Category Archives: abandonment issues

Tried something different.

“Do you know why I usually don’t touch you when I cry?”
“No. Why?”
“Because my mom used to hit me when I cried.”

Last night I cried on Noah’s chest. I’m not 100% sure but I’m pretty sure that you can count how many times I have done that on one hand with fingers left over. We have been married for six years. I cry nearly every day. Often for many hours. I cry alone.

“No one wants to see that Kristine. No one wants to hear it either. Didn’t I tell you to shut up? Fine. I’ll give you something to cry about.”

The fact that I was raped over and over wasn’t good enough. The fact that people chased me home from school throwing rocks at me wasn’t good enough. The fact that I moved constantly and didn’t have friends or toys I could trust owning wasn’t good enough. The fact that I usually didn’t know if we would have a place to live next week or if we would be homeless wasn’t good enough either.

I cry alone. Often (though not always anymore–I kind of glory in being able to make noise when I cry now) I cry completely silently. Even my breathe barely raises in volume. I shared a bed with my mother till I was sixteen. I know how to have tears run down my face and slowly control the sobbing with breath so that I don’t get hit again. Mostly I just prefer to be alone in a room.

I was always told that I wasn’t allowed to cry unless I was hit–that’s the only good reason. Sometimes I wonder if I found the bdsm scene because I knew I needed to cry and I’m just not allowed to cry without being hit.

When other people think of “bdsm” I’m not sure what they think. I think there isn’t a lot of point if someone isn’t crying. A lot. Mostly uncontrollably. As a top I am ridiculously sadistic. Don’t play with me unless what you want from today is to end up curled in the fetal position on the floor sobbing your heart out. That is what I have in me to give. I prefer when my play partners nearly kill me. I want them to hurt me terribly and risk my life. I know I am not important. I know that very sick people exist in the world. I hope that if I can give them a cheap thrill they won’t hurt someone important.

When Noah raised his hand to stroke my face I flinched.

I was kind of randomly curious tonight so I looked it up. I’m pretty sure that I qualify for SSI for disability due to PTSD. If I had to hold down a job right now my life would be pretty nightmarish. I have continual flashbacks. I have a lot of panic attacks. I barely leave my house. I have to talk myself into believing there are “safe” people on the other side who don’t hate me before I manage. Going to the grocery store is hard. I understand that it is for most parents. But when other peoples kids misbehave in public they don’t crumple to the floor crying because it seems so overwhelming to deal with. I feel like a very pathetic person.

In order to figure out how to talk to my kids I sat around reading Jane Austen books. That is the language Shanna learned. That is why she is so excessively polite. I model it all the time. I made sure that for the first few years of her life she rarely heard anyone but me talk and I modeled extreme manners constantly.

I am trying to figure out how to shape the voices in my children’s head. I know I don’t control who they become. But I *do* control the messages they get about themselves right now.

My children believe manners are not optional and the world will crash to a halt with horror if you are rude. So they don’t do it. Except for the one big exception. “If anyone is ever touching any part of your body in a way you don’t like you need to ask them politely to stop once. If they continue, hit them. Scream. Run away. You are allowed to defend you.”Shanna is extremely aware that her vulva is a private space and that no one should touch it until she is full grown and has asked them politely to touch her there. I told her the “whys and whens” around sex are conversations we will probably have in more like ten years. She tried to ask for more information. I said, “At four all you need to know is no one can touch you there. You won’t be grown up for a very long time.” She’s ok with that for now.

It was weird to cry on Noah. I felt really bad about getting him all wet. The snot flows like a river. Mmmm sexy.

One of the things that is hardest for me about being rich is how isolating it is. I feel like I have gotten to know my neighbors to an unusual degree. They are certainly all shocked that I am attempting to do so. My experience of poverty (I understand that my life is not universal and I do not have the “universal poverty experience”) was that people had a lot more time on their hands. There was a lot of time to kill and no one had any money. People had to either fall into a depressive rut in order to survive or they had to get creative.

I am very creative. Unfortunately I hate working alone and I am really struggling with the period of time when my kids are no help and instead a bunch of extra work. I’m willing to bet that in two or three years Shanna will be able to do most of the things I like to do. She helps a little now.

I like building things. I like having a concrete change on the world. I often get very frustrated with myself because I am a perfectionist and I get little practice to practice so I’m not improving at skills at the rate I want to.

Noah not wanting to build with me is hard. He doesn’t want to do any kind of physical labor on the property. I feel like I am having to drag him kicking and screaming (by the god damn hair) towards the idea of doing any help with homeschooling beyond teaching programming. It is feeling very invalidating of the “us” label.

I feel like I subsumed who I was into my family. My life, my time, my work are all spent on things that directly benefit people in my family other than me. It feels like. Because I am self-serving like everyone else and I enjoy lying to myself.

I do home improvement stuff and I cook and I clean.

It is kind of funny because I feel a little competitive because many of my friends have kids in the same age range. Shanna is behind most of the kids we know academically. (I am tracking various kids in my head. It’s interesting.) On one hand I feel like this means I am failing as a homeschooling parent. On the other hand I have the belief that early academic instruction is a bad idea. I am making a conscious decision. It still feels weird that all my friends kids knew their ABCs faster, can count earlier and higher. Blah.

I believe, because research tells me so, that early introduction of these concepts does not improve IQ or overall achievement down the line. I still feel kind of weirdly insecure about my kid and what I am doing. I don’t exactly think my friends are drilling their kids. Why are they picking things up so much faster? I have no idea. But I feel insecure. That is one of the many things I am just going to have to live with being insecure about. I made a decision based on sound principles I still believe.

What I specifically miss about having community was there were always two or three women in the kitchen talking. I thought that was what the future looked like. I’m very sad because my life won’t look like that for another fifteen years. And then they may very well want to go off into the world and spread their wings. I may do all of these years hoping for that and not get it. I have to be ok with it. I can’t spend my life wishing for that. I would be doing something inappropriate. It’s so hard to know that I can never hope for that. I tried to have that with Sarah. She hid from my anger in her room. I don’t blame her.

I don’t share my anger with my children. I share it with the adults in my life. I’m afraid that if I have hopes for what they will do as adults I will get very angry with them for disappointing me. Talk about poisoning the well. I try very hard to not have expectations of them beyond how they are treating me right now. I treat them how I want them to treat me and by and large it works out. When they are having a bad day and they freak out and cry a lot I comfort them even though my head hurts so much I start to cry too. I rock with them. I tell them it is ok to cry.

I tell my kids over and over, “When you feel sad you are allowed to cry.” I will be their inside voice whether they are with me or not. I want them to believe it is ok to exist. I don’t want them to feel like me.

I tell them it is ok to be frustrated. It’s not ok to shout at people. Let’s figure it out. And mostly we do.

I feel like oozing toxic waste. I feel like poison. I am so sad and so angry. I miss my mom. Isn’t that crazy? Shouldn’t I just be glad to be away from her? But she’s my mommy. I ache for her so bad I feel like I can’t breathe. I feel like my organs want to go into failure. I want my mommy. I have been crying for my mother my entire life. Even when I had her I didn’t have her. My mother didn’t take care of me. My mother damaged me.

My mother told me I wasn’t allowed to be angry when I was raped. She told me I wasn’t allowed to yell or scream or cry. I have made my bed and now I have to lie in it. Silently. While men do whatever they want. And I still miss her. Sometimes that feels like the most fucked up part.

I am sad about not having a father. I do not miss James Archer. I didn’t know him. I don’t even remember what he looks like. That part makes me sad. Sometimes I think of writing Jimmy a letter and asking for a picture. I don’t know if he would send me one. I feel very sad about not being allowed to know what my father looks like. My mother gave Jimmy all the pictures of him many years ago. When I was still a child. I don’t even know if he kept them.

I don’t miss my sister. I think a wall came up when I found out about her forcing my niece to give my nephew a blow job. She became the living enemy. Being in a room with her and not spitting in her face is tantamount to supporting her behavior. No thank you. I think she is a piece of shit I stepped on.

I wish I felt like people loved me. I wish I could feel loved. I think part of the reason I cried on Noah last night was because I wanted to feel like he loved me. I didn’t feel that way. I feel dead inside. I feel like I went on an extended vacation to Chernobyl and my insides are radioactive and not quite functioning right.

I feel hollow and empty. I feel already dead. I feel like the cessation of breathing is a mere formality.

I have been here before. I know that how I feel right now is not how I feel all the time. I am dimly aware of that. I did have the chutzpah to up and get married. I felt loved. But mental illness is a liar.

When I was in the teaching credential they told us that a child has to hear ten positive things to cancel out everything negative said to them about themself.

When I think about what my mother said to me I cry. My inside voice is strong and loud and dominating. Shut up Kristine. No one cares, Kristine. Shut up.

I’m very ready for this cycle to change.

About that movie…

4 Replies

I’m sorry about not mentioning the movie title. The title is Absent. If you do decide to watch it, there is a lot of information in it, skip the last twenty minutes. It turns into an infomercial. Which bugs me. Jesus and their Wildmen Group will fix alllllllll your problems. If you are a man. They were quite clear women are just fucked.

The older I get the more I believe that when people offer me two choices the right path is some yet unnamed third option. In grad school I wrote a very long winded snarky rant about the Robert Frost poem The Road Not Taken because anyone who obsesses that hard about trying to be in the minority is an idiot. No you are not a special fucking snowflake. Sometimes you walk the same god damn road as every one else–get over it. It was like Thoreau writing about self reliance. Mother fucker wouldn’t have survived if the wives in his community had not taken pity on his sorry ass.

I’m tired of hearing men talk about the hard lonely road of manhood. Manhood is not harder than womanhood and I’m angry about that attitude and assumption. I feel angry about the gender essentialists acting like all aggression, all choice, all validation must come from a man. It’s just not true. Studies routinely show that children raised by queer parents turn out “normal” or usually better than expected when compared to their peers.

The documentary had a number of very alarming statistics that show a strong correlation between fatherless households and all kinds of problems. The thing is–some kids come out of single mother households and do very well. Where is the gap? Why do some kids fail and others succeed? Yeah yeah resilience. Blah.

I actually think community involvement is key. It’s why I begged, nearly on my knees, for my friends to pick my kids and make a family for them. So far Marcie and Kitten are the primary people to really seek out a relationship. Shanna will spout off, “I like staying with Marcie and Kitten. I like having two homes with two families to take care of me and love me. I know that if anything bad happens I have people who want me.”

She asked me once why she “had” to go stay with them. She was less sure in the first few months. I told her that most kids are born into large extended families and they are protected if something happens to their parents. Unfortunately my kids don’t get that. We have to make our family. That is why she has to spend time with M&K because they are becoming her family. Your family is made up of the people who show up and love you and care for you. That is what makes family.

Watching this documentary made me feel really bad. I don’t like hearing my attitude and my words coming out of the mouths of a series of sex workers. “I just wanted someone to love me.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about the fact that I think I got so fat while I was dating Tom because I felt a constant pressure to look more socially appealing so that I could be a trophy out in public. Fuck you. If you want me to be a skinny trophy then I’m going to get fatter. And fatter. HA. I think that is how I avoided ever becoming a sex worker. If I had been thinner I almost certainly would have done it. I thought about it.

I thought in great detail about how I wouldn’t be able to handle the public humiliation of being a sexual object on the internet. Men are too fucking mean. I would feel bad because I am not the most common idea of pretty. Guys are vicious to women who have the audacity to want to be looked at while being ugly. And I’m not even ugly. I’m just not that gorgeous. They would tear me down. I would never be good enough.

I was just barely smart enough to know I didn’t want that. Specifically I didn’t want to feel like I was never good enough sexually.

When you wander around real life as a pretty-enough slutty girl you hunt with the shot gun method (send out a lot of shells and pray you hit something) and you keep low standards–you never have to feel not-good-enough. There is always someone for whom you are the best god damn thing ever.

Men gain status as they age. Older men have more money, more position, more respect. Women are the opposite. Our value lies in our reproductive-years-tied beauty. We peak at 19 and go downhill fast. By 23 guys were openly snubbing me at dance events to chase 16 year olds. I made god damn sure I was fat during my peak years. I wanted to make sure my peak wouldn’t be high enough to get me in more trouble. I think my life would have been much worse if I had been thinner or prettier. Specifically because I think I have a fairly realistic assessment of my looks and relative status. I know who I can chase without getting in trouble. Now. After many years of trouble and errors.

What do I mean by that? I mean I am too good for the losers. I do have standards. What do I mean by loser? Ha! Not for this post.

The big concept from the documentary that I am going around in my head is this idea of a parent-by-choice. People feel entitled to their mothers. That isn’t validating. They want to have someone else who loves them and spends time with them because they want to.

I think a lot about what parenting means. It is the process of teaching children how to become adults. In America for the last few generations most of that raising happens in schools. Don’t get pissy with me, working parents. Really. We expect the schools to teach them how to balance a checkbook. We expect the school to teach them about our political system and how it was created. We expect the school to teach them about health and hygiene. We do parts of it–but we do those parts grudgingly and with hostility. Maybe I am projecting my attitude onto other people.

Potty training Shanna was hard. Potty training Calli was easy. It isn’t that every part of parenting works that way. It’s that the reason that I had a hard time doing it with Shanna was because I had a hard time learning the routine. I struggled with it internally. I always felt hostile about having to pay that much attention to her body. I did it–you can’t EC a kid from three months old without paying a lot of attention. I did it and I smiled while I did it. But I begrudged it.

By the time Calli came along helping her transition to the potty was easier because I was frustrated and ready to explode because of laundry. All of a sudden modeling potty use was intuitive and constant. And effective. I think I gave Shanna a lot of mixed messages because when I was in a bad mood and feeling angry about her frequent potty-breaks-with-no-pottying I would stick her back in a diaper because I didn’t want to yell at her or shake her and I was getting angry. With the diaper I relaxed. By Calli I didn’t relax when she had a diaper on. Ha.

I did one of my periodic yelling-at-Noah things last night. Yelling is a strong word. We were in bed and the whole conversation wasn’t much louder than a stage whisper because the kids were asleep.

I’m sure that part of the reason that I’m thinking about this is the documentary. Tay–you’d be surprised. The documentary explicitly goes into “emotionally absent but physically present”. I think you would understand some of your fears about parenting more.

I don’t actually think it is so amazing everyone must go watch it. But yet it kind of is. My friends are breeding. How we treat our kids matters. Ignore the infomercial ending. You don’t need God to be a parent but you do need to be very patient and think about what skills you want your kids to have.

Your kids should be prepared to go live in the world. They need to know how to shop and budget. They need to know how to cook and clean and do laundry. If you really want to have your kids interested in electronics and math, you should probably figure out age appropriate ways to bring that into their life as much as possible. Even if your kid doesn’t become a geek they will still have a firm footing in your culture. Your kid is more likely to grow up attached to geek culture–that’s still a win in this valley. Y’all need support people.

Wouldn’t Shanna make a great project manager? ha.

Think about the world outside of school. We want our kids to live in it. We want them to have skills and abilities that the school system doesn’t teach. How do we get these things across? What are the most important things? I’m not sure. One of the hardest parts of homeschooling is having to be present with my own ignorance. I have to be constantly expanding what I know. When I get an internal indication that “That’s all there is to know about that!” because I have made up my mind… even though I’m shaking and can’t really hear what is being said in the moment I store it. I think about it later. I do sometimes become more rigid–not always. The not always is important, I think.

I think that teaching children takes a lot of time. I feel weird about the way in which I am treating this twenty year block as “not about me”. I am trying to learn what it means to stay in one place. I don’t have any scope for being in one place and watching the slow passing of time. It feels like I am not doing anything. My scenery isn’t changing. I’m stagnant. I’m doing a lot of things that are hard and uncomfortable. If Noah and I didn’t have kids I’m not sure I would still be here. I wouldn’t have asked for monogamy without kids. I don’t think I would have stayed for poly.

I look ahead in my life to when my children are older. At some point they will probably figure out how promiscuous I was. How do I want to present that message. “Yeah –it was great! You should try it!” or “It was terrible. Don’t be like me.”

I need a middle path. I was given this parenting book: Raising the Perfect Child through Guilt and Manipulation. I have a perverse habit of reading only what I want in books. Mostly her message about trying to force kids to be Catholic so they feel guilty doesn’t work for me. She is also a big sports fan. Not so much.

But she’s funny and her concepts are not terrible. I’m just not her culture. Anyway. What she is essentially explaining is: pick a definite culture. Indoctrinate the shit out of your kids. Do it in large ways and small ways. Mention your culture and your values as often as possible because your kids will be getting a lot of conflicting messages out in the world. Make sure yours is the loudest. You are the voice inside your child’s head. What do you want them to hear for the rest of their life? And cook a lot of good food so they always want to come home for dinner because being with you is better than being with anyone else. That’s her message in a nutshell.

Given that I don’t want to adopt the cultures she suggests (it’s not that they are bad they just aren’t for me) that means I kind of have to figure out what my culture is.

Long time readers, chorus with me now: I am ____________. I’m not going to say it. You have to comment. Ha.

But is it? I’m not sure.

Thank you opt-in audience.

2 Replies

I’m watching this movie Absent on Netflix instant view. It is making me think of a bunch of things and for no particular reason I decided to share with you ladies. I think I miss getting out.

The movie is a documentary about absent fathers and what that has done to American culture over the past century or so. It is incredibly heterosexual and gender essentialist in its presentation. Holy moly with the gender assumptions–I’ll just say in advance. I am doing my best to flinch only a little and instead substitute “parent by choice” for a lot of the rhetoric. Studies have proven beyond any possible doubt that children of same sex couples do as well or better than children of heterosexual couples… blah blah. Ok, end introduction. 🙂

So my dad wasn’t really in my life. When he was he was a source of horror. I’ve had an interesting journey working on my “Daddy issues”. Watching this movie is personally quite painful. I’m not even done with it. I’m not honestly sure I can handle finishing it today. It’s too hard. I do want to see where they are going with some of this.

I don’t agree with gender essentialism even slightly. But I’m very interested in some of his ideas about aggression (women have hunted throughout all of history too, jerk) and having a kind of balance of personalities between the parents. I am significantly more aggressive than my husband in the vast majority of life.

The movie talks about how little girls look to their parent-by-choice (because children trust their mother’s love in a different way) for validation of their right to exist. That’s something I’m going to have to sit with really hard.

I’m half an hour into the movie. Err, if anyone wants to watch the movie and talk about it I would love to have a conversation. I probably won’t continue babbling if no one responds because I will feel stupid. 🙂

This whole truckload of issues massively impacts my parenting. I over-think life because every model I have in my head is massively dysfunctional. I feel like I never get to coast. I never get to relax and just do what my impulse says because I bloody know my impulses are bad.

I find it interesting that 3/4 of my long-term partners have come from intact families. All of their families have rejected me. Sometimes I think I smell like a homewrecker because I’ve never been part of a home.

(This is where I decided I couldn’t actually handle sharing this with the women in my home schooling group. Originally I started typing this up in their discussion forum. I’m not there to make friends. I’m not there to make friends. I’m not there to make friends. Can’t alienate people. Can’t alienate people. Can’t alienate people. Thank you blogger.)

What are you afraid of?

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I am asked what I am afraid of. I went to a party last night. I have known those people a long time. Shunning. That’s what I’m afraid of. I sat at the party and I listened to people I didn’t know bicker. I listened to the relationship dynamics. The things they were saying and the frustrations they appeared to be expressing. I listened to the passive aggressive shit.

I didn’t stay in the group after Tom and I broke up because I didn’t want to watch what happened when he started hunting and I didn’t want to hunt in front of him. I know less than half of the people who are there now. Now I don’t have to worry about the crowd knowing my whole history. I didn’t want to parade men through the group. I would have been ashamed of myself. I am ok with people having a theoretical knowledge that I am a slut but I don’t parade my business.

I don’t want to be a parent in an open relationship because I don’t want to parade my business and I don’t want to keep dirty secrets. The only way I see to do that is to create an unchanging set of roles that they primarily interact with. It is a choice to be that kind of person for my kids. Not because I think all polyamorous people are bad–that truly isn’t it.

I’m not polyamorous. I’m a slut. I pick up random people on the internet for sex. I have done a lot of it. I have hit three digits of sex partners but I don’t know for sure. I lost my list in a hard drive crash. I used to keep an excel document with check marks for what sexual activities I did with whom. I did that in case I needed to look people up and say, “I tested positive.” I thought it was the ethical thing to do. I did actually go back and contact everyone when I tested positive for herpes. Even the one night stands I otherwise would never fucking have talked to again. It was hella awkward. I explained that I used to get cold sores as a kid, so I have probably had it all my life. I thought I was getting tested for it when I said, “Test me for everything” but actually they don’t do the herpes test as a standard thing. Whoops.

Sometimes people say that they won’t sleep with someone who has had more than x number of partners. I have had guys tell me that completely out of the blue so they can explain why they won’t fuck me even though I am hot. Cause obviously I was hot for them, right? The fact that I was not remotely sexually attractive to them was irrelevant.

I had a different point when I started writing. Shunning. Moving as often I did as a child is a constant slow motion enaction of shunning scenes. There were large scale specific instances that stick in my mind. When I was in eighth grade we lived with Seventh Day Adventists. Living with Uncle Bob sucked because he was a verbally abusive asshole. The only people who would take my mom and I in were the religious folk. They were kind as long as you did what they wanted.

I went to church with them. I went a lot. I got very involved. I started following Joey like a puppy and he was very involved in the church life. I went with him everywhere. I tagged along on trips up the the SDA college in Northern California, I found out about the boarding high school in Mountain View. I had fantasies of going before the church elders and telling them about my life and asking for scholarships. Please, please save me. Joey and I did a lot of door to door missionary work. I helped in the production of a series of classes on spiritual matters. I read my fucking Bible. I could quote it chapter and verse.

I had this friend at school, Yvette. She was involved in a different church. She invited me to come with her to a lock-in. That’s where they lock a bunch of kids in a gym all night long. It was a lot of fun. We played games and sang songs and told stories. It was one of the best nights of my childhood.

I came to one of the leaders of the youth group for the SDA church. I asked if we could look into doing something like this at our church. She recoiled from me in horror. She said that she did not condone filth. She told me that I would be better served somewhere else.

If I couldn’t go with Joey to the Seventh Day Adventist church then I didn’t have a way to get to a church at all. I couldn’t get off the mountain.

To punish myself for being unlovable by God I would enact the most horrible things I could think of. Mostly this entailed reenacting scenes from Bertrice Small books. I would dress up in the closest things I could find to corsets. I would wear really tight tights in layers until they caused me a lot of back pain. Then I would put on layers and layers and layers of gauzy skirts. I was very into the peasant skirt thing. I would put on many layers of shirts and dresses. When I was done I would put on a very tight belt. I walked around in the house. I would pretend to encounter strange men.

I would then pretend to be raped over and over. I used a wide variety of different items to penetrate my vagina starting with pencils. Sometimes I would experiment and see how many pencils would fit. I fucked myself with the legs of a Barbie. It kind of skeeves me out to see my kids play with Barbies. (Obviously not the same dolls.)

I would call myself names for hours. I would chant that I was a worthless whore and no one would ever love me. Even God didn’t want me. I was dirty and bad and I wanted bad things to happen to me. I deserved to be hurt. I was disgusting.

Then I started calling the radio dj. He was twenty-five. We went out on several dates. I was twelve. We didn’t have sex but he did ask me for a blow job. I gave it to him. I knew I was supposed to. I tried to be enthusiastic but it was really unpleasant. I tried to smile. I tried to not vomit in his car.

Not long after that my mother and I no longer were as friendly when the neighbors tried to tell us what to do and how to do it. We moved to the old house in the canyon for a while. I couldn’t stand living with my cousin’s girlfriend and her kids. I wasn’t nice to them and they weren’t nice to me. I think there is plenty of blame to go around for that situation sucking. Then Auntie and Uncle Bob bought the new house up in Redwood Estates and my mom and I joined them. It was like a palace. It was huge compared to the old house.

I spent a lot of time angry at God. I felt very directly shunned by God. I wasn’t. I was shunned by a tight-ass ignorant woman. A mean spirited harpy. Unfortunately God wears many faces. It doesn’t matter that she doesn’t speak for God. No one wanted to help me. Police officers told me not to talk about what happened to me after being sexually assaulted. I was isolated and hunted.

I don’t think the dj sexually assaulted me. I think he exploited my low self esteem, but that’s not the same thing. He didn’t force or cajole. He didn’t pressure me. I wanted to. I was enthusiastic. I asked him out on a date. I think he should have been a good enough person to understand that it was pretty bad for me to be doing what I was doing.

My mom didn’t mind me dating the dj. I broke it off. I felt disgusting and dirty when he gave me an opal necklace for Christmas. I knew it was a cheap shitty necklace. It was a gift worthy of my status. I was that bad of a whore.

Which isn’t fair. It was probably what he could afford. He didn’t know me. We didn’t have a real relationship.

But … yeah.

I don’t want to teach my kids to be the kind of promiscuous I am. It hurts me. I am to a point where I am capable of doing nonmonogamy in an ethical and reasonably safe way because I have made a lot of mistakes and I have been hurt in a wide variety of ways.

I have learned lessons that not everyone needs to learn. My kids don’t need to grow up and be like me. It is not important that my legacy be carried on in such a way. But maybe it is still important for my experiences to be talked about. That isn’t the same thing.

My kids aren’t having a life like I had but other kids are.

I really should try to sleep. I was going to try to go to the Renaissance Faire with the kids. Hahahahaha. We’ll see.

One of those not sleeping nights.

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An awful lot of why I respect Noah as much as I do is because of his single minded fixation on his goals. Which is not to say that all of his goals serve my goals–they don’t. But he’s very honest about that. He is very specific about which sand castles he lets me build–that was the result of years of screaming at him about doing that inappropriately with other people he dated. Ok, I didn’t scream. But I was vehement.

If you are not going to fucking do something then you are a piece of shit asshole when you give women the impression that you will. That is rude, disrespectful, and disgusting. I didn’t hold back. That was pretty surely hard to live with. But he decided that he wants to be married to me. He stopped letting chicks do that. Then he stopped dating them because he wanted to keep me.

Noah is having a good time where he is currently working. I have specific areas of disgruntlement which have resulted in me poking him with a sharp stick. This lead to him poking his head up around and looking around at options. But he has this buddy at work. Sigh. Ok. I will keep putting up with areas of disgruntlement. I don’t actually have any right to complain about his job. He’s the one who has to do it. I am a fascist about enforcing that his work day has an end point.

Any extra time you “choose” to give your company is time you are choosing to not spend with your wife and kids. Why are you doing that? Why are you saying fuck you to me? Living with me can’t be easy. I expect him to work ridiculously hard while he is at work so that he can advance (no really–this is an expectation) and then to walk out the door and pretend that work is almost invisible. That’s a tall order. He’s delivering but the strain is becoming more apparent.

Every so often I have a window into what it is like to be Noah. I understand his perspective just a little. An awful lot of why I respect Noah as much as I do is because of his single minded fixation on his goals. Noah exists. Noah is a force shaping change. It is unpredictable and sometimes everything he works for gets thrown away on a whim.

And for being able to create things out of thin air he is paid handsomely. I think I hold it against him. Sometimes I think I should have deliberately married a loser–that way I would feel like I had gotten what I deserve. Instead I got Noah.

I think that Noah and I fit together partially because we are both so alienated from society yet we are really lonely. Not many people are as alienated from their families as Noah and I are. Noah doesn’t have abuse issues like me–nothing like. But he doesn’t feel like part of that family. It is weird to me. They don’t really understand him–ok. They are ignorant and violent in defense of their ignorance–ok. But he feels no obligation whatsoever.

I feel obligation. I feel terrible guilt about walking away from Aunt Vonnie and my niece and nephews. I feel horrible guilt that I abandoned them to the horror. I can’t believe they are my problem. I can’t fix them. I can’t make their lives better. I just have to run if I don’t want to be like them.

I think that part of why this relationship works for me is Noah has handed all of the day to day money over to me. I get to be in control of my financial safety. In 2011 we spent a bit over $28,000 more than Noah made. It wasn’t a problem–I had the annuities and then we had Sarah’s rent. This year I have already saved $7,000 of Noah’s income. He didn’t get a raise. My book hasn’t even paid off the editor. If the next few months are on target I will have spent $40,000 less this year than last year.

I need to be the one controlling spending. When I am the person doing it I can dramatically shift my lifestyle and feel ok about it. Other people have different priorities. I can’t handle feeling deprived at someone else’s whim. It makes me angry and rebellious. If Noah set our current budget I would freak out. I am cognizant that I am reaching my goals on time or a little ahead of schedule and I try to eek out occasional blips of stress relief.

But from where I am sitting I have a freezer stuffed full of a wide variety of meat I feel good about eating. I have to have a variety or I get pissy and nasty about eating at home. I can’t eat all beef all the time. I have preserved enough local berries to get us through till next year. I have stocked up on dry goods. My grocery budget for the next five months will be almost nothing. I have saved enough that I have already paid next years property taxes in that budget column.

When I am feeling anxious or if I want to buy something I go look at www.mint.com. I am trying to keep my focus on what I’m doing. When I want to spend money I am generally trying to distract myself or soothe myself or get some feeling of pleasure. I know that the thing won’t make me as happy as having the feeling of safety.

This month our bank account cash balance will hit $40,000. This is the first time in my life that has happened because of a slow accumulation instead of from a random extra check arriving. It feels different.

And all of this feels weird because I don’t earn any of it. I feel that so acutely. I am the manager. It helps me not spend money on myself. I use the money in service of our shared goals. I have a specific small subset of the budget that is my personal spending money. I need cheaper hobbies if I am ever going to Starbuck’s again. The book. Race entry fees. Running shoes. A Disneyland annual pass. Lady Gaga tickets. I think that’s a pretty awesome year of fun things. I’m glad to not do a lot of smaller things. No I’m not. I’m lonely. But I still don’t want to change my priorities. I’m doing what I want to be doing.

It is weird to feel envy for what people have and do and know that I am consciously choosing to not do it in favor of other goals. I don’t compromise. It’s kind of weird to recognize about myself. I am on my own course. It doesn’t overlap with other people very often. Other people don’t want to do things in the times and ways I want to do them so I do them alone. That’s ok.

That’s the direction I have to grow, isn’t it? It’s ok that I am alone. I am doing what I want to do. Other people don’t share my interests or timing. That’s ok. It just happens that way sometimes.

This is a lot of why being with Noah is so weird. We are trying to figure out how to grow closer together. It’s hard. Everything we do seems to want us to be separate in space. We don’t overlap in hobbies much beyond sex. That’s a hard one while we have kids around. I have all kinds of issues. I have a brick wall between my sexuality and my children.

At least until they can read. Then I will tell them that if they read my blog they will have to learn how to self-select out of information they don’t want. Ha. I hope they won’t find it till they are basically adults. But I’m not going to hide it. I just don’t need to bring it up or talk about anything I write about spontaneously. It isn’t their business.

I think that Noah and I are comfortable with one another because neither of us has much expectation that the other will change to be more like us. We will change, but in often weird and surprising ways. I see some couples that become practically one person. Neither of us want to renounce main character status. You can’t be that deeply pair bonded and be a main character.

I think that is where the longing for G-d comes in. That would be something I could love without having to give up the essential aloneness that seems to be part of my self-identity. God could love me even when I wouldn’t allow myself to believe anyone else could. Sometimes I don’t allow Noah to be someone who loves me in my head. I mean that when I am thinking of him it doesn’t occur to me that he could love me. He couldn’t act like that and love me at the same time. In my world view those things are incongruous. But not in his world view. He is on a completely different track than me.

I can’t change him. He will always do things that make me feel alienated and alone and completely unloved. That doesn’t mean that he stops loving me during those times. It means I have attachment issues. I do not believe there is a way for me to try to change him that would prevent those feelings from happening. I think it would be unhealthy to try.

That is what my sister does. She wants people who will “try harder” to be what she wants. But at the end of the day they are still them and they just aren’t good enough. It’s a bad cycle.

Noah isn’t perfect. But he is consistently him. I can predict him. I asked him to stop dating people because there would always be bad communication because he would be trying to tell me what he thought would hurt me least. Not what was true. Because that is what he does. If he’s not in a situation where his sex life is on the line he doesn’t worry so much about just telling me.

My sister believes that relationships are good or not based on how much time you spend with someone. This is why she doesn’t work and she dates people who don’t work. They can be together 24/7. It’s awesome! It has been hard for me to deal with how much separation is “normal”. I feel abandoned all day every day. I feel hurt. I feel unwanted. I know that these are entirely irrational feelings. I know that Noah is doing the right thing in every way by working.

When I was a child I couldn’t imagine that being a grown up meant learning to tolerate being alone. Being away from you is part of how people support having a relationship with you. I didn’t understand. I feel like I still don’t.

Someone on the internet (obviously a sound source) said I was a train wreck who depended on my husband too much. I couldn’t agree more. I just can’t work out how to depend on him less. I try to just not talk. I try to not be demanding. I try to just be grateful for what he offers.

Oh who the hell am I kidding. I’m very demanding. I’m sorry for it. I just can’t see a way to survive that involves less demanding. I mean, I could do the ghost thing. But that’s not really surviving. I don’t want my kids to learn that.

I have to act in a way I want them to act. I want them to believe that their needs are worth meeting. Sometimes that involves being demanding.

The dying time

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I feel like this part of my life is the grieving. I am giving up the dream of who I was going to be. In order to be reborn you have to die. Your hopes, your dreams–all of them have to be given up if you are going to be something new.

This is why people stay stuck in the same patterns with the same people. They don’t want to die. They don’t want to give up their deepest held beliefs and expectations.

I really have to. The things I have believed about myself are no longer particularly useful to me. Right now I have Lady Gaga’s song “Bad Kids” on repeat. In my head I will never be anything other than the bad kid. I am the person your parents warned you about. You were told to stay away from me.

I have rebuffed more than one request for help recently under widely varying circumstances. I don’t think I was graceful. I feel like I don’t have enough something to be able to be nice to me. If I can’t be kind to myself I have no kindness for anyone else. I’m sorry. It’s not that I don’t want to help. It’s that I have to live with how unpleasant I am and that is really hard. I don’t like feeling exhausted and angry because I never have the ability to even finish a thought.

I don’t know who I want to grow up to be. I can’t get my head around the picture. I keep trying roles on. I keep trying to get to the point where my mind can encompass it. Future me is hiding from me. I never tried to picture what I would do once I had the husband and the kids. Shit.

More than almost anyone I know I have followed the plans I set down rigidly for myself when I was a child. I got married 8 days before turning 25. My daughters were born when I was 27 and 29. Right on my schedule. I decided that years in advance.

I think that an awful lot of partner selection is deciding that you are ready to take your life in a new direction and you grab the person who looks the most likely. I certainly did that. I had a wide variety of options. I examined them carefully. I would visit their houses and sit quietly and try to think of how the life there would look.

I used to freak out at the idea of being stuck in this house forever. When I dated Noah the first time I firmly rejected him as an option. I didn’t want to be part of this life. I’ve changed the house and changed my future and it’s going better. I wasn’t able to believe that my influence would matter. I didn’t fit in the Disaster House. I’m not an open-invite-party-in-my-house person. I want to exclude the rapists. There were a lot of rapists at the DHPs. They didn’t do it at the parties, of course. But I know a lot of bad stories about people who were quite popular there.

I think I am uninterested in being part of any groups because when I go I am hyper aware of the sexual predators and I don’t want to be in the room with them. Everyone else want me to just get along. I’d rather take a baseball bat to their skull and prevent them from hurting another woman. I can’t just get along. I can not be there. That is my gift to society. That is how I keep my mouth shut.

But when I hide at home I don’t get to talk to women. My perspective is silenced. Kevin gets to keep hunting. Paul. Dan. These are popular guys! I’m not popular.

I feel like part of shaving my head was closing the door on hunting. It has been interesting to me over the years how often my hair is a factor in people wanting to fuck me. They comment on it. I don’t understand why looking at curly hair is so interesting while having sex. I never asked for clarification. It was just one of the things I had to work with so I did.

When women tell me that they can’t get laid I blink in shock. I think their standards are too high. Anna used to complain that she couldn’t get laid. The only person she wanted to sleep with was her best friend. He was from a ridiculously well off family so he was spoiled, self absorbed, and entitled. He wouldn’t date a girl who was that heavy. Or who had such a plain face. Anna certainly wasn’t ugly–but she wouldn’t win a beauty contest. She was not especially pretty either. And she only wanted the best looking boy in the room with the best body. No Anna, you can’t have that.

I think that most of the people I have slept with would be vaguely insulted if they understood my evaluation of their status. Hey, you’re sleeping with me you can’t be that high in status. If you were higher in status you would go fuck someone better. Someone prettier. Someone with a better body. Someone nicer. Someone who… God I don’t even know. Someone worth being proud of standing next to. A lot of men have indicated that they didn’t want to be seen in public with me. I am not the kind of girl you want to introduce to your mother.

And Noah fucking married me. What does that say about him? I think he was rebelling against his family. He married the trailer park slut. I don’t think a rich boy from Texas can do a more rebellious thing. Sure, by the time he met me I was living with Tom in a nice townhouse. Does that raise my status? I was able to fuck a higher quality of person by the time I was an adult.

It really doesn’t matter what status I perceive myself as having. When I go off into the world now people do not see who I was or what I have done. Mostly they have no idea. I am a highly educated person. I have worked very hard to learn about the world. I can converse on a wide variety of topics with fluency and ease. People don’t know I’m white trash until I tell them. I pass. Shouldn’t I just take that and run with it? Wouldn’t that be the smart thing?

In order to do that I have to essentially kill the part of me that I don’t want anymore. I have to kill my bad kid. She has to die.

I have a lot of attachment issues. A friend was admonishing me that I should place my faith in the love of Noah rather than wishing for the love of some mythical G-d. Thing is, I don’t have faith in Noah’s love. I wait for when it ends. I consider it unavoidable. Inevitable. I can’t put my faith in Noah. He will leave me. Everyone does. I’m trying to figure out how to build a self that depends on no one and nothing and I’m failing.

I don’t know how to envision my future. I don’t trust that anyone will be in it with me. All I can see is wanting to die. Wanting to be done feeling alone and unwanted like this. Even though Noah is sitting three feet away from me and looking at me with concern because I am crying.

I no longer believe in “forever”. I feel like I will be here until the wind changes. Then I will blow away. Will I still exist then? I don’t know. I don’t see where I fit. I don’t see a place for me anywhere. I can’t see a future for me.

Why is permanent monogamy so important to me? Because if I wasn’t monogamous I would use that hunting time to line up Noah’s replacement. Eventually I would begin believing that Noah was about done with me. Then I would withdraw. I would just end up at someone else’s house more and more. Noah thinks he would be able to get me to take 50% of the proceeds from this marriage. I think he underestimates the willingness of the California court system to listen to someone who says, “I want to walk away with nothing. Like I came with.”

I feel worthless. I feel like all that I do is meaningless. I am just an empty shell. I can totally envision me fucking up my marriage over sex. That’s why I closed the door on that specific flavor of broken. Even when I believe I am a worthless whore I am not going to go act like one. I am going to model appropriate behavior if that is the last thing I do.

It isn’t that I think that children must see monogamy at all costs in all circumstances. Shanna loves her Grandpa J and his wife C and his girlfriend D. That’s fine. I don’t do that. I pick up random men who like to be mean to women. It’s different. I don’t go find people who respect me. Just listen to how they talk to me. The people who want to fuck me don’t have a lot of respect for me. They want a hole. I don’t want my girls growing up seeing men treat me that way. Noah is nice to me. I want them to see that.

I feel guilty about it but a lot of the reason I can’t help people right now is because I can’t afford to feel invested in people when I have no control over the results of my effort. When I sign on to help I will often put in dozens and up to hundreds of invisible hours of work. In order for me to say, “I recommend you do _______” I have to be god damn sure. I don’t think most people operate the way I do. I will not give a half assed opinion in a situation where someone comes to me for help. I will give them the same support and education I would give myself. I just can’t do that for extra people right now.

I would not be able to hold my head up if I knew I was giving substandard advice. I am not that person. I don’t do that.

I say things like that and then I think–what is my image of myself? Am I the pathetic bad kid? I’m one of the most consistently reliable people I know–or I won’t commit. I take my word seriously. I am honest and dependable. I am consistent. I am not always what people want to hear or see, but I am going to just go on existing. Consistently. Fuckers.

Why do I think I am about to blow away? I am all but building a fortress. I am entrenched. I am settled. I have lived in this house longer than I have lived anywhere. I don’t plan to move again.

I have panic attacks if I am lax on dealing with recycling and I develop a stack of boxes. I cannot handle even the idea of moving.

This vision of myself is dying. But I don’t know what to replace it with. I don’t know who I am. I’m afraid this will be a very hard and dark winter. I’m already freezing all the time but I won’t turn the heaters on till November. Stubborn. That’s me.

Bucket list: Run a marathon

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For many years I have said, “Some day I will run a marathon.” I’m aware that a lot of people say that. My ex-boyfriend said it all the time. He still hasn’t. I suppose the idea came into my head because my brother Jimmy is a runner. I asked him in February of 2011 to commit to doing a marathon with me. It was a tentative step towards developing a relationship. We have never been close. Kids in families like ours aren’t allowed to be close.

In May of 2011 my Uncle Bob died. Uncle Bob was the man in my childhood who loved me and cared for me without sexually assaulting me. My family didn’t tell me he was in the hospital or that they were taking him off of life support. My niece decided I should know and she called me. He died while I was stuck in traffic less than five miles away from the hospital.

Something inside me broke. My sister asked me if I had “ever lost someone close to me before” and turned red with fury when I responded, “like our father or our brother Tommy?” I wasn’t allowed to bring them up. They “didn’t count” because they both abused me and sexually assaulted me. I went home and outed myself as an incest survivor on the internet. My brother Jimmy didn’t think that was ok. He told me I was melodramatic and looking for attention. I haven’t spoken to him since. Since my family all decided they were done with me I figured it was a good time to finally write the story of my childhood. I did so in November of 2011.

In January of 2012 I asked my housemate/co-parent to move out, which was stressful and emotionally hard. I also started running. I decided that even though I wouldn’t actually be doing it with Jimmy I was going to do the marathon anyway. We were planning on Long Beach because it is one of the flattest marathons in the state. I registered. I looked up training plans and put them on my Google Calendar for the next ten months.

When you decide to do something there is this waiting period. You want to do it and it is going to be ridiculously hard—how do you get there? I’ve never done anything physically taxing like this before. The only running I previously had done was getting away from people who wanted to beat the shit out of me. I did one year of t-ball and less than a full season of little league. I was “catcher” for one pitch. I missed and it hit me in the stomach and made me puke and cry. They stuck me in the outfield and I got sick of going after a couple of weeks. So I had no basis of “fitness” to build on.

It’s probably worth mentioning that I am a stay at home mom with two kids. They are two and four. So I’ve been doing this running while trying to manage them. Finding time has been interesting. For the first five months I ran in the afternoons after my husband got off work because none of my runs took very long. Once the runs started getting longer and longer I switched to leaving my house by six in the morning. I have no childcare. I have to make use of what little time my husband has available. He is a software engineer so he is out of the house a minimum of 45 hours a week and often more than that. And he wrote a book this year so he doesn’t have a lot of time available for helping me. It’s been stressful.

I hear a lot of people talk about how running is supposed to improve a persons mood. I have no idea who these people are but it doesn’t bloody work for me. I have spent the year crying. I cry before I run. I cry while I run. I cry when I get home. I have a lot of grief. I’m crying for Uncle Bob. I’m crying for my father. I’m crying for my mother. I’m crying for my sister and my brothers. I’m crying for my niece and nephews. I cry and feel worthless and empty. It doesn’t matter how I feel on any given day. I know what I have to do. I schedule things so I don’t have to wonder what a day will require.

I have asked myself over and over all year why this is important to me. Why am I torturing myself? Am I running because my brother is a runner? Because I want to prove that I am a fucking Archer whether my family wants to acknowledge that I am alive or not? Because I want to be a bad ass? Because… I don’t even know. I said I would do it. If I quit or stop then I become just one more person who makes promises and doesn’t keep them. I said I would run the Long Beach Marathon.

About a month before the event a good friend ran a twenty mile race near her home in Portland, Oregon. I was kidding when I said, “Hey if you trained up to this mileage then a full marathon is easy. Come do it with me!” Surprisingly she said yes. Within hours she had talked to her husband and booked a flight.

The last month of training was both the hardest and the easiest. All of a sudden I wasn’t on this terrible solo death march of feeling abandoned. I had to keep training because Ali was coming. Ali loves me. I still had a lot of days where I cried so hard my knees buckled and I fell to the ground and cried until I couldn’t cry any more. Then I got up and ran again. The good days came more often.

Six days before the race I drove to Southern California with my family. We were off to Disneyland! The girls and I had a lot of fun getting in my last walking miles in the park. The day before the race Ali was supposed to fly down first thing in the morning. Her flight was delayed. At the first notice I started feeling a little worried but I thought she would make it and it would be fine.

Six hours later they cancelled her flight entirely. I was afraid that was the end. I didn’t sob on the phone to Ali. I only freaked out a little in text. Her amazing husband jumped on the internet and booked her another flight. It was later and going into a different airport and it would be a lot more complicated—but she would get to SoCal. Unfortunately she would get there too late to pick up her race bib. She emailed me a picture of her ID and her husband emailed me a waver to print so I could pick up her bib for her. We live in the future!

I drove down to the Expo by myself. I didn’t want to be focused on my kids while I was trying to figure out where to go. I wasn’t feeling patient. I checked the lists of people registered. My brother’s name wasn’t on it. After a year of heart pounding anxiety worrying about seeing him that was rather anticlimactic if you ask me.

So I picked up the bibs and went back to our hotel room. I angsted and fussed. Ali got to her moms-in-law’s house. I arrived around 7:30. We talked more than we should have. It would have been impossible to avoid. I hardly ever get to see her. Talking to her feels really good. So we didn’t get to sleep till around 11 pm. I slept till 2:30 am. Then I woke up to use the bathroom and the crying started. I cried until Ali woke up around 5:30. I cried because I didn’t have one more chance to see anyone in my family. They are just done with me. I think there was some big part of me that was praying that Jimmy would see me and hug me. I haven’t said that out loud all year. I was afraid to hope. I was smart.

We woke up and piddled around getting ready. Ali had trouble forcing her way through her breakfast so we left about fifteen minutes after we were supposed to. That’s ok, we left a little bit of a buffer. Then it turned out that the person driving the vehicle had a different opinion about the optimal way to get to the race grounds. An opinion that was unfortunately not born out in reality. We were blocked continually by the race track. Whoops. Eventually we went around on the freeway (what Ali was campaigning hard for from the beginning, apparently—I was fairly unaware of this subtext) and arrived at the race. We had just enough time to stop at the port-a-potties before the last wave started. We hurried. We made it into the last wave and settled in for our run.

I’d like to say it was wonderful because I was with Ali and in many ways it was. She sang me silly songs. She encouraged and coaxed. She helped me through the rough parts. There were a lot of rough parts. The first big problem was the air quality. I am not used to SoCal air quality. I felt like I had to chew each breath before swallowing. It was really hard to run. I was dizzy and nauseated. We walked a lot. It was also almost twenty degrees hotter than either of us are used to running in. Oh and the humidity. The humidity was nightmarish (thus the bad air quality). We were wet all day and crusted in salt. But the real kicker? I started my period at mile 13 along with terrible cramps that made me want to go to bed and curl up and cry. Luckily Ali had extra tampons. Yay for planning ahead. A medical station provided some ibuprofen. I had to finish.

It was beautiful traveling along the ocean. The city of Long Beach is certainly picturesque. One of the most disheartening moments of the race was when the half marathoners split off and we went from being part of a large crowd to being one of the stragglers. It was a little sad for me to realize how far behind the pack of “runners” we were for the marathon. Really we mostly walked. I ran as much as I could but I didn’t want to faint or puke so it wasn’t that much.

In the end our running time was 6:47. We finished seven and a half minutes before they closed the finish line. We were part of the last wave and they only keep the finish line open for 7:30 hours. It’s a darn good thing we weren’t just a hair later and that I managed to run as much as I did.

I did it. I finished the Long Beach Marathon. Thank you Ali. Near as I can tell this is the hardest thing I have ever done with another person. I’m so glad I had you. I won’t forget.

The flea had a gleam in his eye. (Silly song Ali sang.) I think it was because he was plotting. He was wondering how hard it was going to be to run. He wanted to know if he could keep up with you too.

I won’t do another marathon with you. Can we do a half next time? That’s only half as crazy. Next time on your turf with better air quality.

PS- Sharing is caring.

Goodbye, old friend

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Yesterday someone I have been close with came and got me for lunch. We have known one another for twelve years. For a long time I considered him family. He came over for Thanksgiving and Christmas many times. Things have gone through a lot of ups and downs. He came over to tell me that his wife is pregnant and he is moving cross country. He assures me he will come here to visit so we will probably see one another as often as we do now.

If someone doesn’t know my kids at all because they have never spent any time with them I can’t think of that person as family any more. That is becoming a litmus for me. My children are my family. Perhaps they will be the only people I am that kind of close with. I’m doing my best to teach my children how to have the kind of relationship I want to have.

Family doesn’t say, “Wow. Your life is hard and shitty. Sucks to be you.” Family helps.

I think really hard about what I want to teach my kids. So far Shanna and Calli automatically share any good thing that comes into either of their hands. When I say, “Oh gosh. This is going to be a big job. I think I will need help if I am going to have the time and energy to go do fun stuff after” both kids jump up because they like doing fun stuff with me. Shanna already knows there is a sharp correlation between how much waiting on everyone I have to do and my willingness to play messy games. I’m a hard ass about it. I have to be or I will lose my fucking mind.

It was hard having lunch with my friend. Both he and his wife have told me emphatically and specifically that he has never said a sexist thing in his life.

Then why did he have to go on for four or so minutes when my drink arrived about how disgusting “girly” drinks are?

I also enjoyed the long lecture about how until a given Indian person has proven that he is significantly more competent than 95% of white people that he must be stupid and incompetent. You know this for a fact because your company outsourced a bunch of junior engineer positions to India and those people are just stupid. You know they will fuck up anything you give them at least three times so you try to carefully condescend to them so they can’t fuck up anything important.

Well, it’s overall a reasonable business decision, I guess. But do you really have to rant about those people like that? Are they really less competent than the average white person? Really? Really?! Have you met the average white person?

PEOPLE ARE NOT SMARTER BASED ON WHAT COLOR THEIR SKIN IS NOR WHETHER THEY SIT OR STAND TO PEE.

But you’re not sexist or racist.

Oh, when you were trying to describe the focus of your PhD research to people you probably shouldn’t say, “Oh gosh I’m not sure if I can dumb this down enough for you” and you probably shouldn’t say, “Oh wow. You have gotten a lot more sophisticated. You wouldn’t have been able to understand this before.”

You mean when I was nineteen and I had absolutely no exposure to computer networking I didn’t immediately ping on all the buzzwords? Sure yeah. At this point I am thirty-one and I have been living in this valley a long time. Yes I fucking understand virtual machines you god damn condescending asshole. It took someone assuming I wasn’t stupid and talking to me about them. Thanks, Noah.

When I talk to people I met twelve years ago the main thing I think about is how universal their lack of respect for me is. They are shocked I understand things. They are surprised I can understand complicated systems. Wow. That tells me a lot about what you think of me.

People who met me twelve years ago wanted to fuck me or play with me. I didn’t develop very many relationships with people in other categories. And they think I am stupid. Any hole will do in the dark, right?

I feel really weird about someone who will tell me over and over that he thinks highly of me while being casually dismissive fucking constantly.

There were a bunch of stupid, insulting little things. Every time he said something rude he would notice me flinch. He said, “Oh I didn’t mean that in an insulting way.” Oh, of course not. You couldn’t possibly be insulting when you react with horror over anything “girly.” Nope. I don’t know how many times I flinched. Mostly I stayed blank. He told me he couldn’t read my vibe. I said maybe I don’t have one. He said everyone does. I said maybe mine isn’t visible to him. He seemed upset by that.

I am not a figment of your imagination. I am not a construct that fits your needs. I’m a complicated person. And you don’t know me at all. If you know about my bdsm interests and not much else you don’t know me. Hell it’s getting to the point where I think that people who don’t know me as a parent probably don’t really know me. It’s a very different experience.

I still love him. That’s not the point. I love him very much. I have loved him for a long time. I’m really not up for continuing to feel put down, casually, pretty much all the time in conversation. Maybe I’m over-sensitive. Given that quite a few of my female friends won’t be in a room with this guy because they find him so insulting I doubt it’s just me. I just didn’t think I had a right to complain about how he treated me until several women said, “You know, you don’t have to let him treat you that way.” I don’t? But beggars can’t be choosers. I take what friends pick me.

Or I stay home. Alone.

He asked me how I have been doing. I told him I wake up just about every morning and catalog the ways I want to die. Everyone who told me that they would be there to support me through having children is gone. Because I am a giant asshole and they don’t like me any more. Fair enough.

I’ll stay home.

I’m not completely alone. I get visitors. My friends give me what they have to spare. I’m grateful.

You’re never fully dressed without a smile.

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Noah is awake but playing a video game so I should probably shut up. But he’s so good to talk to… Really we should be sleeping. It is 3:26am. Oh well.

When I’m out running I write these eloquent blog posts in my head. Then I get home and sit in front of the computer and think, “hunh my wrists are tingling. Maybe another day.”

It’s weird to me the ways things intersect. I keep seeing people bringing up the whole “Don’t tell women to smile at you” thing on the internet. I don’t appreciate it when random people tell me to smile like I don’t appreciate random people telling me anything. But I put a lot of energy into trying to smile at people. It almost feels like I shouldn’t.

I feel like a bad feminist pretty much all the time. I very consciously try to smile at people and cheerfully say, “Hello” when I pass them. I’m fairly religious about this when I run. Seriously–this is my church. I go out into my community, likely the only community I will have for the rest of my life, and I smile at people and I tell them to have a good day. It lights peoples’ faces up. The small shriveled old Asian ladies look suspicious at first sometimes. If they look suspicious in English I try “Ni how” (I know I am spelling that wrong. I probably pronounce it wrong but they don’t yell at me.) or “Chao” because I was told that was ok. (That’s Chinese and Vietnamese for those who don’t automatically recognize my poor battered phonetic spellings.) I do try to guess which one is appropriate in advance. I have a high success rate but not perfect. When I get it wrong they look startled for a moment then laugh. When I switch languages again then they get very happy with me.

People want to feel important. People want to feel like they are worth seeing and speaking to for who they are. Not everyone wants to be told they should be like me and expecting everyone in the world to be happy about hearing English is expecting everyone in the world to be like me. I try to say hello to people because whether they like me or not they are my neighbors. If they need help I will stop and try to help.

Once when I was out running I came across a Vietnamese woman who had tripped and hurt herself. She was probably in her 60’s or 70’s. She was quite frail. I helped her up and I walked her home. I half carried her. She spoke very little English. Just enough to apologize for living. I was very happy to help her. She’s my neighbor. When I was running in SF I went passed an older woman who was carrying heavy bags. She would walk a block then put them down to rest. I happened to go around that block three times (don’t ask why–it wasn’t about her) so I stopped and asked her if I could help. She was so happy. (I can also usefully offer help in Spanish. I’m starting to feel less like I am a pathetic linguist.)

I feel like being part of a community will be the closest I have to a church. I live in Fremont. I am likely to live here forever. I don’t want to treat this like a commuter town or one of my brief stops. I don’t want to sleep here and “live” somewhere else I drive to every day. Ugh. No. I want to meet the people who live near me. I want to get to know faces. I want to have people grow to expect that weird cheerful woman at the park. I want to have a role and a place. I want to belong.

No one wants more tragedy. They don’t go looking for it. One of my favorite things I did as a teacher was when I was doing a unit on tragedy. We were having a huge argument on whether tragedy as a genre was obsolete. My little bastards were campaigning hard to say tragedy was just over. Except one kid. My little gang banger. She dropped out in the middle of my second year with her. I loved her. She told me that she was my Brown Eyes. That was her special name and she wanted me to know it. I think it was the equivalent of being a biker and it being her “ride” name. I could be wrong. Anyway, she came in after school one day and said,

“Gibbs. So. You keep saying that this tragedy shit isn’t dead. I have a song I want you to listen to. I think it might count.” She brought in her ipod and played me a song.

It would be fair to say that the song was impactful on me. It made me cry the first time I heard it and every time thereafter. Yes. That is modern tragedy. Thank you for sharing. So I took that song that my wonderful Brown Eyes brought me and I played in every section I taught. I had them write a response and talk about it. We tore the song apart in terms of figurative language, metaphor, simile, exposition, climax, denoument, blah blah blah. All The Stuff English Teachers Do.

A parent called me (on my cell phone which was hilarious because I forgot I put it on the syllabus and I kind of freaked out at first) to ask about it. She said her son came home saying his English teacher played him a song about a rapper who rapes his mom and she can’t see how that is relavent to English literature thankyouverymuch. I went off for half an hour about music and poetry and literature and how they intertwine and how genres morph and in order to get kids to understand the full scope and power of the language you have to examine different ways of using it and and and. I had a good argument at the time. I don’t remember it well this bright and early morning. The mom thanked me for caring so much about helping her son understand the world and we hung up.

I bring the tragedy with me everywhere I go. I’m kind of Debbie Downer and I deliver. I also smile. Even though I tell the worst stories and make people cry I also make people smile. I’m very good at making people smile.

I am not a graceful runner by any measure. I look pretty funny. That’s ok. I am grinning fit to split my face and I call out a cheerful and ebullient hello to everyone I pass. The only people who don’t smile back are Middle Eastern guys with specific patterns of hair cuts and facial hair. It’s kind of weird. I can predict which three people will scowl at me before they do. There are always three people who scowl at me. Some days there are up to a hundred people who smile at me.

There are the half-smilers who are doing it for social compulsion reasons. I barely count them. Ok, they are part of the crowd but they are kind of tuning me out.

You can’t tell for sure who will light up. That’s a wonderful surprise every time. Often it is the people I have to try multiple languages before they “wake up” and notice I am talking to them. (This all happens fast because I am reasonably speedy.) If someone totally tunes me out in English and I try a second language with no response and I try a third language and they look up sometimes there are tears in their eyes. There was one woman in particular yesterday. She looked up shocked. Then her face transformed. She was beautiful. She looked very sad. I doubt she has had an easy life. She looked so happy to be noticed. I feel kind of bad that I try Chinese before Vietnamese sometimes because I can’t tell Asian races apart very well. I feel like a tremendous asshole. I’m trying. I swear.

If this is the only community I am going to have I need to find a way to fit. I need to find things that I can do that are useful and good. I can’t do a lot for most people in most ways. I can take care of myself and smile at people though.

Which brings me back to people being really fierce about how women don’t owe anyone smiles. No, they don’t. No one owes anyone anything. I don’t owe anyone anything.

I smile and say hello in between crying jags. I do it because it lets me feel like I have some way of interacting with people that is ok. It lets me feel like I am not alone. I greet the people who live near me because that is the civilized thing to do. We share this space. Let’s act like it. Let’s act like we are both real people here and I’m the kind of person who likes to smile at people. I don’t think that everyone has to do it. I don’t get mad at the three people each day who scowl at me. But I keep smiling at everyone. Regardless of the fact that some people won’t smile back.

I don’t smile because anyone owes me anything in response. I smile because I am doing the fake-it-till-you-make-it thing. It does elevate my mood. I like provoking smiles. I like the little half smiles of, “Oh you are one of those people” as much as I like the earnest grins. I like being recognized (with an eye roll) as one of those cheerful people. It’s kind of a relieving experience. It’s nice to be pigeonholed like that instead of as the tragedy girl for a little while. It’s nice when people look at me without flinching.

I smile at people because first impressions are a big thing. People decide a lot about you by what they see first. I try not to be sobbing or a screaming harpy when people first see me. Smiling seems like a better plan.

Ah, and I haven’t done my full confession. At this point I bring before the confessional the unhappy fact that I have now hit Shanna for the second time. I was sitting on the floor with Calli working on something (I can’t even remember what) and Shanna kicked me in the head. The first kick was only like a three or a four (out of a ten pain scale) so I looked up and said, “Please don’t kick me. I don’t like being kicked.” She giggled and kicked me in the head again much much harder. My hand was up smacking her foot away from me before I had time to register a thought. See, this is why I don’t sit around sober. I was waiting for park day so I was fully sober (Have to drive, yo) and I didn’t have that second of pause. With the pause I can grab the foot and prevent it from kicking me again without doing the random arm wave of “Pain! Do not want!” All this to say: I’m not losing sleep and I don’t think I am an abuser.

Thus I have hit my kid twice. Both times she was kicking me quite painfully and I swatted her foot. No guilt. But I did apologize to Shanna immediately. Hitting isn’t the right answer. I’m sorry my impulses aren’t properly under my control.

I want to write about money. I had three, THREE separate friends all say, “I’m having a hard time with money” within a six day period. I feel like I should write about money. Not in this entry. It’s coming.

I think it is interesting how there are discrete mood phases of depression for me. I’m not actively suicidal at the moment and I haven’t had any vivid ideation in at least two days (woo!) so instead I’m in kind of a hazy place where I have slightly more energy and I want to be interacting and I want to be giving more to people (I hate the fact that I need so much help right now–I feel like a using piece of shit.) but I can clearly see how I don’t really have it to spare. So it’s like I’m wandering around my kitchen with a big box and I’m slowly trying to decide which things to give to the food pantry but… uhm… all that food is in my kitchen because I’m supposed to feed my family with it. It isn’t “extra”. But I still want to give it away. I will feel better about myself if I give it away. My family will just figure it out, right? We’ll just do without. But I can’t. I can’t do that to my kids all the time.

Once I asked my mom about her childhood. She said she was never important. When she was little her parents cared about her older siblings. When her older siblings started moving out her mother started fostering and the foster kids were way more important than her. The foster kids would show up with clothes and toys from their home of origin and my mother wasn’t allowed to touch their things. But they would steal my moms stuff and break it. She got in trouble if she complained because she wasn’t being properly charitable. My mom said that sometimes her mother would buy a special doll for a foster kid so the kid felt loved while she didn’t have one at all. Her mom would say, “But you have other blessings. God isn’t equal to everyone. You need to be grateful for what you have.”

I think about my mom a lot. I think about how badly she was treated by her parents and her siblings and her husband. She was at the bottom of the shit hill until I was born. My sister kind of took a turn there but not really. My mom protected her the way I protect Shanna. My sister was never really at the bottom of the hill. I think about what it did to my mom. I think about what she grew up to be.

I plot in advance what things I should or should not say to people in order to increase the likelihood that they will like me. I’m confident this is normal. Noah appears to be done with his internetting. That was like 45 minutes of writing. I’ll stop now.

Looking for a therapist (still)

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(First: I didn’t mention getting new shoes and I worried blacksheep. Yes, I got shoes that work better for my feet. No more ouchie.)

I sent out some emails to local therapists last night. When I do the modern equivalent of throwing a dart at the phone book I find that I am mostly interested in working with black women–apparently. If you search through all the people who are therapists in Fremont (and are listed online in a way I can find) only black women mention the important buzzwords for me: intense early trauma, “all stages of addiction”, incest, complex ptsd, ongoing anger issues, depression. Even when white people (or Asian or Middle Eastern [from what I see here]) try to say they work with trauma they are fussy and particular. They work with “change of life traumas” or “immigrant family issues”. Not really my problems.

“Hi, thank you for calling me back I have a few important buzzwords I have to run past a therapist before I can work with them: incest, bdsm, promiscuity, self-harm, attachment parenting, complex ptsd and queer. Let’s talk about them.

I don’t have a problem with educating an open minded therapist about alternative lifestyle issues. I am looking for a long-term relationship. I have two distinct needs with regards to therapy: first is that I go through periodic intense crisis periods. I have very little prediction of when they will happen outside of obvious anniversaries of trauma. Those are often very intense for me. I strongly prefer someone who has some experience in EMDR and CBT because I need occasional directed work. Mostly I see therapists because I do not have ongoing bonding relationships with very many people and I suffer intensely from this. Lack of attachment is one of the hardest parts of my life for me. I use therapists as surrogate parents and friends.

I need a therapist who will not flinch or overly react when I am all of a sudden telling you intense details about lurid rapes. I need someone who will not get overly indignant all the time–that’s not very useful. I am already angry. If you flinch or react or pull away when I talk about difficult things I will begin to look for patterns of disapproval. I will find them, I will project the fuck all over you and then I will disappear. I need to have a fairly blank mirror to talk to for a long time. That is hard for therapists. I am a fairly weird patient. You have to get to know me slowly.

I have been in therapy more on than off for 27 years. I have a few intense hot buttons due to these experiences: first and foremost is punctuality. If you do not respect my time you do not respect me. I will take note. I won’t be back. No I won’t try to “work it out.” I’m fucking paying for your time. I feel entitled to my 55 minutes. It is one of the few things in this life I feel genuinely entitled to: I pay for 55 minutes and I bloody well need to get them. I need you to be careful what you say to me. If something sounds like a promise to me and you don’t follow through I will disappear.

And seriously dude, all of my symptoms existed in well documented fashion for many years before I tried smoking pot. The fact that 99% of western medicine believes that my first problem is marijuana and I “should be sober before beginning treatment” means that I’m just not in a position to accept a lot of help. I’m not very open to western drugs right now. The side effects are far worse than the benefits of the drugs. They hurt me. Pot isn’t great but it is effective and less damaging to me than most of my other options. I’m not interested in being shamed because I’m trying to deal with a lot of stuff that isn’t my fucking fault.

I don’t take advice well at the beginning. I have to warm up to people. I have to know someone for a while and hear a series of shorter conversations before I begin to respect someones opinion. I do not respect people just because they want me to. I am very anti-authoritarian and I am very resistant to being directed towards giving up aspects of my self-determined identity. I have come a long way. I need to be respected for that. I do not need more people who are just assholes about how I’m not perfectly like a non-traumatized person so obviously I suck.”

And the next asshole who sends me a long letter about how what I really need is to say how helpless I am and turn everything over to “God” and go to AA/NA is going to get punched. Fuck you very much. It’s an approach that helps approximately 10% of the people who try it. I’m very unlikely to be in that small group.

It’s weird to me that I am doing very well and very poorly at the same time. I’m afraid that is going to be permanent. I have a lot of body memories from being raped. Most of my intense suicidal ideation happens around wanting to be away from those sensations. it hurts and I’m really tired of hurting in that way. Flashbacks and corresponding suicidal ideation seems to be a permanent fixture in my life. Managing that takes a lot of energy. It has been really bad since Shanna was about eighteen months.

I really hate my parents. If my father were alive I think I would enjoy killing him slowly by inches. I would take off one finger and toe at a time before I slowly started carving shapes out of other parts of his body. I don’t actually want to hurt my mom–I suppose that’s good. But I don’t want to know her. I don’t want to act like everything is all hunky dory and fine now. I’m not fine. I’m a fucking wreck. You fucking assholes wrecked thirty years of my life so far. How much longer am I going to have to feel like this? Maybe forever? Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.

Mostly I feel very lucky that I get to have the life I have. I enjoy my kids far more minutes of the day than they trouble me, even including all the extensive work I do for them. I’m really happy to have them here as companions for my life. I do not begrudge them some work. But it is a lot of work. It’s hard to find enough energy for everything.

It’s not that my relationship with Noah is free from all frustration, but it is very affirming. Noah thinks I’m just a great person. I like being around him. He talks to me like I am smart. My house is a very good and safe place to be.

More whining. I’m sorry I woke up so early.

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I’ve been staring at Mint for half an hour. I play with columns. The Sarah experiment was expensive. Not because of anything malicious on her part or anything like that. Life costs money. I’m ok with that. I’ve been slowly trying to dig myself out of that hole all year. This month is the first month I am not over the food budget. I will remain in the green as long as I don’t spend any money on food in the next three days. Good thing I’m well stocked. And if nothing else I have a yard full of tomatoes and carrots. Shanna may hate me, but we’ll have tomatoes for days.

I have felt ashamed of the fact that supporting me requires work for as long as I have known it was true. My father and mother would talk about what I owed them for supporting me. My mom has always felt guilty about how much work she has added to Auntie and that guilt has made her act out in some weird ways. I feel terrible about needing someone else to go work for me. I’m a lazy piece of shit. I can’t fucking support myself what good am I? I’m being terrible at the whore thing this month. I don’t really want to be touched right now. So, what fucking good am I?

Noah’s book is priced a lot higher than mine. He has made a lot more money at that than I have. It feels… appropriate. Everything about who and what he is dictates that he be paid a lot for what he has to offer the world. I give people free downloads. Because I know I am not really worth anything. Nothing that I have to give could possibly be worth anything.

I’m still selling copies. One or so a week. Heh. Maybe if I did something resembling promotion it would help. Those are pretty much random finds. Holy shit. Random complete strangers on the internet (it is an e-book) want to read about me. I get lovely emails sometimes.

I feel angry with Noah because he has worth and I don’t. But I don’t particularly want to go get a job. The idea of missing this part of my childrens lives makes me feel sick. No. I need every minute of intense love I can get. I need to be loved. I need to have my day full of people who genuinely like me and want to be near me. I may never get this feeling again. They will be adults before much longer. Maybe I’ll work some day. I don’t know what I’ll do, but certainly not now.

So I have nothing that the world values. That’s part of simple market economics. And I don’t really have much time to make things that could potentially be judged as valuable or not because I am busy being loved. And I feel like making that choice means that I am choosing to be nothing. I am something that only has worth and value for a short time. Then I cease to matter at all. In some horrifying ways I feel like more than other people I know that the support a mother gives is a one way obligation. I don’t expect much of anything from my kids as adults.

Which means I spend all day every day feeling like I am pouring all of myself, all of my energy, all that I have to give to the world into two people who will leave me. I feel scared all the time. I know that I am using all this energy–all of these resources in ways that will long term not serve me. I expect to have my fifties to look forward to while feeling like I have done nothing with my life but want love.

Even a cursory glance at my life makes it fairly apparent that for me it is true that no one stays. Noah says he will. I’m crossing my fingers because I don’t really believe him. I think that all I have to do is be a little meaner and he will understand how bad I am and he will go. I just need to show him who I am. Don’t worry, he will go. Everyone does.

I’m really struggling with how alone I feel. If it weren’t for my kids needing me to wait on them hand and foot I don’t think I would make it through today. I don’t want to. But I have to stop crying soon. I have to put this feeling in a box. It doesn’t matter what I want. I made a commitment. It doesn’t matter if they will leave one day. I made the decision to bring two people into the world who require care. I have sixteen more years of duty. I don’t get to shirk that. They really and truly need me. Even though neither of them are nursing. Even though they aren’t really “babies” any more. They need me.

Shanna needs someone who can deal with her intensity. She reminds me so much of me. I was beaten and shamed and told I was disgusting and annoying for being like Shanna. No one but me is going to want to love her so much. I really don’t think other people would have as much patience for her quirks. I can be gentle with her and forgive myself for being punished. I know she isn’t worthless. I know that this investment of time and energy and love will be good for her. I don’t know how it will work out for me long term, but I know that she will go off into the world knowing that it is good for her to yearn and do and be. Calli is quite clear that she wants me. Mama mama mama. If I am out of her sight for an hour there are a lot of tears. I can’t leave her.

I’m really sad. I’m really scared. I’m really lonely. There isn’t really anything I can do about these feelings. It’s time to go run. I have a race in 38 days with a very good friend.

It’s not that I think I don’t have friends or people who love me. But I spend fifteen to twenty hours a month with adults other than Noah who know me and like me. I don’t count the home schooling group because I go there and keep my fat mouth shut. It’s isolating and hard. I feel bad all the time. Like *I* am bad. With my kids. With people I associate with for my kids. It’s hard. It’s really hard.

Not being nice to Noah.

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Sometimes when I am having a hard time at “life” I end up very angry with Noah. It’s not particularly fair to him. It’s actually a lot of the reason I originally wanted Sarah to move in. I thought she could help fill the aching hole I have because Noah is gone all the time. It didn’t work. She wouldn’t come out of her room. I was still alone all the time only I had another person to clean up after. I couldn’t do it.

I know I “should” have a better control over my temper but I don’t. I can (barely) keep it off the kids. As a result when an adult walks in the door they become the lightning rod for all the emotions I was not allowed to express at the kids. Sarah really didn’t appreciate being the person on whom I dumped my anger. I don’t blame her. I don’t blame Sarah for hiding from my frequent anger eruptions. She has every right to do that. She had every right in the whole world to not want to be my punching bag. Truly. I am not upset with her for avoiding me. I just couldn’t live with it. I couldn’t handle living with another person I had to be really nice to. I am too selfish. I am too much of a bitch. It leaves Noah by himself as the person I can get angry at.

It’s not really fun being the one person I can safely get angry at. Noah deals with. Noah understands that I really don’t have many outlets. He is the adult in my life I can talk to about the hard things. That means he gets all the hard things. Including when I am angry with him and blame him for not supporting me enough.

Before we got married I was quite cruel to Noah about how “lazy” he was. It took several years of him ramping up work stuff more and more before I understood that all the staring at a glowing box he does is “work”. And it directly leads to money that supports me. I have tried hard to get rid of my attitude but it’s hard. I was taught, specifically and deliberately, that mental work doesn’t “count” and doing a lot of it without doing physical work makes you a piece of shit. You are a lazy piece of shit. You are shiftless. You are nothing. I didn’t grow up with a family who values academia to say the least.

It’s been a gradual process as I try to discover how to live with someone who lives and works in his head. Tom wasn’t like Noah. Tom also had the hard streak of “must work with hands in order to not look ‘lazy'” and he would do things like build furniture on the weekend. It felt like, sure he does namby pamby brain work during the week but he is still a man. He can fix my computer, my car, and when I say, “I’m tired of having an electric oven. I would like gas” he did all the work to convert the kitchen for me. He just did it. Like that. No big deal. Err, Noah doesn’t do that.

If Noah does a house chore he always leaves parts for me. If he had to use tools they are left out until I put them away. I can wait for fucking weeks and look at the big shop vac he left out after cleaning the hot tub and it won’t go anywhere until I put it away. (Thank you for cleaning the hot tub. That is a huge, shitty job and I didn’t want to do it. I’m really appreciative.)

In many of the worlds I have lived in, Noah would be a worthless piece of shit. But he really isn’t. He isn’t. He isn’t. He isn’t. He works very hard. He does a lot of chores. He spends as much time with the kids as he can. He pays as much attention to me as he possibly can. He works at things that are very difficult to him from when he wakes up until he passes out. I know that. I can see it.

But I get angry with him for not instinctively filling all the roles I kind of assign him in my head. I get mad that supporting our family creeps slowly into filling more and more and more hours. I get mad because I want more support. I thought I would have support. All those people at my baby shower and Noah promised me I would have more support. People are liars.

You aren’t supposed to say that though. I have gotten support. I have a lot of people I can call out of the blue for help. They will be happy to help if I specifically ask and chase them down. But frankly, most of them don’t pursue relationships with my kids so I have let it fall away. I can’t chase people down and beg them to have a relationship with my kids. Most people don’t really give a shit. I have to let it go. I have to not try to force it and create it. Then my kids will turn into me. They will have to get used to trying to form relationships only to observe that once they stop doing all the work and travel… they just don’t see people any more. It’s not worth it. It’s really not.

It’s not worth it *to me* to try and form community. I’m so tired of being lied to. I don’t trust people. I hate people. And Noah has to live with me. And I feel so bad. I’m sorry I don’t trust Noah. I’m sorry I bite his head off. I’m sorry that he has to bear the brunt of what a fucking asshole I am. I really feel like that is probably a bad deal for him. I’m not sure he should do it. But the alternatives are really bad for me so I try not to encourage them too much.

Whether I try hard at it or not I drive people away. When I try to get close to them it just means that I am opening myself up to more hurt. I’m not sure how much more I can bear.

I feel terrible when I yell at Noah. For days I feel this hanging cloud over me. He’s going to get sick of me being an asshole too. He is going to leave, just like everyone else. He has been kind of avoiding me lately. Out alone time is full of me being a bitch. I don’t blame him. I wish I could avoid a bitch like me too.

It’s scheduling stuff. That’s all.

It’s not helping that as the days go by I hate running more and more. I don’t want to do it. It’s physically uncomfortable (not painful, but I am clearly straining my body). I’m god damn exhausted All.The.Fucking.Time. It doesn’t really feel like relaxing alone time. The only time I have to relax and be quiet is when I am smoking pot. I may never stop at this rate. I’m developing a Pavlovian response that I am only allowed to sit down, I am only allowed to write, I am only allowed to read the fucking internet when I am smoking. That’s when I sit down. That is the closest I have to rest. And I type furiously in a bad posture the whole time and my arms hate me. I think I should look into arm braces.

Noah isn’t doing anything terrible to me. He really isn’t. He’s not being selfish. He’s not being excessive about the time he needs, not really. It’s not his fault that I am so alone. It’s really not. I can’t expect him to be everything to me. He can’t be. It’s not fair. Some year I am going to have to realize that not everyone in the world is alone, but I always will be. I need to stop resenting it. I need to stop feeling angry with Noah for abandoning me–he’s not. It’s not his fault that I have driven everyone else away. I can’t expect him to make up for everyone else.

I go back and forth between believing I live a life of utter pointlessness–I feel like a complete waste of oxygen–and believing I must have lived through my childhood for a reason. Please, please, please let there be some kind of plan. Please, let me be useful. Please, let there be something I can do that is worth doing. That is worth going through hell for. What I am doing isn’t. What I am doing means that going through hell should kill you. There is no reason to survive for more of this.

In choosing to not die today I feel like what I am doing is dooming Noah. I will hurt him over and over. Yes, I wake up in the morning and sob and cry for hours because I believe Noah would be better off if he didn’t live with a disgusting bully like me. He says I’m not that bad. Yeah, my tone of voice isn’t great but I’m not that bad. I don’t believe him. Because he will change his mind one of these days. Everyone does. I’m not worth putting up with. I really want to die today. I don’t want to fucking run. I want to die. I don’t want to do today.

But I have to run nine miles. And one of the home schooling moms invited us to walk to our local park today and meet her at 10. (Her son is kind of obsessed with Shanna and vice versa.) I try not to speak very much around her. She seems nice. I don’t want to drive her away. So I’m very quiet. The only way for me to earn a grudging entry into the group, I feel, is for me to be as silent as possible. The only thing me speaking does is earn me a swift kick in the backside. I can’t do that to my kids. So I’ll shut up. Just shut up, Kristine. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. No one wants to hear your stupid, fucking mouth. You stupid, mean, little bitch.

I don’t think that getting over my anger is the point.

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“Get busy living or get busy dying.”- Shawshank Redemption.

Sometimes it feels like life is about learning how to come to grips with your wasted potential. I could do _______ if only ___________. It’s a long series of conversations with yourself as you narrow down possibilities in life until the only path you could possibly take is completely obvious. Look, you’ve been working towards this all along. You did ______ and then you did _____ so obviously ______.

But believing that requires some underlying belief in a greater plan. Things are not inevitable. Things are changeable right up until the second they happen. It’s random. It has to be.

It has to be for me because otherwise there would have to be some specific reason I was picked out of a hat to suffer far more than other people. I’m sorry, there is no Kushiel looking out for my well being. I’ve read the Bible. I’ve read big parts of the Book of Mormon. I’ve read books by Martin Buber and St. Thomas (Aquinas, of course) and Sr. Thomas More and and. I did all the classes required for a masters degree in English. I got good grades. I read. I studied. I didn’t know I was supposed to be practicing handwriting. Whoops. Anyway.

I am educated. I have read what the masters think of the world. Sometimes I agree with them but often I don’t. I have had significant personal experience that disagrees with their beliefs.

I have two ways I can handle that. I can decide that they are right or I can decide that I am right.

Now, I like to hedge my bets. I have strong opinions but I’m willing to reconsider them given reason. It’s very rare that I bother to try, I am human after all. But when something challenges my belief structure I have to think about it very hard. I know I am not always right (really, D).

I kind of feel like I should stay off social networking sites for a while. I am feeling too many “shoulds”. I need to do what I am going to do and not worry about whether other people approve or not. Of course there are lots of people who don’t. Will I let that stop me? No. Then why let it bother me?

Because when people I love reject me in harsh ways it bothers me. When people I love tell people they think I am dangerous it bothers me.

Are they right?

I’m told I need to get over my anger. I’m not sure that it is anger I need to get over. I need to get over wanting things from other people. I need to really and truly not give a shit if a given person likes me or not. I know who my friends are.

As the legal next-of-kin I think I feel very reasonable about treating the God-Mamas as family. They take the kids every month. They have a very serious on-going relationship. They are invested and serious about it. That’s the last time I am going to do that to my kids. My family unit is closed. I can care about me. I can care about Noah. I can care about Shanna. I can care about Calli. I should not try to make sure there is stuff left for other people. Maybe there will be and maybe there won’t. My friends understand. They really don’t have high expectations of me–which should be depressing only it isn’t. They like me anyway.

Anger and anxiety are both emotions that are about energy flow. (In my opinion. I’m going to babble even more whacko than usual tonight. Sorry. It’s been a very long and very sober day and I’ve had time to sit with my anger more than I usually do.) I have a lot of energy. I have spent my entire life feeling like I am sitting with a burning wire of energy in the middle of my body. It churns my stomach. It constricts my throat and my lungs.

People are monolithic for me in a way that I don’t think most people understand. My life has always changed a lot. Every so often I up and move either geographically or in social sphere. As I age there is more and more overlap in communities. I’m having a harder and harder time going out. It’s scarier than I like admitting.

If I had been funneling my whole life towards what I am doing now the path would have looked different, don’t you think? It all depends on how you frame it. I’m a stay at home mom. I used to be a high school teacher. I’ve been married for nearly six years (anniversary is in a couple of weeks). I live less than twenty-eight miles away from my elementary school (well, one of them). My middle and high schools (at least five of them) are slightly closer to me than that. I’m a hippie. I dress very conservatively most of the time. I don’t have a television or watch anything approximating television programming on a computer. I garden a lot. I homeschool. I do building projects.

I am angry. I stay home a lot because I am afraid and I am fucking angry that I am afraid. Today we went to the post office. It went fine. The kids started to get into things but were easily distracted. Nevertheless I spent the whole time feeling very anxious. I was afraid my kids would get yelled at. I was afraid I would get yelled at. I was afraid the woman helping me would be mean. Good freakin grief. It’s ridiculous. I started crying and hyperventilating and the woman helping me told me it would be ok. That’s god damn embarrassing. I’m a fucking adult.

You want to tell me I should just get over it again? Oh fuck off. But the whole episode was under a minute. It’s not like it is a big deal. Only it hurts. It hurts my stomach. It hurts my heart. It hurts my throat. It hurts my head. It hurts my lungs. I feel like I am dying. If I could just stop it I would. There is no magic drug for me. The only thing I can do is dope myself to get the panic to stop. Look at any psych drug on the market. That’s what they do. They do it in different ways, but whatever.

I don’t really see a point in trying to live a long life if I am going to spend a lot of time every day in pain because my brain doesn’t understand that I am not in danger. It’s not like she had the power to prevent me from sending my packages. If she was really bitchy I could have gone to UPS. (But I’ll say: the gruffness from the ladies in the Mountain View USPS is just a front. They are softies.) She had no power to hurt me. Someone feeling irritated by my kids in the fifteen minutes we are in the post office is really not my problem. Why do I care?

Oh wait. That’s called trauma. Sort of. Kind of. I’m not sure. At some point I have to get it through my fool head that there are assholes in the world who are going to be rude to me and mine. It’s not about anything I’ve done. Well, not necessarily. For an awful lot of people I just have to exist. I have to have the god damn audacity to open my white trash mouth. I am offensive.

People like it when you are afraid of them. It makes them feel protective. It makes them feel big. It makes them feel powerful. People like it. I have spent a lot of time afraid and I can see how people react.

I feel like I am searching, always searching, for what I supposed to be doing. How am I wasting my potential? I don’t know. I look for seeds in my life to help me tell the future but unfortunately the future hasn’t been written yet. I have to write it.

It means I’m not looking at right now. It means I’m scared. I’m angry because a lot of people want to tell me things that all boil down to being raped is a womans own fault because the only logical conclusion I can come to is those people believe I deserve to be raped. I cannot put my mind around that. No. I can’t. It’s not possible. No one is born to be raped. Just because I have a cunt that does not decide my destiny.

I am a stay at home mom. I am a stay-at-home-a-lot mom. Well, I like taking BART on outings. Then we can take the bus and I can be stoned all day. I can be calm. I can let the children go at their pace. I don’t feel anxious about being in other peoples way. I don’t feel guilty that I am sitting when obviously this more deserving person (like a guy in his 50’s) should be sitting. No. I have two squirming kids. I should be fucking sitting. Otherwise they will fall and hurt themselves. That’s just stupid.

But I worry. I worry about offending people. I worry about making other people feel annoyed by my physical presence. You’d never guess by how I write, would you? In the privacy of a room by myself I have the biggest cojones of them all. Please join me in a derisive snicker, right?

I have nothing to offer the world to justify the worth of my opinions. I am fairly unlikely to pursue further academic studies. At this moment in time that sounds like hell on earth. Which unfortunately may mean I do it some day. I’m stupid like that. Next time I will practice my handwriting. And it won’t be English. Fuck English.

I don’t think that I need to get over my anger. I need to find a way to use it. I have a lot of energy. When I decide to get going on a project I work like a demon. I get a very large amount done in a short period of time. But I’m a woman. It’s fairly unlikely to ever be noticed. It helps that I pick lame menial jobs because I think that is what someone like me should be doing. I think I never noticed that I stopped working at Boston Market. I still think I am an ignorant fool who cannot be right. Look, all these people tell me I am wrong.

Well, fuck them. I don’t like their system. There is no way for me to win in their system; I was born damned.

Before you tell me to stop being angry let me hit you as many times as I have been hit. Let me rape you as many times as I have been raped. Then I will put you into a culture that tells you it is all your fucking fault that it happened. Then we can talk about anger.

What else did you expect to have happen? Do you know how many people in uniform I’ve had sneer that at me when something inappropriate and illegal happens to me? I can’t really remember. For a while there I was put on drugs against my will when I was a teenager and I can’t remember that period so an exact number is truly beyond me.

I have been told to sit down and shut up and don’t get angry all my life. I don’t think that is a message I should listen to. I think that is a message that seals my doom. I’m not saying that everyone has to be angry with me. I’m saying that once you are marked as prey–once you are truly afraid they smell you. If I am angry enough I can drive them away. I no longer look like easy prey even though they know what I am. I finally got close enough to the herd to not be the weakest link.

And now that I am closer to the herd the mother fuckers around me are going, “Oh shit, who let her show up?” It’s interesting to watch. I just piss people off. I don’t even have to try. I just have to say what I think. I make people angry. Even if I wasn’t angry to start with. It’s interesting.

I make people angry when I speak to them. Maybe I should just stop speaking to them. I don’t mean become selectively mute, that’s a bit extreme. I mean that maybe I should stop setting the bar so god damn low on who I try to become friends with. I should act like I’m worth jumping through some hoops. People do it. They really do. It’s kind of weird.

I think I should stay of social networking sites for a while. Outside of my house there is nothing but bad. Inside my house I live in Wonderland. It’s really nice here. We sing and play games. We dance and should and run around. We paint and cook and garden. We grow up together. We learn how to do things together. We learn how to gently coexist with another human being. When someone slaps you in the face while you are sleeping it is perfectly acceptable to yell, “What the hell are you doing?!” before you are actually awake. (I am very articulate while mostly asleep.) It’s not ok to yell such a thing while fully conscious. We have Rules. No name calling. No hitting. You can’t put anyone down. Everyone deserves to have space but we need to be careful how our space effects other people. Every day involves “I love you” and “I am really glad I know you” and hugs and kisses.

But I know with every day that marches forward that two of these relationships are going to change. They are going to go off into the world. They are not going to stay with me and meet my needs. I have to do that for myself.

Some people can wait until the kids are teenagers to worry about it. My kid is about to turn two. Oh shit. I only have sixteen years to plan. I’m not sure that is long enough. I’m not sure that is long enough for me to finish growing up. I feel guilty because Noah is my provider. Because we have decided that his salary is good for both of. We don’t want another thing pulling from the available energy in our lives–probably ever. I feel like I am wasting my potential. I feel like I am letting down my feminism. I feel like I am setting myself up for a fall. I feel like…

I feel like I am waiting for the inevitable conclusion of the life of a girl like me. What terrible thing will happen next? How will Noah turn on me? Will he wait until a year or two after the kids are gone and say, “I just stayed for the kids.” I don’t think so. I don’t think he could fake that facial expression. He’s a good liar, don’t get me wrong, but not that good. Not with me. I know when that face happens. It isn’t in company. I’ve been watching this man for a while now. I intend to keep watching him. My very survival depends on him.

That’s the bit that is weird and hard to swallow. Basically because it is a crock of shit. Whatever. I wouldn’t necessarily like everything I had to do, but if I had to do it I would.

It’s not that I need to stop being angry. Anger happens. It stops when it stops. But I do really need to stop looking for it. I investigate the candidates before every election and beyond that I need to just live in my little bubble. I feel like we exist outside the modern world with the glaring exception of the glowing box I am staring at. Ok, not really outside the modern world–give me a break. But we do live with a shocking lack of popular culture. Of any kind, really. I suppose we listen to some music but certainly not every day. I would say not every week. Ok, that’s not true for me right now. I listen to music while I run. That’s a new hobby this year. I’m not sure how that will go long term. And my phone battery can’t play music through a whole long run so my phone is now annoying useless on runs. Bummer.

People are going to think I’m a trainwreck. To that I cock my head to the side and say, “Have you ever seen a train wreck?” Things have settled down in my life remarkably over the last few years. Cutting off my family was hard and caused a big bump, yes. I was abused as a child, yes. I haven’t been raped in more than five years? Something like that. That’s the longest stretch of my life. I’m waiting for the next thing that will hurt me. It is very confusing to my brain that I have this nice man in the house.

I would have been fine today if I was able to cut before going to the post office. Because when I start to feel panic I press on the fresh wounds and that keeps me level. It’s more reliable than any drug I’ve ever tried. But people get quite upset with me, so I stopped. I think that really I just don’t want to teach my children to do it. I don’t want them to learn my panic and fear and need for pain.

It’s not that those monolithic “them” are actually all bad. But I have no reason to go fishing to find out. It’s kind of freeing, really. I don’t have to care if people will want to do me ill or not if I don’t give them an opportunity.

What does it feel like to have distant community? I only sort of know. I get it somewhat in the Leather community. I really need some place I can belong with my kids. I’m trying to build places. We are consistent (mostly, barring various events like a washing machine flooding my garage). We have patterns. We have friends. We have relationships.

What is it I am supposed to get over my anger for? What is it that I am supposed to do? Ahhh grasshopper–what I should do is not make people feel uncomfortable. Sorry mate, that ship sailed. I’m going to make you uncomfortable.

I make plans. And I make plans. And I make plans. When you call the suicide hotline one of the first thing they ask you is if you have “a plan”. I laugh. I have plans. I have worked out so many ways to die that I can’t casually list them all. First I do this and then I do that and then I have to look at this and then… I know the dozens of steps involved in any number of ways to die. How accidental can I make it look? Where should I leave the consolidated list of passwords so Noah isn’t screwed? Where… etc.

But the point isn’t to stop being angry. Or really even to stop being afraid. That can’t be the point. If that is the point I will always fail. You can’t decide to stop something. You have to decide to do something else instead. I decide every day over and over. It’s exhausting. It’s hard. I have to sit here all day every day thinking carefully about what I say and what I do. You have read this far in my blog. Surely you think I am a psycho about to fly off the handle any moment now. I’m truly not. I’m pretty quiet. Sometimes I speak unexpectedly sharply. Sometimes my tone of voice is more harsh than seems appropriate to the topic. If I am alone with my family I instantly say, “Oh I’m sorry that came out harsher than I meant it. I’ll try again.” I expect my kids to do the same thing. I say, “Try again.” Shanna says it to me now. It’s interesting to negotiate.

My children are not in charge of me. My children are not responsible for me and they never will be. But they get to have preferences to. How do I sit back and very slowly learn someone like this? I don’t know. I’ve never done very well at close intimate relationships. I just know how to spend a lot of time alone in a room. But I’m trying. I get a couple of hours of sitting alone in a room every day or I feel like I am going to lose my mind.

I didn’t used to be this way. It feels like the anger is the war between my need for people and my terror of them. I don’t want to have any of the feelings I have about people and I can’t make them go away just by wishing and I am fucking angry about it. I hate that I cry over stupid things. I couldn’t figure out a form. It wasn’t a big deal.

The last time it was truly a big deal was when Denise said, “Have you ever had anyone close to you die.” I didn’t let her set the terms of my reality then–she doesn’t get to tell my my father and brother were not close to me–and I don’t think I should let random assholes on the internet. That seems kind of stupid and weak minded, don’t you think?

There is a lot of “you” tonight. I don’t think I do that very often. I don’t even know who I am writing to. I periodically rotate through various people in my head and no one fits. I’m not ranting at anyone. I’m ranting at the unseen you. The one who hurts me. The one whose plan it is. The one I don’t believe in.

I’m very angry at God because I can’t be an atheist. I have known things. I have to believe in my own experiences or I’m fucked. But I don’t think there is a plan. I don’t think it’s the Christian God. I don’t know what it is. But something knows I am here. I’m not sure it cares much one way or another. But it knows something more than me. I don’t know how much more. And it’s probably fallible. Isn’t everything?

I feel like I have no culture to retreat to. I am not Christian. I am currently upper middle class according to my bank balance. In attitude and behavior I am white trash. I don’t know how else to be. I offend people. I have always offended people. I have the audacity to be raped and complain about it. Don’t I know I should shut up?

neeeeeeedy

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I wanted to write about fifteen miles while it was fresh in my mind. I didn’t. It was euphoric and triumphant. Tomorrow morning I am going to do sixteen miles. I’m changing directions slightly for the early part and adding hill. I’m a little nervous. I’m hoping to once again make it in four hours. That’s cocky. That’s really cocky. We are meeting at the same place. Mmmm rewarding noodles.

It’s hard knowing that it is probably smart for people to keep me out at arms length. If you keep me out at arms length I never start to have expectations of you. I won’t let myself feel like I need something from you. For me to have needs in the direction of people is usually the kiss of death. Noah is the last man standing.

Does that make me straight?

I think about that a lot lately. I think about self-identity. What is the point? The point is that if someone wants to know what the difference is between having sex with someone who is transgendered, transvestite, or a butch dyke I can describe it in great detail from personal experience. It was all fun.

Sometimes I look at Noah and feel kind of weird. It’s sort of ironic that I married someone from a small Texas town who had some kind of semi-status from inherited position there. Given my history I mean. And together we are very cis-gendered.

What does being queer mean, anyway?

What does being a “runner” mean? If I walk sixteen miles tomorrow because I am tired am I a “runner”?

I have endurance. I am persistant to the limits I can achieve with my body. I’m not naturally athletic or gifted. I’m stubborn. I’m angry. I’m sad. I have so much grief. I want to prove to myself that I am as good as my brother. No, I’m not as fast as him. I hope he has matured to the point where he wouldn’t be an asshole about that. I think so.

I’m scared to see him and I’m scared not to see him. He despises me. He despises what I have done and who I am and that I had the utter gall to talk about it in public. But I’m going to drive my husband nuts with having to accomodate me as I train for a marathon on my brother’s turf.

Fuck you. You can’t tell me that I am weak. I am here. And at the end I will still be standing.

Lately I feel very weak. I have a lot of needs that are going unmet. I’m getting brittle. It’s hard because I can only handle asking someone to meet a need of mine if I am very ok with the answer being “no”. If I can’t take a no then I can’t ask. If I ask when I can’t afford to be told no and I don’t get help I will turn my frustration and rage on my unsuspecting friend. That’s not fair. I don’t do that.

Right now there is a towering avalanche of need. But I am so afraid of saying the wrong thing or offending people or being disappointed that I don’t know how to deal with any of it. There are a lot of different things going on right now I can’t talk about in writing. That’s hard for me. That feels silencing. That makes me feel angry on top of whatever I’m feeling anyway.

I’m sure some rational person would say, “Well why don’t you just write it and keep it private then”.

I don’t know. I learned a long time ago that I don’t write for me, exactly. I can only write if I believe someone is reading it. I have never been able to consistently maintain a paper journal but if someone speaks up and says, “By the way I read your blog every day. I care about you.” Motherfucker I’ll write every day. I’ll find the time. I will conjure it out of thin air.

It feels sick. This need in me to be seen. I started crying earlier when I realized I treat that ridiculous random validation as the closest thing I will ever have to a mother checking in on me. I feel so alone in the world. Multiple people asked me if I was ok.

It’s kind of hard for me when people notice me. I feel like Eeyore. I used to play games with not posting on my blog for months at a stretch and people didn’t notice. I took that as validation that people wouldn’t notice or be particularly impacted if I died. It actually made me feel better. Because suicide was an option that would be far less selfish for me than most people. Before I got married. Before I had kids.

I don’t have anyone in my life other than Noah with whom I have an intense on-going relationship. Ok, Shanna and Calli. Every other person in my life spends very few hours with me during the course of a year.

If I don’t write on the internet, do I exist?

If I don’t write on the internet I am surely invisible. My pragmatic self says that if I don’t write on the internet people only know the handful of sentences we exchange in person. That isn’t knowing me even slightly. From that I will decide I should be invisible. I will always believe that is just and right and the natural order of things. People like me are born bad. We should suffer in silence. If we talk about what is going on in our minds then we are traumatizing people and we don’t have the right to do that.

I’m scared of the hunt for a new therapist. During my last search I had a few one time only visits. Including with someone who told me point blank that I should never participate in group therapy or write about my experiences in a public way because that is abusive and traumatizing to the people who hear or read about my life. I don’t have the right to do that.

I have to be very careful who I allow to be an authority in my life. I have done too many things that make me already damned in the eyes of many. For a great many people I am already beyond redemption. If you think I am exaggerating then you have lead a very privileged life. I have to be careful who I allow to judge me. Well, I have to be careful if I am going to care about that judgment.

So when people tell me to just “get over” my experiences. Well, despite the fact that it makes me feel pathetic I may well be in therapy the rest of my life. They are going to always be the longest running relationships in my life outside of Noah and the kids. I need to have something. It’s very easy to deem this need pathetic if you have ways of getting your needs met that are simply not available to me.

I don’t know who are what I am defending myself against. The voices in my head. The reasons my throat feels choked all the time. I should be silent. Just shut up. Just listen. Nothing you have to say is interesting any way. Stop. Fucking. Whining.

I go to bed and wake up thinking that I want to die. I want to stop feeling this way. It hurts to move. It hurts all the time. And I don’t know what to do other than wait it out. That’s what I’ve always done. But this time I can’t do any of the impulsive things I have always done. It’s really hard. I feel like I am vibrating with tension. My muscles radiate.

I need to stretch more. I need to sleep more. I need to rest more. I need.. I need a mommy I can call and say, “Come love my babies for me so I can sleep.” But I don’t have one. And that’s just life.

I have to believe that my grief matters. Whether any one else does or not. I have to. I miss my mother. The price I pay for being allowed to go about my life without being abused is that aching hole inside me. There is a cost to everything. I miss my mother. I miss my mother like I would miss an amputated limb. I reach for her. I smell her. I see her in the mirror and in my children.

I want my mother so much I feel like I am going to explode. But contacting her would be the worst thing in the world. For everyone. For me. For my kids. For my mom. Because if I yo-yo back and forth and ask them to make it up to me I am setting myself up in the power position. I’m saying I want to be the next abuser. No. No. No.

There is a lot more I want to say. There isn’t much more I can dance around with anything resembling eloquence. And besides, I have to get up and walk (I will jog!) sixteen miles.

I will be able to call myself a marathoner. I’ll be crafty and specific. I didn’t saying “running”. That way I deal with no assholes and I still make my point.

It feels pathetic to want to figure out who I am. I am nothing. I came from nothing that should be. Nothing I can claim. I am nothing on my own in the world. I exist in relationship to three people.

I’m telling you people, my family had better not die in a freak crash without me. I won’t make it through the day. I’m only a little paranoid about them dying. But I do cry if the word comes through my head. I can’t lose them. They are all I have.

I need sleep. Sleep. Go to sleep. Stop crying. Sleep. Stretch first. It’ll be ok. Really. It’s always ok in the end. If it’s not ok yet, it’s not the end. If you’re going through hell, etc.

Mental illness is a liar.

Get it out of your head.

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None of what I am thinking is all that serious or big. Why are my emotional reactions so out of proportion? I don’t even know. That’s the trouble with brain chemistry. It’s not always reacting to real things in front of you.

I can’t start running yet. It’s too early. Yesterday as I was running I thought a lot about how I should leave my house earlier and run to Lake Elizabeth and swim out to the middle then stop swimming while it is still dark and no one will see me. I can’t start running yet. I can’t go out until people will see me. I can’t go out until I would be traumatizing other people to try and die in front of them–that’s not nice. I’m not allowed to do that.

Why isn’t it more important that I would destroy my children? They would never get over losing me. I know that. They would spend their entire lives wondering why their mother didn’t love them enough. I can’t do that to them. I love them so much. But I hurt. I want to cut. I want to do something that causes me a lot of pain. I didn’t yesterday. I cried. I curled up in the fetal position and sobbed but I didn’t self-harm. I even ate properly at all the appropriate times.

It is very hard to believe that I am worth taking care of. How could I possibly be worth any effort? But every body takes effort. Living in a body is work. You have to feed it and let it rest and treat it at least a little gently. I see how much effort bodies take because I care for two small ones. It’s a lot of forking work. Doing the work for them makes me feel so bad. Why didn’t anyone want to care for me? Why didn’t anyone love me?

I feel taunted every day by the way I lived. I feel angry and jealous of my children. Why didn’t anyone love me? Being nice to my kids makes me feel really bitter. I hate that I have to stop and make up what a good person would do because I don’t know. I see my children do things and what I see in my head are these still-frame pictures of what happened to me when I did the same thing. I know what happened to me was wrong but I don’t know what to do.

I feel over and over all day how bad I must be to deserve how I was treated. I feel like I am choking and drowning in how bad bad bad I am. I deserve to suffer. I deserve to be in pain. I deserve to be told to shut my fucking mouth. I shouldn’t speak at all. I should be seen and not heard.

I don’t want my kids to feel this way.

As an adult I feel so much shame for the things I don’t know how to do well. All those things that other people spent long hours on during childhood. I hid. I didn’t learn things. If I couldn’t get it out of a book by myself it didn’t exist. I had no way of going and learning skills or behaviors or activities.

I feel overwhelmed by how badly living in poverty was. I feel like I’m not over it. I don’t know how to be someone who is safe. I only know what it means to be unsafe and in danger.

I miss my mom. I miss my mom so much that I would like to curl up and die to get away from missing her like this. I love my mommy. I want my mommy. I miss my mommy. But my mommy would hurt me. I think if I let my mommy hurt me again I wouldn’t live through it. That’s a lot of why I don’t have contact with her any more. I was absolutely not going to be able to live through more. I can’t be who she needs me to be.

I feel like I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what possible worth I might have. I don’t feel very useful. But people aren’t worthy or not based on work, are they? I don’t know. I work very hard. It always feels like my work is inadequate. I am inadequate.

I don’t intend to die today. I have stuff to do. I need to finish the box for Jenny. I need to send the care package off to the MDC woman who is leaving her abusive husband. I do things that make other people feel seen and important and loved. Why don’t I feel that way? What would it take?

I have a truly amazing husband. I don’t understand why he loves me so much. He’s so patient and kind. He doesn’t yell at me very often. I think he raises his voice a couple of times a year and it’s only to be heard over ambient noise. Noah is so very nice to me. I feel so undeserving. Every so often I ask him if he is storing up bitterness over the things I make him put up with. I ask him if he wants to get even with me. He gets the most baffled look. He can’t understand why I would think he feels that way. Experience.

I don’t feel like I hold up my end of the bargain. I don’t feel like I really make his life better. Certainly not enough better to justify putting up with me. I am so difficult. So unpleasant.

I wish I could get these voices out of my head. I would I could cut my mother’s voice out of my brain. “Why do you have to be so unpleasant? Why are you so difficult?” I don’t know, maybe because I was being raped and beaten and malnourished and neglected? Maybe that is why I was difficult? It really doesn’t matter why. I shouldn’t be inconveniencing anyone.

I want this panic and hate in my chest to leave. I want it gone. I want to not feel like my heart is racing and any minute terrible things will happen to me. Any minute Noah is going to turn on me and declare that he is well and truly sick of me–get out.

Instead, when I come back from the bathroom at 4:30 in the morning he talks to me for half an hour or so. When he hears me walk in the room he lifts his head from the pillow and smiles as he reaches for me. Having me near him makes him feel happier. I don’t understand. How can I make someone happy?

Mental illness is a liar. My mother is a liar. My sister is a liar. The voices in my head are liars. They tell me I am bad. That I hurt people by existing. Everyone would be better off if I was dead. My sister used to tell me that. Everyone would be better off if you weren’t here. I still believe it. And that’s part of why I walked away from my family. If you are better off without me, fine be without me. That doesn’t mean I have to die.

I’m feeling slightly weird about a few different interactions in my life. I can’t talk about them. Going forward I need to carefully weigh, “Is this person my friend or is this person a relationship with my children” and if someone is more on the kid end I simply can’t bring up issues. When I bring up issues I drive people away. I can’t do that to my kids forever. I have to stop listening and stop caring about people. I need to ignore their behavior and avoid them myself while facilitating Shanna having access. Her boundaries are different from mine.

I can’t keep pushing people away from my kids. The list of casualties in my life is long. And that woman who sent me the nasty Dear Jane letter just popped up again. She wants to reconcile because she misses me and she doesn’t want to have a panic attack for two days every time she runs into me. I’ll try real hard to care about your fucking panic attacks you stupid bitch.

I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have Noah. I would be a lot more sad. I know that part. I don’t feel like I deserve him. I know he is better than me. He tries to convince me that I am more educated but I’m having none of it. I don’t have a degree higher than his. And his degrees are from an actually difficult university. I went to a state school so pathetic it no longer even has pride of place-name. Awesome.

I’m really tired. This week the running is getting to me. I’m sleeping but waking up feeling really bad. Yay depression? It doesn’t matter if I’m depressed or if what I am doing is hard. It has to get done. Life moves on. We go to Disneyland in less than eight weeks. My marathon is in eight weeks and three days. Eep. That’s a lot of fun to talk to Shanna about.

I have a lot of good in my life. I am privileged. I am pampered and kept safe. Why do I feel like I am still in danger? Why doesn’t my brain believe my current circumstances? I don’t know. But it’s fucking annoying.

Bad day.

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Today is really bad for me. And I can’t talk about it. Talking about it at all would be inappropriate. I have these two small children here, you see. Shanna has a cruddy nose and a sore throat. I will be here all day with them by myself. Noah will be home after bedtime. It’s a very busy day for him.

I’m very suicidal. Not in the sense that I think that people should send someone to watch my children because they are at risk. More that I hate myself a lot today. I feel like I am the sole source of bad for my children. I feel like they would be much better off without a toxic piece of shit like me. Someone less stupid could take care of them. Someone who doesn’t need to curl up in bed with a teddy bear and cry at thirty.

Nothing bad has happened today or yesterday or even the day before. But I find places to hide in my house and I take breaks to cry, silently. I’m not supposed to be crying. It is shameful that I am crying. What an ungrateful piece of shit. But I can’t stop. I can’t stop.

This process blows.

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I’ve been sitting here thinking about why I need a therapist so much all of a sudden. What is this urge. What does it mean? Why is it happening?

I have this intense need to be seen. I need to feel like I exist in the world and I need to see proof of myself reflected in the eyes of other people. Right now I have Noah and the kids, mostly. I go through my life feeling invisible. I am not someone in the eyes of the people around me. I am furniture. They don’t know me and they don’t particularly care.

I have wonderful friends who give me what they can. They are all busy people. I tried to change the nature of my friendships-called-family and they blew up badly. It’s happened one right after another. I can’t keep risking this. This is too hurtful. My need is just too much for people.

I see a therapist week after week after week after week because otherwise no one gives a fucking shit about the stupid piddly shit of my life. I feel like I only exist in the highlights. No one cares what I am actually struggling with. No one wants the story. No one has time. Some of them kind of wish they could. The problem is that if they wish they could maybe then they feel some shame about not being able to help me. Then they get mad at me. Because it’s my fault they feel ashamed.

I need a therapist because I need to see knowledge of me reflected in someones eyes. I desperately fucking need to have someone know my complex story so that I can make small references to the distant past that is hugely significant. I fucking need that. I can’t handle having to live my life in the Readers Digest Version. I feel like a fake and a liar all the god damn time. I’m constantly feeling my heart race because I’m afraid I’ll slip and talk about the wrong thing at the wrong time and all of a sudden people will hate me and tell me they don’t want to be near me any more.

Don’t call this fucking paranoia. This is my god damn life.

I have to pay someone to be as consistent as I need. And even when I do pay someone to be in this role I can’t get it.

I’m looking for a parent. I’m looking for someone to be an active mentor. I feel so fucking alone. I’m so scared. I think I am pathetic. Isn’t it past time I was the adult already?

But I still hide under the desk and cry because I don’t know what to do when I feel consumed with self-loathing other than to hurt myself in some way and I’m trying not to teach that. I don’t know what to do. Right now I rock and cry. I feel like a blithering idiot but I try to comfort myself. I feel really stupid. I stroke my own hair.

No. No one is ever going to take care of me. I will never have that. When I am sick I have to get up and deal with it by myself. It is never going to be different. I just missed that. These things are stupid and petty and small.

But I haven’t cut myself in over a year. I haven’t cut myself since I stopped trying to meet the needs of my chosen family. I just can’t. I have nothing to give. If I want to keep the self control to not mutilate myself I have to save that energy. It is that hard to not hurt myself. To not beat my head on the floor. To not punch door frames.

Sometimes all I can do is sit under the desk and cry.

I need a therapist because I need someone to watch the seasons of my life. Who can coach me. Who can talk to me about why I am currently struggling and what are the “balls” I have to drop. How I can I figure out how to lower the amount of harm in my life? It’s a process.

When I am actively involved in communities I can sometimes coast without a therapist and do ok. I had a Buddy when I was a teacher. He had the classroom next to mine. We spent a lot of time talking. He got a lot of the story. Not the details of abuse or anything. But he learned a lot about me. A lot more than a therapist given how much time we spent talking.

I had that at the munch when I dated Tom. Losing that in the breakup was hard.

I need a therapist because for me what I am feeling right now is what I have always felt and will always feel. It’s not true. I have a very convenient memory. I need someone that I touch base with who really focuses on me. Where I get to be selfish and self absorbed and no I am not going to keep my mouth shut because I don’t want to “burden you”. Fucker I need some god damn support. And I have to pay for it. And it’s flakey. And it might die. Or tell me to go away because I do something horrible. Or it might stop showing up within an hour of the assigned start time. Or it might… just… need to move on. I’m a client, not a friend.

As inadequate as it is… it’s the only way I can have a relationship with someone where I see them every week. I need that. Even though it makes me feel pathetic and stupid and small. Better to pay a therapist to be my friend than to kill myself because I feel like I don’t fucking matter.

Just seems like money well spent.

relationship blathering

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One of the best things about writing alone in a room is I don’t have to care about “over sharing”. If people want to stop reading they can and it’s really not my problem. Yay! Ok, that is as much of a warning as you are going to get.

I’m sick. I have a low grade fever; I’m coughing; I have post-nasal drip; I have diarrhea; my throat hurts. Yesterday I went running anyway. When I got home blacksheep told me that I don’t have to run when I am sick. This was exactly what I needed to hear. I have a weird attitude towards advice. Long-time readers are hesitant to suggest anything to me because for many years I responded with immediate vicious hostility to any sign of advice. Mostly because people who didn’t know me that well were going off half-cocked. The advice wasn’t always relevant and I’m not a very nice person about handling that. I understand that is basically a character failing on my part. Such is life.

I am extremely careful in my head about hierarchies. I assign people authority and stature in my head and don’t tell them. If you tell the bastards they get a big head and want to take the increased amount of influence for a spin. Bad plan. But I have little weights and measures in my head that tell me about the person who is talking. It carefully decides how much I should give a shit about what they are saying.

I have been told for a long time that I’m a counter phobic six. (Enneagram shit.) I hear they are very hierarchical. Like, for example, I have a hard time arguing in my head with what blacksheep tells me about exercise. I try hard to understand that she doesn’t know everything about my experiences and I have to give her a lot of information before her advice is perfect. But it is very rare at this point for me to think “She’s wrong.” I think, “Ennnnhhhh I think she doesn’t know what I’m dealing with.” I can understand that her advice is right for 95% of people. Today it doesn’t apply to me (or whatever).

I have a lot of authorities in my head. I don’t tell people I am putting them on pedestals. You can’t tell people that.

So a friend was criticizing another friend. She said, “She lets the internet think for her.” I asked for clarification. The other person asks for advice online and then follows it. A fair bit. I could feel the blush creeping up my neck.

I don’t go to the hospital for illness until I have checked with the internet and enough people tell me it is a good idea. I have a basic belief that I am not capable of evaluating my own health state. It’s not a good belief. So I let people on the internet (let’s not fucking kid ourselves I’m not saying these people know me well or have seen my illness state) listen to my list of symptoms and then decide if it is serious or not. I think the internet has a 50/50 rate of getting me to the doctor for major illnesses (bacterial infection, strep throat, mono) and times I’m told “It’s the flu. Go home and rest.” I’ll still listen to the internet because otherwise I wouldn’t care about myself enough to end my suffering when I am seriously ill. The misfires are probably worth it but I can’t bring myself to make the call alone. I just can’t.

Someone else has to think that my suffering is bad enough and has gone on long enough and that person has to tell me to stop the madness. Without that loop I sit here and cry and feel bad and just deal with it. The human condition involves a lot of pain. Don’t be a god damn whiner. Oh but I am a whiner. A big one.

This is something I talked to my therapist a lot about. I am very careful who I let be an influence on me. I’m well aware that the vast majority of people are poison for me. They will tell me that I am bad or wrong for things I can’t change. I am who I am. I don’t need more shame. I really don’t. I don’t hurt anyone. I’ve had a lot of life experiences that permanently taint me, that’s fine. I don’t hurt anyone (who hasn’t asked very nicely). Not even that, now. I will never hurt anyone again. I feel like I have been defanged. I will never again enjoy sadistic pleasure. It’s against the rules.

It’s really weird knowing that on one hand I am absolutely depraved and sick and blah blah blah and on the other hand I’m this really quiet, mellow little suburban mom. Whose advice is relevant to me? How do I pick people to give me advice on different topics?

The older I get and the longer I stay in one place the more I can judge people based on what they do rather than what they say. That has certainly changed the hierarchy of my internal advice pedestal. I pick very carefully who is behaving in ways I want to emulate. I am a copier. That’s what I do. I pattern myself off of people I respect. I do it in ways the people themselves often don’t recognize that way–but I’m just special that way.

I care about who can show up and get the hard shit done, year after year. Who goes through strife and then recovers and moves on? Who has actual coping skills? What are they? How do they work? How did they develop their expertise in a topic? Why should I respect them?

I’m really harsh in my evaluations. If you ever want to know how I evaluate you go ahead and ask. I’ll tell you. I don’t see any point in hiding it or sugar coating it. I’ll tell you the good, the bad, and the ugly about what I see. Only there is this little manipulation hiding in that–the people I have a problem with probably aren’t reading my journal. Ha.

Many of the women I know view their endurance in a shameful light. They do not take pride in their ability to endure. They are in a crappy relationship and they don’t leave so they view that as a sign of their generic weakness. Life is really complicated. Sometimes those crappy relationships are the bedrock of a whole town. If you take away that one relationship it seems like everything else will crumble. You will have to go build a new town. That’s hard. If you haven’t done a lot of big life transitions such a change is terrifying. Noah had better not turn into a shitty husband in ten or fifteen years because I will probably be too chicken to leave him at that point. I will have invested too much of myself in him. I don’t want to leave the parts of me I gave him. I get it.

Up to now leaving has been so easy. I couldn’t understand why people stayed. For me the devil you don’t know is pretty much always safer than the devil you know so jump ship often. You’ll end up in this magical tidal surge that will take you to the right deserted island in the Bahamas. It’ll work out.

I am so harsh in defending myself that I don’t think people understand that I think they are better than me. I’m defending my pitiful right to be less than you. I tell myself often that people disliking me is not a reason to die. Their opinion is not important enough. It’s hard to believe that my right to exist trumps other peoples right to not be bothered by disgusting people like me. These days it seems to me that I only have the ghost of disgusting behavior lying around the house and I should still be sacrificed. It’s for the good of the whole. People who are bad or unruly should be culled for the sake of the herd. One bad apple can spoil a bunch.

I sit here in isolation and think about the threads in my life. The people who touch me at least occasionally. I think about why I know them. I consciously decide over and over if I want to keep knowing them or if I want to just stop making the effort. Not very many people make a lot of effort to keep in contact with me. That’s part of what makes you so unique, D. You have called me every few months for more than ten years no matter where you were in the world. I feel so very special. You want to know what is happening in my life. Even though you drive me nuts sometimes and I can barely understand you because you talk so fast I feel like my life would be empty and sad without you. I wouldn’t have this mirror floating around in the world carrying a positive image of me. Btw- get off the internet and go finish your damn paper.

A lot of people have come and gone in my life. I have to consciously try to not have attachment to people staying. That is how I can end relationships. I know that if I stop trying the other person won’t put effort into it until they want something from me. Sometimes it is years before they look up and around and realize I’m not nearby any more. It is interesting when people still have attachment to me and I have psychologically let them go.

There is a concept called the Monkey Sphere (maybe I’ll add a link when internet comes back on. If I forget you can google it yourself). Basically this theory is that you can only have intimate relationships with ‘x’ number of people and you can only have more distant friend relationships with ‘y’ people and you can only know so many ‘z’ people casually out in the community. As you get higher in the alphabet the numbers generally get higher. People become less of an individual investment.

I consciously think about the inner circle very hard. Who can I allow to be an actual influence on me? It’s a very loaded self-conversation. I think about how much I have hurt people and how much they put up with. I think about how much they have hurt me and how much I can put up with. I think about whether or not this person behaves in a way that will make me safe. Someone can’t be in the inner circle if they will hurt me. I mean, a little bit of occasional hurt is different. Noah isn’t perfect. Neither are my kids. I do have to keep score and be honest about it in my head. If someone develops a long-term pattern of hurting me I can’t ignore that. It would be stupid. It would be self-harming. It would be deciding that this other person is simply more important than my continued safety and health. Err, not a good decision.

People can be part of my distant community and do things that hurt me. That happens. It’s life. You ignore it and move on. That person doesn’t have a lot of influence. The hurt is small and contained.

The inner circle just has too much access. Too much influence. When I notice a bleed out starting I’m better off severing the limb. I have no other options for keeping myself safe. That’s how it feels.

It’s hard for me to decide I am a good person given how callous and self-centered I am. But then I look around the rest of the world and I notice that I’m really not so bad in the scale of things. It is hard for me to be able to feel good about myself while people in the inner circle disapprove of me. Often I decide that it is easier to cut them out of the circle than try to reconcile the situation. I don’t need people who are going to tell me I am bad. What are they basing it on? How much time have they spent with me in person watching my actual behavior? How the fuck do they know?! Because they interpret things from my journal where I focus the vast majority of my writing energy on things I think that are negative and I don’t write about my behavior all that much. Right. Yeah. Don’t need that.

I’m well aware that even my bad days are significantly better than most of the good days I had growing up. I’m doing well at this point in my life. I really am. My behavior is pretty good. Sure I talk about conversational topics that make other people uncomfortable, but that’s not a big sin as things go. I’m not hurting anyone.

I’m not allowing people to pretend that people like me don’t exist. Even though they want to. Even though people would really prefer I shut up and follow the herd. Watch tv. Talk about movies. That’s what I should talk about. Hell, even if I wanted to get back into the academia shit and talk about books that would be ok as long as I only read authors that are approved parts of the Canon. Right?

I’m not like other people. I don’t know why. I don’t understand all of the differences. But I feel a deep hostility towards people who want me to be more like them. It’s kind of funny. I pattern off of people all the time but I pick specific small parts of their behavior. I am not interested in having someone else’s life. I want my life. I may think that someone is better at _____ than me but I can also hand you a long list of ways the person does ______, ____, and ________ worse than me. I’m alright(sic), Jack.

I really like my relationship with Shanna. I’m allowed to be direct with her in ways I’m not allowed to be with anyone else (until Calli can talk more). Why did I want to be a parent? Because I believe that I have a view of the world that does not deserve to be eradicated. Because in the core of my self-serving soul I believe that who and what I am deserves to continue on after I die.

In cutting off my family I am actually showing the things my mom did right. My mother taught me to be strong. My mother taught me that not a god damn person in the world was going to make sure I was safe except for me. That has been an incredibly useful lesson. Is it possible to teach that lesson without damaging someone? I don’t know. I want to find out. In no other relationship in my life do I get to set terms from the beginning. It’s a compromise. I get to just exist in front of my kids and they can’t tell me to change. It’s… startling.

I could abuse the fuck out of them and teach them that the world is hurtful and violent. But I don’t. I teach them how to notice other people. I teach them how to be considerate and polite. I teach them how to ask for things in a way that will make it more likely they will get it. I’m trying to teach the difference between persistance and pestering.

I can go out and interact with the world and seem totally appropriate. I can keep things hidden and just be sunny and delightful and friendly. People don’t know a fucking thing is going on with me. They weren’t able to see the scars I hid. I am a fucking good liar.

I want my kids to have the choice about how people perceive them. I want them to have my versatility without the underlying damage. I’m not sure if it is possible. I don’t want to control what their variations look like, precisely. And I am very well aware that I only get about ten years of setting the terms. Then I have to start handing over control at a quicker and quicker rate. That’s how they become independent.

I don’t beat my kids because I don’t believe in my heart of hearts that what I am asking of them is always reasonable and appropriate. I know that I ask for things they can’t do. It would not be ok for me to beat them for their lack of development. I think that happens more than people want to admit. It truly is my responsibility to put a lock on the side gate so my kids can’t sneak out and play in the front yard unsupervised. Beating them for disobeying won’t help. They will still want to sneak out. They will just try harder to hide it from me. I don’t want them hiding it from me. I want to control the environment and make it safe for where they are now and gradually pull back.

Calli can’t even speak yet. There is no way she should be in the front without adult supervision. A lot of Shanna’s limits are group imposed and we talk about that. I can’t consider individual safety yet because they aren’t ready to do much separate yet. Shanna gets to run five houses down to see her friend. That is the limit of her independent solo movement. She is resentful. I repeat, “I get to make these decisions until you are older. Then I don’t get to control you. Sorry, kid.”

Even though yesterday morning started off rough emotionally I had a good day. I sat on the couch and read. I don’t feel good. Shanna went to her friend’s house and Calli napped on me. It was restful and silent. Oh that was nice. Even when they were both home they seemed to trade off who wanted to interact with me so the day was paced well.

If I think hard about the words I used and my tone it was a pretty good day. My only nasty carping was at Noah about the topic of leftovers. I’m really grateful that he puts up with me. (The kids won’t eat leftovers for lunch and Noah gets food at work. I end up eating the same damn thing over and over and sometimes it makes me cry.) Batch cooking just isn’t for me.

Abrupt topic shift (like you aren’t used to that by now): Sometimes I think it is weird that the sex I have now isn’t much like the sex I trained for. When I was nineteen a sanctimonious bitch told me that no one under twenty-five should be in the bdsm community. People should go explore vanilla sex till their thirties and then start on rougher sex. I was, understandably, unimpressed with her. When I was nineteen I had been having PIV sex for seven years by choice and I had countless oral sex partners. Telling me that I wasn’t ready and I should have more sex was hilarious. Now that I am thirty I am slightly less annoyed with her and I can basically understand why she believes that. I still think she was a sanctimonious bitch and I am still unimpressed by her.

And now the kids are in here.

Don’t make someone a priority while you are their option.

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I’m really upset about these no-shows. I was already heading in the direction of feeling depressed and having two women who loudly and adamantly have told me they are my “family” behave this way convinces me that I must be a worthless piece of shit. Even my god damn chosen family just won’t bother to think of me. I’m feeling bitter. I try really hard for my friends. I go to great lengths and deal with inconvenience to spend time with them.

I’m feeling bitter and thin and unimportant. I don’t know if this obsession with BFFs is an American thing alone or if it is normal and natural to ache for people who value you this way. I think that is what the BFF thing is about. The longing for someone to really understand you and value you and love you and think you are important. I wish I had that. Instead I get to be an audience member. I get to be an adoring fan. Friendships aren’t based on me supporting your art while you sleep through visits where you might find out something real about my life. Obviously my life isn’t that interesting to you. I understand.

I wish people would stop lying to me. I wish people would stop telling me I am important when I am obviously and demonstrably not. The continual let down hurts so much. Just be honest. You will spend time with me if you can’t find anything better to do. You will spend time with me if you have managed to successfully straighten your stereo wires in time so you are truly bored so why not.

I have Noah. I have the girls. Those are the people I can count on. That’s the list. And I shouldn’t expect too much from my kids. I can’t talk to them about being upset. That’s inappropriate. They don’t need to know why I am crying today. “Because my “friends” are assholes who don’t actually care about me and it hurts my feelings.” I can’t say that to her. So instead I think I’ll just not leave the house this week. Bad things tend to go in threes. I just won’t make more plans. I don’t really want to be ditched again. I am so god damn tired of this being ditched shit. Echoes of my childhood go through my head.

Stupid girl. Why would anyone want to be your friend. Go away. No one likes you anyway. Pissy Krissy always whining about how people aren’t nice to you. Who would want to be nice to you anyway.

I was angry. I was angry because people hit me and raped me and called me names. So I don’t deserve friends because I am too angry and difficult. It doesn’t end at adulthood.

I have spent some time in the last few days on the friend with a close friend’s wife. I don’t know her that well but she is suicidal and I have time during the day to be on the phone and a fairly deep understanding of what it means to want to kill yourself. I have been trying to help her get through the worst of the impulses. Today will end. The intensity of this desire will fade. Let’s just trust the process. You feel this way sometimes. These feelings will end. The only constant part of life is change.

It feels kind of odd to be trying so hard to convince someone else of her worth when I don’t believe much about my own worth. I want her to have what I can’t have. I can’t feel good about myself. What the fuck is there to feel good about? I feel so very unimportant and stupid and stagnant and worthless.

I had kids because I needed to have someone who actually needed me in order to give myself a pass on suicide. I’m fucking needed. I don’t know what to tell a childless person. I don’t know what to tell someone who wanted kids and couldn’t have them. I thank the G-d I barely believe in for my children every day because I’m not sure I would be here without them. How can someone go find the same kind of meaning in another way? People do it. Not everyone has to breed in order to be important. But I wasn’t clever enough to find a way to feel like I mattered.

I survived because I used a long list of bad coping methods that got me through that day. I have spent most of my life worried about getting through today. I have plans, sure. The long-term plans help me find a way to structure my day.

In between conversations with her I am trying to figure out how I am going to explain this in the group. How am I going to talk about all the Craigslist Casual Encounter people I found just because I needed to not be alone. If I was alone I felt like I wouldn’t make it through that night. So I found people however I could. Most of society tells me I should be ashamed of myself. I am a disgusting whore for having sex with so many people. I have had a lot of sex with people I have never seen again. I don’t need to be in love with someone to have sex. I just need to feel desperate.

I will admit it is a bit awkward to me how many people Noah has worked with over the years who are part of my body count. I have gotten to know the men in this valley. The Christmas party last year was festive. Body Count Person’s wife was introduced to me and told euphemistically that I was uhhh someone he uhhh knew. She put it together and made some comment about his wild days. It wasn’t entirely approving so I did my best to become invisible. Good women don’t generally want to have their noses rubbed in the behavior of the filthy whores.

Today I feel convinced that the only use I have is child minder. I’m glad I have that. It’s something. I won’t always feel this way. But I think I’m going to stay home for a week or two. I don’t need to open myself up to more rejection right now. If you can’t handle dealing with what you might get, don’t ask for anything. If you can’t handle being told no or having people just not show up out of the blue don’t make plans. I don’t need anything else making me cry right now. It’s kind of embarrassing. It’s awkward to explain to the kids.

I should rest. I’m sick and I have to run twenty four miles this week. Maybe I can tell myself that my lack of social life is me preparing properly for the marathon. I keep doing things with friends that make training harder.

Like staying out very late with that friend who no-showed on me. That fucked up my running for the weekend quite a bit. I’m three miles down with some nasty blisters because I accommodated her schedule. Oh well! Apparently I am giving people too much of myself because I am doing it with the belief that I will get something back. When the something back fails I feel this enormous cavern of need. Because I was doing a trade not a gift. I don’t have enough spare to gift right now. So I should stay home and stop dealing with people for a while. I don’t have enough going spare to give without expectations so I shouldn’t give at all.

It hurts. I feel humiliated that at this point in time I should stay home and focus on the kids because otherwise the kids have to deal with me crying for hours during the day. They have to deal with me being impatient and inflexible. They have to deal with me not wanting them to help. They have to deal with me being upset.

Those people who are upsetting me don’t have to deal with my upset. They get to go back to their lives and not give a shit. My kids are the losers. That strikes me as unfair. I feel guilty because I want to do the Slow Fade out of most peoples lives because I just can’t handle the losing-trade of our friendship anymore. I don’t have anything left to give them. I’m out. That bucket is fucking empty and is currently being used to beat me on the head as folks look for more water. There is no more god damn water.

I keep thinking about a character sketch about a woman who isn’t much like me but whom I can understand. I have spent most of my life worried about inconveniencing or hurting other people. What would it be like to truly not care?

I have three people in this world I need to worry about. No one else is interested in a truly reciprocal relationship about needs. That’s ok. But I shouldn’t act like anyone else is a priority. They aren’t. I need to not be supportive and not feel guilty. You betcha. I’m not going to support you any more. You don’t fucking support me and I don’t have shit to give any more.

I think this is what self-care is?

There are a couple of people who come to my house to see me. I need to stop trying to expand the circle. It’s not worth it. I have exactly two people who make an effort to see me every month. That’s a lot better than zero, right? They don’t bullshit me or call me family. They don’t ask much of me. They just come hang out and watch my life for a few hours. They don’t add work or effort. It’s not an intense kind of support. But it’s nice. It feels settled and appropriate. They aren’t trying to be my BFF. They are trying to be part of a community. It is a relationship with more distance because they only give me what they have going spare and it’s not a lot. It’s ok that I don’t give them much.

I feel sad and scared and alone. I feel unimportant and invisible.

The thing is, a lot of people have affectionate feelings toward me. They just don’t have any way of meeting my needs. It’s not their fault. It’s not my fault. But it is. It’s real. I have no choice but to figure out how to get by without those supposed needs being met or I need to meet them myself. What is a true need?

I need to eat. I seriously need to knock it off with the sugar. I need sleep. I need to start going to bed at a consistent time again. I need to be kind to my family because they are kind to me. That means I need to limit stress.

I think today will move very slowly.

Today is fired.

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I have been vibrating with anger all day and that isn’t fair to my kids. Part of my anger level is I don’t feel like it is ok for me to talk about the things that are making me angry. It cycles from there. I feel like I owe people respect and privacy. I’m not sure why I feel like I owe people this. I guess that once people get to a certain level of inner-circle-of-friends I feel like they get dispensation from the normal rules I have with other people? I don’t hash out much of my friendships in writing. Not until long after things happen at least.

I’m allowed to talk about me and my experience of things but I don’t get to out people. That is what my “upbringing” in the scene taught me. It’s a harder line to walk than it appears on first glance. How can you talk about things and still obfuscate?

I’ve had two friends no-show in the last week. The second one just finally popped up at the end of the day to explain what happen. I’m frustrated but it’s a situation I understand given that I have done similar sorts of things myself. I’m not happy with her because it is the second god damn no-show in a week so now it feels like a big statement about my general self-worth.

I still haven’t heard from the first no show. It’s been six days. I sent her an email at forty minutes past the meeting time saying that I was going to head out and go to a La Leche League meeting so she probably shouldn’t come by at that point. I haven’t heard from her. I’m sure she’s busy.

I had to explain to my kids what was happening. She told them she was coming. Shanna was looking forward to it. I had to fucking explain to my kid why someone was god damn letting her down. Because she forgot. That happens. Because we aren’t fucking important enough to remember, I guess. I didn’t say any of that. What I said was, “Well, people make mistakes. I guess she didn’t write it down and it slipped her mind.”

I’m seething. And I’m ignored. It’s hard being reminded how little I matter. I hate being lied to. “I’ll be there.” Yeah. Right.

I feel guilty for not being more forgiving. I fuck up too. I expect people to tolerate so much, don’t I owe people an eternity of putting up with in exchange? That’s what this feels like. I’m being tested. Do I love her enough? Do I want a relationship enough? She wants to see what I will put up with before I prove her self-fulfilling prophesy that everyone leaves her. At least that is the story in my head right now. I don’t know another story to put in its place. I could reach out and try harder. If this was the first time I had ever had similar experiences I might. But this isn’t the first or second or third or twentieth. After a while it seems kind of stupid, don’t you think? Obviously I’m not wanted here.

Sometimes life is like that.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Category Archives: abandonment issues

Tried something different.

About that movie…

Thank you opt-in audience.

What are you afraid of?

One of those not sleeping nights.

The dying time

Bucket list: Run a marathon

Goodbye, old friend

You’re never fully dressed without a smile.

Looking for a therapist (still)

More whining. I’m sorry I woke up so early.

Not being nice to Noah.

I don’t think that getting over my anger is the point.

neeeeeeedy

Get it out of your head.

Bad day.

This process blows.

relationship blathering

Don’t make someone a priority while you are their option.

Today is fired.