Category Archives: people hacking

High Maintenance

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I’m not uniformly high maintenance across the board.  And things shift a lot over time.  Once a boy I was interested in told me that I was “high maintenance but low drama”.  He could handle one date a month with me.  We never got very close.

Being high maintenance is very different based on how you do it.  I need a lot of intense emotional support.  I need to be told things many times.  I need to be touched or not touched immediately and without question based on my whims.  I have a lot of control over what conversational topics happen around me because if I start getting angry for some reason I tend to escalate.  I manage that by walking away from things that anger me or people who are engaging in conversation I don’t want to hear.  I don’t mean that I tell everyone to shut up.  I just mean that if I can’t handle what is being discussed I go sit in a different room.  It’s not the easiest thing to live with.  I have a lot of “systems” in place that make perfect sense in my head and I can’t explain them to other people because I know them in a kinesthetic fashion.

I am extremely particular but Sarah says not outside the normal range.  That kind of weirds me out.  Really?  Other people have as many stupid little mandatory preferences as me?  You know When Harry Met Sally?  You remember how she ordered food?  I’m not quite as fussy as her… but almost.  Although I’m less fussy about food.

I’m sensitive.  I wish I wasn’t.  I wish I didn’t have a sensitive nerve ending in my body.  Sometimes my skin is hyper sensitive and small touches hurt.  Sometimes if I am not in the mood for a conversation I feel intense sadness or anger because I have some tangential thought process running tandem that is really unhappy.  The stupidest things can trigger me into devastation and feeling like I am alone in the world and everyone around me would dance on my grave.  It’s often hard to believe that someone like me could have any worth at all.

That’s high maintenance to live with.  It’s fucking irritating.  Especially because I go back and forth between these terrible lows and feeling like I’m a lot better than those other schmucks, so what’s the problem?  (“Better” being defined as not having whatever problem I’m reading about on the internet.  If you set a low bar, you can always achieve it.)

I’m not sure, but I would guess that one of the hardest things to live with is how quickly I expect people to make decisions or act upon things I have said.  Because if people don’t respond/acknowledge/move fast enough I whirl in place and stomp off to do whatever it was I was talking about by myself while muttering.  It’s not a very nice thing to do and I try to stop myself.  I whirl away because it’s hard for me to ask for things sometimes.  I should probably ask for some kind of visual acknowledgement that they heard and understood my speech so that I know to stand and wait while they think.  Right now the problem is that I state what I want, don’t see immediate interest, and I feel like okfineI’lldoitmyselfit’snotabigdealanyway.  It is a little huffy, but it’s huffy in a “I don’t want to be a burden and I feel like I should have done this for myself without mentioning it anyway.  I mentioned it because sometimes you leap up to “do things” for me and it feels nice but if you aren’t in that space I’ll just go do it.”  But it never comes out value neutral.  I always look pissed.

The anger.  The anger is probably the hardest thing to live with.  I get angry so easily over such stupid things.  I let it go quickly and I apologize profusely, constantly because I know it is inappropriate to get as angry as I do.  But a lot of my anger is justified.  And I apologize for that too.  Because I’ve been told over and over, “Wow.  You get angry a lot.”  Because I feel like anger is wrong and bad and I should stop feeling anger.  People comment on me being angry.  That must mean I am inappropriately angry, right?

I feel shamed by comments on my anger.  If people can see it I am failing at life.  I feel this enormous pressure to develop a cheerful mask.  Repression be thy name.  I don’t really want to have to repress my anger.  I want to not feel it.  I want to not get so angry over tiny little things.  I’m aware that a lot of the problem is sleep deprivation and stress.  I can’t even tell if I get angry at a normal level.  I don’t know.  I can’t tell how often any one else gets angry.

Except for Noah.  I freak right the fuck out if he gets angry.  It’s been very difficult for us to work towards a space where I can let him be angry and not make it about me.  I still have to check in about the fact that he’s not angry with me at a particular time.  And then I want to fix whatever is upsetting him.  It’s very codependent of me.

And you know how much I write about myself?  Noah talks about this shit for hours and hours and hours and years.  It’s frankly creepy that anyone other than me has this much interest in me.  I’m so keeping him.  Noah repeatedly, adamantly gives me approval for everything I am and most everything I do.  He is a fount of affirmation and support.  It is very important that my support network be well supported.  I’m trying to do a better job at supporting them.

I feel like we are getting a lot closer to a balance.  Things are a lot better with Sarah here.  I haven’t had an exchange with Shanna I would call ‘nasty’ since the train coming down from Scotland.  I think that a tirade going on about two minutes longer than necessary about train manners in a bad tone of voice after a month of travel is forgivable.  I have been rude, and I’ve apologized and she seemed perfectly ok with the apologies.  That goes both ways.  Her behavior has been up and down, but I feel like it’s all been handled well.  I’m taking time by myself a lot more and I’m a lot more calm because of it.  The smoking helps, but I spend a lot of time out here not smoking just because I dislike the physical sensation.  I’m just hiding.  I’m just intimidated by the intensity of being mom.

I’m sensitive and my kids frankly freak me the fuck out sometimes.  It’s hard to enjoy ice cream if you are allowed to eat nothing but ice cream.  I mean, my kids are more meat and potatoes.  I can handle eating them every single day.  Now there’s a metaphor.  But even though I want meat and potatoes every single day I want meals in the day where I’m eating something else.  Variety is good.

I used to think I was an extrovert who was forced into solitude.  I’m beginning to see that I am an introvert with occasional social needs.  It’s kind of a weird identity shift.  At this point in my life I think of every single person I talk to in terms of how much of my energy they will drain.  Sorry, friends.  I love you!  That’s why I spend the energy I do.  A friend is coming over this morning.  Hopefully she won’t read this until after she has been at my house.  I’m honestly kind of freaked out by having her come over today.  Her son is very energetic and I’ve been trying to get Shanna to be slightly less messy in the house.  Throwing things outside is great.  Inside…. not my favorite.  I know that the right thing to do is to ask them to help clean up during the visit.  We’ll see how that goes.  Ugh.  I’m just so tired.  I don’t want the extra mess.  Fuss.  Whine.  But I want to talk to her.  Ack.  Personal time is over.

The Mom Pledge

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I was reading up on the Band, because they matter.  And I foundThe Mom Pledge.   Text is:

The Mom Pledge
I am a proud to be a mom. I will conduct myself with integrity in all my online activities. I can lead by example.
I pledge to treat my fellow moms with respect. I will acknowledge that there is no one, “right” way to be a good Mom. Each woman makes the choices best for her family.
I believe a healthy dialogue on important issues is a good thing. I will welcome differing opinions when offered in a respectful, non-judgmental manner. And will treat those who do so in kind.
I stand up against cyber bullying. My online space reflects who I am and what I believe in. I will not tolerate comments that are rude, condescending or disrespectful.
I refuse to give those who attack a platform. I will remove their remarks with no mention or response. I can take control.
I want to see moms work together to build one another up, not tear each other down. Words can be used as weapons. I will not engage in that behavior.
I affirm that we are a community. As a member, I will strive to foster goodwill among moms. Together, we can make a difference. 

Part of what makes this kind of thing so weird is, what is “rude, condescending or disrespectful” according to this code?  I’m afeared that an awful lot of what I say would be one of those words.  I’m not trying to be rude.  I reign in my condescension as hard as I am able.  I’m afraid it pops out occasionally when I’m not looking.  People often think that me questioning them at all is disrespectful.  Pointing out inconsistencies in a story is disrespectful.  On one hand I want to say, “That sounds great!”  But I’m afraid it’s just one more way that I feel like I can’t hold up the original spirit of the thing so I don’t join.  I’m a snarky bastard.  Most of my friends are.

I don’t really think of myself as a “Mommy blogger” despite the fact that I have crotch droppings and mention them here.  I feel like I write about my mothering shit the same way I write about me just existing.  I happen to be a mother.  But it’s not all that much of what I want to think about during my off-time, you know?  I have to write about being a mother in so far as I’m trying to hack the experience.  I am trying to dissect it to see how it works so that I can put it back together in a different way.

Inviting Sarah to live with me is part of mothering.  Even though Sarah is inconsistently available at times she is still stable in her moods.  When she is here she is here.  Part of being a mother is recognizing that children need to have people in their life who are rock steady dependable in their affect.  I’m not and I never will be.  I talk about me not being steady.  I talk about how to cope with that.  And I fucking well moved someone in who was stable.  Noah is also more emotionally stable than me.  I worry.  Specifically, to pull from that last link:

“This handling of mental illness (there were several negative examples) tends to present it as something out of control, scary, and dangerous. And also very, very selfish. Mentally ill people in pop culture are often deeply self-absorbed, wrapped up in themselves and their disorders, which means they have no time for anyone else. When it comes to parents, pop culture implies that mentally ill parents are too broken and damaged to possibly provide the level of care and support their children need. When this is the understanding of mental illness that many people have, it sets dangerous precedents.
Finding positive depictions of mentally ill parents is an uphill struggle, let alone depictions of parents who are members of Mad Pride movement, who may reject conventional treatment approaches to mental illness. For people with mental illness who want to be or are parents, pop culture provides ample reminders that this is a bad idea and should be reconsidered. For people without mental illness, pop culture provides ample judgment fodder and this can be a big problem when those people are decision-makers, the people who, for example, get to evaluate whether a parent should be allowed to keep a child after a report to child services expressing concern, or who sit in judgment on a jury.”

I worry a lot.  I worry about talking about my mental illness because I don’t think I can get away with claiming to myself that I don’t have mental illness.  There are legitimate names for my experiences.  The whole thing can be codified as a case study.  But it’s my life.  I speak overly harshly sometimes.  I don’t have the self control not to.  My option is to never speak again.  *I* feel like my behavior is perceived as being outside the bounds of that pledge up there.  *I* feel like my behavior is perceived as “rude, condescending or disrespectful.”  I don’t mean to be though.  This truly is my polite voice.  I am what my life has made me.  I am frequently harsh in tone.  I do it meaning well.  I am not trying to be a didactic asshole.

Bad situations in my life have been really bad.  When I say that I was at an important crossroads, I was often making a choice that resulted in a more dramatic shift than most people have as an option.  That’s convoluted.  Not very many people can talk to a rape crisis clinician for five minutes and be told, “You should be dead.”  That’s happened to me when I have talked to a lot of different people.  My choices kept me alive.  I chose life.  Over and over.  That sounds melodramatic and I want to punch myself for using that particular cliché.  It’s true though.  I self harm because it is choosing life.  It is choosing to allow myself a small amount of relief from the pain rather than actually relieving the pain.  I got away from my father.  It was hard.  It took fighting off my family, but I did it.  I got away from my family.  I could be another drug addict loser.  Instead I’m a drug addict with a functional life.  I am a drug addict with elaborate checks in place to ensure that I am not permitted to be erratic around my children.  My drug addiction is what allows me to be consistent.  Without it I am swinging too hard right now.

But sometimes I come in here to the internet and I vent my frustration.  MDC is really hard to read sometimes.  The problem is that my life choices have been between really really bad things that seemed ok to outsiders and things that looked bad to outsiders but was actually great for me.  My whole view on life choices is skewed far off to the left from everyone else.  For most of my life if you had offered me the chance to die on any given day, I would have taken it.

I had children because I choose life.  When people ask me why someone like me had kids, and I get asked, I say that biological compulsion is a big deal and I was a lot more stable then.  I don’t say, “Fuck you for implying that I am too broken to have worth on this planet you fucking asshole.”  I had children because I desperately want to spend most of my time with them.  Because I like seeing them change day by day.  Because even when Shanna or Calli are doing something that makes me want to put my fist through a wall I would cut my hand off before I would slap them in the face.  Because they are mine.  The first people who love me without any hint of judgment.  That will come later.  They will judge me.  They will judge my behavior as a mother.  They will judge me as a person.  It’s my responsibility to make the choices that will allow us to have a good relationship.

I don’t accept it at face value that I will have a relationship with my grown up children.  I’m aware that there are conditions on such love.  It’s hard.  Do you know why people stay in relationships with their abusers?  Because if you walk away from that love, what will you do about the aching loss it creates in your life?  I had children and I went around and deliberately chose adults to help me raise them.  Adults who are just as intent as I am that our children be kept safe and healthy.  Adults who hold me accountable for my behavior.  I’m not actually taking the risk that other people think I am taking.

If anything I am too hard on myself and I demand an unhealthy amount of 24/7 cheer from myself.  It’s getting better.  Normal, healthy people have mood variation.  Right now I do not get consistent sleep and I haven’t in a year.  I have outsourced feeding me to other people and that’s a mixed bag.  They aren’t actually aware that I stopped tracking that because I’m kind of a shitty person.  If I don’t tell them that I have abdicated responsibility to them then I get to be mad at them a lot when they fuck up.  Control games are awesome.

This is hard to talk about.  Because I can describe it that way, as a control game, but it’s not like I’m experiencing it that way.  I focus on taking care of my kids.  I get them through their day.  They eat at regular intervals.  I uhhh don’t like a lot of the food they like to eat.  I have texture issues.  It’s not even that I don’t like those foods.  If someone else took those foods and cooked them till they were mush I’d cheerfully eat it.  Shanna and Calli like crunchy things.  That feels bad in my mouth.  I usually come in and get food for them quickly and then get to the point where I probably should shift gears and make food for me… only I get distracted and do something else.  I “forget” to eat.  It’s partially a consequence of my weird picky food preference issues.

When Noah or Sarah want to eat then there is pretty much always a way for me to feel like something I want in my mouth is an option.  They like things that are spiced closer to how I want it (I like slightly less salt than Sarah and slightly more salt than Noah) and it works.  Even if it pings me as being slightly over or slightly under salted… that’s a small sin.  That’s how food works when Sarah or Noah is cooking.  I can eat it.

For example, I can’t handle eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches very often.  The oil from the peanut butter stays in my mouth and bothers all the other flavors for days.  And the jam often tastes too sweet.  But I can’t handle eating peanut butter plain because the flavor is too intense and it makes me feel icki.  On some days I can handle eating nuts plain.  Most days the idea of crunching a nut between my teeth will give me shivers down my spine like nails on a chalk board.

But given how many things I feel I must do in a day… I don’t want to go through the effort of making a meal for Shanna and a meal for Calli and a meal for me.  Given that my meals are a lot more work.  I just don’t eat.  Because I’m not really worth it.  But Noah and Sarah think that feeding me is worthwhile.  Hey!  I know if I wait a bit longer Sarah will want to eat and it will be easier to just make one mess for the both of us and…  It works until it doesn’t work.  When it doesn’t work I generally get pretty grumpy.  And that’s how a lot of my self regulation goes.

Ok, this is a problem.  I need to fix it.  It’s hard to get to the point where it feels like I have any more ability to do “care” for a body.  Even my own.  I get really angry with myself for how long it takes me to poop now that I have kids.  That’s weird.  The whole gestating/labor thing changed my plumbing in ways I am not appreciating.  And it doesn’t help that we are eating so many vegetables that my digestive system is on protest.  I don’t believe all the people who say this is a healthy diet.  I never had to poop this much when I was living on top ramen.  That has to be easier on my system.  Ahem.

People are whole systems.  I’m kind of a mommy blogger.  I’m kind of a mental health blogger.  Kind of feminist.  I’m just me.  I don’t think I am going to post the Mom Pledge thing on my site permanently.  I will agree in my head that I should follow those rules.  I will think they correctly describe my approach to life.  But I won’t publicly join a group about it.  That sounds like behavior policing to me.  I can’t handle it.

Guns, cars, and computers

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Noah has kind of a chip on his shoulder about munches.  I understand why.  They tend to only be welcoming towards someone if large numbers of people in the crowd want to fuck the new person.  I think that Noah would walk into a munch now and be catnip.  When he was in his early 20’s… not so much.  That’s how it works for guys though.  I showed up at 18.  There is no meat tastier, than fresh meat.

When I talk about the culture of bdsm I was raised in, it was defined primarily by the munch group I hung out with.  It took a long time before I really understood in the core of me that kink communities are completely different from location to location because the local members create something different in each place.  I feel kind of like a moron for that.  In my location it didn’t matter what race, age, gender you were… the desires were all pretty similar.  I didn’t understand that we chased away the people who weren’t exactly like us.

We had a high bar for entry.  You had to be willing to devote a huge chunk of your life to doing bdsm in order to count as a “real” pervert.  There was a lot a strange overlap with guns, cars, and computers.  You had to be fairly passionately into one or more of those in order to fit in at our munch.  Most of the crew is Libertarian, though basically sane people.  I learned a lot sitting at their knees.  This is decidedly where I formed most of my political opinions because they gave me ways to be uppity towards my family.

I don’t even know how to write about them.  Stephen King would want to whap me with a newspaper for that.  You can’t reach that point as a writer.  Ok, what do I think of when I think of the munch?  I think of a sea of happy faces.  I remember being the pet/mascot.  I was an indulged child for most of my early time there.  Mostly the crowd is married.  Mostly the crowd is mostly monogamous.  There was a lot of puppy pile bdsm.  I don’t know how common that is in other areas.

The Saturday parties were interesting because we all spent so much time together that there was a lot of cross-play amongst friends.  Things like bondage and skilled SM arts were treated like commodities to be shared because there weren’t enough partners to go around.  There was a lot of implicit, “Well you played with so and so and I want to be next.”  The play was kept non-sexual because then it wasn’t about whoring yourself out.  It was sharing skills.  It’s a hobby.  It’s really not much different than getting together a whole group of friends at a commercial kitchen to share ingredients as you make batches of cookies.  Having that kind of intimacy that is not intimate is kind of weird for me.  I do it very well.  I sometimes wonder if that place at that time was just the only way I felt safe getting touched.  For all that they were “perverts” they were remarkably safe people.

A lot of the thing was the whole crowd was focused on exhibitionism.  Play parties would often involve a couple playing in the middle of the living room while everyone laughed and commented and decided the tone of the play.  There were quite a few heavy masochists in the crowd so the play could be intense physically while still being entirely lighthearted.  This was not an environment for serious edge play or psychological play.  Except when it was.  There were always the ability to steal away and do something more intense.  We did, often.  Knives were quite popular amongst the group.  Not cutting, but scratching and threatening.

It’s hard for me to convey how convivial the atmosphere was.  The crowd was more men than women, but it wasn’t that unequal feeling to me.  The men were more intensely regular.  The women came and went.  So if you showed up at the munch on a random week it might be 90% men, or it could be 50/50 because all the girls came.  That felt ok to me because the women were there most of the time.  It was always safe.  No one else was under 30.  Many had kids.  Some of them–I never ever met their kids.  They kept their children 100% separated from most scene people.  You had to earn access to their kids over many years of good behavior.  I fucking respected them.  Notice how I never earned access to their kids?  I was not good at good behavior.

I was indulged universally in my inappropriate acting out.  Some of the women tried to tactfully mentor me on how to get along better in life but I ignored it.  The guys encouraged me heartily.  It was all pretty harmless shit.  I liked to sit on laps and snuggle.  I did a lot more grinding than was strictly appropriate.  No one minded one little bit.  We would do mini-scenes in the coffee shop.  We shouldn’t have been doing it in public because there were random people there.  It was fun.  I don’t feel very guilty.   I do, however, feel like I don’t know how to interact with those people very well without falling into those behavior patterns.  If I want to stop acting like that… I can’t talk to those people any more.

When I broke up with Tom all of a sudden I started getting a different kind of interest.  Actual serious interest.  I ran like a scared rabbit.  All of a sudden these weren’t the gentle friends I had been doing light social play with.  They were potential sex partners and that scared the shit out of me.  I didn’t want to have to have sex with all of them.  So I left the group.  From the cheap seats I see that not one of those men would have pressured me for sex.  They would have asked, once, and forever more tried to make due appreciating what I was willing to offer freely.  By and large they are timid men.

When I think about my assholes with great affection it is funny how many of them I met at the Wednesday munch.  This is where I learned geek culture.  It isn’t much like the geek culture Noah talks loudly about.  They talk about computers, sure.  But they spend equal amounts of time talking about guns, cars, and politics really.  But the politics are interesting so I tend to leave it out of my bitching.  I probably ranted more than a hundred times how tired I was of hearing about guns, cars, and computers.  So in order to distract them from boring conversations I would remind them that they were at a bdsm munch now talk about something more interesting.  I would end up being passed from lap to lap as they talked about what they would do to me.  It was great fun.  A very predictable game.

Except when it wasn’t.  I learned who was safe and who wasn’t.  I felt like Tom gave me a layer of protection.  The whole group was tortured by not having sex.  Only a few of them were more desperate acting in how they dealt with that.  In all the years I hung out there we never had any whisper of actual abuse.  In retrospect I believe that this group of people really did find a safe and supporting environment to be kind of weird.  Sure we all egged each other on, but we didn’t do extreme things mostly.  There was a lot of encouragement to find where your actual limit was.

Bdsm was something to treat as an enthusiastic physical hobby.  You practiced your skills by yourself to hone them early on.  You were expected to take it seriously and do it well so that you could have something to be proud of.  In tangent Tom and I were part of the national convention circuit.  It feels kind of funny to say that, but it’s true.  We traveled to a lot of events and did spectacular public play.  I was very young and he was in his 30’s and doing well in business.  We were a striking couple and we had a lot of fun together.  Our play was show stopping.  In public we did suspension whenever possible and took over as much space as we could.  Tom was constantly on the search for hard points higher than our ceiling.  Ostensibly the reason we did it in public so much more than in private was because it isn’t as fun to only barely get off the ground.  Fetishists are weird.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m the one who negotiated access to mumblemumble so that we could do a suspension that got me 75′ off the ground.  We did do things in private if they had enough brag value.  There are lots of pictures.  What play we did in private was done mostly so that it could be photographed.  So he could look at/think about it while masturbating.  Did I mention we didn’t have sex much?  I really struggled with that.  My sexuality was constantly being used in a way that didn’t involve me.  I was getting off–Tom masturbated me constantly.  But I didn’t get to have intimacy with my orgasms.  I just got off a lot.  I’m not sure if I miss it or not.  I can’t do it any more.  Orgasm is hard now. I often can’t.

A large portion of Tom’s sexuality was exhibitionism.  It was about being seen doing those things.  The girlfriend before me made him go private and that was brutally hard for him.  He needs to have a community of fellow “perverts” where he is totally accepted.  That’s ok.  I have spent the last seven years trying to figure out how much of it was his exhibitionism and how much was mine.  Because I have some, don’t get me wrong.  I like having sex and/or doing bdsm in front of people.  I like knowing that I am what people think about when they masturbate.  My munch friends told me that I was.  It was almost like being a porn model only my adoring fans were my friends.  It worked.

There was a pretty strong D/s contingent in our little community.  Not absolutely everyone practiced D/s (Dominance/submission) but it was common enough that everyone knew everyone else’s roles and treated people differently based on their chosen role.  It was “respecting that persons self identity”.  Hilarious.  But it was all in good fun.  People drifted away when life or work got busy.  It was remarkably Cheers like.  I miss it, but going now isn’t the same.

I have blissfully forgotten most of what I could once rattle off about guns, cars, and computers.  Noah is a software guy, it’s a different kind of conversation.  I was used to hardware boys.  Hardware boys that wanted me to dress them up in full latex then tie them up in mostly comfortable positions.  Then they would struggle while I playfully sat on them.  It wasn’t all that sexy because I was not willing to make it all that sexy.  I did touch them and cuddle them though.  I talked to them.  I verbally played out their fantasies.  I felt like a force for good.

I keep having a Lady Gaga line go through my head, “In the most Biblical sense, I am beyond repentance/ Fame hooker, prostitute wench, vomits her mind.”  I tattooed on my back that I want to forgive myself.  I want forgiveness.  I want forgiveness for everything I do.  Everything I am.  I feel intense conflict about writing the things I write because other people have different perceptions.  Someone else can be part of a conversation with me and remember totally different things and come away with a different impression.  I don’t think either of us are “wrong” but we are shaped by our experiences.  We hear the things that affirm our view of the world.  There is a strong attitude that if someone is doing something only meaning the best then it’s ok.  They didn’t mean for anything bad to happen so they aren’t responsible.

No one at the munch did anything bad to me.  They were good friends, actually.  But it was a continuation of the idea that I had to be available sexually.  It’s not what they thought.  It’s what I thought.  I was surprised how many of the munch crowd came to my birthday party.  In a flash as the song switches to Hair, oh man.  They would all love to still be my friend.  All I have to do is figure out how to spend time with them.  They like me.  They really like me.

Why am I sitting at home crying to Lady Gaga instead of out seeing my friends?  What am I so afraid of?  I’m afraid my children will misbehave and people will think I am a bad parent.  I’m afraid that people expect me to be sexy and I can’t be right now.  I’m afraid that if I go out I will feel uncomfortable and bad and I will sit in a corner and no one will talk to me because I have made myself invisible.  I’m afraid that I don’t know how to have friendships without sex.  I’m afraid that I don’t know how to listen.  I am a bad listener.  I can listen well when there is one other person in the room.  I can’t listen in a crowd.  I am too distractible.  I feel like being a bad listener in a crowd makes me a bad friend.  I don’t hang out with anyone enough to be able to do comfortable casual party conversation.  I feel awkward.

I sit in my house and invite one person at a time.  We have intense conversations.  I get the impression that the intense conversations at my house are slightly traumatic to some of my friends.  I feel like that when we invite the sensitive, quiet introverts over.

Maybe I should invite some of my guns, cars, and computer boys.  I miss them.  I’d kind of like to know more about them.  I’d like to ask them what they experienced ten years ago.  I’m willing to bet their memory is different from mine.  I bet they didn’t think of me as being available sexually.  The thought actually makes me laugh.  I was so nasty with them.  I learned how to taunt.  I felt vulnerable and I showed that vulnerability.  Then I let them know that I am absolutely full grown and here are my steel toed high heels, mother fucker.  I was absolutely one of the nastiest sadists in the group.

Years ago I asked one of them why he never asked me to play again.  He laughed out loud and said, “You are kind of intimidating, you know.”  I think that is so funny.  I’m intimidating because I go through life in terror that at any moment someone will hurt me or betray me.  I don’t think I should be intimidating.  Let me rephrase.

I don’t want to be intimidating.  I want my boundaries to be clear.  I like being easy to get or impossible to get.  I don’t want to feel like I am required to sleep with anyone who asks.  I like feeling like it’s ok for people to ask.  I go to spaces where that sort of asking is ok.  I don’t go on the nights I don’t want to be asked.  I don’t understand why I am so intimidating when I show up quaking like a scared rabbit.  I like being able to say, “I am really enjoying our flirting, but I need to be clear that this isn’t going anywhere.” Sometimes when I say that people get angry with me.  One person told me, “Now you ruined everything.”  He hasn’t flirted with me in years.  I guess he was more interested than me.  I meant that night.  I probably would have been open to being asked out on an actual date.  But sometimes I’m not up for going home with someone after a group social event.  I didn’t get adequate personal attention during our brief heavy breathing sessions in a dark corner.  It’s a faux pas to be clear.

I’m afraid that I don’t know how to talk to people.  I’m too blunt.  I can’t observe social niceties.  I’m afraid that the things I say are unacceptable.  I write because these are the things I think about and I can’t talk about them.  I want to invite two or three people from the munch era over to my house and ask them to talk about their impression of that time.  I want to know what other people saw of me and my life.  I missed fewer than twenty Wednesdays in four years.  I spent a lot of time around these people.  More time than I have spent in any other social group in my life.  I often know people for longer than that, but I rarely spend a lot of time with people.  I have been alone in a room for most of my life.

Fisher Middle School was the only school I ever attended for two consecutive years as a child.  We moved three times, but I stayed in the same school.  Before I was 18 years old I never had a group of friends for more than two years.  Ever.  I was part of the theatre community in college for almost two years but I ditched them after I broke up with Stephen.  Stephen was already working all over the local community college scene and I knew that staying in the theatre world would mean that I would keep doing the make up/break up thing with him.  I left theatre because I couldn’t deal with seeing Stephen and not sleeping with him.

After we broke up I pierced my nipples.  He hadn’t let me while we were together.  He also hadn’t let me shave my pubic hair.  I did that too.  I uhh went over to visit with him once.  I don’t remember why.  I taunted him with the fact that I had done these things.  He wad interested.  I showed him my breasts.  He decided it wasn’t all bad.  I didn’t sleep with him but it was a close and creepy thing.  Me breaking those taboos was a serious turn on for him.  He’s a minister’s kid.  He was repressive with me because he was encultrated that way.  He probably could have been more corruptible than I thought he was.  But I didn’t want to be the corrupter.  I wanted to be corrupted.  So I ran off into the bdsm world.  And found this weird hobbyist sexuality.

I don’t think I really understand this sex business.  I go back and forth in my brain between, “Dude my dad raped me” and “I kind of wish that one guy had asked me to sleep with him…” and “I’m as free as my hair.”  I think I look like shit as a blonde.  I should get more blue dye.  I really like the blue.

I’m weird.  I have these things in me that make people uncomfortable.  I blurt things out inappropriately.  And gosh darn it.  People like me.  I think I kind of miss guns, cars, and computers.

Cheating sucks

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Stuff like that song is why I won’t agree to monogamy.  I don’t want to deal with tearful recriminations after breaking rules.  So I try to keep the rules to things I don’t want to do any way.  I really had to marry someone who is not only ok with, but enthusiastic about me having random sex.

It’s kind of weird, but at this point I sort of feel like my sexual orientation is “transgressive”.  Just like I don’t have any vanilla hobbies I am truly passionate about (except for maybe reading)… mostly I’m interested in whatever my partner is interested in.  Of course everyones taste drift with their influences.  With Tom there was a strong focus on me suffering and being denied.  By suffering I mean he wants women in 4″ + high heels pretty much all the time.  Uncomfortable bondage gear for hours.  He’s very physically demanding for all that he didn’t put out much or exercise.  His sexuality is very externalized.  It doesn’t have much to do with his genitals.  He is a true fetishist.

Noah is different.  Noah is very interested in intercourse, intercourse, intercourse.  Ok, if he has more time available to him he’s thrilled to do kinky shit as a prelude to intercourse.  But the idea of playing without intercourse is kind of confusing to him.  He gets this look on his face.  “So you get all turned on and then you…don’t fuck…  Why?”  I really love that about him.  At times when I’m at a lower libido (the last four years) it’s kind of intimidating to face some days.  I sincerely believe this breastfeeding thing will end some day and I will get my own hormones back.  My own hormones plus the benefit of never being on hormonal birth control again.  Yeah.  I’m going to want to fuck all day again.  I’m confident.

This leaves me in kind of a weird spot with bdsm stuff.  I have been “in the scene” for some value of “in” since I was 18.  I maintain contact with that world even though I don’t go to events.  I have friends there.  There is also a fuck-ton of drama.  Sex is a powerful force.  If you move through a community spreading too much of it around, you develop a bad reputation.  You want to know why you develop a bad reputation?  Because women are bitches.  Do you know what the difference between a bitch and a slut is?  A slut will fuck anyone.  A bitch will fuck anyone but you.  Or so I hear.  If you have sex with more than 2-4 (depending on community size) people in a group there tends to start being rumblings.  You will be stepping on the toes of other women.  They don’t want to share with girls like me.

I’m never entirely sure what it is about slutty women that actually unites them into a group of ‘them’ other than liking non-committed-sex.  Some do it for pay.  Some do it for fun.  Some do it in a desperate search for love.  Some do it because their entire family told them they were supposed to.  Some do it because they think it makes people like them.  Some do it because they don’t know how to have intimate friendships without rubbing sticky bits.  I would love to say that I don’t judge, but I’d be a lying sack of shit.  Of course I judge.  I judge fucking everything.  So what?  Who needs to care?

I have a lot of non-committed-sex because I like it.  It’s fun.  I like finding out what it is like to combine energies with a new person.  I love that thrill of the new.  I don’t move on into committing because it’s a lot of fucking work.  Very few people are interested in dealing with–and I mean actually dealing with, not giving me lip service–my long list of requirements of behavior.  It’s a pain in the ass.  I can’t believe there are two adults willing to live with me.  My friendships wax and wane as people can deal with my storm of emotions.  It’s hard.  I take a lot out of people.  Sex makes that more complicated, not less.  I don’t have room in my psyche to care about another person for longer than it takes to fuck them.  On one hand, that sounds awful.  But it’s reality.  Why does the truth often sound so bad?

I’ve been getting beat over the head lately from a variety of different sources with the idea that if I am a writer it is my job to write what I know as true as I know how to say it.  That does kind of sound like my vocation, yes.

I don’t cheat and I don’t want to deal with people who cheat.  People who cheat do so because they don’t feel like it is ok to change the rules such that their behavior is ok.  People cheat because they believe they are doing something wrong, but they want to do it anyway.  I don’t believe that what I am doing is actually wrong.  If I lay out the ground rules for dealing with me in advance, it’s ok.  It’s ok for me to have space in my life for what I have space for.  The drama comes from people looking at what is offered, taking it, and then complaining that it isn’t something else.

I don’t think I am really all that open to falling in love with someone again.  Never say never, but I doubt it.  Being fond of people?  Sure.  I love my friends.  But it’s different.  That’s weird only because Noah isn’t like me.  Noah probably will fall in love again.  I’ll tell you straight up that it scares the shit out of me.

Being a pleaser

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As I sit here alone in my thoughts.  I realize… I don’t think I’m clear on who I am.  One of my problems is that I am ok with any ‘x’ part of myself as long as it is the part that is ok given my current relationship, and I don’t even just mean romantic relationships.  Whoever I am talking to defines my current behavioral approach.  My neighbors only meet one side of me, know what I mean?  Because even when I leave the house in latex, I dodge the questions.  I had this huge long thing in my head while I was nursing Calli to sleep.  Let’s see if I can recreate it.

I came into the bdsm scene when I was 18.  It’s only now that I am understanding exactly how self absorbed I am and I am shocked and horrified by the crap people put up with.  My friends were very tolerant.  Anyway.  I came into the scene and immediately hooked up with one particular group of people.  We went to the munch together every Wednesday and on the second Saturday there was a play party.  Yes, you all know who you are.  We were a very tight knit community.  There was a lot of hanging out together on other nights of the week as well.  I was absolutely brought into a set bdsm “community” and enculturated.  That sounds pretentious.  I only think of it as a culture now that I am completely outside of it and I can examine how I changed my behavior because of it.

I started dating Tom three weeks before I turned 19.  He changed everything.  It didn’t have to be him, but it was.  In my head we had more than one relationship and I never learned to reconcile them.  I was never comfortable.  I took that out on him.  Before I say anything else, our relationship was consensual from start to finish.  He never did anything to me that broke relationship agreements.  Our relationship agreements were non-standard.  For two of the four years we dated (lived together for the last three and some) in the middle we had a 24/7 Master/slave relationship.  What that meant to us changed a lot over time.

Tom was 30 when I met him.  He had been in the scene for ten years.  Now that I look around and think about taking on a protégé I have a lot of different thoughts about him.  He followed the camp site rule but he was a heavy player.  I’m not sure that was really and truly what I should have been doing.  Now I know why Femme Car condescendingly told me that she didn’t think anyone should be in the scene at 18/19 and they should go have regular sex first.

I’m not very good at regular sex.  I’m not very good at allowing people to touch me gently.  I feel bored by gentle touching largely because I am so dissociated from my body that it takes a nasty whallop for me to notice.  I also prefer for my sex to be fast with very little foreplay.  It’s not really all that intimate of an act.  It’s about getting off.  I do it with such gusto and vigor that folks tend to feel positively about the experience.  I guess.  I don’t know.  But bdsm gave me a way to learn how to touch people.  It gave me a way to have physical connection with another body.  Tom doesn’t have sex when he plays much.  They are totally different.  It’s not that he can’t but at least at that time, they were different animals.  Most of the people he played with were not lovers.

I could play with Tom and get my needs for physical contact met without having to deal with the pain of sex.  I am hemming and hawing about saying this because it feels like an invasion of his privacy but I explicitly asked for permission.  He said he is ok with anything I write about him.  I think that is the thing he gave me, both then and now, that prove beyond a doubt to me how much he loves me.  He lived me with me long enough to know how I write.  He’s ok with the possibility of feeling public humiliation or condemnation because of things he did.  He is ok with who he is.  He knows that he never crossed any lines.  And he trusts me to talk about the things we did.  My Daddy still loves me.  Ok, end of digression.

I didn’t understand for years that we had a basic mismatch of sexual desire.  I naturally default to wanting sex 4-15 times a week.  I like sex a lot.  Thus a lot of the quick and dirty.  When you are having sex that much, it’s about the continual short burst you get from orgasm, not from the long-lingering looks you get during foreplay.  Tom… well… he masturbates every day.  That’s part of getting up.  Which always confused me, but hey.  For the first year we probably had sex 2-4 times a week.  Then it dropped to once a week.  Then I finally relented on condoms.  We had sex with condoms for years because he refused to get an STD test.  I finally decided that he would be my life partner and relented and bam, I had HPV.  He told me, “Oh yeah.  I guess I never told you I had a wart.”  When he told me that I was rocking on the bed sobbing about how I am dirty and I brought this home to him.  You see, this virus can live in your body for years and I thought I must have caught it from one of the people who raped me.

We had very different relationships.  We never learned how to communicate with one another.  He could not volunteer information and I did not know the right questions to ask.  At this point in my life I am capable of managing much more complex negotiations because of what I learned.  The HPV killed our M/s relationship slowly and then quickly.  I began acting out and he refused to punish me because he felt guilty.  From this comfy chair I project that me freaking out the way I did was fairly traumatic for him.  I began a quick descent into depression.  He didn’t know how to pull me out of it.  He told our therapist that he didn’t want to do M/s with me any more because it was too much work.  Which I interpreted as, “Holy shit!  I wrote these contracts where I promised that if she did ‘x’ I would do ‘y’ but I was just kidding.  She was supposed to do ‘x’ without me ever having to notice again and it’s not fair that she’s trying to make me work.”  I had it on god damn paper that he agreed!  God!  Fucking!  Damnit!  I don’t think I ever trusted him again and I began baiting him.

But that’s another story.  I’m talking about the sex.  Or I was.  I’m going to talk about my list.  What was my actual introduction to sex.

I count AJ as my first sexual encounter.  That was the blow job when I was three.  I skip the rapes.

The next was Jasmine.  She was a kid in the canyon where my aunt and uncle lived.  She was a year or so younger than me.  We spent hours and hours and hours lying around licking each other.  That was most of what we did.  Some digital penetration, but mostly that heavenly licking.  Ok, sometimes we would lie face to face with our thighs between one another.  I was… five, six, seven, eight?  I didn’t live there all the time.  We were both outcasts at Lakeside.  Last I heard she ran away from home when she was 13 to be a prostitute in Santa Cruz to support her drug habit.

Oh god.  I can’t do the full list.  It’s making my body shake.  I’m getting really scared when I try to think about what consensual sex I had starting around eight.  Where did I live.  Hmmm.  Oh, well it’s probably because I don’t want to admit how much sex play there was with Michael.  If I skip my rapist then I’m a liar.  That’s the problem with telling the truth.  It tends to not make you look how you want to look.

I don’t remember any sex play other than Jasmine until we moved to Texas.  The trailer park in Texas was honestly one big orgy.  It was really fucked up.  There was a lot of incest.  There was a lot of blatant sexual abuse.  And parts of it I absolutely joined willingly.  Little kids growing up in that atmosphere re-enact what they are experiencing.  It is part of life.  I feel it as a jolt every time Shanna yells “Stop it!”  Every time she yells that at me I feel this pang of horror because it reminds me of re-enacting my sexual abuse over and over and over with all those little kids.  Because I did.  I don’t know how to count that as part of my list.  I never have.  I feel very confused by it.  This is where I have issues with sex positive culture.

I want my kids to only have their early experience to sex be that some day when you are a grown up you will like someone soooooooooo much that you want to do that with them.  It will be a special and private thing.  It’s kind of weird and physically awkward but some day you will be so interested that you will be willing to be brave and talk about it so that you can figure out how to do it in a way that feels good.  Because if it isn’t feeling good then you shouldn’t be doing it.  You should stop and talk about how to make it feel good.  Really.  You deserve that.

I don’t have that.  Not really.  And I want her to.  And I want to learn how to have that.  I’m not topping from the bottom.  I am trying to allow my poor battered body some fucking rest.  I want to be allowed to feel good.  I’m tired of trying to be the heavy bottom so that I can be appealing.  That was what I was enculturated with in that little circle of bdsm people I talked about up there.  I do have a point tonight.  Hopefully I’ll get to it.

Starting when I was 18 years old I joined a little intense subgroup that focused on bondage, heavy pain, and D/s.  There was very little mention of sex.  Almost none of it happened at our “sex” parties.  And Tom and I weren’t having much of it off stage despite the fact that I have a really high libido and want really frequent intercourse.  I had to get my touch needs met in other ways.  I tried really hard to sublimate them into Tom’s needs.  (Want to know what is fucking awesome?  I came up with the word sublimate instinctually but then I second guessed myself and looked it up to make sure I am right.  That’s what reading does for you, folks.)  I wore those fucking high heels and suffered for him even when he wasn’t home.  I sat around our house tying myself up and masturbating while covering myself in clothespins.  I was going fucking insane from not fucking.  He never asked me to be monogamous.  I don’t think he wanted me to be monogamous because I bugged him constantly.  But it made him hot that I was denying myself something that I wanted that much.

Oh, and early on we learned a hypnosis party trick where you can train muscle response with hypnotic suggestion.  Have you caught on yet?  He taught me to orgasm on command.  I had an involuntary muscle spasm on his order.  He thought that was great.  Eventually I had to ask permission to orgasm.  At one point I was allowed, even encouraged, to masturbate all day but I wasn’t allowed to come without his permission.  And it really wouldn’t have been ok for me to call him all day.  Sometimes he would be nice and give me permission for more than one.  It was an odd dynamic.  Chastity play was something we did.  Yeah.  It was hot and I was engaging in such a constant amount of sexual stimulation that I really could orgasm that easily.  I needed the freaking release.

But actual intercourse became increasingly rare and increasingly painful.  Why does one always leap to animal metaphors when trying to describe a penis?  Ahem.  Tom has the cock of a porn star.  He liked to repeat the line, “You know how there are growers and showers?  One time this girl was getting ready to go down on me and she said, ‘Oh… you’re a shower, huh?’ and I said ‘What are you talking about?!'”  Hyuck hyuck.  But it was accurate.  Flaccid he is noticeably larger than a lot of men I have slept with have been while erect.  I have not missed his cock.  I’m kind of the anti-size queen.  Noah’s cock is just about dead average and I wouldn’t mind if it was smaller.  Thank god.  You all wanted to know that.

But it actually is part of the picture.  Tom was probably something like #32 on my body count list and you can see that it is a pretty generous list.  I was seeing adult penises regularly starting from when I was seven and living in that trailer park.  At 18 years old I knew I wanted intense sex all the time.  And I picked Tom.  In some ways it was a really good thing.  I did a lot of bdsm play in a very short period of time.  A lot of it alone in a room, which is about as safe as it can get.  I would really like to find out what foreplay is like.  I have trained myself out of it.  This is a digression again.

I didn’t know how to get my needs met in that relationship.  When I was his slave I tried to get my physical needs met through bdsm play because he sure as shit wasn’t fucking me.  When he withdrew emotionally because he felt guilty for giving me a disease that involved scarring part of my cervix… which might have caused problems with the children I was so intent on having… I acted out and broke our M/s contract.  I didn’t feel I had other avenues available to me for getting the attention I needed.  Asking wasn’t working.  He was at his job constantly.  When he ignored me breaking the rules of our M/s contract I became a hellcat.  I was nasty to him and I started acting out in fairly public ways.  He didn’t want to have to control me.  When we stopped doing M/s we morphed into a Daddy/little girl relationship and that actually did a lot to heal how we had treated each other.

The problem is that when you grow into being Daddy/little girl… some day the little girl has to grow up and be a partner.  We couldn’t do that together.  He didn’t want to be responsible for carrying me as a burden and I don’t blame him.  He could never commit to being there for me.  It was too much work for me and a for better, for worse relationship really has to have enough of a balance to be worthwhile.  Tom never decided that my better was worth my worse.  Sometimes that is hard to live with because I worked so hard at that relationship.  I made that relationship a goal and I feel like I failed at reaching the goal.  That’s kind of a funny thing to realize.  That’s what I did.  I think I knew more of Tom than anyone ever had before I met him.  That might be hubris, but I doubt it.  I like to poke into people and we spent a lot of time alone.  He’s a good man.  He really is.  But he didn’t want me enough.

I chased him till I was done and then I left.  I left quickly and abruptly despite us having negotiated this long-term I could still live with him while I worked on school thing.  I couldn’t be in his house.  It hurt too much all the time to have it rubbed in my face that I wasn’t good enough for him.  It was the whole white trash thing.  I couldn’t fit in with his older, settled, more educated friends.  Or so I thought.  It took a lot of years for me to be ok with the kind of friendships I have now with his friends.  It’s a totally different relationship now.  They are people I used to know.  I care about them and they periodically reach out to me in ways that make me believe they care about me.  But life is busy and the monkey sphere is only so large.  I don’t fit in their culture and I rarely visit.  They consciously and specifically rejected mine.  It’s not a judgement.  They just didn’t want it.

It’s not even that, really.  I never learned how to integrate my sex community friends because I have never mastered how to navigate my different conversational/behavioral quirks and pitfalls.  I have a rather lot of them you see.  When I think of mixing the stream of people I know from different communities I have an adrenaline shot so intense that I start to hyperventilate and I get very angry because that is a really lot of energy for me.  Trying to stay present and focused in a conversation when I feel like I am supposed to be shifting my affect back and forth drains me and makes me feel like a deceptive and disgusting person.  I feel like I don’t know how to just be in the room.  I am supposed to be performing for the room and I don’t know what role I am in so I am reading two scripts at once and I start to panic because that means I am going to fail and then I feel abject terror because oh my fucking god here is more proof that I am a fucked up piece of shit I can’t even interact with two people at once oh my god I hate me so much and then I am angry.  I’m sorry for the run-on.  Once I hit that point of feeling angry with myself I instantly feel my face flush and I feel the need to start yelling at whoever is nearest to me.

Yesterday was a hard day.  And yes, it is all connected to the relationship that started when I was 18 and it’s all connected to that orgiastic trailer park.  I’m pretty sure I’ve never fully explained the extent of what I did in that trailer park, not even to Noah.  It was remarkably kinky.  In packs of children.  Oh what did we do.  Lots and lots of glorious oral sex on everyone.  Mostly this was a bunch of little girls ranging in age from 4-ish on to about 12.  Boys were around occasionally and when they were it tended to look just like a harem scene from a bad romance novel.  We competed to learn technique.  We knew what we were supposed to be doing.  It didn’t matter if we felt awkward.  It didn’t matter if we felt gross or bad or uncomfortable.

Most of it felt like shit.  I don’t count any of those kids on my list.  I felt degraded and nasty.  Most of them were dirty and smelled.  They had terrible hygiene and it grossed me out to perform oral sex on them.  Have I ever mentioned that Tom did not see a dentist during our relationship and he only brushed his teeth a handful of times when I specifically asked him to because the smell was bothering me so much?  We didn’t kiss.  I felt repelled by being too close to his face.  This is probably a big factor in our lack of intimate sex.  I didn’t want to face him.

Part of our M/s relationship centered around me doing his hygiene for him.  No really.  I bathed him.  I shaved him.  I cut his hair.  I trimmed his finger and toe nails.  I dressed him.  I shined and polished his shoes and boots.  Really the whole personal valet thing.  I picked someone with remarkably bad hygiene and made it my job to keep him decent enough for me to have sex with.  That’s really pretty fucked up, yo.  When I trailed off on doing the hygiene I expected him to just keep it up.  He didn’t.  I wasn’t very nice about his descent into being a slovenly disgusting… I don’t know… geek?  Who the hell did I think I was dating?  And then we look at Noah.  Ha.  I’ve given up on trying to clean him up.  I try to just not notice anymore.  I do pester him to get hair cuts because I think he should be looking vaguely more professional.  That’s it.  It’s kind of weird to not have control over his bodily functions.

It was this really weird enmeshed thing.  I truly had control over Tom’s body in ways that adults don’t normally have control over other people… and yet I wasn’t in control.  It was weird.  Now as a 30 year old who has been married for five years I understand some of the bdsm we did.  I can see how doing some of those things with Noah would build intimacy if done as a one time special occasion thing.  Or even as something it is ok to ask for once in a while. But it was my job with Tom.  It was my job to care for his physical body the same way I now care for my children.  It was a fucking pain in the ass.  But it was intimate.

A kind of weird false intimacy.  One emotionally distant pillar of the community asshole told me, “It’s good that he got you young.  This way you can be trained right.”  All the older people chuckled.  I got so angry I wanted to beat the ever-loving-shit out of all of them.  I felt completely enraged.  I wasn’t very interested in being trained.  I was interested in being appreciated for the things I did and acknowledged for the ways I behaved naturally.  I enjoy caring for people.  Ok, periodically I go through these periods where I feel enraged by the pointlessness of my life… but that’s a different issue.  There has to be balance.

I like caring for people and I like teaching people to be self-sufficient so that if my care is withdrawn for some reason they are able to carry on as if I was never there.  I like to get things on a well ordered clock. This is why I normally retreat to a room alone and refuse to interact with anyone when I’m having rage issues.  My rage issues arise because I am all of a sudden confronted with how little control I have over the people around me.  Someone is standing in front of me with a stunned deer look.  I should say, “May I get by” if I want to get through an entry way.  Instead I glare in silence as frustration and anger build and then I stomp off on in a different direction.  It doesn’t matter who the person is.  I do this no matter who is here.  I swear to god it isn’t personal people.  I get just as angry with the refrigerator.  I feel so overwhelmingly powerless to control the stupid, small annoyances in my life.  I feel like I am required to submit to the whims of anyone who demands from me because… after all… I enjoy caring for people–right?  It has to be all or nothing, right?

Haven’t you ever noticed that the men show up for a dinner party and sit on the couch to chat while the women walk into the kitchen and ask to help?  That’s true in some cases but not for all.  There are awesome men who always offer to help.  They aren’t in the majority.  And even the ones who offer to ask will stop asking if they are told no a few times.  Women tend to continue to pester.  They know that I am a lying sack of shit when I say I have everything under control because they know they don’t either.  Every woman needs more help than she is getting but getting help is sometimes a lot more work than doing it yourself… so we say, “I’ve got everything under control!”  Have I mentioned how much Sarah has improved my life?  I fucking hate cooking.

That’s not even true.  I hate long-term monotonous tasks that have to be done according to other peoples schedules.  I’m fucking sick of having to feed my fucking kids eleventy billion times.  It’s fucking boring.  I have have prepared and fed probably 70% of Shanna’s meals at this point.  The percentage is dropping fast.  The only reason it is so low is because Noah has been cooking breakfast for a long time.  Shanna eats four-five meals a day.  And it’s not just snacking.  I can’t believe how much that child eats.

So my intimate life with Tom became about me caring for his hygiene and enduring as much pain as I possibly could while complaining as little as I could manage.  While still being entertaining for the people who were watching because he really only wanted to play when people were watching.  I was his slave, not his girlfriend.  We supposedly had a concurrent girlfriend/boyfriend relationship… kinda…  We certainly did some vanilla things together and had fun.  We traveled but I’m a shitty traveling companion.

I could both see and not see Tom.  It’s only now that I understand that I feel like it was a failure because I was trying to be prescriptive of our relationship rather than descriptive.  I couldn’t just be in a relationship with him.  I had to name it and write out a long document of how it would go and we both had to live up to it or it wasn’t a real relationship.  We failed at doing what we said we were going to do.  That’s hard to live with.  We tried so hard to grow past the end of our M/s but we couldn’t.  He wasn’t a good match for me as a partner.

That is a lot of why I put Noah on the pedestal I do.  I dated Noah through the last six months of my relationship with Tom.  He even spent the night and I slept between them.  I couldn’t do it.  I couldn’t deal with the increasing separation from Tom.  He didn’t want to marry me.  He didn’t want to have kids with me.  What did he want?  He wanted me to wear horribly uncomfortable shoes and allow him to cause me pain while I smile for the rest of my life.  Uhh, no thanks.

It’s actually kind of nice to think of it as a role I was auditioning for and I rejected it.  It wasn’t right for me and he didn’t think I was worth much without that.  Ouch.  I think that’s what I grieve.  For years he called me One.  Because I was that special.  He had finally found the right one.  I would have let him do anything to me to prove how devoted I was.  I could not come up with scenes that were dirty or painful enough or dangerous enough to quench the need I had to prove that I loved him.  Being there wasn’t enough.  I wanted him to constantly test me.  I demanded that he do so.  He got sick of it.  He’s a good guy.  He can only abuse his girlfriend so much before he wants to go do other things, you know?

If he could have handled switching to having sex all the time we could have had a chance.  But only having sex eleven times in the last year meant it was a no-go.  That’s ok.  Noah is awesome.


 I want to explain more about how that little bdsm group shaped me.  There was a gentle constant pressure to behave submissively.  We had a lot of puppy-pile bdsm and a fairly rigorous lack of switching at an event.  People were expected to be one way all the time, even if they switched elsewhere.  Or when Tom and I switched in public… it was always understood that I was his slave giving him physical sensations he wanted to experience because it was my job to please him.  An awful lot of it I didn’t enjoy.  It was my absolute responsibility to be gung-ho and do what he wanted and perform sexual enjoyment to fulfill his fantasies.  I’m not turned on by cross dressed men.  I’m just not.  I don’t think there is anything shameful about it.  I don’t think it’s bad.  I can think it is fun to put makeup on someone.  But seeing a man in a dress does not inspire me to have sex with that man.  Tom is actually quite into cross dressing and being “forced” to do things.

Even the sex that was available to me was sex I frankly wasn’t interested in.  It’s kind of remarkable the store of guilt I have for not enjoying more of our relationship.  I forced myself to stay in it and stay enthusiastic long after it was apparent we weren’t a match.  I learned to do that.  I was specifically taught that sex was something fairly unpleasant (hygiene, specific activities that hurt) but parts of it feel good and you are required to be available for it at all times with anyone who asks.  I’m very angry with myself for the amount of time I have been demanding that guys perform in a set specific way because that is how I trained myself to get off.  I refined it with Tom.  Because the way that I push people to treat me is often fairly unpleasant.  But I egged it on.  It was my initiation.

Why do I keep insisting on having sex that hurts me.  Maybe instead of looking for a medical assist on not tearing vaginally I should start with foreplay.  It sounds obvious, doesn’t it?  But it’s not really an option in my life right now.  If sex lasts longer than about ten minutes it becomes really painful because we don’t have a good place to have sex.  I want to get it over with too.  I think that Noah is kind of tired of my mixed messages that I am upset about not having foreplay but I push him really hard to just get it over with already because my body hurts.

I’m tired of having my body hurt.  I’m tired of being hurt.  I want to be touched gently and that means modeling it for my wild animal children.  It’s very hard that they hurt me all day long.  They don’t mean to.  It’s hard to control all those pointy little joints.  They love me so much that they want to cuddle me all day long and climb on me like monkeys.  Mt. Mommy is the best ever.  And I sit there and with every jab of an elbow, every kick, every knee dug into me… I’m tired of pretending to be happy while I am being hurt by people who love me.  So tired of it.

Then I hide and feel guilty.  Wanting to be away from my children feels like a sin.  Like I am abandoning them.  Like I am the thing that their whole fucking world is pinned on…  For most of my life my mother was the only consistent person.  I lived with her more than I lived with anyone else but I moved constantly and I wasn’t always with her.  I had to constantly adjust to new rules and new expectations of me.  If I didn’t perform appropriately, instantly, I was punished.  It was for my own good.  I had to learn.  I wanted so badly to learn and perform and be a good girl.

I really wish fewer of the lessons had been about sex.  I wish fewer of them had come from new neighbors.  When I would go over to play at the houses of my new friends in Texas I would wander by the bathroom door.  One of the step fathers spent a lot of time in there supposedly peeing while sitting down.  Most of the time he was masturbating and waiting for us to show up.  We helped.  He smelled really bad.  His hair was dark.  He probably shaved about once a week because he was pretty shaggy a lot of he time.  His breath was foul.  I remember him asking me, “Here, won’t you touch it?”

I wanted to vomit from the smell, but I stepped in and did it.  I don’t think it occurred to me until much later that I could have said no.  I was seven.  I didn’t believe I was allowed to say no when someone dropped their pants and told me to do something with what I found.  That step father only ever had us masturbate him with our hands.  He didn’t touch us.  It barely even counts, right?  I don’t consider him a rapist.  I don’t really consider myself his victim.  We were just fucking around, right?

If someone did that to my daughter I would castrate him.  I think that is why I need to have my lovers not interact with my children.  Noah has a good healthy respect for me and a bone deep understanding of me that frankly freaks me out.  I trust him because of this.  I do not trust the men I have transgressive relationships with.  I just don’t.  They’ve already proven that they have no respect for the rules of society, why exactly should I trust them around my kids?  They have proven to me only that they have a moral code that is transgressive… not that they have a moral code that aligns with me.  The only way to prove that you have a moral code that aligns with mine is to absolutely only behave in ways that you agree in advance to behave.  Tom didn’t do that.  Do I think Tom would hurt my kids?  Oh give me a fucking break, no.  Not in a million years.  I don’t think Tom has it in him to hurt a child.  Most perverts are actually pretty helpless people.  They are so petrified with guilt and shame for the things they want to do that they have to go construct this little other-life where they get to be their “real” self.  It’s not integrated into your whole person.

Unless you want to be really socially transgressive and rude about the fact that you like kinky sex.  You want everyone in the fucking coffee shop, including the five year olds, to hear about it.  No thanks.  I don’t want that in my life any more.  I need to start monitoring myself better.  I’m just as guilty about this as other people.  I take on that persona when I am out with that kind of group.  Now, I want to specifically say one thing.  It’s not about clothes.  I don’t care much about someone wearing clothes that are explicitly “adult” where children might see them.  That is something a parent is supposed to help their child learn to navigate.  I actually think that is healthy.  There is a range of human expression out there and kids have to learn to navigate it.

But I think that should be done much more slowly than other people do.  That’s ok.  As I’m dealing with the intensity of my feelings about this topic I realize that I will be fine with my kids “overhearing” those conversations in coffee shops once they hit 11, 12, 13… whenever they are obviously starting to have hormonal surges.  Because then we can talk about them and I can present my values.  I don’t want people out in the world to really change.  But I do want to be very very careful about who I bring around my kids when they are little.  I don’t want to be asked what porn is yet.  I love my friends, but I never associated with them in contexts where they watched their mouths.  So I don’t believe they can.

Most of this is because when I am around those friends I bring it up.  I am so desperate for adult conversations and flirting that I will take it any chance I can get it.  And then I feel like I am crossing lines.  And then I flagellate myself for days.

I hope I had a point somewhere.  It’s time to go have breakfast.

Just another day

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My shrink doesn’t think I should find stronger anxiety meds.  As I was leaving her office today I asked her about her opinion about what I should tell a doctor.  What part of my current shit is the most physical in origin and what is likely the best thing to do about it.  She thinks I should talk to the doctor about my stomach hurting and probably something for sleep.  As much as the smoking isn’t great for my lungs she thinks that having to go spend thirty minutes away from the kids is better than taking stronger meds so I can endure more pressure.  She may have a point.  As much as I have this inner resistance to it, I kind of think I may need to make a schedule for us and stick to it.  We could all use the predictability.  I need to have breaks from the kids most days.  Luckily, we now have a Sarah.

Is it really nerdy that I am going to make a big graph and highlight things and move them around?  I need to figure out something though.  I hate smoking.  It feels shitty.  I want to not need it.  Plan A right now on getting my shit together involves ridiculously scheduling my life so that I can try to find a way to balance my moods.  It feels like a New Shiny Neurosis.  If I want to stay off meds I need some way of reacting to my bio-chemical stress loads.  I don’t know another way.  What do I need in order to feel like I can stay calm.  I feel very weird about the fact that my therapist considers marijuana significantly superior to other potential anti-anxieties for me.  I suspect it is partially because of my ridiculous conflict around what I’m doing.  I won’t use it if I have to drive.  I am very careful about proper supervision of the kids, etc.  If I had pills that I could use when I was out I would probably end up trapped somewhere feeling unable to drive and get hysterical.  I suppose this way I always make it home because I don’t bring pot out of my house.  I’ve tried bringing it with me a few times and I never have the nerve to sneak off and use it.  It’s pretty funny.  Even if I am sitting amongst a group of people passing a pipe… I just can’t bring myself to smoke in front of people.  I have problems.

Today I told my therapist about the second time I broke my arm.  I was 12.  I had to call my mom at work to come home and take me to the hospital.  She worked 90 miles away in City of Industry.  She screamed at me a lot about how I had better not be lying.  I was scared shitless my arm wasn’t actually broken.  I had to endure a lot of pain before I was willing to call her and ask for help in the first place, but I didn’t have other options.  It was broken.  And to put the icing on the cake when I went back for the actual cast I told her I wasn’t feeling well.  She told me I was a hypochondriac and a whiner.  I vomited on the floor in the waiting room.  The hospital staff was really nice to me as I sobbed my apologies for making a mess.  My mom yanked me by my unbroken arm away and told me how disgusting I was for making the mess.  Sometimes I wonder if I am more fucked up by my mother or my father.

Now as an adult I get why my mom was so harsh with me.  She was walking a tightrope financially and she truly couldn’t take time off frivolously.  I was sick a lot (I’ve had stomach problems since I was a child) and Tommy needed a lot of time off.  His care would have been a full time job.  It was for more than one person, actually.  It’s interesting thinking about my mother now that I have children.  When I think of the things my mother didn’t know about me… I wonder what things I will miss in my children.  I’m absolutely confident that I am already a better mother than my mom though.  That’s kind of a weird thing.  I have already provided my children with more stability, security, attention, and kindness than my mother showed me.  In less than six months Shanna will have lived in this house longer than I have ever lived anywhere else.  This house, this life that I am building with my family… this is the only stability I’ve ever had.

Every time I move I mostly change friends groups.  I change everything about my life.  And I have done it every 3-18 months from age 3 till I was 19 years old.  Then I stayed at Tom’s for three years before moving around several times in two years before moving here.  I’m getting the feeling this is my forever home.  We may add a second story some day.  I’m trying to meet most of the neighbors on our street.  I am floating the idea past all of them for a block party.  So far everyone has indicated that they would try to come.  For better or for worse this is where my children will grow up.  These people will be their community.  I get a lot of say in how that works.  I want a Leave it to Beaver style community where everyone knows everyones business.  I guess I had better start meeting people and learning their business then.  It’s frightening to consider.  They will see me go through stages.

I am having trouble with this whole 5% thing.  I can’t shake the feeling that it is bad.  Like I should be culled from the herd for daring to deviate.  I’m trying to decide how and where I will deviate from the norms in my home and in my community because it isn’t fair for me to alienate people.  My children have to live here.  I am weird.  I know it.  The thing is, why am I so convinced that everyone will hate me?  Yeah, yeah… polarizing figure.  I’ve mellowed with age.  I’m a lot easier to be an acquaintance with.  I think.  It’s really hard to go meet my neighbors but Shanna thinks it is easy.  I’m trying to remember that part of me that sees every person as a potential friend instead of a potential judge.  Most people don’t care enough about me to bother to judge me.

In completely other news, Sarah is preserving food for winter.  I have succeeded in my way of being a provider for my family.  I win.  At the rate these tomato plants are going we might be able to eat a tomato based dish (pasta, chili, stew, etc) a week for almost a year.  That’s really cool.  We haven’t really gotten to eat much of the other veggies I’ve grown.  I think the cabbage is too tough to eat now, but I watched the full growth cycle and that has value.  It was neat to see these plants emerge.  I feel like as a science experiment it was a fabulously productive summer.  I failed on most of it in terms of providing food (with the huge exception of the tomatoes), but that’s what I was supposed to do.  I was learning what to do and not do.  I have to learn at some point.

Random feedback question, oh those who read this blog: I tend to keep a window open and add to it for a few days.  Are more frequent little posts easier to read?  Would you like visual breaks so you know when I walk away and come back because it’s often a very different thought?  Do you not care because my verbal diarrhea is hard to follow anyway so it might as well be a huge blob?  Feedback welcome on that topic.  Solicited, even.

It’s my birthday now.  Noah made me breakfast and let me sleep in.  Him making me breakfast is actually an every single day thing.  That’s one of the things that makes me feel loved.  He gets up every day and thinks about how to feed me.  Food = love.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Mo’s post on submission.  It’s kind of funny because I don’t play much these days.  And I haven’t been in anything like a D/s or M/s relationship in eight years.  Not really.  It’s weird to think about because I don’t think people recognize how deeply ingrained my impulse towards service is.  I go clean my friends’ houses.  I always have.  I always feel like I must do physical labor for people I love.  Shared work is one of the quickest ways to bond with me.  I don’t bond well in party situations because I’m not one to relax while sitting in a room with people who have the ability to stop and stare at me.  They have to be distracted and looking somewhere else so that I don’t feel tense.

This is a problem mostly because I have this simultaneous issue that if I am the only one working I am a martyr and no one loves me.  This is a problem because I am much more bothered by visual disarray than anyone else in my house so I am constantly working and they truly can’t do that with me.  I am at an unhealthy place with my level of getting upset over doing house work.  I don’t like to feel taken for granted.  I need a lot of acknowledgment.  Even if I am the only one working, if I get frequent, sincere comments on my work I feel seen.

I think that I have been working in my head towards how to feel like my position in my family is one of submitting my work to the common betterment of my family.  That sounds really stupid and weird.  Ok, bear with me.  I “grew up” in a weird generation of perverts and I have all this bullshit about slave hearts going round and round in my head.  I miss the stillness I got in my head and in my heart when I was a slave.  I was able to shut off my background chatter of negative self talk and just work because that was my place and my job.  I was to facilitate Tom’s life.  It would be fair to think of it as dehumanizing me, or at least minimizing my importance in life.  I did everything with the specific goal of pleasing him.  It took enormous focus and energy.  I could lose myself in it.  I could stay present in the moment in a way that eludes me these days without enormous physical output.  Rototilling the yard keeps me in the same head space.  It’s probably what other people attain through meditation.  I can’t meditate for shit.  But I like bringing that calm focus into my work.

In the bdsm community you can spend a lot of time and money going to classes to help you learn how to cultivate a relationship where you can dictate the narrow limits of your life to allow you that kind of focus.  No matter what your side goals are: making money, buying a house, having kids… the only real goal is pleasing your Dominant/Master.  It’s a much more immediate thing to check up on.  Handy in the immediate feedback sense.  Easy to get obsessive with.  I was certainly obsessed.  I ate, slept, and breathed Tom’s happiness.  It is intriguing to think about that level of intensity.  I like to think that Noah is a great person to have an affair with.  When he turns the full power of his gaze on someone… it’s intoxicating.  I know some of his ex’s read this, you had better be nodding.

Noah is a crack boy.  He’s easy to get obsessed with.  Part of the reason is that it is always clear that there are big chunks of him that are simply not available to me.  I can never fully understand him no matter how many years I stare at him.  If someone is too available to me emotionally, I don’t pursue.  I have nothing to chase.  It’s terrible, but I don’t see a point in lying.  I like complicated people.  On the day Noah asked me to marry him he told me he also wanted me as his slave.  Neither of us really knew what that meant then.  I’m not sure I do either.  But I’m thinking about it.  I need an obsession.  I really do.

I have nothing to keep my brain from dwelling all day on how it is not fucking fair that by Shanna’s age I was giving out blow jobs to neighbor kids.  My parents were divorcing.  I had already been raped.  Very soon we were about to be homeless.  I think of those things and I look at my wonderful girl, who if anything is getting bored with how safe her life is, and I feel rage.  I’m burnt out though.  I’ve had all the rage my body can take for a while.  I desperately need a distraction that won’t fuck up my life.  My therapist is right that I should not try to get stronger meds so I can be more of a zombie all day long.  That’s not really the solution.

So I’ve been thinking about my wonderful husband.  I’ve been trying to deliberately think in terms of serving his life.  What would actually serve his life better.  It’s kind of funny that phrasing it in that way changes a lot of the discussion for me.  If I drop my set of living-life-expectations… it’s weird.  I should call a cleaning company tomorrow.  I should never dust again.  It makes his life worse because I don’t have the physical body load to do as much as I am doing and be in a good mood.  The reason I am so beat down is because I am trying harder and harder to take the shit work off of Noah because I need him in a good mood.  I need to make Noah happy.  I have to.  If I don’t I am failing at this life and Jesus H Christ I am the biggest piece of shit ever.  Not that he thinks that.  But as much as I love my friends, Noah is the only person on the planet I am going to see every day for the rest of my life.  Not my kids.  Not anyone else.  I want a happy marriage.  I really do.

So whereas we are not in a place where we can get the M/s thing to work right now I’m thinking about the future.  For the record I have changed some of my opinions.  I no longer go by Lenora, that was an in-the-closet-while-teaching thing.  How’s that for crossing the streams?

Anyway, I’ve been obsessing about Noah during my time off lately.  It seems the most benign and cheerful way for me to pass a little time while letting my body rest.  The last few years have been hard for him.  Any effort at all is pleasing.  I’ve already been reading more.  I’ve already read two books this week and I have a couple more I am working on.  He likes it when I am really on for verbal banter.  Oh man does that require more rest than I am getting.  It’s really nice for me to realize that some of the best things I can do to serve him and make him happier is eliminate as much work as possible from my life so I can sit around and read and pamper my body so that my interest in sex returns.  I’ve had a few glimmers lately and that’s been comforting.  But it’s not really back yet.  Next on my desk is Les Liasons Dangereuses and I really need to read The Prince again.  And I should probably review a rhetoric book because my arguing skills are shitty.  If I’m going to keep up with Noah I need to get crackin’.

Luckiest girl in the whole world

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We kind of ignored our fifth wedding anniversary.  We were busy.  I’m not actually sad about that because the party was fun.  Last night I was told extensively how much I have changed since marrying Noah.  I agree.  For the first time in my life I know what it is like to have someone unreservedly like me.  It’s a novelty.  And Noah doesn’t just like me.  Noah is kind of obsessed with me.  We have spent hundreds of hours talking about my life and history and psychological health.  There are not enough hours in a day for me to tell him more about the inner workings of my brain.  I was informed that is not normal.  Ok.

It’s weird to live with someone who likes me but has no compunction pointing out where I am doing something badly.  It’s refreshing.  After five years together, I even prefer his voice in delivering criticism.  When he’s consciously trying he’s good at being gentle with me.  We have a lot of verbal conversation short cuts that help with my layers of emotional baggage.  That was hard to build.  It is amazing that at this point we can have these massively intense conversations because we can reference this long history of conversations.  I’ve never really had that before.

It’s weird how this relationship is really my “college” education in the sense that most people have them. Noah has encouraged me to learn about things I actively shunned.  He has read books to me and articles and blog posts and comics and we have watched movies together.  We have built this weird unique little subculture just for us.  I imagine this is what growing up in a family is like, because we include the kids whenever we can.  This will be their weird little subculture.  I think about that.  My children will never have normal.  My children will be in the 5%.  Probably.  Maybe.  I hope.  I hope they know that the 5% exists and that they have the courage and fortitude to do anything they want to do.  I want children who are so courageous that there really isn’t much chance they will meld into the crowd.  I have that already.

Noah encourages me to feel really happy about being me.  He thinks I should grin when I think of something clever I said.  It’s kind of an odd feeling.  He likes it when I am cocky and arrogant.  But then I later collapse in private and have to breathe through my panic attack.  Noah is definitely a mixed bag for my personal development.  Sometimes I wonder if part of what makes me so uncomfortable when I go out into the world is the fact that I know that no one has ever liked me how Noah likes me.  I feel like other people dislike me in contrast.  It’s not true.  But it is true that I am starting to run into conflict with friends because Noah has influenced my behavior.

I have Noah at home telling me that conflict is an ok thing.  It’s hard to believe him.  It’s hard to believe that getting better at arguing is really going to earn me more friends.  Noah is trying to convince me that it will absolutely chase off some of my current friends but it will earn me friends who actually like me more rather than what they are projecting on to me.  I think that is what he is trying to convince me of.  I could be wrong. There is no way for me to remember everything we talk about with super concrete details.  I am out of tapes.

Why is being avaricious in a woman so threatening?  I’ll tell you flat out that if Noah gets to the point where he is offered $250k/year in salary, hell yes I’ll do anything he wants.  That kind of power and influence is highly erotic to a dirty little street kid like me, what can I say?  He can have a weekend where I do anything he wants.  And the current potential ideas are the kinds of things nice normal housewives should be degraded by.  I should feel devalued and lessened.  Cheapened.  Instead my response is: hawt.  It gets me off to think about it now and it will really get me off to do it.

My marriage wouldn’t work for everyone, but we’re having fun.  I can’t really see another way for me to deal with my class issues, really.  I could pretend they don’t exist… but they do.  We like looking at things head on.  I don’t see the value in pussyfooting around my stupid little landmines.  If I’m going to set them off, let’s go kablooie.  Why not do it in a way that maximizes the fun.  Seriously.  I don’t consider that a real question.  This is work I need to do in my life.  I need to deal with my class issues.  Mostly I talk about them in therapy, on the internet, with friends, with Noah, and I think constantly about them.  Ok, not constantly.  But they come up and I address them.  And every so often I go and play some dramatic game about sex exploitation.  So what?  I think that giving my husband a weekend for sex that we will both find really hot is a pretty reasonable reward for him being a fan-fuck-ing-tastic provider.  I don’t really care if anyone disagrees.  (Then why am I writing about it on the internet.  *sigh*)

I want to try to explain how I see Noah.  I really do.  I don’t have the words this morning though.  He’s such a big concept in my mind.  I watched this bad bad movie recently about 20’s relationship angst and the big whore butch dyke finally settles down into a monogamous relationship because “You hold my interest.”  I like the fact that sleeping with other people reminds me that I married the right person.  I enjoy it.  I want to do it again.  But I married the right person.  Never before in my life has anyone cared enough about me and my happiness to change their behavior for me.  That’s the part that other people don’t get.  That’s why I keep them at a distance.  They think I have to just “learn to accept them”, which means that I have to change to suit them.  Noah looked at me and thought that keeping me and making me happy was worth making dramatic bone deep change.

I am the luckiest girl in the whole world.  He has absolutely changed for me.  Yes, I’m going to change for him too.  Because I want to validate the important parts of him that much.  Because I think he is worth it.

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We kind of ignored our fifth wedding anniversary.  We were busy.  I’m not actually sad about that because the party was fun.  Last night I was told extensively how much I have changed since marrying Noah.  I agree.  For the first time in my life I know what it is like to have someone unreservedly like me.  It’s a novelty.  And Noah doesn’t just like me.  Noah is kind of obsessed with me.  We have spent hundreds of hours talking about my life and history and psychological health.  There are not enough hours in a day for me to tell him more about the inner workings of my brain.  I was informed that is not normal.  Ok.

It’s weird to live with someone who likes me but has no compunction pointing out where I am doing something badly.  It’s refreshing.  After five years together, I even prefer his voice in delivering criticism.  When he’s consciously trying he’s good at being gentle with me.  We have a lot of verbal conversation short cuts that help with my layers of emotional baggage.  That was hard to build.  It is amazing that at this point we can have these massively intense conversations because we can reference this long history of conversations.  I’ve never really had that before.

It’s weird how this relationship is really my “college” education in the sense that most people have them. Noah has encouraged me to learn about things I actively shunned.  He has read books to me and articles and blog posts and comics and we have watched movies together.  We have built this weird unique little subculture just for us.  I imagine this is what growing up in a family is like, because we include the kids whenever we can.  This will be their weird little subculture.  I think about that.  My children will never have normal.  My children will be in the 5%.  Probably.  Maybe.  I hope.  I hope they know that the 5% exists and that they have the courage and fortitude to do anything they want to do.  I want children who are so courageous that there really isn’t much chance they will meld into the crowd.  I have that already.

Noah encourages me to feel really happy about being me.  He thinks I should grin when I think of something clever I said.  It’s kind of an odd feeling.  He likes it when I am cocky and arrogant.  But then I later collapse in private and have to breathe through my panic attack.  Noah is definitely a mixed bag for my personal development.  Sometimes I wonder if part of what makes me so uncomfortable when I go out into the world is the fact that I know that no one has ever liked me how Noah likes me.  I feel like other people dislike me in contrast.  It’s not true.  But it is true that I am starting to run into conflict with friends because Noah has influenced my behavior.

I have Noah at home telling me that conflict is an ok thing.  It’s hard to believe him.  It’s hard to believe that getting better at arguing is really going to earn me more friends.  Noah is trying to convince me that it will absolutely chase off some of my current friends but it will earn me friends who actually like me more rather than what they are projecting on to me.  I think that is what he is trying to convince me of.  I could be wrong. There is no way for me to remember everything we talk about with super concrete details.  I am out of tapes.

Why is being avaricious in a woman so threatening?  I’ll tell you flat out that if Noah gets to the point where he is offered $250k/year in salary, hell yes I’ll do anything he wants.  That kind of power and influence is highly erotic to a dirty little street kid like me, what can I say?  He can have a weekend where I do anything he wants.  And the current potential ideas are the kinds of things nice normal housewives should be degraded by.  I should feel devalued and lessened.  Cheapened.  Instead my response is: hawt.  It gets me off to think about it now and it will really get me off to do it.

My marriage wouldn’t work for everyone, but we’re having fun.  I can’t really see another way for me to deal with my class issues, really.  I could pretend they don’t exist… but they do.  We like looking at things head on.  I don’t see the value in pussyfooting around my stupid little landmines.  If I’m going to set them off, let’s go kablooie.  Why not do it in a way that maximizes the fun.  Seriously.  I don’t consider that a real question.  This is work I need to do in my life.  I need to deal with my class issues.  Mostly I talk about them in therapy, on the internet, with friends, with Noah, and I think constantly about them.  Ok, not constantly.  But they come up and I address them.  And every so often I go and play some dramatic game about sex exploitation.  So what?  I think that giving my husband a weekend for sex that we will both find really hot is a pretty reasonable reward for him being a fan-fuck-ing-tastic provider.  I don’t really care if anyone disagrees.  (Then why am I writing about it on the internet.  *sigh*)

I want to try to explain how I see Noah.  I really do.  I don’t have the words this morn

Bad decisions

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In life there are trade offs.  You only have so many resources at any given point in time.  I feel like an awful lot of the problems in life are because of the fact that there are insufficient resources.  And I don’t mean oil–I’m talking about time and attention.  I’m talking about the fact that I don’t keep up with my friends as well as I wish I could because I cannot handle the fact that I am already touched and pawed at all day long.

A friend else-net got very drunk last night.  She’s at a hard spot in her life and she wanted to drink to forget.  Of course she now believes this has destroyed her value as a person.  On the kind of nights where you drink to forget you tend to believe your value was gone before you started.  I make bad decisions.  I don’t want to add an adverb describing when or how often. Because the reality is I probably make bad decisions about as often as average and maybe less.  Do you want to know why I say that?  Because something being a bad decision or not depends on your perspective.

Getting shit faced drunk and passing out seems like a bad decision.  Until you realize that the alternative may very well be ending your life.  When you realize that choosing to get shit faced drunk so that you can make it through the one bad night is actually a good choice.  At the crisis point, get drunk.  That’s ok.  Really.  It’s not a bad decision.  If that is how you are going to still be alive in the morning it is a good decision.  It’s a bad decision to do it every night.  It is a bad decision to make it a lifestyle.  Anesthetics have their place in life.  I believe it is ok to self-medicate.  But be very careful.

Does that mean it is the safest choice?  Of course not.  Drinking until you pass out is dangerous and I don’t really think people should be doing it.  Much like cutting.  It’s not a great thing to do.  I don’t recommend it as a coping strategy for people who are looking for new tools.  Sometimes people do make mistakes while cutting and accidentally die.  It is not beyond the realm of possibility.

A lot of my friends point out that their lives “weren’t that bad” so they shouldn’t be upset.  I honestly don’t know a lot of people who experienced more abuse than me… and I still don’t feel entitled to be upset.  Not really.  To me that means that it doesn’t matter whether I am entitled to the upset or not.  I am upset.  I need to not worry about whether or not I should be.  I need to not focus on how my being upset affects other people.  I need to look at how being upset affects me.  It’s hard because for all that I have been talking constantly about being narcissistic… I’m truly not.  I have a hard time paying adequate attention to myself.  I worry constantly about the happiness of those around me.  I work extensively to build up other people.  That’s just an insecurity.

It’s just as true for everyone else though.  Ok, there are people who are actually narcissistic.  Most people are just existing though.  You get upset.  It’s ok to deal with being upset.  If that upset goes on for weeks, months, years… you use up your resources.  When you are low on resources sometimes you hit the bottom of the barrel.  It’s ok.  That’s why it is there.  It is still a tool.  The bottom exists for a reason.

Why am I babbling about this.  Because I can say this emphatically when I am speaking with my friend in my head.  When I picture my beautiful, wonderful friend who is going through a very hard time and there is nothing I can do to help… that feels like I am failing in my life.  I don’t want my friends to suffer.  I want to take it away and make everything better.  I want to help build my friends up so big and so strong that they cannot be hurt any more.

I’ve been reading more in TCTH (The Courage to Heal–I’m sick of typing it out.)  I think it is funny that every time I read it I get to a few pages past where I feel emotionally that day.  When I come back and catch up I get to read on the page these testimonies from all these women describing their emotional processes and I could have written them.  It feels really hilarious and predictable.  This experience of going through this book is ensuring that I know I am not a special fucking snow flake.  Ha.  It’s nice though.  I now have this invisible group of women who know what I have been through. Healing from incest is a fairly predictable path.  I’m not lost and wandering and doing it wrong.  I am working the steps.  I really and truly am doing something that is worth doing.  As hard as this is sometimes, as bad as some of my mistakes are… I am improving.

My momentary bad decisions do not negate the fact that I am a good person.  That it is worth getting up every single day and continuing for as long as my body will let me because I add good to the world.  Far, far, far more good than bad.  I haven’t been sleeping enough and my emotions are very close to the surface.  I feel very upset when I see my friends self-flagellating in ways I also do.  It hits home for me what I need to start working on doing and that’s hard.  I kind of don’t need more pressure to work, you know?  I’m very tired.  I feel so flawed.  I feel like I will never be good enough.

And TCTH tells me that is part of the process.  It will pass.  This day will end.  Today I will get good and stoned and I will wander around the house puttering and singing and talking with my babies.  If I just putter around absent mindedly all the rest of the cleaning will magically happen.  But I have to be very stoned.  Or I will be a stress monkey and twitch and be unable to complete tasks and cry and probably scream at both kids.  I have a choice, right this minute.  I can continue to distract myself with the internet because I believe smoking marijuana is a bad choice and I am a bad person for doing it, or… I can shut up and do it.  And have a really nice day.  Bye y’all.

Can’t.Get.Out.Of.Head.

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I’m not so good at this sleeping thing lately.  I’m thinking a great deal about my role models.  People who are alive, people who are dead, people who were dead before my birth and people who have lived only in the mind.  I spend a lot of time feeling like I should apologize for who I am and what I do.  Not because I really believe that I am wrong.  But because I feel like I do not have the right to make choices that differ from the people around me.  The thing is, everyone does things differently and that’s how it is supposed to work.


Ok, I’m beating around the bush.  A while back I had a conversation with a friend/former lover in which we both kind of nudged the other to test the waters.  Nothing came of it that day and that’s ok.  He brought up a really important point though.  He breaks condoms.  Due to a wide variety of factors (size, piercings) he has an above average number of breakages.  He *is* careful.  He has had multiple accidental pregnancies because of this.  Uhhh… my baby factory is closed.  After careful thought about how much I loathe everything about being on duty 24/7 for an infant I never want to have another child.  I love my children.  I’m fucking done.  So I’m thinking about permanent birth control.  Not in the next three months or anything, but I think it will be done soonish.  I want to never have to worry about that again.  The thought of pregnancy fills me with revulsion and horror.  I’m done.


I have then been thinking a lot about safer sex.  It’s complicated.  What does one mean by “safer” sex? Blah blah blah.  Near as I can see it there are a few reasons to use latex (or equivalent) over all contact between bits: disease, pregnancy, or show of good faith.  Most everyone is pretty loud about the disease one and I agree with it.  I have been pretty rigorous throughout most of my sluttery with barriers.  It’s important!  I drank that kool aid.  I think it’s a good flavor.  I’m going to deal with that pregnancy bit forever.  Then there’s the good faith bit, and that’s tricky.


If you are a slut you are supposed to tow the party line about doing it safely at all times in all ways.  SSC is based on that. used as a battering ram by people who claim that is what it means.  What an awesome history piece.  The opening of the RACK definition mentions my historical associations.  I guess I was ignorant.  It’s interesting how often that is coming up lately, my ignorance.  Anyway.  I’m avoiding again.


I’m thinking about how I feel about unprotected sex with people other than my husband.  I haven’t done it.  This is still hypothetical in the future.  I’ll tell you that the sticking point is the word husband.  I have been told that baby making sex is husband sex and at this point unprotected sex = baby making sex.  I’m a big fan of two forms of birth control.  If I am sterile and a guy is sterile then pregnancy is such a low possibility that I’m willing to risk it.  I’ll say that flat out.  I’m brave enough to trust two surgical operations.  Then comes disease risk.  Unless you believe that diseases manifest out of nowhere, there are ways to ensure that people are not carrying diseases.  It’s really simple actually.  You just go down to your local clinic before engaging in activities and voila!  


But oh man.  Then there is that party line.  I probably don’t mean it in the way you think.  However you think it.  I worry about not representing the “right kind” of promiscuous sex.  I’m pretty defensive about my behavior and all.  I worry that sex with Noah will feel less special.  I don’t honestly think it will.  I’m pretty base about such things.  I’m pretty darn sure that I will think it is hotter than the sun to come home after sex with someone else.  Uhm.  Yeah.  I actually really like that idea.  I think that idea is so fucking hot that I am going to take a break to masturbate.  I’ll be in my bunk.


Thanks to the internet I know that lots of other people feel the same way.  Either that or one person has been very prolific at writing stories.  This is a fairly basic biological urge.  Evolution programmed me to think this is hot.  Why should I carry shame for enjoying it?  Seriously.  At this point it is still hypothetical and I already feel guilty.  Ridiculous.  I’m a smart girl.  I want to lead a long and healthy life.  I promise you, oh internet, if I sleep with someone without using a condom I will do my preparation work.  I will ensure that the person in question is not a disease risk and I will prevent pregnancy at all costs.  And then I will decide if it will add more drama to my life to use or not use a condom.


It’s fairly reasonable to ask why I don’t just default to using condoms because that’s a good idea and all.  There are some downsides to being raped repeatedly throughout your childhood.  And bodies were designed to glide on other bodies, not on a piece of rubber.  Condoms hurt and I am at a point in my life where adding any more pain to my body is repugnant.  I have had tearing and resultant burning for over a week with each time I’ve used a condom recently.  It’s almost enough to make it not worth having the sex.  Dilemma.  


I’ve been thinking a lot about my position as a sexual outlaw.  I use that mockingly because I have never done sex work and I’m pretty sure it is considered part of the deal.  But I break laws with sex.  I have sex in public places.  I am always very disappointed when I have a partner who isn’t up for it.  I suspect that one of Noah’s biggest appeals is that he really and truly is up for doing anything and everything I want from him sexually.  That’s useful.  But there are parts of unlawful sex he cannot help me with by definition.  


The thing is they are crimes because if someone accidentally finds us then we have harmed those people by engaging in the act we are engaging in.  Which makes what we are doing dirty.  You know that scared nervous feeling you get when you make out with someone just out of sight of people?  Doesn’t everyone do that at some point when they are young?  Ok, the geek boys will smack me and shout that not everyone spends time making out when they are young.  Whatever.  I can’t explain exhibitionism but I presume I don’t have to.  If what I am doing is perfectly fine behind closed doors then it is probably more exciting for me to do it in public.  It’s a wiring thing.


So yeah.  Unprotected sex.  Public sex.  Taboo sex.  I really miss the part of me that is willing to take very calculated risks with self confidence.  I take fairly big risks.  Kind of.  Not really.  I take risks that sound really bad but aren’t once you listen to the details.  I’m very logical about the risks I take.  Which is kind of hilarious.  “Don’t knock rationalizations. I don’t know anyone who could get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations. They’re more important than sex.”  But what happens when my rationalizations are trying to make it so I can have sex?


So I’m up late at night thinking about how I can feel more comfortable in my skin with the decisions I make.  Even though I’m not making choices that would be right for other people, I’m making choices that are ok for me.  There isn’t a One Twue Way.  My personal religion seems to be formed around a bastardized notion of gnostic sin I got from Noah.  Something is only a sin if you are ashamed to talk about it.  He told me it was the basis for his open relationship with a previous partner (*wave*).  I’ve been thinking about it a lot.  


I’m thinking about the possibility of unprotected sex with men other than the one I am married to.  My husband (within certain parameters) is fine with it.  Why am I worried about breaking the sanctity of my marriage in this one more way?  Partially because I’ve been told quite clearly that it would be bad.  I would be bad.  That’s dirty.  I would be defiled.  Just go read a message board anywhere.  Oh man.  But I wouldn’t be.  That’s the thing.  No one would know unless I told them.  I would still be just me.  With upgrades.  I think this is what being an adult actually means.  I get to make decisions.  I get to make choices amongst a dizzying array of options.  I am not at the mercy of my fate.  I do not have to do what people “do” just because it is “done”.  


The trick is to do it and not feel shame.  The shame is poison.  If you feel shame about what you are doing you should not do it because shame gets into the water and the soil and the air and it is poison.  I feel shame because other people tell me that my choices are wrong.  “Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.”  Dr. Seuss told me that.  I worry because anxiety was taught to me.  I’m supposed to be afraid of what people think of my actions.


And here is where the fun part goes away: my sister raped my brother almost thirty years ago.  My sister allowed her husband to rape her son almost ten years ago.  My sister taught her daughter to perform oral sex on her son about ten years ago.  I have no idea what she has been up to since then.  It scares the shit out of me.  According to my brother he hasn’t told people that she did it.  Until me.  And I have told the whole damn internet.  My father spent decades raping his daughters and no one stopped him.


I am very good at putting on my public face and having my public persona.  But with the intense pressure to behave “appropriately” comes this simultaneous backlash of anger that makes me compulsively want to break rules.  I have broken some pretty big ones.  I stole borrowed my mom’s car when I was 15 before I had a license because I promised someone a ride and I couldn’t back down.  Want to know how I got caught?  I uhhh forgot to put my headlights on as I pulled out of a lighted parking garage after Rocky Horror.  And the registration was expired.  That incident is why I couldn’t get a license until I was 18.  You see, I gave my mother the money to pay the fines and she bounced the check.  Once you do that the fees go up and I was well aware my mother would just bounce the second check.  I had to put on the public face of not acknowledging the fact that my mother was literally stealing from me.


If I said anything about it I would endure a tirade of hysteria about how I blame everything on her even though she is the victim in life.  I see that pattern emerging for me with Shanna.  I don’t vocalize it, but I think it.  But I’m not the victim any more.  I now hold absolutely all of the cards.  I have all of the power.  Do I want to use my power for good or evil?


At this point in my life I am neither a victim nor a martyr.  I’ve made choices to end up where I am.  I’m pretty fucking thrilled with my life, actually.  I’m still slowly trying to sort through the house.  I’m not doing anything wrong.  I’m trying as hard as I can not to hurt people.  Sometimes that isn’t good enough and I’m sorry for that.  I really like fucking multiple people. I’m going to keep doing it.  I’m going to make my decisions about safer sex based on actual risks not perceived status around said decisions.  And I’m going to let go of feeling bad because I’m breaking this taboo.


And what is up with this shit about me feeling like I don’t get to consider myself a sexual outlaw because I’ve never been paid.  Oh man.  I spent years in a relationship that was pretty extreme trying to keep up with the bad asses.  But I’ve never liked actual pain all that much.  It’s kind of funny.  I want to be an edge player.  I don’t want to be in a lot of pain.  It’s a competitive thing.  I can cop to that.  Not many people eroticize things like being suspended 75′ off the ground.  I learned to orgasm only with permission and on command.  I have been hog tied in a bath tub and tied so I could barely breathe.  We did a lot of breath play.  I have been well hanged.  With pictures to prove it.  Because without pics it didn’t happen, right?


There is this idea in my head about absence of self without a consistent mirror.  That’s convoluted.  I don’t exist if I can’t see me in other people.  In other words, whatever group I am standing near I will try as hard as I can to conform.  When I notice that I am really different from the people around me I feel as though I was just publicly shamed.  Because there will be people who disapprove of me in any group.  There’s a lot to disapprove of, yo.  So I run away.  Because I cannot conform to the norms of any group I have ever been part of and I don’t know how to feel like it is ok to deviate from the norms.  I assume people dislike me despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.


So coming back to this idea of gnostic sin.  I’m very certain that I am not hurting anyone right now.  And if no one is getting hurt (physically or mentally) then I think the activity is ok.  I do not participate in any formal moral structure that judges any of my actions.  My only judge and jury is whether or not I can look at myself in the mirror.  Have I done right by the world.  Have I done my best to make this world a better, happier place?  Then I’m ok.  And there is no cookie anywhere in the world big enough to make me feel like I have the external validation I need.  I have to just accept that I am going to do what I am going to do and it’s ok.  In 100 years no one will remember or care.  So why not?


My body’s talking to me
It say,’Time for danger’

It says ‘I wanna commit a crime
Wanna be the cause of a fight
Wanna put on a tight skirt and flirt
With a stranger’

The problem is finding balance.  And the first towards balance is sleep.  Night.

Sex is complicated

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The super frank way I handle my sexuality is not appropriate for children.  The way I talk about it.  The way I pursue it.  Not. For. Children.  The way I handle my sexuality makes a fair number of adults extremely uncomfortable.  How do I raise kids who can have a more “normal” view of sexuality?  I don’t have a normal view of it.  Growing up it was pretty clear that my options were celibacy (my mom and mostly Aunt Vonnie–it was a running joke that she didn’t put out) or being the kind of whore who ruins my life regularly with toxic men (go Denise).

The idea of not knowing what sex is till 10 or so really weirds me out.  I don’t know what it will be like to grow up with children who are ignorant so long.  I taught my niece and nephew how to use condoms way before then because it was necessary information in our family.  And no one else would talk about diseases or contraception at all.  I have books on what age appropriate sexuality is, but it’s still a weird concept.

You see, because I’m the kind of person who wants to host sex parties.  Let me just take a moment to say that hosting a sex party is very complicated.  There are a few other layers of things going on that make everything way way way more complicated.  Because really what I want to do is have a woo woo sex magic ritual and that’s an even more specific kind of event.  That kind of event requires rather a lot of thinking, planning, discussion, etc.  But I have these little kids around.  At this point in time I’m aware that some day soon Shanna is going to turn around and ask me point blank what a sex magic ritual is.  As I sit and think about it right now I think my answer should be, “Sex is something you do once your body is physically mature and you want to.  Magic is a way of thinking about what you want really hard.  And a ritual is where you think really hard about something you want with other people helping you focus more on what you want so that you think about it harder than you can alone.”  That’s an ok answer, right?  Because I don’t believe there is any chance we will just stop talking about it at all.

And holy shit.  How do I feel about my child growing up knowing that her parents are into sex magic rituals?  No, she doesn’t have a clue what it is about now.  We aren’t graphic in the slightest.  We talk about people and emotions.  We don’t talk about sex acts.  Shanna is going to grow up hearing a very odd therapy sort of talk.  I mean, we sit around and talk about the people who are involved in the ritual and what their various potential levels of involvement could be (nothing graphic) and try to get a sense of what to expect.  A lot of what is going on here is that I can’t be in control of everything in the world.  But I can be in control of this very small setting on this one day.  I can be in control of who comes.  And that has been a rather fraught process.  I may have lost a friend over it and that makes me sad.  I have had to deal with the overwhelming guilt and shame that I went from in-my-head having a fairly ordinary party to these increasingly complicated layers of intention and want and overlapping needs.

I didn’t realize up front that I was doing a sex magic ritual.  It wasn’t until I did extensive negotiations with most of the people coming that I realized I was trying to set the stage for that.  I have only done sex magic explicitly with one person.  I think of him as my personal shaman.  Our relationship has gotten very complicated over the more than 10 years he has been in my life.  Some day I should send a thank you message to the woman who connected us.  Ok, done.  I kind of like reflecting when and where I walk away from writing in the blog to do other things.  I don’t know if it is ADD or what but I really can’t finish something in one go.  I just can’t.  I peck at everything.  I don’t think it is perfectionism because it’s not that I’m trying to be perfect.  I just have to think about the next step before I can have it.

I’m going to be a big judgy bastard.  I think there is a big difference between people who are sex positive and people who actively hunt a lot for new partners.  I know people who hunt.  I don’t like how they parent.  There.  I said it.  I like the children of monogamous households.  Which really this is selection bias.  I don’t know very many children who have grown up in poly households.  Very very few.  I know a few adults who were children in poly households.  They are neat.  But uhm… I like the children of monogamous parents because I feel more comfortable with the kinds of acting out they do. Which is to say that in the far less than 500 hours I have been around “children of poly households” in aggregate over my entire life I had feelings of discomfort and I blamed them on the kids.

And that is the kind of judgy bastard I am.  Ok, fine I’ll deconstruct this again.  Why do I have a problem with poly parents?  Because I think my sexuality is something that should always be on the side of a closed door from my children.  I do not flirt in front of my kids.  I cannot be a sexual person in front of my kids.  I cannot hunt.  I do not want my extra “partners” around my kids because I am uncomfortable having that energy around children.  I have felt really uncomfortable when I am dating someone and they want me to hang out around their children.  In almost every case (with one huge exception and I really respect him) there was more hand holding and hugging and PDA type behavior than I found appropriate.

Where is the line of what is ok to do in front of your kids?  Or even where in my house?  When I am interested in sex I want to have a lot of very heavy groping in my life.  It’s awesome and fun.  I am very uncomfortable with the prospect of trying to be secretive about it around my kids.  That’s not a good feeling for me.  I have been secretive about my sex life since I was two years old and I shouldn’t have had a sex life to be secretive about.

When I am otherwise doing well emotionally I get off on every part of being sneaky about sex.  I fucking love that I am the chick who sneaks off at parties.  And yet that is clearly acting out behavior and there are places I am not welcome because of it.  Awkward.  Shouldn’t I have to give up on that kind of acting out now that I have kids?  Large swaths of society thinks I am inappropriate for doing that.  I could even link to a very old blog post with a poll about it.  Fully 1/4 of my friends thinks that is not an ok thing to do.  And these are the people who are open minded enough to be friends with me in the first place.  Let’s not ignore that incredibly high bar here.

25% of my friends (who responded to that poll) disapprove of a very consistent part of my behavior.  That’s absolutely a high enough percentage to make me go into convulsions of shame.  Because that (to me) means if that was more of a general humanity sort of poll it means more like 80% of people will think I am disgusting.  Cue bad self talk tape I don’t want to play today.

Why do I feel I have to be celibate because I am a parent?  Oh let me see.  Maybe because the parts of my sexuality I enjoy the most are the parts that push the boundaries of what society considers acceptable.  Silent quickies on the couch are really shitty.  I’m fucking tired of them.  If that is all my god damn sex life is supposed to have for the rest of my life you can take this job and shove it.  Cue running away and engaging in acting out behavior.

But how did I act out?  I went to an adult only party.  Where people were already naked.  And heavily indicating that they like extra marital sex.  And I went to a former partner (who has loudly stated he is still interested) and I suggested running off because I hardly ever get to be in an environment where there are no children so I never enjoy sex.

I feel like a dirty disgusting whore.  And sometimes that is really hot and sometimes it makes me cry.  I feel so much shame for wanting sex the way I do.  I feel like I am obviously dirty.  I am contaminated.  I must be sick for wanting this the way I do.  And then I won’t let anyone touch me in any way because I feel like they will be made dirty by touching someone who wants sex the way I do.

So I kind of want to have a sex magic ritual.  I kind of feel like there might be some worthwhile emotional work to be done in this area.  Kinda.  And on one hand I feel like I should only be saying this to the very short list of people I feel comfortable engaging in this kind of party with.  But on the other hand, continuing to believe that I should be ashamed of talking about this part of my sex life is a lot of the point.  Let me restate: I have already lost a friend over this party.

Why do I feel like I have to be celibate to be a good mother?  Oh man.  Because being queer and kinky and poly means not only that I have sex with my husband (I feel ashamed of almost any touching around my kids so our marital sex is rather limited right now) and I occasionally sneak out in a way that I can completely hide from my kids and keep secret (limited primarily to heteronormative behavior because casual sex with women is way more complicated than I have time for, men can get it up on demand if you select carefully) but I am being flagrant to the world about things that I feel I have to hide.

The closet sucks.  I do talk about being queer, kind of, in front of my kids.  It really doesn’t come up.  I have friends who are queer, so obviously my children see examples of it.  But I don’t engage in any behavior that would look queer to them.  Kinky is something that I have put on hold 100% until my kids are older and can be left alone longer.  I don’t feel ok having that in my house and I get very little time off.  Poly?  Dating feels like the same thing.  I don’t want to take that much time away from my family.

It’s not that I don’t want these things in my life.  But I have massive issues around my kids seeing any of it because I feel ashamed.  It feels like I am supposed to.  When I make the decision to take people off the guest list because they do not feel safe enough to have a sex magic ritual in front of I lose friends.  It really really feels like I should be ashamed of having these things in my life.  If I am doing something at all, ever that some people won’t like then I am bad.

Why do I think I have to be celibate to be a mother?  Oh I don’t know.  Maybe because I can’t be satisfied with the limited shitty sex other people want me to have so it is easier to just shut the whole system off.  And just not be me.

Cycles

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When I spend a lot of time around people who are really enthusiastic in their approval of me I get a temporary “high” and I start to feel more confident and I get into a basically manic state and I go out and I am intensely social in some large community for a while.  Inevitably something happens that shakes my perception of my degree of welcome and I start pulling away.  I generally feel more and more anxiety and I go through a period of dealing with intense abandonment fears and anxiety about the fact that I feel like everyone in the world hates me.  After this happens I start baiting people who are my friends (in my point of view) and I am extremely emotionally unpredictable.  I start getting my feelings hurt and I take everything as an insult no matter how I have to contort to make it sound that way.  I made it so there was no way for people not to reject me.  Before having kids I went into isolation for a while and I stopped talking to people.  Then I would slowly inch my way out again over time and follow some new acquaintance into a new community and start the cycle over again.

Is that a correct description?

Privilege

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I’ve been thinking a lot about privilege since reading this blog and I think I hit on part of it this morning.  I was talking to someone recently and I was trying to explain the pressure of meeting new people and how it is better or worse depending on how much they will matter in the long-run.  Meeting Noah’s friends is stressful because I will have to deal with them for years… I’d better not fuck up.  Which means I inevitably will feel like I did no matter how I actually behave.  In the course of this conversation I said that I can’t handle the pressure to be “nice” when I meet someone.  She seemed shocked, aren’t I nice whenever I meet new people?  I actually laughed out loud.  Of course not.  I walk into every new association wondering if I am going to feel disliked because I am bad.  Whether this person will be “big enough” to overlook how fucked up I am and give me a chance anyway!  (This is said in a cheerleader voice.)

That shit gets old.  Privilege is feeling like you deserve to be breathing the same air as everyone else.  Privilege is growing up in a place that is safe and secure enough that you never freeze up in blind panic when your husband raises his voice the tiniest bit because surely this will be the time he makes you leave.  I believe there is no way that people could love me unless I change myself to meet their needs.  I believe that who I am, at a basic level, is wrong and I deserve to suffer for being wrong.  Because I cannot just “be nice” when I meet someone new.  I can’t do that.  In order to just be nice to other people I would have to first stop expecting them to be vicious to me so that I can stop feeling defensive.  Given what did happen to me I’m really glad that I was good and vicious in response.  It was literally a survival mechanism.

But how do you just stop feeling defensive and vicious?  It’s not as simple as anger management.  It’s not as simple as just meditating and staying in the here and now.  Not for me.  Because the point of all those techniques is to let you relax into the assumed basic training of being a polite person.  I have never had that.  No, that’s hyperbole.  That is not what I had as a child.  That is not my default at rest position.  I can actually get to a place where I feel calm and relaxed.  Sort of.  Briefly.  I can suppress my feelings with the best of them!  But then I am always paying in some way.  I’m hypersexual or asexual.  I’m binge eating or starving myself.  Privilege is thinking that “stopping my anger” will solve my problems.  No, it just moves the focal point of my current problem area.  I am broken and I have to figure out how to fix it.  Being quiet doesn’t work.  Being quiet means passing on broken patterns on to my children even if they are never abused.

Denise’s drug addiction would go in spurts.  She used intensely for a while then she blew up her life and was clean for a long period, or she used so minimally as to be functional.  My anxiety goes in hormonal spurts like that.  I can tell that I’m having totally irrational emotions.  If I can tell that they are totally irrational I can often talk myself through them.  When I suppress my memories and I refuse to work through them as they come up I am left sitting on a powder keg.  I don’t think it is actually reasonable to ask me to deal with as many triggers as I have by just meditating.  Give me a break.  That might work for someone else, fine.  It doesn’t work for me.  I just can’t.

I feel like white trash because as I move through the world something about my physical presentation makes people wince.  Not all the time, I can control it with enough effort, but often.  It’s something about my tone of voice, my looks, my word choice… I don’t even know exactly.  Even when I am not cursing. Even when I am “trying to be nice” people still jolt at me.  I don’t think I am actively yelling all the time. But people react visibly to me.  And it is common for people to comment on the fact that I have a lot of class markers of being poor.  It’s excellent.

That is my basic self image moving through the world.  Then I read news articles about finance talking about how Noah is in the top 5% of the country financially.  I feel this simultaneous shock and horror.  How in the hell can that be me?  I feel like now that I am in this different class I should suddenly know how to behave as if I am of this class.  But I don’t.  I feel awkward and uncomfortable.  I feel fake and deceitful.  How dare I come among good people when I’m obviously common trash.  As a result I am usually rude when I meet people because I have it so deeply ingrained in me that I am bad.  I don’t know how to be anything else.

These are the things I think about when I think about privilege.  Because I have the unimaginable privilege to sit here at my computer whining about my pain when at this point in my life I have it easier than the vast majority of people ever in the history of the world.  That’s perspective.  My problems are so small and so petty.  Why do I act like I’m important?  Because I have to.  Because everyone has to be concerned with themselves first and foremost or they have nothing to give.

Why aren’t I “nice” when I meet people?  Because I am white trash and I don’t know how.  No one ever taught me.

I’m baaaaack

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And of course the first thing I do is plop myself down in the middle of a big thought process around priorities.  I’m thinking about my priorities in life because right now I have to start acting on them in terms of living my life.  I no longer have a brick wall event coming that forces a reordering into crisis mode.  How do I actually want to live?  Priority number one: deciding my priorities needs to not become an obsessive thing that disrupts my life.  (Here I will make a side note: I have already had multiple funny asides I wanted to make but I can’t remember the code for how to create a footnote and trying to think about how to make them is derailing my thought process.  I’m annoyed.  I may have finally found a motivation for learning how to code.)

It is 10 pm and my entire family is asleep.  Seems quite reasonable.  Only… the kids and I went to sleep at 1pm.  We are going to have an interesting adjustment from jet lag.  I’m up thinking about the patterns of our days and unschooling and my mental health and getting the house ready for Sarah and food and gardening and…

So I am thinking about priorities.  Sarah will be in our house within 20 days.  I am so excited I can barely sit still.  But that’s not a hard dead line in any negative traumatic way for me.  I don’t have to have the house to a certain “readiness”.  She could move in today and it would all be handled.  I can do work before then that will make the integration process easier, and I’m doing that.  But it’s not an emergency.  It can happen or not in whatever time or order I want.  I’m done with the scary bits of that project.  I just get to anticipate having Sarah here.  Everything else is gravy.  So right now I really am at the place where I get to sit down and think about how I want my life to look just because I get to start making it real now.

While I was on the trip I spent an obscene amount of time on Mothering.com because I was stuck in hotel rooms.  I don’t have any idea how much I posted and I don’t want to think about it.  I also wandered around the net looking at other parenting websites.  I learned that I need to stay on MDC.  I do not have the time or energy to go find a new forum.  My story is long and complex.  And I can’t tell people little comfortable sound bites that ensure that they feel comfortable enough with me for me to say things without being attacked.  I have a long posting history on MDC.  Folks recognize me.  It feels like a community to me.  I have noticed it becoming more close knit after the recent mass evacuation.  A whole bunch of people have reached out to me during the decline of the site.  I feel increasingly seen there and I like it.  I suppose that means I am moving up the hierarchy of the clique?  But in a war of attrition I will lose.  I have too many other things to do and I am going to go do them.  I don’t want to prioritize the kind of time it takes to stay popular on MDC.  I have a life to live.

I started this blog because I wanted a place to feel accountable to so that I could document my life.  I am not good at staying productive in a vacuum.  I need a boss.  Which isn’t to say that I think I owe accountability to anyone specific on the internet.  Y’all can kiss off.  (said with love)  But I am choosing an unorthodox path for my family.  I want to prove to myself that I am actually doing what I say I am doing.  I don’t know another way to give myself the motivation to keep working without trying to produce some result.  I want to talk about what I’m doing.  I miss the camaraderie of having a job.  Raising my kids is my job.  And sweet sony Jesus don’t make this into a stay at home mom versus a work out of the home mom thing.  That’s not what I mean.  I mean that I have decided to not only stay home, but I am educating my kids.  That’s a separate job as well.  I am responsible for preparing them for the world.  Every parent is responsible for raising their children, and we all get help along that process.  Each parent chooses a different amount of help.  There is nothing wrong with that and I’m not judging how much “time” people spend with their kids.  I’m really not.  I’m trying to figure out what parts of raising them, educating them, preparing them for the world, entertaining them, etc. I actually have to do on a day to day basis and what parts of that can I and/or should I farm out?  There is no need for me to be a martyr.

My other job is being me.  Being me is high maintenance.  Being me (near as I can tell) is a lot more work than it is to be someone else.  I can’t get good trade in value, so I’m sort of stuck with being me.  If I want to be me well I have to put a lot of work into that.  I am trying to get to the point where I respect and like myself enough that I feel good about all the time and effort I put into me instead of feeling ashamed that I require so much effort.  That is complicated.  Since we got home I have been doing a lot of emotional eating.  I can tell.  I can feel it.  I can look at what I am eating and see why it is making me physically feel bad.  But I can’t seem to motivate myself to deal with it because of all the complicating factors around being exhausted from the trip.  But tomorrow we have a local farmers market.  And I’m working on giving myself permission to make specific choices that are short term suboptimal in favor of preparing for the marathon.  It’s weird.

I don’t know if I am making any sense.  I am also, once again, able to medicate for my anxiety.  Thank you California for recognizing that I should be able to have control over whether or not I have to feel that upset all the time.  I haven’t yelled since we got home.  And my stomach isn’t hurting all the time.  I’ve been able to slowly start stretching out the muscles in my head and neck and I no longer have a headache.  I had that headache for a month straight.  I’m fighting with my guilt to allow me more than the absolute bare minimum to be not full of rage.  It’s 10:23 and my kids are likely to wake up in the middle of the night.  So I will be on duty and that requires being mostly sober.  But then I will get edgy.  Ah fuck it.  It is better for me to ensure that my stomach stops hurting.  That requires more than the amount that takes the edge off of my anxiety.  Tonight, that is the right decision.

I worry about putting things on the internet because I worry that I will only put the bad things.  Or only the bad things will be true.  I need to get back to a place where I am loudly doing the good things too.  That’s the only thing that will allow me to feel safe.  And in order for me to feel like I am doing the good things loudly… I need to figure out what doing the good things are so I can know if I am actually doing them.  Seriously.  Do other people have to stop and think about this stuff?  Do you just know?  Ugh.

I don’t think that today’s noodling counts as a binding agreement.  Just so it has been said.  But I want to give my boss a status update.  I’m like that.

I think that it’s time to set priorities.  What things actually matter to me.  And I need to act like I really do believe my priorities.  And if I can’t act like I believe them… I need to decide how I feel about not believing them anymore because I need honesty.  I can’t deal with hypocrisy.  But it’s complicated because sometimes it isn’t about hypocrisy, you just aren’t meeting ‘x’ priority because you are still stuck on ‘g’ and it is more important.  I want to be very clear with myself about when and where I am stuck on g and when I have simply stopped believing that x is important.

For example.  The local food thing.  Wait, no… I want to back up.  I want to start at the beginning.  It’s my story.

So I spent a lot of time on MDC during the trip.  One of the best things I got out of it (and the side track over to Trolls With Wooden Spoons) was to examine some of the ways in which I really did drink the Kool Aid at MDC.  And some of the things I have gotten from the experience have been good for me and I’m thrilled, and others suck.  But I’ve been forcing myself to take it as a package deal.  It’s not.  No matter how rabidly people on the internet berate me for not meeting one specific point on a checklist… dude.  Really.  I’m not failing at life if I stop doing something perfectly.  Uhm… not that I have been perfect at any step on this journey.  I think I need to stop making perfection a goal or part of the conversation.  I just need to figure out what it means to be me and do that.  How pretentious is that?

I feel about as self-involved as an adolescent.  Shanna and I are at the same space in development, and in some ways that’s true.  As I am discovering myself on the journey to recovering from incest, I really am starting in about the same place Shanna is.  I am reparenting myself.  But I’m far harder on myself than I am on Shanna.  Maybe I should be a lot more gentle with both of us.  My daughter is already a shining example of vitality.  I need to stop acting like I need to feel guilty for neglecting her.  I’m not neglecting her.  I am treating it like my only job is to educate her and she’s blossoming.  Ok, she’s weird… yes.  But she’s trying things out.  None of what she is doing is for keeps.  Geez, she’s only three.  But why can’t I have the same latitude?  Why can’t I be just figuring out who I am too?  That’s also my job.  I didn’t get that when I was a small child the way normal kids do.  I was too busy keeping secrets and trying to be the person other people wanted me to be.

The thing is, part of who I am is a responsible adult.  I need to ensure that I am meeting the specific priorities that actually matter to me and to the people and community around me.  I am quite literally responsible to and for the people and things around me.  I have obligations.  I have no interest in walking away from my obligations.  I really don’t want to leave.  I have a wonderful life.  But it is work.  I have many jobs there.  I have been hiding at home for a long time because I haven’t been up to the work of being in a community and being me and being a parent all at the same time.  I’ll be frank and say that I worry about that decision.  I worry about that decision partially because I know that I describe my life on the internet in ways that make some people worry about my children.  I want witnesses.  That sounds awful.  I want there to be no way in the world for me to get away with doing anything bad to my children.  I want there to really and truly be no way at all I could hurt my kids and it would be invisible.  And that means a blog is not the whole answer.  That means people who interact with my children a lot and watch them.

Side note: this blog post about being queer just made my day.  I struggle a lot with queerness as an identity.  I feel pressured to engage in homosexual sex in a way I don’t feel pressured to engage in heterosexual sex.  It’s self-imposed.  But that is part of me figuring out who I am.  So maybe this isn’t a side note after all.  I’m crying because I know I am begging for permission for spending time on thinking about myself.  I want to believe it is ok for me to take up as much space as I need to take up in my day.  That’s part of my job!  Damnit!

Another side note: the more I think about Lady Gag’s The Edge of Glory video the more I think that woman is a fucking genius.  In most of her videos she hands you a fully fleshed out STORY and you are not allowed to project your own stuff.  There is no room for you in her stories.  She is sharing her fantasy.  Not this time.  In this one there is a lot of room for the argument that she isn’t presenting a story at all.  For once… she’s just … on the edge of a story with you.  And this time you get to tell it.  “I think that at this point in the video I would do…”  And yet you can’t get away from the fact that it is a Lady Gaga video because even when she is downplaying all the stuff that is her normal trademark she is still so very her.  So in this video she is inviting collaboration.  I don’t think she made this video so simply because she is a cheap bastard.  I think she wanted to give her fans a place to project themselves into a relationship with her.  I think she is that willing to be vulnerable.  And that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.  Seriously.  This video is a love song to each and every fan.  She didn’t want it to be a big dance number song.  This is how she feels about every person and she wanted it to be one on one.  This is how she wants to fuck every single one of her fans.  I think she is a genius.  She wants to feel like she is in love with each person.  She is Mother Monster and she wants to be lover as well.  I really think I should take the trouble to learn more about her and become more of an actual fan.  Because only in talking to other fans will avoid sounding like a lunatic.  ha.

I need to not focus on what other people should or shouldn’t be doing outside my family.  That needs to drop off my priority list entirely.  So when I notice at 11:22 that I am no longer able to coherently write I need to go to sleep instead of trolling the internet.

More introverted than I think

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Noah and I tend to read different things.  Sometimes he sends me a link that I find really interesting.  Today’s link is about Introvert/Extrovert stuff.  I’m shocked by the fact that according to his definitions:

Introverts
  1. require a minimum period of isolation every day to survive psychologically
  2. are energized by weak-link social fields, such as coffee shops, where little interaction is expected
  3. are energized by occasional, deeper 1:1 interactions, but still at arm’s length; no soul-baring
  4. are energized by such 1:1 encounters with anyone, whether or not a prior relationship exists
  5. are drained by strong-link social fields such as family gatherings
  6. are reduced to near-panic by huddles: extremely close many-many encounters such as group hugs
  7. have depth-limited relationships that reach their maximum depth very fast
Extroverts
  1. need a minimum amount of physical contact everyday, even if it is just laying around with a pet
  2. are energized by strong-link social fields such as family gatherings
  3. like soul-baring 1:1 relationships characterized by swings between extreme intimacy and murderous enmity
  4. are not willing to have 1:1 encounters with anyone unless they’ve been properly introduced into their social fields
  5. are made restless and anxious by weak-link social fields such as coffee shops unless they go with a friend
  6. are reduced to near panic by extended episodes of solitude
  7. have relationships that gradually deepen over time to extreme levels
From the Introvert list I have: 1, 3, 4, 5, 6.  From the Extrovert list I have: 3, 6, 7.
What does that make me?  I have always thought of myself as an extrovert and yet, I tend to feel like larger groups don’t like me.  I don’t feel safe when I have to figure out how to relate to more than one person at once.  I used to love big groups.  I was good at them.  Not anymore.  Anxiety has pushed me towards isolation and it really sucks.  I often feel better connecting briefly with a stranger because I don’t have to worry about offending them.  I don’t have to worry about them learning to be disgusted by me.  I’m trying to cobble together a mental support team without overly depending on any one person.  Because if I depend too much on one (or three) people I will exhaust them, they will get sick of me, they will move on.  If I can get bits and pieces from many, many people, I can pretend that is enough.  
I think that a lot of my conflict with Noah is because I swing hard between the sort of energetic transactionalism this essay talks about.  What an interesting thing to consider.  I can’t decide if we should have one “bank account” or separate accounts.  I suppose it makes sense that I gravitate heavily towards folks with Aspergers and I am absolutely terrified of being codependent.  I would rather learn Aspie coping mechanisms because they make me feel safe.  They make me feel less vulnerable.  I wish every single day that I could take my extrovert needs and burn them out of me with a poker.  It has been the work of a lifetime to stop being an extrovert.  Being an extrovert is dangerous.  It’s not safe.  I can’t depend on people.
I can go weeks without talking to people I don’t live with.  Most of the people I depend on heavily rotate in and out of my life.  My friends all have their own mental health issues and they will go radio silence for months or years.  I poke at them every so often to see if they are still around, but almost none of them come back to me.  I’m too hard.  When I lose contact with people it is because *I* stop forcing a relationship.  That hurts.  That hurts a lot.  I don’t have many people who reach out to me unless I post excessively on the internet about how I may not make it to tomorrow.  Otherwise people just don’t have room for me in their lives.  I’ve never been able to figure out what to do about that. 

Where is my fight?

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I’m watching The Color of Freedom.  It’s interesting for me to watch this.  I’m sitting here with enormous privilege.  Oh dear God I am privileged.  I am rich, secure, safe.  I have basically nothing that I want or need that anyone can take away from me.  I am really a sanctimonious bitch whining about my suffering.  No part of this is rational.  Sort of.  My brother Tommy was hit by a car in May of 1989.  In my head I was 8 already, so in my stories I am 8.  I remember how old I am based on what birthday I’ll have that year, but my birthday isn’t till September.

That birthday was horrible.  My mom sent me to Aunt Vonnie’s house.  So I was in Los Gatos.  I had a slumber party with all the girls from Lakeside.  Aunt Vonnie bought me a cake.  It really should have been a great party, you know?  But this was less than six months after Michael raped me.  Tommy had been hit by a car and I didn’t understand what that meant–he was still in a coma.  I was supposed to put all that aside and act like a normal kid.  I wasn’t allowed to speak about any of that.

So do you know how the party went?  I spent a lot of it crying in the bathroom.  I said awkward things.  I was weird.  The other little eight year old girls had in-jokes and long-standing friendships.  They didn’t much like me.  I was this strange child.  I didn’t know what was true and what was lies.  I didn’t know what input from my body was real and what was imagined.  When I came home from being raped my mother beat me.  I felt like I was being punished.  I don’t remember what I said to her at the time.  I’m very certain that I vomited at that birthday party.  My family was angry with me for acting out.  I was so ungrateful.  Every human being wants to be free from suffering and pain.

When I think of myself as a grown up, you know… some day I will grow up… there is a dignity to people who know in their soul that they are working to reduce the suffering of other people.  A peace.  At this point my suffering is only in my head.  I am trying to lance the wound so the poison can seep out, but I need to go do something to help it heal.  I don’t know what yet.

I know that most of the things that are argued about on the internet really don’t matter.  Is circumcision an injustice?  Yes.  Should people stop doing it to their sons?  Yes.  But they should stop because there really isn’t medical benefit to doing it.  They shouldn’t stop because they will be joining a monolithic evil cabal.  It’s a shitty part of our culture and it should change.  It already is.  Rates of it are dropping like dramatically.  I think it is ridiculous to try to push through legislation banning it.  It’s a waste of time and effort.  By making it illegal there springs up potential for an underground, illegal network.  People would still do it.  It is cultural.  You can’t do away with culture by making a law.  Instead you will have people become intensely devoted to Their Right To Circumcise!!!  Yeah, like we need anyone jumping on *that* bandwagon.

Pretty much everything about attachment parenting.  I’m feeling very bitter.  I’m not able to do the super attached thing this time.  I feel bad about it.  I’m going to have a different relationship with Calli than I have with Shanna and a lot of it is that I literally haven’t spent as much time with Calli.  I did not ignore Shanna the way I ignore Calli.  Calli has had to learn to get her needs met by people other than me.  I have mixed feelings about that.  On one hand, I feel like I have let her down.  On the other hand… she’s happy and thriving and really loves the people she hangs out with.  She gets really excited to see people in a way Shanna didn’t.  Shanna was a limpet.  She didn’t warm up to anyone, not even Noah early on.  I’m so glad to not go through that again.  I feel freaked out even thinking about how much touch I endured then.  Right now I’m not sure how I managed.  But the reality is, right now I can’t do that.  I loved it.  I mean, I did get overwhelmed.  But I thought Shanna was doing everything exactly right and I was happy to meet her needs.  Even though I got overwhelmed and cried.  Now I hand Calli off to Noah to soothe when she doesn’t want to nurse and I hide and write.

I must say, when I go back into the house it’s nice to notice how much they missed me.  Sometimes I have to fight the urge to burst into tears as I realize how much my kids love me.  Because I love them just as much.  It’s actually hard to take the time to write.  I feel guilty for doing it.  I feel like I am abdicating my responsibility as their mother.  I feel like I am a stay at home mom so I should be available to my children 24 hours a day.  This is the job I picked.  And I want this job, kind of.

I have a compulsion to be more than this.  It sounds horrible to me for no logical reason.  Because I was told I was small and petty and mean and vindictive and angry and evil and a bitch and a whore and that I would die alone and bitter.

But I’m not.  I’m not mean.  I’m not petty.  I’m not vindictive.  I’m not evil.  I’m not a bitch.  I’m not a whore.  I am not alone.

I am angry.  I don’t know if I’m bitter or not.  What does that mean exactly?  I am sad.  I am very sad that my family is not able to acknowledge what happened to me.  I am sad that they are still destroying one another.  I’m sad that Jimmy and I cannot heal together because he is not ok with me telling my story.  As I watch these movies about social injustice something I’m noticing is that, people don’t go looking for a fight.  The truly great leaders are not people who went looking for a cause.  They can be helpful, think of things like union organizers.  Union organizers bring matches.  They light a fire where there is already a huge powder keg.

I need to stop looking away from my life for my reason for living.  I’m complicated.  A lot of things have already touched my life.  I moved away from all of those communities because they weren’t my fight.  I need a fight.  That is how I will learn to be not bitter.  That is how I will grow past this.  I can’t do anything about what has already happened to me.  But I need a fight for someone else.  I have to believe that I picked this life for a reason.  No one goes through what I did for nothing.  I can’t let this be senseless.  If this is senseless, if there really is no reason behind my father raping me over and over from when I was a toddler until I forcibly stopped him at 16 then I really should kill myself because that is not something I can bear for no reason.  I just can’t.

Thing is, I don’t really believe in God.  Not really.  I kind of do.  I think there is something.  But I’m not sure if it is anything beyond plain old animal instinct.  I don’t want to die.  I feel like a wolf caught in a trap.  I am flailing around blindly at a pain I cannot get away from.  It’s like my life blood is leaking out.  I am trying to contain my pain in too small of a space.  Pain has to be transformative or else it has to kill you.  You might die very very slowly in inches.  Mostly your spirit will die.  People who are in pain are not pleasant.  It hurts and they are rarely all that nice about it.  (Caveat here: I do not have any real disabilities.  I speak here with the hubris of someone who is not actively hindered by my body in any way.  Well, I have inflexible shoulders.  But yeah, that’s my limitation.  Someone else will have a different story here.)

So then there is the conflict.  A big part of what I’m trying to do right now is just figure out the parenting thing.  And I need to stop listening to experts.  I am sitting here in weird isolation because I read and read about norms and averages and obsess over whether I am doing things right.  When the truth is that my kids need me to hang out with them and not lose my shit.  Yeah, we should learn some manners eventually but if they fuck up at three… who gives a shit?  I need to find a way to balance the fact that I like being home and I like spending so much time with my kids but I really need to be part of a fight.

I can’t just sit here and be the kind gentle mommy all the time.  I really can’t do that.  I don’t want to be that.  I have to do something bigger than this.  So I’m looking at my life.  The thing is, an awful lot of fights were brought to my door.  It depends on how intellectually masturbatory you want to be about it.  But I know that my sister is really not a healthy person.  I know what she has been part of in the past.  I know what she is capable of.  If I have this much rage and anger and fury inside of me… I don’t think you can safely say that I am just projecting.  My sister lived with my father until she was 16.  He gave her a swimming pool for her 16th birthday.  He offered me a computer.  I wonder what she had to do to get the pool.  I wonder what he would have expected for the computer.

That’s my mother’s story.  She tells people I prosecuted my father because he wouldn’t buy me a computer.  My dear Aunt Vonnie told me that.  Years later in a conversation.  She thought that I was lying about being molested and I prosecuted my father because I was petty and mean and I wanted revenge because he wouldn’t buy me a computer.  I shit you not.  That is what my family thinks of me.  They are all MAD AT ME for prosecuting because I disrupted their lives and created drama.

This is my fight.  I am petty or vindictive in telling my story.  This is righteous anger.  I am really tired of being told I should just get over it and move on with my life.  No.  I shouldn’t.  Because that is what allows me to move on and “be free” while my sister rapes another generation.  Do I know for a fact that she is doing that?  No.  I will, most likely, never know.  Because even if she swears up and down that she never did that she will say the same thing about raping my brother Jimmy.  And according to him, it was rape.

I am tired of being told I am bitter because I want to blow my family to hell and back.  I am not bitter.  I am angry.  I am not vindictive.  I am not mean.  I don’t want to hurt my family because of what they did to me.  I want to do anything I can to prevent them harming another generation.  I stopped my father.  Prosecuting him was the right thing to do.  No one in my family is going to be willing to step up and prosecute my sister, even though she is a multiple repeat offender.  She participated in the sexual assault of her children.  Did she do all of it completely directly?  No.  She didn’t rape her own son.  Quite frankly given how they stand near each other I’d be fucking shocked if they aren’t having sex.  Or if they won’t get to it some day.  When you live hard and do a lot of drugs you get uglier and uglier.  Soon you can’t go out and find people any more.  When you can’t find people to fuck and you have those urges, well… you know…

Do I know my family is doing this?  No.  But let’s just say that I have seen enough that I wouldn’t be shocked in the slightest.  And that’s a problem.  If almost anyone says “I wouldn’t be surprised if my sister fucks her son or if my mom and my sister fuck sometimes” that would be horrifying, right?  But I know what I grew up with.  I know what kinds of books I read and I know how graphically they portrayed incest.  I know that I learned to read those books because I was borrowing them from my mother and sister.  I know that my father raped me more times than I can count.  More times than I remember.  I know that he did the same to my sister.  I know I liked it sometimes.

So.  Maybe I’m not bitter.  Maybe I’m fucking terrified and angry.  I know how stressed out I feel in my life sometimes.  I know how very close to the edge of doing terrible things I have been in my life.  I know exactly what kind of monster I could become.  I don’t walk down that road right now because I have resources.  I have people and money.  I have time.  I have the glorious luxury of time.  I do not have to earn money.  I can write because I feel compelled to tell my story from the depths of my soul.  Maybe some day I will get past rambling and find some truth.  Something that will alleviate someone else’s suffering.

I’m a weird creepy shut in who cannot handle being touched by other human beings.  How can I go out and join the world?  There is a time honored tradition of people writing inflammatory things while isolated off in a weird bubble.  Maybe that is the only fight I need to be looking for.

Because you see, I’m trying to learn how to do the marathon thing.  The thing is, I want my children.  I have a lot to give children.  I have a lot of love and ability to keep people safe.  And I need to know that some day there will be two people walking this earth who grew up in absolute safety while being taught to care about other peoples pain.  Shanna is deeply empathetic.  She gets other people.  I want to know what her spirit will look like if she is allowed to chase every dream she has.  She will be educated to within an inch of her life.  It won’t be (much) in a brick and mortar building, but I promise you she will be well educated.  The act of learning will be what we do.  I believe that other people can do this with their children in a traditional school setting.

But we’ve all learned that I’m special, right?  Special little snowflake, that’s me.  But I am.  My needs and dreams are different.  Not better, not worse.  If you spend much time looking at actual human history you will see that as long as people are given love and the basics, they can turn out ok.  I mean hey–look at me.  I’m “ok”.  I lead a more functional life than an awful lot of people.  But I don’t think my life can look like other peoples lives.  I don’t have the same rhythms.  I wasn’t raised in that culture, not really.  When I read about other peoples lives/causes/whatever I feel like I am being sold a product.  I feel like I am supposed to conform to being like them.  If you look back on my family life, you can see why I have a lot of issues with conforming.  If I am told that something is a rule, the first thing I want to do is break it to see what happens.  I shit you not.  I don’t do it (mostly) because I have a highly developed superego.  I should really read some psychology people other than Freud.  It might be good for me.  I like Logotherapy a lot.  It seems to be my approach to life.

And I’m looking for my meaning.  I’m trying to figure out what I have to say that might actually help someone else.  I have no idea.  It’s 5:45 and I just noticed that the birds are chirping like mad.  I can see the sky getting lighter.  It’s not going to really get bright today because of the clouds.  But morning is pretty clearly here.  Today I need to patch the drywall in the garage and paint Sarah’s room.  Those are the things that I can’t do here alone with the kids without a big fight.  And we leave for Europe in 6 days.  I think I should cancel the second therapy appointment on Thursday because it will wipe out most of the day for me in terms of productivity (trips to Oakland do that) and child care would be tough.  I like this lady, but she’ll be here when I get back.  For me to prioritize therapy over getting ready for this trip is for me to derail my life right now.  I will have a ridiculous amount of anxiety over losing a day of prep time. Things are already slipping in the schedule because Noah really needed a day of rest yesterday.  We all need rest.

Noah is nervous about the trip.  He’s worried about how stressful it will be.  He has (only half-joking) asked about rerouting and spending part of the trip in Amsterdam so I won’t be so stressed.  It wouldn’t honestly make the trip much more expensive.  Ha.  And that’s the kind of thing we can talk about, casually.  That is what I mean by privilege.  I feel guilty that I have such enormous privilege at this point in my life.  I feel guilty because I feel like I don’t deserve it.  Just like Aunt Vonnie.  Aunt Vonnie is going to die penniless and stepped on because she supports the whole lot.  Although, I don’t know.  If Auntie is lucky she will take her kids and move out of state to a place where they can be more secure financially.  That will only be lucky if she leaves my mother and sister behind.  Otherwise they will follow and be a barnacle on her until she dies.  Then they will find someone else to leech on.  I married a rich guy, who in the hell am I to judge?  Right?

I don’t know.  I don’t know if I should judge or not.  But I know that whether or not I judge them, their actions are not honorable.  My sister and mother both “borrow” money as often as people will let them.  I know that part of the problem is that my mother spends money she doesn’t have spare on frivolities because she wants to.  And then I talk about doing the same thing.  But spending the money that way isn’t going to hurt my life.  The only debt we have is mortgage and that will be paid off by the time I am 40.  At that point I don’t know what we will do.  I know that I am in this position because I live in a small house and I fix a lot of things myself.  We lived with one car for years.  I am not rich because Noah makes such an obscene amount of money, though he does make plenty.  I am rich because I look at our income and I make choices that look like they belong to a lower tax bracket.  That is a lot of why I have the freedom I have.  I know my limits.  I don’t know where or why I learned that sense.

But my family thinks that I have money in the bank because of dumb luck and that I don’t really deserve it so I should “loan” it to them.  They feel entitled because they “supported” me when I was growing up, don’t I owe them?  My impulse now is to promise publicly that I will send them money some day to prove that I’m not bitter.  I’ve started and deleted a lot of text going in that direction.  Fuck ’em.  I don’t have to prove I’m not bitter by doing what they want me to do.  Down that road lies madness.  So what do I do instead?  I go to Europe for a month.  I want to say I saved up for it, but that’s only sort of true.  I keep a lot of cash in reserves.  but on my birthday in September I’m being given a check for $35,000.  That is the final check on my annuities.  I am going to pay off the Disney Vacation Club mortgage (at 12%… ouch) and contribute some towards the college fund.  But I’m mostly going to rebuild the buffer because I have brought it frightening low (at one point we only had ~$3,000 in cash in bank accounts.  I almost had a heart attack from fear that month.) and it’s only back to about $16,000.  That’s not high enough you see.  If the buffer drops below $20,000 I feel like something terrible could happen and I would be screwed.  Yes, we actively invest.  If we were in any kind of trouble we could access lots of money.  But it never feels like enough.  So once in a while I blow a bunch of money on something like a big vacation and the rest of the time I control my emotional spending.

Maybe that’s why I judge.  Because when it is my family saying to me that I have no right to judge them, yes I do.  Because it’s not like I was brought up in some magical mythical land where money sense exists.  I grew up among them and I’m not like them.  I’m really tired of people ranting against the idea of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” because from where I’m sitting that sounds like the lazy cry of people who don’t want to work hard enough.  But I have so so so so much privilege.  I am white.  I grew up in places where I learned what it was like to not be white.  I learned what it was like being white in poverty stricken Hispanic and black neighborhoods.  I was treated like a dog.  People chased me home from school throwing rocks at me because I was a freak.  I moved back and forth from Los Gatos to the slums.  I was expected to learn how to go back and forth between fighting kids off of me as they beat me up as the representative white kid they could take out their institutional rage on and the rich, sheltered white kids in Los Gatos.  I was sexually assaulted over and over and no one ever said anything to me about it.  I believed no one knew.

I had help in unexpected places.  I am alive because I have had subtle advantages.  When I was five I was attacked by a pit bull.  There were 117 stitches in my face.  At the time there was a lot of doubt as to whether I would ever speak normally and there was some damage to my jaw and teeth were knocked out.  Kind of harrowing, don’t you think?  I don’t even think the dog bite story made it to my list of big life events.  Ha.  That’s telling.  It’s ironic that it didn’t appear in the timeline because it is such a huge part of my adulthood.

I have lived on the annuities from that settlement since I turned 18.  It has been almost the entirety of my income since I was 18.  I get $1200 every month like clock work.  Just think about what you could do with $1200 every month of tax free money.  Kind of nice, eh?  And I’m ashamed to talk about it.  My mother told me I musn’t ever speak of it because then people will want to steal it.  Kind of ironic how often she asks me for money.

There are things here worth telling.  It matters to me that I tell this story and make sense of it.  It matters to me that this story become something that people talk about.  It matters to me that my family come under intense public scrutiny because I believe that is the only way to curb the sexual violence in my family.  It’s time to clean out some closets.  I don’t get any dirty little secrets and neither do they.  Maybe the fight will find me.

It’s a process

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I keep getting stuck on “I was raped””I was raped””I was raped””I was raped”.  Ok.  So what?  What does that mean?  Why is that the sticking point?  What is rape?  Why do I get to make rape jokes and no one else does?  Because every time a different survivor starts making the (really good) case for why rape jokes are never ok… I get my hackles up.  Hmm.  That’s interesting.  There is a lot of competition between my family members.  There is one victim at a time.  No one else is allowed to have needs while that one person is being the victim.  I would be lying if I said I never had my turn.  My family acknowledged, sometimes, that something happened to me.  Sorta.  Really what they acted like is that it was a shame I was such a precocious whore, but they’ll try not to hold it against me.

My body.  This frail shell that houses a tremendous spirit was violated.  Things were put in me.  Fingers.  Penises.  Tongues.  I was not allowed to have the sacred space of my own person.  My body was made to hurt.  I was taught to hate my body and use my body.  I struggle with dealing with my body.  I don’t mean, “Man, I think I’m ugly.”  I mean, my back and neck hurt very badly right now.  I just finished a massage.  He did help, but I still hurt quite a bit.  I have bruises all over.  I don’t know how or when I got them.  I don’t shower regularly.  When I am in a young place I have to be careful what clothes I wear because if something is even slightly uncomfortable it will send me into a rage.  Because something has happened to cause me pain again.  Kind of weird from a masochist.  I have food issues.  When I am young like this I eat about as much as Shanna.  And society thinks that is great.  I’m not sure.  I need to figure out the doctor situation.  I am so very uncomfortable working with anyone in that kind of authority.  They scare the ever-loving-shit out of me.  And I feel like a complete nutcase saying that.  I used to scoff at people who admitted they felt that way about doctors.  I didn’t feel that way.  But I also have never been able to see a doctor in a consistent, healthy way.  Hell, even my beloved midwife isn’t so happy with me these days.  I soured the end of that relationship, with help.  It feels like my body is more of a deficit than an asset in life.  It’s too much work and only brings me pain.

But I was taught to suck dick while my father held a gun to my head.  I had tears running down my face and snot dripping and mixing in with the semen and saliva.  I was nine.  Is it any wonder I like violent sex?  Is it any wonder that I want my lovers to hurt me in ways I frankly hate to prove that they love me?  I’m not even sure I am a masochist exactly.  It hurts and it is horrible and I want it to stop.  But I want to date people who want to do that to me.  I want to find people who literally get off on watching me suck their cock while I sob and cry and snot mixes in with the semen and saliva.  That’s pretty broken.  [Disclaimer!  Not all people who are into bdsm had horrific childhoods!  Do not use my case as an example of how no one who does this can be healthy!]  *ahem*

Do you know what is really awesome about dating men who get off on treating me that way?  When they don’t do it… they are making a special effort for me.  They are showing me that even though they are absolutely monstrous they care about me more than they care about getting off.  It’s pretty odd.  Because, if you do it right, bdsm involves a lot of communication.  I was shown porn, raped, molested, given graphic historic romance novels to read full of really kinky shit.  I was allowed to read those books when I was eight.  I was absolutely being primed to be ruled by my sex life.

That’s why my sister is a whore and my mom is celibate.  Those were presented as my options.  Which would you choose?  I have a high sex drive.  Pre-kids my sex life was shaped primarily about dealing with the demons in my head even though I usually didn’t tell my partners that.  That’s where Noah comes in.  I don’t know how to describe my experience of Noah.  I’m not even sure if I should try.  If I do it badly he looks like shit.  We are intense people.  But he isn’t shit.  He is wonderful.  And he loves me so much.

My husband married a tremendous pervert.  Now I kind of want to take it all back.  But that’s not how it works.  I don’t know what to do.  I don’t like being touched much.  Having someone touch me is scary.  I try to have sex even though it is hard.  We have to stop a lot.  We are definitely only having fluffy gentle bunny sex right now.  That’s not something I have much experience with.  Sometimes having gentle sex makes me cry.  Because I realize that is probably how most people learned about their bodies.  Other people mostly discovered sex as something kind of weird and awkward but fun.  I think.  I’m guessing.  I don’t know.  Mine was pain.  Because once I got past the point of being raped and I asked to have sex I was too young.  It hurt so much.  But that is what I was brought up to do.  So I did it.

Today is a hard day.  Today I have no defenses.  Today I feel sad and scared and like any minute now someone is going to turn around and hurt me.  Want to know how today has really gone?  I woke up at a normal time and did some writing.  Then everyone else woke up.  Noah decided that he just didn’t feel like cooking so we went to our local breakfast place.  Shanna was a bit moody and particular about things, but not that bad.  And when I made my boundaries clear she figured out how she could deal with her part of it.  (Yes, you can be sad about something.  No you may not scream in the van or in the restaurant because you are sad.  That hurts.)  We did ok with breakfast.  I was overly touchy and edgy but I didn’t blow up.  I didn’t let it escalate.  I said I couldn’t continue a chain of conversation instead of yelling or being nasty.  At home I had a massage and ate lunch.  There has been various talking to people in there.  But I had to tell Noah and Taylor that I was feeling young and I needed them to be careful with their tone of voice.  I had to say that.

Because I was raped.  I remember.  When I was very very young, must have been four or five, my father would pick me up and swing me through the air and I loved it and then he would lower me to his lap.  If I had pants on it was a little bit of rubbing and it felt good and I didn’t say anything.  If I had a dress on, which was basically all the time.  My mother describes me as refusing to wear pants.  She says, “Oh you were such a girl.  You wouldn’t wear pants at all.”  And when I wore a dress my father would support me on his leg with his hands on my hips.  I remember the feel of his knuckle shoving deep into my thigh as he tried to get the right angle.  It hurt and I would bite my lip.  If I cried out with the pain he would flick me in the head and tell me to stop whining.  Then he would go back to holding my hips.  Sometimes he would stay external and play with my clitoris.  I hope I don’t need to explain the basic human physiology of why that feels good.  That is where I learned about sex.  And I feel so very dirty.  Because I liked it.  Because I still like sex.

I think I like kinky sex because as long as someone is hurting me at the same time it’s ok for me to like it.  I have to have that trade or I don’t deserve it.

What is rape, anyway?  Is it just penis in vagina intercourse?  Do fingers count?  I say they do.  I say that when you are four and your father puts his finger inside your vagina and makes it hurt deep inside you and then punishes you for reacting to the pain you are raped.  And sometimes my body remembers.  Something I’m really glad about is since Calli was born sex doesn’t hurt as much any more.  I no longer get the tiny little tears all through my vagina during sex.  You see, when your father starts raping you that young you develop a lot of scar tissue.  A gynecologist who specialized in dysfunction once used a clear speculum and a flash light to show me the spider web of scar tissue all the way deep into my vagina.  That’s not normal.  Those little scars become little dotted lines that break over and over and over again.  But if you do deep enough massage you can break up scar tissue.  It’s possible that having kids healed that pain.

Before children I had physical discomfort with basically every sex act to a greater or lesser extent.  But I didn’t cry during sex.  I felt ok with myself because I dissociated away from that pain and I didn’t notice much.  It’s different now.  I’m trying so hard to not dissociate and sometimes it doesn’t feel worth it.  I’m tired of trying to force myself into a body that hurts this much.  But I have to because that is the only way to deal with this shit.  I thought that being a grown up was supposed to make this easier?

The first step.

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I feel like I spend most of my life lately saying, “It’s complicated” because no matter what subject I am looking at there are many different things that could be combined/fixed/told.  And I don’t know how to begin.  Luckily I have the internet, and friends who are awake.  My friend Peter pointed me towards the class where I met him.  There is material there.  And he’s right.

My first semester of graduate school was in 2003, before I met Noah, right after Tom ended our M/s relationship.  Before Tom and I were poly I started grad school.  Naw, that’s not even true.  That’s when I applied to grad school.  I started spring semester so I started grad school in January of 2004.  I met Noah in late February.  So this story is going on concurrently to me starting to tell the story of my abuse out loud in the context of my relationship with Noah.

I went to a fiction writing class.  Honestly I picked it based on when I wanted to be on campus.  Always the best selection criterion, I tell you.  I did write some fiction for the class but all of the fiction I chose to wrote was borderline pornographic (or very explicitly pornographic depending on which story) or I wrote creative non-fiction.  I didn’t tell the class that I was writing about my own childhood abuse.  I did not explain that the horrific, gut clenching story about a 7 year old being raped was my story.  I kept distance there.  Most people in the class responded just fine and they gave me very valid feedback on my writing.

But there was this one woman.  Liz?  I think her name was Liz.  She didn’t like me much.  She didn’t like my stories.  She didn’t like my attitude.  She was one of those out and proud lesbians who acts like all heterosexual sex is rape.  I doubt she would have actually said that, but that’s pretty much the place she was in.  Now, like 7 years later, I can see why she was the way she was.  Then she just felt mean.  She picked on me when I shared my stories.

What do I mean by that?  I mean that when I was visibly upset when people were workshopping the story about my rape she was very hostile.  She specifically said, “This story is ridiculous because this kind of thing doesn’t really happen to people.”  Now I kind of wonder if she was denying her own abuse.  Her response was really hard for me.  I brought stuff that was too intense to class and I felt like I got screamed at for it.  To be perfectly clear, the professor was awesome.  I’m quite sure he had strong suspicions about me because he gave me great writing feedback and he gingerly patted me on the shoulder and told me I would make it.  Men like him have been the rock I have built my life upon. Women rarely manage that kind of support properly.

But oh man.  I’m not over Liz.  How dare she tell me that my story was unrealistic?  That’s not fucking writing feedback.  We had a guy in class writing stories about people who were kidnapped by aliens!  She chose to tell ME that my story was unrealistic!  Ok.  Fuck her.  I feel like she is part of the great evil cabal that wants me to kill myself instead of speaking because she doesn’t want to hear about my pain.

But I’m in a lot of pain.  And that’s a hard thing to talk about.  How do you express your pain properly without hurting anyone else?  I mean, the problem with Sharon and Liz is that they feel I am overstepping their (or someone elses) boundaries and I don’t have the right to do that.  Thing is, I don’t have any clue whatsoever where boundaries are supposed to go.  I flail and I fuck up.  Sometimes they are really far away from me and no one can get close enough to have a conversation and sometimes they are in so close that I can’t defend myself when someone rapes me.  I do not know what healthy boundaries feel like to naturally have them for ones own body.  I don’t.  I pretend.  I try to make it up. My boundaries shift depending on time of day, how many people are around, how recently I have thought about my family, what I’m eating, how often I sleep…

And that’s not cool for the people around me.  That’s messy and abusive.  Because then I go off on people for correcting my grammar.  I saw that I know it is a little thing, but it felt abusive.  It felt over the top.  It felt like you were trying to publicly humiliate me and make me look small and stupid and you look big and powerful.  Thats not what was happening, but that’s how muddy my boundaries are. I can KNOW things and not feel them.

I hate being sober.  I can’t tell the stories.  See how I am dancing here?  But Sharon made a crack about the marijuana and how I should stop using it and go on psych meds.  Despite the many many many years of problems I had trying to get psych meds to work.  Despite the fact that the people who are in my house with me monitoring my behavior tell me adamantly that marijuana is the right decision right now in this crisis point because it is clearly helping me and it does not have the miserable side effects.  But someone in authority, someone I feel “knows more than me” told me that I should stop.  So I am not smoking this morning.  Even though I am going round and round in circles and winding myself up.

I don’t know how to get past the anxiety and look at the stories without it.  My brain is too effective at shutting down those avenues of thought.  When I try to sit here and think about being raped when I was 7 years old my stomach starts to hurt, my neck hurts.  I feel tense.  I am breathing fast and rapid.  If I were trying to speak out loud I would be doing it so fast and so quiet that people probably wouldn’t really be able to hear me.  I’m scared.  I’m small.  And I have no real voice.  Even if I could start rattling off the facts, I was 7 years old when a neighbor raped me.  There was a witness in the room and another witness (his mother) came in and saw what was happening and then walked out leaving it to continue.

Many many people saw my story.  People were there watching it while it happened.  People actually physically saw me being raped and didn’t stop it.

Why shouldn’t I be angry again?  Why in the hell is it surprising that I have rage issues?  Why in the hell should I learn to tell my story in a small, inoffensive way so that other people don’t have to be hurt by my story?  Why is that my responsibility?  I didn’t do anything.  All I am doing is telling the truth.  All I am doing is saying, “Hey I was a little kid and people hurt me” and people then react to me as if I am a monster.  They want me to shut up.  They want me to be little and silenced.  They want me to make my story palatable.

Well fuck you, none of this is palatable.  This is disgusting and horrible and I had to live through it.  How fucking dare people tell me that I don’t have a right to speak.  How dare people tell me that I have to make my story palatable.  I had no choice.  I was raped.  I was raped over and over during my formative years.  I was programmed to think that my value was in sex and I should be silent the whole rest of the time.

But I am not that person.  I am loud.  I am here.  I have a voice.  And I’m not going to stop using it.

In May of 1989 my brother Tommy was hit by a car.  My entire childhood is told in relationship to that event because that is the Big Obvious Date that I can remember.  I turned 8 in September of 1989. Tommy was in a coma for five months so he woke up in October.  When he was hit by a car we were living in Texas.  I dreamed about the accident and woke up and told Mommy that I saw Tommy get hit by a car.  She told me it was just a dream but couldn’t get a hold of my dad for three days to find out how Tommy was.  I have no idea how long this lasted, but my mom was there for a bit before rushing back to California to sit at Tommy’s bedside.  She left me with Denise (my sister) who was pregnant and her then husband Bobby.  I was raped after my mom found out about the accident but before she left.  So I am pretty sure I was 7.

This is how it works with all of my memories.  I have to stop and think of all the collaborating details or I am afraid I am making it up.  I have to be able to list off long, extensive lists of things that happened the same day to prove that I was alive and I had that day and I saw those things and other people believe me about all the other things (often these details are verifiable) so therefore they will believe me about the abuse.  But people don’t.  People tell me that I am lying or exaggerating.  That my stories cannot be real.  But they are.  My stories are real.  I am real.  This was my experience of the world.  It is bad and scary and hard.  But it happened.  Dirty things were done to me but I am not dirty.  I am not bad.

His name was Michael and I had quite the crush on him.  I followed him around.  I was desperate for any sign of love and affection.  I was willing to do anything he wanted me to do.  I don’t think I told that part in the story in class.  This event wasn’t the first time Michael and I had sexual contact, it was just the last.  One day when we were in Michael’s room and he and his cousin were playing video games in between saying degrading things to and about me.  I can’t tell the whole story right now.  Not right.  Not the real thing.  I can’t.  I want to but I don’t feel safe.  I feel like if I tell the whole story again someone will be nasty, and they might and I can’t control that.

I feel like it is my fault Michael raped me because I put myself in the dangerous situation.  I went after him.  I pursued him.  I am in the phase of recovery where I can’t tell the story from the point of view of a victim.  I am the monster.  Right this minute I want to tell the story as a bragging story.  I want to talk about how I am so into sex that I knew when I was a little girl that I wanted it.  That I picked a boy I wanted and I went after him.  I didn’t let any obstacle get in my way.  And I fucked him.

That’s all I want to say.  I want to sound tough and bad ass and brave.  I want to sound like I had choice.  I want to sound like I was active player.  I wasn’t a victim.  I wasn’t abused.  I wasn’t raped.  I was just ready for sex earlier than other girls.  Do you know how many times I have told that story?  More times than I can count.  That is how I survived.  That right there.

I have been raped so many times in my life I’m not sure I can count them any more.  The vast majority of the sex I had was only consensual in the sense that I got into a situation where a guy wanted sex and I didn’t believe I was allowed to say no.  I wanted to be touched.  I wanted physical contact and I knew no other way to get it.  When I was a toddler and I sat on my fathers lap he would put his hands under my panties and slip his fingers into my vagina.  That was love.  They showed me porn.  My mother started giving me tips on blow jobs when I was 11.  It was my fault, of course.  I brought it up.  I asked.  She didn’t initiate that conversation so she feels like she is innocent.

But my mother gave me advice on better blowjob techniques when I was 11.  That’s not ok.  She needed to hold that boundary.  That is how she continued the cycle.  That is why I do not trust her.  My mother does not know what kind of boundaries other people have either.  But she is in her 60’s and she still doing things that are that kind of inappropriate and if you call her on it she goes into this long explanation of why she isn’t responsible for her behavior.  Bullshit!

I am responsible for my behavior.  Me.  Not God.  Not my father.  Not my mother.  Not my sister.  Not my therapist.  Not my husband.  Not my children.  Me.  Me.  Me.  At the beginning of the day, at the middle of the day, at the end of the day… I am with me.  I always have been.  I always will be.  I am not looking to be any one else’s ideal of the right person.  I’m afraid that right now I am at the point where I have to stop relying on anyone else.  Maybe I can find the right therapist if I keep looking but it will really and truly have to be the RIGHT therapist.  Sharon isn’t it.  Sharon wants to make me into her image of the perfect post-abuse mother.  No.

Why do I want to recover these memories.  Why am I doing this to myself.  This is horrible and I am beating myself over the head with it.  I am very good at forgetting.  I was told I have to forget.  I was told to be quiet about what I do remember.  But instead I am completely structuring my life right now so that all I can do is look at these memories.  But I’m letting the memories control me.  I am letting personal time become all the time.  Why.  That’s a big thing to do.

I’m afraid that if I let myself have these memories fully, if I really examine them I will become the people who hurt me.  When the people around me react with horror I feel silenced.  I feel like I am driving myself insane.  I have to say these stories.  I have to tell them in all their tear filled agony and I cannot bear to see peoples reactions.  I think that officially makes me a writer.  Right now Noah is making breakfast and my babies are playing and singing with him.  I am not allowing my rage to destroy my family.  My family is beautiful and strong as I am beautiful and strong.  Most of the time I bear my burdens lightly.  I do not feel weighed down by the weight of incest.  I know the right road for me and I am on it.  I don’t want to change who I am.  I really like me.

I want to feel like it is ok to be me.  I want to feel like who and what I am is right.  I want to feel like it is ok that I am different from everyone else.  I want to feel like it is ok that I am special.  That sometimes I need to say, “Hey can people use gentle voices with me even when I try to escalate things” and have the people around me understand that saying that is humiliating and embarrassing and I feel like a disgusting person for saying it.  I need it to be ok that I talk about my past.  I need to get to a place where I know in my heart what the right amount of information to give my children is.  I do not want my children twisted by my legacy of shame.  I want my children to continue to grow in the absolute safety I have provided.  My children are a strange mix.

So here’s my thing.  My daughter is verbal.  Astoundingly verbal.  Exceptionally verbal.  Who knows what that will mean in terms of her overall achievement in life.  That’s not the point.  It’s not about competition and I don’t know how to talk about it without it sounding like I am being an asshole.  So I don’t speak about this problem.  This is a problem.  I am having a very hard time with how verbal Shanna is.  Shanna asks me questions and she mentions things in off-hand ways that sound like they might maybe be questions and I don’t feel like I know what the appropriate amount of information to give her is.

Shanna wants to know why I am sad.  Shanna is acting out being sad and I feel horrible about it.  So far I have told her that I am sad because bad things happened to me a long long time ago and I think about them sometimes and that’s hard for me.  I have described my anxiety as “I have a lot of work to do.  And you know how you feel when you are tired and really hungry?  I feel like that all the time when I am trying to do this much work.”  I have no idea if I am doing this right.  I honestly think that I am freaking out so much because I feel like I have to hurry up and get over feeling like this because otherwise my kids will grow up with someone like me who just checks out for a while.

And I have a lot of shame about that.  That is what my mother did.  My mother was on so many drugs to numb her pain it was absolutely ridiculous.  She popped so many pills it was unreal.  That was normal.  I grew up convinced that I wouldn’t do that.  And I have such an aversion to taking pills that prenatals were nightmareish for me and I have now stopped taking them because I simply cannot do it even though I should take them as long as I am nursing.

Instead I am smoking pot.  I’m not drinking.  I’m not taking pills (and I won’t), but I’m smoking pot.  I am having a hard time with that.  I am not a lifelong pot smoker.  I really don’t enjoy doing this.  I’m not enjoying how it feels.  But it keeps me level.  It keeps me from snapping while I can’t get the memories under control.  It is making me go flat line.  And while I am doing it during the day I have people here watching my kids for me.  That is the difference between me and my mother.

I cannot meet all of my children’s needs by myself right now.  I am having a crisis.  But I am dealing with it.  I am dealing it with it in a way that is safe for me, for my children, and for the people who are offering help.  I am not stepping on anyones toes.  I am not doing something bad by asking for help.  I am not imposing.  I am not hurting anyone.  I am weaker than normal and I cannot carry my load.  People with room to spare, people who love me are helping me.  I am doing the right thing for me.  I am.

Believing that is the first step to recovery for me.  That’s it.  Right now, for this moment of this crisis that is my step.  I have to believe it is ok for me to be weak and need help.  I have to believe that it is ok for me to ask for help.  I need to feel like I can allow other people to help me.  I need to actually accept the help.

Baby steps, people.  I see several of the offers and I love you and I want to respond and I can’t right now.  That is too big of a step.  I don’t yet believe I am allowed to take it.

The difference

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I should have been removed from my family of origin because I was not safe.  No one protected me.  That is a failure on the part of my entire extended family and the system.  The difference between what happened to me and what is happening to my daughters is I know I am in a place right now where I am not competent to care for them as they need so I asked for help.  I went out and I admitted out loud that right now I need other people to care for my children so that they can come out of childhood unscathed. I may be fighting demons but they don’t need to get hit in the cross fire.

That is what my family doesn’t understand.  My sister and my mother have gone through these periods.  I’ve seen this from the kid side.  But what my mother and my sister did was scream at me, bring people home and have sex in front of me, basically they did anything to prove that they were bad.  But they didn’t start out bad people.  They started out good people who were making mistakes.  They became evil because they kept doing it.  Because they shame their victims and require silence about what they did.  I have that potential in me.

I feel the urge to harm them.  I visualize how I should do it.  I have detailed pictures in my head of what I should be doing to them.  And that is why I am freaking the fuck out.  The images are getting more intense.  I am fucking terrified of hurting my children and I don’t feel in control right now.  This is the cycle.  That is what is going on.  This is what my mother and sister were to weak to do.  They were too weak and to stupidly prideful to say, “I am weak and broken and I need help.”  So they perpetuated the abuse on to the next generation after me.  In the approximately 6 years since my brother broke contact with the family I have had conversations with my niece and nephew where they detailed their own sexual abuse history.  My nephew was raped.  That’s not my story to tell but I’m not keeping silent any more.  I was told I have no right to reveal his pain.  But I do.  Because he was abused by the same people who abused me and I have the right to stand up and say that my sister is a disgusting monster and she should be shunned.  She should be in jail.  She is not a good person who makes mistakes.  She is a child molester.  She is filth.  She deserves every bad thing in the world.

And my family is siding with her.  And I sit here and freak out with these pictures in my head.  I want to abuse my children the way I was abused.  And I pray that my friend drives very very fast on her way to care for my children today because I am very close to the edge.  I am not going to fall over it.  I can hold out long enough.

Because that is how you stop this.

And I’m glad I didn’t hit send.  Because I went in there and I dressed my baby more warmly because she was slightly chilly and I nursed her and I put her to bed and my older daughter asked me a bunch of questions and I answered them and then she told me to go away again because she likes watching her movies in private.

Why do I believe I am a monster who is going to harm them any second?

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Last night I went to my support group.  It was more or less “my turn” to share my story but that was not given support or space.  I was expected to give short sound bites in ways that didn’t scare the horses.  But I don’t have that kind of story.  It’s hard when the act of speaking my story traumatizes people around me.

This is more of that “what to say” thing.  When I get up the nerve to say these things out loud, with my voice, it is a big deal.  I don’t do that.  As loudly as I trumpet Radical Honest Damnit!  I don’t actually describe these things out loud very well.  And I need to.  Ok, maybe not every incest survivor needs to, but I need to be able to speak about what happened to me.  It is not fair that I have to continue bearing this in silence.  Silencing me means telling me that I am wrong for talking about myself.  Silencing me means that I am invisible.  Silencing me means I deserve it.

When I finally get to the point of sharing my story I need people to look right back at me like I am still clean.  Like I am still worth seeing.  That’s why I want people to talk to me about my story.  I leave details out every time.  Often on accident.  But when people ask me questions I realize what pieces I am conveniently telling and what pieces I am conveniently leaving out.  I figure out a lot more of what scares me.  But people have a limited capacity for that.  I can only ask the same people to listen to the same stories so many times.  But I have to tell them.  I can’t be quiet and nice about it.  I can’t keep my voice silent so that other people can ignore that horror exists.

The family members who are upset with me?  The ones who sent me long and impassioned, or angry and defensive messages?  Yeah.  They don’t get me and they can’t.  My niece sent me a message saying she hopes I can get over my father some day and return to the family and she doesn’t understand why I am hurting her so much because of things that happened before she was born.  My cousin is saying, “All of that shit happened before I was born and now you are being mean to me so fuck you.”

I am not allowed to have my feelings and processes.  It’s not ok that I view my mother and my sister as culpable.  I am supposed to “let it go” which means forgive and forget and move on with the victimization stuff.  How do I tell my niece that I have to cut her off because of the ways her mother sexually assaulted her and her brother.  Because I need to ensure that people like my niece, who have been pretty badly sexually abused, are not an influence.

I just did a nasty thing.  I sent my niece a response and I shouldn’t have.  I told her that this, right now, actually has very little to do with my dad.  This is about my mother and my sister sent me off to be raped and my sister participated in the rape and molestation of her own children.  As long as people continue to talk to my mother and sister like they are normal people I can’t stand near any of them.  Because they are acting like my mom and my sister ate good people who made a mistake.  I’m sorry but systematically sending your daughter off to be raped means you are not a good person.  You lose the chance at good person status for this lifetime.

And I told my niece that as long as she wants to continue to act like her own abuse didn’t happen and she can go about her normal day to day life with her mother and my mother acting like they are ok reasonable people… I can’t know her.  Because she obviously feels like that kind of abuse is ok and she continues to take whatever people dish out.  And therefore I don’t want her interacting with my daughter because she will pass on the feeling that girls deserve that treatment and you should keep your mouth shut when it happens.  Not my fucking babies you pieces of shit.

I am frantic, scared, and angry.  And I feel like it’s not ok to say what happened to me.  I feel very unsafe.  I feel very attacked.  Even here, within my family in my home.  In my sanctuary I still feel like someone will show up at any second and do horrible things to me.  Want to know why I feel that way?

Because I am in a place where emotionally I am a small child.  But I have small children.  And they have needs.  And small children don’t give a shit about anyone but themselves.  Small children want to be protected and to sit and stare and dream and become.  I can’t be the grown up right now.  Thank god I don’t have to.

As I sit here and spin my wheels getting more and more upset with that group and my niece and my cousin and…  I realize that I am trying to look around me for unsafe people and then getting mad when they are unsafe.  My niece isn’t even close to going through recovery.  She’s too close.  And I need to leave her alone because sharing my story in the way I am is kicking her.  Maybe she doesn’t deserve to have me take on the abuser role too.  I do think I’ll be able to long term live with myself though.  I didn’t say that Tyra was bad in and of herself.  I said that as long as she associates with them she will accept their reality and it is broken.  She doesn’t get to pretend that they are not monsters with me.  With everyone else, fine.  Not with me.

Now I’m drifting off into thinking about my kids.  I need to have chats with my friends.  As much as I am a raging pervert, I’m also the victim of incest, rape, and molestation.  I need to not have sex stuff around my kids.  I need that to not be part of their existence in any way.  And people think Shanna isn’t listening.  It’s not ok.  I have been interrupting people for a while, but I need to take a more proactive stance.  I need to talk to people before the conversation gets going about what is ok in my house.  Because that is how you break cycles.  My daughters will not learn what a blowjob is at this age range.  That will not be part of their world.  And when my daughters do learn about blowjobs it will be because we are having an age appropriate discussion about sex with our clothes on and there will be no porn to demonstrate.  I am not going to lock up my books about being a survivor of sexual abuse but I want to get through this awful period of recovery so that I can stop talking about it around them.

My children cannot support me.  It does not matter that I feel like a small child right now, I’m not.  And my children should not have to support me in any way.  That is not the role of a child.  I’m hurting but they cannot fix me, nor should I in any way ask them to try.  I’m not going to an extreme so don’t get paranoid.  I’m not going to be able to help the fact that I cry randomly sometimes.  But what I say is, “I’m thinking about stuff that happened a long time ago.  I should probably start thinking about you though because you are awesome.”  Then we run off and play.  But I can’t do that today.

Today I am too small.