Monthly Archives: May 2012

Memory lane

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I had dinner with my ex last night. That was interesting. I asked him a lot of questions and he answered as best he could. I told him point blank that I’m glad the kids thing worked out or I would have kicked myself for the rest of my life for leaving him. I actually kind of wonder if he lost a little bit of his sparkle for me last night. I think I had forgotten a lot of things. His opinion is the only opinion. I remember why we didn’t argue: I bit my tongue a lot. There was no point in discussing controversial topics because he has already made up his mind and he will be condescending, dismissive, and really pretty rude the entire time you talk about something that isn’t his thing. For example: organic farming. He believes it is going to be the destruction of the human race. He won’t talk about the problems from animal feed lots or mono-crops. He thinks there aren’t any problems. Right. I let it go because I don’t care about converting him.

Noah listens to any crack brained thing I bring up in a polite way and when he is doubtful he carefully says, “Can I see some of where you found this information?” If I’m using an idiotic source he lets me down gently. It’s nice to be reminded that for the first time in my life I live with someone who genuinely thinks of me as an intelligent person. I had forgotten. I had forgotten how much everyone before him made me feel like I should shut up and sit down and just let them speak because they are smarter than me. I didn’t always do it but I felt it.

There has been a lot of research lately on how hard it is to change peoples minds. The less smart someone is the more likely they are to be really entrenched in everything they know. Holy crap Tom is narrow minded. He knows what he knows and believes there is no validity in any point of view he disagrees with. It’s fascinating.

He wants to live in a Sci Fi future. He thinks things will be every increasingly technical and people will move to increasingly thinking jobs. I think that is folly. If you look a distribution of intelligence, 50% of people are below average. You really think that everyone in the world should sit on their ass and do a computer job? Really? Not all of us would even enjoy that let alone be capable. I think we should be encouraging people to work more with their bodies if they show the slightest inclination. We are a nation of people who are desperately unfit and unhealthy. The solution is not more sloth.

He wants to have fun. He doesn’t want to create anything in particular. His job is creative enough for him. Every year or so he has a new hardware design project. He is designing things that use basically entirely outside components. He’s figuring out how to assemble the right configuration of after market parts. He doesn’t have much desire to really grow the business. He wants to keep very busy (he’s a work-a-holic in my “I lived with him” opinion) at work and make a lot of money so he can have more and more fun. That means racing his Porsche, tying up and sexually controlling women, and working. I told him to go get a vasectomy so he can make damn sure he never accidentally ends up a parent because he wouldn’t be a good one.

Tom is a just fine person. I think I just got over him romantically. It was sudden. I no longer look up to him. He doesn’t have a talent or a skill I respect any more. That was weird to notice. I am now how old he was when we met. I feel disappointed looking at what he has done with his life in the last twelve years since we met. He doesn’t have to give a shit about my disappointment, in fact he doesn’t. He has enjoyed his life. He wants to keep doing the same shit for another thirty or forty years before he croaks. He is perfectly happy. Another woman will always come along, right? SM is more interesting with new people any way. I don’t want that life and I’m really glad I only stayed for four years. I have now been married for longer than I dated Tom. Noah is a larger influence on my character than Tom was. I’m glad for that.

I asked Tom what it was like living with someone as crazy as me. He said he was unaware of it. I cried alone and he didn’t know it existed. He didn’t know I was unstable.

I cut and was suicidal a great deal while I lived with him. I was still interacting with my family a fair bit. I was quite unstable. He didn’t notice. He didn’t fucking notice. You have got to be fucking kidding me. Seriously? You are that self-involved? You never noticed that your partner of four years was unstable emotionally? It makes me think I should feel a lot more confident in my acting skills. Maybe I am even harder to read than Noah says. I cultivate being hard to read. I practice. Really. I do not want to give away the intensity of my emotions when I am around people. It’s dangerous to be noticed for your strong emotions. I didn’t know I was that good though. Tom remembers that we had a lot of fun and got along well. That’s good.

Tom has never read any of my writing. He doesn’t want to know what goes on in my head. That may be brilliant of him. I didn’t understand how much my writing has always contained a plea for someone to read it and come talk to me about it. Noah does. Noah is the only fucking person who is interested in crawling as deeply into my head as possible. It was really wonderful to be reminded what it is like to be in the room with someone who requires me to have a brick wall between myself and him. Noah is interested in what I am thinking and feeling, pretty much at any point. Sometimes he is distracted with other bits of life but if I write it down and leave it for him he always catches up. He has read my entire archive on every blogging site I have ever used. Multiple times. That makes me cry. Oh my G-d he actually loves me. He thinks I am worth that kind of time and attention. I write a fuck ton and I’ve been blogging for over nine years. I need to poke around old storage disks and see if I can find my g-blog archive. I’m not sure if I still have it and that is sad. I should probably make another LJ book so that I have a copy of it. Other people write in paper journals and keep them.

All of a sudden I feel a little spark of interest in finding out what I actually like about bdsm. I spent a lot of time last night feeling like I’m just not a pervert any more. I have no interest in the kind of stuff Tom is into. I’m not interested in being degraded for someone else’s amusement any more. I think the joke is kind of thin at this point. Yes, yes, I know that I am disgusting and should suffer. Blah blah. I’m tired of the role I had to fill. I’m tired of having to denigrate my own thinking abilities in order to tolerate being bossed around by someone who is so not smarter than me. He knows different things than me and he believes that the only important things to know are the things he knows. He thinks my things aren’t worthy of much respect. That is probably hyperbole. He doesn’t bother to notice that my things are there so he doesn’t have to listen to me on any topic because I’m not very educated. Or something. “Sure I can “listen” to you blather on about something idiotic while I roll my eyes and don’t really listen.” It’s really very similar to how I feel with Alex. To be fair Alex has dramatically improved in this area in one on one conversations, in particular since he started working on it with his therapist. It’s still a thing.

Tom told me he hasn’t done Daddy/daughter play since me and he hasn’t been interested in rape play either. For all of the years I have known Noah he has been staunchly uninterested in Daddy/daughter play–not his kink. After he read the book and he understood the emotional power it has for me he is suddenly interested. Rape play has been a major component of our life. Tom didn’t think I was a fine instrument to be played. He wanted to have fun with a buddy. Noah is consciously working on helping me change because we both want me to. It was weird to understand that at this really deep level last night. Tom knows very little about me. He knows hand wavey bad stuff happened. He knows a few details and will admit knowing them after a lot of pressure. Holy shit. That is actually kind of amazing. I remember Tom’s life. I pieced it together very carefully. I have a whole timeline constructed in my head about his family and school experiences from very young. I wanted to know him so I could serve him better.

We went to McDonald’s a lot, probably every week. Tom wants to rest when he is at home. He wants to eat on the go as he dashes to and from work and parties. It’s a lifestyle. So one time I asked for chicken nuggets and he asked what kind of sauce I wanted. I responded with, “The usual” and he said, “What’s the usual?” and I could feel my face involuntarily fall. We had been dating for multiple years at that point. “Sweet and Sour.” There was some little flick of memory in his face as he recalled my voice saying that over and over for years in his memory. He looked kind of guilty but turned around to the cashier without saying anything.

If I walk into any restaurant with Noah that I have ever been to he can tell me which foods I enjoyed and for what reasons and which drinks I particularly liked or disliked. Sometimes he makes me cry. It’s kind of embarrassing in public. Noah knows what I like. I think that is the most amazing thing in the whole world. He pays so much attention to me. How can a human being be capable of paying so much attention to me? He has a catalog of my smiles. He knows what kinds of memories go with which expressions because he looks at me and asks what I am thinking over and over.

Having dinner with Tom was intense. And then not. And then it was kind of boring. I couldn’t have a conversation with him because he wasn’t interested in my point of view. He was dismissive and cold. He didn’t mean to be. He could speak perfectly politely as long as he could feel it was entirely “fun”.  He wanted to have an agreeable conversation and he was perfectly happy to bulldoze and be rude and ensure that I didn’t conversationally disagree with him. I am so happy that I now live with someone who values my opinions even when he doesn’t agree with me. It was really nice to see that I have found someone who suits me far better. I am glad I kept looking.

I have to go run.

Apparently I don’t want to track.

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I got busy. Then we decided to use a lot less electricity for a while (no artificial lights and no computers during darkness) and my computer time went down. I'm cheating today because I am in a bad mood. 

I went and saw my therapist on Thursday and that was a good thing because I was having a lot of intrusive suicidal ideation all week before that. Over the weekend I just didn't have the thoughts and that was restful. But this morning Calli had a hard time sleeping and I wasn't very patient with her and I feel quite guilty about it and here I am. Noah tapped me out because I wasn't being very patient. Shanna didn't have this many sleep interruptions. This is hard. I don't handle many of them–Noah does 90% of them. Once in a while I try to tap him out around four so that he can get a little sleep before work. I did that last night and I shouldn't have. Turns out she had just barely woken up and he had slept most of the night. Dang it. That's what I get for trying to be nice. He came back at five and told me I could be done. He's very nice. It's going to be a long day and I will be nicer to the kids all day if I have some time when I am not being kicked or having someone scream in my ear. 

Running continues. I have missed a couple of days of training due to tripping. I feel mixed about that. It just means I need to be more careful, right? I don't think that long term it will be a problem that I lost a total of three and a half miles more than five months before the marathon. I will still get enough miles logged. It will be fine. I'm struggling with my attitude about running. Some where in tracking I stopped thinking about it as "just get there" and started thinking "I am a loser for being this slow." I am not a loser. I am not an athlete. I do not have a history of running. I'm doing fucking great. My attitude isn't great and I'm trying to work on it. I wish I could just feel happy with myself for what I have done so far. I don't know why I feel so little pride in the half marathon. I suppose because I was bitching and moaning in my head the whole time. I cried through a lot of the race and felt self-pitying. Why should I feel pride in spending three hours feeling that way? Running is extremely emotional for me. I think about my siblings a lot. I think about my brothers and how they used to run. I think about being told all my life that I was not athletic and never being given space to try. If I wasn't going to go out and be the fastest person on a track team tomorrow I shouldn't bother to get off the couch. 

I think about how I want my kids to perceive exercise. And I think it sucks that my experience of running is that it triggers a lot of crying and very sad thinking. I wish to God that I had memories of my family that made me happy. I want to be able to think of something that has happened to me and not cry or feel bitter. How do I turn things like a half marathon into something to feel kind of lame about? I know I didn't "enjoy" running it. So it doesn't count. I sure as heck wasn't that fast. I feel like there is no point in me doing things. I think that at least part of me believes that because no one will be there at the finish line whether I am the first person or the last who gives a shit about me so why bother? It doesn't matter what I go do when I am alone in a room by myself. I don't really exist.

I go see a therapist because I need to have an "authority" who I can come back to time and time again who I can come back to and get continual reassurance that I am doing the right thing. I need to be seen. I need to have someone I can trust witnessing my life who isn't going to allow me to be invisible. I have had a few good therapists in my life. They have all been able to present a neutral facade no matter what I am telling them about until I ask them for feedback. Then they react a great deal. I can't handle working with a therapist who flinches and pulls away from me when I talk about the things that are going on in my head. I can't expect neutrality from Noah or my friends. I have gotten to the point in my therapy career where I talk about that on the first visit with a new person. "I need a blank wall. I will project all of my shit onto you if you give me any reaction." My current therapist has a wonderful presence. She radiates comforting. I like her.

Last week we talked a lot about what it means that having panic attacks and feeling suicidal is my normal. What do I do about that? How do I go about living my life knowing that it is true? I have yet to have a stage of life where I have gone more than a year without thinking about suicide. I didn't think about it for the first year of Shanna's life. Then I had a miscarriage and a bunch of issues with my mother. 

If I wasn't someone with a panic disorder what would my life look like? How would I interact with people? What would would I do with my time? I have to construct this story out of whole cloth. I try to guess. I switch social groups so often because I don't feel like I guess well and then I am afraid to see people again. I won't be able to duplicate the same "character" I was trying for the last time I saw them. A lot of how this is manifesting is I just don't talk as much any more. I feel like I only have bad things to say so I shouldn't say anything at all. Sometimes I get into a blurty stage because I have so many words in my head and I don't have very many appropriate places to put them. 

I want my kids to have a different relationship with exercise than I have. So I pretend that running is awesome and I do a lot of it. I like that my kid thinks nothing of the mile walk to the park. She would much rather walk to the park than drive because she thinks car seats are annoying. We have a different sense of time than most people. We have long days to fill. We don't do much and we don't have very many obligations at specific times. Well, we do a lot. It's just all decided at the last minute and most of it is in or near our house.

How would I live if I didn't have panic attacks and suicidal ideation? I'm not really sure what would be different. I wonder what my life would be like if I didn't waste so much physical energy on being afraid. Terror is hard on the body. My body feels terror a great deal of the time while I am doing common every day things. I wish I understood how much it was taking away from me, although I'm not sure I need more reasons to be resentful. I don't like my body for being maladapted in this way. I wish my body understood that it is ok to be safe here. I kind of feel like part of it was being mailed the letter. People who are mad at me aren't even going to limit telling me that I'm bad to the internet. They are going to mail shit to my house so that I can't avoid knowing that I'm bad even if I avoid the internet. Well, fuck. 

I want the voices inside my head to be kind to me. I want to know how to change those tapes. I'm tired of feeling like I loathe myself. I'm tired of feeling critical of my accomplishments. I really and truly am safe. I feel like I need to get to the place where I can really trust that Noah and Shanna and Calli are probably always going to like me. They will get mad at me as well. Other people need to be not my problem. I need to stop caring if other people think I am bad. I need to stop rehearsing these tapes that confirm that people think I am bad. I need to not care that what I am doing is not good enough for other people. That isn't my job. I don't need to be good enough for them. Three people. What would my body feel like if I really understood that I only need to expend energy worrying about three people instead of untold numbers? I think I should make up that story in my head. That should probably be my story all the time. Then I won't have to worry about remembering a new one. This is my family. I care for them and they care for me.

Instead of hearing my brother criticize me I need to hear Shanna telling me that I'm the best mom in the world. Shanna has already declared that she is running in a race with me as soon as she is big enough. I guess I will have to keep running. I need to get the wheels fixed on her bike so she can ride while I run. 

I had to have kids or I probably wouldn't have made it to thirty. I have been suicidal for a very long time. My will power needs rejuvenation. Right now my job is to teach my kids how to be functional, happy adults. That means I have to figure out how such a person behaves and act like that in front of them all the time. So I cry when I run. Maybe I should stop feeling bad about that. Maybe it's really awesome that I have space in my life where I am alone and I get to vent those horrible overwhelming emotions. Maybe a skinned knee isn't the worst thing in the world. I do need to pay more attention when I am running. I want to show Shanna how to be competent and that means being at least minimally attentive. Injuries suck, yo. 

Planning

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Noah is a lot smarter than he looks. He let me buy into the Disney time share program. Even though it was a lot of money. And he hasn’t gotten mad at me for not paying it off faster. He’s really quite patient with me. I say that he is smart because a lot of how I manage self-discipline is in service of some goal. I can talk myself out of eating out if I know that all of my Disneyland spending money in October and December have to just come out of our normal budget. I have to save up gas money in advance. I can’t buy a race day t-shirt at the marathon unless I save money. I have to think about these things in advance. If I want to have the money then I have to save now. Our income dropped dramatically. I can’t just doall of the things I expect in the back of my mind to do. It’s feeling hard to adjust to. We lost a big darn cushion. I always planned for us to live on his income and the reality is we spent every penny of extra income too. Some of it was shuffled off to savings/investments but not a lot. We have had a really comfortable and fun life. It’s been awesome.
Noah wants to try some big hard stuff. My role in that is to be the one to save the money in advance that will allow us to take this risk and not suffer from it regardless of the outcome. I have to plan in advance and it’s feeling hard. It’s feeling like more self discipline than I have.
Part of the reason I am walking as much as I am with Shanna is I’m trying to see if I can live without the van and be ok with the kids. Can we get to the places we want to go? I’m trying to learn what places near here we want to try. Every additional car adds a huge amount of liability: gas, insurance, repair. Saving multiple thousands of dollars a year is a lot. It just limits my range with the kids a lot. We are thinking hard about that.  Things like: it would really suck to not be able to go to many home school events. I’m trying to figure out when they happen and if I could manage it. I should probably actually investigate options on the peninsula because then it makes a lot more sense to take Noah to work and use the car during the day. Most everything we do now ranges up and down the east bay.
I saw my therapist last night. Yeah. I feel like this. And that is probably going to keep happening. This is my normal. Time to move on with life. Life isn’t going to wait for me to feel better. I have to think about things that matter. Things like: what are the actual needs in this house? How can I meet them? What would a life that meets those needs look like? I need to backwards plan this. I need to draw up a long flow chart so that I can figure out what I should be doing now in order to move towards those goals. Yes, my stomach hurts. Yes, I feel like I am about to puke. Yes, I feel like my heart is racing. Yes, I am afraid.
But Noah slept in and I have to go make breakfast. That’s a lot more important. He really needed the sleep. And he will want to go in early today because we are having dinner with a friend tonight.

Everything must be bad

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There is a diner in town we go to for breakfast. Noah went there regularly even before I moved in, so we have gotten to know the staff. The two main servers have been the same for more than ten years. We have kind of a special relationship with the woman, who is probably around my mom’s age. Her grandkids live out of state so she quite dotes on my girls. Towards the end of today I got up the nerve to ask her to go do something social with me and the girls. We are going to go to tea in Niles for Shanna’s birthday later in the month. It will be really nice.

Talking to her is kind of a mixed bag. I have been crying a lot after eating there recently. I am so fucking jealous of her relationships with her children. Recently her youngest daughter decided to do a city hall wedding, last minute, with her partner of almost seven years. My friend was so excited. Her daughter allowed her to do all the doting and the silliness and traditional stuff that she desperately wanted to do but her daughter didn’t exactly want. Today we talked about how excited she is that this summer she gets to spend her oldest daughter’s birthday with her this year and she hasn’t done that in a long time. She has been very sad about that. I haven’t spent a birthday with my mom since I turned 18. I never will again.

I seem to be working hard to ensure I won’t have family at all some day. I hope I don’t fuck things up with Noah and Shanna and Calli like I do with everyone else. I ran Sarah off. I ran Alex off. I ran Andrew off. I ran Julia off. That is all in the last year. I told Noah this morning that part of why I asked him for monogamy is because I’m afraid that he will come home from a date to find me dead. I keep making it harder and harder for him to stay with me.

I’m just not worth the effort. I’m too angry. I’m too mean. I know. I drove my family away. I chose to send out a nasty message to every member of my family basically telling them to fuck off. I’m really glad I have therapy today because I would kind of like to walk in front of a bus before anyone else can leave me. I don’t know why this is so bad right now. I have nothing more to give. Why would anyone want to know me?

I know why Shanna and Calli want me. I understand that for them I am still a fucking need. They would never be whole people if I died now. That would hang over them and poison their entire lives and I am not that selfish. I don’t know why today is so hard. I have been sleeping. I’m eating. I really really really don’t need more exercise than I am getting. I’m up to running (just over 5 mph consistently) at least 12 miles a week and it is about to start increasing dramatically. I’m walking 5-10 miles a week with the kids. I really don’t need more fucking exercise. I have the house at such a state where I can clean it from top to bottom in three hours. No matter how untidy it is I have a system for doing a basic pick up in about thirty minutes. The kids are both being loving and sweet and remarkably agreeable. We are in a honey moon phase. Why do I want to kill myself? My mommy calls me a liar. I must be a piece of shit. I wish that wasn’t enough. I wish I didn’t care what she thought. I really do.

Everything is in the right place. My life is really as set up as it is going to be for the next few years. I feel like everything but me is perfect. Someone better than me should be in my place. Someone who is not spiteful and bitchy. Someone who doesn’t burst into tears just because some woman in a diner loves her kids. I feel so deeply unlovable. So worthless. Noah seems to love me. I don’t understand why. I understand the girls loving me. That is a biological self-defense mechanism. They want to god damn survive and I am their ticket to doing so. But it’s deeper than that. They are part of me. Just as I am part of my mother. And I can’t have her any more. I feel like I am on the road to ending up like my step-mom. She overdosed on heroin in the bath tub. At her funeral everyone said they couldn’t understand why she did it. They thought she was perfectly happy. She told me she wasn’t. She talked to me about being depressed. Given that her mother went through a long and messy battle with cancer and all the things in her life that bothered her I perfectly understand why she did. Perfectly.

I can’t let Noah date because he would find some nice secondary who would appear to me to be better than me in every way and he would come home to find me dead. Obviously this person is better to spend time with, so why don’t you do more of that. It’s not right. It’s not true. I suppose in this objective way. That is how it feels to me. I want him to go find someone better than me because he deserves someone better than me.

I’m having a lot of trouble with sex. I feel like he married me because I was so enthusiastic about sex and I was so enthusiastic about sex because I am deeply broken and I seem to have settled into this entirely asexual motherhood thing. In our marriage vows we specifically did not promise monogamy because I didn’t think either of us would ever do such a thing. Now I’m threatening to kill myself if he dates. To be fair, I never did that. I didn’t tell him I thought about such things while he was out on dates because it wouldn’t be fair. Why would he need to know that kind of thing? It’s emotional blackmail. I should just shut the fuck up already. I feel like writing these things in my head is a form of bullying. People who love me will feel bad. I don’t think I currently have anyone in my life who actually wants me to hurt. And I have friends. I have awesome friends.

Being an orphan is fucking hard. When I went to the grief ritual I met a woman who runs an adoption support group. I told her that I wasn’t officially adopted so I don’t count. She told me that I have absolutely been abandoned by my family of origin so I count. I think I should send her an email about that. They even meet on Monday nights and that is my night off. Done.

I feel like maybe the next big task in my life is for me to find things that I love about myself. All I see is the bad and the not good enough. Surely I do something to a degree that I am satisfied with. Even when I look at my cat, whom I rescued before her eyes were open–I am the only mama she knows. I bottle fed her and taught her how to eat food. I taught her to talk; her meows pattern on mine. Right now when I look at her I feel guilty. I am not affectionate enough. I don’t let her sit on my lap as much as she wants. I don’t clean her litter box until she yells at me. I just don’t think about it. Even though I have had her for fourteen years. I’m a self-absorbed asshole. Why don’t I take better care of her? She is a really nice cat and she has very rarely made any trouble. But I don’t clean her box until I have to and I resent her as I do it. That is what I see when I look at myself. All I do is resent everything. Every good in my life I make bad. I dislike myself for my ingratitude and hostility and resentment. Why the fuck can’t I just be grateful that my life is better now? Why do I still whine all the god damn time about things that are over?

My garage is really cool. I did a lot of really fun things here. I should feel proud of myself. Mostly what I feel is shame because I am so far removed from what is in my head. What it could be if I had more time and money. That kind of thing. I can make anything bad. Everything I do is a symbol of how I failed to do something better. Is that perfectionism? I don’t know. Noah says that I use the fact that I can find one person better than me at doing every specific task to prove that I am a loser. He argues with me a lot about my self-esteem. I’m worried about wearing him out.

I keep feeling reminded of my lack of earning potential. My life isn’t worth much to anyone. If Noah gets sick of me my life would dramatically change. It would be very hard because I’m about as dependent as a person can be. From here on out I have no source of income or any potential source of income. And I’m asking him to buckle down and stop getting a whole bunch of the perks of living with a sexual abuse survivor. I’m not doing the ridiculous promiscuous sex any more. Why in the hell would he stay? I feel like a leech. I feel like I will never be able to pay him back for how hard it is to put up with me. I feel so god damn mean.

But if I am so god damn mean how come people stop me on a regular basis to tell me that they enjoy hearing me interact with my children? But if I was so god damn mean I might run four chosen family and my entire biological family out of my life in a year. I’m that talented.

Today is going to be a long and hard day.

Parenting, anxiety and me!

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Sometimes I feel like a broken record. My anxiety level for the past couple of days has been unreal. My stomach aches all the time. I feel like I want to vomit fairly regularly. Nothing is going on. My life is smooth, relatively easy, I don’t get a lot of surprises… and yet… here I am. I hate this. I hate that my body is so broken that it is incapable of ramping down my ambient stress level when there isn’t much stress in my life.

I have fairly ruthlessly culled people from my life over the past year and some. I didn’t really do it on purpose but the shape of my days is different than it was a year ago. I don’t talk to as many people. I think I grow ever more isolated. It’s hard but it feels like the right thing. People distract me from the business of my life. I don’t feel good about that. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that wanting people distracts me from the business of my life. If I accept the fact that people are not going to show up and suddenly love me and want to help me I get by.

As always I feel like I don’t explain well. Watching Shanna is how I learn about myself. It’s a slow process. I understand things about myself as I see her doing things. Noah likes to tell me that I picked the high-intensity version of parenting. I feel like an asshole saying that about myself but it is basically true. I am with my kids all the fucking time and when I am with my kids I pour enormous amounts of energy into them.

A friend has an autistic son. I asked her to describe what his therapy looked like because I was curious. I felt kind of weird about the fact that my day-to-day interactions with my kids sounds remarkably like the therapy for autistic children. And I do that for 12+ hours every fucking day. I talk and talk and talk and talk. Shanna is, thank God, a highly verbal kid. So she listens to my explanations and takes them seriously. I can talk her into or out of almost any behavior. I explain in great detail why things are important. Hell, I’m coaching her to require a why so that she feels like she knows why things happen. “If I tell you not to do something and you really want to do it, ask me “Why” and I will explain. Most of the time I have a good reason.” I let my kids destroy the house in the name of creativity day after day. I don’t prevent them from doing things that make my life hard. I try to keep them safe. If it’s not a safety issue I will tell her, “Ok I will feel frustrated if you do that but there is nothing inherently wrong with you doing it so I’m going to leave the room and not watch. Have fun.” Usually I say this when she is about to do something that will cause me to be on my hands and knees for an hour picking something up. It’s going to suck. But I’ll do it because that is my job.

My job is to teach my children how to be functional adults. This is fucking tricky because I’m not sure I qualify every day. Hell, I’m not sure I understand what it means to be a functional adult. I see a wide variety of function out in the world. People get by. What is the base line? Am I shooting for the baseline? Oh god no.

I think a lot about why I want to homeschool. How do I want to do it. Am I doing it because I had a traumatic experience in school and I’m afraid my children will have the same life experiences? They won’t. Full stop. I’ll be frank and say that part of the reason I think about it is because I don’t feel like I am really a fully functional human being as long as I hide at home with my kids. Do we really hide at home? Well, it depends on how you mean it.

I feel like this part of my life seems to be focused on figuring out how my body works so I can turn around and teach my kids how their bodies work. As usual I feel ashamed that I don’t already know. I don’t know because I have spent most of my life dissociated from my body. I don’t know how different movement feels. I’ve never paid enough attention to know. I’ve never moved enough to know. I have hit this weird plateau in running. I can’t go faster for a while. I need to stop trying. When I leave my house hoping for just a few seconds faster I spend the entire run feeling angry at the weakness in my body. I’m at this place where I don’t think I can get much faster without a whole bunch of strength training I’m not really doing.

The pickle is I feel like my entire life works that way right now. Everything I am doing is at this stuck, hard place. What I need to do is just be stronger and everything will be fine. I’m at the stage of gardening where I need to weed like hell. Ugh. It’s not hard for the first hour. After that it hurts. Running isn’t hard for the first fifteen minutes. After that it hurts. Going on walks with the kids is easy for the first 3/4 of every walk. Then it hurts. etc.

It hurts in unexpected ways. Today I stopped at about 2.5 miles in and stretched for several minutes because my back muscles were so horribly tight I felt like they were about to spasm. My skinned knee is still stiff and uncomfortable. Other than that my knees and ankles are doing well so I don’t intend to slow down on the running. But I need to stretch more.

There is nothing in my life I need to do “less” of… other than maybe whining. I could do less whining. But why do I feel like a whiner? I whine at my blog (not even daily) and I do it at random opportunities. It doesn’t happen daily. I feel like I am not allowed to feel like my life is hard because I am sitting on a mountain of privilege and I need to shut the fuck up. So many people have it worse than me. Poor fucking baby. That’s not really a useful attitude to have towards one’s self. (oneself? weird.)

I don’t believe that any of the things I am doing is really all that hard. Hell, even the marathon training doesn’t feel that hard individually. What is hard is that I feel inadequate to the long list of work in my life. I don’t see how I will do it all. I keep hitting this terrible wall of desperately wanting someone to teach me how to do this life thing. Where the fuck is my Mr. Miyagi?! Someone who will just pluck me up and teach me how to survive and work and find discipline? I need help.

That’s nice, dear.

Where is my mommy? Where is the mommy who loves me enough to teach me about life the way I am teaching Shanna and Calli? Why don’t I get that? Well, honestly, it’s because not very many people want to put as much time and attention into another person the way I want to do with my kids. I want my kids to move through the world believing that just about everything has an explanation and if they want to know it we can bloody well figure out what it is. That doesn’t happen in school. In school the reason you have to do something is because some arbitrary asshole somewhere made a draconian rule. Bowing to random arbitrary rules isn’t very functional, in my opinion. In my opinion being functional means staying your course and figuring out how to survive in a terribly rigged system. Not a god damn person in the public education system tried to do anything to help me. I’m an outlier, fine. People can tell me hundreds of stories of them having good experiences. Research says that outliers do not do well in our system. Is there any chance in the whole god damn world that my kids won’t be outliers?

It is an Adverse Childhood Experience growing up with a parent who has diagnosed mental illness. Hi. I’m Krissy. During my life I have been “officially” diagnosed with PTSD, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Major and Minor Depression, Bipolar Disorder, and lots of people have unofficially thrown out a variety of other options for various reasons at various times. My kids are going to grow up with that. I can’t prevent that. I can’t not exist in their lives so they can benefit from not being around a crazy person. That feels bad to say, but it is a fact. My kids wouldn’t be able to go to school and be just like everyone else and fit in and progress at the normal rate in the normal manner. They would always have the horrible reality of coming home to me. I would be highly disruptive to a child who was genuinely normal. I’m not good at that type of existence.

Stupid shit. A friend posted pictures of bringing in goody bags and cupcakes to the classroom for her daughter’s birthday. I would be shittier than shit about stuff like that. I wouldn’t want to spend the money. I would resent putting forth effort to do “expected” things and I would be inconsistent and pissy about it. I wouldn’t encourage my kids to dress normally. I wouldn’t encourage my kids to behave in ways that worked in the classroom. When Shanna says, “Shit. My glass is empty. That sucks.” I just smile and don’t worry about it. When she says “fuck” I completely ignore it in the moment. Later I work into the conversation how some people dislike certain words for totally illogical reasons. If you want those people to like you then you have to play their game. I’m not going to tell my daughter these words are bad because I don’t believe it is true. I believe it is an irrelevant distinction. I think they are impolite in some circumstances just because it is good to treat people how they want to be treated. It is important to me to handle it that way.

My kids will have a profoundly different understanding of the world than most kids because I removed the explicitly sexual content from my view of the world and have otherwise just merged them with my experience. To me that is what life is. You take your children with you for your life. Shanna has some interesting things to say about the police given her experiences participating in the Occupy movement. She was upset about not going to the General Strike yesterday but Calli wasn’t feeling well. Sick kids trump politics in this family.

That is what I am specifically teaching to my kids. Life is about this weird slightly moving hierarchy of importance of needs. You have to triage and decide your priorities over and over and over again. If you don’t think about your life that way you won’t really be able to make long-term planning decisions.

Right now we are trying to find balance on budgeting stuff, money is hard and complicated. I’m trying to figure out how to divide the hours of the day. How much time do I spend on different tasks around the house? The thing is, I’m doing the high intensity version of parenting. I do tasks around the willingness and ability of my kids to handle me working. That makes everything complicated. I’m juggling their attention needs, my need for time when I am not being pestered with 20+ questions every minute, the need to constantly be in the fucking kitchen cooking and cleaning up after the mess, and everything else I want to do in this life: writing, running, gardening, have friends. I keep reminding myself that my children won’t be small forever. I’m crossing my fingers that this ridiculous outpouring of energy will eventually slow down. I have no way of knowing. I can’t plan as if it will. I have to plan as if I am going to be this tired and interrupted forever. That way every improvement will be a blessing and a wonderful gift instead of something grudgingly grasped.

I really struggle with this whole “mental illness” thing. I have a lot of days where my body is in active fight or flight mode for a lot of the day. It is very hard to calm it down. I have terrible ranges of emotions. But I’m at work so I stomp the shit out of most of it. Producing people who can function within society is my goal. That means I can’t cause them to develop the same kind of extreme coping mechanisms. I just can’t. How can I teach something I have never experienced? How can I teach what it is like to move through the world without fear? I feel so much fear I want to vomit sometimes. And nothing bad is happening to me. I think that part of the reason that I have so many friends on the autistic spectrum is because I know my emotions are too extreme for the normal range so I need to hang out with people who just won’t notice or care. Honestly hanging out with my kids is similar. Well, my kids notice. But they give me a kiss and a hug and smile and expect everything to be all better now. As far as they are concerned, it is. Because mommy smiles and hugs them and says, “I am so glad I get to spend my life with you.” They do make me feel better. I had this whole range of emotions before I had kids. Before them I had sex with random people or did drugs or cut to deal with my emotions. Now we are trying to move in the “hugs not drugs” direction. The pot is so complicated. I have, uhm, tried a wide variety of street drugs. The pot is different in how it functions in my life.

What is the difference between drug addiction that is bad and being dependent on a medication for survival? Many diabetics require insulin. Thyroid medication is a big deal. Etc. My brain was damaged by what happened to me as a child. It does not function normally. I feel genuine terror and have the full body experience of being retraumatized some days. It really sucks ass. But I can take that sensation away and relax enough to have a conversation with my kids and be mellow. I feel disgusting for needing help. Why the fuck can’t I just be stronger? Such a fucking loser.

Noah told me last night that he can tell I have been feeling unworthy lately. I’ve been struggling with finding a place in my head and my heart where I am comfortable with who I am and what I am doing with my life. In a variety of different places in the past couple of weeks I keep finding stupid things that all remind me that I don’t have a lot of earning potential. My credential has lapsed. I would have to go back to college before I could usefully work in my field again. I think I would rather eat manure. I feel like I am a bad partner to Noah. I feel like he is giving up too much in being with me. I feel like a failure because I can’t figure out how to settle into the traces and just be happy with my life. I can’t figure out how to stop having panic attacks. I can’t figure out how to be calm and mellow. I don’t know how to be happy. I only know how to be scared and afraid and lonely and angry. What fucking good am I? How functional am I? This is what I don’t understand.

I feel defensive and guilty because I want to keep my kids out of school and I don’t want to try to be a “working” parent. It is stupid and ridiculous. No one who knows me is campaigning against me. I am only arguing with voices in my head. Part of the problem is I have this growing horror as I acknowledge that I am going to have to explain to Shanna that a lot of the ways in which I interact with her will get her into trouble out in the world. People don’t like bossy know-it-alls who narrate what is happening in life. They think it is weird. It makes people uncomfortable. They don’t want to hear that. And people get really upset if they think they are having a “private” conversation (loudly, in public) and someone comments. I have never understood why. I’m a sit-in-the-diner-and-talk-to-each-table sort of person. My older daughter is like me only she doesn’t have any brain damage. She loves talking to people and she feels safe and comfortable in the world. So she has virtually no fear. Watching her makes me feel like I am living a good life. I don’t want to miss even five minutes of the Shanna Show. Unfortunately it’s hard to find balance.

Calli is so different. She is not @#$#@ interested in having me narrate for her the way I do for Shanna. She hits me when I try. This is going to be an interesting journey. I am startled by the things she manages to figure out by herself. This is going to be an interesting journey. Shanna thrives on hands-on directed learning. Calli wants to watch and then figure it out on her own. I’m surprised by the physical dexterity she exhibits. She is trying to keep up with Shanna and she is fearless in her attempts. She lands safely more than she falls so she keeps trying to do things that should be far beyond her development. I think I was quieter when Shanna was this age but I can’t remember. The words blur. I think I was a lot quieter. I was a lot more lost in my thoughts. That is the hardest part about this job. I don’t have a chance to think very often. I have to carve out deliberate silence in my life. I crave it. I need it. The constant talking is hard because it requires so much thinking. She makes a lot of conversational leaps that are hard to follow unless you know her whole little set of life experiences and she needs a lot of repeating of everything. Our daily conversational life does literally look like therapy for autism. I don’t set specific developmental goals, I just conversationally speak that way about pretty much everything. If I introduce a weird or new word I will emphasize it and break in the conversation to explain what it means and use it several times in several ways so that it sticks better in Shanna’s head.

It is really weird for me to sit and think really hard about what my life is going to be like in twenty years. What am going to do when my baby is twenty two? What will I do with all this energy? I’m kind of scared. I have no idea what the future will look like. I have no idea if I will ever get to the point where I stop vibrating with fear all day long for no reason at all other than bad things happened a long long time ago. I think being afraid I will always feel this way is making it exponentially worse. I don’t know how to just accept the feelings and deal with them when they come up and wait them out. I have no trust that they will end. They never have. Well, they pause. I don’t always always feel this way. It’s so complicated.

And I don’t even have time to get into sex. I have so much thinking to do about that. And it’s largely being evaded. I don’t think about sex when I am with my kids. That doesn’t leave me a lot of time to think about it. This shit is complicated.