Tag Archives: people on the internet

Pick a side

Yesterday I had the hilarious experience of being told (online, so does it even count?) that I am demanding that all women subject themselves to abuse because I am on the side of men. This was an interesting experience given that I was saying women use sweeping judgments because not doing so is too high in cost.

Bluesky is hard to visit these days. I know the real time documentation of the fall of the US is important. It is also deeply upsetting and there is literally nothing I can do from here.

Once upon a time people did not have political turmoil across an ocean impacting their nervous system all day. It’s not great for us as a species.

My boyfriend is going to meet my kids in 27 days. That’s feeling dramatic. The few days before we go we will be away for a weekend together with friends. I’m looking forward to this weekend and I am also feeling terror. It is a huge cliff to go over.

My sister was fond of a few sayings: “abused children are the most loyal” and “you are on my side or you are against me”. It didn’t work though. I didn’t pick her side. I was not loyal.

I love the relationships I get to have with my kids. They blow me away. They are smart, funny, and deeply thoughtful. When someone blows their top a bit much we ignore it in the moment and come back a day or two later to say, “Hey, when you need to say (thing) it works a lot better if you say (slightly softened thing).” It doesn’t matter who had the bad moment. It applies to every person in our house equally. I love the way we all feel free to correct each other.

I worry about inflicting this sense of rightness in sitting judgment on my kids. They will not bow to authority how others expect. They don’t perceive that whole “adults are in charge” thing the way they would have if they properly attended school for longer. They think they have the right to say that people can’t be rude to them. I love watching them as young people. I can’t wait to see them as adults.

Pieces of dysfunction.

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.

Empowered mother?

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. 😛