I have known that I wanted to have children and homeschool them from when I was a teenager. That was what I wanted from life. When you combine that driving urge with my compulsion towards promiscuous sex you have a high potential for problems. Not a guarantee–there are people with split custody who have plenty of spare time for dating but I actively chose not to take that path. Let me back up.

When my husband and I met we each had other primary partners. I was living with my boyfriend. I was no longer his slave at that point so he was just my boyfriend. I was rather clearly shopping for the reason to leave him. He and I had blunt conversations about the fact that I didn’t think we had a future because I wanted kids and marriage and he didn’t. So my days were numbered. We knew that before I asked to open the relationship and sleep with other people. Really he stopped sleeping with me right after that.

He was done too. He didn’t want to play with me any more. We had played to the utmost limits of what you can safely do to someone. You really can’t play harder than we did. He wanted to start over again. He wants the excitement of the new experience, not the sad resignation to more pain. Fair enough.

So I met my husband. I think he became interested in me because I wasn’t hunting for him but I was so clearly hunting and I was doing it awkwardly and blatantly in a way that was tailor made for him but I was trying for someone standing right next to him. That shit is catnip. The dude I was hunting for turned out to be spectacularly uninterested in me and that’s all good.

So I met my husband. And we dated for the last six months of my relationship with my ex-Owner. And things got progressively more serious because he really liked me but his primary was not in a position to want their relationship to change. But he wanted me to be a co-primary. Err, not so much. My husband was in a horrible motorcycle accident while we were dating. I broke up with my Owner during the period of recovery. I kind of realized that if this “other boyfriend” was so much more important to me than my former Owner-turned boyfriend then it was time to leave. Because I was spending all of my time dealing with accident recovery care or going out in the evenings hunting.

I was done. I didn’t want to use him as a crash pad so I broke up with him and moved out basically as soon as I could find a place six weeks later. He had been hoping we would remain roommates and friends and work out a house cleaning arrangement in exchange for rent. In other words I would still wait on him. Yeah. No. Time to leave.

I moved out. I was dating my husband (with no premonition he would ever become such–I was one of like four women he was dating) and I immediately started a relationship with Daddy J. I was one of many for him too.

I was speaking bluntly with these men about my desires. They were enthusiastically agreeing that it sounded like fun–sure let’s do that. I didn’t see any desire to change their lifestyle though. They both actively plotted how to ditch future children for events.

I broke up with my husband. I broke up with Daddy J a month later. In this period there were a variety of one or two or three week affairs with other men. Two or three proposed marriage by the fourth date.

I don’t think I’ve ever admitted that in public before. It’s kind of awkward. I watched this movie Jolene on Netflix instant streaming (I love this service) and I felt this kind of weird throw up in my mouth. Holy shit that was the alternative path. Seriously. I had that offered to me.

I wanted children. I wanted them badly. I flat out told people that when I had kids all overt sexual behavior would end. Their reaction to that decided most of whether I kept talking to them. It’s not about being in the closet–I’m really not in the closet but I don’t model behavior in front of my children that I feel ashamed of them repeating with friends.

Then I met Puppy. On paper he looked a lot like my former Owner (gun nut, bondage as sadism, strong Libertarian) but in practice he had very different issues. When I would pester him about relationship questions things usually ended with me trying to apologize for asking then fleeing the room to hide behind a closed door while he shouted at me and beat on the door. It’s probably a good thing he broke up with me as quickly as he did.

It’s bad to go through life asking each guy you meet if he wants to support a stay at home wife. It just is. Wanting sex is partially, at least on a biological level, about wanting to make babies. That’s how evolution works.

But as I was auditioning and rejecting these guys I went through college. I got a BA in English. I finished my course work early even though I skipped a semester or so in the middle because I always went double or more the full-time load. I finished my BA in 2003. I finished classes in March. I wasn’t sure what to do next and I wasn’t completely and totally convinced my relationship with my Owner was pointless yet (I hadn’t started sleeping with anyone else yet) so I started the masters program. Officially I started it because even if I went into teaching primary school I didn’t feel like I understood my subject well enough to deserve to teach it.

I missed a lot of school. When I was present I ignored my teachers by reading books in class. I knew I wouldn’t be in the school long enough for it to matter if I was polite to the teachers or not. I’m not here for your entertainment. I didn’t care about trying to fit in or learn social norms by the time I was about ten. I dropped out when I was sixteen after missing freshman year of high school.

It felt rather ironic that I wanted to go teach. I needed to learn more about literature. So I started graduate school. I decided mid-way through that semester that kids weren’t optional and I applied to the teaching credential program. I told my Owner. He said he didn’t think he was ready. That was the beginning of the end, really. He finally said it. I didn’t leave for a year but it was inevitable. I hated the therapist who got him to admit that. She blamed me for forcing a lot of things that I wasn’t forcing. I should at least appreciate that she got him to tell me the truth.

Fast forward. I broke up with Noah right in the middle of my year-long intensive teaching credential. What he wanted from me was too much work for too little reward with regards to my long-term goals. He wanted a lot of time and attention and to feel special but I was one of a harem.

I’m feeling quite guilty about how little sex I am up for this month. That’s the problem with this tracking business. I told people up front that I would not commit overt sexual behavior in front of my kids but I thought poly would remain on the table. I thought I would want to have that as an option.

Then I realized that poly has a very hurtful learning curve. It’s not a malice thing. Mistakes are part of life. I think that the stakes change when children are involved. If I am going to have to keep part of myself away from my husband in order to share it with someone else then that is a compartmentalization I have to keep alive all the time. It’s not a sometimes food. And I have to always have a part of my heart ready to accept him being inconsiderate in how he pursues partners. It is impossible to be fully considerate without making mistakes and learning from the process.

That’s life. The thing is… in order to do poly well you have to forgive for those mistakes. I don’t forgive. I carry around a tally list of done-me-wrongs. It’s not right. It’s not a positive attribute of mine but it allowed me to decide that it was worth pressing charges against my father so it’s not all bad either–ok?

Being a stay at home parent involves an enormous financial and career risk on the part of the person who stays home. It is risky in our culture to depend on someone. My husband works in an industry where people age out pretty young. He feels enormous stress to hurry up and be better than he is.

And I’m withholding what he has for stress relief. It feels like at the long end of this I should be absolutely a sex fiend–right? Sometimes I just don’t wanna. And that feels like a dereliction of duty. I’m not being pressured. He went to the gym rather than even ask. Footie jammies are a fairly universal “I’m not having sex soon” signal.

And instead I tell pointless stories to the internet. Because I want to be seen. Even though it’s not pretty. I need to tell the story as if someone has never heard any of it before. Even though I am afraid of being repetitive. It is ok to tell the story if I need to today.

I’ve been really sad lately. I have arranged to no longer fuck up my sleep schedule once a week. I think that will help. The vaporizer is… well. Doing this produces a different chemical reaction and I’m having a different and less useful effect. I suppose that what it is doing is reducing my anxiety but it is not elevating my mood. I don’t get “high” at all. I miss being high. It’s been over a week and man it is really feeling pretty awful. I’m crying a lot. And sleeping a lot during the day. Which is not great. The kids climb on me and whack my face. And they always decide that whatever they are eating for snack must be ground into the entire table cloth.

So. It feels like I have some kind of work to do. The vaporizer is a useful way to treat some set of problems but not all. The atypical depression characteristic of PTSD is usually a reaction of the body trying to regenerate after all the excessive chemical use. By chemical I mean things like adrenaline and oxytocin–all of those things involved in love and trauma and sex.

Life is long and really complicated. I need to believe that marriage is about building something that is greater than either of us could make on our own. I need to believe that we are choosing to become one thing that is acting for mutual good. Or I need to be protecting myself. This is a specific choice.

I don’t mean to end on this kind of note but breakfast is ready.

I am struggling with the need to protect my body from being responsible for needs I can’t meet. I feel brittle and defensive and unworthy. So unworthy.

But breakfast is on the table.