Category Archives: abandonment issues

Mostly parenting babbling

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I’m trying something different this morning, my wonderful daughter Shanna is cuddled up next to me on the couch watching Fraggle Rock.  I’m going to see if I can usefully write with her in the room.  I’m not sure.  I feel very self-conscious about how often I cry in the process of writing.  Often I’m sobbing the whole time.  I’m kind of weird about crying around my kids.  I do it sometimes, but I go to great lengths to avoid it because I feel so terrible about my moodiness.  I wish I could manage consistency.  I think the only baseline I could have would be anger.

That is what I am having so much trouble with.  I feel guilty that I will never be able to be a placid, mellow, just happy mom.  That’s not an option this lifetime.  I am often happy.  I am sometimes mellow.  But I am also quick to anger.  My anger burns hot.  I get very sad.  I may be one of the only women I know who isn’t bothered by the term “hysterical”.  Even though I know it has nothing to do with my uterus, I really do get a kind of freaked out that men don’t get.  At least not in places I can see.  Sometimes it seems like I am the example of what is wrong with women.  I should try to be more stable.  More like the men in my life and all.  Because the women in my life are more stable than me, but not by much.  I’m sure that’s not a nice thing to say.

I’ve been really enjoying reading Austen novels lately.  That’s funny because I avoided them like the plague when I was in college for that English degree.  I’m enjoying seeing how very slow their lives are.  It feels like it is giving me permission to strive for less.  If I want to be a developed and accomplished person I need to have a lot of time spent in my house just improving myself.  If I am running around with too many things I am obliged to get done in a day I will spin my wheels in place and not improve much.  I’ll be too angry and frustrated to get the lessons from things I want to get.

Writing with Shanna here is different.  I’m being vague and that’s funny because she can’t read yet.  I’m not trying to spare her.  If I want Shanna to grow up reading I need to read in front of her.  If I want her to grow up being curious and interested in everything she can reach her hands out and touch I have to be free to walk with her and talk about the things she sees.  I have to be non-distracted enough to focus on her questions.  If I’m busy then I snap at her to leave me alone.  I don’t want that to be our relationship.

I want my daughter to be one of the blessed few.  I’m not striving for a “normal” childhood.  I don’t think I could create one if I wanted.  But she will grow up in this cocoon of love and acceptance and constant education.  That’s why I am drawn to Unschooling.  We really do sit and talk about things happening all day long.  I’m learning how much I know as I talk to her.  I know a great deal more about biology than I would have guessed.  I am thinking about getting a few books so I can learn more.

Now I am in the garage.  Calli called for me after that last paragraph and I spent an hour nursing and cuddling.  I got to sit and think about how weird and defensive I feel right now.  I’m often not sure what I am writing about until I am done.  Randomly: last night I was thanked for writing the post about admiring women.  I was weird and awkward and I almost cried.  But I didn’t.  Self control!  I have it!

I don’t think I know how to be a mother, exactly.  I’m not sure I know what that means.  But I do know how to talk to my children as if they are humans-in-progress and someday, not that long from now, they will know everything I know and more.  I tell Shanna every day that my job is to teach her everything I can so that she can be any kind of grown up she wants, regardless of my preferences.  I talk to her constantly about how different people have different things they like and she gets to decide how much she will agree with my opinions.  I feel weird about how often she wants to be like me.  It feels like a lot of pressure for me to think hard about why I have the opinions I have.  I don’t want her to have opinions based on my ignorance and bigotry.  I don’t want her to become an angry person because I am angry.

I feel like there is a certain level of anger that is normal and occasional and everyone gets to have.  I have no idea what that line is because I am often derided for any show of anger about any subject.  There doesn’t seem to be a consistent scale.  Or, whatever the scale is, it is also combined with the rule “And you are never to express any anger where any one else can hear you.”  I missed the rule if it exists.

I often feel like it is perfectly appropriate for me to be angry, but I should probably max out at seven when I express it and I seem to read to other people as much higher than that.  What am I teaching?  The funny thing is, I don’t have much desire to change this behavior pattern of mine for the sake of the relationships I’m missing out on because people are uncomfortable with my anger.  At this stage of my life I really and truly have to just be ok with making people uncomfortable, period.  I don’t want to teach my children to do the same thing though.  Or, rather, I want them to be able to make a decision for themselves.  I want them to have an understanding that I may get intensely angry but most people don’t and most people dislike it.  They get to have their own lives and figure out if they are angry or not.

Calli is at a different stage of development.  She has grown increasingly cuddly and desirous of physical contact with me.  She is starting to imprint pretty rapidly.  She is absolutely copying my physical movements, facial expressions, and tone of voice.  I have to stop yelling.  I don’t actually want to live in a house where yelling happens so quickly and constantly.  That places it on my head.

I’m dealing with a lot of my sources of anger.  I am going to decide by the end of today if I think I am willing to do the books for the business.  The answer is probably.  I would like to have a way to be involved with the community.  The owners and managers would become people I communicated with more.  I would be able to go visit when I wanted.  I was told that it isn’t reasonable for me to spend my only off-time doing more dishes.  I feel valued.  Thanks D.

I am figuring out my limits with regards to house cleaning and how I will manage that.  I can’t live in a big mess and Shanna was born messy.  When I make sure that Shanna and Calli are the only ones I’m cleaning up after, it’s a different conversation.  This is my job.  This is what I am doing with my life.  I am caring for my children.  That means I do have the entire obligation for the tornado.  I’m talking to Shanna about why I clean.  I show her how I do it.  I am increasingly asking her for help.  Often she is told, “I will clean up everything but _________.  If you want to go to the park today, you need to help me clean up.”  I work hard at encouraging her to play with one thing at a time and clean it up when you are done.  But that’s not how Shanna plays.  When Shanna plays the whole damn house is part of the game and every item of clothing and block and blanket and item of furniture is part of the story.  It’s amazing to me that she really and truly has an explanation of what everything is doing.  It’s not that she’s messy.  She is highly creative.  She needs to interact with a lot of items in order to fill her need to manipulate things.  I’m trying very hard to talk to her about cleaning in a neutral tone of voice.  I only manage when I’m alone.

When I’m not alone I’m angry that the other adults aren’t helping and it creeps into my voice.  When I’m alone with the kids I don’t expect any one else to be doing anything so I don’t have a reason to be upset.  I’m just muddling along doing my job.  I care about doing my job well.  When I worked at Ross Dress for Less as a teenager I was a ridiculously good employee.  I kept my areas spotless and I always covered more area than I was technically assigned.  I knew they weren’t giving me enough work because they were assigning work based on how much other people could get done.  I have never been able to tell if I have much more energy and ability to work than other people or if other people are lazy.  I think that most of it is that other people just aren’t as invested in (thing of the moment) as I am.  I was told over and over and over, “If you are going to do a job, do it right.”  And I consider so many parts of life, and therefore work, not optional.  If it’s not optional and you have to do a job right… that means you put 100% of your energy into everything you touch, right?

This is hard to sustain.  I feel like I am deficient as a person if I leave a job half done.  I do it sometimes but I beat myself up for a long time.  I’m learning how to put the housework into categories for myself.  Right now the living room is a disaster.  It looks like it hasn’t been cleaned in weeks.  The entire house was completely spotless and I vacuumed and dusted and swept and mopped yesterday.  I just can’t get upset.  I have times of the day where I am supposed to get up and clean until the house is clean again.  Then I am supposed to stop at a certain time.  The house always has areas I could be doing more in.  I need to deal with filing again, for example.  Right now I am trying to not worry about those things because I have (deleted future stressful event) coming up.  Lots of feelings.

But it’s time to get back to where I was before I dropped my basket.  My kids are getting easier to care for.  Calli is still a baby, but barely.  She’s very nearly a kid.  I realized this week that I need to get my sign language books out.  She’s not going to match Shanna’s early learning curve so I need to teach her more signs.  She wants to learn them but I haven’t been modeling them this time.  That is something I should do.  Calli clearly has opinions and wants to communicate.  I haven’t been giving her enough scaffolding for being able to do that.  I get the impression that her tantrums would disappear if she could just bloody say what she is thinking.  Development is an interesting thing.

I’m developing an increasing appreciation of having two girls.  I think I would have been the kind of asshole who thought they had boys and girls figured out because they have one of each.  Calli is emerging more by the day and I find her so fascinating.  She moves like me.  By which I mean, she moves like my mother.  I see so much family resemblance in her.  I see my brothers.  I don’t remember what my father looked like, not really.  I don’t see my sister.  She strongly resembles her biological father.  But Calli has the same skull shape as me.  I have a picture of me at thirteen months up on the wall in the hallway.  Right next to Calli’s six week pictures.  It looks like it could be the same kid.

Part of the reason this feels weird is because Shanna has always felt like a mini-me.  But Shanna and Calli don’t share any of the things that make Calli feel so very startlingly like me.  It feels like a strange split personality situation.  They each took very different things from me.  Shanna has a lot more of my personality.  Shanna acts like me on my very best days.  She is friendly and empathetic and eager to bring joy to people.  Calli looks and moves like me but is much more reserved.  She is very clearly going to be an introvert.  She’s seventeen months old and she needs alone time.  It’s funny because I have only started to recognize how clearly I need that as an adult.  So Calli then feels like more a reflection of my moody and difficult days.  That terrifies me.

I have a friend who has a very troubled relationship with her teenage daughter.  I’m terrified.  I’m terrified of how I will manage to get through the next two decades of trying to impersonate a stable and good mother so that my adult children will want to know me.  I don’t exactly take that as a given.  When I talk about my fears it’s funny how people always say, “Your kids obviously know they are loved.”  My mommy does love me.  She just couldn’t take care of me.  And when she didn’t take care of me she told me it was my fault bad things happened to me.  I’m not afraid of my kids not knowing that I love them.  A lot of the reason that incestuous families are so intense is because there is just so gosh. darn. much. love.  I’m not worried about my children knowing that I love them.  I’m worried about my children only being exposed to age appropriate things.  I’m worried about my children being told that they are to blame for circumstances beyond their control.

My children are bright and curious and indulged in activities that encourage both.  That means they are going to fuck up a lot as they figure out how everything works.  I get to decide what their experience of fucking up is.  Do they grow up learning that perfectionist attitude of: if I ever fail I am a Failure?  I think not.  Everyone makes mistakes.  Kids and grown ups alike.  Shanna broke a glass yesterday.  I can’t remember the last time she broke a glass.  I think it has only happened once before.  I didn’t yell.  I didn’t shame.  I didn’t say anything nasty.  I said, “Ah man!  Ok, that’s why I ask you not to set your glass on the edge of the table.  Can you look around and see how far the glass shards went?  Don’t get off your chair!  I’ll get the broom.”  Then we talked about what it means that we have broken glass on the floor.  We talked about safe clean up.  We talked about where glasses are supposed to sit on the table.  And she got a hug and a kiss and a hope that I got all the glass shards up because I don’t want my sweet girls getting cuts on their feet.  I did it right.  I don’t do that every time.

But isn’t teaching interactions one of those things I’m supposed to be teaching?  Ok.  So I don’t do it right every time.  How badly do I fuck up?  How often?  I don’t know.  How badly do I fuck up?  Not very.  Not really.  How often?  Enh, depends on what you mean.  How often do I use a tone of voice I regret?  Daily.  How often do I say something I regret?  That’s hard to measure.  It goes in bursts.  I’ll have like five of them in two days because I’ll feel guilty and off-kilter after the first one.  Then I won’t have one for a long time.  How often do I do something I regret?  Very rarely.  I don’t spank not because of some crunchy ideal but because I don’t think I could use it appropriately as a consistent tool and there are much more effective tools out there.  My big punishment is three minutes of time out.  I lost my temper and kicked things where the kids could see once.  And then I dealt with the consequences.  If it happens again then there can be a reevaluation of my monster status.  Everyone gets to fuck up once.

Right now I feel like I am drowning in my feelings of obligations.  I can’t have interactions with people unless I am working to earn them.  I’m not sure exactly what the mechanism of this is for me.  But I sure treat it in-my-head like I am required to always work in exchange for someone tolerating my company.  I must be paying for the effort of dealing with me.  I’ll make dinner.  I’ll wash your dishes.  I’ll do the driving even though you are a single person and this is going to be a nightmare for me with my two kids.

I have friends who have helped me massively.  I now have this huge feeling of guilt.  I have been in this needy phase of life for a few years now and I feel terrible that I require so much help and I can give so little.  I will never discharge this guilt though.  And I don’t want to pass it on.  I don’t want to feel it.  I feel so much less deserving of help than other people.  Other people don’t have to rely on their friends so much.  Other people have families.  My family wouldn’t really be able to help me even if they wanted to.  Sure, they could provide “babysitting” but it would be in a neglectful and abusive environment.  No thanks.  I feel so much jealousy and rage that other people have families and I don’t. To that end I’m supporting Noah’s fledgling efforts to introduce our kids to his family.  They aren’t perfect, but they are something.  And they want to love the girls.  I don’t want my kids to grow up like me.  I don’t want them to grow up knowing that there are all these relatives but none of them have any interest in them.

All these feelings around housework and obligation and love and caring for people and physical limitations and support and abandonment… it’s all one big mess.  I’m going to be an asshole for a minute and say that acts of service is probably my primary ‘spoken’ love language.  Having someone see that I am tired and offer to carry my load?  That is a lot of what lets me feel loved and seen.  I’m not invisible.  Yes, I am happy to do all this work because I love you.  But I need to be coaxed too.  I need to be coddled too.  I am tired too.

Noah spent a while last night laying out his timeline on burdening me.  We talked about how it has gone in the past, how it is currently, and how things will go in the future.  Noah went down a long list of reasons explaining why he thinks he needs to just step up and do a bunch of things right now.  Noah specifically talked about the things I have done for him and why he wants to turn around and help me.  I can’t ask for that help.  I can’t direct it.  I don’t know why.  I know that is a failure on my part.  Noah explained in detail that he has learned over time to notice a variety of signs that my difficulty level is much higher than I am expressing.  On one hand it feels kind of weird being decoded and on the other hand I didn’t know how much I was apparently hiding or lying about or something.

Yesterday I found out that one person recognizes that I am past my breaking point and I am going to get help.  In the past week I have made it such that I am not going to be providing much help to anyone but the kids any more.  It feels needlessly extreme, but it seems to be necessary for me.  I can’t be one of the modern women who gets everything done for everyone.  I don’t want to figure out how to rescue an unproductive day.  I want to revel in days where we spend all day lying in the sun talking about all the things I see.  I talk about plants and clouds and buildings.  I talk about how people behave.  I talk about how things are made.  I talk about metal and plastic and rubber.  I talk about what it means to be responsible.  Unproductive days mean I am too busy enjoying what I am doing.  I can live with that.

I want my daughters to learn that for everything there is a season.  Some day they will work.  I will almost certainly work at some point.  I’ll get bored without something to do.  But for now what we are doing is learning together.  I have to spend all the time that I can with my kids learning about the world because there is so much to learn.  How will we get it all done?

I have let Shanna have basically unfettered access to the iPad.  She watches a lot of Fraggle Rock, Thomas, She-Ra and then she has her movies.  She is increasingly playing with games.  She is doing the letter tracing.  She’s fascinated with youtube and what she can learn there.  I uhhh don’t know how she found nail polish and makeup tutorials, but she has had fun playing with those.  I don’t let her have access to youtube on the iPad.  That has to be used with an adult because bad links pop up.  I feel comfortable with this now because she uses it for a variety of things and she is incredibly physically active.  She likes to go on multiple mile walks with me.  I keep telling Calli that iPads are three year old toys.  We’ll see how long that goes.

So much is in my head and so much of it I can’t write about.  Life is really complicated.  I keep telling myself that everything will be okay in the end.  If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.

From here on out Noah is the person I have lived with the longest of anyone in my life.  With the exception of Jenny and our other housemate, I don’t have contact with anyone I have ever lived with.  Ok, sometimes I run into Tom, but our lives have diverged.  Noah is the only carrier of my story.  Noah is the only one I have to worry about being appropriate for.  Wow.  That’s actually an interesting thought.  When I’m having my ambient feelings of guilt for my behavior, Noah is the only one I will really have to worry about.  I have the kids for ~17 more years and then they are adults.

That’s a lot more pressure than it seems like.  A specific kind of pressure I don’t do well with.  I feel I owe my children a decent childhood.  I brought them into a world they didn’t make.  I have obligations to them.  I have a very different relationship with Noah.  I owe him nothing but what I choose to owe him.  Yet in every way that matters I would be a fool to not see Noah as “rescuing” me.  I feel like he took a chance on a stupid gutter kid, and this is how I repay him?  By being needy and whiny and incompetent and angry?  I feel like he is getting a bad deal.  And that makes me feel savagely angry that all I have to give is a bad deal.  I am a bad deal.

I was certainly a bad deal for Sarah.  I failed her.  I need far more help than she can give and I can’t help feeling angry about it.  That’s not her fault.  That’s not something she is actually to blame for.  She’s not doing anything wrong.  But I feel it.  And I take it out on her.  And that’s wrong.  I am wrong.  I don’t know why I need so much help.  It doesn’t seem like other mothers I know get even as much help as I get.  They don’t seem to fail as often.  They seem to be able to handle getting things done in a lot of different places.  I can’t track it.  I need to have my responsibilities all lie pretty close to one source.

There are a lot of things I don’t know or understand.  Right now I know that the sun is up and the sky is a beautiful blue.  The clouds are all drifting out of sight.  It’s been raining for a few days here.  For once I don’t hear a bunch of people whining about rain.  Almost everyone who has commented on the weather has been grateful for it.  I feel like for one storm we are all collectively breathing a sigh of thanks.  We need the rain.  The drought is ongoing.  I hope the clouds come back.  We need more rain.  Besides, when it rains I don’t have to go outside and water.  I’ve made a bunch of progress on the front yard recently.  Now that the rain washed all those obnoxious white rocks clean, I should probably take pictures.  It’s looking more like a garden.  I don’t know when I will get the playhouse made.  I screwed up billpay and we had some unexpected expenses.  The house part of the budget is overspent for many months.  I’m sad about that.  Oh well.  It just means I have more time to dream about it.  My kids are getting the house and yard I would have enjoyed growing up in.  I hope they like the experience.  I’m trying to not be oppressive about it.

Time to go inside.

Inadequate to the task

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I feel like a failure.  I feel like I have harmed my best friend.  It’s true.  I have.  I told Sarah that I can’t continue to live with this level of unreliability.  I don’t think there is any chance that I can get my anger under control while I do.  I really and truly cannot handle having to ask another adult to do their chores. I can’t.  I know that is a failing on my part.  I know I should be able to learn to communicate better.  There are some battles to improve I can win and there are some I am going to lose.  I will never be able to handle micromanaging someone else in my house.  I’m trying to do less and less of it with the kids.  I’m sure I’m failing, but they are quite young.  I have time to figure out how to do that as it is necessary.

I cannot unlearn a lifetime of bad habits fast enough to be a civil person for Sarah to live with.  It’s not fair to her to put up with my temper tantrums and nastiness.  She is doing the best she can.  She really is.  I feel like this isn’t working because I don’t care enough.  Because I’m not trying hard enough.

The truth is, I’m out of support to give.  Sarah needs a lot of it.  And she needs to be able to drop in and get it how and where she wants while giving the support she can when she can.  I can’t do this.  I don’t have enough of me.

I think that more than the work I was depending on Sarah to be someone I could hand off being reliable on a schedule.  It’s not working because Sarah’s health is difficult to predict.  Sarah’s body is not mine.  When Sarah is sick she has to rest.  She really and truly does have to or she will pay for a long time.  When I am sick I have to keep going or I get so far behind that catching up is a problem and I’m even nastier and more bitter.  It’s very hard for me to give Sarah the space she needs.  I don’t get it.  I feel very bitter that I am supposed to be providing this privileged space to someone else and I don’t get it.  I am very petty and I’m sorry.

The thing is, I am this petty.  I do feel used.  I do feel like I am working as hard as I can with all of the hours of the day I am physically able to work.  I don’t work more because I haven’t gotten enough sleep in years and my body hurts and I’m exhausted most of the time.  I have nothing more to give.

When I have Sarah here I plan as if there is another adult to take the hand off.  This means I have too many days where I burn through all of my energy by 1pm and then I’m done.  I’m tired.  I hurt.  I’m impatient.  I’m exhausted and frustrated.  Then I have to deal with wondering if Sarah is going to do her “chores” on time or if I’m going to have to go ask her to do them.  No one woke up this morning and gave me a list of chores to do.  I know what they are and I have to just do them.  I can’t turn around and delegate.  I’m not the boss.

That was the problem with the domestic help, too.  I don’t really want to be the boss.  I want to one time sit down and negotiate with you what you want to be responsible for and have you just do it.  I can’t keep telling you.  You volunteered.  I asked for your input from the beginning and this is what you said you would do.  I can’t keep asking.  I can’t.  I don’t know why that is broken in me but it is.

Which is to say, Sarah is asking for reasonable prompting.  But I can’t give it.  That is a failure in me, not her.  This is an incompatibility, not a grave personal sin.  But it becomes harder and bigger while living together.

I don’t know if this will wreck our friendship.  I hope not.  I love Sarah so much.  I just can’t keep doing this much work.  I can’t keep depending on help that only mostly appears.  That’s not something I can live with any more.  It’s not her fault.  I don’t want to be angry with her all the time because she has health issues she can’t control.  It’s not her fault.  But I still have to do the work.  And that’s hard.

I feel like this is proof that I don’t deserve relationships.  They take work and I don’t have enough to give to do it.  So I don’t deserve relationships.  I can’t earn them.  I can’t do what they take.  I failed.  Again.  Because I am inadequate to meet the needs of my partner.  As usual.

I went to see my psychiatrist yesterday and she told me that I don’t need a pill I need a reduction in stress.  She told me that I need to ask my friend to leave and spend several months of staying home and actually getting my stress under control.  I’m trying too hard to do too many things.  I’m spread too thin.  That’s not what you expect from a psychiatrist, you know?  If anyone wants the recommendation for a psychiatrist in San Francisco I would recommend Ann Barnes.  Just sayin’.  It’s really nice when a pill-doctor says, “There is no pill that can fix this.  You need rest.”

I’m going to try.  I’m afraid of the loneliness.  I’m so afraid of having Sarah move out.  I don’t want her to go.  But I can’t keep doing what I’m doing.  I’m breaking.

First world problems

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Life is what you do while you are killing time until you die.  Really, that’s all it is.  Maybe you’ll die soon, maybe it will take a long time.  Maybe you will know lots of people.  Maybe you will spend all of those years alone; lonely is strictly optional.  Happiness is a state of mind, not a circumstance.  And yet, we expect people who are financially secure and stable and married and _______ to be happy.

Seeing my shaman was a good choice.  I have a lot of oppositional defiance response to people.  To him, in particular.  Oh man he triggers all of my, “No no no no no no no” buttons.  And no matter how frustrated I get with him I will always go back for more because I learn so much about me being with him.  I learn more about the shape and size of me.  I learn where I need to push back because I really truly believe something.  I know something is true no matter what his opinion is.

He tried to tell me that I have previously been just fine with Noah dating.  Uhm… no.  I have written records.  See, this is why I write.  I was fine with Noah dating other people during the first six months we were dating and I was living with someone else.  That’s true.  But I was poly and Tom was monogamous because I couldn’t stand him being intimate with anyone else.  He wasn’t real motivated to go find another sexual partner either.  He wanted companionship more than sex and I still provided that.

Noah has different needs.  No, I’ve never been happy about him seeing other people.  I’m not shy with that information.  I have tried to accept it as part of him.  But I measure his dates in cuts on my legs.  I don’t actually think it is good for our marriage for us to do nonmonogamy.  If something hurts me that much, he really shouldn’t be doing it.  I am totally fine with it in theory.  I don’t have a problem with other people doing it.  But knowing that my partner would rather be doing that with someone else rather than me?  Yeah.  That bothers me.  I don’t say no.  Ok, I do.  But it’s pretty rare.

My shaman contends that the real solution is for me to just work on being bothered until I’m not bothered anymore so that Noah can keep doing what Noah wants to do.  To be fair, he thinks that I should work on it because I also have trouble with monogamy.

I think it is more useful this lifetime for me to work on other parts of my life that are causing me strife. I only have so much time to spend beating my head against walls of shame and terror and anger and hatred.  It’s going to come up around other issues whether I like it or not.  Nonmonogamy is complicated.  It takes a ridiculous amount of time and energy.  I don’t have it to spare.  And I won’t invest in this relationship fully if I know that I am just waiting for when he is going to pull away from me so that he can give a big chunk of himself to someone else.  Fuck that shit.  I guess I’m a selfish piece of shit but I think I deserve better than that.

The thing about first world problems is: they still hurt.  And you still have to live with them day in and day out.  No one expects anyone to be cheerful about third world problems.  But you are god damn expected to just suck it up for first world problems.  I certainly expect people to.  I will probably die like my grandfather having a heart attack out in the yard while working.  He was in his 80’s.

Ok, I’m going to take the first world/third world out of this for the next part because it sounds dismissive and snotty and I don’t mean to be.  I’m talking about my perception of the difference between rich problems and poor problems.  I’m using the phrases first world/third world reflexively because it is a common dismissive thought process.  But I should be better than that.

When I was a kid surviving was different.  The life I lead with my mother was different.  Being alive day by day was different.  Now that I am an adult I have a completely different situation in life but I am still the same person.  Surviving my childhood took a very different skillset than … what am I supposed to say about adulthood?  I won’t survive adulthood.  Ha.  What am I going to do with my adulthood.  How is the pattern of my days going to look in comparison to all I know.

What I know is a disjointed life.  What I know is work that comes and goes.  Unending sorrow and bitterness.  Trauma.  That’s not all I know though.  I know how to work with my hands.  I know how to build things.  I know how to build people.  Shit dude, I made two of them.  That’s pretty fucking cool if you ask me.  I’m defensive about being a good parent because that is my primary job.  I feel like I have to be judged on something and apparently that means I will some day be judged on whether or not my children are… I don’t know.  Appropriate?  Kind enough?  Successful enough?  Smart enough?  Uhm.  Yeah.  I have no control over those things.

How do you talk about these subjects without blame?  Happiness is a state of mind, not a circumstance.  Uhm, yes.  But if I had been happy during my childhood I wouldn’t have gotten out.  My niece is as smart as me.  I’m worried she won’t be able to get out.  And my nephew won’t get out.  At this point simple economics will bind them all together.

I feel I have satisfied any debt I owed my mother for the care she gave me as a child.  I have given her thousands and thousands of dollars, often to my own detriment because she was stealing my pay checks.  I don’t owe her anything.

I am angry this morning.  So angry.  I woke up so angry I feel like the top of my head might come off.  I am still just me.  But I cancelled my therapy appointment.  I feel very defensive about that.  I know I need to continue therapy but I don’t have anything I want to talk about in therapy today and is that relationship about meeting my needs or is it something I am doing so that I can check of check lists of what crazy people like me have to do on a set schedule for the rest of my life?

Today the opportunity cost of having to drive for two hours and spend about $18 in gas on top of $150 for the privilege of talking to my therapist… that’s too high of a bar for what I will get out of it.  On many days it is the right choice and I shut up and just do it.  But today what I will get out of the session will not be worth the opportunity cost.  Why is that something I feel guilty about?  Because I feel like I have to be accountable to other people in order to ever be right.  I don’t feel like talking to my therapist today.  So I’m not going to do it.  And I feel angry about having to defend that.  I really feel like I have to go down a long list of justifications about why.  Because I don’t want to isn’t good enough because I am crazy and bad and I need to go talk to a therapist.  Uhm, yeah.  That’s fucking useful.

Do you know what I’m mad about right now?  The price of juice.  I don’t need to go talk to my therapist to find my way down the rabbit hole of why that pisses me off.  I am even tactful enough to not write the story on the internet because such things actions are kind of tacky given why I am mad about the price of juice.  But I am going to go inside and tell my family the story.  And then I can stop being angry.  I don’t need to pay someone else $150 to listen to the story so I can stop feeling angry.  Once I explain it to my family we will figure out what we can change so that I can have help changing the feeling of anger.  I can do something about my problems.  That’s what makes it a first world problem?  My problems are all things that I can solve or out wait and they will go away.  I have short-term temporal problems right now.  Life is harder than advertised and all that.

Right this minute Calli is crying.  I have no idea why.  Noah is on duty.  I feel like I should stop what I am doing and go try to solve whatever is happening.  She would probably settle down more with me.  But she would demand to nurse.  I’ve already nursed her once today.  When she is upset like this she is especially rough.

These are problems that will go away.  Calli is already done crying.  I can hear her playing.  Maybe I don’t have to fix everything.  Having Sarah here feels different than I thought it would.  I didn’t know I could have another adult in the house so much and still feel so lonely.  Sarah has a lot of health issues and keeps a very different sleep schedule.  To be fair she has made remarkable progress towards being more in-synch with the kids.  We keep very different schedules.  And she has spent a lot of time by herself.  She’s used to being silent in her room all the time.  It’s different.  Sometimes it feels like we talked more when we were both on IM a lot.

I had a really exciting November.  I went out a lot.  I got to have a lot of really intense conversations.  It was wonderful.  I had a lot of interesting experiences I can sit and think about for a while.  That’s not my life though.  My life is quiet, mostly.  There is a lot going on–don’t get me wrong.  But it’s house work.  And laundry.  And gardening.  And taking She-Ra to swimming.  And being home from the zoo/park/museum in time for nap or all hell breaks loose.  And laundry.  And trying to make sure Calli doesn’t nap too early in the day or we will all pay.  And more house work.  And laundry.

I only make breakfast occasionally if I feel the desire to.  Like, a couple of times a month.  I make maybe four lunches a week.  I have to come with dinner three or so nights a week.  It doesn’t get to be take out any more.

I don’t get to be bitter about my problems because they are of my own choosing.  Why am I choosing to be bitter about the life I am choosing that no one else is forcing me to have?  Let’s be clear here.  Noah is not pushing us towards saving.  He pays no attention and I could financially ruin us and he wouldn’t notice for years.  Instead he is tolerating me forcing him into an ascetic life ridiculously cheerfully.  I am choosing every part of my life.  From how much I clean to how often I have friends over.  Why am I bitter?

I feel like I am not really choosing it.  I feel like it is forced on me because no one else wants it.  That’s true and not true.  Sarah and Noah are both willing to do more when asked.  And when I stop working hard things keep going the house just isn’t as clean.  I’m cleaning to please myself.  Ok, I feel upset that I have to work as hard as I do to have a house that looks the way I see my house in my head.  That’s an interesting entitlement.

I was never really allowed to play.  I was a reader because I wasn’t really allowed to have toys.  My mom always gave my toys away because she didn’t want to clean them up.  She went through my room with trash bags several times and just got rid of everything.  I don’t build attachments to things very easily.  I can’t.  Things are easy come easy go.  I’ll forget about it eventually, except those weird pangs some day.  When I realize that there is very little evidence of my life.  Only my sketchy memory and the random shit my mother chose to save.  Items that are essentially meaningless to me because I will never know the story attached to them.  I am invisible to myself because I have no reflection.  I have no one to tell me what they saw.

I have a lot of guilt around the fact that I make Noah and Sarah and the kids get rid of things.  I don’t let them keep all of the things they have sentimental attachment to.  I can’t.  We don’t have room.  And really should not have a storage unit with stuff we will never use again that was important or fit or was relevant a long time ago.  No.  That’s money that needs to go elsewhere.  It’s not rational.  But the push back is that I require the house to be easy to clean.  That means we really have to limit how much stuff we have in our house and everything must have a clearly defined home or it must not live here any more because the clutter builds and builds and then my life is a nightmare.  I won’t let anyone else make my working environment hostile.  I don’t go take a shit on your desk at work, thanks.

But then you have to figure out how much space should belong to each person.  It’s hard to define.  I feel like my day and life will be better if I stay home and save money and instead talk to Noah and Sarah about the stuff we can have some effect on.  I can figure out actual compromises and do actual work instead of just telling more stories about my mom.  Today, maybe just for today, I don’t really want to talk about my mom.  I hate that most of my stories about her are so awful.  She’s my mom.  I love my mother.  Irrationally.  Completely.  Intensely.  Why was my mama so mean to me?

Because my mother had problems.  She didn’t choose to handle them well and the collateral damage was massive.  That happens sometimes.  At this point my actual problems are all fairly small and easy to isolate.  I have a lot of lasting damage, but I feel like it’s maybe time to start leaving the scab alone.  Maybe just for today.  That’s good enough.

Why am I choosing to be monogamous?  If I reach down in the pit of my stomach it is because I don’t want to be a free person off living my life.  I want to be part of an intense dyad.  I want to be one with Noah.  I don’t want him to be a free person off living his life either.  I want us to be sharing this life.  That’s why I married him.  I have an easier time collaborating with him to do elaborate role play situations about pretending to sleep with other people than I do finding extra curricular sex that doesn’t make me feel like shit in some way.  The opportunity cost is so very high.

I don’t think I want monogamy because of ideals, necessarily.  I want to be able to stop thinking about this part of my broken.  I don’t want to have to deal with keeping a tight leash on my compulsive behavior and only meting it out in small carefully considered not-quite-destructive doses.  God it’s a lot of work.  I’m tired of doing it.  I am so very conflicted about sex.

My shaman told me that broken is a component of whether or not you have a range of emotions and a range of intensity within different emotions.  Like if you always go from 2/3 to 9/10 and you stay in only two or three emotions you are probably in a broken place.  If you have a range of emotions and a range of intensities… sure.  That’s how you feel.  Why not.  It’s not broken it’s just where you are.  I like how he alternates challenging me and affirming that I am already fine just how I am.  It means I get to pick how I grow.  Well, that’s part of why it didn’t work as a closer romantic relationship.  I couldn’t deal with how much I would have to push back.  It’s very hard for me.

Sometimes I wonder if my shaman has consciously created a personality for me.  He speaks about his multiples fairly frequently.  Fairly casually.  I know that he alternates between very distinctive approaches in how he talks to me.  It’s part of why I like him less around other people.  He is so very different.  He really is a different person, one I don’t know or like as much.  He can listen to me and not challenge me and go down a laundry list of points to affirm that who I am and how I am is working well in every way.  At the same time he can absolutely force me to speak in detail about all the specifics of why I am doing any of the things I am doing.  It’s hard to be honest enough to be worthy of the conversation.  I can’t do it very often.  It is too hard to be present with him as intensely as I am present with him.  Maybe that is why I don’t like him around other people.  I am also attuning to the other person instead of him.  Hm.  Interesting.

It’s probably time to go in and start working on my first world problems.  It makes me really happy that I know I can walk in the door and explain what I am upset about and talk about the root of why I am upset about it and have people be sympathetic and give a shit.  Then we can figure out how to solve it.  Because we will.  This life thing will happen.  Today will end and tomorrow might be anything.  Some of my first wold problems won’t be solved yet, but they will.  All I’ve got is time.

monogamy

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Monogamy.  It’s a weird concept for me.  I need to spend the rest of my life learning how to have relationships with people without having sex with them.  I think that will be good for me.  Weird and awkward, but good.  What does that mean though?

I hesitate to talk about this.  I don’t want to eat crow later.  Mmmmm crow.  Never say never.  I remember a friend of mine, years ago, telling me, “Of course I don’t like that he plays with other women.  But I want to play with other men so I shut up and put up with it.”  I think I’d rather not play with other people than feel like I have to bite back my actual opinion.  I don’t want to have to learn masking behavior that I use only at certain times.  That feels like lying.

Noah playing with other people makes me cry.  It reminds me that I don’t ever get to be special.  Which is stupid, right?  He married me.  He didn’t marry anyone else and he is not going to leave me.  Why isn’t that enough to convince me?  Sex is so mixed up for me.  Near as I can tell most people have enormous sexual hang ups without having to be abused starting in toddlerhood.

I don’t want to feel like I have to have sex with people in order to be interesting and I do.  I really do.  I don’t like that part of myself very much.  I feel rather disgusting, really.  This is bordering on a lot of things I’m deeply conflicted about.  I am an exhibitionist.  No one reading this is surprised.  I’m not sure how that ties in with a lot of my need-to-feel-available.

I think I want to find out how forever feels.  I want to realize that I’ve probably kissed someone else for the last time.  Really.  He’s it.  Forever.  I’m kind of excited.  I should decide that I deserve to be touched only by someone who wants me enough to actually want all of me.  Not just that piece of me.

How am I going to connect with all the people I want to connect with?  It’s kind of terrifying, really.  What do I have to offer?  I don’t know.  I have spent my adulthood with people who believe that monogamy is terrible and limiting and to be avoided at all costs.  I feel kind of ashamed that I want to keep Noah all to myself.

I feel like I am doing something wrong by joining the Embargo and refusing to sleep with anyone ever again.  It’s not fair that all these guys want sex and I won’t sleep with them.  This is not a guilt I should carry.  It should never enter into my mind that it isn’t fair that this nice guy isn’t getting _____ need met.  Life isn’t fair.  I bear no obligation to anyone but Noah for sexual needs.

That’s complicated too.  I think in some ways monogamy is terrifying because it means that we will both have to be a lot more honest about what we want.  If we want to get our needs met, really met we have to talk about them even when it is hard.  Even when he’s afraid to say it to me.  Even when I’m afraid to say it to him.  I do not need to agree to do more than I do in order to be GGG.  I need to say “no” a lot more and have more ownership of my body.  We need to find a way to meet our mutual needs without me biting my lip and doing things that feel bad.  I can’t hold Noah accountable for the consequences of his actions if I withhold information.  I can’t decide it is proof that he doesn’t care when he doesn’t notice.

I can’t relax and enjoy this relationship while I feel like I am constantly preparing to be paranoid about Noah running off to fuck someone else.  And that is how I feel in an open marriage.  It feels like every day is just a count down until he gets to do that again.  I feel like I am always doing something wrong by wanting to spend time with him.  I should be giving him lots of time away from me to go do and be lots of things away from me because obviously he wants to reserve a lot of himself away from me.  He is waiting for someone better than me to give that part of himself to.  I don’t blame him.  I constantly feel like I am waiting for him to go find someone more understanding than me to go talk to.  Someone who is entirely on his side.

I have signed on to be completely dependent on Noah for the next twenty years.  No, I am not going to relax my hypervigilance as long as I know that is coming some day.  It means I have to steal myself that whole period until that day comes because I will not be able to bear the loss otherwise.  I have to create a big hole in my heart and leave it that way and never let you touch it or come near it.  Because that is where I will have to go when you are fucking someone else.  It’s the same place I go when I sleep with other people.  It is a space outside of me, outside of my life.  I don’t really bond with casual sex.  I have an experience.  It is outside of me.

I’m afraid of monogamy because Noah really likes to take it to 11.  If I have clamped down so hard on him that he isn’t allowed to go play with other people, how much will I egg him on to do because I feel guilty?  I don’t know how to do this in a way that is good for me.  Nonmonogamy gives me the eternal out that I can say, “Fine you have this part of you that I can’t deal with… take it somewhere else.”  I never have to deal with my own actual limits that way.  I never have to deal with telling him, “Fine but no really you have to stop at 8 because my jaw hurts.”  That’s harder.  Telling him no is a lot easier than having to figure out what I can do.

I’m afraid because I think we are going to have some difficult periods and a lot of crying over sex.  I think this is going to be hard.  I think we will both have to do a lot of forgiving one another for mistakes and that’s hard to think about.  It’s weird to be discussing monogamy after five years of marriage.  We really know what we are getting into, you know?  Only we don’t.  Because things will be very different in twenty years.  We will be very different people.  Can I really require that he never again touch anyone else intimately?  I’m not going to do poly-anything.  If he is going to follow my boundaries well, I feel weird about that.

I feel very pressured as the gate keeper.  It’s weird to feel so conflicted about this.  On one hand I feel uncomfortable with the idea of keeping him from having sex and other hand I’m not thrilled about feeling required to have sex absolutely as much as he wants forever.  I don’t have any idea what my limits are.

I don’t like the way I dissociate rather than deal with feeling uncomfortable during sex.  I have a hard time dealing with my anxious feelings in the moment.  It’s hard to say when I really don’t want to be pushed.  He likes pushing so much.  It’s so weird to me that he worries about me wanting him.  I worry about wanting him so much that I break myself trying to meet needs I can’t meet.

Because the thing is, I don’t actually think there are needs of his I can’t meet.  Because I think that if he picks the right days, I probably can actually meet all of his needs.  I like to go to 11 too.  I feel scared that he isn’t going to be willing to walk around the cracks.  I really do like the image of myself as a mosaic.  My picture was broken so long ago and put back together so clumsily that it is an entirely new picture.  On even median days I like me.

I don’t think he can really just learn a “set of triggers” and avoid them.  It’s quicksand.  And it moves.  I want to find out how it moves.  I want to be able to try things many times and know that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.  I want to be brave enough to not be angry when I say, “Ok not tonight.”  I’m not failing if I say that.  I’m not failing if my body is not up to something on a given day.  I am not failing if sometimes I need to be held instead of hit.  It’s hard to admit that I’m not instinctively automatically in the same place as Noah.

It feels like I don’t deserve him.  Because I cannot do that.  Because I cannot just accept whatever he wants to do whenever he wants to do it.  I feel like I cannot require monogamy because I will never be good enough to satisfy him.  I will never be enough.  I will always fail.  I’m scared.

I’m terrified to believe him.  I’m so afraid that I will believe him that he wants to be monogamous.  Only in twenty years things will be different and I will be expected to just understand.  People evolve.  Needs change.

I know that I will want to sleep with people.  That’s just a fact.  I’m not actually in denial about that.  I will want to do it a lot.  It will feel compulsive for the rest of my life.  But I’m going to choose not to do it.  I don’t think that I am actually served by following my pointer through life.  My compass is broken.  I need to think about the long-term and understand that sleeping with other people does not feed any of my needs (ok hyperbole for effect but the problems outweigh gains) and does not meet any of my goals.

Ok, maybe the hookers in Vegas.  Because I can get behind you being motivated to attain that salary.  Especially because the deal was always that they would be there in case I wore out.  You haven’t done it yet.  I don’t safeword.

Good thing I have therapy today.

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The song right now is Tonight I Wanna Cry.  I wish he had used a real word, but whatever.  It’s kind of funny because I’m not crying.  This is the first time in a week I haven’t been.

I’m thinking hard about what marriage means to me.  You see, I’m at a weird tipping point in my marriage. A point of leverage.  Most people don’t get to the point where they have lived with their spouse longer than anyone else ever in their lives until about twenty years in.  I’ve been married for five years.  I have lived with Noah longer than I ever lived consecutively with either of my parents.  It really doesn’t matter if it is not fair that I hold Noah to a higher standard of truth telling than other people use in their marriage.  I do.  And that’s the fucking deal.  You take it or…

Ok, now I’m crying.  I will get to the point where I am not angry all the time.  This is a stage.  I know that.  But I will never stop needing that level of trust.  Noah is already the only mirror my life has.  I won’t leave Noah.  It really doesn’t matter if he breaks my trust over and over.  I will never be willing to walk away from another person.  I will be mean and nasty and vicious sometimes and try to drive them away because I am angry.  But I can never leave again.  I don’t have that in me.

Yesterday I talked to the friend who was born across the street.  She asked me if I could bear living with it because her mom couldn’t.  I remember how that happened.  I visited during that period.  It was bad.  I remember what happened to her family.  I know what has happened to her mom.  Noah will never leave me and I will never leave Noah.  I’m afraid we may hurt each other very badly though.

Given that everyone in this house agrees to the basic premise that our kids deserve to grow up safe and happy we will make sure they do.  I’m really scared.  As much as people mock me fucking constantly for being angry, oh my fucking god you have no idea.  You have no fucking idea what I sit on.  I am direct and I am female.  Stop fucking commenting on my anger.  If a man said the same thing you wouldn’t fucking say, “Don’t hold back, tell me how you really feel.”  Well, Noah might.  And he does it on purpose to be a fucking asshole.  (He does not say it to me.)

I have to choose to not be angry.  I have to choose to bite my tongue and not escalate.  I have to choose to not make nasty comments.  When he goes out with people I have to not snap, “And you had better fucking come home this time.”  He knows already.  He knows I am on edge.  He’s not going to push that again, maybe ever.  What will he push instead?

I apparently get to hold him hostage for the rest of our lives.  His level of nonmonogamy will mirror mine.  I guess that’s a good way of seeing how effective of a whore I am.  How long can I hold out?  How long until I have to admit that he is right and he should be allowed to do whatever he wants whenever he wants because I want to do the same.  I don’t know.  It’s not worth the fucking drama.

I have to decide how to tell this story.  What story is this?  I’ve already been monogamous for most of the marriage.  I guess I’m supposed to be one of those stories about how open marriages don’t work.  Swinging?  When I know that everything I do is giving Noah a free pass to go do it with someone else.  Wow.  All of a sudden it really makes me feel sick to my stomach.  It’s not about him having the sex with someone else, although I do try hard to not picture it.  Noah wants to egg me on to do things with other people so that he can do it.  I don’t want to be used that way.  I don’t want to feel pressured to have sex with other people because I know I have to in order to give Noah “permission” to go do something I’m not thrilled about anyway.  I am really unhappy about being part of the Embargo Noah, I’m not fucking doing this arrangement.

No.  I am not going to be a gate keeper.  You can’t blame me for the rest of your life for what you do and do not get to do.

I feel like what I am going to do is learn to shut my mouth.  I’ll perfect my come on.  I’ll do what Noah wants me to do and I’ll sleep with other people.  I will learn to tell the story perfectly so that I don’t talk about the fact that it always hurts.  It always leaves me uncomfortable for days.  Even the fairly nice stuff with lots of lube.  I don’t fit other people.  It always rubs wrong.  It’s feeling increasingly apparent with each person I sleep with.  I have intense feelings about that.  I feel intense compulsion to figure it out because Noah wants me to.  Noah wants me to be slutty.  He wanted that kind of wife.  He really did.  He went out and picked the woman with the highest body count he could find who wasn’t already married.  I guess I didn’t tell him up front how much of that sex was quasi-consensual childhood experiences did I?  It kind of changes the picture.

It’s going to be interesting when people see the blanks filled in on my promiscuity.  I wear it like a bragging badge.  I am such a whore.  Everything is complicated.  I don’t feel bad about the sex I had recently.  I don’t feel like it makes me a bad person.  I didn’t break the sanctity of my marriage, blah blah blah.  But it was remarkable to me just how weird it felt to me to be so uncomfortable during and after sex.  I had forgotten that part.  That used to be such an understood part of sex for me.  Oh yeah.  It always hurts.  It doesn’t with Noah.  And it’s not that he has the smallest penis I have ever had sex with.  (Uhm, err should I insert a disclaimer?)  Smaller penises often hurt more than him.

We fit.  I don’t know why.  It’s one of the most intense parts of our marriage for me.  He is the first sexual partner I’ve ever had where I am not uncomfortable and/or in pain during and after.  I mean, he can but it takes effort on his part.  Sex is such a huge part of me and my life.  I am so intensely conflicted about it.  I finally have a partner who doesn’t hurt me every single time we have sex.  I don’t want to leave this.  I don’t want to give up on sex for the rest of my life.  That’s what my mother did.

I wouldn’t really do the single and dating thing while raising my kids.  I would stay home and cry that I fucked up my ability to watch their whole lives.  Being a mom is a way of finding out what it would have been like to have a mother who was continuously with me throughout my childhood.  Yes, I’m doing it in a much more high intensity way than most of my friends who are mothers.  You don’t have similar wounds to heal.  I need this consistency.  I need to have a stable period in my life of twenty years.  At least once.  I need it.  I have to choose this.  If I left I would never have a stable period to finish growing up in.  I would never get to have that safety.

Tom gave me the first period of safety.  But he wasn’t willing to let me finish growing up.  Noah will let me grow up.  He will let me change.  He will encourage me whole-heartedly.

But he doesn’t want just me.  And I am very compulsive about sex for a long list of reasons.  I don’t have a good excuse, and I’m not sure I need one given that I’ve been honest and up front and negotiated to be allowed to do the things I wanted to do for a very long time.  So did he.  He doesn’t need an excuse either.  He just wants it.  New-shiny-sex is pretty hot.

But it always hurts.  There is always a down side for me.  Not to mention that I feel intensely conflicted about being out of the house and not present with my kids.  It’s not like I do night-time parenting any way.  Noah does, except when he’s out.

It is hard to not be angry all day every day.  I’m not.  I’m a little snippy.  I’m generally very polite with my children.  But small irritations are escalating too fast for me these days.  I get so mad so easily.  I’m not doing anything other than making terrible facial expressions and having a shitty tone of voice, I hear. I don’t want my kids to remember this.  I don’t want to be this person.  I really don’t know what the road forward looks like.  I’m so scared.

Bonding

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I think a lot about why I want to overshare my emotional experience while hunting.  I think that part of it is, I don’t know how these things go for other people.  Does everyone waffle like me?  Noah says he doesn’t.  Does anyone?  I don’t know.

I feel like my whole life has been a weird balancing act.  I have to do enough hard things to balance out the easy things.  I’m not really even sure what that means.  Why do I feel utterly compelled to promise elaborate sex acts to strangers?  I can’t do it with people I know very well because then I feel like I have to live up to that promise all the time.

Last night I did well.  I closed.  Three times.  Excellent.  It helps that this was one of the rare times when I have taunted this person in real life previously.  He was ready for some follow through.  I feel giddy that I managed.  It’s like checking a box on a treasure hunt.  w00t.  Inspired hot sex three times in one night.  And he didn’t finish quickly.  Excellent stamina.  I feel like women are judged this way, why shouldn’t men?

Why shouldn’t I talk about sex as if it is a perfectly respectable hobby?  Excepting religious reasons… no really, why should anyone care?  Granted not everyone wants to hear about it, but I don’t want to hear about golf either.  So?  Why are most hobbies morally neutral but sex is bad?  Why am I bad because I like to feel this way?

It’s not like I have devoted my entire life to it.  I’m doing a few other things as well.  Like writing about it.

Sarah is taking Shanna to Arizona tomorrow.  I will miss them.  It’s always hard for me when Shanna visits people without me.

I have a date Thursday night.  I need to go to bed early on Tuesday and Wednesday if I want to be in the mood.  If it was for tonight I would cancel.  I’m burning too hot.  I’m using too much energy and way way too much at night.  I’m so tired.

I feel the kind of tired where I am emotionally raw.  This is how I always came home feeling.  And my mother would pick a fight.  When I feel vulnerable like this I am sensitive and I easily feel shamed and unwanted.  It doesn’t always happen after sex with new people and it can happen with Noah.  When I feel like I am breaking taboos this sometimes hits.

I feel really bad about telling the guy last night “Maybe” when he asked for a second date.  I feel like I made promises I don’t intend to keep.  I kept my mouth shut about things he said or did that were complete relationship deal breakers for me because oh man is that not a battle I’m interested in.  I’m not trying to hurt him.  I think he is a fine individual.  Just not someone I want to be in a relationship with. Oh the sex was hot though.  If we run into one another at a sex party… maybe.  If I’m in the mood.  He certainly did most of it just right.

It feels like as a slut/whore/whatever word you want to use having those kind of preferences is kind of mean.  I’m supposed to just take people as they are and like them.  Mostly I do.  But there’s always one thing… I know it would drive me batty.  I go home and thank God that Noah doesn’t have/do/think/whatever the thing was.

This is why I don’t feel polyamorous.  Not really.  Only I have my boys.  I do feel a connection to them.  It is pretty much always more intense on their side.  I have a date scheduled with my shaman.  We haven’t been on a date in about six or seven years?  And it was a four or five year gap between that and the previous set of dates.

I have a long cycle sometimes, apparently.  It’s interesting to learn that about myself.  I’m glad I didn’t stay with Steve because I would not have had the room to grow to be the person I am now.  I like who and what I am.  He wouldn’t have stood next to me for this journey.  He wasn’t my partner.  Not like this.  Tom didn’t want to have kids with me.  That is why I left him.  Having children was more important to me than being with him.  I made the right choice.

I am strongly dyadic in my bonding.  I do very intense one on one bonding.  And then it scares the piss out of me and I run away.  Noah is the only person I have ever met who can really match my intensity in an on-going way.  We take breaks occasionally when we are escalating, but we always come back to a topic.  We can always finish talking about something no matter how hard it is.

I have never had a person in my life who will do that.  I would follow him off a cliff because no one will ever make me feel seen the way Noah does.  I’m protective of this space.  I feel terrified of it being encroached on.

That’s why I only go on first dates.  I have no interest in finding a new bond right now.  Fuck you all.  You all suck compared to Noah.  I’m not going to go on a second date and start dealing with the fact that you can’t have conversations the way I want to have them.  It feels like a waste of my time.  I’m not interested in sitting through multiple dates where I have to silently roll my eyes and put up with shit that irritates the fuck out of me.  Everyone irritates me.  Everyone.  But I can turn around and tell Noah what he is doing that irritates the fuck out of me.  I can’t do that with anyone else.

It’s very stressful being around people and being polite.  I’m really not very polite in my head.  But I want polite children.  I have gone most of the way towards creating polite children.  When they start behaving in a way that irritates me it is because they are mimicking something I’ve done.  If I want to change their behavior the first thing I need to do is identify where I am behaving in a sub-optimal way and change it.  I put a lot of pressure on myself right now.

But people seriously irritate the fuck out of me and I’d like to yell at them a lot.  I don’t.  It’s not personal.  I’m sorry I feel this way.  But I do.

I don’t go on second date because that one little thing that irritated me?  I left thinking about it.  I constructed a story in my head about that little personality tic becoming part of my life.  Oh god that would require a lot of patience.  Can’t do it.  I’m sorry.

I’ve done a fair bit of recycling old hits in my head, lately.  I’ve gone on dates with several old flames, with mixed success.  I’m interested in seeing how things have changed with my shaman.  I feel weird about the fact that he is ok with being available for me whenever I want him over the course of more than a decade.  That’s… holy shit that’s commitment.  I love him.  But I’m not and I never have been “in love”.  It’s dramatic that I now have Noah to compare everyone to.  He changed the whole scale.

I like inspiring people.  Really good sex can change your world view.  There are so many good chemicals.  The aftermath of goodness can be bittersweet.  I like inspiring people to feel better about themselves.  I want them to feel affirmed for the one gift I am willing to accept from them.

I’m tired.  I’ve had a week of bad sleep.  I feel guilty that I avoided conversation last night by falling asleep.  He woke me up after an hour and a half to put me on bart.  Fucking slick, Krissy.  I feel bad.  It’s not like I did it on purpose.  I’m really tired.  But uhm, that shouldn’t be part of the first date.  Kind of poor form.

Noah is trying to schedule a date for Thursday.  I have extra impetus to not cancel.  Bother.  This is the kind of thing that inevitably happens around him dating.  If I cancel it gets weird.  He’s just as (or more) twitchy than I am at this point.  He acts like he should be kicked.  I have a hard time when Noah puts his head down and looks like he is in pain.  Like I have already been berating him… just because he feels guilty.  I haven’t said anything.  It makes me angry.  And then I’m going to say things.

This is a bad cycle.  Mostly in our life he acts like my ambient anger isn’t about him.  He goes about his life being cheerful and dandy and on his own time.  This is a good thing.  When he feels like he is to blame for my anger the dynamic changes.  I feel like an abusive asshole because he starts flinching.  It’s hard because it feels like my anger isn’t much higher than normal but all of a sudden I am bad for feeling it.  WTF?  Why do I have to be Miss Susie Sunshine on this sacred topic above all others?  I’m a cranky person.  I just am.  Why is it surprising around this topic?

Why am I only not allowed to feel feelings about this.  You are fine with them on every other topic.

I’m going back and sleeping with my friends because I have already been fierce and aggressive and they have proven they really like me.  It’s weird to show up and let them surprise me with how they actually want to touch me.  It’s weird finding out what is on the other side of the brick wall I build around myself.

First date sex has a certain loneliness to it.  That’s the bittersweet part.  You know that this person doesn’t really know you.  When you plan to disappear in the morning you hide behind that knowledge.  You carefully don’t present yourself at certain times.  It’s not worth finding out how this person feels about ‘x’ controversial topic.  For me to carefully censor what I’m saying…

This feeling.  It’s like what I had as a child.  When I was being sent to a new place.  I desperately wanted to please them.  I wanted to be liked.  Not being liked was so bad.  So very bad.  When people don’t like me they tend to loathe me.  They feel free to say the nastiest, meanest things possible.  They do this because I reveal a lot of intense personal feelings quickly and then other people bond to me.  Then when I reject the bond, because it was ephemeral for me, something that was completely true in the moment and not true later, they know personal things.

I’m being vague.  There is no way for me to recount the people and ways I have been told I am disgusting for the kind of sex I like to have.  I had a good night last night.  I don’t want to do it again soon because of my own issues with being patient with people.  He did nothing wrong.  He’s awesome.  My shaman is wonderful.  I feel much more connected to him than I do to most people.  I only want to go out on approximately a dozen dates over a decade.  It’s not because he has done something wrong.

I feel like running away from intimacy this hard is a sign that I am deeply broken.  If people cannot be everything and perfect then I have no space for them in my life.  And I judge everyone against Noah and find them wanting.  I’m lonely.

A lot of the impatience is just that people feel weird to me.  I never feel comfortable.  I always feel fake and like I have to be thinking very hard about not saying “the wrong thing” because inevitably someone will blow up at me.

Talking about sex and relationships feels especially charged and fierce.  People always feel weird to me.  I’m not very adaptable.  I have times where I can do it, but it’s hard.  I’m always poised for inevitable rejection.  Some woman who wrote me a nasty dear Jane letter felt the need to go back and change her RSVP to a no for an event I had in 2010.  Uhm.  Wow.  Thanks for letting me know, again, that you still dislike me.

I feel inadequate to the task of living my life.  I feel like I keep writing checks my body can’t cash.  I haven’t run in a few days.  I’m too physically exhausted.  Shanna and Calli and I did help shut down the port yesterday.  That was a walk.  I was impressed with Shanna’s tenacity.  I gave her multiple opportunities to wuss out when she got tired.  She said, “No!  I can do it!  I’m buff!”  My strong girl.

I feel a vague desire to probe her for why she introduces herself as She-Ra.  But that’s people hacking and she can’t consent.  So instead when she does it I just smile along.  I don’t know what to say.  Why should she feel more attached to the name I picked out?

I’m teaching her to be kind of weird.  I feel bad about that.  I’m very good at talking to strangers… if I initiate it or if they follow a pattern of questions I recognize as “valid”.  I can answer some questions easily.  Other times I freeze up and feel really dumb and walk away muttering about my inadequate social skills… she notices.

Today there is a park day trip to the park where I used to meet the above mentioned Dear Jane woman.  It’s a great park.  The homeschool group is going.  I keep thinking to myself that I’m not there to make friends.  I’m there to let Shanna make friends.  I don’t know that I can do it.  I can’t sleep in, ok fine.  I need to start going to bed earlier at night.  I’m so tired I can’t function.  This is not useful.

This is part of what I mean when I say I can’t date.  I don’t regulate my energy well.  Right now I’m trying to do too many things.  I can’t do everything.  Time to drop some balls.

Irrational feelings

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Noah made the comment that our nonmonogamy rules are based on polite fictions.  I did not yell or scream or hit or punch or any of the things that went through my impulse queue.  He just called me a liar.  But he did it in one of those civilized ways you can’t really argue with.  He can get away with it.

He’s not calling me a liar.  He’s pointing out that my emotional experience and the actual real experience often differ and we planned for my emotional experience.  He’s kind of a fucker that way.

We originally said we wouldn’t date until Youngest Child (whoever that would be) was five.  We think that little kids need a lot of attention from their parents.  I’m starting to realize that I overestimated how much I would be able to give to my kids without getting anything for myself.  I planned on seven to ten years of me not getting any attention.  Maybe that was poor planning.

Noah points out that I’m being unfair and dishonest about how I’m representing the breakdown of our respective time off.  Maybe.  I’m not going to say yes to that yet.  I have too many years of him having a lot more time and space than me.  I’m still dealing with being completely overwhelmed and unable to function.  I’m trying to figure out where the happy medium will be.

The class he signed up for?  The one we thought was six week?  It goes till March.  So much for carefully figuring out how our reserves of energy will be spent over the next few months.  Not how I have been planning.  Ok.  I can regroup.  That’s fine.

Noah is going to want to go out on a date.  I don’t know when.  Not this year.  It will probably come up some time next year if I’m even vaguely honest with myself.  With how much time I have spent on okcupid lately I understand why women will line up to date my husband.  I don’t like feeling like part of a group.  I have trouble with being out with my family of five sometimes.  If I wasn’t so clearly a huge needed constantly necessary part of the group I wouldn’t be comfortable.  Parties are hard.  I feel like I never fit in.  If I go to a party and I feel awkward and uncomfortable from the time I arrive but Noah looks like he fits in I feel like I should leave.  I should let him have this space he is comfortable in.  It’s his.  Not mine.

That’s kind of how I let Tom have the south bay bdsm community.  If I am attached to someone and they disengage from me in any way when we are out with a group I feel the instant need to panic and leave.  I can’t be there.  I’m not wanted any more.  I have no place.  No identity.  I’m nothing.  I vanish once the identity I have in the group leaves.

I can’t be one of Noah’s girls.  If I am one of Noah’s girls I don’t exist when he is not with me any more.  I feel like I am watching someone else live my life.  Someone else gets to be Noah’s partner.  I guess that means I stop existing as his partner.  When he was dating W. I sat at home crying and cutting.  I didn’t tell him about the cutting much.  Everyone knew about the crying.  I wanted to have as much physical pain as emotional pain.  I wanted to see how big of a wound I had inside.  I couldn’t tell.  I couldn’t tell how big, how destructive the pain was until I saw how much of my leg I had to sacrifice to it.  I had to know how big it was.  Do you know why I stayed?  It was never more than a two or three slice date.

I think I’m done with writing about when I started cutting, for the book.  I haven’t continued to bring it up because it seems weird to do so.  For about seven years I cut more days than I did not.  Do I really need to say that over and over through the story?  Should I talk about the fact that I learned to measure my emotional pain by how many cuts it took to get me to calm down?

I am nonmonogamous and deal my intense jealousy and emotional break downs around Noah dating because it is only a two or three cut activity.  That’s not that bad.  I didn’t need to cut every date.  I established how much pain it was.  There were times when I used to make cross hatches on my thighs that were five or six inches long.  I would make hundreds.  Two or three cuts that are only an inch or so long?  Psh.  This really isn’t so bad.

It’s hard when Noah says that are rules are based on fictions.  What he is saying is that I was making up a part of me.  Or making up what I thought I should say.  I was lying.  I don’t want to be a liar.

I don’t want to be a liar.  But I can’t figure out how to explain what is going on with me.  I’m saying the closest thing to the truth I can at any given moment.  Sometimes, when I’m dealing with my emotional experiences, the truth is like water.  It flows wherever it wants to paying no attention to previous course corrections.

I’m dating.  I shouldn’t lie about it.  I haven’t found a boyfriend, but I’m dating.  Maybe I should stop trying to set rules about how long we have to endure any given state of life.  I keep fucking up my guesstimates.

I said five years because I was hoping that by then I would feel secure enough with Noah that I wouldn’t feel so threatened every time he looked at another woman.  So scared of losing him any minute.  I don’t think time is really going to give me that though.  I would feel just as paranoid in twenty years.  And I can’t seem to be monogamous.  I’m not ok with being a hypocrite.  That’s a lot higher in my personal scheme of sins than almost anything.  I’m acting like a hypocrite.  Shit.  I don’t wannnnnnnna stop.

I didn’t ask for monogamy as part of our marriage.  I specifically excluded it from our wedding vows.  I knew I didn’t want it.  I have to let Noah figure out what he wants without dealing with temper tantrums.  It’s not fair.  It’s not the kind of marriage I want to have.  I can’t freak out in front of the kids when he is out, either.  Luckily it will be a smooth transition for them because they already don’t see him several nights a week.

Speaking of appropriate topics, I won’t be able to make fresh references to Noah’s whores.  That uhh won’t go over well.  Maybe I’m going to have to work on that whole thought process a lot over the next few months.  I doubt he would try before the end of the class he is working on.

I’m weaning at eighteen months.  I’ve decided.  That’s the end.  I’m gradually working her down.  I’m only allowing her to nurse twice a day right now.  It will be once a day for the last while.  There are things I want to do with my body that I don’t want to do while nursing.  It’s time to stop.  I want to be able to make choices based on what I want rather than on what I have to do.  Do I get tossed out of the crunchy mom club for not doing child lead weaning?  I’m not making it to two years either.  Calli is fifteen months tomorrow.  I feel like I will lose my mind in the next three months.  I hate nursing.  That’s all I’ve got in me.

I’m going to try stopping the pot in December.  I am going to start actually training for running.  I need to stop coughing.  Eek.  I’m nervous.  I’m going to talk to my psych about that and using Ativan more than I am.  I was given six pills for a month and I still have two left.  But I’m still smoking pot every day because of the writing.  I’m going to stop writing on the 30th.  I’m going to switch to using Ativan instead.  With the goal of not needing anything at all in the next few months.  I’m already cutting the Ativan in half and I may need to cut them into quarters if I use them more.  Right now they make me fall asleep.  I really and truly am not safe to drive within four hours of taking one.  That limits my life.

So I need to be able to cope if I want to go off and do the things I want to do.  It’s time to get off the crutches.  That’s going to be explosive for a while and I’m scared.  I smoke pot because I have a temper problem.  Because it’s hard for me to be calm and patient 24/7.  I just don’t have that naturally.  I’m going to need to find other ways of dealing with my anger.  Running is going to be a lot of it.  But I also seem to be using dating to fill a lot of my energy input needs.  I feel deeply conflicted about it.  But I am.

I fucking need something.  I don’t want to just sit here and eat and try to convince my brain that I’m happy that way.  It’s a false association.  Being fatter doesn’t actually make me happier even though I have this really strong self-belief that it is true.  My weight is pretty irrelevant but the other circumstances in my life matter.  I have usually been happier while I was fatter.  It wasn’t because of the weight though.  I need to stop feeling bad about not being fat.  Yeah, that convoluted.

I’m bigger than my mother.  I’m not fat.  I need to let go of her endless lectures about what a cow I am.  I’m not.  I’m a fairly average sized woman.  My mother is extremely petite.  Let it go Krissy.

Tonight we are going to spend money we really shouldn’t be spending this month on an over the top luxury meal with my lovely Complication.  She’s worth it.  I’m going to enjoy every fucking minute of it.  Later I will have a panic attack at the AmEx bill.  Then I will stop, breathe, think of the sight of my Complication eating good food and pay the bill without complaint.

That’s what you do as a rich person.  You facilitate life being good.  For yourself.  For other people.  Because you can.  Because why the fuck not.  There is no deserve.  There is no “right” to these things.  I’m not bad for spending this bonus money on an over the top good meal.  I’m not wasting it.  I’m enjoying it.  I’m enjoying every bite.  I’m enjoying every minute that I can of a life that is full of a lot of ups and downs.

When you have much greater lows than normal it only seems fair that you get to have better highs, right?  I’m about to go to the French Laundry for the second time in two years.  I am a lucky bitch.  I have a husband who loves me tremendously and is willing to spend most of his spare time on figuring out how to earn more money so he can pamper me more and more.  Because he wants to.  Because he thinks I deserve it.  Because he thinks it is great that he can do that for me.  Because wanting to give to me makes him want to go out and conquer the world so that he can give it to me.

I think I will need to be ok with him sleeping with other people once in a while so he can come back and appreciate me more.  I really am unique.  When I sleep with other people I come back and tell Noah what they did wrong.  He does the same.  It’s a very bonding experience for us that we match perfectly for pretty much every part of sex.  The rhythm is ideal.  No one else quite gets there.  Those other people are fun and awesome, don’t get me wrong.  But Noah is home.  And I am that for him.

These irrational feelings are hard.

epiphany

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When Tom ended the M/s portion of our relationship (after being directly challenged in therapy) he said: “It’s not worth the effort.”  I took that as a statement about his belief about putting effort into our relationship as a whole because as a 24/7 slave… that’s a big deal.  We never recovered.  He didn’t want to get married or have kids with me.  He wanted me to just kind of exist without getting any of my needs met and keep company with him doing the shit he wanted when he decided he wanted it.
It occurs to me this morning that I’m approaching hunting wrong.  I go through a lot of effort to meet people where they are.  I do the driving.  And as a result people don’t value me much.  They stop responding to me.  I’m chasing them.  I think I should stop.  Why in the fuck am I out wasting energy on chasing people?
I think I’d like to be chased for a while.  I think that I’m going to stop sleeping with people on the first date because the first date is going to have to be really convenient for me.  And that means sex isn’t on the table.  We aren’t going to do that at my house.  I think that part of the problem is that people don’t generally properly appreciate the fact that it takes a lot of time and energy to drive as much as I do.  Maybe they should bear some of that cost.
This is where I have this funny side thought.  People tell me I should be very careful about talking about where I live.  Some one could come after me.  My response is, “What are they going to do?  Put a gun to my head?  Rape me?  And this is a change in my life pattern… how?”  They can do that whether I am hesitant to list my address or not.  I’m not hard to find and I never will be again.  There are too many people I kind of hope will come find me.  Like Belinda.  Or Michael Paul Douglass Goble.  If he ever wants to look up Krissy Archer I hope he finds me.  That means I have to take the risk of other people finding me.
It’s really a statistically low chance.  People are far more likely to be killed by their families.  Given what I have survived I’m just not all that scared.  I mean, I am.  Let’s be real.  But not enough to shut up.  Ever.  I can’t.  Never again.
And this is all tied together.  I need to feel like I am a destination worth reaching.  It’s ok to talk about where I am.  I’m in Fremont.  If you live in Berkeley and you think I am interesting you had better get used to driving south.  And I have a weird ass schedule.  You will have to be flexible.  And smarter than me.  
Or worth seriously traveling for.  Once someone has established that they are worth going to, ok.  I do want to have sex and all.  But I would like to be courted.  I have never made anyone court me before.  I wonder what that would be like.  But I still can’t date or have a boyfriend.  I’m just making friends.  I’m seeing if there are people out in the world I should occasionally go see when I have spare time.  Because I need more of those people, right?  
I get something from sex.  And I give something.  There is an emotional transaction.  I need it.  I don’t know how this is going to work.