Monthly Archives: February 2012

Sex is problematic

A long time ago a spiteful woman told me, “You’d better be careful about that multiple orgasms thing.  You might run out.”  Unfortunately she seems to have been right.  Something is broken.  It broke during the first pregnancy.  I started to kind of get it back between kids but it’s been gone for a while now.  I can kind of sort of eventually get there with a vibrator but it’s not what it was.  I have orgasmed during sex, but it’s not what it was.  It is rare.  That’s…  When Tom and I went to Leather Retreat I had to ask for permission for my orgasms and keep track of them.  I can no longer recall the exact figure (and I didn’t blog then) but it was several hundred.  Now if I have one a week that’s pretty good.  Something is broken.

I can no longer handle the mental space around the fantasies that used to always be present in my mind.

Sex is problematic

A long time ago a spiteful woman told me, “You’d better be careful about that multiple orgasms thing.  You might run out.”  Unfortunately she seems to have been right.  Something is broken.  It broke during the first pregnancy.  I started to kind of get it back between kids but it’s been gone for a while now.  I can kind of sort of eventually get there with a vibrator but it’s not what it was.  I have orgasmed during sex, but it’s not what it was.  It is rare.  That’s…  When Tom and I went to Leather Retreat I had to ask for permission for my orgasms and keep track of them.  I can no longer recall the exact figure (and I didn’t blog then) but it was several hundred.  Now if I have one a week that’s pretty good.  Something is broken.

I can no longer handle the mental space around the fantasies that used to always be present in my mind.

Countdowns

Next weekend (so in 6 days) I will be going to a grief ritual.  It is going to take all weekend.  The book and packing Sarah both want to be done/finished in the next 18 days.

I also didn’t put carrots in the ground yet and I need to get on that.  I’m not going to feel bad about skipping parsnips.

6 weeks till the 1/2 marathon.  8 months till the full marathon.

Just keep running, running, running.

Two short things.

Recently I was asked, “You do understand that you were tortured, right?”  Not really.  It feels like maybe my life was harder than average but what does “torture” mean anyway?

And I realized yesterday that my dream of traveling with the kids when Calli is over is a bit… not realistic right now.  Unless I can get to the point where I can handle travel without having a nervous break down or crying I can’t do that.  I want to go to countries that are far less friendly to hyperventilating women.  I can’t do that right now.  It’s just not safe.

Lots to think about.

Reading.

I haven’t read much in a few years.  I would say that I haven’t read a book a month in years.  I think I should do a book a week.  Rereads are fine.  Kids books are ok as long as they are long chapter books.  I’m going to count graphic novels just because it makes Noah happy for me to read them.  Before I was willing to post about this I tried it for a month very quietly.  It worked!  Here’s what I read in January:
Girl Genius by Kaja and Phil Foglio volumes 1-9 in paper.
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
A Little Princess also by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

I read like my friends start knitting projects.  These are the ones I am in progress on:

Hideous kinky by Esther Freud
Autobiography of Mark Twain by… Mark Twain.  This one is going to be a slog.  Holy moly.  I’ve been working on it for weeks.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
Neverwhere by Neil Gaimon
Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaimon (this is the one Noah is reading me)
The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty by Anne Rice  (I don’t want to talk about it.)
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle or something like that.  The Kingsolver one.

I need to change the stories in my head.  Time for distraction.  It’s making it hella hard to edit my book.  It’s too sad.

Perspective is everything.

Jenny’s father is dying.  It’s at a somewhat unexpected time because he isn’t that old but he had a weird injury and it wasn’t treated and… that’s how life works.  There is nothing I can do to help her with this.  This is her own journey of grief.  I imagine what it would be like to lose a father at this age after having had a relationship with him, having lived with him, for so many years.  I can’t imagine that.  Not really.  It’s going to be bad when my mom dies.  I will feel so much guilt.  I don’t even know if I will be told.  For all that Jenny isn’t close with her family she has never broken contact.  She has always treated them appropriately and with respect.

Everyone has a complicated relationship with their parents.  It’s a difficult relationship.  I understand it more from the side I am on now.  It seems to me that parenthood is a relationship based on temporary, stored power.  Right now I have incredible power over my children.  I get to decide pretty much everything about their lives.  In fifteen years Shanna will be an adult.  My power over her will be limited to the amount of influence she chooses to allow me.  It will depend on how well I have earned that respect.

Yesterday I spent my off hour reading/watching videos about Steve Jobs again.  I like his Stanford commencement speech and his sister’s eulogy is gut wrenching.  I also watched a few random videos about happiness because D sent them to me.  What does it mean to live?

When we were up in Portland I broke a large relationship rule.  This is part of why I say I am not good at monogamy.  Noah was right next to me and handed me the implement so he’s not as angry as he could be.  What happened is we were at Dad’s birthday party (non-bio dad) and I got to talking to one of my sisters-in-perversity.  Dad has a whole harem of daughters you see.  The one in question is the youngest in terms of being newest to the family but she is a year older than me and thus technically the oldest of us.  I refer to myself as the senior daughter for clarity.  He adopted me first.  We like to ignore the one he adopted second.  She’s not my favorite sister.

I don’t keep in close contact with this sister most of the time.  Her life is in a very different place than mine and we are both busy.  It’s not a slam or a negative judgment.  It’s nice to catch up when we can.  At this party I heard a lot about this guy she had fairly recently broken up with–see, there he is.  She spent a lot of time watching his scene with another woman.  Her heart was on her sleeve.  One of the things that breaks my heart faster than anything is seeing a woman I love pining over a piece of shit man.  And from what I saw of this guy… yeah… he’s a piece of shit.

I don’t like men who pursue mastery to be degrading to women.  If you only want to own women you can insult then I have a low opinion of you.  I don’t mind that you want to use those names sometimes, but if that is what you think of your partners I think you have a personality disorder you fucking piece of shit.  You are not better than women.

My sister managed to kind of get involved in the scene.  She really wanted to play with him.  The girl he was playing with was slightly less extreme of a bottom than my sister and my sister pretty obviously wanted to show off.  The guy demurred.  He had been using his belt as a whip.  He gave it to his slave/submissive/bottom/partner/whatever her chosen identity label thing is.  He then taunted and forced her to hit my sister.  She did, but it was lackluster and obviously not that intense.  It was a giggly good time.  The guy started encouraging fairly random other people to hit my sister.  One got her in the eye because he didn’t know what he was doing.  I felt like I was watching a train wreck.

I nudged Noah and told him to give me his belt.  He did.  See how it feels kind of fuzzy for him to get mad at me for doing it?  But I’m not supposed to play with people any more.  It didn’t feel like a scene, exactly.  I sure didn’t do it for my sexual gratification.  I did it because I didn’t want to listen to those asshole men tell her that she was a dirty whore.  They didn’t mean anything nice by it.

My sister has had times in her life when she needed to feed her kid and she didn’t have a job.  She has sold her body to put food on the table.  I felt such an explosion of anger when he was picking on her for it.  They dated.  He knows her history.  He was explicitly picking on something that is a mixed circumstance in her life.

I changed the intensity of the scene.  I only used the belt and I stayed on her thighs: the fronts, backs, and sides.  I hit her hard and I hit her fast and I forced her emotional reaction towards panic as hard and fast as I could.  And while I did it I started a litany to her.  You are not bad.  You are good.  You are strong.  You are brave.  You are fierce.  You have survived things that would take down lesser people.  You are strong.  You are good.  She tried to interrupt me and tell me that she was a whore.  I paused long enough to hold her face in both of my hands and tell her that even if she has had to prostitute her body to survive she isn’t a whore.  You are not defined by what you do.  She is a bad ass mother fucker.  She sobbed and clung to me.

Bdsm is rarely about sex for me.  That is not how I grew up in the scene.  I made every top who was kind of sort of leaning in to get in on the hot available action flinch and back off.  I was not going to be one more person starting a pile up on a poor girl.  I was nastier and meaner and harsher.  I kind of like being the visiting bad ass.  This wasn’t a game.  It was very serious business.

I do bdsm because it is one of the best ways I know to force the body to get rid of the excess energy that poisons people.  There is atonement and release and a journey to find the core of yourself.  When you are in the middle of a very intense scene you can’t hide who you are.  You react from the animal core of yourself.  I am a vicious animal who will strip you down to the bone and show you what it looks like.  I will tear the flesh from your body so that you know that I can see all the way through you.  I see exactly who and what you are.

And you are beautiful.  Your strength amazes me.  That you can allow me to do this to you amazes me.  I worship you.  I adore you.  I love you.  Thank you for showing me this fierce core of strength and intensity that other people simply don’t have.  It takes a warrior to experience pain like that over and over and over.  We don’t have a good place in our current world for people who have to suffer.  Even being a soldier is more about being a cog in the machine.

I see in my sisters-in-perversity a desire to be made clean through suffering.  Not all people in the bdsm world are after the same thing.  But I know my sisters when I meet them.  I see the same need in men, but I am less able to address it.  It has long felt like a flaw in me.  I can’t offer the same experience to men.  I am too locked in being afraid of men.  I can’t look at them the way I can look at a woman.  I can’t identify in the same ways.  I have always believed that is a grave failure.  I’m sorry for it.  There is a part of me that understands men as other and I don’t know how to change that.  I see a specific wildness in women.  I see women in bear traps thrashing about.  I understand their feelings.  I don’t have to know all their feelings.  I don’t have to really know everything about their lives.  I know that trapped.  I know that desperate need for release.

I know how to rip someone down until they can no longer stand nor defend themselves.  I know how to make them cry and hurt and wish they could do anything to get away from the pain.  The pain I am giving is just a stand in for all those things they can’t change in their lives.  All the things that hurt and hurt.  All those other things make you feel worse about yourself.  Because it hurts and you can’t stop it.  It weakens you over time because no one can stand up forever under an onslaught.

My beatings are short in duration.  And the whole time you are taking it you are being coaxed and reassured and told that what you are doing is impressive.  You are showing your mettle.  You are proving how very strong you are and I will delight in building you up with it.  By the end you know that you are an intensely strong person and you can go do fucking anything.  Anything in the whole world.  Most people are cowards compared to you.  Not very many people will permit a beating like I give.  I only hit the girls who can’t say no.  They have outrageous pain tolerances.  Other people want warm ups and I’m not here for that shit.  I’m here to prove that I can take you apart but it will be a lot of hard work for both of us because you are so god damn intense.

I always stay in contact with my sisters-in-perversity for a while after a visit.  It seems important.  They see a part of me I don’t reveal much in life.  It’s interesting for me to get perspective on how we are changing over time.  I learn a lot more from brief flashes of my wounded warriors than I do from dozens of conversations with people who have never been hurt.  This is the part I hesitate to say because it sounds so awful.  I learn what mistakes are there for me to make.  When I see my wounded warriors I see There But For The Grace Of God Go I.  In their struggles to perceive themselves as valuable I see what could happen to me if I had a lower opinion of myself.  I know that I was brought up to be one of them.  I was quite literally brought up to be competitive about being able to take more pain during sex.  Thank you, Jim.  You were an inspiring father.

I have been binging on sugar for the past few days.  It’s kind of obscene.  I came home from Portland and both girls are acting out in various ways.  I feel trapped and angry and frustrated.  My life fucking sucks.  But my life only sucks because I have a bad attitude.  I look at my sister-in-perversity and I have to understand that my life is quite cushy in terms of me having everything I want when I want it.  Sure, I have to do it with my kids along.  That just means I need to figure out how to work with my kids.

Someone on facebook linked to an article about why French parents are happier.  Apparently in French they do not have the concept of “discipline” the way we do here.  They constantly think that they are educating their children.  My entire life right now is an education to my children.  What am I teaching them?  Dissatisfaction.  The funny part about sitting in the garage as I write… it’s a constant reminder that I get work done with my children around.  I didn’t have child care when I insulated the walls and put dry wall up.  I didn’t have child care when I painted a mural.  I had help sometimes.  I had friends who did it with me.  But my children were around and under foot and I cared for them.  I had help for all the stuff that was genuinely beyond my ability to do it alone.  I could not have done the drywall without the consistent and reliable help of T.  He saved my ass.  I’m going to owe that man for a few lifetimes.  He doesn’t understand what he is to me.

I have been struggling for a long time with feeling trapped.  It’s been a lot of … well… all of it.  I have a lot more freedom than most.  More than most people for all of history.  I am somewhat unique in being financially secure in a tumultuous period of history.  Yes, we could be hit with disaster.  For now I am going to continue with the fact that I am ridiculously safe.  I have a lot of options.  Even as Noah and I fuss back and forth about the fact that we have to carefully budget… we have a lot of options.  Noah only  gets $600 to spend on a weekend trip with his buddy.  Cry me a river.  We have a really good life.

In every relationship I have in my life there is a mixture of uplifting and wearying.  I need to start thinking a lot harder about the uplifting or I am never going to get out of this muck.  I have a marathon to run.  I can’t be hanging out in the muck.  It’s too tiring.  I will injure myself.  I have to run five miles today.  You know–just get up and do it.  And tomorrow I’ll run three miles.  On Saturday I will run seven miles.  Next Saturday eight miles.  So on.

When I run I feel strong and capable.  What I used to get from getting my ass beaten.  I don’t know how to get it from getting my ass beaten any more.  Now I’m always mad that Noah isn’t doing _______ exactly how I would.  It’s kind of sick.

I don’t know how to be a follower right now.  But we don’t have room for much else in our relationship and I don’t know how to guide us.  I don’t know how to guide Noah.  That’s an interesting thought.  I resent being the guide for more than a couple of minutes.  I’m impatient.  I want to be lead.  There are journeys Noah simply can’t lead me on.  He doesn’t know how to get there.  I’ve had kind of this dawning horror around this topic recently.  I have some ideas.  I’m not ready to spill them yet.

I don’t know what the future will bring.  I hear that if you spent more time focusing on the positive you can change your life.  You can actually make things better.  I am fairly uniquely positioned to do so.  Dr. Frankl taught me that if you have something you are burning to do you can get through any circumstance.  Some dude on a Ted talk yesterday brought up the idea that everyone desperately wants to live.  Then I listened to Steve Jobs talk about how much he wanted to live.

How does one go about finding their own path?  Well, I think by definition I can’t ask anyone else.  Whatever it is they did or would do will be wrong for me.  That’s why I’m not fond of advice.  I do like hearing stories though.  I like finding out what other people have done and why.  I’ve been reading a lot more recently.

When I feel fussy about what I am doing I need to decide what I would rather be doing and do that.  That’s part of the binge eating of sugar.  The kids are pestering me for sugar.  We have a lot in the house that we don’t normally have.  I am tired of fighting the kids off of it.  I’m tired of being whined at for it.  I’m eating it with them them till it is gone.  Then we don’t get dessert unless you can talk me into making some with sweet behavior.  I like doing it when I have a cheerful house to do it for.  I won’t do it for whining.  It has worked for me in the past.  I think we ran out of chocolate last night.  Now the sweet snack in the house is fruit.  When the answer is, “We don’t have any chocolate in the house; would you like an apple?” The response is more positive than you think.  And then we just don’t think to buy it at the store.  It works out.  One of these days she will remember to ask for it at the store.  That will be figured out later.

I’m getting defensive already.  That’s lame.  I felt cheerful through most of the writing.  I’m tensing up as I think about going in.  The family is awake now.  The girls are extra clingy right now.  I will miss these days.  It’s a lot of physical contact for me.  I feel bad about how difficult it is for me to handle physical touch sometimes.  I wish I liked it more.  This is part of my feeling of inadequacy.  I’m not sure why I feel inadequate though.

I’m supposed to think about three things I am grateful for.  I’m always grateful for a white wall in my house.  I like thinking about how I will paint it.  I think I should paint it next month after I get the book edited and up on Amazon.  We’ll see.

I’m grateful that I get to raise two daughters in an environment where I am not under ridiculous stress all the time.

I’m grateful for stories to think about.  Something is bubbling in my head.  I’ll think about it on the long run today.  I’m going to run to Lake Elizabeth.  It is just over five miles roundtrip.  I hope it warms up soon.  I have to leave by nine.  Noah is having a late start day.  I should probably go see him for the time I can today.

Running and singing and whining and kids.

When I sing I listen to my ‘healing’ playlist.  Mostly women.  Mostly at least semi-introspective music.  Lots of relationship stuff.  Lots of anger and lots of sadness.  There are happy songs too.  One of the main reasons I don’t think I run very fast is because I can still sing along sorta pretty much the whole time.  I pant the words out during sprints.  Just like labor, I never lose the ability to talk.  I keep hearing about how something doesn’t qualify as heavy exercise unless you lose the ability to talk.  I hear that serious labor inhibits the ability to talk.  I never lost my ability to communicate.  I don’t get silent.

I used to.  I used to experience everything scary or hard or painful as something that caused me to withdraw.  Now the harder something is the louder I want to be while doing it.  I just can’t suffer in silence any more.  This means that my neighbors look at me funny while I run around singing fairly loudly.  I smile and wave.  I decided that if I am going to run in a Cheshire Cat hat complete with ears I am required to be cheerful.  People stare at me a lot.  If I take the hat off and run with the super short hair they stare just as much.  Early in the running I felt kind of defensive and weird.  I doubt my facial expression was cheerful.  People used to look at me warily.  Now I run along singing, at about a normal conversation volume, and I smile and wave and interrupt myself to yell, “Hello!  Nice night, isn’t it?”  Then I go back to singing loudly.  Now people laugh and wave and answer me with some appropriate comment.

I think people dislike me because I project hostility so much of the time.  Mostly people don’t have an opinion of me.  But I’m a polarizing figure!  Whatever.  Mostly people don’t have an opinion of me.  They don’t care enough to have an opinion.

I’m not sure I can actually wrap my head around that.

Yeah, no.  Can’t do it.  I have an opinion about everything and everyone.  Only I don’t actually.  I think I’m lying again.  I’m sitting here trying to force myself to have neutral thoughts.  It’s more difficult than one might think.  If I look around my garage I can think that I don’t have an opinion on the quality of most of the books (I share library space with people who have a lot of books I haven’t read) but I have an opinion on how much room they take up and where they are stored.  Is it a neutral impression?  Well… if I see the book dropped somewhere else I will have very strong negative opinion about the book.  So I think that all of them are just on the negative side of neutral for me which means I have an opinion.

Yeah.  I don’t think I can imagine what it is like to go through the world with actual apathy.  Do you want to know the problem?  The problem is that I have this weird little piece of me in the center and it decides if my opinions are positive or negative today.  Pretty much across the board.  Today I’m feeling hostile and pissy; I don’t even know why.  I could come up with candidates, but they aren’t really big enough.  I have too much good coming.  I should be excited.  At this time tomorrow I will be on an airport shuttle with Noah and we get three full days of no kids.

The running is hard.  I’m tired.  When I arrive back I am in high spirits.  Then I crash the next day.  It’s fairly consistent.  I am not explosively angry I am just kind of short in temper.  Snippy.  I feel bone weary exhaustion and the kids aren’t happy unless I’m running with them.  I really can’t right now.  I’m so tired.  I’m not always.  I won’t feel like this all day.  But it feels like the core of me is just barely on the negative, whiny side.

Noah is trying to express appreciation for me.  For all the work I take off his plate.  I hate feeling like it isn’t enough.  I don’t feel appreciated.  I don’t feel valuable.  I don’t feel effective.  I feel plodding and stupid.  I feel like I am barely going through the motions.  I feel like I’m looking at everything through a dense cloud bank.  I feel like gravity is too heavy.  I think that is what I feel.  Gravity is too heavy.  That makes it harder to do everything.  I have to decide if it is worth the effort.  I still haven’t started packing.  Not for us and not for Shanna.  Shanna is getting picked up at two this afternoon.  I should probably get started.

It doesn’t help my overall feeling bad that last week Shanna was helping me with cleaning.  I didn’t like how nasty her tone was and her word choice in describing the activity.  Do you know where she learned it?  Watching me.  I didn’t say anything to her about it.  She was just reflecting what she sees.  But I’ve been thinking about it.  I haven’t described her toys as crap since.  She doesn’t have crap.  She has high quality neat toys in a dizzying variety.  It’s really not crap.

I’m cheerful sometimes.  I’m not sure why it is so hard right now.  I’m grieving; I think that is part of it.  Grieving for so many things.  I’m more than half way through the first round of editing the book.  I really don’t want it to be an angry book.  I want to tell the story in the most simple and direct way I can.  I don’t want to flail around and be angry forever.  I just want to get it right.  I want to have other people know the simple facts.  I don’t want to be alone with my story.  It’s scary.  I can’t handle being alone with it.

As I run I think about a lot of things.  I think about the one who got away.  Ha.  I have several.  I think about the many possibilities I had open throughout my life.  I think of what choices I made and where.  Which were the most important ones?  Where was the tipping point?

I have the life I wanted.  I really do.  Why aren’t I happier?  Why is everything viewed in terms of me failing?  How have I really failed?  How am I bad?  I’m not really engaging in questionable activity any more.  I think this is as close to the center of the bell curve as I will ever be.  I still feel bad.  I still feel like I am bad.  That’s what makes everything just negative of center.  Because I am.  I can’t help it. I was born bad.  This is why I run as far and as fast as is safe for my body on a training schedule and I yell out the words to Born This Way.

I’m not bad.  I have done a lot of things that other people don’t do.  That doesn’t mean I am bad.  The balance of my life is heavily skewed towards doing and being good.  Why do I still feel so unworthy? I feel terribly unworthy.  God knows I don’t deserve Noah.  He is far nicer than anyone like me deserves.  In this mind frame I even know that he wasn’t trying to cheat.  He did act like a jerk, but good grief how much do I expect one man to put up with while never ever doing anything to retaliate? I deserve a good smack down now and then.  I get too demanding and pushy and uppity.

I don’t like it when I think this way.  I know these thoughts are fleeting.  I know this isn’t how I always feel.  It’s how I feel today.  I’m enjoying this part of growing older.  I feel a lot more security around the fact that I won’t feel this way forever.  And I really do know that I have far more good than bad in my life.

Today my baby goes to her Godmamas.  She is excited.  She loves these visits.  Recently she asked me if we will be together forever.  I told her that depends on how we define it.  I told her that we will always be together again but we won’t do everything together all the time.  Sometimes we will be in separate places but if she thinks about me real hard and knows she will see me again soon it’s like being together at all times.  We will always be together again very soon.  She said that works for her.

Calli has changed dramatically recently and I don’t talk about her in writing much.  My experience of parenting her has been different.  She needs me in very different ways.  For the past few months she needs much more intense physical contact than she seemed to want when she was small.  She is very serious and when things don’t go how she wants she gets this stricken expression on her face.  It’s really pretty hilarious.  I love watching her play with things.  She looks like she thinks more like an engineer.  She isn’t a dilettante.  She wants to sit and figure something out.  That’s not how her sister approached objects so it’s neat to watch.  She makes me understand how uncurious I am.  She also makes me understand that I know so much more than I think I know.  She holds things up and grunts at me.  She wants me to explain.  I always start at the most concrete level with name, color, size, that kind of stuff.  Eventually I get to imaginative uses.  It generally takes several options before I find the right one for her.  Then she nods and runs away.  I’m not sure if I have finally given her sufficient data or if I finally said the right word.  I won’t know until she can talk.

Calli is going to talk on a very different curve than Shanna.  That’s ok.  It means that she feels much less there and I think I’ve been underestimating her for a while.  Her comprehension is fairly astounding.  I think she understands a lot more than she obeys.  She is willfull.  In a very different way than Shanna.  If I try to prevent Shanna from getting what she wants she responds in a very wild, free-swinging way.  She always has.  Calli clenches her fist and shakes with fury.  She may or may not release a few ear-drum-shattering shrieks but mostly she just looks like a bull about to charge.  She doesn’t swing out but she may lean over and bite.  Calli is a runner.  Letting her walk on her own is dangerous.  She won’t come back and she is going faster by the day.  Shanna never went far from me and would come back when I called.  This kid doesn’t feel as strong of a leash to me.

Today I need to pack.  I should probably go do that.  Everything takes a really long time so I had best get moving.  Any second now.  Don’t wanna.