Category Archives: mirrors

You have no power over me.

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Noah asked me why I am letting this woman have so much power over me. She responded to my first email with a short thing basically saying, “I was nine months pregnant when I sent this to you. Maybe I could have had more compassion. Can’t you forgive me?” I ranted back. I explained that I am going to spend every minute I am near her terrified that I am going to have another panic attack in front of her. I’m afraid of how nasty she will be next time because apparently I go through “chances” without ever having any idea I am doing something wrong. I told her I don’t really want to deal with that given that it took me a year to have the courage to leave the house because I was afraid of running into her.

Why am I so afraid of her? What does she represent to me? Noah pointed out that I’m creating my own self-fulfilling prophecies here. I say that people hate me and reject me foreverrrrrrr I will be aloooooooooooooone foreverrrrrrrrrrr. Ahem. Or something like that. She apologized, why don’t I accept the apology?

If she had sent some kind of an apology spontaneously instead of because she couldn’t ignore me any longer I would have had a different reaction. She didn’t want to apologize. She doesn’t think she did anything wrong.

Why does she have so much power? Why does her disapproval matter? Because I spent about a year telling her intimate things. It didn’t feel like the break up of a “friendship”. This was as emotionally intense as a romantic relationship. Since I had kids I have been bonding a lot more strongly with women. I am getting too attached too quickly, apparently. I told this woman extensively about my mental health issues and more specifically about my life. Then she shamed me.

I don’t like someone deliberately shaming me. I shouldn’t care what she thinks. I don’t have anything invested in her opinion. She is not going to be part of my life again if I can help. She responded to my last rant saying she left the Meet Up group.

She’s right that it will be hard to avoid one another given that she lives twenty minutes away. I get to ask her for space once. Past that she really doesn’t have to give me any room. She gets to live her life as well. She lives around here and there is a finite number of kid things. I can’t keep her out of all of them. That’s not cool to her kids. But I can ask her to stop showing up at my gosh darn park day, once.

There were four of us. We spent over a year hanging out together at least once and up to four times a week. When we got together we would spend at least five hours, sometimes up to nine hours. We did a lot of long-term talking about things that our kids would do. We spent holidays together. Then I got told that I was out of chances completely out of the blue after I had a panic attack.

I was punished by the removal of two peoples love because I was bad. Because I am crazy.

So what happened was I was on edge to start with. I was at the beginning of the unravel I had last year. Shanna was in a brief hitting phase (it lasted less than a month). She hit this other little boy twice and I pulled her into the bedroom and told her that if she did it again we would have to go. It was not nice to repeatedly hit someone in their own house. That’s just really over the line for me. She was two. No she didn’t “get it” but if children never have consequences for their actions they will never “get it”. Of course she hit him again. And right as I was telling her in a ranty voice that if she hits people we have to leave Calli had a dirty diaper. I tried to get Shanna to sit still while I changed it because she lost the privilege of playing. We walked out with me repeatedly saying in a louder-than-necessary voice something to the effect of “It’s not ok to hit people. When you hit people there are consequences. Get your butt out to the van. No, don’t play. You are in trouble. It’s not ok to hit people.” I never called her a name. I wasn’t demeaning. I wasn’t insulting or nasty. My tone of voice was really harsh and loud. I couldn’t breath and my heart was racing. Dealing with both kids in that moment was hard and over whelming.

That night I received an email telling me that she didn’t want to know me any more because my behavior is over the top and I am mean to Shanna. I don’t have age appropriate expectations.

Uhm, I expect my two year old to hit people. I think it is then my job to enforce consequences so she can have some idea that it’s not a great plan. I don’t hit my kids. I don’t call them names. I don’t put them down. But I do separate them from their friends when they can’t play nicely. I guess that’s not “age appropriate”.

I feel defensive and angry. I feel like for some reason she has the power to cause other people to share her opinions. I’m scared that she would join this play group and people who currently tolerate me would no longer want to because she would sit there and gossip about my faults. I’m worried because the “Attachment Parenting” community is very harsh and dogmatic. They absolutely encourage shunning people who do not completely follow the party line.

I have mixed feelings because I wonder if her nastygram was a good thing. I wonder if I really am a mean nasty person. Shanna really is a strange mini-adult. I don’t tolerate a lot of “age appropriate” behaviors most of the time. I set really firm boundaries around them. Am I somehow robbing them because I expect manners? Obviously I am insecure.

I believe deep in my heart that I am nice to my kids. I get angry, yes. My anger is bigger than a lot of peoples, yes. My kids are going to have to deal with being my kids. I have mental illness. That’s just a fact. I may always experience panic attacks. I don’t know. I have no crystal ball. My kids have to be near me. It isn’t possible for me to make my panic attacks completely invisible and silent to them. I talk to them a lot about how they aren’t responsible for my emotions and my behavior.

Awhile ago I was having a panic attack and angry with Shanna over something. She started crying. I looked at her and asked her if she was afraid. She told me yes. I sunk down to the floor and put my head down. I told her that I was doing something wrong then. Kids shouldn’t be afraid of their mothers. Mothers are never supposed to hurt kids. I sat up and pulled her into my lap. I asked her to explain what she understood about why I was upset. She did a good job. I explained the rest of the back story on why I don’t want her doing _______. I told her that I was sorry I scared her. I didn’t mean to. She hugged me and said that she would try not to do _________ again. I thanked her.

But I’m a terrible person, right? It’s not ok to ever raise your voice. It’s not ok to ever be angry.

Wait, what? Oh good grief. Why do I give this idiocy so much power over me? Partially because it feels like the drumbeat for my stage of life. It’s not as if this woman is the only one presenting that image. I spent way too much time on Mothering.com.

She was just an echo chamber for what I feel society as a whole wants from me. The vast majority of the time if I express any anger near anyone there is some comment on it. “Don’t hold back, tell me how you really feel.” “My son is an empath so you can’t get angry near him.” “You get angry really quickly.” I suppose that depends on how you look at it.

Why does she have so much power over me. Because she is able to smile and spew poison. Because I am very susceptible to girl games. Because I was taken down many many pegs. And now she has come and joined my new hierarchy. Those kinds of status things feel extremely transitory. I don’t really want to get a sudden demotion.

When I transferred to Leigh High School during my freshman year of high school I started going by a nickname derived from my middle name. After I was there for a month or so someone leaved over a teacher’s shoulder and said, “Wait. Your name is Kristine? Like Krissy? Are you Krissy Archer? That Krissy Archer?” I had sex with multiple people at my previous school. It was part of the reason I ran. I didn’t want to deal with that reputation when I moved. Abruptly I had someone calling me a whore in every class.

And women are vicious in a way that is far more hurtful. They don’t just insult you and call it a day. They get close to you and then use withdrawal of love as a weapon. They talk to your friends. They lower the general opinion people have of you. Often by repeating half-true stories. The more they smile at you while they are doing this the more problems you will have later.

My kids need a fucking stable group of friends. I really don’t want to play the social status game. I only kind of interact with the other parents. I really need for my behavior and relationship with my children to be judged based on the things we actually do. Not the things people speculate that we might do because they witness some of our worst interactions. Everyone has their worst interactions. If mine involve my tone of voice being ranty and harsh while I say things that are otherwise fairly reasonable I will live with that and consider it a life well lived. I don’t rant very often. It’s quite rare. And Shanna is quick to tell me that my tone of voice isn’t ok and I need to change it. I don’t think she is a beat down child.

Why have I set her up as a judge and jury I have to defend myself from? Because most other people don’t pay enough attention to me for me to feel like they would bother judging me? And yet mob mentality is very real. I am weird. I am reminded over and over again in a variety of ways (parenting books like this try to make it a joke) that for me to be weird is a problem for my kids. They will suffer for it. It will be my fault and that’s bad. I should be trying to blend into the crowd. That book in particular stressed how it is ok that you know you don’t fit in but you have to learn how to fake it so your kid isn’t punished. It’s true if you are in a public school. I don’t want it to be true at our home school group.

It’s kind of like playing Plants Vs. Zombies. She’s a double pea shooter walking towards me. She’s going to kill me. She feels like she can poison my environment. She was certainly good at having me like her and think well of her. Until she turned on me abruptly and was really nasty. Oh shit I don’t want that kind of poison in the well. It’s just a bad idea.

Why does she have so much power over me? Her brand of poison is pretty powerful. I believe she mostly liked being friends with me. But I’m one of those polarizing figures. She liked me a lot but the things she didn’t like she disliked a lot. I don’t need to have someone who is good at making me like them but who occasionally tells me I am a terrible person in my life. That’s kind of my crack. What’s our favorite game, Noah?

I don’t want her in the group because all of a sudden park day becomes a whole different beast for me. I no longer have to think of whether I’m up for all of the basic things. I have to think about how secure I feel that I can sit off to the side quietly and not get into a conversation that might trigger a panic attack. Because it absolutely not ok to have a panic attack with that woman nearby. Oh God. Poor Shanna might lose more friends. And it would be All My Fault.

I’m not planning to move. Shanna is stuck here. She has to make friends here. I have to not fuck this up.

Why does she have power over me? Because I’m not good at taking it back once I give it to someone. Why the fuck do I care what Tom thinks? Why in the fuck do I care what my mother thinks? Because I do. Because I love them. Because I wish with every part of me that they thought I was good. Because I am very used to people who profess to love me telling me that I am horrible. I have a magnetic attraction to this cycle. I like people who have more control than I have who tell me I am bad for not having it. It’s really pretty fucked up and self-loathing of me.

Why does she have power over me? Because in my experience, other than the people I live with, people don’t give other people second chances. Not really. She has a bad opinion of me. I’m supposed to try and prove that I am worthy of a second chance. Now she has told me that I am going through chances so I can be held to it.

Noah thinks I should just think of her as a stupid person and move on with my life not caring how she feels about me. He has a point.

Even though I feel wicked uncomfortable about having done so I created a socially safe place for me. I hope. I don’t think I will have a perfect experience without her there. But I’m not going to be judged on something half remembered from a long time ago.

I’m not at this group to make friends. I am cordial. I participate in conversations enough that I sort of look like part of the group. Mostly I play with the kids or run. People probably either think I am aloof or shy. I’m ok with either. I have told more than one person that I have horrible social anxiety. That’s as personal as I have gotten.

Where is this space in our life for acquaintances? For community? For people who are around but with whom you don’t have a personal connection? If I keep people out at arms length then they can be out at arms length forever. What they do has very little effect on me. If I let someone in closer they have to be shoved much much further than just arms length away when they hurt me. It’s not a very forgiving system. My problem is I assign too much intent to behaviors. People aren’t trying to hurt me. They are trying to express their emotions.

She felt intimidated by me. So she attacked. Normal. The person who sent the recent accusatory letter? He’s not really upset because of my actions. He’s upset about things in his life and I’m a good target. He at least thinks he is doing a good thing.

It’s not about me. Don’t make excuses. Don’t apologize. She apologized to me. Shouldn’t I take that at face value? What I should do is get off my butt and go eat a banana. Then get dressed. Then go run. Today my wonderful friend Taylor is coming over. That guarantees a good day. I’m going to stop thinking about her. I asked her to leave the group and she did. I may run into her again some day and then I will have to revisit this emotional experience. That time I won’t get to ask her to leave a group. She lives here too. It’s not ok to make her pay for the rest of her life. That’s really not cool. Hell, in a few years I may suddenly grow up and decide I don’t give a shit. Folks either like me or they don’t and I will have been part of the group long enough that it really won’t matter.

But I’m not there yet. My skin is not that thick. It’s too raw. It’s too scary. I have a hard time getting out of the house. If I knew she was going to be there I wouldn’t be able to go. I wouldn’t be able to put my kids through the experience of dealing with my panic attacks. That’s not fair.

I’m going to go now.

Memory lane

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I had dinner with my ex last night. That was interesting. I asked him a lot of questions and he answered as best he could. I told him point blank that I’m glad the kids thing worked out or I would have kicked myself for the rest of my life for leaving him. I actually kind of wonder if he lost a little bit of his sparkle for me last night. I think I had forgotten a lot of things. His opinion is the only opinion. I remember why we didn’t argue: I bit my tongue a lot. There was no point in discussing controversial topics because he has already made up his mind and he will be condescending, dismissive, and really pretty rude the entire time you talk about something that isn’t his thing. For example: organic farming. He believes it is going to be the destruction of the human race. He won’t talk about the problems from animal feed lots or mono-crops. He thinks there aren’t any problems. Right. I let it go because I don’t care about converting him.

Noah listens to any crack brained thing I bring up in a polite way and when he is doubtful he carefully says, “Can I see some of where you found this information?” If I’m using an idiotic source he lets me down gently. It’s nice to be reminded that for the first time in my life I live with someone who genuinely thinks of me as an intelligent person. I had forgotten. I had forgotten how much everyone before him made me feel like I should shut up and sit down and just let them speak because they are smarter than me. I didn’t always do it but I felt it.

There has been a lot of research lately on how hard it is to change peoples minds. The less smart someone is the more likely they are to be really entrenched in everything they know. Holy crap Tom is narrow minded. He knows what he knows and believes there is no validity in any point of view he disagrees with. It’s fascinating.

He wants to live in a Sci Fi future. He thinks things will be every increasingly technical and people will move to increasingly thinking jobs. I think that is folly. If you look a distribution of intelligence, 50% of people are below average. You really think that everyone in the world should sit on their ass and do a computer job? Really? Not all of us would even enjoy that let alone be capable. I think we should be encouraging people to work more with their bodies if they show the slightest inclination. We are a nation of people who are desperately unfit and unhealthy. The solution is not more sloth.

He wants to have fun. He doesn’t want to create anything in particular. His job is creative enough for him. Every year or so he has a new hardware design project. He is designing things that use basically entirely outside components. He’s figuring out how to assemble the right configuration of after market parts. He doesn’t have much desire to really grow the business. He wants to keep very busy (he’s a work-a-holic in my “I lived with him” opinion) at work and make a lot of money so he can have more and more fun. That means racing his Porsche, tying up and sexually controlling women, and working. I told him to go get a vasectomy so he can make damn sure he never accidentally ends up a parent because he wouldn’t be a good one.

Tom is a just fine person. I think I just got over him romantically. It was sudden. I no longer look up to him. He doesn’t have a talent or a skill I respect any more. That was weird to notice. I am now how old he was when we met. I feel disappointed looking at what he has done with his life in the last twelve years since we met. He doesn’t have to give a shit about my disappointment, in fact he doesn’t. He has enjoyed his life. He wants to keep doing the same shit for another thirty or forty years before he croaks. He is perfectly happy. Another woman will always come along, right? SM is more interesting with new people any way. I don’t want that life and I’m really glad I only stayed for four years. I have now been married for longer than I dated Tom. Noah is a larger influence on my character than Tom was. I’m glad for that.

I asked Tom what it was like living with someone as crazy as me. He said he was unaware of it. I cried alone and he didn’t know it existed. He didn’t know I was unstable.

I cut and was suicidal a great deal while I lived with him. I was still interacting with my family a fair bit. I was quite unstable. He didn’t notice. He didn’t fucking notice. You have got to be fucking kidding me. Seriously? You are that self-involved? You never noticed that your partner of four years was unstable emotionally? It makes me think I should feel a lot more confident in my acting skills. Maybe I am even harder to read than Noah says. I cultivate being hard to read. I practice. Really. I do not want to give away the intensity of my emotions when I am around people. It’s dangerous to be noticed for your strong emotions. I didn’t know I was that good though. Tom remembers that we had a lot of fun and got along well. That’s good.

Tom has never read any of my writing. He doesn’t want to know what goes on in my head. That may be brilliant of him. I didn’t understand how much my writing has always contained a plea for someone to read it and come talk to me about it. Noah does. Noah is the only fucking person who is interested in crawling as deeply into my head as possible. It was really wonderful to be reminded what it is like to be in the room with someone who requires me to have a brick wall between myself and him. Noah is interested in what I am thinking and feeling, pretty much at any point. Sometimes he is distracted with other bits of life but if I write it down and leave it for him he always catches up. He has read my entire archive on every blogging site I have ever used. Multiple times. That makes me cry. Oh my G-d he actually loves me. He thinks I am worth that kind of time and attention. I write a fuck ton and I’ve been blogging for over nine years. I need to poke around old storage disks and see if I can find my g-blog archive. I’m not sure if I still have it and that is sad. I should probably make another LJ book so that I have a copy of it. Other people write in paper journals and keep them.

All of a sudden I feel a little spark of interest in finding out what I actually like about bdsm. I spent a lot of time last night feeling like I’m just not a pervert any more. I have no interest in the kind of stuff Tom is into. I’m not interested in being degraded for someone else’s amusement any more. I think the joke is kind of thin at this point. Yes, yes, I know that I am disgusting and should suffer. Blah blah. I’m tired of the role I had to fill. I’m tired of having to denigrate my own thinking abilities in order to tolerate being bossed around by someone who is so not smarter than me. He knows different things than me and he believes that the only important things to know are the things he knows. He thinks my things aren’t worthy of much respect. That is probably hyperbole. He doesn’t bother to notice that my things are there so he doesn’t have to listen to me on any topic because I’m not very educated. Or something. “Sure I can “listen” to you blather on about something idiotic while I roll my eyes and don’t really listen.” It’s really very similar to how I feel with Alex. To be fair Alex has dramatically improved in this area in one on one conversations, in particular since he started working on it with his therapist. It’s still a thing.

Tom told me he hasn’t done Daddy/daughter play since me and he hasn’t been interested in rape play either. For all of the years I have known Noah he has been staunchly uninterested in Daddy/daughter play–not his kink. After he read the book and he understood the emotional power it has for me he is suddenly interested. Rape play has been a major component of our life. Tom didn’t think I was a fine instrument to be played. He wanted to have fun with a buddy. Noah is consciously working on helping me change because we both want me to. It was weird to understand that at this really deep level last night. Tom knows very little about me. He knows hand wavey bad stuff happened. He knows a few details and will admit knowing them after a lot of pressure. Holy shit. That is actually kind of amazing. I remember Tom’s life. I pieced it together very carefully. I have a whole timeline constructed in my head about his family and school experiences from very young. I wanted to know him so I could serve him better.

We went to McDonald’s a lot, probably every week. Tom wants to rest when he is at home. He wants to eat on the go as he dashes to and from work and parties. It’s a lifestyle. So one time I asked for chicken nuggets and he asked what kind of sauce I wanted. I responded with, “The usual” and he said, “What’s the usual?” and I could feel my face involuntarily fall. We had been dating for multiple years at that point. “Sweet and Sour.” There was some little flick of memory in his face as he recalled my voice saying that over and over for years in his memory. He looked kind of guilty but turned around to the cashier without saying anything.

If I walk into any restaurant with Noah that I have ever been to he can tell me which foods I enjoyed and for what reasons and which drinks I particularly liked or disliked. Sometimes he makes me cry. It’s kind of embarrassing in public. Noah knows what I like. I think that is the most amazing thing in the whole world. He pays so much attention to me. How can a human being be capable of paying so much attention to me? He has a catalog of my smiles. He knows what kinds of memories go with which expressions because he looks at me and asks what I am thinking over and over.

Having dinner with Tom was intense. And then not. And then it was kind of boring. I couldn’t have a conversation with him because he wasn’t interested in my point of view. He was dismissive and cold. He didn’t mean to be. He could speak perfectly politely as long as he could feel it was entirely “fun”.  He wanted to have an agreeable conversation and he was perfectly happy to bulldoze and be rude and ensure that I didn’t conversationally disagree with him. I am so happy that I now live with someone who values my opinions even when he doesn’t agree with me. It was really nice to see that I have found someone who suits me far better. I am glad I kept looking.

I have to go run.

No social skills

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Today I went and talked to a man who does things. I feel like a lazy slacker when I hear about what he gets done. He’s running a little farm. He works a computer job 80 miles away from his farm and deals with that commute. He is high up in management for a variety of different annual events like historical re-enactment events and Burning Man. He has an intense life. I’m not going to bother to talk about his 15 active hobbies.

Just the thought of having to deal with that many people gives me the shivers. I can do a fairly heroic amount alone but having to work with people is hard. I don’t trust people. I never believe that any one else will deliver on what they promise so I can only plan for what I can accomplish alone. It’s rather limiting.

I will never have a family the way I picture in my head. I have Noah and Shanna and Calli and that’s it. And I’m god damn lucky to have them. There are people who love me. There are people who care about me a great deal. There are people who will try hard to help me. But they all go back to their families. I am not part of their families. I am a spoke person they can have a one on one relationship with occasionally but I’m not a big part of any one’s life. Except for Noah and Shanna and Calli.

I’ve been calling K every day because otherwise I can’t get through the afternoon without crying. I’m glad she lets me do that. I miss days occasionally because I don’t hear the alarm on my phone. I go through periods of talking to people daily or nearly daily on IM. They never seem to last very long.

I don’t really have people to share my life with outside of this house. I have people who want to see me once a year and get an update on how I am living my life. I’m impressed by the people who slog through this blog. I write because I am shouting into the void. I don’t know who or if anyone other than Noah is actually going to read any of it. The fact that people catch what I say bewilders me. I say so much because I have to see the words outside of my head but I know so little about the people who read. Even the people I “know” I don’t really understand. I rarely spend enough time with people to see past my projections onto them. I am not good at meeting people and treating them like a blank slate. I am always looking for patterns.

Patterns are important for my survival. At least they have been in the past. Patterns are causing me problems now because Noah doesn’t follow many patterns. He’s kind of weird. But he understands when I talk about the people in my life like characters in a story. He understands why I look for clues for how to react. Many of my assumptions are wrong. Why do I assume that people who come over to my house dislike me? Why do I physically react to them as if they were threatening? I can like someone and enjoy their company and still not know how to have a positive conversation with them. I always feel like I am being mean and they must think I am bad. (If you are thinking, even me? Yeah, probably.) I feel like I talk too much. I am rude. I dominate conversations. I take up too much space and I should shut up and sit in the back. My turn is over.

Ok you know how people talk about how homeschoolers “won’t be socialized”? Well. I went to public school so I got my socialization there. I think I had five or six teachers over my educational career tell me point blank in class to stop raising my hand because other people needed to have a turn. Teachers and people who are older than me and people in “authority” trigger me heavily. I have very strong internal meters that tell me that pretty much any talking is disrespectful. And I always say weird or wrong things.

I was at a party this weekend and two women were talking. They were doing that “build you up” sort of thing. Life is hard and we must be brave. You can never be too brave. You can never be too balanced. You can never be too strong.

I interrupted there and said, “Actually you have to be careful how you get stronger. Like right now I’m running and I’m learning a lot about how the muscles around the knee work and…” I went on for a while. I felt like a party pooper. “Oh hey, you know how you are trying to build her up and convince her to reach for the stars? Well here’s a cup of ice water in your face. You’re welcome.” I don’t mean to do it. I feel like such an asshole.

I don’t think it was actually that bad. I’m really not good at the art of conversation. It’s a skill and I’m sorely lacking in practice. The real problem is, Noah doesn’t mind if I’m an asshole and I point out things about him that sound rude as long as they are true. I think I grow more unfit for human companionship by the day.

I’m not sure why I have had such an upsurge of pervasive negative thought for the past few days. Is this my brain’s horrible reaction to Noah saying that I was out of the emergency phase?

Anxiety is energy that wants to be put to use but is instead being held in. What energy do I want to expend? Why do I feel so bad? I feel like talking about Sarah would be horribly disrespectful and rude. I’m having a lot of big feelings. I’m not sure why I think it would be disrespectful and rude, but I do. I’m not processing my emotions and it’s not working for me.

It’s not about a list of done-me-wrongs. We tipped the bucket. Lots of water came out. The drip isn’t starting back up again. I’m scared. I don’t get to control what happens in life. That’s hard. I feel sad. I miss my Sarah. Am I emailing her? No. Does that make me a passive aggressive bitch? Maybe. Things were said. Not all by me.

I’m scared and I’m sad. I hurt people.

I have had so many people tell me they were my “family” until I said or did something they didn’t like. I don’t see those people any more. They broke off contact. That’s just how life works. Some, many, of them resurface every few years for a phone call or dinner.

I got really good at lying to myself that I would have what I see in my head as how a family works. I’m too mean and I drive people away. I sit here and wonder why I am so broken. Why don’t I deserve what I see other people having? I missed that life path. It’s just not really an option for me. Pity party: table of one.

In my head I hear this rough amalgamation voice saying, “Don’t you realize that no one gives a shit that your mother didn’t love you? Get over yourself.” I should forget my shit and go out and join something. Subsume my identity into a group identity and stop thinking about my shit. Because my shit isn’t important. But when I get to the meeting or social event or class or or or or or or or I don’t know how to talk to people. I don’t know how to form relationships that go beyond a surface level. Because NOT BEING TAUGHT THOSE SKILLS IS PART OF MY SHIT.

It isn’t any one else’s problem. Well, that’s not true. What am I going to teach my children? Fuck. Who knows. We’ll see. I should go in. I should stop crying again.

Attachment and set patterns

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I’ve been slowly working my way through the Wikipedia article on Attachment Theory for about a week. It’s a beast. It makes me sad for some very specific reasons. I’ll start at the beginning. Attachment theory mostly focuses on what happens during the infant/toddler stage. Babies require stable care givers who respond promptly.

“The set-goal of the attachment behavioural system is to maintain a bond with an accessible and available attachment figure.[16] “Alarm” is the term used for activation of the attachment behavioural system caused by fear of danger. “Anxiety” is the anticipation or fear of being cut off from the attachment figure. If the figure is unavailable or unresponsive, separation distress occurs.[17] In infants, physical separation can cause anxiety and anger, followed by sadness and despair. By age three or four, physical separation is no longer such a threat to the child’s bond with the attachment figure. Threats to security in older children and adults arise from prolonged absence, breakdowns in communication, emotional unavailability or signs of rejection or abandonment.[16]“

We went to our local breakfast place on Easter, partially just to see the waitress. We like her a lot. This time she had an excited story to tell. Her daughter, seven years into a relationship, suddenly called her mom out of the blue and announced she was getting married and would mom like to help with stuff? Obviously this made our waitress’ year. She was so happy. She got to buy her daughter a dress and get her a bouquet and take pictures. I spent the rest of breakfast crying. I’m very glad she got to have that experience. There are a lot of reasons why Noah and I got married in a room with a drive-in-style preacher and no one else. There isn’t a picture of us. We had a wedding pint of Häagen-Dazs. I ask Noah fairly often if he ever feels weird about how alienated he is from his family. He doesn’t have much more of a relationship with his family than I do but he doesn’t have any specific reasons like I do. He just didn’t bond there. It’s weird to me. For me to maintain relationships with my mother or sister would involve me choosing not to see huge problematic behaviors. Noah has a different situation. I don’t really understand it.

My parents divorced when I was three. Supposedly up to that point I should have had a reasonably secure attachment. My mother was a stay at home mom. She breastfed me for more than six months (only partially–I always had bottles too). I believe that she coslept with me early on and moved me to my own bed fairly late by societal standards. She’s a light sleeper and always has been. I can’t imagine her ignoring my needs.

As Ann said, “You were clean, well fed, and well dressed. What was there to report?” But my mom ignored the fact that my father was molesting me. If you go further into the Wikipedia article you find:

“The most concerning pattern is disorganized attachment. About 80% of maltreated infants are likely to be classified as disorganized, as opposed to about 12% found in non-maltreated samples. Only about 15% of maltreated infants are likely to be classified as secure. Children with a disorganized pattern in infancy tend to show markedly disturbed patterns of relationships. Subsequently their relationships with peers can often be characterised by a “fight or flight” pattern of alternate aggression and withdrawal. Affected maltreated children are also more likely to become maltreating parents. A minority of maltreated children do not, instead achieving secure attachments, good relationships with peers and non-abusive parenting styles.[9] The link between insecure attachment, particularly the disorganized classification, and the emergence of childhood psychopathology is well-established, although it is a non-specific risk factor for future problems, not a pathology or a direct cause of pathology in itself.[40] “

The specific behaviors in a very young child that indicate disorganized attachment:

“Stereotypies on return such as freezing or rocking. Lack of coherent attachment strategy shown by contradictory, disoriented behaviours such as approaching but with the back turned.”

I’m not sure why it uses the word “stereotypies” but whatever. I can remember rocking; I still do it when I am very upset. And I have always frozen upon return of the person I am most attached to. I hold back. I am terrified of touching them. I need to be approached. Noah comes into the house and comes to me for a hug and a kiss. It’s nice. I know that my mother talked about these kinds of behaviors when I was small. Yes, one shouldn’t self-diagnose. Whatever.

“Over the short term, the stability of attachment classifications is high, but becomes less so over the long term.[9] It appears that stability of classification is linked to stability in caregiving conditions. Social stressors or negative life events—such as illness, death, abuse or divorce—are associated with instability of attachment patterns from infancy to early adulthood, particularly from secure to insecure.[46] Conversely, these difficulties sometimes reflect particular upheavals in people’s lives, which may change. Sometimes, parents’ responses change as the child develops, changing classification from insecure to secure. Fundamental changes can and do take place after the critical early period.[47] Physically abused and neglected children are less likely to develop secure attachments, and their insecure classifications tend to persist through the pre-school years. Neglect alone is associated with insecure attachment organisations, and rates of disorganized attachment are markedly elevated in maltreated infants.[40]
This situation is complicated by difficulties in assessing attachment classification in older age groups. The Strange Situation procedure is for ages 12 to 18 months only;[9] adapted versions exist for pre-school children.[48]“

Since I’m an adult none of this is exactly relevant and I’m just pulling things out of my ass. Awesome.

“Significance of attachment patterns

There is an extensive body of research demonstrating a significant association between attachment organisations and children’s functioning across multiple domains.[40] Early insecure attachment does not necessarily predict difficulties, but it is a liability for the child, particularly if similar parental behaviours continue throughout childhood.[47] Compared to that of securely attached children, the adjustment of insecure children in many spheres of life is not as soundly based, putting their future relationships in jeopardy. Although the link is not fully established by research and there are other influences besides attachment, secure infants are more likely to become socially competent than their insecure peers. Relationships formed with peers influence the acquisition of social skills, intellectual development and the formation of social identity. Classification of children’s peer status (popular, neglected or rejected) has been found to predict subsequent adjustment.[9] Insecure children, particularly avoidant children, are especially vulnerable to family risk. Their social and behavioural problems increase or decline with deterioration or improvement in parenting. However, an early secure attachment appears to have a lasting protective function.[51] As with attachment to parental figures, subsequent experiences may alter the course of development.[9]…

One explanation for the effects of early attachment classifications may lie in the internal working model mechanism. Internal models are not just “pictures” but refer to the feelings aroused. They enable a person to anticipate and interpret another’s behaviour and plan a response. If an infant experiences their caregiver as a source of security and support, they are more likely to develop a positive self-image and expect positive reactions from others. Conversely, a child from an abusive relationship with the caregiver may internalise a negative self-image and generalise negative expectations into other relationships. The internal working models on which attachment behaviour is based show a degree of continuity and stability. Children are likely to fall into the same categories as their primary caregivers indicating that the caregivers’ internal working models affect the way they relate to their child. This effect has been observed to continue across three generations. Bowlby believed that the earliest models formed were the most likely to persist because they existed in the subconscious. Such models are not, however, impervious to change given further relationship experiences; a minority of children have different attachment classifications with different caregivers.[9]
There is some evidence that gender differences in attachment patterns of adaptive significance begin to emerge in middle childhood. Insecure attachment and early psychosocial stress indicate the presence of environmental risk (for example poverty, mental illness, instability, minority status, violence). This can tend to favour the development of strategies for earlier reproduction. However, different patterns have different adaptive values for males and females. Insecure males tend to adopt avoidant strategies, whereas insecure females tend to adopt anxious/ambivalent strategies, unless they are in a very high risk environment. Adrenarche is proposed as the endocrine mechanism underlying the reorganisation of insecure attachment in middle childhood.[46]“

I describe myself as being “bad at monogamy” not polyamorous. (Not anymore! Just monogamous.) I am not all that familiar with the music of Amy Winehouse (and I didn’t hear about her until well after her death) but I have had people push a few songs at me recently. In particular: You Know I’m No Good just seems relevant to me. When I try to talk about “what kind of girl I am” that’s a lot of what I am talking about: That. She is compulsive sexually and very self-harming. Crying on the kitchen floor because you feel disgusted with yourself for your behavior, check. Sex you don’t even really enjoy, check. But you owe these men. They understand you. If you don’t put out then you are being part of The Embargo and you are bad. It’s just my place in life. He wanted to get off. What was I supposed to do other than get him off? (This is when I wish I had a guest post by Noah explaining the Embargo for me. I would link to it even though I think being self-referential is kind of hilarious.)

Back to this Attachment Theory stuff. Being sexually assaulted by one of my primary caregivers from toddlerhood (or earlier, who knows) means that I was pretty primed for not-perfect-attachment. And things in my household were far more chaotic than they appeared to the neighbors because my father was a raging alcoholic and drug addict. I think it is reasonable to assume that I am on the problematic end of things. I don’t think I have Reactive Attachment Disorder even though it is uncomfortable to read.

I had so much repeated sexual contact with neighbors over the years because I went out looking for some attention and affection anywhere I could get it. It wasn’t safe for me to ask for affection or attention at home. My sister has issues with being touched like I do. If I approached her at the wrong time I would end up in a lot of pain. It would always be phrased as my fault or an accident. I wasn’t supposed to say out loud, “You hurt me on purpose” because then she would actually slap me to “show me the difference.”

My mother was always preoccupied. Always thinking about other things, other people. I’m sure Shanna feels that way about me. I make up for it by spending many hours a day focusing on the kids. I only let my thoughts wander at pre-selected times. It’s hard to control. Back to the Attachment Theory stuff. It has only been applied to adults in terms of their romantic relationships. The basics of adult styles are:

“Securely attached adults tend to have positive views of themselves, their partners and their relationships. They feel comfortable with intimacy and independence, balancing the two. Anxious-preoccupied adults seek high levels of intimacy, approval and responsiveness from partners, becoming overly dependent. They tend to be less trusting, have less positive views about themselves and their partners, and may exhibit high levels of emotional expressiveness, worry and impulsiveness in their relationships. Dismissive-avoidant adults desire a high level of independence, often appearing to avoid attachment altogether. They view themselves as self-sufficient, invulnerable to attachment feelings and not needing close relationships. They tend to suppress their feelings, dealing with rejection by distancing themselves from partners of whom they often have a poor opinion. Fearful-avoidant adults have mixed feelings about close relationships, both desiring and feeling uncomfortable with emotional closeness. They tend to mistrust their partners and view themselves as unworthy. Like dismissive-avoidant adults, fearful-avoidant adults tend to seek less intimacy, suppressing their feelings.[7][52][53][54]“

I really like to date dismissive-avoidant men. (love) I kind of go back and forth between being anxious-preoccupied and and fearful-avoidant. Which means this isn’t something I can self-diagnose well. Regardless of which of them it’s pretty clear I’m not secure if you know what I mean. There is hope though.

“Some authors have suggested that adults do not hold a single set of working models. Instead, on one level they have a set of rules and assumptions about attachment relationships in general. On another level they hold information about specific relationships or relationship events. Information at different levels need not be consistent. Individuals can therefore hold different internal working models for different relationships.[56][57]“

So even though I am pretty clearly fucked up I could probably, with enough time and effort, learn how to have a secure relationship with Noah. He keeps assuring me that as long as something has the possibility of success, even if it is a low possibility, keep trying. I don’t understand why he picked me. I make it as hard as possible to have a relationship with me. I ask him to do very hard things all the time.

A friend told me a cool analogy: trust is like water dripping into a bucket. When there isn’t much water in the bucket it is hard to spill water out if the bucket tips a little. If the bucket is full it is easy to dump water out.

Every so often Noah and I tip the bucket. I want to say more. But it’s time to go in.

Always with the defensive, this girl.

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Yesterday was one of those magical running days. The kind where the beat of the music and my grief match up perfectly. It’s hard to describe what I enjoy about running. There are several stretches of blocks in my neighborhood that I use for sprinting. The lines on the sidewalk just require it. When I get to those specific streets I pray for the right fast song. I run until I can barely breathe. I run until I am gasping out sobs and I can barely see anymore because I am crying so hard. There is so very much to cry about.

I have so much grief. I feel like I will never stop grieving. I will never feel like I can move past these feelings. I’m trying to trust the process. I’m trying to believe that even though this cycle of mourning isn’t over it will end some day. I just don’t know when. It’s hard to keep going.

Why was I crying yesterday? It’s hard to remember specifics because I cover so many topics in my head. I spent a lot of time thinking about why I am the sort of person to send nasty judgmental shaming letters to. I get them every so often. I trigger the shit out of people. It’s the same reason my former therapist fired me. I don’t do things how other people think they should be done. In the process I am deeply distressing. People don’t like feeling distressed by how “off from the norm” I am. They want me to fall back in line, damnit. I should do _________ in order to be acceptable to them. I can’t.

I can’t ever be acceptable to everyone in my life. That isn’t an option open to me. I will always bother people in some way on some level. Pretty much everyone. I will always talk about subjects that make you uncomfortable, no matter who you are. I will search for that topic that bothers you the most and then I will harp on it constantly. I do this on an unconscious level. I default to challenging people. A lot of the time I’m not doing it on purpose. I believe with every part of me that I would not have survived if I was willing to let other people set the terms of my reality. I would have crumbled a long time ago. I would have to believe that I was who they say I am.

This time I would have to believe I am an addict. I am bad. I am helpless before these things that control me. My cutting, anger, drug use, and sexual activity are bad. I am bad for being addicted to these things. Bad. Bad. Bad. I know. I’ve always known. I know that you think I am bad. That doesn’t mean that you are right or that I have to agree. That’s an opinion not a provable set of facts. I’m obsessive (even though I hear this kind of pedantry means you lose the argument I am going to do this anyway because it is my fucking blog and I’m only arguing with myself which means there is no such thing as losing) so here’s a definition for you:

Addiction is defined as the continued use of a mood altering substance or behaviour despite adverse consequences.[1] This can include, but is not limited to, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, exercise abuse, and gambling. Some defining characteristics of addiction include: impaired control over subtances/behaviour, preoccupation with substance/behaviour, continued use despite consequences, and denial.[2] Habits and patterns associated with addiction are typically characterized by immediate gratification (short-term reward), coupled with delayed deleterious effects (long-term costs).[3]Physiological dependence occurs when the body has to adjust to the substance by incorporating the substance into its ‘normal’ functioning.[4] This state creates the conditions of tolerance, and withdrawal. Tolerance is the process by which the body continually adapts to the substance and requires increasingly larger amounts to achieve the original effects. Withdrawal refers to physical and psychological symptoms people experience when reducing or discontinuing a substance the body had become dependent on. Symptoms of withdrawal generally include but are not limited to anxiety, irritability, intense cravings for the substance, nausea, hallucinations, headaches, cold sweats, and tremors.

That’s from Wikipedia. I use marijuana under medical supervision to deal with psychological issues. Yes there are technically adverse side effects because smoking is bad for your lungs. Overall it makes my life so much better it isn’t funny. I repeat that it has fewer side effects than any other drug I could be on.

Cutting, sex, and anger are all in a hand wavey category. I have a problem with the 12 step language of weakness. “I’m not responsible. A higher power has to save me.”  Well… I am certainly addicted to harming myself. I do it in a variety of ways. I don’t give any particular method much higher billing than any other. I think that is what he really meant by saying I am addicted to these things. But of course he’s blowing hot air out of his ass so he doesn’t quite see the pattern. I go through long periods without cutting. I have gone many years between periods where I feel bad enough about myself to need that release. I can easily channel that frustration and rage into other areas if given the slightest chance.

Cutting works to put an end to bad emotional states that would otherwise lead to suicide. Is it a great approach? No. It isn’t. But for an awful lot of my life I didn’t have a better choice and I think that cutting was significantly better for me than suicide. No one is going to take that belief away from me. I had to cope. I managed. I survived. The last time I cut I had kind of an epiphany that it wasn’t working any more. I threw away my scalpels. I have moved beyond the utility of that as a coping method. I didn’t stop because someone shamed me or told me I was bad for doing it. That kind of response is only likely to cause me to go do it more and more and more. I stopped because I realized it was insanity to continue. Insanity in the sense that it doesn’t make sense to keep doing the same activity and expecting a different response.

I no longer have a life where I need a physical outlet for my emotional pain. Thank you, Noah. Thank you for being my bulwark against the dark. Thank you for providing me with a safe place to live for the rest of my life. Thank you for supporting me so that I can do work I am better suited for and I don’t have to go out and “get a job” to prove I have worth.

The emotional pain I feel now I can talk about and find solutions for. I think the only place where the language of addiction is particularly useful for me is where it talks about the diminishing returns issue. Or if you talk about the cost being too high for the benefit.

I asked Noah for monogamy partially as a way of providing myself an ‘out’ on dealing with a lot of my problematic behavior. I’m not good at self-regulation when it comes to sex. Now I am safe. Now I will always be able to say, “I’m in a monogamous marriage; I can’t have sex with you” instead of having to be able to say “I don’t want to.”  Saying I don’t want to have sex with someone is hard. I feel unworthy of doing so. I feel like if someone is suffering for lack of sex it is my job to fix it. I can be a sacred whore, that’s fine–but I must be a whore. I don’t say no very well. I am going to hide behind monogamy and be grateful for it. I feel guilty that I am dragging Noah behind me kicking and screaming into this change. I feel like I am unfairly punishing him for a problem he doesn’t have. But I asked and he agreed and he doesn’t really want to talk about whether it is fair or not. It is. Move on.

I cried yesterday because I feel terribly bad that in order to protect myself from my own impulsive behavior I have curtailed Noah. It seems selfish and immature and just flat mean. I am such a bitch. And I’m trying to learn how to tell him “no” in general. I no longer close my eyes and go away and let him have sex with me. It’s hard. It’s hard to feel like I am not breaking rules. It is hard because I feel like I am bad for not giving him release when and how he wants it. I am not holding up my end of the deal. He is supporting me–don’t I owe him?  I told him that thirty years of being a whore is enough for anyone. It’s time to retire.

Noah isn’t attacking me. Noah doesn’t require that I put out because he wants me to. I project that onto him. I fear that belief. I have it. That’s enough.

Am I an addict? Maybe? Yes? It seems to be an irrelevant question.  Unless you believe that someone who takes thyroid medication is also an addict it is simply a innate bias to say that the pot is a problem. It’s not your preferred kind of medication but I’m a hippy and my doctor agrees that it is good for me. Imagine me sticking my tongue out at you. I also see a massage therapist and an acupuncturist (ok, not since pregnancy but I will get back there some day–I believe in the benefits). I think I should see a chiropractor about something going on in the lower right hand side of my back. That has been a problem since Jeremy sodomized me when I was like ten. I have never been able to get it to stop hurting. Running is teaching me a lot about my body. I think I have a better idea of how to deal with the pain.

So! Am I an addict when it comes to pot? Wikipedia says no. I’m going to go with that. Sex? Well… obviously I’m doing as much “recovery” from that as I can do. I am not actually interested in celibacy and trying to be celibate just because someone else might think I should be would result in me not being married any more. Noah wouldn’t tolerate that. He’s dealing with me saying “no” a lot and he’s dealing with not being allowed to have sex with other people. I think he’s a god damned stand up guy. No more can or should be asked of our marriage as I’m figuring out this shit with my relationship to sex. So am I addicted to sex? Maybe? But it doesn’t matter because I’ve figured out how I can have a healthy relationship with it and I’m moving forward. Kind of a useless thing to sit around and go to meetings on at this point. Just sayin’.

I haven’t cut in nearly a year and I no longer have my favored cutting tool. I could some day acquire another one, sure. I don’t think I will though. I don’t want that modeled for my children as an option of coping mechanisms.

It’s interesting to me how this evolution has happened. I cut for many years. When I stopped cutting my body as a teenager I started cutting my hair. It got shorter and shorter till I shaved it when I was seventeen. My mother was so angry with me it wasn’t funny. I felt like the whole world was radiating anger with me for cutting my hair. I was told constantly how ugly I was and how unflattering my “new look” was.

It’s been very weird and uncomfortable that people keep gushing about how good I look with a shaved head/short hair this time. It makes me cry. Because when they say it I hear my mother ranting in my head and I want to hit them and cry that they are lying to me. I feel rage that this person is lying about finding me attractive this way. I try to not do more than clench my fists. I try to not stomp away. I smile. I say thank you. I think that I flinch sometimes and then people simply become more emphatic. Noah certainly tells me that he likes it often. That is one of the things I cried about yesterday. “Hair” was on.

I wonder if my family hated this as a hair cut because of how intense it makes me look. I feel like I have to plaster a fake smile on my face all of the time or I look like I might punch you in the face as soon as say “hello”. It’s weird. I feel like the effects of aging are doing interesting things to my face. I am going to wrinkle like fuck. All the women in my family have deep lines of care from a fairly young age. We live hard lives and it shows. I look at my hands and I see my mothers hands. I see the rope appearing. My hands are the hands of someone who does manual labor. Well, I don’t have deep callouses yet. But I will as soon as I get up the energy to do more gardening. I would have done anything to prevent aging the way I am if I had stayed in a relationship with Tom.

One of the things I cry about when I run is thinking about how resentful Tom would be of the changes in me. It’s strange. I cry because I loved him so much and he wanted such a small piece of who I am. I feel bad that after my family he felt so very good to me but we didn’t know how to be real people together. Tom lives in a world where “pretty” and “sexy” are such a high bar that they become a vocation. I’m naturally pretty lazy. I don’t think I am that pretty and I don’t see much point in dressing up a plow horse to take it to town. I know I am attractive but it’s different. As I age it becomes more dramatic to me. I am intense in a way that precludes pretty. Pretty is about unoffensive and I will never be that. My perception of the world Tom lives in is honestly kind of bleak. I would not be happy in it. I can’t stay dedicated to something I feel like I will never actually attain. It involves a lot of specific activity and specific idleness that I just don’t want. I think back over how I lived my life and I feel glad that I made most of the choices I made. I was always running.

A boyfriend from high school sent me a congratulatory message about the half marathon and sent me a link to a marathon training program that is way more awesome than what I had been doing. By which I mean I am so grateful that this program wants me doing two miles for the first few weeks because it feels like such a wave of relief I can barely stand it.  Doing only two miles for the last two days of running has meant I have practiced sprinting. It uses different muscle groups and it feels good to stretch my legs once in a while.

I lost my train of thought a while ago because my cat jumped on the keyboard and then I got mad at her. We had to pause and have a negotiation wherein she glared at me and looked sad that I had thrown her the floor. I sighed deeply and went and got a blanket to prevent her from drawing blood and I moved my computer so she could lay on my lap. Puff’s mother gave her to me when Puff was only a few days old. Her eyes were still closed and I bottle fed her to keep her alive. Puff’s mother brought us the babies to save them from a rain storm that would have drowned them outside. The feral mama wasn’t willing to come inside and care for the babies and she didn’t want anything to do with them later, but she did save them. That feels important. I have had Puff for fourteen years. My niece named her. T said, “She looks like a puff of clouds.” She is white with grey nearly-Siamese markings. For a couple of years after Shanna was born Puff avoided me. I feel like our relationship has deepened a lot over the last year or so. She doesn’t mind Calli the way she minds Shanna. She loves that I sit in the garage alone. I attribute a lot of our relationship growth to the smoking, actually. It keeps me away from the kids and she is quick to remind me that our alone time should be special, darn it!

I feel the need to apologize for my many typos. I stop writing when I am abruptly pulled away to do something else and I really don’t have time to edit. I’m not a professional writer so it feels ok to be sloppy.

Perspective is everything.

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Jenny’s father is dying.  It’s at a somewhat unexpected time because he isn’t that old but he had a weird injury and it wasn’t treated and… that’s how life works.  There is nothing I can do to help her with this.  This is her own journey of grief.  I imagine what it would be like to lose a father at this age after having had a relationship with him, having lived with him, for so many years.  I can’t imagine that.  Not really.  It’s going to be bad when my mom dies.  I will feel so much guilt.  I don’t even know if I will be told.  For all that Jenny isn’t close with her family she has never broken contact.  She has always treated them appropriately and with respect.

Everyone has a complicated relationship with their parents.  It’s a difficult relationship.  I understand it more from the side I am on now.  It seems to me that parenthood is a relationship based on temporary, stored power.  Right now I have incredible power over my children.  I get to decide pretty much everything about their lives.  In fifteen years Shanna will be an adult.  My power over her will be limited to the amount of influence she chooses to allow me.  It will depend on how well I have earned that respect.

Yesterday I spent my off hour reading/watching videos about Steve Jobs again.  I like his Stanford commencement speech and his sister’s eulogy is gut wrenching.  I also watched a few random videos about happiness because D sent them to me.  What does it mean to live?

When we were up in Portland I broke a large relationship rule.  This is part of why I say I am not good at monogamy.  Noah was right next to me and handed me the implement so he’s not as angry as he could be.  What happened is we were at Dad’s birthday party (non-bio dad) and I got to talking to one of my sisters-in-perversity.  Dad has a whole harem of daughters you see.  The one in question is the youngest in terms of being newest to the family but she is a year older than me and thus technically the oldest of us.  I refer to myself as the senior daughter for clarity.  He adopted me first.  We like to ignore the one he adopted second.  She’s not my favorite sister.

I don’t keep in close contact with this sister most of the time.  Her life is in a very different place than mine and we are both busy.  It’s not a slam or a negative judgment.  It’s nice to catch up when we can.  At this party I heard a lot about this guy she had fairly recently broken up with–see, there he is.  She spent a lot of time watching his scene with another woman.  Her heart was on her sleeve.  One of the things that breaks my heart faster than anything is seeing a woman I love pining over a piece of shit man.  And from what I saw of this guy… yeah… he’s a piece of shit.

I don’t like men who pursue mastery to be degrading to women.  If you only want to own women you can insult then I have a low opinion of you.  I don’t mind that you want to use those names sometimes, but if that is what you think of your partners I think you have a personality disorder you fucking piece of shit.  You are not better than women.

My sister managed to kind of get involved in the scene.  She really wanted to play with him.  The girl he was playing with was slightly less extreme of a bottom than my sister and my sister pretty obviously wanted to show off.  The guy demurred.  He had been using his belt as a whip.  He gave it to his slave/submissive/bottom/partner/whatever her chosen identity label thing is.  He then taunted and forced her to hit my sister.  She did, but it was lackluster and obviously not that intense.  It was a giggly good time.  The guy started encouraging fairly random other people to hit my sister.  One got her in the eye because he didn’t know what he was doing.  I felt like I was watching a train wreck.

I nudged Noah and told him to give me his belt.  He did.  See how it feels kind of fuzzy for him to get mad at me for doing it?  But I’m not supposed to play with people any more.  It didn’t feel like a scene, exactly.  I sure didn’t do it for my sexual gratification.  I did it because I didn’t want to listen to those asshole men tell her that she was a dirty whore.  They didn’t mean anything nice by it.

My sister has had times in her life when she needed to feed her kid and she didn’t have a job.  She has sold her body to put food on the table.  I felt such an explosion of anger when he was picking on her for it.  They dated.  He knows her history.  He was explicitly picking on something that is a mixed circumstance in her life.

I changed the intensity of the scene.  I only used the belt and I stayed on her thighs: the fronts, backs, and sides.  I hit her hard and I hit her fast and I forced her emotional reaction towards panic as hard and fast as I could.  And while I did it I started a litany to her.  You are not bad.  You are good.  You are strong.  You are brave.  You are fierce.  You have survived things that would take down lesser people.  You are strong.  You are good.  She tried to interrupt me and tell me that she was a whore.  I paused long enough to hold her face in both of my hands and tell her that even if she has had to prostitute her body to survive she isn’t a whore.  You are not defined by what you do.  She is a bad ass mother fucker.  She sobbed and clung to me.

Bdsm is rarely about sex for me.  That is not how I grew up in the scene.  I made every top who was kind of sort of leaning in to get in on the hot available action flinch and back off.  I was not going to be one more person starting a pile up on a poor girl.  I was nastier and meaner and harsher.  I kind of like being the visiting bad ass.  This wasn’t a game.  It was very serious business.

I do bdsm because it is one of the best ways I know to force the body to get rid of the excess energy that poisons people.  There is atonement and release and a journey to find the core of yourself.  When you are in the middle of a very intense scene you can’t hide who you are.  You react from the animal core of yourself.  I am a vicious animal who will strip you down to the bone and show you what it looks like.  I will tear the flesh from your body so that you know that I can see all the way through you.  I see exactly who and what you are.

And you are beautiful.  Your strength amazes me.  That you can allow me to do this to you amazes me.  I worship you.  I adore you.  I love you.  Thank you for showing me this fierce core of strength and intensity that other people simply don’t have.  It takes a warrior to experience pain like that over and over and over.  We don’t have a good place in our current world for people who have to suffer.  Even being a soldier is more about being a cog in the machine.

I see in my sisters-in-perversity a desire to be made clean through suffering.  Not all people in the bdsm world are after the same thing.  But I know my sisters when I meet them.  I see the same need in men, but I am less able to address it.  It has long felt like a flaw in me.  I can’t offer the same experience to men.  I am too locked in being afraid of men.  I can’t look at them the way I can look at a woman.  I can’t identify in the same ways.  I have always believed that is a grave failure.  I’m sorry for it.  There is a part of me that understands men as other and I don’t know how to change that.  I see a specific wildness in women.  I see women in bear traps thrashing about.  I understand their feelings.  I don’t have to know all their feelings.  I don’t have to really know everything about their lives.  I know that trapped.  I know that desperate need for release.

I know how to rip someone down until they can no longer stand nor defend themselves.  I know how to make them cry and hurt and wish they could do anything to get away from the pain.  The pain I am giving is just a stand in for all those things they can’t change in their lives.  All the things that hurt and hurt.  All those other things make you feel worse about yourself.  Because it hurts and you can’t stop it.  It weakens you over time because no one can stand up forever under an onslaught.

My beatings are short in duration.  And the whole time you are taking it you are being coaxed and reassured and told that what you are doing is impressive.  You are showing your mettle.  You are proving how very strong you are and I will delight in building you up with it.  By the end you know that you are an intensely strong person and you can go do fucking anything.  Anything in the whole world.  Most people are cowards compared to you.  Not very many people will permit a beating like I give.  I only hit the girls who can’t say no.  They have outrageous pain tolerances.  Other people want warm ups and I’m not here for that shit.  I’m here to prove that I can take you apart but it will be a lot of hard work for both of us because you are so god damn intense.

I always stay in contact with my sisters-in-perversity for a while after a visit.  It seems important.  They see a part of me I don’t reveal much in life.  It’s interesting for me to get perspective on how we are changing over time.  I learn a lot more from brief flashes of my wounded warriors than I do from dozens of conversations with people who have never been hurt.  This is the part I hesitate to say because it sounds so awful.  I learn what mistakes are there for me to make.  When I see my wounded warriors I see There But For The Grace Of God Go I.  In their struggles to perceive themselves as valuable I see what could happen to me if I had a lower opinion of myself.  I know that I was brought up to be one of them.  I was quite literally brought up to be competitive about being able to take more pain during sex.  Thank you, Jim.  You were an inspiring father.

I have been binging on sugar for the past few days.  It’s kind of obscene.  I came home from Portland and both girls are acting out in various ways.  I feel trapped and angry and frustrated.  My life fucking sucks.  But my life only sucks because I have a bad attitude.  I look at my sister-in-perversity and I have to understand that my life is quite cushy in terms of me having everything I want when I want it.  Sure, I have to do it with my kids along.  That just means I need to figure out how to work with my kids.

Someone on facebook linked to an article about why French parents are happier.  Apparently in French they do not have the concept of “discipline” the way we do here.  They constantly think that they are educating their children.  My entire life right now is an education to my children.  What am I teaching them?  Dissatisfaction.  The funny part about sitting in the garage as I write… it’s a constant reminder that I get work done with my children around.  I didn’t have child care when I insulated the walls and put dry wall up.  I didn’t have child care when I painted a mural.  I had help sometimes.  I had friends who did it with me.  But my children were around and under foot and I cared for them.  I had help for all the stuff that was genuinely beyond my ability to do it alone.  I could not have done the drywall without the consistent and reliable help of T.  He saved my ass.  I’m going to owe that man for a few lifetimes.  He doesn’t understand what he is to me.

I have been struggling for a long time with feeling trapped.  It’s been a lot of … well… all of it.  I have a lot more freedom than most.  More than most people for all of history.  I am somewhat unique in being financially secure in a tumultuous period of history.  Yes, we could be hit with disaster.  For now I am going to continue with the fact that I am ridiculously safe.  I have a lot of options.  Even as Noah and I fuss back and forth about the fact that we have to carefully budget… we have a lot of options.  Noah only  gets $600 to spend on a weekend trip with his buddy.  Cry me a river.  We have a really good life.

In every relationship I have in my life there is a mixture of uplifting and wearying.  I need to start thinking a lot harder about the uplifting or I am never going to get out of this muck.  I have a marathon to run.  I can’t be hanging out in the muck.  It’s too tiring.  I will injure myself.  I have to run five miles today.  You know–just get up and do it.  And tomorrow I’ll run three miles.  On Saturday I will run seven miles.  Next Saturday eight miles.  So on.

When I run I feel strong and capable.  What I used to get from getting my ass beaten.  I don’t know how to get it from getting my ass beaten any more.  Now I’m always mad that Noah isn’t doing _______ exactly how I would.  It’s kind of sick.

I don’t know how to be a follower right now.  But we don’t have room for much else in our relationship and I don’t know how to guide us.  I don’t know how to guide Noah.  That’s an interesting thought.  I resent being the guide for more than a couple of minutes.  I’m impatient.  I want to be lead.  There are journeys Noah simply can’t lead me on.  He doesn’t know how to get there.  I’ve had kind of this dawning horror around this topic recently.  I have some ideas.  I’m not ready to spill them yet.

I don’t know what the future will bring.  I hear that if you spent more time focusing on the positive you can change your life.  You can actually make things better.  I am fairly uniquely positioned to do so.  Dr. Frankl taught me that if you have something you are burning to do you can get through any circumstance.  Some dude on a Ted talk yesterday brought up the idea that everyone desperately wants to live.  Then I listened to Steve Jobs talk about how much he wanted to live.

How does one go about finding their own path?  Well, I think by definition I can’t ask anyone else.  Whatever it is they did or would do will be wrong for me.  That’s why I’m not fond of advice.  I do like hearing stories though.  I like finding out what other people have done and why.  I’ve been reading a lot more recently.

When I feel fussy about what I am doing I need to decide what I would rather be doing and do that.  That’s part of the binge eating of sugar.  The kids are pestering me for sugar.  We have a lot in the house that we don’t normally have.  I am tired of fighting the kids off of it.  I’m tired of being whined at for it.  I’m eating it with them them till it is gone.  Then we don’t get dessert unless you can talk me into making some with sweet behavior.  I like doing it when I have a cheerful house to do it for.  I won’t do it for whining.  It has worked for me in the past.  I think we ran out of chocolate last night.  Now the sweet snack in the house is fruit.  When the answer is, “We don’t have any chocolate in the house; would you like an apple?” The response is more positive than you think.  And then we just don’t think to buy it at the store.  It works out.  One of these days she will remember to ask for it at the store.  That will be figured out later.

I’m getting defensive already.  That’s lame.  I felt cheerful through most of the writing.  I’m tensing up as I think about going in.  The family is awake now.  The girls are extra clingy right now.  I will miss these days.  It’s a lot of physical contact for me.  I feel bad about how difficult it is for me to handle physical touch sometimes.  I wish I liked it more.  This is part of my feeling of inadequacy.  I’m not sure why I feel inadequate though.

I’m supposed to think about three things I am grateful for.  I’m always grateful for a white wall in my house.  I like thinking about how I will paint it.  I think I should paint it next month after I get the book edited and up on Amazon.  We’ll see.

I’m grateful that I get to raise two daughters in an environment where I am not under ridiculous stress all the time.

I’m grateful for stories to think about.  Something is bubbling in my head.  I’ll think about it on the long run today.  I’m going to run to Lake Elizabeth.  It is just over five miles roundtrip.  I hope it warms up soon.  I have to leave by nine.  Noah is having a late start day.  I should probably go see him for the time I can today.

I’m sorry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First world problems

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Life is what you do while you are killing time until you die.  Really, that’s all it is.  Maybe you’ll die soon, maybe it will take a long time.  Maybe you will know lots of people.  Maybe you will spend all of those years alone; lonely is strictly optional.  Happiness is a state of mind, not a circumstance.  And yet, we expect people who are financially secure and stable and married and _______ to be happy.

Seeing my shaman was a good choice.  I have a lot of oppositional defiance response to people.  To him, in particular.  Oh man he triggers all of my, “No no no no no no no” buttons.  And no matter how frustrated I get with him I will always go back for more because I learn so much about me being with him.  I learn more about the shape and size of me.  I learn where I need to push back because I really truly believe something.  I know something is true no matter what his opinion is.

He tried to tell me that I have previously been just fine with Noah dating.  Uhm… no.  I have written records.  See, this is why I write.  I was fine with Noah dating other people during the first six months we were dating and I was living with someone else.  That’s true.  But I was poly and Tom was monogamous because I couldn’t stand him being intimate with anyone else.  He wasn’t real motivated to go find another sexual partner either.  He wanted companionship more than sex and I still provided that.

Noah has different needs.  No, I’ve never been happy about him seeing other people.  I’m not shy with that information.  I have tried to accept it as part of him.  But I measure his dates in cuts on my legs.  I don’t actually think it is good for our marriage for us to do nonmonogamy.  If something hurts me that much, he really shouldn’t be doing it.  I am totally fine with it in theory.  I don’t have a problem with other people doing it.  But knowing that my partner would rather be doing that with someone else rather than me?  Yeah.  That bothers me.  I don’t say no.  Ok, I do.  But it’s pretty rare.

My shaman contends that the real solution is for me to just work on being bothered until I’m not bothered anymore so that Noah can keep doing what Noah wants to do.  To be fair, he thinks that I should work on it because I also have trouble with monogamy.

I think it is more useful this lifetime for me to work on other parts of my life that are causing me strife. I only have so much time to spend beating my head against walls of shame and terror and anger and hatred.  It’s going to come up around other issues whether I like it or not.  Nonmonogamy is complicated.  It takes a ridiculous amount of time and energy.  I don’t have it to spare.  And I won’t invest in this relationship fully if I know that I am just waiting for when he is going to pull away from me so that he can give a big chunk of himself to someone else.  Fuck that shit.  I guess I’m a selfish piece of shit but I think I deserve better than that.

The thing about first world problems is: they still hurt.  And you still have to live with them day in and day out.  No one expects anyone to be cheerful about third world problems.  But you are god damn expected to just suck it up for first world problems.  I certainly expect people to.  I will probably die like my grandfather having a heart attack out in the yard while working.  He was in his 80’s.

Ok, I’m going to take the first world/third world out of this for the next part because it sounds dismissive and snotty and I don’t mean to be.  I’m talking about my perception of the difference between rich problems and poor problems.  I’m using the phrases first world/third world reflexively because it is a common dismissive thought process.  But I should be better than that.

When I was a kid surviving was different.  The life I lead with my mother was different.  Being alive day by day was different.  Now that I am an adult I have a completely different situation in life but I am still the same person.  Surviving my childhood took a very different skillset than … what am I supposed to say about adulthood?  I won’t survive adulthood.  Ha.  What am I going to do with my adulthood.  How is the pattern of my days going to look in comparison to all I know.

What I know is a disjointed life.  What I know is work that comes and goes.  Unending sorrow and bitterness.  Trauma.  That’s not all I know though.  I know how to work with my hands.  I know how to build things.  I know how to build people.  Shit dude, I made two of them.  That’s pretty fucking cool if you ask me.  I’m defensive about being a good parent because that is my primary job.  I feel like I have to be judged on something and apparently that means I will some day be judged on whether or not my children are… I don’t know.  Appropriate?  Kind enough?  Successful enough?  Smart enough?  Uhm.  Yeah.  I have no control over those things.

How do you talk about these subjects without blame?  Happiness is a state of mind, not a circumstance.  Uhm, yes.  But if I had been happy during my childhood I wouldn’t have gotten out.  My niece is as smart as me.  I’m worried she won’t be able to get out.  And my nephew won’t get out.  At this point simple economics will bind them all together.

I feel I have satisfied any debt I owed my mother for the care she gave me as a child.  I have given her thousands and thousands of dollars, often to my own detriment because she was stealing my pay checks.  I don’t owe her anything.

I am angry this morning.  So angry.  I woke up so angry I feel like the top of my head might come off.  I am still just me.  But I cancelled my therapy appointment.  I feel very defensive about that.  I know I need to continue therapy but I don’t have anything I want to talk about in therapy today and is that relationship about meeting my needs or is it something I am doing so that I can check of check lists of what crazy people like me have to do on a set schedule for the rest of my life?

Today the opportunity cost of having to drive for two hours and spend about $18 in gas on top of $150 for the privilege of talking to my therapist… that’s too high of a bar for what I will get out of it.  On many days it is the right choice and I shut up and just do it.  But today what I will get out of the session will not be worth the opportunity cost.  Why is that something I feel guilty about?  Because I feel like I have to be accountable to other people in order to ever be right.  I don’t feel like talking to my therapist today.  So I’m not going to do it.  And I feel angry about having to defend that.  I really feel like I have to go down a long list of justifications about why.  Because I don’t want to isn’t good enough because I am crazy and bad and I need to go talk to a therapist.  Uhm, yeah.  That’s fucking useful.

Do you know what I’m mad about right now?  The price of juice.  I don’t need to go talk to my therapist to find my way down the rabbit hole of why that pisses me off.  I am even tactful enough to not write the story on the internet because such things actions are kind of tacky given why I am mad about the price of juice.  But I am going to go inside and tell my family the story.  And then I can stop being angry.  I don’t need to pay someone else $150 to listen to the story so I can stop feeling angry.  Once I explain it to my family we will figure out what we can change so that I can have help changing the feeling of anger.  I can do something about my problems.  That’s what makes it a first world problem?  My problems are all things that I can solve or out wait and they will go away.  I have short-term temporal problems right now.  Life is harder than advertised and all that.

Right this minute Calli is crying.  I have no idea why.  Noah is on duty.  I feel like I should stop what I am doing and go try to solve whatever is happening.  She would probably settle down more with me.  But she would demand to nurse.  I’ve already nursed her once today.  When she is upset like this she is especially rough.

These are problems that will go away.  Calli is already done crying.  I can hear her playing.  Maybe I don’t have to fix everything.  Having Sarah here feels different than I thought it would.  I didn’t know I could have another adult in the house so much and still feel so lonely.  Sarah has a lot of health issues and keeps a very different sleep schedule.  To be fair she has made remarkable progress towards being more in-synch with the kids.  We keep very different schedules.  And she has spent a lot of time by herself.  She’s used to being silent in her room all the time.  It’s different.  Sometimes it feels like we talked more when we were both on IM a lot.

I had a really exciting November.  I went out a lot.  I got to have a lot of really intense conversations.  It was wonderful.  I had a lot of interesting experiences I can sit and think about for a while.  That’s not my life though.  My life is quiet, mostly.  There is a lot going on–don’t get me wrong.  But it’s house work.  And laundry.  And gardening.  And taking She-Ra to swimming.  And being home from the zoo/park/museum in time for nap or all hell breaks loose.  And laundry.  And trying to make sure Calli doesn’t nap too early in the day or we will all pay.  And more house work.  And laundry.

I only make breakfast occasionally if I feel the desire to.  Like, a couple of times a month.  I make maybe four lunches a week.  I have to come with dinner three or so nights a week.  It doesn’t get to be take out any more.

I don’t get to be bitter about my problems because they are of my own choosing.  Why am I choosing to be bitter about the life I am choosing that no one else is forcing me to have?  Let’s be clear here.  Noah is not pushing us towards saving.  He pays no attention and I could financially ruin us and he wouldn’t notice for years.  Instead he is tolerating me forcing him into an ascetic life ridiculously cheerfully.  I am choosing every part of my life.  From how much I clean to how often I have friends over.  Why am I bitter?

I feel like I am not really choosing it.  I feel like it is forced on me because no one else wants it.  That’s true and not true.  Sarah and Noah are both willing to do more when asked.  And when I stop working hard things keep going the house just isn’t as clean.  I’m cleaning to please myself.  Ok, I feel upset that I have to work as hard as I do to have a house that looks the way I see my house in my head.  That’s an interesting entitlement.

I was never really allowed to play.  I was a reader because I wasn’t really allowed to have toys.  My mom always gave my toys away because she didn’t want to clean them up.  She went through my room with trash bags several times and just got rid of everything.  I don’t build attachments to things very easily.  I can’t.  Things are easy come easy go.  I’ll forget about it eventually, except those weird pangs some day.  When I realize that there is very little evidence of my life.  Only my sketchy memory and the random shit my mother chose to save.  Items that are essentially meaningless to me because I will never know the story attached to them.  I am invisible to myself because I have no reflection.  I have no one to tell me what they saw.

I have a lot of guilt around the fact that I make Noah and Sarah and the kids get rid of things.  I don’t let them keep all of the things they have sentimental attachment to.  I can’t.  We don’t have room.  And really should not have a storage unit with stuff we will never use again that was important or fit or was relevant a long time ago.  No.  That’s money that needs to go elsewhere.  It’s not rational.  But the push back is that I require the house to be easy to clean.  That means we really have to limit how much stuff we have in our house and everything must have a clearly defined home or it must not live here any more because the clutter builds and builds and then my life is a nightmare.  I won’t let anyone else make my working environment hostile.  I don’t go take a shit on your desk at work, thanks.

But then you have to figure out how much space should belong to each person.  It’s hard to define.  I feel like my day and life will be better if I stay home and save money and instead talk to Noah and Sarah about the stuff we can have some effect on.  I can figure out actual compromises and do actual work instead of just telling more stories about my mom.  Today, maybe just for today, I don’t really want to talk about my mom.  I hate that most of my stories about her are so awful.  She’s my mom.  I love my mother.  Irrationally.  Completely.  Intensely.  Why was my mama so mean to me?

Because my mother had problems.  She didn’t choose to handle them well and the collateral damage was massive.  That happens sometimes.  At this point my actual problems are all fairly small and easy to isolate.  I have a lot of lasting damage, but I feel like it’s maybe time to start leaving the scab alone.  Maybe just for today.  That’s good enough.

Why am I choosing to be monogamous?  If I reach down in the pit of my stomach it is because I don’t want to be a free person off living my life.  I want to be part of an intense dyad.  I want to be one with Noah.  I don’t want him to be a free person off living his life either.  I want us to be sharing this life.  That’s why I married him.  I have an easier time collaborating with him to do elaborate role play situations about pretending to sleep with other people than I do finding extra curricular sex that doesn’t make me feel like shit in some way.  The opportunity cost is so very high.

I don’t think I want monogamy because of ideals, necessarily.  I want to be able to stop thinking about this part of my broken.  I don’t want to have to deal with keeping a tight leash on my compulsive behavior and only meting it out in small carefully considered not-quite-destructive doses.  God it’s a lot of work.  I’m tired of doing it.  I am so very conflicted about sex.

My shaman told me that broken is a component of whether or not you have a range of emotions and a range of intensity within different emotions.  Like if you always go from 2/3 to 9/10 and you stay in only two or three emotions you are probably in a broken place.  If you have a range of emotions and a range of intensities… sure.  That’s how you feel.  Why not.  It’s not broken it’s just where you are.  I like how he alternates challenging me and affirming that I am already fine just how I am.  It means I get to pick how I grow.  Well, that’s part of why it didn’t work as a closer romantic relationship.  I couldn’t deal with how much I would have to push back.  It’s very hard for me.

Sometimes I wonder if my shaman has consciously created a personality for me.  He speaks about his multiples fairly frequently.  Fairly casually.  I know that he alternates between very distinctive approaches in how he talks to me.  It’s part of why I like him less around other people.  He is so very different.  He really is a different person, one I don’t know or like as much.  He can listen to me and not challenge me and go down a laundry list of points to affirm that who I am and how I am is working well in every way.  At the same time he can absolutely force me to speak in detail about all the specifics of why I am doing any of the things I am doing.  It’s hard to be honest enough to be worthy of the conversation.  I can’t do it very often.  It is too hard to be present with him as intensely as I am present with him.  Maybe that is why I don’t like him around other people.  I am also attuning to the other person instead of him.  Hm.  Interesting.

It’s probably time to go in and start working on my first world problems.  It makes me really happy that I know I can walk in the door and explain what I am upset about and talk about the root of why I am upset about it and have people be sympathetic and give a shit.  Then we can figure out how to solve it.  Because we will.  This life thing will happen.  Today will end and tomorrow might be anything.  Some of my first wold problems won’t be solved yet, but they will.  All I’ve got is time.

"Go see a therapist"

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

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

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

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

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

This isn’t about laundry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Different facets.

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Today is hard because I have already been a friend, a lover, and a therapy client.  Any second now I need to be a mother.  I need to be a partner.  I need to be a wife.  I need to be a boss.

It’s hard to be these different parts of me.  They feel like they don’t add up to a person.  I’m not sure if they are less or more than a person, but not really a person.  A host with many guests.  I hurt.  I hurt inside my heart.  I am all these things and more and it feels like a terrible thing I am doing.  I am supposed to pick.  Ok, probably not one.  But just two or three.  Fine, I can be a mother and a therapy client and a wife.  Those are supposed to be my priorities, right?

But I really enjoyed being a lover today.  Today I felt beautiful.  Noah tolerates a lot of my derogatory self-talk.  Well, he ignores me.  He tells me I’m beautiful.  He tells me he likes me.  Today my Daddy made me stand in front of a mirror and he touched me and made me look and told me that I am beautiful.  I feel like I can still barely lift my head.  I can’t look up at someone saying that about me.  I’m not.  I’m so ugly and mean and bad.  You don’t know how bad.

Maybe.  There are parts of me that are ugly and mean and bad.  I have done things I am ashamed of.  I have hurt people.  But maybe this isn’t an ‘or’ situation.  Maybe I’m ugly and I’m beautiful.  Maybe the most beautiful thing I have done in my whole life was standing up to my family and prosecuting my father and preventing him from ever victimizing another person.  I did that.  All by myself.  My father was a serial rapist.  He had molested many people from childhood to adulthood.  I. Got. Rid. Of. Him.  As sure as if I put a gun to his head.  I made sure he could never hurt anyone again.  Ok, so I didn’t expect him to kill himself, not really.  I was surprised.  I was devastated.  I knew it was a risk.  Everyone thought he would put a gun in his mouth.  But he didn’t.  He sat, like a chicken shit, in his garage and ran his truck.  While he sat there he wrote notes of hate to me and my mother.  I burned that note many years ago after Tom urged me to.  It ate at me.  He told me, essentially, that he was committing suicide because I was an evil liar and he didn’t want to go to hell for the sin of murdering me because I murdered my brother.  Did you follow that?  His grammar (and spelling) was worse.  But the hate was god damn obvious.  What a piece of shit.  He sent that note to his daughter.

It’s not like he could tell himself that he was innocent.  Give me a break.  He didn’t want to go to prison.  He was too fucking chicken shit to accept the consequences of his actions.  I’m not.  My father is dead.  I’m glad.  I made the world a more beautiful place by effectively killing him.

But I am still what he made me.  I still thrill to the touch of my Daddy.  Maybe I can find a way for that to be ok.  Maybe that’s just one way that my friends can love me and touch me and heal parts of me I can’t reach by myself.  Every man I call Daddy has been in my life for a long time.  Specifically, Dad has been active in my life for nearly as many years as my biological father.  I stopped seeing my biological father when I was thirteen.  I have known Dad for eleven years.  I have spent considerably more time in Dad’s company than I did with my father in my entire life.  Dad is also a really good grandpa to my kids.  He loves them.

And Daddy?  Well, he sure knows how to make me come.  And he is ok with me waking him up in the middle of the night when I need to talk.  He has been for more than seven years.  I have done so, whenever I needed to, for over seven years.  And I’m crazy and bossy and difficult and he loves me.  It was really nice to come home to my Daddy today.  I am feeling pretty shocked by how this feels.

Maybe the only kind of love I have ever known how to get from a dad will be met.  And it will be met in a way that allows me to be healthy and whole.  I’m not a hole.  My Daddy may be a big slut, but I’m special.  I always have been.  And Dad?  I’m his first daughter.  He introduces me that way, which is funny because he has a biological daughter.  He’s had several girlfriends after me who are also “daughters”.  But everyone knows it’s different with me.  I’m not a girlfriend and I never was and I never will be.  He just takes care of me when I don’t know how to do it for myself.

I feel very little.  And happy and sad at the same time.  I feel like I am holding the hand of my best friend at the funeral of a very bad person.  I am safe now.  I will never be hurt by my dad again.  I may be single tailed by my Dad.  I may be fucked by my Daddy.  But my dad will never hurt me again.

Maybe I’m not over the incest thing.

Admiring women

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If you know who this is, don’t say it.  It’s going to freak her out.

I have been thinking about one particular friend of mine a lot recently.  I go through phases where I focus on people heavily in my head.  Mostly I don’t tell people that I am doing this because it is frankly kind of creepy how much I think about other people sometimes.  Anyway.  So she’s been on my mind a lot lately.  I recognize that I focus on people the way I do because they are doing/saying something that reminds me of me in some way.  Because everyone is obsessed with themselves most of all.

So this friend is brilliant.  I kind of have a large ego.  Kind of.  At least about my intelligence.  As long as you come talk to me on a good day I’ll remind you over and over that I’m damn smart.  I think she is smarter than me.  I certainly think that she has a larger index of stuff in her brain than I have.  And she can think faster than me on a great many subjects.  I notice because that is the kind of thing I subconsciously (and consciously) compete on.  That’s my thing if I have one.  My knowledge on most topics is not deep.  But it is broad and I make connections very quickly between things that are not obviously related.  She’s better at it than I am.  In some ways this kind of pisses me off.

But like I do when I admire things in someone, I like to watch them do it.  The problem with this particular friend is that she probably has a lower opinion of herself than I do of myself.  You can see why I scratch my head about this fact.  I go back and forth between loathing myself and thinking I’m the best thing since sliced bread.  She is better than me at the thing I value the most about my intelligence.  Why the fuck isn’t she the cockiest piece of shit on the planet?

Oh!  Right.  Other people have other value systems.  Got it.  Weirdos.  You see, this is why I should get to run the planet.  Everyone will be happier.

In surface ways this friend and I are not very similar.  We picked very different kinds of job stuff, we have fairly diverging lifestyle and sexual preferences, and she’s single with no interest in kids.  But we had enough similarly unhappy-making things in childhood that there is an attitude similarity at times.  Anyway, I can project on to her like mad and she can’t stop me.  So neiner.

When I think about this friend I am struck by how much more than me she has done in terms of learning things and accomplishing things.  She probably would laugh and say that wasn’t true.  But the thing is, she is a fairly senior (actual profession deleted).  In my little corner of the world people who do “X” are higher up the social food chain than me.  In fact I was told by a different person (a woman) in my social group once, “Well you should be used to being discriminated against as a woman, you are not a geek.”  Because if you become a geek you become magically better than those other women and the men should suddenly recognize that you deserve nice treatment!

Anyway, so this friend of mine does not value herself much despite having a job that is one that would convey to a man high social status.  Do you know what this says to me?

I really can’t fathom what value system my friend actually has.  How in the world can she be reaching the conclusion that she has no value?  By what metric?  In what system?  On what planet?  Oh, because your piece of shit father felt threatened as fuck by your very existence so he felt free to tell you from birth that you were nothing.

I’m not sure why people think that families are good things.

The most awesome thing about not being dead is I get to go meet new people.   The most awesome thing about being an adult is I no longer have any reason to have to be near my family of origin.  The most awesome thing about being an American is that I can write any fucking thing I want on the internet and so long as it is true, I have freedom of speech.  At least until someone decides they don’t like me.  And when they decide they don’t like me, I can use the court system to back up my mother fucking rights.

You are pretty enough.  You are smart enough.  You are exciting enough.  You are good.  The core of you brings joy to the world.  How can you not see your value?  Whatever system you are using to judge yourself is broken.  I suggest picking a new system.  If you don’t like any of the ones I have suggested here that’s fine, we can brainstorm more.  There will not be a shortage of available value systems that like you just how you are.  And other awkwardly worded sentences will be in stores near you.

Why do I personally ascribe to the value system that gives career X value?  That’s complicated.  I care because the majority of my social group cares.  Why do they care?  Because it is a career on the cutting edge of technology.  Because it involves being paid an obscene amount of money during a recession when most people are barely making ends meet.  Because it requires years of study and intense effort to actually be good.

I think it is an additional random interesting data point that it is an intensely male dominated field.  And my friend has low self esteem and thinks she is low status.  I think she’s just standing next to a bunch of assholes all day.

Sometimes I wish I could hand my friends a mirror.  I want them to see what I see.

Mirrors

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Whenever a woman tells me, “I don’t really have chick friends” I turn my head and blink funny.  I don’t know where I would be without the women in my life.  They provide a very different mirror from the men in my life.  I need them.

My friends arrive in waves.  I find new groups and meet tons of people all at once and only keep a few from each generation.  I have a friend who was born across the street from me.  Four months before me.  Through thirty years and fifty plus moves we have kept in touch.  I love her a lot.  She is very different from me.  She’s a JAP and makes no apologies.  As she shouldn’t.  She’s tentative and slightly nervous but very ambitious.  I think she will have a life she is proud of.  I think that she will be old and smile because she is a really good person.  I’m glad I know her.

Her parents divorced acrimoniously when we were in high school.  Most of her grand parents have died.  These are the traumas of her life.  She has taught me about stability.  She has been the most consistent person in my whole life.  We go through periods of being closer and less close.  That’s ok.  She always comes back.  I can’t wait till she has kids.  I will be over there a lot.  We will have an interesting time negotiating her telling me to stop bossing her around.  She rarely manages to do that well.  I’ve been bossing her around for 30 years.  It’s hard to stop.  Once she has kids… I need to not boss.  It’s going to be weird because she will make entirely different choices.

For one thing, she’s Jewish.  If she has a boy he will get snipped.  That’s her culture.  She makes no bones about it.  I will, of course, quietly submit some information for her to read if she wishes and then I need to shut the fuck up.  I can’t bitch at her about circumcising her son.  I can’t make this the issue that ruins our friendship.  I need her too much.  When people think about “cutting off” a friendship, they are thinking about what do you get from the relationship.  What does this person need that you no longer want to provide.  What do you need that they no longer provide.  Most people aren’t honest about those exchanges, but they exist.

I need this friend.  This friend is very important to me.  This friend is the only person in my life from my childhood.  I need her.  I need someone to talk to my kids about me.  I need someone who can talk about  how I have grown and changed with real serious perspective.  I feel so alone in the world without a family.  It’s terrifying.  This is being an orphan.  I feel like I am going to pass out of notice and be forgotten unless people like this exist.  I am going to master my temper and my nasty judgment.  I am not going to alienate this friendship.  I love her too much.  I love her like I love my mom and my sister.  But she has never hurt me.  I want to keep her.  I will do things that are hard for me because she is worth the effort.

Don’t get me wrong, she’ll know I’m not thrilled.  But I can go to the fucking bris and keep my fucking mouth shut.  I don’t think I can do it for anyone else.  I can do that for my mirror.  She shows me that I can.  She shows me the truth about who I am and what I am capable of.  For her, I could move mountains.  I can totally keep my mouth shut and make idle chatter with her dad and brother.  I will hug her mother.  I need to call her mother and ask if she has pictures of us from when we were little.  Maybe her dad does.  This family shows me that I survived intact.  Me, as a person.  They knew me from my birth.  They saw me through everything that happened.  At least once a year through my childhood and we’ve kept in touch as adults.  They took me into their home when I was homeless as a small child.  More than once.

When people talk to me in shocked voices about how strong my boundaries are… it’s a funny conversation.  They are stone walls out there.  The inner circle doesn’t really have boundaries.  I will shut my fucking mouth about the degree of my horror of circumcision for this friend.  I will simply not go to the bris for other people.  That is how I can avoid making a scene and making something private about me.  I will god damn behave myself and be civil and sweet with my friend and her family.  With someone else I feel like if I am having a bad day I might just snap and tell the (hypothetical) other parents I thought they were disgusting savages.  I have my biases.

I don’t have a culture to participate in that requires such an action.  Thus I have the luxury of it being a clear situation for me.  My friends give me reasons to have to shut down my own bigotry (I have lots) and stop and really think about why in the fuck someone might make such a horrendous decision.  Well, for one thing I would do significantly more traumatic things to my kids and not think twice about it.  Horrendous is a strong word.  My personal life experiences are such that I place genital integrity above cultural identity.  Convenient given my cultural identity, eh?  And that’s the thing.

I think that if the general population stops being assholes and drops the legislation push that most Jews will stop circumcising in the next couple of generations.  I think that people will evolve.  If they are left alone and allowed to do so.  Persecuting a group isn’t how you make them change.  It is how you cause them to dig in and become stubborn.  Ask me how I know about that behavioral quirk.

I keep my friend because she is good.  And she still does things that feel bad to me.  Learning to navigate judging the behavior of other people so I can make my own decisions is complicated in the face of these complicated people.  I feel more comfortable with extremes.  Oh well.  I love her.  I need her.  I want her.  Ok fine, if I have to I will grow for her.

In chronological order next comes Miss Jenny.  She’s Jennifer to you.  She’s my Jenny.  I don’t even know how that started anymore.  I met her in junior high and I hated her.  However the loneliness of rural children is a powerful force.  We got over it.  And we kept in touch.  I would say we were barely friends in high school and college.  After college we have been quite close.  She has also been around through a lot of different phases.  And she was closer to my life.  She knows many of my friends (heck, she knew them before me).  She is the reason I learned to dance.  She is the reason I started blogging.  She taught me about Renaissance Faires and Dickens Fair and The Starry Plough.  I wanted to go dancing, but mostly I really wanted to hang out with Jenny.  I like her.  She makes me feel good about myself.

On the trauma scale, well, she had some stuff happen.  Enough that when I showed up at her house sobbing after the suicides in my family, she could take care of me.  She was only 17, too.  She knew what to do.  Jenny is significantly more stable feeling, even when her life seems outwardly unstable.  It’s a core feeling.  She is there.  I feel like it doesn’t matter if I go five minutes, five months, or five years without seeing her.  She’s Jenny.  She has this really strong presence.  She has taught me a lot about mastering my emotions.  Personally I think she’s a bit closed off, but I get to have any wrong opinion I want.

Jenny is consistent emotionally in the ways I fail.  She gives me a stable mirror for my storms.  She teaches me about dealing with the in-between-places.  She may not like it, but she deals with limbo fairly well.  She’s good at getting up and staying busy.  It’s not a skill everyone has and she had to slowly learn it.  Honestly she sucked ass at that when I met her.  I think that was because of issues with her mom.  But we all have those in junior high.

The next big wave came with the theatre group.  I am not as close with anyone from that community.  None of them have kids and that has been challenging.  Flakey bastards.  But I keep in touch with them and we have dinner once or twice a year.  Of all the waves of my friends, this is the group that builds me up the most.  That’s an interesting thought.  They have no reservations about me.  I don’t remember ever having a disagreement or argument with anyone there (other than my boyfriend) about anything I did behavior wise.  They were completely comfortable with me.  It’s been a little odd at how impressed they are with “what I have done with my life”.  I’m in a fallow period so I feel pretty lazy.  But they are still working the same jobs doing pretty much the same things they were doing when I met them thirteen years ago.  It has been a busy decade and some for me.  It’s nice having them pop up and cheerlead every so often.

Then there was bdsm.  I met the Godmama at my second munch ever.  (She’s the legal next of kin to my children.  That lawyer was expensive.)  I think that one of the most important things I get from this relationship mirror is that, what I can bear is not what everyone can bear.  I mean, that’s true in every case.  But she is really good at laughing at me when I express to her that her life would be hard for me.  She is so different.  It’s not any one thing.  It’s everything.  Almost all of our hobbies are entirely different.  We have very different social, romantic, sexual, relationship needs.  And by golly that’s ok.  I think she is the most adamant person I know about us both being ok.  It’s very comforting.

She has had a much more challenging life than the previous people mentioned.  She’s also a lot older than us.  Almost twenty years older.  It’s a very different relationship.  It fills different parts of my needs.

I wandered off and the thread in my head changed.  Fudge.