I need to get a chlamydia test done for reasons I’m not going to explain here. Life is complicated. PAMF is being annoying. I had some kind of visit in the last year so they’ve told me that I will have to pay for 100% of the visit. Why do I have insurance again?
I think I’ll go to Planned Parenthood. Even paying out of pocket there is cheaper.
I went up to work at Wicked Grounds this weekend. On Saturday I went up after running thirteen miles. I was tired but ebullient. BART was really full so at one point I gave up my seat so that an elderly person could sit. Even though I just ran thirteen miles, I am clearly in a better position to be standing.
When I stood up two elderly Latina women started making comments–ok, so only one of them was loud. They glared at me. The words are already fuzzy in my memory (ahhh blessed medication) but she called me trash. They expressed shock that I was that gross and a woman. Ew. I was wearing jeans, a t-shirt with the words “Rope Slut”, and a zip up hoodie mostly closed over my chest. And a dog choke collar closed with a padlock. I looked at her quite fiercely and asked, “Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” She turned bright red and looked down.
By contrast I ran around several blocks in San Francisco yesterday wearing a latex cheerleader outfit. It’s made with maroon and clear panels. One of the clear panels on the skirt is right over my ass crack. There is a deep clear vee in the front of the shirt. Now that I have ginormous mom nipples you can clearly see areola but not quite the nipple. It’s uhh festive. I had quite a few gay men tell me that I looked fabulous and they were proud of me for wearing it. It was… different.
Dore Alley is my anniversary. I got beaten by choice for the first time the night before Dore Alley in 2000. I was eighteen. It was my second weekend at the Power Exchange, a bdsm themed sex club in San Francisco. I had brought my sister the previous weekend and I was too afraid to play. I came back dressed in clothes I bought at Hot Topic and I asked a transwoman to beat me. I was afraid of the men, honestly. She flogged me very well.
I feel like Leather as an identity has changed a lot in the twelve years I have been part of the bdsm community. Even though I’m not active these days it still feels like my community. I have been there my entire adult life. I don’t have another community. There is no other grouping of people who will accept me for absolutely all of my fucked-up-interests.
I got to know a new person yesterday as a result of a massive faux pas. I used the wrong gender pronoun. I felt like a total fucking asshole. The woman-born-woman very bravely stayed near the cash register to tell me that I made a mistake when I said “he”. I felt so bad. (In my defense she is a very butch lesbian. Not that it excuses me in the slightest.) After that I ended up having a very long and protracted conversation with her.
It’s not every day I meet someone who says, “I know I am weird but it is because I was tortured as a child.”
Her androgynous gender appearance is the result of her father performing medical experiments on her from birth and trying to change her gender because she was born an identical twin and they wanted a boy.
We had a lot to talk about. We felt very comfortable together. We both found the bdsm scene at eighteen. She’s two years younger than me. I’m not sure how I have missed her for ten years. I do recognize her handle. I think I just have never been a San Francisco person. And City people don’t come south.
I got to sit down and have a surprise conversation with someone who I pretty much couldn’t shock. Do you know how often that happens to me? I’d put it at twice a decade. Normal people want to talk about their lives. From birth to eighteen I lived a traumatic horror show and when I turned eighteen I ran straight into the Leather community. I was embraced and adored. I still am.
I didn’t spend much time with anyone outside the Leather community for the four years I was with Tom. I was still close with Anna but Jenny and I barely spoke. We had very different lives even though we were both college students. I have rarely been like people my age. It was really amazing yesterday to find this person. I hope I can keep in touch with her. She feels like a gift.
The actual Up Your Alley Fair wasn’t very exciting. I felt pretty sad about how much it has changed. I saw far more latex than leather. Most guys were simply wearing underwear if they weren’t wearing pants. It didn’t look like a leather event. It looked like a bath house but outside with very little sex. I only saw three or four guys getting head. There used to be hundreds. I had the very strong impulse to ask the only really slutty guy I saw there (he had a line of boys) if he was willing to see if a mouth is just a mouth. I didn’t! I don’t do that any more! But I wanted to. I wonder if he would have let me. The fair felt uninspiring and if no one else was going to put on a show I might as well.
I really like this part of me. I want Noah to go to Folsom with me. Exhibitionism is big for me. I probably won’t have actual penetrative sex at Folsom but we will have to drive because I won’t be willing to make it home. The car can be put somewhere private.
I really like getting the shit beaten out of me while people watch and freak out. I like it. I really really like it. I like the energy of the crowd. I freak people out in dungeons too. I am on the far extreme edge of what is currently common. I wasn’t when I came into the community.
I found the leather community at the very beginning of the online era. People were still very paranoid about using the internet. It was harder to find parties because they weren’t advertised online. You had to get to know people still. We hung out in IRC talking all day and night together but we arranged the parties at munches. We had dungeons that were basically our community spaces. People spent a lot of time hanging around.
When I showed up as an eighteen year old it was very rare to see another person under thirty. The community was full of people who had already had full lives and then discovered something about themselves. They were people who made very conscious life choices to become the people they were.
Where I was there were a lot of older women who were very heavy masochists. Life has already made their ass hard. They have been getting hit for a very long time and they have leather butt. They can barely bruise any more. Sadists like bruises. If it gets harder and harder to bruise you… well… I guess I’ll just have to hit you with something bigger.
I got to meet someone this weekend who grew up like me. She was intensely abused and ostracized as a child and then found the same Leather community. I know all of the people she was mentored by. I don’t know how in the hell I have missed her.
I really want to write more about sex but I should go in.
I have a theory as to why significantly more men than women run marathons. It’s because men don’t have to bleed every month. Today I have to run a half marathon and then go work a full shift at Wicked Grounds (come visit, ok?). I started bleeding yesterday. I’m pretty fucking uncomfortable. My lower back is quite unhappy with life.
What I would like to do right now is get an old fashioned hot water bottle and fill it and a new fangled heating pad. I want to lie in the fetal position with the hot water on the front of my belly and the heating pad on my lower back. Instead I am going to get dressed in that rabidly uncomfortable sports bra (My last long run caused me to get a rash from rubbing) and run for three or so hours. Because of how my body feels I’m going to aim for three and a half hours. Which is more than twenty minutes longer than my previous time for this distance. I hurt.
I should probably take some pain medication. Today will probably also be a day for caffeine. I have to start running no later than 5:30 if I want to do everything on time today. It’s going to be a very long day. I’ve already been up for a while taking care of Calli.
But I’m a fucking bad ass and I can do anything. Time to run.
I have been internally struggling with how much I want to write about the kids. Privacy and all. I've set my privacy bar at a very non-standard place. It's not transitive. So it's awkward.
I was watching a movie on Netflix about a beauty school in Afghanistan. It's kind of interesting. Then Calli woke up. I could hear her knocking softly on the door and saying, "Mama." When I got there and opened the door (carefully so I didn't hit her in the dark) the first thing she did was sign "milk". Yeah.
We settled in on the rocking chair. She nursed on both sides and then fell asleep on my chest. From start to finish of picking her up until I laid her back down in her bed was twenty five minutes. I saw the clock as I left and returned to the garage.
It felt like a lifetime. I think that a lot of my physical nursing discomfort with Calli has been anxiety around the pot. I feel bad that I smoke pot and nurse. I have done a lot of medical research and I have consulted with a number of medical professionals on this topic. It's not great but it's better than any of the other drugs I could be on, honestly. There is still this miasma of shame and guilt. It makes me tense. At this point I don't have a lot of milk left anyway. She's nearly two.
It is going to be hard to finish weaning. She's not ready. She only nurses once or twice a day but it is very important to her. If she doesn't get to nurse at those crucial times she feels really bad. She cries and cries. It breaks her heart. Nursing is a very complex experience on both sides. It still provides enormous health benefits to both of us. (My risks for various cancers and diabetes goes down by the year.) It is very good for both of us to do this.
And when I sit down and nurse her I focus on her in a way I don't the rest of the time. When I sit down and nurse and trace her face with my finger I see how much she has gotten from me.
Shanna feels like a mini-me in a variety of ways that bring me great joy. I feel like if I got to go down a list of traits that describe me and pick which ones to give to my kids Shanna got the things I would pick to give away. Shanna makes me very happy. Seeing her move around the world convinces me that there is good to come and I have to be here to see it.
Calli is a different experience. Calli is a lot like me, don't get me wrong, but if I had to pick the traits to pass on I probably wouldn't have selected quite the list Calli got. Calli is like a lot of the parts of me I struggle to accept. But this morning as I nursed her I found peace with that.
Instead of feeling bad I felt joy that she was there to remind me that even the parts of me I struggle with are good and worthy of emulation.For better or worse this tiny person sees me and sees someone good and wonderful. Someone she wants to be just like. So she picks things to pattern off of. If I don't like the patterns she is picking up, maybe I'd best watch my behavior-hey?
They are so different. Calli's birthday is next month. I asked her if she wanted to have a party for her birthday. She said yes, adamantly. I asked her if she wanted a big party or a little party. That took a little negotiation and explanation. Shanna campaigned hard for a huge party. She started listing off names of people to invite. Calli vetoed almost everyone.
Calli wants the woman who comes to our house every two weeks, her Godmamas whom she sees every month, and the family that has provided the most care taking for her since birth. She strongly vetoed every other name we could come up with.
Shanna invites every person she talks to on the bus and the train to her birthday party. It's hilarious. I'm starting to think I should reserve a spot at Lake Elizabeth and start letting her hand out business cards. If she wants that, she can have it. Calli doesn't want that.
Calli likes quiet small groups. She's overwhelmed by sound and too many people. She doesn't enjoy it. She likes having the few people she is comfortable around visit and that's it.
They mirror very different parts of me. I like it. I like watching them. I feel really good about the ways in which they are different. I feel like they embody the extreme ends of my personality. I feel like a constant peace keeper. "Shanna, don't pressure Calli to do things. If she says no you have to respect her wishes." They are both persistent. It's really wonderful.
I thought about all the things I love about Calli while I was nursing her. Including the fact that she continues to need me so intensely and viscerally. I thank anything that will listen for my children. To my children I am the most important and wonderful person in the world. They are probably going to be the only people I ever feel really comfortable around. They are the extent of my clan.
I haven't weaned Calli and I don't know when I will. It's one day at a time. Some day she will no longer need this from me. I hope I can continue to meet her needs for a while longer.
Yesterday was a very physically demanding day and I fell into bed due to righteous exhaustion at 7:30. I wake up at 3:30 whether I like it or not, lately, so that seems prudent of my body. I have always been inclined to be awake earlier than the people around me. I don’t really care if my blood type says I am pre-agrarian. Clearly my body thinks I should be up and milking some cows right now. I am adapted to farm life in some interesting ways. And I can’t shake these habits. I’ve never really lived on a farm.
For a while when we I was sixteen we lived on my grandfather’s property. It wasn’t anything close to a farm by the time I lived there. He had been dead for years and the various houses were rented out to lazy people. No one worked the property at all. It just decayed.
I’m out of bed right now even though what I want to be doing in snuggling Noah. He’s not a freak of nature like me. He doesn’t go to bed early enough to be wakened right now. I wasn’t this much of an early riser when I was younger but I’ve always had problems based on the fact that I wake up to early. It’s amazing how many people there are in the world to get mad at you for stupid things like waking up early in the day.
Tom went between not liking it (while traveling because I am thoroughly obnoxious) and ignoring it. He went to bed late and got up somewhere between ten and noon. He wasn’t going to change his life for me. When you add in his work schedule it very quickly became obvious that once I had a real job (especially teaching, with it’s early-morning schedule) I probably would never see him again. We just didn’t match up. It was a petty reason but on the list of reasons we were Just Not Compatible.
I grew up with my sister loathing me. She is a night owl. She thinks the day should start at 2pm. My mom wasn’t that extreme. My mom was actually remarkably flexible. She could fall asleep whenever (years of pervasive exhaustion teach you this trick) and she was happy to take drugs (usually just caffeine, but harder stuff sometimes) to stay up as long as she wanted.
I’m extremely hostile about caffeine usage. I can tell I’m getting snippy towards Noah about the topic. My mom woke up every morning and took a hand full of pills. Sudafed and Vivarin were always in the mix though it changed up a lot over time depending on time of year and current health issues.
I don’t want to need stimulants to live my life. I want to go to bed when I am tired. I’m not entirely sure why this makes me pathetic but it seems to. I am out of synch. I do not have a “fun” schedule. My schedule seems to be freakishly well suited to my being isolated and alone. This is my chattiest part of the day. I’m in the garage typing because Noah has to sleep. This is when the loneliness gets to me the most.
I wake up in a good mood. I wake up fairly excited about the day. I just do. I always have. And then I have to go spend hours and hours in a room by myself not talking to anyone. For the love of Christ don’t talk to anyone. They need to sleep. Shut up. Don’t you care about anyone but yourself? I do. So I hide. I keep my mouth shut. It’s polite.
I wish I could do things and not feel like I am doing them because I am bad. It is highly inconvenient that my most cheerful part of the day are the three hours before anyone else is awake. If someone woke up with me this would be party time. I have nothing else that needs to be done and I’m quite energetic. Yay! That’s a lot of why running in the morning isn’t that much of a hardship. But I don’t like going in full dark. I’m klutzy and that’s a recipe for injury. My eyes aren’t so hot these days anyway. Dear g-d I need new glasses.
I don’t know if other people have the same experience, but for me getting older is this long surprising journey of finding who I am and what I need. Like the early rising. I’m a lot more at peace with it than I used to be. Now I go to bed at 7:30 instead of trying and trying to stay up later so I can be “cool”. I’m not cool. That’s just life. Oh well. For me to try and stay up in order to be “cool” makes about as much sense as lipstick on a pig. I’m a nasty fucking bitch when I stay up too late. My body doesn’t like it.
It’s hard because that cuts me out of just about every social group I have ever known about. I can’t go dancing. I can’t go to bdsm events. I can’t go hang out with people after fucking dinner. I can’t handle the late-night camping sessions. I’m in bed by 8. I’m exhausted. I am a very physically active person. If you include the silly little walking around during the day ten miles of movement in a day is very common. And I’m carrying a minimum of thirty pounds of weight while I do this movement because I have to get Calli around.
I’m oriented early. I just am. I wish I didn’t feel lame for it. I’m uhm, like Benjamin Franklin? Does that make me seem more virtuous? (He was a cantankerous old lech so maybe I’m on the right track.)
It doesn’t matter. Over the years I will use this time to write a good many books. I think I have a lot in me. Good thing I have thirty + years ahead of me of 3-5 hours of being awake before other people. It will give me a lot of time to get these words out of my head.
Today is Friday. It’s a rest day. I think I will stay home today. I will try not to freak out because I’m sick of the neighbor. I feel bad making my kids play alone. But I’m not happy about the behaviors they are picking up. I have limited ways of influencing this and all of them make me feel guilty. I think it’s time to stop feeling guilty and start feeling ruthless.
I made this chunk of my life about raising my kids. I need to make all forward progress about that. If I don’t like all the results of that forward progress, whatever. I can’t try to take care of everything or I will end up taking care of nothing.
Well that is the last time I'm going out with that baby carrier. Calli is too fucking heavy. I hurt. Today I woke up and did my three miles (actually 3.26 because I didn't judge the loop perfectly) then we walked to Fairyland and went around Lake Merritt. We do public transit to Oakland so there is a fair bit of walking involved. My off the cuff whine says that I moved my body through at least eight, probably nine, possibly ten miles today. And I carried Calli for at least three miles of it. I carried both kids for about 3/4 of a mile. That was all I could manage. I hurt. Together they weigh ~64 pounds. And I had a bag that was probably almost five pounds.
I think I should stop thinking of myself as not very strong. It's an interesting part of my self identity. On Saturday I am going to go run my second half marathon this life time. And then I will take a shower and go to San Francisco and work a shift in a coffee shop.
I think I should stop thinking of myself as not very capable. I'm starting to think that if I am still not competent then the bar is too high. Give me a fucking break. I've done a lot of manual labor this week. I did a bunch of yard work. I have run 24 miles in the last seven days. And on Saturday I will go run a half marathon.
I'm having a little trouble with this explanation being me. I'm not athletic! I'm a shitty runner! I'm in terrible shape! See, I still have a big belly. (Whatever. I have an ass. I have a very very very nice ass. With shelf. And definition. And LIFT. It's god damn awesome.)
Ok. This is weird. My body has changed a lot. I don't feel like I recognize me very well. I look more intense and feral by the month. Getting through this much exercise is something I can only do through brute will. I hate exercising. This is a nightmare. Only it's not always. It is at the end of a lot of walking in a poorly fitting carrier.
I had a span of intense joy while running today. I had been fucking around with going a little faster then a little slower and I was just going through a corner right at the end of a get-my-breath-back slow jog session when Lady Gaga's "Hair" came on. I could feel the first few beats of the song make my body start lengthening. I consciously checked in with my lungs–my biggest downfall as a runner is I have very low lung capacity. Running has been amazing for this. I had a very slow breath rate and my heart was nice and low and slow. I saw the nice long straight block with decent sidewalk come straight into my line of vision. I lined up on the center line. It felt like giving a horse its head. I felt pulled forward by the fierceness of my energetic response. All of a sudden I just had to run. I sprinted down the block for all I was worth.
It felt so good. I felt so free. I felt so strong. I felt like a god damn bad ass. I probably flailed and looked kind of funny, but not really. I carefully felt every muscle group in my body. I felt like I was moving in tandem. I felt balanced. I felt really good. At the end of the quarter mile stretch I reached down fast and pulled my phone out of my pocket and turned it on to see what it said. The phone has a bit of a lag. By the time it registered I know I had slowed down from my maximum speed. It said I was running at 8.64 mph.
When I first started running I googled "What is the difference between running and jogging?" Some asshole on the internet said, "Nine minute miles. That's the difference."
I'm not there yet. But all of a sudden I feel the ghost of a chance. Some day I might be able to run one nine minute mile.
I cried a lot today. I come from a very athletic family. They sneered at me for my fatness. My sedentary life. It's all so complicated.
Dinner time.
I’m having issues with the neighbor kid and dealing with them is complicated. She is a year older than Shanna and she likes to think that makes her the boss. Lately she has been physically preventing Shanna from doing things I tell Shanna to do.
Yesterday I tried to go over to her house and talk to her and her family about it. I talked to the grandmother first. Then the mom. The mom didn’t want me to talk to the kid and said she would handle it. The thing is, this kid is in my house 20-30 hours a week. If I can’t talk to the kid about stuff then she can’t be here.
I’m feeling extremely conflicted. On one hand I TOTALLY GET WANTING TO MICROMANAGE YOUR KIDS. On the other hand, when someone is a caregiver nearly full time… uhm… well… telling me not to talk to your kid about issues is kind of a problem. I think I’m going to need to start sending her home a lot. And Shanna won’t be allowed to play over there.
The grandmother is ostensibly in charge during the day but she spends a lot of time lying down in the other room. She has migraines and a variety of mental health issues that are mostly untreated. She is on meds and she thinks that is all she needs to do for them. Uhm. If you spend more than twenty hours a week in bed because you are sad then your mental health issues aren’t treated. Ask me how I know.
It’s hard trying to figure out the right thing to do. I think I need to start watching them like hawks and sending her home at the first sign of trouble on a day. If I don’t then she punches Shanna. This is getting ridiculous.
I can be honest and admit that part of the problem is I don’t like little kids. They are assholes. (Yes, mine too.) The thing is, this is a little asshole I’m not allowed to discipline or tell no. I’m not going to put up with that shit. If you are going to grow up to be a fucking bully you can do it somewhere else.
But then I feel like, “If no one helps this kid… no one will help this kid.” This is how I fell through the cracks, you know? But she’s hitting my fucking kid. Pretty soon I am going to hit her. The last time she punched Shanna in the stomach hard enough to knock Shanna down and wind her I sent her home and didn’t let her come back for a week. I don’t think the kid’s family cared.
On one hand I feel bad not letting them play because it means that I am dooming Shanna to a lot of alone time. On the other hand I don’t want Shanna getting used to people hitting her. She shouldn’t think that is just a standard part of friendships.
It’s not just the hitting though. I told Shanna to go put her scooter in the yard and this kid physically blocked her and told Shanna she wasn’t allowed into my yard. WTF?! And her mom wouldn’t let me talk to her about it.
Thank goodness she starts school soon. Thank goodness. Thank goodness. Thank goodness. Maybe we will just get busier and not have time for the kid. Too bad I don’t want to drive much.
I’ve been sitting here thinking about why I need a therapist so much all of a sudden. What is this urge. What does it mean? Why is it happening?
I have this intense need to be seen. I need to feel like I exist in the world and I need to see proof of myself reflected in the eyes of other people. Right now I have Noah and the kids, mostly. I go through my life feeling invisible. I am not someone in the eyes of the people around me. I am furniture. They don’t know me and they don’t particularly care.
I have wonderful friends who give me what they can. They are all busy people. I tried to change the nature of my friendships-called-family and they blew up badly. It’s happened one right after another. I can’t keep risking this. This is too hurtful. My need is just too much for people.
I see a therapist week after week after week after week because otherwise no one gives a fucking shit about the stupid piddly shit of my life. I feel like I only exist in the highlights. No one cares what I am actually struggling with. No one wants the story. No one has time. Some of them kind of wish they could. The problem is that if they wish they could maybe then they feel some shame about not being able to help me. Then they get mad at me. Because it’s my fault they feel ashamed.
I need a therapist because I need to see knowledge of me reflected in someones eyes. I desperately fucking need to have someone know my complex story so that I can make small references to the distant past that is hugely significant. I fucking need that. I can’t handle having to live my life in the Readers Digest Version. I feel like a fake and a liar all the god damn time. I’m constantly feeling my heart race because I’m afraid I’ll slip and talk about the wrong thing at the wrong time and all of a sudden people will hate me and tell me they don’t want to be near me any more.
Don’t call this fucking paranoia. This is my god damn life.
I have to pay someone to be as consistent as I need. And even when I do pay someone to be in this role I can’t get it.
I’m looking for a parent. I’m looking for someone to be an active mentor. I feel so fucking alone. I’m so scared. I think I am pathetic. Isn’t it past time I was the adult already?
But I still hide under the desk and cry because I don’t know what to do when I feel consumed with self-loathing other than to hurt myself in some way and I’m trying not to teach that. I don’t know what to do. Right now I rock and cry. I feel like a blithering idiot but I try to comfort myself. I feel really stupid. I stroke my own hair.
No. No one is ever going to take care of me. I will never have that. When I am sick I have to get up and deal with it by myself. It is never going to be different. I just missed that. These things are stupid and petty and small.
But I haven’t cut myself in over a year. I haven’t cut myself since I stopped trying to meet the needs of my chosen family. I just can’t. I have nothing to give. If I want to keep the self control to not mutilate myself I have to save that energy. It is that hard to not hurt myself. To not beat my head on the floor. To not punch door frames.
Sometimes all I can do is sit under the desk and cry.
I need a therapist because I need someone to watch the seasons of my life. Who can coach me. Who can talk to me about why I am currently struggling and what are the “balls” I have to drop. How I can I figure out how to lower the amount of harm in my life? It’s a process.
When I am actively involved in communities I can sometimes coast without a therapist and do ok. I had a Buddy when I was a teacher. He had the classroom next to mine. We spent a lot of time talking. He got a lot of the story. Not the details of abuse or anything. But he learned a lot about me. A lot more than a therapist given how much time we spent talking.
I had that at the munch when I dated Tom. Losing that in the breakup was hard.
I need a therapist because for me what I am feeling right now is what I have always felt and will always feel. It’s not true. I have a very convenient memory. I need someone that I touch base with who really focuses on me. Where I get to be selfish and self absorbed and no I am not going to keep my mouth shut because I don’t want to “burden you”. Fucker I need some god damn support. And I have to pay for it. And it’s flakey. And it might die. Or tell me to go away because I do something horrible. Or it might stop showing up within an hour of the assigned start time. Or it might… just… need to move on. I’m a client, not a friend.
As inadequate as it is… it’s the only way I can have a relationship with someone where I see them every week. I need that. Even though it makes me feel pathetic and stupid and small. Better to pay a therapist to be my friend than to kill myself because I feel like I don’t fucking matter.
Just seems like money well spent.
Noah recently discovered that we have money in an HSA we forgot about. Woo. That means I all of a sudden have money in the medical section. I think I am going to call my former therapist and say I am ready for a referral now.
What I am doing right now isn’t working for me. That means I need to figure out how to change it. I’m not very good at doing that by myself. That’s ok. There are professionals for this shit. This is why I have been in therapy for decades and I probably will be for most of my life. Even though I feel ashamed of myself for that. My therapists are the most stable friendships I have. I need mirrors. I don’t seem to be able to construct a mirror with sufficient intensity any other way. I have to pay someone to pay attention to me before I believe that they will actually do so week after week.
I feel really pathetic. I also feel really suicidal. It’s time to call for a referral. I’m not managing on my own right now.
I really hate me.
I’m frustrated and angry. I can’t seem to get off. It’s this ache inside of me, this need. But I can’t get there. The galling thing is I know I would be able to go find a stranger on the internet and get off. My orgasm response is largely tied to being performative. That’s not really how my sex life works any more. So I just don’t get off. And if I’m any kind of honest I will admit that I kind of hate Noah right now. He can get off. No problem. And I’m left with this feeling of being a cum dumpster. It’s the only god damn reason I participate in sex. He needs somewhere for the goo to go.
When people I am ostensibly “close” with tell me emphatically that they don’t read my blog and they didn’t read the book and they aren’t going to I feel a sudden and distinct cessation of closeness. This person only wants to know about the parts of me that are “nice”.
I don’t think that everyone has to keep up with the blog in order to like me. But I do feel kind of intensely about people not wanting to know about my life. I’d like to turn around and start walking so we can keep it that way. I’m not going to fucking censor so you so that you can avoid being uncomfortable. If you don’t want to know things like that about a person maybe you just shouldn’t know me at all. I will be better off if I avoid people who want me to think that parts of my life are unmentionable.
It isn’t that I think everyone has to read it. It’s that when people feel the need to emphatically tell me they won’t I want to leave. That feels like a door slammed in my face. They won’t allow themselves to find out things that are painful so they don’t want to know about me.
Ok. I’ll take that at face value and leave. There are people in this world who do not flinch when they look at me. I live with them. Maybe I should just stay home.
I’m tired of having to be supportive of people who want to avoid trauma by never knowing that people like me exist. I don’t have energy for this.
I’m editing No Secrets again.
If you have read it, did you have any burning questions? Any parts you really didn’t understand and you wish you did? That was really what I was hoping to get from working with an editor, finding out where the holes in the story are. I didn’t get that feedback. Oh well.
It’s hard to read this story. It’s really annoying finding dozens of typographical errors in each chapter. I thought I fucking paid an editor. Oh well. :-\
I’m also working on another book. I feel like I have to be doing something. I feel so trapped and stuck and boring and… Oh man.
For the last day or so Noah and I have been talking about how he thinks the next book shouldn’t just be part two of the autobiographical series. He thinks the next book should be about suicide. So far this morning I’ve written about 2,000 words. I think there is a part of me that wants to hurry up and write about suicide now because I want to work on part two during NaNoWriMo. This isn’t the same kind of story telling. I want to tell stories! But he’s right. This is weighing heavily on my mind.
He keeps asking me who I want to talk to and why. Who do I want to talk to? People who think they have it so bad that there is no point in continuing to try. It couldn’t possibly ever stop hurting. Life is pain. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
But how do you bear it? How do you keep going? How do you get through yet another shitty day? A big part of it for me is this obsessive, tenacious belief I have that I am not alone and there are people in the world who understand me, at least a little, and more importantly there are people who love me and need me. I don’t just mean the kids.
I was a teacher for two and a half years. Former students talk to me at least once a week telling me thank you for helping them with something or other. I’ve helped some of them become better educated about their birth choices. A student told me that she avoided a c-section because I gave her the strength and assurance to argue for her rights. I feel like that’s a big deal. She had the brass plated balls to argue with a doctor about her rights because I told her she could. Fuck yeah.
When people are very suicidal they call me. Even if we aren’t close. Even if they barely know me. I wear my heart on my sleeve and I seem safe. I am not going to look down on someone no matter how low they feel because I feel like I’m sitting there in the gutter with them. You can’t look down when your chin is on the ground. Everything is level or up.
I feel pretty ridiculous sometimes because I feel like part of my gift this lifetime is the easing of other peoples pain. Even if I am not that important in and of myself I touch people. Maybe they will be important. Maybe they will be able to do something because they felt seen by me. Maybe I will be able to lend them some of my strength and stubbornness.
How do I make it through another day? By making deals and trades. Over time I have made some bad deals but all that mattered to me was making it through the day. By that metric I’ve been quite successful.
I feel pathetic because I measure my success in “not dead”. Seems like a pathetically low bar. Not so much of a high jump but rather something to trip you up. If you fuck up on “not dying” the consequences are bad. If you hit a trip wire it hurts even though it’s not a high bar. Landing on your face really really hurts.
I think a lot about survival. What does it mean to live? Why are we here? What am I doing? I feel overwhelmed by life. It’s too much and not enough. But I have to stay. I have things to do. There are people who need me. I have to believe in the pit of my stomach that somewhere out there in the world there is someone who needs me quite badly. I can’t die yet because I haven’t met that person. I want to. That’s enough to get me through today. I’ll find a reason to get through tomorrow then.
I’m really upset about these no-shows. I was already heading in the direction of feeling depressed and having two women who loudly and adamantly have told me they are my “family” behave this way convinces me that I must be a worthless piece of shit. Even my god damn chosen family just won’t bother to think of me. I’m feeling bitter. I try really hard for my friends. I go to great lengths and deal with inconvenience to spend time with them.
I’m feeling bitter and thin and unimportant. I don’t know if this obsession with BFFs is an American thing alone or if it is normal and natural to ache for people who value you this way. I think that is what the BFF thing is about. The longing for someone to really understand you and value you and love you and think you are important. I wish I had that. Instead I get to be an audience member. I get to be an adoring fan. Friendships aren’t based on me supporting your art while you sleep through visits where you might find out something real about my life. Obviously my life isn’t that interesting to you. I understand.
I wish people would stop lying to me. I wish people would stop telling me I am important when I am obviously and demonstrably not. The continual let down hurts so much. Just be honest. You will spend time with me if you can’t find anything better to do. You will spend time with me if you have managed to successfully straighten your stereo wires in time so you are truly bored so why not.
I have Noah. I have the girls. Those are the people I can count on. That’s the list. And I shouldn’t expect too much from my kids. I can’t talk to them about being upset. That’s inappropriate. They don’t need to know why I am crying today. “Because my “friends” are assholes who don’t actually care about me and it hurts my feelings.” I can’t say that to her. So instead I think I’ll just not leave the house this week. Bad things tend to go in threes. I just won’t make more plans. I don’t really want to be ditched again. I am so god damn tired of this being ditched shit. Echoes of my childhood go through my head.
Stupid girl. Why would anyone want to be your friend. Go away. No one likes you anyway. Pissy Krissy always whining about how people aren’t nice to you. Who would want to be nice to you anyway.
I was angry. I was angry because people hit me and raped me and called me names. So I don’t deserve friends because I am too angry and difficult. It doesn’t end at adulthood.
I have spent some time in the last few days on the friend with a close friend’s wife. I don’t know her that well but she is suicidal and I have time during the day to be on the phone and a fairly deep understanding of what it means to want to kill yourself. I have been trying to help her get through the worst of the impulses. Today will end. The intensity of this desire will fade. Let’s just trust the process. You feel this way sometimes. These feelings will end. The only constant part of life is change.
It feels kind of odd to be trying so hard to convince someone else of her worth when I don’t believe much about my own worth. I want her to have what I can’t have. I can’t feel good about myself. What the fuck is there to feel good about? I feel so very unimportant and stupid and stagnant and worthless.
I had kids because I needed to have someone who actually needed me in order to give myself a pass on suicide. I’m fucking needed. I don’t know what to tell a childless person. I don’t know what to tell someone who wanted kids and couldn’t have them. I thank the G-d I barely believe in for my children every day because I’m not sure I would be here without them. How can someone go find the same kind of meaning in another way? People do it. Not everyone has to breed in order to be important. But I wasn’t clever enough to find a way to feel like I mattered.
I survived because I used a long list of bad coping methods that got me through that day. I have spent most of my life worried about getting through today. I have plans, sure. The long-term plans help me find a way to structure my day.
In between conversations with her I am trying to figure out how I am going to explain this in the group. How am I going to talk about all the Craigslist Casual Encounter people I found just because I needed to not be alone. If I was alone I felt like I wouldn’t make it through that night. So I found people however I could. Most of society tells me I should be ashamed of myself. I am a disgusting whore for having sex with so many people. I have had a lot of sex with people I have never seen again. I don’t need to be in love with someone to have sex. I just need to feel desperate.
I will admit it is a bit awkward to me how many people Noah has worked with over the years who are part of my body count. I have gotten to know the men in this valley. The Christmas party last year was festive. Body Count Person’s wife was introduced to me and told euphemistically that I was uhhh someone he uhhh knew. She put it together and made some comment about his wild days. It wasn’t entirely approving so I did my best to become invisible. Good women don’t generally want to have their noses rubbed in the behavior of the filthy whores.
Today I feel convinced that the only use I have is child minder. I’m glad I have that. It’s something. I won’t always feel this way. But I think I’m going to stay home for a week or two. I don’t need to open myself up to more rejection right now. If you can’t handle dealing with what you might get, don’t ask for anything. If you can’t handle being told no or having people just not show up out of the blue don’t make plans. I don’t need anything else making me cry right now. It’s kind of embarrassing. It’s awkward to explain to the kids.
I should rest. I’m sick and I have to run twenty four miles this week. Maybe I can tell myself that my lack of social life is me preparing properly for the marathon. I keep doing things with friends that make training harder.
Like staying out very late with that friend who no-showed on me. That fucked up my running for the weekend quite a bit. I’m three miles down with some nasty blisters because I accommodated her schedule. Oh well! Apparently I am giving people too much of myself because I am doing it with the belief that I will get something back. When the something back fails I feel this enormous cavern of need. Because I was doing a trade not a gift. I don’t have enough spare to gift right now. So I should stay home and stop dealing with people for a while. I don’t have enough going spare to give without expectations so I shouldn’t give at all.
It hurts. I feel humiliated that at this point in time I should stay home and focus on the kids because otherwise the kids have to deal with me crying for hours during the day. They have to deal with me being impatient and inflexible. They have to deal with me not wanting them to help. They have to deal with me being upset.
Those people who are upsetting me don’t have to deal with my upset. They get to go back to their lives and not give a shit. My kids are the losers. That strikes me as unfair. I feel guilty because I want to do the Slow Fade out of most peoples lives because I just can’t handle the losing-trade of our friendship anymore. I don’t have anything left to give them. I’m out. That bucket is fucking empty and is currently being used to beat me on the head as folks look for more water. There is no more god damn water.
I keep thinking about a character sketch about a woman who isn’t much like me but whom I can understand. I have spent most of my life worried about inconveniencing or hurting other people. What would it be like to truly not care?
I have three people in this world I need to worry about. No one else is interested in a truly reciprocal relationship about needs. That’s ok. But I shouldn’t act like anyone else is a priority. They aren’t. I need to not be supportive and not feel guilty. You betcha. I’m not going to support you any more. You don’t fucking support me and I don’t have shit to give any more.
I think this is what self-care is?
There are a couple of people who come to my house to see me. I need to stop trying to expand the circle. It’s not worth it. I have exactly two people who make an effort to see me every month. That’s a lot better than zero, right? They don’t bullshit me or call me family. They don’t ask much of me. They just come hang out and watch my life for a few hours. They don’t add work or effort. It’s not an intense kind of support. But it’s nice. It feels settled and appropriate. They aren’t trying to be my BFF. They are trying to be part of a community. It is a relationship with more distance because they only give me what they have going spare and it’s not a lot. It’s ok that I don’t give them much.
I feel sad and scared and alone. I feel unimportant and invisible.
The thing is, a lot of people have affectionate feelings toward me. They just don’t have any way of meeting my needs. It’s not their fault. It’s not my fault. But it is. It’s real. I have no choice but to figure out how to get by without those supposed needs being met or I need to meet them myself. What is a true need?
I need to eat. I seriously need to knock it off with the sugar. I need sleep. I need to start going to bed at a consistent time again. I need to be kind to my family because they are kind to me. That means I need to limit stress.
I think today will move very slowly.
I have been vibrating with anger all day and that isn’t fair to my kids. Part of my anger level is I don’t feel like it is ok for me to talk about the things that are making me angry. It cycles from there. I feel like I owe people respect and privacy. I’m not sure why I feel like I owe people this. I guess that once people get to a certain level of inner-circle-of-friends I feel like they get dispensation from the normal rules I have with other people? I don’t hash out much of my friendships in writing. Not until long after things happen at least.
I’m allowed to talk about me and my experience of things but I don’t get to out people. That is what my “upbringing” in the scene taught me. It’s a harder line to walk than it appears on first glance. How can you talk about things and still obfuscate?
I’ve had two friends no-show in the last week. The second one just finally popped up at the end of the day to explain what happen. I’m frustrated but it’s a situation I understand given that I have done similar sorts of things myself. I’m not happy with her because it is the second god damn no-show in a week so now it feels like a big statement about my general self-worth.
I still haven’t heard from the first no show. It’s been six days. I sent her an email at forty minutes past the meeting time saying that I was going to head out and go to a La Leche League meeting so she probably shouldn’t come by at that point. I haven’t heard from her. I’m sure she’s busy.
I had to explain to my kids what was happening. She told them she was coming. Shanna was looking forward to it. I had to fucking explain to my kid why someone was god damn letting her down. Because she forgot. That happens. Because we aren’t fucking important enough to remember, I guess. I didn’t say any of that. What I said was, “Well, people make mistakes. I guess she didn’t write it down and it slipped her mind.”
I’m seething. And I’m ignored. It’s hard being reminded how little I matter. I hate being lied to. “I’ll be there.” Yeah. Right.
I feel guilty for not being more forgiving. I fuck up too. I expect people to tolerate so much, don’t I owe people an eternity of putting up with in exchange? That’s what this feels like. I’m being tested. Do I love her enough? Do I want a relationship enough? She wants to see what I will put up with before I prove her self-fulfilling prophesy that everyone leaves her. At least that is the story in my head right now. I don’t know another story to put in its place. I could reach out and try harder. If this was the first time I had ever had similar experiences I might. But this isn’t the first or second or third or twentieth. After a while it seems kind of stupid, don’t you think? Obviously I’m not wanted here.
Sometimes life is like that.
Something that probably isn’t obvious is: the frequency I write is largely dictated by how much shame I feel about what is swirling around in my head. I haven’t been writing as much. I feel too much shame. I feel ashamed of who I am and how I experience the world. I shouldn’t talk about how I am experiencing things because that is drama. Which means I am running in little hamster circles in my head. It’s almost fun only it isn’t.
Puppy was a mistake. I thought he was like Tom only younger and wanted kids. I was quite wrong. I should have never tried to date someone who thought it was funny that I was an actual Californian and would mock me and my vapidness for living here. And he thought I was fat even though I was at my lowest adult weight. He was very harsh about my body. He was very bitter because of his ex-wife and has a lot of mommy-issues. That relationship didn’t stand a chance.
But I’ll come back to edit and tag and add that it is because my life is so good that I feel so bad about feeling bad. I need to stop feeling like someone who has had my life. It’s really hard.
So I was reading this article about how 50 Shades of Grey Gives Bondage a Bad Name. She was quite scandalized by the use of cable ties instead of rope. She adamantly says that real players don’t use cable ties they use thick rope to prevent damage.
That’s for those folk what know the difference between fantasy and reality. I have been restrained with cable ties quite a bit. Want to see pictures? In a variety of different postures. Once I was even hog tied with cable ties face down in the bath tub. Then my partner filled it. Good times!
I love when people loudly say that bdsm has no correlation to abusive childhoods. Except in those rare, freak cases–of course. *wave*
While I was running today the Prince song “Gett Off” came on and I got to wander down memory lane. Mmmm hunting. I remember hunting. That was one of my favorite songs to listen to as I got ready to go out and find sex. I wanted to go find someone who was looking for me and they don’t know it yet.
I can’t hunt with witnesses. I went to the parties of friends-of-friends and then I avoided the one person I knew. You can usually determine early in a party if there is any prey lurking about. Men with high libidos have a way of checking out women. You can tell the ones who have been without sex for a while. They squirm once in a while as they look around. I would hang back and watch them for a few minutes. I should only go after men who are willing to look at many women as potential. The kind of guy who stares wistfully after one woman all night is unlikely to want to fuck someone on the side.
I like big blustery guys. They are cocky and domineering and usually quite insecure. It’s certainly not all I go for. There have been some men with slight builds and everything in between. I don’t hunt for women like this. It’s different.
I like approaching someone who looks like he can be funny and at the center of the crowd but right now he is just sitting on the side. It’s best to approach prey when they are alone. It is less pressure. The stakes are lower to start with and you can raise them much faster.
I find that the best way to get people to have sex with me is to make knowing personal commentary. I point out things that are stark staringly obvious… that they believe no one knows about them. I am quite good at that. I can make people feel seen. Once you start having a connection and a conversation I just move closer. I reach out and almost touch them and visibly stop. Oh wait. I forgot. I don’t know you yet. I don’t know if it is ok to touch you.
Sometimes it isn’t. I like knowing that early.
Usually it is. Most people go through life pretty touch starved. Prey often don’t recognize themselves as such early on. They seem to believe no one would want them that way. I think that part of the reason my hunting technique works so well is because most people do not believe they are attractive and are happy to jump on any opportunity in life to prove otherwise to themselves. I try not to disappoint.
When I want things to move towards sex I start abruptly switching the conversational topic (might about books, computers, politics, religion, whatever) to something slightly inappropriately personal. Did you see that your seam is starting to come loose… here? Then rub my finger up the center of their thighs. I love the gasp and wide eyes. People really do fall into types and I can smell my prey. Not everyone reacts this way to my behavior. Only prey. If someone isn’t prey then they have usually made it clear long before this point and I move on.
Do you know how I have been so successfully slutty? I’ve been turned down hundreds of times. You can’t take it personally. Move on. Someone else will be interested.
In my wilder and friskier youth the next move was sitting on a lap and lowering my voice so my prey has to lean in even closer to hear me. It doesn’t matter what I talk about at this time. I can talk about the food at dinner and it is an obviously irrelevant point to what we are clearly doing. If I talk about something explicitly non-sexual I have the opening to act almost surprised by the growing cock underneath me while I squirm. It’s awesome.
Then comes the abrupt switch to talking about Responsible Adult Things. So, how often do you get STD testing? (I did every three months when I was active.) When was the last time? What were the results? How many partners have you had since then? What kind of protection do you use? Then I find a euphemistic way of alluding to the fact that I get around and I explain where I am right then. For a while I had a number of people in the poly community all getting tested every three months so that I would have unprotected oral sex with them. I felt like a good influence. I got to talk about HPV and HSV in detail. People end sex with me a lot more educated than they start.
I miss the hunt because I miss having to decide what kind of sex I want and then go out and find it.
Kids woke up.
Sometimes it seems kind of funny to me how well suited Noah and I are for one another. I think about this mostly in comparison to the other men I have lived with: Uncle Bob, Tom, Puppy, Steve. No other man had an appreciable day-to-day influence at any point. It’s kind of interesting to think about how I have gone about trying out different lives. I tried to be who they wanted.
Uncle Bob wanted a meekness I never displayed. I was supposed to be grateful and I wasn’t. I was never grateful for anything throughout my later childhood and teenage years. Well, that’s not true. I was quite nice about presents and such. But I didn’t act like a beneficiary of charity. I worked hard for Auntie. I did my best to ensure that my presence impacted them negatively as little as possible. I started working at fifteen, as soon as someone would hire me. I paid my room and board. Didn’t I owe them for taking me in when I was a pitiful little girl? Fuck off and die. Oh wait. He did die. And I didn’t get to say goodbye. They didn’t tell me it was time. He died with a wedge between us. I’m sorry, Uncle Bob. I am grateful. I am. You did your best. I’m sorry that your best was so far from what I needed that I could never have the relationship you wanted. I could never look up to you. I could never treat you like my protector. You didn’t protect me. Not even a little bit. Not even at all. I suppose you prevented me from living in a car. You prevented me from going hungry. I am grateful that you helped me when I was otherwise helpless.
I tried to be what Tom wanted. I looked at his picture files and I dressed how he wanted and I wore shoes how he wanted and I mostly kept my mouth shut like he wanted. He was quite into gags. I have a lot of pictures of me tied up with a variety of gags in my mouth. I don’t look at the pictures much. Mostly what I see when I look at them is how sad my eyes seem. I wanted to be what he wanted. I tried hard. The dream of children was far more important to me than making him happy. That was the right choice. Thank goodness it worked out.
Puppy was a mistake. On paper he had similar attributes to Tom and I thought he was close enough that I could make it work. He wasn’t Tom. He wasn’t at all as close to wanted as I thought. I will never know for sure but I think he was lying to me from fairly early on. He told me what I wanted to hear. I’m not sure why. Oh well. He was always very jealous of Noah. Oh dear me. Now iTunes has provided me with the Heart classic “Alone” and it’s kind of funny timing.
Steve wasn’t the right fit for me. He was very submissive and vanilla sexually. He was repulsed by most of the “crazy” things I wanted to talk about during sex. Leaving that relationship was smart. I wish I hadn’t pushed it as far as I did. I thought he was my only way out. He wasn’t. But he was my first step.
Noah makes me feel comfortable. Noah makes me feel right. The way I want to do things is fine and should be mostly catered to. Occasionally he has a different preference and he’s willing to negotiate. I don’t feel like my voice is onerous. I don’t feel annoying. It is such a sharp contrast to how I feel when I am in the room with anyone else that it hurts. Why can’t I believe that anyone else really likes me? Given that most of the people who spend time with me go through great efforts to do so I know it is completely illogical to act like they don’t like me. Yet here I go. Every time.
I fucked up this weekend. We were invited to a brunch. I read that email at least four times. I put it on the calendar for the wrong day. Uhm. That’s embarrassing. These are people that Noah knows and I don’t really know them well. I have enjoyed all of the interactions I have had. The wife in question was quite pleasant and welcomed us into the house and we had a pleasant visit. Except for me wandering off to “find the bathroom” when I couldn’t control my crying because I felt so bad and stupid and wrong because I came on the wrong day and inconvenienced her. She didn’t seem inconvenienced terribly. It seemed like a nice surprise. Yet I couldn’t enjoy it. I felt horrible anxiety and stomach pain. I felt like I was on the verge of puking on the floor for most of the hour or so we sat there and talked.
I get really irrational about food at times like that. I don’t (can’t) eat a lot but I get very fussy about only wanting to eat real food and not snack food. I get bitey and pissy and fierce. All of a sudden what I eat is something where I get an idea in the back of my head and I latch on to it and I am like a starving dog defending my bowl.
Today I felt like I was vibrating with anxiety pretty much all day. Thankfully the neighbor and I seem to be passing the kids back and forth now. They tend to spend two or so hours at one place then trade off all day. Sometimes both girls go over there and play. It’s useful. It means that I can sit very still and stare at one point and calm down without the kids present in between volleys of screaming.
I keep telling myself that I am not working this hard on my tone of voice and attitude all the time because I am worried about her liking me today. I’m worried about how she will talk to me and remember me in twenty years. I can correct her, and I should–I am her mother, but I don’t need to be a bitch. Ever. I don’t know very many happy people. I feel like a liar.
I feel like Noah knows more about me than anyone. He understands a lot of my moods. He helps me figure out what triggers my mood swings because he stares at me so hard he knows when I have subtle shifts. It’s kind of weird to live with. But it makes me feel good. I feel important. I feel special.
I think I still participate on MDC (mothering.com) because hearing other women talk about the shitty things their husbands do makes me feel so much better about my marriage. I am reminded to be grateful. I feel fairly uncomfortable with how grateful I feel sometimes. I feel rather awkward about the fact that the intensity of emotion I feel for Noah is what I associate with the same feeling of thinking about G-d. It’s not an all the time thing. I couldn’t function that way. But when I stop to think about how grateful I am for what he has done for my life–yeah. I cry. I choke. How could anyone want me enough to change my life the way Noah has? How could I possibly be worth how much effort he has put into me? What have I done to deserve this?
I feel guilty that I am being supported. I feel like I must be taking advantage of him. Using him. What I offer in return is so meager, so little. I cannot possibly be earning my keep. But I’m so tired from working as hard as I can. I can never be enough. I can never do enough.
I try to figure out what it is that Noah wants me to be. To do. He’s a cagey fucker and he won’t give me any instructions at this juncture in time. Probably for the best. I don’t think children should have to deal with a power imbalanced relationship. I have to be responsible for me. It’s quite frustrating. I’d kind of like to relax into being chattel right about now. Then at least I wouldn’t have to wonder if I was doing enough. If I wasn’t told to do more I’m fine. It’s a system.
It’s hard to talk to Noah about my perception of isolation and loneliness. He works in an office and is required to talk to people quite a bit during the day. He’s just having an entirely different experience of life. It’s hard to make him understand how I see things. I don’t explain very well and I get frustrated and irrational quite easily. Luckily he’s patient and lets me control the flow of conversation a lot of the time. I can be testy and stop talking for a while and he doesn’t react much. Stoic. That’s really the word for him.
I worry about what I do to Noah. I worry about how I have changed him. Will change him. I feel guilty for my mercurial lashing out. He seems to think it is tolerable.
I’ve been reading a very long winded book series. Outlander by Diana Gabaldon. I haven’t read it since before I had kids. I think the last time was when I was on bed rest when I was pregnant with Shanna. I reread everything.
I have a different perspective on the comfort of a partner now. In a couple of months Noah and I will have been married for six years. That is far longer than I have consecutively lived with anyone else in my life. I think I only lost about a year and a half of time with my mom over the eighteen years of my childhood. But it was splotchy in pieces. It will be a while before Noah is the person I have lived with absolutely the longest. I think I have lived with him for more time than any of my siblings.
I live with people who like me. It fucking freaks me out. It must be because I am playing the right role right now. I had better not fuck this up. I hope they don’t find out I am bad.
When I was pregnant with Shanna a close friend told me that someone like me (meaning with my mental health issues) had no business becoming a parent. I couldn’t do a good job. I feel haunted by that prediction. Is it a prophecy? I’m aware that the baby shit is convenient for people to focus on. It’s this weird, isolated, obsessive part of life. Everything Feels So Important! Until it’s your third kid. Then you need to move on with your fucking life and things are more relaxed. Anyway.
I have felt very actively depressed all day. I am swimming through molasses. This week is action packed for us. I should probably go to bed. I have to get up and run as early as possible. Taylor is coming tomorrow night and I would like Noah to come home from work early-ish. But I procrastinate. Because I’m too busy singing along with The Verve Pipe and those stupid “Freshman”.
D- I think of you. And that stupid boy we dated. Scott. We can’t be held responsible. We fell in love in the first place. It’s kind of funny that the boy turned out to not be worth it at all but I kept you. I’m glad I have you.
Simmering. That is what the acid in my stomach is doing. No more rest for me tonight. That’s ok. I climbed into bed at eight. I didn’t sleep for over an hour because I was reading, but I did rest my body. I seem to be heading into the “need less sleep” portion of life. It’s about fucking time.
All of the kids I spend time with are in screaming phases. For some of them it comes and goes for some of them it is mostly a constant state of life. I’m struggling. More than once lately I have gotten up and specifically walked five feet away from a kid and clasped my hands firmly behind my back before I had the ability to speak to them about a situation without hitting them. If I stayed in striking distance I would have lost it and hit. I don’t think I am on the verge of giving anyone a terrible beating.
I have always told myself I “wasn’t hit much”. That’s a big part of my story to myself. My sister and my brothers were fond of telling me I wasn’t “really” hit. My mom didn’t leave bruises because she wasn’t strong enough. I wasn’t hit by my father so it didn’t count. Mom hitting didn’t mean anything. I was hit a lot. I was hit fairly constantly as a means of exerting control over me. I am learning it more and more as the years go by with my kids. Truth be told I was hit far less than any other child in my family in the generations before me. The generations after me weren’t hit much due to a change in public social climate and because I god damn hit back. My mom became afraid of hitting kids. The kids were now so disrespectful that they defended themselves.
It is hard to look at every impulse I have all day and think, “It’s bad. What should I actually be doing?” It’s exhausting. It is hard to find any love at all for such a nasty, fierce, mean-spirited person. I don’t want to turn my kids into competent adults! I want to turn them into quiet and polite children! Well, not really. Have you met my kids? Quiet will never be the word. Thank G-d. But that is my impulse. It really is.
Part of what I like about this parenting gig is that it is the most unrelenting training ground I have ever been through. Other people (sane people) take more breaks from their kids than I get. They have jobs or they have families or daycare or something. They get away from the kids. They are not in the house with the children for 21+ hours of most days. And for those ~ three hours we go out… I’m with the kids! How I am with them is how I am. That is how I spend my time. Who and what I am to my children is pretty much all that I am right now.
They see someone who has some pretty hostile facial expressions and someone who needs a fair bit of personal space sometimes but mostly I am patient and kind. Why don’t I believe that is who I am? It’s one of life’s little mysteries.
Lately I am in one of those super clingy phases where I initiate a lot of sex! Five times in three days! We didn’t keep going because Noah was tired. As much as he says, “It’s ok to wake me up for sex” he is a human being with limits and when the kids aren’t sleeping… yeah. Not so much. That’s ok. I need to touch him. I’m feeling like a fraud and invisible and bad and touching him makes me feel better. He loves me and wants me. I’m safe.
I don’t think that most modern wives look at their husbands and feel gratitude the way I do. Without Noah my life would be very different. When I sat down and wrote out a list of what I wanted–I think it was even before I left Tom–Noah had more than 80% of the things on the list. What he didn’t have then he has since changed. It was like I created Noah out of thin air. I don’t understand why he likes me so much.
Well, until he explains how badly he feels about his interactions with the wide world. I don’t think I understood that nasty isolation like I experienced really doesn’t have to be about abuse. It can just be. Being rich doesn’t make you safe. What makes you safe is not needing anything from people.
Things are kind of awkward with the home schooling group. The other moms are actively trying to become friends. I’m trying to let Shanna make friends. I often sit on the edge of the crowd with a book. I can’t fuck this up. It’s not fair to my kids. This is the largest and most active home schooling community in our area. I can’t fuck this up. That is a terrifying kind of pressure for me. I fuck everything up. I get run out of every god damn community. Or I leave when I stop finding people to have sex with. One or the other. I’m not hunting so I’m waiting for pitch forks. I think I hide behind the men who want to fuck me in most communities. I feel like status is highly transferable and I am allowed to stay and be tolerated as long as I can find someone willing to take responsibility for me. I am not part of communities in my own right. I’m there as ________’s person–even if it is only person-of-the-night. Someone wants to talk to me. I’m allowed to be there.
Noah gives me the freedom to exist. I don’t think I have offended him much. When I hysterically demand that we stop speaking about _________ he listens and that topic is gone from the roster. He adapts to me seamlessly and enthusiastically. I don’t think I have met another man in my life who would have been a good coparent for me. Not like Noah. Noah wants me so bad that every hurtle is just an impetus to run faster as he sees it coming so he has the power to fly over it. Right now Noah is the reason I can leave the house. Noah wants me. I’m allowed to be here.
It’s hard because status is not transferable up. I can’t get status or worthiness or place from my kids in the same way. Shanna and Calli get to be active members of the home school group. I’m not much like the other moms.
For one thing I genuinely do not feel the desire to emulate the preschool experience. I am not preparing my children for “school” thus they do not need “pre-school” as a stage. It seems kind of silly to me. We do a lot of kinesthetic activities that are similar to some things in preschool but not much. And I’m not going to go through a lot of trouble to make silly staged art activities so they can “learn to interact with nature”. I just have a different approach.
This is the way in which I feel insecure about my educational approach. I am not particularly giving my kids what is commonly thought of as “child hood” in my time and place. I’m not interested in shoving them into a large mostly homogenous group of children who are all the same age and mostly from the same place and who all have the same experiences going through. When people talk about school being how children learn about diversity I have to guffaw. I have been to a lot of schools. I have seen diversity in education. I’m pretty sure few of my classmates saw similar diversity. You don’t know what you don’t know. If you have been standing in one place your whole life you might believe you understand diversity. That’s because you’ve never actually seen it! I keep my mouth shut at home schooling gatherings. My philosophies are not universal.
My kids have eighteen years where I am responsible for keeping them safe before they will be abruptly let loose on the world and they will have to make their way. That’s not a long apprenticeship, not really. I don’t feel like I have the time to waste on getting them ready for kindergarten. It seems like a besides-the-point set of activities.
I believe very firmly that extremely young children (under four) should not be encouraged to sit still at tables and write. That is a skill for older children. In this age group they need to be rolling around on the floor. They need to be figuring out how to move their body. They should be so brimming with energy you feel like you will lose your mind if you don’t take them out to run laps. Then take them out and run laps. What they are working on are the building blocks of physical existence. Yes, language acquisition happens. It’s very important. It should be happening incidentally. Take your child out to the mall and walk around. Get used to saying, “no”. Talk about everything you see. Talk about the different kinds of furniture. Talk about wood and metal and plastic. Talk about manufacturing such items. Talk about food. Talk about the fact that food requires a lot of fucking labor to get it to you. Talk to them about their position in the world.
Seriously, they are going to figure out how to draw a fucking square. I don’t need to sit there and pester them to practice. Give me a break.
For all of my choking social anxiety, I get over it and I get things done when I need to. I may feel bad why I am doing the things I need to do–but they get done.
When I feel generous towards my family I recognize that this was probably one of the most helpful lessons I learned as a child. Never expect things to be easy. Everything will be so hard you want to quit over and over. If you quit you will never get what you want. Ok, now how do you want to act?
My sister and my mother both go through very functional periods. Then they crack under the weight of life stress and mental illness. They don’t describe things that way but I do. Given my life I get to. Anyway.
A friend sent me an essay on Unschooling as a feminist act that is sitting heavy in my mind. What kind of world do I live in, anyway? I live in a world that values my ability to produce products or do work that creates money. What I am doing with my life is… almost an irrelevant hobby.
I don’t much care for the modern way of living. I want to have enough food and I want shelter and I do want money (I won’t lie) but I don’t need to always be striving for a bigger house. I don’t need to go buy a new car because mine has dents in it. It’s fine. It’s functional. It gets me from point A to point B. I’m told that people have to care about their appearance because appearances are how people are judged. No wonder I don’t fit in.
I think the lack of community in our country is oddly striking. We don’t view children as a blessing. We view them as an unfortunate pestilence. They should be hidden away and kept out of sight as much as possible. They should sit still in chairs and be entertained with handheld devices. No one wants to deal with the endless questions and talking and running and…
I feel that way still. Who and what I am doesn’t fit very well into the carefully constructed institutionalized view of the way people should act. I am not normal. I do things at unpredictable intervals. I can be silent when necessary.
I know a fair number of very quiet people who can blend into groups and feel comfortable anywhere. They don’t need to feel understood in order to feel accepted. They feel group identity by virtue of standing in the right place and that is good enough. I don’t have that. I need to be god damn wanted or I strongly feel like the right choice of physical action is for me to get away from the large group because large groups are dangerous. Large groups harbor bullies and predators. I get into trouble. I get kicked out. Not of every group but enough that I am not paranoid I am skilled at detecting patterns that really do come up time and time again for me.
The people who feel offended enough by me to send me nasty letters or emails or phone calls are in the minority. Why do I care?
Because unless I want all-out-war I have to avoid the turf of people who feel free to attack me. It’s a tactical decision. Unless I want to fight I should avoid people who start fights. It seems practical.
Ok, the screaming stage is hard. But why am I really freaking out lately? Part of the way that I avoid general arguments is I tend to speak very exclusively about my life and my experiences. I try to avoid larger commentary. It’s a decision. It’s not going to continue working as my kids get older. My experiences are unusual. I’m not sure how unusual. Everyone lies to me so I can’t get a good guesstimate. But I need to unconsciously adapt to their experiences. I need to allow them to grow up and become them and they are very different from me. How do I figure out which things are actual systematic problems and how do I decide that something is just my problem?
The thing about “just my” problems is that I live with them. And the people who live with me have to deal with me. The people who are my friends have to deal with them. Oh wait. Maybe all problems are community problems. Why am I so angry? Because I have these problems. And a lot of them are things that I really need some fucking support for and I don’t have anyone. How do I deal with that? How do I teach my children to deal with these situations? Should I teach my children that they should expect to be alone their entire lives? That no one will give a shit? That no one will show up when they need help?
Shall I teach them to conjure a partner out of thin air so they don’t have to do everything alone? It doesn’t work out very well. It’s highly probable the bastard won’t enjoy dancing. Even though he has all that wonderful, juicy status to share… it’s not enough. I still want to take up space and have status in worlds he is not connected to. And I can’t go fuck anyone else and steal their status. That’s why I hid behind my girl-friends at the last dance event. I wasn’t looking for a guy to fuck so I just didn’t talk to men much. I was there to see the people who liked me. The two people who asked me to come. I don’t need to interact with all of those people who are at best ambivalent about my presence. They want me. I’m allowed to be here.
I feel like part of my feminism is this pathetic need I have for community. It’s not that I need a community of just-women (I’m not a separatist) but I need a community that values who I am and what I do. I don’t get a lot of that from general men. I have men who value me: Taylor is the main one I think of who isn’t a former lover. I don’t have very many men in my life I haven’t had sex with. If they stick around I eventually have sex with them because that is the trade–right? In order to bribe people to put up with me I will put out. It seems a fair exchange.
For the 4th we were invited to a friend’s house. She has a five week old baby who is just out of the hospital after having open heart surgery. They didn’t need to go anywhere. When I was there I had a great conversation with the dad. We talked about religion and spirituality. I don’t talk about my relationship with unseen things very often because I can’t deal with being ridiculed. Tom was fond of saying, “Anyone who believes in God is brain dead.” That was accompanied by a loud chorus of laughter from all the munch guys. But I had a conversation with a man about what we believe. And he wasn’t nasty to me. He didn’t obviously think I was stupid even though he is older and has more experience. It was novel.
It isn’t that I need a community of just-women. It is that I need a community of people who genuinely see what I am doing as good and worth doing. I need people who believe that I have worth. Outside of using sex I don’t know how to find that with men very well. I have mostly found it in the last few years through parents. Other young-parents understand how hard what I am doing is. But there seem to be two general camps. Either they think it is a good and worthy thing to be doing or they think I am stupid and I should pawn it off on someone who is lower status/less able to earn money than me. Shouldn’t I be above such menial labor?
What are we teaching children? That they should only be influenced by people who are too poor or too little educated to do something better than hang out with kids? Really? If you have more privilege/education/whatever you should go out to the real world. That world that doesn’t have any children in it. Because children aren’t real and they don’t matter. You cannot look at America and say that I am wrong.
We want children to be entertained and Educated. By someone else. But we don’t understand how to educate. You educate by allowing someone to do things over and over at their own speed. People do things in different orders. It is hard to predict what a child needs. Mostly safety, security, love, affection, and room to run. Time out in the woods.
Seriously? Every time in the woods has to involve sitting down and writing activities? For kids under five? Really? Yeah I don’t fit in at the homeschool group.
We will write. When my children are teenagers they will be able to write long, complicated pieces of writing. I kind of know how to ensure that happens. Right now I take dictation for letters to relatives. That’s the extent of me encouraging writing. I want them to think of the physical act of moving a pen/pencil over a paper as magic. It allows things they say to be “heard” by people far away. Typing is many steps more magical and we aren’t getting there yet.
I want my children to think about the world as a place they can have influence on. What kind of influence do they want to have? I don’t care if you know what a rhombus is while you are four. And no I don’t need you to prove over and over that you know your colors. You fucking know your colors and we don’t have to do yet another color scavenger hunt.
So I sit on the edge with a book and the kids play. I really don’t have the extra physical energy to create a bunch of preschool-style activities. That shit is work. I would have to alter my priorities. Most people say that they give up cleaning. I uhhh don’t want to. I don’t think that it is worth that much of my time and energy to manufacture “entertainment” for my kids. In the overall scheme of my life I will be better served by teaching my kids that I god damn expect the house to stay clean. And I spend time every day helping them learn how to clean house.
Right now I am worried about teaching my children mindfulness and connection. I’m not worried about counting. We count, sure. But I say, “Can you pick up three dolls for me?” I don’t go get out a fucking counting activity with manipulatives like beans. Then I would just end up cleaning up the fucking beans as well. Fuck no.
I’m feeling some internal conflict about being a fascist because I took most of the toys away. I’ve noticed that their play hasn’t slowed down at all. Shanna has brought me more bags of things to put up “Because I’m sick of having to pick them up and Calli keeps dumping them on the floor.” I told her that was an excellent approach. So I feel a little guilty but not much. My irritating focus on cleaning is something my kids can learn to live with if I figure out how to make it manageable for them. Part of that is being fair in my expectations.
If it is possible that their mess takes a sustained forty-five minutes of picking up to sort out then it is above their skill set. They can’t pull that apart. It’s too hard. In giving them enough belongings that they are overwhelmed to the point of tears I am not serving them well. Ok! Pull back! Its been a week. Going well. At least I’m not feeling pissed off about picking up those toys. The screaming is of the “I told her not to follow me and she’s following me” variety. Everyone wants privacy but no one can leave anyone else alone. All three of the girls are trading off these roles. I want to beat my head through a window. But they have to work it out. They will. It’s not easy to figure everything out. They have to figure this shit out on their own. I should probably start putting ear plugs in the morning as a matter of course instead of waiting for the headache to start. See, writing is good for me. I figure shit out. Oy.
There are a lot of things in my head I wish I had time to sit down and Really Write About. I don’t have the mental energy. I’m starting to try and think about scheduling. I try to look for predictive patterns in life. If I can find the natural energy cycles and schedule things that way then everything goes better. Things like: don’t start a painting project in December when I’m focused on Christmas. Even if the pantry is pissing me off. There are also financial concerns for a lot of the things I would like to do. Self-control is hard.
Right now summer is just starting. Summer is the time to be outside. I need to deal with growing and preserving food. I need to be playing at the water park. I need to be running. It’s not the time to do serious writing projects. I think that is a switch that has hit post-parenting. Now I want to do more than record the endless flow of my thoughts. I want to produce specific things. I want to make my own status. I want to be doing and not just being. I want to find how I fit into that world out there that I will have to deal with again in fifteen years. Ugh.
This intersects strongly with my feminism. My complication wants me to write about feminism. The thing is, that’s on that list of “uhh… later” topics right now. I am too busy trying to construct what I believe to explain it. If someone believes the feminist battle is over then I want to know why I have to worry so much about staying “relevant” if I don’t want to end up sitting alone in my house after my kids leave because no one will hire me to do anything else once I was stupid enough to stay home with my kids because kid care is obviously only done by people who are too stupid and uneducated to do anything else!
I have no interest in ever working in a setting where I have to behave but at some point I will probably work again out of boredom. What can I do? I can write. Blogging isn’t shit and I know it. I have project ideas. I’m thinking about them pretty hard while I run. There are things I can say. It’s scary to think of really being judged on products. I have to do it. I have to deal with people not liking me. That is part of being a functional adult and I have to do it and I have to show my kids how to do it.
I think part of my current food issues is another way of dealing with the conflict about being good/bad/defective.
I think I need to read more about potatoes. If I’m not supposed to be eating grains, how about potatoes? (I know they are a New World food. They probably aren’t good for me. Maybe I won’t read about them. I don’t want to know.)
Anyway. I woke up really early. I don’t have to go yet. But I think that is all the venting of my spleen I have at the moment. I’m a lot less frustrated. I suppose that’s good. I like purging all of the swirling negativity. If I don’t get it out in some form then it stays and intensifies. It’s hard. I suppose it’s like using a leech. You just have to get some of the bile out.
I was hella smart yesterday. I acquired supplies for making dinner in the crockpot today. Hella smart. That way I don’t have to come home from the county fair and cook. Lately Noah has been making more dinners.
That’s something I haven’t written about lately. I’ve been thinking about Noah a lot. I’m thinking hard about how I am going to shape the book. It means I’m thinking really hard about Noah and his behavior. What am I going to show about Noah?
Noah has shaped my feminism. Noah appreciates me. Noah looks at me and values what he sees in a way I have never experienced before. Noah looks at me how I imagine people look at men.
Then the kids woke up. Oops.