I’ve always had a thing about being called a bad girl.  There is no quicker way to get me to modify my behavior.  If someone even strongly hints that what I am doing is bad I disintegrate.  I am instantly ready to appease that person pretty much no matter what they require of me.  A lot of the anger people see in me is because I have no other way of defending myself from the overwhelming pressure of feeling I am bad all the time.  I am not bad.  I am not mean.  I am not a terrible person.

These thoughts haunt me.  And the thing is… mostly I’m just upset at myself for my thoughts.  I guess that Catholic baptism really took.  I imagine doing bad, violent things.  I imagine starving my baby because I hate her so much for wanting to come near my nipple.  What I actually do is go to my baby and nurse her.  I might delay for a minute or two as I try to gain physical control over myself so that I can sit through the painful experience without lashing out at her.

But from Calli’s point of view I am a slightly dotty but affectionate and thoroughly adequate mother.  But I still feel like I am bad because I have thoughts towards her that I consider inappropriate.  I shouldn’t ever feel that way about my beautiful, wonderful baby.  I am a monster.

I even went out and bought formula.  But she didn’t like it.  So I grit my teeth and I went back to nursing.  I need to be careful about that gritting my teeth thing.  I’ve cracked two teeth and my dentist is rather upset with me.

I am doing it.  I am doing exactly what I am supposed to be doing.  I am providing not quite instant, but fairly rapid care around the clock.  I even mostly smile while I am doing it.  I cuddle her.  I wear her on my back for hours every day.  I kiss her.  I hug her.  Why do I feel like my very existence is a terrible horrible thing and will hurt her.  Post partum depression, blah blah blah.  No.  Because it isn’t just Calli.  And it isn’t just right now.  This isn’t all the time, but it’s a lot of the time.  And it is far less true now than at any other point in my life.  (Except the first year of Shanna’s life.  That was the longest period I have ever gone without a depressive episode and it was still brutal.)

I’m telling stories about my father.  That’s wrong.  I know that is part of it.  But why do I like to have my lovers do obscene things to me while telling me I am a good girl and I thank them and call them Daddy? (Uhm, not every lover.  Just some special ones.)  And then there is that eternal quest for Daddy.  I want to name them all.  I want to point out that two of the most important ones have the same name as my father/brothers.  In retrospect that has been interesting.

I had to break there because Calli woke up crying again and again last night.  I have now had a relatively full night of sleep despite her having a lot of wake ups.  I had to sit in here and cry hysterically for a few minutes while Noah rocked the baby.  And then as her cries got increasingly distressed I realized that this is one of those chop wood, carry water moments.  My baby needed me last night pretty desperately.  She is just hitting a bunch of new milestones.  She is teething.  She is hitting separation anxiety like a brick wall.  So I got my crying under control and I started chanting, nurse baby, cuddle husband.  And I did.  And I didn’t sleep well but I got through the night and Calli got to nurse as much as she needed (which was a lot) and Noah got to have the kind of cuddling that makes him feel better.

And I still feel bad.  I did everything I was supposed to do.  I’m beginning to feel like there isn’t a way for me to truly be right.  At least on my bad days.  Good days are fine.  I suspect today will be another bad day.  But my friend is coming over so I will hold it together.  Enh, I would mostly be fine whether she is here or not.  But I will fake cheerful better with her here.

It’s weird to be deliberately faking my emotions.  I do a lot of it with the kids.  They don’t need to know what I’m really feeling most of the time.  So of course there is this big part of me which feels like I am a terrible awful liar.  Is it lying if I never tell my children about my self-loathing?  Or is that just good boundaries?  Does that fall into the category of not telling the cashier in the grocery store?  I’m really struggling with understanding appropriate disclosure right now.  I’m really struggling with the idea that most of the time I shouldn’t disclose because other people will be made to feel uncomfortable.  I shouldn’t even be allowed to talk about being assaulted because other people feel bad.  I am making people feel bad.  It’s all my fault.  If I could keep my stupid, pathetic mouth shut I wouldn’t be hurting other people.

There.  That’s why I’ve never been able to get deeper into my shit than this.  I hit this brick wall.  I feel like I should shut up.  I feel like what I am doing, even if I am doing it just on my journal on the internet, makes me a terrible person because people feel bad when I do it.  The logical part of my brain understands that people an opt out of reading this and the logical part of my bran understands that people aren’t feeling bad because of my actions.  They are feeling bad because horrible things happened to me and they are sorry.  But that doesn’t seem to matter.  It’s not really about other people.  It’s about me.  It’s about my family telling me that I should keep my dirty laundry in the closet.  It’s about being told that it is embarrassing for me to tell anyone what happened.  How’s that.  My mom doesn’t want me to talk about this stuff because she thinks I should be ashamed of it and she doesn’t want people to know about my shame.

I am ashamed.  I do feel like it was my fault.  There is some part of my brain that decided that the stuff with my father had to be my fault.  And as a result I have spent 17 years fucking men I shouldn’t and often calling them Daddy.  I want my Daddys to hurt me.  No, I don’t want it.  I need it.  I require it.  If they do not violently abuse me I don’t want to call them Daddy.  That is one of the biggest triggers for me.  If someone scares me just right during a relationship they instantly feel like Daddy.  This is so Electra Complex.  So standard.  But it is standard.  I have been trying like hell to find a Daddy to fuck since my father killed himself.

I started dating a man when I was 18.  He was 30.  He had ten years experience in the bdsm scene when I met him.  He was my first Daddy.  He absolutely followed the campsite rule, so don’t start jumping to awful conclusions about him.  He left me much better than he found me.  I dated him for four years and lived with him for three years and I was in a 24/7 Owner/slave relationship with him for two of those years.  We engaged in some really intense play in that period.  I will say that for all we played absolutely to the edge of safety, he was very serious about safety.  He let me play with fire (literally) and do terrible self-destructive things and he kept me safe.  He let me grow up in a safe, secure environment where I was very loved.  He was very anti drugs and he didn’t drink while I was under 21.  I cannot stress enough that despite there being all the hallmarks of it being a terrible situation to outside vanilla folk, that was a very stable healthy relationship.  He taught me how to ask for what I wanted in very detailed and specific ways.  He taught me what communication looked like and didn’t look like.  (Which is not to say that he was always perfect at communication.)

But because society in general isn’t so big on relationships like that I fear it was “bad”.  I fear I am “bad” for having it and liking it.  Am I bad because of the things I do and the things I like?  I like to be beaten.  I like to have friends and lovers take implements like a cane or a single tail whip (I hate floggers) and beat me until I cry and scream and struggle to get away but the pain just keeps happening.  I feel very comforted by being completely overwhelmed with pain and having it stop.  I feel like that is a way for me to have control over an unavoidable physical process.  I cannot help the fact that I am in pain a lot or most of the time.  I have lower back pain from one of the assaults when I was a child.  I don’t even know if it is really physical pain from an injury at this point or if it is psychosomatic, but still hurting.

Specifically when I was a little girl there was a neighbor boy.  We were living in Whittier and I was in 4th or 5th grade, so whatever accompanying age that is.  He was 17.  He was a high school football player.  I talked to most of my neighbors because I was pretty desperately lonely.  This was after Tommy’s accident and he was living with us at home.  Tommy terrorized me.  He repeatedly tried to kill me.  He hurt me constantly in big and little ways.  My sister was dating the drug addict loser who gave her her second child.  She had no time for me because when there is a dick around she can’t think straight.  She never knew that the loser drug addict asked me for sex too.

Tommy would come into my room at night with knives and try to stab me.  I have never been able to get passed that in any way.  My brother literally wanted me dead.  He hated me that much.  How in the hell could I have deserved that?  Why did he feel that way?  Why did he think I was so awful?  It doesn’t really matter.  He was a kid with a lot of problems.  He was a boy with an evil father who was deliberately twisting him into a monster.  Tommy hurt me early and often.  And I had to get away from that.  So I wandered the neighborhood.  I left to get away from being physically hurt constantly.

And I wandered the neighborhood and I played sex games with adult or nearly adult men.  There were the neighbors a few doors down.  We played strip poker.  Obviously I lost basically every time.  They taught me a lot of sexual positions with my clothes on.  They thought it was fucking hilarious that I was willing and interested in having them teach me how I was supposed to have sex.  I’m pretty sure I’ve never told anyone in the world about them because I am so ashamed I did that.  I was what, 8? 9? 10?  Something like that.  And I went to any man available to learn what I was supposed to be doing.

I have treated basically my entire life as an apprenticeship to be a good enough lay for my father.  Before I had kids probably more than 75% of my masturbation involved thinking about my father fucking me.  Thinking about me begging my father for forgiveness for hurting him while he hurt me and fucked me.  While he did humiliating things to me.  While he forced me to perform for his friends because he believed I was his whore to do what he wanted with.

That’s why I am bad.  Because I’m fucking pissed off that he killed himself and I will never get to do it.