Category Archives: having limits

Broken promises

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My mom likes to make promises she can’t keep.  Oh she always intends to do it when she says it.  She just isn’t very good at taking stock of what things are realistic and possible in life.  And she rarely has the willpower to deny herself something in favor of a later pay off.  It’s all stupid shit, right?  She promised she would take me to Magic Mountain every year from when I was eight on.  My siblings grew up with season passes and I heard the stories and I felt envious.  I went by myself when I was twenty-one.

One of the talents my mom has is sewing.  She’s a fairly talented seamstress.  I still have things she made from me and I wear them when I get the chance.  I have a Snow White costume and an Ariel (from The Little Mermaid) dress–you know the one when she comes down to dinner and brushes her hair with a fork?  That one.  My dress is awesome.  And my mommy made it for me which makes it extra special.  She made my Dickens costume.  I wish she hadn’t told me to buy the pattern and material for three separate Dickens costumes because then in the long run I feel bitter that (as usual) she doesn’t follow through completely on what she says.  I should just be grateful she did one.  Usually she doesn’t get through one.

I focus on the fact that in everything she said to me there was always a lie.  I always had to be careful not to get my hopes up when she said anything.  I would say I had less than a 50/50 chance of her following through.  That wears on you decade after decade.  I wish she had promised less.

“I’ll pick you up from school” was one of those ones I wish she had promised less of.  I would not be able to add up all the hours I sat around waiting to be picked up.  I understand.  She always had a reason.  It’s not her fault.  Ever.  It is always someone or something else’s fault.  Always.  Always.  Always.

I hold the people in my life to a higher standard of truth telling because of this.  Approximations are not good things.  Over-promising is the worst thing you can possibly do.  I try very hard to keep my expectations and hopes very low.  Too many people are fucking liars who are too self absorbed to even admit to themselves that what they are doing is lying.

There are sins I forgive easily and barely notice; there are sins that cause me to feel like I have to smite someone from the earth because they are hurting me.  The real solution isn’t to smite anyone.  I’m terrified that the solution is simply to never trust a word that people say unless they prove over years that they aren’t a liar.  Unfortunately I tend to trust more than I should.  I get lied to a lot.  Oh of course it is never a lie it’s just that people don’t think they need to have a lot of integrity in what they say.  They feel no need to be impeccable with their words.  Close enough is good enough.  And I die of a thousand paper cuts.

I don’t want my children to have this hostility and rigidness around promises.  I know it isn’t healthy.  It is isolating.  I certainly can’t hang out with people much.  I’m trying to figure out how much I can handle really having steadily in my life.  I want there to be a predictable pattern.  I want to have a pattern, damnit.  I’m really struggling because nothing else in the world wants me to.  Stupid life just keeps happening.  I really do want to see people and so far that has to be a flexible thing.

It is hard to be this lonely and angry at the same time.  I know that I have to be careful not to get too angry when other people are around.  I manage this with the kids by not talking at all.  It’s hard to do that with adult visitors.  Then they become discomfited and I have to try to knock it off.  I can see the visible discomfort spread over people and I feel a wash of shame.  Yup.  That’s me.  The angry one.  Then I feel so much self loathing that I am always the angry one that I just feel more anger.  I’ve been told a lot of times that feeling that angry around people is basically abusive.  I’m a monster no matter what.  I just am.  It doesn’t matter what I do.

Ok, I kicked the cabinet door off the wall.  I suppose that is something terrible and horrible.  Because more shame really makes everything better.

I have had trouble running since the grief ritual.  I feel so overwhelmed with anger that I can barely see straight and it makes me stumble so I am running more slowly and carefully.  I don’t want to injure myself; I truly don’t.  I don’t want running to become my latest method of self-injury.  I want to find joy in my body.  It’s hard to do in the dark and cold.  I miss the afternoons.

I feel stuck in this anger.  I am so frustrated and anxious.  I need to go proofread six more chapters back from my editor and that’s scaring the crap out of me.  I am so tired of reading this story.  I want to avoid it and I want to get this done and over with.

When I say I follow the scorched earth path I mean that I will forever say anything I want about someone and shun that person from my life.  I will be as harsh as I feel the need to be.  I can be a very harsh person.  It is obvious when I am truly done.

I am struggling with some things in my close personal relationships.  I don’t want to regret the things I write, ever.  I want to always know that I am writing a truth I feel comfortable standing behind.   Right now I am having a lot of very strong irrational emotions.  I don’t know how to deal with them.  I am already saying things that are impossible to take back.  Dear sweet Jesus at least I will keep them off of my blog.  I’m struggling.

How can I talk about what I am experiencing without giving any information or judgment.  hm.

I feel unappreciated and used.  I feel like I am getting the realistic version of an impossible situation.  I feel tightness in my throat.  My neck aches.  My shoulders ache.  My lower back aches and I can feel how bad my posture is right now.  All right, I made a few chair adjustments and that is slightly better.  I feel empty and drained.  I feel abandoned and untrusting.  I feel exhausted in a way that isn’t going away with more sleep.

Recently I heard someone describe it as being “pregnant” with her book and I kind of feel like that.  I’m getting a lot of harsh physical symptoms and emotionally I feel like I am living on the memory of fumes because I ran out of gas long ago.  I am at a time and place in my life where I feel like I need an endless stream of support but I am too ashamed to ask for it.  I don’t have a family and people like me have to just figure it the fuck out because we are too unpleasant to be around.  I feel so pathetic and needy.  I feel so very lonely.  But I don’t feel like I get to talk about that because it is my own damn fault that I am so fucking unpleasant to be around and that’s why I am alone.

Sometimes I wonder what it is like to be part of an extended family.  Thinking about it makes me cry.  What would it be like to have people who know me and want to spend time with me?  I have friends, yes.  But my friends go see their families on holidays.  I notice.  I tend to feel like it isn’t possible for me to stop being angry so I should stop attempting to spend time with people at all because no one should have to deal with my fucking mouth.

It’s probably a good thing I see my therapist tonight.

Grief ritual

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I was surprised by how much crying I ended up doing for my family. It was different than I expected. I thought I was just here to mourn how shitty I was treated. Instead I cried and cried and cried for whatever happened to my different family members to cause them to become the kind of people who related to me the way they did. I cried for generations of women who were beaten and raped and told they had no alternative. They were to be seen and not heard.

I cried because my father must have felt a great deal of pain otherwise he wouldn’t have hurt so many people.  I had all these thoughts about his parents, whom I never knew.  What did they do to him as a child?  How did he come to believe that female family members were fair game for raping?  What I was told this weekend is each person has to deal with his/her family’s grief going back seven generations and what you incur in this life is going to be passed on for another seven generations.  Nieces/nephews count as the next generation.  Even if you don’t have children your karma can still be sent on for many many years.

I cried because my sister is so buried under her grief that she turned around and hurt her children.
Anger is healing and inspirational but if you don’t do something with the strength it gives you then you risk burning up in the flames.  Today I found a place in my heart for forgiveness for Denise.  I didn’t know I could do that.  It took me emotionally hitting a place where I realized just how young she was when she had different experiences.

According to the Burkina Faso traditions when someone in your life dies they hand you their spirit and life so that you can accomplish more.  They had you, essentially, a golden ticket.  Suicides are viewed as a very powerful way to grant someone else your spirit (my understanding is) because the person escaped great torment and brought that with them.  They learned a lot in the process and once they are on the other side of death they can help you better.

My maternal grandmother committed suicide when my mother was pregnant with me.  My paternal grandmother (whom I am named after) died a year or two before my mother had me.  My paternal grandfather died days before my brother Tommy was born.  If Orlando gave Tommy his spirit, maybe that is part of why Tommy was so fucked up.  My maternal grandfather died right before I saw my father for the last time at Jimmy’s wedding.  Right before I told my mother that she had to take my father back to court in order to get him to stop touching me.

When I was pregnant with Shanna I lost both my adopted step-mom and my beloved therapist to heroin overdoses.  Two of the women who were among my strongest bulwarks against the dark.  They both suffered terribly from their internal wounds.  They were not strong enough to fight back their demons.

Unsurprisingly I arrived at a place of deep anger.  I raged and screamed and started beating my fists on the floor.  The wonderful facilitator had someone put a thick cushion in front of me.  I would have cheerfully broken my hands to pieces and enjoyed the pain manifestation.  Later in the day I told her, “I have a habit of beating my hands and head against concrete floors.  I really appreciate that you put a pillow in front of me.”

Apparently the concept of “personal problems” simply doesn’t exist there.  All problems are problems of the community because if the community was functioning appropriately the problems wouldn’t exist.  That made me ache with loneliness for someone who would give a shit about me enough to want to actually help me with my problems.  Not just one person at a time.  I wish all of Lakeside School would gather to hold me in their arms and let me sob out my grief.  I wish they had stepped in and helped me instead of saying that people like me don’t exist.

It was interesting to think through the level of responsibility I bear for my niece and nephew being sexually assaulted.  My brother thinks it is enough for our generation to shut up and not talk about the incest.  He thinks that will solve everything.  Thus our grief has already passed on to the next generation.  We did not take responsibility for speaking the truth about our family.  Silence is consent.  If my understanding of the situation is correct I was twenty-one when my sister assaulted her children and taught them how to give one another oral sex.  I was living with Tom.  I had almost no contact with my family because I was not ready to have boundaries with them.  I never stepped in on behalf of the kids.  I didn’t tell my story to a CPS agent and get a case opened on my sister early enough.  There were already many HUGE issues at the time that would have been enough to open a case.  Maybe if Denise was being watched more closely it never would have happened.

I don’t know.  I will never know.

This is where the twelve step programs tell me to trust God.  Well fuck God.  No.  I need to let go of responsibility for my family.  I can’t save them.  I don’t have enough of me to give to fill their malicious black hole of need and pain.  They have to find a way out of that on their own.  If they come find me I don’t know what I will do.  I know one thing I will avoid doing: letting them develop a relationship with my kids.  My family doesn’t get to know my kids until my kids are adults.  If they want to go meet my family then I will drive them over.  I probably won’t get out of the car… but I’ll drive.

I grieved for my mother.  I thought about the smell of her and the comfort of her body against mine as we slept together.  I thought about how very much I love my mother.  I idealize my mother.  It always felt like she was so talented and wonderful and beautiful.  I will never compare favorably to my mother.  Only at the same time I think she was a weak monster.  I think she was shaped by ignorance and pain.  You don’t know what you don’t know, right?  I don’t think I can remain angry with my mother much longer.  I need to treat her as already dead.  I need to move forward in my heart to a place where I no longer desire vengeance.  She is my mother.  She carried me in her body.  She nursed me.  When I think of what my daughters mean to me I know that my mother is already in enough pain.  She has lost three of her children, two to desertion.  I’m sure she has already had enough pain this lifetime.

I feel so very sad for my mother.  She was abused and abandoned over and over.  Her father was a nightmare and he loathed her for the divorce.  Vernon treated my mother like a cockroach because she had committed the sin of leaving her husband.  Who cares what he does to the kids, right?  My mother was feisty and mouthy; her Mennonite family thought she should be taken down a few pegs!  See how it starts?  My mother used to come home from school as a child and have to clean up from her mother attempting suicide.  Again.  My grandparents fostered and my mother was never allowed to have any special toys because it “just wouldn’t be fair” to the transient kids.  My mother was never given a Christmas stocking until I was sixteen and I did it.

And I abandoned her too.  Even though I was supposed to be her comfort.  Even though I was the good and affectionate child.  I was so fucking devoted to my mother.  I can’t allow her to teach my children that they are small and bad and dirty and they deserve to be tortured.  I just can’t.  I was given a sacred trust by the God I don’t believe in to guard these people.  My only job is to raise them in safety and love. I’m not about to fuck up my job.  Not even for someone I have loved more than life.

I think the oddest part of today was the random older woman who came to join us.  She likes to just sit in on these rituals.  She was probably in her seventies with broken, missing, and severely discolored teeth.  Her hair was a mixture of grey and white and tied into a braid that went down past her waist.  She had these interestingly bright blue eyes.  She mostly looked like she was in a stupor, honestly.  But if you sat down next to her and looked at her with respect she came alive.

I don’t want to give her name because that seems like a violation.  We talked about anger.  She looked at me and she said, “Oh you are vibrating with anger.”  It was less obvious than usual, in my opinion, so it was both startling and not.  I felt calm and like I was in a decent mood.  Given how much time I do spend vibrating with anger I just said, “Yes.”  I can’t possibly remember the exact wording, today has been intense and full of new impressions, but she looked at me hard and didn’t ask any questions.  She volunteered these…I don’t want to say fortune cookie comments.  It’s kind of like reading the Horoscope.  Any of them can fit, right?  Only it wasn’t really that.  It felt more like she was getting something from me.  God I feel stupid talking about this woo woo shit.  She asked me if I was selected for suffering every time.  It’s not unreasonable for me to feel like that.  It’s not true any more, but it was.  She told me very clearly that I escaped because of my anger but now I have to be careful.  She said that there are two emotional experiences that come up completely unprompted: anger and laughter.  She said that I have gotten what I needed from the anger and now I need to laugh.

I cried.  I cried and screamed and ranted about how much I fucking hate them and I am glad they are dead.  I told him that if he wasn’t dead I would kill him myself.  I beat the floor until my arm muscles spasmed too hard for me to lift them.  I beat my head against the floor until I could no longer lift it from the pillow.  I lay there and cried and cried and cried for hours lying on my side because I could no longer hold my neck up because I was in so much pain.  People took turns sitting with me to share my grief.  Mostly I could not allow them to touch me.  There were a few specific women who felt safe.  Two.  I let them hug me.

I feel humiliated admitting that in this room full of people having this emotionally bonding experience I could let two of them (three including the instructor) touch me.  I feel like this distance that I keep is part of my problem.  I feel so deeply unable to allow people to love me.  I don’t know how.  That is not a skill I possess.

I understood more about my mother today.  I understand her scars and wounds in ways I didn’t before.  I love my mother so much.  I understand her frustrations and anger and thinly veiled violence.  I understand why she was so frantic when I misbehaved where anyone could see.  She told me constantly that people would judge her by my behavior so I had to not fuck up.  I understand now why she reacted the way she did to my unpredictability.  Now I have children.  Now I can think about her father and what kind of man he was.  Now I can think about Aunt Vonnie’s dark references to terrible beatings.

Sobonfu’s tradition believes that diabetes exists in the body because of an inability to truly accept love.  Vernon, my mom’s father, is the oldest example of that in my family I know.  And I know he treated his daughters like shit.  He never wanted their love; he wanted their silence and obedience.  Sound familiar? I was actually rarely hit as a child and my mother took flack from fucking everyone over that.  The whole family was ready to line up and beat me with sticks.  I have never been popular.  My mother defended me.  My mother defended me in so many ways.  She saw me as being like her.  We were both the youngest girl in families of four.  We were both raised very separately from our siblings.  We both felt like the black sheep.

This life business is complicated.  I’m starting to understand how compassion is part of this story for me.  I can have compassion for my mother and her suffering and still refrain from contact because my children deserve a childhood safe from people who are likely to tell them things they shouldn’t be told.  My mother likes to blame people for things that aren’t their fault.  My children will not learn shaming from their family.  They’ll have to figure that out somewhere else.

Part of my ancestral grief is our constant desire to have shit roll down hill.  We always pass the blame for our emotions.  I wouldn’t feel this way if you hadn’t made me.  This is why I cannot be angry with Calli for throwing my wallet out of the wagon.  She is a baby.  She is not responsible.  I should have bloody well put my wallet somewhere secure.  When Shanna is doing stuff that drives me nuts I have to ask her why she is doing something before I react.  9/10 times she has a reason that is totally fucking logical from her world view.  Her world view and mine have only occasional overlaps, mostly things like “ice cream is good” though we strongly disagree on how often we should eat it.

I don’t want to teach my children that they are to blame for my rage.  They aren’t.  I have a whole god damn book about why I feel so much rage.  I have no ability in any way to blame my emotional reactions on them.  That’s kind of annoying, actually.  In my family I was the scapegoat.  I wonder who is getting it now?  Someone is at the bottom, I promise you.

And I spent a long time today thinking about everything I know about my ancestors.  I can see why my family culminated in the horror that was my life.  I can have compassion for all of our respective victim-hoods.  I would kind of like to stop being a victim and they don’t even know enough to understand that it is an option.  That’s quite sad.  Today I thought hard about the fact that my sister wouldn’t do the things she does if she was in less pain.  She was harshly rejected by two fathers.  Her birth father rejected her before birth and then again in her thirties.  He didn’t want to know her despite the fact that she did 100% of the effort to have a relationship.  I pity her.

If the book pays off the editor I’m going to use that personal money to go to another grief ritual.  I have many more layers.  But I feel like I can perceive the beginnings of a path.  I think I am going to find somewhere to put an altar in my house.

It’s time to wash this grief off and go to bed.  I need to scrub my entire body with salt first.

If you build it, they will come?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

frustrated

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I feel like I haven’t been blogging much lately.  There are a bunch of things happening I feel like I can’t talk about.  I’m really bad about that.  If I have to censor what I say and speak carefully I don’t see much point in talking at all.  If I have to do those things then my point of view isn’t actually desired and I’ll just shut up.  It’s part of why I don’t follow social conventions much on “appropriate topics”.

Life involves an awful lot of work.  I can only do so much and feel good in my body.  There needs to be a balance of different kinds of work: mental, physical, emotional.  Without balance it all falls over.

I’m trying to edit the book.  I have 13-14 pages left.  I’m struggling.  I’m feeling a lot of tremendous anxiety about the end of the book.  How do I ensure that all the right elements are in place to honestly lead to the rest of my life?

I’m thinking hard about the foreward.  Ok fine, I wanted to write this.  Reasonable, fine.  Why do I want to publish it?  Why do I want other people to know this story with me?  Because I’m tired of being alone with it.  I’m tired of having people giving me entirely inappropriate advice because they assume my life was like theirs.

Other people grow up with families who pass their stories on.  People know what “Bob” acts like; you can tell because they say things like, “Well you know how Bob is.”  No, I don’t know.  I have never been around long enough to find out.  And people haven’t really been around me long enough to understand me either.

No one can ever know these things about me unless I tell them.  I have spent my entire life feeling isolated and alone and scared.  Once this story has been set down there is no fucking way I wouldn’t publish.  I want to be known.  I want to be seen so much it makes me ache.  I’m publishing because I want to.  Because it is an interesting story and I want to share it.  Because people will finally understand my vague allusions.  When someone wants to give me advice I can ask them if they’ve read the book and then let them say what they want.  I don’t have to follow the advice.  But I get to know that this isn’t some random passerby who doesn’t know shit about me.  This is someone who cares enough to go read the backstory so that (s)he can be part of my life.

That feels really different.  Most of my family will be shocked if they ever read the book.  They have no idea about most of it.  They don’t know me and I savagely resent them for this.  I savagely resent that god damn everyone in my family will get to say, “But we never knew!” and be telling the truth.  I think that is what I can’t forgive them for in the end.  They managed to silence me such that I was never able to get proper help from all that psychiatric care for fifteen years.  They can’t silence me forever.  I want to tell my story.  I want to get very clear about what happened to me and I can’t do that in private.

That’s strongly related to why I am upset about some other things in my life.  I’m not happy about how I am being treated and I feel like I can’t talk about it in public and I don’t have anywhere else to talk.  I am talking in therapy and to Noah about this situation but that’s the limit of my talking to people.  I literally just don’t do much else of it lately.  All of my IM buddies have disappeared.  Fuck you all.  (I’m kidding. I love you and miss you intensely while you are having Real Lives.)

It’s time to go parent.

Two short things.

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Recently I was asked, “You do understand that you were tortured, right?”  Not really.  It feels like maybe my life was harder than average but what does “torture” mean anyway?

And I realized yesterday that my dream of traveling with the kids when Calli is over is a bit… not realistic right now.  Unless I can get to the point where I can handle travel without having a nervous break down or crying I can’t do that.  I want to go to countries that are far less friendly to hyperventilating women.  I can’t do that right now.  It’s just not safe.

Lots to think about.

I’m sorry

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Today isn’t starting off well.  I think these physical symptoms are stress not “sick”.  That doesn’t make them better.  We kind of sort of tried to have sex today and Noah finally stopped when he noticed how much I was flipping out.  He’s a kind sort.

I started thinking about how much Noah really wishes he got to go from girl to girl.  He wants that so much.  From the outset, with that want, I can never be enough.  No matter what.  I can’t be multiple people.  I can’t give him that thrill.  I could stand there and watch (or not) him have it.  I can’t give it to him.  Given how much trouble I’m having with sex right now it feels like I have completely cock blocked him in every way.  He didn’t promise celibacy.

I feel like such a failure.  I’m feeling eaten away by stress and failure and all the things I will never be good enough for.  This morning as I was crying at Noah I told him that whenI was a kid I would say: “I’m sorry”, the response was: “Yeah, you’re sorry.  You are the sorriest piece of shit ever born.”  I’m realizing why I don’t notice that I am expressing contempt.  I don’t know much else.

This book is very hard to read.  I don’t really want to think hard about the fact that this is my life.  How can I have these experiences and come out anything but a piece of shit. An angry waste of air.  Yes, yes, happiness is a state of mind, not a circumstance.  I don’t know how to forget everything that happened and just go on to be happy.  I’m hopeful that some day other people will know the story.  Enough people will tell me that I’m not bad that maybe I will believe it.  I still feel like I deserve everything that happened.  It wouldn’t have happened to a nice person.  Someone who was good.  Someone kind.  Someone who wasn’t a piece of shit.  Instead it happened to me.  That must be how it is supposed to work.

Today is going to be kind of rough.  I had planned to take the girls to Fairyland.  But I’m dizzy and weak.  I don’t think that is a good idea.  I wish the stupid place was open during the week.  I’ve been taking sleeping pills for almost two weeks.  I’ve gotten 7.5+ hours for almost that many nights.  I wish my body felt better.  Everything hurts.  I remember my stomach hurting like this when I was a kid.  This was usually my reason for staying home from school.  My mom would always yell at me that I was a hypochondriac or a liar.  At least she let me stay home anyway.  I’m scared.  I’m so very scared.

I just sent an email to some of my co-owners in the coffee shop.  I guess that money is going to be a donation after all.  I asked to have my name taken off the ownership paperwork.  I don’t want the stress going forward.  I bought it when I thought I had more help.  Things change.  If they could give the money back some day that would be great but I won’t be holding my breath.  I wasn’t looking for that.  I wanted to do good in the world.  I hope I did.

I want to be someone who can take care of a lot of people and fix a lot of problems.  Unfortunately I only seem to be able to fix knots in capes.  I can clean up toys.  And three people is the absolute physical limit of how many people I can take care of.  I wish I didn’t know that for sure.  I wish I hadn’t hit that wall.  I wish I got to still have the fantasy of being very competent.  I’m very competent on my best days.  I don’t have best days very often.  I have to plan my life around my very worst days.  Because I have to determine what I can truly carry on my own.  Because I have things I have to carry no matter what.  I have to take care of my family.  I have to.  There is no one else to do it.  No one else is available to just come take care of my kids.  I tried to see if it was possible.  It’s not.  Well, I could pay someone but that would require getting a job.  No thanks.  Once you start upping the ante like that it isn’t figuring out how to adapt my life it is going out and getting a whole new life.

I like my life.  I like hanging out with my kids.  I like writing.  I’m even quite house proud.  I like looking around and seeing the things that bring joy to me.  I’ve created my house very intentionally.  I didn’t pick it but it’s mine.  Maybe the only house I will live in for the rest of my life.  I want it to bring me joy.  I’m pretty selfish.  Luckily Noah doesn’t seem to worry too much about what I do.  For some odd reason he trusts me.  Or he just doesn’t care.  Either way.

Noah told me that he isn’t sure what to say.  I’m convinced I have no value.  He disagrees.  I told him that I’m afraid he is lying.  I am.  I’m terrified.

I don’t feel much pride in myself.  All I see are my failures.  It’s interesting how differently Noah and I view failures.  He tells me often that you learn more from doing things wrong.  It feels like such a privileged thing to say.  It may be true, but only some people keep getting second chances.  I think that’s part of it.  Noah rarely fails at anything that matters.  I do.  When I fail I have to once again deal with the consequences of the fact that I am a piece of shit and everyone is going to leave me in the end for being a nasty, angry, bitter person.  My mistakes in the past twelve months have cost me three friendships.  I run people off.  My mistakes mean that I spent seven years in graduate school but I have no degree to show for it.  Yes, I learned things.  That’s still an awful lot of time and money to spend.  I’m glad I was able to pay off my student loan debt so fast.  If I was still paying for it I would be much more bitter.

Only time will tell how I am as a mother.  I’m afraid.  The stakes are so high.  Even if some day I manage to run Noah off, which I think is more possible than he gives me credit for, I really am afraid that I won’t deserve my children.  It was decided so long ago that I am bad.  What hubris do I have to think I can change that?

Today I hate me.  And I’m sorry.  So very sorry.

second chances

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long-term friendships.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mostly parenting babbling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time to go inside.

I’m going to run out of steam

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I’ve been thinking a lot about this whole “having limits” thing.  What does it actually mean?  Does it mean that I have pushed myself so far that I end up in a hospital?  I’m not sure if something is going to have to go wrong internally or if someone is going to over rule me on putting me in a psych hospital some day.  I suspect that part of the reason I put off finding a therapist last year until I did was because I had to get past the lowest point on my own because a professional would have made different choices.

What life am I choosing and how do I want to live it?  I wanted to give the money to Occupy and be done with it.  I knew I didn’t have extra spoons.  Instead I was asked to invest in a company that exists to support a community I am only kind of attached to any more.  And now I am a business owner.  And now I have Responsibilities.  And simultaneously I have also discovered that I was inappropriately depending on help from some sources.

Lately Shanna is increasingly cranky.  Some of it is her age and normal development.  A lot of it is me.  I can see my facial expressions and I can hear my tone of voice.  I am teaching her to be an angry person.  I am teaching her that life is overwhelming and not something that can be done to ones satisfaction.  I am teaching her that life is a series of failures and let-downs to be bitter about.  On one hand, not everything works out and learning to roll with that is part of life.

I don’t think that I can truly be accused of not coping with the things life throws at me.  I do it.  But I’m not a nice person.  When people promise me things and then don’t deliver I am so angry I can’t function any more.  Part of that is I am over-scheduled and over-promised as well.  When someone lets me down I have to either suck it up and find a way to do even more with less or I have to let someone else down.  A large number of my biggest fuck ups in life have happened because I was terrified of letting someone else down.

My children are 17 months old and 3.5 years old.  They must be supervised 24 hours a day.  When I am trying to figure out what I can accomplish in a day the very first thing I have to account for is watching my children.  Once again it is me and Noah.  Noah is working from home one day a week now so that I can continue to see my therapist.  That means he is down to being unavailable for ~55 hours/week.  That is better than it was.  If I am going to go anywhere during any of that time I have to pay someone to watch my children.  I don’t have enough money in the budget to pay for a date night with my husband once a week.  I am sure as shit not going to pay a babysitter so I can go work for free.  I can’t.  That’s a hobby I can’t afford.

Because of how much our income has been reduced my driving is severely curtailed.  I get to put about a tank and a half of gas in the van every month.  That’s it.  And my kids deserve to still go to homeschooling activities.  Sorry, that’s basically all of my gas money.

I get $100/month to spend on all of my personal entertainment.  My extra commuting money comes out of that and means I don’t get to do anything fun.  This fund also has to buy my running shoes and running bra (that I still don’t have).

I have less than two hours a day where the children are guaranteed to be ok-to-ignore.  That’s only if they nap at the same time.  That happens most week days, but certainly not all and Shanna is trying hard to drop naps entirely and Calli really wishes I would move the start time of nap-time up by 2 hours.  But then I would be in the house having to keep kids (alternately) quiet for four hours and never get five minutes off.

I am of the opinion that my children are rather freakishly independent and able to entertain themselves.    Unfortunately Shanna’s favorite game is still, “Let’s dump every drawer, shelf, item of bedding, toys, and anything else I can find all over the floor!”  She has been a force of destruction all day every day since she attained mobility.  I refold every item of clothing in their room multiple times a week.  Often multiple times a day.  Now that Sarah has moved out I think I am going to give them a sleeping room and a play room.  The sleeping room will have about five toys in it so that during quiet time Shanna can’t rip them all out.  Her clothes can go in a different damn room.

During the day I have to deal with the fact that if I am absorbed in something I am doing (delete details I am not allowed to give in public about something very hard to learn that requires a lot of training, education, and higher learning thinking) Shanna is probably going to decide that when she pees she wants to use the little potty.  And she wants to be helpful and dump it into the toilet herself.  In the process she sprays half of the god damn bathroom with pee.  Do you think this is an isolated incident? Oh god no.  It’s worse when she shits.

You have to supervise children.  You can’t ignore them to go do adult things at these ages.  You just can’t.  It’s not ok to do.  They get into trouble.  And when they get into trouble guess what happens?  I get angry.  And then inevitably I say something I shouldn’t.  I don’t name call.  But I’m louder and fiercer and more blaming than is appropriate.  “It’s your fault I have to do ________ and I don’t want to.”  Whereas it’s true that I wouldn’t be doing whatever I was doing if not for her making the mess the blame is on me for not supervising my freaking three year old.

I can’t have so many adult things requiring a lot of my time and attention.  It doesn’t work.  I know it is the modern way that people have to be multi-tasking at all times but multi-tasking means I do everything badly.  I have to supervise my children.

And the second most important priority in my life has to be sleep.  If I don’t sleep I get physically ill and my emotional problems go through the roof.  The single most important piece of holding my mental health together going forward is probably going to be sleep.  Not sleeping makes me crazy and suicidal.  The strain of feeling that way makes me incredibly difficult to live with.  I’m quite sorry I wake up as early in the morning as I do.  I would give just about anything to change that, but I can’t.  If I go to bed at 8pm I get enough sleep.  That is just how my life has to be for a while until my body decides to allow this to change.

Those are some pretty big limits to have in this life.  If I was more able to deal with sleep disruption or change my sleep schedule I would have a lot more options.  But I really and truly can’t.  This is the make or break of me getting to be sane.  No one can ask me to give that up.

That does still leave me some wiggle room.  Not a lot, but a little.  I could start using Noah-home time for business related stuff that I can do from home.  There is a fair bit of that.  I am not going to give up the marathon training, but that doesn’t use up that much time yet.  I’m not happy about it.  I think I shouldn’t.

I wanted to donate the money to a cause I believed in not get tied to something that was going to steal what little down time I have.  I’m not sure how this is going to work.  But I think I am going to have to push really hard and really fast for limits on what I am giving.  We need to find a way that will make it work or walk away.  I’m not killing myself for a business I can’t set foot in because I am stupid enough to be a breeder.

I don’t want to be angry at my children because they need my attention.  And I don’t want to be doing tag team parenting so that I can go put in more work for someone else.  That’s not something I can support right now.  I’m not getting anything other than the knowledge that other people get to enjoy it. Fuck that.

I’m not being effective.  I’m spinning my wheels and focusing on the wrong things.  I’m not thinking like Sebastian here.  I’m acting like my time doesn’t need to be treated as valuable.  That’s really not an approach to life that is going to work for me long term.

Keeping this business would mean giving up writing.  There just isn’t enough time in the day for me to do both.  I’m not going to do that.  I think that’s another limit.  If something is going to cut in on my time to such a degree that I can’t write… I should strongly consider just not having it in my life.  Writing is how I find my way through this life.  I decide things and think things while I am writing.  I can’t do the same thing any other way.

When I am going through the day working I can’t finish my thoughts.  I can’t make connections.  I have to be in the moment responding constantly.  I have to have time to finish my thoughts or I feel increasingly angry all the time.  I am not going to get much socializing out of this business experience. I’m not going up there to schmooze I’m going up there because we need someone to fucking wash dishes and we can’t pay people right now.  And the smell of coffee makes me want to vomit.  I’m not going to learn how to barista.  Having to wash the dishes is disgusting enough.

I gave the money to this company because I was willing to walk out front and dump the pile of money on the ground and light it on fire if I thought that would do something in the world I cared about.  That doesn’t mean I have the energy to go get a job.  I don’t.  That’s a big difference.  Ok.  I’ve been negotiating wrong so far.  I need to change my approach if I am going to get what I want.  It’s time to go inside.  Noah is going to work soon.

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Yesterday we took advantage of our date night to shave my head.  First Noah used the clippers, then a straight razor.  I discovered that straight razors hurt a lot more than safety razors.  This is the second time I shaved my head.  The first time was when I was 17.  I shaved my head around three weeks after my father killed himself.  It was time for a new beginning then.  It’s time for a new beginning now.  From 17 until now I have made most of my decisions about my appearance based on the opinions of men.  I feel kind of ashamed when I write that.  It’s not the “me” I’m supposed to be.  I’m supposed to only care about pleasing myself.  You don’t amass a body count like mine by only trying to please yourself.

I’m taking more comfort from monogamy than anyone but Noah knows.  I don’t have to hunt any more.  I never have to leave the house wondering if I look good enough for someone.  Well, I’ll still dress in stuff Noah likes occasionally.  But I’m done trying to find people who are willing to fuck me.  It’s a different approach to life.  Non-monogamy is fairly all-consuming for me.  I don’t have many non-hunting periods.  I didn’t hunt during the breeding period.  I didn’t hunt much for a couple of the years I was with Tom.  Tom had me jumping through enough hurtles that I was content.

Noah is different.  Noah is happy to have sex with me at any time.  No factors beyond, “Are the kids occupied and safe and fine on their own?” matter.  He looks for child care or sleep.  Then he’s good.    I think he’s enjoyed the various colors and he’s finding something to like about every length of my hair.  Today the tiny cuts no longer sting so I bet he’s going to touch it a lot more.  It is neat feeling.  Last night it still hurt and the pillow was annoying so I didn’t want him to touch much.

I put a body stocking on after we shaved my head so that I could stay warm.  The plan was to tie me up and mess with my head being different.  That didn’t happen.  Instead we talked about the way our sex life is causing me to feel unsafe.  The way our sex life is dramatically increasing how much I dissociate.  We talked about the fact that every time he rapes me there is serious long-term damage.  How much damage am I really expected to bear this lifetime?  How many of these does he think I can handle before I jump off a bridge?  I have been sexually assaulted over and over for nearly thirty years.  I think I need at least a few years off.  At the very fucking least.

This is something I struggle with.  It seems like most of my appeal is that I am someone you don’t have to care whether I am interested or not.  If you want to fuck me, sure go ahead.  It seems like that usage is really the only purpose for my life, so why not?  That doesn’t increase my ‘bonding’ feeling during sex for some reason.  It means that pretty much all sexual contact has to be treated as potentially unpleasant and I have to learn to block out all of those sensations, forever.  Because that way I can survive being repeatedly raped.  I won’t feel it any way.  I can’t work on getting back to the place where I can orgasm.  If I do that, how will it be used against me or withheld from me?  How will I be hurt in exchange for being stupid enough to present more vulnerability in my body?

It’s time to start new.  For the first time in my life I never have to give in to that compulsive feeling again.  I never have to earn my social admission with my cunt.  I no longer have to advertise that I am there to fulfill sexual needs other people have.  It’s not my problem.  I am no longer the designated whore.  I don’t know what else I could be.  What else am I good for?  If I’m not going to be that, just generically, I think I am tired of being raped too.  I think it’s time to say that my husband should really start to respect the word “No.”  I should be allowed to be in control of my body.  I deserve it.  I have carried this body around for thirty years.  No one else has the knowledge of it that would allow them to treat it with respect.  Just me.  So right now no one treats it with any respect.

I need to change that or I am never going to stop feeling like I am one push from jumping off a bridge.  Life is harder than advertised.  Life hurts.  That doesn’t mean I should accept with resignation the idea that I have to tolerate being raped for my entire god damn life.  No.  Even though so many people obviously think that is what I am good for, they show my by continuing to rape me, I am done thinking that is all I am good for.  I don’t think I am strong enough to keep getting up afterwards.  I don’t think I have many more rapes left in me.  I think my body is nearing its limits.  I have already been taken down all the pegs I can be taken down.  If you put me any further down I’m going to fall off the board.

I go through the world in the body of a woman.  I don’t think it works like this for men.  Every day, whether I put time or energy into my appearance or not, I have to be braced when I am out in public.  People feel quite free to comment on how I look and act.  Most of the comments are nice.  I get told ridiculously often that I have a nice smile.  It’s one of the reasons I am completely uninterested in braces.  My smile is special and unique to me.  It is nice enough that random strangers tell me they are happy to see it when I walk around by myself.  I think what God gave me was good enough.  Even though my teeth aren’t perfectly straight.  Even though they aren’t very white.  I didn’t discover teeth brushing until I was twelve and I started noticing that it was really gross when boys didn’t brush their teeth before kissing.  I decided that applied to me too and I started brushing my teeth.  I have a lot of legacy damage from poor dental care.  I have an ass-rapingly-expensive dental implant.  Oh wait, did I just make a rape joke?

Of all the people in the world, shouldn’t I take it more seriously!  Don’t I know that this topic isn’t funny?!  I have been raped far more times than I can count.  It is just part of life.  I’m going to joke about it.  Otherwise I cannot live with the constant effect it has on me.  I know that other rape victims feel differently.  I’m sorry if what I say offends you.  We are all just trying to get through the day.

I am almost out of pot.  I will either run out today or tomorrow.  We have $29 left for this month in the health budget.  I plan to see my therapist one more time and that will be $150.  I don’t think I should buy more pot.  This is already going to be dinging next month.  Budgets suck.  I am *only* going to be able to pay for therapy next month.  Nothing else.  I need to start saving room in that budget because soon I will want to buy another massage package.  The massage probably is more important given the current strain my body is under.  Intimidating.

It’s time to start again.  The only way I know to be a parent is to be the kind of adult you think your kids should respect.  I want to be worthy of respect.  I want to make choices that are actually good for me instead of being a less bad form of self-harm.  Sex is often a form of self-harm for me.  That’s one of those things I will only admit on days when the wind is right.  I have as much denial around that topic as everyone else.  Having to be available to basically anonymous men is a form of self-harm.  I’m putting myself at enormous risk.  For the thrill of hopefully having judged right and the sex doesn’t hurt this time.  Maybe instead of trying to figure out how to write just the right personal ad I should tell my husband I want him to stop choking me and raping me.  Please can our sex life not be something that hurts me.  I don’t want to perfect the art of asking other people to stop hurting me.  I want to just close that book and walk away from it.  There is no point in pursuing that story.  I don’t want to keep upping my body count.  It’s not a goal any more.  Whatever there was to get out of that activity I did it long ago.

I know, everyone else who is non-monogamous will now tell me how they want to have connections and I’ll tell you that fucking me is one of the fastest ways to ensure that I am going to avoid you in the future.  You want more of those connections in your life?  I can have boundaries and keep myself safe if I treat the people as disposable so I don’t have to care what they want.  It is excruciatingly hard to tell Noah about the results of his (occasional, rare) actions because I already feel like I am letting him down.

He wanted a poly marriage.  He wanted to have a life where he got to be a highly individualized person.  He wanted a lot of time to himself to keep having other people and things in his life.  He wanted to continue on being a cheerful sadist.  He wanted to be allowed to do the things he imagines.  And I am not only backing out on being the recipient of his urges but I’m telling him that he shouldn’t do them with anyone else either.  I feel like the worst kind of double crosser.  I am a piece of shit.  I am changing the deal.

I can’t handle being raped anymore.  Maybe ever again.  This hurts so much.  The cost is too high.  I cannot live with someone who really likes it when I don’t enjoy our sex in any way.  Well, that’s too harshly worded.  I can live with him.  But I can’t keep doing that.  I’m tired of barely being able to feel my vagina.  I’m tired of rearranging furniture in my head during sex.  I’m tired of feeling scared in my home.  I never get to be safe anywhere in the whole wide world.

But Jesus-H-Christ.  I am now a partial owner of a bdsm coffee shop.  I am going to have to figure out how to negotiate those kinds of worlds knowing that I will never really feel all that much like I belong.  I don’t want to be hurt any more.  Nor do I want to hurt anyone else.  I don’t want to be raped any more.  I don’t want to fuck everyone who is kind of hard up.  What good am I then?  I don’t know.  But maybe it is time to find out.

I did’t shave my head to make me ugly.  I don’t think it does.  But I did do it to remove the distraction of trying to be appealing.  I don’t want to actually be pretty right now.  It is hard figuring out how to let guys down gently in a way that doesn’t result in me getting nasty treatment.  I have to instead figure out how to just not attract them.  Because if I am attractive it is my own fucking fault and I’m just an asshole cock tease if I don’t follow through.

I went to a friend’s party on Saturday.  I spent my time clinging to the few people who have come to my house.  I only had one conversation that was not me clinging to someone who has proven they like me.  The one-off was about babies.  And someone rapidly left the group when I talked about my labor experience.  I felt like I should just get up and leave the party.  Everything I have to say is repulsive and depressing.  My experiences are things people don’t want to hear about.  I’m not pleasant enough.  My life isn’t pleasant enough.

I think I need to learn how to just stop speaking at all.  Can you pick up selective mutism as an adult?  Probably not.  But I need to appear happy and perky.  I need to smile.  I need to be polite (whatever that means).  I need to look and act like I had a different life than I had.  That is what people like.  Those are the people who are liked.  I’m not nice.  I’m harsh.  I’m abrupt.  I sound angry.  I’m unpleasant and difficult and prickly.  I swear a lot.  I have no idea what manners most people follow.  I am bewildered in every social space because I am inevitably wrong and I don’t know why.  I don’t understand and I don’t think I ever will.

I own a business now.  I don’t have a choice about going out into the world.  I have a specific format that interaction is supposed to revolve around.  I have a job and I’m perfectly capable of behaving myself at work.  It’s time to try again on leaving my house and interacting with people.  Even if I’m not the biggest bad-ass bottom in the room it’s ok.  There is no where else in the world I can talk about the intensity of my sex play without people running in horror.

Just because I don’t want to be raped any more that isn’t truly going to send me screaming into the closet.  Once your sex life is as weird as mine it just morphs.  It doesn’t really contract.  There have to be other avenues to pursue.  Surely not everyone in the world is hurt constantly during sex.  They wouldn’t have so much of it.

I kept myself company while watching a movie.

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I’m thinking about escapism and loneliness.  I’m thinking about destiny and choice.  I’m watching a terrible movie so how could I think about anything less lofty?  King Arthur is the choice of the morning.    I’m watching movies about people who lived long ago and I’m wondering… what did they do with their time?  How did they while away the hours until death?  Did they really work all. the. time?  No, they couldn’t.  No one can.  But I look at the meaningless gestures in movies (dude smashing a pot just out of frustration) and I think, “Holy shit.  Someone would have to remake that by hand.”  I think of the things I have to repair when I break it in frustration.  It’s different.

I live in a small, constrained world.  I don’t have anywhere in my life I can go pick a fight with impunity.  I don’t have anything that wants my aggression.  I am supposed to be pleasant or at least neutral basically all of the time.  The running is one of the better coping mechanisms anyone can come up with and I’m doing what I can at this point.  I’m working on it as fast as I can and be good to my body.  Really.  Probably faster, in fact.  I am impatient.  I really should be stretching more.

Neutral or pleasant requires a lot of concentration and thinking about my demeanor.  It mandates a lot of silence on my part when I cannot be certain what my tone will be.  That’s a lot of concentration.  I think about how much freedom there would be in a place where sudden outbursts of violence were tolerated more because everyones life sucked.  Life was simply brutal.  You had to just expect that one or more of your children would die.  You were lucky if all of your children lived to adulthood.  It meant you were special.  God must have favored you.

Now we think that if your child gets a scraped knee it is because you weren’t working hard enough to protect them at every moment of the day.  And we must also ensure that they are entertained in a suitably educational environment for as many days a week as possible.  And activities!  It is no longer enough that you keep them from starving and keep them warm and clothed.  Now you must also provide for their entertainment and benefit constantly.  I think we make parenting a lot harder than it has to be.

I think of how very little survival is entailed in my life.  Is that why I feel free to create my own torment?  Is that why I start cycles of self-harm?  I believe that I should be hurt, that I deserve to be hurt.  And then I look around at pop culture for escapism from my non-hurts and see these glossy pictures of the only exciting two hours and twenty minutes that happened over a span of decades.  Seriously?  Wow.  Ok.  That’s a lot of shitty time to just gloss over as if it isn’t part of life.  I think that is the part that is missing in the cycle right now.  No one wants to put their head down and do the hard, shitty, brutal parts of life.  Brutal is so relative, you know?

I have been physically safe for the vast majority of my life if you judge by minutes of danger.  That is not true of most people throughout history.  If you look back, not that far, people had a lot more danger in every minute of their life.  Not too long ago you had to worry about a measles epidemic meaning you lost one or more of your kids.  We have gone so far in the other direction that people believe the benefits of survivorship outweigh the costs.  That we have somehow lost something by not culling the herd in that way.

If it was not my responsibility to live as long as possible, how would my actions be different?  If I were more likely to possibly die of starvation?  If I had real fear of disease?  I really and truly laugh at increased cancer risk warnings sometimes.  Because we have to die of something.  I have a pretty lame life if my only risk is increased cancer risk because I am carefully meting out my self-harm in ways that won’t really shorten my life but will make my time here less pleasant.

Anyway.  Kids like me used to be able to get in a lot of fist fights.  By the time you were an adult you had either gotten your shit together or you ended up in relationships where you hit and were hit often.  Honestly if I hadn’t been told and told and told and told that I deserve better I would be able to live that comfortably forever.  It would feel right.  I’m trying to figure out what I can do with the desire to be put in my place.

I feel like I don’t want to be the boss because the only boss I know how to be is an abusive one.  I can’t mete out tasks.  I can’t be in charge of that.  But Noah and I went round and round until I finally got to the point where I was keeping the house as “clean” as he thought that meant.  It was a process.  I am not good at turning around and dictating to other people how much work that means because apparently I do a lot more work than other people are inclined to do in a given period of time.  I can’t give someone the incentive of $30 an hour to work as hard as I work on my house.  That’s an experiment I can’t afford to repeat.

Having children in the house all day means destruction and food spills all day.  One right after another.  Going out is a different set of stressors.  It’s all a balance.  I don’t have time to think right now.  There are too many things I need to actually focus on.  I need to start learning Quickbooks.  Looks like that is going to work out after all.  I don’t know how I am going to make it work.  I’ll find a way.  And maybe if I have more to get done I will discover that I have less time to sit and think about how wretched my life was a long time ago.  That’s the essence of “getting over” PTSD, right?  You have to get on with your life and stop being distracted by things that are no longer happening.

It’s interesting how we seek to recreate cycles over and over again.  We want to do the things we are comfortable with.  That’s kind of the definition of insanity, yo.  What does it mean to do something different?  What should I be doing with my mind instead?  That’s what actual “coping” means.  It means successfully using up all of your time on thinking about other things.  It means finding a way to while away the hours until death doing things that bring you joy instead of things that irritate you.  That means you have to look at the things you are doing pretty carefully.

So far my method of parenting seems to be training them by modeling behavior.  I limit my world to things that can include them.  The more of the outside world I have to deal with and the more adult thinking I have to do the harder this is for me.  The shift is not automatic.  And I have to know my chores are done or I can’t relax.  I just can’t.  I recognize that not everyone agrees with my fanaticism.  I try to keep my chores to such that I can do them in two or three hours in the morning and be done for the day.  It seems like a reasonable amount of time.

I think I hide in the garage for three hours a day because I think that Noah needs to have individual time with his kids every day where he is also responsible for life stuff because they have to work out how to be around each other and this is the only time they can.  I just wish it left more hours for us to all be together.  If I go in there then it ends up being “kids are distracted at all times so they never have to entertain themselves”.  No thanks!  I am alone with my children for a very large number of hours a week.  They need to have steady time with people other than me.  It’s important for them to not grow up thinking I am the sole model of adulthood.

But I need to think a lot harder about how I am doing this and how much work I can handle doing in an ongoing way.  I think it will be ok.  I’ll find a way.  And I have to do it in a way that allows me to feel like I am enjoying my life.  What can I do that will help me enjoy my life more?  And it has to be pretty nearly free.  Excellent.  On one hand I feel like the answer is, “I have a whole library here of books I haven’t read.  I should read them.”  There are reasons I haven’t read the books I haven’t read.

Maybe I need to sit in one place and learn to think about things that are not my favorite.  Maybe I need to learn about a few more things.  I’ll have more time later.  The kids won’t need me so much later.  I’m not going to be in a place where my life is genuinely hard, maybe ever again.  I feel like such a whiner.  Isn’t that what mental illness is about?  Being upset by reality is kind of silly.  Perceived risk is such a strange thing to be afraid of.

I am not ever required to do something that is too hard for me again.  I can say stop.  It’s hard to adjust to and I feel ungrateful.  And I suppose that is my freeform response to watching this silly movie.

Inadequate to the task

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I feel like a failure.  I feel like I have harmed my best friend.  It’s true.  I have.  I told Sarah that I can’t continue to live with this level of unreliability.  I don’t think there is any chance that I can get my anger under control while I do.  I really and truly cannot handle having to ask another adult to do their chores. I can’t.  I know that is a failing on my part.  I know I should be able to learn to communicate better.  There are some battles to improve I can win and there are some I am going to lose.  I will never be able to handle micromanaging someone else in my house.  I’m trying to do less and less of it with the kids.  I’m sure I’m failing, but they are quite young.  I have time to figure out how to do that as it is necessary.

I cannot unlearn a lifetime of bad habits fast enough to be a civil person for Sarah to live with.  It’s not fair to her to put up with my temper tantrums and nastiness.  She is doing the best she can.  She really is.  I feel like this isn’t working because I don’t care enough.  Because I’m not trying hard enough.

The truth is, I’m out of support to give.  Sarah needs a lot of it.  And she needs to be able to drop in and get it how and where she wants while giving the support she can when she can.  I can’t do this.  I don’t have enough of me.

I think that more than the work I was depending on Sarah to be someone I could hand off being reliable on a schedule.  It’s not working because Sarah’s health is difficult to predict.  Sarah’s body is not mine.  When Sarah is sick she has to rest.  She really and truly does have to or she will pay for a long time.  When I am sick I have to keep going or I get so far behind that catching up is a problem and I’m even nastier and more bitter.  It’s very hard for me to give Sarah the space she needs.  I don’t get it.  I feel very bitter that I am supposed to be providing this privileged space to someone else and I don’t get it.  I am very petty and I’m sorry.

The thing is, I am this petty.  I do feel used.  I do feel like I am working as hard as I can with all of the hours of the day I am physically able to work.  I don’t work more because I haven’t gotten enough sleep in years and my body hurts and I’m exhausted most of the time.  I have nothing more to give.

When I have Sarah here I plan as if there is another adult to take the hand off.  This means I have too many days where I burn through all of my energy by 1pm and then I’m done.  I’m tired.  I hurt.  I’m impatient.  I’m exhausted and frustrated.  Then I have to deal with wondering if Sarah is going to do her “chores” on time or if I’m going to have to go ask her to do them.  No one woke up this morning and gave me a list of chores to do.  I know what they are and I have to just do them.  I can’t turn around and delegate.  I’m not the boss.

That was the problem with the domestic help, too.  I don’t really want to be the boss.  I want to one time sit down and negotiate with you what you want to be responsible for and have you just do it.  I can’t keep telling you.  You volunteered.  I asked for your input from the beginning and this is what you said you would do.  I can’t keep asking.  I can’t.  I don’t know why that is broken in me but it is.

Which is to say, Sarah is asking for reasonable prompting.  But I can’t give it.  That is a failure in me, not her.  This is an incompatibility, not a grave personal sin.  But it becomes harder and bigger while living together.

I don’t know if this will wreck our friendship.  I hope not.  I love Sarah so much.  I just can’t keep doing this much work.  I can’t keep depending on help that only mostly appears.  That’s not something I can live with any more.  It’s not her fault.  I don’t want to be angry with her all the time because she has health issues she can’t control.  It’s not her fault.  But I still have to do the work.  And that’s hard.

I feel like this is proof that I don’t deserve relationships.  They take work and I don’t have enough to give to do it.  So I don’t deserve relationships.  I can’t earn them.  I can’t do what they take.  I failed.  Again.  Because I am inadequate to meet the needs of my partner.  As usual.

I went to see my psychiatrist yesterday and she told me that I don’t need a pill I need a reduction in stress.  She told me that I need to ask my friend to leave and spend several months of staying home and actually getting my stress under control.  I’m trying too hard to do too many things.  I’m spread too thin.  That’s not what you expect from a psychiatrist, you know?  If anyone wants the recommendation for a psychiatrist in San Francisco I would recommend Ann Barnes.  Just sayin’.  It’s really nice when a pill-doctor says, “There is no pill that can fix this.  You need rest.”

I’m going to try.  I’m afraid of the loneliness.  I’m so afraid of having Sarah move out.  I don’t want her to go.  But I can’t keep doing what I’m doing.  I’m breaking.

Discretion is the better part of valour

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I feel like the search for appropriate discretion is one of my more difficult journeys as an adult.  It’s one of the only ones I necessarily conduct in private.  That is just not my way, you know?  I have been having issues with Sarah.  This isn’t good.  I think that Noah tolerates me saying so many negative things about him in writing because he knows it is the only way I can give feedback.  I can’t say out loud the things I write.  I seem to be nearly physically unable to.  I simply cannot usefully communicate about them.  But I can write them down.

I am having trouble with the fact that Sarah is forgetful because of medication and then will adamantly swear up and down that I only said something once so she can’t be held accountable for the fact that I am so mad.

No one is to blame for the fact that I am “so mad”.  My inappropriate escalations are absolutely my fault.  Yes.  That is true.

But I can’t deal with how often promises are reneged on without any communication at all.  You just don’t show up and I have to roll with it.  I thought I was getting a coparent.  But you aren’t responsible.  You very clearly don’t think you are responsible because you don’t show up and do your job.  You want me to follow you around telling you what to do and reminding you about all the many things you aren’t getting done.

I don’t want that.  No.  I am not going to follow you around asking you to clean up after yourself all the time.  Do I seriously have to ask my adult house mate to put her crafting supplies away?  Really?  That’s my job?  Because you don’t notice.  Then I have to remind you.  How are you supposed to know I want it done?  And yet you come down pretty harshly on Shanna for leaving a mess.  That seems like “do as I say, not as I do” and I’m not interested in parenting like that.

I am so angry because to me the way you teach children how to be an adult is you act like one in front of them.  I’m fairly ashamed of how I have acted in the last few days.

So.  We went up to Davis on Saturday.  We had a good visit early in the day with a friend.  But I said something judgy and pissy and then she called me on my anger.  It was all done very appropriately.  But I felt really bad.  It felt like more evidence of what an inappropriate asshole I am.  Then we went directly to see Noah’s aunt.  It went fine, but I feel really stressed out and pissy when dealing with his family.  It’s really hard.  Then Noah and I had a fierce nasty argument for a lot of the drive home.

And I walk in at 4:50 to a kitchen that is a mess and no sign of dinner.  Even though it was Sarah’s day to make dinner.  We sat down just last week and made the new schedule.  She was in bed.  She had a migraine with aura on Friday night that involved diarrhea and vomiting simultaneously (thus the only semi-cleaned up bathroom I found on Saturday morning) so that is why she wasn’t responsible.  And besides I hadn’t clearly communicated what time I would be home so how is she supposed to know that I expected dinner at five she planned to start when I get home and it only takes thirty minutes and that is within her “window” of acceptable time to serve so there is no problem.  Right?

I didn’t bother to mention that I have had issues during my tenure of parenting where I was in ridiculous pain and projectile vomiting while shitting.  I cleaned up after myself and parented solo.  I got dinner on the table basically when it is supposed to be on the table.  The reason that happens is because my kids don’t eat flexibly.  They get upset and cranky and nasty if they are not fed on schedule.

Schedule slips with food effect the behavior of every single member of my family in negative ways.  And I’m supposed to just roll with whatever happens whenever it happens because hey, that’s just how life works.  You wouldn’t understand how dramatic those behavior shifts are because they have not been eating consistently any more.  Everything has been disrupted ridiculously because I’m trying to roll with it.  And things are so much harder.

If you want me to communicate in a way that adequately explains how important things are to me that means long ranty blog posts.  That is the only way I have found to really get my thoughts together.  Some rational person would say, “Why don’t you write it and send it privately.”  Because then it will be ignored and I will feel ignored and angry and unheard and like my reality is being denied.

I’m having a very hard time with how little housework Sarah does.  Being a body in a house creates mess.  I was overwhelmed before she got here and it has only gotten substantially worse for me.  I’m sure someone else would think that the solution is just to get used to living in a dirtier house.  Only then Noah comes home from work and starts helping.  He and I have specific deals about how clean the house has to be so that he gets to relax when he’s home.  It’s not ok to move another adult into the house who makes my job significantly harder and just absorb that load.

This is hard to talk about because Sarah does contribute.  But I can’t depend on her.  She helps and does work when she can.  When she has a migraine I can’t expect dinner to be on the table because she might be asleep or medicated and not really communicate about that fact.  I have to just roll with it.

But a big part of why I am so angry is Sarah has consistently pushed to be more responsible because she truly wants to be a coparent.  But then I have to put up with her being responsible with great flexibility around when and how things are delivered.  And I have to do a lot of micromanaging telling her to clean up her craft supplies within two weeks of using them because the children are spreading them all over the floor and I’m fucking sick to deal of cleaning this shit up.  Or I can just carry it to her room for her.  She may or may not say thank you.

She’s not aware of the mess.  She doesn’t scan the room for things that are out of place that need to be put away because she doesn’t treat it like her job.  I don’t have any interest in living with someone that I have to micromanage them cleaning.  I don’t want it.  I have said that loudly from the beginning.  The problem with the domestic-help-that-is-no-more was usually that she had no initiative.  I had these really long in-depth conversations with Sarah about that.  How much I dislike having to tell someone what to do all the time.

So we negotiate on the board for time.  Sarah has ten hours of solo-parenting time per week scheduled.    I have to cover all of the hours Noah is at work or working on his side project stuff.  That’s around 60 hours per week.  Five of Sarah’s solo-parenting hours are so Noah and I can have a date night once a week.  Most of Sarah’s other solo-parenting hours are when the girls are asleep during naps so that I can run.  I have another floating five hour block that I am allowed to schedule as out-of-the-house social time.  And previously I had a three to five hour window for therapy once a week.  Noah is now covering my therapy time.

I am running out of cope.  I thought I was getting more help.  Sarah is going to be basically scheduled “off” this coming term for 3.5 days every week.  She will be responsible for providing dinner four nights a week.

And we are also having a hard time figuring out money stuff.  That’s hard.  I talk about my finances far more openly than most people.  Right now I have long lists of things I want to be talking about.  But it would be hard to talk about in a way that didn’t sound really nasty.  We haven’t sat down and had a conversation about long-term financial planning.  That’s a serious issue.  I don’t feel like our goals are in alignment.  Not about anything.

I’m feeling really scared because even though I have had to go clean garbage that was sitting around for months out of Sarah’s house more than once I somehow thought that with a little support she would figure out how to at least do maintenance level stuff.  I unpacked her, organized her stuff, found a home for everything… all she has to do is put things away when she is done using it.  But she doesn’t.  And I’m supposed to follow her around and ask her to.  Because she’s not aware that it bothers me.  She’s not even aware that she left it out.

I don’t feel like I have a good response.  I am completely unwilling to micromanage her.  That’s not my job.  No.  No.  No.  No.  No.  No.  I do a very large chunk of the kitchen cleaning (more than half).  I do 90%+ of the dusting, sweeping, mopping, vacuuming, picking up, laundry (no one even has to fucking sort their own laundry), dealing with bills and finances, and I could go fucking on and on.  And I am supposed to remind her to clean her own blood off the toilet seat because how is she supposed to know it is happening.  The same way I know.  Because I have had to clean my blood up in the past.  I check the toilet seat carefully before I leave, even in the middle of the night.  No I’m not ok with having to teach you that.  I’m not your mother.

Sarah is responsible for ten hours a week of solo parenting with up to ten hours of carefully negotiated flex time.  We get a weekend off in February that I am going to have to pay for because she will do far less for many days in a row before and after “saving up spoons”.  And making dinner four times a week.  Other than that she does what she can when she can.  And it’s not a lot.

It’s important to say that I don’t ascribe malice to Sarah.  I don’t think she’s being lazy.  But I’m drowning.  I’m supposed to know which things to ask her to do on the right days.  Because if I ask her on the wrong day or at the wrong time she gives me a sleepy, “I’ll get to it” and then forgets the conversation happened.  She’s on a lot of meds that cause memory problems.  And then I just have to roll with it.  And keep reminding her.  And make a lot of lists.  I have to be responsible for writing everything down, which frankly makes it far more stressful and difficult than just doing it myself.  Because first I have to deal with writing it down and then I have to deal with remembering to show you the list.  And then I just have to just suck it up because it may or may not address the problem.

Sarah is doing the best she can.  I’m still drowning.  I thought that a coparent would be more help and less work.  I knew she was disabled.  I knew that in advance.  She made it sound like she would take more initiative with things on her good days.  Instead she does her own projects.  And leaves the mess for me to clean up.

I am not actually a tidy person.  I drop stuff wherever I am standing.  That’s why I do sweeps through the house over and over all day long.  That’s the only way I can have a tidy house.  I had to learn how to do it.  I am trying to teach my kids how to do it.  Things have been steadily improving for a long while.  I have made it so that Noah doesn’t drop stuff (he puts his shit away when he gets home from work) and I clean up after myself and I’m teaching my kids how to clean up after themselves.  Now I have a really messy housemate.  Who is so messy partially because of personal inclination and partially because of disability.

Teasing these two things apart is hard.  And I’m thinking very hard about whether I can handle having Sarah here if it adds to my physical work load this much.  My options are: take responsibility for having to ask her to clean up after herself all the time, do the work, or deal with the mess.  Those are the only options I have.  Or I can ask her to leave.

I don’t think I am negotiating my expectations very clearly.  I hired domestic help in October/November/December and spent way way way too much money on it because I was trying to find a way to get more help in the house.  I was trying to find a way to get things done to my satisfaction.  That was fairly disastrous.  Oh well.

Yeah, I am not ok with living in a messy house.  I’m dealing with helping my kids learn to be tidier.  I cannot fucking deal with having to live with a messy adult.  I can’t do this.  I have spent my whole life having to deal with the collateral damage and I can’t do it.  It sends my anger issues through the roof.

It’s going to be challenging to deal with the fact that Shanna is probably going to go through a period of having a tremendously messy room.  It is probably going to be one of her biggest forms of rebellion towards me.  My response, as the adult, needs to be to ignore it and say, “That’s nice dear.”  She’s going to have to rebel against me and she’s not going to be with me many more years by the time that’s a big issue.

I can’t live with a messy adult.  I am teaching my kids what it means to be an adult and have a tidy space.  I am unwilling to teach them that it means having to follow the other grown ups around asking them to pick up after themselves.  Hell fucking no.  I’m not doing that.  I’m not ok with it being my responsibility for communicating the fact that it bothers me that you leave shit out.  How are you supposed to know it bothers me?  Uhm.  By being in my house for more than five minutes?

And yet, Sarah has lived alone for a long time and it takes a long time to adjust and I’m not the boss of her and how dare I expect her to move in here and automatically start doing a bunch of work she hasn’t had to do and so on and so forth.  There are absolutely two sides to this story.

I have communicated to Sarah in the past that I cannot be responsible for assigning her constant chores.  And if she agrees to do something she has to be rock solid because I am constantly out of cope myself and when she lets me down at the last minute I have a really hard time adjusting.  Because my entire life right now is functioning on out-of-cope.  To co-opt her language I have been running entirely on spoon deprivation for a really long time.  Oh well.  I have to suck it up and adapt and get shit done.

And my entire family gets out of whack when we aren’t eating on a schedule.  It’s really dramatic.  But if I don’t write long ranty posts I don’t seem to be able to provide enough background information to explain why something is important to me.  Or it gets forgotten.  Or Sarah just doesn’t have enough spoons to do more than she is and I have to just deal with that.

I’m not sure how much cope I have left.

family roles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shorter and shorter.

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I’ve been pulling at my hair for an hour in that way that means I will cut it again today.  I have Hair on repeat.  Really if you think about it, Lady Gaga singing about hair is somewhat ironic.  She wears wigs.  As she says over and over, “I am my hair” she is saying that she is something that is external.  She has so much control over who she is that she decides differently on a daily basis.  Does that mean that people who have abrupt changes in their appearance are changing who they are?

This is all too angsty; I know.  I love semi-colons.  Damn you, commas.  Jenny likes to remind me that the “rules of writing” were just randomly invented by some twat one day.  Ok, that’s not exactly what she says.  But it is what I hear.  It makes me smile every single time.  Because if some twat just made it up one day I don’t need to feel bound to it.  I can do whatever I want.  It’s a fun kind of rebellion–normally invisible.

Along with my hair getting shorter I notice how my field of vision is shortening.  I’m not responding to emails or text messages unless I have seen the person recently.  Recently as in seeing them within the last month.  People I haven’t seen in many months… I don’t know.  I just never seem to remember when I am at the computer.  Or it is something like right now where I am actively avoiding.  I don’t know why I am actively avoiding.  I do.  I don’t want to say why I am actively avoiding.

I’m not at ease in my skin right now.  I feel not-ok in a way that I can’t ignore.  I feel like a thousand monkeys are jumping on my chest.  It hurts just behind my breastbone.  Right now I don’t feel like I can look people in the eye.  I feel dirty.  Small.  Less than.  It’s not anyone else’s fault.  At this point in time I don’t think there are very many people who know me even casually who think that of me.  Not really.  Sure, there are people who dislike me.

Outside of my family I don’t actually believe that people wish me ill.  And they all feel very guilty for wishing me ill.

I am trying to see my shaman on Thursday.  Since our babysitter quit I’m not 100% sure that is going to happen.  And I may have to reschedule with him because of a meeting in the city anyway.  It feels kind of like the universe doesn’t want me to see him.  I want to see him.

I’ve got my bangs too high that I don’t stand a chance.  I think I need to ask my shaman to shave my head.  There.  That is the compulsive.  Why don’t I ask Noah?  Why do I want to keep this away from him?  Why is my shaman more appropriate?

Well didn’t I just fucking load that question.  What does ownership mean?  I don’t know.  I really don’t.  I am very much like a wild animal.  I run off and do things by myself sometimes.  I can’t accept having everything in my life have to come from Noah.  Right now there is so very little in my life that isn’t for him.  That plays a part in why I was dating too, I think.

Noah doesn’t have the same wounds in identity because of his appearance.  I don’t see the deep fractures in his soul from feeling bad about how he looks.  My shaman has spent a fair bit of time being upset with his physical body.  Even my use of male pronouns is part of that fight.  I feel like it is a failure in me that I cannot default to gender neutral pronouns.  They all feel wrong, false, not grammatical.  Not allowed.

Does that mean that people who are not easily labeled by one of those correct pronouns do not exist?  It certainly feels that way.  I suppose that since the dominant name and label is generally male it is close enough.  That is awkward to say and write about.  I feel like I am jumping on the crazy train, but who am I kidding?  I was already here.

I want to see my shaman.  I want to talk to him about my shifting sense of self.  I want to talk to him about feeling so very bad about existing.  I don’t have a church.  I don’t have a congregation.  But I do have a shaman.  I’m not sure how these things happen.  How does a life get built, anyway?

The part of me that is fighting with my compulsion admits that I want to use sex to get close to my shaman.  I want to feel connected with him.  Given our history I know it wouldn’t work in the way I wanted it to, anyway.  We have an odd time connecting that way because we go at very different speeds.  We are not a match or it never would have fallen off.  But I feel like I should do it anyway.  I love him so much.  I feel like I have to earn the honor of his regard.  I have to prove to him that I do want him.  I do love him.  There is nothing else I have to give that has any value or worth at all.  Absolutely never is the pleasure of my company a possible exchange.  I know there is no pleasure in my company.  I am too mean.  Too sharp.  Too vicious and unpleasant.

I take comfort in getting to explain to him that I am not allowed to have sex with anyone else anymore.  It’s not my fault.  I’m sorry I am changing the deal.  I’m sorry.  I’m so sorry that I will never meet that need again.  Please, please don’t reject me now.  He won’t.  But I feel absolutely terrified anyway.  Hell, he doesn’t remember the last time we had sex.  I was not pleased when I figured that out.  Butthead.  Apparently he doesn’t value me based on the things I think he does.  He doesn’t even remember the parts that I think are the most important thing I have to give.

What the fuck is it that he is getting then?  I need to ask.  I need to go to him and talk to him about starting to dye my hair when I first started pulling away from my mom.  The colors have gotten increasingly bolder and more odd and aggressive as I have felt angrier and angrier with my mother.  The bleach is kind of a bitch though.  I had a temper tantrum while trying to comb my hair one day because I couldn’t get the knot out.  I cut it out.  I did a bad job.  It was fun for several days to try to even it out and giggle because with the curls and the weird dye job (I think five colors in splotches) it really doesn’t matter much if it is “even”.

But I’m tired of going out in public and hearing the comments.  I smile at the children who ask.  I frown at the boys who snicker “clown”.  It’s like fucking junior high all over again.  I’m done.  I’m not hunting. I’m done.  I feel like that part of me is gone.  I miss my hair.  I miss being able to turn my head and get a curtain to hide behind.  It was part of how I dealt with my vast discomfort in public.  I lost my veil.  I feel exposed in a way that feels deeply uncomfortable.  I have nothing to hide behind except my eyelids.  They do not feel like adequate cover.

I feel like me shaving my head will happen like all the cutting.  In the bathroom by myself.  I know my shaman doesn’t keep up with my blog.  He frankly tells me he doesn’t have the time to read my ever-increasing flood.  That’s ok.  It means I can talk about him all I want.

I feel like part of what is going on with the less-than is I feel so very weird about my place in the social hierarchy lately.  I don’t feel like I am behaving.  I fit nowhere.  It was a true thing I said when I told my therapist that the only way I will ever fit into a group is if I leave Noah and am a poor single mother.  They just don’t make groups for me any more.

What does that mean?  I guess that means this is the American Dream then.  Solitude.  More of it.  I don’t understand why.  I’m not sure where I got broke and I don’t know how to fix it.  I don’t fit.  I feel wrong. I feel like everything in me is wrong.  I still feel bewildered by my lack of anger.  I don’t have that energy right now.  Anger is normally a big spur to me getting off my fucking ass and getting shit done.  It’s one of the things I use to fuel my productivity and I don’t care if that’s healthy or not.  Everyone dies, right?  I could very carefully never ever use my body harshly.  I don’t think I would be very proud of my life.

What am I proud of?  I kind of want to go ask my shaman to bait it out of me.  He drives me insane.  He says irritatingly true things.  One right after another.  It’s hard to not hate him sometimes.  I would ask him to take the last of this shame from me when he shaved my head.  But I don’t think I am going to ask.  Because this is one of those things I have to do alone.  He can’t take shame from me.  Not really.

Shame is something that I own all by myself.  I have to learn to wear it or I have to take it off.  I don’t know how to take it off right now.  I feel stuck.  I feel too little and small.  I haven’t done anything to really be proud of.  I have done things that other people do and I expect far more support for it.  I am small and selfish and petty.  I am weak.  Really?  Am I?  Maybe.  Yes?  Of course?

I recently saw this picture, one of the canonical “starving children in Africa” pictures.  I feel terrible describing it that way.  But these pictures are used as bludgeoning tools.  You can’t ignore the fact that seriously, right this minute a small child is starving to death in another part of the world.  While you wear big fur boots and lots of makeup and talk about how pathetic they are.  It’s kind of an American trope, this guilt.

If I ever feel bad for myself I am supposed to remind myself that I am at least not a starving child in Africa and go on about my life.  Well doesn’t that just support the status quo.  I don’t much like the status quo.

The thing about guilt and shame is they aren’t useful.  They are paralyzing.  They rarely spur people to much action beyond denial.

When the children hiss hostile words at me I hear my mother telling me that all the people in the world think I look stupid.  Everyone thinks I am ridiculous.  Why?  What have I done?  Why is it ridiculous to play with your appearance?  Why is it expected to be a set thing that doesn’t modify as time goes by?  Why can’t I change?  Why am I to be mocked?

But you know what?  I’m a fucking grown up.  My triggers are mine to manage.  I am not going to get all the children in the world to stop making fun of me.  They are little assholes.  They can’t help it.  So are their parents.

I have a lot of interesting feelings emerging as my hair gets shorter and shorter.  My mother liked my hair short.  She wanted me to look like a boy.  She commented openly on it.  I’m really intrigued by how harsh my face appears with short hair.  I’m not sure how I feel about that as a lifestyle choice going forward.  I am going to have an interesting time as it grows out.  I want my veil back.  It’s interesting knowing that if I want long hair going forward in my life I have to stop doing anything to it.  I’m stuck with baking soda and vinegar for the rest of my life.  I will have gorgeous hair again.

It’s weird learning what self-care means.  It’s weird thinking about learning to take care of my body.  It’s weird learning what it means to be gentle with myself.  It’s happening in unexpected ways.  I don’t feel bad about the cutting.  I hope I don’t do it again because the marks aren’t fading fast and I don’t want my daughters to learn it as an appropriate coping mechanism.  It means I need to figure out what to do.  I don’t know right now.  So far the answer seems to be, “Don’t hate yourself.”  I’m not sure what that actually means as something to teach my kids.  How do I do that?  For the love of shiny green apples, how can someone like me teach anything other than hating yourself?

I’m going to a homeschooling meet-up tomorrow with the kids.  We will be doing Sharpie tie-dye.  I won’t shave my head before then.  They deserve to know what they are getting into with our family.  We are weird.  Get used to it.

monogamy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Go see a therapist"

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You go see a therapist when you are stuck in some way and you can’t change by yourself.  Otherwise you just change by yourself and save the money.  Therapy is expensive, yo.

Who do I want to be when I grow up?  What patterns am I actually stuck in and which patterns can I change if I think about them?  What is a happy life?  What do I want to do with my time and my life?  That really is the crux of it, isn’t it?  The way you spend your hours is the way you spend your years.  I think I am saying it wrong but someone had something like that as a sig line on MDC.  Where is my Zen place?  What is it that I should be doing for my spirit to be in alignment with my body?  (By the way I don’t use the word Zen in a way that is associated with any actual definition or official usage.  I am a co-opting piece of shit.)

I told Noah this morning that I don’t feel like I am having sex for me and I don’t like that feeling any more.  I am having sex so that I can continue to be this construct in my head.  I am not really getting off much these days.  That’s a big change.  Sorta?  It started with pregnancy.  It kind of came back and then it seems to be gone again.  I can get close and I have all these nifty hypnosis tricks in place so I can trigger muscle spasms in the appropriate way such that I suppose it feels like an orgasm, kinda.  It’s like eating soft serve.  It’s just not ice cream even if it looks like and is presented as the same thing.  Even with sprinkles.  It’s not ice cream.

You aren’t supposed to say that on the internet, right?  The way we are having sex isn’t working for me.  I don’t want to be this right now.  I’m not saying never again.  I am saying I need something other than what I have right now.  This is hard to write about because I am trying very hard to not represent what Noah wants.  I don’t think I really know or understand what Noah wants.  It’s not his fault, but I think we are operating with a lot of unspoken assumptions and I should only speak for me.

I’m sitting here thinking and thinking and thinking.  In these arguments I always get stuck with this huge load of rage and I scream that I don’t want to spend the rest of my life doing laundry.  Dude.  The rest of my life will involve laundry.  Shut the fuck up already.  Why does this become such a sticking point?  I could dissect it.  I could start having the other adults in the house do the laundry; they would if I required it.  Really and truly, they would.  But it would require reminding and fussing and then I would never be satisfied with the results.  They would fold the damn shirts wrong.

This isn’t about laundry.

I don’t have very many pictures of my mother.  But in several she’s doing laundry.  I remember the sighs.  The long tirades about how much she hated having to clean up after me.  I remember her bitterness at having to go out and earn money and come home to the messes I made  It’s honestly one reason I don’t want to have a job.  If I had a job I would resent the ever loving shit out of my children for having the audacity to live in the house and make a mess when I wasn’t there.  It offends my dignity.  Oh God help someone who breaks a dish when I’m not home.  I’m completely unreasonable.  But if I’m standing in the room and not the one who does it?  My reaction is, “Thank God it wasn’t me!”  And I’m not mad.  Mistakes happen.

I don’t forgive slights that are done when I’m out of sight.  I’m not sure what is up with that.  Hunh.  Ok, that’s actually a big one.  I’m going to have to think about that one for a long time.  I resent having to be a support network for a life and for happiness I won’t get to share.  It really bothers me.  It makes me feel angry that I spend ‘x’ hours of week doing extra work so that Noah gets to have ‘y’ hours of time completely alone.  Because the hours aren’t equal.  Not in my head.

There is a tally.  He doesn’t understand it or track it.  It is totally invisible to him if I do it right.  Sex is part of the tally.  Part of the things I “have to do”.  The tally that “should be” invisible to him.  Which means the cost should be invisible as well.  I’m having trouble writing a coherent sentence about this.  If I don’t explain the tally system he can’t change his behavior based on the different costs.

For the whole rest of my life Noah will have more effect on me than anyone.  Dealing with him is effort because he is a human being and that’s just life.  That’s ok.  That’s more than ok.  I want to put a lot of effort into him because I like him sooooooooooo much.  If he doesn’t understand where I am putting effort and why… it’s kind of silly, you know?  I don’t know that I am using my effort to good effect.  I don’t know where I am spinning my wheels and trying to do things to please dead people.

Who do I want to be when I grow up?  What would I be like if I had grown up believing that my body is mine and people should only do things to me that I want them to do?  I wonder if she is more or less fierce than I am?

Obedience.  What is it?  Obedience to what?  To blind ideals?  To stupid short-sighted goals?  To instant gratification with a high opportunity cost?  What cost can I bear?  Honestly–a high cost.  I really can.  But where should the cost be spent?  I don’t think that decision should be made in a vacuum.  Years ago Noah offered me an abusive relationship with off-switch.  What does it mean to be off?  What does it mean when it is turned on?  I’m not afraid of Noah, not really.  Noah told me flat out this morning that he doesn’t believe me when I say I won’t leave.  He’s a smartie, that one.  The part that I don’t think he understands is I wouldn’t be able to stay gone.  I can never actually walk away from him.  He is the father of my children.  Until his death he will be in my life.  That is complicated.  Noah doesn’t actually know what it means to talk about a broken home.  I do.  I want a home.

Even if it is soft serve, it’s home.  That sounds terrible.  Even if I am nothing exciting you will still stay.  Even if I am a poor imitation of what a wife should be.  Even if I am not anything like advertised.  I feel like I am ruining Noah’s life by being so conflicted about sex.  I don’t think Noah’s sexual performance has suddenly gone down hill.

Who do I want to be when I grow up?  I don’t think a therapist can just fix me.  I need to figure out who I want to be.  No one else can tell me that.  What would I be like if I could move through the world without the sure knowledge that if someone asked me for sex I am essentially required to say yes, or at least only say no to a very small number of people in specific categories.  Anyone in category A should be good enough.

People are not interchangeable.  They really aren’t.  And I don’t fucking owe anyone anything.  The Embargo is not my fault.  It really doesn’t matter what my father told me.  I don’t have a cunt so that I can get as many dicks as possible.

hair cutting

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No one really knows what the boundaries are for another person.  You have to speak for yourself, only, always.  I decided to stop hunting and I cut all my hair off.  In the bathroom with nail scissors.  And now I’m going to feel like a fucking schmuck for years.  Something broke.  I think if I believed I could get away with wearing a burqa I would.  I feel like a melodramatic, stupid, immature moron.  Not to put too fine a point on it.

Ok, so what really happened is I was in the process of trying to leave the house one day and I couldn’t comb through the snarls.  I lost my temper and badly cut the knot out.  I have been compulsively going into the bathroom to fix it ever since.  It’s rather short.  My hair is not ok with bleach.  I have a fairly ridiculous amount of shame around the fact that this is not the first time I have stopped hunting and shaved my head.  I should tell that story.  I don’t know if it is in the book or not.

I was seventeen and at West Valley.  I was hanging out with Praveena.  It was towards the end of our time hanging out together.  I was on the tail end of one of my whoring-around-phases and feeling really bad about myself.  I was getting to the point where I noticed that everyone who fucked me ditched me really soon after.  I was at Praveena’s house and we were having a conversation about the fact that it bothered me that people no longer wanted to be my friend after we had sex.  She thoughtfully looked at me and said, “Then why don’t you find out if they want to be your friend before you have sex with them?”

I started shaking.  You don’t understand.  People don’t spend time with me very often.  Sex was how I got people to look at me.  I moved around so often that I knew that I had to get attention quickly or I wouldn’t get it at all.  I know what I’m supposed to act like.  I know my “role”.  I couldn’t verbalize any of that at the time.  I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to be near me.  I just sat there shaking.  I had been cutting my hair at home compulsively for a while.  It was probably three or four inches long.  I asked her for shaving supplies.  She was kind of confused as to why I wanted to shave my legs right then but she got them.

I went out in the back yard and shaved my head.  She watched in wide mouthed horror.  She had hair almost to her waist.  She was a gorgeous Persian girl with super thick luscious hair.  She sputtered and gasped and tried to talk me out of it.  I remember the look of squick on her face.  I laughed.

My mother didn’t laugh.  To put this in larger context, this happened in October of 1998.  My father had killed himself a couple of weeks earlier.  Tommy had killed himself in June.  My mom said a lot of very rude and nasty things to me about my looks.  She pointed out that my head was exceedingly lumpy.  She pointed out that given how fat I was, my head looked especially small and stupid.  I need that big bushy hair to balance out my fat ass.

I was invited to go to a ‘formal’ dinner related to the haunted house event I volunteered at.  My hair was only a few millimeters long at that point.  I covered my head in glitter and wore a tight black velvet dress.  My mom didn’t say anything, but she shook her head and grimaced.

At the time I felt awkward and stupid and barely spoke to anyone.  The reality is that people were perfectly nice and civil to me.  The people who knew me at all were friendly and strangers went out of their way to be nice.  I never went back to that organization.  My mother extensively talked about how stupid I looked and how she bets they would be making fun of me behind my back.

I’m not really cutting my hair because I think it makes me look ugly.  When I feel ugly I feel compelled to cut my hair.  I really do have beautiful hair.  My hair is lovely enough that someone who feels and acts the way I do should not have that much camouflage to look “normal”.

I can’t possibly explain my mothers furious disgust at people who dye their hair “funny colors”.  Oh my god.  Anyone who would do that is disgusting.  They are lesser, dirty people.  They are not normal.  Above all we must be normal, right?  I don’t even know what that means.

I really and truly did dye my hair because I thought it was fun.  I have enjoyed catching glimpses of myself in reflections and seeing the shock of color.  It makes me smile.  Unfortunately my hair is quite fine and the bleach destroys it and it gets shorter and shorter and… yeah.  It’s time to deal with letting it grow out again.

And that represents so much internal conflict of self-expression and self-identity.  It’s ridiculous that it matters so much.  As I listen to Lady Gaga sing about her own hair experience I feel trite and ridiculous and like I am such a product of my generation.  Of course I dye my hair odd colors and cut it myself in ridiculous ways.  I’m Emo, right?  I guess I never got over high school.

This is part of what I mean when I say I don’t fit.  I don’t really know the rules.  Do you want to know the main reason I’m cutting my hair myself?  Because it really doesn’t matter if I pay someone to do this.  Pretty soon I’m going to just buzz it because it’s time to start fresh.  There really isn’t a point in paying someone to do that.  I’ve been looking extensively at our budgeting.  I’m going to continue paying for Noah’s haircuts because I like them.  Enh, I’m just done paying for them for a few years.  It makes me twitch to pay that much money on hair care.  Curly hair is very forgiving and it’s not like I’m trying to impress anyone.  That feels bad to say.

I have fun cutting my hair.  I like trying to figure out the shape of my head.  I get compliments from random people when I am out so I think I do a reasonable job.  I’m not ugly.  I don’t really think that having short hair makes me ugly.  I don’t think that other people with short hair are ugly.  But when I am feeling ugly I compulsively cut my hair.  I’m trying to change what I see in the mirror.  I want to have more control over what I see.  I don’t want to go pay someone else who will try to make me look like some mainstream idea of beauty.  Whatever it is that society values and requires of women I am not it.  Let’s get the advertising straight.

There are fifty sides to every story.  I like cutting my hair.  I think it is fun.  I think it is weird.  I think it is a slightly self-harming behavior but fairly harmless so it’s ok.  I think it is an obsessive compulsive tick when I am overwhelmed with my sexuality.  I think that other people will judge me badly for being the kind of person who will do this.  I don’t know why I care.  Thank goodness we are through picture season.

I need to let the roots get a bit longer before I decide how short to get.  Until then I get to cut off bits and pieces every time the urge strikes.  I think it is kind of funny that I do this during cold weather.  I guess I’ll just have to wear my Cheshire Cat hat all the time for a few months.  That’s subtle.

I told Noah some truth last night.  I wonder how that will work out.

That’s why.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think I’m ordering more pot today.