Category Archives: kids

I have a very fun life when you stop and think about it

I’m packing for Disneyland. It is raining so I don’t have to water or garden. Ok, it isn’t raining hard–I could go put seeds in the ground. It would be a great time. But I’m hanging out in the house instead.

The girls told me that I could pack for them. They expressed preferences for matching beautiful dresses. Luckily we have a week of those. Because they are into that kind of thing. They pick these dresses out. They go into the store and say that they want matching stuff. I don’t push this.

I feel a little weird about how much they want to be like one another. I think I am afraid of doing that.

I get to have a really easy life. I get to have all the wonderful fun stuff I can imagine having in a childhood.

Today, despite anxiety, I’m in a good mood. I love the planning stage.

And I have home made cupcakes. Banana-pecan-chocolate chip cupcakes. We win. It’s the little things, right? My day is going to be very good. Next week will be very good. I’m limiting my life down to what I can do.

And it’s going pretty well.

“Recovery” and a brain dump about being an asshole.

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Resurrection After Rape puts forward this explanation for how one will recognize “Recovery” when it happens:

When you can face the thoughts of rape rather than having to avoid them;
When you understand the connection between your current self-concept and your rape, so that when you feel down on yourself you won’t accept that as a “permanent truth” of who you are;
When you no longer engage in self-harming behaviors (including substance abuse) to manage emotions and memories;
When flashbacks have diminished to the point they either no longer happen, or no longer interfere with your life and emotions;
When you can appropriately respond to people’s ignorant attitudes about rape, rather than withdrawing from them and wilting in lonely shame;
When you have begun to offer support to other survivors;
When you have begun to view your body as a valuable thing and not as a betrayer or curse, and you take care of its needs;
When you learn to recognize the warning signs of dangerous men and avoid them, no matter how charming they appear to be;
When men no longer have control over your opinions of yourself;
When you are able to confront, challenge, and speak proudly to men;
When you make your own choices whether to disclose your rape to someone because of something you need to say, not something you need to hear for you to make progress;
When you no longer feel guilty for asking for help, or for having rough days, or for taking the length of time needed for growth.

This organization does not recognize the medical studies showing marijuana to be the most effective drug for PTSD apparently. They exist. If you can’t find them then you are too ignorant to be allowed on the internet.

I think I’m fairly solid on 1, 5 (I have some inappropriate mixed in with my appropriate responses but I think I’m in “recovery” territory on this one.), 6, 7 (I thank the marathon for this. I was not capable of properly taking care of my body when I was pregnant–I didn’t know how. I learned during the marathon. It was a weird change.), 8, 11.

I’m working on 2, 3 (I have prescriptions from doctors for all of my drugs. I do use as minimally as I can get away with but I absolutely need these meds at this point. Is that abuse?), 4 (I have the ability to not react to them in front of anyone else. I can’t make them stop. They increase my overall stress levels slowly. I have to periodically go allow myself to consciously think about them or I start having ranty inappropriate outbursts in random settings.), 9 (onman don’t get me started), 10 (Often I am shitty at talking to men.), 12.

Mixed bag as usual. I’m just like that. And this guy doesn’t have a monopoly on definitions.

I will say that I appreciate the section on managing panic attacks. Education + replacement of negative self-talk with positive self-talk has been my approach. Glad to get my little gold star there. I read everything looking for confirmation bias to prove I am “right” like every other human. I like to blame it on public education but that’s a straw man argument.

A question from the book. If rape is a form of theft, what did it steal?

I am afraid of men. I do still stand near them–but I do so uneasily and with great anger. I feel that rape stole my faith in men. People can rant at me all day and all night about how women rape too and that won’t change the fact that I was raped by twelve men not twelve women.

Are twelve men a representative sample of all men? Can I judge all men based on them? Of course not. I don’t actually judge all men. I just avoid the ones who are not already through the barriers of trust. They have to come in sideways. Usually they have to fit in a nice, neat little box so that I can trust how they will behave. I really like men who are emphatically not interested in me even though they like me. When they feel the need to mention that I am completely not their type I feel a little relaxation of tension.

I am not a nice person. I yell. I say mean things. I say hurtful things. I am a dick. I am an asshole. I am a bitch. Pick a word. White trash whore. Sure. I say mean, nasty things. Sometimes there is a very small grain of truth in what I say and I use that as justification for my hurtfulness.

I’m not a sociopath. I don’t deny my actions or the results of my actions. I don’t deny my blame. I just don’t seem to be able to adequately shut my mouth. I think it would take suturing. Luckily I have friends who are into that sort of thing because they agree with me that women should just shut the fuck up. I would be a much nicer person if I just shut the fuck up.

Today I yelled what my mother yelled at me. I feel pretty ashamed of myself.

I have no excuse. I do not get to deflect blame. I could give a laundry list of reasons why I was out of patience. Doesn’t matter. Being mean isn’t ok.

I will never be good enough. Ever. I’m literally not capable of it. Yeah, I probably shouldn’t have had kids. I don’t deserve them. I am not capable of being nice enough. I pray that the damage I cause is slight in the scope of their lives. I cross my fingers that I am a net positive for them. I’m scared.

I feel very ashamed of myself for not being good enough. I’m just not. Just work harder is the only message I have on this score. I weigh, eternally, in my mind if my children would be better off if I got a job and let them go to school. Would they be better off if they didn’t have to deal with me so much of the time?

I don’t know. Every decision is so layered, so complicated I’m not sure I can know what the right decision is. I know what I am doing. I know why. Today was a rocky day. I think I have been over extending myself and I ran out of spoons. I was mean and nasty.

It’s not ok. It’s not justified. I’m not claiming any expiation. My choices and my behavior are my god damn fault. I don’t get to say, “Well I was just acting like my mother” like that excuses anything.

It’s really stupid but I think my next therapy session will be a whole long conversation about hair. About my mother screaming at me and hitting me and cutting my hair into ugly hair cuts on purpose as punishment so people would mock me and the nasty shaming that happened for months when I shaved my bangs off in fourth grade. My mom was so fucking pissed when I shaved my head when I was seventeen. She liked my hair about an inch long so she didn’t have to take care of it. I wanted to be pretty. When my hair was long it wasn’t pretty it was matted.

My long hair was the long unkept hair of a neglected child. I can’t figure out how to care for my children’s hair. And I can’t keep everything in the house under lock and key. My kid has some interesting impulse issues.

And I have a bad temper.

I need to get my temper under control. I need to not say the things my mother said to me. It’s hard having to stop and think carefully about everything you say because what comes out of your mouth naturally is poison. I know how to say what I was taught to say. Do you know why I cuss so much? My entire childhood was full of being told what a fucking rude ass bitch I was.

I’m struggling with the me-not-me boundaries. I know what I was taught to say in these scripts. The scripts I have are bad. I am not ad-libbing well. I am not trying to excuse or justify myself. I certainly don’t think I can continue.

Feeling guilty isn’t good enough. Crying for hours after I am nasty really isn’t good enough. It isn’t even remotely helpful.

This is broken. I don’t know how to fix it. I feel really stupid and pathetic and useless and bad.

You can’t just stop being something. You have to pick what you want to be and move towards that. I don’t want to say what I said today again. I don’t know what I’m going to say instead. That will take thinking. I don’t know what to do.

I have been told that people pity my children for having to live with me. Why do I feel free to say whatever comes into my head? Because people tell me things like that. I feel like I have listened to enough diarrhea of the mouth that I get to have it too. No I’m not taking the fucking high road. Instead I am the crazy ass old lady with the big knife who makes the punks run away in fear.

When it comes right down to it… I don’t actually want to be a nice person. I’m a dick. But I don’t want to be one with my kids. I want to treat them like they have earned better treatment than that from me. They have. They have a variety of character flaws, most of them age related, which I can’t exactly hold against them. That’s the revenge of grandmothers every where. “Ha ha. You used to do that.” And now my daughters do to me what I did to my mother.

Of course my daughter pushes every boundary to the point of breaking at all times. She’s related to me. And I want her to be that kind of adult. Yup, she’ll be somewhat sociopathic. But I hope she understands that I have earned consideration other people haven’t earned and she will be nice to me.

I want to be nice to my kids because I am a selfish son of a bitch and I want to have good relationships with independent adults. I don’t want them to be like me and I don’t want to decide what they should be.

I can’t insult their choices even though I find them frustrating. But what does that mean?

I don’t know. I fucked up today. I’m reading a book on rape recovery that harps up one side and down the other how one must be completely sober forever and ever amen or you are not “healed” and it makes me want to drink a bottle of wine. I don’t actually drink much–alcohol gives me terrible stomach aches. But I was told not to. So I want to.

How in the fuck can I get mad at my kids for being exactly like me? Punishing them for being something I will encourage in adulthood is kind of ass backwards. I am not actually working towards my long-term goals.

I think I need to do some work on my attachment to how my kids look.

I didn’t yell “You are a reflection of me and I’m fucking tired of walking around with an ugly little brat.” I just said that it was ugly hair cut and she looked funny and people were going to laugh at her.

I got mad because we are going to be in a wedding in two weeks. I said, “Now you will look ugly in the pictures forever.” That was what my mother said to me when I gave myself a haircut two days before school picture day. You know what? I don’t look any worse than I do in any other awkward school photo. It really hasn’t wrecked my life.

I shouldn’t have said that to my daughter. I have already apologized. But you can’t actually take it back. You can’t unsay things.

I’m not a monster. I’m self aware enough to really understand that on a primal level. I have not done monstrous damage to my children. But sometimes I take a little spike and a mallet and I insert those mean things she will hear in the back of her head forever. I hate myself for that. I don’t want to be her mean inner voice. I want to be the voice inside her head that makes her feel good about being alive.

I don’t want my daughter to hear what I heard. I don’t want her to have these tapes. Mostly she won’t–I get that. I’m already through a lot of important hurdles and I understand it looks like relatively smooth sailing through the next few years of non-anniversaries.

I’m going to freak out. She is going to do things just like me and I will react blindly. I will play the tape that is instantly related to the behavior. I don’t know how to completely circumvent this. Do I just stop speaking at all?

I need more of a plan than I currently have. That’s kind of a horrifying and overwhelming thought.

I need to schedule less. I’ve gotten schedule-happy again. I schedule things because I feel guilty about isolating my children. I know a lot of home schoolers who are out all day every day. I feel kind of uncomfortable about how much socialization my kids get.

I feel like what I am doing is not good. I don’t know why. It’s kind of a creeping fungus feeling. I’m not giving my children what is “normal” for their peers.

I don’t want to in some strong idealogical ways. But I think I drank the Kool-Aid on “Home schoolers aren’t at home”. I feel like I should be more active in the communities that exist. I should present a large peer group to my kids and then consistently expose them many times a week.

I’m struggling. I feel existentially not-ok. I have a really high level of self-loathing. My self-talk is all mean and nasty. It’s been on an uptick for a bit.

I want relationships but I can’t handle them and I don’t deserve them. Life isn’t really about deserve though.

The future isn’t written yet. Maybe my children will remember me as an abusive bully. Maybe not. They are certainly clear on the point that Mommy is not always nice. Sometimes Mommy is mean.

If I ever get dragged in front of a judge in a CPS court all they will have to do is print my blog. I don’t want secrets. I didn’t hit. I didn’t go on an extended tirade. Noah did step into the room and signal me that it was time to stop. Good for him. I’m glad he was home.

It feels very bad sometimes knowing that I am simply not a nice person. I would have died if I had been “nice”. If I had been more passive my life would have been so much worse. Being defiant and nasty has truly been useful.

It is still useful sometimes. Not all the time. It’s a hard character trait to keep under control.

People alternate between telling me I’m a bitch/dick/asshole/whatever and telling me that they like that they always know where they stand with me.

When I get up from this keyboard I need to be mostly done processing this. I need to talk to my therapist about it but I can’t keep going on and on with my daughter. That would be dragging her into my emotional quagmire. She doesn’t have the attention span to still be upset about a random one off comment she will probably never hear again. If I don’t turn it into a thing.

If I drop it and never say it again then I will have succeeded in not passing this tape on. If she wants to cut her own fucking hair she can cut her own fucking hair. I do. I have since I was a very young child. For me to get angry about it is so over the top ridiculous that there aren’t words.

But my tape for mothers is rabid anger because now people will think my child is unsupervised and ugly. She is neither. She does have access to scissors. She is out of my line of sight during the day. We have a small house and they wander at will. I work wherever I am working. I don’t pen them right with me–it seems silly.

If I want children who are autonomous and independent in their actions I need to give them more direct supervision (which would drive me ape shit) or farm it out or be ok with what they do.

Those really are the only options. It is not ok to expect micromanaged results from a free range kid. I honestly don’t want kids who require direct supervision at all times. My kids entertain themselves while I work. I can clean/cook/garden and they run around and play.

Short of putting padlocks on everything in the house, which I am morally opposed to doing, there is no “putting things up” at this point. Kid is too big. Yes, there will be consequences and occasionally fury over her decisions.

You can’t learn without making mistakes.

I tell other people that the way to get good at something is to make as many mistakes as possible as fast as they can–they will learn the most the fastest that way. Somehow that approach doesn’t seem suitable in parenting.

I’m off to feel awkward and uncomfortable and like I’m the biggest asshole in the room. Cheers.

And then! We paint.

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Today some of the home schooling folks came over. We painted my house. Nine kids between the ages of 2 and 11 and two moms (including me–we did clean up not major painting) produced some pretty fun stuff. I particularly like that the butterfly/rainbow are right at eye level when I sit at the table to eat. And just off my line of sight it says “Love You”. I’m glad I did this.

End rape culture at the playground

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Sometimes I feel a little weird on park days. I make a conscious effort to always trudge out and rough house with the boys. Ok, I do miss some days when I’m being whiny and want to talk to grown ups. But I try to do at least a little rough housing every week.

I talk to all the little boys. They are getting used to me. I’m pretty different from their moms–that’s cool. We wrestle. Some new ones got brave yesterday and joined in. We had to negotiate. I talked about how breasts are really sensitive so be careful not to whack them and never grab a woman or girls breasts without permission. That’s a private area. But I did it with a smile on my face and a gentle voice and I went right back to wrestling and rolling around like puppies.

I think this is what really influences character. I feel like a lot of the rape culture ranting that yells at adult men about how terrible they are for the patriarchy is missing the point. I don’t want all of the adult men in my life to feel terrible and guilty for having a penis. That’s not what I’m interested in. That won’t make anyones life better.

One of my buddies in the home school group told me that she likes talking to me because I am very opinionated and very different from her but I’m not trying to convert her–I have no interest in having her be like me. So she gets to listen to things that are totally outside her experience and think about them without feeling pressured to change. I feel like that means I am doing exactly the right thing and I am tuning my message appropriately. Good.

I want to exist loudly in front of people. I want people to understand just how different from them the people around them actually are. I want it to be ok that I exist. I don’t need a whole bunch of mini-me’s running around. I’m not trying to become the dominant culture–I’m trying to be allowed to exist. I’m trying to stop feeling like I should die.

Playing with the little boys is part of this. I hug them. I will even kiss the top of their heads when they are being very affectionate (Err, this has only happened with boys I have known multiple years or who were under one year old I’m not incredibly creepy or anything.) I don’t kiss their faces. I don’t get into long embraces and I talk about body autonomy all the god damn time. I am very conspicuous about asking for hugs before I touch them. I model how I want to be treated. How else can they learn?

I have been seeing a lot of things on the internet advising parents to work on boundaries with their own kids–I agree with that message whole-heartedly. I just think it doesn’t go far enough. I don’t have responsibility just to and for my children. I need to talk to the kids at the park. I need to talk to talk to the kids in our neighborhood. I need to talk to all of the children who could be the ones my kids will sneak off and play sex games with.

I need for everyone to be playing by the same rules. No one but me is standing up to loudly announce the rules so I’m happy to do it. I go to the park and I don’t care if I know the kids or not I referee. I don’t micromanage or anything–I stay out of 80% of the arguing. But I intervene when they can’t share. I intervene when hitting starts. I intervene when someone is on the side-lines crying because they are too young to understand how to join the game.

I don’t favor my kids–Shanna is pretty bitter about that–because I care a lot about being neutral. I don’t pick sides. I model how to work things with words. I give lots of examples, “So you could say____ or ____ or ____ what feels closest to what you are actually feeling? Or something else entirely! I could be wrong.”

I tell them over and over that they own their body and they have the right to dictate how people treat it. I say that the other kids they are playing with are in the same spot. You can’t touch someone without consent. You have to ask. Don’t assume just because you are “friends” that it is ok to touch someone.

(My kid is not picking this up fast. Oy. Touchy thing.)

I’m trying very hard to create the idea that everyone has preferences and you must follow peoples preferences–which means asking questions.

One of the boys was playing with my belly jiggle yesterday. He said, “You have fat.” He was smiling and laughing and delighted by life. Clearly he didn’t see this as a problem. I bet his mom has done exactly the same thing to his belly.

I laughed and said, “I do! I do have fat! I looooooove fat. Mmmm tasty delicious fat! Fat! Fat! Faaaaaaaaaaaaaaat!!!!!!!” Then I grabbed him and rolled around on the ground with him. Other boys jumped on the pile, also laughing and started offering up types of fat:

“Like bacon?”

“Yes! Like bacon! And ice cream! MMMMMM”

Everyone was overjoyed.

A few minutes later after the crowd had dispersed one of the boys lingered and said, “I don’t think it was very nice of him to call you fat.”

My response was something close to: “Well he didn’t call me fat. He said I had fat and that is true. If he had said,” I deliberately made my voice all sneering and nasty, “‘Ewww you’re fat’ then I probably would have hurt feelings. Because he would be trying to make me feel bad about myself. But he wasn’t. He was just commenting on me. It’s like saying I have brown hair. I’m ok with him saying things that are true.”

He looked so confused. I’m sure he and his mom talk about me outside of actual interactions. Ha.

The reason going to the park is so “high spoons” for me is I believe with every fiber of my being that I am obliged to be nice to the kids. They are just learning and if I can seem positive and loving while I am giving instruction they will remember it and imprint on it more deeply. I am consciously didactically teaching children basically every time I am near them. It’s exhausting.

I think that’s what home schooling community is about. I think we are agreeing to teach one another’s kids. I realize not everyone feels the same way so I try not to say it too loudly. Ha. I’m not forcing them to memorize times tables or anything neurotic like that but I use group social outings as time to consciously work on the rules of society.

What the hell else are such times for? And if kids have to learn every rule completely on their own without adult help things turn all Lord of the Flies. Judicious adult intervention while mostly letting the kids direct and handle things is the optimal learning environment.

Studies god damn prove this.

It made me really happy when I commented to some of the moms that I was talking to their sons about boundaries and touching stuff she said that I’m going to teach sex ed when the kids are a little older. YES! Please! I’ve been training all my life. Ha. *beat head on wall*

The thing they don’t understand is I won’t be starting when the kids are older. I’m starting now. I’m starting when they are 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, ,9, 10, and 11 because that is how old the kids are in our group. I’m talking to all of them about touching and consent. There are slightly different explanation levels–I don’t talk to the three year olds about nerve endings. I say sensitive.

Sex is part of life because touching is part of life. If you want your kids to grow up to be healthy adults who are good at sex then they have to be good at touching–that is how things work. I understand that most parents feel kind of nauseated at the idea of their kids growing up to have sex but I have my eye on the end goal.

I want healthy adult children.

I have to teach my children and their peers about healthy touch if I want that to be the norm for their world. That means I have to be didactic. I have to choose to send on a message. I can’t just ignore things and let them slide or I don’t get to be upset when the culture isn’t what I want it to be.

Am I changing the world? If my little cohort of kids manages to grow up together and everyone gets a fresh healthy launch together to go out and feel like they are allowed to have the sex they want within the boundaries they choose then maybe I will have done something.

You don’t know what someone wants by looking at them. You only know what they want if you ask. If you have never asked what they want then you have no business having your hands on them.

If people believed that in the core of their being–how would the world be different?

Now I understand “fuck cancer”

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For most of my life I have been kind of confused by the “fuck cancer” emphasis people have. They seem to be more upset by it than other kinds of death. I’m a death-is-death-how-doesn’t-matter person. Only in the past couple of weeks Kate Bornstein (who is one of the most important voices in gender deconstruction) has had a crowd source fundraising effort because she has cancer–we need her. She has the courage to speak about things that must be spoken about. She is really important.

And another person I know has 6, 4, and 2 year old children. Kate is very likely to survive. She has a very survivable kind of cancer and now the outpouring of love and money she will need to fight for life. His survival chances are in the single digits.

I can’t stop weeping. I “know” my grandmother died from cancer. I don’t know what kind–not breast cancer. I know that much.

The kind of knowing I want my children to have for me is something that cannot come until they are adults and putting it all together in retrospect. I think that I all of a sudden just received a catapulted stone of fear in my belly. How will his children know him?

He told me just before he found the lump that I had inspired him to start marathon training. That process was more or less how the lump started bothering him. That’s why they found this. I told him to start making videos for his kids. One for each birthday up until they are 25 or 30. They need to know you and get the advice you would give them.

Shanna was asking me about parents yesterday. Kind of the standard kid question kinds of things: do only Mommies take care of babies? Oh dear goodness I hope not or a lot of kids would starve to death. I told her that some babies have only one mommy or only one daddy and some babies have a mommy and a mommy (or mama) and some babies have two daddies and some babies have more than two parents of any possible gender consideration. What matters to a baby is that consistent grown ups hold and care for and love the baby. That is all that is needed to make a parent. Not biology. Not anything else. I said that babies are designed to fall in love with the grown ups who care for them because that is how the baby will ensure survival. Mutual love with a grown up means the grown up becomes invested and puts a lot of time and energy towards the baby.

She said, “So it doesn’t matter if it is a boy or a girl?” I asked her how many times it has mattered whether I have a penis or a vulva while I change diapers. I asked her if she thinks our female friend K is too stupid to figure out how to clean her son’s penis. Shanna laughed. I asked her if her father has ever had trouble wiping her butt. She confirmed that he is a poop wiping expert. I said, “Anuses are universal.”

She asked if girls are supposed to stay home with their babies. The timing on this conversation was just hilarious considering what I have been reading on the internet lately. I said girls are supposed to do the things that make them happy. By being happy in front of their kids they are teaching their kids the right way to live. For some mothers this means staying home and for some mothers this means working outside the home for a company. All mothers work. All mothers do a back breaking amount of work. If a mother has an outside job then the children can either stay with dad (I cited families we know) or if both parents work day care of some kind can be arranged (I explained several different examples we know).

Every family looks different because every family is made up of different people. Different people are made happy by different things. That is what makes life beautiful. If everyone was exactly the same life would be really crappy. Every person is on a completely individualized path through life.

I said that different people have different advantages. I talked to her about money. I talked to her about how some people have large extensive families and that is a different very important kind of support. It gives different life options. For example: single parenting is a very different experience if you are rich than if you are poor. Single parenting is a very different experience if you have a large and involved family than if you have no family support. I went on and on. She asked more questions. It kept going.

I tell my children frequently that while they are children they have a few specific jobs they have to work on. Their primary job is to play with the world. The process of play and exploration is the primary thing that children should be focused on. After that you have to learn how to have relationships with people; you have to learn how to be considerate. But the third thing is: with great privilege comes great responsibility. I tell my children explicitly that they are part of the most privileged cohort that has ever been born. They have more access to information and the ability to learn than any person has ever had at any point in history. And my kids have free access to it all day every day because they are not locked in an institutionalized setting following some bullshit agenda that is the resort of so much compromise nothing real is taught. I expect them to take learning seriously.

I talk about how the world is changing and there are a lot of people in the world who do not have access to information. There are a lot of big problems to be solved. People will have to be exceptionally able to synthesize large amounts of data in order to solve these problems. People will have to learn a bunch of cross-disciplines in order to solve these problems. The only way is to start young and take it seriously. Learn.

I tell my kids that I want them to grow up and be fierce and sure of their opinions. They should not believe they are “always right” because that is hubris–no one is always right. But listen to Davey Crockett: Be sure you’re right and go ahead. Plan at leisure; act with haste. If you hesitate then some someone less qualified will speak first and set the plan. That’s really not a great situation. If you can’t find a way; make a way. You will make mistakes or you will never learn and grow. You must make big mistakes. That is part of life.

Even if I get upset with you over a mistake I will get over it. I love you more than I love breathing. More than I love any thing in the whole world. I will get angry with you. I will shout at you. I will never hit you. I will always love you.

Thinking about cancer makes me feel so very afraid of my children not knowing me. Shanna proudly informed me that she was going to grow up and be a bad ass just like me. I laughed. I told her that would make me very happy. I want to see that. I want to see what she is going to be like. I want to know her. I want that so fucking much.

Getting to see what Shanna will do in the world will be my entertainment and reward for still being alive.

And that’s before I even get to Calli. Calli is a born engineer. She is going to need to have a woman behind her saying, “You can do it” for a great many steps in her life. She is going to live in a “man’s world”. Hell she already wants to be Diego–not Dora. Not Alicia. She’s Diego. She’s the god damn main character who rescues everyone.

They need me. It is so clear. Like my friend’s children need him. And I start weeping again and I understand fuck cancer.

There is no right. There is no should. There is no deserve in this life. There just is.

On April 1st it will be the birthday of one of the awesomest women I know. I’m sorry I won’t be in Portland with her. That would have been wonderful.

In other news I am exchanging books with a friend who is also a writer on April 1st. We are essentially work-shopping one another’s books. You know, a real forking editing job. I’m ridiculously excited. I want No Secrets to be finished and I have stalled. It has been almost a year and a half since I wrote it and it still isn’t in paper. Erf.

In September Noah is officially off the leash and he gets to start being a mostly absentee father/husband while he works on whatever he wants to work on. I’m thinking about treating July like my own personal NaNoWriMo. I want to write Outrunning Suicide before I have a hard time negotiating for time. A lot of the shape of it is working itself out in my head. Stylistically it will not resemble No Secrets. That’s for the best. I’ve been reading reviews of writers differently lately. “What will they bitch about with my content–repetitiveness. I can’t just tell the same stories. Hm. Interesting.”

Sometimes it is kind of convenient that I have been through such a ridiculous variety of kinds of extreme trauma. I always have another fucking story. Ha.

A few times lately I have thought about my mother. I’ve thought about what will happen when Shanna is eighteen. Shanna might want to meet my family. She will be allowed to. I’ll drive her to the house and wait at the bottom of the hill for her. She doesn’t have to share my views on them. She didn’t make my bed; I did.

Shanna asked me if I loved my mommy when I was a little girl. I told her that when I was a little girl I thought my mommy was the best thing in the whole universe. I loved her with my whole heart. She was my sun and my moon. Shanna then pointed out that I don’t feel that way now. I said, “No. I don’t. You will have different opinions when you are in your thirties than you have right now too.” She looked thoughtful.

It is really hard giving space for beliefs that are not your own. If I break the incest chain in my family I have absolutely done a measurable good in the world. I just found a biography from someone in the middle of a six generation chain. My stomach hurts too much to read it right now. At some point in the not-too-distant future I will have read everything easily findable on this topic. That’s a little weird to know. It makes me want to create more data.

Life goals:

I want to deepen and broaden the scope of information known about incestuous families. At some point I will figure out a measurable goal around this topic. I don’t have it yet.

I want to live outside my country of origin for a minimum of five years, preferably in one year chunks. I’ll get homesick bad.

I want to see what Noah can do. He has really impressed me so far. I want to see what he and I can do together.

You outrun suicide by giving yourself full permission to do it, but you keep moving the goal posts. “Ok I can do it. But first I have to do…” It’s on the to do list. But a lot of other things are going to happen first.

I want my children to be adults and to be able to say, “Yeah. I agree. It’s time. I love you. Do what is right for you.” Maybe I will have to move to Oregon once I hit 70. When I get there I will get to be near a friend of mine. She is partnered with one of the people who pushed that law through. I feel so grateful that I get to know people who change the world. They give me the courage to keep trying.

Holy fuck. I just had a thought. What age level is Outrunning Suicide aimed at? If I want a lot of people to be able to read it I have to think about that. My writing is rather obtuse most of the time. Well that will take some thought.

When I was a child there were very few periods of time when I didn’t want to die. I stayed alive mostly because I was too depressed to be expeditious. I didn’t know anything other than pain. I was not permitted to act like I was in pain. That was rude.

My life is different now. I didn’t understand what a life free from pain was. It was a myth. I wouldn’t say that I am exactly pain free at this point but I am probably at the lowest level of pain and the highest level of joy I have ever had. These are the best days of my life. And I know it while I am living them.

I keep wandering in my head to a Madeleine L’Engle book A Wind in the Door. The mitochondria are in trouble! The farandolae aren’t deepening! I just read Collapse by Jared Diamond. Help! The planet is in trouble! The humans aren’t deepening!

I don’t know. Lots of feelings. Today I don’t want to die. And I weep at the loss of a great mind. I hope he doesn’t read this. My grief is not his problem. I’m glad his wife has a very supportive family. I’m glad they live near her family and not his. I am so sorry it is happening.

I’ve read tragedies for years. I’ve taught units on tragedy. I never really got it before. I’ve never been deep enough into a community to really understand what the loss of a person means before.

He’s going to fight. He’s that kind of guy. My grief is entirely premature and I need to stfu. But this is where I feel.

I have spent most of my life believing very firmly that for me cancer was one of the goalposts. I wouldn’t fight. I would go quietly into the dark night because I’m not interested in more suffering.

Life is pain, highness. Anyone who tells you different is selling something.

Now I don’t know. When I think about the things I want to do. When I think about not seeing my daughters grow up to be fierce and bad ass? (She-Ra is pretty bad ass is a frequent comment around our house. I said it once. Oy.)

There is no right. There is no should. There is no deserve. There is only what is. And what you go do with it. We live in a time of practically preternatural access to science. If you have money. If you want to fight something bad enough we live in a time of honest-to-goodness miracles.

How much do I want to see my daughters at thirty? Forty? Fifty? Sixty? What will they do with their lives? I want to know so very badly. I am curious. I want to know. I want to see what this being I have unleashed on the world will do.

Somehow I don’t envision her walking onto the family compound at eighteen and not coming back. It’s thirteen years away. She’ll be able to evaluate people on her own at that point. She will have had a lot of practice with a lot of different kinds of people. She will be able to read people well. My family isn’t subtle. Even if she does want to get to know them–and why not, they are interesting people–she won’t want to stay.

She will have shit to do. My family has nothing to do but be unhappy. They will sit in one place doing that until they die. I don’t understand why. It’s like a clock that has run down. Poverty, physical health, mental health, and a kind of apathy I don’t understand. An anger about entitlement and responsibility I don’t understand.

I have had such a ridiculous amount of privilege. I’m only starting to understand the shape of it.

I have had the privilege of being able to set the goal post of “I’ll kill myself if” pretty low but I’ve been healthy enough to always meet a really ableist centric attitude. I have been able to be an asshole about independence. I’ve also had a guaranteed income for most of my adult life. I’ve been financially stable without having to have a job. That’s so fucking ridiculous.

I have no safety net though. I don’t have Bank of Mom and Dad. I don’t have emergency reserves beyond those I create. For most of my adult life I was inches above the poverty line living in one of the most expensive places in the world. I have never come close to bankruptcy and my credit score is ridiculous. I did that with a lot of seed capitol. I feel like an asshole for being glad that pit bull attacked me. It made the whole rest of my life better.

Perspective if everything.

I’ve been thinking about my mom. I have been specifically thinking, “I forgive you. I hope you forgive me.” If my kids ever go and meet her I hope my mom understands why I kept them away. My kids will be different. They will not have broken spirits. I hope she will be able to see that and be glad. I hope she will forgive me. I hope she understands wanting to keep your kids safe.

I hope she will forgive me.

I hope she will still be alive so that she will be able to meet my kids some day. I hope my kids want to talk to her a lot for a while. I bet she won’t live long after that but she will die happier than she has been in a long time. They will be like her. They will be able to ask her questions about things she has had great skill at doing. They will think she is an interesting person.

It’s kind of a weird balance. I have to tell the truth to my children. The truth is that no one is all bad. Everyone has good parts. The thing about life is learning how to find the good that balances the bad and evaluating if the value is high enough. In most families people decide that the kin alliance is worth putting up with the bad. That’s normal and right.

When my kids are adults they will not be children who are easy to mold. They will not be instructed in how sex is natural and fine between family members as long as you don’t breed because it is only in breeding too close to the line that you develop problems.

I hope that when my daughters are eighteen they will have the ovaries to say to a biological family member who solicits sexual contact, “You are a disgusting piece of shit and I hope you rot in hell.” Because yeah. That’s the reaction you should have to incest.

But I don’t think my family would dare at that point. And if everyone keeps their britches on, it’s fine… right? Oh fuck. *beat head on wall* Wait. I’m not supposed to do that any more.

Maybe I should get dressed and run. That would be all healthful and crap.

I want to live. I have stuff to do. I’m scared. Fuck cancer. I can’t be strong enough to outrun it. No one can. It just happens. Am I going to instantly stop smoking so I can lessen my risk of lung cancer? No. I wouldn’t be a nice person. (Vaporizer is still impact on the lungs. My lungs will tell you.)

On the way I will eat more Easter candy. My body says: “Hey, I know-instead of crying: sugar rush and endorphins!” Is this ideal? Nope. We recognize two candy-holidays a year in this house. Otherwise I would get in a long of trouble. I didn’t eat candy like this when I was a kid. It’s kind of weird.

Ok, run.

If you build it; they will come?

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My favorite thing about being married to Noah is that all of my dreams seem… so very attainable. We talk a fair bit about what will happen after the house is paid off, after the WWOOF year, after Noah feels he will no longer be likely to be a full time professional coder. We won’t be this kind of rich forever. We will be a different kind of rich. What will we do with it?

We have been talking for a while now–years–about wanting to open a school. At this point our language is solidifying around wanting to start the year that would be Calli’s freshman year of high school. This wouldn’t be the right kind of school for Shanna, anyway.

We would like to run a boarding school for nerds. The curriculum will not look a lot like most schools. Kind of a cross between a free democratic school and a vo-tech program. How do you teach entrepreneurship? Luckily we are getting to know the people who are important in those worlds. We are learning what people need to know.

How do you teach responsibility? How do you teach compassion? How do you teach teenagers to believe that their agency actually matters?

I really like being married to Noah. I feel like I could not have a better partner. I feel so very lucky.

damn skippy

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4 yr old: “You are not the boss!”

2 yr old: “Yes I am! I’m the boss of me!”

If you have too many projects going then you can’t die.

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I spoke with my therapist on the phone. She’s thrilled that I sent her such an email. She said, “When a client can get mad at you and articulate it–that is often a good sign. It means you actually trust me.” We’ll see. We are going to continue working together. We are going to change the structure of our sessions and the content of what we are processing. I’m willing to keep trying.

I feel bad when I write about being suicidal because I know I worry people. I know it sounds a lot like the boy who cried wolf. The big reason I want my own domain is so I can talk about feeling intensely suicidal without violating a TOA or getting a smack down from a moderator.

I know it is hard to know someone as specifically unpredictable as I am. Bonding to me is foolish. Goodness knows when I will blow up and hurt you again. I’m just like that. And I’m selfish–so very selfish. If I weren’t selfish I would be dead.

When I am not feeling suicidal I know that I am a rule breaker. I know that there are taboos around talking about suicide for a reason. Why do I think I am so god damn special that I should get to break that taboo? I literally believe I will die if I try to follow the taboo. I can’t.

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night to a beautiful girl saying, “I need you.” Then there is cuddling and kissing and stroking as we go back to sleep. I need you, too. I need you so much I feel like my heart will explode.

I used to not talk about being suicidal. Instead I cut myself and burned myself and overdosed on pills and took whatever drugs people handed me and fucked anyone who was even vaguely interested. Anything to not have to think or talk about how very suicidal I was.

I don’t do any of those things any more. I’m just left with the fleeting feeling of being completely overwhelmed by pain and wanting to escape.

Today is starting off ok. My neighbor told me I can paint her fence. The school is happy to go along with the contest idea after STAR testing in May. Frankly I’m glad of the delay. It gives me time to get organized.

My therapist asked me if I feel I got value from the group therapy experience. I told her, “I already knew the outlines of my tribe. I already understood the commonalities of our experience–even if I don’t understand each specific member of my tribe. I won’t keep these women in my life due to geographic constraints–it’s no insult towards them. I didn’t learn anything particularly new and I didn’t form relationships that will change my life. It was a neutral experience.

I was watching an interview with Amanda Fucking Palmer (Supposedly I will be going to a backyard concert with 49 other rad people sometime this year. I am trying to learn more about her. She commented that she believes the human brain is not meant to know 50,000 people and care about them and their problems and their sister’s problems. Our brains were meant to care about a few hundred people. It’s an interesting problem on the modern scale.

How do you pick who to care about? Most people just get who they get. They grow up around a set of people and they never move that far away. You know who was born near you. My life isn’t like that. The people who are keeping threads in my life have scattered to the winds. They are not day-in-day-out dependable. They are all busy and spread out geographically. How is the human brain meant to adapt to this? I’m not sure but I’m trying.

I’m reading more about resilience and getting pissed off. I’m tired of statistical everything acting like I shouldn’t exist. Statistical anomaly. That’s me. I just shouldn’t happen. People can’t do what I can.

Aut viam inveniam aut faciam. I shall either find a way or make one.

I’m just about done with Collapse by Jared Diamond–author of Guns, Germs, and Steal (which I haven’t read). I’m having a bitch of a time keeping up with reading new books. I don’t like reading new books. I like rereading old books and visiting my friends. I finished Outlander again for my book club and I have to sit on my hands so I don’t read the whole damn series again before book club. (I have like three weeks. I could totally read the next six books that each are over 1,000 pages long in that time but I wouldn’t read anything new and if I want to read 52 new books this year… oh man. Get crackin.)

Today we are going to learn about local weeds with the homeschool group. And have dance class. And swim class. And our back door will be sealed against the coming rain (it’s a process). I need to wash one load of laundry and fold three. I need to start thinking about packing. Ugh.

It’s just another day in paradise, right?

Thank you, hormones, that’s better.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suicidal ideation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I should probably go start breakfast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I want to believe that most parents have vague expectations/hopes/dreams about how this process of parenting will go because then I don’t feel like an asshole. I don’t have hard core expectations of my kids like “You will grow up and be a lawyer” but for most of my life I kind of fantasized about stroking my little girl’s hair and helping her fall asleep. Cue birth of first daughter. From about three months of age little S has been slapping my hand and glaring at me if I stroked her hair. I feel a degree of sadness about this that is entirely out of proportion but there it is. Then I had C. She loves having her hair stroked. I’m so glad I had two daughters so I could spread out my expectations and not ask too much of either one of them individually.

We are off sugar. It doesn’t effect the kids but I’m also off caffeine and alcohol till Easter. I think that harm springs from excess. Moderation is very important in life–moderation in everything! Even moderation. Which means that I am bad at keeping things like sugar/alcohol/caffeine as a sometimes treat and they start creeping in more and more. So I periodically take a while off then I try to go slow when I start again. Then things get out of hand and I take a break. I’m not sure it is “ideal” but it is how I get through. My kids hate me. My husband isn’t too sure about me. Why did I make everyone else do it with me? Because sugar is literally a drug. If you look at studies of what it does to your brain it’s not a joke. I want my kids to grow up knowing that you have to consciously look at your consumption of things that are bad for you and take breaks. Your body needs them. It’s not about punishment. This is a big part of my food religion.

I am too mean and nasty to be a vegan. I honestly don’t care enough about animal rights to do it. I am, however, not a big fan of factory farming or most of our current system of producing goods. I’m not a vegetarian because my diet is not diverse enough to provide me the nutrients I honest to dawg need so I eat meat to fill in the gaps. It’s not a perfect system but it has obviously worked for many species for a long time. I don’t need perfect–I need to not be dead. And when I read things about how consumption of quinoa is probably going to contribute to the destruction of a Latin American country I can’t help but be reaffirmed in my belief that if it doesn’t grow within 100 miles of my home I probably shouldn’t eat it.

But that springs from my hubris. I live in Northern California. More food grows here than anywhere else. The only thing I would have to give up from my regular diet in order to eat entirely locally is bananas. Whoopie. Most of the people in the entire world can’t have my hubris.

Ok. So my food religion doesn’t actually scale. Or make sense at all for large populations. If you look at pretty much every religion of every kind I feel that way about it. They don’t scale. They make sense for whoever they make sense for and not at all for the rest of the world. That’s kind of how things work.

My food religion partially springs from the fact that I live in a place where this is possible. It is disgusting, ethically, to be completely aware of all of my resources and make different choices. In my entirely judgmental opinion. But I know almost no one who has my degree of resources in this area. So it gets trickier almost immediately.

Understanding what privilege means, what having money means, what having resources really means is this constant slow-dawning process for me. What things are actually secure for me and which things aren’t.

I have been participating in an incest support group. Next week is our last meeting. They aren’t a bad group of women but I can’t deal with a support group that far away. It takes too much of my life to participate. In order to spend six hours a month with them I have to spend $240 and spend eight hours driving in miserable traffic. I don’t get enough out of it to balance the cost. Not when I also have to arrange child care and deal with stress around that. My friend who has been watching them is quite sick. I don’t feel ok asking her for this as a permanent favor. She can’t truly commit to doing it and I don’t want to get into the situation of being mad at her because her body is doing what it is doing. That would make me a serious asshole.

I did that with my former housemate. I thought I was agreeing to a trade of work. But I had an expectation level that was higher than her body could provide. Not because she didn’t want to. Not because she wasn’t trying. Bodies betray us. And I was an asshole. So I lost my friend over it. I can’t keep doing that in my life. I will end up totally alone. So I can’t ask too much of anyone.

I also participate in an online ptsd support forum. That is, uhm, more at my participation level and spoon level. I can do it in my garage at 4am and not trouble anyone at all. It’s fucking great.

But both groups function to scare the ever loving shit out of me. Given my level of trauma I am unbelievably productive and functional. At least that is how it appears to my judgmental eye. That’s… kind of scary for me.

Am I just in a good period? Am I going to crash like they did? Many of them didn’t truly lose control of their lives until they were in their 40’s or 50’s. I’m not past falling yet. I was reading today about why a woman became homeless at 49. I’m not past that yet. I can’t lose vigilance.

I live with extreme mental illness. I have studied the field enough to be utterly confident that the devils chasing me are much larger than most people deal with. I’m able to put that mental illness in a box and study it from the outside. I’m able to see where my behavior is broken and just decide that I have to alter that pattern. The mental illness is still there but the behavior is corrected.

I’m able to consciously try and see from other peoples perspectives. It’s empathy. My shaman laughed at me and told me that I act autistic but I don’t know that he is right. I make a logical decision… sorta. But I’m acting from the ability to guess what someone in that position would want. I’m kind of mind reading. I’m going through my film rolodex in my head, “What do I know about this person. Play entire film of life in fast forward. Go.”

What would someone who had that life want? I fucking guarantee you it is different from what I want. From what the monsters in my head are screaming at me to do. Doing this is very tiring. If I don’t do this in full detail with each person as an individual I fall prey to stereotypes and then I offend the shit out of people so I have to be careful not to do that. Or to blatantly say, “So if I were to treat you like person of _______ group the answer would be _______ but obviously you’ve had personal life experience that differs from your group. What do you say?”

I’ve fallen into Pinterest since I ditched Facebook and Mothering. I still feel that is a good decision. But I’ve been a bit more bored. I’ve also been rewatching The West Wing during break time. It’s less diverting. And less connecting. But I’ve been thinking about me more. So who knows.

Winter will always be a fallow period for me. I think I’m actually categorically ok with the idea that as an animal I want to take some time off from my most tiring work in the winter when my body aches and I’m stiff and uncomfortable all the god damn time.

So I was reading an article that was adamantly about Self-Reliance as opposed to Survivalist in nature and hanging my head in shame. I’m that kind of nutcase. I totally am. My uhh future planning is increasingly of the self-reliant nature. And travel. I want to root firmly then run away and know I can come back. It will always be here for me. I don’t know why I need to do this. I just do. I have to see things. I have to experience them myself. I don’t learn enough from reading about them.

I want to talk to people in a lower stakes environment. The thing that is hardest for me about my life is the degree of censoring what I say I have to do. Have I mentioned the extreme mental illness part?

My kids know that sometimes their mom is sad and cries. They know that a long time ago bad stuff happened but we are all safe now. They know we don’t have contact with my family because they are not nice people. That’s all they know.

I need to travel because I need to have the experience of being able to reinvent myself as new and interesting over and over. It is comfortable and safe. It makes me feel better about myself. I know how to do that. I have finally gotten good at it.

I have been thinking almost constantly about how I got good at that specifically because I was training myself for prostitution. When I first saw the movie Pretty Woman and Julia Roberts said something about how no little girl wants to grow up and do that I consciously thought, “Well I will charge more than you.”

I absolutely expected I would end up a prostitute until I was 19. Then I met a prostitute. One of the high charging kind. Ok, she wasn’t still a call girl by the time I met her. She was a pro domme. But she had done every kind of sex work there was and I ended up in her house over and over again. That sounds kind of funny. My boyfriend was best friends with her boyfriend and we visited them from out of state. So we had kind of an interesting relationship. Not exactly friends

She explained to me what was necessary for a girl to keep herself safe. She talked about a kind of trusting your instincts that I don’t have. I literally am not physically capable of doing what she talked about. I am specifically drawn to people who will damage me instead of people who will honor agreements.

That is a lot of why it has scared me so bad when Noah had done things that have pushed boundaries. Life is very scary. I am very dependent.

Those conversations with her are really why I never got into sex work. I was asked. I actually think that I gained so much weight because I was trying to avoid that fate. The last thing I wanted was to be attractive and stand near the people my boyfriend knew. As a fat girl I was invisible and left alone. I saw what happened to the thinner and more attractive women. I saw how they were rotated in and out of the community if they were bottoms. Only the tops survived.

I didn’t want to do that to people. So I got fat. Then I got out.

I’ve had a lot of time lately to think about my relationship with my body. I kind of wish I hadn’t let the doctors office weigh me. Going off sugar is letting me see my emotional pattern with regard to eating lately. If I’m hungry enough to eat some nuts then I do. Mostly I’ve just been eating a lot less and feeling fine.

Since I went to the doctor I’ve been eating a really lot. I thought I weighed more than ten pounds more than that and by golly before I go and see the bastard again I will weigh what I think I weigh. I will have the body I think I have.

It’s really kind of weird. I’m pretty afraid of being thin. I’ve been looking at my therapist and feeling twitchy lately. She is uhm a stones throw from my body. She is my body if I never had kids and I had exercised more starting earlier. So yeah. So I eat. And miss my old therapist who was a motherly alternating warm and stern black woman with a full figure and a rich laugh. When I was being stupid she called me on it. When I was doing well she was really enthusiastic and told me why I should feel good about myself.

I don’t have that kind of relationship with my current therapist. I don’t feel warm. I feel defensive. I feel like she is very agressive in pursuing her agenda. I’m having a hard time with therapist directed therapy. Ha.

I’ve been reading a lot of therapy comparison stuff lately and man are people against folks having a “paid friend”. I kind of think that is what I want. I miss Traci so much. I think Traci would be delighted with how my life is going.

I’m going to visit Dad soon. He has another new girlfriend. I was just getting to know the last one. I miss Francesca. I’m so sad that she doesn’t get to know my children. I think they would have filled a big void in her life. She had so much love to give. Grandkids who visited every other year? She would have been thrilled. She liked sending me presents every year as his “daughter”. My relationship was an entangled mess between both of them.

Traci was my therapist for seven years. She died of a heroin overdose just about five years ago. Francesca was Dad’s wife. I knew her from when I was nineteen. I met her long before they were married. Before they were even solidly together. She overdosed five years ago. Pain medication for cancer. She had gotten addicted while treating her mom. It looked like an accident. Kind of. But she was a recovered heroin addict.

Traci and Francesca were two of the people I looked to for a lot of support. They both died right around Shanna’s birth. I totally enmeshed with Shanna as a result in that first year. I tried reconciling with my family because I was lonely and needy. I paid for Conflict Mediation and was soundly manipulated.

I didn’t divorce my family until Uncle Bob died. Not until my sister asked me in a condescending voice if anyone close to me had ever died before. Because my brother and my father don’t count.

I feel like every relationship in my life has a shelf life. Brittney left at thirty years. Her family is angry about the book. Ok.

I look at Noah and my kids and I feel throat wrenching fear. I feel like I have a fifteen year year of reprieve and then oh holy hell what is going to happen to me? Sometimes I feel very ashamed that I “pull of normal” such that people are surprised at how broken I am. It’s complicated. I contribute to the invisibility of “people like me”. I feel a lot of pressure to maintain a specific front for the benefit of everyone but me. It feels invalidating all of the time.

Sometimes I just like staying home for a while. That way the level of censoring is automatic. We talk about what they want to talk about and it all works out. Other grown ups bring up topics. I spend a lot of time in my head. I have strong opinions loosely held. I’m ridiculously picky about how I am challenged though.

I’m starting to look at who is good at challenging me and getting me to actually change. That’s useful data for me to have. I like pushy people. Holy potato do I like me some pushy people. I combine that with requiring them to recognize specific “I’m done” signals and being willing to go with “Shiny Change Of Topic Please”. That’s a hard combination.

It’s kind of funny watching The West Wing. I have a lot of authority issues. I neither want to be the President nor serve anyone else. I don’t want responsibility for other people and I don’t want them to have responsibility for me. I want things exchanged to be gifts. But I’m really not into Burning Man. I think that is pretention not a gift economy. I need to travel. In other places they have gift economies. Yes, I will read about them before I go so I won’t be too gauche. I hope. I’m sure I will be. But I will be able to apologize for living in the native language.

I want to meet people who are nothing like me. I want to hear as many stories as I can hear. It is hard maintaining relationships with people who live near me. I feel afraid of the eventual brush off. I really need to travel.

I’ve been feeling a lot of guilt because the kind of travel I want is just not something Noah is interested in. And it will make this monogamy stuff more complicated. We also have stern agreements about celibacy. Complicated.

I’m dependent so I want to run away so I can prove that I’m not really in a cage. I am still free. Or some stupid shit like that. Or I want macro scale view on my country. I want to actually understand it better. And other countries. I want to talk to people. I need to. I need to hear their stories. I need to hear what life is like for other people. I need other models in my head. I need alternatives to what I know.

What I know isn’t good enough. I need to know more. I don’t learn as well from reading or from taking classes in school. I like talking to people. I want to know about them.

It feels like looking at the future destruction of my life. How far will I run? How many people will I hurt in the process?

I don’t know how I am going to balance everyones needs but I’m going to have to figure it out.

For a while there I was looking in the mirror a lot. I enjoyed watching my hair grow–I shit you not. I’m past that phase, mostly. Now when I look in the mirror I feel dismay at being untidy. But if I try to fix it I’ll make it worse; I promise. Curly hair is just like that. So I’m not looking at myself again.

And we come back to body issues. It’s just been that sort of week. I’ve been thinking. How am I going to wreck my life? My health? My relationships?

Participating on a ptsd support website and being in a support group for incest survivors is giving me a dizzying array of options to work with. Many/most of the issues being accidents because man do we not have control of our bodies. We just don’t.

I have a pretty ridiculous amount of control near as I can tell. I’m not sure why. I just do. I know that this role requires this behavior for this amount of time and you just fucking do it.

Two of my potential biggest supporters through this phase of my life were taken from me right at the beginning of the journey. I’m one quarter of the way through the expected time of specific duty. I’m doing ok. I’m trying to not be demanding or too taxing on any source of support but that balance often makes people feel unwanted or unappreciated or something.

I feel like I understand why I am taking winter off of people. I am not going out much. It is a good thing. Spring is coming. I have busy times coming. Lots of work to do. I won’t be able to sit around in my head. I want to seriously produce this year. I need to. I need to root. I have mother-in-law money set aside for it.

It will be fun.

Privilege. Responsibility. Curiosity. Sustainability. I don’t have any answers. I am, however, a wasteful American. I look at my habits and I think about what it will be like to live differently at this point.

I have been homeless. We lived in our car so I have not had the experience of living on the street. I have been sent to sleep on the floor or the couch in a series of homes of people I didn’t know. I was often not with family for extended periods. Given what I have read about attachment theory I cry for the child I was. No wonder I fucked everything that moved. Please, please love me. But I ran away right after the sex was over because I made sure that no one could leave me ever again.

Puppy did me a huge favor by being the only boyfriend I’ve ever had as an adult who has broken up with me. He wasn’t a good fit and he recognized it. He could have been more gracious–I’m just saying. But that needed severing and I’m glad he did. Things are certainly working out really well.

And breakfast is ready.

Perspective is everything

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7am: What a glorious, loving day. I’m so glad I’m here.

8am: Weird SMS conversation with a kinda friend/former play partner from the east coast. His phone accidentally merged my account information with someone else who has a similar name. Whoops. It was reiterated that now that I do the mom thing I no longer have “adventures” and my life is boring. He has been going to the same events for the past twenty-five years. The only thing that changes is the identity of the women he is tying up on any given day. They stay the same age. I don’t go to bdsm conferences or pick up casual sex. My life is boring, obviously. In the past five years I have spent a month in Scotland (including some time in England and France), almost three weeks in new Zealand, wrote a book, had two kids, been out of town on some kind of travel more than forty times… I’ve learned to garden. I’ve remodeled my house–mostly while alone with my kids. (I get help on crucial days. I have a whole crew of wonderful friends.) And I’m the boring one? Really? Ok then.

9am: Sitting around talking to K. Anxiety starts creeping in. K’s life is not so smooth as mine. I WANT TO FIX IT. I can’t fix anything. I can feel guilty about making her life harder and not easier. But that is where I am. I’m trying to reduce how much I ask of her. Good grief her life is harder than mine.

10am: Well, shit. At least my father didn’t knock me up as a teenager. I suppose no matter how bad my life was some blessings went past my door without knocking. And my mom isn’t still living with my rapist. That’s something. That’s a big something. I’m even lucky enough to have my dad be dead and I’m the only one in the room and that’s kind of weird because I am by far the youngest.

11am: Please please please can we stop talking about the Pervasive Societal Myth That Most People Who Claim Memories of Incest Had Them Implanted By Some Malicious Person. Yes. I am aware that lots of people think this. I’ve seen this myth running around all by myself. Yes, I’ve already seen and heard such imprecations. So what? What is the point of this elaborate conversation–ah yes. To tell us that despite lots of people saying it we shouldn’t believe it. Here’s a list of out-of-date studies to convince us we shouldn’t believe it. Uhm, there are several much better much more recent studies. Maybe you could update your hand out. I should probably start a bibliography page one of these days.

12pm: Holyfuckingshit what is in your freaking mouth?!?!?!?!! I didn’t phrase it like that. Almost. We need to work on rules about taking things at other peoples houses. Oh man. I would have been screamed at and hit. I did minimal screaming and losing the iPad for one day seems so… stupid. Ugh. And a lecture.

1pm: Oh lunch. Lunch is sooooo awesome right now. I love you both sooooo much while there is a delicious sandwich in my mouth.

2pm: I like sitting. I don’t like the internet. Maybe I should do something else. Wander off.

2:45pm: Oops. I forgot to hit post.

Or maybe you wake up feeling different.

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Within half an hour of waking up the girls started stirring. I went in and hung out with them. I was ever so politely asked, “Mommy will you please fetch me a handkerchief? I can’t breathe.” My baby cuddled up and breathed her disgusting first-thing-in-the-morning breath right in my nose and said, “Me love you more than ice cream.”

Then they both cuddled me. By “cuddle” I mean shoved every part of their body as far into my body as they could get traction. They smile at me.

Today I feel lucky to be alive. If I had died before I would never have found out what this feels like. I am so grateful that I get to have this life.

And three of my tomato starts have green things coming up and the rainbow chard so far. I have more than twenty other seeds that could germinate in the next 10-ish days. We’ll see how it goes.

Homeschooling and hubris and motherhood is not a career

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I’ve had several prods recently to think about why we are homeschooling. Oh my goodness. The reasons are so many and varied. First and foremost we homeschool because I decided when I was seventeen that I wanted to homeschool my kids. Let’s be honest here.

Because I have always known that I wanted to homeschool my kids I got a BA in literature and a teaching credential and went to graduate school (no degree there). I wanted to feel like I knew enough. I desperately wanted to feel qualified. This is a fairly unusual route to take towards homeschooling. I have seen some mention in writing that “former teacher” is one of the fastest growing segments of the home schooling community. I don’t know if that is true or not. Even when I talk to other former-teachers they didn’t start out teaching in order to homeschool. They move to hoomeschooling because they feel their child needs something that isn’t otherwise available and they are trying to meet the needs of their family.

I have more hubris than that. I want my children to be unschooled while they are young. I want them to think learning is an amorphous non-linear process that happens in weird spurts and starts because that is how brains operate. Very few people really learn best lock step rote memorization. I live in California. I can promise you that lock step rote memorization is a big part of the educational philosophy. It’s the best way to baby-sit a bunch of potentially unruly kids.

When I was a teacher I handled unruly kids by giving them Legos and Play-Doh in class and I kept them after school for academic detention and we sat down and figured out where the holes in their knowledge was. Many of my teacher peers were quite frustrated with me. I was teaching these little brats that they get to run the show and demand an endless amount of my time and I should respect myself more than that.

No, I was teaching them that some people need to be physically moving in order to access their brain and that is ok. I was teaching them that some people take a little longer to pick up concepts and that is not shameful it is just something to accommodate.

I decided to homeschool my kids because my own public school experience was so overwhelmingly awful. I do understand that my children are not me and will have their own experiences–but big parts of the experience don’t change.

When you are bored in class you are expected to stare straight at the teacher and feign attention and not allow yourself to get distracted. You are not allowed to go actually learn anything–you have to pay attention to the teacher because (s)he is talking. Being in public school dramatically slowed down the rate at which I learned. I went in and out of twenty-five schools and really got to experience what it means to be educated in California. I wasn’t around long enough to experience much long-term benefit. Maybe if I had learned to feign boredom better I would have had a better experience.

My experiences outside of California involved me being beaten at least weekly and usually more like daily. My attitude sucks. I’m distracted. My handwriting is terrible. Obviously the best way to educate children is to make sure they are so afraid they cannot dare move or wiggle during class.

Regardless of the fact that I hear there are excellent teachers in the system (I’ve even seen a few) they are in the dramatic minority in my experience.

When I read people say, “I can’t make my kid learn anything so we can’t homeschool” I want to respond, “So your child is still lying prone in a crib somewhere unable to move or walk or talk or eat food or use the toilet?”

I make my kids be polite. Past that I don’t make them learn a whole lot. They learn how to clean up after themselves because I model it. I don’t force them. I talk about the process and why we engage in it. I did the work until my kids hit a level of competence where they wanted to do it for themselves and now I don’t do it. It’s great.

Shanna is counting higher and higher by the day. Occasionally I will correct one prononciation out of the 50+ numbers and she almost always skips one or two somewhere and I don’t say anything about that. Sometimes she makes it to seventy. She has almost entirely taught herself to read. She has actively rejected any vague attempts to help her. She wants me to read to her and not slow down to be didactic. It’s annoying. Ok.

My kids have high motivation to read. I spend many hours every day reading. I read books to them, books to myself, and the computer every day. I talk to them about what I am reading and why. Now that I am not on facebook or mothering.com at all I am spending about four hours out of every day reading actively-informational books/websites. I’m learning. I’m getting up and using what I learn. I’m talking about broad connections between different areas of our lives.

I’m not worried about my kids learning math. I’m about to get up the courage to build a big play structure in the back yard because that is the only way to get a slide to our property. I have all the technical knowledge for how to do this. I have a next door neighbor who owns all the equipment and is happy to help me for a few hours as I get started–the rest I will do with my kids. They really do help.

I talk about geometry and force. I will talk about why you need cross-braces under the platform. I will talk about distribution of weight (a frequent topic in this house anyway) and I will talk about the benefits of screws and nails and I will talk about treated and untreated wood. It will be an edu-tainment because they will always know that they helped build it. That they are competent people who can just do stuff because that has always been true. That has simply been what they have done with all the days of their lives.

Can people do similar projects with their kids and go to public school at the same time? Sure. Of course. But your kid is spending 6+ hours a day having to stare forward with at least a faked expression of interest. Man. What a waste of a life.

I hear that time spent in school is really important. But I also hear that if you subtract for transition time, recess, and discipline there is somewhere between forty-five minutes and ninety minutes of actual honest-to-dawg instructions in a full day.

And on the socialization front–it has not been the norm in our species for children to spend all day every day locked in a room with twenty to thirty people their age and only their age for more than about one hundred and fifty years. I have not been convinced that this grand sociological experiment worked out the way folks hoped it would. I mean–I don’t think it is actively evil… mostly… but I get why people use it.

I so get why people don’t want to do what I am doing. I absolutely get that. This is hard. Trying to figure out what to go learn next so I can model learning is hard. It requires a specific way of thinking that is extremely high energy intensive. I feel very overwhelmed by how hard it is and I have reason to believe that this specific sort of thinking is much easier for me than it is for most people. That’s not a snooty statement–it’s what people have told me repeatedly and emphatically.

I specifically went through a lot of training so I could understand the real eventual goal of education. What does it really mean to expose children to information and expect them to become “educated”? I’ve tried as hard as I can and I’ve worked for more than ten years to find out what breadth and depth of knowledge is actually expected out in the world. Did I go out and actually learn all of it? No. But I have worked very hard to create a model in my head of how information flows. What knowledge leads to what. When you talk to extremely smart people–what got them started. Where did their passion begin? How were they exposed?

My kids may grow up to be a hairdresser and a burlesque dancer, respectively. They may grow up to be scientists or mathematicians. Or writers or carpenters. My kids will almost certainly know how to program–maybe they will just stay there. I don’t know. I don’t have a very accurate crystal ball.

But in homeschooling my children I am committing to expose them to the depth and breadth of life experiences. They need to find out what their options are. I feel that one of the potential worst experiences of the hubris involved in homeschooling is that in modeling so strongly one way of life–how will our children really understand how it is ok to live? They don’t need to grow up like me.

Other than having a kind of adorably off-beat sense of style they are both experiencing a life that is about as far from everything I knew as a life can be. They won’t want to grow up to be me. That is not only acceptable it is wonderful.

I have to teach them how to wonder and explore and how to evaluate if the consequences for being caught breaking a rule outweigh the awesomeness you will get if you break the rule.

Seriously–that’s one of the biggest life lessons I will consciously teach. There are a lot of rules in society. Some of them you can break basically penalty-free and some of them have catastrophic results. How do you decide which sets of only annoying penalties you want to put up with?

Everyone should teach their children that. That is part of the process of deciding how many homework assignments you can blow off and still get the grade you want.

That is what I don’t want. I don’t want my kids to care about working for a grade. Once you finish school they stop handing out those grades. It’s been hard to figure out if I am really learning or if I deserve to be allowed to speak on topics I have read about if I don’t have a degree proving I have read those books and gotten passing grades on the tests.

What is this fucking bullshit. Wake up America. Socrates did not have to pass a god damn written exam before he was allowed to teach. I’m just g-d sayin’.

Not that I’m Socrates–nothing of the sort. But this is a very weird very modern American invented way of thinking. It wasn’t long ago that most medical doctors never went to college. They apprenticed. Or they just read some books and started doing it.

That is what “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” partially means. It means thinking, “I want to do _____; ok what do I have to do to get there?” And then you independently educate yourself. We live in the era of the internet and free public libraries. There is no excuse for ignorance.

Well, that age old excuse “I don’t have time.” I… Yeah. I make the time. My life is about that time. I think it is very important. If other people do not do it do I care? No. But I agree with them that they probably shouldn’t homeschool. Which I never suggested or thought or tried to imply that they should but I am often defensively told why other people could never do it.

Here’s this: I believe you. But guess what? I can.

That’s the hubris. It’s a flat statement of competence. Ok, you may not be competent at this–I am. I am very good at it, in fact. So far. I don’t have a strong agenda for most of their lives. I have extremely strong backed-up-by-research opinions on why I absolutely do not want them in a formal schooling environment until after age ten or so and then I will listen to them. They will have options and I will be supportive. I want them to set their own educational goals. It’s not my life to lead.

But it is my job to teach them how to learn and how to actively work really hard towards creating new things in the world. I want them to think of themselves as Makers. I want them to believe that they are strong and smart and competent because they can point at things they had to struggle to make, but look they did it.

I don’t want my children to waste their childhood staring straight ahead in a class room. I want them to be out running for miles with me talking about the plants we see–which ones are edible and which ones are not. We pick up garbage in our neighborhood (I need to do this more often because I write about it and then feel guilty that I haven’t done it all that recently). My children are learning what the rest of their lives will look like. They are training to be an adult. When adults have time they have to fill it. My children are learning how to fill that time, fill that hole in life. How do you spend your days?

My children are basically never bored. If they are bored I say, “Excellent! Time to get dressed and go into the back yard!” We don’t stay bored long. There is always a long list of things to do. Keeping a home is work. Having a pretty yard is work. Getting to look at lovely flowers is work. Growing food is work. They participate and help and grow more competent constantly. They are learning fine motor coordination. We have so forking many tea parties it’s unbelievable. Sometimes like six a day. They move around the house. The children are almost entirely capable of making a real one by themselves.

By the time my eldest is six and the youngest is four I anticipate that they will be able to create nearly all of the food and set the table for a large group of people. They practice over and over. They handle more steps each time. They want to. Because if all the work is dumped on me they don’t get a tea party. I get tired. It tends to mean a third or fourth time making a mess in the kitchen in a day.

I need them to understand what it means to keep your workspace clear so that you can continue to work on it later. I need them to have an investment in that state of being. We all help clean up after all of us. We are a helpful family. I say that over and over. So they do it.

I feel like I spent my late teens and early twenties studying how to be a truly great governess. It was a specific course of study. At this point in time we are unschoolers. Not Radical Unschoolers. We have limits here. But I don’t introduce academic book work artificially. I do a lot of specifically educational speaking but it is as I narrate what I’m doing anyway. I’ve been doing exactly the same kind of speaking to my kids since the day they were born.

I have taught my kids how to drink from an open cup, how to use a toilet, how to get dressed. From the day they were born I have been talking to them about their surroundings and experiences all day every day.

A great many stay at home mothers have the experience that when their children are very young getting out of the house is often an unsurmountable task. They spend a lot of days just kind of stuck at home bound by nap schedules. I remodeled my house and did extensive gardening. I couldn’t really go anywhere and I was bored.

I have slowed down on the rate of home improvement in the last year. Instead we have been venturing out more and more into the homeschooling community. My kids will have friends. They will grow up running in a band of kids. They will have ups and downs and trials and tribulations. They won’t always have a good time. Good. That’s how life is supposed to work.

I really and truly understand the arguments against homeschooling. The one that has the most merit, in my opinion, is the notion that people like me are the ones with the passion to change the system. To that I say–maybe. But in the meantime my kids would suffer through years of what is the worst education ever offered in the history of my country. Oh dear G-d no. I know those standards well. I’ve taught them. They have very little to do with learning except in a round-about back-hand way.

Opting out is a position of ridiculous privilege. Having someone available with my work background and education is extremely unusual. I get that. Not everyone knows that they have to raise themselves as they raise their kids and that it will take a lot of time and a lot of not-formally-structured consistent time. We have a very consistent life but we don’t have much formal structure. We do not live by the clock much.

One of those hard facts of life is that my desire to homeschool my kids intersects with the fact that I have a rather lot of psychological problems. I have PTSD and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I experience depression and suicidal thoughts with great frequency and I have been a self mutilator since I was a young child.

Raising my children really and truly is the only way I can see forward to really raise myself. I’m trying to do so in a way that is off-screen for them. Time will tell if I am successful or not. It is hard having patience and giving myself room to be imperfect while still truly progressing forward at a rate of development that exceeds theirs. It’s… an experience. I don’t get the impression this is the standard approach to home schooling.

One of the best things about being an American is that you have the right to live a life of which other people disapprove. You’re just allowed. It’s in our Constitution. We have the right to pursue happiness. No one promised you’d get it–but you are allowed to pursue it. You are allowed to structure your life around pursuing happiness.

The way I see forward to maximize my lifetime happiness is to take this opportunity to appreciate the time I am privileged to have. Not everyone has this much time during the day. Most of the people who have the time during the day have worries that simply do not trouble my mind. That is a burden I do not share so I don’t get to judge how hard it is to carry. I’m a fucking lucky bitch.

I get to spend the next fifteen years playing and building and learning. Then I get to decide what I want to do when I grow up. This is part of why I do not think mothering is a career. Mothering is about learning how to see the world as an experience that must be past on. I know it is work but it is the work of life. It is the work of becoming a whole, individuated person.

I say this is the journey of mothering because it my journey as a mother. I do not know how it might be similar or different for fathers. I feel like I have had a profound life changing experience where I understand exactly how and why I am a product of the abuse I endured and I have had to consciously teach myself new behaviors at every stage of their development in order to appropriately parent them.

They keep changing the damn target on me. I get a handle on one kind of difficulty and then it changes and isn’t difficult any more. I see more and more of my control issues. I see more of my frustration and helplessness. I see more of my inability to control anything or anyone.

I’m sure there are other life experiences that teach similar types of humility but I don’t have experience with them and I’ve never even heard them spoken about in real life. When you are responsible for the 24/7 needs of a child for year after year after year it’s an endurance test. We were meant to raise children in communities. We were meant to have a grandparent living in the house who could walk the baby while mom rested some nights.

Right now I feel like mothering is the journey towards understanding your place in the scheme of things. Ok. In history I am daughter of _____ wife of Noah. Mother of Shanna and Calli. Sister of. Cousin of. I actually have a large family when you look at it all written down on paper.

And I can’t give them that community. It does not exist to them as a resource because of something that happened long before they were born and is not about them. That feels like an unfair burden. The result has been that I have cared for them mostly alone for years.

I get more help by the year. I trust more. I know that my children require a family to go to who would love and accept them no matter what so they visit their Godmamas. It’s kind of like a shared custody agreement. For the rest of their lives they will have had these years of being cared for by gentle, loving women. Both of whom have conflicting feelings about never having children of their own but it is highly unlikely they will. Life choices are complicated. And they love my daughters. They have extensively remodeled their guest room to be a kid room. It’s a really beautiful set up. They live in the mountains and they go for long hikes and learn about the flora and fauna of my childhood. They are only a few miles away from where I lived for most of my childhood, in the house where they all still live. I sometimes drive almost right past it. I do drive by other houses we used to live in. There are a bunch.

On the direction without the kids I drive a route past a former home and I sit and think really hard about how my life looked when I lived there. How old was I? Where did I go to school? How was my mother currently behaving?

I catalogue these things endlessly. It helps that we moved a lot so there are a lot of places to pull over for a think.

I have to think about what I was taught and unlearn it. I have to consciously go figure out what the correct response should have been. I have to say it to myself.

I have to. No one else is ever going to. No one else gives a shit. Not really. Not to the degree that a mother is supposed to care for her children.

Sometimes I think of things done right and I try to add them to my toolbox. My mother was not a complete fail. No one is.

This conscious choice of deciding who and what you want to be is the real work of motherhood. It is becoming the person you actually want to look at in the mirror. Does every woman have to become a mother in order to go through such change? Oh of course not. Don’t be silly. But motherhood is a slap in the face that can’t be ignored. There are mothers who choose to ignore this process. They neglect their kids. I don’t think they will be able to read four thousand words to get pissed off by me insulting them.

I’m not saying that there is anything terrible about daycare. There isn’t. But it isn’t what I want for my kids. I don’t want them to be peer centric. That is a specific lifestyle choice I don’t want to make. I don’t think it is wrong or bad, but I have a lot of privilege to decide and I don’t want to do that. I have never wanted to be separated from my young children.

I will be the one packing the suitcase when they are seventeen years and eleven months though. Not really. But I will start charging rent. And board. I’m serious. I am trying to train adults. If you are not able to be an adult then I have failed and we need to get moving on fixing this fast.

I can’t promise to always be available. I won’t promise to always take care of my kids. I have seen that go extremely badly. My entire life experience makes me absolutely gut level terrified of creating dependent adults. But I treat my babies and young children like they are totally dependent. The shift starts happening around puberty. Then they get to start deciding the course of their life. Until then it is my job to keep them safe and protect them. No one else will care as much as me. No one else will want it with the fierce intensity that I want it. My children will not be victimized as children.

You’d never know I was so paranoid if you met me in person. My children walk up to every single person they walk by and say, “Want to play?” or “Hi, my name is (name of the day). What’s yours?”

They are not sheltered. They are escorted. They talk to obviously on drugs people because those folks just live in our neighborhood and have to walk to get to the bus. I don’t mind. When Shanna snuck out every house on her route ratted on her. It was great. They made sure to tell me that she stayed on the side walk like she was supposed to. It was hilarious how they didn’t want me to get mad at her.

Kids are supposed to try to test the limits of their parents. That is the whole nature of their life experience. And parents are supposed to grow and change over and over and over and over as they define who and what they really are.

This is the work of every truly-lived-life. I obviously have strong specific philosophical roots. Only the examined life is worth living. Only that isn’t even it.

I need to have a safe place to grow up. I’ve never had it before. I understand that other people had it while they were children but I didn’t. I’m doing my work here, but give me a break. Yeah it takes a while. It’s hard. It hurts. Yes, it is a river of self-pity. Someone has to have pity for me. Even if it is only me.

I need to have the whole experience of a life that happens without terror and horror and shame and blame and guilt. I need it. I know it is selfish of me to keep my kids home so I can see theirs. I’m not trying to co-opt their life. I’m not forcing them to be like me. I’m educating them. In actually traditional ways instead of in the manner of the current fad in public education. I only feel a little guilt. I only feel that guilt because this is such a wonderful experience–of course I should be denying it to myself because I don’t deserve it. I should be trying to force them to be just like their age and location cohort. Gosh. Aren’t I terrible and selfish.

No life is without bumps or course corrections. No one is born a finished product. I knew before I got a fake high school diploma (in my opinion getting a high school diploma after three semesters of attendance is a joke) that I wanted my children to have a life that was more consistent with the lives I read about in books. Those people seemed to turn out better.

Maybe they are all right. Maybe the answer is that women shouldn’t be allowed to read. Before you know it they get ideas and they start thinking and then we get uppity women who don’t do what they are told.

The whole world might explode.

Early Childhood Sexual Assault, Anger, and Parenting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do people like me ever heal?

What the fuck does that mean?

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

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

It’s complicated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or something.

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

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

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

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

Not competent enough.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wait… not everyone thinks about this? Oh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Really disjointed; sorry.

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The cookie exchange went well! I was blurty a couple of times and people looked kind of taken aback but no one left angry with me. I’ll call that a win. I’ll be seeing them all again in a few hours today. That is the best I can hope for.

I’ve been thinking hard about empathy and bonding. Calli came in at 2am and said with ridiculously clear and deliberate enunciation, “I need you.”

I need you too, baby. I pulled her up and held her till I woke up for the day. I feel so blessed.

Getting to hold my loving, trusting baby is the best experience I have ever had. I feel happier about being alive in that moment than I have ever felt before. I understand that not everyone is a breeder and wants this situation. I understand that it isn’t euphoric in different life circumstances.

I am safe. I am ridiculously privileged. I am allowed to devote my life and energy to adoring my children and teaching them about the world.

I want more adventures with them. I want tapes and tapes and tapes in my head of their happy laughing. It blocks out the screaming.

They don’t think I am disgusting. Well, not beyond the normal “old people are disgusting” sorts of things. Strangely I feel pretty happy about that.

I have convinced Shanna that the belly flap apron is what you get what you level up. You are stuck with a boring flat body before then. She thinks that having stripes makes you way cooler. I like this age. I like that she believes me whole heartedly that I am beautiful and she is beautiful and we are each perfect for the stage of life we are in and we are all going to change in a million tiny ways. She doesn’t think she should be trying to be like anyone.

I like that my children and my husband say nice things to me. They tell me they love me every day.

I live with a constant overwhelming, pervasive fear about Noah dying. I try very hard to not send him out the door with angry words. He could die in a car crash today. I am not fucking ok with risking having the last words I say to him on this earth be petty or spiteful. I try very hard to always hug him and kiss him and tell him I will miss him. Even if I am angry those things are still true. I love him. Even when I’m mad. So we don’t do the brooding leaving of the house thing.

It is very hard to think of myself as not-disgusting.

dis·gust·ing

/disˈgəstiNG/

Adjective

Arousing revulsion or strong indignation.

Synonyms

loathsome – nasty – repulsive – abominable – revolting

Hm. Thing is… I arouse peoples strong indignation all the god damn time. According to the dictionary I am disgusting. And I do trigger revulsion. Not of me necessarily–but certainly for my subject matter. Nasty. Loathsome. Repulsive. Abominable. Revolting. Yup. That’s me.

But Noah and Calli and Shanna like me. They need me.

Where is the meet in the middle? Is there a happy medium? I haven’t had a really hard cry. It may wait for Christmas.

I miss my mother. I want to tell her to stop making her cinnamon rolls with Crisco and start using butter–they are way better.

Yesterday I was asked, “So you talk about being neglected but your mom made you a lot of costumes. That seems incongruous.”

My mom didn’t know how to budget. My mom had a lot of very bad things happen to her that were outside of her control. We had periods where we were stable and flush and my mom had a lot of skills that make her a very good stereotypical mother. Then there were the bad periods. The bad periods were a kind of bad kids shouldn’t have.

I didn’t say any more. Someone else said, “Some of us have basically had two mothers.” I nodded and said yeah.

That is all I can say to a group of people who don’t know me if I don’t want to repulse people. If I don’t want to be disgusting. That is what I say when I have enough control. When I am appropriate enough.

I was absofuckinglotely stupid. Err, it’s a long story but I noticed after deleting my facebook account that Noah never unfriended my niece. I caught up on her life. I didn’t need to know that. I saw that my mom now has an account. My sister has posted on her wall over and over how she is the best mommy in the world and my sister is so lucky to have her. My sister said, “You should have stopped with me because it doesn’t get any better than this!”

My sister is a pedophile. But if my mom hadn’t been married to my dad would that have happened? Probably not. My sister and my mother both probably would have had better lives without my father–even if they had been poor.

I feel like they should put my face on the poster for why abortion should be safe and legal. I was the product of rape. I was not wanted. Look what fucking happens.

All of that “doesn’t matter now” and “don’t think about it”. I’m here. It doesn’t matter that my family treated me very badly I am not treated badly any more.

I watched another movie about a mean family last night. Another Happy Day. Unless you want to look at mean family dynamics I don’t recommend it. But it is well acted. I hate them all. They are all fucking assholes. Good job.

It is kind of weird and amazing to me how nice the people in my house are. I feel a lot of pride in that. We take turns. We share. We are all generous. We don’t shout very much. We hug a lot. We laugh a lot. We talk a lot. Here people are allowed to talk.

I listen to my kids and actively respond until I feel like my ears are going to bleed and I have horrifying headaches. It is really hard. I don’t care. This is the most important thing I will ever do in my whole fucking life.

Nothing else matters to me compared to the relationship I have with my children. I have that luxury and that privilege because Noah supports us very well.

I won the poor girl lottery. I didn’t do it by being the prettiest. I’ve been reading The Moral Animal so I’m thinking about what got my genes into the gene pool. I was interesting to Noah specifically because of the overwhelming intensity that normally repulses people. He liked me because I am disgusting.

~~It’s kind of weird.~~ It’s fucking ridiculously weird. I could not have married a “normal” person. Noah likes that I change. He encourages it. He wants me to learn new things and be different in five years–provided there is still a lot of sex.

If sex is something I need to provide at that kind of level forever then I need a lot of specific support around doing so. Sex is literally harder on my body than average. I have a lot of internal damage. I need to stop having sex that hurts. It has an overall negative impact on my life. That’s going to be weird to figure out. How do I reveal those details to someone? How do I learn how to insist that those details matter even though I’m not pretty?

What I got from the bdsm community is there are two kinds of women. The pretty ones you want to be seen with and the ones you want to hurt really really badly behind closed doors. Often the ones who are willing to put up with being hurt like that aren’t all that attractive. Only the most hard core of sadists don’t care at all about how pretty a woman is if she will take a lot of pain. I’m probably an extreme masochist compared to the “normal” population but I am not extreme in the little elite world I watched from the edges. I don’t want to be. I’ve been hurt enough. But I wasn’t really pretty enough to be the pretty kind of girlfriend. I was… just not quite good enough.

I don’t think it was good for me to spend that much time around fetish models and photographers and producers. I don’t like the frank appraisal of my worth. I don’t like hearing the speculation about what price looking at me could be sold for. How much humiliation would I be willing to tolerate? Could they put me on a diet first?

I think I ate so much while I lived with my Owner because I really really really didn’t want to be prettier. I didn’t want more of them interested in me. They were scary. These days I’m feeling scared of them again. I feel like maybe it is time to back away from that community entirely for a bit.

I don’t do abrupt switches in social dynamics very well. Having to completely change my boundaries is hard. I have trouble jumping tracks in my head so I freeze as I try to figure out what to do. Which is taken as consent.

I spend a lot of time wishing I lived in a tribal community so I could go outside and work with women during the day but I still had a home to hide in when I needed peace. I want my children to run off and play with their friends while I keep our home.

We’re figuring it out. We are trying to set up daily visits to the local pool with the home schooling kids in our town. It’s not living in a tribal community but it is something. I’m keeping my mouth shut enough. I am not repulsing people too much. It’s hard to always be afraid that people will discover how bad I am.

I am not ashamed of being an adult and sleeping with a lot of people. I’m not ashamed of doing drugs or even of mutilating myself. Those are things that I have done. Kind of like dancing. I tried them. I saw how they worked for me.

I had to find out a lot about my self hatred and where it comes from. If I don’t want to blindly teach what I know then I have to ensure that I know what I was taught and make specific active choices to be different.

A lot of people in my life tell me to just move on. Stop worrying about it and just do things that make me happy and it will work out. I uhhh don’t agree. I don’t see those people ending up in places in life I want to go. I don’t actually see anyone as particular inspiration for what I want. Uhm, sorry everyone.

I feel like I need to stop talking before I get in trouble. And Calli wants me to come in. That makes sense.

Living post-rape

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I drove home from Disneyland today and I spent most of the drive thinking about rape. How the public “standard” is violent stranger rape it’s… so completely missing the point.

Rape is someone you know just pushing too hard. Rape is very rarely a stranger jumping out of the bushes. Ok, that does happen. But it’s incredibly rare. As a species the risk for engaging in that kind of behavior is too great. Most men have incredibly high impetus to not try that sort of funny business. When I talk about rape culture that isn’t what I’m talking about.

My dad was a rapist. He raped his wife, his daughters, his son, his sisters, the children of his girlfriends… I don’t know where the list went from there. My dad is dead. He killed himself because he couldn’t handle going to prison. He died the morning his trial was to begin. He had already fully confessed. He gave them a lot of details and corroborating evidence that I had not given told the detectives about. I wrote a book about my childhood and I poured every detail I could remember. It’s 160 pages. That’s both a lot of remembering and not so much.

I mean, I did gloss over details and all. But if my dad raped me way more than I remember… when in the hell did it happen? What don’t I remember? I kind of want to read his confession and I kind of don’t. I’m pretty sure I could get it but it would take work. The trial never technically happened but I don’t think they get rid of evidence anyway.

I love my dad. I love my mom. I love my sister. I love my brothers. But I can’t be near them. Well, my dad is dead, Tommy too. But I divorced my mom and sister and brother and extended family.

It doesn’t matter if I love them. They poison me. They tell me it is not ok for me to inconvenience them when I go through trauma that kills people. I’m kind of indignant on this score. I was not allowed to speak when I was a child–I was slapped into submission. Now it is “digging up the past” and “You’re remembering wrong”. Oh man.

It doesn’t matter how much I love them. They hurt me. They tell me to be a prostitute. They tell me actively and specifically that I am required to have sex with any man who wants to have sex with me especially my family members. I mean… eww.

It doesn’t matter how much I love them. My children can’t grow up knowing those people and that dynamic. I don’t forking think so.

In the first year we were married my husband and I agreed that some day he could ignore me saying “no” and push for sex. I imagined in my head some night of casually saying no and ending up playing a dead fish. I’ve certainly played that game before.

He picked the day I turned my sister in to CPS. I was a mandated reporter. When she laughed and told me about the 12 year old with alcohol poisoning in her house I had to call. I was completely hysterical. I was breaking every taboo of my family. We are white trash. You don’t fucking nark. The police are the enemy. They want to hurt us. It’s a thing.

We beat the shit out of each other. It was really brutal. He’s a mean bastard when he wants to be. I think he partially does that because it makes me appreciate him being nice to me the vast majority of the time.

I’ve told him bluntly that I will never be raped again. He has a lot of enlightened self interest. And he only raped me because I had given him explicit consent with a set of boundaries I didn’t properly think about. Whoops. Ok. I’ve played that game to the end. I’m done now.

It’s kind of weird. I was 25 then. So I had a period of about 23 or 24 years where I was raped every so often by a new person.

It’s really kind of weird to be thinking about my life now as “post-rape”. And it is difficult to trust my husband. I don’t very much. I mean… I do… but I have walls I didn’t used to have. I protect me actively more now. I keep more of me hidden from him and that feels hard. It means I have no one to share those things with.

I want a mother so bad. But my mother isn’t a mother. She’s a monster. And I love her. But I can’t let her destroy my kids.

My mom tried to tell me, “But I wouldn’t have the same kind of influence on them that I had on you.” You bet your skippy you won’t.

I am ridiculously attentive. I don’t hover, but I pay attention. My kids feel special and loved. They feel like they have a lot to give the world and many things they want to hurry up and get doing.

It’s so different from my childhood. It’s hard to watch sometimes. I feel like I am constantly having this pity party track in my brain as I see what I had to go through at their ages. As I realize just how much of a baby I was oh god. How could they have done that to me?

My father liked to penetrate my vagina while in amusement parks. That was his favorite way to spend the day together as a family. We went often. He always had me sit on his lap. His hand was always inside me. I had to not react. I had to sit very still and barely breathe.

When I watch my children exist in the world sometimes I feel like I am watching them through a sheet of glass. I am still holding my breath and trying to not exist. I wish I could feel the same joy they feel but I can’t. I feel dead.

I feel like I have to create a new person out of whole cloth. I don’t know what else to do now. I was told what I was supposed to do. But I’m not doing it. I’m being bad. Aren’t I?

I don’t know. It’s very confusing sometimes.

I’m doing it.

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I spend a fair bit of time trying to figure out how to appropriately talk about mental illness with children. I also feel compelled to figure out how to explain stuff to friend’s kids some day. I will get questions. Recently I was relaying the story of shooting my mom in the face with the kitchen faucet (one of those neat ones with a tube so you can rinse off the whole sink) because she was being nasty and a kid asked me what she said to me. I told him I would tell him when he is older. He didn’t like that.

My kids need to understand why I medicate. They need to understand why I keep them away from it. Bodies are different. People have different needs. I assume that diabetics explain to their children why they must never play with insulin.

Right now the explanation that in my head feels “age appropriate” is “I had a lot of very unusual life experiences. I felt scared a lot. My body forgot how to feel not-scared. The medication I take lets my body understand oh yeah–nothing bad is happening because my body gets confused. It’s very annoying and inconvenient. This is why we ensure that you don’t spend much time feeling scared. I don’t want you to need medications to correct problems in your body so we are going to try to avoid creating them. Medicines are extracted or created in a wide variety of ways. This plant releases its medicine best by burning. But any kind of smoke at all is very bad for your body–it’s an irritant. It is hurting me. Right now the balance of my life is such that I need the help in my brain enough to deal with the fact that I am hurting my body. It’s not forever. Your body is perfect still. Let’s keep it that way as long as possible. All medications should be prescribed by a doctor.”

That feels kid-appropriate to me.

Yesterday was nice. I had several moments of reflection throughout the day where I managed to shut off the hand-wringing-oh-no-I-can’t-do-this voice that lives in the back of my head. The voice that occasionally rises to a panicked frenzy and it is all I can do to not find a dark closet and hide in it and beat my head till I drown it out. I used to do that, before I had kids. Now I don’t really have time for that.

Now mostly I mutter “shut up” every so often and try to ignore it. But it is a loud voice. It counts as background noise in my hearing and makes it harder to follow conversations.

Shanna climbed in bed with us in the middle of the night. The thing I am looking forward to the most about our trip to Disneyland next week is sleeping with the girls in a large and comfortable bed. I really like sleeping with them. They make me feel good about myself because they love me so much. And they do not fear me.

Looking into Shanna’s face in the middle of the night is one of the only times the I can’t do it voice is silent. When I look at my sleeping daughter I think I’m doing it. She is so wonderful she takes my breath away. I do not understand how I was blessed this much. We have such a pleasant relationship. We are really nice to each other.

My kids want to be near me because being near me is a pleasant experience. That feels so good. My children do not flinch. We are all yellers–they don’t take it as threatening. We just happen to express ourselves with force.

I like to let Shanna run and run and run and run in a field until I can barely see her and then I scream, “Come back now” and she does. She turns on a dime. It is miraculous to me the way she knows how and when to push the boundaries with me. She only rarely is impulsive in inappropriate places. Mostly, because I over-explain everything, she knows what I want from her behavior in different environments.

“In Disneyland you don’t have to hold my hand the whole time–I know that irritates you–but you do need to be able to reach out your hand and touch me the whole time. That’s how you know how far away to be. It’s a big crowd and you could get pushed away from me easily.”

I’m starting to feel excited about the trip. We plan to spend most of the days in the pool at the water slide. Ha.

I like being forced to look at them. I probably won’t really carry my phone around. Unschooling is a way of life. I try really hard to not distract myself during the day. My job for the next fifteen years is to be available to them for help with learning.

I feel the most joy I have ever felt. I confess that I partially feel a bit cocky that I’m not trying to actively teach Shanna anything “academic” at this point but she’s learning it anyway. Oh wow! It works! She has mostly taught herself to read. I will give 2-5 minutes of feedback at her request once in a while and I think that’s only happened three or so times.

I want to find out who she will be. I’m really interested.

It’s really kind of funny how “gendered” behavior is working in my house. They both have “intensely male” interests and attitudes right along side their uberfemme girly stuff. I really like that the princesses are exploring outer space. With a sword. That pretty much exactly seems right to me. We aren’t so big on the guns. Hand to hand combat is much more fun.

Today I’m packing. And cleaning. I have to get the whole house picked up and prepared because Noah is going to steam clean the carpets while we are gone. I feel very weird that my instant impulsive follow to that statement is, “I’m a lucky bitch” What in the hell has happened to me? Ok. Yeah. I’m kind of a freak now.

If you aren’t a parent–strongly consider whether you want to be deeply grateful for carpet cleaning. If that seems icki–don’t have kids. Heh.

Calli is past potty training. We haven’t had an accident on the floor in months. Oh man.

I’m going to have a more difficult relationship with Calli because she resents the fuck out of sharing me with Shanna. She doesn’t ever seem to feel like she gets enough of me. I do give her one on one time every day but I can’t get rid of my older child. There has been a rough bump around language acquisition. She gets so frustrated with having Shanna nearby and when she is trying to talk and Shanna talks over her… woo boy. I remember being the baby.

The dynamics here are interesting. We have specific dogma around behaviors in order to smooth things out. I hear lots of screaming recitals of “Moms rules” when I’m not in the room. Uhm, well it’s a process.

Shanna’s favorite is, “We are a sharing family.” She has a hard time with the fact that this doesn’t mean she gets to eat her share and my share and Noah’s share and Calli’s share. We should share with her after she finishes eating the fastest–right?

The flip side is she will hand her bowl over to someone if they ask before she has bolted the food down. She isn’t attached. She’s just ravenous. It is really interesting to watch them share. They share food with joy. I like it.

Toys… well they will have a long life of working out conflicts. We are working on doing so without hitting, biting, kicking, screaming, pinching, spitting, pushing, or intimidating someone. You have to be persuasive. Make your case. Oh, and no whining. Or pestering. Asking more than three times is pestering and then you get an automatic no for the day.

I’m firm but not mean. I think. I am really controlling. I feel very weird about that. But I’m very controlling about how they treat me. I have to believe this is healthy. You can’t hit me. You can’t kick me. You can’t spit on me. You can’t scream in my ear because it causes blinding headaches that last for days. etc and so on.

I believe with every part of me that if I want my kids to be nice to me I have to show them what it is like. I have to let them know that I feel frustrated with them sometimes and that’s ok and they will frustrated with me sometimes and that’s ok too. Even when we feel frustrated that is no cause to go being mean to someone you like as much as we like each other.

I’ve had several what I think of as Zen moments lately. All the bad tapes stopped playing for a few minutes. I felt really good about what I was doing. The kids and I were working on something together and I felt actively instructive in the good ways and they were thrilled I was paying attention to them and teaching them and I felt so fucking lucky that I get to have this life. I get to find out what a happy childhood looks like. That is not lost to me. I don’t get to have it–that is past. But I can see it. I was told that people like me couldn’t create one.

I’m doing it.

That was so much fun.

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The home schooling group got rained out of the park. So I posted on the meetup, “Why doesn’t everyone come over here?” There were 8? 9? families most of them with two kids. Some with three and some with one kid so it balanced out to about two kids each.

It was loud. It was insane. It was hella messy. It was so fun. The kids were running back and forth as fast as they could. There was so much laughing.

And the moms sat around and talked about how they are dealing with PTSD. (Ok, not all the moms–but there was a conversation in the kitchen with a couple of us.) And when I swore people expressed shock and horror but uhm mostly ignored it.

That’s the best it is going to get, right?

I kind of had trouble focusing on any conversation for more than a couple of minutes–but there was a lot going on.

It was really nice. No major injuries. No one got seriously in trouble.

Having a whole pack of kids over feels so nice. They were here for 4.5 hours. I’m so tired. And I have to hurry up and get ready for therapy tonight. At least I’m not as morose as I was yesterday.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Category Archives: kids

I have a very fun life when you stop and think about it

“Recovery” and a brain dump about being an asshole.

And then! We paint.

Now I understand “fuck cancer”

If you build it; they will come?

damn skippy

If you have too many projects going then you can’t die.

Thank you, hormones, that’s better.

Suicidal ideation

Perspective is everything

Or maybe you wake up feeling different.

Homeschooling and hubris and motherhood is not a career

Early Childhood Sexual Assault, Anger, and Parenting

Not competent enough.

Really disjointed; sorry.

dis·gust·ing

Living post-rape

I’m doing it.

That was so much fun.