Category Archives: people hacking

frustrated

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s time to go parent.

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.

Long-term friendships.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Oh gracious.  Someone is coming over to dinner.  Someone I barely know through adult-only venues.  And I’m going to put him in the hot seat of meeting the girls.  Oh goodness.  This probably isn’t a nice thing to be doing to him.  I’m asking him to dinner because he expressed that he liked what he knew of me but he has social anxiety issues so he never really talked to me.  By golly that sounds like someone I can talk to.  We’ll see how it goes.

Today both of the girls are actually asleep for naps.  It’s been an interesting few days for sleep.  And moodiness.  Lots of moodiness.  Well, different moodiness.  More sadness.  My over all anger level is much lower.  There is still a lot of unfinished business and I never like limbo.  Patience, Grasshopper.  Uprooting takes time.  Not everyone uproots in less than forty-eight hours at the slightest provocation.  (I’ve done that multiple times as an adult.  And I can’t count how many as a kid.)

I’m learning a lot about my life during my childhood.  I have a different perspective on interactions now.  I struggle endlessly with my inability to grant forgiveness.  I am trying to understand that people now are not people then.  I can forgive everything that has been done to me as an adult.  I think that is why I generally do not think of my adult less-than-consensual sex as rape, fully.  Because I do not shun the men.  Because I understand their point of view and I know that I did get in over my head.  I courted danger and I let my guard down at the wrong time.  My bad, right?  But now I understand that no one wants to be the bad guy in their own story.  Except for me.  I don’t seem to want to be anything else.

What does it mean to not be the bad guy?  I think I have been an asshole.  I think I have been volatile and threatening.  I have lost my temper in front of people in ways that scared them.  Effectively I lost control.  That makes me the bad guy.  I was telling Shanna just the other day that bad guys can be girls too.

I want to be something else though.  I don’t want to be the bad guy forever.  I hear this involves learning to “let go”.  I’m never sure what of.  They certainly don’t mean of control.  I don’t know what people want.  What does it take to be a good guy?  Damned if I know.

Today both of my children napped.  Tonight someone is coming over to supper.  I’m going to actually cook.  Using ingredients I grew in my yard.  That’s so fucking cool.  I need to go start figuring out food.

======================================

I left off there yesterday.  I’m resuming for no reason beyond I don’t think I have enough mental energy to really write again today.  I feel slow and stupid and sad.  I’m pretty sure this is chemical depression.  I’m trying hard to not get too far mired in the idea that I am a tremendous failure at everything in life.  Just because I can’t do everything that doesn’t make me a failure.  It’s not all or nothing.  Today that is hard to believe because I’m grieving.  My body aches and feels heavy and weary.  It doesn’t really matter how I feel though.  I have chores to get through.  Then I really need to take the kids out of the house.  I’m thinking Discovery Museum.  We are all cooped up and frustrated.

I think I am at the limit of what I can do.  Now I wait.  I wait and feel this creeping sadness.  I failed.  I failed.

Mostly parenting babbling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time to go inside.

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.

Shorter and shorter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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.

I am my hair

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Last night Noah finally talked about his areas of insecurity.  It makes me feel like perhaps I shouldn’t have put the trampoline in the exact location I did.  There is a really lot of “But I thought you wanted…” in my marriage.  That’s not good.

No matter how much I am hurting, I want Noah.  Noah sees me in a way no one else does.  He wants me more than anyone else ever has, and I don’t mean just for sex.  Noah lies to me because he wants to be perfect for me and he’s afraid he’s not.  He’s afraid to tell me he isn’t.  Oversimplifying, but true.  I think that’s never ok.  You have to tell me the truth, for better or worse.

No one promised me more better than worse.  Mostly it has been more better than worse.

I told my therapist yesterday that I don’t fit in groups.  She tried to argue with me until I leaned forward and intently told her, “If I left Noah tomorrow and all of a sudden I was single and poor I would find dozens of groups that would take me with open arms.  As a married, rich, seemingly heterosexual, who looks the way I do and acts the way I do with the trauma history I have… No.  I don’t fit into groups.  She closed her mouth and nodded.  She told me she can see my point.  My therapist also took a new job.  She will only have hours on Thursday or Friday nights.  Thursday’s Sarah is going to be taking a class and it’s Noah’s night off.  Not to mention that I don’t think I want to fight rush hour traffic to Oakland.  And having therapy on Friday night would wreck the whole fucking weekend.  I cry enough.  I guess this means I am going to be between-therapists.  Shit.  Perfect timing.

It feels like petulant whining for me to be upset.  I have such a comfortable, easy life right now I shouldn’t whine so much about anything that is going wrong.  How can it be that bad?  I feel really weird about the fact that I still have loud, messy poor people problems.  The way I throw temper tantrums feels low class to me.  I have only witnessed the “public” faces of homes with more money.  I can’t act like them.  I can’t produce children who act like them.  I can’t even have a middle class attitude about infidelity.  I want to go jump off a bridge.  I’m so melodramatic.  It’s all so very intense.  I can’t have “normal” “acceptable” feelings.  I don’t feel angry and upset.  I feel like (and do) cut up large swaths of my body.

What exactly are people supposed to do with anger?  I’ve never been able to figure this out.  You’re allowed to feel anger you just aren’t allowed to show it.  How the fuck does that work?  I don’t think other people get as angry as me.

Side note: the dry cleaners who got their window broken at the General Strike?  $620.  I feel thrilled that I did that.  The family who owns the business almost cried.  The building management was going to make them pay it.  Do you know why I did it?  Because I really want to break windows and it is only the thinnest veneer of control I have over that urge.  I can’t feel angry with whoever broke the windows.  I understand.

I just honestly think I am smarter and more willing to think about long-term consequences than him.  (I know it was a him because J.P. Massar watched the kid do it.)  I understand ignorance.  I think that people should be working a lot harder to learn about different points of view.  I know it is hard.  I struggle with feeling safe being myself around other points of view.  I start to feel like I meld in and disappear.  Until I do something Wrong and I feel ostracized.

I don’t go dance because there are too many people who won’t look me in the eye.  I feel unwelcome.  I’m not mad about it.  I’m resigned.  This has been my whole life.  I understand.  I’m not someone that people want to look in the eye.  It’s ok.

It’s approaching the end of funny colored hair time.  The bleach is destroying it.  Yesterday I cut off several inches in the front at a funny angle with wisps every which way because I couldn’t comb the knot out.  I should probably straighten my hair cut a bit today.  In front of a mirror this time.  It’s time to stop bleaching and let it grow.  I’m also at the perfect point in my cycle to kind of want to shave my head so I will have a weird reason to hide at home again for a long time.  That’s the kind of thing I want to do and I don’t want to deal with the social consequences of doing.  Boy howdy do you get comments when you shave your head as a girl.  I’m trying to decide how short I am willing to go this time.  I have a lumpy head.  I went down to nothing when I was seventeen.  Not long after my father killed himself.  So
thirteen years ago I shaved my head and like a year ago my hair was nearly to my waist.  If I ever want long hair again it will be a long, slow slog.  Like, when I’m fifty.  We’ll see.

My heart hurts.

Hunting is hella awkward (this whole thing is tmi)

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We went from having a weekend of lots of planned sluttery to only having sex together.  This is rather hilarious, I think.  But Noah was approached on okcupid.  He’s making a date.

I love masturbating right after sex.  I’m sore and overly sensitive so it kind of hurts and it takes me a long time to have an orgasm.  I have to really make up a story in my head.  I’m just starting to do this again.  I haven’t done this in years.  I don’t masturbate when my kids are in bed with me.  I like to follow the stories that come up.  Often they involve sex with one or more of my friends.  It usually involves me getting to meet some need in their life.

Having sex with your friends is shitting where you eat.  It’s hard because having your needs met feels really good and it’s easy to get upset when you know people in your life can make you feel that good but they choose to schedule their time elsewhere.  That’s a hard thing emotionally.  It’s a lot of the reason that I am gun shy about polyamory.  I have my priorities set where they are set and no I am not fucking adjusting them for someone else.

I don’t think I have ever hunted the way I am hunting now.  I have never gotten to set the terms before.  It’s really hot.  It’s really hot to have people be willing to seduce me by email before we ever show up in person.  I have a great correspondance going right now.  The problem is that people get to the date and then have performance anxiety.  I don’t have performance anxiety.  I’m that good at sex.  As good as I say and better.  Because if you write me a script in advance I will make sure it is a script I can play and then I will play it to the hilt.  It’s really fun.

People who know me have a hard time engaging with this part of me.  They already have so many experiences that have made them gun shy.  I should make people gun shy on a day to day basis.  I’m kind of twitchy.  You don’t know how my moods will flow, it’s true.  Pushing an agenda on me is normally a questionable idea.

Except when it isn’t.  And I don’t know how to figure out the boundaries around this with people I know.  But I am learning how to do it with strangers and it’s really hot.  One hiccup is that I was asked if choking is really a hard limit.  Uhh, yeah.  It is.  No hands around my neck at all.  I don’t care that you like to assert your dominance that way.  Find another way.  Hey, I’m a nice girl.  How about if I tell you that I have been thinking a lot about face slapping?  You’ll believe me because I’ve been so clear about my boundaries in every other place.  Start slow, of course.  I’m sensitive.  But if that is interesting to you… I would feel put in my place.  Just sayin’.

It’s hard to do these exchanges with people I know.  I don’t trust very many people to that level.  It’s hard to use your friends as one night stands.  They feel bad.  Friends feel used and abandoned.  It’s important to not spike that oxytocin too high with people who already are more emotionally connected than I am.  That’s shitting on people I like.  Because they get hurt.  I don’t like doing that.

I am really thrilled about how many dates are happening.  I’m having fun.  I’m thrilled that Noah’s response to me hunting is to start talking about going to the gym because now he has to compete.  He totally doesn’t.  But I like it when he is in better shape.  Our sex life improves.  And given where it is… oh my.

I think it is funny that I hunt so hard for sex with other people when I know that Noah will be a better lover.  Every time.  It’s kind of like how Noah won’t eat McDonald’s, so I go without him.  I have these tastes for things that are bad for me.  My vices.  I like McDonald’s, ramen, and dates with new-to-me-men.  I’m going to get to the point where those are it.  (I eat McDonald’s like once a month.  Just sayin’.  Happy Meal joy.)

Noah tried to wake me up for sex on Friday night and I bit his head off.  Thursday I didn’t sleep much so I was cranky.  I made it up to him by waking him up on Saturday morning.  And we went to a party and played together on Saturday and had hot sex.  And we came home and had hot sex.  And Sunday afternoon Sarah took the kids out and he tied me up and did wonderful things to me and we had hot sex. And Sunday before passing out we couldn’t stop pawing at one another… so we had hot sex again.

Sometimes just being near him makes me shake with wanting him.  I have felt this voracious need for sex basically all of my life.  For the first time it’s not only ok it is preferable.  Because Noah actually likes me and appreciates me.  I worry about how other people will perceive me for being this kind of person.  I worry and feel stupid for worrying.  Of course people judge me.  So what?

I am not at risk of being hurt.  It would be very hard for anyone to hurt me just because they disapprove of my behavior.  My kids are far more sheltered than average.  They have a fierce sense of body autonomy and you can’t get that if you are abused.  They shine with good health and love.  I don’t have a job that is at risk.  Noah tells me he doesn’t care what I write.  He’ll take the hit.  Because I’m worth it.  I am financially secure enough that I will never have to play a public game again in my life.

Still I feel this fear.  If I feel this afraid, what is it like for people who have something to lose?  I have hubris on my side.  I can limit my hunting pool ridiculously.  I seem to be only hunting among people who have college degrees, often PhDs.  Not because I care but because those are the ones with the cajones to message me.  They are the only people who are willing to put up with a long list of nitpicky requests and demands from me before they meet me.  People who will write a sex script with me before meeting me and allow me to call a large percentage of the shots.  Am I actually doing risk management this way or am I lying to myself?

Communicating clearly that I am a sure thing gives me this sensation of butterflies in my stomach.  That moment of revelation, when I have to say I am interested in sex feels incredible.  Because I am interested in sex.  Not with anyone.  With people who can talk to me and help me make a script and help me figure out why I am there.

That’s what I’m doing with the pre-writing.  I’m giving myself a chance to create the back story on why the kind of girl he is fantasizing about would show up for the experience he is about to have.  Everyone wants a different why.  I’m very curious about why people think they should have sex.  It’s different from the why they have for love.  The why people have about sex tells me so much about their life.

Most people think they should have sex because they are in love.  It’s kind of a weird thing, to me.  Why do I think I should have sex?  Because it feels good.  Because I like carefully balancing how much of my life is devoted to things that feel good to me.  The specific kind of feel-good I get from sex with new people is apparently worth a lot of effort and angst to me.  I’m trying to get to the point where I can attenuate the effort and get rid of the angst.  I’m not for everyone.  The kind of people who are in the right place to do exactly what I want… that’s serendipity.  I need to be honest about the emotional cost.

I need to stop being messy with my emotions in my house.  Sarah has nightmares and I make them worse.  I’m not yelling or screaming.  But I am huffy.  I do visibly shake with anger.  To someone who grew up in a violent household I look like I am on the verge of hitting.  I need better control.  And that means I need to back off on hunting.  It’s taking a lot of my brain cycles and that makes me short tempered elsewhere.

I need to figure out how much energy I actually have left once I am meeting my obligations at home.  Right now I don’t feel like I understand that balance very well.  This is where I don’t have a map.  I guess I do though.  I painted it on my wall.  I’m going into the cave.  Sometimes.  Or I’m wandering off to have an island retreat.

Have I mentioned that due to plumbing mishaps I have a white wall in my house?  The possibilities are endless.  I still haven’t painted the garage door.  All of these things take energy.  Energy I am currently holding in reserve because later today I am going to go shut down the Port of Oakland with a few friends.  I’m bringing my kids.  And after the Port Shutdown I will be dropped off for a date.

There is only so much of me to go around.  I only have so much energy to give.  It’s really awesome; I have to be pragmatic.  What do I want to have in my life?  What are my actual, actionable priorities?  What am I doing with my time and energy and how is it balancing throughout my life?  I have to think about these things.

I am sad things went the way they did with muse, but I can’t say I’m surprised.  I shouldn’t have tried for a month.  I know better.  I know I don’t have that kind of energy for a relationship.  I should have left it at the first date.  If my one night stand hunting culminated in a night of bath house sex where I don’t have to talk to the person after that… that would have been great.  I was stupid.  I tried to get the short-term boyfriend experience.

Know yourself.  Know your limits.  Noah has different limits.  Hell, near as I can tell everyone has different limits than me.  That’s ok.  It’s tricky trying to figure out where I get to have  rock hard limits around what I can and can’t request from people.

I’m interested in one night stands.  If you aren’t, that’s fine.  We aren’t a match.  Move along.  Don’t get mad at me and I’ll try not to rant about you.  I’ll make that promise to all the future boys.  I’ll try not to rant.  Which is to say that I will rant but try to be balanced.  You did good things too.  We just aren’t a match.  No shame in that.

That’s why.  That’s why I’m hunting.  Because I am continuing the behavior I have done my entire life but not I am trying to do it without shame.  I want to find a way to balance this part of me that feels bad because other people do not value it with the knowledge that it does bring good to my life.  It gives me the energy to go conquer the world.

I’m probably not going to schedule a one night stand attempt in January.  I need a rest from that energy drain.  It’s time to re-evaluate the energy I’m giving to my sex life.  I promised Shanna that I would make her a play house in January.  I can’t be tired from staying up all night for sex and do that.  It’s going to be awesome.  Just wait.  But it will take creativity.  It has to fit into Wonderland.

How can I talk about parenting and being a slut in one post?  Because I’m both.  That has to be ok.  I’m not actually doing anything shameful.  I have an unusual hobby that most people don’t share.  Like people in this valley should fucking judge.  You are all a bunch of weirdos.  What the fuck is this geocaching shit?

I think that if you look at history you will find a lot more people who pursued sex voraciously than people who beat some video game.  Who is the freak?  Ahem.

Stop bitching.

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It occurs to me that I mean something specific when I say: stop bitching.  I think other people may mean different things.  It’s time to define terms.  In this post I talk about why people should compare abuse.  I need to elaborate more, I’m good with that.

I do not mean that people should suck it up and continue to be abused because things aren’t that bad.  Ever.  Never ever ever.  I mean that people should stop bitching and start acting.  Bitching, to me, is complaining about the same situation year after year without any effort to change things.  This is one of those areas where I’m not popular in Domestic Violence conversations.  Because people tell me at great length how hard it is to leave.  I may not be the best person to talk to.  There are other people who can be more sympathetic to that point of view.  I don’t want to stomp on people.  I’ve had strong experiences that color my voice.  If you at any point feel like I am telling you that you deserve what you are getting or that you should stay please know that it is your own insecurity.  I don’t think that.

But I do think you need to get the fuck out.  I think that planning is awesome.  To me there is a difference between bitching and complaining.  I complain a lot, I have no problem with complaining.  Complaining changes over time.  You aren’t still talking about the exact same behavior situation ten years later.  If you have been married to an abusive asshole for twenty years and you say the same things about his behavior over and over then you are bitching.  Change something.  If you don’t want to leave, put your fucking foot down.  The person you are in a relationship with has no impetus to change unless you force the issue.  They will not magically become nice some day out of the kindness of their heart.  If he’s verbally abusive and you are tired of hearing it start wearing ear plugs.  Seriously.

If you notice that you are saying the exact same complaints as you did five years ago it’s time to change things.  Seriously.  Take responsibility for your life.  It’s yours to live.  No one else.  If you are unhappy with your life what do you want it to be like?  I don’t mean lottery fantasies, though I have them.  I mean what are small sustainable steps you can take?  Where do you want to be in five years?

I think that lack of forward planning is part of the reason people get stuck.  They never get into the nitty gritty of what it would take to change their life.  It is hard.  Very hard.  Life is hard sometimes.  Harder for some than for others always.

I do not think that people should take abuse and shut up.  I think they should stop taking abuse.  If you choose to stay in an abusive relationship, that’s a choice.  Own it.  Figure out what you can do to make the situation work for you.  Find a way to come to peace with your choices and stop bitching.

Get involved with your community.  That is the most important piece for abuse victims, in my opinion.  If you know you are never going to leave your abusive piece of shit husband even though you should… go find something to do with your time.  Find a volunteer project.  Get out of your house and away from that man and find something to do that you can feel good about.

I walk around my neighborhood with trash bags cleaning up.  It’s a random thing.  It’s rare that people notice.  But it’s important to me.  It’s something that I am concretely doing that makes the world a better place.  I can go do it today.  I need no help from anyone else.  I don’t have to organize or commit.  But at the end I have this little feeling of goodness.  I know who and what I am.  No one can take it away from me.  I am a caring person.  I do things that are invisible to other people and I keep a tally in my head.  Ok fine, other people may not appreciate it.  I do.  It’s part of the bulwark of my self-esteem.

If you want to be able to talk about your shitty husband, at least change the complaints.  You need to grow and change as a person.  You can choose how you feel about situations.  You can develop internal bulwarks against abuse.  You can know in the pit of your stomach who and what you are without changing any part of your life.  This will also lead to a cessation of bitching.  Think very hard about what you actually do with your behavior.  Make lists.  Decide for yourself what kind of person you are.

If you are told you are worthless, go pick up garbage in your neighborhood.  It’s a thankless job.  No one will notice.  But you know that you aren’t worthless.  It’s a task that needs to be done and you did it.  You didn’t pass the buck until someone else was paid for it.  You provided effort into the universe.  You can go home and smile a little smile of joy to yourself.  Don’t tell people you did it.  They tend to look at you funny and ask why you bothered.  You know who you are.  No one can take who you are away from you without your permission.

Build yourself up.  Find a way to create an internal life that gives you freedom.  I don’t mean escapism.  I don’t mean drugs.  I don’t mean reading popcorn books.  I mean find a way to know that you are putting good energy out into the universe.  Do something that you feel proud of.  It will change how you talk about yourself and your life.  You will stop bitching.  You will stop bitching because you will feel less bitter.

I complain a lot.  It’s a bad habit.  I write similar stories about my family year after year.  Of course I try to justify myself a lot.  People are like that.  I am trying very hard to get to the place where I am not bitching about my family any more.  I talk about them.  I explore my feelings, but I’m not bitching because I have changed my perspective and how I talk about them and even what I say substantially.

I think people should talk about their abuse situations extensively.  I think they should examine their own experience as many times as they need to move on.  Moving on means changing your life and going and doing something else.  It means stopping the abuse.  Somehow.  I don’t feel like I’m a great person to give advice on how to stop abuse.  I have followed the scorched earth policy.  It’s not required in most cases. I don’t really know exactly what other people should do.  That’s not my story.

Noah told me once that if you couldn’t look back on yourself 18 months ago and say, “Man I sucked” you aren’t working hard enough.  That pretty much summarizes my approach to life.  In no way shape or form do I think people should shut up and take abuse.  People are too important for that.

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Last night I once again went to a sex party and didn’t have sex with anyone.  This time I did play though.  It’s a subtle distinction.  I also noticed a few interesting things about my anxiety.  I’m really glad I’m not allowed to really date anyone right now.  I’m glad that the affair kind of trailed off.  I’m not hunting for a partner.  I’m looking for friends.  And I’m not hard up for sex.  Why am I acting desperate?  In November we’ve been having sex more or less daily. Before that we were having sex three to five times a week.  Why am I out hunting so hard?

Part of it is that I’m lonely still.  There isn’t much to compare to NRE and I’ve been in a stable relationship for a long time.  Mostly I want friends.  But I want friends I can have sex with because that is how I get my touch needs met.  Yeah yeah I “should” get over my issues and be able to handle getting my touch needs met non-sexually.  Whatever.  I don’t wanna.  I want to figure out how to get them met without doing damage to my life.  Whatever that means.  What does it mean to be stable?  To be consistent?  I’m not sure I know.

What do I want to be doing in five years?  In ten years?  In twenty years?  What parts of my life will be the same?  What parts will be different?  How much leeway do I want to leave in my plotting?  By which I mean: which things are non-negotiable if I am going to qualify as “stable”?

I don’t think that most people think about that in advance much.  Not really.  Not what that might mean.  They don’t think about how hard it might be.  I do not like that Noah wants to sleep with other people.  Only I do.  Only I like that he is the kind of person who likes that.  Only I like that he loves that I’m the kind of person who likes to sleep with other people.

I feel bad that Noah wants to sleep with other people because I’m afraid to trust him.  More than most people, he’s all I have.  I have spent more time talking to him than any other human being.  By far.  And I’ve known him for almost eight years.  He knows me.  If I risk him getting to know other people I risk him deciding they are better than me.  Letting him fall in love with someone else means that I have yet more lonely hours to fill as the people that I want to be with have something better to do.

Only it doesn’t have to mean that.  Even when I choose to be alone in the garage, why does this have to be a banishment?  Why does it have to be some terrible thing?  I have massive social anxiety and I am the mother of two young children and I have the weirdest damn sleep cycle in the world.  Of course I’m socially isolated.  This is not a statement about my character.  This is a natural part of my life cycle.

It’s all tied together.  It’s hard to believe that I still exist.  It’s hard to hope that this hard cycle will end.  It’s hard to believe that this much hard is worth it.  This much hard meaning dealing with my intense abandonment fears, parenting, being a partner to a disabled person, and having to support Noah in his career aspirations.  I picked these roles.  They are all hard.  They all take a lot of physical effort and emotional effort.  No wonder I want to hide in a dark room.  At least it’s quiet.

I have some weird ideas about who I am and what I should be doing.  I don’t think I understand them all yet.  I’m not sure I need to because I need to change a lot of them.  I really only look at myself in the most negative ways possible.

Today Shanna was resisting putting her underwear on after taking a shower.  She put her face in her hands and started rocking back and forth.  She was chanting, “I can’t.  I can’t.”  I stopped.  I asked her, “Are you doing this because you see me do this when I’m upset?”  She perked right up, jumped out of role and said, “Yup!” I told her that we try to reserve that kind of display for something slightly more life impacting than being cold after a shower.

I need to stop saying I can’t.  I’ll make it true.  I can.  I’m just shy of 39,000 words.  I am trying to decide if I should try to push through to 40,000 tonight.  I kind of think it would be better to rest.  Right now I’m writing about 1994-1995.  Fisher Middle School.  Oh boy.  This is when I start to introduce people who are in the current cast of characters.  People I don’t want to piss off.  But no pressure, right?

This is why people don’t write this shit.  It’s a lot of fucking pressure.  Do you want to know why I am chickening out about making the book about more than just the first 18 years of my life?  Because I’m almost 40,000 words in and I’m not even close to done and I still have a few years I haven’t even started writing about yet.  Because I think Jenny will forgive me for things I say about then, but I’m not so confident about the other people in my life.  Time to write.

One of the problems with polyamory

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I don’t know if other people sit around in their off-time listening to songs and trying to place them onto various relationships.  Particularly, today I am listening to Adele’s Someone Like You.  The way she talks about the song in this video is striking.  It has dramatically altered my hearing of the song.

I miss Steve and Tom.  I think I would be able to be the kind of person Steve could be friends now.  I think I have changed my reactions to some of our patterns.  I didn’t like how I treated Steve, but I liked Steve.  I would have broken him if I had stayed with him.  Instead I ran away.  I didn’t just break off dating him.  I stopped going any place he might be.  I avoided his friends like the plague.  Anyone who knew us both lost me after the break up.

I walked away from my life.  I broke all ties.  I changed my major in college.  I dropped out of college.  I broke up with Steve just a few months before our wedding and then I evaporated like a drop of water.  But there were a lot of reasons I wanted to marry him, you know?  He was a really amazing person.  I miss him.  I miss the things he brought into my life.  I don’t want to have sex with him, that part didn’t work well for me.  But I miss him being my close friend.  I dated him before I had ever told anyone the full story of my abuse.  Before I was out publicly as a rape survivor.  I could still name every single person I had ever had sexual contact with.  I had two lists.  One of girls, which was very long.  I didn’t tell people about that list.  And the boys, which was long but not frightening because I don’t count my rapists.  Oh wait, there was a third list in my head–the rapists.  I could still count my positive boy-sex experiences on my fingers with Steve.  Steve was the first boy who ever gave me an actual orgasm. I faked it before that.  Uhm, sorry people from high school.

I miss Steve a lot.  He was passionate about things the way Noah is.  I love basking in that kind of joy in the simple act of attaining knowledge.  Steve liked to learn.  He was inspiring to be around.  He isn’t book smart, and it was by choice.  He came from a highly educated family.  He was a self-didact though.  He knew how to do an amazing array of things.  And if he didn’t know how to do something he would figure out how to learn.  Nothing daunted him.  I miss that.  I didn’t know how to deal with it when I was 18.  I didn’t know how to explain to him that things were harder for me than him because I didn’t have this loving background telling me I could accomplish things, I had to move slower than him sometimes.

Enh, I don’t remember the particulars well enough to analyze it.  Whatever.  That’s not the point.  I would really like to know what kind of man he has become.  I’m pretty sure I was right back then when I knew that I wouldn’t enjoy living with him long-term.  But I think I could be his friend now.  I think I would know how to listen to his interests without bashing him over the head with my issues.

I ran from Steve to Tom.  In a straight line.  Jumping on a few nice people along the way.  I was 18 and living with a lonely old lady who wanted company and I wanted to be surfing the internet looking for sex.  As soon as I became involved with him I started using his house as a base.  I was there a lot when he was at work because I didn’t have anywhere else to be.  His internet was paid for, he didn’t seem to care.

I’m not sure he understood how much time I was there.  How much time I spent auditioning a life in that house before our relationship got all that serious.  I picked him.  I wanted him.  I didn’t have to look around the local community for more than three months before I was damn sure he was the only person in that lot I wanted to seriously pursue.  And I did.  And on our first date he told me that he was looking for the One.  The One he would marry and have children with.

I am not going to get into it much right now.  That’s too big of a story.  I can’t do that today.  I can’t write it down today.  But I can sit here and listen to Adele sing.  And I cry.  Because I can’t write that story yet.  I am in the middle of another one.

I date Puppy because I was trying to replace Tom.  Puppy was the most abusive relationship I have had as an adult.  If he had not ended it when he did I think he would have hit me.  He was escalating in his violent displays when I didn’t react how he wanted.  I wasn’t good enough for him.  His family hated me and picking me would have meant ostracizing his family.  Or having to have relationships with them that involved no discussion of his life with me.  He didn’t think I was worth it.  He was a nasty piece of shit to me trying to get me to break up with him.  When my response was to cry for a while then try to problem solve he freaked out.  He wanted me to do something nasty so he had justification for his behavior.  I feel like my relationship with Puppy absolves me of my guilt for treating Steve so badly.  I learned how to control that anger.  I’m really sorry I fucked up like that at 18.  But I learned.  I changed.  Some people never do.  I’m proud of myself.

I am too angry with Noah.  Almost none of it is directed at him.  I’m not angry because of anything related to Noah.  I’m just angry.  At so many stupid things I remember and can’t let go of.  So many things that I’m trying to write down and be done with.  Puppy left me with a nasty email about how I will end up bitter and alone.  Just. Like. His. Mother.  Yeah, that’s about me?  I think not.

I don’t need to feel bad for my part in that any more.  That was a shitty relationship.  I don’t think it escalated to abuse but it wanted to.  It didn’t partially because I learned to control my temper.  That’s pretty cool.  I needed to do that.  It was essential in helping me be a good teacher.  And oh boy is it more important as a mother.  I’m sorry I hurt Steve.  But I forgive myself.  I had good reasons to be angry.  The more of this book I write the more I understand why people in authority positions widen their eyes when I tell my stories.  I should be exploding with anger.  I should be standing on top of a tall building with a machine gun taking my rage out on all of humanity.  That’s what a wounded animal as smart as me would do.

For all that people tell me I’m an angry person, I’m not.  Not really.  I was.  I’m sad.  I’m afraid.  Writing my story down all in one block and thinking about how many years of my life I have spent alone in a room is hard.  I don’t know how to have a real live actual family.  I’m scared.

I dated Tom for more years than I lived with my brother Jimmy after the age of three.  I lived with Tom for almost as many years as I lived with Tommy.  We were very close.  But he could never decide if I was really worth so much effort.  He wasn’t interested in getting married and having kids with me.  I think that given his life priorities, he made the right decision.  I’m not the right kind of girl for him.  And that still hurts.  I wanted to be.  I tried so hard to be what I thought he wanted.  Oh so many things I want to say.  They come over me in waves, these memories.

But I don’t think I can be friends with Tom.  We were too much.  I want too much.  I miss too much.  I want too much of him still.  I don’t know if anything could ever actually work.  I’m not going to let myself think about it.  I can’t.  I ran away.  I slammed the door on that part of my life pretty hard.  It has taken many years for me to figure out that some people in that community can be my friends because they aren’t actually interested in being his friend.  I didn’t have to ask them to pick a side!  They came pre-picked!  I’m a shallow piece of shit.

No, I have problems with boundaries.  I don’t think I would be able to have any if I spent extended time with Tom.  Once again, I don’t know that it is even sex I want.  I want to crawl back into his head.  I want to once again hear him tell me about the most intense parts of himself.  I want to watch him enjoy driving.  I want to be tied up.  I wouldn’t mind it being non-sexual.  I miss being enjoyed for just being there to look at.  That’s something that’s hard to communicate about objectification.  It means that someone doesn’t have to know all of my dirty stupid little secrets, they can enjoy looking at me.  Maybe I am beautiful.

Maybe if I write about what I really miss in enough detail I can find a way to get those specific needs met in other ways.  It’s worth a try.  But not today.  Maybe someday I will find someone like Tom.  Maybe I will be able to figure it out.

Daydreaming is weird.  Because I have these thoughts.  I have them a lot when I’m driving.  Polyamory means that I can have my Bridges of Madison County track in the back of my brain and know that I am not being disloyal to the people in front of me.

I feel sad that Noah does the same thing.  I don’t know that he does it exactly the same way I do.  But he has similar yearnings to not feel like doors are closed.  There is one girl he is kind of bitter about.  I handled it badly.  He really was falling in love.  It felt like watching my chance at stable happiness leave every time he went on a date.  I don’t trust that anyone else can love more than one person at a time.  My family couldn’t do that.  One kid at a time was “special” and whoever wasn’t in the center… well… when my brothers weren’t at the center it was because they weren’t there.  Sometimes when my mother and I lived alone somewhere I was the center.  That was wonderful.  Anytime there was anyone else around I was ignored.  She had missed those kids the whole time she had me.  She had talked about that endlessly.  She didn’t talk about me in glowing terms the way she did them.  She didn’t idealize me.  She lived with me.

I don’t want to be that for Noah.  I’m scared.  It is so hard to trust him.  It is so hard to trust anyone.  There is no one else in the world I would even bother to try to trust like I trust Noah.  I can’t.  I’m not capable.  And that hurts.  Once people have been close to me like that, if they fuck up even slightly then I have to completely and totally evaporate from their lives.  I can’t handle being demoted.  When Noah starts paying attention to someone else I feel demoted.  I go from being the wife to being part of the harem.  Now I’m “one of Noah’s girls”.  I feel disposable.  It’s not true.  I know Noah doesn’t feel that way.  Not even slightly.  But that’s what I feel.

You know.  Once I get the problem nailed down this specifically it’s time to talk to the California Mindfucker.  I like NLP.  It’s a convenient tool.  I keep hitting this same wall.  And it’s not rational.  I can explain it 50 more times and they will all come down to the same thing.  I want to change my irrational feelings and I’m not managing on my own.  There are tricks for that.

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.

Rape Culture

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Often I do not get along with rabid feminists on the topic of rape culture.  The reasons for that are myriad, but mostly revolve around the fact that I think most feminists are too sensitive.  I think a lot of women cry rape when they are stretching.  I think we need another word.  I think that there should be some commonly understood word for coerced or unwanted sex that the woman never actually refuses.  I think there should just be a way for women to talk about it.

“Yeah, last night he totally ______ me.  It was ok.”  I don’t know what this word should be.  There is something missing in our language.

I have a hard time asking my casual sex partners to not choke me.  Do you know why I have a hard time with this?  Because I was brought up in a family where sexual assault was as common as dirt.  Anything short of penis in vagina rape isn’t even worth talking about.  I have had members of my biological family tell me that because my father and brother never had their penis in my vagina that I shouldn’t complain.  Orally raping me with a gun to my head doesn’t count.  The fact that I had to physically fight my brother off of me over and over and over… doesn’t count.

I have a hard time believing that I am allowed to feel good during sex.  I’m going to tell you a secret, oh open internet.  That whole “being trained to orgasm on command” thing?  I actually don’t like that about myself.  I feel pretty disgusting.  But it’s a really good trick for when I am in a lot of pain and I’m not enjoying the sex much.  I can whisper in someones ear that this works.  And it does.  Hypnotic suggestion is awesome.  An orgasm involves vaginal muscle spasms.  It’s more complicated than that.  But the vaginal muscle spasm part can be triggered.  It’s enough to keep the endorphins up in my brain to numb the pain so I can get through the experience.

I’m also going to tell a secret, I mostly only do this with men who are physically too large for me.  I don’t need to resort to this “trick” when I am sleeping with someone who has a smaller dick.  Which is why I prefer sleeping with men who are not that big.  I don’t like having to use over ride tricks to talk my body out of throbbing pain.  It’s not very fun.  It feels like cheating.

It feels like cheating that I can’t depend on my partners to only do nice things to my body.  It is a rape culture adaptation.  I know that men are going to be doing things to me that hurt.  When I was younger I was smart enough to have an overly endowed partner figure out how to make sex with him bearable.  It’s a good trick.  But it’s a trick.  I always know later that my body didn’t want to be there.  My body didn’t want that experience.  It hurt.

I lost my ‘virginity’ when I was 12 and I asked a 25 year old to fuck me.  He did absolutely no foreplay.  He spit on his hand, wiped it on my cunt, and started fucking me.  That is still how I have sex.  These days it is better if he grabs me by the head and has me suck him hard first.  A lot more saliva is deposited that way.

No, sex isn’t about orgasms.  I have learned how to have sex with my husband that feels nice and makes me feel like a whole person instead of a hole.  I rarely orgasm.  If I need to get off, if I physically feel that ache… I need to feel like a hole.

I don’t like that I have become so thoroughly part of rape culture.  I am the byproduct.  If it doesn’t feel kind of like rape it probably isn’t going to get me off.  But I’m honestly only kind of willing.  It hurts.  It makes me feel bad about myself.  That I need to be treated like that.  That I’m not very interested in sex with people unless they hurt me.

If I swear of masochism I swear off orgasms.  I don’t want to say that out loud.  It’s not completely true.  But my days of numbering my orgasms in the hundreds are over.  I can’t do that without someone hurting me.

I get off because someone else is using me to pleasure themselves.  Because they want me that much.  I don’t orgasm because things feel good.  There should be a word for that.  There should be a word for this feeling of needing violent sex but not enjoying, kind of.  Yeah, we mutually got each other off.  It was kind of emotionally uncomfortable.  Yeah, we exchanged a little light-hearted sexual assault.  Yes we totally _____________.

I need a word.

Casual sex

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“I’ve got someone who loves me more than words can say
And I’m thankful for that each and every day
And if I count all my blessings, I get a smile on my face
Still it’s hard to find faith…

But if you can look in my eyes
And tell me we’ll be alright
If you promise never to leave 

You just might make me believe”

I listen to country music because it makes me cry.  Because it is just as sappy as me.  It’s kind of a weird balance that the more I think about having sex with someone other than Noah the more I am inclined to cry and feel unworthy of him.  It’s a hard balance.  I like it, and I want to pursue it.  There just seems to be some magical amount of it that is hot for my marriage and more than that starts to feel threatening.  I need to keep my priorities straight.  Noah is forever.

It’s scary to think about forever.  How long does that really mean?  I won’t know until it gets here.  But I really like thinking that I can plan for 2020 with Noah.  What do we want to do with our life?  It’s hard to tease out which parts are just for me and which parts are just for him and which parts are actually for both of us.  It feels important to me to have some idea in my head so that I can ensure that we are all getting our needs met in the most balanced way we can manage.  The funny part about our life is that if Noah didn’t program for a living he would do it anyway.  That makes me feel a lot less bad about him spending so much time at work.  Just sayin’.  From where I’m standing programming looks like programming.  I’m only kind of serious.

Why do I fuck other people?  Do I do it for me?  Do I do it because I think that is the kind of girl Noah wanted to marry?  It crosses my mind once in a while that I do feel pressured to be slutty.  Noah really likes the trashier the better.  I’ve noticed.  But oh man it feels comfortable.  When I am not actively flirting and/or hunting I feel like part of me is dead.  I feel invisible.  I feel… like I have no value.  Yes, I recognize that it’s fucked up.

You know, I can tell myself that it’s fucked up and I should get over it.  Then I could stop going out and flirting.  Somehow I don’t think the problem would evaporate.  Today I went to the Westboro Baptist Church counter-protests in Cupertino.  At the Apple campus that rather charming young man was clearly hitting on me.  I uhh mentioned my partner and kids and he sighed deeply.  I was just trying to amass the courage to say that didn’t mean I was unavailable!  Then his friend pulled on his sleeve and he left.  Oh well.

I think that’s a lot of why I don’t mind that I like extracurricular sex so much.  Because I don’t actually do almost any of it. I think about it obsessively, but so what?  I vacillate between feeling guilty because I think about sex outside my marriage let alone doing it and feeling kind of boring because I have so much trouble scoring.  I spend a lot of time laughing at my own stupidity.  I like these double binds where I’m wrong no matter what I do.

I say I have trouble scoring because when I finally find someone who is interested in actual NSA sex right now I turn him down.  I won’t sleep with someone who is cheating.  Ha.  I guess I do have standards.  Other than that I am batting 1 in 3 for attempts.  I’m pretty glad for that one, let me tell you.  Otherwise I’d feel a lot more sad.  It’s weird to feel almost sad for not finding random sex.  Because I want such a specific kind of sex, of course I’m not finding it left and right.  Noah has spoiled me.

I think I spend so much time thinking about possible sexual encounters because otherwise I want to start a remodeling project and I really need to spend some time sitting on my ass in between running.  Really. My poor body needs a break.  I’m kind of bored of reading.  I’m not interested in more time watching movies or television.  I have cut all my reading filters down so far that they only produce about twenty minutes in a day.  I could obsess about my kids, I suppose.  Instead I think about sex.  It’s more fun.

I think that a lot of the fantasizing about other people is just a way of creating roles for us to play later.  We do a lot of roleplay during sex.  Honestly that’s a lot of why Noah is so fun.  It’s like having a whole harem in one.  He’s willing to do absolutely anything I want.  It’s pretty miraculous.  He uhm lacks some of the technical skills I miss though.  I’m trying to figure out which ones I care about the most and why.

I miss being tied up.  It’s been a very long time since I’ve had a serious bondage scene like I used to do with Tom.  Not since March of 2006.  It’s not that I haven’t been tied up since then.  I have.  But I haven’t done a bondage scene that gave me the D/s aspect that is important to the experience.  It’s hard to figure out how to talk about this.  There is something missing.  It’s probably easier to talk about Max than Tom, there’s less emotion there.  So Max is Tom’s best friend.  They have been best friends for nearly two decades now.  They learned rope at the same time from different sources and then came into the scene at the same time and strongly influenced one another.

Max is one of the nicest guys I have ever met in my life.  He’s also one of the nastiest sadists.  And he has the best quietly commanding air of anyone I have ever met.  There have only been a few men ever who can say, “May I please have a glass of water?” and my response is to jump up and run to get it and return it on my knees saying, “Thank you for the honor of serving you, Sir.”  I’ll tell you plainly that I never came anywhere close to having sex with Max but oh god I thought about it.  I was always very sad that I didn’t know what a man that powerful needed to get off.

That’s it.  I like finding people who are interesting to me and finding out what gets them off.  What sexuality goes with that outer shell.  It tells me a lot about peoples insecurities.  I know how to deal with people once I know how they get off.  I know what their needs are.  I find out who they need me to be.  Because I require that my sex partners talk about what feels good and what they want.  What do they want me to do.  Please instruct me.

I can’t go to bed with someone who can’t talk during sex.  It doesn’t work well.  I never feel like I know what to do and it’s awkward and slightly uncomfortable.  Those kind of people are the sort who don’t want to have sex on the first date.  They want to go on 3-5 dates and then you are supposed to suddenly just “know” without instructions.  Bah.  Lousy lovers.  No talking in bed, no sex for you.  (with a nod to Sarah)

Saying lousy lover is a bit strong.  But it means we aren’t compatible.  So much of what is going on in my head is related to the things that are said more than anything I feel in my body.  Ok, I’m trying to use gender neutral language as if sex with men is like sex with women and it’s not.  I haven’t slept with very many women in the last few years.  I’ll tell you plainly it’s because I’m sick to death of pillow princesses. I have only managed to find a few active women in the last ten years.  I pretty much stopped trying because I’m tired of doing all the work with bicurious or heteroflexible women.  Ahem.  I’m sure the problem is where I am hunting, but I don’t know where to look.

Men are easier for me to relate to.  They tend to not bring their emotions into sex.  And when a guy starts telling me he is in love with me I’m in trouble.  It rarely goes well from there.  All of a sudden they have needs outside of sex I am supposed to meet.  I tend to feel angry about that because I can’t.  So I feel like I am disappointing them.  Like I am failing at my responsibilities.  That’s frustrating and my response to people adding frustration I don’t need is anger.  It’s not optimal.  It’s one of the biggest things that keeps me tentative about going to places I know would be more target rich environments for sketchy catches.  I’m trying to only hunt in places I have a good chance of running into people who won’t fall in love with me.  I’m a good friend and a good lay, but I’m not girlfriend material.

What is the difference?  How is that all tied up (ha) with the bondage I miss?  I want an intensity of focus in my interactions that people other than Noah frankly can’t sustain.  I think that someday he will be able to do exactly the kind of bondage I want him to do.  I just need to get my head out of my ass and teach him.  It’s my fault he can’t do it yet.  I get really impatient and mean because he’s not perfect yet.  He needs practice and I don’t have the patience to give it to him and I don’t encourage/allow him to go practice with anyone else.

I’m aware that this is one of those 10,000 hour skills.  Do you know why Tom and Max are so hot?  Because when I met them more than ten years ago they had already been each tying people up for over ten years.  So they are each at twenty-five or more years of tying people up recreationally.  No shit they are better than Noah.  They had to start somewhere with a patient girlfriend.  I’m so sick of being patient.  Dear god.  Is there one more fucking thing I can add to my life where I have to be patient?  Bah.

Max is so hot because Max is a Master because he knows his will down to the letter and he knows exactly where he wants to delegate and where he doesn’t.  He’s not messy.  Ever.  (Ok, I’m sure he is occasionally because he’s had personal issues just like everyone else, but not in front of me in any capacity.)  He mastered his emotions.  So when he ties me up every move feels deliberate.  For that space of time *I* am being almost an object that he wants to touch and move around.  And in the process he slowly adds rope that is tight but not overly painful for the primary purpose of restricting circulation and blood flow so that I get light headed.

I don’t know if that explanation makes sense.  But it’s really hot.  Being tied up by someone really skillful is nice because it doesn’t have to be overly painful in order to be effective.  You can slowly be pulled through neat stretches while nicely light headed.  I like particular positions more than others, of course.  And being suspended is amazing because fighting gravity is always intense.  Not having any part of my body resting on something makes me feel giddy.  Even if I’m not far off the ground.  It’s intense and scary.  Once Tom put me 75′ off the ground.  I really like being anywhere off the ground I can.  I’ve always liked climbing trees and fences.

For most of my life I have had several recurring dreams about flying.  I feel like the suspension fits into that part of my psyche.  It’s a way to escape this mortal coil for at least a brief reprieve.  I can dissociate without the fuss of someone feeling bad because I can’t feel anything they are doing while they are having sex with them.  That upsets people.

Being completely outside my body feels safe and comfortable in a way that very few things do.  I can will myself into doing that while stone cold sober just sitting in a chair.  But it’s really hard and I lose focus easily.  When I’m tied up it’s almost impossible for me to be present in my body after a while.  I get to simultaneously become hyper aware of my body and completely feel absent from worrying about it because I feel like I am soaring through the air free from it.  It’s wonderful.  It’s not all the time food.  Well, not for me.  Not without Tom.  That’s ok.  Noah has other perks.  It’s weird to miss that so intently; it’s weird to miss Tom.  I feel disloyal.

That feels tied up with my current anxiety around not wanting to get attached to anyone other than Noah.  As usual, for me, it also feels tied up with the incest.  My father told my brothers that they have the right to have sex whenever they want.  Rape was specifically fine.  It didn’t matter if it was a chick outside the family or inside.  If you want sex, you should have it.  If you can’t find it outside the family it is the responsibility of someone in the family to provide it, if you can take it.  So my mother, sister, and I had to fight Tommy off for years.  It’s a good thing he was disabled or I would have lost.  I was 4.5 years younger.

If I like people and want to get to know them I feel like I have to be available for sex in order to be interesting.  Which is tied up with the fact that when I like people I want to have sex with them.  And I really enjoy the kind of getting to know people I get from having sex with them.  I find it deeply fulfilling to get someone off.  Really.  I get this boost that lasts weeks.  It’s very similar to the feeling I have when I am serving someone.  I can get the same getting-someone-off-high from serving someone in a D/s capacity.  It’s a lot of why I miss it so much.

Noah builds me up differently.  The biggest difference between Noah and Tom is that Noah could probably tell me my whole life story back to me right now before I write the book.  Because he has asked over and over for information and he has bothered to remember.  I doubt Tom could ever tell anything about me other than “She had a bad childhood.”  He wanted a very different kind of relationship than me.  He wanted less of an examined life.  Fair enough.  This takes a lot of time away from doing other things.  But it’s my hobby.

I’m feeling kind of guilty about how antsy I am to find someone to have sex with.  So my thoughts keep wandering to how I can start painting the pantry today.  I think I should just get laid.

It’s not what you know it’s who you know

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I used to have a coworker, Christina.  We were hired for the same department the same year.  I think in our first semester of being teachers together I subbed for her one period.  That is a common thing for teachers to do.  For things like doctors appointments, it’s easier than finding someone outside the school.  You generally don’t get extra pay for it, but the goodwill is huge.

We were both still learning how to put together curriculum and we had very different styles.  She was going from the textbook.  I never checked the textbook out of the book room.  I ran my classroom as close to a college class as I could get away with.  I followed the state standards for educational guidelines, here let’s look at one set as an example (these are the official standards for the state of California):

WRITING (Grades 11 & 12)
1.0  Writing Strategies
Students write coherent and focused texts that convey a well-defined perspective
and tightly reasoned argument. The writing demonstrates students’ awareness of the
audience and purpose and progression through the stages of the writing process.
Organization and Focus
1.1  Demonstrate an understanding of the elements of discourse (e.g., purpose, speaker,
audience, form) when completing narrative, expository, persuasive, or descriptive
writing assignments.
1.2  Use point of view, characterization, style (e.g., use of irony), and related elements for specific rhetorical and aesthetic purposes.
1.3  Structure ideas and arguments in a sustained, persuasive, and sophisticated way and support them with precise and relevant examples.
1.4  Enhance meaning by employing rhetorical devices, including the extended use of paral­lelism, repetition, and analogy; the incorporation of visual aids (e.g., graphs, tables, pictures); and the issuance of a call for action.
1.5  Use language in natural, fresh, and vivid ways to establish a specific tone.
Research and Technology
1.6  Develop presentations by using clear research questions and creative and critical research strategies (e.g., field studies, oral histories, interviews, experiments, electronic sources).
1.7  Use systematic strategies to organize and record information (e.g., anecdotal scripting,
annotated bibliographies).
1.8  Integrate databases, graphics, and spreadsheets into word-processed documents.
Evaluation and Revision
1.9  Revise text to highlight the individual voice, improve sentence variety and style, and
enhance subtlety of meaning and tone in ways that are consistent with the purpose, audience, and genre.

To me there is no part of that needs to include dead white guys or boring work sheets.  I want to talk about controversial books, stories, songs, news articles.  Ok, some of the dead white guys are ok.  I am a big fan of Mark Twain.  I really enjoyed teaching Huckleberry Finn even though I’m sure I wasn’t PC.  I made ever white kid in the class read aloud until they could stop stuttering when they said nigger.  It’s just a word.  Then the black kids spontaneously decided to talk about how it felt.  There were fewer jokes after that day.

Anyway, Christina.  When I subbed for her I made fun of the poem we were reading from the textbook. I did it reflexively.  I did it because I had an instinctive hatred of the textbook.  Of course word got back to Christina.  She was cold to me for years rather than tell me that what I did was unprofessional.  In the week or two before I quit I came into the break room.  She was sitting there alone.  I sat across the table from her and I said, “I feel that I must have wronged you.  I’m not sure what I did.  But you’ve been very angry with me for a long time and I was hoping you would tell me why.”  She tried to deflect me.  Naw, she’s got no problem.  Then I told her the story I just wrote.  I got to the end and I said I was sorry that I poisoned the well when I was an insecure new teacher.  I did it because I was trying to bolster my sense of myself and in the process I damaged hers and that makes me a bully.  I’m sorry.  She cried.

She told me it was hard to keep hating me because I said things that were so funny and then she got mad at herself for laughing because she was supposed to dislike me.  I told her I understand.  People often feel that way about me.

Like they are supposed to dislike me, but they don’t and they aren’t sure why.  I’ve been told that more times than I care to recall.

Yesterday we had our first visit from a housekeeper/babysitter person.  She’s young and in college.  She’s not white.  The things she has mentioned so far make my heart beat faster.  She was turned out at 13.  She has been homeless for most of the time since.  She made it through DeVry under extremely suboptimal conditions because she wants to be a Systems Administrator.

Some of the things she said remind me strongly of Christina, who was also not white and from a less than privileged background.  It’s a specific quality.  If I follow the textbook I will be doing it right.  I have to do what the textbook says.  They are both climbing the ladder by doing things right.  I have always known that there must be an easier way.  And because I was white and I lived in Los Gatos and I was invited into the homes of very rich people and I got to listen to the way they just randomly talk around the house…

Yeah, it’s different.  My family taught me I had to conform and be like other people.  A very firm caste system, if you will.  I had to be who I was born to be.  My circumstances of birth should have dictated my actions.  But you see, I have always been able to find the ability to ‘pass’ around people of higher social class for at least a little while.  I can’t maintain it for long and it feels like incredible strain.  But all those bits and pieces and glimpses have shown me that the people who make it really far are people who believe that their circumstance of birth are irrelevant to their potential.  They simply have a larger hunger than that.

Christina and the housekeeper and me are all hungry in that way.  We want something more.  This is very common.  I’m hitting writers block because I feel like I want to say something that sounds bad or mean, but it’s still true.  I’m paralyzed with fear.

Ok.  I think that Christina and D (chick from yesterday) are afraid to go off book because otherwise they would have to start making up their own path.  They have never been encouraged to do so.  Everything in their lives has pushed them into a fairly narrow walkway for “success” but neither is going to actually reach success that way.

This is my big judgmental mouth here.  This is hard to admit out loud that I think.  Ok.  I feel like they both need to go off book.  If you are always afraid of failing you never commit yourself foolhardily to the most important decisions.

I called the Sheriff’s department and reported my father and had everything set, done, rolling before my mother got home from work.  I knew that if I talked to her she would try to talk me out of making waves.  I was just imagining things.  According to my mother nothing was that bad; there was nothing to report.

I think that Christina needs to learn to stick up for herself and tell coworkers, “What you did was unprofessional and rude” because she needs to learn that she’s worth that.  It will make her a better teacher.  I think D should find a way to live and breathe Sys Admin shit for a few months in someones garage and not bother with DeVry.  She needs to go talk to real live people who do this shit.

In both cases I am struck by their unwillingness to assert themselves with power.  They both wait to be told what they should be doing and how they should do it.  I don’t do that.  I don’t think it is because I am white.  I think it is because I was shown that rich people are assholes and they do whatever the fuck they want whenever the fuck they want.  They can get away with it.  I wanted to learn how.

In Los Gatos High School the kids all got away with murder.  It was eery.  I watched kids be disrespectful in ways that made my eyes bug out.  But the teachers were powerless in terms of discipline.  It was really obvious to me that the teachers were only going to be effective if they form a personal bond.  And you can’t do that with everyone.

Christina isn’t a bad teacher and she doesn’t need to do anything different from what she’s doing.  Her kids will learn just fine.  But she’s not the right teacher for people who are hostile to working from a textbook.  Early on when I was teaching it made me angry that she followed the textbook because it felt like a personal injustice that she was perpetuating the lie that people need to know the stupid shit inside that book.  No one ever needs to read a god damn textbook ever in their lives in order to be educated.

This is my dirty street kid talking.  I didn’t ever read the textbooks.  I didn’t do homework.  I was socially progressed through elementary and junior high because I did no work.  Looking around the room I always felt like the other kids must be smarter or better or… something than me.  For whatever reason I was never willing to do what I was told.  Ever.  I have had several teachers (in public schools) beat me trying to get me to change my behavior.  It only ever made me more stubborn.

It’s scary to stand near people who take up a lot of space.  It feels like they encroach on me and try to make me more like them.  It’s scary to stand next to people who invite boundary incursion.  I don’t want to push anyone to be more like me, either.  I’m pretty fucked up.  Why in the hell would anyone want to be like me.

But I went from the bottom 10% to the top 5% in a time when my generation is crying out against the injustice of lack of social mobility.  It’s hard to not feel like a whore.  I am this rich because Noah fell in love with me.  He wanted a wife who was sufficiently slutty and fun.  He encourages me in doing every transgressive thing I want to do.  Because he thinks there isn’t actually anything wrong with anything that I’m doing.

I think it was easier to go find other groups that would encourage healthier behaviors because I looked enough like the groups that I wanted to be part of.  When I was in neighborhoods where I was the only white kid, I wasn’t invited into the homes of nice families.  I never had the experience of nice families in a multi-cultural setting.  In Los Gatos it took a while for people to notice that I didn’t fit in and then they would stop inviting me.  So in the poor, non-white (the specific concentration depended on where we were living) areas I spent all my time alone.  Occasionally I wandered out for a sexual assault.  When I was in white areas I was surrounded by very affluent, quirky people.

It’s had an effect on me.  So yesterday when this nice girl was helping me clean my house we sat and talked a lot about her school experience and how she feels quite sure that they aren’t teaching her what she needs to know.

You know, I can’t foster children in a house this small.  But I sure as shit can have a long string of people who need money work for me and I can help them network.  You want to be a Sys Admin, honey?  Let me introduce you to some nice girls I know.

Why I want to be a stay at home mom

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So I was watching the Steve Jobs speech at Stanford and it occurred to me that I should spend some serious time thinking about why I am a stay at home mom.  I’ve been having internal pushback towards my decision making process lately and I think I need more clarity.

I view parenting as accompanying your child through an apprenticeship to adulthood.  One that my mother failed at.  My mother gave me adult responsibilities when I was very young.  I had to be responsible for myself in a way that was not appropriate or fair.  And I failed often.  The result was that I got hurt often.  I don’t instinctively know what skills a child would have to avoid problematic people.  I don’t want to teach my children to be just like me.

I don’t think my aggression is an ideal life attitude.  And I want my kids to be allowed to be them.  I don’t know how to do that without looking at them all day long.  I don’t know how to bond in a shorter time span than that.  I believe that working mothers love their children just as much as I do.  I don’t know how they find time in the day to deal with that much emotion.  I can’t.  It overloads me.  Having to be patient and interactive with them is incredibly difficult.  If I had other things adding stress to my life (like a job) I would be nasty and mean and vicious pretty much all the time.  It is hard for me to be nice and I find that embarrassing.

I only know how to get through the bad days by having a lot of control over every single solitary thing I say and do all day.  You can’t do that and have a job.  So really, I just don’t want to have a job.  No.  That’s not true.  I do not believe I am capable of managing the stress of a job and the stress of children.  I would not be pleasant, ever.  Dealing with my mental health takes up too much time, honestly.

And I am getting to discover what it is like to unfold in a safe, gradually expanding environment.  I am watching how Shanna changes.  It’s amazing to me to look at her in all of her grumpy glory and think, “That is in absence of any external stress whatsoever.  Hunh.  How does that jive with what I remember doing/being/saying?”  I’m learning what it means that someone else can’t “make” you feel something.  My children get on my nerves.  That is kind of their job.  When I lose my temper and start yelling at them I have this huge hammer in my brain hitting me as hard as possible saying, “She’s a fucking three year old!  She doesn’t know this is an annoying thing to do!  You are supposed to be helping her learn not berating her for her inadequacies!!”  I feel like my anger is not supposed to be part of the equation.

Do you know why I feel that way?  Because in my family you weren’t allowed to address small injustices or issues.  You were required to stay silent through small problems and big problems alike.  I was supposed to just smile and “be pleasant”.  “Why is your tone of voice so nasty all the time” was the favored thing to tell me.  I learned that I was simply an unpleasant person because I wanted them to stop “playing” with me in ways that hurt me.  I was a whiner.  At least according to them.  And looking at Shanna… I can understand why people around me didn’t notice that anything wrong was happening.

If I put my hand around Shanna’s hand to hold it when she’s not in the mood it doesn’t matter if I am holding her with so little pressure I barely encircle her hand.  “It huuuuuuuuuuuurts.”  I feel like I’m going to lose my mind.  She is constantly whining about how much I am hurting her, when I am not even touching her body.  When I am walking towards her with the hair brush she starts crying and clutching her head and rolling around the floor sobbing because I have hurt her.  When I haven’t touched her yet.  I did that too.

Do you know what my mom did?  She probably thought she was just trying to get it over with as fast as possible.  Oh how I screamed.  I have done the same thing to Shanna.  You pull them over to the couch, hold them between your knees, and as fast as possible you get the knots out no matter how they squirm.  But my would start with a fine tooth comb at the top of my head and yank.  I have a baby brush with soft bristles and I start at the ends and I pull knots apart with my fingers.  I don’t think Shanna is reacting to what I am doing less than I reacted to my mother.  I sincerely believe that Shanna experiences actual physical pain for less than 10% of the time I am brushing her hair.  My mother could be gentle but when she was in a hurry… well… that was that.  And she was in a hurry a lot.  I was the youngest of four.  She worked most of my life.

If I had to hurry and get Shanna ready for daycare before I got ready for work we would not have a pleasant relationship.  She wakes up slow.  We generally sit in a chair for half an hour cuddling before we do anything at the beginning of each day.  Calli is joining us now.  Then Noah makes breakfast and the kids go back and forth between us.  If I also had to get ready for work then, that would be the end of my writing and relaxing.  That is when I have that time.  The other tasks would get managed somehow by someone else.  I would just lose writing.

It’s hard for me to actually admit that I need this writing.  It feels so banal, so unimportant.  Why would anyone ever care about anything I have to say?  Who the fuck am I?  Because if I’m telling you the truth I want people to read this.  I want people to give a shit what I say.  But I’m not sure anyone should.  Have I thought anything useful?  Have I taught anything?  I don’t know.  Not enough, I’m sure.  What is teaching anyway?  When I worked as a high school teacher my goal was to have the kids be able to argue with me more by the end of the year.  I want them to be ever increasingly sure of their own opinions.  I want them to be able to talk in finer and finer detail about what they believe.  Because only once they can talk about it can they really be a fully integrated person and deal with their little hypocrisies.

I actively want to avoid being a hypocrite.  That means being very sure what my priorities are and changing my behavior when it’s not in alignment.  It’s hard.  It means I don’t get to coast for long.  What are my priorities.

Me.
Noah, Shanna, Calli, Sarah.  Not necessarily in that order.  Spending time with them.
Writing
Learning/Reading
Socializing with other people
Gardening
Housecleaning
Cooking

It’s a short and broad list to start with. That means that when I sit down to read a book to Shanna I am not evading my housekeeping duties.  I’m following my priority list.  I want to stick my tongue out at an imaginary person now.  I feel like there is some judge and jury out there who is going to tell me I am a bad mother because I want to sit in the garage and smoke pot instead of clean my house.  Seriously.  Who the fuck wouldn’t agree with me?  I’m writing, damnit.  Why am I writing.  Why does writing matter.

Writing lets me get out the stupid shit I am thinking about into a format where I can see it, understand it, and recognize that it is idiotic.  If it is just running around and around and around in my brain… I don’t know how to get off the train.  The writing changes it from a train on a circular trap to a traffic loop.  Yes, it is possible to get caught in the center if you are being dumb, but there are exits all fucking over the place.  Just pick one.  Are any of them really worthwhile?  I don’t know.  I don’t know if anyone will read my writing one day and feel like I made their life better.  I gave them an idea they didn’t have before and it made their life just a little easier.  I feel like it is so hard for me to “act normal” that certainly some other people are also just acting and they might like a trick.

I loathe when people say, “Be yourself!”  Yourself is a bizarre construct of all the different influences you’ve had in your life + personal taste.  It’s pretty vague.  And let me tell you, when you do things you genuinely like (like making your hair increasingly AWESOME) people are quick to remind you that you are stepping out of the herd and you should stop that.  I think I dyed my hair because it makes me visually a freak but it doesn’t cause any more pain to my body.  I think that is a god damn excellent direction of progress.

I want to be a stay at home mom because some accident of fate handed me a partner with sufficient money to support me all my life in a manner to which I would like to become accustomed.  We’ve been married for five years.  Until now I have contributed enough to pay for my truly unnecessary stuff.  I was self-sufficient enough.  Now I have no form of income.  Now I am completely dependent on someone else for the first time since I was 15.

Of course I’m secretly having a fucking heart attack and hoping that I do a good enough job in November that I can sell the book.  I don’t want to be a god damn dependent.  But I don’t want to do anything that requires me to deal with other people.  Err, well, that kind of limits the options.  And honestly I wouldn’t take a random retail job right now.  For one thing it would be hard to get someone to hire me because I am so overqualified.  I think I could overcome that though.  It’s called lying.  But I would feel guilty for taking that job away from someone who needs it more.  I don’t want an office job.  I don’t want anything where I have to be doing additional work.  Ha.  I feel like being the housefrau maid for my family is enough fucking work this lifetime, thanks.  And I want to write.  And my husband wants me to write.

I have such intense feelings about Noah’s perception of my writing.  He takes it more seriously and gives it more respect than I do.  I think that Noah is the one who convinced me that I am a writer.  That anyone who compulsively feels the need to write 10-20 pages a day is a fucking writer.  That’s just not normal.  Normal. Normal. Normal.  I hate that word so much and I use it constantly.  I think it goes a long way towards wrecking the meaning I am going for.

Why am I so god damn compelled to be just like everyone else?  When I stand near people too long I start acting like them.  I conform.  I do it in subtle ways at first, then loud, then I explode and yell at them and make it seem like I was being oppressed by the ways I was conforming.  Even if the other person was unaware of the whole situation.  They are just standing there confused.  In my family the constant chatter is about telling you what to think, when to think it, how to think it.  So someone sitting there and telling you something about how they handled a situation is fairly explicitly giving you directions on how you are expected to handle it in the future.  You know that whole, “Childhood as apprenticeship for adulthood” thing I have?

Until fairly recently my aunt and uncle were supporting their three adult disabled children.  And a bunch of grandkids and SOs.  Because they reinforce one another’s behaviors.  They will rise or fall as a unit.  They are all so ridiculously similar it isn’t funny.  Like obsessions with collecting useless things.  Everyone has a different animal.  For every holiday under the sun people compete to find you something with that animal on it.  But they are all dirt poor.  So all the stuff is cheap, ugly, and really pointless.  And they have LOTS of it.  That’s one small point, but they do the same thing with everything.

When I walk into a middle class persons house I instantly put on my ‘acting’ face.  I start to imagine, “How would people who live here behave?”  Do you want to know why I paint my house really dark colors?  Because I grew up in houses with dark wood paneling.  They were caves.  I don’t know how to cope with relentlessly white walls.  We had relentlessly white walls in a series of depressing, horrible rental places.  Or ugly paneling that turned the house into a dark cave.

So I painted my house purple and cornflower blue and green and raspberry and navy blue…. among other colors.  They are dark enough to make me feel calm and settled.  Aunt Vonnie’s houses were the home base.  That was as much of a home as I knew.  That feeling is in a dark house… even though it bugs me.  I don’t want to be the kind of person who has a uniformly dark house.  It feels oppressive to me.  But I like darker, more saturated colors.  Who says a house has to look like the materials came that color direct from nature?  I never got that memo.  I guess I ditched that day at school.

This constant attempt to conform to whomever I am standing near creates problems.  Because then I get angry at the person for “making” me feel like I have to conform and be like them.  I have had this problem in particular with a couple of female friends.  We will be having an intense conversation about something and they are giving advice and all of a sudden I go ballistic and start screaming because I don’t want to be like them.

I don’t know how to handle those feelings very well.  That sudden explosion of fear that they are trying to wipe me off the planet.  I know that it was that fear that got me out of my family.  I respect that fear.  I respect the fact that my individuality comes with a rock solid fist to defend it.  But I really wish I wouldn’t hit my friends.  They haven’t done anything.  This is my fuck up.

I am struggling with the fact that my self control runs out.  I have too many things I am trying to control. I don’t know how to relax and let go of the anger in the moment very well.  It cycles so fast out of no where.  When I am at home I take a time out.  It’s not perfect because I’m doing too much stomping away/slamming doors.

The only normal I care about is the one where my kids aren’t afraid of me.  I don’t want my kids to quake with fear from my voice.  That is not a relationship I want.  But I want to be effective.  Three sucks.

I want to be a stay at home mom so that my kids and I can learn how to be nice to each other without outside pressure.  We can learn how to be a family together.  Because really I don’t know much more than them.  Luckily Shanna is an excellent teacher.  She’s having an emotional period, but mostly she can talk about her preferences and make requests and follow directions.  She is in a rough phase (the book told me to expect it! I love that book) and that’s ok.  Hormones are rough.  I try to be gentle and understanding.  For her, this is just a phase because nothing bad has ever really happened to her.  Minor injuries and scrapes.  Losing her friend Rowan was the biggest loss she’s been aware of.  If I am patient and loving, she will come through this and on the other side she will hopefully understand that three year olds are assholes and I was really nice to her.  This is part of the circle of life.  I wish I could apologize to my mother for some pieces of it.

But that is when we jump on the merry go round again.  I don’t think my mother abused me as a small child.  I think she neglected me to such a degree that it becomes criminal.  I think she tried to enculturate with the only thing she knew… and it worked.  I am indeed, white trash.  Even that didn’t go how she planned.  One of the strongest and most defining things about white trash as I understand the concept is the fierce loyalty.  Blood is everything.  How do you think they get away with incest?  If you are related to someone you are obligated to do anything they want… forever.

Excuse me while I pause to vomit on the floor.  I respond to feeling like I should conform with hostility and aggression because it was a very useful tool at one point.  My friends aren’t trying to convert me though.  Gah.

I should stop writing.  It’s already too long.  But I don’t want to.  This is the problem with trying to do shorter entries.  I don’t always see a clear stopping/starting/dividing line.  How do I talk about things in separate posts when it is all one big concept in my head?  But then I ask and people tell me, yes they would prefer shorter posts.  And then I feel like I am failing to deliver something that people want.  I wish I didn’t do this to myself.  Shit.  This is over twelve pages long.  Ok, I’ll stop.  And it took me just over an hour.  That’s actually kind of hot.

Admiring women

3 Replies

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.