Noah got the book Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel. I’m almost half done with it and I swear this woman knows my life. Yes. A lot of what I did earlier this year is explained in the book.

I’ve spent my whole life being textbook, why stop now?

You just have to find the right textbook. So I’m weird, I’m a statistical outlier… in a completely predictable set of ways. Humans are funny.

I desperately want to study other people who grew up in incestuous households and find out what else we large scale have in common. Anyway.

I have spent most of my marriage parenting. I have spent most of my marriage in my house relating to the people who live here and not many other people. If you look by time spent… I seriously don’t have that tight of relationships with anyone else. Attachment. Attachment. Attachment.

But who am I? Where did I go? Where is the space for me to have separation? Does it exist? In some ways this is like a teenage rebellion and in some ways it really isn’t.

I feel bad coming back to this over and over, but Noah has a career. He has a career where the best in the world in his field invite him to join them at lunch because they understand he is the up and coming in the field and they want to share his knowledge. Sure, he feels insecure about how much he “deserves” to be at the table… but he also has the job that was hotly contested and his heroes are glad he got hired.

Uh. Yeah. I’m a great mom.

Wooo.

You know what kinda sucks? I know a lot of great moms. They manage to do it and still have jobs and friends and hobbies and…

I spend a lot of time shutting everything else down to focus on parenting so that I don’t blow up inappropriately at my children. I go months without touching dirt in my back yard because I can’t even find time to garden because I need to keep my workload low or I will freak out at my kids and that isn’t fair.

What does “being disabled” mean?

What does individuation mean?

I have my friends. That’s kinda what I have. And it’s very important that I not depend on any of them too much so I need to have a really large number of them so that I can have a part time job in managing my connections to people because…

Otherwise there isn’t a me that is separate at all.

This is hurting me.

I mean yes, I write. I write a lot. Furtively. Usually before everyone has woken up or in stolen moments like these.

I feel shamefully small and unimportant and useless.

And I’m going to have more babies to compound my sense of being trapped and useless and limited with nothing to offer.

I have nothing to give beyond what I give to my children. I feel really bad about that.

I sideline sex with Noah too. There isn’t enough me in my life for me to desire sex for myself. Which means I have sex “for him” “for my marriage” a lot of the time and I feel sad and withdrawn and frustrated.

I used to have sex because I wanted to get off.

For a long time now it hasn’t been like that. Ok, things improved this year. This year has been great.

I’m scared about the previous 2-5 years and what is going to happen again.

We spend so much time quantifying our sex that we don’t pay a lot of attention to the quality of our sex.

And it is hurting me very much. I’ve done it. I’ve been complicit. In many ways I’ve helped drive it. I’m not denying that.

I have always been partial to self harm.