The cookie exchange went well! I was blurty a couple of times and people looked kind of taken aback but no one left angry with me. I’ll call that a win. I’ll be seeing them all again in a few hours today. That is the best I can hope for.

I’ve been thinking hard about empathy and bonding. Calli came in at 2am and said with ridiculously clear and deliberate enunciation, “I need you.”

I need you too, baby. I pulled her up and held her till I woke up for the day. I feel so blessed.

Getting to hold my loving, trusting baby is the best experience I have ever had. I feel happier about being alive in that moment than I have ever felt before. I understand that not everyone is a breeder and wants this situation. I understand that it isn’t euphoric in different life circumstances.

I am safe. I am ridiculously privileged. I am allowed to devote my life and energy to adoring my children and teaching them about the world.

I want more adventures with them. I want tapes and tapes and tapes in my head of their happy laughing. It blocks out the screaming.

They don’t think I am disgusting. Well, not beyond the normal “old people are disgusting” sorts of things. Strangely I feel pretty happy about that.

I have convinced Shanna that the belly flap apron is what you get what you level up. You are stuck with a boring flat body before then. She thinks that having stripes makes you way cooler. I like this age. I like that she believes me whole heartedly that I am beautiful and she is beautiful and we are each perfect for the stage of life we are in and we are all going to change in a million tiny ways. She doesn’t think she should be trying to be like anyone.

I like that my children and my husband say nice things to me. They tell me they love me every day.

I live with a constant overwhelming, pervasive fear about Noah dying. I try very hard to not send him out the door with angry words. He could die in a car crash today. I am not fucking ok with risking having the last words I say to him on this earth be petty or spiteful. I try very hard to always hug him and kiss him and tell him I will miss him. Even if I am angry those things are still true. I love him. Even when I’m mad. So we don’t do the brooding leaving of the house thing.

It is very hard to think of myself as not-disgusting.

dis·gust·ing  

Adjective Arousing revulsion or strong indignation.

Synonyms loathsome – nasty – repulsive – abominable – revolting

Hm. Thing is… I arouse peoples strong indignation all the god damn time. According to the dictionary I am disgusting. And I do trigger revulsion. Not of me necessarily–but certainly for my subject matter. Nasty. Loathsome. Repulsive. Abominable. Revolting. Yup. That’s me.

But Noah and Calli and Shanna like me. They need me.

Where is the meet in the middle? Is there a happy medium? I haven’t had a really hard cry. It may wait for Christmas.

I miss my mother. I want to tell her to stop making her cinnamon rolls with Crisco and start using butter–they are way better.

Yesterday I was asked, “So you talk about being neglected but your mom made you a lot of costumes. That seems incongruous.”

My mom didn’t know how to budget. My mom had a lot of very bad things happen to her that were outside of her control. We had periods where we were stable and flush and my mom had a lot of skills that make her a very good stereotypical mother. Then there were the bad periods. The bad periods were a kind of bad kids shouldn’t have.

I didn’t say any more. Someone else said, “Some of us have basically had two mothers.” I nodded and said yeah.

That is all I can say to a group of people who don’t know me if I don’t want to repulse people. If I don’t want to be disgusting. That is what I say when I have enough control. When I am appropriate enough.

I was absofuckinglotely stupid. Err, it’s a long story but I noticed after deleting my facebook account that Noah never unfriended my niece. I caught up on her life. I didn’t need to know that. I saw that my mom now has an account. My sister has posted on her wall over and over how she is the best mommy in the world and my sister is so lucky to have her. My sister said, “You should have stopped with me because it doesn’t get any better than this!”

My sister is a pedophile. But if my mom hadn’t been married to my dad would that have happened? Probably not. My sister and my mother both probably would have had better lives without my father–even if they had been poor.

I feel like they should put my face on the poster for why abortion should be safe and legal. I was the product of rape. I was not wanted. Look what fucking happens.

All of that “doesn’t matter now” and “don’t think about it”. I’m here. It doesn’t matter that my family treated me very badly I am not treated badly any more.

I watched another movie about a mean family last night. Another Happy Day. Unless you want to look at mean family dynamics I don’t recommend it. But it is well acted. I hate them all. They are all fucking assholes. Good job.

It is kind of weird and amazing to me how nice the people in my house are. I feel a lot of pride in that. We take turns. We share. We are all generous. We don’t shout very much. We hug a lot. We laugh a lot. We talk a lot. Here people are allowed to talk.

I listen to my kids and actively respond until I feel like my ears are going to bleed and I have horrifying headaches. It is really hard. I don’t care. This is the most important thing I will ever do in my whole fucking life.

Nothing else matters to me compared to the relationship I have with my children. I have that luxury and that privilege because Noah supports us very well.

I won the poor girl lottery. I didn’t do it by being the prettiest. I’ve been reading The Moral Animal so I’m thinking about what got my genes into the gene pool. I was interesting to Noah specifically because of the overwhelming intensity that normally repulses people. He liked me because I am disgusting.

It’s kind of weird. It’s fucking ridiculously weird. I could not have married a “normal” person. Noah likes that I change. He encourages it. He wants me to learn new things and be different in five years–provided there is still a lot of sex.

If sex is something I need to provide at that kind of level forever then I need a lot of specific support around doing so. Sex is literally harder on my body than average. I have a lot of internal damage. I need to stop having sex that hurts. It has an overall negative impact on my life. That’s going to be weird to figure out. How do I reveal those details to someone? How do I learn how to insist that those details matter even though I’m not pretty?

What I got from the bdsm community is there are two kinds of women. The pretty ones you want to be seen with and the ones you want to hurt really really badly behind closed doors. Often the ones who are willing to put up with being hurt like that aren’t all that attractive. Only the most hard core of sadists don’t care at all about how pretty a woman is if she will take a lot of pain. I’m probably an extreme masochist compared to the “normal” population but I am not extreme in the little elite world I watched from the edges. I don’t want to be. I’ve been hurt enough. But I wasn’t really pretty enough to be the pretty kind of girlfriend. I was… just not quite good enough.

I don’t think it was good for me to spend that much time around fetish models and photographers and producers. I don’t like the frank appraisal of my worth. I don’t like hearing the speculation about what price looking at me could be sold for. How much humiliation would I be willing to tolerate? Could they put me on a diet first?

I think I ate so much while I lived with my Owner because I really really really didn’t want to be prettier. I didn’t want more of them interested in me. They were scary. These days I’m feeling scared of them again. I feel like maybe it is time to back away from that community entirely for a bit.

I don’t do abrupt switches in social dynamics very well. Having to completely change my boundaries is hard. I have trouble jumping tracks in my head so I freeze as I try to figure out what to do. Which is taken as consent.

I spend a lot of time wishing I lived in a tribal community so I could go outside and work with women during the day but I still had a home to hide in when I needed peace. I want my children to run off and play with their friends while I keep our home.

We’re figuring it out. We are trying to set up daily visits to the local pool with the home schooling kids in our town. It’s not living in a tribal community but it is something. I’m keeping my mouth shut enough. I am not repulsing people too much. It’s hard to always be afraid that people will discover how bad I am.

I am not ashamed of being an adult and sleeping with a lot of people. I’m not ashamed of doing drugs or even of mutilating myself. Those are things that I have done. Kind of like dancing. I tried them. I saw how they worked for me.

I had to find out a lot about my self hatred and where it comes from. If I don’t want to blindly teach what I know then I have to ensure that I know what I was taught and make specific active choices to be different.

A lot of people in my life tell me to just move on. Stop worrying about it and just do things that make me happy and it will work out. I uhhh don’t agree. I don’t see those people ending up in places in life I want to go. I don’t actually see anyone as particular inspiration for what I want. Uhm, sorry everyone.

I feel like I need to stop talking before I get in trouble. And Calli wants me to come in. That makes sense.