I feel like I live in this place where I am supposed to pretend that everything is all hunky dory–NO PROBLEMS HERE so that I don’t make other people uncomfortable.

I don’t ever want to be raped again. I’m firm on that in a way I wasn’t earlier in my life. I used to, fairly seriously, just expect that it would happen no matter what–so what.

I think I would rather die. And that’s kind of weird. When I was younger I was very contemptuous of the rape victims who treated it like a good enough reason to die. If you think you should have to die if you lack “honor” as defined as a maidenhead then lets line up all the motherfucking men and shoot them now. Not one of the bastards has a hymen.

Oh wait–it’s ok for them to not have a hymen? Then it’s god damn ok for me to not have one anymore too.

I believed, when I was young and stupid, that having sex–even sex I didn’t want and was saying “no” to–made me an adult. I thought I was just … what’s that gamer phrase? Leveling up?

By the time I was ten years old I could look around a room of adults and guess which ones had less sexual experience than me. I thought that made me better than them.

Now I weep over it and ensure that my daughters will not in any way shape or form have access to the kind of education I had.

It’s not about keeping them “pure”. It has nothing to do with that. Who they (consensually) fuck or don’t fuck won’t be any of my business. Keeping them safe while they are children and sex isn’t appropriate is my job. It’s not about “purity”. I don’t give a shit about their hymen one way or another. It is irrelevant to my experience of them.

However my kids have read enough anatomy books that they have a way above grade level understanding of how bodies work. They know as much at their age as I knew. Only all their knowledge is theoretical with a strong underlining chant “Not till after puberty”.

Ok, they don’t know 1/10 of what I knew.

But they know a lot more than their peers. They have spent a lot of time looking at anatomy drawings and talking about the prostate and how weird it is that girls get a urethra and a vagina and boys only get the urethra for pee and baby making. That’s so weird. (I hear.) Shanna wants to know if pee can start a baby just like sperm does.

I think I kind of coughed no and changed the subject.

My kids are very well versed in “red flag” touches and “tricky people” and they have no knowledge of “stranger danger”. Strangers aren’t the problem. Your friends are the potential problems.

I love watching Shanna do sword play with the little boys. She is learning how to negotiate her boundaries. She is learning that some kinds of bossing work better than others. And a full throated roar is often the fastest way to get a pack of people doing what you want.

That’s my girl.

It doesn’t always work. And sometimes people get mad at you. Tools are like that. Not every problem needs a hammer. Sometimes you use a hammer and you get in big trouble. Doesn’t mean a hammer is a bad tool.

I feel so sad. I’m not sure exactly why.

A lot of people came yesterday. They are all very nice people. If I added up all the hours I have spent with every person at that party individually I think it would be at less than a week.

I know a lot of people. But I don’t spend very much time with anyone in particular. I spread around my time. It’s the only way I have found to ensure I don’t overwhelm people and ask for too much and hurt the friendship.

Manure is a funny thing. A little bit of it is good for your soil–even necessary. But if you plop on too much and it’s too fresh you will kill your plants.

terrible trouble terrible trouble terrible trouble terrible trouble terrible trouble

It’s always coming. If I say the wrong thing they won’t come back. If I am too violent or mean or aggressive they won’t come back. Don’t scare anyone. Don’t be rude. Don’t talk about subject that might bother people. Don’t dominate the conversation. Don’t be too loud. Don’t be too defensive.

If I stay in a world where I make sure I only deal with women then I can kinda sorta follow the rules and tone down enough that they will keep me around because I work like a dog. I take on the man role in a group of women. I do the butch physical labor and I love it.

But when I’m in a mixed environment I have to deal with the fact that my life is populated by men who have raped. And I am not supposed to be defensive or aggressive or anything like that. No matter what has happened to me. I’m supposed to be encouraging and sweetness and light. I’m supposed to make them feel like the big strong men.

But what if I’m raped again? In their rulebook the only option is to close my eyes and wait for it to be over. I disocciate incredibly quickly. I wouldn’t even really feel it until later when the ache set in. Would that even count?

“Oh don’t be so paranoid. Who would rape you?” Want a list?

Yes, it hasn’t happened in 7 years. Have you noticed how that time span overlaps with my marriage and me not being alone with men.. basically at all?

Ok, sometimes I will be alone in a room as long as other people are in the house. Sometimes I will walk alone on a side walk because passers-by happen and there are houses so I could scream. I have risked that kind of “alone time” with men.

The only time I have been alone in a house with a man was when I went and asked the guy to apologize for putting a taser on my cunt. I was shaking like a leaf the whole fucking time.

When someone says, “Get over it” really they mean “stop making this impact me” and it would be far more expedient if they said the second instead of the former. That is a useful bit of feedback. Boundaries.

I would really like to stop having nightmares. I would like to believe I am safe.

I could go down a list of ways I do feel safe. I am a privileged person living in the first world. I am not worried about popular insurrection or genocide suddenly occurring in my neighborhood. No asshole government (Thanks USA) is going to drop a bomb on my house. (I am pretty ashamed of my government.) I have food security. I have secure housing. I have enough money in the bank that I could survive quite a few small to medium financial disasters and come out on top.

I believe that Noah will never rape me again. (Now that’s a long story. I’m still here because consent is a very complicated creature. I will never again promise in advance to do something I may or may not want to do at the time.) But sometimes I know in the deepest part of my heart that every woman who has ever been raped has had a period of time where they believed that about the husband/boyfriend/family member/friend who rapes them.

Noah has worked so hard at gentling his manner. And sometimes that sets me off because it seems like predator behavior to me. It’s the honey moon stage. Only it’s been 99% of our relationship and one huge fuckup that was as much my fault as his. (When you give consent in advance but then change your mind it is a very complicated muddle of blame.) We like to joke about Stockholm Syndrome.

I have never liked how someone treats me as much as I like how Noah treats me. He gets mad at me for saying things but he doesn’t tell me to stop. He will argue for why he thinks it is a shitty thing to do, but he doesn’t boss me. He doesn’t tell me who I have to be.

He married an angry fucking woman. He knows it and he tries to deflect the blasts to prevent scorching and he otherwise tries to be as supportive as he can be.

He makes me fucking breakfast every morning. And he frequently makes dinner when he gets home from work. I don’t have a husband. I have a working wife. (My former therapist was a Berkeley dyke and she liked to talk about Noah being a Berkeley dyke with a dick he unfortunately can’t put in a drawer.)

Noah is a partner.

So it feels really bad when he’s being painted as the enemy. Noah is the only person alive who wants to stand next to me every day and make my life better. When I get stuck and I don’t know to take a next step he helps me work it out.

He built me a sales page for my book. If you want to buy it: here it is. That’s because of Noah. Not because he wants me to hurry up and make money and support him. Ha. Not because he wants me to hurry up and stop stealing his money.

Because he thinks my writing is good and he thinks people should be able to buy it and read it. Because he believes that people should know about the things I talk about. Because instead of silencing me he wants to do what he can to amplify my message.

I can’t construe Noah as the enemy unless I do contortions and backflips and then look through a two way mirror the wrong way. I am more my own enemy in this marriage than Noah is my enemy.

Noah’s a kid who grew up and found a girl he liked and he’s trying as hard as he can to make everyone happy. Once he thought it might make me happy to have him rape me. That turned out to be more complicated than we understood. He is not my enemy. He is not someone I need to punish.

But he’s not the one who can rescue me either. He can do the wife thing, and he’s a fucking good one. But that’s not the same thing. Wives are not white knights.

(If you assume that the title “wife” is assigned after noticing what sets of duties someone does instead of looking at their crotch then it’s a fairly clear role. A knight should function fairly similarly in my opinion.)

Sometimes it is so hard. On one hand: you can tell the story so that no one is the enemy. Everyone is a “victim”. On the other hand: the fact that I was abused so terribly does not give me the right to climb on a bell tower and take a bunch of people out.

I do kind of think that undergoing an extensive many decades long process of becoming more violent … at some point you are going to be to blame for continuing to be that person.

I don’t hit my kids. That is one of the most important rules of our household. I don’t hit my husband. No one else gets to hit either.

If some dude casually gropes me “just as a flirtation” I have the right to break his nose and do pretty much anything else I want to do right in that moment. I have no reason to believe he will stop at a casual thing and I have too much to lose.

Kill first, ask questions later.

No, I don’t need to be less violent to the men who touch me.

I get that I should not be verbally attacking every person who stands near me over nothing. Duh.

I’m actually a very pleasant conversationalist. I can find conversations anywhere with anyone. I will find a way to get them to talk to me. And it’s not through being violent or scary. I can be quite charming. Downright non-threatening. People tell me how calm and safe I make them feel.

I don’t hit kids who touch me in inappropriate ways but I do give them sharp verbal feedback about the boundaries of my body.

The violence I feel seems… ya’ know… warranted.

I’m struggling really hard with how to talk to alllllll the men who ain’t never done nothing to no one and they are so fucking sick of being treated like they are a rapist and a monster and blah blah YOU HURT MY FEELINGS AND YOU OWE ME AN APOLOGY.

Ok, now I feel violent towards you too. Because you expect me to accommodate your feelings while stomping on mine.

I’m sorry my trauma inconveniences you. I will try to do my house keeping better.

You know how you can tell you have a good house keeper? You never see that anything needs to be done. It is invisible behind your back. I am an excellent house keeper.

My mom started working at Ross Dress for Less when I was twelve. I would hang out during her working hours because I had no where else to be. So I helped.

I have always been good at taking a random assortment of “what the fuck is this?” and creating order. When I was older and I worked for Ross I was moved from store to store clearing out the stock backups because I worked faster than crews of 5-7 people all by myself.

Probably what Noah thinks of as a 10x engineer or approaching it.

It “doesn’t matter” only that’s a serious skill. Yes, I used it in department stores–but I also used it in my class room and in my house.

I get a random huge pile of shit and I can figure out what to do with it all in a very short period of time. I don’t have to stop and think and ponder and wonder. Keep/trash/recycle. Kitchen/bedroom/playroom/garage/living room. Move big stacks. Put it ALL AWAY PROPERLY.

This is just how I do things. I go through months of not actually keeping up and then it takes me 30 or so hours to get it back to baseline so I can coast for a while.

It’s harder with kids. They tear things apart so fast.

Yesterday I was bitching to Noah about how defiant Shanna is getting and how annoyed I was. So I went into the garage and picked up the six year old book in the magical series I love. Guess what the title is? Loving and Defiant. hahahahahahahaha

I love these books.

I now have a much better idea of how I need to arrange my spoons over the next few months. I am going to grab the idea of “three chances” and run with it. I am going to have to sit on my yelling no matter what. This is a phase. It will pass. If I scream a lot the thing we will remember from this period is that I was a screaming harpy. We will both forget that she was a gigantic pain in my ass.

I hope all we remember long term is that the Easter parties are ridiculously fun. I will forget how tired I was from all the work. I think I nailed the behavior profile I was shooting for. I’m proud of myself.

I managed to refer to hot tawdry days of yore without making it seem indecent at all. I was proud of myself for that G-rated explanation. *pat self on back*

There were representative samples from the home schooling group, dancing, Noah’s work, Noah’s college life, neighbors, the poly community and former uhh partners-now friends.

Everyone got along great. It was very kid appropriate the whole time.

Then I crash. And want to spend a day crying. There is some part of this trade that isn’t working and I don’t understand yet what it is. I’m not still irritated about the My Little Ponies. We kept hunting till bed time and eventually found two. I can think of myself as some random middle school kid who got similar donations from friends. I can let that one rest.

But man still feelings. Explosions of feelings. Tornadoes of feelings.

My head hurts so much. I have lots of allergies. And I’m physically tired from the twelve mile run on Saturday. But the massage was miraculous.

Dinno. I’m a puzzle.