Yesterday I took the girls on our first bike ride. We went a bit over two miles. I was thrilled with how well they did. When Shanna fell over she jumped up and brushed herself off and said there was no blood so she was fine. She announced, “Well now I know not to turn my wheel like that on a driveway.”

When we were getting started we went over to 7-11 so I could fill up my tires with air. There was a gentleman sitting next to the machine having a smoke.

He was dirty, thin, greasy looking, his hair was straggly and unkempt. But he smiled at my kids and nodded to me. I smiled back and said a cheerful, “Hello!” He seemed surprised because he startled then looked down at the ground.

*I* know that I am no better than him. I felt a little weird as my kids rolled through on their shiny brand-spanking-new bikes. We have so much and he has so little. You don’t spend your days sitting next to the 7-11 smoking if you have anything better to do.

I have a nice comfy backyard to sit in when I smoke. I am in no way shape or form morally superior to him. But I’ll bet that he would be surprised by the idea that I am not better. I bet he would be surprised to find that I don’t believe I deserve better than him. I don’t think he is getting what he deserves. I don’t have to know him. I don’t know very many people on this planet who “get what they deserve” for good or for ill.

I choose to enact a lot of weird poverty quirks in my life. I flush my toilet with recycled bathwater. I wash out plastic Ziplock bags and use them forever. I have some kinda bizarre grey water recycling in my yard. My composting is not fancy or staged. It’s primitive. I just bury shit.

I feel guilty that I wasted the money on brand new bikes. I could have hunted yard sales. My kids would not have felt bad. They are equally excited. They have no brand name preferences.

But sometimes there are things you just want and it isn’t about whether or not you deserve them. There is no “right way” there is just what you did today.

I am not better or more deserving than anyone else. I’m sorry that other people are not getting closer to what they deserve.

We don’t deserve shiny new bicycles more than that man deserves somewhere to go where he is wanted and loved. But we have the bicycles and that man doesn’t seem like he has anywhere to be.

Life is very unfair sometimes. Sometimes it is unfair and you are at the bottom. sometimes it is unfair and you are at the top. We don’t get what we deserve. We don’t even really get what we earn.

Next time I will ask him his name. I have seen him there before when I was getting gas but not getting air. Next time I will not walk past him as one more person treating him like he is invisible.

I can’t afford a pet right now. It’s not that I will take him on as a project or try to fix his life. I can’t. I can’t give him what he deserves. It isn’t mine to give. But I can ask him his name and I can see him as a real person and if he turns out to be chatty with provocation I can listen.

He’s here. And I’m here. And no one gets what they deserve. And no one gets all of their needs met. Maybe I can see him and that is better than nothing. Many days that is all I need. I need to be seen. I need to be encouraged to still be here.

I have a home where I’m allowed to line the walls with photographs of people smiling down on me. I can bask in their love all day every day even though those people can’t actually stand me on a daily basis. Or they live far away. Or they are busy. Or.

Here we like to think about Helping People meaning that you send money to the third world. There are people within one mile of your house who would have their lives immeasurably improved if you spent one hour a week with them.

The world doesn’t have anything to give you. The world only cares what you have to give. It’s hard. It feels unfair. It feels silencing and horrible and awful and ugh.

The world doesn’t give a shit about your needs. The world is too busy nursing its own wounds. It isn’t personal. The world sure as shit doesn’t care about me either. I have to. It’s my job to care about me. Not anyone else. I mean, I kind of bully a little of it out of Noah and the girls but…

Breakfast is ready. I love you. Even if you drive me crazy. Even if you have nothing to give me and I have nothing to give you and I hate your politics. Even if I hate your religion.

I love you and I want you here. Maybe I don’t want you right here all the time but I want you in the world. Take up space. You matter. You impact people. Your ability to smile at someone or help them or ask a follow up question like, “So how did your dad’s surgery go?” make people feel like they are part of a web.

Just go talk to people. Even if you are kind of annoying. We need to be poked.

I love you. Even you.

Had dinner with my friend and his brother recently. After the fact the brother said to my friend, “I was quite surprised by how deep that conversation was. I don’t usually talk to people about those things.”

I don’t really know how to have casual, surface conversations. I want to know the details about your childhood. I want to know why you are so violently opposed to having kids given that you are married to someone who wants kids even if it is none of my business. I’m not going to judge your reasons or argue with you. I’m just curious.

I want you to tell me why you think my friend ended up the way he is. You were there during his childhood and I wasn’t. Yes, I totally want to hear about the long-term relationship ups and downs you have had.

I don’t have relationships with my siblings. I don’t know how they work. I want to hear how they work for other people so it can help me guide my kids. I need to hear as many different points of view as possible because I don’t know what the range is. I only know my life. I know the books I have read.

I want to know about real life. I haven’t seen very much of it. Of course I am going to ask you deep and probing questions to find out what causes you to behave the way you do. The why behind people intrigues me.

Thank you for humoring me by telling me your story. I won’t reveal the details in public and I won’t betray the secrets you gave away on accident. I’m kind of like a bottomless well. I hold lots of secrets. The only ones I tell are my own.

That’s not even true. I’ve told secrets that aren’t my own. I do try to limit my confessional spews to my family. And lovers. Err, and I only tell ones that relate to me.

I’ve never gone through my brain and tried to organize my thoughts into lists of rape survivors. I don’t know how many I’ve talked to and I don’t want to. The list is very long.

I’ve never gone through my brain and tried to organize all of the incest survivors I have met. I don’t want to think about them that way.

Instead I think of my friends in more abstract pictures. They kind of swirl in my head in bright colors. Some of them have deep cracks fracturing their section. They aren’t broken but they show a lot of wear. Some of them are pale because I don’t know much about them. Some of them are bright and shining. The cracks don’t decide if the color is strong or weak. That’s on a completely different gradient.

Despite my obsession with lists I try not to list my friends or categorize them much. I do have some groupings. Breeders and non-breeders. Perverts and “I’m not privy to information about their sex life”. In town and out of town. Dancers. Home schoolers.

But I don’t list them. I just try to poke that corner of the web of my brain and see what floats up. I consciously don’t want to try to write them down.

I do think about the whole level thing. Level one, two, three, four, five. It does decide a lot of my behavior with people.

Level one gets to actually see me relax. They see the full variety of my behaviors and hear my thought process. I think out loud as much as I don’t. Level two gets to hear my unedited thoughts when we are together. I don’t use tact. Level three gets a strong dose of tact and an attempt to conform to their culture as much as I am able. My behavior and thoughts are censored but I feel comfortable with the idea that this person likes me. I can talk to them and feel safe but I know I need to be mindful of behaving “appropriately”.

Level four are people I think don’t like me very much. I try to avoid speaking directly to them and I literally keep my head down when I am physically near them. I am trying to stop. This is less pronounced than it used to be. I’ve worked on it pretty hard. I generally have to be near these people for reasons of shared community.

Level five is for strangers. How I treat them partially depends on how embedded in my web they are. I am tentative with people who know a lot of people who know me. I worry like fuck about reputation. With people who are completely unrelated to me I am much more free with casual speech. I babble, to put it frankly.

The more I spend time with Shanna the more validated I feel in my basic approach to strangers.

I wonder how much of our ability to talk to people will work in more diverse settings? I hope to find out. Will we be able to adapt into different settings? I wonder how much of my, and her, ability to talk to people is grounded in looks versus personality. I will never be able to know.

I hope I am not failing them.

Anyway, I don’t write down lists of people I know and sort them into levels. That uhh would take a lot of energy I don’t want to spend. I just notice the physical differences in how I react to people and I need to be honest with myself about that structure. If I settle in to understanding how I work I can figure out how to break patterns.

I suspect a lot of people I slot into level four don’t have a problem with me and it is all in my head. If I recognize my own inability to determine other peoples emotional states perhaps I can figure out some sort of testing protocol over time. Yes, I’m that dorky. But how to float test balloons and all.

It is very useful for me to determine who should be on level three instead of level two. That way I don’t cross lines and offend people. I’m really good at offending people if I’m not careful. When I’m careful I can sit and talk to someone of any religion of any color of any socio-economic class and have a lovely conversation. I can be respectful of other boundaries and social limitations. It just takes a lot of work and it means censoring out a very high percentage of stuff I think.

I can have a lot more time in a week with level two people without feeling physical stress than I can people of lower levels. Lately I feel quite supported. I worry about the eventual shift in life. The last two months have been really nice. I’m working on figuring out how to have more like this level of support when things change.

But if I think I have an “in” with you of any kind–of course I will ask personal questions. I’m not really interested in anything about you that isn’t personal. I’m kind of weird that way.

I’m happy with my forward progress this year in terms of gardening. Next year will be a fallow year because of the road trip. I think I will leave a stick house and come home to a playhouse completely covered in vines. I can’t express how happy that makes me.

I have this deep need to figure out how to live with my kids in a migratory fashion. I don’t know why I need this as bad as I do. I feel weird about it.

Maybe I want to prove that I could do it better than my mom? I don’t know. My mom didn’t have my life circumstances and I can’t blame her for doing the best she could with the meager resources at her disposal.

I have the internet. I can’t judge what she did. That would be a completely asshole move.

So if not a competitive thing, what? A way to figure out how it should be to break my ingrained patterns of panic? It seems unfair to drag my kids through my exposure therapy. Only…

If that is the way that I teach them how to have healthy reactions and they don’t know what I’m doing… is it actually bad? I don’t know.

I want my kids to see as many different kinds of lives as possible. I want them to understand the vast differences that privilege make. I want them to think about what they actually see in terms of generosity, community, and humanity as they meet different people.

I don’t believe I can force them to think the way I do or reach the same conclusions as me. That’s not the point. All I can control is what they see and are exposed to. And only for a short time. After that I don’t get to be the boss any more.

Go now.

My kids express fervent appreciation of fat bodies. They are completely blind to the world of “diets” and “thinspiration”. When I read articles about the prevalence of eating disorders in children under ten I feel so sad. I can’t do anything about all the kids. My kids so far are lucky enough to love their bodies and bodies in general. They have positive associations with people of all body types.

That’s all I can control.

I feel sad when I read about the color coded and gendering of toys that seem to be common now. My kids don’t live in that world. Sure, they have some pink and they play princesses. But they are also fierce knights and doctors and cooks and fire fighters and cupcake girls and super heroes and …

They have no idea that people think girls shouldn’t “do”. They are incredibly assertive instead of passive. They are not aware that some people believe that children should be seen and not heard.

I was told and told and told and told to just shut up. My kids don’t hear it.

Today should be a nice day.

I read research studies as a hobby. This has been true for many years. I read studies about a wide variety of topics. I have read just about everything written on the topic of incest that was available as of the time I last sat down with databases to search (I haven’t gone looking for research studies on incest in the past four years so I’m probably out of date now). I read about PTSD, parenting, child development, race, vaccines, breastfeeding, other more general mental illness issues, among many random one-off topics that aren’t normally part of my obsessive researching.

I confess that I do not bother to keep a running bibliography of all the studies I have ever read. I do not read these things so I can impress anyone else. I feel incredibly frustrated that so many people believe that if I am going to write about what I know then I must footnote everything.

Guess what? That’s an incredibly idiotic thing to demand of people who are not writing for an academic journal. Have you noticed how I have shunned academia? Yeah, fuck you too if you think I must cite everything I know or it is invalid.

 

I read studies that agree with my points of view and studies that argue with me. I can almost always sit down and present bullet point lists of the pro and con arguments if I’m asked to do so. No, I can’t fucking remember the name of the schmuck who did the study. That’s not how my brain works.

What is more important? That I be able to cite a small list of studies so I can win internet arguments or that I read absolutely everything I can and come to my own conclusions?

Have you ever read meta-research? The vast majority of studies that exist are unsound, inaccurate, biased, or otherwise not all that appropriate for basing your life around. Most studies are done on populations and every single thing that is true for a population can be disproved on an individual level. Which means to my jaundiced way of thinking that they aren’t all that valid.

Kind of like looking at you BMI as an indicator of health. Like Brad Pitt being deemed “unhealthy” if his BMI is too high. Err, his BMI is high because he has muscles and if we’re dinging people for that our “health standards” are kind of broken.

Just about all of science works that way when you go read study after study after study after study.

So no, I’m not going to spend the rest of my life carefully footnoting everything I write. Give me a break. I’ll do it for books. I’ll do it if I ever decide I want to participate in academia. Otherwise: bite me.

Saying that someone must cite everything or it isn’t valid is kind of like saying, “People who have only read one or two studies and they have memorized them are way more important to listen to than someone who has so much information in their brain that they are now uncertain what started from where.” Well, uhm… ok. Have fun with that.

I don’t mostly write because I am trying to convince people of anything. Have you noticed how I’ve never gone out and tried to write in a general forum addressing lots of people? I write to clear my head and figure out what I think. If that’s useful to other people, great. If it isn’t–don’t fucking tell me that I have to cite studies in order to prove what I think. Just ignore me and move on with your life.

That said, man do I wish I got to be the boss of other people. I really do.

I read about parenting because I have spent my whole life knowing that what I saw of “parenting” was bad and I need to understand what “good” parenting means.

Mostly what I find is that gender essentialism is a problem for everyone. When you look at research, depending on who does the research, you either find that it doesn’t matter what gender the parents are (kids from queer parents do great thankyouverymuch) to finding out that “men have a unique role”.

Men are supposed to teach kids how to rough house. Learning to rough house is how you learn more about your body’s physical boundaries and the boundaries of people around you. When a child is very young they climb all over you and you ignore a baby. They can’t help hurting you. As they get heavier, parents have to teach them how to be non-hurtful.

Kids are not born knowing that if they shove their knee into your belly it hurts. They just don’t know. They have to be told hundreds or thousands of times.

If I cared more about research I would be tapping my foot and looking at Noah with impatience.

Instead I look at the combination of things I learn and think “Hey–I think these people “proved” that fathers must teach these things because that is what they wanted to prove. That doesn’t mean it is TRUE.”

So I rough house with the kids I know. I rough house with my kids and I go to the park and wrestle with the home schoolers. I get the impression I am more rough with the kids than their fathers’ are in general. We live in Silicon Valley. Our fathers are mostly computer geeks. They aren’t rough and tumble brogrammers either. I am blissfully surrounded by men who are not so physical.

So I am instead. I brought the power tools into my relationship. If there is something to be fixed in my house we don’t wait for “father to come home” I fucking do it.

I do, however, think that parents play very different roles for children. I don’t think that is any more gendered than it has to be.

I believe that parents have responsibilities to their children because the parent of a given child has a unique ability to help that specific child.

Your kid is a mixture of you and another person. That means your kid is going to have some personality and/or physical traits like you. What have you learned about the world in your tenure pre-children? What did you learn about how to manage your personality in the world?

Your kid isn’t going to be exactly like you. What you teach them about your experience is about guidance, not requirements. You should not expect them to handle everything exactly how you would because they are also like their other parents. Presumably you mated with someone who had at least some traits that are different from yours, right?

Parents need to teach their kids what to expect from the world. If you are an asshole to your kids then you teach them the world is like that. They will never unlearn that point of view.

Daughters and sons who have fathers who think they are unimportant go on to find more people to treat them like they don’t matter. People want the world to make sense. Even if that means they pick dysfunctional relationship after dysfunctional relationship.

It matters how you treat your children. And some of how parents treat their kids is about gender and it is about privilege.

No one should scream at their kids. Not mothers and not fathers. That’s pretty well shown to be true. Screaming elevates cortisol and adrenaline and the more time you spend with those chemicals racing through a developing brain the worse time that kid will have becoming a calm, functional adult.

Fathers are often, but not always, bigger and stronger than their wives. Whenever you are standing next to someone who is much smaller than you then it is important that you consciously not be scary.

It isn’t fair that a large man is more inherently scary to a child than a woman but it is mostly true. Women have to work much harder to be scary compared to men. Men are often terrifying if they don’t consciously work to not be.

If you go look at history that made more sense. Men have often been more brutal than women. I’m not saying women aren’t brutal–far from it. I’m aware of how scary and nasty women can be let me tell you.

In any given family a mother might be more scary than a father but in general children spend more time with their mothers and they are more acclimated to the mother so she is more familiar and “normalized” than the father.

If a father stays home and the mother works then this seems to reverse. It’s not actually about gender. It’s about familiarity and acclimation. We have just had a long period of

 

And I’m going to stop there because I have two forking kids asleep on me. fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. I’m feeling oppressed and bitter lately. My attitude fucking sucks.

Ok if I’m going to have children fucking climbing on me from 4 fucking 30 in the fucking morning I’m going to need pot today. fuckfuckfuckity.

The best thing about having the pantry torn down is I can sit on the floor and see both the “window” near the washing machine and the mural at the same time. I’m not what you’d call a “good artist” but I do ok. I feel proud of these pictures.

I read recently that most of the cave paintings they have found were probably done by women. They are judging this based on the size of the handprints left.

The desire to decorate the walls of your home is just about as old as my species.

I am so grateful that I get to do this in the ways I want. For most of my life spending this much money on furniture was quite literally unthinkable. It was not an option. We did not have it, period. It wasn’t about juggling the budget… we didn’t have it.

They say that humans are really bad at acclimating to their luxury and then they stop taking joy in it. Periods of deprivation are useful for making you appreciate your baseline again.

I hope I never stop taking joy in bright pastel stripes in my pantry. Or the changing color river. (Even my “pastels” are still ridiculously loud.)

When I was a kid my mother called me Punky Brewster. She didn’t mean it as a compliment. I got tired of the shit and retreated to black. I wore pretty much exclusively black for seven years because I was tired of being mocked. Black makes you more invisible. Also, scarier. I was told that I was that “scary girl on the bus”.

I really like my life. I feel grateful that I get to be here today. What I do all day will be stuff that I pick just because it makes me happy to do. Today is Halloween! Candy will be brought back to me! I’m going to stay behind and hand out candy. The menfolk can go off with the home schoolers. We’ll see how this goes. Ha.

I really should spend the early part of the day on the scare princess. I haven’t done it. No one has wanted to do it with us and Shanna is too short to do a lot of the work so it will be all me. I really wanted kids to do it. For kids it is fun. For me it is work. Oh well. I would like it done. I should go do it. Maybe some other year.

I didn’t paint. My back is spasming. It happens even when I’m not being stupid about too much physical labor. It’s just part of life. It seemed kind of stupid to go up a ladder though. See–I do have self preservation instincts. Neiner. It’ll get done when my back feels better.

Instead I went to Ikea. Cause I’m super S-M-R-T. I didn’t get anything close to my full list. But I got a couple of pieces to put together. Not done. Can’t go back to Ikea until I finish processing this load. I already have a scheduled trip. See, I like pressure. I pick it on purpose. It’s how I manage my anxiety. That sounds stupid but it is true.

Breakfast.

This morning I woke up to see a friend post on twitter that she needs more than an hour after a shower in order to get ready. The main thing I thought was, “I’m glad I’m not beautiful.”

Pam, before you argue with me, I’m not homely or anything. But beautiful is largely about performing a certain kind of look. I’m not beautiful. I don’t want to be.

I like being quirky and attractive without beauty. It allows a lot more freedom for the day after day when I don’t brush my hair and I look increasingly Medusa-like. I should probably take a shower today because it is getting bad.

Today will be kind of insane. Today is the home school Halloween meet up. We have a Jake costume and a growling spider costume so we are good to go. I haven’t decided if I will once again be Snow White or Ariel. Though I don’t have an Ariel wig an more. My hair has always been more Snow White. That is why my mom made me that costume.

Maybe some year I should get a costume that wasn’t made by my mother so I can stop the random crying fits when I dress up. I miss you mama. I think about you every day.

I think that if circumstances had been just slightly different I would have grown up to call my mother on the phone every single day.

Instead I look at my daughters. I’m allowed to think about them every day right now. It’s kind of mandatory. Calli reminds so much of my mom. Facial expressions, body language.

Do I remember a good Halloween with my mom? My mom made me a pink princess dress when I was … eight? Nine? I loved that dress. I wanted to wear it all the time but my mom only let me wear it occasionally. She was afraid I would ruin it by wearing it. Then I outgrew it. I don’t save much of anything for special occasions. If you ruin something oh well.

The scarcity mindset versus the abundance mindset is really different. I mean, dude…. I was on track to outgrow it any way. What in the hell were we saving it for? She never wanted me to play with my toys. I was supposed to keep them nice. What, so people wouldn’t know we were poor? Give me a break. That was written on my dirty face and bad behavior.

Do you know why poor children are enculturated so differently? Because you learn culture by sitting and watching people and then trying to copy how they move, talk, and think. If you are left alone a lot you don’t become shaped by people. You go your own way. People who go their own way are weird kind of by definition.

Being not pretty plays into this. Who are you trying to impress? If I spent an hour (or more) every day on my appearance I could probably get to the point of being “beautiful”. If I wanted to go to the gym it is becoming apparent that I could have a societally approved body.

I really don’t think so. I have better things to do with my life. This shell is not me. The important things about me are not that other people find me visually non-threatening and appealing. No. I’m not that.

That would kind of take away from the ability to look terrifying at the drop of a hat from ten feet away. Many teenagers have let me know that I am fucking scary. I learned a lot from teaching. Maybe that was why I struggled so much as a student.

People get away from scary peers. They don’t have a choice to get away from a scary teacher.

You can find studies going back and forth on the idea of first impressions. Either they are very important and all later interactions are confirmation or denial of belief or first impressions are about the person projecting and they only get to know you over time. Be consistent and don’t worry about the first impression.

I really worry about the first impression. I do my utmost to ensure that I am peppy, clever, and lively in conversation. But I try to not mention sex, parenting, or anything about my childhood. I am really happy about having gardening as a hobby. I can’t even talk about most of the books I read. I can cherry pick. “I’m most of the way through The Happiness Project by Gretchen … something. It’s ok.” I could rip the book apart from a literary point of view. But mostly what I get from this book is that she is a nice person trying hard to be a force for good in the world. Awesome. Go have fun.

Mark Twain says “Use ‘damn’ as your only adjective or adverb. It gets the point across and it is easier for your editor to find it and delete it than ‘very’.”

Err, I may have mildly paraphrased him. A word or so sounds wrong but I’m too lazy to look it up. (I thought of this quote because I used the word “very” four times in the previous paragraph before I noticed and started to twitch.)

My house is in flux and it is making me twitch really hard. One of the large washing machine bits broke in transit. A tiny little corner popped off. But it was the corner of the latch. Kind of important to have a latch. Shit. There will be no washing machine in my house for over a month. I understand that other people deal with this all the time but it’s a pretty big change in routine. I’m not trying to whine and say that it is hard. It’s just an errand instead of something I do while I’m juggling six other things. Frankly it may feel almost fun to have to go sit for a while. I don’t sit much.

The part that is making me twitch isn’t the growing pile of laundry. I can mostly ignore that. I had to tear out the pantry corner of my garage. All of my food storage is stacked haphazardly all over my desk and floor and bookshelves (the ones with books) in the garage. It’s a tripping hazard and the kids are starting to go through things and I feel like the top of my head will explode. Oh man. Please please please please no.

I am terrified that if I go see this allergist my friend is recommending that I will be told that I need to move in the direction of being gluten and dairy free. I have almost never been free of pain in my life. What do I live on? Gluten and dairy.

It is interesting how triage works. Never before in my life would I have considered seeing a doctor for my abdominal pain and diarrhea. That’s just how my body works. Whatever. I have been less supportive than I could have been to friends over the years who have all climbed on the no gluten bandwagon.

Did you know that Depression is highly linked to inflammation in the body? Your brain is over stressed so it shuts down. There are a lot of factors, of course, but eating foods that irritate your body when it is already sensitive to chemical imbalance is uhhh apparently dumb.

Which is to say, I’m dumb. And I have been my entire life. But are you dumb for eating the only food you can afford and that doesn’t make you spontaneously vomit from fear sometimes? I have had a lot of meals in my life where I was so harangued that I finished eating and went in the bathroom and threw up. It made the entire act of eating a real problem for me.

I have only rarely brought up how disordered my eating is over the ten years I have been writing. It isn’t something I think about much. I have been trying to move in the direction of doing better because I understood that my childhood was very unhealthy. But you don’t know what you don’t know.

Trying to get my body to stop hurting is a process. Every animal has very different “care and feeding” requirements. I still haven’t learned mine very well. I was specifically taught that caring for my body was something that should be avoided as long as possible. Dying early has never seemed like a bad result.

I don’t want to die right now. I feel very pleased that I can look around at the mess (I’m sitting on the ground next to the side door) and feel anxiety about the mess but it is not overwhelming. The only thing that I need to do to solve this problem is let time pass. We have the money to pay for every step of fixing this. I just have to wait for shipping. I have quarters. I can go to the laundromat.

At another point in my life I would have cried and cried and cried. Because it is one more thing. I don’t feel that compulsion now and the absence feels nice.

Something else that I notice: I buy my kids more expensive versions of things. I buy the cloth or wood versions. They get the plastic versions from other people as gifts and they use them like crazy. Mine… don’t get played with. I bought my kids a train set. They *did not use it*. Once in a while I would set it up and play with it. They watched or bossed me or tried to take the track apart. Calli was given a plastic train set for her last birthday by one of her favorite grown ups. She plays with it a lot. It is easy for her to set up and use and she finds it delightful.

See, this is that control shit. Enh, I’ve let them get rid of most of the wood stuff I liked. So much for that Waldorf fantasy. S’ok. I kept the cute baby toys in a basket so I can “play” with little ones who come over.

I want to add more Christmas lights to the ceiling in the garage. I should insulate the damn garage door. Ugh. See, always one more damn thing. It can either depress you or give you something to do.

I see a trip to Ikea in our future. We lost a bookshelf in the garage. I may replace it with a smaller one so that I can have a wider hallway into the pantry. It’s a pain in the ass getting through there. It will mean finding other homes for things currently in storage there.

Next few steps of back yard planning:

Once the hot tub is gone (see how I don’t have to do anything until AFTER this and I’m waiting on someone else’s schedule and it could take a while *phew*) I want to get two big storage boxes that are weather proof for the back yard. Hopefully ones that look like benches because that will be handy. They will go where the hot tub is, but against the bedroom wall.

One tub will contain garden tools and there will be a detailed inventory list. Maybe with pictures. Kids need to learn to put things away.

One tub will be wood working tools including hand saws. It will of course contain a detailed inventory list etc.

There will be basic baby proofing, like I think a carabiner should close both but older kids can just access stuff. I think I will have a big sign on the wall that says, “Notify Krissy before beginning projects with tools.”

There are times and places where “just be respectful” is an adequate rule. Then there is the rest of life.

I am not going to spread the mulch until the hot tub is gone. That occurred to me yesterday after making the to-do list. It will make it harder to remove. Yay for a task off the list for this week!

I want to get the hot tub out, spread the mulch to create a running path, and leave spaces for later gardening steps. I will shape the future with the mulch. Ha. I want a raised bed next to the house between the concrete slab and the arbor. That area gets the most intense sunlight in my entire yard. I want it.

I want raised beds in the back corner around the concrete slab. Instead of seeing ugly fence I want trellis with climbing plants. And the whole bed will have a bench along the side so you can sit down and chat. I would like it if there was a table there that was wide enough to have someone work on large-ish projects. So people can sit on one side doing their thing and people can stand on the other side doing something else.

The concrete slab nearer to the house will be used for a variety of projects. There will be wood working tools and piles of wood. But I also want to have some big containers with pipe parts and gutters and various attachment mechanisms for more like science experiments. Water play. Tennis balls. (I’ll need big pipe.)

I have a circle of stones for jumping now. This makes me very happy. I would sorta like one or two more big stones to make the circle better but they are crazy expensive. Not soon.

Under the arbor I want to put stuff that feels nice to walk on. I want something soft and comfy for me to use there. I hope I can get the arbor covered by vines within five years. I need to plant more things in the spring to contribute to that. I have several more vertical support poles I could take advantage of. I don’t know what to put though. Research! I hope to get the arbor painted this week. If I keep up the paint job it will last me till old age. If I am a slacker then it will rot. It’s really pretty. I totally want to keep it.

In the spring I should invite the home schoolers over for more fence painting. After that I can get around to installing raised beds along the fence on the side yard. I would like to have better soil at a level I can reach without having to sit on the ground. I am also going to build a clothesline structure on the fence. (Ok probably several independent structures.) My preference is to wash one load of laundry a day. That’s a rate that allows for a clothesline.

I would really like to have my side gate painted. It would make me happy.

I think that what I like so much about my house and yard now is I see the time spent creating that part of my house. I sit in my garage and think of Tay arguing with me about flooring. I think about it a lot. I feel smug and right. Given that I have destroyed a bookshelf with my inability to deal promptly with some problems I made the right flooring choice. You have to know all the conditions you are dealing with in order to make the right choice. I wasn’t ready to deal with the plumbing. I’m glad I didn’t put in better flooring so that it also got ruined in the process.

Since I have my garage ripped apart it is time to call in a plumber and have my water system fixed. The way it was sorta fixed isn’t really a long-term solution. I need to have all the pipes replaced. This is the time to do it. Rats.

I like to stop and catalogue my anxieties because at this phase of my life I get to just know that whatever the problem it is… it is tractable. It is solvable. I have the money to purchase a solution if all else fails.

That is like a god damn miracle. Things in life are complications and annoyances instead of catastrophes.

If my mother had an experience like I am having she would have fell to the floor crying and not risen for days. I squinch my face and say, “ok.” For most of my life this little sojourn into fixing my washing machine and plumbing would represent half a month of income or more. Probably more than half a month. She just didn’t have that much money lying around. Every month she needed 110% of her income in order to meet all of her obligations.

The older I get the less comfortable I feel judging my mother. The poor woman has had a truly horrifying life.

Sometimes I say her name to myself. That’s not who she was to me, of course. She was just mama or mommy or mom or mother depending on my level of affection. Never her name.

My kids say my name a lot. They go around the table saying our full names. Calli is having a hard time believing that I have an “other name” than Krissy Gibbs.

“My name is Kristine.”

“No it isn’t! You are Krissy Gibbs!”

Yeah, I’ve never really identified with Kristine. Kristine has better manners than I have. I’m just Krissy.

I have read a bunch of back and forth bitching about the name changing thing lately. Feminists like to scream about that one. Why should I have picked my rapists last name? Why is it so bad that I don’t want to remain at all attached to a man who raped my mother to begat me and then started raping me when I was a baby? I mean… really?

I’m ok with sharing the name of my husband and children instead of the keeping my point of origin name. It doesn’t bother me one bit. Yes, I did give up an identity. I am not that person any more. I am not going to be raped any more. It is not my obligation to have sex with people just because they ask any more.

I understand that few people have a relationship with their father that resembles mine. Blah blah blah fringe case. But I’m not alone. And when your rhetoric relies on the idea that someone should not give up their space in the connection with their heritage… I just don’t have to agree.

I don’t think people have to stay who they were born. I think that everyone is born with the capability of embracing just about any culture or identity that they want to go out and find. I think that names are important signifiers but if someone wants to shed the identity they had that is fine with me.

I also think that if someone has a professional career where name recognition matters that it shouldn’t matter if you are a male or a female that should be treated like a priority.

What you are called doesn’t determine how you act.

When some kids say, “Moooooooooooooom” they get yelled at or pushed or ignored or fawned upon. There is no such thing as a standard reaction.

All of this ties together in my head. I am not beautiful. I am not performing being an attractive version of myself because that requires work. I am working on being able to not be like my mother. It is hard and takes conscious thought. I am working on physically creating a beautiful space so that I have the physical manifestation in front of me all the time of my enormous privilege.

I have the spare time to work on my house. That is privilege. I have the money to buy paint and wood and bits and pieces. I have to keep it sorta within reason. I define what is within reason. I have to justify myself at the end of the year. Oh man. But I don’t have to justify myself to anyone but me. Noah says, “Are the bills being paid? Are we making forward progress? Ok.”

This freedom is intoxicating. I get to define, through my choices in how to use this money, what my priorities are. I want a small archway arbor that covers from the back gate to just past the side door so I can grow flowering vines to look at while I sit near the side garage door. This dream is way down the list. I probably won’t build it till 2017. But I think about it a lot.

Time passes slow when you are waiting for your washing machine to be fixed. But it means I can think through what I wish I had done to finish up the pantry area. Ha. Maybe a cloud border to cover the ugly pipes? It would be easier to string the Christmas lights with only one line of book cases. Hm.

I struggle with thinking that I am just taking the obsession with beauty and moving slightly outwards. I’m more obsessed with my house by the year. Isn’t this a stereotypical human trait? I don’t seem to find the same things beautiful as other people.

If you leave me alone in a house with money and a Home Depot within walking distance this is what I do.

My plans for the front yard are more in flux. I really really really want a bathroom with two toilets. I have a whole plan. If I get what I want it will be awesome. That will steal a lot of the front yard. I can’t be too attached right now. We’ll see. (I also have a bathroom with a rapidly deteriorating wall. I could do a simple small fix for a small amount of money. Or I could have a bathroom that would make me a lot happier about living in this house for the rest of my life.

Not this year.

I have ideas for the side yard I currently use as storage. I’m not nearly ready to follow through though.

Lots of painting to do in the house. I really want to learn how to mosaic so that I can make a back splash. Yes I understand that I could just put basic tile up in a very short amount of time with little skill.

That’s not the point.

Oy.

I want my home to be a very specific kind of back drop. I want to look at very specific things. It’s ok that I don’t like looking at the same things as other people.

Err, I’m not trying to imply that all people who are not me are a monolith or anything.

I love Ikea so much. I change my house a lot. Frequently. I don’t go out and buy all new things so much as I rearrange everything I already own and buy one thing or two things.

One of my online friends (thank goodness for online friends) is kind of petrified with the idea of how many bookshelves I have. She has bad associations. No! They are tidy and organized! Seriously!

Ikea makes it possible to organize anything. You may have to down size what you own but then Ikea has a freakin way to make things work. My house is sort of Montessori inspired. Children are triggered by what they see. My house is full of books. That’s not true. There are no books in the play room and they only rarely have them in their sleeping room even though there are book shelves. So we aren’t “full”, yet.

But we have books and toys and stuff is all organized in some wacky fashion. It is out there designed to be appealing to children between the ages of one and about nine or ten. There is something for anyone to do.

I have a pretty impressive kids library already and it is getting better by the year. I have science books, math books, and books on a wide variety of social and body topics. They are all aimed at one through eight. Someday this variety will shift. Of course we have a lot of fiction too. Fiction on any kind of topic.

I’m not saying I have every book on any subject. Heck no. I’m not a specialist. I’m a generalized. Here you will find a little bit of everything. If you see spots you want to suggest a book for, let me know. I will look for it.

I want to be able to have a lot of different kinds of kids feel exposed to reading here.

We’ll see.

I feel like a spider weaving a nest.

Sometimes I wonder if I am so attached to the idea of monogamy as a way of staving off my fears about my compulsive sexuality. That way I will never cross the line with any children who come to visit.

(Err, for the record: I have never exhibited any signs of pedophilia. I have always been partial to people who are older than I am. I have not touched anyone who was under 21 since I was under 21.)

But I like to make sure a lot of doors are not only closed they are slammed shut, you know?

I need to find a way to be of value without sex. That has to be part of my life journey. It’s going to be hard. Other people started this road when they were young children. I really got started ten years ago.

Interesting to think about.

Everyone is always evolving and changing. But some people don’t. Some people set right down and stay that way.

The sun is starting to come up and I can just picture people cringing as they scroll down and wonder does she ever stop typing?! I’m warming up for NaNoWriMo. I won’t blog next month. All of my hand strength will go to that. I’ll post at the end of the month when I finish the book. I have the sad feeling I should go off twitter too. And I shouldn’t check fetlife. And I haven’t been participating at the PTSD forum.

I need to just write this book.

I need to think about the kids I love. I need to think about what I want them to know so they can be safe. I need to think about what their mothers will allow them to read. I need to think about how to ignore that knowledge.

Some kids will need photo copied versions because their parents won’t approve. I’m not saying I will photo copy it for them. As an adult I will not do that sort of thing. But hopefully their friends will.

“I am not a pretty girl. That is not what I do. I ain’t no damsel in distress and I don’t need to be rescued.” Ani DiFranco is a good song writer. I feel guilty because I rather did get a white knight. I found a backer. In the time honored tradition I found someone who wanted to support me. I feel awkward about it being socially sanctioned because we are “married” but if we weren’t married it would be terrible and better at the same time. I don’t know.

I’m not independent at this point. Not in the ways that matter. I am dependent. And I shun the idea of trying to be beautiful which means I had to go find someone with low standards.

And he just finished making me breakfast. Holy moly. I don’t even have to tag this. Yay!

When I am having a lot of generalized anxiety but little specific anxiety (I am currently blissfully conflict-free with regards to other people so far as I know) I always cycle back to feeling very upset with myself for medicating. I have a really bad attitude about people who use medication to deal with their feelings. Addicts are bad. I don’t really care if they are addicted to alcohol, pot, or Prozac. Addicts are bad, right?

But I don’t really believe that. I just feel scared. I feel that other people, those unimportant people I don’t know or care about, think that I’m bad because I’m an addict. Is a diabetic an addict when they use insulin?

The transition between smoking and edibles is kind of weird. Smoking takes a lot more time. I won’t be around the kids when I do it. (Recently I was talking to a mom who smoked a lot of pot with her kids in the room when they were little and she talked about how she started sharing as soon as they hit double digits in age. Uhm. I wouldn’t give my kids my Prozac so I’m not going to hand them my pipe.) I have a lot of anxiety around the amount of time that I spend away from the kids smoking. I feel like it is neglectful.

I don’t actually think it is neglectful. I’m within 50′ of them but I’m through walls. They can come and talk to me and ask questions and I take breaks to come in and help them with things if they need help. They aren’t actually being neglected. I can sort of intellectually understand that my kids aren’t being neglected.

But I’m afraid that someone like me will neglect her kids because of inattention or being so self-absorbed. What is neglect anyway? No one can give me an amount of time. “If your kids have no adults willing to jump up and help them for x time then it qualifies as neglect.” No one will tell me the answer. I can’t find the answer. I’ve read a lot of “experts” and lay people. No one knows.

They know that children who are not cuddled in the first three years have severe problems for the rest of their lives. I would not have been able to cuddle my kids without the pot. I feel really bad for that but it is simple fact.

Without pot I shake a lot of the time. I have severe hypervigilance. You can put me in the room with ten other people who are all diagnosed hypervigilance and I can rattle off tons of things those people didn’t notice because hypervigilance means different things in different bodies. (What do you fucking mean you DIDN’T NOTICE THEY HAD SECURITY CAMERAS?!)

A long time ago I learned that I had to stare really hard at any person who came near me. I had to try to figure out their mood and how I should react to them. If someone touches me by surprise I inflict violence. It was a very consciously learned skill.

When I’m smoking the come down is a lot faster and harder than with edibles. Edibles provide this languor that goes on and on. But the effect is much more dramatic initially and you can only use as much as you need with smoking. With edibles you get how much your body decides to give you from that batch. It is hard to titrate.

Yesterday was a very low use day because I had a dentist appointment in Cupertino in the afternoon. That’s a bunch of driving in heavy traffic. I don’t smoke before such a day.

I had a little bit before bed but not much because I was too eager to just go to bed. So I woke up with a stomach ache so terrible I really want to go in the bathroom and make myself vomit so I can just get it over with. I’m not going to do it. I understand that my body is looking for another bad coping method. I’ve always been very lured by vomiting. I have a quick gag reflex. A lot of things make me puke. At some point I did learn how to make myself vomit because there are times when I really just need to vomit because that will end the pain.

When I’m unmedicated first thing in the morning my stomach hurts and I have a terrible time not clenching my teeth so hard my whole lower jaw aches. My hands  shake. All of the random body pain I always have feels tightened and sharpened.

If I go smoke pot… it’s not exactly miraculous but it’s pretty extreme. All of a sudden I can decide to relax my jaw and it will do it. I notice my body pain in a different way. All of a sudden it feels like, “Ah! I need to stretch!” and I do and I feel better. Well, my back always hurts. My back has hurt since my age was in single digits.

My stomach relaxes and all of a sudden I recognize that I am hungry. It doesn’t feel like nausea any more. Now I can eat. If I try to eat without smoking I can eat about a piece of string cheese and that’s it. I can’t have a meal. It will cause me too much pain and if I really force myself to eat I will end up vomiting.

This has gotten a lot worse since I had kids. I used to be able to eat a little bit of food at a time all day long and keep the pain sort of handled. I can’t do that now. A lot of the food we eat now are vegetables and fruit. I’m used to wheat products as what I eat. I’ve always eaten bread or noodles or something like that. Vegetables and fruit cause me a lot of pain. Malnutrition is like that.

I am trying to talk myself into working with a specialist. I know I need to do something about how my body handles food.

But if I smoke pot in the morning I can eat a normal breakfast and then snack of vegetables and fruit with my kids. I don’t experience the same pain.

Am I an “addict”?

I worry most about the startle reflex. I worked so hard on becoming more instinctively and quickly violent. In the scheme of my life the period of time during which it has been rational and safe to respond to random, painful touch with kindness has been very short.

I want to repeat that rational word a few more times. At this point in my life it is not rational to respond to sudden, painful touch with violence. My children aren’t hurting me on purpose they just haven’t learned how to be gentle yet. It is a process. If I want them to learn something I have to slowly and carefully and deliberately model it to them. That is how children learn. You act in front of them how you want them to act.

Reacting with violence was a rational response before I had children. It just was. I don’t give a shit what anyone else thinks. At this point it is completely unacceptable. That’s tough.

Sometimes you develop ways of coping with really bad situations that are necessary at the time. Those skills may not translate well into later parts of your life. It is important to periodically assess how your skills are in relationship to your current life.

November is coming up. I’m going to do NaNoWriMo. I need to get disciplined again about getting up at 4:30 and I need to write until 6:30. I have to if I want to work on Outrunning and I do. I want to finish writing Outrunning in November and I want to spend December working on the resource section. I want a complete first draft by the end of the year.

I have decided that next year I am going to find a better editor for No Secrets and then I am going to take the New & Improved version shopping for a real publisher. I expect at least fifty rejections. Maybe I should be prepared for more like two hundred rejections. The kid who discovered a way to work with pancreatic cancer had to get 199 rejections.  I don’t think I should feel like I deserve an easier road.

I feel that is one of the most damaging messages I received as a child. If something is hard it isn’t worth doing. Not true. Sometimes the most important things are things you have to fight tooth and nail to even be allowed to do.

I’m scared to commit. I’m scared to admit to the grown ups what I say to their children. I’m afraid the grown ups are going to yell at me. I’m afraid the grown ups won’t let their kids read the book.

I have spent a lot of years researching a lot of topics around mental and physical health through adolescence. I’m by no means a PhD style “expert” but I know how to find the expert opinions when I need them. I know a lot about the problems that emerge during adolescence and I pray with all my might that the things I have in my head are things that would be useful if other people knew them.

I feel scared of admitting to myself that this is as close as I have to religion. Let me be enough. Let me be able to help people. I want to help. I want to help so bad. Sometimes it feels like the only way I can make me feel better is if I make other people feel better. I don’t feel less anxiety until I see that I can make them feel less anxiety.

When I am too much for people, when I am too intense, when they have to back away for their own preservation… I feel like I should die. I don’t want anyone to feel guilty about this. It isn’t someone else’s fault that I am so ridiculous. When I feel like I have nothing to give and instead I am a burden I feel like that means I should be culled from the herd.

Does that mean I look at every disabled person and think, “They should be culled”? Err.. no.

I am able to see the value in other people in a way I am not able to see my own value. When I look at other people I can see how dependence is part of creating bonds. Needing help and accepting it from someone is a way of creating a social bond. Giving help feels good. You can only give help if someone needs it. It’s a cycle thing.

I have been told that in Burkina Faso there is no such thing as a personal problem. Every problem is a problem for the community. Depression basically doesn’t exist. People keep you tied to life because they honest to goodness need you. If you are feeling sad you can find a funeral within walking distance and go grieve as much as you want to. No one will think there is anything wrong with crying because you feel bad and there will be people near you who know you and love you and see your value to comfort you when you need it. They know why you are crying. They understand.

I’m sure there are flaws in the system.

It is hard for me that I still need to cry so much and I don’t have space in my life where that is really considered “ok”. I can’t model walking around crying all the time. It will fuck up my kids. I can’t be a miserable son of a bitch. It’s just not ok. But I am a miserable son of a bitch.

I feel sad. I feel scared. I feel like no one has ever liked me or will ever like me. I understand that these are not “rational” things. They just are. I don’t know how to interpret signals of people liking me. I know this is broken. I know that people demonstrate that they like me by continuing to talk to me year after year. I know that I can’t ask anyone to jump through hoops “proving” anything to me. I don’t think I test people much any more.

I just stay home. And people either visit or they don’t.

Well, I go out to home school events because I owe that to my children. They will be exposed to lots of people. And not just people who are willing to jump through the hoop of coming to my house. That is a very different sort of bubble.

This is part of why we are getting to know our neighbors. There are a lot of people around here who just kind of hang out all day. We are not the only home schoolers (though the kids are high school aged so not really friend material). There are a lot of retired people in our neighborhood. They hang out near their garages. We talk to them. I’m not limiting my kids to people who are weird enough to like me. Ha.

So I’ve been thinking about my policy of screaming at the neighbors (only when they are racist!). I don’t really want to cause them to stop talking to my kids. This is going to be hard.

When I use edibles I stay a lot more consistently stoned a lot more often. There aren’t as many spikes and dips in pain and emotion. But edibles are $400-$500/month. (Depends on what I am able to buy because the prices can vary.) Smoking is more like $100-$150/month. I have a lot of anxiety about that price difference. I feel like I can’t really justify spending as much money on my body every month as I do.

I spend $300 every month (occasionally $450 but rarely) on therapy. I buy pot. I buy massages, though we’ve been fairly stingy with those this year. We’ve spent less than $200/month on massages. I can tell that my ambient pain is a lot higher. I wish I was also paying for acupuncture but man can I just not bring myself to cough it up. Hell, I wish I was regularly seeing a chiropractor and a nutritionist. Let me feel the explosion of stomach acid. Wheeeee.

My body does not function very well. I’m trying to figure out how to make it run better so that I can “just be a nicer person” but I didn’t get enough of this shit taken care of before I had kids. I didn’t feel the damage so much then. Learning how to take care of an animal is a process. Human beings are animals. We need particular kinds of foods in differing quantities. You have to figure out each animal. It’s a process.

No one ever really looked at me or tried to maintain proper care of me. Learning how to do so now is hard. I am only figuring out how to do it because I am reading in books what I should be doing with my children. It feels daunting.

I read that human beings are usually naturally opposed to “going to exercise”. Humans stay fit if they do work in the course of their life. Sitting on your ass doesn’t count as “work” in this sense.

I have struggled all of my life with my visceral disconnect that anything I do while sitting on my ass doesn’t count as “work” but that is the only kind of work people want to pay you to do. Physical work is what counts in my subconscious but it is not socially valued. Look at how class hierarchies work.

I think I should resign my membership in the Libertarian party. I have changed my mind about wealth distribution. Three hundred Americans have as much wealth as eighty-five million Americans. Yeah. That sounds like time for redistribution.

We live in a time when there is no excuse for people not helping others survive at a reasonable level. Food should not be so hard to find. We waste so much food. It is stupid.

But man can I not devise a system that would solve the problem for the whole country. Would I be able to design one that would work for my town? My town is trying really hard to gentrify. How could I figure something out that would help my community? I don’t know yet. That isn’t a problem I’m ready to try to solve. I think I will try some day though. Not while the kids are little.

I have a hard time with the fact that I have ended up being “the woman in the home”. I have chosen it consciously and deliberately every step of the way. Does that mean I am choosing to be silent and inconsequential for the rest of my life?

Luckily Noah plans to keep me steadily in laptops and internet connection. (I have three laptops and an iPad in the house. I have a voice.)

When I look around at feminist dialogue I feel sad because I don’t want to speak because I am a white woman. Does the world really need the opinions of one more white whiny bitch?

Do I spent my life just thinking “poor me”? No. Not really. I understand that whereas my life has contained a lot of specific trauma I have benefited from an enormous amount of help as well. I’m alive and well because of the charity of a lot of people. Many of them are very angry that I am not happy and doing well because of the help they gave. I am very sorry that the help they gave was so inadequate towards meeting my needs. It is very hard on both sides.

I have to deal with the physical damage caused by trauma though. I feel very lucky that I live in a time and a place where if I want to I can spend ten minutes on the proper search engine and come up with lots of documentation of why I have the physical reactions I have to life. I feel validated.

But once I have that validation I need to keep reading and look at the consequences of being someone with those physical reactions. It’s not good socially or physically.

I bless my inordinate ability to go make friends. There is a very large part of me that is still a charming three year old trying to make people love me. But now I understand that I have to do it without sitting on their laps and grinding.

The whole “fake it” thing is accessing part of me. It’s not like I am trying to act like someone else as my model of being happy. I have never found anyone who is the way I want to be. I’m ok with that. I don’t think it means anything bad about anyone else.

No one else has had my life. No one else can understand the dissertation associated with every coping method. Just like I can’t understand theirs. Because everyone else has their own story.

I’m getting better at seeing people in the context of their own story. I’m getting better at seeing my role in their lives. I’m trying to understand what it means to play a supporting role while still getting to be the main character in my story. What does it mean to be part of an ensemble piece? What is my role in the quirky sitcom of life? But my life has really been more of a Greek tragedy, you know?

I no longer have the energy for peppy. I’m just too damn tired. I see the need for other people more. I see the sadness of other people better. I see why they react the way they do and why they must react the way they do. I don’t take it so personally when people can’t handle me. I still feel sad.

I don’t feel as suicidal any more. That’s why I had kids. Never again in my life will it be a good thing that I die. I am required to put it off as long as possible because it will hurt my children terribly. We are very close. I am nice to them. I am gentle with them.

Because I medicate. That gives me the ability to be gentle with them even when they are loud and boisterous and very physical. It allows me to have a pause.

Why do I feel so bad about medicating? I know a wide variety of people who are a wide variety of functioning while using a lot of pot. These are all people who would be more and less functional without the pot. So what?

I feel grateful that I live in a time and in a place where this is a legal medication for me to use. If I lived somewhere else I would not be able to use this medication. If I lived in a different part of my country I would not be able to use this medication. I’m only quasi-legal on a federal level. They rarely persecute users. They prosecute dispensaries instead just so they can steal a lot of money. It is state sanctioned piracy.

In medias res. I think about it all the time. What does it mean to truly live in the time and place where you live? What does it mean to be limited by the culture you were born into? What am I capable of doing? I don’t know yet.

I tell myself that if I learn how to be nicer to my body I could have a good forty years of work left after my children are grown. I think of what I want to do while they are children. I think of what I want to do after they are grown. I need to take better care of my body.

I don’t think that all women should stay home with their kids. I really don’t. Really. I think it would be really traumatic and awful for some families, quite frankly. But I wish that more kids got to be with a parent for the first few years. I wish there were more ways of figuring out how to make that work. Sometimes neither parent is the right one to stay home and be all nurturing. I wish that a grand parent lived nearby who was thrilled to take on the early care-taking role or an aunt who was happy to take a few years off from working. Or an uncle. Or a cousin. Someone who was deeply tied to the long-term well being of the child who would devote lots of love and attention. Preferably this person would live with the family.

That’s what I wish. But I understand that it isn’t the reality for every family. I don’t think that families who do something different are doing something bad. I think they are living within their resources. I get to have a fantasy life. I get to pretend that somewhere out there maybe it could be true that it worked out that way.

It doesn’t mean I think bad things about people who are living in the world they live in. I mean Jimminy Christmas haven’t I demonstrated that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones and I’ve got my own list of sins?

I don’t like Christianity but I grew up entirely within that narrative. It is most of how I view the world whether I like it or not. It is my background culture. It won’t be for my kids and that is really weird.

I feel scared of really putting out what I believe in the form of a book. I will flat encourage people I know to buy it and give it to their kids. What do I feel comfortable saying to my little niece in Scotland when she is twelve? What do I want to say to my little nephew over in Mountain view when he is twelve? What do I really want them to know about the world? What do I want my kids to know?

What do I wish I had known?

What do I think I can get past the censorship of the wonderful sweet Christian ladies in my home school group?

Holy moly.

Talk about a tight rope.

And I want to produce this document within the next two months. No pressure. Luckily I have done a lot of writing already. It will be ok. It has to be a length a twelve year old can handle without feeling freaked out. Even ones who are not the most fluent readers in the world.

Why that age? Why that focus? Mostly because that is when I picked up a string of twenty-five year old men. What do I wish I had known?

Hormones change around then and it is a very scary process. What do I wish I had known?

I feel like this is what I have to give the world. I’m not sure what it is worth. I’m not sure that other people will agree that twelve year olds need to know all this. I do. I believe it with all my might.

And I will have to be ok with the fact that lots of people will disagree.

Ok.

I’ve been really busy for the past few days and feeling fairly up emotionally. Now I am awake and crying and I am having trouble stopping because… Noah will die some day. Shocking, right?

Sometimes it is really hard knowing that I am probably already 1/4 of the way through the best years of my life. I feel very guilty for being so unstable and sad during what is going to be the easiest and happiest portion of my life. Well, maybe empty-nesting will be “easier” in terms of less work. I don’t think it will be happier.

I feel really weird about the fact that Noah has bought so much life insurance. I wouldn’t need to work for a few decades and possibly never if I scrimped the whole time.

I feel weird and ungrateful because I really hope I die first. I don’t want to find out what it is like to go back to wishing that somebody liked me enough to hang out with me on a day-to-day basis.

I am so afraid of being an old woman like my mother. She hides in her room. She comes out to do her crappy job. She doesn’t have friends. She hasn’t dated in decades because she knows beyond the shadow of a doubt that the only kind of man who would want her is someone with bad intentions. It has been true over and over and over.

I think about my mother’s life. I think about the permanent damage she has incurred because of domestic violence. She did “get out”. She left. She did what people tell women they “should do” when they are being abused. And her life got worse. And she has never been allowed to have a scrap of dignity since.

And then she gets her kids all grown up and they violently reject her for not being a good enough mother. For not being able to protect them. The only one that still wants contact with her is the one who bought hook line and sinker into the perversion and degeneracy.

It is hard feeling like I am trapped somewhere in between two stories. I wish I could stop feeling afraid. I wish I could stop feeling like I am just waiting for the next terrible experience. Of course it will come. How could it not?

Noah dying is something that there is just one way to avoid. I have to die first. But he and my kids don’t want me to decide to do it on purpose just to make sure. Which means just sitting with that discomfort.

Sometimes I feel like it is ridiculous that I can’t just “enjoy life”. I have a good life. I have a lot of things happening that I do genuinely enjoy.

And I’m still sitting on the couch at 3 am crying.

Sunday walked three miles to the farmers market. Monday ran three miles while the girls had dance class. Tuesday walk three miles to the park. (The home schoolers are coming to our neck of the woods! Woo! We win!) I haven’t had a ten mile week in a while and right now my hips hate my ever-loving guts.

And I’m going to finish painting the second story of the play structure this week. It is ~30 minutes of painting away from being ready for the roof. Woo. I probably have another ten or so hours to go? I think I will finish painting the play structure before Halloween even. Which would be nice. I really should paint the arbor in a big hurry. It will be both easier and harder than painting the play structure. Easier because it is just thin coats of stain and I have to do the work and the kids can’t help. Harder because I will have to work on a very tall ladder and that is never my favorite. Work must be done. Ain’t nobody but me here to do it. No whining. Just work.

Washing machine repairperson scheduled. Good thing because now it won’t fill or spin. Weeeeee.

I feel guilty for liking that my daughter is so bossy with me. She is repeating my language exactly back to me. “It’s food. Eat it.” is a common refrain. Shanna won’t let me skip trying foods. She thinks I need to widen my food palate. Well, she isn’t pushy with sushi any more. We went to the buffet again. I like taking them there.

I like going to the buffet restaurant because I like being able to practice negotiating with my kids in a low-stress environment. If they genuinely have a melt down then… dude… it’s the buffet restaurant. There are already ten kids making a lot of noise.

Shanna can serve her own salad at this point. We walk around together and discuss the options. You must eat a reasonable amount of vegetable matter before moving on to the carbs and sugar. And only take as much as you want to eat. And you need to eat what you have before you go take more. No, you don’t get to serve a salad then not eat it in favor of chocolate cake. Idon’tthinksokid.

For the second course, Shanna still needs help. The hot foods are just a bit more intimidating. So I hold both hands and we walk around and look at the options and they tell me what they want. Then I walk them back to the table and they sit quietly and color while I assemble their plates. This time I had the brilliant idea to say, “Why don’t you draw me a picture of your favorite part of the day.” Shanna drew her gymnastics class. I could see the uneven bars very clearly. Calli drew rainbows because her favorite part of the day was painting rainbows on the play structure.

Then I get drinks. Then I get my plate. They have to sit patiently and wait for me to finish eating before we get dessert.

Always when we are there I notice some minor way that someone needs help. Often it is a mom struggling with holding too much. If you stand nearby and say, “Is there any assistance that might be helpful?” something will be shoved at you post-haste. Last night I noticed that a big man sat right behind an older woman. His chair was slamming into her and she had no where to go because she couldn’t push her table forward. I got up and asked her if she would feel more comfortable if her table was scooted over. She lit up. “Oh yes. That would be so very helpful. Thank you so much for noticing.” It took me under a minute. And she was more comfortable for the rest of her meal.

I am shit-tastic about being steady support for people. I don’t have the spoons to sign up for being weekly babysitting for a friend. I can’t just show up and help my friends with their problems any more. I take care of the kids and the house and that is all I can be responsible for on an ongoing basis.

When I find out my neighbors have had surgery I show up with food. If I see something right in front of me where someone could use minor help I don’t treat it like an invisible problem.

I want to feel seen and supported and like I matter. So I look at other people and I try to support them and I try to treat them like they matter.

I wish I were less limited in the kinds of support I can provide. But it is what it is.

I’m not very good at supporting other people though. In order to really support someone you have to understand them. I don’t really understand other people.

The older I get the more I feel sad that most of my memories of my mother involve her sitting on her bed (we usually didn’t have any other furniture) reading a book with an intense look on her face. I wasn’t allowed to touch her. She wanted to be left alone. She read a couple of different romance authors voraciously. She read nothing non-fiction. She didn’t want complicated books and she felt annoyed with me when I suggested she might like something I had read. She wanted to read Amanda Quick, Bertrice Small, Jude Deveraux, Johanna Lindsey, and J.D. Robb/Nora Roberts.

She would not talk to me about the books she read. She didn’t want to get into the sex details and she had no interest in dissecting plot.

I remember playing cards with her. I wasn’t very good. When she won (which was ~90% of the time) she would cackle and do this little “ha-ha-ha-ha-ha” thing. I used to beg her to play cards with me because it was the only thing we had to do together. Then she would gloat and I would lose and lose and lose and lose. By the time I was a teenager I would get so angry at the gloating that I threw the deck of cards in her face a few times. She wouldn’t play with me after that because I was such a sore loser.

Why do I miss my mother so much?

When we lived in Apple Valley I was on break from school during December. It was a year-round school and we got a month off every three months. My mother’s birthday is in December. The same day as my adopted leather mom. I made my mom a cake as a surprise for her birthday. I didn’t know the difference between wax paper and cling wrap. Err, oops. She tried hard to be nice to me about it. But she felt disappointed and annoyed. I had wasted a box of cake mix and ruined it because I was stupid. The fact that she told me that I wasted a box of cake mix because I was stupid means that her “nice” wasn’t all that nice.

But I miss her.

My mom regularly, starting from when I was a teenager and had my own pocket money because I worked, promised to sew me things. She would bring it up. “Would you like to have a _____?” Yes! We would trudge off to the fabric store and pick out a pattern and fabric and thread and notions and go home. Then she was tired. Then she wouldn’t want to do it that day. She would do it next weekend. Only next weekend she was always too tired. That’s why I had so much sewing stuff to give away a few years ago when I cleaned out the garage. Years of my mom telling me to buy stuff so we could make things together. Only she never actually wanted to do it.

“Get over it. Move on.”

If I could point to a place where the ache for my mother lives and cut it out of me I would.

Sometimes Shanna wants me to do something or give her something and I respond however I respond. Then she keeps pestering because she wants something different. I have started asking her, “Do you want me to be a mother who does what she says so that you can believe me when I tell you things or do you want me to be a mother who flip flops so you never know if you can trust what I say?”

Of course sometimes I do have to change my mind. I try to follow that with, “I made a mistake when I responded quickly with that answer. I didn’t think the situation through fully when the answer popped out of my mouth. I really apologize for misleading you.” I try to do this flip-flop fairly immediately. It sucks to wait all day for something and then not get it.

I don’t remember my mom smiling much outside of work. I expect she didn’t have a lot to smile about. She only smiled at work because they required it of her. After all, if you are a woman living in poverty who is being worked hellish hours as you do physical labor that is often really too demanding for your body of course you should be smiling. You wouldn’t want anyone to think your job was anything other than a pleasure.

No one wants to deal with your bed temper. It isn’t their problem that you are in a bad mood. That is a personal problem. Take care of it.

Sometimes when I am up crying in the middle of the night worrying about Noah dying I think about the fact that his death would not be financially destructive. I think about my mother’s life and what the simple lack of money has done to it. I think what a selfish piece of shit I am that I have no interest in helping my mother at this point. Isn’t aging hard enough without your children turning on you? Aren’t children supposed to be a comfort to their parents?

Aren’t parents supposed to provide some level of protection for their children?

With every day that passes I close my eyes and say a prayer of thanks that my children are still whole and safe. No one has hurt my daughters.

The older I get the more compassion I have for my mother. When I think of the story of her life I feel really bad for her. She has truly never had a break. I don’t think it is her fault she is so damaged. But she is. She is really messed up and she has never tried to fix any of it.

My shrink had me watch the movie The Brave One. It’s about vigilante justice after trauma. (My shrink is not trying to prompt me to start killing people despite the movies she keeps encouraging me to watch.) The reviews are pretty harsh.

I got into an argument recently about Moll Flanders (the book) and how the person I was arguing with (a modern American of course…) thought it was reprehensible that someone would act that way. Moll doesn’t raise any of the children she bears. She leaves them with people who can provide a stable life.

The reviews of The Brave One sound similarly like either you get why someone will do something or you don’t. Sometimes there are no good choices. Sometimes being told, “Well the police will handle it” isn’t good enough because the police won’t fucking handle it. So either suck up your trauma and shitty life and smile or … something. Something else.

You can kill yourself. You can decide to start defending yourself. When you get the urge to get into fights on your own behalf that tends to lead to wanting to wander around places where fights are more likely to happen. Then you get to fight more. It becomes chicken and egg. Do you fight because you have to or because you want to?

Just be nice. Just be forgiving. Turn the other cheek or some shit. I don’t have any cheeks left. They have all been hit already.

If someone murdered one of my children I’m pretty sure I would not be interested in waiting for what passes for “justice” and I wouldn’t worry in the slightest about going to jail. That would be fine with me. I would be quite happy to take the consequences for actually fucking doing something. Would it be terrible and hard for Noah and the remaining kid? Probably.

I still think I would lose my shit. And I think I’m pretty violent. See! I don’t own a gun! I don’t plan to ever own a gun!

I will be ok with going to prison if I hunt someone down and beat their brains in with a baseball bat. I will know it is an appropriate reaction from society and I won’t feel angry about it.

Sometimes there are no right choices. Only the choice you can live with. I don’t think I could live with doing nothing. I could kill them or I could kill me. I don’t want to die yet. Going to prison would be fine though. Plenty of alone time for writing and reading.

I don’t believe I am working in this life for a reward later. I think this is all I have. I can make of it what I will. I don’t go out looking for violence any more. I try to avoid it. I do my best to have it no longer come in to my life.

I have to just stop.

 

I feel like my perspective changes a lot as I get older. I can no longer pretend that I am a low-status, powerless individual. That would require a level of irrationality that I have not mastered. Thank goodness.

When I look at people now I feel like I am seeing two selves kind of blurrily moving back and forth in front of one another, even though they are adjoined at the feet. Like two people trying to stand in exactly the same spot–they have to kind of wobble to keep balance.

In most cases I primarily see the “adult” version of them. I get all the impressions I get. I see them as grown ups. I see them as interesting, smart, powerful. But then I look again and I see them as little kids. I see why they doubt their own effectiveness. I see why they think they “can’t” do things. They were told that over and over and over. You “can’t” do this! Go away.

I feel like it started happening with Noah first. Then when I had a good friend who is autistic sit down and explain how badly I scare the shit out of him it morphed into being something I see more often.

I have the inherent talent for being intimidating. Partially it is just kind of innate but mostly I worked really hard on being and looking scary. It was a conscious goal for a long time. Now I have arrived at adulthood and I find that the coping method of my childhood has some consequences.

I used to teach high school. By my second year they gave me alllllll the problem children. There were only two junior English teachers in my school. Me and the lady who threw away any work that was not in blue or black ink and legible enough for her to easily read it. Obviously a lot of students decided she wasn’t worth working with so she had a lot of in-class conflicts with the problem children. By my second year there the guidance counselors were SO HAPPY I was there. It meant they could split junior year into suck-ups and problem children and give each kind the teacher they needed.

The vast majority of my students told me I was very intimidating. Including the big guys. The football players and gang bangers quaked before me. It’s kind of a weird experience.

But my students all made huge progress. They all learned. Many of them more or less caught up to grade level after being considered stupid most of their lives. Because I told them over and over, “If you haven’t gotten this yet it is because I am too stupid to figure out how to teach it right. It isn’t your fault.” That gave them courage to try. They didn’t want me to feel bad about myself and they saw how I cried in frustration when I was trying to come up with a new and novel way of explaining something.

And I kept everyone in academic detention forever if they struggled so that everyone ended up getting the individual level of attention they needed.

I know I am intimidating sometimes, well… I know it abstractly. I’ve been told enough times that I no longer say, “Yeah right” because it isn’t very nice to the people who are giving me their honest opinion.

Stepping back to autistic friend. He is willing to tell me boundaries more clearly and specifically than anyone else in my life. Oh thank goodness. It means that we can play back and forth with how boundaries work. Because we are both over-sensitive and prone to feeling victimized we can take turns figuring out how to not appear scary. He’s working with me on eye contact. He has to make more. I have to make less. The in-between lesson is good for both of us.

The whole seeing-a-younger-self thing is about understanding that everyone is vulnerable. Everyone has old stuff that they carry around. Maybe most of their baggage is fairly positive and maybe it isn’t. Having a mostly positive childhood is not always easy either. Being controlled all the time is hard on people. And what if you only ever spent your time around very soft spoken, slow moving people? I will be a complete assault on your senses.

There has to be a balance. Not all harsh people can get soft enough to not scare people at all. Not all soft people can live in a bubble where they are only with people of their kind. We will have to figure out some kind of way of interacting. What will that mean?

Maybe soft people have to learn how to accept that some people have disruptive energy and it isn’t about them? Maybe hard people need to learn how to be aware of how they talk and what they say and to whom.

But there will always be faux pas. Always. Either you choose to forgive or you choose to end relationships. You can ask for modifications… but you can’t give an ultimatum.

How you deal with the fuck ups kind of decides everything, right?

I feel like my whole life is a series of fuck-ups followed by my frantic efforts to repair the damage I am creating. I don’t even understand why or how I break everything… I just do.

One important feature of my personality: I LOVE to argue. In the actual argument it is not always easy to get me to admit that I am wrong and the other person is right but there is generally some part of my brain that notices. At some point I will no longer argue because I’m thinking about what was said to me. Maybe a week or so later I will decide the other person was right. Then I have a wash of shame for arguing.

I like hearing different points of view. I think almost everything in the whole wide world is relative (I mean shit, lets start with the weather. Is it hot? Warm? Warmish? Cool? Coolish? Cold? Freezing? Stand in one room and you can all those answers from different people.) If you move on from there you will find that most subjects are two people talking at one another. Unless you are trying to build consensus so you can create something it generally works just fine for everyone to walk away from an argument with their own conclusion.

Living with Noah has been very good for me. Noah can argue fiercely about a topic and never denigrate my intelligence in the process. He can say “I think you are wrong” without any hint of implication that “I think you are stupid.” Not many people manage that. I think I am not nearly as good at it as he is. I’m trying to be better.

The more research I do on mental health (I look at a lot of different disorders out of curiosity-there is the non-zero possibility grad school might be in my future, if I can stop hating school.) the more I see that connections between people creates the vast majority of what we think of as “mental health”. Ok, there are some people who are complete loners and who have no support network in any way and they are fine with that… it’s not the “norm”.

Humans are social animals. We want to be liked. We want to feel approved of. We want to feel like our presence is desirable and positive. Pretty much everyone wants that. Arguments seem like they take away those feelings don’t they? Maybe. Depends on who is arguing and how.

I have enormous respect for my husband’s brain. He is good at learning complicated systems at a speed that baffles me. I don’t see the patterns he latches right onto. He learns languages very quickly because he is good at finding ways to link new knowledge to old knowledge and then it is just easier to remember. When I look at him I feel very insecure because I am not smart like him.

My smart is different. When I was eight or so years old the school district I was in tested my IQ to see if I would be allowed into the GATE program. (Gifted and Talented Education for those who did not suffer through California public schools.) He told me that if I wasn’t so smart I wouldn’t be able to learn because my life was so disruptive.

I learn best by playing with things and making mistakes. I think it works that way for a lot of people but the public education system is not set up for such exploration. The public education is just eager to give you a big check mark next to whether you did it right or wrong and if you have too many wrong check boxes you must not be very smart.

I am so insecure about my intelligence. That is a huge tender spot for me. That’s part of my phantom child-self I drag around. I’m scared I’m actually stupid and I won’t be able to do the things I need to do.

Everyone seems to have that phantom self. They work differently for everyone. Some people are afraid they are unlovable. Some people are afraid they aren’t smart. Some people are afraid that others will continue to hurt them… even though they are now one of the biggest people in the room and it isn’t likely.

What we are taught to expect during our childhood maps our entire future.

Well, we can choose to change. But part of changing is honestly assessing where you are and deciding where you want to be and figuring out how to get there. You can’t change if you are in denial. It doesn’t work.

I get what DSH means about “people don’t like fake. They like authentic” but people don’t like things that are authentic but scary or different from them. The Hindu temple in my neighborhood is very authentic. There is a lot of neighborhood hostility towards the temple and many of the residents hate the temple and want it to go away. “They are ruining our neighborhood.” Fuck you. The temple has been here a lot longer than I’ve lived here. They pay their taxes. They are all polite when you talk to them. You don’t get to say that this is your sandbox and everyone has to stay out. Not unless you are so rich you can buy all the land and keep alllllllll the people off.

Which none of my neighbors can do. All they can do is bitch. I feel very conflicted about hearing this. When will they learn that I am not a good recipient for these diatribes? I go off on them. They still babble at me. It’s hard to trump that whole “white people are safe and on my side” instinct they have.

I’m struggling between my inner demons. On one hand I don’t want to give up all the harshness that is part of my personality. I feel proud of myself for never hesitating to argue with someone I know who is expounding on racist, sexist, ableist, whatever crap. I do not solely defend the groups I am part of–this is what being an ally means. You should hear me go off on sex worker rights. It isn’t my battle. But it matters and very few groups ever defend themselves alone. They need allies.

And yet I wish I was more comfortable for people to be around. Sometimes I observe that some people are just so awesome that when they walk into a room everyone nearby relaxes. Just being near them feels so nice.

That’s not me.

I feel a lot of jealousy. I wish that I knew how to help people feel soothed instead of disrupted.

Well, I help the extreme incest cases and rape cases. I can help them feel better sometimes. I’m just too much for non-traumatized people.

No one can please everyone. I’m not sure I want to please everyone.

But I’m trying like fuck to write a book that your average self-involved, selfish twelve year old boy can read and find interesting and learn how to not be a rapist. It won’t be explicit “Hey! ALL BOYS!?!?! Did you know I think you are a potential rapist?! DON’T DO THAT!” Err, that won’t be my approach.

I have spent a lot of time over the past two years trying to figure out how to talk to adult men about rape. It is complicated and I am grateful for the friends who have been tolerant enough to engage in these exercises with me. It is different talking to men than to women. Talking about responsibility and victim blaming and shame and power…. all of these conversations are shaped differently for men and women. Even though men get raped too. Even though women rape too. The overall tone of the conversation is different.

If you want to teach people, if you want to really change them you have to start by understanding where they are starting from and you have to have some idea how the road will work for them. Not always–sometimes you can help someone just get started on their own path… but then you don’t know what they will change into. If you want to teach a specific skill or lesson the process is different.

Learning comes from trust. Learning comes from opening your mind to new thoughts and entertaining them without guilt or shame or resistance.

Which means I need to find a way to phrase all this shit in a way that will not offend any particular religious groups. I can’t piss off the Christians and I can’t piss off the Muslims. (Other religions strike me as caring less what random white American women think…)

Sex. Oh man sex. It all comes back to sex for me. What do I want to say about it and what do I think I can get past the censors?

Religion, in pretty much any form, is a combination of stories and rules about how to live a good life. People in different parts of the world were isolated for a long time so many different religions were created to fill the needs of the people then living. Over time which stories feel “more real” change. Why do we consider Jesus more believable than Zeus?

I don’t care which stories you listen to and I don’t care which set of rules-to-be-a-good-person you follow as long as you just go out and do your best. You don’t have to be a Good Christian. You don’t have to be a Good Buddhist. You don’t have to be a Good Atheist.

Just be good. Not capitol letter good–that has too much force and pressure behind it.

Think about yourself and the people around you. Think about how your behavior impacts other people. Think about how you wish people felt about you. What sort of behavior on your part would be most likely to motivate such feeling on their part? It isn’t a guarantee, but you can do your best.

I appreciate and value the arguments I have with my friends (autistic and otherwise) because my friends know things I don’t. My friends often know things I have had no access to learn. My friends are wonderful and they share the gift of their knowledge without even feeling like they are giving me a gift. I know it is. That’s enough.

Come December it will be seven years post-rape. This has been the most stable period of my life and it shows every sign of continuing. I try not to trust it too much.

Sometimes I think it is pretty ridiculous that I have all of the “everyone hates me” stuff still in my head all the time. Whereas I have pissed a few people off spectacularly in the last few years… only a few. In very specific ways. In general… I don’t believe that anyone in my life hates me. I am pretty sure that everyone who knows me ranges from ecstatic love to apathy to mild dislike. I don’t think I have behaved in such a way as to provoke hate in a while. I could be wrong though.

I enjoyed some Cracked.com yesterday. This one was about OCD. The part that is sticking in my head the hardest, “If you have OCD you know that your behavior is crazy… but you can’t stop.”

That’s what I struggle with. When I am most mired in feelings that everyone hates me… I know it isn’t “true” but fuck all if I can stop sobbing hysterically because it could be true and I have no way of knowing and people could be lying to me left and right and….

It isn’t rational. I’m not pretending it is rational. I’m not saying, “All of my friends should bend over backwards supporting me. Everyone should get on a rotating schedule so I NEVER HAVE TO DOUBT YOUR AFFECTION AGAIN.” No, that would be an irrational reaction to an irrational feeling. That’s not exactly a good merry-go-round.

What is rational?

Well, the simple fact is that given how geographically diverse the bay area is I need to always just understand that most friendships will be about occasional visits and not continual company.

I listen to Pam too much. Pam has the family I want. I mean, not really… they are super controlling. But that’s part of the deal. (Pam is Taiwanese and sends me HUGE documents with her family tree explained in great detail so I can understand wtf she is talking about. Her family is hard to track without visual guides.) There are a lot of people. Pam could choose to spend all of her time (like 15 hours a day every day) with family members and not have to get bored of the same people. She has so many people who love her and want to be with her. She has a sister who looks up to her and loves her and wants to see her at least once a week when they are in similar locations.

On one hand I view Pam as inspirational. I want my kids to love me like she loves her parents. I would give anything in the world for that. But the funny thing is… I can’t act like Pam’s parents in order to get it.

Pam was hit. Pam was shamed. Pam was forced to sit and do hours of homework.

Err… wait. Why in the fuck is it that being close to your family as an adult doesn’t seem to be about how you were treated as a kid necessarily? It doesn’t seem to be the deciding factor.

Most of the people I know who were treated “ok” or better don’t talk to their parents much.

I think it isn’t about the treatment. I think it is about the expectation. It doesn’t enter into Pam’s mind that she might dislike her parents. Whatever. They are your parents.

But throughout Pam’s adult life her parents have been supportive, kind, and kind of ridiculously non-judgmental given their cultural background. They got a fucking weird kid by their way of measuring. And they deal with that with grace.

I feel blessed because I get to sit here day by day telling my kids that I don’t know what they will be like when they are grown ups but I’m sure that I will be happy to help them reach their dreams. Whatever that means for them.

I feel very guilty when I talk about the out-of-face-out-of-mind feelings I have about love. I think that is all the “attachment” stuff. I have never been diagnosed officially as having an attachment disorder. I just… have attachment issues. I think that if I walked in and explained to a therapist how my emotional attachment issues goes I could have such a diagnosis if I asked for it. I don’t think that is good though at this point. Let’s stick with GAD and PTSD. That’s enough. That’s hard enough.

PTSD can cause attachment problems.

It isn’t that I “stop caring” about people when they aren’t in front of me. It is that I feel like one of those little wind up dolls with a key in the back. I can’t find a good easy link. You have to just know what I mean. When I am standing in front of someone I am wound up. I can access emotions that are simply not present for me when I am alone.

It just occurred to me to wonder if part of this problem is my extreme lack of self-love. Maybe those feelings don’t exist in side of me when I am alone because I don’t feel any love for me. It is hard to feel any love at all in a vacuum of feeling evil. Everything feels tainted and distant. Dirty screens. Dirty cage walls. It’s like someone hasn’t been cleaning the bird cage and the birds managed to shit all over the walls.

When I see my children I feel an over flowing of love. It is part of the reason I am a stay at home mom. This is the longest and most consistent access I have ever had to the feeling of love. When I’m away from them it goes away.

I don’t think I “don’t love” my kids when I sit in the living room typing and they sleep in their room. But I don’t feel love. I feel like an empty vessel waiting to contain something. I feel like I am waiting to exist. I am not really existing without them.

I am relational in a way that is deeply unhealthy. I feel like I don’t exist outside of the roles I play in other peoples lives. I fade out of a lot of friendships because I can’t see an easy role for me to fill so I just… stop showing up. If someone has no need of me then I don’t feel secure. I don’t feel like there is a reason for me to be there. So I leave.

“If there is work to do, Lenora won’t stand still until it is done.” Damn skippy. (Err, Lenora is my middle name. A long time ago I worried about being “out” about being a pervert because I was heading into my teaching career. Now I am at a point in my life where I can never slam the closet door shut and I’m comfortable with that. So I don’t bother using my middle name in some contexts and my first name in other contexts.)

When I was in high school people would tell me to my face that they wanted me to come to their (wild, all-night) parties because they knew I would fall asleep early and not bug them all night long and I would wake up and start cleaning before anyone else was up. I would destroy the evidence so they didn’t get in trouble with their parents.

Some habits die hard.

I like taking care of people. I like feeling useful. I like feeling like I have something specific to offer that someone needs–even if that only means telling them my wildly different perspective. The truth is probably somewhere between our perspectives anyway. It’s good to understand the whole range of opinions.

I feel like most of what I need from people is just the opportunity to listen to them talk. I only know what I know. What I know is so twisted and fucked up that I am not good at figuring out where other people really are. I don’t know what people know. I don’t know what will surprise people.

Just talk to me. I’m working really hard on not needing anything from anyone. I understand that some people have to be basically self-contained units. I mean, I depend on Noah. I am so grateful for Noah there are not enough words in our language to express it.

When Noah looks at me with his patented-creepy-guy-I-like-what-I-see-stare I know that he isn’t judging me based on whether or not my breasts or my ass are the right size or shape for his adolescent fantasies.

Noah appreciates me in all of my complexity. He can only take so much sometimes–he has limits too–but he doesn’t want me to stop being intense. He just wants to be along in a room sometimes too. I get that.

I told my shaman that sometimes I feel kind of guilty because I think my marriage is a white knight situation and I wish I hadn’t shoved Noah into that role.

My shaman turned and cocked his head and said, “Wait… who is the knight here? Because if you think there is just one possibility you are deluded in a special way.”

I sure pick tactful friends. <3

It is hard for me to see what Noah “really” gets from our marriage. It is hard for me to see our situation as being good for him. But when I’m talking to someone who is much older than Noah who really kind of wishes that he had found someone like me (or that I had said  yes to him) it is a lot easier to see the advantages.

I have a lot of friends who are heading towards old age and they are single. They don’t have a lot of patience with my self-denigration. They clearly see how Noah’s life did improve and continues to improve with my presence. For some reason my married friends just get my whine more and they don’t argue in the same way.

Marriage is a really interesting relationship. Different people treat marriage very differently. I think that marriage is where you go find someone who is a good partner–someone who can balance your weaknesses and strengths. I probably actually wouldn’t do well with a live-in partner who did construction type work. We would fight a lot about how to do things. Noah just lets me do whatever I want. Even if it is wrong.

And I let Noah mostly do what he wants, even if it is wrong. I can’t save him from his fuck ups and mostly I don’t try. (Ok, I do save him from a lot. I handle ALL THE PAPERWORK.)

Noah wasn’t so good at managing money. Well, not the real day-to-day kind. He cam manage investments. I can’t. People like me don’t invest. (Statistically a fairly small percentage of the country is seriously “invested” in companies. During childhood and early adult hood I was in the bottom 10% of the country for wealth. In my first year of teaching full time I jumped up to the 40%. I’m not the kind of person who invests.)

But holy moly I can pinch a penny till it cries. I just put their whiny snively little selves into a jar under my bed instead of in an investment house.

I feel uncomfortable every time I look at our bank balance. Surely this isn’t mine. I comfort myself with the knowledge that I didn’t earn it. I probably couldn’t earn it. That doesn’t feel very good. Kind of cold comfort. Like holding an ice pack on a bruise for three hours. Maybe not so much help after a while.

My therapist regularly comments on how surprising it is that the cast of characters in my life is so large and so diverse. I know a lot of people. In the modern facebook/raver climate knowing so many people doesn’t seem like a big deal.

But I don’t just have a lot of acquaintances. I have a lot of people I can call in the middle of the night. I have a lot of people I can ask for help in emergencies. Would I feel uncomfortable asking? Sure. But in a true emergency I have a rather long list of people to call. I might have to go through 20 or 30 names to get my needs truly met… but I know hundreds of people and many of them are very ok with being woken up in the middle of the night.

When I was younger I consciously worked on being a nexus point between many very diverse groups. I’m not the only one, of course. But I went through a lot of kinds of groups. I didn’t alienate everyone.

I feel like a spider sitting in a web. Do you know that most job leads do *not* come from people you know directly? Most job leads come from the friend of a friend. How you make your network of people work decides a lot about how successful and happy your life will be. At least so some books claim.

I know a lot of people. I don’t know what that will mean some day. Maybe nothing. Maybe something useful. I keep hoping.

Sometimes a friend calls me up to say, “So I was in a situation today and someone started doing (thing Krissy writes about disapproving of) and I recognized it as a problem… so I spoke up.” That makes my fucking day. It has come from multiple people. It’s been about sexist stuff, racist stuff, queer bashing…

I believe that intersectionality is the way to the future. People who can be bridges between communities are going to become ever more important.

Human beings have always functioned heavily in an Us vs Them manner. It is how we rally up our energy to get things done. But as long as you think of people as Them you can’t figure out how to live peacefully.

I begin to understand pacifism.

And now my family is awake. Calli is lying on my arm. It makes it harder to type. But I’m so happy she is here that I can’t tell her to go away. Today we are having leftover pancakes and french toast along with fresh fried potatoes and sausage and eggs. It’s a good life.

I am pleased to report that the evil gunk I am coughing up from my lungs is a nice pale green with no black at all. The more I read about chronic bronchitis the more I think I am just screwed. My mom was a really heavy smoker. I have had coughing problems all winter from the first sign of cold for as long as I can remember and I didn’t smoke pot for that long. (roughly four years of consistent smoking in my late twenties into thirties) I’ve been off smoking for a while and the black stuff in my lungs has cleared out. But I am probably never going to stop coughing all winter.

Did you know that chronic bronchitis can kill you? I am curious what I will die of some day. Suicide has its down sides, but it also assigns a certain dignity compared to dying because my airways just close. Enh. We’ll see.

I’ve been thinking a lot about suicidal ideation as a concept as opposed to having suicidal ideation. What function does that hold for me? Is it relief? Is it company? Is it safety?

If I believe that at the end of the day *I* get to decide if I have to face tomorrow… that’s some power. It is most of the power I have ever felt a had.

At this point, whereas it is hard to control, I can manage to switch some of the tracks of my brain to other things so I can still “function” even while the imagery is happening. Earlier in my life that wasn’t true. On days when the multi-plex went live I just had to hide in a closet to avoid getting in trouble because I would inevitably get in a lot of trouble those days. I don’t value myself or my body so I pick fights. I’m just looking for the next person who will hurt me. I assume that is the only reason I am here anyway. Someone has to be at the bottom of the shit hill.

A friend asked me how I was doing yesterday. Other than hacking up a lung I don’t have a lot of room for complaint. I mean, could I talk about things that are bothering me? Sure. Could I list all my stress and anxiety? Sure.

I am exactly where I want to be doing exactly what I want to do. I have so much privilege it blows my fucking mind. I get to be independent and secure because I have a provider. It’s… kind of weird.

Most people developed their early sense of security from their parents. Mine couldn’t take care of me. Not in any way. My mom sent me off to live with other people who could take care of me and my father said that providing support for me wasn’t a worthy enough thing to do–he needed trade in the form of sex with my mother or I didn’t deserve support. Even after the divorce.

I haven’t had sex with Noah in a while. I’m not sure what all is going on. July we went slightly over quota. But for the last week I have felt numb. I just can’t have sex right now. I can’t open my legs and provide the trade that keeps a roof over my head. I can’t. I can’t believe that is the only reason I am allowed to stay.

Noah didn’t really know what he was getting into. To be fair, neither did I.

I don’t know how to tell Part 2. I don’t want it to be a continuation of the first book, exactly. I’m doing plot outlining and thinking about the evolution of my relationship with my Owner. Am I telling a story about being trained as a slave? About becoming an adult? About the bdsm community? About the psychopathology of sadists? I’m not really sure. Figuring that out will determine a lot about the book. And how graphic should it be? It’s not like I actually had all that much sex with my Owner. He wasn’t interested. I will need to describe the bdsm and that is graphic enough. “Then he placed the noose around my neck. He said, ‘Well I hope you don’t die’ then he walked over to the pulley system and tugged on the rope that lifted me off my feet while I tried to relax and go limp so it would hurt less. Then I waited to find out if he would kill me or not.”

I mean, is that x rated? It is uhm… festive? I don’t know.

The suicide book also wants more work. Sigh.

I spent an hour and a half working on curriculum for sex ed for home schoolers. Yes yes, I’m “unschooling” my kids and all. Sorta? Maybe? Am I even physically capable of thinking about things as an unschooler? So what I’m doing is putting together what I think they should know and why. Then I’m trying to figure out how to present the information.

I won’t provide them with a one-size-fits-all curriculum. I know all the kids I have been approached about teaching. (Moms have asked at the park. Ok, some moms have also explicitly said “You won’t be teaching MY kids.” Ok, not a problem. It isn’t as if I am so desperate for things to do that I need to chase down other peoples kids for more work.)

I feel weird about putting this together. I was asked to. By multiple people. Other people emphatically don’t want me near their kids. Uhm, ok? That’s fine?

I hear Davy Crockett. Be sure you are right and go ahead. I believe that sex education is important. I believe that all human beings should have access to sex education. I also believe that parents have the right to set culture for their own children. That means that “sex education” will be done in a variety of ways by a variety of people. For example, I will not a teach a sex ed that says, “Boys have a penis and girls have a vagina.” I will say, “People are usually born with genitals. Most of the time people grow up believing that they have the right set of genitals for them and they are happy with who they are. Sometimes people feel like they do not feel comfortable with what they were born with in some way. Some people grow up and reject being called a man or a woman and choose no gender. All while having a penis or a vagina. So it isn’t as simple as it might appear.”

It is ok with me that some people do not want their children hearing this message. I believe that parents have a right to shelter their children. I just do. I believe that whether or not a parent wants to shelter his/her child is ok in as far as that parent does not try to pretend that the outside world and the different opinions in it are ALL BAD. I like “They are fine like that, we just aren’t like that.”

-It will probably take me a week or two to put together the sex ed curriculum with materials. (Estimate 15-30 hours [I’m not shitting you. Being a teacher is work.]) Not sure I will get to this before the birthday parties.

-Must grade and set syllabus for remaining English classes at Hindi temple. (Estimate three hours of work)

-Must clean house and yards for upcoming birthday parties. (Estimated 40 hours. Let’s be real here. It may go up from there. I will cap it at 50 hours because then I will just be crying.)

-Decorate for parties (including figuring out treasure hunt. I was told there MUST be a treasure hunt. Sigh.) I should AT LEAST put the invitations in the mail tomorrow. (Estimated 15 hours)

-Must get over being sick, thus should consciously choose reduced work load. Shit. Really should limit body to six hours of WORK per day. (No pretending that “writing isn’t work” or “taking care of kids isn’t work”.)

-There are more Home Depot trips in my future. Sand. Glorious sand. (2 hours at least.)

-Not to mention reading to the kids, taking them to the water park, taking them to home school outings, not to mention swim classes, and not to mention cooking. Because I can’t wrap my head around the timing of all of this.

 

For the record, I do not judge when other parents have messy homes because keeping my home clean is a full time job and I don’t expect people with other full time jobs to be able to also do the same full time job I do. And acting like it should be easy for someone to do what I do in addition to a job is highly insulting to me. I work my fucking ass off and my house is nothing resembling spotless. Cleaning is work.

I think I spend too much of my life preparing for parties. They occupy a huge space in my brain. They are my way of trying to build community. They are pretty much the only way I get into a group of people without being convinced that more than half the people would merely step over my corpse if I dropped dead. So I like hosting. When I host I know the people are there because they like ME ME ME. It’s a good thing.

 

I wrote this yesterday and didn’t finish. I can’t reread it with helpful folk around. The end.

I am not good. I am not kind. I am selfish. I am mean. I am sometimes cruel. I am self-centered and self-absorbed.

Becoming these things has been a process. It has become a process because without these traits my life was extremely problematic. When I spend more time worrying about other peoples needs instead of my own then I tend to develop health problems. My psychological issues get worse. I become far less functional.

Animals require care. Dogs, cats, rabbits, birds, fish… whatever kind of animal you want to have around requires care. You have to feed it, keep it clean, give it water, love it, sometimes clip nails, sometimes clean out the cage… etc.

I require a lot of care in order to not be a screaming harpy. I am very sorry for this. In no way shape or form do I think this care should come from outside myself. I do not write because I want people to jump up and care for me. I would react with extreme hostility if you tried. You are not my keeper. You won’t be here tomorrow. I don’t want your half-assed-sorta-guilty help. I just don’t. It won’t actually make my life better.

If you have starving cats wandering around your neighborhood feeding them one time is not going to improve their life. It will make you have warm fuzzy feelings of being a good person for an act that is mostly meaningless in the lives of the affected target. That is how I feel about people helping me.

If I come to you and say, “Can you help with _____” that is absolutely all I am asking for help with. If you start trying to manage my anxiety while helping with _______ I am going to freak out at you. That’s not your job. My anxiety is not your problem. You can’t fix it. It is a very old problem. When you act like your bubble gum as bonding agent solution should be good enough for me you are being incredibly fucking rude. And you don’t even know it. And you really don’t give a shit. You have your warm fuzzies. If I don’t react appropriately obviously I am just an ungrateful bitch.

I have learned how to live with being an ungrateful bitch. Other peoples scraps of attention are how I piece together a life. I don’t have a big piece of anyone. I get small pieces. I get what they have to spare.

I don’t ask for more. I don’t want more. I am not trying to become a big part of your life. I don’t think I am capable of having that with anyone but the three people I live with. I don’t have enough to give.

I don’t have the ability to form really bonded relationships at this point. I am broken. I do not trust people. I assume that if I am stupid enough to continue to exist that every few weeks or months someone is going to scream at me for being so mean. Yup, I’m mean. I have learned to live with it.

I can’t avoid people getting upset with me and still exist in public. The only way I can see to avoid having people be upset with me is for me to entirely fade out of any sort of publicly accessible space. Otherwise I *will* offend people. Period.

I have to act like I am entitled to exist even though I offend you. Even though you think my behavior sucks. Even though you think I am not a nice person. Even though you think you can’t manage my anxiety. I didn’t bloody ask you to. My anxiety is mine. Stop acting like my problems are your problems. There is this great concept called “Boundaries”.

If I do not come to you with particular requests for behavior modification assume that I have no interest in you modifying your behavior on my behalf. I think that people act how they act because of a long history that I am pretty much not ever going to know about. I don’t think they need to change because of me.

Let’s be clear that I assume that most people I see in real life are going to fade out of my life after one-to-five years. I am not invested. I am sorry for that. I’m sure it makes people feel bad. I’m sure it makes people feel like I don’t care about them.

Well, I care about me more. I want to be alive when I am no longer a temporarily amusing person for you to talk to. I have to not care very much about your priorities. You won’t be in my life long enough for me to care what you think.

I don’t feel like a very good person for this. But it is realistic.

I am having a very hard time with the fact that I don’t constantly move any more. All of my behavior patterns are slash and burn. I find friends quickly and easily and I lose them even more easily.

Yeah, I know it is my fault. Blah blah blah. All my fault. Yup, I know. I realize that people don’t stay in my life because I am so unpleasant. Yup, I know. Thing is, it doesn’t matter how pleasant I try to make myself appear… if you stand near me for a few more minutes you will notice it is an act. Then you won’t like me any more. Then you will leave.

Forgive me for not crying over all of you. I would never stop crying.

I am not important to people. Well, they will give me the hand wavey “Oh I care about you!” but I’m not in peoples lives in a consistent way. I am someone they like to see when they can. I am not an essential part of life for more than three people.

I can’t build my self worth around people who only pay attention to me when they have nothing better to do. I have to be self-absorbed. I have to think my story is interesting. I have to think it is worth telling. I have to think it is ok to make the choices I make. The alternative is to kill myself.

I can’t please everyone. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I have tried and I have busted my head against that wall so often that there is a permanent dent in the wall and my head. I am not something that is pleasing to people. I can’t change that any more than I can change what race I was born.

My isolation is my fault. I’m not blaming anyone else. I’m not saying that those people are bad for not wanting to put up with me. I think they need to have boundaries. Good for them.

I need to have boundaries too. Boundaries like, “I am not like you. If me being different makes you feel attacked then STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME BECAUSE IT ISN’T MY PROBLEM THAT YOU HAVE FEELINGS.”

In no way shape or form do I want to say that I “understand the black experience” because I don’t but when I hear black men talk about what it is like to have white women fear them as they walk down the street I see a glimmer. I can understand a slice of that.

For the record, black men do not intimidate me. My problems are with white men.

I remember a conversation amongst a bunch of perverts years ago. (I use “perverts” with great affection.) Man A was talking about how easy/hard it is to find the scene. He said something to the effect of, “I tried finding the bdsm community when I was 19. When I came to a party and saw people beating the shit out of people it scared me and I left. I didn’t come back until I was 35. It wasn’t up to the people in that room to make me comfortable. I had to just be comfortable or I had to leave.”

He said that in response to like four other people saying that heavy or edge play was not appropriate in a public play space because it might scare newbies.

I’m an edge player. Ok, I haven’t done much bdsm in years and things are going to be interesting to figure out with Noah once I actually get up the nerve to go there again. I am an extreme player. If you ask a random group of perverts about their preferences mine are often some of the most intense.

I am not mild and unoffensive. I will never be. That is not a goal.

If I bother you, that’s totally ok. I do that. I bother people. I am an irritant. I am annoying and difficult and offensive.

But if you pay attention you will notice that I rein in like 95% of this when you are talking to me in public. My self absorption is not something I shove in peoples’ faces all day. I go out and I ask questions about other peoples lives. I listen to their stories. I want to hear about what other people think and feel and do. I just don’t want to emulate any of it.

I understand that people don’t want to hear about people like me. You know that difficulty in putting up with me? That’s the “extreme mental illness” that has been diagnosed over and over since I was a small child. No, I don’t think I am fucking normal.

But is it ok for me to exist? I am not anything near the most self absorbed person in the world even though I am extremely self absorbed. I am no where near the meanest person in the world even though I am mean. I am not ever going to be the most violent person even though I have tendencies.

I’m not the most extreme everything. I am just annoying. I’m not dangerous just irritating. Is it ok for me to exist?

I have had a friend volunteer a friend to finish the projects in my yard. Things will work out.

I’m ok with people needing to put up boundaries to keep me out of their life. I would think there was something wrong with the world if people didn’t put up big boundaries keeping me out of their life. That is just the natural order of things.

I had children so that I would have little people who understood my culture. I don’t know if they will share it when they are done growing up–I doubt they will be as crazy as I am. But someone will have a chance of predicting my behavior accurately.

I can’t invest in anyone else. I have two children into whom I must pour everything I have to give.

That’s a big fat lie. I pour pieces of myself into other things all the time. I have friends. I have a friend sleeping in the garage right now who has loved me since I was 17. (Technically we met when I was 15. The boy I wanted liked her more than me. That’s typically the story of my life. Except for Noah.)

I can’t be upset or take it personally when people walk away. Not everyone does. I have to take what people can hand off comfortably and not feel entitled to any more. I can be self absorbed and selfish but I may not be entitled. I’m not entitled to any-fucking-thing. Especially not relationships. Holy shit am I not entitled to relationships.

I try to be nice to people. I try to be considerate. I try to be a good and supportive friend. I give what I have to give. If the fact that I also write about a lot of anxiety is a problem, well… then I can’t do anything more than what I am doing. I have to believe that I have shot my wad and that’s what I have to give.

Then keep walking. Or die. I choose to keep walking. I choose to not attach. I love people but I am always prepared to let them go. “If you love them set them free” and all that shit.

I am shocked that I still know K. I didn’t think that any of my mommy-friends would last for more than a year or two. I was at her sons first birthday and next month I will be at his fourth birthday party. Three years is pretty long for me in a close friendship. Seven years is really the kicker though. We’ll see.

Pam, I do expect you to get sick of me one of these days. I know you say you won’t. But I’ve heard that a lot. I have been told by hundreds of people that they love me and will never leave me. I don’t bother to listen to the end of that sentence any more. It is such a fucking lie.

I’m self absorbed because I’m the only one who has to do the work to keep me alive. It is a lot of work. If I don’t take it seriously I will not continue to be functional or alive.

Sometimes when I am told that I think I love my kids more than other people do (well my first thought is “Really? I think that? When did I think that, precisely?”) I think that it isn’t that I love my kids more. It is that I have no one else in the world to safely pour my love into. So it seems more obvious and noticeable by contrast. I’m not all that nice to random people so it seems all the more startling that I am so gentle and affectionate and loving with my kids.

Based on my writing I don’t seem like the sit and cuddle gently sort.

My kids are the only people in the whole fucking world who get to touch my body for many hours a day. My husband isn’t allowed to touch me like my kids are. My kids act like we have one body and they occasionally orbit off but then they are coming back to reattach.

We went to a birthday party recently and Calli fell down. A bunch of mothers leaped up to help her. They got there before me. I kind of hung back. I don’t push to the front. I don’t assume I am the important one. But Calli pushed them away from her and said, “I want my mommy.”

That is why I had kids. That moment of affirmation. Someone thinks I am the best. Even if it is only two people and even if it is only for a few years before they grow up and hate my guts like everyone else.

For now, I am the best. And they love me so much. And I love them. This is all I have.

Tommy has been dead for fifteen years today. I don’t blame myself for his suicide any more. I used to. It took a long time for me to stop feeling like it was all my fault. I didn’t even think about it until I called a girlfriend yesterday and said, “I am completely freaking out and I’m not sure what is triggering it.”

She said, “Don’t you have a big anniversary at the end of June?” Oh. I had managed to not remember until she said that. Yup. This is a big one.

I called her because I’m told often that calling people is the right thing to do when you can’t think of what else to do other than hurt yourself. Distraction is your friend and all.

I haven’t cut in quite a while. The last time was one night when Alex was here and I could not get my body under control to even talk to him. That was a few years ago. I haven’t beaten my head on the floor since my 30th birthday. That is going on two years.

I have been appropriate for a couple of years in a row. I don’t scream much. When I do I immediately apologize and I have to take a time out to model dealing with inappropriate behavior. I haven’t hit anyone in a very long time.

I maintain “good” behavior by removing stimulus so my life is nice and boring.

Right now my stomach hurts so much that I feel like I could vomit on my bed. I haven’t medicated yet today. I have been playing games with not medicating. Because I go through these shame spirals about only disgusting bad people are addicts. I need pot. Therefore I am a disgusting, bad addict. Aren’t addicts supposed to be punished? Isn’t that what we do here?

I think that thinking about Tommy is part of the emphasis on the burning-alive screen in my head. Normally that show isn’t so prominent. But when I think about Tommy pretty much what I see in my head is a flip-flop between images of him burning (which I didn’t actually see) and the physical feelings of him trying to rape me. I wish I could forget what that felt like.

Next year he will have been dead for half of my life. Due to funny math it takes a bit longer until my father has been dead for half of my life. I had a birthday in between their suicides even though they were only four months apart.

Just breathe. Therapy tonight. Not going to the park today. Thank goodness for rain. Please start raining, sky. I want to have a good reason for not going instead of just being a whiny bitch.

Sometimes I can not-hate me for the things that have happened to me. Then there are all the other days when I look around and notice that other people didn’t have lives like me. I must have deserved it. I must have been supposed to be treated like that.

The one thing I have no fear of as a parent is whether or not I have snuggled my children enough. It would not be physically possible for me to spend much more time snuggling my kids. We spend hours every day hugging and cuddling. My children will not have brains and bodies full of the feeling of being hit and held down as someone tries to remove your clothing.

My children have never been told that they are whores who are required to open their legs whenever they are told. No one has ever hit them and told them to be still and silent while they are being hurt. No one has ever humiliated them and then told them to stop crying or they will be given a reason to cry. No one has ever told them, with fingers in their vaginas, that this is the only part of their body worth keeping them alive for.

Sometimes when I think of all the evil poison I have inside me I feel like the only way to run away from the toxic sludge is to be dead. Otherwise I don’t know how to stop remembering these words, these feelings.

Just get up and do something else. Even if the first attempt to distract myself fails I have to try again. And again. And again. I have to get through today so that I can have a tomorrow that hurts less. It will hurt less. I believe that in the pit of my stomach in a way that I believe very few things. Not every day hurts like this. I know this.

I suppose that is actually major progress. I don’t think I had that belief in the past. When I was young I remember feeling trapped in the fear and pain. I did not believe I could ever not be in pain. Then I had my children. They bring me more joy than anything in the whole world. A lot of the time I am able to immerse myself in the joy of being near them and forget everything that came before them.

Sometimes I feel like I was born with them. I am trying to write a new story. It started on May 24th, 2008. That was the day that me being in pain wasn’t really something that bothered me. It was pain with a purpose. I needed to help my daughter be born. I wanted it. I wanted it more than I have ever wanted anything.

And the person I got is even more incredible than I imagined. She is more loving than I thought she would be. I think I believed that my children would always have thinly veiled contempt for me like I was told to have contempt for my mother.

My father, sister, and brothers all told me to have contempt for my mother. She was weak, powerless, stupid, ineffectual, unable to handle real life. We were supposed to lie to her always because she couldn’t handle anything.

So far my children seem to believe that in any average room I am going to be the most competent person there. If something needs to be done they assume I can do it. Even if I have never done something before I say, “Well let’s check the internet!” Then I just do it. I don’t care if it is “hard” or not. If it needs to get done and a person can do it then I believe I am capable of doing it. (Ok, barring some limitations of sheer strength or size. But there are tools that help you over-come such short comings!)

Fifteen years ago when I was told that my brother was dead, no wait–let me be clear: when I was screamed at that I was a stupid bitch who killed our brother I went off by myself. Eventually I went to Jenny because I had nowhere else to go and I knew I wasn’t really welcome in our house. It was all my fault after all. Everyone was so mad at me.

If I hadn’t prosecuted my dad none of this would have happened.

Fifteen years since I called 911 and said, “I need to talk to someone about my dad molesting me.” I cried and could barely give the operator my address. Hell, I barely knew my address. I think I had to find a piece of mail and read it off. I hadn’t lived there very long.

That was when I started really fighting back. I wish that I knew some way of fighting back other than disappearing. That is what I have done. I left. I left everyone who was previously in my life. I treated them like there was an ultimatum and they lost.

Pick my abusers or pick me. Given that you never knew about any of the abuse and you don’t believe me that it happened I will take that as you picking them and I will leave.

I don’t need you.

I don’t need my mother or sister or brother or aunts or uncles or cousins if they aren’t going to believe me about what happened to me.

I live in hell because of the things that were done to me. And I’m supposed to make nice-nice with the people who hurt me. I’m supposed to forgive and forget and support them and love them because they are family.

I think that if a dog was treated the way I was treated my family would go to jail over it. Animal rights activists are fucking fierce.

I learn every day how bad it was because I make conscious choices about how to talk to my children. I weigh my words very carefully. I have to think about every.fucking.thing.I.say. Or I might slip and be inappropriate. I know how very inappropriate I could be. Oh holy fucking shit I could be wildly inappropriate.

Someone tried to tell me that I don’t understand how upsetting rape pornography is. I said, well very few people have pictures of themselves being hanged by the neck but I do. Do I understand how upsetting it is that generic men might want to do that to generic women? Uhm, how about having to live with the fact that someone I loved very much wanted to do that to me. He thought that was the appropriate way to treat me. He masturbated while watching me choke.

I am very careful what I say to my children all day every day. I have had an entire life of Not Safe For Children. Like 99% of what is in my brain is not appropriate to share with children. So I have to think very hard and very carefully all day every day to ensure that I am appropriate. This is the hardest thing I have ever done. I have to think about my words, my tone of voice, and my facial expression. I have to do this full speed ahead while interacting with two very challenging individuals all god damn day every god damn day.

I actually feel proud of myself when I think about it. I am not perfect. I am snippy and I say things that are too harsh sometimes. Hopefully not in a long-term damaging way? Who knows. I’m saving money towards their future therapy if needed. Seriously. Growing up with me is an Adventure!

They sure don’t act like children who have had all the joy taken from the world. (I’m sitting in the play room watching them interact. We’ve been in here a while.) Ok, actually they aren’t both in here any more. I guess stuff changes.

I should probably start chores. It is a day and all.

Sometimes it is inconvenient that I think it is so important to model this shit every day. It is inconvenient that I prioritize their having these memories over what my body wants to do. It is just more important to care about their future selves having this stable scaffolding to build on. It doesn’t matter how I feel. I want to sit in bed and watch The West Wing season two for the sixth time.

But that wouldn’t be functional, now would it? I’m pretty sure I am getting sick. My nose is running and my throat is getting sore. We still need to go on a walk and get work done. The world does not stop just because you aren’t feeling perfect. We won’t run but we do need to move our bodies. We need to be active. We need to be out in our community seeing people and continuing to exist. We won’t stop and chat as long and we won’t stand as near them.

This feels very important. Just keep moving. It doesn’t matter if you want to be alive you are still alive. Keep moving. Act like you will be alive for a long time. You can either do it miserably or you can do it in reasonable health.

If you want to actively die get it over with. Stop the bullshit. Don’t kill yourself with a thousand paper cuts. That is chicken shit. If you are doing that, stop it.

There has to be a different way. What is it? Time to go start the day.

I have vague suicidal ideation pretty frequently. I’m basically always aware of at least three ways to commit suicide within the next hour. Usually I consciously try to physically stay a bit away from the methods I am considering.

Today is really bad. I am having a terrible time distracting myself. I can’t get off that track. I feel scared. My body physically hurts. I feel useless and bad. I feel like I must die. I don’t know how to explain this very well. It feels like dying today is the will of the universe and if I ignore what I am supposed to be doing there will be serious consequences.

I called a friend and talked to her until she had to pick her kid up from school. I watched a movie (sorta). I saw maybe thirty minutes total out of the pilot for Little House on the Prairie. (I feel annoyed that the presented Pa without a beard.) I tried to wash dishes. I’m having trouble getting through a task. In the middle my knees turn to water and I start crying.

I want to die. I want to die far more than I want to breathe. Breathing hurts. I want to stop.

I can’t. It doesn’t really matter if I hurt. I have these kids to take care of. I grow increasingly certain by the year that I would be dead if I had not managed to procreate. I feel grateful for them and very angry that they won’t just let me die.

Ok DSH–really my kids are more important than my marriage in terms of being able to have a permanent relationship. Can I be kind enough to them? Can I take care of them well enough? What is “enough”?

I tried to read. I can’t get through two pages. And I’m still reading the Little House series so that means my brain is toast. Yesterday I read the first book in the series in two hours. It isn’t that the books are hard. I just can’t think of anything other than killing myself.

It is like I live in a movie multi-plex. You can see all the screens from the center of the space. Like at the drive-in movies. On every screen I see a different way of dying. The speed and tempo of what I am seeing speeds up and slows down. Sometimes I focus in on one screen at a time and I watch the razor blade move with infinite slowness and deftness as it severs the artery. The bus hitting me goes really fast. I see that one happen over and over really quickly. I can hit by a bus 100 times in a minute. I can’t see anything else inside my brain.

I’m trying really hard to see something else. My kids are really clingy today, as you would expect.

What is it going to mean for them growing up with someone like me? I am keeping them fed. I think they have even felt the semblance of play today. I certainly haven’t said the word suicide nor the word cut nor die nor nor nor nor.

I say nothing. I just sit here and shake. Sometimes I go hide in my room. I sit between the bed and the wall under the window where the kids can’t see me because then they don’t jump on me immediately. I can cry and shake and try to rock myself.

Shouldn’t I put them in school and get them away from me? What in the fuck makes me think that I am an adequate human being to parent at all let alone home school? Shouldn’t my children be around healthy, functional people?

Do they know that I am not functional? Do they see me as broken? Do they see me as inadequate? Do they care that I cry while I walk around the house puttering through my chores?

Maybe I’m freaking out because Noah did most of the cleaning yesterday so I haven’t gotten into the flow of cleaning the house? Maybe I’m freaking out because tomorrow marks fifteen years since my brother lit himself on gasoline and burned 85% of his body.

Let me tell you, that screen in my head is festive. I’ve done a lot of research into what happens to the body as it burns. You never get those images out of your brain.

You can never unknow what you know. You can never unsee what you have seen.

My children do not know what is inside of me. All they know is even on my bad days they can say, “I need hugs” and I will immediately hug them. Ok sometimes I have to put something down first. My kids know that the rules for how the house works are consistent. Even on my bad days food has to stay in the kitchen or we get bugs. Even on my bad days you have to pick up after yourself before you get the iPad. Even on my bad days there will be food put in front of you at appropriate intervals.

Even if mom doesn’t eat because giving her food would clearly be an inappropriate use of resources.

Even on mom’s bad days big sister is still not the boss, sorry kid. Even on bad days mom will still smile and say that she loves you. Even if she is crying at the same time.

When they ask me why I’m crying I lie sometimes. Or I tell part of the truth. I tell them I am crying because I am so happy I get to be near them. I don’t say that I am so happy to be away from the people who used to hurt me. That’s a part of the story I can gloss over just now.

I want to die. Today I do not have more than 50% on the want to live side. It is just not there. I want to stop hurting. I want to be selfish. I want to only care about me.

But I won’t. I have these two kids to take care of. More than I want to die I want them to reach eighteen with a whole heart. I do not want to be what breaks them. Life will be hard enough without me destroying them. I will not kill myself today. It doesn’t matter that I want to.

In some way that is a kind of comfort. I feel terrible guilt because I know that Noah would not be enough today. If I did not have children today I would be done. I’m that sure. I want out of my head that bad.

But I can’t. It is kind of a weird feeling. I can’t. I made two people out of pure selfishness. I made Shanna because I have dreamed of meeting my daughter Shanna since I was twelve. Ok, she’s slightly more blonde than I pictured but otherwise I feel like I got exactly what I wanted. I designed this kid in my head and I got her. She is as outgoing and friendly and charming and considerate as I hoped. Those were the parts of me that I really wanted to see in an undamaged person. I knew that before she was born. I fucking prayed for a friendly child. I wanted someone who has never met a stranger, someone like me.

I feel like if I went through and listed off my favorite things about myself: how good I am at meeting people, how good I am at taking charge, how good I am at making sure something is followed up on, how tenacious I am, how stubborn, how sure I am right I am. That describes my daughter. Maybe I’m lying to myself but I see her trying to be those things. (Maybe I am inappropriate in how I direct her, maybe in the long run none of these things will describe her.)

I can’t leave her without someone who understands her. Noah has a very hard time understanding her behavior. He gets so furious sometimes when she does stuff. Then I sit down and explain to him how the situation looks from her perspective. Then he figure out how to handle her. How would they get along without me?

They would get by. I know. I can come up with a lot of reasons why it is ok for me to just be done.

But then I look at Calli. No, she would never be ok. That one would be broken by this. Shanna would try to fill the void by loving other people. I think she would be ok. Calli is different. Calli is different parts of me. I think that if Calli is betrayed by the person she loves most in the whole wide world she will never get over that. It will destroy her sense of self-worth. I can see that so clearly.

I can’t do that. I see the power I have here. Just living is good enough some days. Just continuing to hug them when they ask is enough some days.

Some days I don’t really make forward progress. Sometimes I, to quote my therapist, am immobilized by reliving trauma and I have to coast on how good my kids are at entertaining themselves and being responsible.

This was how I did it as a teacher too. I had such a strongly ingrained routine that I didn’t actually have to do much of anything. The children taught themselves. I showed them the process then they went through it over and over because I was consistent in the beginning. It was ok for me to mentally check out some days. I could say, “Hey you! I have decided that you are teaching this lesson. All of the material is right next to the overhead projector. Get to.”

They did it. They did as well as I would have. Sometimes watching them learn the material out loud was really instructive to me. I learned things I hadn’t really understood even as I prepared my materials.

I didn’t teach from what was in my head. I wrote everything down. I knew to the minute what to do every day. I knew what questions to ask and what things to say. I didn’t follow pre-prepared curriculums. That’s why I worked seventy to eighty hour weeks.

My children have similar sorts of patterns. Even when I fall of the flow they still follow it.

The job of children is to play and learn. You get two hours a day of iPad usage. Other than that it is your responsibility to figure out how to entertain yourself. No one else can crawl into your brain and know what you want to be doing. Figure it out. And they do. Ok, so I do interact with them. And they follow me around and interact with me a lot.

Today I am writing because this manages to pull a track of my brain away from thinking about suicide. When I type it is like abruptly switching screens with keyboard shortcuts. It is abrupt and sudden and there is only text. The movies switch off. Very little else can interrupt the flow of images. That is interesting to think about.

I can’t flip between the screens at will like this for anything else. Typing pulls up a part of my awareness that other things don’t. It is kind of interesting to wonder how typing will play into the personhood of humans in the future. How does the activation of our brain work differently for typing as opposed to other methods of communication or living?

I don’t know if it works this way for other people. But man is typing awesome as a focus device. I think that is why I like it so much. I write terribly slowly. I hate my hand writing. It feels like torture. Which is why I am thinking of hand-writing my next book. I’m just not getting the feel of it in typing.

Today is a funny day to think about the next book. It does need to be Outrunning Suicide and it’s kind of funny to want to write about this process this way. It will be ironic if I write a book about not doing it and then I do it. Ha. Fitting?

Maybe I want to write a book about not doing it because I am trying to convince myself. Do I really believe in any of the things I want to write down? Why do I want to record them? Why do I want to share them? Who do I want to share the ideas with? For what purpose do I want to write this book?

I’m not dead. I have wanted to die this much before and I am not dead. I have done incredibly risky things one right after another and I am not dead. I want to really examine for myself what I have done.

I think I want to hand-write it because I want to write stories that young people can read. When I type I get kind of out of hand. *cough*

I think that the most important thing to remember when I am suicidal is that this is a feeling–well, a whole set of feelings, really.

One of the most profound experiences of being a parent is knowing that if I believe that on some basic level my children require me to live then I have to change my behaviors in a variety of ways.

I have to really think about what it means to live even though I am suicidal. I need to actively work towards not dying. I need to stop taking stupid chances. I have to actively stop and consider the results of a wide variety of actions and I have to act as if the results matter.

I have to think about taking care of my body. I have to think about what it means to keep a human animal alive. I have to act like I am important. Or, statistically speaking, I won’t live very long. Some of the people in my family get old. Some of them kill themselves early. Some are alcoholics and destroy their bodies that way. My sour stomach keeps me from drinking. Even though I think about having alcohol almost every day. “Wouldn’t that taste nice?” No. That stomach ache isn’t bloody worth it.

Calli picked Alice in Wonderland as the movie. It is funny hearing it. She knows she is growing up in Wonderland. She actively refers to our house that way. Shanna doesn’t usually and kind of resists the label.

I think it is kind of magical that Calli can point at the kitchen floor and say, “I was born right there.” I can’t leave her. I don’t want that to be her story. I think that knowing that I am the one who decides what kind of childhood they have is going to be the thing. That’s the trick for me. Everyone has their own trick.

I don’t get to be the author of the story of how life goes for very many people. There will be only two people who get to experience the world entirely shaped by me. My children  believe that most people are good and that meeting people is a great experience. They know that some times people do bad things. They know that sometimes people are evil. It isn’t common but you have to prepare yourself for life any way. You need to take care of your body. You need to be strong. You need to be able to do a lot of things. You need to be able to teach yourself how to do things. If you sit around and wait for someone else to teach you how to do what you want to do you are going to sit for the rest of your life. Get to.

Sometimes I’m pretty impressed when I think about it. My oldest is five. I’ve gone that long. I have not been perfect. There have been outbursts of anger. There have been consequences. I have to fix the holes I kick in the walls. I had to fix the cupboard door I kicked off the wall. I had to feel ashamed of myself. I had to do it in front of my kids. I had to talk about why my actions were wrong. I had to talk about what I should have done instead. I had to apologize. Three violent outbursts so far? Oof. That’s not a good ratio.

I’m sorry is a chicken shit thing to say. Don’t fucking do that shit if you are fucking sorry.

I am pretty sure it has been more than a year since I have done anything. It isn’t like I am not being tested. Hoo boy.

I hope that these will be things that happened before Shanna’s memory started. I hope they never witness me losing control.

Suicide is, I think, a way to get out of being more of a failure. I won’t fail them in a million small ways and watch them decide they don’t want me any more after I have been uhh overly enmeshed for years. Yes, oh internet, I know I am enmeshed. Sort of. I know that I have very little permanent influence over them. I know I’m on a timer.

It is very hard for me to believe that my children will grow up to like me. Even though Shanna loves fucking everyone and Calli isn’t sure she loves anyone like she likes me. I know that sort of thing does change. I would have to fuck up pretty big. I have done well by her so far.

Noah says I was much harder on Shanna than I am on Calli at the same age. My response is: well when Shanna was at this age I had a kid this age and  a newborn and I just bloody couldn’t cope. I was very liberal with time outs. I am softer on Calli. I have felt a lot of guilt for weaning her when I did. She clearly wants to still be nursing. I forced her to not be a baby a whole year earlier than I cut off Shanna. I pushed her to potty train early. She just hasn’t had as much of a babyhood. So, yeah. I tolerate more whining from her. I haven’t let her be much of a baby. I will never have another baby.

I find it weird that every month and a bit I sit down and cry for a child I will never meet. I didn’t do that before I had kids. I actually think the miscarriages effected me far more than having children did. Those were children that I almost met and didn’t. I miss them every month. I don’t wish Calli away though and I definitely wouldn’t have met her if I had either of the other children. It’s a weird thing.

It doesn’t matter much if I feel distracted-enough by typing. I need to go eat something.  I need to get the kids ready for ballet and swimming. (All driving within three miles of my house at 24 mph.) I need to get the rest of dinner started.

I am probably clinically “depressed” because I feel like I am swimming up a river of molasses. It really doesn’t matter that it feels harder. I believe that my future self requires me to get off my ass and get work done today in order to be happy. I know this. What I am feeling right now cannot be what is important.

It is hard really believing and forcing myself to act as if it is true that I am required to provide a good childhood for my kids. I signed on to a specific job. I am doing it. I have bad days.

They often coincide with bad weather. And my period. And the anniversaries of suicides.

Oh man Tommy. I have therapy tomorrow night. That’s useful. Fifteen years. I am ten years older than he was when he died. He always was my big-little brother. I actually think that him committing suicide is ok. He had a severe traumatic brain injury. He was a very fucked up person before the car accident. He was going to be a truly scary sociopath. Then he was just a freak. I get why he didn’t want the future he had available.

I actually like the future I see for me if I just keep on keeping on.

Just don’t die today. Tomorrow can take care of itself.

But that isn’t good enough once you are a mother. You can’t just not die. You have to get off your ass and provide care. Like right now. Go. Ack.

I often feel really guilty about the way my brain works. I feel very guilty for being so broken. I don’t even mean the flashes of anger and rage. I had a good day yesterday. I was scared of the reaction from the book club (outing yourself as a big freak is a big no-no in mommy-groups) but I sent out a tentative “Please confirm you don’t hate me” (worded differently…) and got positive feedback.

I don’t feel good about asking for it. I should just let other people have whatever feelings they have and not care. But I do care. I’m scared of not being liked. I’m scared of actually feeling safe because whenever I’m stupid enough to feel comfortable and I actually share my thoughts with people they don’t stick around too long. Goodbye Brittney, Anna, Sarah. 30 years, 11 years and 8 years of trust. I understand that it is my fault.

I’ve been reading a lot of survival skill books. Who are the survivors? Apparently people who accept responsibility are more likely to live. I didn’t know that. I have a (perhaps unhealthy) strong internal locus of control. I believe I am responsible for what happens to me. It happens because of my actions.

It goes back to when I was really small. I remember conversations about this with my mother’s second husband he was gone before I was six. If things don’t work out the way I want it is all my fault that I didn’t work hard enough to make it happen and I have no one to blame but myself. Ok, so he was blaming me for not getting done the things he wanted done but that’s not the point.

I was taught that things were my fault. In fucked up and inappropriate ways but it has served me so well.

I need to not take it so personally that I offend people. There will always be people who decide they don’t want to be my friend.

Why PTSD morning? Because when I wake up with a little bit of anxious like this it manifests as rapid heart rate, sweating, I see time after time of people rejecting me and telling me I am disgusting playing in my head like a news reel. I see the dangers and problems of being alone. I start to cry. I want to wake up and cancel every RSVP I have and not talk to anyone ever again. Even the ones who have never shown signs of being mad at me because it is inevitable that they will and I don’t want to experience it. I wake up wanting to hurt myself.

But I had a fucking good day yesterday. It isn’t fair to have this kind of bounce. I should not be down right now. No, I will never be prom queen or anything like that. I understand the shape and limits of my community. I’m not sure I will ever try for having a best friend again. I talk to K the most but I expect that to change as the years go by and I’m just grateful I have it right now.

I have to not expect that anyone will be in my life in twenty years. I can’t plan around anyone but me. Maybe Noah.

Someone on my PTSD forum said that he was jealous because when I told someone in person about my trauma I got to be comforted. I got to be held and I got to cry. I didn’t laugh in writing but I laughed as I read it. No, actually when I told Noah about my traumas I made him go to the mall and we walked. I didn’t want him to be looking at my face and for the love of all that is holy I did not want to see his face. I didn’t let him touch me. He didn’t see me cry for years of marriage. I’ve only let him hold me while I cry a few times recently. It’s very scary and overwhelming.

I feel guilty because I start out the day smoking pot. But my options are to skip smoking and continue to feel anxiety and like I should set fire to every relationship in my life just so that I don’t have to sit around waiting to be dumped… or I can smoke and have a nice day. Today is the day to clean the bathroom and the floors. And gardening. The kids and I will laugh and have fun. We will go snag the big huge crate I saw out running and the little girls will each get their own raised bed to do whatever they want with. I’m pretty excited.

It’s going to be a day full of only the things I want in my life. A local homeschooling buddy SMSed me last night to ask if they could come over and weed with me for an hour or so in the afternoon.

I’m obviously not a leper. I feel like a bragging piece of shit when I talk about my social life because I am extremely busy. Why do I feel so hated? That’s mental illness, folks. I catalog what I do and who I see to remind myself that it isn’t possible that I am as disgusting and bad as my family told me. If so I wouldn’t go to a fair in San Jose and see several people who squee and rush at me to hug me.

But then I think about the fact that I skip parties at friends’ houses sometimes because I can’t handle being in the room with their rapist friends. Maybe I am tolerated in the same kind of defective zone in society. I’m afraid that is true.

I yell at kids because I honestly believe it is good for them. Right now there is a whole wave of parenting that kind of thinks I am from the devil. I say, “Your kids have to go live in the world. How in the hell do you think they will handle people like me once they are grown?” I’m really not that extreme out in the big bad world. And after I yell I explain why and what needs to change in the future and I don’t carry a grudge and I generally hand out food right afterwards as a bonding thing.

No really, kids need to hit a brick wall. They need to be told that what they are doing isn’t acceptable. Then it needs to be made clear that you have a problem with their behavior, not their personhood and you believe in zillions of chances. Just don’t do that one again, m’kay?

I wish with all my heart that someone would have cared when I was a kid. I wish someone had told me that my misbehavior was very dangerous and they didn’t want me to be hurt. I was kind of told that half-heartedly by people who never followed up and with whom I had no bonding experiences.

I need to be told things I don’t like. I’m blessed with having people who look at me hard enough that I trust their feedback. That feels good.

No person, no personality, no path is completely set in stone until you are dead. People can change and change and change again up until that point. There aren’t really any rules.

Once upon a time our species had very little impetus to figure out how things like PTSD worked. People died in their 30’s or 40’s and it just wasn’t a big deal. You deal with it then you die. I’m going to live post-trauma with symptoms for decades and decades and decades. That’s pretty fucking daunting. That’s motivating. If I don’t think really hard about how to handle this then I might have a miserable life.

If I just drifted through accepting what happens to my body without question I would have an unpleasant life. If I want to change what is happening in my body I have to do it. No doctor and no pill can fix it for me. I have to map a path through doing this.

Neurobiology, brain imaging scans, and psychology are sort of trying to solve this for me only they really don’t understand what is happening to me and that makes them rather impotent.

I would give just about anything to be part of a study that does brain scans of me every five years as I try to change my PTSD symptoms. I want to know what is happening with the grey matter. I wonder if I can change the brain damage. I want to know where it is and the shape of it and the extent of it so I can put my energy specifically towards what I need. Right now I am throwing darts in the dark. I’m not even sure I am hitting the wall.

The thing that I am most convinced of as I grow up is that humans really do have the ability to do magical things–you just have to want something bad enough. “I’ll find a way or make a way.” People survive things that simply can’t be survived. People heal from incredible injuries and diseases–because they want to sooooo much.

The more I read about combat PTSD the more it scares me. The big difference between me and them is I was taught to be a prostitute. They were taught to kill people. I think that is a different scope of anger issues. I’m at risk of maybe giving someone a bruise if I really lost it and whacked. I don’t think that’s ok so I work on my anger issues.

I live in a culture that does not permit violence. Adapting to it is very complicated. I did not grow up in that kind of culture. I grew up in a culture that thrives on violence, encourages it, and consciously teaches it. After I kind of hinted to my big brother that I was having trouble with boys he taught me how to grab someones pinky and do serious damage to them and control their whole body. I have never done it in earnest because I am too afraid of it failing and what the consequences would be.

I think I partially got into the bdsm community because I was abused a lot as a child but I wasn’t hit very often. I was shamed continually because I wasn’t beaten enough. When I was four or five years old someone in my family (I don’t even remember who) snapped that they were going to beat me and I said, “If you do I will call 1-800-FOR-A-CHILD and report you for abuse.” I didn’t get hit. That wasn’t my mom. Like a cousin or Uncle Bob. A man in that house.

So I grew up and proved that I could be beaten. That I wasn’t weak. That I could take it–I just wasn’t going to fucking take it from them.

I tell Shanna that yes, she needs to be prepared to defend herself with violence if necessary but it should rarely be your first step. If you hit people as your first step you won’t have any friends because people will think (correctly) that you are an asshole. You use your words so that you can still have friends. If you want to be allowed to exist near people you have to be a certain level of civil. This extends to yelling in public places, etc.

My kid is going to get in trouble some day for correctly saying someone is an asshole. Ha. I’m trying to model that you don’t need to tell people your evaluations of them. I have a visceral problem with the word “bad”. I don’t want to tell my kids to not be “bad”. Many of those “bad” behaviors are things that could save their lives. I want them to understand that it isn’t about being good or bad it is about figuring out the correct behavior for the place you are in and following that.

I actually got into that with the book club yesterday too. Other folks are far on the other end of the spectrum wanting their kids to have uniform behavior. Not in this house.

I simply do not identify with the idea of one behavioral code. I behave differently in the park (where I run and climb trees and shout and keep cussing to a minimum and Do Not Get Into My Shit) compared to a bar hosting a munch. Mostly: less running.

I want my children to have a bone deep ability to sense when and how to change to deal with the people around them. That means exposing them to an extremely wide array of people and SUPERVISING the contact and helping them understand it later.

I don’t intervene. I don’t guide during most interactions other than small manners coaxing. I learned how to do all of that in sign language so that I could do so unobtrusively. They do need scaffolding still.

What I am doing is giving them what I needed. Which may not actually be what they need. As they get a bit older it will become more obvious if I am just a narcissist or if this is working for them. So far they seem to be doing well.

My goal in this parenting business is to prepare them for how to be an adult. “People who cannot care for themselves are always dependent and that is a shitty place to be in life. Get up and learn how to do this for yourself.” And they do. They want to model off of their mom because your mom is the best person in the world–right? I mean, dad’s cool too… I guess… but but… MOM. Geez.

I can’t really recall feeling that way about my mother. I wrote up budgets for her when I was seven. I didn’t want to be like her. Only I did. Only I didn’t. Only I did. Oh god.

I wanted to be her with upgrades. I kind of sort of am. I’m a housewife. But I’m not like her. I don’t have the same priorities. I’m not trying to impress anyone. Well that’s a big fat lie. I’m not trying to impress people by having fancier things than them. My mother was big on collecting crystal. She wanted to “look” rich. I want to be rich and I understand financial planning enough that combined with Noah’s salary making efforts–I will get there. I can work with the hand I was given and multiply it. I’m good like that. My mom… not so much.

My dad had to babysit her. He had to handle all of the finances or she would have fucked them over badly. When she was a little girl her mom took in a lot of foster children and neglected her. She was totally trying to make up for the lack of love in her life with things. I feel bad for her. I understand that she had a very hard life.

I can’t be selfish like she is. The funny thing is–in order to not be selfish like she is I have to be selfish in ways she is not. If my mom is flush she is quick to lend money to anyone and everyone. She doesn’t pay back the people she owes… but that’s just the deal, right? Money should always flow downwards in “earning potential” no matter how many times one is told one will be paid back.

If you could have stopped lying to me about that one we might have had a chance.

I live in a world where there are consequences to financial mistakes. I need to act like I’m working without a net. I don’t have a Bank of Mom & Dad. I have an extended clan of disabled (being lifelong drug addicts hasn’t helped–both legal and non-legal drugs) and dysfunctional people. They don’t know how to change themselves. They are producing more little legacy welfare babies.

That’s why I have been a registered Libertarian for over ten years. I grew up knowing that the welfare system was exploited by people like my family. I watched my sister commit outright fraud. It horrified me.

It took almost ten years for me to understand what a statistical anomaly my family is. I had to get to know a lot more people. MDC gave me that. I’m glad for the experience.

My heart rate is lower. I’m going to need to do a lot of stretching today. I had a wonderful massage on Saturday (thank you again, Tay) and the running and now typing = oh boy. But I feel less scared. I don’t feel as much like if I am stupid enough to look up I will see the sword of Damocles.

I smoke because I don’t want to yell at my children because I am terrified of phantoms in my head. I don’t want to be short-tempered because I am spending my spoons on not crying in front of everyone. I don’t want to be short-tempered because I am spending my spoons on trying to block out my perception of the evil reel going in my head. I don’t want to be mean.

So I won’t be. Thanks medical card.

I’m very excited to report that my evil mood didn’t last twelve hours. I “ran” six miles (no that wasn’t the “schedule” but I did it anyway) but I was slower than a turtle. I’m nervous about the 10k coming up. I haven’t really been training. I’ll get through it but I believe I will hold my partner back and I feel guilty about that. I’m not honoring her commitment.

I’m not working on a book and I feel guilty about that. I haven’t emailed off No Secrets to the friend who will edit.

I haven’t weeded much. My garden is over run. I feel discouraged by losing sixty starts. I’m having a hard time motivating myself to work even though I will be grateful in the long run.

I haven’t been working on Spanish or French or ASL in the past month or so. The very idea makes me want to cry.

I have been a tremendous flaky asshole with the home schooling group lately. I’m not showing up. I am not feeling competent. It isn’t about anyone but me.

I haven’t been cooking much. I just don’t want to. I feel angry and trapped and frustrated instantly at the very idea.

Luckily the kids go to visit their Godmamas this week. I have every intention of hiding in my house for a few days and not talking to anyone. It sounds divine. Maybe I can catch up on my chores and stop hating the universe for not allowing me to get through my list of tasks.

So yesterday when I decided to go for a run first I had to find socks. That required digging through laundry. On the trip to get stuff out of the dryer I discovered that the kids (in that charming way they have every time I’m in a bad mood) dumped several dozen crackers on the floor and crunched them. Mess ~ 4′ wide by 4′ wide. Cue fury. They got put in time out. And I screeched (it wasn’t pretty) THIS IS THE LAST TIME. IF THIS EVER HAPPENS AGAIN I AM PUTTING PADLOCKS ON EVERY CUPBOARD IN THE KITCHEN AND YOU WILL GET BREAKFAST LUNCH AND DINNER AND YOU NO LONGER GET SNACKS.

Then I got out to the garage only to discover that the cat needed food and water and and… it just kept going.

When I start out wanting to go for a run and it turns into having to do a bunch of laundry and care for the cat and the kids make a huge mess (Noah actually cleaned up the crackers–God bless him) I lose my shit.

What does losing my shit mean? It means I want to hurt someone. I’m not too particular. My favorite target is, of course, myself. Yesterday I wanted to beat my head so badly I couldn’t think of much else. I wanted to drown out all of the other sounds. If I beat my head hard enough I am not capable of thinking about all of the things that I am “supposed” to be doing. It drowns out all of the noise in my brain.

It doesn’t help that both of my kids TALK NONSTOP AT THE TOP OF THEIR VOICES ALL GOD DAMN DAY EVERY GOD DAMN DAY. Sometimes it feels like my ears will fall off. Silence. Goodness I miss silence.

The thing that is hardest for me lately is: when I am angry it is about things inside me. It is not reasonable to expect other people to conform to my moods.

I can’t expect people to cater to my moods. But man I am looking forward to my kids being older. I’m looking forward to being able to say, “I am in an evil mood. It’s not your fault. I’m going to put my headset on and please pretend I’m not here.” Right now my sweet babies just can’t handle that. It’s hard on all of us.

Time passes. Things will change. I’m glad that evil moods don’t come as often as they used to. I didn’t kick a hole in the wall. I didn’t do irreparable damage to any relationships. I didn’t break anything. I cried while I was running. I was just so mad. I feel impatient, frustrated, trapped, inconsequential.

No biblical hell could ever be worse than a state of perpetual inconsequence.

I’m having trouble with scale. Right now is marathon-style terrible preparation work. Where is my instant gratification? But I’m so bogged down with marathon-scale prep work that I cannot even vaguely imagine taking a break for instant gratification. I would fall into an exhausted ball on the floor and cry. Just can’t. Not right now.

This is where I used to go pick someone up. That’s instant gratification. I bet that’s why I went to the bar. But I can’t pick someone up. Sex with Noah just… isn’t the same kind of thing. I feel bad about that. He would like it if it was the same. I love him. Sex with him is different.

Most recently I was reading about sexual dysfunction for PTSD and looking at how the brain operates with arousal/numbness. Ah. That’s why I like one night stands and people who beat the shit out of me. That’s why the nice bunny sex in the dark is not so orgasmic. I’m safe. Safe=not aroused.

The problem is, most of my brain arousal manifests as anger. I can’t use it as fuel for finding sex partners. Fuck, fight or flee. I can’t really do any of the above. Sex with Noah isn’t really fucking lately. I’m happy about that. If he tried I might smack him in the face. I don’t have patience for that from him right now. What we are doing is ok.

This is new. Well, I suppose other people have been managing not having these options for  most of their lives. Ha. That must be very frustrating. But I see the value in learning it during childhood so that your mistakes have less lasting impact. Err, not that I’m going to let my children learn during childhood. Wait, all the modifiers in this paragraph are confusing.

The whole fuck/fight/flee thing is instinctual for everyone. Most people are not really permitted to follow these urges during childhood. They have to suppress them. I didn’t learn most of the normal coping methods. It’s weird feeling so immature. The ridiculous impulsivity. But I can learn it. Everyone else learned it. Other people make mistakes like cheating on their spouses as adults. Ha.

Ack. Breakfast.

Kids are in a bad mood. It’s going to be a rough day. So I did something out of character. I sent my therapist an email. Usually I am fanatical about “I pay you for x minutes that is all I am taking” but she has been asking and asking for me to check in by email. We don’t see one another as often as she would like and she’s having a hard time with dealing with the flow of information in x minutes. She is asking for more time.

I think that part of it is, I pay absolutely at the top of her scale and that is part of the reason I don’t go very often. I could pay for therapy or I can accelerate my house payment. That’s how I look at money. I look forward to the some day of not having a mortgage. That is going to feel like an awful lot of freedom to me.

So my therapist has been asking me at every session to email her. She’s pestering. Ha. I sent one today.

I’ve been having a lot of intrusive thoughts about my brother trying to rape me and how the fighting him off experience happened. I’m thinking very graphically about what it meant for me to fight him off of me. What did I do? How did I move my body? I didn’t say anything.

I can feel the twisting and contorting in my muscles. I can feel them pull towards re-enacting it over and over.

It started partially when I read the Alanna books. She speaks so graphically about what it means to train your body. You practice that motion over and over until you can do it without thinking about it.

I have been having a lot of intrusive thoughts about my brother. Noah, that’s part of why I have been pulling back from sex. I can feel my muscles reflexively curl into a protective, fighting position. I’m not trying to do it on purpose. It’s just happening. Then I think about why I learned it. Then they feel locked into fighting position. I think that is what is going on with all the weird knots in my muscles lately. I feel physically freaked out and like I’m ready for a fight.

This is not a good mind set heading into a party. I want to punch someone in the face. I need to do something with this. I feel scared. Why am I so scared?

I’m scared in a way that makes me want to fight. That makes me want to defend myself. I don’t feel likable. I feel ready to have to physically deal with people disliking me again. I have been having some friendship conflict. I don’t worry about being attacked. But I feel uncertain of myself. Of my future. I feel uncertain that I will be a good enough person to do the things I want to do. I feel so intensely drawn to doing specific things. I don’t know if I will let me do them though. I worry so about being judged for doing the things I want to do. I worry about being wrong and doing it wrong.

I do stay up nights worrying about this home school thing. Not because I think my children will be behind academically. My children will probably always be above grade level in terms of the state standards. They are mildly inclined to acceleration and they live with me 24/7 and I just talk about things. They are bright and they like to listen to me. They know a lot of stuff already. It’s not that I worry about that.

I worry about the future. I worry about being someone who is worth knowing. I worry that I will not actually be able to help large numbers of people because I am too small and selfish and bad.

I want to start compiling data on incest survivors. To the best of my knowledge all information about them right now is sketchy at best. I want to understand my tribe. I want to know their stories. I am trying to learn enough programming to put together an information gathering tool as a page on my website. No one else has the data I want. I will have to mine for it myself.

If I want to have a tribe I am going to have to build it myself. That scares the shit out of me. I’m not exactly a charismatic leader–I’m a bitch. It’s not even that I want to lead. I just want to get them together so I can hear them speak. I want them to want to hear me speak.

I’m sad that the support group is so far away. Not sad enough to move to Oakland.

Ok. breakfast.

Alright, internet, it’s confession time. Sometimes I intensely dislike my husband. Parts of P!nk’s new album The Truth About Love were written from inside my brain. If you haven’t heard any of them and you are killing time on the internet, please do.

So end of digression. I’ve been having feelings. This isn’t about Noah bashing. He hasn’t done anything wrong. I just feel unsettled and angry and resentful and scared and hostile and like I want to fucking punch someone in the face and you are the only stupid fucker here. I don’t hit Noah. Not in jest, not in retribution–nada. If I hit Noah he hits back. Harder. I don’t really need to start a fistfight in front of my kids so I don’t hit Noah.

But I’m having these feelings. I’m so angry. So angry. So fucking angry why can’t I fucking hurt someone angry. But I can’t. I will not. I am very aware that there is a very big part of my brain that wants to seriously hurt someone. Kicking the bag isn’t really much of an outlet for this energy. Encouraging it is poison.

I’ve had friends in the bdsm community offer to “do a scene with me where I can get out those demons”. I burst into spontaneous laughter at the thought. No. You only think you want that. I learned a lot of very specific skills during my time in that community. The first thing I would do is staple your mouth shut. So you can never revoke consent. Things would go from there.

I am an extremely violent person. This isn’t something that feels good to me. I want to break someones nose specifically because I want to spit on the blood and grind it all over someones face. I want to damage someone very badly. And I learned how to tie people up very well. If someone was stupid enough to walk into that… that wouldn’t be pretty. I would probably go to jail. And I’d accept that. It is appropriate to lock up people who want to do that. But there was consent.

I don’t top from this place. And luckily I married into this situation that prohibits that from happening because Noah will never give initial consent. It is tidy.

I like those kinds of specific closed doors. They force me to think about no longer trying to hunt or ways of pleasing other people. Want do I actually want?

I don’t know but I feel angry. I don’t always feel like I want to punch the person in front of me and spit in the blood. Uhm, rarely even. Almost never? It’s unusual? Ok. I think that one looks bad and can’t be made better so I’m moving on.

I have a lot of unexpressed frustrations in my life and it’s something I need to be more honest about. In the past few days I’ve been reading books about teaching computer programming to children as a way of teaching a specific style of thinking while also reading a book that railed against the entire mechanism and orientation of the modern school system. I’ve also been reading about how networks work versus how communities work. I live in an era and a place where people have a kind of basic orientation to friendship that is the exact opposite of what I grew up to expect.

I always thought I would kind of just jump into a camp. I’d find a partner and ditch my family and blend in to his. Well. So much for that. Ok. It’s us. And the kids. That’s my “family”. When I need support I need to consciously think about how to meet it. I watched some terrible movie on netflix with rape as a plot twist and the only part of it that was in any way worth remembering was watching the mom try to support the daughter through the healing process after trauma. But she was fucking there. She crawled through the stupid window in a stupid plot device that is only found on movies.

But dude.

Isn’t anger one of the stages of grief? All of the ways I look up for help are ways my mommy taught me to look up to her to for help. And right now I fucking hate her so much. Right now I wish she was dead. I don’t feel this anger at my father any more. It won’t be over until she is dead.

She was my mommy and she did not take care of me. Yes, yes you tell me… get over it. Forgive her. Oh fuck you. You forgive her. But this anger is eating me alive. I want my mommy.

When I was Shanna’s age I had to learn to silently cry myself to sleep because I wanted my mommy. If I wasn’t silent then “I was given a reason to cry” and I would be hit and the tv would be turned up terribly loud.

My mommy was getting married. Her other kids were at the wedding. I was too much trouble. I would get in the way.

Sometimes standing next to Shanna makes me shake. I feel so much anger at her entitlement. I feel like a gigantic jackass but I say, “Try again” is pleasant a tone as I can manage. Ok sometimes it is through gritted teeth. Rarely. She comes back with a please and a question instead of a demand.

I was not allowed to get into things. The food was for the family. But Auntie always had big tubs of red vines and vanilla wafers. And those delightful Fruity Pebbles. Oh man. I was never supervised all that well. I learned how to how to be sly and get my way very early. I stole so much sugar. Did I mention I’ve been hiding bags of chocolate chips in my shirt drawer and I come in and sneak handfuls? Oh internet I’ve been keeping a lot from you lately.

I’m having a lot of feelings. I’m baiting Noah. I think there are points where he could be persuaded to change his thinking but my current approach is nothing short of taunting him. I’m just not being nice. I must have been snippy with the kids because they are both clinging to me like mad all day every day. I’m trying to have patience. You teach patience by having patience. It is pretty much my meditation period during the day. Sit down and try to have an out of body experience so you don’t beat the shit out of someone as they gouge you one more fucking time.

This is an investment in a future person who does not yet exist. That person is shaped, every day by how she is treated. My kids do not have lovies. They have me. Mt. Mommy. Apparently. It’s quite uncomfortable and something I am struggling with how to have boundaries about. This is the kind of thing that is supposed to happen by the grandmother dragging the kid off the mom and saying, “Dude! You’re getting heavy. You’re mom asked you to sit next to her not on her.” Then the kid listens. With mom it’s a huge battle.

I could have had that. Fuck. She’d love to live here. Even the cold garage would be fine. She would constantly complain about me overheating the house just to get back at me.

But she is monstrous in her way. “Do you know what happened because of you” should never be followed with information about *anyones* finances. My niece feels a lot of obligation to support the family. I don’t know how she is going to do it. I’m scared for her. But I need to be unaware of this situation. If she wants out she knows where I am.

But my sister and my mom are not welcome in my life. Not given the way they behave. It is hard knowing that they are monsters and I’m not allowed to kill the. We live in a time and a place that doesn’t really allow that.

Ok, I don’t want to go kill them. Not just because of the legal consequences. I’m angry but I’m not that angry.

But I will feel lighter when I find out each of them is dead. I suppose I should feel guilty about that…. Ok done.

I feel really angry that I wasn’t taught what this life was like. My mom worked from the time I was four years old. I have no memories of spending days with her. I was with a series of indifferent, inattentive caregivers until I was entirely left alone. It was financial necessity. Just a high school diploma from Bakersfield was not really much to go on for employment.

I get “why I should forgive her”. I can tell you that whole story. But it doesn’t change the fact that she would try to make my daughter feel small. She does it to everyone around her. I don’t want my kids to learn it. And when you have it around you are allowing it to be taught. I know that makes me rigid.

I mean, I am not open to that. But we have people in our lives. Am I treating my resources like a network or like a community? Who is open to what? I’m going to be let down. I’m going to have to be ok with hearing no. Is it terrible that sometimes I feel terrible about being turned down when I invite people over? Then I get to stay home. Without noise–ok, mostly without a huge din.

But I just wander around feeling this coiling, coursing snake. I want to attack someone so much.

I’ve been running a bit more. I’m hella slow. Ha. I’m going to be running a 5k with a friend… shit. Next weekend. Ack. Ha. Well, we’ll make it through and have a lovely chat.

My kids then my bowels then my racing thoughts have other plans for me. Screw you, body. I should have taken a sleeping pill. I meant to take a sleeping pill. Getting less than five hours tonight will be inconvenient. I can’t take a sleeping pill tomorrow (tonight?) because I have to wake up and drive so I can’t be groggy. Weeeeeeee.

It’ll be ok. It’ll all work out.

Some folks posted full medical studies about cannabis on the ptsd forum that I read. Apparently there are a fair number of psychiatrists in the world who believe that cannabis is the go to medication for PTSD. I don’t think I was aware of that. Nice to hear though.

PTSD slowly wears your body down. You can’t eat or sleep properly and losing those two functions is a sure fire way to lose your mind. You will die if you cannot eat or sleep. That’s just part of being an animal. Cannabis is particularly good at encouraging people to eat (I generally smoke before breakfast and before dinner or I can’t eat because my stomach is in knots and I want to vomit from the pain) and I have some right before bed because it increases the likelihood I will sleep through the night.

I certainly get far more sleep stoned than I get sober. Stoned I usually get 5-7 hours. Sober usually 2-3 hours.

“My body forgot how to feel not-scared.”

There are a hand full of men and women on the forum with early childhood sexual assault. We have distinct similarities in our adult lives. Honestly the part that fascinates me is the people who developed PTSD from like medical trauma. Those folks have an interestingly overlapping but very different journey. When I read the other CSA (childhood sexual assault) people I feel like my experience might be relevant. When I read about people losing their lives because of fear of medical procedures…

Wow. I don’t know what to say. I have issues with doctors–but not like that. I feel utterly useless. How do you get over that much terror around the idea of your body betraying you? That sounds ridiculously hard. The combat folks I get and I don’t know what to tell them either. It’s just different.

Extreme early child abuse prevents a person from learning normal life coping mechanisms. Someone who has a good life but who undergoes horrifying medical procedures and treatments has coping methods for most things but then their body is entirely out of their control. That’s different. It is really interesting for me to try to wrap my head around the idea of having these coping methods for life and having them gradually either lose effectiveness or just blow up in your face.

For most of my life in my head I was sexually abused but not physically abused. I wasn’t covered in bruises and I didn’t get broken bones in the family (though my brother telling someone to throw me off the monkey bars is a bit sketchy) so I wasn’t physically abused. Being slapped constantly didn’t count. I wasn’t slapped daily but I was slapped at least a couple of times a week until I was thirteen and I slapped my mom back. I was taller than her and heavier than her. I was fucking done.

I need to change my techniques with Calli. Last night bedtime was late (we went on a walk to see a light show at a church a mile from our house–it was pretty nice) and Calli was overtired and worn out. She did not want to put her jammies on. I told her that she had to pick or I would. I think that is going to be the last time this lifetime I force her into clothing. Oh man the screaming.

Then once she was in the jammies she hit me over and over. Fair enough. She didn’t want to wear them. In order to contain the screaming and the hitting we put her in her playroom for a minute. Her response was to strip naked and stretch out on the floor crying. I didn’t yell at her. I said, “You feel that strongly, huh? Then you really do need to pick out a different pair. It’s too cold to go to bed naked.”

She sobbed and picked out different jammies and let me help her put them on. I need to not do that again. She’s too big and her will is too strongly developed. It’s not worth it. If it was less cold (or if she didn’t run cold all the time) I wouldn’t even fight her for jammies. I don’t with Shanna. If Shanna wants to sleep naked she can. She wakes up in the middle of the night and takes her jammies off if I force her to put them on. I remember doing that. I did it all through my childhood. I went to bed with jammies on and woke up naked.

I’m about done with this battle. I don’t have babies any more. I don’t need to care that much about their temperature. They are good at determining for themselves. Time to let go of feeling control over this. It’s going to be weird.

While I was lying in bed trying to sleep I counted my blessings.

I feel ridiculously lucky to have Noah. He talks to me and listens to me and supports me absolutely to the best of his ability. He gives me more support and love than I ever believed I would have. I didn’t know that a man could respect me and be nice to me the way he is.

I feel so blessed in having Shanna. Our personalities are so very compatible. We get along so well. Even her difficult days are more delightful than not. I feel so lucky that I get to spend all day every day around someone who makes me so happy. I know things will change and I hope that I give her enough space through adolescence that we manage to continue having a good relationship. I try not to bank on it, but I hope for it. I’m trying to give her a respectful relationship she will want to continue.

Calli astounds me more by the day. I think that her facial expressions are harder for me to read and she often looks kind of grumpy even when she is in a perfectly fine mood so we have a less steady relationship. We are both kind of anxious about trying to please one another. It feels amazing to me that progression into language seems to be mostly about being able to say, “Actually mom you have to sit right next to me” rather than asking for other things. I had no idea she liked me this much. I think I mistook her willingness to tolerate being put down for a preference for it. She was not a limpet as a tiny baby but she is turning into one now. I try very hard to meet her needs for touching me. She is getting more specific about it by the day. It isn’t even just lots of asking to be picked up. She comes and gets me and asks me to do what she is doing. That’s new for her. She helps with all kinds of work because she wants to be close to me. Because it is happening simultaneously with her losing most of the difficult “baby work” it feels like such a blessing. I feel so happy to have her company. She is funny and smart. I’m really enjoying getting to know her.

I am very lucky in my friends. In my experience most people are good. They want to help. They do want the world to be a better place. I am very lucky that I have people in my life who love and support me. I’m going through my mental list. I don’t really understand why you all try so hard. I am not easy to love. I make it just about impossible. Some of you have probably had to tolerate far more shit than you should. I’m very grateful.

I have done a lot of really interesting things with good people as an adult. Since I turned 18 I can probably number the worst things that have happened on my fingers.

Dan raping me.
Paul raping me.
Kevin sexually assaulting me.
Noah raping me.
Miscarriage.
Miscarriage.
Almost dying during childbirth.
Uncle Bob dying.

Family divorces, romantic breakups and losing friends just aren’t on that list. It’s different.

Dan, Paul, and Kevin all assaulted me in the short period of time I lived alone in San Jose in between breaking up with Puppy and Noah asking me to marry him. So between December and March. They all were men who knew about my childhood issues in vague handwavey ways and had been “supportive”. They all went through long conversations in which I was ridiculously explicit about what I wanted. This was at the height of my slut period. I fucking negotiated hard. But Dan got me drunk and Paul knew I was on GHB and Kevin did it during a massage.

So as long as I am never around anyone other than Noah while I drink or do do drugs I should be ok and my current massage therapist is the most professional person possible. And my kids are in the room. That makes me feel way more secure, honestly.

I have had the good fortune to have security. Noah makes me feel safe. Noah is working himself like a dog trying to provide me with a home I own free and clear because that is so important to me. Things happen. He may not always be able to work. Right now I could not support our family. I just can’t make enough money. That feels humiliating and degrading. I have in the past. In the first year of our marriage we lived on my salary and his whole salary went to paying off debt. I wouldn’t be a stay at home mom with extraneous debt. I would be too scared the whole time.

I want to be able to take care of my family. In about seven years I will be able to meet our financial needs without a problem regardless of what happens to Noah. If everything goes according to plan. This is when you cue the laugh track.

I want to denigrate this plan because then I don’t look like I’m taking it seriously. If I don’t look like I’m taking it seriously no one else will bother to take the time to explain in a friendly way how I shouldn’t try because it is too hard or not a good idea because your mortgage is a tax write off. My priority is very specific: lower monthly expenses. Telling me that my minimum of $25,000/year mortgage is a tax write off doesn’t get me nearer my goal of lower monthly expenses. That’s a god damn substantial chunk of change. (I say minimum because we overpay by a lot because I am trying to pay it off early.)

This is money that would probably otherwise go towards fairly “lifestyle” upgrades that are just not requirements. They aren’t things that would make me happier.

Noah gets what this means for me. He has goals of his own that do not include working a shitty job at a shitty company for the rest of his life because he has to earn a ridiculous salary to support our lifestyle. Things may become more volatile in a few years.

Six more years. Then our financial needs will be much lower. Like, less than half of what they are now. If I put my head down and follow my plan six years will feel like nothing. A blink.

I only have about seven more years until I need to be full speed ahead preparing for the trip abroad. This is the time to get ready. I am working on Spanish. I need to figure out how I want to tackle French. We are also working on ASL. In seven years I would like to be able to have a conversation in all three of these languages.

Oh shit. I need to start working.

I feel so lucky that I get to have this life. I get to have this life because of Noah. He’s my backer. Sometimes it is a little weird to me that he is frank about his ardent support of my artistic endeavors/writing/travel. I’m not entirely sure I believe that anyone is entitled to the kind of freedom I have let alone me.

Hm. Given how late the kids went to bed I bet they will sleep in. I should go have sex with him. Bye.