Monthly Archives: October 2011

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Seasons changing.  So much changing.  Uncertainty.  Mood shifts.

It’s getting closer but not fast enough.  I never think things have happened fast enough.  It will be ok.

I have been talking to a lot of people about writing.  It’s astounding to me to wander around to my friends and have them tell me resoundingly that they think I have several books in me, and they want to read them.  I feel this impending sense of doom.  Of course I will fail everyone.  I don’t have anything to say.

I do.  I have things to say.  I have a story to tell.  It’s just as worthy of a story as any other.

If I started writing the book today it would be the story of why I divorced my family.  I don’t know if that is what it will be by November.  It’s morphed a lot over time.  I don’t think that is the right book though.  That’s a mood.

Do you know what will last?  I will write the story of me for my mirrors.  My husband, my Sarah, my kids.  Friends who love me.  I tell this story because if I died tomorrow my story would be gone.  My children would know very little about me.  There aren’t very many people who would or could step up to tell them about me.  The only two people I am still close to from childhood, Jenny and B, they didn’t see almost any of my life.  They can’t tell anything about me.

I only talk about the abuse.  Like that is all that made me.  It’s not though.  No one is that simple.  Everyone is more complicated than that.  But other people grow up with people who see them and help make them for decades.  I didn’t.  No one remembers pithy little stories about what I did in school.  No one remembers that great mission project in fifth grade.  We made it out of cookies and used frosting for glue.  The inside was supported with Lego’s.  It was epic.  No one knows that I spent six weeks doing a mini lesson on aeronautics and could never make a paper airplane fly.  I’m pretty sure I have still never done it successfully.

Do you know what keeps me up at night?  The fear that I don’t exist without my family.  Without the people who do have positive memories of me.  They know every good thing I did as a child and they loved me.  I miss my mommy.  I miss my mommy so much.  I was always a mama’s girl.  I was so clingy.  I begged for her.

I can’t let her do to my children what she did to me.  And I need to explain exactly what that was.  Not really for anyone else, for me.  I need to forgive myself for my choices.  I need to explain them.  I want to.  I want to know that at any point in time my children will have access to all the stories I can give them about myself.  They will never have to deal with the loss I am dealing with.

I know very little about my mom.  I know basically nothing about my father.  I know absolutely nothing about anyone further back in my family.

I am alone.  My brother hates me.  I should not be telling these stories.  He wants them to die.  I don’t think he’d mourn much if I died too.  He would probably think I deserve it.

I don’t.  I want to explain why.  I shouldn’t be dead.  It’s demeaning to me to say I should be dead when you hear about my life.  I’m tired of being told to kill myself.  I’m tired of being told that someone like me should fucking give up.

I don’t want to.  I want to watch my babies turn into children.  I want my daughters to invite me to their fucking weddings.  I don’t want them to run away from me.  That means I want to examine what my mom did that drove me away.  It was there.  It was there from very early on.  Conform or leave.  It’s always been clear.  And I don’t conform much.

I’m scared to really do this and I’m terrified of not doing it.  I want to create the space and do it right.  I am going to tell this.  It will be a book.  I don’t know if it will be worth reading.  I don’t know why anyone will care.

This week a former coworker told me I should write the book.  He will read it.  He thinks lots of people will want to read it.  Why do people write?  Because they have something to say?  Because they have such an overweening ego that they neeeeeeeed to have strokes from random people?  Because I just want to be loved.  I want to feel like, whether anyone agrees with me or not, I explained my side.  It’s not really a debate.  Only it is.  I’m not having a debate with anyone else.  I’m debating with myself.  I’m deciding whether or not I want to forgive me.

I want forgiveness more than just about anything else in the world.  I need it from me.

I asked my favorite student what I taught him.  He smiled at me.  That quirky, gorgeous smile.  I think he had a crush on me.  He told me elaborate stories about sleeping with his 35 year old boss when he was 18.  Ahem.  He told me that I taught him that it’s ok to be yourself.  And to like himself.

I want to teach me, too.  Maybe that is the book.  Why I should like me.  I don’t know.  I am kind of afraid that I am going to write out thirty years of anecdotes and not know how to make it a story.  A story needs a point.  Well, Stephen King tells me otherwise.  I’ll figure it out as I go.  I am so going to need a good editor.

It’s weird to be present with this project.  There are different sorts of things to think about.  There are the later mechanics of dealing with a book looming.  I’m scared.  I’m trying to mostly not worry about that till  February or March.  Mostly.  Periodically I read short things and freak out.  I’ll have to think about that later.

When do I write?  How do I create space to do that reliably?  Ack.  Complicated.

I’m also going to run a 5k with a friend at the end of November.  Oh this fall will feel different from the summer.  I feel like I have to tell the stories all in one big go.  Then I can stop this frantic refrain of hiding in the garage and crying because no one knows them.  Of course I will leave things out.  Life is like that.  I can’t remember everything.  Many of the stories of me are gone.  I don’t really know much about what I was like as a baby.  I know that when I was 14 months old I toddled into the bathroom and said, “Kissy go pee pee” and like that I was potty trained.  I know that my mother told me that.

Given that Shanna was in diapers till she was thirty-twoish months.. holy moly.  And I think of Shanna as being advanced.  Psh.

That was my funny voice.

I don’t want to spend my life dealing with overwhelming flashbacks of abuse as Shanna grows up.  I’m kind of hoping to circumscribe that by doing it at speed in November.  God help me.  No, I’m not going to do a lot of drugs.  That’s hard to control.  I’ll have to be soul achingly bare.  Ew.  I’m worried about being stable the rest of the time.

I’m getting really bitchy and picky.  I feel like I am.  I need… something.  I need to break a rule.  I need to do something I’m not supposed to do.  I am holding too many balls in the air.  Something has to give and give hard.  Right now I’m doing that in the wrong direction.  Too much of it comes out in snippy stupid comments to Sarah.  I need to find an outlet.  Soon.  That’s a really dangerous line of thought right now…  wait.. a very pleasant thought just went through my head.  I’ll be in my bunk.

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This life shit is really tiring.  I have a lot of stuff to do.  Some of it I feel like I can’t talk about.  I can’t talk about it because it involves doing stuff for Sarah and I have this strong internal pushback that talking about it is shaming her in some way.  But it’s not.  I don’t think Sarah should feel bad for needing my help in order to get things done in my time frame.  I have a pretty ridiculous time frame.  Sarah can do these things.  Just not as fast as I want her to.  That’s a very different distinction.  I’m having trouble internalizing it.  I feel like I am creating the problem in talking about the mechanics of life.

Things were different with Tommy.  For a long long time there was very little he could do.  And he hated everyone for it.  It embarrassed him.  You were never to speak about the help you gave him, you were just supposed to shut the fuck up and be there the minute he had the fucking need and just spontaneously do it. Or he got angry and violent.

Maybe it makes a lot of sense that I’m having trouble with dealing with some of my feelings around doing stuff for Sarah.  It’s complicated.  Everything always is.  I think one of the hardest parts is that she needs so much sleep.  And she does.  She has to have that much sleep or she can’t put coherent sentences together.  I believe her.  I still struggle with feeling abandoned with the kids.  She’s a night owl.  My kids are early birds.  An awful lot of their awake period is while she is still sleeping.  Noah is still here for part of it.

Hm.  Problem solving.  Right now I am feeling overwhelmed by how much of the day I am alone with the kids.  Shanna is acting exactly how a three year old should act.  That lovely book I read about three year olds told me that this would happen.  Her advice was as much babysitting/care by other people as you can manage.  Three will be over soon.

Right now our priority is to have Noah home from work as early as possible because I am fried after the long day.  I wonder if it would work better if Noah went into work much later (he is a software engineer, no one would blink) and hung out in the mornings and planned to come home after dinner.  Or we could play with how the kids eat and get them on a four meal a day schedule and he can eat fourth meal as dinner at more like seven.  It’s not unprecedented.  The kids would probably be ok with that adjustment.

I don’t know.  I’m not sure what we should do.  But it’s my blog and I can babble all I want to.  I’m struggling with getting through the mornings until Sarah wakes up.  I feel increasingly bitter and resentful because I am taking care of the kids during the time when I physically can best do the chores around the house.  So I’m constantly yelling at the kids to leave me alone while I clean.  If Noah went to work later in the morning… I could do all the chores before he left.  The girls would love to have that time playing with Daddddddddy.  If Noah waited until a more civilized hour to go into work, it’s only a thirty minute drive.

Even if he still left before Sarah woke up I would be only dealing with the kids and not trying to run around and do chores at the same time.  Who knows.  Maybe.  Maybe it would be better for Noah and the kids to have calm hang-out/play time in the morning rather than fussy evenings.  If I don’t start the day pissed off before 9 am… I have a better day.  I don’t neeeeed Noah by 5 pm.  Sarah is a lot more capable of being consistent with evenings.  It would allow her to get all the sleep she needs.

It means we would have a lot more time when there are two people in the house and a lot less time when there are three adults in the house.  That might work out better.  Sometimes writing about my thinking helps and sometimes it hurts.  Sometimes I get too entrenched and hard to negotiate with.  Often I don’t feel like I get an even amount of thinking/explanation of thinking on the part of my partner and I get pissy.  That’s not real helpful.                                                                                                                      

Just visiting.

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Today I went down to the school where I used to teach to hang out with an old co-worker and a former student. I no longer know any students on campus. It was weird and hard. I was told more than once that I can come back any time I want to. I am still thought well of. My former co-worker told me that I am inspirational. And he apologized for not always being able to handle hearing my stories. I told him it was ok. I can’t handle them all the time either.

I asked my student what I taught him. He said, “You taught me to be myself. More than anyone else ever in my life, you taught me to like myself. It’s made a big difference.”

I didn’t cry, but it was close.

Mirrors

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Whenever a woman tells me, “I don’t really have chick friends” I turn my head and blink funny.  I don’t know where I would be without the women in my life.  They provide a very different mirror from the men in my life.  I need them.

My friends arrive in waves.  I find new groups and meet tons of people all at once and only keep a few from each generation.  I have a friend who was born across the street from me.  Four months before me.  Through thirty years and fifty plus moves we have kept in touch.  I love her a lot.  She is very different from me.  She’s a JAP and makes no apologies.  As she shouldn’t.  She’s tentative and slightly nervous but very ambitious.  I think she will have a life she is proud of.  I think that she will be old and smile because she is a really good person.  I’m glad I know her.

Her parents divorced acrimoniously when we were in high school.  Most of her grand parents have died.  These are the traumas of her life.  She has taught me about stability.  She has been the most consistent person in my whole life.  We go through periods of being closer and less close.  That’s ok.  She always comes back.  I can’t wait till she has kids.  I will be over there a lot.  We will have an interesting time negotiating her telling me to stop bossing her around.  She rarely manages to do that well.  I’ve been bossing her around for 30 years.  It’s hard to stop.  Once she has kids… I need to not boss.  It’s going to be weird because she will make entirely different choices.

For one thing, she’s Jewish.  If she has a boy he will get snipped.  That’s her culture.  She makes no bones about it.  I will, of course, quietly submit some information for her to read if she wishes and then I need to shut the fuck up.  I can’t bitch at her about circumcising her son.  I can’t make this the issue that ruins our friendship.  I need her too much.  When people think about “cutting off” a friendship, they are thinking about what do you get from the relationship.  What does this person need that you no longer want to provide.  What do you need that they no longer provide.  Most people aren’t honest about those exchanges, but they exist.

I need this friend.  This friend is very important to me.  This friend is the only person in my life from my childhood.  I need her.  I need someone to talk to my kids about me.  I need someone who can talk about  how I have grown and changed with real serious perspective.  I feel so alone in the world without a family.  It’s terrifying.  This is being an orphan.  I feel like I am going to pass out of notice and be forgotten unless people like this exist.  I am going to master my temper and my nasty judgment.  I am not going to alienate this friendship.  I love her too much.  I love her like I love my mom and my sister.  But she has never hurt me.  I want to keep her.  I will do things that are hard for me because she is worth the effort.

Don’t get me wrong, she’ll know I’m not thrilled.  But I can go to the fucking bris and keep my fucking mouth shut.  I don’t think I can do it for anyone else.  I can do that for my mirror.  She shows me that I can.  She shows me the truth about who I am and what I am capable of.  For her, I could move mountains.  I can totally keep my mouth shut and make idle chatter with her dad and brother.  I will hug her mother.  I need to call her mother and ask if she has pictures of us from when we were little.  Maybe her dad does.  This family shows me that I survived intact.  Me, as a person.  They knew me from my birth.  They saw me through everything that happened.  At least once a year through my childhood and we’ve kept in touch as adults.  They took me into their home when I was homeless as a small child.  More than once.

When people talk to me in shocked voices about how strong my boundaries are… it’s a funny conversation.  They are stone walls out there.  The inner circle doesn’t really have boundaries.  I will shut my fucking mouth about the degree of my horror of circumcision for this friend.  I will simply not go to the bris for other people.  That is how I can avoid making a scene and making something private about me.  I will god damn behave myself and be civil and sweet with my friend and her family.  With someone else I feel like if I am having a bad day I might just snap and tell the (hypothetical) other parents I thought they were disgusting savages.  I have my biases.

I don’t have a culture to participate in that requires such an action.  Thus I have the luxury of it being a clear situation for me.  My friends give me reasons to have to shut down my own bigotry (I have lots) and stop and really think about why in the fuck someone might make such a horrendous decision.  Well, for one thing I would do significantly more traumatic things to my kids and not think twice about it.  Horrendous is a strong word.  My personal life experiences are such that I place genital integrity above cultural identity.  Convenient given my cultural identity, eh?  And that’s the thing.

I think that if the general population stops being assholes and drops the legislation push that most Jews will stop circumcising in the next couple of generations.  I think that people will evolve.  If they are left alone and allowed to do so.  Persecuting a group isn’t how you make them change.  It is how you cause them to dig in and become stubborn.  Ask me how I know about that behavioral quirk.

I keep my friend because she is good.  And she still does things that feel bad to me.  Learning to navigate judging the behavior of other people so I can make my own decisions is complicated in the face of these complicated people.  I feel more comfortable with extremes.  Oh well.  I love her.  I need her.  I want her.  Ok fine, if I have to I will grow for her.

In chronological order next comes Miss Jenny.  She’s Jennifer to you.  She’s my Jenny.  I don’t even know how that started anymore.  I met her in junior high and I hated her.  However the loneliness of rural children is a powerful force.  We got over it.  And we kept in touch.  I would say we were barely friends in high school and college.  After college we have been quite close.  She has also been around through a lot of different phases.  And she was closer to my life.  She knows many of my friends (heck, she knew them before me).  She is the reason I learned to dance.  She is the reason I started blogging.  She taught me about Renaissance Faires and Dickens Fair and The Starry Plough.  I wanted to go dancing, but mostly I really wanted to hang out with Jenny.  I like her.  She makes me feel good about myself.

On the trauma scale, well, she had some stuff happen.  Enough that when I showed up at her house sobbing after the suicides in my family, she could take care of me.  She was only 17, too.  She knew what to do.  Jenny is significantly more stable feeling, even when her life seems outwardly unstable.  It’s a core feeling.  She is there.  I feel like it doesn’t matter if I go five minutes, five months, or five years without seeing her.  She’s Jenny.  She has this really strong presence.  She has taught me a lot about mastering my emotions.  Personally I think she’s a bit closed off, but I get to have any wrong opinion I want.

Jenny is consistent emotionally in the ways I fail.  She gives me a stable mirror for my storms.  She teaches me about dealing with the in-between-places.  She may not like it, but she deals with limbo fairly well.  She’s good at getting up and staying busy.  It’s not a skill everyone has and she had to slowly learn it.  Honestly she sucked ass at that when I met her.  I think that was because of issues with her mom.  But we all have those in junior high.

The next big wave came with the theatre group.  I am not as close with anyone from that community.  None of them have kids and that has been challenging.  Flakey bastards.  But I keep in touch with them and we have dinner once or twice a year.  Of all the waves of my friends, this is the group that builds me up the most.  That’s an interesting thought.  They have no reservations about me.  I don’t remember ever having a disagreement or argument with anyone there (other than my boyfriend) about anything I did behavior wise.  They were completely comfortable with me.  It’s been a little odd at how impressed they are with “what I have done with my life”.  I’m in a fallow period so I feel pretty lazy.  But they are still working the same jobs doing pretty much the same things they were doing when I met them thirteen years ago.  It has been a busy decade and some for me.  It’s nice having them pop up and cheerlead every so often.

Then there was bdsm.  I met the Godmama at my second munch ever.  (She’s the legal next of kin to my children.  That lawyer was expensive.)  I think that one of the most important things I get from this relationship mirror is that, what I can bear is not what everyone can bear.  I mean, that’s true in every case.  But she is really good at laughing at me when I express to her that her life would be hard for me.  She is so different.  It’s not any one thing.  It’s everything.  Almost all of our hobbies are entirely different.  We have very different social, romantic, sexual, relationship needs.  And by golly that’s ok.  I think she is the most adamant person I know about us both being ok.  It’s very comforting.

She has had a much more challenging life than the previous people mentioned.  She’s also a lot older than us.  Almost twenty years older.  It’s a very different relationship.  It fills different parts of my needs.

I wandered off and the thread in my head changed.  Fudge.

Trust is hard.

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Today was a rough day for me.  I had a lot of intense emotions.  But I did talk about them.  Badly, at least at first.  I have to trust that the people who love me knew that there were going to be bad days.  It’s this balancing act between not wanting to take advantage of good will and… no really.  I have bad days.

I wish I could get over feeling like I must be nice.  I think my life would be easier.

Fun plotting.

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I’m drawing pictures of my imaginary house.  I like to think about what I would change.  It’s kind of daunting to think of paying for it.  I don’t want to finance it.  I’m really repelled by the idea of paying interest on things that I want.  It strikes me as the wrong approach to life.  It is going to cost at least $250,000.  Realistically, a shit load more than that but not everything has to be bought at once.  That’s about the original asking price of the house.

My neighborhood is full of renters.  This area could change for better or worse easily.  I have no guarantee of recouping my investment.  That will be an easier pill to swallow if I save up the money in advance and have it to spare.  The problem with loans is that you are signing on to always and forever have this obligation.  It makes me uncomfortable.

A lot of it could be done for cheaper if I wanted to do it myself and deal with “close enough”.  After looking around my garage for a few months I can tell you I won’t be happy with “close enough” forever in my whole house.  I’m kind of tired of living in a cage.  I want a house with a lot of light.  My entire childhood I lived in close dark cramped quarters.  I don’t have to do this forever.  As my children grow and invite friends over… I am going to need to have somewhere to go other than my bedroom.  If I want my kids to have friendships that do not bend at my whims, I have to have a place to be away from them.

When people glorify the Noble Savage and idealize that behavior into AP dogma things get twisted.  I don’t live in a tribe.  It’s not possible for me to give as much constant contact as that requires.  AP as preached by the extremists on MDC (just to be clear who I am talking about) is pretty restrictive.  And the choices they advocate can be right given a very narrow set of circumstances which apply to their lives.

I honestly believe that if I lived in po’dunk North Dakota I would not have vaccinated my kids and I would have laughed my ass off at people who told me my kids were at risk for the diseases that are mostly wiped out in this country.  If I lived in Missouri… I’d look at what diseases are happening in Mexico and I’d vaccinate based on that.  I like international travel.  I like going off and creating stories.  I feel absolutely driven to be an interesting person.  Damnit.  My kids need to be vaccinated.

But not for chicken pox.  Or rotovirus.  Or the flu.  I think we overmedicate as a country.  I will tell my kids about chicken pox and try to expose them when they are young, but if we don’t catch it in the wild I will vaccinate them at 12.  Earlier if they tell me that I am nuts and they don’t want chicken pox.  I get the impression Shanna will be the kind of girl who speaks her opinion.  At least occasionally.

Anyway.  All this to say that I think we will get along better as she grows up if we have a bigger house.  I have issues.  I know this.  The thing is, all those Noble Savage societies have a very different structure to their entire community.  They have more support than a nuclear family does in America.  It’s an apples to oranges comparison.  It’s not that a child must have mommy 24/7.  A child needs to be cared for by consistent caregivers 24/7.  It’s not the same thing.  I can believe that an infant in the first few months may fare better with just mommy.  I now have a toddler and a kid!  I don’t have a baby any more!

The upside of having married Noah is… I can have dreams and know that I don’t have to be the only road to accomplishing them.  I can’t express the safety that feels like.  It makes my breath come short.  When I’m hiding by myself of course I dream of having the book I write in November be good enough to publish.  It’s a nice dream.  But I spend about five minutes doing that.  I don’t think it’s good to think too hard about that.  I think about what I want to say.  And why it’s worth saying.

I have a lot of format ideas that I’ve been noodling with for years.  Noah has listened to more teary conversations where I sob that I want to write a book about everything that has happened than I care to count.  I need to do it so I can move past this phase of my life.  I’m not over it.  I haven’t said enough about it.  There isn’t anyone in the world who knows the story from start to finish other than me.  I lost the people who were my witnesses.

I have to write it down.  I can’t be the only one who knows I exist and why I exist the way I am.  It’s not fair.  They can’t do that to me.  They can’t take away my right to have eople in the wolrd who know know me.  They can’t isolate me.  They can’t tell me I am a liar.  They can’t take my story away from me and call it a lie.  Fuck them.

I want to write my story because it is true.  And it fucking bothers me that no one but me saw it.  I’m tired of being told that I am lying.  I need to feel that intimacy with people.  And a few people will read it.  I hope it will be told in a way that is good enough to publish and a lot of people will read it.  I hope people will get an edutainment out of it.  It’s not that I’m always right.  I’m not.  It’s that my perspective is different.  It is jarring to people.  That is why I identify as white trash.  I have a way of speaking, of presenting myself into the world with aggression.  But not just that.  I call attention to myself with things that are kind of tacky.

Just wait till I’m done with my house, y’all.  It’ll be great.  Do you know what I’ve learned sitting here in my wonderful garage?  I’m not satisfied with close enough.  I despise the unfinished wires.  I loathe the exposed pipes.  I have a friend who offered to help (he means do all the work; he’s sweet) me fix a lot of that cosmetic stuff.  But none of that would change the fact that the city of Fremont says this can’t be a living space.  It’s a garage.  That’s why I won’t call it a den or office or whatever.  It’s a garage.  It’s a great garage… but it’s a garage.  I want to move up in the world.  This will never be good enough for me.  I will always feel like I am hiding in the dark.  I need more light.  The living room isn’t really good enough either.

I won’t ever be happy in this house until there is a lot more light and higher ceilings.  It’s too claustrophobic and dark.  It reminds me of the house in the mountains.  It’s not the color of the walls–which I like.  I am not a tall woman.  I can touch my ceiling.  I have tall friends.  I dislike that they have to duck and be made smaller in my house.  It’s a standard ceiling.  I have to jump.  I don’t care.  It’s like trying to get around in a 6′ town when you’re 10′ tall.  I hate it.  I would never have picked this house.  And moving isn’t the right option for a variety of reasons.  A more expensive house would still be wrong because what I want is a custom house.  I can do that here.

So how the fuck do I raise that much money.  Well, as it so happens, I married this geek.  He makes a decent salary.  If he keeps going at the rate he is going financially it can happen in about 13 years.  That’s a long time to be impatient.  How much do I want the money?  When would I like to do the remodel?  These are interesting questions.  The big structural stuff I simply can’t do.  I can’t add a second story full of windows and reinstall the solar panels.  I’m good, but I have my limits.  We just replaced the roof.  Most of the stuff I’m seeing says that I can expect it to last 15-20 years.  Tap fingers.  It’s been on for two years.  Twitch.  Well.  That gives me a lot of time to save money.  There is no chance I will tear it up in the next ten years.  That’s a kind of wasteful that would turn my stomach.

Ok.  I can fuss with the garage.  And try to be frugal.  And put money away.  I can have that dream.  It’s just long-term.  I kind of hate the long-term.  Ack.  It’s terrifying to think of committing, truly committing, to being in this house in ten years with a track record of maintaining the same financial pattern for that long.  It makes my blood run cold.  That’s a lot of fucking pressure.

Side note.  Right now I have Rascal Flatt’s song Stand on repeat.  


On your knees you look up
Decide you’ve had enough
You get mad, you get strong
Wipe your hands, shake it off
Then you stand, then you stand

Learning to marathon means that some goals are just not a high priority.  No matter how intense they feel in some moments.  I will have to learn how to live in close quarters with a lot of people for a while.  I do need privacy.  I need to learn how to create that space for writing.  I need to get the book done and over with.  I have too many uuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhh I wannnnnnnnnnna in my brain.  I need to get one of them done.  I have proven to my own satisfaction that I know this story.  I can tell it.  And I can certainly do it quickly.  I can write the whole thing down in one go.

But I can’t blog it.  Blogging is different.  Every time I blog I write to a different person.  I have a different ideal reader and I’m trying to coax a different reaction.  I need to write the book for Noah.  And I can’t do it with him reading and nodding and changing his behavior in random ways near me.  I would be influenced.  It’s really hilarious to me to think that.  Noah is too important to me in a global fashion.  If I want to truly create something for him I have to do it in complete absence of his knowledge of it.  Otherwise he will come home from work grump on a day when I posted something I am particularly proud of and I will feel crushed and I will stall on writing.

I use blogging as a crutch.  I have learned to write in blogging.  I don’t know if that will translate to a book.

Take what you are given before it is gone

I have a story to tell.  Not telling it is interfering with my life.  That means it is time to stop medicating to prevent my story from being present.  It means telling it fully from start to finish.  And then stopping.  And letting it go.  Maybe only Noah and Sarah will read it and care.  I don’t believe that is true.  I’m actually terrified.  I’m afraid only Noah and Sarah will read it and care.  I’m afraid that it will only influence them.  Because it will influence them.

Writing this book will change Sarah and Noah.  Eventually it will change Shanna and Calli.  I won’t tell either of them about the book until they are adults or until it is so famous I have no choice.  But this having this book in existence in complete form means that I can have people who can fully speak my verbal shorthand.  I can create a way to be fully present in all my broken glory with the adults in my life without having to constantly think about it and try to keep it away from my kids.  Blogging isn’t enough.

I want stories to be comfortable and familiar.  I don’t want to feel like I am unmasking more abuse constantly.  I want the adults in my life to be able to help me censor for my children.  I want to be able to say that I am thinking about Tommy and have them be able to ask, “What about him?” and be able to give them a useful answer.  One that will allow them to be present with me as an adult as someone who sees me without me having to tell this long gory story in front of my kids.

I feel this constant pressure to monitor every word out of my mouth.  I feel horribly uncomfortable because I want to feel this intimacy with Noah and Sarah and it eats me alive.  I can rectify this problem. I can spill my guts.  And then I can relax and listen to them talk and stop feeling so driven to share my story all the time.  I want to be able to listen.  Right now I don’t listen.  I blog and then I nod along waiting for them to mention it and help me process… only those bastards have lives.  My writing is for me.

I need to just write for me.  It’s not working how I want it to work.  Let’s try a different approach.

Life’s like a novel with the end ripped out.

It’s time to go do life.

The house

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I want people who went to the DHPs to walk on to my property and say, “Oh my god is this the same house?”  I probably would not have picked this house.  Given that it is exactly the size/shape/layout/everything as one of Noah’s ex girlfriend’s childhood home… it’s a little too standard.  It’s a tract house.  Someone other than me won $55.5 million last night (that was the cash value–actual prize was $113 million).  That means we won’t be remodeling soon.  Rats.

I don’t think I want something that will be easily categorized as a “style” of architecture. x

Choosing life

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What I like the most about Harm Reduction Therapy is that you start with the basic premise that you don’t want to die.  If I really and truly wanted to be dead, I would be dead right now.  Instead I have chosen life, over and over.  Just over a year ago I had a chance to die peacefully in my bed holding my last precious gift to the world.  It would have made for a touching movie and all.  But I wasn’t ready.  When my midwife said, “If you close your eyes you won’t wake again” and I practically asked for toothpicks to keep my eyelids open.

Most of the time I struggle with ensuring there is more than 50% of me that wants to live.  It’s hard to explain what this feels like.  When you experience a fight or flight reaction in your body because you are afraid, one of the first things it does is cause digestive problems because your digestive system gets put into a holding pattern while your body focuses on other things.  It’s quite brilliant, actually.  But it’s uncomfortable after years of daily, continual small startles that shut off my digestive system.  One of the ways this manifests for me is burning, awful diarrhea.  Cheers.

I want to stop startling.  I want to stop being afraid.  I want to stop being in pain.  I’m not entirely sure how to go about the whole thing.  On one hand I have 30 years of establishing this pattern.  On the other hand, it’s not like it’s been all the time in a long time.  I just have a little bit of reducing my stress levels left.  The parts where you stop feeling where your friends hate you and want to attack you.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the gaslighting article I read recently.  And this one about how “citation needed” is not actually an argument.  I spend a lot of time with agressive geek boys.  I spend a lot of time with my stomach hurting because I feel very uncomfortable with the level of agression I need to display in order to be comfortable around many of my male friends.  They expect me to rise to their leve of sarcasm and snottiness.  Sometimes I do.  Often I feel attacked instead.  It’s not exactly a gentle friendship approach.  I feel weird because I don’t know how much space in this area it’s actually ok to demand from a friend.

I am currently having a hard time with a friend because his casual conversational gaslighting makes me so angry that I can’t handle being around him without spending most of the time screaming at him that he is an asshole.  I don’t go through most of my life feeling angry and screaming at people that they are assholes.  I truly don’t.  There is more than one person in the world who causes me to feel this way, but it’s probably far less than 10% of the population.

Why do I feel so guilty about getting angry with how they treat me?  I don’t like the way that I am treated.  I’m allowed to get angry about it.  Why am I so closed off to the idea that it’s ok to be angry?  I’ve had a lot of people mention in my life that they think I am angry person.  It’s never said with a tone of approval.  Many of my friends have casually told me they think I am really angry.  It comes up.  I don’t know that there is judgment intended, but I get told a lot that my reactions are irrational or overly sensitive.

I’m kind of ready to tear down the rational tree and use it for firewood.  I’m starting to feel like the obsession with “rationality” is just one way of manipulating people.  If you didn’t have the experience in front of other people in a verifiable way then your lifetime experiences should not be relevant if they are outside the common pool.  Freak.  Why don’t you act like everyone else.

Because I haven’t met very many people who can sit down and trade me story for story.  I have never met anyone who has a lifetime total of more weird traumatic shit happening to them.  I don’t say this in pride.  I set the bell curve on weird, apparently, for the people I know.  I have to believe that there are people in the world who survive as many or worse things.  I have to have faith that people have survived worse than me.  That gives me a path to follow.  There have to be people who have as much right to be angry as me.  I am angry.  I am very angry.

I think it is right that I am angry.  I am right to be angry about the things that were done to me.  I’m right to be angry when a friend says something rude but covers with, “It was just a joke.  You are too sensitive.”  Actually my level of sensitive is exactly where it should be.  You are a fucking asshole.  But how do you say that to your closest friends?  They have sensitivities of their own.

How do you have a conversation with someone who was bullied as a child and say, “You learned some of those behavior patterns a little too well.”  I’m really tired of being at the bottom of the shit hill.  As a child I was taught that the way to get out of from being at the bottom of the shit hill was to find someone lower in status and dump all the shit on them.  That was my role in my family.  I’m tired of playing that role with my friends too.  I’m tired of feeling like I have to shut my mouth and put my head down because I am too angry and I should stop being angry and learn to just accept people as they are.  Fuck that.

I think I’m ready to say that gaslighting isn’t ok.  I consider it abuse.  It is crazy making.  I’ve had enough god damn crazy making.  I get to say, “Actually you don’t get to decide for me whether or not I get to have an opinion.  You are not the judge and jury on “rational””.  It doesn’t matter if my side of an argument is “rational” if it is true.  Many things are not rational and still true.  Pi is irrational and you don’t see anyone trying to banish it.

Whether or not my feelings, reactions, thoughts, etc are rational is not a useful part of the conversation.  And derailing the conversation to whether or not my feelings are acceptable to have derails the conversation from whether or not someone else’s behavior is reasonable.  Obviously opinions will vary.  Where do I get to set my lines though?

I think that next time I go see my friend I have to be in my own car.  Instead of getting angry when he dismisses me I think I will get up and leave.  I’m done with accepting that in my life.  I’m done with biting my tongue when someone who “loves” me tells me that I am over reacting and I need to chill.  I’m done.  I choose to live.  It isn’t living to be angry like this.  It isn’t living to feel like I have to carefully monitor every single fucking word out of my mouth so that it is all coded in strong enough language so that I am not dismissed instantly by someone who thinks he is just smarter and better than me.

That codependent chicklist I was looking at?  That’s my relationship with this friend.  I can’t be in control all of the time and I don’t want to be.  I want to stop feeling like I have to control our friendship in order for him to stop talking to me like I am shitty and stupid.  I want to stop feeling like I have to carefully pick my words to ensure that the evening goes how I want it to.  I want to stop feeling like I have to restrict the conversation to like three topics or I will feel like shit at the end because I am tired of feeling berated.

I have done the cooking and cleaning and serving and tongue biting thing to preserve this relationship for a long time.  I’m not sure why.  Because I feel an emotional connection.  I feel an emotional connection with my mother too, I’m not talking to her.  I think it is hilarious how people tell me that our chosen family bonds are strong enough to weather anything.  I always want to snicker.  It’s really cute that people trust me like that.  I’ve already walked away from my entire biological family.  There are at least a dozen, probably more, people in the world who are my actual “family”.  And I don’t believe those ties are important.  Why do my friends think they are in a different position?

I’ve read a fair bit about how severe trauma makes it more difficult to bond.  I could move away from the bay area tomorrow.  I’d miss people, sure.  But I would be able to find other people for the level of friendship I have here.  I’m confident.  Especially if I took my household with me.  I don’t see other people much.  I could cut contact.  I don’t want to.

If I want to have healthy relationships with people.  If I want to have a healthy life… it involves committing to relationships and situations.  That is what keeps people balanced and here.  That’s what choosing life means.  I choose my friends because they make me think and work at being a better person.  What should I do when a given friend is not encouraging me to be a better person?  What do I do when a friend wants me to stay the same person I was when I was 19.  I’m kind of tired of the sarcasm, bitterness, and constant verbal sparring.  It’s not my culture.  Yeah, I married a geek.  He adapts.  Noah doesn’t bait me and he is only sarcastic in very gentle ways.  He’s nice to me.  I can live with Noah day in, day out and never be made to feel smaller.

Noah doesn’t want me to feel smarter than him.  He doesn’t crow when he is right, which is a good thing because I would get nasty fast.  You see, he’s right a lot.  Probably most of the time.  I rarely argue a factual point with him.  I hate being proven wrong.  However, in with his being-rightness, he has a lot of humility.  He doesn’t think he is a better person because he knows things I don’t.  That’s the difference between him and most of the geeks I know.  That’s why I married him.  He doesn’t think he is better or smarter than me, even though I think he is.  I usually feel like men look down on me, especially when they know a lot of things I don’t.

Noah believes that I have equally valuable knowledge in areas he doesn’t.  He trusts me.  When we are talking about a topic where I have more subject knowledge than him… he might ask probing questions about the nature of the support of my knowledge… but that’s it.  Even when he tells me I’m wrong it is very clear he is challenging an opinion not me.  I feel respected.  I feel like Noah married me because he wanted an equal partner to go through life with.

That’s not how it feels with other people.  It feels like a constant jockying for “who is right”.  Not all people, of course.  My assholes.  I’m vacillating about how to communicate this best.  It’s mostly my assholes but most everyone does at least a little of this.  My assholes are really bad.  They bait everything.  You can’t say the sky is blue without them challenging it… why?  Just to be funny?  It’s not funny.  It makes you look like a dick.  And I’m sick of it.

I’m getting kind of tired of being baited.  I’ve had enough this lifetime.  I’m tired of ending my time with my “friends” angry and hostile.  If I feel like that after spending time with someone… it isn’t fun.  And I should stop doing it.  I am not ok with constant dick contest challenges to everything I say.  I get enough of that with Shanna.

Then it comes down to the guilt of holding boundaries.  If you hold boundaries people will get mad at you and tell you that your boundaries are in the wrong place.  I can promise you that the person I am talking to will get upset if I just up and walk out ten minutes into our next hanging out time.  The hanging out time that I haven’t scheduled.  Because I’m not over being mad about the last hang out.  It was almost a month ago.  This isn’t good.

I feel like staying on this merry go round isn’t choosing life.  It’s getting derailed.  But I’m kind of tired of walking away from people who love me.  Everyone fucks up.  I can’t give up on everyone, right?  Isn’t this what battered women feel?  I love him but I feel bad when we are together.  I love him but I’m tired of him making me feel small and stupid with his casual comments about how irrational I am.  I am tired of being brushed off because obviously my opinion is worth less because I was traumatized as a child.  It’s a great dismissive tactic.  “Oh you are just over reacting because you had trauma as a child.”  No.  I am not over reacting you gigantic piece of shit.  My reaction is totally appropriate.  You are an asshole.

I’m tired of feeling like I have to come up with extensive justifications before my feelings magically transform into being “ok” because *you* agree with them.  Who died and made you in charge of rationality?  I don’t think I actually expect people to do only what I say.  Noah sure doesn’t.  Sarah doesn’t.  Shanna doesn’t.  Calli doesn’t.  I love them and let them go about their day.  Because them going about their day never makes me feel small and bad and stupid and inconsequential.  If my friends make me feel that way (yeah yeah no one can “make” you feel anything) then maybe I shouldn’t hang out with them.  Maybe the word “friend” is misapplied.

How do you decide if behavior is too much in a friendship?  How invested do you have to be before you will put up with anything because he means so well.  He’s convinced he is being friendly and that kind of mocking/joking/baiting is awesome.  I disagree.  Does my opinion matter?  Do I get to have any influence over his behavior?  No.  I can’t control him.  But I can walk away.  I kind of feel like that has to be my next step.  I have tried hard to control his behavior and make it “ok” for me.  It’s not.

The next time I see him I am driving.  I am not going to try and control his behavior.  I’m not going to continue the endless begging I have done for ten years to try and get him to stop being nasty.  I’ll just get up and leave.  It doesn’t matter if I’ve been there for 2 minutes or 2 hours.  I’m done talking to him about this.  That is what choosing life is in this situation.  I can’t “make” him be nice.  I can’t.  But I can get up and walk away and say it isn’t my problem.  If he considers his behavior jim-dandy that’s fine.  I don’t.  I can control whether or not I listen to it.

Honestly that would probably be a good approach for him too if I am a jack ass and start bitching at him like a harpy.  I don’t pretend I’m innocent.  I’ve done my share of bullying.  I’m ready to stop though.  I can’t push him into being what I want him to be.  He’s there or he isn’t.

It’s hard reaching this point of resignation.  He is obviously committed enough to the friendship that he is making grandios statements about how nothing could end our friendship because we are so close.  It’s like he’s never met me or listened to any of my stories.  I can end any relationship if I don’t think it is good for me.  I do not actually feel life long compulsion to maintain relationships “just because”.  Everyone else was raised with that.  Not me.  I wonder how sociopathic that is.  I don’t feel like I have to stay with Noah.  I want to.  I could leave.  Easily.  I don’t want to.  I like him.  I like being around him.  He makes me feel good about myself.

If my friends don’t make me feel good about myself, maybe they aren’t such good friends.  Where is that line though?  Where do I get to say, “Well obviously he still enjoys my company and gets positive from this interaction… but I feel drained and angry.  I have nothing to spare.  I’m done.”

I don’t exactly have a lot of spare energy or patience in my life.  I need my friends to be easy.  My kids require all the patience I have in life.  I barely manage to be civil with Noah and Sarah with their (patient, gently worded) requests and conversation on many days.  Why in the fuck should I turn around and have a social engagement that fills me with rage and frustration for over a week?  I don’t believe that is all my fault.  I don’t feel that way with very many people.  Just my assholes.

I can’t be at the bottom of the shit hill anymore.  I’m done.  I’m tired of nasty comments and casual put downs.  I’m tired of being made to feel less-than.  If you spend your whole god damn life in a dick contest trying to prove that you are smarter, better, more knowledgable… and you are going to prove it by making everyone else look dumb then you aren’t a man.  You are an obnoxious little boy and I’m sick of it.  I’m done being patient with adults who won’t grow up and learn to be civil.  If you want to stay with the good-ol’-boy network that tolerates that shit from guys, fine.  I’m done.

Choosing to be alive means consciously trying to avoid pain.  I’ve spent a lot of time being angry about this friendship.  I don’t want to just dump him.  There is a bond there.  But I need to keep it very distant.  And I need to just get up and walk away from him when I’m getting angry.  If I don’t he will never believe that I am serious.  He’s gotten away with this shit for over ten fucking years.  No wonder he thinks it is ok.  You don’t convince someone that their behavior is a problem by biting your tongue and putting up with it.

The thing is, I’m not an innocent victim.  He hasn’t abused me.  We have a mutually broken dynamic.  It’s not his fault and he hasn’t done anything terrible.  It doesn’t have to be abuse and terrible for me to say no more.  I’m allowed to do that at any point.  Truly.