I feel like I am always surprised when an intense suicidal jag comes up. Why so intense? Why now? It’s not like things have actually hit a fever pitch of bad in my life… why now? I don’t know. Because these are the cycles I live with.

Lightning spends all day and most of the night whacking me telling me that more life is coming and death is…

I don’t even know. But good grief this kid is lively. It’s hard to sit around and think about offing yourself when you have something this alive inside of you. I’m capable of doing it because I can multi-task like a boss… but it’s kind of weird.

I don’t really want to kill Lightning. They clearly are ready to be born and to make an impact. Probably with their fist or foot. Ow. Some of these feel like out and out head butts.

In that way I have of not really acknowledging “now” and instead focusing on future tripping so that I’m constantly preparing for a future I may not have… Noah is really encouraging me to do baby prep. There’s a big piece of me that feels like I’m being ridiculous for buying anything for this baby. In this minute I still feel like I shouldn’t be here in four months.

But I made a list of all the shit I probably ought to get at the consignment sale anyway. Because if I don’t off myself… I’ll need this shit. And if I do off myself getting rid of that crap will be the least of Noah’s problems.

Oh, hey K… did you hear that there is a new fire in the Santa Cruz Mountains near Boulder Creek? There is an evacuation center at Lakeside and somehow that feels so close and scary and like it is part of my story even though I don’t live there now. Bear Creek Road is shut down and that’s… that’s so close to where we grew up. My family is still there in the mountains. My family’s home is risking being burned down. My bio-family should probably be looking into evacuation. My extended, very disabled, very poor family should be looking into evacuation. I feel like a monster because I’m not calling Auntie.

But I’m not calling.

Auntie and all three of her kids and one of their partners and probably my mom are living less than 10 miles from this fire.

And I’m not calling to offer help. Even though they kept me alive as a kid.

I’m sorry, mama.

Yesterday my kids asked me if my mama was pretty. It was kind of funny because I wanted to say no, but I say yes too. I think she started out a pretty woman and then life was really unfair and the tracks of her life walk right across her face.

You can’t fake or hide grief lines very well. There are these deep gauges that folks get in their face, lines that go from the corners of the mouth up to the nose. The deeper those marks go the more grief you have carried. The more time you’ve spent crying or trying not to. It’s not really mistakable. When I notice that someone has them I feel this wave of compassion and comradeship–I understand.

I wear my life on my face too. No amount of moisturizer will cover these lines and tracks.

We had a family therapy session yesterday. We walked out with some ideas of how to handle some issues we’ve been having. I feel it was a fairly productive situation. I have endless appreciation for the fact that my kids are willing to be honest and frank about what they are doing and why. “Sure I smacked so and so. I was feeling X and it seemed like the right thing to do.”

*blink* Well… at least we can talk about it…

I grew up with so much denial. Why do I write down all of this awful roller coaster of emotion? So that later I can never ever deny that it happened. Yup, I was genuinely that difficult.

Things are hard but feel like there are whiffs of more positive with Noah. We’ve tried some different ways of having sexual contact and it went better than normal. But we are both so raw and untrusting that every step and every attempt at anything is complicated. We are clinging to each other in that lost child way we have. But it feels like the wounds are still actively aching.

How in the fuck do we make this work? I need for my cunt to not be hurt anymore. Even if the cost is that I am the shittiest wife on the planet who will not meet her husband’s needs. I’m feeling better every day about my desire to fire the therapist who spent 5 years telling me I needed to compromise and put out because Noah does so much for me I owe him.

I don’t need more of that god damn voice in my ear telling me that I owe anyone my cunt.

I’m not opposed to touching Noah’s body. I’m not opposed to being part of his sexual life. But I need that to not mean that I am required to submit to burning pain as part of the deal. This has to change because I am not physically nor emotionally capable of continuing to do that and be ok in other areas of my life. I will have to blow things up in very bad ways in order to cope with that and that’s going to create other problems. If I have that much pain brought into my life all the time… I have to cope however I have to fucking cope and I don’t give a flying fuck if you like it.

And Noah’s really opposed to some of my coping methods because they hurt him a lot. Fair. So let’s stop damaging me, m’kay?

I can’t pull off the amount of boring and staid I pull off and be constantly pushed into dysregulation by pain like that. The amount of pain I deal with from my body in general is bad enough. I can cope with back and hip and neck and arm and shoulder and head pain with just being surly. It’s a deeper ache that I process differently. The burning active injury feel inside my cunt is different and activating in a very different way. I have to either face it head on and do as much sexual activity as I can to cause the area to go mostly numb so I can step into a dissociative state to deal with it or I need the god damn pain to stop.

Because this pain is something I can’t cope with and pull off this mommy-act I play all day.

This pain means I’m just a worthless whore and if that is all I am then I need to be that with a vengeance.

It’s complicated.

I like the role I’ve been playing for years now. I like the way my kids look at me. I like that when they are having big feelings a lot of how that manifests is for both of them to literally fall out of their beds because they are reaching for me because they need the physical contact to reestablish connection.

We fall asleep differently when Noah is around. Noah requires silence and stillness in the pre-bed ritual. When he’s gone the rest of us wiggle and flop back and forth like a fish dumped into a boat. We talk for 20-40 minutes about the stuff that’s bothering us and we talk about how to cope with our big feelings. Noah doesn’t love this period. It’s distracting and bothersome for him. I call it getting out the wiggles and it helps me and the kids. Last night I told Noah to chill and let us do it when he asked us to shush.

The kids needed the extra snuggling and talking really a lot. They are struggling to make their own sense of living with a depressed mother and their parents are fighting about something and they are transitioning away from their beloved babysitter still and they are adjusting to this school having OUTRAGEOUS REQUIREMENTS LIKE TURNING IN TWO ASSIGNMENTS PER MONTH PER SUBJECT, OH THE INDIGNITY and a variety of other such factors. They are taking a lot in and trying to figure out what it means to them. A lot of how they do that is to lay on top of me and talk about how they are trying to put the pieces together.

I feel so honored to be part of this process. I love you.

I don’t want to hurt them. And leaving would hurt them so much. Noah would try to be as emotionally supportive as I am…. but I think he’s not even aware of just how much emotional support and scaffolding I provide.

My kids have never really had to struggle with hard feelings on their own. They have had me around their entire lives to go to, “This one is super hard huh? Yeah. Getting through the big hard feelings hurts and it’s a struggle and you don’t have to be alone for it.”

It was funny having the family therapist kind of nod in agreement/appreciation of how I take myself away from the children to go cry. Adults have to manage their own shit; it’s not ok to ask a child for support. I mean… that’s such a funny weird line to walk. I actually did allow the children to comfort me/grieve with me over my cat dying. That was a very appropriate kind of grief to share.

My horrible crying that goes on and on and on year after year… it would be wrong to share.

Sometimes my kids look at me with these shining eyes and they tell me that they really appreciate that they have never had to be alone.

One of my children talked yesterday about how they are struggling to deal with half an hour separations from the family because it feels like it will stretch into YEARS OF BEING ALONE. I understand that feeling so well, but it’s really kind of hilarious in the context of our little family. I gently teased about the YEARS part and they stepped it down to MONTHS and then got to WEEKS… and I said, “It really does feel like that, doesn’t it? And that feeling is so hard to live with because even five minutes starts to feel like a whole lifetime.” They nodded in this sad and heart broken way.

They are so real and so honest and so present with everything they feel. I love being near them.

EC is ready to start doing the pre-teen pull away thing and FMC is flipping the fuck out. FMC is feeling abandoned by their sister and by me because a baby is coming. EC wants more time on her own to be quiet and contemplative and to be thinking about what being a teenager means. FMC is all “What do you mean you don’t want to play dolls with me forever?!”

This is such a normal milestone to have to work through. It’s hilariously ordinary and that is just… whoa. This isn’t trauma, this is life.

But life hurts too.

Both kids are finally talking about their anxiety about how things are going to change when the baby comes. It is sinking in that they will get less direct attention from me and they are both clinging to me like a life raft. FMC is saying that they need LOTS of dates in the last few months here because they need to fill their bucket up until it is overflowing to help them get through the drought.

EC is in this point where she feels she should be trying to be an adult and I’m ragging on her to stay a kid for a few more years. “This time passes so quickly and you never get it back! Be a little kid for EVERY MOMENT YOU CAN.” She wants to be responsible and a good example. I told her she can do that by being the best little kid she can be and not striving for being an adult before it is time. She gave me that funny “I see what you are doing there, mom” look. I love that look. It’s like I’m gazing into my future at all the times when she is going to get sick of my bossing. I can’t wait. “I can handle it, mom”. Yes ma’am. I know you can. I was just… helping.

I want to die because carrying the burden of being the source of pain for so many hurts. And I’m a coward. I don’t want to hurt like this anymore.

I want to live because people look at me in the most beautiful ways I can imagine and I’m really not done being looked at like that.

Life hurts.

Thank you very much for reaching out to let me know that you care about me and you want to support me. It is incredibly kind. It is thoughtful. It is loving.

I’m not reaching back because I’m still in that place where I would manage to turn the most innocuous statements into proof that you hate me and you think I should die. I don’t really think you believe that so I’m just not getting into that conversation. Because I don’t want to do that to you. I’m holding my breath and waiting for the wave to finish passing by. I don’t want to damage my relationship with you just because my brain is being a complete asshole right now.

I don’t document these kinds of ups and downs because I want to distress you or ruin your day. I can tell you are worried. I’m sorry I’m scaring you. I document these sorts of dips in my psyche partially because someday my children might say, “Remember when I was x years old and you flipped out? What happened?” I will be able to go look in my archive and answer that question.

I asked my kids if they have heard me swear at their father much, this was in context of a conversation on contempt, and they sat there and thought hard and counted on their fingers and said they can remember 7 times. So those are 7 times in their whole life when I have been disrespectful enough in your presence to call him a name. That’s not good. But you notice how I don’t do that casually? We have a fight every so often and I have this incredibly bad habit that there are things I can’t say out loud until I’m screaming them with a curse word. It’s really bad. But I don’t refer to your father that way casually or very often because I don’t want to demonstrate contempt. I don’t want to feel contempt either… but you don’t call people names all the time. It should be rare or never. I mean, it would be best if I could grow the fuck up and fight without yelling swear words…

I’ve come a long way…

With Noah holding the key to all the stuff in the house that is lethal I’m pretty sure you can go back to checking my blog once a day. I made it hard for me to off myself.

It isn’t that I feel better. It’s that I’m thinking long and hard about the impact on my children and I’m not viewing my pain as equally as important. My baby is struggling so hard to become an emotionally regulated person. I can’t do this to them. They are struggling hard with impulse control and they are terrified that having less than perfect impulse control means they are a terrible person who is beyond redemption.

If I went now… they would assume blame forever. And baby it’s not you.

Oh it’s never you.

I can’t make my baby feel like me.

It’s really weird knowing that as much as I feel like I am poisoning everyone around me… my kid will listen to me telling them that they made a mistake and now they need to shake it off and try again because that’s just life. They listen when I tell them that it’s not good to internalize that mistakes make you a failure. Mistakes give you chances to learn. They are valuable. Mistakes are necessary and important and that means they really can’t prove that you are bad. Don’t make some of the truly heinous mistakes more than once… but once… you know…

You have to learn.

My kids believe in me more than folks believe in Moses. My word is law. It’s the weirdest fucking phenomena. I don’t think I ever felt like that about anyone as a child. Even though my kids know I’m wrong sometimes and I make mistakes… they view me as just about perfect.

It’s the fucking weirdest thing.

I may be a shitty wife… but my kids look at me like I’m the best thing ever. I don’t want to hurt them like that.

Even if that means I keep hurting Noah.

Only 4 days this week of leaving town. I’m so fucking tired.

How much pain can I absorb in this life? I don’t know. Are my kids going to keep looking at me while I do it? Because I’m kind of a macho show off. If I think I’m impressing them I can go pretty far.

My wonderful, beloved friends… I do appreciate that you reach out. But the thing about chronic long-term mental illness is… I can’t treat everything as a crisis. I know there is terrible advice out there telling people “Every time you feel suicidal, go to the ER!” No. Don’t do that. Well, if that is what you feel you need to do to get through a night… you do you. I will never do that. Never ever ever ever ever.

I will never risk having an authority figure strap me down because I have the unfortunate tendency towards having emotions they do not want me to have. Not again in this life. I can’t.

I will not risk being shot up with drugs I do not consent to. I have no rights in this country as a mentally ill person. The minute I enter the system they can do any abusive thing they want to me and I have no recourse.

No. That’s not a way to “get better” and if you try to force me through that… you aren’t a good person. I don’t care what you tell yourself. That’s terrifying and abusive and just plain wrong. Even the fucking UN believes I deserve better than I can get in my country.

I got to meet one of the lawyers who helped draft their position. What a beautiful and inspiring person.

I feel less frantic. Frankly I’m in the danger zone. Because this is the kind of mind set where I have enough energy going spare that I could get up out of the house and get it done. I still believe it might be the right decision. Except for my kids.

My kids…

I know what suicide does to a kid.

I’m not sure my pain is that important. Maybe when they are in their 20’s or 30’s and they can understand chronic conditions… but they won’t ever get over it right now.

That’s a choke chain if ever there was one. Last night my baby wanted to have one of our bed time chats where they ask me about tremendously serious, ethical, philosophical matters. They need me. They need someone to sit there and talk through how to think about boundaries and consent and limits and showing love. They need someone who will compassionately say, “Yeah, we all screw up. This is how we do better.”

They need someone who is invested in seeing them as someone with potential.

That’s supposed to be your mother.

And the waterworks start again on cue.

It just occurred to me that I’ve been friends with my former students for about half of their lives at this point. They come back because I look at them as someone with potential and they want to see that reflection.

I get it.

I see so much in you and you and you and you. I am sorry I am harsh in how I phrase my criticisms. I’m much harsher with myself. You do get the gentled down version of how I look at the world. I see you as so capable and I’m an asshole about how I prod that. I’m sorry. You deserve better.

I don’t know that I have better to give… but you clearly deserve better.

That’s so complicated.

The thing about suicide is… if you prevent me on a given day you will only increase the horrible lethality of the method I will choose on another day. This is not a “temporary mood problem” I have where you just need to lock me in a box until it is over. This is a long term chronic problem that isn’t going to go away until I am dead. I mean… maybe it could… but I’m not holding my breath on that.

*You* can’t panic and give up pieces of your life when I fall to pieces. If I am in a place where I need you to be a physical/emotional/spiritual place to block me from killing myself… I’ll ask. I really appreciate the offers of support, but sometimes I’m not in a place to take the support because I will twist it and turn it into more poison. I’m good at that. When my uncle died and I did not believe I was capable of taking care of myself well enough to survive the week alone… I asked for help. I wasn’t alone for over a week. I do recognize different plateaus of coping…..

Even that week I didn’t want to talk much. I just needed an adult in the house to watch me and the kids.

One week out of the 9 years I’ve been a parent. I don’t need that kind of support much. Mostly I have to put my head down and get to my life.

I have to pull the meaning from where I am standing… or I’m not going to last very long. I have to pull the will to live from what I’m doing or I’m in trouble.

But I love you. And I’m glad you love me.

I really struggle with what it means to be human. I struggle with what it means to be allowed to defend yourself. What does it mean to be allowed to assert yourself even when others don’t like it.

I hurt Noah a lot last year. I think I will flinch when someone says “2016” for the rest of my life. I hurt him emotionally for several months. Yup. That happened. I did that. I did that in large part because I was trying to cope with the physical damage that was happening to my body.

I don’t think Noah was damaging me on purpose. That wasn’t his “goal”. His goal was connection and he was seeking it in the best way he knew how. But I showed up in this relationship broken.

I wrote in my first fucking users guide I think in 2004 that I have extensive scarring damage in my cunt. Vaginal sex hurts me. I keep having it because I like it even though it hurts me. There are times when it doesn’t hurt that much and there are times when I feel like I will go out of my mind from the pain. Because it is so deep inside me I can’t get away from it. I feel like I want to scratch my skin off to get away from that fucking pain. I want to reach inside me and yank my cunt and uterus out and never have anyone use me like that again. Sew the fucking hole closed.

I have been trying to talk about this for years. I have been writing down that it was an active problem for at least 13 years. It is not news.

I have never treated it like a problem my partners need to care about. I have been incredibly callous about it. But if you had been taught that you were going to have a problem your whole life starting when you were a baby and it was a problem for the next 30 years you might be kind of callous in how you deal with it too.

Having sex with multiple people changes how my body operates. It’s like switching a car’s gears. For one major factor: it is so much easier to dissociate. I enjoy the sex way more when I’m only sorta physically/emotionally present. Which is fucked up. The more numb my cunt is the less I am aware of how much it hurts but I have to have a really freaky amount of sex to get there. I have to be wearing out a bunch of people before I get to this state. When I access this mode of existence… it’s just different. My body hardens itself against what I am forcing it to put up with.

Which isn’t a slam on the lovely people who fuck me. Y’all ain’t doing a bad thing.

I can show up for the kind of sex I have perceived Noah as wanting without feeling emotionally battered by it when my body is in that mode.

I have really struggled with matching Noah’s sex drive over the years. I have done my absolute best to carry that god damn quota even when I was in a lot of physical pain and I really should have loved myself enough to say that I wasn’t up for sex. But I don’t really love myself so protecting myself seems like such a stupid waste of time.

I’m a waste person. Might as well use me up and discard me instead of take care of me.

So I’ve grit my teeth and shut my eyes and I’ve had a lot of very painful sex. All in the name of “connection” and “showing love”.

Do you know how degrading it feels to have someone tell you over and over that they are showing you love by reaching up inside you and damaging your insides?

I have tried to talk to Noah about this pain over the years and I have not found words that got the message across. I have failed to explain why this is a problem and how I need it to change. So last year I hit a boiling point in my ability to cope and given that I’m not supposed to be mutilating myself to cope I had to find something else in my bag of tricks that would let me carry the burden farther. I went with an old trusty standby–promiscuity.

In many literal ways promiscuity kept me alive for decades. It kept me trying again when it came to reaching out to people. It kept me in a mindset where I could put my head down and just work at the things I needed to work at because I was dissociating hard from the pain in my body. I am a very effective tool when I am not paying attention to myself. Promiscuity aids me in that.

Noah perceives it as an existential threat to our relationship. I view it as giving me the ability to cope with things I can’t cope with. I get that I can’t ever date again and keep Noah. Any and all sex I have with anyone until Noah dies needs to include Noah. I get that. I get that Noah can’t handle me going off the rails like that because it ties into Noah’s core wounding from when he was a kid.

But what in the hell are we going to do about my cunt and the fact that trying to be in less pain, trying to cope with the pain I am in makes me bad and an abuser because I’m hurting him.

How come it is so easy to label me as abusive when I am trying to insist on less damage happening to my body?

A friend posted a review of the movie Bladerunner the other day. I’ve never seen the movie and I never want to. The review was incredibly triggering to me. It explained the movie as being about A.I. slaves who are only allowed to live for four years and they are killed if they rebel. Creatures that are created to be sex slaves are killed if they ever assert their right to say no.

I can’t watch that movie. That’s not entertainment. That feels like my life.

Ok, not really. But too fucking close for comfort.

I am bad because I hurt Noah. I hurt Noah so bad that he believes that no reasonable person could hear his story and think he should be married to someone as abusive as I am.

oh.

I am really struggling with what it means to exist in my body. Flailing through insisting that I have the right to exist without constant pain means I’m bad. Insisting on less damage to my body means I’m bad because I’m “withholding sex”.

I think I wanted to fire my last therapist as badly as I did because she spent a lot of time telling me how I have to care about Noah’s needs and marriage means I need to have sex with him. She was so hard on #TeamNoah that I felt like I was an expendable piece of the puzzle.

That’s a shitty dynamic with someone I’m paying $180/hour to help me feel better.

How much pain am I required to be in in order to be “good”?

I can’t keep this cycle up. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.

I cannot act like my cunt is an acceptable expendable part of my anatomy in service of other people getting to feel good and it’s ok if it makes me want to die.

And if I’m a bad person and a monster because I flip out as this is happening then maybe it is better that I just go ahead and die now because I just cannot continue this dynamic. It is better to be dead.

I have no more ability to absorb damage. I’m done. I’m tapped out. I know that makes me a bad wife and a bad person. Fine. I can be out of the picture then.

I would much rather be the horrible wife who killed herself to get away than be the monster who sat here hurting him decade after decade. Isn’t one decade enough?

But the problem is one of my kids is… really kind of in a crisis point. I’m not going to write about it because this isn’t my story to tell at this point but if I died any time soon my child would believe for the rest of their life that I did it because they were bad.

I feel the weight of that like an anvil on my head.

I really don’t want to hurt my baby like that. I know that dealing with my suicide would be hard enough. This timing would be catastrophic for life.

But I can’t wait until Lightning is here. That’s really not ok.

I understand the mothers who kill their kids when they kill themselves. Not that I have any plans to kill Eldest Child or Future Middle Child. I really don’t. I can’t handle slapping or spanking them… I really wouldn’t be able to talk myself into killing them unless there were horrifying extenuating circumstances like they were about to be killed in a slow brutal way by a bad person so I do it quick. Something ridiculous and dramatic that is never going to come up.

So yeah. Can’t wait till the third kid is here. That gets too complicated.

But if I feel like I’m a bad person for hurting Noah by cheating on him that’s nothing compared to the damage I would do if I killed myself right now. My babies would not get over it. I think FMC would be a basket case for life. I think EC would kind of hold it together but she would feel hollow inside forever.

I don’t want to hurt either of them like that.

It feels so selfish to want to be done. It is selfish. I know.

If being good means letting people hurt me inside my body forever so they can feel good…

I’m not sure I care that much about being good either. Who is selfish here?

People have been telling me for almost 20 years that sex is supposed to feel good and make you feel connected to people. Excuse me while I laugh until I need supplemental oxygen.

Sex is alienating and degrading and painful. Sure, I get off on it. I’m a masochist. But that doesn’t change the poison I carry around inside me.

Noah is kind of bitter about the times when he asks me about connecting physically and it turns into him rubbing me and I fall asleep. To him that feels like him not being allowed to get what he wants. That’s not sex. That’s not connection.

The only thing that counts is the thing that hurts me. So sex isn’t about connecting with me. It’s about using my orifices until you are done. Can we stop fucking pretending that this is about emotional connection then?

If sex was about us connecting emotionally and about my body feeling good… those times that start out as a massage and that’s how far it goes… would count.

But they don’t. And I am bad every time that happens. So sex is not about me feeling good.

Me feeling good is the opposite of the point of sex.

And I’m supposed to cope with that by shutting up and opening my legs. Or I’m bad. I’m not allowed to fuck other people to make it easier… that makes me bad. I can’t say “no” because then I’m bad. I can’t…

I can’t exist in this dynamic and be good. There is no good for me in this set up.

And I guess it is my fault. Because I haven’t managed to negotiate in a way that meets his needs and allows me humanity. I’m bad. I’m hurting him. He should leave me because I am so bad. Any person who cares about him would tell him to leave me because I am so bad.

That’s what he believes.

Being me really kind of sucks.

Should I be permanently investing in lidocaine so I can stop feeling my cunt and I can stop acknowledging that the pain matters at all? Is that really what I should be doing.

That is sure as shit what I walked away from my therapist thinking she believes I should do.

“Marriage involves compromise, Krissy. You need to meet his needs.”

Or I need to die. That could work too.

I have fucking tried to talk about these problems. Have I done a good job? Well no. I don’t have good language for all of this. This is the water I swim in, how do you describe it? I have sex that doesn’t hurt… occasionally… it’s kind of random and I can’t predict it very well… So how in the fuck do I say “more like that”? Mostly it god damn hurts.

And I’ve been shutting off my brain when that happens for more than 30 years. If you have similar experience I’d love to talk about it and if you don’t I don’t fucking care what you think and you can shove your fucking opinion where the sun doesn’t shine.

Side note: I can’t remember if EC and FMC were as active in utero as Lightning. This kid is a tornado. Constant barrel rolls inside me. This is a very alive creature. I fear this child will be born running.

And I’m so tired.

Sometimes it feels like the kid is actively protesting my depression and my thoughts of killing myself and thus my parasite. “NO. I AM HERE. THAT IS NOT OK. I HAVE SHIT TO DO. LET ME OUT.”

I’m going to add a third dose of pot for a bit. I’m crashing too hard in between doses and I don’t care if some medical providers want to hysterically wave their hands and talk about “But oh no! We don’t have adequate safety testing!” Yeah but it’s safer than anything you want to replace it with so shut up.

If you ever 5150 me you are fucking dead to me. Do not think about calling the police for a safety check. If you report me as suicidal then they may or may not find my body. Don’t do it. Is it scary for you to read that I’m having big feelings? Put your big kid panties on and cope or stop reading my blog. I am documenting the ups and downs of mental illness. If that roller coaster is too much for you, then you are allowed to step off. I am not allowed to step off no matter what. When I hide what I am feeling so that people do not punish me for my feelings things get worse. If you 5150 me you will be punishing me for daring to talk about something you find scary. The hospital will not help me in any way shape or form.

Do you know what is a lot more helpful? My friends letting me know that they love me and if I need them they will do whatever they can. I probably won’t ask for anything. Mostly I’ll say “thanks” and just walk right past the offer. If I don’t say thanks I’m sorry for that–I should.

This is not a journey you can change for me. This is not a journey that would be helped by more people in authority showing me that I don’t matter and hurting my body to make me more convenient for them to manage.

I am long term chronically mentally ill. That means I can’t act like everything is a crisis. I have to be moderate in my response to my brain freaking out. As K points out, I document the waves and ride them and mostly that’s what I’ve got. More drugs don’t make things better–I’ve tried over 30 psych meds. I’m on the most effective one and it’s far from perfect. More therapy isn’t that helpful at this stage. I still go to therapy… but it’s not a silver bullet. It’s not going to magically fix me.

I’M DOING ALL THE THINGS THEY WOULD INSIST ON IF THE GOVERNMENT WERE MORE HEAVILY MICROMANAGING ME SO SHUT THE FUCK UP AND LEAVE ME ALONE.

Just because you are doing the All The Things to manage mental illness that doesn’t change the fact that it is a shitty ride.

Ok, that’s pithy and wonderful. I love that sentence. ha.

*pat self on back for clever line*

Noah is talking to Pam. Noah doesn’t feel he can lean on his friends because he believes it will turn his friends against me and they will all be constantly telling him to leave me and he doesn’t want to hear it so he’s talking to my best friend of 20 years. He thinks I’m mad at him for this. Mad really isn’t the word.

Either he’s right that anyone he talks to will grow to hate me and believe he should abandon me and I will lose my best friend or he’s wrong and maybe he needs to fucking hear that he isn’t right.

But I’m terrified about this. There are layers here. If he’s right and I deserve to lose my best friend when she hears his side of the story… that will suck but I made my bed and I get to lie in it. If I deserve to be abandoned then I should be. If Pam tells him to divorce me and save the kids… it will be because that is necessary.

I think he needs to talk to someone. If Pam is the only person he feels he can talk to, so be it. I find some irony in the situation for spiteful reasons I won’t write down. But yeah. Talk to someone. If it is Pam, fine.

If I lose another person… I deserve it.

Besides, if I off myself Pam would probably be one of the people who supports Noah the most over the years with the kids so I need to make sure that bridge is well established. They might need it.

I think ahead.

I’m sad and I’m tired and I feel hopeless about the possibility of being in less pain. I feel like I will never never never never never matter enough for that to be enough of a priority to make it happen. It’s too hard. It’s not worth what it would take.

I know Noah has tried over the years to make sex better for me. But if we are starting from me having the mindset that sex hurts and that’s the way it is… that’s only going to be a marginal improvement and I’m going to still flip out sometimes because I can’t cope.

I’m not saying it is his fault. I’m saying I don’t know how to change this.

Sex hurts is a core belief. I believe that sex hurts like I believe that gravity exists. Like other people believe in G-d. It’s just… how it is.

How do I survive this? How do I change this? How do I make it so that I’m not a terrible, horrible person because I am tired of my cunt burning and aching and hurting?

I’m pretty sure that Noah and I don’t fight much where the kids can hear because yesterday we had a doozy and the kids heard and they were both absolutely shocked that they heard us yell swear words at each other. They both commented on how weird it was. “What happened?”

None of your business.

Sometimes people fight.

They are 7 and 9 and they don’t have memory of us screaming at each other before. That’s kind of fucking miraculous to me.

I know we need to not make a habit of this.

You figure out how to fucking have a civilized conversation when all you want to do is put your head through a window. I don’t fucking know how right now.

I am trying to reach out. I am trying to communicate. I am trying to figure out how to change things so that I’m not so freaked out. This is hard.

There is this section in the Rihanna/Drake song “Work” that I really like:

 All that I wanted from you was to gimme
Something that I never had
Something that you’ve never seen
Something that you’ve never been
But I wake up and everything’s wrong

That’s what we are trying to do here. Something I’ve never had or seen, something you’ve never been.

I have friends who identify as women… who don’t have vaginal sex. There are various reasons for this and every case is quite unique. But when I find out this is the reality they live with… I have this shocked attention experience. “Wait. Wut?” It isn’t that I believe that they should. It is that… they have relationships… with people who have penises… and… they don’t seem to be perceived as bad for having this limit.

How does that work?!

I’m not even saying I want to swear off vaginal sex forever. I do like it. But I’m not allowed to be good and have limits around how often or when… how do you manage to be good and not do it at all?

I don’t understand.

It’s like you just told me you were born with three tongues in your head. How in the fuck does that work?

My cunt has been such a non-negotiable part of my life. I am very curious how it works for other people. What does sex look like when you get to just declare parts of your anatomy a no-go zone? I mean… yeah I’ve read about queer sex. My queer sex involves a lot of strap ons because penetration is…

I don’t really understand sex without penetration. That’s not my reality.

I’m a hole. That’s what I am. That’s what I was made to be. That’s why I was born. I can’t understand being something else.

But it hurts. And I can’t keep hurting like this. Even if I’m bad for insisting that it stop. Even if I’m so bad that I deserve to be alone and unloved forever because I’m not compromising enough.

Ok. I should probably stop before I get onto the 9th page of writing this morning. It’s been a good hour of writing.

I can’t create safety for other people.

I can’t sleep.

I can’t reach out and ask for support.

I can’t stop thinking that the only way I will stop being bad is to die.

I can’t stop thinking about all the all the all the all the all the fuck ups. I deserve what I get.

I can’t stop being a monster.

I can’t be worthy.

I can’t be good.

I can’t stop crying.

I can’t be on a different path; this is the one in front of me.

I can’t be quiet enough with my crying to be allowed in the bedroom and that’s hard.

I can’t stop thinking that she will hate me now too. Another one bites the dust. I deserve it.

I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.

I can’t stop thinking about my mama, about mothers, about how does any mother ever figure out what “good enough” means.

Gosh I’m boring. I don’t keep up with most of the tv people watch. I can’t discuss makeup or hair fun or nails or… any of the things that seem to make the people I like feel like they are more interesting. I can’t really discuss fashion. My fashion statement is mostly sweats and a baggy t-shirt I stole from someone else.

For tv I watch The West Wing, Madame Secretary, Orange is the New Black, and Call the Midwife; I’ve tried a few others but I don’t really manage to continue. They are interesting but there is a higher barrier to watching so I just don’t bother. That’s not a list of shows that gives me good conversation material with other people.

I feel more and more like discussing children is a way to make people feel bad. I notice that I’m not holding on to mom-friends very well. I don’t think that how I parent is superior to how other people parent… I think I make some weird as shit choices that wouldn’t work for most people. I don’t think my way of being completely enmeshed with my children is the most healthy option available. I think that I’m coming from a family background of severe mental illness and difficulty attaching and that’s why I make the choices I make. They sure as shit aren’t appropriate for everyone.

I don’t feel like I have much of anything to talk about that is fun or light or entertaining. I’m not pretty. I’m not fun. I’m not interesting.

Hi, I’m Debbie Downer and I deliver.

I don’t have interesting hobbies to talk about. My poor plants are barely staying alive because I’m so fucking exhausted I’m not watering like I should.

I feel like I’m failing at everything. I’m failing at being interested enough in my friends. I’m shitty support right now. I feel like I’m boring and stupid.

I feel like I should stop reaching out to people at all because I have nothing to offer and all I am is this boring pit of need.

I’m so tired.

On the upside, this is not a suicidal version of feeling bad. Just… a whiny one. I suppose that’s better than it could be?

Noah pointed out something at breakfast. October 6th is the anniversary of my father killing himself. I managed to… miss that it was coming this year. He said he was watching my increasing suicidal fervor and talk about being a worthless whore with one eye to the calendar as he watched that date come up. Within 24 hours of it being over the panic broke like a wave.

He thoughtfully didn’t want me to be aware of the incoming anniversary if I wasn’t bringing it up. He didn’t want to invalidate the feelings I was going through or even sound like he was saying they weren’t real because they were connected to an anniversary.

I’m married to an incredible person.

I find some comfort in knowing that this is a predictable part of my pattern. Oh, yeah. It’s the beginning of October. No wonder I’m flipping the fuck out. For over a decade I basically didn’t eat in October from stress. Oh yeah.

I said, “Oh yeah… and it’s coming up on Sarah’s anniversary of losing her dad…. Ohhhhh….” Noah and I discussed that Sarah and I are doing unusually well this year as we are both in our pits of despair to reach out with occasional messages of “I’m a needy pit of doom. I love you and have no support to offer. I’ll check in again soon.” Neither of us have expressed any feelings of frustration because the other isn’t up to jumping into a codependent neeeeeeed circle. We may or may not be feeling them, but what we are saying to each other is going really well.

Boundaries and understanding your limits are good things.

This is beginning to more strongly resemble what a healthy relationship might look like. Though I will say that I have enjoyed our decade + of codependency very much

I am always going to struggle with my mental health. There will always be times of the year when I kind of… need to crawl under a rock. I think I’m doing better at handling them as the years go by.

I’m a little concerned about the fact that Lightning’s estimated due date is four days before my brother Tommy’s birthday. He’s the dead brother with all the problems. Sigh.

Yet another thing I get to get over.

19 years since Tommy and my father killed themselves. I still feel like a worthless whore. But it’s better than it was.

Things are changing. Sometimes it feels like at a glacial pace, but the change does happen. Will I ever really grow up enough?

Another busy week again. Whyyyyy do I feel my children must participate in so many damn activities?! This week I get to drive to Mountain View, San Jose, Pleasanton, San Pablo, Mountain View, Union City, San Francisco, and San Jose.

I’m so fucking tired. Ok a bunch of those drives are for medical appointments. And a birthday party for the children of former students and a birthday party for a grown up, and visits with grown up friends… so I can’t just blame the kids.

I am blessed to have people who love me. The kids and I are going to have breakfast with one of my ex’s this week. I’m going to see if the kids can sit at a separate table with their academics because after breakfast they are getting a haircut and it’s entirely jacking up academic time for the day. I catch up with him once a year or so. I catch up with most of my ex’s every so often. I date nice people.

Every week is busy for a while here. Basically until I go into confinement. I fucking love confinement. I know that not everyone does it and I know that opinions vary on how necessary it is… but I slow my life down at the end of pregnancy. I will probably basically shut down after Christmas. We won’t do the second semester at the out of town class place because that’s a lot of driving for Noah. It’s not so bad for him to do the driving for all the classes that are within 10 minutes of the house because it is an hour or so of interruption a day if they have multiple classes… but the out of town classes necessitate a four hour or more window of being out of the house and that’s just too much. He has a job.

The bay area has such fascinating perspective on how much time is worth spending in a car.

I’m kind of glad that EC is stating with firmness that this is going to be the only year in a charter. She plans to spend next year studying religion and she’s not interested in having to follow the state standards for producing specific items every month. Ok. Sounds good. I know she will do a lot of serious reading. I will assign projects. It’ll be fun. FMC is ready to set fire to the curriculum so yeah. It was an experiment. They are pissed off about being judged. Yeah my kids are going to make fascinating adults.

I’m almost done Christmas shopping. We are sending the library of books about trans folk to Noah’s family and sending to Jenny’s family and giving inside the house and I think that’s about it. We will make food stuff to give as gifts to other people because we like to do that, but I’ll be done shopping and spending money before November I think. We can schedule what date to send the mail to folks and Noah and the kids can do it as an Advent activity. Ha. I’m staying home.

We will probably discuss adding a couple more Advent activities that are out of the house… but our calendar is already about as full as it can get without me being pissy all the time.

We are going on the light train thing on my mother’s birthday. So far we have a massage scheduled for my father’s birthday. We should probably do something fun with the kids that day too. Because I often get weird around these dates I’m thinking ahead.

My life is pretty fun. It is hectic because my children are lucky enough to have a ridiculous number of opportunities in life and I feel like I must provide access to a lot. It’s a job. A job a lot of mother’s do. (And other parents too!) It’s fucking exhausting. Our ancestors did not do this shit. Little Johnny did not get six hours a week of getting driven all the fuck over the place. Fuck this shit.

I’m looking forward to confinement. Hell yeah. My body is more important for a few months. Nyah nyah. You have to wait.

Yeah… I’ll go back to being your bitch. But I get a fucking fourth trimester too. That’s the deal.

Dude…. I start out with fucking health problems. This shit is hard on my body. Recovery is a bitch and if I don’t take it seriously I’ll pay forever. I have to be careful how much damage I deliberately add to my body. I don’t recover fast. It doesn’t matter what other people are capable of. It doesn’t matter what I would do if I had to in order to put food on the table. I’m not in that position and I’m in shitty shape and I’m trying to figure out how to hurt less. I can’t force a quick recovery.

I’m speshul snowflake, mkay?

Time to stop babbling.

Today the kids and I were gone for 12 hours. We went to Sacramento for a field trip. We didn’t really talk to many folks from the charter school but we did enjoy the Crocker Art Museum. The docent we toured with was 71 and super entertaining and had super fun hair and visible neat tattoos and she was just awesome. She was thrilled that my kids already knew terms like impressionism and realism and cubism. She said no kid has ever known about cubism before so I’m doing something right.

Dude, it’s on Khan Academy…

I like talking to my kids about art. It’s the most friendly introduction to art I’ve ever had.

We had an emotional day. Both kids are acting rubbed raw and sensitive and fussy and ugh. Both kids keep pushing the other’s buttons. Both kids are being insensitive and they are shaming one another and it really sucks. We are talking about it but it’s a tough phase. When we talk through, “So you did x. Why? What did you hope to gain? What actually happened?” They always spontaneously realize that they did something shitty and they should apologize… but we had to go through this process like 7 times today and I’m fucking worn out.

I’m really impressed that both kids can have me say, “So what you did was x” and then they can fill in most of the other blanks. “When I said/did x it probably made my sibling feel _____ and that’s not very kind. I wouldn’t want them to do the same thing to me. I should apologize.”

That’s good and all, I’m glad they can do that… BUT I’D LIKE TO GO A DAY WITHOUT HAVING TO GO THROUGH THIS FUCKING PROCESS MORE THAN HALF A DOZEN TIMES. I’M REALLY GOD DAMN TIRED AND EMOTIONALLY SPENT AND BEING FUCKING NICE ABOUT THIS IS HARD.

We need to go back to the museum because we didn’t get through half the exhibits and they were really neat. We have free passes. If only it weren’t in fucking Sacramento.

On the way home we stopped to visit Aunt Candy. She is Noah’s mother’s sister. She’s the entomologist who sends us the cool bug stuff for the kids. She also sends a huge box of candy at every possible holiday occasion because she has no children or grandchildren and she has an incredibly stable/comfortable life.

I like talking to Aunt Candy and Aunt Cookie (Aunt Cookie is the one who sends the boxes of cookies every year from Oregon.) about Noah’s family. Today Candy was telling me about how she and Cookie and Uncle Nod (the brother in the family) spent all of Noah’s childhood talking about how unfairly he was treated and cursing the school system for tormenting him. Apparently Nod spent most of Noah’s childhood a few inches away from going to the school to hit kids. Nod was very angry about how Noah was treated as a kid. He wanted to get involved and did not believe that Noah’s mom would permit it without being nasty to Noah as a result so he stayed out of it.

She reflected that Noah’s siblings (at least the boys) are better at fitting in to the small shitty town dynamic and Noah’s just… different. Candy was saying that she thinks that part of Noah’s problem is that he is too much like his mother and she never fit in there too. Really Noah’s mother’s entire family didn’t fit in that well in the shitty town and Candy speculated that Noah was treated badly in school partially because of the halo of people remembering Candy and Cookie and Nod.

I asked Candy if she felt her family was physically warm. She was adamant that they are not. Only Cookie is a hugger and everyone else feels really bothered by her desire for physical touch. She said that Noah was an incredibly touch starved little kid and he radiated sadness for most of his life. She was glad he got out at 17 and never really came back.

Before we left for the trip this morning I was talking to EC. I don’t remember the exact framing of how this came up but she mentioned that Noah and I wouldn’t care if we had a boy or a girl or another enby. I told her that it is true that we will be thrilled with any child we get… but we do kind of want a boy and that’s complicated. She asked me why a boy would be different.

I told her that having her has been very healing for me because I have been able to see a little girl get the things I desperately needed. That fills a hole in my heart that pretty much nothing else has filled. It’s different for Noah because he felt like he grew up watching little girls get what he couldn’t get so she doesn’t fix the same wound in him. He would probably benefit from watching a little boy grow up getting kisses and hugs and being told that crying is healthy and ok. He would see himself reflected. He would have a way to give what he couldn’t get and that’s a big deal. I also told her that I have issues with men and boys that are hard for me to get over. I believe that if I had a son I would have to confront the fact that I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that this child has never hurt me or any other woman and I would have to learn how to trust and extend gentleness to little boys in a way that is currently really really hard for me. I’d be thrilled to have another daughter or enby… but there’s a hole in my heart that I think a boy would fill in a different way. And that sounds disgusting but I don’t mean it like that.

She kind of thought about that and said “hunh. I guess that makes sense.”

But I have the best damn girl’s name I can imagine lined up so I’m going to be really kind of bummed if I don’t get to use it. So a boy isn’t the be-all-end-all. We talked about the dictionary definition of the middle name we like and she agreed that any little kid would be lucky to carry that name. IT’S SO COOL.

I have a friend’s little sister to thank for the inspiration. I love my friends and their little sisters and the fact that they share their little sisters with me. I’m a lucky bitch.

This weekend the only thing we have scheduled is book club. Nobody finished the book. Ha. So we are going to get together to talk about the first half and I suspect Noah will read us a chapter (he’s so damn good at reading out loud… he can make lists of names of organizations sound interesting). We are definitely going to finish Uninvited Neighbors and I think I will read it a few more times before I internalize more of what it is really saying. It’s super dense and full of facts. It’s about the migration of Black folk to and from the San Jose area and it’s really fascinating. The chapter we were just reading spends a lot of time talking about Warm Springs and that’s… 3 miles from my house. This is real California history. The part that is usually hushed up. It’s wonderful only it’s kind of disgusting to read just how awful people like me act. The book is well researched and documented. I recommend this book to anyone and everyone who lives in this valley. This is our story, this is our history.

Random topic shift. If you have not heard the new Kesha album… you should. I only dislike one song on it. My favorites are: Rainbow, Woman, Praying, and Learn to Let Go. I like more of the songs on the album… but those are the ones that I keep hitting repeat on.

There’s big emotional stuff I’m just… not writing about. I don’t know how to frame it. I don’t know what to say. I am not sure I understand what I feel. But I know that I need to find a way to put words to pieces of it or I’m not going to get past this cycle of feeling like a piece of shit who should die. This is going to be really hard because it’s going to involve saying things about my marriage I don’t feel ok about saying.

I’m scared of yet more backlash. I’ve already kind of fucked everything up. If I do more to defend myself what else is going to come crashing down on my head? Shutting up and just continuing to feel like shit will do less to make my life come to an end. I’m really not ready for it to be all my fault I lost everything.