Tag Archives: parenting

Pieces of dysfunction.

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Mostly I keep my crazy ranting on my blog. I figure the few people who want to know my wackiness follow me over there and writing on a more public site is… I don’t know… forcing my insanity down peoples throats. But the thing is, the stuff I have to work on changing next is stuff that is rooted in my sexuality. That’s a journey that has been highly shaped by folks who hang out here. So once in a while my insanity will leak out a bit here.

I’ve worked pretty hard on changing my perception of myself over the years. I no longer believe I am worthless. I have substituted the belief that I am an incredibly effective tool. I know how to do a lot of different kinds of work and when I show up to do work… I get a lot done. I have developed quite a bit of pride in how effectively I can get work done over a broad swath of types of work. I’m not a one trick pony.

My family wanted me to perceive myself as stupid but all of the GATE testing when I was a kid and grown ups going “Holy crap this kid is SMART” means that their attempts to make me think I was stupid just kind of failed. I’m brilliant and I’m comfortable with acknowledging that. The rate at which I read complicated non-fiction books helps me not ever succumb to the belief that I might be stupid. But I have to keep working consciously on expanding what I know or I would start chanting this at myself. I view smart as something that has to be constantly worked on or it doesn’t count.

I could go through a long list of specifically triggering things I’ve worked on, but the problem that keeps coming up and I just can’t fucking deal with it in a rational way… is what I was born to be.

Let me explain. My father raped my mother when she knew she was fertile and she didn’t want to have more kids. He wanted to make another kid to rape. He was already raping the children they had. Like a true pedophile, gender wasn’t that important to my father.

So from when I was a tiny baby the story I was told about my existence is that I was made so that men would have more holes to use and how I felt about that really didn’t matter.

This is the problem I keep coming back to. This is the core belief I have not been able to shake or move or change in years of trying. This is what I am here for. It doesn’t really matter if it feels good to me or if I like it or if I want it. That’s why I am here. It is literally why I was made.

I don’t know how to alter these wires in my brain so that I stop giving a shit what my father’s intentions were and start feeling like I get to define what I am here for.

This piece is just sticky as hell and I have not figured out how to change it. This is what brings me to my knees over and over sobbing and feeling like I need to die to get away from the terrible burden of being responsible for taking more and more and more pain inside my body.

Even when my partners (my husband most of all) have tried to figure out how to fuck me without hurting me we always run up against this strong limitation that I can’t really talk in the moment about sex hurting my cunt. I dissociate away from that so fast I am literally physically incapable of talking when it happens. Even though I’ve done decades of work on trying to fix this.

I’ve fixed a lot of pieces of this. But this spot still persists and I have not yet figured out how to rewire this in my brain.

I can write about it when it’s not happening. I can barely speak out loud about this topic without melting down into tears or screaming swear words like FUCK YOU FOR HURTING ME. Which is not all that productive.

I continue to be impressed with my husband’s persistence in wanting to help me deal with my laundry list of problems.

I sabotage efforts to make sex not hurt me. Because I have this internal motivation that I have to be providing a lot of sex, even if it is damaging me and I have to initiate even when I’m in pain and….

I know I create a lot of this problem with my utter unwillingness to act like pain in my cunt is worthy of acknowledgment in the moment. There were a few times when I was very young when I mentioned that it hurt to partners and the response was a solid wall of “So?” and I just completely lost the ability.

The kinds of 25 year olds who like to fuck 12 year olds really don’t care.

This internal belief, that fucking is literally why I exist, is why I push so hard for sex with so many people. I have an internal programming that dictates that I must ask for sex. Because this is why I exist. To give this experience to people who want it.

This has gotten more complicated as my partner has gone through a shift from actively wanting polyamory when we met to very actively wanting mainly monogamy with very rare occasions of group sex.

Fitting into the expectations that are currently held for me takes a lot of work. I’ve adapted as best I can. It’s not always easy. But the good I get from being part of this family is so breathtaking. I get to belong somewhere. People care when I’m crying. People care about me in this house. I am important to them. It’s worth a lot of pain and suffering to try and deal with more layers of my mental illness to try and stay here for more of this.

Recently I went through a multiple month period where I genuinely didn’t want to die. That is the longest I can remember feeling like that in my entire life. I have always wanted to die. That has been the drumbeat chasing me through life for just about 30 years now. “I should die because this hurts too fucking much.” I want more of the not-wanting-to-die feeling. And I have to change this belief to get there.

This is tricky because I partially married my husband because he has the highest sex drive of anyone I ever seriously dated. He’s been the only one who wanted to keep up with what I wanted to initiate.

But a lot of what I initiate hurts me. And then there are waves of consequences.

This is so unfair.

It is desperately unfair to my husband and frankly it isn’t fucking fair to me either. It is fucking shitty being in my head and in my body. It isn’t anyone’s fault at this point that it sucks so much to be inside of me… but it’s a fact.

One of my buddies idly mused that I get a lot of self esteem from my interactions with my children.

Children are the only people I know how to interact with without feeling like I am failing in not offering sex. That’s the only time I feel like it is completely appropriate for me to not be offering sex. It’s safe in a way nothing and no adult ever is.

I don’t ask everyone for sex all the time for a variety of reasons (I’m pretty sure you don’t want to be asked, I’m pretty sure my husband would flip out, etc) but I have had to grow up and work on my boundaries to get to this point. It took a fair bit of maturing before I understood that my father was lying and not everyone wanted that from me.

Thanks to all the folks who have skillfully and tactfully turned me down over the years. I’m glad you didn’t follow that up with refusing to know me because I was so rude/tactless/gross/insert word of choice.

I’ve tried to grow up as fast as I have been able. I’m a lot closer to my goal of “grown upness” than I actually believed I would make it to… but I’m not there yet. I’m hoping I manage around the time my 9 year old makes it to adulthood.

What am I here for?

That’s this huge existential question, right? I’m super partial to the work of Viktor Frankl, a psychotherapist who went through the Holocaust. He wrote the book Man’s Search For Meaning. His general hypothesis is that folks can survive any horror in life if they have something they believe in and it doesn’t matter what it is. It could be “I want to see my wife/husband again”. That kind of belief is enough. If you believe that your love for someone else is your reason for continuing to be alive then you can make it enough to see you through anything.

I can’t control why I was made. I can’t control the intentions behind my makers.

But why do I stay alive?

Maybe that needs to be the focus of the next stage of work. I can’t change what I was made for or whether I did my best to live up to that for the first few decades of my life.

But why now?

I feel really guilty that a lot of why I’m staying alive at this point is a science experiment. Will I be a good enough mother that my children will want to know me when they are adults? Am I capable of treating them in a way that will cause them to want to know me?

I feel guilty about this because I feel like I “should” pick something that is more oriented towards my husband and… that’s different. It’s really complicated that I already feel like I have failed at being a good wife and I feel like there is no walking back from that. He’s not leaving because I’m better than nothing but I will never make it to good. I can’t hang my hat on that in this life.

Ok, so “I am bad” and “I am a monster” are strongly tied in with what is causing me these eternal problems.

It is hard because my husband is having a hard time with how much the shift into being a mother has derailed a lot of the hypersexuality and a lot of my strong need to be hit so much. I’m boring now.

I feel like I am bad for even trying to work towards a future where my cunt will hurt less because that will mean I am not meeting his expectations for how often he wants to get laid.

And the cycle continues.

Reinventing yourself

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People who have known me since I was a kid tell me that I don’t seem like the same person any more; I have changed so much. I changed a lot in my time in the scene, then being a teacher was a huge shift, being a parent has kind of forced me to complete a lot of huge seismic level differences in my life.

For the first few years I had kids I went through a Madonna/whore problem where my body stopped wanting sex or bdsm. It was the way that my brain managed to pick a path through my personal history of having no healthy boundaries around sex. It wasn’t a healthy response because it was bad for my marriage.

But I grew up watching all of the adults in my family have sex. I needed to have some kind of shift in my brain that ensured that my children would not see me have sex. My kids have still never walked in on me having sex and I’ve been doing this gig almost a decade. It is a huge accomplishment for someone with my background.

I think that my libido partially shut off because that was a lot of what I saw happen to my mom’s life. She had a few boyfriends (all of whom I saw her have sex with) and she realized that I was acting out a WHOLE LOT and she… shut it down and to the best of my knowledge has never had sex again. I think she stopped when I was around 10. That was a quarter of a century ago. I’m pretty sure my mom has been celibate because she decided she didn’t know how to have a healthy sex life.

She might be right. She picked some awful people.

I feel this kind of long drawn out pleasure and shock that the vast majority of people I slept with are really awesome people and they are still all invited to my house if I have a Christmas party. Only a few people have fallen off the list because mostly… gosh I picked good people.

I read in a book about postpartum recovery that it takes a body 4 years to fully reset after having a baby. My libido came back like a sledge hammer about 5 years after having kids. 4-5 years is a natural child spacing in nomadic societies so it isn’t that shocking that my body picked that window for saying, “Moar seks please.”

It’s been complicated since then. My poor husband has adjusted from the extreme hypersexuality I experienced when we first got married and before our marriage to me shutting down completely to me being a bitch and fucking lots of people as my libido exploded and… now I’m pregnant again.

What is going to happen next?

I don’t know but healthier sex has to be part of this experience.

It is complicated for a masochist to stop something because it hurts. But there are kinds of pain that are positive/emotionally expressive for me and there are kinds of pain where I shut down my brain and go to a bad place. There are kinds of pain that increase my general feeling that I should die because I have no other escape from pain in this lifetime.

My kids and my husband tell me all the time that they want me to live for A VERY LONG TIME and I’ve tried to change how I live to reflect the fact that they don’t want me to die young.

I have to figure out how to convince my body that I can be in less pain. (Fibromyalgia makes this super complicated.) I have to figure out how to stop shutting down my self-protection mechanisms during sex. Because the specific pain I have during vaginal sex sometimes (it’s not all the time) is a problem. It is directly tied into the abuse from my father. It is a mainline to my internal reaction that I was born from rape; I was born to be raped; that is all I should deserve to expect until I die.

I have changed so much about my destiny. I didn’t think I would ever have a forever home. I didn’t think I would ever be part of a family.

I have a really cool family. I mean, we are all flaming weirdos… but we like each other a lot and we spend a lot of time together and it is all so intensely positive…

I didn’t think someone like me would ever get this far, let me tell you. But I did it.

My current shrink is probably the most bdsm aware/positive shrink I’ve ever seen. They suggested that I’m going to have to face my dissociation head on and in their opinion I am going to have to do it within the structure of my M/s relationship.

Now that’s some awesome feedback to get from a shrink. I’ve never had a shrink talk so specifically about the difference between therapy and therapeutic and bdsm can be so very therapeutic…

I know. I used to not be able to set any boundaries at all with my body. Bdsm taught me how. My beautiful friends and play partners taught me how. Very therapeutic.

It is complicated on so many because having my husband hit me a lot is different from having my lovely friends hit me a lot. My husband is the only person on this god-forsaken planet who has given me any real safety. It’s complicated when he hits me. It isn’t that I never like it. It’s that there are so many layers of psychological events that happen around the physical events that… it’s hard to manage that and bounce back into my life.

My life is very constrained. I have to “behave” and project a kind of behavior that is very hard for me. I believe that children learn primarily through modeling and if I want to show my kids making good choices I have to make good choices and I’m really more inclined towards being a fuck up and doing everything wrong.

But the children. Sigh.

My kids are the reason I get up in the morning. My kids are the reason I put breathtaking amounts of effort into being a healthier person. My kids are the reason I’m trying to learn how to stop hurting myself so that I can handle being alive long enough to watch them grow up.

I haven’t cut myself in over half a decade. I have burned myself in longer than that. I haven’t beat my head on concrete in a bit longer than that. I have made a lot of progress on my self mutilation.

I really want to know what happens to my kids. I think they are so neat. I feel so lucky that I get to have another child. These people are the best people in my life. I wake up and go to sleep seeing their smiling faces.

I did not believe that my children would like me. I expected to be the recipient of contempt and apathy. Instead my children adore me like I adore them. It feels like magic.

Is it magical enough to propel me through figuring out how to stop allowing more pain into my body that damages me?

What does being kinky mean anyway?

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I feel like I’m in such a weird place in my body and in my mind. Yes, pregnancy is weird… but this predated the pregnancy. This got started over a year ago.

I still like the idea of being tied up and hit. When it happened last year I still liked the reality of it. But this is compounded by the fact that I don’t have a lot of childcare and when I did… it was not really during hours that were conducive to kinky play. I know that most of my friends have had a “Whoops the kids walked in during sex” story but I don’t. My sex life is off. fucking. screen. My children do not walk in on us having sex. And I don’t think they ever will. I have sturdy locks all the fuck over my house to prevent such a mishap.

Because given my background having my children SEE me have sex is a major violation and one I won’t be able to shake off.

If I could forget the sight of my mother and my sister fucking people maybe it would be different. My children will not learn from me.

Things with Noah are complicated for a lot of reasons. I have a strong sense of debt. Noah didn’t rescue me from the streets, I did that for myself thank you very much, but he did rescue me from being alone and that’s a big damn deal. Noah gave me a forever home that he’s serious about. If we divorced he would probably want me to have the house and he would leave. I’m a stubborn piece of shit and I wouldn’t accept but that’s different. Noah gave me a family. He didn’t share his family I’m still basically a non-person there (except with his grandmother and his aunties–I am glad for those women) but he gave me children. He helped me create a family where we both get to belong.

I owe Noah a lot. Noah has cared for me through several periods of time when I was all but nonfunctional. He feeds me. He makes sure I take my meds. He asks after my appointments and reminds me to go. When I express my overwhelming shame at stealing so many resources for my health he tells me over and over that keeping me alive and healthy is the point of us having money.

And the primary thing Noah wants from me as a demonstration of love is physical contact. Specifically, sex. The talking is awesome. The snuggling is great. He really gets a lot out of the sex.

My body is complicated though. I arrived at this marriage with sexual dysfunction in place. I arrived in his life with scar tissue and pain through my nether region. It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t cause any of the damage. But it’s there and I have to cope with it.

In my brain I want to be available for sex at any moment because that would be hot and fun for him and it would make him feel really loved. I tried to meet that standard for years. I hurt myself in the process and I damaged the trust in my marriage.

It isn’t Noah’s fault that I did that. He was negotiating in good faith. I was doing the best I could and I fucked up.

The thing is… I’ve been hurting myself for almost 30 years. This was just the latest incarnation and in some fucked up ways it was a healthier way of hurting myself than most I have tried. I still need to change it. But I also need to acknowledge that I am not as pathetic and back sliding as I feel.

This is complicated.

I feel like I don’t count as a kinky person anymore because in my mind kink is associated with exhibitionism and public play. The fact that I call my husband Daddy when he’s fucking me is just kind of meh, whatever. Basically vanilla people do that too.

cough

I may have some weird assumptions here and there.

It doesn’t help that when I got into the scene there was a lot of nasty back and forth in email lists about how having a strong focus on sex instead of just the SM part of bdsm meant you weren’t really kinky. And I like fucking lots of people so I’m more of a swinger, right? Only at swinger parties I have to ask humbly for exceptions to the rules because I really want to make this person cry while I’m sucking his dick.

Ok I didn’t actually make him cry. He’s really tough. But he made lovely noises.

I don’t feel like I fit in a community. I’m too sexual to feel properly “kinky” and I’m too kinky for most of the sex-only spaces.

And it doesn’t help that my behavior in private is way more timid and unwilling to set boundaries than I am in public. In public I am responding to the crowd and crowds take rock solid boundaries. I have to protect myself. At home…. I don’t want to. I don’t want to say no. I don’t want to set limits.

Which is incredibly fucking stupid and creates problems all over the place. I know.

Playing at home is complicated because the kids are always god damn here and I don’t want them hearing or seeing anything. Ever. Period.

It isn’t that I will never be “out” with my children. It’s that my sex life will always be off stage and kind of a mystery. I’ll hint. I’ll answer some questions in broad ways. That’s it. I will never discuss my kinks with my children. They know I have not been monogamous all my life. They know I went out with a lot of people before I got married (How are you supposed to know if someone is right for you without trying out lots and lots and lots of wrong people first?!) and they know I’ve been on dates since getting married.

I think that’s plenty.

I’m ok with talking to my kids about sex in the abstract or in ways that will increase their future safety… they don’t need to learn how to have sex from me. My way is kinda fucked up. Like at one point my daughter asked if there is one kind of sex (or something very like that question) and I said, “Oh no! There are lots of kinds of sex. There’s manual sex (with fingers/hands); there’s oral sex (that involves a mouth and a set of genitals); there’s anal sex (playing with a butt–can be with fingers or a penis); and vaginal sex (can be with a penis or with toys).”

My daughter’s response was to raise her eyebrows and kind of say “hunh.” We didn’t keep talking after that. It wasn’t a conversation that needed a lot of in depth follow up at that point.

I just will never have a child who is talked into anal sex because it “doesn’t count”. What bullshit. Also: a huge swath of teenage girls these days are being pressured into oral sex because it “doesn’t count” and it’s a way to keep from having “more happen” and oh hell no.

My children will have language about sex and about their body. They will know what they are saying yes to and what they are saying no to. And I’m pretty damn sure my kids are growing up with the idea that sex is a super fun thing to do when you are ready and with the right person(s) but until you are ready it’s a problem.

And that all feels weirdly tied up in my kinky. Because I still struggle to set the boundaries I want them to have. I still struggle to say out loud “I want _____.” I can ask for abasing things very easily. Not affirming things.

I still struggle with the idea that sex is supposed to feel good for me. When the first several decades of your sex life is incredibly painful… that’s a hard thing to rewire in your body. It is hard to change my expectation.

What does being kinky mean?

I think it is funny that my current M/s contract has been going on for 9 months and I still don’t think I’m that kinky. Even though I have rules around my body and my sexuality that I follow.

WHAT IS BEING KINKY?

In flux x-post

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I feel like my periods of equilibrium are short and not satisfying. My life has been in limbo for pretty much all of my life. I’m always transitioning. I was transitioning from “done breeding” into “more exciting” and then that got… interrupted. Instead I’m back to breeding.

If only I didn’t want more children so much that I cry with every period.

I miss being exciting. Being a wife and a mother doesn’t feel exciting. Being sadistic and masochistic and slutty feels exciting.

But I want these children so much that I deal with not feeling exciting. I want these children so much that I will defer most dreams. I will put off most goals. I want these children so much it physically aches.

I thought that having two kids might scratch the itch. No. I want more. I want more kids so much I feel like I can barely cope with the urge. I feel no end of gratitude that my partner changed his mind about two and done.

But I’m struggling with feeling like so much of me is shoved into a box in the closet indefinitely. It’s like those other parts of me don’t exist.

I am sadistic. I am masochistic. I am submissive.

How much of me are these things?

Not as much as being a wife and a mother. No matter how much I resent the fuck out of mostly being a wife and mother.

I want to be something different. But instead I’m typical. I’m a wife and mother.

I really want to be a badass motherfucker. Instead I’m a wife and mother.

How do we decide who we get to be? What we are? What makes us?

I don’t know. But I struggle.

My partner has gone from saying “One kid… maybe two” to saying “As many as we can” given the constraints of our life/age/health. That means we will have three or four. He’s open to five. The reality of my age is that probably won’t happen.

I feel like there is something I have to give to these children. Something that is so important that it is more important than fun or excitement or personal projects.

I need to have these children to repair the damage I feel inside me.

I don’t know how to get over grieving that I didn’t get to grow up in a family. I didn’t really get to have a mother or a father. So instead I give to my children. That is my only route to having a family. Because I feel like I am dying from lack of care and love that I should have gotten from a parent.

Instead I have children who shine with love, attention, and good health. Because I wither on the vine because I still miss my mother. I still wish someone wanted to mother me. But no one does. That door is closed. I get to give, not receive.

Life works that way, sometimes.

Gratitude bandwagon

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Today I am grateful for being the mom. I’m not every day so I thought I would note it today. (full disclosure: I am always grateful for my kids, but being the mom sucks rocks a lot of days.). Last night Shanna asked to sleep next to me. She doesn’t cosleep anymore so we had to maneuver a bit. Some time in the middle of the night she woke up, sat up just long enough to look for me then she threw herself across my chest to snuggle. She’s a cuddly kid in general but that instinctive “where is my mommy” in the middle of the night feels different. That is primal. I am the one she wants and needs and loves the most in the world.

Calli has been resisting napping alone. She wants to be on my lap. I haven’t been willing to give her this for most of her life but I’m doing it on vacation. Sometimes she wakes up just a little and starts to panic, then she notices that she is on me and her whole body relaxes. Oh Mommy.

This is why I had children. I wanted this. I want this so much that I ache with it. And I have it. It’s a gift. I constantly feel like I don’t deserve these amazing kids, but they think I am perfect. I am so grateful that I get to be Mommy.

Good parenting.

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I asked on MDC what makes good parents and someone turned around and asked me if I would like to have me as a parent. Yes. I really would. I would so love a mom like me. I am empathetic, strong, dependable, mostly consistent with my behavior even though my moods are unpredictable, I am fun! I like to play. I like doing all kinds of neat things and I think, “Why not?” is a great answer to questions like, “Can I cover my entire body in finger paint?” I am fiercely protective. I fight through my touch issues to be incredibly snuggly with my girls. I think that everyone needs to scream sometimes–just not in the house. I think that everyone has bad days and they do not in any way reflect your value as a person. I am loyal. I am honest. I am kind. I am considerate. Loving! So! So! Loving. I pay so much attention to my kids. As people. I like to stare at them.

So it seems that I am a great supporting character. (Like I was a good secondary.) I’m not that great at being the main character. Maybe I should just like me more. Maybe then I would do better at being the important one in my life.

Also, really thrilled about the push to recognize Shanna’s behavior as Not About Me. We’ve had a really great day and a lot of it is when she starts pushing on something I am stopping to think how it relates to her and her needs instead of mine. *That’s* good parenting. 😛 Thanks for telling me to do it, blacksheep.

I think I needed that.

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Today my therapist laughed at me. At some point we worked our way around to how to continue processing abuse stuff in a limited way in that little box over there in the corner so that there isn’t ‘leakage’ into the rest of my life. These are important things to consider when planning how to end the cycle of abuse or build a nuclear reactor plant. Just sayin’. I came around to the idea of a support group. Yes! That is what I need! A support group for mothers with mental illness or mothers who are survivors of abuse. Yes! Because then I can have people who are in the same place as me who can give me advice because I suck and I’m not figuring it all out. She almost fell out of her chair laughing. Apparently she thinks they don’t have much to teach me. We actually spent the rest of our time together talking about a workshop she has been dying to lead…and she has been trying to figure out how to talk to me about it. Because she thinks I have a lot to teach about doing this. She views my recent blip as as really… nothing to write home about when dealing with mothers who were victimized. No lines have been crossed. No one has been harmed. No actual damage has been perpetrated. Ok, my tone of voice sucks sometimes. Why am I crucifying myself? We spent a lot of time talking about victim/rescuer judge/(can’t think of the word but you catch my point). It was really neat. It was interesting having her point out on this little graph how I was moving around in my relationship with Shanna. We talked about specifics of how to step out of it and she said that really the only thing she would have suggested is what I started doing yesterday. It was very validating. She more or less gave me a check list of things to think about when considering parenting stuff and that was extremely useful. It was also nice to be reminded that as a parent it really and truly isn’t my job to ensure that my kids like me. Making them happy at all costs is really not the right road to a happy adulthood because they will be total assholes. But I digress. 🙂

I’m always going to be kind of messy (like emotionally and psychically) and weird. But that’s ok. So is everyone else if I look at them closely enough. I am not a bad person. I want to stop treating myself like I am. No matter how much I want to believe that I am a monster in the making, I’m really not. I’m not abusing my kids. I’m not hurting them. I’m loving on them and giving them lots of attention and affection and support. Why do I only see the 4 seconds I yell and decide that is the only important 4 seconds of the day? It’s really not. All the time I spend patiently showing Shanna every step of ‘how to do things right’ even when it is challenging to let her do it. For every time I say, “Man you’ve been working on that! You couldn’t do that a week ago. I wonder what you will be able to do next week.” I see her. I love her. I don’t need to buy her love. I make a vow today, I will stop acting like I have to buy my daughter’s love. That course of action will result in both of us losing.

Maybe I should read parenting books more often

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So I’m picking around Becoming The Parent You Want To Be. I’ve been kind of poking at it intermittently for years. It is interesting to have it reaffirmed that no really, it’s ok for my kid to be kind of weird and different from other people. If she’s happy, secure, and prepared for success in life there isn’t a thing wrong with being weird. Maybe I should stop listening to other peoples parenting advice.

How ironic that I want a parenting advice book to tell me to stop taking advice. Ha. I’m a moron.

More kid musing

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It’s kind of weird writing this stuff here because the internet is forever. How will my kids feel about so many random people being able to find so much about them? Kind of an interesting thing to think about. But, here’s more anyway. 🙂

I think that nursing is a skill and Shanna was good at it and Calli is kind of awful. Seeing as I just read a chunk of The Birth Order Book yesterday that’s kind of funny. Apparently it is completely standard for second children to go the exact opposite of the older child. Fair enough. Calli seems to have a really hard time regulating my milk flow. She has one nursing speed: full bore. (Is that the right spelling? bore? boar? Darn Noah for not being awake yet!) This means she coughs and chokes and sputters. Still. She’s six months old. She should bloody well have figured out this nursing thing by now. (said lightheartedly) She also yanks really hard as she whips her head around. She can’t lie still on my lap. At all. Ever. She is either waving her arms or her legs or rolling her head back and forth or tapping her foot or… On my best days I think this is the coolest thing in the world. She has so much energy to burn it isn’t funny. I think that is a positive thing. On the worst days I can’t stand having her on me to nurse and I contemplate supplementing with formula. This thought kind of horrifies the lactivist in me. :-\ I’m actually nervous about giving her a bottle though. Yes I know I could pump, but I kind of suspect she would love switching to a low flow bottle and never nursing again. I don’t think I am up for committing to another couple of years exclusively pumping. That is my nightmare. It’s complicated. So far I am just working constantly on nursing manners. I believe in letting kids nurse full term.

Shanna is being restricted to one nursing a day because she doesn’t seem to be able to stop biting. I think her mouth has changed and biologically she’s ready to be done. Emotionally she totally isn’t. *sigh* It’s hard because nursing is her biggest comfort in case of something awful happening or if she is feeling particularly insecure but it wicked hurts and puts me in a horrible mood. :-\ Not a great plan then. I feel like completely weaning at this time would be a bit much for her. She’s had enough adjustments lately–new bed in a new bedroom (alone by herself for the first time in her life), potty training, new sister, extra vaccines lately because of the travel, I’ve been having a hard time all on my own and she notices. I seem to have given up on complete sentences. Interesting. So I feel like I’m trying to give Shanna a bit longer before I force weaning. We are talking about it and leading up to it. I think her birthday will be the cut off. Eek. Poor baby girl. 🙁

And I really don’t have time for more. ack

And the good moments

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So between first nap and second nap we played together. First we played with legos in the house then we spend almost an hour in the back yard mostly playing in the sand box. The very best moment was when Shanna and I were digging together and singing songs about how awesome we all are and Calli was leaning over from her perch on my lap, laughing. It was beautiful. And later Shanna was telling me some very silly story about the scary cat running through our yard and I was holding Calli above my head and looking at her. Then I remember why I chose this life.

Where is the line where the good outweighs the bad or vice versa? I’m not sure I know. But I’m having more fun than not because the good moments are really beautiful.

Bad moment

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Calli is sobbing her heart out on my back. She wants to be lying on my lap nursing on the couch. I just can’t do that anymore. I did that through Shanna’s babyhood and right now that will be the straw that breaks the camels back. I just cannot endure that again. So Calli cries. Crying is even an inadequate word for what she is doing. She is screaming and flailing and pounding on me. She is having a tantrum. It’s not that she is starving because she doesn’t want to nurse in any other position. She just wants to comfort nurse to sleep. Trapping me. And I just can’t do it anymore. Not with Shanna whining at me all.day.long. for food. And sometimes as I pace the house I cry. Because how could I have wanted this to be my life.

More parenting issues

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I think it is kind of funny that most of my parenting issues involve conflict with other parents, not problems with my kids. I can’t post about them on MDC though because the women I hang out with are on it. And apparently it is actually against the User Agreement to post about issues with other members. So yeah. Y’all get to hear about it. 🙂

Disclaimers! I like the kid in question a lot. He is a wonderful little snuggle bug and I adore him. I like the mom in question a lot. She is a great match for a lot of the things I miss so much about Sarah (although dear God is she *not* Sarah… some big differences).

So one of the little darlings in our play group is ~15 months. We have been hanging out with him for almost a year. He is now getting to the walking and talking stage. …And the hitting stage. And thus the difficulty. And he’s a biter. He has both bitten and hit Shanna in the face. Repeatedly. Now, to be clear, it’s not like I think his mother should beat him or anything, but she’s not reacting. She says, “Ohhhh [first name]” and that’s it. She doesn’t walk up to him to redirect. She doesn’t talk to him about his behavior being unacceptable. She just kind of lets it slide. I kind of have a problem with this approach seeing as he might be 16 months younger than Shanna but he outweighs her. He is a *very* sturdy child. When he hits it *hurts*. I know. He’s walloped me and I was shocked by how much it hurt. And yesterday he clocked Shanna in the face while simultaneously screaming, “No no no” because he didn’t want her to move the toy they were both playing with. I think once you get to the point where you are actively saying that you don’t like someone else’s behavior you can understand the request to not hit. You may not follow it… but I think he would understand redirection. And the mama isn’t giving him any.

So I’m not sure what to do. She’s not doing the parenting here and my kid is suffering. I’m not sure what to do. I’m about 10% tempted to tell Shanna to knock his block off if his mother allows him to hit Shanna. But uhm, yeah. That’s not actually a great plan. He needs help with his behavior and in the moment I am usually caring for a sobbing Shanna and I feel like it shouldn’t exactly be my responsibility to talk to him about his hitting. However she isn’t doing it. How horribly inappropriate would it be for me to start talking to him/working with him on the hitting? I feel like since she isn’t willing to shadow him I need to start. He really needs more input than he’s getting from her about his behavior. One more time! I don’t think he’s a bad kid! He’s 15 months old and he’s got poor impulse control. I like his mom too! But she’s… not as instructive as I would prefer for the continued health of my kid, ya know?

As per the norm when asking for advice on the internet I am not explaining every single thing from the situation. Like, I suspect that part of the reason she is so laissez faire is because she had a very hard road to have him. Many years of fertility treatment and a previous abortion at 20 weeks because the baby wouldn’t have been able to survive anyway. Hard hard road to parenthood. I get that she is just grateful to have him. Complicated.

{milestones} and those other things

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I haven’t seriously babbled about my kids in a while! Such a tragedy. *cough*

Calli is awesome! But she’s awesome in that way that babies are awesome so it’s pretty generic. I think she’s an easy sleeper (certainly compared to Shanna) so that makes things easier. She is trying really hard to get more clingy and I am resisting with every fiber of my being. I was astounded throughout Shanna’s infancy that I didn’t really hit ‘touched out’. I now live in Touched Out. I would kind of like to have an asbestos suit so that no one gets too close to my skin. I do carry Calli around but when she has the days where she starts fussing the minute I lay her down for a nap I end up having a stern conversation with her then holding her hand while she fusses for a while. I’m still opposed to “Cry it Out” but I am much more ok with fuss-it-out-while-I’m-holding-your-hand. I just cannot do the 24/7 in contact with the newborn thing this time. I will lose my mind. But she eats a lot and she’s vigorous and very interested in the world around her. Since the most recent pediatrician visit (dear god do we need a new one) I am aware that she is a full pound less than Shanna was at this age and almost an inch shorter. This child will not be larger than average. Apparently she is right on the 50% line for height and weight. So in fact she is… dead average. 🙂 Despite the ped telling me to get ready to start her on iron fortified rice cereal, I don’t get the impression she is going to be the most food-ready kid at 6 months. It’s kind of weird how different she is from Shanna. 🙂 She’s rolling over, but only on soft surfaces. The floor is still too hard. The couch or the bed is super easy. Sitting up this morning was surprising. I set her down and expected her to immediately collapse but she didn’t. Yay! She sat up for quite a while as I tended to Shanna.

Shanna continues to develop at an amazing (to me) pace. I don’t have much experience with other kids so it’s kind of weird to have an intellectual understanding about child development and them come against an actual kid who isn’t following all the normal curves perfectly. I was looking at the milestone chart this morning (someone asked me when sitting up was normal… I don’t know…) and I looked at the bits for Shanna. Holy Milestones she is asynchronous. The average kid her age is mastering their second adjective?! Oh. She’s speaking in 10+ word sentences using several $2 words at a go. Her favorite right now is ‘diatomaceous earth’ because we have been using it to deal with our ant problem. If you have ever heard the word before you can understand her. If you’ve never heard of the stuff she sounds kind of muddled. 🙂 I’m pretty impressed though. She is also being increasingly helpful in the kitchen. Like this morning she helped with a large portion of breakfast. She scooped out the granola, helped cut up the apples (her little kid knife did a better job than I expected), and she helped pour out the yogurt. Yay! Simple, but she’s trying so hard. She can also almost entirely make a pbj by herself. By 3 she will be able to make herself simple meals. I’m thrilled. But her physical development is… spotty. She’s a total klutz. And she also shows very little inclinations towards artistic stuff. I’m trying pretty hard to provide access to such things, but it’s not my thing… so I kind of suck at helping her. I’ll keep trying and she’ll keep doing her thing. I don’t actually mind that she would rather spend 30 minutes cutting up a piece of paper than color. 🙂 Oh! And she’s making more progress towards potty training. At this point my approach is to just leave her alone. When she makes comments complaining about diaper changes I tell her that she can avoid them by using the potty and she often asks for panties instead of a diaper. We aren’t having many accidents in panties because when she isn’t in the mood for the potty she asks for a diaper. Although I do give her candy for using the potty. 😛 I am trying to be mellow though.

Balancing the two of them is… interesting. Luckily they are both easy going and mellow so they wait their turn extremely well. It helps if I keep on a constant stream of, “I can see that you really need me to ‘x’ but right now I am doing ‘y’ for your sister. I know it is hard to wait, but please try to be patient for another ‘z’ minutes.” If I can keep that up in a patient, kind voice waiting up to 15 minutes is not a big stretch. 30 minutes can be very hard for both of them. Which uhm… is ok. They’re kind of young. 🙂

I feel like we have hit the ‘terrible twos’ and yet… if this is the worst I see we’re doing GREAT! Shanna doesn’t ‘tantrum’ much at all but she does cry a lot. She has a lot of really intense feelings and it’s hard for her to figure out what to do with them. I feel like as long as she is well rested and not hungry she does better than a lot of adults with her strong feelings. It’s kind of hard to console her if she is hungry or tired though. It gets hard. The crying sound makes me feel homicidal.

Because I’m exactly this kind of full disclosure person… I’ve lost it a couple of times. 🙁 When we were driving to Disneyland and she was really really sick of the car she started kicking the drivers seat on purpose pretty hard. I reached back and hit her feet. 🙁 I know it wasn’t the right decision and we’ve talked about it. She’s pretty happy to lecture me for a long time about how hitting is wrong and I shouldn’t do it so she enjoyed the hell out of that conversation. (so my daughter) I’ve smacked her hands a couple of times purely as a reflex when she is doing something that makes me twitch. Every time I do she begins her lecture again about how hitting is wrong. She tells me to apologize and I do. She cries and we cuddle and kiss and then feel ok again. I am trying really hard to increase my patience level but it’s hard. This is part of that ‘there are no perfect parents’ thing. I try to not spend much time feeling bad but instead put my energy towards doing better next time. It’s hard to not get into negative self-talk. Given how much stress these kids add to my life (it’s incredible in a kind of scary way) I’m aware that I am actually doing phenomenally well. It helps that I now self-medicate. The next step is to increase my exercise because that will help a lot. I informed Noah that I was going to the gym today. Period. He’s supportive. 🙂

Guess I’m willing to leave this kid before 6 months. Ha.

New and Improved Parenting! Now with Hygiene!!

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Ok, so it’s all lame and silly and stuff but I feel kind of absurdly proud that I took a bath today with both girls and all three of us got scrubbed from head to toe. I think I feel as proud as I do because no one ended up crying. Like, “Holy Shit. I’ve arrived. I’m an honest-to-Gawd parent with skillz.”

And then I put Calli in a back carry by myself and did chores. Seriously. This is what I am now proud of. Boy howdy is life different than it used to be. And I like it.

Questionable scheduling

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We have a doctors appointment this morning. By ‘we’ I mean both girls. Shanna is just getting a shot (Polio) and Calli is getting a well baby check and a shot (DTaP). It didn’t occur to me until last night that I am a complete fucking moron for scheduling shots for both of them in one day by myself. Ugh. I think it didn’t occur to me until last night because originally our plan had been to follow Shanna’s path and not vaccinate Calli until she was older. But you see… we are having this epidemic… Damnit! I have always said that if factors were different in Shanna’s life we would have made different vaccine choices. Well, things are different for Calli and we are going to make different choices. We spend a lot of time with the anti-vax crowd and that just wasn’t true when Shanna was little. I’m not risking many months of misery for my tiny little baby. To be clear here–I think Calli’s chance of dying of Pertussis is 0 with or without the vaccine. But I feel like it would be inhumane to risk her suffering for months. There were 257 new cases in the state in the last week and 20 of them were in my county. That’s still not that high… but it’s high enough for me to pay attention to the fact that I go out constantly with her and she doesn’t exactly have a highly developed immune system.

As I’m worrying about it this morning Shanna is narrating to her doll what the process of getting a shot is like. It’s so interesting listening to her thought processes about things. I feel blessed by how verbal she is because I get to know what she is thinking. It’s amazing seeing how much blind faith she has in me and in the things I tell her. If I tell her that this shot is necessary to keep her healthy she believes me. She will pass that on to whomever she talks to as if it the gospel truth. It’s humbling. I feel like I have to try extra hard to have integrity in my words because to her there is no one in the world who has more authority than me. Anything and everything I do is what I am supposed to do. Scary. That’s a lot of pressure. I need to get a handle on my frustration with life because I don’t want to model this kind of behavior. Not to someone who trusts me so much.

This parenting gig is intense. Sometimes I feel so strongly about my kids that I feel like I am going to choke on the feelings. It’s amazing.

Parenting interactions

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So I’ve been hanging out with these lovely ladies for a while now. I like them. I like their kids. I like the overall dynamic quite a bit. Yesterday there was an interaction where one of the moms yelled at Shanna for watching her change her son’s diaper. “This is not a spectator sport!” This wouldn’t have bugged me much except all of the moms in the room were watching and discussing the horrible sores on the little boy’s bottom and possible treatments and what could be causing them… so all the kids were looking too. It felt like she was singling Shanna out in a way that wasn’t cool. So I felt fussy at the time and we left soon after. It was late in the day and all the kids were getting cranky anyway so the timing was an incidental as anything else.

Me being me, I called the mom last night to talk about it. I was pretty polite but I said I felt like she was picking on Shanna and I’m not ok with that. We discussed that her real problem is that Shanna was leaning on her while she was watching and this woman is also fussy about her personal space bubble. I’m not one to complain about having that kind of issue. 😀 I told her that I am completely ok with her defending her personal space, but please try to remember that even though Shanna talks like a five year old she’s only two. Give her a break and please try to be a bit kinder and more direct. If you want her to not lean on you, say that. Don’t yell at her for doing what every single other person in the room is doing. She took it well and we had a pleasant rest of the conversation. I thought that was all fine and dandy.

I have since had email conversations with the other moms in the group because they are all upset with how that mom treats Shanna. They think this mom picks on Shanna all the time and is constantly yelling at her and treating her differently. I find it kind of interesting that a)they are as upset as they are b) that they are so much more sensitive to the behavior and c)that they are bringing it up kind of as behind-her-back gossip. I think the mother in question has a sharper tone of voice than the rest of us and that she does correct Shanna more than the other boys… but that’s because she interacts more with Shanna. This mom just doesn’t interact with the other boys in the group almost at all. I suspect the boys avoid her because of her tone of voice, actually. Shanna constantly crawls all over her and seems to love her so I’m not worried about it.

It’s interesting to me how things are working out with this group. It’s been a long time since I got to know people solely in real life without the crutch of them reading my journal so learning a lot about me quickly. I feel… more anonymous. Very strange.

Empowered mother?

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So I was reading a blog post over at Ph.D. in Parenting about Empowered mothering vs. Feminist mothering. She asks folks about what kind of mothers they are. I’ll wait while you get an idea what she means….

….

Done?

Ok. 🙂 So that was a really interesting thought provoking blog for me. I’m fresh back into the I-have-no-identity-cause-I-have-a-newborn stage. Yeah. I’m not feeling very empowered right this minute. But, one of the awesome things about this being my second time through this gig is that I feel rather Zen about the fact that this will pass (PPD and all). Seriously. This too shall change. Right this minute my needs are getting ignored left and right and I am totally subsuming myself into the role of Mother. I’m not doing it because I am oppressed by the Patriarchy. I’m doing it because after doing a lot of research on child/human development it is what I believe is the right thing to do when you have a kid. Newborns need this kind of dominance of place. But she’s not going to be a newborn forever (Halle-fucking-lujah) and behaving like this with regards to her needs and my needs… not going to be healthy forever.

So! This is a blip in the life of my kid so I’m going to pretend that this is not really indicative of my ‘parenting’ for the rest of this conversation. The thing that struck me the most about that blog post was how the difference seems to be “Am I more concerned about myself or society?” which seems to be one more go round about how women are not supposed to be selfish. “Well… if you are serving your own needs above your child’s it should only be if you are really serving these larger social/political goals.” Well, uhm… fuck that. (I don’t think that the blogger in question is saying that in the slightest. It’s just how I read the difference between Empowered Mothering and Feminist Mothering in the descriptions.) Let me take a moment to say hell-to-the-no. I bloody well matter. ME ME ME MEMEMEMEMEME. I matter. I am absolutely not going to sign on to some passive aggressive bullshit that says I can only meet my needs if I can justify them as really serving something ‘larger than myself’. Hell no. I think that ultimately that is not good for my kids. I think that is really continuing the bullshit the patriarchy/kyriarchy/whatever bullshit societal ideal that individual women don’t matter much and I am not teaching my daughters that.

That said, yeah it’s a balance. I am not going to fuck my kids over. They didn’t choose to be born and they are real people with real needs and they deserve to have their needs met. I think one of the most important things I will teach my kids (hopefully–if I do my job right) is the difference between their wants and their needs. Yeah, my kids absolutely deserve to have their needs met and I am going to work hard at doing that. But their wants are not the most important thing ever and that’s just the breaks. And just because their needs have to be met doesn’t mean I have to meet them every time. That’s a lot of why I am working so hard to cultivate community, oh and let’s be sure to mention they have a rockstar father.

I guess that makes me an Empowered Mother. However, being empowered (by this definition) does not mean you have to be an asshole. 😛

Flying solo

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So Noah is gone on jury duty. He was gone yesterday too. Instead of asking for people to come here I have made plans to leave the house. The morning yesterday was… awful. Oh man awful. I am now even more firmly of the opinion that I could have benefited from Noah being home for the full six weeks and that’s just not happening.

But life, she does not do what I want and I have to suck it up. No one’s dead yet and children are resilient so I guess things will work out.

Privilege

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Privilege is one of my favorite words. I like looking at the ways in which people take for granted the good things in their life that just happen. Rarely I drop into the nighttime parenting/sleep issues area at MDC. I don’t go there much because I just can’t wrap my head around the problems. I think that a lot of my inability to grok what they are going through is because of my privilege in being a stay at home mom. My kid ‘slept through the night’ early because I learned how to stay asleep while she nursed all night long. My kid went to sleep when and where she wanted to and I didn’t particularly care if it was in bed at 7pm. I don’t particularly see the value in ensuring that my kid is in bed from 7pm-6am with no more than one night waking. I mean, I can see the help in that if you have older children who need to be functional during the day… but for a three month old? Enh, they sleep when they sleep.

Privilege is an interesting thing. If I had a whole bunch of older kids and/or I *had* to sleep during particular hours because I had a demanding job it would be a whole different matter when it comes to sleep. So yeah, I don’t volunteer my opinions on sleep much because boy-howdy do I have a lot of privilege in this area. 🙂

Differences

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I could totally be wrong about these impressions. My memory is never the sharpest and it is especially cloudy lately.

It is interesting to me how my mindset is different this pregnancy. I feel a lot more confident about the early parenting stuff so I just don’t need to do much research at this point. I keep doing my gradual stuff for Shanna’s development, but overall I don’t feel like there is much that is super pressing RIGHT NOW. So my mind is wandering a lot. I’m spending a lot more time thinking about sex (my lack of interest and how much that pisses me off); non-monogamy (both how that will work out in my life over time and how I feel about it as an abstract concept;, feminism (My Fault, I’m Female has been a big part of this); adoption/fostering issues (this is an ongoing thing in the back of my mind. I don’t know that I will ever go back to teaching, but it is still important to me that I do some kind of work with children at some point); how to balance this crunchy shit (I’m feeling more and more like the fanaticism approach just isn’t one that works for me); lots of time thinking about abuse stuff–a lot of this is because I have been hanging out in the Surviving Abuse forum on MDC a lot. Other people have very different experiences than me and that’s interesting. (Uhm, not interesting in a bad way, more like

I feel like there is a lot more ‘me’ in this pregnancy. I am not just in this haze of hormonal love for the fetus and obsessed with all things baby. I have everything I need for the homebirth (I uhhh didn’t actually get that far last time–oops). I feel like I have done sufficient preparation of the house for incoming child, but I’m not actually all that focused on it. I’m sick to death of being held back by pregnancy. I want to hurry up and get birth over with so I can move on with my life. I know the first few months will be challenging, but I can’t help but think that I will actually have way more energy than I do right now. I feel like Shanna will get out of the house more. That’ll be good.

I didn’t start looking at me as a separate entity until Shanna was over a year old. Then I started getting really antsy. I wonder if I will get the hormone rush with birth again and be completely immersed in “Mommy” being my whole world. I might not. If I don’t get that rush, am I going to feel more resentful of the extreme dependence early on? Hm. Interesting.