in a sing song voice.

My youngest responds to this by hitting her older sister and saying, “You so mean.” Good for her.

Ok, that’s not what I say in the moment. But it’s what I’ll say in my damn journal.

In practice I talked to my oldest about the kid up the block who is just a little motor cross champ in training. This girl is a year older but she rides her bike really well and can take jumps off a ramp and she practices all kinds of stunts. She’s going to be quite the bad ass in a few years.

I asked my oldest daughter if she would like it if her friend did the same thing to her about bicycle racing. Obviously the neighbor is going to win every single time they have a bike contest given that my kid can’t even ride a bicycle properly. I asked if she wanted to be taunted and called a loser. She looked horrified. I asked her why she thought it was ok to do to her sister. She apologized and offered a hug.

I talk to my therapist about losing my temper. Her response is her most fucked up clients are people who had parents who always controlled their anger. It’s normal and healthy to get mad. What matters is how you handle getting mad. Do you blame your kids? Do you tell them that you wouldn’t get mad if they ________. Whoa. What an inappropriate amount of responsibility to put on a kid. Really on anyone.

I have issues with being lied to. If someone habitually lies to me I tend to get angry to the point where I kick holes in the wall and then I stop dealing with that person any more. This has been a frequent pattern for me. I can’t do that with my children and all children lie.

I’ll tell you the truth and say that one worries the shit out of me. I don’t have a good plan yet. We’ll see how things go.

Will you ever have peace? Well… what does peace mean for you? It means something different to everyone. Yesterday I had a moment of Zen.

I was out in the garage in the morning before anyone woke up and I was feeling panicked and scared and like I will never be worth anything at all–my husband really wants me to work on that word “worth” and deal with what it means to me–and I will never be able to accomplish anything and I will never be good enough and I will never do anything that makes the world a better place. I am just a fucking waste of oxygen.

Doesn’t sound like a moment of Zen does it?

Then I stopped the whole cycle of suck for one moment.

My father was a severe repeat offender. He raped many children. He is dead because of me. He stopped because of me. Because of me my father was not able to pass his warped values down to my brother’s children. My still-living brother hates me for taking his daddy away.

I had a moment of complete calm. I did make the world a better place. It was hard and it was scary and it involved a great deal of pain and making a lot of people hate my guts. It involved having to break the bonds of family. But I did it. I made the world better and safer.

It’s not hyperbole. It is simply and literally true. How my father and brother chose to die was not my fault. I hold no responsibility there. But I stood up and told the truth and I said I wouldn’t be raped any more.

I am an angry person partially because it took sixteen years before I could get my father to stop raping me. Over twenty-three years I was raped by twelve people. Because I was taught to go find people who would treat me that way. And they can smell blood in the water. They know I am not good at stopping people from hurting me.

I believe I should be in pain. It is one of the basic under pinnings of my world view. I don’t truly believe that consciously but if you look at my life it is clearly true. At every stage, at every age I have hunted hard for ways to hurt myself. I have cut myself, burned myself, found friends who believe that whores don’t get to say no, and boyfriends who like to hit their girlfriends. I made sure it was “bdsm” and I “consented” because do you know what happens when I say “no”?

Someone holds a taser to my vulva. True fucking story. That’s what god damn happens when I say, “I don’t want someone to use a cattle prod on me.” The response is “Well this is a taser. Here you go!”

Do people like me ever heal?

What the fuck does that mean?

I haven’t been raped in years. I’ve told my husband that if he ever rapes me again I will not only divorce him I will make sure he rots in jail. Not because I think he has plans to do so. But because that is something that I have to be prepared to do in defense of myself.

I have to believe that I do not deserve to be raped. I have to believe that I do not deserve to be in pain. It’s the only way I can teach my children to not believe that they should be raped or in pain.

It’s complicated.

Do you know how you teach your children? The vast majority is unconscious. They just watch you. They watch how you are an adult taking up space in the world. They watch how you let people talk to you. They watch how you talk to people. They watch what you tolerate and when you say, “Hey I deserve better.”

They watch if you think the way to handle a disagreement is to fly off the handle and scream.

That part sucks ass. I’m just saying. I feel like a total douchebag sometimes. I apologize.

My children are aware that a long time ago stuff happened to me that changed how my brain works. Once I get into an emotion like anger/sadness/frustration I have to consciously work on changing that because my brain wants to just stay in that rut. It’s not because of them it’s because of stuff that happened years and years before they were born. They are not the reason I get so mad and I’m really sorry that sometimes it feels that way. Let me excuse myself into time out for a few minutes so I can come back and do this like a nice person.

(For the record I rarely smoke during these time outs because I think modeling Get Stressed = Do Drugs! is a bad idea. Even though I gosh darn want to. That’s why I smoke on a schedule so that the kids don’t associate outbursts with needing anxiety meds. And I now have a vaporizer! It has been here for twelve hours. Uhm, review later.)

I’ll be honest that I tell myself “I lived through twenty years of hell. I can do twenty years of kind of frustrating.”

Because really… the kids are frustrating. They aren’t bad. They aren’t malicious. They aren’t evil. They aren’t hurting me. But they frustrate the shit out of me sometimes. That’s ok. Learning to deal with frustration is probably good for me.

Or something.

When you go find a therapist you have to be hella picky. You need to interview the therapist and decide if this person has an attitude and approach to like. When you pick a therapist you are essentially picking a surrogate parent of sorts. A guide towards more appropriate behaviors. You get to pick which therapist will be able to guide you in a way you want to be guided. You don’t have to become a born again Christian just because some shrink tells you that is the answer to your problems.

You are unique. Your attitudes, your beliefs are things I don’t share and I don’t understand. I don’t know what kind of support you need. You have to find a therapist who will be good for you… so I don’t know exactly what advice to give.

I tell therapists during the phone screen: “I need you to never flinch. I need you to be a blank wall. You are not allowed to say, “Oh no” or “You poor dear” or any other such commentary or I will leave and not come back. I do not need to be mollycoddled. I need to be able to talk about my traumas so you can help me learn to work around them not so you can minimize or avoid them because they make you uncomfortable.”

It weeds out a lot of people, let me tell you.

I guess that means my family found my blog.

4 Replies

Hello anonymous comments shaming me for not playing the game right.

I didn’t walk away from my family exclusively because of my mom. I didn’t divorce my niece or nephew or aunt because of my mom.

My sister is a pedophile. My mother covers for her. That’s enough for me. If you think that I am wrong for keeping a pedophile out of my life, or someone who has actively covered for multiple fucking pedophiles, well then… we have no common ground.

I feel enormous guilt for kicking my niece out of my life. I know it’s a shitty thing to do. I left her to carry the whole abusive raft on her own. My nephew won’t work enough to keep a place to live. My sister hasn’t worked in years because she has enormous psychological issues (no shit). My mom hasn’t worked in years–I presume she is waiting for my father’s social security.

They wanted me for money. I’m not interested in being that for them. I don’t make any. I have no fucking money of my own. They would love to drain my husband dry. That’s family, right?

No. I was told from when I was a little girl that I would be responsible for taking care of my family when I grew up.

Now my not even 21 year old niece works at In-n-Out and sells Mary Kay cosmetics because that is the income in the house.

I didn’t walk away from her because she has a relationship with my mother. I walked away from her because as long as she buys into the idea that she has to carry the whole broken family she is going to fail. It is inevitable. I only hope she doesn’t have kids because her mom is a sick and scary person.

Yes, I’m a selfish fucking asshole. I divorced my whole family along with the problem people because the whole system creates a safe haven for abusers.

I just can’t be part of it. If that hurts my feelings or their feelings, oh well. We are all grown ups now. We are all making active choices. I’m allowed to dislike the choices that other people make and I am allowed to not have a relationship with them over their choices.

Don’t act like I am the bad guy here. Give me a god damn break. I’m not supposed to be allowed to break contact with my family after how badly I was abused? Oh go fuck yourself. With a chainsaw.

So far I have tried pretty hard to avoid using the full names of my family members. Occasionally a first name slips out. Very very rarely a last name (and we don’t all have the last name) so I feel like I’ve been polite and all that. I’ve been trying pretty hard to make my story about me and leave other people out of it. If I feel threatened the correct thing for me to do is to come out more, not less. I don’t think anyone in my family would like it if I used their legal name every time I talk about my family history of pedophilia and rape. That would make Google a very different entity in their lives.

Right now I believe I am one of the top ten hits for “my father raped me”. I have left my family out of that very consciously. I could change that. If I feel more threatened I absolutely will.

The main protection I have in this life is to not be silent. I can’t give it up.

Not competent enough.

3 Replies

Yesterday we were scheduled to go to two parties. I wanted to go to two parties. We went to one party. The kids were normal, healthy, active kids. By which I mean it was invasion of the brats. As we were getting in the car to head to the second party Shanna collected a whole big pool of saliva in her mouth and spat it on her sister. Then started laughing. That is specifically why I don’t hit my kids. Because in my heart of hearts I believe that is not worthy of being hit for but in the moment I had to clasp my two hands together because I wanted to slap her face.

This was after a day full of Shanna beating on people and occasionally getting hit back. She has a huge scratch down her face and she spent almost twenty minutes crying after she was kicked in the stomach. Of course it is all his fault only the moms were standing around watching. She ran up to the kid and hit him five times before he finally reacted. I’m just not mad at him for defending himself.

I didn’t stop hitting people until Noah. I used to hit people a lot. Ask Jenny. For years she flinched around me constantly. I was extremely violent. Noah hits back. Not over and over but once, decisively. Much like the kid who was getting sick of Shanna yesterday. Ha. Shanna is so much like me.

There was a laundry list of other similar preschool drama. It was just a bratty day. She was sneaking a lot of sugar–all the kids were. There were a lot of kids we didn’t know well. All kinds of stuff. I’m sure I wasn’t being appropriate with the kids either. I certainly did a lot of snapping out orders and telling Shanna to either help or go to her room as we were getting ready. That never sets a day up to go well. That’s my fault.

So I decided it was better to go home and have a quiet night so that I didn’t start screaming at them or inappropriately punishing them. Even though we all wanted to go to the party. It wouldn’t have gone well. When Shanna gets into the hitting stride she starts hitting every kid she sees–basically to learn what happens. I understand it as a learning technique. But I lose my patience and one of these days she will pick the wrong kid and end up with a bloody nose. I will not be indignant on her behalf and I think that is going to piss her off. I will of course talk with the kid and parent about it–but not from an indignant point of view.

Kids do this stuff. Let’s talk about it and try to avoid it happening again because it’s not ok to hit people. I do not think it is wise, reasonable, or even possible to prevent it happening entirely.

Part of the problem is that they both need a lot of active supervision and I’m one person. I get mentally fried trying to track them both in a large crowded area. That uses a lot of circuits at once. After a while I start shaking and crying when it is bad.

Part of the reason I bailed on the second party is because my kids don’t know those folks. Not really. No one would have really been able to help.

The main reason I had fun at the first party is because we have been playing at the park with those families for almost a year now. There is a particular family with two older girls who come and take Calli away from me. They adore her and play with her for hours. She loves them. She walks around the house practicing their (hard, many syllables and consonants) names.

That is what community is for. That is how it is supposed to exist. Kids have lots of people they like to talk to. They don’t have to be on top of me 24/7.

At the second party there is that community for other people. It is a party for a close knit group. I peripherally know a few people. The host and I adore each other–that’s why I go. But I think I will email him and ask about a visit while he is on vacation next week. We can handle that. A big party full of the people he knows is harder.

I feel like that is because I am a failure. I know a lot of very social people. And they bring their kids. If I could handle going eventually those people would love to be the kind of community I have with the home schooling group. They feel like they have been that community to me in the past.

I have a weird bonding experience that seems to be partially based on exchanged work. If I feel emotionally connected to someone I want to work for them. I come over and clean peoples houses. I bring food. Now I offer to baby-sit. Taking care of kids is brutally hard work and I try to help my friends who are freaking out. And I have a few who have helped me.

It is weird how baby sitting works. It is pretty rare that I find someone I exchange kids with. Usually it primarily goes in one direction or another and I think that creates (in me) weird feelings of not knowing how to trust the situation. I can only ask for help when I am ok with the answer being no. If I actually require a yes then I have a much more difficult time with asking at all. That’s dangerous. If someone tells me no to meeting a need then I hate that person and I don’t want to talk to them any more. It’s not particularly rational or nice. If I manage to keep my mouth shut and not burn any bridges I generally get over it with time… but it seriously takes me a while.

So I have to keep my needs small. I have to only share ‘wants’ with people. It’s a trust thing. It isn’t because anyone is doing something wrong or bad by saying no. I think people need to say no when they need to say no. I really do.

I don’t understand how other people manage to believe that everything that happens to them isn’t personal and doesn’t matter. It is happening to me of course it is personal. I don’t think it is mean or vindictive or calculated or anything like that. But it is personal. It is happening. I have been told that I am over-sensitive by entire fucking life. People told me that after sexually assaulting me. Just get over it. Don’t be so sensitive. It’s not a big deal.

I don’t react to anything like it is a small deal any more. My life is happening to me and it has to be important to me whether it is important to anyone else or not. Or I spend a lot of time cutting to remind myself that I am not important. That is part of how I keep myself in that box. Remember Krissy, you don’t matter. You don’t matter. You don’t matter. When I would start to get uppity in conversations and defend myself and people would get mad I would reach down and push on the cuts. That was how I could keep my mouth shut and my mind distracted.

I know that feeling as much anger and hatred as I do when someone can’t meet my needs is inappropriate. I don’t voice it much any more. I have learned how to silence that. It’s a set of feelings. It passes. I can’t help the fact that I have a lot of years of issues around no one being able to meet my needs. I’m sorry that my life has hurt me so much that I have really thin skin.

I wish I took things less personally too. I wish I was less sensitive. My life would be less tumultuous.

I frequently come back to this white trash thing. I identify my culture of origin as white trash. If I’m in a “consciousness awareness group” sort of thing (I live in California, this shit just happens here) and there is an ice breaker so people can start to understand one another and people talk about ethnicity or culture I always say white trash.

You should see the expressions on peoples faces. It’s an experience. I think that mostly people just dismiss it in their minds and ignore me. Often people will say, “I grew up in a trailer/poor/rurally/whatever and I’m not white trash so you aren’t either.”

I love how that works for people. Good luck with that.

I am white trash because not hitting people is constant all day effort. I want to jump on people and beat them to bloody pulps on a very regular basis. I have to consciously think about not hitting pretty much all the time.

I will never own a gun because I do not believe I have enough self-control. There are people in this world I would like to see dead and I would really like to be dead. It kind of seems like a no-brainer that I should avoid guns. If something inside me ever snaps and I beat my sister to death with a baseball bat to prevent her from ever raping another child I will be surprised. That’s a lot of hate. I will be surprised if I can summon the will to do that. It’s extreme. Shoot her? Oh shit yeah. That can be done impulsively with very little actual effort… if you have a gun.

Wait… not everyone thinks about this? Oh.

I have spent a lot of time studying the psychology of pedophiles. It seemed important. My sister is unlikely to ever stop. She is, essentially, a rabid dog. And there is nothing I can do about it. That scares me. My brother threatened to leave his wife if she pushed him on the issue of adopting a little girl. He doesn’t think he should live with a little girl. Ever. He believes they had three sons together because God knows he can’t have a little girl.

I’m not trying to say that everyone who grows up poor or everyone who lives in a trailer or everyone who is homeless or or or or or or or is white trash. I am saying that I am. I am saying my family is. We have a violence in us–a twisted perversion. A lot of it comes from entitlement. I deserve to have therefore I will take.

I feel very weird about having the life I have had and then marrying Noah. He didn’t tell me he was a trust fund baby until we were engaged. It was after I moved in and like a month or so before we eloped. We were having a conversation about long-term safety–specifically financially. He asked me how much money it would take before I felt “safe” quitting my job and staying home to take care of kids. How long I worked was going to be directly determined by how fast I could pay down debt (I paid off $100,000 in debt in the first year of our marriage–we lived on my teaching salary) and when we had enough of a savings buffer. He told me to give him a number. How much did I need to have before it would be ok. I told him that I really want to have a minimum of $250,000 in some kind of investment account before I will feel ok quitting.

He said, “Hold that thought” and left the room. He came back holding a piece of paper and said, “this isn’t actually all of it–but this is one account” and he handed me an account statement. He had like $257,389. I think. I may be mixing up a couple of numbers in the tens or ones column. Fucking close enough.

I almost had a heart attack. I started hyperventilating. Are you for fucking real? You want to marry me and hand me everything I have ever specifically planned how to get all nice and neat wrapped up with a pretty little bow?

After we were married and he heard me reading (cause I read out loud and react to things) MDC in the single parent forum about all the things women had wished they had done before they headed towards divorce (this was while I was pregnant with Shanna. When I tell you I plan ahead I’m fucking serious.) he grew concerned. He figured out how paranoid I actually am. When Shanna was under a year old he dragged me to a lawyer. He put all of his inheritance and pre-marriage money into a family trust so there is no chance in hell I can ever walk away from him legally with less than half his assets. (I think he’s wrong. A judge would let me walk away. But I digress.)

Noah is very serious about wanting me to trust him. He works very hard at being dependable–something that is specifically challenging for him. I’m a kind of consistent he just isn’t naturally. But he does it for me. Because he loves me so much.

I feel so much guilt for needing so much help from him. I do need it. He is so patient with me. I don’t tell him about my needs until I am at the point of shaking and freaking out. He doesn’t take my behavior personally. I don’t really understand how he does that.

I feel a lot of guilt about asking him for more at any point in time. I know that when I complain bitterly about being a lot less interesting than _____ that in pretty much every case he places the needs of his physical body way below me. He hurts himself to do things for me. The things he places in his top priority spots are things that earn money.

He feels very driven by my insecurity. I feel like that is not a good thing. We are certainly long past the point where more money buys us more happiness. We have specific goals, yes. We are on track to meeting them. I think I’m the kind of crazy where I could die a billionaire but clutch a dollar bill to my chest and say, “Well at least they didn’t get all my money.” I don’t think Noah should feel like he has to work harder. Good fucking grief man.

More money won’t fill my needs. That’s not the point. What is the point then? I don’t know. The point is somewhere long out of focus. I will probably decide what the point was and construct the story around it in my seventies. Until then it’s a mystery.

I’m kind of ridiculously glad that it is pouring rain (and lightning! and thunder!) because now I don’t have to go to Fairyland. Yay.

I could decide that “God” wants me to stay home. See how this works? I don’t think I should start having an invisible sky friend to blame everything on. That could go badly. Sometimes things happen. It’s not about deserve. It’s not about what is right. They just happen. There isn’t a plan. I can’t believe there is a plan that involves raping little girls. I just can’t.

The loyalty trap

2 Replies

Recently a friend tactfully and gently pointed out that the way I write about family isn’t exactly standard. The kind of help I think I would get is fairly unusual. I couldn’t name a close friend who has the kind of relationship I write about wanting. No one has family who just shows up to take care of you–that isn’t how things work in America.

To this I reply: Ahh. You think that I have a mental model of a healthy family with boundaries. Hahahahaha. No. I come from a crazy enmeshed codependent family. What I talk about wanting is what I have seen. I get my longing for family from watching how people treated my sister having kids. Quite frankly folks worried about her being incompetent and immature. So they just showed up and helped. My mom did. My aunt did. My brother did. I did. Sometimes cousins helped too.

I’ve been watching a lot of movies lately trying to figure out what I mean when I say “white trash”. I’m trying to figure out how to explain it. Some day I want to have a concise definition that really explains what it means to me. I’m not there yet.

Movies I have streamed on Netflix recently: Winters Bone, The Poker House, The Burning Plain. All featuring the same actor (Jennifer Lawrence) and I feel kind of weird about her going on to be an action star. I probably won’t get around to watching the action movies any year soon. I care about the depictions of violence and family.

If you care about movie spoilers don’t read the rest of this post. That is your warning. That said, I think all three of those movies would be useful for people who want to understand me. Of course none of them is exactly right but there are interesting elements in each.

In Winters Bone she is trying to track down information about her father. She has to ask nosy questions. She lives in the Ozarks and she has to pester extended kin that don’t like to be pestered. She gets beaten by a group of women who do it so that her uncle can’t get mad at the men. There is this strong pressure through the whole movie that the police are the enemy. Drugs. Drugs. Drugs. My family used to do drugs like that. These days everyone has prescription meds.

In The Burning Plain you see seemingly disconnected stories that eventually make sense. It’s about mothers and daughters and feeling invisible and accidents and hating yourself and running away to deal with how much you hate yourself. Charlize Theron manages to look as empty as I feel. The way she self harms, the way she runs away because she is bad… yes. I understand that.

The Poker House is the most recent one. It is based on Lori Petty’s actual life. (The chick from Tank Girl.) Holy shit for shoe shine. My mother never prostituted herself and my mother never did drugs in front of me, so I had a very different set up than this movie. Nevertheless I had similar levels of neglect. Similar kinds of being abandoned in unsafe environments. I thought the rape was extremely well done and non-graphic but accurate. That is the truth. That is how fast and how easy it happens. I actively dislike the fact that Lori Petty’s take away message is “Don’t hold a grudge–forgive people for hurting you because they were hurt too”. To that I say: “Bullshit. I have children to protect.”

When I gave up on my family I gave up a lot. I gave up a support network that hasn’t worked in years and fucking loves hanging out with little kids. My family loves children under about eight. They are still cute and fun. Especially little girls. And my little girls are so angelic and wonderful that they would have done well.

But three people in my family have told me that my sister sexually abused them. I have fairly good reason to think that my kids would be good targets for her. The price of all the support is that you have to keep your mouth shut and understand that “people make mistakes” and ignore horrifying behavior year after year. If you need the support and you cannot survive without it this is the bargain that must be made.

I don’t fucking need the support that bad. I can sit home and cry from being overwhelmed instead. It’ll all work out. They are less overwhelming by the month. Shanna is much better at picking up after herself and my life is getting much easier on a day by day basis. Before too much longer they will actively make my life easier. They want to. They understand that doing so leaves me with more energy to do the things they want to do. Their mama didn’t raise no fools.

My sister hasn’t had a job since around when Shanna was born. She was laid off and lived off unemployment. I have the general impression that they are waiting for my mom’s social security to come in. She’s going to get my dad’s because they were married long enough. I think that is totally fair and it means that her retirement will be the most financial security she has had since divorcing him. I hope she finally settles down. I hope my sister isn’t molesting the kids she baby-sits. That’s what she does with her time. She stays home and takes care of little kids so their teen moms can go to school and/or work.

But I know she is a pedophile. I know how inappropriate she was with me. We didn’t have sex. But she did start telling me when I was four years old what I had to do to relax my anus so anal sex didn’t hurt so much. It was actually a thing for me for years. I didn’t manage to successfully have anal sex until Noah. (Violent sodomy as a small child doesn’t count. No, I didn’t relax enough to make it hurt less then either.) He was the first person who could work through that fear. A number of people tried before then. It always hurt too much and the hysterical crying freaked people out.

I felt specifically bad and like a failure because I was not able to have anal sex with the people who wanted to before Noah. I have had a lot of intense feelings of lack of worth because I was not able to do what people wanted. I was supposed to.

My sister is probably really who taught me this. I think she was the main consistent source of this. She talked about sex all the time and had sex in front of me and consciously and deliberately told me what I should go do.

I can’t play the game any more. She’s not ok. And my children do not deserve to be exposed to her.

But I’m losing out on cousins who fix my cars. And cousins who know how to help with plumbing. And all the free babysitting I want. And holidays full of people. And a niece and nephew who really need my help.

I can’t play the game any more. I’m not at the bottom of the shit hill any more and I won’t allow them to set the terms of reality. I just can’t. But it is hard.

You know how I moved around a lot as a kid? I was often staying with relatives. I didn’t know them well and I didn’t stay long so I never got to know them… but they took me in. Over and over. My family takes care of children. They would have been very happy to know my children.

But it’s a trap. It’s all or nothing. You have to play the game and keep the silence or you are out.

I’m out.

6 Replies

Last night was a slight change in how we have been doing therapy. I told her I needed to take a break from history because I am struggling with boundaries in a few places in my life and I need help.

About the doctor–she says that I should carefully rehearse exactly what I need to say about this specific stomach pain, “It started right after my second daughter was born about two and a half years ago. It is a very specific sore spot that often feels like it is pulsing. It is usually in the 1-3 range of pain with it being more intense while I lie down. It isn’t majorly painful but it is tender and prevents movement in some directions and it causes me to be stiff and awkward so I don’t twist which is hurting my back. So yes, this spot riiiiiiiiiight here probably needs an ultrasound.”

She said to very consciously and deliberately decide for myself that all of the other parts of my medical history are a distraction to dealing with this problem and I don’t need to mention them until and unless I want that doctors help. She said if they try to shunt me off to psychiatry give them her number and she will deal with them.

I will feel like a deceitful liar but that is the least anxiety-producing way to get through this. I will actively feel like a lying liar but oh well. It will be ok. I can probably live with being a lying liar with people in the medical community.

We talked about friendships and how those are working for me. How I feel very obliged to offer help and assistance and compensation–essentially–in order to beg people to be my friend. I have a bad habit of “giving till it hurts” because I don’t tell people on day one that I can’t do what they really want to have someone do. Everyone needs support. I am not in a good place to support people. Not really in any way. I have to be ok with the cycle of life I am in and not beat myself up for how little I can do for people.

We talked about how when I think about people in my head and I kind of do the weighing and measuring sort of shit that I do I can think I am “higher” on 99 different topics but I will always be able to find some specific thing that makes this person is “better” than me. More essentially valuable or useful. More lovable. More worthy of help and assistance.

If I can’t handle driving I need to not feel like a pathetic person who is unworthy of relationships just because I can’t drive to people. I need to just deal with where I am.

We went through people in my life and made specific lists for her records of “I react to this friend like my sister. I react to this friend like my mother. This friend reminds me of my brother (now deceased). Etc. I did that because I feel like I put people in categories and then I just react to them without examining what I am doing. It’s not positive.

Side note–P, of course you are grandmotherly. You are extremely grandmotherly and wonderful. You are part of a small pool of women who kind of interchangeably provide similar sorts of interactions with my kids. You do it when you have time and space and energy–not when I need it per se. WHICH IS OK! This is what I am trying to figure out how to accept emotionally. My kids don’t have a “grandmother” who is specifically invested in their welfare. They have wonderful and kind women who for whatever reason love me and by extension are nice to my kids–absolutely. We have good and kind people.

There is a difference in actual family and people who are good friends who visit once or a couple of times a year. For one thing, I can’t talk about most of my friends with my kids. I don’t know stories about my friends lives that are appropriate to share with my kids.

My adopted Dad sent me an sms asking what stuff he should send to the kids. I called him back and left him a voicemail saying he isn’t getting the easy way out of this. He needs to talk to me. I’m not sending an sms list.

We had a lovely phone call over the weekend. I told him the best thing he could do for his relationship with my kids is to send them pictures of himself and his life along with little stories explaining the pictures.

The only stories I know about my Dad are stories I can’t tell my kids. They don’t want to hear about how hilarious it was that Dad went to a leather con in Denver Colorado and his biological brother ended up at the same event and found him while he was doing a labial inflation. And his wife was on stage (with me) screaming her fucking head off while I beat on her like a piñata and tried to all but rip her nipples off. It was a heavy scene.

Those are the kinds of things I know about my Dad. I can tell you his entire Leather history start to finish. I can describe who he has played with and what he specifically did. I know his partners and their partners and and and.

Not things I’m telling my kids.

Most of my friends come from sex communities. I have pretty much the same situation with most of them.

P–when I talk about the lack of grandmother I am not trying to demean our friendship nor how kind you are to my children. I am trying to explain that there is still a hole for me. You are good. You are wonderful. I am so grateful that I have you in my life that I would quite cheerfully kiss your feet. Please for the love of shiny green apples don’t decide that I am an ungrateful bastard who is unworthy. It may be so but I hope our relationship is little enough work for you that you can overlook that flaw.

I desperately need what you have to spare in your life. But beyond that I still have this cavern of need. You aren’t available to fill it. That is appropriate. I try very hard not to be bitter or demanding or difficult about the fact that my friends are clearly giving me the limit of what they have to give.

I am at a place where I don’t think any friendship can give me what I need. Having a mother is simply different from having a friend. That does not mean my friends are not doing their jobs. They are wonderful and kind and supportive.

You are still supposed to have a mom. And I don’t. And it hurts a lot. I know my whining gets old. I know that I am over thirty and I’m not supposed to still be whining about how much I miss my mommy. But I do. I started missing my mom when I was three and have never stopped.

I can only do what I can do. I have no one to catch the ball if I drop it. Thus I need to decide for myself what I can and can’t be responsible for. I can’t feel like I owe people things. Not reassurance, not comfort, not support. I don’t have enough reassurance or comfort or support for me. If I turn around and hand off what I have that is actively self-sabotaging myself and that’s not ok for me to do to my kids.

Even though my inability to follow through on relationships feels to me like absolute proof that I am a piece of shit I need to ignore that. I have to leave a lot of run-off room for my kids’ needs. They spike unexpectedly sometimes. I have to just have slack sitting around. I can’t run near capacity all the time. I just can’t.

My therapist and I talked a fair bit about how I value other people for having knowledge but I devalue everything I know. She asked me if I think a professor is a low status position. I laughed and said that I try to give occasional professors respect but mostly I’m not real flattering in their direction.

I read a lot and I know a fairly ridiculous array of things. Sometimes, like yesterday in my kitchen, I get to show off. I am perceptive. I can listen to under two minutes of a conversation other people are having and then go through and fill in the blanks on a whole bunch of behavior patterns in the life of someone I have never met before. That’s kind of cool.

That’s why I talk so much and so loudly about rape and incest and ptsd and all the other things I talk about as loudly as I can. Because I am not actually a special snowflake (Even though Lisa made me a very nice special snowflake ornament to argue with my premise.) because the things I experience are textbook and happen to other people too. And those people rarely have spent as much time reading about it as I have. Not very many people are as dedicated to studying their body as I am without getting into a profession where you settle in to one specialty and become a specialist in how you deal with people and their issues. You narrow down what it is you know.

I’m not a specialist. I can’t dive deep into one subject and immerse myself in the way that true professionals do. I’m not a doctor. I don’t have the memory or attention to detail. I will frankly say that when there are two things that have perhaps vastly different functions but nearly identical names… I’m almost certainly mixing a lot of those up. I’m sure I have mistakes in my brain. I am sure I read so fast that I kinda skim sections and miss important details.

I am not a doctor. I am not a psychologist. I am not any kind of specialist. But I’m good at recognizing my tribe. I can recognize our behavior and smell. I think it kind of weirds people out that I meet them and talk to them for a few minutes and decide, “Ah. You are my tribe. Ok.” because then I speak very familiarly. I make predictions. I talk as if I know things about them. I’m usually right.

I do get it wrong. Not everyone is my tribe. I have shitty luck predicting people who are not my tribe.

I obviously derive a lot of feelings of positive self-esteem from this knowledge. I obviously feel an elevation in worth or value or status because I really and truly can, occasionally, make peoples life better just by talking about things that I like to talk about.

Tell me there isn’t a career somewhere in that.

Bucket List (first draft in this journal)

~~run a marathon~~
~~have kids~~
travel for a year outside the country
live for one year in one place in a foreign country
hike a substantial portion of the Appalachian trail
drive cross country with my kids studying historical sites
do the training to be a first responder
reach at least the penultimate belt in a martial art
someday I want to read a whole new book every day for a year. this will have to be fluffy shorter books, obviously–yay for libraries.
I want to write a novel–like… fiction.
I want to write a graphic novel series. No, I’m not trying to be Neil Gaimon. I see pictures in my head and I want other people to see them and that is probably the best format.
I want to write a childrens book.
stop smoking or needing any anxiety medication–I will fucking shrink my life.
go to the Michigan Womyns Music Festival with my kids
go to all of the Disney parks in one year, err… maybe not Paris again.
go to all 50 states (I have seen 27 so far)

Those are all things I have already told Noah about. Well, I’m not sure he has been told about the hiking part. He has this magnificent coworker who did that after college. She has no idea how much she inspired me. As much as I overall am not in love with Noah’s current employer I have to admit that his coworkers here are way cooler than average.

On the train yesterday I was at the part of The Moral Animal where he talks about low self esteem as a survival trait. Ha. It is very probable that this pervasive belief that I am worthless is my way of trying to convince people that they no longer have to kick me to knock me down any pegs. I’m at the bottom. It’s cool. I know. Just leave me alone.

Then I came home from therapy and talked to Noah. I asked him to explain what kind of intimidating I am. Once a student (who was a large football player who dwarfed me) slowly backed away from me and told me that I looked like I was about to rip his head off and piss on his neck. What in the hell do I do that causes people to say things like that to me?!

He told me it isn’t that I am that intimidating looking. But I am very unpredictable and startling. I don’t fall into any of the obvious patterns for people who look like me and I very carefully mask how far off from the norm I am until I explode because I have carefully learned how to mask all the small distress signs. There is no sign whatsoever that I am feeling even slightly off until I am hysterical or screaming or something.

He said it is kind of like if a big guy was kind of vaguely menacing in the direction of a little bitty old lady and she turned around and snarled like a tiger and pulled out a large knife.

Clearly the guy is no longer in control here despite outward appearances of being more intimidating. Now there is no obvious script to follow. Oh shit. He says I’m like that old lady.

I didn’t say thank you.

I am so difficult to predict and when I explode it is so intense that people can’t handle it. They have no coping methods for people like me other than avoidance. And by the time the old lady pulls the knife–should you have been running thirty seconds ago? oh shit.

When I was a child I was literally taught that there is no such thing as a fair fight. If you fight you fight to win. You fight to cause as much injury as possible. You have to escalate with as much force as you are capable of instantly because otherwise someone will want to slowly escalate and walk up the ladder to find out what you are capable of and they will eventually find the ceiling. If you come back with an overwhelming show of force they don’t try again.

I want to learn a martial art because I have been practicing my physical approximation of the movements I will need since I was a child. Stomp their toes. Everyone has weak feet. If you are close enough and the need is dire enough pull your fingers in to make a hard line on your hand and you have to hit really hard to break their nose and hurt them enough to let you get away. Knees are weak.

When I used to walk through the mountains past kids who gave me shit I carried a stout stick. I took out several much bigger kids by hitting their knees.

I’m not trying to make it sound like I won most of the time. I didn’t. I lost. I got the shit beat out of me because there were almost always more of them and they were bigger. But I made sure they fucking hurt.

Now, as an adult, if someone attacked me I would find a way to rake them with my fingernails. That’s DNA. Even if it does result in a more severe beating. No one is getting away with it again. I will have evidence.

Sometimes I don’t like where the rabbit hole goes.

The social mask

7 Replies

In the past three weeks I have had three people comment on the difference between what I write and what they see when we are together. That makes it something worth writing about.

Of course there is a difference in how I act in public and the crazy shit I write about. If I acted in public the way I write about on my journal I would be in a lot of danger. If I was unable to mask my craziness it would be extremely unsafe for me to go out in public. I would risk being 5150’ed again. I never want to go to a hospital again. I can’t lose it where anyone can see.

If you look at the whiteboard in my room there is a lot written down but if you notice very little of it is outside my house and even less than that is any kind of social activity. I generally keep my “socializing” to under twenty hours in a week and most weeks I’m under eight hours.

That is how much “playing the game” I can do right now.

On the occasional week when I try to push it and do more because that week just happens to be busy I am usually sorry. I will have to spend a lot of time in the bathroom crying for all the hours over my “maximum” I am actually out. It is embarrassing and humiliating and I feel ashamed of myself the whole time.

Being around people involves a lot of active and conscious thinking about “what I am allowed to say”. The consequences for getting it wrong include being asked to leave, being asked to never come back, or if I genuinely lose it and start freaking out I may lose my kids or get arrested.

I’m not exaggerating and I’m not wrong.

I’m aware of how “hysterical” women have been treated throughout history. I have done a lot of specific research. In olden times I may have had to walk around with my tongue in a heavy vice for days or had to wear a collar with spikes on the inside while tied to a post in public so other people could remind me how bad I was.

The consequences in the modern area are downright soft and fuzzy in comparison–I get that. Nevertheless I don’t want them.

I don’t want them. I don’t want them. I don’t want them.

I’m awake in the middle of the night because my stomach is hurting because I didn’t smoke before bed. By 2:30 my stomach hurts and I can’t sleep through it. Then I start having racing thoughts because that is just what I do when I am in pain. Then I risk being a mess tomorrow. Lots of breakthrough crying.

My kids know I cry. I can’t hide it from them. I try my best to present it as, “Everyone is different. I cry a lot–most people don’t. That’s ok. People vary.” They are still young enough that they don’t really ask questions about why.

Noah deals with/occasionally sees me crying as I’m going about my day. I wander around working and crying at the same time. That’s just life for me.

Yes, I believe this is something that I have to carefully keep people from seeing. This is probably, by hour, the biggest part of my life and I have to make sure no one else sees it happening. Or I will get in trouble for being bad again.

The fact that I wander through life feeling very sad and crying for many hours of most days is something I have to carefully hide and prevent people from seeing or I get in trouble. Over and over and over.

It’s not hyperbole. I can tell stories all day and all night long.

I’m at a very low ebb on my ability to “play the game” with other people because I require so much of myself for my interactions with my kids.

My kids know I cry. They know that I have wonky chemicals in my brain that make me prone to have my eyes just start watering and it’s not a big deal and they know that sometimes I think about things that happened long ago and it was bad and I’m really glad that my life is different now and I’m so glad that I know my kids. They know that they are nicer to me than anyone has ever been and that I am grateful.

Well, so far Shanna parrots these things back. I say “them” but I am still working on brainwashing Calli but Shanna is pretty ingrained at this point.

I feel really stupid sometimes but when I am saying in a calm and clear voice, “It’s ok to be mad at me. I do things you don’t like. You are totally allowed to have those feelings but it is not ok to call me names and it is not ok to scream at me. Try again.” I still have tears running down my face. I can keep control of my voice at this point–it is great effort but I can prevent myself from descending into the ragged sobbing sort of breathing that makes talking hard. I sound “like a teacher should” but my eyes are watering.

I feel weird knowing that my children are going to grow up thinking that your mom crying all the time is normal and something to ignore. I feel very ashamed of myself. I feel like I am proving those people right who told me that I should not be a mother because someone like me isn’t capable of being a good mother.

I’m not selfless enough? I don’t have enough self control? For the past couple of years of “bad cycle” which probably actually started as postpartum depression after Calli was born combined with Shanna hitting the age I was when my abuse started so I started having daily intrusive flashbacks.

That was not long after Traci–my therapist of seven years–OD’ed on heroin and I ended up finding Sharon who totally sucked and tried to talk me into believing that I had Disassociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personalities) because of how I segment my behavior when I am around people.

I don’t think I really took the placenta pills as long with Calli. I stopped taking fish oil. I haven’t started again even though I know it is a mood stabilizer. I have other supplements my therapist wants me to start and when I think of the act of swallowing pills I start to gag and my stomach aches just thinking about it.

By the end of the time I was taking all the god damn supplements my midwife wanted me on (15 fucking pills a day) I was frequently spontaneously vomiting them up.

My body knows that when I take a lot of pills it is because I want to die. That is what my body thinks is happening because I was dumb enough to treat my body disrespectfully enough that it doesn’t trust my intentions anymore. Smart body.

I really am not so good at taking pills. And the idea that I should take a handful or so every day for the rest of my life is something that I don’t think I can get my gag reflex to move past.

Even though everyone keeps telling me that if I only swallow this pill my life will be magically better. It hasn’t worked any other fucking time I’ve tried some fucking magic pill. I’m still me. I’m still completely broken. I still don’t have a family or very much consistent support–I am building it. I’m trying. But it is dependent on having people in my life who actually show up to do it. I don’t have many people volunteering for that role and of the people volunteering I have to evaluate for them if they really have enough spoons to be dependable *for me* because I am a god damn special snowflake with standards through the roof.

If I know I will have an out of proportion negative reaction to someone acting how they typically act I need to be very careful how much time I spend around them. It is not their fucking problem I’m crazy and that I have had “bad life experiences” that cause me to want to yell at them. If I can’t be tactful (otherwise known as keep my fucking mouth shut or on trivial topics) then I can’t be around people. I silently back away from most relationships because I don’t think I have the right to hurt people by being mad at them for being them.

I don’t know how to reconcile the fact that it isn’t that I actually think they are wrong it’s that it is very hard for me to keep straight in my head what kind of commentary is appropriate in which settings. I’ve been introduced to a much larger number of social situations than most people. I have moved somewhere between 60 and 70 times in my life. Each of those times involved meeting somewhere between five and hundreds of new people all in a big rush. I have lived at every socio-economic level from the projects to multi-million dollar homes and I went to school with Steve Wozniac’s kid. His son was best friends with the brother of the girl I was best friends with. Many of my friends had server space hosted by Woz because that’s just how things worked. That’s where I lived.

I could pull out my sock puppet prime minister (it’s a long story–maybe I will tell it some day) and name drop all the long list of two degrees of separation I have with “important” people.

So uhm yeah. I walk through life feeling like I am the lowest status person in every single room I walk into. I assume that if I say the wrong thing and offend the wrong person (and I have no god damn idea who the “important” people are–I constantly fuck that up) I will be told to leave and all of a sudden there will be a tidal wave of nasty gossip about me behind my back.

How many illustrative stories do I need to have? I could start with less than two years ago and move backwards over thirty years and have many dozens.

Being the scapegoat is hard. I have a lot of behavior patterns that get me into trouble. I don’t understand exactly how they work. I don’t understand why I am so god damn offensive to people but I am.

I tend to go through life believing that people who are still here are the ones around whom I have been most successful at wearing the right mask. I look for signs that I am breaking their social contract and I try very hard to apologize for fucking up before they have to call me on it because I don’t want to be rejected just because I said or did something that was inappropriate for someone in that kind of relationship.

I hyperventilate over this and hyper-analyze every thing I say or do after the fact and try to look for reasons I might have crossed a line and pro-actively send an apology. I really can’t handle losing many more friends. It devastates me so much.

Oh for the love of toast of course I hide “what I am really like”. I am unpleasant and needy. No one likes people like that. I really can’t handle having more people decide they don’t like me en masse. So I need to be god damn careful about everything I say and do.

After smoking for half an hour I think that the stomach pain has changed enough that I can try eating and see if that will help.

I have been trying to track my marijuana usage more. Why am I using it. When. What, specifically, is it doing for me that I need? Mostly it is the end of the year and I am freaking out about how much I spent (I used edibles basically exclusively for about two months while I was training for the marathon to clear some of the lung funk–yes smoking is disgusting and I would like to stop–and those two months cost as much as the whole rest of the year combined and gosh it sounds like way too much money for any medication and… accompanying shame cycle.) thus I am beating myself up about how much I need to stop using it.

If I’m going to damn myself it will at least be with accurate data.

I go through ~ 1/8 of pot/week. I wake up earlier than everyone in my family and I have some then. It calms my stomach pain enough for me to eat. On days when I don’t smoke before breakfast (often out of impulses of shame because I am a disgusting person for needing a “drug” I should just “willpower” my way through after all) I generally am unable to eat because the stomach pain is such that I have constant nausea and I have a ridiculously strong gag reflex. If I try to eat I have a lot of violent stomach pain because my stomach is not fucking interested in accepting food.

If I am in a restaurant this is when I have to get up and leave the table. I either go to the restroom or I go outside because I need to cry. I need to cry because it hurts and because I am ashamed of myself for crying in public just for something stupid that someone else would be able to hide. I know I am not exhibiting the proper social behavior and if I keep that shit up in public I will be fucking sorry.

At home that is when I say in a small voice, “Excuse me” and I go smoke enough to relax my nausea and deal with my gag reflex. I usually feel better after eating. But I am also still stoned after eating. So who the heck knows exactly where the better comes from. But on days when I don’t smoke I probably don’t consume a full meal worth of food in a day. I physically can’t. It hurts too much.

So a year ago when I went to the doctor I layed out all my issues and I was told she wouldn’t deal with my stomach until I dealt with psychiatry and psychiatry told me to take a pill I didn’t want to take, stop breastfeeding instantly (because this new magic pill is extremely toxic to me and the baby), and stop pot instantly or psychiatry would not work with me.

Uhm. No. Fuck you. I know what those side effects will do to my life. They will make it so I can no longer play the game when I have to because I will be debilitated by the side effects. I have watched this effect cascade with person after person in my life. No. No. No.

I will not work with a fucking doctor who spends five minutes talking to me and then wants to prescribe a medication that will destroy every coping method I have and tell me that I just have to “deal with it” while smirking at me. That is demeaning. You have studied what trauma does to the brain? Well so have I, motherfucker. You have not done a single fucking blood test. You have not done a brain scan. You have not taken a full medical history to find out how bad the side effects have been every time I have been forced onto a drug “for my own good” and how often that has lead to significant public blow ups and more trauma.

You don’t give a shit. It shows on the fucking smirk on your face. I don’t fit into your mold of a good person so you want to drug me into a stupor so that I stop doing what I am doing and blindly do what you say. No. You don’t know what I have to react to or why.

Fuck you. You want me dead. I can’t come to any other conclusion and continue to survive.

It took twenty-five minutes (I’m uhm babbling paragraphs in between random distractions else-net Oooh shiny! That’s a lot of why it sounds so incoherent and random-ha.) but I finished a piece of string cheese. Minimal gagging but I haven’t been able to eat any nuts yet. And my graham cracker is untouched.

We will have new insurance cards soon. I promise that as soon as I can log into the new insurance system I will make an appointment. I promise me.

An awful lot of why I am smoking the pot is to deal with my massive stomach pain. I feel very scared because if I reveal that there is an anxiety portion to the pain I risk not being treated again but if I don’t tell the doctor that I may not get appropriate treatment.

I feel like I am in a bind and there is no way for me to get out of it. I have to just throw a dart at a dart board and pray that I get a doctor who will want to help me without requiring that I instantly trust them enough to send my entire life headlong. No one deserves that kind of trust from me. Give me a fucking break.

I know that my intense fear of having to deal with a doctor for this is making the pain escalate unbearably. I understand that link. I understand that for most of the year the pain has stayed at a consistent 1-3 with spikes up to 5 or so when I try to eat without smoking but since I have been actively been thinking about the fact that I have to deal with this soon the pain has been spiking to 8 and 9 and causing me to nearly vomit spontaneously in public–which is kind of embarrassing. And shame producing. Knowing that my body may betray me at any moment and make me a public spectacle makes me feel constantly ashamed of existing. I should just fucking die so that I don’t have to go around inconveniencing people all the time.

When I vomited on the floor of the hospital when I was twelve, when I was waiting in the lobby to get a cast on my broken arm, my mom grabbed me, hit me and hissed: “You just did that to get attention.”

Over and over I sobbed “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.“

The nurse tried to tell me it would be ok but I couldn’t stop crying.

When I go out in public I generally did not smoke because I don’t do so before driving. Which means I have to get through breakfast without smoking if I want to go to the park. I generally don’t eat much or sleep properly the night before with anxiety about the spike in stomach pain and the increased difficulty in being patient with the kids.

That’s a lot of why I limit excursions out of the house. Those days are ridiculously hard on my body. When people come to me I evaluate how offended they will be if I am stoned and I try to uhm match expected tolerance because generally what I think other people will be ok with is lower than what I actually usually use.

This is the big problem with using any medication so sporadically. The effects are needed when dosage isn’t present. I have many days where I wake up and I let the negative thoughts get too entrenched before I start smoking (it is an unpleasant process and I don’t enjoy it and I don’t like being “the kind of person who smokes pot” and and and) so often I have to kind of psyche myself up first and bribe myself with the idea of being in a more pleasant mood.

The amount of conscious dealing with shame I do every day is really hard. I have to consciously deal with it or I will not eat and not sleep and get weak to the point where I am not physically able to complete my chores without slowly dragging chairs all over the house so that I can move from chair to chair to finish my cleaning.

Because I am that compulsive and crazy. I have to “appear” functional. I “have to” maintain certain appearances or I risk terrible consequences. I don’t know exactly what they will be or from whom. Sure as the sun will rise I will have someone else in my life whom I trust a great deal turn around and tell me that I am abusive and terrible and they are disgusted by me. It is going to happen again and again because that is something that people just feel free to say to me.

That is part of what I mean when I say that I am the lowest status person in every room I walk into. I am a white trash whore and I can never undo that. In any room I walk in to someone may decide to go off on me. It happens when I happen to say something I shouldn’t say.

Usually that means I answer a question honestly. People ask a wide variety of questions in the casual chit chat process that if I answer honestly the person will respond with horror and disgust and move away from me exhibiting great hostility. I have to guess which lies to tell and when.

When my mask is slipping, like it was this weekend, I went to a friends baby shower. Want to know my connection to the group? I knew the host from working together (where deliberately obscured) and the party was at the house of someone she has known since middle school–they were both around our mutual place of employment. I went out with both of them like twice. I uhh begged to eat out my friend’s friend. She let me. Then never talked to me again.

Till I walked into her house this weekend and she didn’t remember me even slightly (or at least gave no sign of remembering me–she certainly didn’t know my name).

This uhm, happens to me pretty regularly. I’m very careful what questions I answer when I talk to people in general. I uhm was kind of stupid.

So the father of the host (he has known the mom-to-be since she was a kid, remember) was chatting me up and he told me that his wife wrote a book but she is afraid to publish it. I uhm wasn’t thinking so I said, “I actually wrote a book and self published. If you look at places like Amazon publishing or there is a wide variety of competing models you can be e-published for practically nothing and you can get books in print and deal with hawking them at book stores yourself for fairly little money. That is how publishing often works, actually.”

So then he asked me about my book. He had to prod me more than once. “Oh you wrote a book? I bet it’s a lovey dovey romance isn’t it? I bet it’s all cutesy schmoopsy and adorable right?” heh heh.

Cue my not amused face.

“No, actually it’s a memoir about the first eighteen years of my life.”

*snicker* “No eighteen year old has done anything worth writing about.”

By that point in the conversation my heart was racing and I was breathing fast and I could feel the flush rising. I had been kind of avoiding eye contact. Then I looked straight at him and said, “Well I I was moved more than fifty times, I was homeless, I stole to eat, I went to twenty-five schools in diverse combinations of socio-economic levels and race: everything from the projects to graduating high school in Los Gatos after only going to that school for my sophomore year and only three semesters of high school total. (said to someone whose kid went to one of the worst schools in the east side of San Jose [these two places are right next to each other and Los Gatos is where all the rich people live]) I was raped or sexually assaulted dozens of times over more than twenty years, including my father and my brother extensively abusing me, along with a bunch of random neighbors. I self-mutilated for decades as part of how I dealt with what was going on with me and every mental health professional I have worked with has been freaked out by the variety and range of trauma I have been through.

I had enough happen to me to justify a book.”

At this point picture him kind of mouth agape blinking kind of fast. “Oh uhm. Wow. Yes. You would have enough to write about.”

We didn’t really talk after that.

I let my mask slip. I did not tightly contain my answer enough. I wasn’t appropriate enough. Mostly because I didn’t give a shit. I will probably never see this man again. My connection to him is tenuous enough that I just don’t have to fucking care if he thinks I am awful for unloading on him like that. (You wouldn’t fucking believe how often people screamed at me for uttering even four sentences of the above paragraph in a challenging voice. I should not be speaking. Shut up. I don’t have the right to make people think about unpleasant things.)

The conclusion I draw from this is I shouldn’t exist. Or I should simper and play stupid and lie and answer questions in evasive ways and for the love of crisco stop writing and talking about this shit.

So I do my very best to force my lips to be literally closed for as much of the time I am with other people as I can. I end every social interaction with sores on the inside of my mouth from chewing it so hard to keep from saying anything that might be inappropriate.

Yes. It is enormous physical strain.

I can’t tell how these descriptive/prescriptive things work about labels. People tell me that I should eschew thinking of myself as bad and stop thinking about my behavior as bad. But I regularly get into trouble I don’t want to be in because I don’t have appropriate filters. Bullshit I’m not bad. I’m punished for being bad often enough that it seems imprudent for me to stop trying to filter.

I want to be a nice person. I really fucking do. I am tired of being told I am not wanted and being abandoned. I am tired of people kicking me really hard and feeling free to tell me that I am a disgusting piece of shit but they still love me and if I start jumping through x, y, and z hoops then they might be able to have a relationship with me or help me. But not until I jump through all those hoops without support. If I don’t do that first I won’t be able to prove that I deserve them bothering to waste time and energy on me.

I uhm can’t bend to whims like that. I have to live in my body 24/7 and deal with the consequences. I have a very tightly controlled life that I can manage because I limit it so severely.

But when I say, “I stay home” I don’t mean that I hide in bed crying all day. I mean that my kids and I play in the yards and garden and walk for miles around our neighborhood when I stay regularly medicated thus I can sleep and eat in a way that allows me to be physically able to.

Since the marathon I have been fucking around with almost not using pot to see how this works for me. It’s going really badly. I need to see a doctor.

The reason I don’t just “get a vaporizer” to try it is because when I spend money on something believing that it is unlikely to solve my problem and it is money I don’t want to spend… it’s kind of doomed before I start. I can’t be on marijuana forever. I do have to figure out how to live life without it in order to do the things I want to do.

But what does that even mean? Part of it is that my stomach god damn hurts and I have to heavily medicate in order to deal with the pain and nausea in order to eat and sleep like a “normal” person and have any appearance of functionality.

Being in pain actively triggers my PTSD symptoms and causes flashbacks because I have such a long history of being in pain and that being something I am not allowed to talk about or deal with because “You aren’t really in pain–you are just a whiny hypochondriac.”

My mother screamed at me and threatened me that “my arm had better fucking be broken or she would break it herself” because I asked her to leave work early and come home (I was 12 and alone all day every day because I was on year round school and had no friends or family) to take me to the hospital. It was broken.

Something is wrong in my body. Something that I can’t fix. Something that I am self medicating (said with substantial scorn and derision) to deal with because doctors have actively told me they will not provide service until I jump through hoops I can’t jump through.

I can’t abruptly switch psych meds right now because I have no reliable help with my children. When I go through med rounds the side effects make me extremely unpredictable and historically very violent and my self-harming goes through the roof and my ability to function completely disintegrates and I spend hours every day literally hiding either in closets or under beds because I want to kill myself so much.

I literally cannot do that to my kids. There are reasons I’m not on psych meds. If someone bothered to ask me what those reasons were I would be happy to explain and I am willing to bet a compassionate doctor would hear my history and agree that it probably isn’t the best idea to try to force me to take a psych med as step one of any and all physical care.

That is not a way to establish trust because my behavior will abruptly be destroyed and out of control and erratic and I will completely associate it with my relationship with that doctor and have to stop association because I can’t continue to listen to the advice of someone who is going to force me to go through that given that I don’t have the fucking resources to deal with dropping the ball on the ways I am currently functional.

It feels humiliating. But that is the reality of my life right now. I stay home so that I can always handle talking to my kids in the tone of voice I want them to talk to me. I have to keep my physical stress levels down enough to not freak out when we are in an environment where I have less control.

Watch me at parties. If I stay seated the whole time I have a much better chance of being able to have conversations because being there makes me physically weak because of the strain on my body of having to be hyperaware to such a level. If it is a stand-and-mingle sort of party I am going to spend a lot of time walking in and out of the room because I have to go find somewhere to sit down and sob hysterically because standing in that room and trying to talk to people hurts my body so much.

No, this isn’t something that is obvious to people around me. If I was visibly contorting with pain people wouldn’t talk to me. If I said anything other than “Oh I’m fine” “Great!” when people ask me “How are you?” then they won’t ask me any more. And they won’t talk to me about anything else either. They try to keep a wide distance between them and me because I have revealed that I have needs and they are very fucking sure that isn’t their problem and they don’t want to get involved. That’s a direct quote. I get told that a lot. “I’m sorry. You have a lot of needs and I don’t want to get involved.”

Uhm, I didn’t ask you to do anything. I don’t fucking ask people to meet my needs. I can ask for help with wants–I have to be very ok with hearing “no” or with the fact that there is a better than 50/50 chance that I will be stood up because that is just my historical percentage. Because if I ask someone for help with a need all hell breaks loose when they let me down. My relationships don’t last through me asking things of people other than the pleasure of their company on sporadic occasions. I am doing my very best to ensure that I understand my place and stop fucking up this boundary.

Having this sort of level of need as a background thead in my life why won’t anyone help me means that I don’t understand how hard it is for people to meet my needs. I am not good at understanding the limits of how I should ask for things. When I ask for actual needs to be met I have to understand that the person may just not show up or may not feel like it any more once the time comes or have some emergency in their life that is more important than me so I have to suddenly scramble for how to figure things out at the last second without the normal planning time I give myself. It feels very unfair at the time I’ll tell you.

I go through life knowing that I am “not rational” and I am “over-sensitive” thus pretty much no one needs to give a shit what I think or feel because I’m a piece of shit.

No, I do not act in public like I have the thoughts I have. It would be incredibly dangerous. It’s not hyperbole; it is simply true.

I should have seen this coming.

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I have had several men ask me in the past day if they would be on the list of people I pulled into a room to “have a talking to”.

I can’t answer and that is really intense feeling. I want to answer. I desperately want to. I want to be able to absolve of guilt. I want to be able to hand down sentencing.

These aren’t my secrets. If I go about telling men, “You but not you” then I risk revealing what has been told to me in confidence. The women who have confided in me did so with the rock solid belief that I would never betray them. I have to continue to earn that trust even though it is driving me insane.

I can’t answer any of you. I can’t say, “Oh of course I haven’t heard anything about you!” because even if that is true–that just means I haven’t heard anything. I can’t give anyone a gold star that says, “Certifiably not a rapist” unless I go talk to every partner you have ever had.

Unfortunately in my little world the burden of proof isn’t that I haven’t yet heard anything. I have to know it is true or I won’t say it is true. The emotional burden of guilt from being wrong is simply too high. The absolutely strongest recommendation I can give is, “I haven’t been told anything about you.”

And even that reveals the fuzzy outsides of what I have been told. It starts to narrow the field. What if guys start comparing notes to see what I said to whom? That’s completely conceivable. How can I maintain confidentiality that way?

I just can’t respond about this topic. Not really. I will respond to each of you individually (probably after finishing this blog–I haven’t been at a computer since I hit post yesterday) because I appreciate that you are someone who cares about my opinion. But I can’t answer this question. I just can’t.

My honor doesn’t look like the honor everyone else carries around but I will defend it tooth and nail. I gave my word that I was a safe space for these women. I can’t dishonor that.

Even though I want to go beat some people over the head with big sticks because of what I know. I have to keep my fucking mouth shut. I have to smile and give that asshole a hug when he comes up to me at a party because if my behavior radically changes towards him he will probably figure it out.

I can’t out people.

I can tell my secrets. I can tell my secrets all day and all night. I can write or scream them as much as I want. I can’t tell other peoples secrets. That is an individual journey. If someone is forcibly outed that becomes a new trauma. It can’t be a healing process. I don’t get to hurt people like that.

The shape of this community role was actually discussed in my last therapy appointment. She asked me what I take pride in. I told her that I take a lot of pride in the fact that traumatized women find me and feel comforted by me. I wanted and needed someone to go to. I had no one. I have become what I needed. I work very hard at it.

Maintaining confidentiality is part of that. I cannot be trusted if I cannot keep my fucking mouth shut.

Have you noticed how hard it is for me to keep my fucking mouth shut? Oh man.

I was asked several specific questions by a good friend that he felt self-conscious leaving in comments here (totally ok!) about how consent works. He has had a very different set of life experiences than me (women don’t tear my clothes off much–at one point in time I was very upset about that) and he has to cope with things I haven’t imagined yet.

I think it is going to take a couple of days before I can fully answer the questions. I don’t want to give a half-assed reply. I think it deserves serious thought. When men I already love bring me questions about how they can better understand consent in their life I feel a great responsibility to answer in a way that is a)useful b)non-harmful to the man (they do matter too) and c) something that has an actual set of logic behind it.

Thank you for caring about my opinion of consent. I am going to think very carefully and answer you fully. I don’t want to be unclear or unable to explain my thinking. I hate it when I do that.

I have a ridiculously busy day off-line ahead of me. It is going to be a day that combines a wide variety of different high anxiety situations for me. But a kind of anxiety that centers around am I really good enough to be the person in this position in this interaction?

Today I have the opportunity to have a sit down with an eighteen year old girl with borderline personality disorder who is getting into drugs and casual sex via the internet. When she leaves me she is going to stay with her Master overnight.

I can barely stop myself from rubbing my hands together with glee. I have trained for this. I can’t control her. I can’t decide how her life goes. But what I wouldn’t give to have had someone like me when I was that age.

Then I get to go to Dickens Fair and apologize to the friend who kind of catalyzed my leaving Facebook because I deeply value the relationship and I don’t want their to be hurt feelings over my deleting the stupid account. If I can’t keep my emotions in check it is my responsibility to deal with the kinds of input I allow into my life. Facebook, for a variety of reasons, makes me significantly more unstable. I need to eliminate it from my life. I’m sorry she was the one standing closest when I noticed but it is really not her fault.

And she is one of the fucking coolest people I have ever met in my whole life and I don’t want to drive her away because I am crazy and unstable and dramatic. How about if we just have those in person interactions that make us both feel good about ourselves. Facebook is not good for me. It’s not about her. I have those kinds of issues with lots of people online. I don’t read tone well. I hear it with the voices in my head.

Pretty much all the voices in my head hate my guts. Everything I read comes through that filter. It’s very hard to circumvent.

I like in-person interactions. They are real. They aren’t about me fighting with my ghosts while someone else is trying to have a conversation.

I don’t want to detonate that relationship for a laundry list of reasons. In person I don’t freak out about what she says to me because I can hear her voice. I hope that it will be ok that I can’t handle facebook.

Sometimes it feels very humiliating dealing with the limitations of my brain. That is what this is. I have to accommodate what I need even though I am having a completely irrational reaction. Whatever. I can’t rational my way out of it. It happens over and over uncontrollably. The only thing I can do is remove the stimulus.

And then enjoy people in person instead of clinging to facebook as a way of holding on to a thread of contact. I can’t weave a tapestry out of those threads. I need the in person. I need to change what I have been doing. I hope this turns out to be a positive step.

And even if that friend decides she can’t handle my drama (reasonable) I will still be at Dickens with someone who has a current higher thresh hold for my shit. I will accept the grace while I receive it. She knows she is chaperoning me so that I feel safe.

That’s a pretty big gift. I need to walk through the day feeling that gift. When I feel really scared I know that I was given a participant pass by one friend and another friend is keeping the dark at bay. I am not the untouchable I believe I am.

These lies will pass.

probably a good decision process

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I am at a weird stage of thinking with regards to bdsm. I feel like I am slowly migrating into thinking that it’s pretty broken and fucked up to be pining for people who will let you hurt them a lot. I mean, I get it as an urge. But it’s broken.

What these people is for there to be more people who are broken inside who want to be hurt. Not every masochist is broken–but honest-to-dawg masochists are rare in my experience. Mostly if you want to be heavily beaten or made to bleed you are pretty broken. Sometimes it isn’t directly related to any specific trauma–many masochists come from reasonably great homes. But they got broken somehow.

I don’t feel equally about all kinds of pain. I’m thinking specifically about the heavy players. The ones who have less of a “let’s play a game together” and more of a “I’m going to put you in your place.” Traditionally I don’t play very well with the “let’s play a game together” people. I’m not playing a game. I think I should be hurt.

I feel very confused when someone “gives me a spanking” that doesn’t even turn my ass red. I feel like, “Well there is an hour I can never get back.” I feel compelled to hunt for the bruises. I’m not a stoic bottom so it takes someone who really wants to make someone cry for me to get there.

I want to digress and give a disclaimer: I use very heteronormative language most of the time. This is because I have had an easier time finding guys to play and/or have sex with. In my experience women and transpersons (going in either direction, with or without surgery) take a lot more energy from me to woo them. They want to be sure I like them before they give it up. I often go hunting with very low energy because I want the hunting to replenish my energy. Guys just need me to show up and not say no. So my language is very heteronormative. I don’t know what to do about that. By the numbers I have slept with ~125 (+/-5ish?) people. I lost my excel spreadsheet years ago so yes it is approximate. I have slept with 5 glorious people who fell somewhere not on the binary and with 40-ish women. If women and people not on the binary were easier for me to pick up I don’t think there is any chance the numbers would skew so high towards men. Anyway!

So when I talk about feelings about predatory people I am talking about my experiences with men and why those experiences bother me.

I wish it didn’t come with a general distrust of men too. I truly do. But whether you like it or not I need to keep me safe. It is a slow and gradual process for me to trust a man. Mostly the harder I try the further away from trusting them I get. Very few men actually strike me as non-threatening. There are very few men I will cheerfully leave alone in a room with my kids.

Want to know the weird thing? I am ok sending my kids on a walk with someone I know to be a tremendous pervert because I know they will never be alone inside a private space and I know my neighbors are watching and I know my kids know their routine and Shanna is not ok with deviating from it. But I feel mixed about the conversations inside.

Every few years I have to drop a lot of balls. I think that is ultimately how I keep from killing myself. I just walk away from relationships and communities. I feel guilty for culling the bdsm community and I’m not sure why. Am I doing it because I think I’m better? I don’t think so. I don’t want my daughters to learn that women should be hurt at home. Including because my friends think it is fucking funny to insinuate all the fucking time.

But I’m too sensitive. Maybe so. Maybe I just can’t accommodate your issues because I have to deal with my own.

I don’t want to do the polarizing thing. I need this specific characterization of women to disappear from my life and that doesn’t mean that all of the people who do it are terrible people who deserve to die or anything dramatic like that. What does rejecting/pulling back from the community even mean?

The vast majority of people involved in the bdsm community like to play games while having sex. Most of them are perfectly normal, happy, well adjusted people. Why am I tarring them all with the same brush? Why am I being like that? Because you still follow the trope that says it is fun and funny to hit people.

My kids don’t hear that shit. In our life you learn how to hit people because you will, unfortunately, at some point need to defend yourself. There are bad people in the world who are not interested in respecting you or your body and you need to be able to handle that.

She can find out if she likes being spanked once she can kick the shit out of somebody who ignores her “no”. And I feel weirdly like I hope she feels ok with talking to me about the experience and like I hope I never hear about any part of her sex life. I think that is a normal dual thought process and I can live with that discomfort.

I am having a hard time with how often conversations come up with some people. I feel like it is “my fault” because I bring it up. I don’t think I always or even usually do. Sometimes I am stupid and I make the joke because I fell into feeling like I was one of them again. I am so institutionalized it’s kind of ridiculous. I think I should be hurt.

Noah describes himself as being calculatedly self-interested. He isn’t like the people who genuinely want to hurt people. I mean, we have done some fucked up shit–don’t get me wrong. (And honey–don’t try to prove you can ok?) You don’t pursue doing that to the point that it drives people from your life over and over. You were overly aggressive and intense for a lot of the people you dated, yeah, but not because you were beating the shit out of them.

It’s different.

I know a large number of men and women who feel they cannot be happy unless they have many people in their life to beat at a moment’s notice. I kind of feel live and let live about it. I mean I don’t think they need to stop wanting what they want because I have issues with it. But I don’t want to stand near it right now. It makes me feel intensely bad about the world and the people in it.

My masochism springs from a very deep self-hatred. This isn’t true of all masochists so my opinions and experiences are far from universal. I want people to hurt me because I believe I should be hurt. I can come up with dozens of people in under a minute who would agree that I should be hurt. Just knowing that makes me want to walk in front of a truck.

I think I hate that they want me to be hurt even more than I hate myself. I am running out of feelings of compassion. I am running out of feelings of trust and friendliness and love. I can’t keep ignoring how much this hurts me.

I don’t think it has always hurt me like this. I think this is part of this whole identity crisis thing. Being a mom is very all encompassing. I can’t model how to be a healthy whole person while nurturing the constant desire to experience pain. In order for me to figure out how to stop hurting myself I need to stop being around people who tell me continually that I should be in more pain. That really my life is not complete unless they get to hurt me. Preferably while I am sucking their dick.

I can’t do this any more. Maybe I would hate men less if they fucking talked to me differently. If I am not supposed to generalize to all men then I do not understand how I am supposed to keep myself safe. How am I supposed to go out and figure out who the problematic people are? How am I supposed to identify danger if I am not allowed to talk about it or address it as an issue?

The bdsm community is very broken. And I can’t fix it. I have other shit to do. That’s not my battle this lifetime. Unfortunately it is a kind of broken that is a specifically delicious poison for me. I want it. I miss it. I am not willing to model this kind of life in front of my children.

What does that mean? Does that mean I will never go to parties? No. I will probably go to parties with Noah. We like to play games. I can’t make much noise in our house because at this point we know all the neighbors and I get embarrassed. It’s hilarious. And I do like having sex in public.

I showed up in the bdsm community looking for sex. I found something different and went with it. I ended up in a relationship with someone who would far prefer to masturbate while thinking about fetish items than have sex. Noah says that one of the reasons he married me is because I instituted a quota for sex in a previous relationship. After my long-term bdsm relationship I told my next serious relationship, “If you want monogamy that is fine. But I need to have a lot of sex. Either you do it or someone else will.” Noah thought he could live with that.

All community, all family is a mixture of good and bad. If you throw out the bad you throw out the good too. But the ratio of good to bad has changed a lot for me. I need to keep my energy and my intentions to people who actually are part of my life. I need to stop waiting for people to care more and find time and… I don’t know.

I am busy enough. I have a full enough life right now. I deleted my facebook account because at least once a week I end up sobbing about something from there. I feel minimized or dismissed and it’s my own fucking problem. I read things wrong. I put half-assed stuff on there and people snap back. If I could shrug it off then it would all be fine. I can’t. That means I need to be a grown up and stop putting myself in that situation.

I want to keep my friends. That means I need to keep them in the size and shape of container I can handle them in. I am over-sensitive to things I read in text. I pretty much always put the most hostile spin conceivable on anything I read. When I listen to someone speak I am not able to overlay their words with the hostility in my head in the same way. It makes me like people much more.

I’m mostly up because I’m basting the turkey soon. Noah has to do the next shift because I need the sleep.

It is not anyone else’s fault that I hear a nasty, hostile track when I read things on the internet. I need to limit what I read on the internet. It’s not about people being mean to me. This is a consistent problem I have.

I already limit my social life a lot. I think that I need to stick with how limited it is. I need to stop listening to the people who believe I should be hurt a lot more. What that means, exactly, I’m not sure. Does that mean severing contact? Ending relationships? I don’t think I need to be dramatic about it. No one has done me wrong. I don’t put a lot of energy in that direction already. I am not sure that anyone will notice if I drop what I still put in that direction.

Noah is the only one who gets explanations about this sort of crap. I don’t tell other people that certain topics are off-limits. I just stop hanging out with them. I can’t change anyone. I can just choose to be around people who are appropriate for my kids.

I don’t want to be a grown up that bad it seems.

I think that when someone’s words and behavior show me that they think my life would be “better” if I was less happy and in more pain then I don’t have space for that any more. Is it mean of me? Maybe. But I need to matter some year.

I’m trying to stop wanting to be hurt. It is hard. I need to not be around people who tell me I should be hurt. If that bothers you, well, uhm, not to be an asshole or anything but go suck an egg.

That’s the line. If people have these urges about other people that’s not really my business. If it is kept away from my kids–whatever. Once you start talking to *me* about what I should do for *you* then I’m done.

I don’t owe any one any more god damn pain.

The dying time

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I feel like this part of my life is the grieving. I am giving up the dream of who I was going to be. In order to be reborn you have to die. Your hopes, your dreams–all of them have to be given up if you are going to be something new.

This is why people stay stuck in the same patterns with the same people. They don’t want to die. They don’t want to give up their deepest held beliefs and expectations.

I really have to. The things I have believed about myself are no longer particularly useful to me. Right now I have Lady Gaga’s song “Bad Kids” on repeat. In my head I will never be anything other than the bad kid. I am the person your parents warned you about. You were told to stay away from me.

I have rebuffed more than one request for help recently under widely varying circumstances. I don’t think I was graceful. I feel like I don’t have enough something to be able to be nice to me. If I can’t be kind to myself I have no kindness for anyone else. I’m sorry. It’s not that I don’t want to help. It’s that I have to live with how unpleasant I am and that is really hard. I don’t like feeling exhausted and angry because I never have the ability to even finish a thought.

I don’t know who I want to grow up to be. I can’t get my head around the picture. I keep trying roles on. I keep trying to get to the point where my mind can encompass it. Future me is hiding from me. I never tried to picture what I would do once I had the husband and the kids. Shit.

More than almost anyone I know I have followed the plans I set down rigidly for myself when I was a child. I got married 8 days before turning 25. My daughters were born when I was 27 and 29. Right on my schedule. I decided that years in advance.

I think that an awful lot of partner selection is deciding that you are ready to take your life in a new direction and you grab the person who looks the most likely. I certainly did that. I had a wide variety of options. I examined them carefully. I would visit their houses and sit quietly and try to think of how the life there would look.

I used to freak out at the idea of being stuck in this house forever. When I dated Noah the first time I firmly rejected him as an option. I didn’t want to be part of this life. I’ve changed the house and changed my future and it’s going better. I wasn’t able to believe that my influence would matter. I didn’t fit in the Disaster House. I’m not an open-invite-party-in-my-house person. I want to exclude the rapists. There were a lot of rapists at the DHPs. They didn’t do it at the parties, of course. But I know a lot of bad stories about people who were quite popular there.

I think I am uninterested in being part of any groups because when I go I am hyper aware of the sexual predators and I don’t want to be in the room with them. Everyone else want me to just get along. I’d rather take a baseball bat to their skull and prevent them from hurting another woman. I can’t just get along. I can not be there. That is my gift to society. That is how I keep my mouth shut.

But when I hide at home I don’t get to talk to women. My perspective is silenced. Kevin gets to keep hunting. Paul. Dan. These are popular guys! I’m not popular.

I feel like part of shaving my head was closing the door on hunting. It has been interesting to me over the years how often my hair is a factor in people wanting to fuck me. They comment on it. I don’t understand why looking at curly hair is so interesting while having sex. I never asked for clarification. It was just one of the things I had to work with so I did.

When women tell me that they can’t get laid I blink in shock. I think their standards are too high. Anna used to complain that she couldn’t get laid. The only person she wanted to sleep with was her best friend. He was from a ridiculously well off family so he was spoiled, self absorbed, and entitled. He wouldn’t date a girl who was that heavy. Or who had such a plain face. Anna certainly wasn’t ugly–but she wouldn’t win a beauty contest. She was not especially pretty either. And she only wanted the best looking boy in the room with the best body. No Anna, you can’t have that.

I think that most of the people I have slept with would be vaguely insulted if they understood my evaluation of their status. Hey, you’re sleeping with me you can’t be that high in status. If you were higher in status you would go fuck someone better. Someone prettier. Someone with a better body. Someone nicer. Someone who… God I don’t even know. Someone worth being proud of standing next to. A lot of men have indicated that they didn’t want to be seen in public with me. I am not the kind of girl you want to introduce to your mother.

And Noah fucking married me. What does that say about him? I think he was rebelling against his family. He married the trailer park slut. I don’t think a rich boy from Texas can do a more rebellious thing. Sure, by the time he met me I was living with Tom in a nice townhouse. Does that raise my status? I was able to fuck a higher quality of person by the time I was an adult.

It really doesn’t matter what status I perceive myself as having. When I go off into the world now people do not see who I was or what I have done. Mostly they have no idea. I am a highly educated person. I have worked very hard to learn about the world. I can converse on a wide variety of topics with fluency and ease. People don’t know I’m white trash until I tell them. I pass. Shouldn’t I just take that and run with it? Wouldn’t that be the smart thing?

In order to do that I have to essentially kill the part of me that I don’t want anymore. I have to kill my bad kid. She has to die.

I have a lot of attachment issues. A friend was admonishing me that I should place my faith in the love of Noah rather than wishing for the love of some mythical G-d. Thing is, I don’t have faith in Noah’s love. I wait for when it ends. I consider it unavoidable. Inevitable. I can’t put my faith in Noah. He will leave me. Everyone does. I’m trying to figure out how to build a self that depends on no one and nothing and I’m failing.

I don’t know how to envision my future. I don’t trust that anyone will be in it with me. All I can see is wanting to die. Wanting to be done feeling alone and unwanted like this. Even though Noah is sitting three feet away from me and looking at me with concern because I am crying.

I no longer believe in “forever”. I feel like I will be here until the wind changes. Then I will blow away. Will I still exist then? I don’t know. I don’t see where I fit. I don’t see a place for me anywhere. I can’t see a future for me.

Why is permanent monogamy so important to me? Because if I wasn’t monogamous I would use that hunting time to line up Noah’s replacement. Eventually I would begin believing that Noah was about done with me. Then I would withdraw. I would just end up at someone else’s house more and more. Noah thinks he would be able to get me to take 50% of the proceeds from this marriage. I think he underestimates the willingness of the California court system to listen to someone who says, “I want to walk away with nothing. Like I came with.”

I feel worthless. I feel like all that I do is meaningless. I am just an empty shell. I can totally envision me fucking up my marriage over sex. That’s why I closed the door on that specific flavor of broken. Even when I believe I am a worthless whore I am not going to go act like one. I am going to model appropriate behavior if that is the last thing I do.

It isn’t that I think that children must see monogamy at all costs in all circumstances. Shanna loves her Grandpa J and his wife C and his girlfriend D. That’s fine. I don’t do that. I pick up random men who like to be mean to women. It’s different. I don’t go find people who respect me. Just listen to how they talk to me. The people who want to fuck me don’t have a lot of respect for me. They want a hole. I don’t want my girls growing up seeing men treat me that way. Noah is nice to me. I want them to see that.

I feel guilty about it but a lot of the reason I can’t help people right now is because I can’t afford to feel invested in people when I have no control over the results of my effort. When I sign on to help I will often put in dozens and up to hundreds of invisible hours of work. In order for me to say, “I recommend you do _______” I have to be god damn sure. I don’t think most people operate the way I do. I will not give a half assed opinion in a situation where someone comes to me for help. I will give them the same support and education I would give myself. I just can’t do that for extra people right now.

I would not be able to hold my head up if I knew I was giving substandard advice. I am not that person. I don’t do that.

I say things like that and then I think–what is my image of myself? Am I the pathetic bad kid? I’m one of the most consistently reliable people I know–or I won’t commit. I take my word seriously. I am honest and dependable. I am consistent. I am not always what people want to hear or see, but I am going to just go on existing. Consistently. Fuckers.

Why do I think I am about to blow away? I am all but building a fortress. I am entrenched. I am settled. I have lived in this house longer than I have lived anywhere. I don’t plan to move again.

I have panic attacks if I am lax on dealing with recycling and I develop a stack of boxes. I cannot handle even the idea of moving.

This vision of myself is dying. But I don’t know what to replace it with. I don’t know who I am. I’m afraid this will be a very hard and dark winter. I’m already freezing all the time but I won’t turn the heaters on till November. Stubborn. That’s me.

Goodbye, old friend

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Yesterday someone I have been close with came and got me for lunch. We have known one another for twelve years. For a long time I considered him family. He came over for Thanksgiving and Christmas many times. Things have gone through a lot of ups and downs. He came over to tell me that his wife is pregnant and he is moving cross country. He assures me he will come here to visit so we will probably see one another as often as we do now.

If someone doesn’t know my kids at all because they have never spent any time with them I can’t think of that person as family any more. That is becoming a litmus for me. My children are my family. Perhaps they will be the only people I am that kind of close with. I’m doing my best to teach my children how to have the kind of relationship I want to have.

Family doesn’t say, “Wow. Your life is hard and shitty. Sucks to be you.” Family helps.

I think really hard about what I want to teach my kids. So far Shanna and Calli automatically share any good thing that comes into either of their hands. When I say, “Oh gosh. This is going to be a big job. I think I will need help if I am going to have the time and energy to go do fun stuff after” both kids jump up because they like doing fun stuff with me. Shanna already knows there is a sharp correlation between how much waiting on everyone I have to do and my willingness to play messy games. I’m a hard ass about it. I have to be or I will lose my fucking mind.

It was hard having lunch with my friend. Both he and his wife have told me emphatically and specifically that he has never said a sexist thing in his life.

Then why did he have to go on for four or so minutes when my drink arrived about how disgusting “girly” drinks are?

I also enjoyed the long lecture about how until a given Indian person has proven that he is significantly more competent than 95% of white people that he must be stupid and incompetent. You know this for a fact because your company outsourced a bunch of junior engineer positions to India and those people are just stupid. You know they will fuck up anything you give them at least three times so you try to carefully condescend to them so they can’t fuck up anything important.

Well, it’s overall a reasonable business decision, I guess. But do you really have to rant about those people like that? Are they really less competent than the average white person? Really? Really?! Have you met the average white person?

PEOPLE ARE NOT SMARTER BASED ON WHAT COLOR THEIR SKIN IS NOR WHETHER THEY SIT OR STAND TO PEE.

But you’re not sexist or racist.

Oh, when you were trying to describe the focus of your PhD research to people you probably shouldn’t say, “Oh gosh I’m not sure if I can dumb this down enough for you” and you probably shouldn’t say, “Oh wow. You have gotten a lot more sophisticated. You wouldn’t have been able to understand this before.”

You mean when I was nineteen and I had absolutely no exposure to computer networking I didn’t immediately ping on all the buzzwords? Sure yeah. At this point I am thirty-one and I have been living in this valley a long time. Yes I fucking understand virtual machines you god damn condescending asshole. It took someone assuming I wasn’t stupid and talking to me about them. Thanks, Noah.

When I talk to people I met twelve years ago the main thing I think about is how universal their lack of respect for me is. They are shocked I understand things. They are surprised I can understand complicated systems. Wow. That tells me a lot about what you think of me.

People who met me twelve years ago wanted to fuck me or play with me. I didn’t develop very many relationships with people in other categories. And they think I am stupid. Any hole will do in the dark, right?

I feel really weird about someone who will tell me over and over that he thinks highly of me while being casually dismissive fucking constantly.

There were a bunch of stupid, insulting little things. Every time he said something rude he would notice me flinch. He said, “Oh I didn’t mean that in an insulting way.” Oh, of course not. You couldn’t possibly be insulting when you react with horror over anything “girly.” Nope. I don’t know how many times I flinched. Mostly I stayed blank. He told me he couldn’t read my vibe. I said maybe I don’t have one. He said everyone does. I said maybe mine isn’t visible to him. He seemed upset by that.

I am not a figment of your imagination. I am not a construct that fits your needs. I’m a complicated person. And you don’t know me at all. If you know about my bdsm interests and not much else you don’t know me. Hell it’s getting to the point where I think that people who don’t know me as a parent probably don’t really know me. It’s a very different experience.

I still love him. That’s not the point. I love him very much. I have loved him for a long time. I’m really not up for continuing to feel put down, casually, pretty much all the time in conversation. Maybe I’m over-sensitive. Given that quite a few of my female friends won’t be in a room with this guy because they find him so insulting I doubt it’s just me. I just didn’t think I had a right to complain about how he treated me until several women said, “You know, you don’t have to let him treat you that way.” I don’t? But beggars can’t be choosers. I take what friends pick me.

Or I stay home. Alone.

He asked me how I have been doing. I told him I wake up just about every morning and catalog the ways I want to die. Everyone who told me that they would be there to support me through having children is gone. Because I am a giant asshole and they don’t like me any more. Fair enough.

I’ll stay home.

I’m not completely alone. I get visitors. My friends give me what they have to spare. I’m grateful.

working and sexual assault

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On bart. Yesterday was a whole series of adventures. I didn’t sleep much on Thursday night. Lots of anxiety and fuss and such. But Friday morning Noah let me sleep on the couch for a few hours because I wasn’t scheduled till the afternoon.

Working is such an odd experience for me. Noah told me to enjoy my busman’s holiday. (There is an old joke about how bus drivers go on vacation and drive around the countryside.) I washed a lot of dishes yesterday. I made a lot of ice cream sandwiches and two quiches. It doesn’t really feel like I’m doing something important or useful only this is all work that has to be done for this business to succeed. I think that the fact that I won’t benefit from the business at any point no matter how hard I work is part of why I’m just… flat.

But being there was useful because one of my internet fans came in and gave me a fancy-pants keyboard. Whoo! We had a really nice chat. I figured out who he was and we are a lot closer than two degrees of separation. It’s always funny to meet those people and go, “Oh wait! I know stories about you! And I have questions!”

When I talk to people in the kink/freak communities the whole topic of monogamy/nonmonogamy comes up. I think partially because when people make different choices there is the natural response to consider how those choices would work for you. It’s hard to explain why I want Noah to never sleep with anyone again and yet that’s the important bit. It’s not that Iwant to be monogamous. It’s that I want Noah to be and I know I can’t ask him to be without doing it myself. I’m grudgingly willing to accept that what is good for the goose is good for the gander.

Noah sleeping with other people bothers me. It makes me feel unwanted and unloved. Sure those are feelings I could work on but don’t I have enough to freak out about having to work on? For the love of toast why do I have to work on that specific bit of awful? No thanks. So we are monogamous.

But then I go out in public. For the first while I was there and working there was this hoooooooootguy. I looked up and saw him and I started salivating and I flushed and uhm more moisture appeared. Not in my mouth. Ahem. He was really gorgeous. God he was my type. Nerdy—this guy had to be a geek. Any other profession would kick him out. He had dark hair that was on the shortish side and a white streak and dark framed glasses. He looked like he could would smile when making someone cry.

It’s kind of weird to react like that. To want like that out of the blue given that I’m not allowed to follow my pecker through life any more. Why is it more important for me to say that Noah can’t have extra sex than for either of us to be allowed to do things we enjoy? Because seriously I enjoy anonymous sex.

I’ve been trying to come up with the whole list of people who have sexually assaulted me since I turned 18. It feels like I should get to the point where at least I know who I have to worry about. Dan. Paul. Kevin. That coast guard guy.

With Dan I wanted to have sex with him but I told him no unprotected sex. He got me drunk and had unprotected sex with me while I was unconscious. With Paul I wanted to have sex but I told him no unprotected sex. I was on drugs and unable to physically force him off of me. GHB makes it really hard to fight back. That’s kind of the point. Kevin was one of the few friends I had during a time when I was scared and lonely. He likes giving massages and I have always been in a lot of pain. I knew fairly quickly that I would have to say no to sexual contact every single time I saw him no matter how clear I made it that I was not interested, ever. I would often have to reach down and remove his fingers from my vulva or vagina while he was giving me a massage. I had to tell him over and over that surpriseoral sex isn’t ok. The coast guard guy spiked my drink but at least he used a condom.

That is my adult sexual assault history. I have done a lot of very heavy play with people that falls into the ambiguous land of consensual nonconsent but I would not accuse any of those people of being out of bounds. They did what I negotiated. There were others, like Matthew, who was so brutal and nasty that I felt physically bad and emotionally bad about myself afterwards but I don’t think it was sexual assault. I negotiated and agreed. It just turned out to be much heavier play than I wanted. And I never have the balls to say in the middle of a scene, “Whoa—slow down.” I don’t safeword. I take what people feel like doing to me.

Last night Kevin came into the coffee shop. I asked the other owners who were on shift if I was allowed to kick someone out if he sexually assaulted me years ago. They offered to do it for me so I wouldn’t have to. I took several minutes to think about it and process and decide. Then I squared my shoulders and marched over to Kevin. I said, “I feel really uncomfortable doing this but…”

He broke into my sentence and said, “I have to go.”

I said, “Yes. What you did to me wasn’t ok. No one should have to tell you no over and over. It’s sexual assault. Get out.”

He started to argue but I turned on my heel and kind of ran back behind the counter. I ran all the way to the end where I could duck down behind the coffee machine and cash register. I hyperventilated for a while and felt like I was going to puke on the floor. I pretty much kept my crying under control. It took more than half an hour before I stopped shaking.

This was one of the few times in my life where I was in a position of having to deal with someone who hurt me and I had multiple men offer to rescue me and solve the problem. I told them no. It’s hard to understand why it has to be. Why do I have to be the one to do everything? They wanted to help. They would have done fine. They would have solved the problem and I could have quaked with fear on the far side of the room.

But that’s just the thing. I am no longer 23 and alone and scared. A lot has happened. I have had enough experiences that I know the difference between things I have agreed to and things I have refused. I have gotten to find out what that is like. I didn’t know before. It has always been true that I have to just do what I’m told and accept unwanted, painful sexual contact. That has just been life for me. But not any more. Now I can say “Get out.” I feel like no one will believe me. Who cares if a whore is raped any way. Heck, a lot of it wasn’t “rape rape” any way.

I may not get to actually feel safe this lifetime but I do get to say that people who have already hurt me have to get the fuck away from me.

Today is going to be another very long day. I ran ten miles this morning instead of twelve because I am going to have to walk across the city later and I think it will be ok. I’m going to go make food and food and food. I should eat before I start working. Yesterday I ate lunch at 11:30a and dinner at 9:30p. I can’t do that again.

I’m really weirded out by how much running is an appetite suppressant. Not what I expected. I have two offers of couch crash space tonight. I may go out after working. I brought one of those frightening 5 hour energy drink things Noah gets from work. I’m going to be going to bed at like 6pm on Sunday. I hope I have fun. I hope I don’t feel too anxious. I hope I feel like I am still interesting to talk to even if I won’t be sucking anyone off.

It’s hard to believe sometimes.

And after working all day Saturday I’m tired. Holy moly. Lots of working. Tired. But I want to go out!

If there is a predator in the room I’ll find him.

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I just had an important realization. If someone sends me a message out of the blue saying, “Hey I was talking to _____ about you! It was great hearing how highly they think of you! It made me miss you. I hope you are well.” and my response is to go talk to _________ and say, “Stay the fuck away from him he is a predator” then I should probably not be “friends” with this person on social networks.

That’s a boundary. I like finding boundaries.

I told him no more than once. I don’t call it rape because tongues and fingers don’t count, right? But I said no. But I kept going back. I was lonely. I didn’t really have other options. I kept saying no.

I don’t want to have to keep saying no over and over. Once really should be enough.

don’t be mad

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So I found a ptsd sufferers support forum. Want to know what they recommend? That I get more obsessive about house cleaning. Yes!

I feel weird and bad about my depression. It feels quite shameful to be this depressed. I am one of the most fortunate people to ever live, how fucking dare I get depressed. When friends in the mental health field start openly worry I feel quite bad. I shouldn’t be worrying people. It’s not very kind. I’m fairly sure I will manage to avoid killing myself for another fifteen years at minimum. Even though I’m depressed. It feels more polite to just shut up about how I am feeling. If I don’t think I am actually likely to do something suicidal I should shut up about feeling like I want to. It’s a “cry for help” and that’s lame. It’s not actually. I don’t expect any one to do anything. I don’t expect anything to change because I am talking about how I feel. I don’t think I do it because I want help. Well, I do.

When I explained to my friend K how I was feeling she said, “How about if I take the girls for Saturday. You have enough on your plate.” I don’t particularly feel like I want people freaking out and panicking over the idea that I might kill myself presently (really I’ve been suicidal for decades there is no sense in getting extra nervous about it now) but it feels nice that people think, “Gosh you feel stress. Here is a bit less stress.” It feels like a gift.

I feel less helpless today. I don’t feel like an animal caught in a steel trap today. I think my body is too exhausted to manufacture those chemicals. I’m pretty fucking tired. And when I was exhausted and past capacity yesterday I didn’t have to also dig deep and find a way to kindly and gently meet the needs of my children. I got to be a selfish bitch just kind of wandering through the world.

Holy shit it feels good. I’ve been doing more of it just lately. Consciously putting myself in the mindset where “I am just a person existing and I only have to care for myself.” It’s weird. Do you know what I do when I only have myself to care for? I clean the house. OF COURSE I WOULD.

It honestly felt good that I got to greet Noah and the girls in a house that was clean and ready for anything. I could react to any request without having to do a bunch of prerequisite steps. That is what drives me crazy. “No, we can’t bake because I have to do dishes and clean off the counters and go to the store first.” Those beginning steps are doozies. If you don’t have anywhere to work you can’t work. If you don’t have ingredients it’s a non-starter. I’m having a hard time with adjusting to what “prepared to work” really means.

Abrupt topic shift: I’ve been told that I should be mad at Noah. Which feels pretty funny given how much time people spend telling me I shouldn’t be an angry person. The thing is: getting angry with Noah serves none of my goals.

I am absolutely willing and able to see that Noah goes above and beyond for me. No one is perfect. Somehow I feel like we fit together so well because no one else understands our shortcomings and properly appreciates us. Noah told me he was over committed. Noah told me that he can’t keep up what we are doing. I have to believe him when he says that. Immediately. Instantly. With love and support. I can’t get mad at him for telling me in a small little boy voice that he can’t do everything he would dearly love to be able to do. When he takes his courage in his hands and tells me that he is going to fail me… he already feels bad. He doesn’t need more shit from me.

Noah works like a demon for me. For us. For our family. When he hits a wall that is because he is cruising along at 80 trying to be everything and do everything for me.

Noah has a full time job that requires more than 40 hours a week and between 5 and 10 hours in commute. Then he has this book he is writing (I’m mildly shocked and appalled by how much money that has earned so quickly) and he is an adjunct professor for CMU on the side. And he does a lot of solo kid care (around 20 hours a week). And he wakes up every day and makes breakfast. He does a fair number of dishes. When I am fussy and whiny and the house is a big mess he cleans up. He comes home from work and makes dinner several nights a week.

When Noah comes to me and tells me in a very sad, very small voice that he can’t keep up what he is doing… I can’t come down on him. I can’t get mad at him. He is working at an unsustainable pace. I know that. When he falters it is normal and natural–not shameful.

It’s still very disappointing. And it’s hard that I have these expectations in my head he can’t meet. It’s not really his fault that he is so busy working on my other expectations that he doesn’t have the time or energy to get through all of my expectations. I have a lot of them. I need to be responsible for most of them. He truly can’t bear any more weight.

I feel lucky. When I met Noah he was kind of a slacker. Not really, but he wasn’t exactly motivated. He worked because he liked what he was doing but he wasn’t goal oriented. In the almost eight years I have known him he has changed. It’s hard for me to reconcile the boy he was with the man he is. I need to not act like he is a boy anymore. He truly isn’t.

When my man runs as hard and as long as he can to take care of me it isn’t right for me to sneer and call him a boy who isn’t living up to expectations. Near as I can tell that won’t lead to a happy marriage. I would honestly really like to have a happy marriage.

But I still have these expectations. And sometimes I am disappointed. Right now I feel like I should think of some more creative solutions beyond “be mad at Noah” to solve this problem. I don’t feel like that would actually help.

I can be honest and say that I try to avoid getting mad at Noah. I will pay a very high cost to avoid being mad at Noah. It is far easier and more comfortable to be mad at me for wanting too much. That’s an old reason to despise myself. My mom spent two decades telling me that I want too much. I’m selfish. I’m self-absorbed. I’m too needy. No one will ever give a shit about me. I know. It’s a lot easier being mad at me than him. It’s comfortable and familiar.

I use Noah up. I wear him out. I wring him dry. I feel like it is my fault he has nothing left by my birthday. Maybe if I wasn’t so fucking needy the other 364 days he might have some “want to” left by my birthday. I doubt I am going to be less needy any year soon. Actually, I think I will. I am far less needy than I was two years ago. I’m going to need less support from Noah fairly soon, actually. Shanna already does for herself. Calli is trying.

Sometimes it feels like running is a lot easier than standing still. I ran 23 miles yesterday (I actually ran for a surprising amount of it) and that was easier to do than filling the hours until Noah and the kids came home. I didn’t know what to do with myself. So I sat down for a bit and I ate and I smoked and then I cleaned. I spent hours cleaning. I don’t feel like I am capable of sitting down much any more. No matter how tired I am. I have to keep moving. Keep doing. I’m not sure why I have ever thought of myself as a low energy person. That was part of my story “I have to have my kids early because I’m a low energy person and it will be much harder when I’m older.” On crack.

Yesterday morning when I was about to head out the door (I was quite decadent and lazy and I didn’t leave the house till 6:30 because I didn’t feel like running in the pitch black) both little girls woke up just as I was leaving. Calli hugged me and kissed me several times and said, “Bye mama. Mama happy.” That’s her way of saying, “Goodbye and have fun.” Shanna said, “Do you have any food with you? It’s going to be a very long run today and you can’t get through a run like that without food. Have you packed food yet?” Yes I packed food, thank you for checking on me. I really appreciate it. I started crying. I told her that I appreciate her thinking about the needs of my body. Sometimes I’m bad at that and I’m glad she cares.

Ironically, I gave my huge bag of trail mix to a homeless guy. I stopped and took the pot edibles out first because I’m not that nice. But he was there. And he had a dog. And he looked so much like Stephan that my heart broke. When I see homeless guys who look like him I feel my heart jump into my throat. (He just looked like a homeless guy in the making. I think he’s gotten a hair cut since then.)

As a result when I was ~4 miles from home I stopped at KFC. I think that I could have gotten home noticeably faster if I hadn’t stopped and bought a mashed potato bowl on the way. Mmmmm. There is something about walking and eating at the same time that I like. I always have. From when I was a little kid walking and eating at the same time feels like a decadent treat. It feels like proof that I am more highly evolved and AWESOME than other species. Squirrels can’t do what I can do with food while moving with the same kind of speed and agility. Maybe monkeys but I’m pretty sure they don’t.

For some reason just knowing how many processes are going on at once in my body excites me. I am breathing. My blood is flowing. I am walking quickly so many muscle groups are responding quickly. I am eating. I am coordinating my hands and my mouth. My stomach is working. My throat is working. AND WHILE I’M AT IT MOTHER FUCKER I WILL SING. I’m not sure why I like it so much but I do. It’s this weird feeling of satisfaction. I am one of the most complex organisms ever. THAT IS SO FUCKING COOL. Let’s feel a little gratitude we weren’t brought into this life as an amoeba, ok? This is better.

It’s hard to feel like a depressed loser when you are sauntering up your street telling every neighbor, “I haven’t finished mapping it yet but I’m quite certain I covered twenty two miles today!” I feel a lot of pride. It’s weird feeling how the pride lives in my chest with the shame. It’s like they are next door neighbors in a condo complex. They take turns who is leaning over the back fence shouting.

Yesterday I talked to one of the neighbors for a while. Little M who isn’t allowed to come over anymore was apparently throwing rocks and dirt at her house. She told me she was thinking about calling the police over the vandalism. She threatened M to her face. Apparently M broke down sobbing hysterically and begged to not be sent away. I had a long talk with her about how she needs to never threaten that kid again because she has a hard enough life and for an adult to keep picking on her is cruel and unacceptable. Every fucking five year old throws rocks and dirt. It’s not vandalism. It is being a kid. Give her a fucking break. The neighbor seemed very inclined to listen to me once I started talking about the abusive alcoholic father. I think she will be nicer to M. I’m not saying let the kid get away with shit–but you don’t need to call the cops.

When did we become a society that wants to call the police because a five year old throws dirt? I feel so sad. I feel like there is no way for people to grow up and try things and see what happens in the world.

The other day Shanna got her hands on the last rogue bag of cookies and brought it into her room. I yelled at her, of course, because crumbs in your room attract ants ohmyfreakinggoodness how many times do I have to say this? When I finished dealing with the cookies I came back into her room and sat next to her. I said, “I have been so busy yelling at you for making messes lately that I haven’t stopped to say that it is really cool how much you have grown. You are very good at taking care of yourself. You are very good at figuring out what you need and how to get it. Most of the time you make very good choices both for your body and for being polite to me. Thank you. I do see it. I appreciate you a lot. I think it is wonderful watching you grow up. You surprise me every day by learning new things and I’m so glad I get to watch you.” She told me, “Thank you for noticing. I’ll learn about the crumbs one of these days.” I laughed and hugged her. I told her I believe so.

It feels like depression is this binary switch in my brain. It goes on and off many times a day. There are many things that bring me joy and when I feel those things I am distracted and the depression switch goes off for a bit. But I can’t do this on purpose. I’m not a rat and it isn’t a food pellet button. I can’t just decide to keep myself distracted. I can’t decide to feel joy. It just happens. Often in connection with my kids.

I feel like the most prideful person on earth when I look at my children. I feel like I will explode with good feelings when I look at them. How did something so wonderful come out of me? I am so grateful that I get to know them. Even though they make my life harder (and holy shit they do) I wouldn’t have it any other way. Without them I don’t have this joy on tap.

So I spend my days walking between depression and shame and anxiety and anger and joy. I can’t just sit down and decide how many minutes of a given day will be spent on which emotion. I can stack the deck in my favor. There are stress relieving choices I can make. But the stress relieving choices are unfortunately often choices that lessen my joy. It’s a weird balancing act. Less bad might mean less good too. More good might well mean a lot more bad.

Today I feel quite confident “not today”. Today is a day of rest. I will spend today with Noah and the kids. Noah will rub my feet because he is nice. We will cuddle and read together. I will get to touch Noah. This morning I am typing from bed instead of the garage because I haven’t been touching Noah much lately and I feel this aching emptiness without him. I like keeping my foot on him. He’s there. He’s real. He’s mine. I’m not alone. No matter how I feel, no matter how I think–he is here. I can touch him.

Noah has spent years trying to get me to understand that I shouldn’t have put up with things from Tom that I did. It wasn’t a “good” relationship it was just a lot better than what I had previously known. I don’t know if I put up with things from Noah that I shouldn’t. I know that, unlike Tom, Noah is working on things that benefit both of us. Noah is very serious about everything he has being for me. It’s a weird feeling. Someone wants me to have as much as can be given to me. I feel constantly unworthy.

I have been diagnosable as “mentally ill” for a long time. It’s not Noah’s fault. I don’t really want to come down on him for the results.

We all have things we want to do in this life.

2 Replies

I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of support. I think about it in terms of the idea of being a main character. If you are someone who says, “I want _______ but I can’t have it because ________ won’t help” then you won’t ever have what you want. If you depend on someone else to do work in order for you to go get your dreams then you are dead in the water on the first day.

I want to be a writer. I want it so badly that my fingertips itch. I want people to know my name. I have a lot of book ideas swimming in my brain. I’m working on different story arcs. I know what I want to say. I just have to find time to go say it. That is hard and frustrating. It’s easy for me to say, “I could do it if only I wasn’t stuck with my kids all the time.”

That’s a cop out. That’s saying that I am entitled to not have to do the work I signed up to do now that there is more interesting work available. Sometimes people get away with this trade. If you can go earn a bunch of money then eventually you can say that your time is worth money and it is worth paying someone with fewer skills to do the easy stuff. You can’t say that until your time is worth enough money though. Before your time is worth money you are a whining twat.

That’s more or less how it seems to me. When someone comes to me and complains that they could be more creative if only they had more spare time I blink then want to laugh then want to punch them in the face. Don’t fucking talk to me. I haven’t had spare time in more than four years and I’m unlikely to for another eight or so years. If I sit here and get nothing done I have no one to blame but myself.

I am to the point where, quite bluntly, someone whining at me that I’m not doing enough for them makes me violent. Very violent. I don’t have an extra five minutes of support to give myself let alone anyone else. But it’s not fair. I haven’t noticed life being very fair.

Is it fair that I have to frequently go pause my day in order to hide in another room because I am completely physically overwhelmed by the physical sensation of being raped again that I can’t really see the people in front of me and I can’t respond to them? Is that fair? It doesn’t matter. It is. I can’t stop it. I’m thirty and I don’t know if my body will ever let me stop feeling like I am being raped. It seems pretty unfair to me. It makes my life pretty hard.

If I don’t do anything it is my own fucking fault and I have no one to blame. I can sit here and be useless and cry about how hard my life is or I can do something. I choose to work. I choose to take home schooling seriously so I spend a lot of time that way. I paint my house a lot. (And painting multiple murals with two little kids is pretty fucking hard work.) I write. My first book has been downloaded well over a thousand times. I have worked on my house to the point where there is a place for everything and if the house is destroyed I can pick it up in about an hour. That was a really hard place to get to in a house this small with this many people and this much shit.

If I give excuses for why I can’t do things I am just giving them to myself. I am just telling me that I can’t do things. Fuck that. I can do things. Not if only I had support I can fucking do things. I am buff. I am strong. I am inventive. I am creative. I am determined and stubborn and very dedicated. If I want something I go fucking do it.

I’m getting a little tired of being told it is my fault other people can’t do what they want. If only I was willing to work a little harder. If only I would float a little more money… No.

No.

I’m not going to be devalued. I put up with Noah needing a lot of time “off” because Noah’s time is quite literally worth a lot of money and the more politely and respectfully I “tolerate” him having extra time to work the better my life is. It’s different. Noah is working himself into the ground in service of communal goals. I can uhhh, not be an asshole about that. I can be enthusiastic support. I can see what we are doing here. He’s not acting entitled. He’s acting like he has a really hard project in front of him and he needs to get it done. Supporting a family is harder than I thought. My naiveté was influenced by never seeing a financially stable house during my childhood.

It is interesting to me to watch entitlement in other people. Which people think they deserve more than they currently have without being willing to do any work for it?

My nephew started working at a movie theater when he was eighteen years old. He broke some expensive equipment because he wasn’t paying attention while he cleaned it. He quit after eighteen months because he wasn’t a manager yet and that proved they didn’t respect him enough. He didn’t have a steady job for the two years after that I knew him. No one would hire him.

If you want to “start a business” in the bay area I believe you should expect a minimum of 80 hours a week of work. I have seen successful business owners and I have seen unsuccessful business owners. I would have to hire a babysitter with money I don’t have in order to go work in an adult-only environment. That makes it financially impossible for me. So I do the stuff I can do at home. I write. I paint. I run. I do the things that are physically possible in my life right now. I can’t add more. I physically can’t. I already rarely get more than six hours of sleep in a night. I can’t cut time with my kids. House remodeling is on pause for a few years.

For someone to act like I am a big meanie for not taking on their burdens right now is really making me feel violent. I’m very angry and feeling very unappreciated and used. For something that will never give me anything beyond a warm fuzzy feeling and an occasional milkshake. I could pay for the milkshakes myself if I didn’t have to pay $10 fucking dollars on public transit every time I have to go to work.

I don’t really think I need people in my life who let me know that my time and energy are worth far less than theirs. With Noah it is literally true and the mother fucker still gets up every day and makes me breakfast. He doesn’t act entitled to my fucking service. He’s nice to me. He’s apologetic about needing so much time. He puts a lot of effort into working efficiently and productively. He acts like him having time “off” from the kids is putting strain on me and he tries to do what he can to minimize that. He’s a god damn nice man. I really like him.

Then there are these other… I’ll stop. All the words I want to fill in with are not nice. Thumper’s father says, “If you can’t say something nice don’t say nothing at all.”

I feel very angry with the world right now. I have a very unusual experience of the world only it isn’t. I’ve been reading more on father/daughter incest. My experience of the world is pretty classic. We really are the victims of more violence. More people rape us. We are more likely to be shouted at as we run down the street. People can smell us. People don’t like us. People blame us. We deserve every god damn bad thing that happens to us.

It’s kind of funny that part of how I build “personal status” in my head is by knowing that I am well educated. I don’t have degrees proving it. I used to have the books I have read as evidence. Not any more. We down sized. Now my library represents books from me, Noah, Shanna, and Calli. I own approximately 10% of what I have owned since I was eighteen–for books at least. I got rid of a lot when I left Puppy. I got rid of a lot more in my relationship with Noah. Then I got rid of more to make room for Sarah. Then Sarah took the things we had duplicates of (it was suggested by me in advance because long-term I will have more means of replacing them even though I don’t right now).

Right now my library is pretty empty. It feels like my knowledge is pretty empty. I no longer have proof that I am well read and that I know things. I no longer have physical reminders, at least to me, that I am pretty fucking smart. I know a remarkable variety of things. I do deserve to be treated like someone worth talking to.

Yesterday at the park two of the moms were talking about opera–mostly they were kind of laughing that they both abstractly thought they should like it but they didn’t know much. I uhhh started talking. The lecture ended about forty minutes later and their mouths were hanging open. “How do you know all that?” I used to be a technical theatre major and I did a lot of reading in my graduate program about traditional plays and I have had season passes to opera companies. That’s how.

But it’s really not a topic someone would think to come talk to me about, right? If I had my fucking library you would.

One of the things that I like and dislike about the minimalist approach to stuff is it forces me to build an additional layer between me and other people. I can’t volunteer things about myself silently. I can’t advertise with stuff. I have to prove stuff by doing. I don’t get an out. I don’t get to fish casually. If I want to be respected on a given topic and not be ignored I have to be willing to verbally, ever-so-casually, slap my dick on the table. It’s pretty rare that I bother but sometimes I do. I have a really big dick.

One of the lasting effects of incest is the daughters always know and believe and carry within themselves the knowledge that their needs are just less important. They simply don’t matter as much as other people. It’s never confined to just the father. There is a whole family, a whole community involved in silencing incest and allowing it to happen. No one wants to be upset. No one wants to have to think about things like that. So they don’t. So we know that we just don’t matter compared to other people.

I’m in this weird position. It is not good enough for me that my kids be with a warm body and ill supervised. It is not good enough for me that my kids be parked in front of a screen all day so I can get work done. My first and most important job is taking care of my kids. And I have some extremely long days. That can’t be helped. There is no one else to do it. I have to be nice to my kids.

I have to be nice to my kids no matter how high my panic levels are. No matter how high my stress levels are. No matter what is happening in the world around me. That is how you break cycles of abuse. My mother wasn’t mean to me because she hated me. My mother simply took out her bad experience of the world on me. That’s not fair.

I can’t invite people into my life who treat me badly and tell me I’m not important. I just can’t. Because I bring that rage and futility and anger into my home with my children. No one is worth that. No one. My kids need me to not be treated badly. It’s a really nice experience, actually. I get to try to find out what it means to have a whole life where I’m not treated badly. Because when I’m being treated badly I get angry and I stay angry. It’s the only way I know to protect myself. I don’t need to protect myself from my kids. If someone is making me feel threatened then that’s just not good and I need to not do that any more. It’s not like I’m deeply enmeshed or anything.

In life you have to make choices. You can’t have everything. You have to decide what you want and go get it. You can’t let people or things get in your way. I want to be a good mother before I want to be anything else. That means that things that make it pretty much impossible to do that job well need to go. That’s just how life works. I will meet my current obligations and be done.

I’m done going to a place where I am expected to care a lot about someone else’s problems and do a lot of physical labor at my own expense in order to be supportive when said person knows jack shit about me and my problems and really doesn’t care.

Done.

Even if no one else does, I have to care about me. I don’t want to do that any more. It’s time to stop. I don’t want a toehold in that community enough to continue being treated like this.

Stupidly defensive.

1 Reply

I feel strangely guilty for liking Disneyland as much as I do. I really do. I’m not alone. This is a grand passion that many people share. But I feel vaguely ashamed of being part of the cult. I’m even part of the time share. Cue jokes about lame people.

When I go down for the marathon I am getting an annual pass with Shanna. This is the last year Calli is free. Shanna and I will go four times if I get my way. I think I will. With an annual pass and a time share the only unusual expense is gas. And I have a fund for that. It’s less than $100 round trip in the blue car. I put about $40 extra every month into a fund for Disneyland travel. I don’t feel too guilty.

Disneyland is pretty much the only place I feel like I can trust people to be really nice to me. I spend my life on edge waiting for people to snap at me. That’s part of why Disneyland Paris is so awful. You go there expecting, you know… Disneyland and instead you get France. Fuck yourself very much.

I haven’t had an annual pass since before my parents divorced. I had one when I was three. That’s not true! I have the vague memory of buying one on the Christmas Day I spent there with friends after Tom and I broke up. I didn’t actually make it back to Disneyland that year–unsurprising I was busy figuring out being a teacher–but I bought one as a self-comfort thing. This time I have three sets of reservations so far. The fourth will be easy.

I am going to be there for the anniversary of my father’s suicide. I’ll be there on my father’s birthday (missing my mom’s birthday by three days). I will be there for Shanna’s birthday and I think I will go again for the fourth trip for my birthday. I have given other people trips to Disneyland for their birthday but I haven’t been for my birthday… ever. I really should stop giving other people things I want. People always leave me. Then I get to remember that I will go through great effort for other people and it’s not reciprocated. Fuck them. I should save my energy for me.

All told that will be nineteen days of travel. Noah will be there for the marathon and I suspect he will come down for my birthday. The other two trips I will be alone with my little girls. I can’t wait. I like traveling with them. I pare down my needs until we can move at the same pace. It’s a lot of fun. Watching Shanna and Calli navigate new situations and people are some of my greatest joys in life. Seeing them exist makes me feel very good about the world. See, I did make it a better place.

I like watching their joy and eagerness. I like watching Shanna run until she is so tired she can’t walk any more and she must be carried. I like watching Calli be brave and fearless… as long as she is standing behind me. Otherwise she is cautious around new people. I like watching my solemn, intense little girl light up like a roman candle when I walk into sight. I like being loved. I like watching how my children believe that love is absolutely limitless. Shanna goes back and forth between which kid she is going to grow up and marry. So far she is not picky between boys and girls. Sometimes she talks frankly about how she is going to have a wedding with one person and a hand fasting with someone else. (Thanks to Grandpa J, his wife C and his hand-fasted partner D.)

Shanna likes people of all races and physical abilities. If you will sit still and talk to her she likes you. Sometimes she seems to disconcert the large black men on BART. I beam benignly from behind her. The conversations are great. “Does your mother know you are talking to me?” “Yes.” “She doesn’t mind?” “Why would she? Are you a bad person I shouldn’t be talking to?” Then they blink in kind of confused/bemused horror. Then they just talk to her. It’s great.

I used to think Shanna was extremely physical. It turns out I was a first time mom who had never been around a baby. Who knew? From birth Shanna was obviously trying to pattern off of me. She wants to be like me. Calli wants to be like Shanna. Only she’s hitting milestones a lot faster than Shanna. If it weren’t for the difference in leg length I don’t think Shanna could catch Calli. Calli is starting to get mad if I don’t let her practice running with the group. “Me hurry!” Of course with emphatic scowl and pointing to the ground. Yes ma’am.

That’s one of the things that I think makes the biggest difference in how my kids speak on a regular basis. I say “Yes ma’am” to things. I use a lot of weird speech patterns, basically on purpose. I like playing with accents. It makes me happy. I use funny accents because then I consciously think about what I am saying and how I am saying it. Then I don’t snap. I’m not nasty. I use a lot of polite words in theatrical, emphatic ways.

I’ve never understood why other people think I am as rude as they seem to. I try. I really do.

I think people who are on the fence shouldn’t have kids. It’s a huge commitment. It’s a lot of work. If I didn’t feel like I was alive for this very purpose I don’t think I could do this. I would hate them and hate my life. But this is the life I want. So I’m trying to figure out how it goes.

I’m struggling with finding the last granules of patience I have left in me for a baby. Calli is still a baby. She gets a while longer. I told her that milk will be all gone on Tuesday on her birthday. Even though she is potty trained, even though I can’t handle nursing her any more… she really does still feel like a baby. It’s funny, when Shanna was that age I marveled at how kid-like she felt. Now that I have a kid I look at two and think, “Baby!”

I’m basing this intense belief on different developmental stuff I’ve read about. Kids’ brains work one way before three. It’s a large developmental stage. Then three to six is another big period. I’m not going to get into it. If you are interested there is a lot of research.

I’m thinking about pacing of the day and learning activities, that may not be obvious. I have a hard time with baby-pace. I don’t like it much. But I follow it. It’s not like I run my home like a daycare or anything like that but I consciously think about what kinds of interactions and reactions are appropriate. I can say things to Shanna I just can’t say to Calli yet. I feel like it requires intense concentration in my mind to censor things to an appropriate baby-place.

I am a volatile person. It has been very difficult for me to be mostly level and calm and happy for more than four years running with my babies. I freak out on the internet because this is the only place I have to put those feelings, those words, that part of my existence. People who watch me interact with my children who do not read my writing have no idea that I am depressed and suicidal unless I tell them. When I have told people (seriously, I think part of the way I am handling my mental illness is building up the responsibility to my community to not die) they are shocked and surprised. They never would have guessed! I think people aren’t very observant.

Everyone is motivated by different things. Part of what I like about staying at the Disney time share is the way it will push the kids into a foreign environment and they will get to find out which parts of their lives and routine is place dependent and which things are all-the-time-required. Like brushing your teeth. You do that no matter where you sleep. You have to eat no matter what. But things like clean clothes? Well… it varies. How you wash. If you wash. How dirty you get. There is a lot of variation possible in life. How do you roll with differences? How do you learn how to observe local customs and adapt to be like the natives? Even things like how do you learn how to use different versions of what you have–like a dishwasher.

When we are alone and going at their pace my kids can do at least half and sometimes all of the work to feed themselves. They can deal with a lot of minor cooking stuff (ok, Calli isn’t there yet–Shanna makes enough for two) and it’s easy to get them to do other cleaning stuff if everything is kept simple and slow. Calli sets the table while Shanna makes food. I think about how I learned to do things. I think about what it is they need to learn.

I think my kids will know how to cook more at five than I knew how to cook at eighteen. That is really kind of weird to me. I knew how to make ramen. I could open cans and microwave things. I could follow the directions on the back of a tv dinner. You can hand Shanna a (small) pile of vegetables and she’ll fucking make you soup. It feels weird to me that these things are so important to me. My kids will know how to handle food. My kids will know how to make a meal plan and go to the grocery store and come back with ingredients instead of boxes and make food. I learned it slowly over time as an adult. It’s been hard. It’s been embarrassing.

I have weird issues around food. If that’s not obvious by now. I feel very differently about what I/we eat when Noah is home than I do when he isn’t home. Taking his preferences into account messes me up. I have to think a lot harder about food and process because I’m trying to take a lot of different things into account.

When I’m alone with the kids I let Shanna do the best she can for as long as she can. She generally finishes enough for her and Calli. Sometimes I finish Calli’s share. Then I do mine. I don’t have to think about mine. It’s automatic and easy. I get territorial about feeding Noah. And if I have to take the time to do two adult portions it is a lot faster and easier for me to do basically three adult portions and call it a day rather than let Shanna slowly and ponderously do everything she wants to do. (cutting, cleaning veggies, breaking things up, assembling plates, whatever food task) Calli helps as she can. Mostly she sets the table and yells “Me do!” without being able to figure out which side of the plastic knife is sharp. It’s a process.

I’m looking forward to being alone with the girls for a few days. I’m looking forward to sleeping with them in the big hotel bed. I’m looking forward to simple foods Shanna and Calli can get on their own. I won’t bother too cook meat while we are gone. I may not cook much at all. We like fruit and raw vegetables with dip and bread and cheese and lunch meat and cereal. That sounds like a vacation to me. A glorious vacation. If I put a bowl of fruit on the table my kids would eat it. No matter how big the bowl was.

Abrupt topic switch: Noah timing stuff and my complaints about losing a year. I was told that bit was unclear. A while ago Noah and I sat down and fleshed out what he would like to do career wise over the next few years. Where would he like to end up. What is our plan for retirement (says she who doesn’t work)? If you are going to be my provider forever then we need a god damn plan because things don’t always work out just for hoping. If you want to get somewhere it’s probably a good idea to make sure you take steps in that direction.

For all that I am so rebellious and anti-authoritarian… I do have a high school diploma (this was complicated to get and I am the only one of my siblings with one–I am the youngest of four), BA, and teaching credential. I failed the MA, but I can jump through hoops. I usually don’t want to.

What path are we on? Where is this hand basket going and who is driving? So we made a plan. Then Noah had someone bring up an interesting idea. But it takes a year away from me. And leaves me standing with a year left in the baby stage and only a couple of drips of patience left and my husband about to make me a work widow. Apparently my response to this is, “Fuck you then I’m running away to Disneyland.” It’s ok. I’ll come back. I think it will be fun.

I think I will slowly replace my memories of my mother in Disneyland with memories of my daughters. It will be good. I will get to share my good memories. Shanna asks me a lot if I used to do ___________ with my mom when we are doing stuff. I try to answer simply and honestly without a lot of detail when it is bad. “No, doing this with my mom wasn’t a lot of fun. She didn’t have patience left by the time she got to me so it was hard to learn. I got in trouble every time I did anything even slightly wrong. I hope you feel like this is going better.” Said after Shanna had dropped about 1/2 a cup of flour on the counter, step stool, and floor. My mother raged. My mother screamed at me and told me I was a disgusting brat.

When Shanna has mastered a skill I feel a relief of fear. I no longer feel tensed up waiting for a blow. I feel like I am waiting for her to grow up without being abused before I can really trust that it can happen at all. I’m waiting for the abuser to show up. I’m waiting to get in trouble for her mistakes. I’m waiting to be told that obviously my daughter is a loser like me. Only it isn’t coming. I got us away. We can hide away and do things at her pace and move slowly and feel safe. It’s really nice. We can learn things at the pace we learn them instead of trying to hurry up or slow down on someone else’s agenda.

I think this last year of babyhood will be the last year that Calli is less capable than Shanna physically. I think that when her proportions lengthen out she will be a force to be reckoned with. I’m looking forward to it. I want them to run with me. I want them to challenge me to work harder. I want to learn how to run from joy instead of fear. I have spent my whole life running away. I don’t want to run away any more. I want to stay here. Except for trips to Disneyland. That’s just going home for a few days (as they like to say–it’s awesome).

My kids have to learn how to stand in line politely. They have to learn how to look at a barrage of options and make a choice. We live in the world we live in. Disneyland is not the world. But it’s a very safe testing ground of a lot of basic skills for very young children. I can relax and not worry about the assholes who feel inconvenienced by me having young children out in public. Shanna’s friendliness bothers people sometimes. They chew her (and me) out for it. I think she needs to learn how to deal with those assholes, yes, but man it will be nice to be in Disneyland. It really will be magical for my kids. I can. Why not? Why do I feel defensive? Because I don’t approve of all of the everything associated with the Cult of Disney™? I’m not even sure. I know it is wasteful of resources. It’s clearly a first world evasion of stress.

I don’t live in poverty any more. Why do I feel so ashamed of that? Why do I feel bad about being secure and having things? I feel absolutely required to believe that my preferences are wrong and bad. What other people want is more important. More relevant. More… just more. I don’t know. I am less. I should shut up. I should stay home and not spend money. Between the annual passes and gas Disneyland is going to be ~ $1,000 for the year of going. (Uhm, on top of paying the time share. Musn’t Forget That. It will probably not be fully paid off this year. It almost certainly will be paid off next year.) I get $100/month to spend on anything I want. We also have a $100/month “entertainment” fund. And Shanna’s spending money comes from her allowance. She has been saving up. She’s really proud of herself. I can afford this. It is within my means as a hobby. Why does it feel so much more extravagant than other things? I don’t know but it’s silly. I have small children. It’s a fucking great hobby.

Whatever. I should go start breakfast.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Category Archives: having limits

Thank you, hormones, that’s better.

Suicidal ideation

Playing house and thinking about destiny

I don’t think group therapy is working out.

February is non-stop.

Early Childhood Sexual Assault, Anger, and Parenting

I guess that means my family found my blog.

Not competent enough.

The loyalty trap

The social mask

probably a good decision process

The dying time

Goodbye, old friend

working and sexual assault

If there is a predator in the room I’ll find him.

don’t be mad

We all have things we want to do in this life.

Stupidly defensive.