I want to believe that most parents have vague expectations/hopes/dreams about how this process of parenting will go because then I don’t feel like an asshole. I don’t have hard core expectations of my kids like “You will grow up and be a lawyer” but for most of my life I kind of fantasized about stroking my little girl’s hair and helping her fall asleep. Cue birth of first daughter. From about three months of age little S has been slapping my hand and glaring at me if I stroked her hair. I feel a degree of sadness about this that is entirely out of proportion but there it is. Then I had C. She loves having her hair stroked. I’m so glad I had two daughters so I could spread out my expectations and not ask too much of either one of them individually.

We are off sugar. It doesn’t effect the kids but I’m also off caffeine and alcohol till Easter. I think that harm springs from excess. Moderation is very important in life–moderation in everything! Even moderation. Which means that I am bad at keeping things like sugar/alcohol/caffeine as a sometimes treat and they start creeping in more and more. So I periodically take a while off then I try to go slow when I start again. Then things get out of hand and I take a break. I’m not sure it is “ideal” but it is how I get through. My kids hate me. My husband isn’t too sure about me. Why did I make everyone else do it with me? Because sugar is literally a drug. If you look at studies of what it does to your brain it’s not a joke. I want my kids to grow up knowing that you have to consciously look at your consumption of things that are bad for you and take breaks. Your body needs them. It’s not about punishment. This is a big part of my food religion.

I am too mean and nasty to be a vegan. I honestly don’t care enough about animal rights to do it. I am, however, not a big fan of factory farming or most of our current system of producing goods. I’m not a vegetarian because my diet is not diverse enough to provide me the nutrients I honest to dawg need so I eat meat to fill in the gaps. It’s not a perfect system but it has obviously worked for many species for a long time. I don’t need perfect–I need to not be dead. And when I read things about how consumption of quinoa is probably going to contribute to the destruction of a Latin American country I can’t help but be reaffirmed in my belief that if it doesn’t grow within 100 miles of my home I probably shouldn’t eat it.

But that springs from my hubris. I live in Northern California. More food grows here than anywhere else. The only thing I would have to give up from my regular diet in order to eat entirely locally is bananas. Whoopie. Most of the people in the entire world can’t have my hubris.

Ok. So my food religion doesn’t actually scale. Or make sense at all for large populations. If you look at pretty much every religion of every kind I feel that way about it. They don’t scale. They make sense for whoever they make sense for and not at all for the rest of the world. That’s kind of how things work.

My food religion partially springs from the fact that I live in a place where this is possible. It is disgusting, ethically, to be completely aware of all of my resources and make different choices. In my entirely judgmental opinion. But I know almost no one who has my degree of resources in this area. So it gets trickier almost immediately.

Understanding what privilege means, what having money means, what having resources really means is this constant slow-dawning process for me. What things are actually secure for me and which things aren’t.

I have been participating in an incest support group. Next week is our last meeting. They aren’t a bad group of women but I can’t deal with a support group that far away. It takes too much of my life to participate. In order to spend six hours a month with them I have to spend $240 and spend eight hours driving in miserable traffic. I don’t get enough out of it to balance the cost. Not when I also have to arrange child care and deal with stress around that. My friend who has been watching them is quite sick. I don’t feel ok asking her for this as a permanent favor. She can’t truly commit to doing it and I don’t want to get into the situation of being mad at her because her body is doing what it is doing. That would make me a serious asshole.

I did that with my former housemate. I thought I was agreeing to a trade of work. But I had an expectation level that was higher than her body could provide. Not because she didn’t want to. Not because she wasn’t trying. Bodies betray us. And I was an asshole. So I lost my friend over it. I can’t keep doing that in my life. I will end up totally alone. So I can’t ask too much of anyone.

I also participate in an online ptsd support forum. That is, uhm, more at my participation level and spoon level. I can do it in my garage at 4am and not trouble anyone at all. It’s fucking great.

But both groups function to scare the ever loving shit out of me. Given my level of trauma I am unbelievably productive and functional. At least that is how it appears to my judgmental eye. That’s… kind of scary for me.

Am I just in a good period? Am I going to crash like they did? Many of them didn’t truly lose control of their lives until they were in their 40’s or 50’s. I’m not past falling yet. I was reading today about why a woman became homeless at 49. I’m not past that yet. I can’t lose vigilance.

I live with extreme mental illness. I have studied the field enough to be utterly confident that the devils chasing me are much larger than most people deal with. I’m able to put that mental illness in a box and study it from the outside. I’m able to see where my behavior is broken and just decide that I have to alter that pattern. The mental illness is still there but the behavior is corrected.

I’m able to consciously try and see from other peoples perspectives. It’s empathy. My shaman laughed at me and told me that I act autistic but I don’t know that he is right. I make a logical decision… sorta. But I’m acting from the ability to guess what someone in that position would want. I’m kind of mind reading. I’m going through my film rolodex in my head, “What do I know about this person. Play entire film of life in fast forward. Go.”

What would someone who had that life want? I fucking guarantee you it is different from what I want. From what the monsters in my head are screaming at me to do. Doing this is very tiring. If I don’t do this in full detail with each person as an individual I fall prey to stereotypes and then I offend the shit out of people so I have to be careful not to do that. Or to blatantly say, “So if I were to treat you like person of _______ group the answer would be _______ but obviously you’ve had personal life experience that differs from your group. What do you say?”

I’ve fallen into Pinterest since I ditched Facebook and Mothering. I still feel that is a good decision. But I’ve been a bit more bored. I’ve also been rewatching The West Wing during break time. It’s less diverting. And less connecting. But I’ve been thinking about me more. So who knows.

Winter will always be a fallow period for me. I think I’m actually categorically ok with the idea that as an animal I want to take some time off from my most tiring work in the winter when my body aches and I’m stiff and uncomfortable all the god damn time.

So I was reading an article that was adamantly about Self-Reliance as opposed to Survivalist in nature and hanging my head in shame. I’m that kind of nutcase. I totally am. My uhh future planning is increasingly of the self-reliant nature. And travel. I want to root firmly then run away and know I can come back. It will always be here for me. I don’t know why I need to do this. I just do. I have to see things. I have to experience them myself. I don’t learn enough from reading about them.

I want to talk to people in a lower stakes environment. The thing that is hardest for me about my life is the degree of censoring what I say I have to do. Have I mentioned the extreme mental illness part?

My kids know that sometimes their mom is sad and cries. They know that a long time ago bad stuff happened but we are all safe now. They know we don’t have contact with my family because they are not nice people. That’s all they know.

I need to travel because I need to have the experience of being able to reinvent myself as new and interesting over and over. It is comfortable and safe. It makes me feel better about myself. I know how to do that. I have finally gotten good at it.

I have been thinking almost constantly about how I got good at that specifically because I was training myself for prostitution. When I first saw the movie Pretty Woman and Julia Roberts said something about how no little girl wants to grow up and do that I consciously thought, “Well I will charge more than you.”

I absolutely expected I would end up a prostitute until I was 19. Then I met a prostitute. One of the high charging kind. Ok, she wasn’t still a call girl by the time I met her. She was a pro domme. But she had done every kind of sex work there was and I ended up in her house over and over again. That sounds kind of funny. My boyfriend was best friends with her boyfriend and we visited them from out of state. So we had kind of an interesting relationship. Not exactly friends

She explained to me what was necessary for a girl to keep herself safe. She talked about a kind of trusting your instincts that I don’t have. I literally am not physically capable of doing what she talked about. I am specifically drawn to people who will damage me instead of people who will honor agreements.

That is a lot of why it has scared me so bad when Noah had done things that have pushed boundaries. Life is very scary. I am very dependent.

Those conversations with her are really why I never got into sex work. I was asked. I actually think that I gained so much weight because I was trying to avoid that fate. The last thing I wanted was to be attractive and stand near the people my boyfriend knew. As a fat girl I was invisible and left alone. I saw what happened to the thinner and more attractive women. I saw how they were rotated in and out of the community if they were bottoms. Only the tops survived.

I didn’t want to do that to people. So I got fat. Then I got out.

I’ve had a lot of time lately to think about my relationship with my body. I kind of wish I hadn’t let the doctors office weigh me. Going off sugar is letting me see my emotional pattern with regard to eating lately. If I’m hungry enough to eat some nuts then I do. Mostly I’ve just been eating a lot less and feeling fine.

Since I went to the doctor I’ve been eating a really lot. I thought I weighed more than ten pounds more than that and by golly before I go and see the bastard again I will weigh what I think I weigh. I will have the body I think I have.

It’s really kind of weird. I’m pretty afraid of being thin. I’ve been looking at my therapist and feeling twitchy lately. She is uhm a stones throw from my body. She is my body if I never had kids and I had exercised more starting earlier. So yeah. So I eat. And miss my old therapist who was a motherly alternating warm and stern black woman with a full figure and a rich laugh. When I was being stupid she called me on it. When I was doing well she was really enthusiastic and told me why I should feel good about myself.

I don’t have that kind of relationship with my current therapist. I don’t feel warm. I feel defensive. I feel like she is very agressive in pursuing her agenda. I’m having a hard time with therapist directed therapy. Ha.

I’ve been reading a lot of therapy comparison stuff lately and man are people against folks having a “paid friend”. I kind of think that is what I want. I miss Traci so much. I think Traci would be delighted with how my life is going.

I’m going to visit Dad soon. He has another new girlfriend. I was just getting to know the last one. I miss Francesca. I’m so sad that she doesn’t get to know my children. I think they would have filled a big void in her life. She had so much love to give. Grandkids who visited every other year? She would have been thrilled. She liked sending me presents every year as his “daughter”. My relationship was an entangled mess between both of them.

Traci was my therapist for seven years. She died of a heroin overdose just about five years ago. Francesca was Dad’s wife. I knew her from when I was nineteen. I met her long before they were married. Before they were even solidly together. She overdosed five years ago. Pain medication for cancer. She had gotten addicted while treating her mom. It looked like an accident. Kind of. But she was a recovered heroin addict.

Traci and Francesca were two of the people I looked to for a lot of support. They both died right around Shanna’s birth. I totally enmeshed with Shanna as a result in that first year. I tried reconciling with my family because I was lonely and needy. I paid for Conflict Mediation and was soundly manipulated.

I didn’t divorce my family until Uncle Bob died. Not until my sister asked me in a condescending voice if anyone close to me had ever died before. Because my brother and my father don’t count.

I feel like every relationship in my life has a shelf life. Brittney left at thirty years. Her family is angry about the book. Ok.

I look at Noah and my kids and I feel throat wrenching fear. I feel like I have a fifteen year year of reprieve and then oh holy hell what is going to happen to me? Sometimes I feel very ashamed that I “pull of normal” such that people are surprised at how broken I am. It’s complicated. I contribute to the invisibility of “people like me”. I feel a lot of pressure to maintain a specific front for the benefit of everyone but me. It feels invalidating all of the time.

Sometimes I just like staying home for a while. That way the level of censoring is automatic. We talk about what they want to talk about and it all works out. Other grown ups bring up topics. I spend a lot of time in my head. I have strong opinions loosely held. I’m ridiculously picky about how I am challenged though.

I’m starting to look at who is good at challenging me and getting me to actually change. That’s useful data for me to have. I like pushy people. Holy potato do I like me some pushy people. I combine that with requiring them to recognize specific “I’m done” signals and being willing to go with “Shiny Change Of Topic Please”. That’s a hard combination.

It’s kind of funny watching The West Wing. I have a lot of authority issues. I neither want to be the President nor serve anyone else. I don’t want responsibility for other people and I don’t want them to have responsibility for me. I want things exchanged to be gifts. But I’m really not into Burning Man. I think that is pretention not a gift economy. I need to travel. In other places they have gift economies. Yes, I will read about them before I go so I won’t be too gauche. I hope. I’m sure I will be. But I will be able to apologize for living in the native language.

I want to meet people who are nothing like me. I want to hear as many stories as I can hear. It is hard maintaining relationships with people who live near me. I feel afraid of the eventual brush off. I really need to travel.

I’ve been feeling a lot of guilt because the kind of travel I want is just not something Noah is interested in. And it will make this monogamy stuff more complicated. We also have stern agreements about celibacy. Complicated.

I’m dependent so I want to run away so I can prove that I’m not really in a cage. I am still free. Or some stupid shit like that. Or I want macro scale view on my country. I want to actually understand it better. And other countries. I want to talk to people. I need to. I need to hear their stories. I need to hear what life is like for other people. I need other models in my head. I need alternatives to what I know.

What I know isn’t good enough. I need to know more. I don’t learn as well from reading or from taking classes in school. I like talking to people. I want to know about them.

It feels like looking at the future destruction of my life. How far will I run? How many people will I hurt in the process?

I don’t know how I am going to balance everyones needs but I’m going to have to figure it out.

For a while there I was looking in the mirror a lot. I enjoyed watching my hair grow–I shit you not. I’m past that phase, mostly. Now when I look in the mirror I feel dismay at being untidy. But if I try to fix it I’ll make it worse; I promise. Curly hair is just like that. So I’m not looking at myself again.

And we come back to body issues. It’s just been that sort of week. I’ve been thinking. How am I going to wreck my life? My health? My relationships?

Participating on a ptsd support website and being in a support group for incest survivors is giving me a dizzying array of options to work with. Many/most of the issues being accidents because man do we not have control of our bodies. We just don’t.

I have a pretty ridiculous amount of control near as I can tell. I’m not sure why. I just do. I know that this role requires this behavior for this amount of time and you just fucking do it.

Two of my potential biggest supporters through this phase of my life were taken from me right at the beginning of the journey. I’m one quarter of the way through the expected time of specific duty. I’m doing ok. I’m trying to not be demanding or too taxing on any source of support but that balance often makes people feel unwanted or unappreciated or something.

I feel like I understand why I am taking winter off of people. I am not going out much. It is a good thing. Spring is coming. I have busy times coming. Lots of work to do. I won’t be able to sit around in my head. I want to seriously produce this year. I need to. I need to root. I have mother-in-law money set aside for it.

It will be fun.

Privilege. Responsibility. Curiosity. Sustainability. I don’t have any answers. I am, however, a wasteful American. I look at my habits and I think about what it will be like to live differently at this point.

I have been homeless. We lived in our car so I have not had the experience of living on the street. I have been sent to sleep on the floor or the couch in a series of homes of people I didn’t know. I was often not with family for extended periods. Given what I have read about attachment theory I cry for the child I was. No wonder I fucked everything that moved. Please, please love me. But I ran away right after the sex was over because I made sure that no one could leave me ever again.

Puppy did me a huge favor by being the only boyfriend I’ve ever had  as an adult who has broken up with me. He wasn’t a good fit and he recognized it. He could have been more gracious–I’m just saying. But that needed severing and I’m glad he did. Things are certainly working out really well.

And breakfast is ready.