When I hear abused women talking about being afraid of what will happen when they leave I get it.

I just yelled at Noah and Sarah.  It’s hard that Noah has absolutely nothing he is interested in that is interesting to a child.  He insolently tolerates childrens activities because he has to.  I think that is one of our biggest points of friction.  I feel like I should entertain the kids away from him then.  Right now I am so angry that I want to hit someone.  I have all this energy and nothing to do with it.  I sit here and get bored and frustrated and all I can do is fucking clean house.  I feel like the most stupid pointless person on earth.  I hate my fucking life and I fucking hate these fucking fuckers who make me sit here fucking bored all the fucking time.

Do you know what I leave my house to do?  Go to therapy.  Go get groceries.  Entertain Shanna.  Once in a while I sneak off and do something for me but that’s probably less than once a week.  I sit in this house day after day hating my life.  As a result I have a very stable kid whose moods can be managed.  And I am so fucking insanely bored I want to do something very violent.  I am angry and trapped.  I hate these people and I hate this life.

I understand why the housewives of the 50’s were using valium.  The dispensary opens in an hour.  Being stoned means I don’t care that I have no control over my life.  That I feel apathetic about the fact that I stay home all the time.  I don’t sit any more.  I have too much nervous energy.  Instead I wander around cleaning and yelling at Shanna for making messes.  It’s charming.  I know things are changing and getting better.  It’s just not happening very fast and I am so tired of doing this.  I hate that I can’t take my kids out when I’m having a bad day because I will freak out.

Even when I’m walking around this angry, I don’t think I’m actually projecting it very much in my life.  I certainly don’t think this anger is apparent.

I’ve been thinking about my family all morning.  Thinking about how my parents hooked up.  Thinking about how people go out into the community and get really really involved because the bigger a pillar of the community you are the bigger your shadow for hiding all your dirty secrets.  I hide at home but I don’t have any secrets.  If I feel mean I admit it.  If I feel angry I talk about it.  I make people uncomfortable because I don’t know how to do the public persona thing.  I feel so raw.

Why am I so mad?  This isn’t about Noah.  Why am I so mad that he doesn’t want to do things with his kids?  I want to say my father didn’t do the kid things, but he did.  I think there is a part of me that feels like Noah just isn’t ever going to be as interested in the kids I had because I didn’t have a boy.  He is going to volunteer his interests as things to share less.  I don’t know if that is real or not, but that popped up right now.

I’m really sad.  I feel like a failure.  I feel like everyone around me has all of these needs and I have nothing to give.  I’m tired.  I want to have fun but I’m not allowed to do anything that I consider fun because it all comes with this backbreaking amount of work that makes me so angry I am incapable of enjoying anything any more.  I don’t know why I resent doing work so much.  When I am doing it I don’t mind.  I enjoy physical activity.  I do actually enjoy getting up and the physicality of maintaining a house.  But I have to do it in very particular ways and I can’t be stopping to go around people.

I feel very guilty because I keep getting angry with Sarah.  It’s making her jumpy and then I feel like a terrible person.  When I get up to do chores I tend to dart around the house.  I spontaneously jog regularly.  I just like to do it.  But uhm, she takes up space as an adult human being does and then

I spend a lot of time feeling vaguely upset with myself for being so self-obsessed that I am utterly incapable of writing fiction.  But I just had an idea.  What would I be like if I had not been abused.  It would be interesting to try to write two chapters in parallel going through an imaginary life I could have had while comparing it to what did happen.

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You never know the full impact of your life until you are dead.  I don’t want to die yet.  I figure I have at least fifty more years.  Given that I am thirty that means I have a long way to go before I hit halfway through my lifetime.  I hope I am grown up by then.

I was born the fourth child in an established relationship.  My mother was a stay-at-home mom who excelled at cooking, baking, sewing, and being involved in all aspects of her children’s school.  She often babysat for half the neighborhood because she was just good at managing children.  My father was a printer.  It was the family business.  He tended to work graveyard shifts because it earned a lot more money.  My father was also kind of the suburban ideal dad.  He coached many sports teams.  He was heavily towards boys, that’s normal.  He only wanted to teach things like sports, heavy Sci-Fi novels, and appreciating alcohol.  He figured that was his role in the family.

The first few years of my life were just a continuation of the same-ole-same-old my family had been doing for years before me.  My father was apt to say “no” to things so my mother learned how to work around that.  My mom thought that her little boys should have linoleum in their room because all they wanted to do was play cars and the carpet was terrible

It took 20 years before I told my family that my father raped me.  I don’t think of myself as keeping secrets and yet that’s a long time.

I’m reading TCTH again.  I’m feeling kind of upset about the constant refrains that people should get off all drugs.  I don’t think they are including psych meds and I am god damn using marijuana as a psych med.  So I’m feeling very defensive.  See, even the other survivors think I am bad for needing help in coping.  I am supposed to just manage.  I am supposed to have all this self control magically appear because I am ready to heal now.  How do I get through the parts where I am raging inside my head?  When I am stoned I can sit on the couch and stroke Shanna’s hair and smile at her while she babbles at me even if in my head I feel like I am strapped to a table screaming as loud as I can.  I feel like my head is going to explode from the intensity of this silent screaming.

When I am stoned I honestly don’t think it impacts her.  Noah and Sarah both say they cannot tell.  I do experience the emotions.  I do try to work through them in my head and in writing and in talking to people.  But I really and truly have to maintain a stone facade when I am with my kids.  I can’t have feelings that are about these other parts of my life.  I am too volatile.  As long as my children continue to cause me physical pain all day long every single fucking day I need some way of not reacting.  I have been very hyper sensitive for months.  This stage of processing is always like this.  My skin is too thin.  I am in horrible pain from the most casual of touches and nothing these children do feels casual.

I’m reading about Complex PTSD.  I feel haunted by the repeated mention of the fact that the abuse had to happen in an on-going situation where you couldn’t get out.  That’s what is contributing to my abject panic and desire to get away from the kids.  I feel trapped and they are hurting me.  It’s hard to know if any of this has physical cause.  I say.  I’m going to see a doctor.  I’m kind of terrified.

Today is a high anxiety day.  I was fairly social yesterday.  Far more so than usual.  I went and mingled among a wide variety of different social circles and had to manage very different kinds of interactions.  I’m exhausted.  I’m also tired because I haven’t slept properly in years.  I’m being snippy with Noah and Sarah and it’s not fair.

I’m rather a work-a-holic.  I tend to say that I have a Puritan work ethic.  I feel terribly guilty if I’m not doing something productive basically at all times.  I don’t believe in idle hands.  This is part of why Noah and my therapist are so enthusiastic about me smoking.  Because I don’t do it around the kids I have an enforced period of isolation.  That’s when I can find the time to write and think.

When I slack I stop working on my list of priorities.

Today we went to a wedding and then out to a bar with a group of friends of friends.  The second part was all date-like.  I think I did pretty well.

“A real artist isn’t afraid of what people will say about them.”  That’s part of it.  I’ve been thinking a lot about Noah.  It’s kind of amazing how much space he takes up in my brain.  I think I am a very different person than I was when I met him.  I like me more.  I like him a lot more.

So I’ve been chewing on something for a few days now.  I’m not sure how to talk about it.  Here, I’ll just go.  I believe that my children should grow up to expect that no man will ever clear his throat at her and bark an order at her.  I don’t want that.  I don’t want that for my children.  There.  Right there.  That is my line in the sand.  That is why I divorced my biological family. Because I absolutely believe that to stand by and keep silent when someone is rude is about the biggest sin in my personal religion.  I cannot do that.  Not ever again.

I just had to say that.

I logged on to lj for you! Where are you? 🙂

Debbie wants a sex story.  A fun one.  Oh gosh.  I’m not sure I can remember far enough back to fun sex.  Oh that’s not entirely true.  But most of our recent fun sex is of the “Oh man that was a silly noise” variety. It’s hard to have sex with two little kids around.  Hm.  Ooh!  I’ll tell one D was kind of there for.

I describe myself as not so much polyamorous as not good at monogamy.  What that means is that when I feel stifled in my relationship my impulse is to want to sleep with other people.  When I was younger I had a strong personal ethic that if I wanted to sleep with someone else that much I should break up with the person I was dating because obviously I wasn’t truly in love with them.  That would be one of the break ups with Stephen.  I was 18 and not very interested in being boring.  I wanted to be out having an exciting life!  Which meant fucking other people.  I re-met D right around this time.

Background on D!  So when I met D I was 15.  I was attending LGHS, the only high school I attended for a full year, my sophomore year.  I was hanging out at Rocky Horror Picture Show.  I had originally been brought by some friends but they stopped coming.  They were successfully controlled by their parents who thought it was inappropriate for high school kids to be out all night long every Saturday.  I didn’t have such a situation, so I did whatever I wanted.  Which was to glom onto a couple of guys in a row.  One of them was skeezy and icki and he is the only boyfriend who has ever slapped me (without permission).  I think he was 27 years old.  I dumped him the minute he hit me.  I wasn’t going to put up with that shit.  Then there was a boy who was attending Santa Clara University.  Oh I thought he was dreamy.  Really he was a self-absorbed jerk, but that plays well to 15 year old girls.  The whole time I was chasing him he was chasing D.  Who had a boyfriend.  It was all very 90210.  I quite obviously didn’t like her much.

Then I remet D a few years later and liked her very much.  She kind of grew on me.  Like a fungus.  It started out because I ran into her at a local theater where she was stagemanaging a production of Hair.  I started hanging out with a bunch of people from that theater all at the same time.  I did the “I have no life and maybe if I hang out here and do little odd jobs they’ll let me stay” thing.  Luckily they did!  In retrospect, I was very willing to work and I had some level of skill so I wasn’t in the way at awkward times.  Why wouldn’t they let me volunteer at a random small community theater?  But I was insecure and they were cool grown ups and I wanted them to like me.  So I did a lot of work.  No!  I wasn’t 18!  I was still 17.  Because I don’t think I had moved out yet.

So there was of course this guy, Steve.  Funny that I dumped a Stephen because I wanted to go fuck a Steve.  But there it is.  I didn’t cheat at all.  As soon as I had lustful thoughts I broke off dating.  I was going to be ethical, dangit.  And slutty.  Even in the depths of my current whinge I can’t feel bad about it.

Oh man.  She wanted fun.  I’m being whiny.  Gah.  Steve!  What did I like about him…  hmmm… If I tell the truth I probably mostly wanted him because D was toying with him (but had a boyfriend) and he wanted D.  This is why I know girl games exist!  I play them!  *ahem*  (delete ranty digression about how I am not alone in being manipulative and in fact it is a common and useful skill.)