Tag Archives: negotiating

I like my housemates

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It’s blowing my mind that my oldest child is 12 days away from being an adult. This feels absolutely impossible and bizarre. Yet, here we are. My second child is 3 months away from being a quasi-adult in this country. (Scotland is strange. There are many ways in which you gain admittance to a softer version of being an adult: you vote (in some elections), can join the military, can leave school, and you can get married without permission. You may not buy a plastic picnic knife or a pair of scissors.) In our house one of the things that turning 16 gets you is that I no longer micromanage school/screen stuff. I go hands off and allow them to fuck with their schedule. I figure that making mistakes with running your body between 16 and 18 is one of the lowest stakes time in ones entire life. Might as well make as many as possible.

I feel like I have spent the last 18 years training housemates not raising children. They communicate so well, both of them. When one of my children is struggling with doing one of their chores they initiate a group conversation so we can re-divide chores. It’s miraculous and glorious. I feel so much pride I want to explode. MC (Middle Child) has figured out that they are happiest if they can do their contributions to the household when no one else is around. They clean the kitchen after everyone else goes to bed. They are now choosing to opt in to getting up early enough to make breakfast. These wrap around chores will make sleep slightly more of a specific issue but they want this combination because it produces the lowest amount of distraction while working.

It is really cool living with people who know who they are and what they want. I feel really proud of them. I watch them self advocate and I struggle with not crying. It never enters into their psyche that maybe they should just shut up and suffer. Their life hasn’t gone that way. When they are suffering they speak up about it and demand change. That said, we also talk through the things that must be endured because they cannot be changed DBT style. I love Dialectic Behavioural Therapy. It really works for me. The framing of it helps me a lot. I have been super active in teaching it specifically to the kids. There are things that must be endured: challenging developmental stages, security in airports, recovery from surgery. These things can’t be changed when you want to. Most things can be changed though and having the strength to make it happen is the obstacle. My children are so strong. That feels mystifying to me as they balance the contradiction of being very strong and also disabled.

MC had an adenoidectomy last week. They are really enjoying the way they can already breathe through their nose somewhat. It’s hard because they haven’t been capable in many years. I am overjoyed with the impending running schedule. They are going to be coming out with me several days a week and that thrills me. Up to age 24 is when you build all the fast twitch muscle mass you will ever have in your life. We have 8 years left to push hard together to make them stronger and capable for the whole rest of their life. That’s fun.

EC (Eldest Child) is frankly suffering a lot more. His body is crap and he is not getting a lot of help from the NHS. To be fair, I don’t know what they would be able to do for him. He eats in supportive ways. He does supportive work for his body. He is doing everything that someone with our alphabet soup of labels can do. He’s going to have a rough road. He’s going to lose a lot of time to feeling like crap and being unable to force his body through coordination. There is no avoiding this. So he takes on chores around the house that have a bit of wiggle room and he can do them in batches on days that he feels well.

YC (You are catching on with the naming convention, yes?–Youngest Child) is not so good at these things right now mostly because she has zero self initiatory drive absent an immediate reward and that’s a complicated thing. Her motivation isn’t present and I’m struggling with being consistent enough to make demands every day. It’s a negotiation and a production every day still and I’m really tired. It’s hard to be as consistent without Noah around filling in the gaps.

I miss Noah every single day. It’s not every hour at this point, that’s progress. It’s hard accepting all the ways I have less to give now because he is not the backstop. I commit to so much less than I did. I feel like my brain is constantly overwhelmed and I’m drowning in lists of things. Yes, I write them down. I still repeat them in my head because otherwise they will never happen. I feel like barely contained chaos at all times. Noah made order out of the chaos. I feel deeply helpless without him. I’m trying to learn that the maelstrom of words is not something that I can share in the same way. I will never be able to jump topics in a conversation the way I did with him again. No one else will ever have so much context for my thoughts. He could look at my face and know why I was crying. He knew which wrinkles in my face were for which layer of grief. It is hard the degree to which I will not be known going forward.

I don’t mean that no one will get to know me. They will do their best but I have a lot more history now and way less time to talk about it. What Noah and I had took so much time. I don’t have that kind of time to give anymore. It feels like I am not able to promise that depth and intimacy and I feel really mixed about that.

I feel lots of feelings at this point because poly is going to be complicated. I’m looking forward to it and also dreading it. I think that is a fairly normal set of feelings about poly. Poly is great! Also: poly is terrible! I really like my boyfriend. He feels like a really solid human. Our explorations together continue to deepen and broaden. I don’t currently have any idea what we are building towards. I don’t know what the limits of this relationship will be, exactly, yet. I don’t anticipate living together. For sure not any time soon. I am looking forward to when YC is older and I can sleep at his more often. He has a kitty who doesn’t appreciate being abandoned so he shouldn’t sleep here too often. We both have these anchors in our own spaces and that feels really comforting to me. He has been burned by relationship changes in the past. I like that we are both coming into this relationship with our own centres of gravity. (Also, if you are from the UK please give me spelling feedback. I’m trying to adapt but this shit is hard.)

I have started dating a nice woman I know in the queer community. It is still very early days and we can’t get together often. We’ve had two dates. We have not had sex. I feel like it’s going to take a while before I can be capable of having the kind of sex we are interested in having together. I have a lot of issues. My marriage involved a bunch of very conscious programming work that Noah did on my brain to try to change me. He wanted me to be monogamous. He wanted me to never top/dominate/hit someone ever again. He did a lot of hours of work on making it so that my body feels like it can’t access these urges I have. He wanted me to only need or want him. Now I can’t help but feel like I was right to refuse that.

I keep replaying in my head when he burst into tears saying that he was going to turn out to be only one of my great loves when I was absolutely the one big one for him. It feels like an indictment of my character.

The pain I feel right now because I couldn’t give him the single minded focus he needed so bad is part of why I feel like I should never live with someone again. My inability to have only one love hurts people and I don’t want to lead anyone on ever again.

It’s not that I spent my whole marriage cheating on Noah. I didn’t. He was always terrified of it though. He felt like I could at absolutely any moment and he never relaxed. He didn’t trust me. He didn’t believe I would keep choosing him. He was afraid that any amount of not looking at him would invalidate all of the time I spent looking at him.

He was suffocating me. I feel awful about this. I didn’t have the capacity to be satisfied from spending 20 hours a day with him. He was very stingy about how much time I was allowed to be out of the house. I didn’t want to leave. I did only want 10-12 hours a day with him. That hurt him. I couldn’t make that not hurt. For him that was overwhelmingly painful rejection. I talked about getting a crappy retail job to get out of the house and meet people and he was very upset. He could not accept me wanting to spend that much time away from the family. He would scornfully tell me that I would make so little money that it could not possibly justify being away from him. He missed the point.

I was trying as hard as I could to be ok in the small box he wanted me to live in. I wanted to be the wife he wanted. I am really sad I couldn’t be. I was going to keep beating my head against that wall forever. I’m sad that our journey together is over.

I am sad that my need to be alone and to have adventures with new people will continue to hurt people forever. I am selfish. I want myself. I want to be alone. I want to spend time in my brain. I want to form new understandings of humans and that means continuing to meet new people.

Another Kid is entering my life. I am really enjoying having intergenerational friendships with folks. I love that these young adults are drawn to me. I love getting to talk to them about what is going on in their lives. I’m trying to map them out in my brain.

I feel really lucky that these people come and seek me out. I don’t do that great in group situations at this point. I hang out on the outskirts of communities. I am not a central pillar of anything. I hide in my house and garden. These folks come to me and share their hearts and life stories. I rephrase what I hear to make sure I’m understanding properly. This process is a big deal. I don’t have to have solutions or answers to anything. What I do is properly listen and help them frame the topic. That’s enough. Having someone else understand and validate what is going on is already a big deal.

I feel like I should put more effort into friendships with folks my age but they all have kids and the schedule conflicts are impossible.

I have been spending more time with Jenny. That’s really good for my soul. Once again she is pulling me into dancing. Now we go to line dancing classes together. She has been good for me for over 30 years and I cannot overstate how grateful I am. She is such a good friend.

I am not reaching out to most Californians. I feel incapable. I feel overwhelmed. I feel like I am drowning. I am fully present in every moment and I don’t have the ability to reach backwards for all the old ties. I feel like I am barely stumbling through my days. I am so tired.

Today I have a whole bunch of time. I get to weed! This is the big thrill for me right now. Yeah, yeah, “No mow May”. I’m not mowing. I’m removing grass from growing areas. I don’t have the space for a meadow. Luckily my neighbour is letting the patch next to me run wild. I finally acknowledged to myself that I missed the window on starting seeds so I have bought some plant starts. I try not to do this. Oh well. It is what it is. Food will grow. Asparagus (not to be harvested this year of course), a variety of different Asian green vegetables, a bunch of salad green things, some peas, some brassicas. I need to chuck my potatoes in the ground today.

I won’t get everything done today that I “should”. I’m not capable of it. That’s feeling really hard. I should also try to get all the tax documents sent off to the accountant. That should have happened already. Fuck.

Also I want to read more. I want to sleep more. I need more rest. I also need to exercise more. DO EVERYTHING MORE ALL AT THE SAME TIME.

My safeword is “Long-term trauma’, bitch

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I keep getting comments from complete strangers, which is still slightly surprising to me. I write about myself and I had extensive and varied trauma as a young person. It comes up as I try to figure out how to handle situations in my life as an adult. I function best, as a person who is autistic and has PTSD, by writing out the things that I am having big feelings about rather than trying to talk about these things in real time. My side of the conversation is too big. I like to play in ways that will upset sensitive people. I encourage you to take care of yourself and not read my writing.

Lately we have been having to have the kinds of serious talks that fucked up people need to have before they go wading into the murky morass. Things like: it is ok to harm me if you are doing it on one axis at a time and it isn’t ok to stack traumas because I can’t process my way out of that fast enough to be appropriate with the kids.

My life is still incredibly structured around my ability to be level through my day to day life. I’m homeschooling my kids and I have over a decade to go before I’m done and that requires a high level of emotional regulation from me. (Not debating this choice here.) But this is the rock around which my life is built.

I have a lot of experience with complex trauma. Lucky me? I am a bit of a tight ass and I define trauma in my personal life as circumstances in which my survival has been in question and ongoing issues where my brain is not capable of telling a situation apart from things that might kill me. Being uncomfortable or stressed out is not a trauma in my personal nomenclature. Brains can be difficult. If something was a threat to your survival at a formative time in your life and it continues happening past the point where it can threaten your survival sometimes your brain struggles to turn off the “Oh shit I am going to die” part.

This is relevant because my father liked to tell me that I exist to get men off. I am the product of rape. Like, those fucked up incest stories? That was literally my childhood. He would tell me, from when I was a toddler, that if I am not pleasing there is no point in him continuing to let me be alive. That means that for the rest of my whole life sex is wrapped up in Do I deserve to be alive? Am I going to fail at getting this man off and then he is going to kill me? Or should I kill myself out of shame. That part was a lot less clear.

Noah is getting older. There are biological factors at play that influence when he can come a lot more than I can be the force that decides his orgasm. But if you tell me that I’m not getting you off that I’m just not quite good enough combined with putting your hand on my neck*? That is a singular layer of trauma for me that I can process and internalise and enjoy the mind-fuckery. I know Noah is actually very happy to be married to me and orgasm or not he is absolutely thrilled to fuck me for the rest of his life. He has demonstrated the absolute commitment he has to me not dying–I can deal with that.

But I cannot cope with that if I am already overwhelmingly upset or feeling suicidal for other reasons. This is part of why I cannot play like this if I am not writing. I have to tell you where my brain is so you can make decisions about what is safe.

This is why I don’t play with safewords. It’s not because I’m so bad ass. It’s not because I think someone should read my mind. It’s because either my play is so light that “Hm that’s kinda pinching” is the same as “red” or because I am doing play so intense that “red” isn’t a word I am going to come up with under pressure. I just won’t. My brain isn’t going to go there. I will be unable to use that as a word to help myself.

In the fourth month of our marriage he raped me. I don’t mean we did a rape scene I mean I was hysterically sobbing because I had spent the day talking to CPS about what my sister was doing to her kids and that was an extremely upsetting situation. I was not fucking ok and I felt like I was about to break into a thousand pieces. I have been raped quite a few times in my life. Every other time my brain has coped by freezing. That day with Noah I was completely unhinged and I fought him. I fought him until we were both bleeding. I lost. That had reverberations for years. I was scared of him and I flinched when he tried to touch me. That was before we had children. There was no reason in the world why I should have stayed.

Except I am pretty sure I could not be married to someone if they will not hurt me like that. I am pretty sure I could not maintain interest in a singular person who was not willing to do that to me.

So yeah, we are talking about the role of rape in our life going forward. I am someone who has spent decades teetering on the edge of committing suicide. It is kinda a family tradition: maternal grandmother, father, brother. It’s just there as an option, always.

I am 8 years younger than my father was when he quit. But hey, nobody is going to send me to prison for raping them as a child so I guess I don’t have his good reason to wuss out.

Anyway. When it comes to raping me that’s a topic of some delicacy. We have talked about the fact that what he wants is not a rape scene on a pre-negotiated day… where is the trauma in that? We are discussing ways to upset me/pick a shitty day that isn’t too shitty. As a recent example of oh-god-no: if he had decided to rape me on the day I got the news about Andrew dying I would not have been ok. I would not bounce back from that in a way that would be acceptable for the parameters of my life. The absolute best case scenario is I would get out of bed 10 or so months later and be maybe ok with trying to avoid dying.

So strategy is important.

But like, I’ve started running again. I haven’t paid the fee yet but right now I’m thinking my self-masochistic act of physical pain for my birthday this year is running another marathon. If he were, say, to wait until I am tired and focused and all I want to be thinking about is the race to absolutely insist and piss me off and hurt me so that I have to feel that while I’m running?

Oh yeah I could still behave how I am supposed to behave in my day to day life. That is a reminder that my body isn’t mine. I have accepted that I like having times when my inconsiderate asshole of a husband lets me feel pain and additional physical burden outside of my usual standard chronic pain because I’m a lucky whore.

I know that there are a lot of feminists who would be extremely unhappy about the fact that I need my marriage to involve explicit sexual violence as the trade for my comfy rich bitch life. I would say that I am a lady of leisure if I ever stopped working. The working won’t stop because it is ingrained into my bones that you work until you die and that rest is for other people. But mixed in with that is constant gratitude that I get to choose my work and I get to choose the scale of my projects with almost no limitations.

Hi newish people. I grew up in really deep poverty. I didn’t have a “permanent address” until I got married. I moved every few months–more than 50 times before I was 18 and then 9 more times in the 7 years of being an adult before I got married. I went through more than a dozen different foster homes and when I was with my mom things were often bad enough that I stole food in order to eat. I mostly crawled out of that poverty thanks to a dog bite settlement. It’s why I am fervently in favour of universal basic income. My lawyer set me up so that the settlement could pay for college. Without it I would not have gone; there was no chance.

So marrying a trust fund baby has been weird. It wasn’t a big trustfund by such standards but he was able to buy a house in his mid 20’s in California in an intense housing market. He was able to go to a good school without loans and he has had a really blessed career in tech.

I get to do what I want. I get to focus on what I want. He lets me control a lot of pieces of our life and I get to decide how money is spent and how it is saved and invested. It blows my tiny little mind that I do the things I do on a daily basis. I was not fucking trained for this shit. I feel wildly out of my depth. I feel incompetent in the extreme even as according to all metrics that can be validated by outside professional sources I am doing extremely well. It feels like a farce. It feels like the house of cards will collapse at any minute.

Now that’s kinda a loophole you can drive a truck through. Because that’s not existentialist trauma. Fucking with me around those insecurities? Oh yeah, that’ll be fine.

Fucking me when I’m sick and I feel terrible and I am not going to enjoy any bit of it at all? I mean… not like cancer sick–don’t be ridiculous. (I’ve already had cancer twice so it’s a reasonable part of the conversation.) But a bad cold? The flu? Oh sure. Mock the fuck out of me. Great time to shove my face in a pillow so you don’t catch anything.

I have heard from other people with PMDD that they too have times of the month, every month, when they don’t have any interest in sex and it is very repellant. For the past almost decade and a half of having small children it’s been very questionable fucking with me when I’m on the low end of that cycle. I’m less stable if you do and the level of stable I have needed has been pretty difficult for me. I am not naturally a stable person. I have no useful training in stability.

Things are changing. I don’t have super little kids anymore. I have support in the day for me to duck in and out for a few minutes so I can take breaks and have time alone in my brain–I have literally never had this like it is now before we moved to Scotland. The way our life is set up now feels like an utter fucking miracle. This is beyond my wildest dreams.

Noah is nervous that this is a short uptick and it won’t continue. That’s a reasonable worry. The little kids part of our life has been hard on both of us. It has been hard to trust that there is a far side that will be fun. (If you do not feel in your bones that you must have children or your life will be incomplete don’t fucking do it. This shit is exhausting and frustrating and steals all your fucking time.)

The thing is: I have been in the bdsm community looking for people to do mean things to me from as soon as it was legal. I was desperately masturbating thinking about it and hurting myself before that. I think that being at a low ebb while I am going through the intensity of early parenting is reasonable. I’m just been fucking surviving. I don’t think that having kids is going to turn me vanilla in the long run of my life. I like it when people are crying way too much. I don’t care if it is me or someone else–if we are fucking someone should be crying. And bleeding at the same time is even better.

I miss you D. I will love you forever and I wish you only happiness.

Just like the growing tightness in my legs feels like carving off a layer of shell I don’t need anymore–a return to who I have been. My legs feel like I have been running. My legs feel like I have been bouncing up and down like I am dancing. I miss dancing so much. I used to dance 5 nights a week doing a wide variety of styles–most of which were extremely energetic. I’d go running at lunchtime.

I want that back. I tried to start running not long after we moved but I think it was too close to the more recent cancer and the house repair has been really demanding. I’m just to the point where it feels like I can.

I feel like that with sex. I feel like that with needing Noah to hurt me. I think there were reasons I could never walk away from the scene. I think there are reasons I started making friends before I was even playing again. I am a shark and I like swimming near other scary creatures.

Also: fucking terrified of the ocean. I am completely convinced I am going to be eaten in the ocean. It is not rational. FUCK MY OLDER SIBLINGS.

Anyway. I think I have followed this train of thought far enough. mwah

  • = Don’t even come for me about breath play. I didn’t say he choked me. He can’t choke me. I have had a significant number of brain injuries and I am at high risk for stroke. He is deeply invested in keeping me for a long time and that means I can’t be choked anymore. I miss it.