After I go on my little tirades about things I tend to feel very guilty for days. Who the fuck am I to decide who is and is not a good father? What right do I have? How the fuck do I know? How do I know how people treat their children and families when I am not around?

I don’t.

So how dare I judge?

I’m not sure I can help it. I judge. I evaluate. I think about everything I hear and see and I think about how it fits into my world and value system. Ok, “everything” is hyperbole. But I think about a really fucking lot of things. 

It’s kind of a modern joke that moms go read a bunch of baby books when they get pregnant. It’s a trope. It is something to mock. I started out preparing to be a parent when I started the credential program. I went and learned how to work with children. When I got pregnant I started reading childhood development books which are a very different category than “parenting” books. I want to know what researchers have found.

I have spent thousands of hours reading medical/behavioral research. I mean real stuff in medical journals. I mean like reading the vaccine studies. If I lived in a small town in the middle of the country with a low immigrant population and I never traveled I wouldn’t vaccinate. I would be a selfish asshole and decide the risk outweighed the benefit for my kid. They are vaccinated because I did a fucking thorough evaluation of the risks and benefits. Given where we live and how we live vaccines are not optional.

I read about child development because I have never seen a healthy childhood before. I have seen a few minutes or a few hours of someone else having healthy childhood in brief spurts. I need to learn how to take care of my children. I do not want to fail them.

I want to be a good parent because I want to find out how that works. No one is perfect. But I want my children to grow up in a house where their mother is respected and not taken for granted. I want my children to grow up in a house where no one is inherently better than anyone else. I want my children to grow up in a house where everyone must share the work of living. There are no free lunches.

I’m like everyone else. As I walk through the world I am continually surprised that people aren’t like me. They don’t sit down and think, “I want my children to have ____ experience” and then prepare a course of attaining it. And even the people who do think about it generally don’t share my values. Like, at all.

I’ve read so much research that I feel confused when I see people making choices that are uhm outside how I interpret research. But that just makes me as big of an asshole as everyone else. Other people can’t understand why I reach the conclusions I reach. It was a process. A long one. Same for you. I need to stop getting angry with people for being different from me. It’s not fair. People are going to stop putting up with me. It’s not only a realistic possibility it is what people should do if I am lashing out at them constantly. No one should tolerate that from me.

There are reasons that it was initially useful and helpful for me to have that “This is bad” reaction. It is no longer as useful. Once upon a time lack of nuance may have saved my life. It will, at this point, destroy my life.

I have been watching the Bill Gates top 13 recommended TED Talks. Things like “This is the least violent period in all of human history. Yes, even with these bombings.” It makes sense that my physiological response is violence and anger and hatred–those things would have enabled me to kill people who seemed a threat to me or mine. We live in an unprecedented era where our mouths and our ability to persuade are uniquely necessary. Violence is no longer the answer. The rage that I learned how to feel no longer has any advantage in my life. This is fucking inconvenient and my ancestors would not have handled this better than me.

My nearly five year old keeps asking “Where did the first people come from before there were parents?”

“Well, there are a lot of different theories. I’ve told you what a theory is–right? A theory is when someone takes all the clues they have about a problem and they try to guess the answer. Some theories have more evidence than others. Some people believe that everything started in a big explosion of gas in space and we slowly evolved into being humans. We are kind of related to apes. Some people believe that a magic invisible sky friend decided to make the world and all the animals and people–they think he did this in a week. Some people believe we are descended of a giant rainbow serpent. I could go on for a long time. There are a lot of theories. But the plain truth is we don’t know. No one does. It’s a mystery. People tend to pick the theory that suits them the best.”

I have this basic physiological problem. My brain says, “It is ok for people to be different from me. That does not challenge my safety. Everyone is allowed to coexist.” Then the rest of my brain gets a big club and whacks that part of my brain for a while screaming, “SHUT UP SHUT UP THEY WILL KILL US ALLLLLLLLLL.” It’s kind of melodramatic. And while this is happening I have to stand very still with a neutral or positive expression on my face or there may be consequences.

I dislike the fact that I work on being “nice” because I don’t like dealing with the social consequences of being not nice. I don’t want to be shunned. I don’t want to be rejected. If I didn’t give a shit what people thought about me I would be so much more hostile I would not be recognizable as the same person. Seriously.

I feel like part of the reason I scream at the people I do (because I don’t scream at everyone) is because they fall into this weird cross section of feeling safe to get mad at, like someone I want to influence, and someone who feels similar enough to me that I have a prayer of influencing them. But only if I stop fucking screaming because no one listens to a screaming banshee.

My behavior is not serving my goals. I want community so bad I stay up late and wake up early crying and crying and crying because I don’t feel connected to people. I feel like people secretly hate me and tolerate me for…. I really don’t understand the reasons. It just feels that way. It’s not exactly rational.

Part of what I like so much about hanging out with my kids is they walk through the world wrapped in a blanket of security. They believe they deserve to be loved and wanted and that they are wonderful people. Shanna can absolutely spout off, “Even if someone gets mad at you that has nothing to do with whether or not they love you. Everyone gets mad sometimes. You shouldn’t be mean to people you love though. That’s not cool.”

She in fact rattled that off nearly verbatim yesterday when I screamed at her. I think her wording was closer to, “Even though you are mad at me you are not allowed to scream. You have to use a polite voice.”

Sometimes I feel like the top of my head will explode. But when she says that I stop mid-shriek and say, “You are right. I will leave the room until I calm down and then we can talk about it.”

Her saying that to me gives me this psychological permission to say and believe the same thing. Shanna is allowed to have boundaries and so am I. So are my friends. My friends do not need to put up with me screaming at them no matter how dysregulated I feel. That is my problem and not theirs.

I feel like I keep having these weird flashes into peoples lives. As I was being mean to my friend’s husband the other day I felt like I couldn’t stop the rude words from coming out of my mouth but as I was speaking I saw this whole full-length movie in my head of what I know of his life. He is behaving entirely appropriately given what he has known and experienced. My nastiness seems totally irrelevant and inappropriate. I wish the movie had started playing like three minutes earlier so I could have buttoned my lips shut. Or said something appropriate.

If instead of being pissed off at him I had said, “Well, we’ll see if things change or not. Babies have their own agenda” then maybe I would have had a prayer of opening his mind. Yelling at him… not so much.

If I want to influence people I need to think about how my behavior, tone of voice, and attitude affect how I am perceived. If I want to be influential in positive ways I have to make conscious choices. Otherwise I will still be influential but I sure as fuck won’t be a force for good in the world.

More self-control. That is pretty much the beginning, middle, and end of that conversation. But no one has endless self-control. I could choose to just avoid the people I blow up at. Honestly that is usually my first choice. If I find myself blowing up at someone over and over I start avoiding them because they don’t deserve to deal with my ill temper. I consciously don’t want to do that any more. I’m tired of walking away from relationships because I can’t control my temper tantrums. It’s really lonely.

The thing I am getting the most strongly from the survivor books I’ve been reading is: you have to figure out a way to have the worst things that happened to you become sources of strength. You have to have a sense of humor and perspective.

It was very useful at one point in time that my brain developed the ability to categorize behavior as Good/Bad but that doesn’t serve the same purpose any more. I’m still looking for my Faith in Gray. Just because something would be bad for me does not mean it is bad for someone else and I need to not freak out. Seriously.

Speak less. There is no shortage of words in the world. Consider what I will say before I say it. Play that fucking video of peoples lives in my head before I start being a condescending bitch. It is truly not my place.

No one is trying to make me be like them any more. Why do I turn around and tell people to be like me? Because that’s a species level attitude. I have to find a work around.

Progress, not perfection–right? I feel sad because it feels like when I fuck up that I have to abandon all the work I have done on that relationship so far because I am no longer worthy of that persons company. If I can’t control myself I should not inflict my asshole behavior on other people. I have no way of knowing if that is actually the best choice or not. It’s the only way I can figure out to ensure that I am not nasty to people.

It feels very lonely sometimes. Even though I have no right to claim loneliness. I’m really over-scheduled right now.

But if I have to be careful and never really just speak to people then it doesn’t change how lonely I feel. If I have to weigh every word because I know that I am not really appropriate and I don’t really belong in such an environment I feel terrible the whole time. I know I am a fraud. I know I am not really connecting. I am a card board cut out of a person standing where a person should be. A person would be genuinely kind and loving. I have to pretend.

And then I think about some of my male friends. Holy shit do they not care about being kind and loving. And they are real people. I feel like I am caught in the trap of being female.  It is just too dangerous for me to fuck with my herd status. I will die. It’s not really true any more–we no longer live in that world. My brain doesn’t know that.

I can’t help but feel that there is no way to make progress on rape culture without finding a way out of this anger. This anger is paralyzing.