Category Archives: activism

Unschooling

I have a lot of volatile things in my head I can’t talk about. So I’m going to write about unschooling instead.

I was hanging out on Pinterest trying to distract myself from my current feelings so that I can get some kind of grip on myself for a day of painting. It isn’t happening fast.

I was looking through a lot of unschooling articles and I was pinning them, as you do, and I thought, “Holy crap I hope that none of my traditionally schooling friends see this and think I am saying mean things about their choices.”

I think our education model in this country is broken. I understand that there are a wide variety of reasons to opt-in to it despite it being fundamentally broken. But I think of it like opting-in to a relationship with an abusive parent because you can’t handle the pain of breaking things off. I get it. But I hope I don’t ever do it.

There are a wide variety of reasons I would put my kids in school and then undermine that shit as best I could at night. I don’t think my kids are too good for school. I think I have the luxury and privilege of being able to make a different decision and I really really want to.

I very consciously educated myself with the goal of being able to be… more or less an elite private tutor. I grew up in a place where I could see that people were being taught lessons by their families that I had no access to. I sometimes lived in extremely wealthy areas. Those kids just knew things about life I had no way of learning.

I wanted kids. It isn’t that I want my kids to grow up to be the smartest people ever. It isn’t that I want my kids to grow up and make lots of money. It isn’t that I want my kids to be perfect in any definable way. I have a very loose schema of criteria.

I want my children to believe that the bodily integrity of people matters. Yes, yes yes… many children come out of the public education system with this intact… blah blah blah. Lots don’t. My kids are already in the advantaged sect because they have parents who believe it regardless of the messages they would hear at a school blah blah blah.

I want my children to really grow up with that message being presented as de facto and it is not in most schools–public or private. If you have to raise your hand and ask permission to use the toilet and a teacher can tell you that you have to wait until the bell rings you do not have bodily integrity. Sorry.

I want my children to believe that information about stuff that interests you comes from a million different places. I don’t want them to think you sit down and do your lessons. I don’t want “school” to be something that bores you and wastes your time. I want my children to appreciate the inherent usefulness of mathematics so I talk about it allllllllllll day in a lot of different contexts. My daughters will not hear the message that girls are bad at math until that concept will make them laugh out loud with surprise. They will know they are good at maths. The person saying that is just kind of silly.

I want my kids to believe that boredom is a sign that you need to get up and start cleaning something. If you really don’t want to clean then you will find something better to do and all of a sudden you aren’t bored.

I understand the need for large scale child care. That is more or less how I view the public education system. We are a society based on parents being out-of-the-home. I want to live in my home. I want to do most of my work here.

If I were able to buy a property out in the middle of some rural place my habits would be totally logical. My proximity to cities does not change the basic nature of how I like living. I choose to not feel shame for feeling soothed by living in a way that is more like how my ancestors lived. Ok, they lived in family groups that were larger than mine but people lived in fairly closed communities. They didn’t have to deal with many people. Oh of course this is partially about my anxiety but I don’t see how kowtowing to a system I don’t believe in just so I can’t pretend that I don’t have anxiety will improve anything.

Lately Noah has been talking about trying to figure out how to actually break down what he has experienced in life and explain it so that kids who don’t have role models can have some idea of what people with privilege see. Ok, that wasn’t precisely how he phrased it. That conversation was a few days ago.

We don’t just stay *in the house*. We are outside a lot. We know our neighbors. We talk to people often. We have relationships. The relationships are getting deeper and more influential as the years go by. My children spend a lot of time with elderly people hearing stories about the Old Days. It’s really fun. I supervise but don’t intervene much in them figuring out how to talk to people.

Well, that’s not true. I help them prepare for conversations in advance. “When you meet someone, what do you say?” After conversations I talk about how it went. I talk to them about facial expressions and body language. I help them understand more about what just happened. “Do you understand why he laughed when I said _____?” I fill in the blanks and help the stories make more sense. I break it down. Stories about WWII become large and convoluted follow up conversations with millions of questions. I don’t direct much. I just answer anything. I look up what I don’t know.

I am a guide and a facilitator.

Will this go on forever? I don’t know. I don’t know how our needs will change. I know that at this moment in time I can’t imagine sending Shanna to a place where they would expect her to sit still (even with breaks) for four or five hours a day let alone six or seven. Some kindergardeners are in school for eight hours. They do have play periods but they do a *lot* of table work.

We complain constantly about an obesity epidemic and we chain children to chairs. What in the hell is going on? I will never put my children on a diet. The very idea makes me sick to my stomach. I will, however, ensure that they learn how to be very physically comfortable with walking at least ten miles a week. I’m becoming increasingly sure that Santa will be bringing bicycles. With bicycles we can get to all of our extra-curricular activities in town.

I pick swimming, martial arts, dance, language, gymnastics and rock climbing classes based on the ability to walk to them. I *have* walked my kids to every location they have taken classes at. We don’t always walk because we often have somewhere else to go before or afterwards but I prefer to walk. If we had bicycles I think I would just figure out how to not schedule things close to classes.

I do not want my children to be used to an air conditioned world. I want them to be used to using their own bodies to go places. I expect them to go do manual labor on farms in third world countries in a few years. They can’t be too soft.

I want them to actually see how it works in other parts of the world. I don’t want to show them pictures of the objectified third world. “Oh those poor oppressed people. All They Need Is A Honky.” Err, not so much. I want my children to meet people when they are young and have no belief that they have the key to life. I want them to just meet people who live differently and learn to love them.

Can you imagine Shanna and Calli living with someone for two and a half months without falling in love? If someone is remotely kind to them they will be hook line and sinker. Those kids like people. All people. They aren’t “color-blind”. They think all colors are beautiful. They want to meet everyone and talk to them. Ok, that’s Shanna’s deal. Calli is dubious.

I think Calli and I will hang back and watch. That will be ok too. That will also be a positive experience. Sometimes I feel like I am watching Shanna work a room. She wants to know everyone. I don’t even understand why. I didn’t implant that.

If she went to a school across the street from her house she would get to know the kids in this neighborhood better. The kids in this neighborhood come and go a lot because we have a lot of rentals. There are only a few owners with kids. She wouldn’t see much diversity. She would see a revolving door of poor brown children who come and go because their parents move. That is the neighborhood we live in.

You know… we play with the kids in the afternoons. I think we get enough of the “people don’t stay in your life” phenomena. My kids are improving their Spanish faster than any other language because a lot of the neighbor kids don’t speak English. We have an increasing segment that doesn’t speak English because they speak some variety of Asian language. Those kids aren’t usually allowed to play with us in the yard.

We play with anyone. If you are here, let’s play. It’s really fun.

I don’t want to spend my life driving to see pre-selected and approved people of appropriate IQ and education level and life philosophy of whatever. I also don’t want to spend my money on lots of being entertained for a few hours. I like most of my hobbies to be cheap or free.

I don’t want to opt-in to the system as I understand it. Given that I have attended twenty-five public schools across three states in a variety of socio-economic settings and then I went on to be a credentialed teacher… I think it is kind of idiotic to try and say that I am not understanding the system. I think I have enough experience that on this matter I get to just trust my gut.

It isn’t an evil place. I’m not trying to say that it is evil. But it is a waste of time. That is what it is designed to do. Waste time. I don’t want that. I don’t want my children to be taught that.

I have the privilege and luxury to make a different choice. I recognize that my choices are not open to everyone. I recognize that there are very good reasons for making different choices. I recognize that I would make different choices based on different life circumstances. I am not trying to put people down who put their kids in school.

I am saying I don’t want to and I don’t have to so I am not going to. Not until they are old enough to pick a course of study and go pursue what they want to be doing on their own. I am fully qualified to ensure they get the basics of life.

I think that I am actively choosing the term Unschooling because I don’t think that the Radical Unschoolers should get to hog the term. We do life learning. I don’t see that changing any year soon. I do not do permissive parenting. I think that refusing to set limits is abdicating your responsibilities as a parent. I think it is unfairly expecting a child to know an adult’s role. Children don’t know the limits yet. That’s kind of how childhood works.

Davy Crockett says, “Be sure you are right; then go ahead.”

I feel intense anxiety about most of my behavior in life. I don’t know how to be good or appropriate or worthy for the vast majority of life experiences.

But I god damn know how to be an elite personal tutor. I trained for that shit. The slow paced isolated life is really good for kids I read. Even if it makes grown ups think I should go get a job.

I think I’m under enough stress already. I don’t have to measure up. There isn’t actually a grading curve in life. But I went to public school. I keep expecting my bad report card. I keep expecting to be expelled or suspended. I absolutely expect to be punished for being an unpleasant person. How dare I exist in public space in a way that others find displeasing.

My kids don’t get punished for being children. My children don’t get yelled at for getting the hiccups. My children don’t get yelled at if their attention wanders and they want to switch activities.

I won’t have to deal with a teacher suggesting medication to calm my unruly child. I will instead just have to figure out how to get all of us enough exercise that we can manage inside behavior when we are inside. Or go outside again. It’s all good.

I want this life so much. I want to find out what someone is like when they are actually treated like a person for their whole life. I don’t know very many people who felt valued through school. I know some. It does happen sometimes. It doesn’t seem to happen in the majority of cases.

Shanna would probably get it. Calli would probably not. Shanna is loud and assertive and charming. Calli is loud and prone to feeling provoked so she attacks with great vigor and ends up looking like the aggressor.

I don’t have a crystal ball or anything. But I’ve seen an awful lot of patterns.

I don’t want my children to spend many hours a day with children who have been socialized to fat shame. No thanks.

I don’t want my eight year old believing she should be trying to be sexy.

Yeah, I’ll shelter them. And I’ll take them to dangerous parts of the world. And shelter them there too. They will always have a modified experience of the world. They won’t even understand it.

I will understand it. No one sheltered me. I don’t think that unsupervised long exposure to random men is something that will happen basically at all. Probably not with women either. My children will develop safe, appropriate relationships.

Is it overly protective of me? Fuck you.

I am not a helicopter parent. My children climb trees and talk to strangers and move around in the world doing shit I dislike all day long. But I am aware of what they are doing. I pay attention. I want to know what they are doing as they take up space in the world. I want knowing them to be my job.

It is a luxury and a privilege that I understand is not available to everyone. I also understand that not everyone would have the desire for this kind of relationship. I also understand that not everyone would have the capacity to be running this kind of constant background schema building exercises. I scaffold their life very carefully and appropriately. Silently. They live in a “yes” environment.

But I am not permissive. And I have really strict boundaries. I just acknowledge that things outside my boundaries are not mine to control.

I want the experience of learning healthy boundaries with people. I want the experience of long term relationships.

Maybe I am a selfish piece of shit for not trying harder to form adult relationships and instead having children. I can live with that. I want to have someone who actually cares about seeing me on Christmas. I want someone who wants to call me on their birthday and say, “Thanks for having me, mom.” (I have a friend who has to do that. I envy her mom. So I’m hoping this friend tells this story over and over as my kids grow up. That lesson can’t come from me.)

I wanted children. I know it is selfish. But I wanted them. Even though I am a crazy bitch. Far meaner crazy bitches than me have managed to not completely fuck up their kids.

Maybe with enough privilege and luxury anyone can be a good parent. Maybe.

I have the luxury and privilege of filling all of my time with things I want to do. I want to educate my kids. I do not want to school them.

There are no personal problems; all problems are community problems.

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Yesterday I found out that some folks I love are struggling with domestic violence. That scares me pretty bad. I was aware that I wouldn’t sleep for fretting about them so I called them up and asked if I could drive up to their house after dinner for a meddlesome conversation. They consented. I’m so glad.

The whole drive up to their house I chanted a variety of phrases. “I will be kind. I will be thoughtful. I will be helpful. I will be useful. I will be considerate. I will say only necessary things. I will say kind things. I will be helpful. I will only be compassionate. I will be calm. I will be loving. I will be a friend to their marriage. I will be supportive. I will be kind.” etc. I chanted it over and over as I drove.

I fetched ice cream as part of the preparation for the conversation. We sat down and talked about why things are hard. Life is really hard sometimes. Some of us have very good reasons for the way we panic and over react and freak out.

One of the folks in this couple is like me. There were very serious childhood issues. Well, they both had hard childhoods. One of them clearly doesn’t have PTSD and one clearly does.

I talked about the amygdala. I talked about self-control. I talked about how if your brain was damaged in these ways approximately 50% of people cannot change their behavior without conscious professional help–read that as therapy. I am not qualified to be anyones guide. I do not have specific training on how to help other people heal from PTSD. I am just not adequate. I can love you and support you and help you find the help you need but I am not capable of giving it. That’s over my head.

I talked about how the only way to still be married in twenty years is to deal with these emotional issues. If y’all continue to be unable to keep your hands to yourselves you will not be married in twenty years. You will flee an abusive relationship and spend the rest of your life bitter and angry. Is that really what you want?

Changing your behavior is hard. I no longer hit people. I hit people a lot–basically constantly–for about twenty years. I understand how hard it is to stop hitting. I really do. When your brain was damaged by being severely abused and neglected as a child you have to consciously work at changing your behavior to be more appropriate. You have to go out and learn what is appropriate and how to get there from where you are. It has to be a conscious journey and you need professional help. This isn’t optional for us.

50% of people who have PTSD cannot get better without help. That is not because we are weak or because we failed. Anyone who implies that I struggle because I am stupid or because I lack willpower is welcome to sit on this greased fire hydrant I have over here. I am not lacking in willpower. Not all things can be changed through willpower.

I don’t want anyone to get in jail. I don’t want CPS invading the lives of my friends. I don’t want my friends divorcing because they are both sad and angry because of things that happened long ago and they are unable to truly understand what is going on right now because everything is still seen through the lens of “must survive.”

I meddled. I pushed. I interfered. It isn’t my place and yet if I don’t do it who the fuck will? Who will show up and say, “Let me explain the results these behaviors will have on your children. This is very well studied. I can tell you each of the different patterns your kids might follow. There aren’t many options.”

I love you all. I do not want any of you to be hurt. I do not believe any of you deserve more pain. I think you have been through enough pain and that you desperately need a reduction in pain. We really really really need to figure out how to reduce your pain. You can’t live with this much pain.

I feel wildly resentful that no one ever tried to help me. I cannot do that to children I love. I have to talk to their parents about things that happen. I have to. I did not lose this friendship over my meddling. Instead therapy appointments are being made. It’s not that I am “right”. It’s that everyone needs help. Everyone needs help on their path. Please oh please find the help you need so you can help your children. You cannot teach them how to be a functional adult if you are only quasi-functional yourself. You cannot teach what you do not know.

Hands are not for hitting. (Ok, unless you negotiate a bdsm scene. Different.) Love one another. Listen for why the misunderstandings are happening. Respect boundaries. Set them earlier and more firmly.

This life business is hard. I want all of us to have the support we need. Sometimes that is having someone who loves you say, “I can see the road you are on and I don’t see it going somewhere you want to go. Would you like to diverge onto a different path?” It’s not that I have a crystal ball. It’s not that I know everything. For the love of Christ I want to be wrong about my predictions.

Let’s make me wrong. Let’s sit next to one another holding hands at your childrens’ high school graduations. Let’s still know one another in twenty years. Let us choose who we want to be instead of ending up like our parents.

We are better than them.

PSA: Exit plans

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Sometimes talking to people makes my heart stop.

If your partner knocks you down that is domestic violence. That is something (s)he can go to jail for. If you do not know this already: please learn it from me. Your partner is not allowed to knock you down. Your partner is not allowed to knock you down. Your partner is not allowed to knock you down.

If you have a partner who has done so then you need to find a coffee can and dig a hole in the yard. You need to start hiding money in that coffee can because there is the very real and escalating possibility you will have to leave in the middle of the night or you will be killed.

I wish this was hyperbole. This is statistical fact. There are very distinct patterns to domestic abuse.

Does every single person who knocks his/her partner down once kill them? No. Of course not. And one is allowed to forgive such a thing happening once. We are human beings and we fuck up. We are allowed to forgive fuck ups. You can maybe even forgive the second time.

By the third time you need to have an exit plan. You need to have a diary where you record every incident of violence along with the date and time and description of what was going on before and after the incident. You very seriously need to find a way to hide cash. I’m not fucking kidding. If you are financially dependent on someone else you need to have as much cash physically hidden as you can. Multiple thousands of dollars if you can. If you can’t put that much in a can to hide then take $20 out of every paycheque.

You deserve to be safe. You deserve to not be hit in your home. Your children deserve to never see their parent get hit.

If your partner hits you and you need a place to go in the middle of the night, call me. If you have my phone number then you are welcome to show up in the middle of the night during an emergency. I swear to god.

Everyone should feel safe in their home.

End rape culture at the playground

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Sometimes I feel a little weird on park days. I make a conscious effort to always trudge out and rough house with the boys. Ok, I do miss some days when I’m being whiny and want to talk to grown ups. But I try to do at least a little rough housing every week.

I talk to all the little boys. They are getting used to me. I’m pretty different from their moms–that’s cool. We wrestle. Some new ones got brave yesterday and joined in. We had to negotiate. I talked about how breasts are really sensitive so be careful not to whack them and never grab a woman or girls breasts without permission. That’s a private area. But I did it with a smile on my face and a gentle voice and I went right back to wrestling and rolling around like puppies.

I think this is what really influences character. I feel like a lot of the rape culture ranting that yells at adult men about how terrible they are for the patriarchy is missing the point. I don’t want all of the adult men in my life to feel terrible and guilty for having a penis. That’s not what I’m interested in. That won’t make anyones life better.

One of my buddies in the home school group told me that she likes talking to me because I am very opinionated and very different from her but I’m not trying to convert her–I have no interest in having her be like me. So she gets to listen to things that are totally outside her experience and think about them without feeling pressured to change. I feel like that means I am doing exactly the right thing and I am tuning my message appropriately. Good.

I want to exist loudly in front of people. I want people to understand just how different from them the people around them actually are. I want it to be ok that I exist. I don’t need a whole bunch of mini-me’s running around. I’m not trying to become the dominant culture–I’m trying to be allowed to exist. I’m trying to stop feeling like I should die.

Playing with the little boys is part of this. I hug them. I will even kiss the top of their heads when they are being very affectionate (Err, this has only happened with boys I have known multiple years or who were under one year old I’m not incredibly creepy or anything.) I don’t kiss their faces. I don’t get into long embraces and I talk about body autonomy all the god damn time. I am very conspicuous about asking for hugs before I touch them. I model how I want to be treated. How else can they learn?

I have been seeing a lot of things on the internet advising parents to work on boundaries with their own kids–I agree with that message whole-heartedly. I just think it doesn’t go far enough. I don’t have responsibility just to and for my children. I need to talk to the kids at the park. I need to talk to talk to the kids in our neighborhood. I need to talk to all of the children who could be the ones my kids will sneak off and play sex games with.

I need for everyone to be playing by the same rules. No one but me is standing up to loudly announce the rules so I’m happy to do it. I go to the park and I don’t care if I know the kids or not I referee. I don’t micromanage or anything–I stay out of 80% of the arguing. But I intervene when they can’t share. I intervene when hitting starts. I intervene when someone is on the side-lines crying because they are too young to understand how to join the game.

I don’t favor my kids–Shanna is pretty bitter about that–because I care a lot about being neutral. I don’t pick sides. I model how to work things with words. I give lots of examples, “So you could say____ or ____ or ____ what feels closest to what you are actually feeling? Or something else entirely! I could be wrong.”

I tell them over and over that they own their body and they have the right to dictate how people treat it. I say that the other kids they are playing with are in the same spot. You can’t touch someone without consent. You have to ask. Don’t assume just because you are “friends” that it is ok to touch someone.

(My kid is not picking this up fast. Oy. Touchy thing.)

I’m trying very hard to create the idea that everyone has preferences and you must follow peoples preferences–which means asking questions.

One of the boys was playing with my belly jiggle yesterday. He said, “You have fat.” He was smiling and laughing and delighted by life. Clearly he didn’t see this as a problem. I bet his mom has done exactly the same thing to his belly.

I laughed and said, “I do! I do have fat! I looooooove fat. Mmmm tasty delicious fat! Fat! Fat! Faaaaaaaaaaaaaaat!!!!!!!” Then I grabbed him and rolled around on the ground with him. Other boys jumped on the pile, also laughing and started offering up types of fat:

“Like bacon?”

“Yes! Like bacon! And ice cream! MMMMMM”

Everyone was overjoyed.

A few minutes later after the crowd had dispersed one of the boys lingered and said, “I don’t think it was very nice of him to call you fat.”

My response was something close to: “Well he didn’t call me fat. He said I had fat and that is true. If he had said,” I deliberately made my voice all sneering and nasty, “‘Ewww you’re fat’ then I probably would have hurt feelings. Because he would be trying to make me feel bad about myself. But he wasn’t. He was just commenting on me. It’s like saying I have brown hair. I’m ok with him saying things that are true.”

He looked so confused. I’m sure he and his mom talk about me outside of actual interactions. Ha.

The reason going to the park is so “high spoons” for me is I believe with every fiber of my being that I am obliged to be nice to the kids. They are just learning and if I can seem positive and loving while I am giving instruction they will remember it and imprint on it more deeply. I am consciously didactically teaching children basically every time I am near them. It’s exhausting.

I think that’s what home schooling community is about. I think we are agreeing to teach one another’s kids. I realize not everyone feels the same way so I try not to say it too loudly. Ha. I’m not forcing them to memorize times tables or anything neurotic like that but I use group social outings as time to consciously work on the rules of society.

What the hell else are such times for? And if kids have to learn every rule completely on their own without adult help things turn all Lord of the Flies. Judicious adult intervention while mostly letting the kids direct and handle things is the optimal learning environment.

Studies god damn prove this.

It made me really happy when I commented to some of the moms that I was talking to their sons about boundaries and touching stuff she said that I’m going to teach sex ed when the kids are a little older. YES! Please! I’ve been training all my life. Ha. *beat head on wall*

The thing they don’t understand is I won’t be starting when the kids are older. I’m starting now. I’m starting when they are 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, ,9, 10, and 11 because that is how old the kids are in our group. I’m talking to all of them about touching and consent. There are slightly different explanation levels–I don’t talk to the three year olds about nerve endings. I say sensitive.

Sex is part of life because touching is part of life. If you want your kids to grow up to be healthy adults who are good at sex then they have to be good at touching–that is how things work. I understand that most parents feel kind of nauseated at the idea of their kids growing up to have sex but I have my eye on the end goal.

I want healthy adult children.

I have to teach my children and their peers about healthy touch if I want that to be the norm for their world. That means I have to be didactic. I have to choose to send on a message. I can’t just ignore things and let them slide or I don’t get to be upset when the culture isn’t what I want it to be.

Am I changing the world? If my little cohort of kids manages to grow up together and everyone gets a fresh healthy launch together to go out and feel like they are allowed to have the sex they want within the boundaries they choose then maybe I will have done something.

You don’t know what someone wants by looking at them. You only know what they want if you ask. If you have never asked what they want then you have no business having your hands on them.

If people believed that in the core of their being–how would the world be different?

My ego: wanna stroke it?

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I went out. To a munch at a bar. It was made clear to me that I could have gone home with at least three people. Apparently folks missed me. I was offered beatings and cuddles and kisses and bondage. I could really have an ego if I wanted one. It’s kind of mind boggling how I maintain such low self esteem.

I’ve been having a rabid argument on my ptsd support site today. Can someone “heal” while using drugs or must they be completely sober before the journey can begin. Discuss. I have strong views. I am not on AAs side.

I have been reading a lot more about men hating women. You know, stuff written by men. It’s like visiting crazy town. I think I understand a bit more about why they don’t like me though.

I’ve been reading about consensual incest because it occurs to me that if I am going to try and collect real stories and serious data I will have to be completely accepting of whatever I get. And people are going to have a very serious range of backgrounds.

Tonight, at the munch, as I was on my way out a woman asked me for advice on how to handle advances from men. How do you deflect attention you don’t want? What things do you say? How do you deal with them? I told her I have a nasty history of sexual assault so I’m not sure my advice is the best. And then I told the story about being humiliated on the beach.

So, years ago I was brought into an extended part of the Burning Man community. I participated in a particular local burn every month. I never went out to the playa–I’m not a dusty girl. The one year I bought a ticket I gave it to my friend Mo and ran off to marry Noah instead. That was the right choice.

Long before I married Noah, right after I left my Owner (I literally moved my stuff from my Owner’s house on a Thursday and left on Friday for my first camp out with the group) I went on my first date with someone and spent the weekend doing ecstasy and nitrous for the first time and drinking a rather lot of alcohol. In the first weekend I fucked six people. I liked that group a lot.

After I had been part of that group for a year or so there started to be increasing problems with men being overly aggressive with women. The burns had gotten more popular and it was held at a nude beach so things got heated. This was in the height of the tribe.net days. Oh I miss tribe. It was decided that there would be a workshop on how to deal with sexual advances.

The woman who ran it pulled me out in front of the group and identified me by name. In the next few minutes she said explicitly that it was possible to have boundaries without being a bitch like me.

So tonight when I was asked for advice on how to handle unwanted advances I had feelings. Mostly how I handle them now is by holding up my big shiny ring and saying, “Monogamous!”

But before that. What did I do?

First, think about it from the male point of view. He is experiencing chemistry with you. He is in an at least mildly heightened arousal. And men are socialized to know that if they don’t push aggressively for sex they probably won’t get any. Any sign of equivocation or hesitation is a signal that you are just hoping that he’ll try harder.

So you need to be very clear. Never apologize. Acknowledge and be polite. “I’m not hunting. I’m really not looking for anything but friends.” You don’t need to feel responsible if he gets butt-hurt. That’s part of his growing process. Everyone gets rejected sometimes. I have kind of a ridiculous success rate (err, historically) and I get rejected tons.

It’s ok for guys to ask. It’s ok to not be interested and just say no. Don’t apologize. Never apologize for not wanting to have sex with someone. It is not their right. It is not something they have a basic set of permissions to access.

It was hard tonight to figure out the right mix of behavior. I flirted. I flirted with people I have a very long history with (my wonderful Daddy was there or I wouldn’t have gone) and I felt safe. I felt pretty and fun. I don’t feel fun very often. Usually I feel boring or bad. I kind of alternate between them.

I feel like my stories are all sad and full of woe. I feel like I am pathetic and uninteresting. When people ask me what I have been up to I know they only want the highlights so I go with: “Gardening and home schooling my kids and painting murals in my house.” That certainly isn’t lying. I don’t mention the book much. That’s a downer. WHICH IS WHY IT DOESN’T SELL. Silly girl. Ack.

But it was nice going out to the munch. It reminded me that there is a critical lack of mentor-like people who are without agendas in my community. My community is primarily a place where people go to hunt and hunt hard. There are monogamous people but they are kind of weird.

I think we are good for the community. I think it is good to understand that you can have boundaries and closeness. You don’t have to fuck everyone you love.

That’s kind of a weirdly intense thing for me. You don’t have to fuck everyone you love. I was supposed to fuck my brother. I was supposed to fuck my dad. But you don’t have to fuck everyone you love.

It’s ok to leave doors closed. I know this shouldn’t be epiphany territory. Maybe you aren’t compulsively sexual.

And also:

“Compulsivity model of hypersexuality

Compulsions are behaviors a person performs in order to reduce feelings of anxiety or tension. According to this explanation of hypersexuality, persons engage in whatever sexual behavior in order to reduce feelings of tension, instead of to express sexual desire. Because engaging in the behavior can worsen the situation causing the tension, the person experiences a longer-term increase in tension, despite the shorter-term relief, resulting in a self-perpetuating cycle.”

Yeah, that’s me.

Part of the reason that I “rape easy” is because I have a lot of compassion specifically for men who are very frustrated by sexual rejection. I find the sex addicts. I understand why they feel like someone like me should exist. It was really intense for me when I read the Kushiel series. I have felt like I was required to take in the pain of other people since I was a small child. For a long time I felt like it was more or less my duty to make their lives better.

It doesn’t hurt me to have sex with lonely, frustrated men. And it makes them so happy. Don’t I owe them that happiness since it is so easy for me to give and they want it so badly?

It feels weird when people ask me for advice on how to handle men. What the fuck do I know? How to get raped over and over. Because I am stupid and I keep standing near dangerous people. I stand near them because they understand the game and for most of my life I needed to have someone acknowledge to me that the game existed. (I don’t mean you lost the game. That’s different.)

Life presents you with teachers in the right times and in the right places. I have learned from prostitutes and drag queens. I have learned from old leather fags and rednecks. I have learned from WASPs and the projects.

One of the most important bits is stay away from anyone who makes you nervous. That’s where I get hosed. The ones who make me nervous intrigue me. I’m stupid. Let me tell you the rapes were uninventive enough that I mourn for their other partners. They wouldn’t be fun to stand next to for long.

But I feel bad for them. Because they so obviously feel pain. I want to help. Codependent dumbass. I want to be liked. That was what was on offer.

It is nice knowing that I don’t have to hope anyone else will like me every again. I get to just exist. But how am I going to deal with advances? You don’t have to be a perfect ten in my community in order to be considered interesting–it’s an awesome community.

It is all so complicated. How does one develop an actual clear way of managing oneself? I can’t pretend I’m not hot (I totally am) just because not every person on the whole planet wants to have sex with me. But I have self esteem issues. (Not body issues exactly.)

I will say that it was kind of weird having people plot porn out on the table in front of me. Other than my recent foray into tumblr I don’t look at a lot of visual porn anymore. I stopped that when I stopped having partners who were aggressively interested in porn. I presume that Noah looks at porn occasionally but I know for a fact he doesn’t have time to do much of it.

I was reminded what world I was in. I was repulsed and comforted simultaneously. I will note that the people in the pictures represented a fabulous array of sizes, shapes, and skin tones.

Oh yeah. I forgot. People are really beautiful. I haven’t looked at them like this in a long time.

I think I will go out wearing red lipstick again. I liked the reaction. It was really nice not feeling invisible. And it was nice being with friends. And, let’s be honest, it was nice feeling like I could crook my little finger and disappear with any number of people.

Ok. I think my libido is starting to reappear. This life business is going to be interesting. Monogamy is a conscious choice for me. It is a decision I make over and over and over like I make the decision to stay married and I make the decision to not run away from home and take my kids and start over somewhere new. Not because Noah has done anything wrong–I’m just crazy.

Being in love is, in my opinion, largely a choice. I could choose to nurture resentment. Instead I choose to be grateful that I have an exceptionally giving partner and I know I won’t find better. Sure, I could find someone to fuck me or hit me… Noah loves me. Noah loves me enough to give me his name and his babies and all of his spare time and mountains of money and all of the property he didn’t have to share because it was from an inheritance.

Should money matter? Enh, it’s not the money. If I left I would leave with little more than the clothes on my back and I would laugh at his attempts to give me money. I wouldn’t starve my kids but I’d get independent real fast and I’d stop cashing checks. I’m like that.

It’s the trust. It’s the commitment to making me safe. It’s the commitment for seriously investing in me.

Whoa. Holy fucking shit. How did I inspire that? I know that people get married all the time. I’ve spent enough time on the internet reading about dysfunctional relationships to understand how good I have it. Noah is probably glad that I no longer troll single parenting forums obsessively reading threads like “What do you wish you had known before you negotiated for custody?”

Ok, I think the caffeine has worn off. I wanted to make sure I could drive home safely. Woof. Tomorrow will be interesting.

Usually when I get this little sleep it isn’t because I was having fun. I think I will be able to smile tomorrow. I will remember watching the very pretty women doing terrible things to one another and I’ll smile. No one will need to know why.

Now I understand “fuck cancer”

6 Replies

For most of my life I have been kind of confused by the “fuck cancer” emphasis people have. They seem to be more upset by it than other kinds of death. I’m a death-is-death-how-doesn’t-matter person. Only in the past couple of weeks Kate Bornstein (who is one of the most important voices in gender deconstruction) has had a crowd source fundraising effort because she has cancer–we need her. She has the courage to speak about things that must be spoken about. She is really important.

And another person I know has 6, 4, and 2 year old children. Kate is very likely to survive. She has a very survivable kind of cancer and now the outpouring of love and money she will need to fight for life. His survival chances are in the single digits.

I can’t stop weeping. I “know” my grandmother died from cancer. I don’t know what kind–not breast cancer. I know that much.

The kind of knowing I want my children to have for me is something that cannot come until they are adults and putting it all together in retrospect. I think that I all of a sudden just received a catapulted stone of fear in my belly. How will his children know him?

He told me just before he found the lump that I had inspired him to start marathon training. That process was more or less how the lump started bothering him. That’s why they found this. I told him to start making videos for his kids. One for each birthday up until they are 25 or 30. They need to know you and get the advice you would give them.

Shanna was asking me about parents yesterday. Kind of the standard kid question kinds of things: do only Mommies take care of babies? Oh dear goodness I hope not or a lot of kids would starve to death. I told her that some babies have only one mommy or only one daddy and some babies have a mommy and a mommy (or mama) and some babies have two daddies and some babies have more than two parents of any possible gender consideration. What matters to a baby is that consistent grown ups hold and care for and love the baby. That is all that is needed to make a parent. Not biology. Not anything else. I said that babies are designed to fall in love with the grown ups who care for them because that is how the baby will ensure survival. Mutual love with a grown up means the grown up becomes invested and puts a lot of time and energy towards the baby.

She said, “So it doesn’t matter if it is a boy or a girl?” I asked her how many times it has mattered whether I have a penis or a vulva while I change diapers. I asked her if she thinks our female friend K is too stupid to figure out how to clean her son’s penis. Shanna laughed. I asked her if her father has ever had trouble wiping her butt. She confirmed that he is a poop wiping expert. I said, “Anuses are universal.”

She asked if girls are supposed to stay home with their babies. The timing on this conversation was just hilarious considering what I have been reading on the internet lately. I said girls are supposed to do the things that make them happy. By being happy in front of their kids they are teaching their kids the right way to live. For some mothers this means staying home and for some mothers this means working outside the home for a company. All mothers work. All mothers do a back breaking amount of work. If a mother has an outside job then the children can either stay with dad (I cited families we know) or if both parents work day care of some kind can be arranged (I explained several different examples we know).

Every family looks different because every family is made up of different people. Different people are made happy by different things. That is what makes life beautiful. If everyone was exactly the same life would be really crappy. Every person is on a completely individualized path through life.

I said that different people have different advantages. I talked to her about money. I talked to her about how some people have large extensive families and that is a different very important kind of support. It gives different life options. For example: single parenting is a very different experience if you are rich than if you are poor. Single parenting is a very different experience if you have a large and involved family than if you have no family support. I went on and on. She asked more questions. It kept going.

I tell my children frequently that while they are children they have a few specific jobs they have to work on. Their primary job is to play with the world. The process of play and exploration is the primary thing that children should be focused on. After that you have to learn how to have relationships with people; you have to learn how to be considerate. But the third thing is: with great privilege comes great responsibility. I tell my children explicitly that they are part of the most privileged cohort that has ever been born. They have more access to information and the ability to learn than any person has ever had at any point in history. And my kids have free access to it all day every day because they are not locked in an institutionalized setting following some bullshit agenda that is the resort of so much compromise nothing real is taught. I expect them to take learning seriously.

I talk about how the world is changing and there are a lot of people in the world who do not have access to information. There are a lot of big problems to be solved. People will have to be exceptionally able to synthesize large amounts of data in order to solve these problems. People will have to learn a bunch of cross-disciplines in order to solve these problems. The only way is to start young and take it seriously. Learn.

I tell my kids that I want them to grow up and be fierce and sure of their opinions. They should not believe they are “always right” because that is hubris–no one is always right. But listen to Davey Crockett: Be sure you’re right and go ahead. Plan at leisure; act with haste. If you hesitate then some someone less qualified will speak first and set the plan. That’s really not a great situation. If you can’t find a way; make a way. You will make mistakes or you will never learn and grow. You must make big mistakes. That is part of life.

Even if I get upset with you over a mistake I will get over it. I love you more than I love breathing. More than I love any thing in the whole world. I will get angry with you. I will shout at you. I will never hit you. I will always love you.

Thinking about cancer makes me feel so very afraid of my children not knowing me. Shanna proudly informed me that she was going to grow up and be a bad ass just like me. I laughed. I told her that would make me very happy. I want to see that. I want to see what she is going to be like. I want to know her. I want that so fucking much.

Getting to see what Shanna will do in the world will be my entertainment and reward for still being alive.

And that’s before I even get to Calli. Calli is a born engineer. She is going to need to have a woman behind her saying, “You can do it” for a great many steps in her life. She is going to live in a “man’s world”. Hell she already wants to be Diego–not Dora. Not Alicia. She’s Diego. She’s the god damn main character who rescues everyone.

They need me. It is so clear. Like my friend’s children need him. And I start weeping again and I understand fuck cancer.

There is no right. There is no should. There is no deserve in this life. There just is.

On April 1st it will be the birthday of one of the awesomest women I know. I’m sorry I won’t be in Portland with her. That would have been wonderful.

In other news I am exchanging books with a friend who is also a writer on April 1st. We are essentially work-shopping one another’s books. You know, a real forking editing job. I’m ridiculously excited. I want No Secrets to be finished and I have stalled. It has been almost a year and a half since I wrote it and it still isn’t in paper. Erf.

In September Noah is officially off the leash and he gets to start being a mostly absentee father/husband while he works on whatever he wants to work on. I’m thinking about treating July like my own personal NaNoWriMo. I want to write Outrunning Suicide before I have a hard time negotiating for time. A lot of the shape of it is working itself out in my head. Stylistically it will not resemble No Secrets. That’s for the best. I’ve been reading reviews of writers differently lately. “What will they bitch about with my content–repetitiveness. I can’t just tell the same stories. Hm. Interesting.”

Sometimes it is kind of convenient that I have been through such a ridiculous variety of kinds of extreme trauma. I always have another fucking story. Ha.

A few times lately I have thought about my mother. I’ve thought about what will happen when Shanna is eighteen. Shanna might want to meet my family. She will be allowed to. I’ll drive her to the house and wait at the bottom of the hill for her. She doesn’t have to share my views on them. She didn’t make my bed; I did.

Shanna asked me if I loved my mommy when I was a little girl. I told her that when I was a little girl I thought my mommy was the best thing in the whole universe. I loved her with my whole heart. She was my sun and my moon. Shanna then pointed out that I don’t feel that way now. I said, “No. I don’t. You will have different opinions when you are in your thirties than you have right now too.” She looked thoughtful.

It is really hard giving space for beliefs that are not your own. If I break the incest chain in my family I have absolutely done a measurable good in the world. I just found a biography from someone in the middle of a six generation chain. My stomach hurts too much to read it right now. At some point in the not-too-distant future I will have read everything easily findable on this topic. That’s a little weird to know. It makes me want to create more data.

Life goals:

I want to deepen and broaden the scope of information known about incestuous families. At some point I will figure out a measurable goal around this topic. I don’t have it yet.

I want to live outside my country of origin for a minimum of five years, preferably in one year chunks. I’ll get homesick bad.

I want to see what Noah can do. He has really impressed me so far. I want to see what he and I can do together.

You outrun suicide by giving yourself full permission to do it, but you keep moving the goal posts. “Ok I can do it. But first I have to do…” It’s on the to do list. But a lot of other things are going to happen first.

I want my children to be adults and to be able to say, “Yeah. I agree. It’s time. I love you. Do what is right for you.” Maybe I will have to move to Oregon once I hit 70. When I get there I will get to be near a friend of mine. She is partnered with one of the people who pushed that law through. I feel so grateful that I get to know people who change the world. They give me the courage to keep trying.

Holy fuck. I just had a thought. What age level is Outrunning Suicide aimed at? If I want a lot of people to be able to read it I have to think about that. My writing is rather obtuse most of the time. Well that will take some thought.

When I was a child there were very few periods of time when I didn’t want to die. I stayed alive mostly because I was too depressed to be expeditious. I didn’t know anything other than pain. I was not permitted to act like I was in pain. That was rude.

My life is different now. I didn’t understand what a life free from pain was. It was a myth. I wouldn’t say that I am exactly pain free at this point but I am probably at the lowest level of pain and the highest level of joy I have ever had. These are the best days of my life. And I know it while I am living them.

I keep wandering in my head to a Madeleine L’Engle book A Wind in the Door. The mitochondria are in trouble! The farandolae aren’t deepening! I just read Collapse by Jared Diamond. Help! The planet is in trouble! The humans aren’t deepening!

I don’t know. Lots of feelings. Today I don’t want to die. And I weep at the loss of a great mind. I hope he doesn’t read this. My grief is not his problem. I’m glad his wife has a very supportive family. I’m glad they live near her family and not his. I am so sorry it is happening.

I’ve read tragedies for years. I’ve taught units on tragedy. I never really got it before. I’ve never been deep enough into a community to really understand what the loss of a person means before.

He’s going to fight. He’s that kind of guy. My grief is entirely premature and I need to stfu. But this is where I feel.

I have spent most of my life believing very firmly that for me cancer was one of the goalposts. I wouldn’t fight. I would go quietly into the dark night because I’m not interested in more suffering.

Life is pain, highness. Anyone who tells you different is selling something.

Now I don’t know. When I think about the things I want to do. When I think about not seeing my daughters grow up to be fierce and bad ass? (She-Ra is pretty bad ass is a frequent comment around our house. I said it once. Oy.)

There is no right. There is no should. There is no deserve. There is only what is. And what you go do with it. We live in a time of practically preternatural access to science. If you have money. If you want to fight something bad enough we live in a time of honest-to-goodness miracles.

How much do I want to see my daughters at thirty? Forty? Fifty? Sixty? What will they do with their lives? I want to know so very badly. I am curious. I want to know. I want to see what this being I have unleashed on the world will do.

Somehow I don’t envision her walking onto the family compound at eighteen and not coming back. It’s thirteen years away. She’ll be able to evaluate people on her own at that point. She will have had a lot of practice with a lot of different kinds of people. She will be able to read people well. My family isn’t subtle. Even if she does want to get to know them–and why not, they are interesting people–she won’t want to stay.

She will have shit to do. My family has nothing to do but be unhappy. They will sit in one place doing that until they die. I don’t understand why. It’s like a clock that has run down. Poverty, physical health, mental health, and a kind of apathy I don’t understand. An anger about entitlement and responsibility I don’t understand.

I have had such a ridiculous amount of privilege. I’m only starting to understand the shape of it.

I have had the privilege of being able to set the goal post of “I’ll kill myself if” pretty low but I’ve been healthy enough to always meet a really ableist centric attitude. I have been able to be an asshole about independence. I’ve also had a guaranteed income for most of my adult life. I’ve been financially stable without having to have a job. That’s so fucking ridiculous.

I have no safety net though. I don’t have Bank of Mom and Dad. I don’t have emergency reserves beyond those I create. For most of my adult life I was inches above the poverty line living in one of the most expensive places in the world. I have never come close to bankruptcy and my credit score is ridiculous. I did that with a lot of seed capitol. I feel like an asshole for being glad that pit bull attacked me. It made the whole rest of my life better.

Perspective if everything.

I’ve been thinking about my mom. I have been specifically thinking, “I forgive you. I hope you forgive me.” If my kids ever go and meet her I hope my mom understands why I kept them away. My kids will be different. They will not have broken spirits. I hope she will be able to see that and be glad. I hope she will forgive me. I hope she understands wanting to keep your kids safe.

I hope she will forgive me.

I hope she will still be alive so that she will be able to meet my kids some day. I hope my kids want to talk to her a lot for a while. I bet she won’t live long after that but she will die happier than she has been in a long time. They will be like her. They will be able to ask her questions about things she has had great skill at doing. They will think she is an interesting person.

It’s kind of a weird balance. I have to tell the truth to my children. The truth is that no one is all bad. Everyone has good parts. The thing about life is learning how to find the good that balances the bad and evaluating if the value is high enough. In most families people decide that the kin alliance is worth putting up with the bad. That’s normal and right.

When my kids are adults they will not be children who are easy to mold. They will not be instructed in how sex is natural and fine between family members as long as you don’t breed because it is only in breeding too close to the line that you develop problems.

I hope that when my daughters are eighteen they will have the ovaries to say to a biological family member who solicits sexual contact, “You are a disgusting piece of shit and I hope you rot in hell.” Because yeah. That’s the reaction you should have to incest.

But I don’t think my family would dare at that point. And if everyone keeps their britches on, it’s fine… right? Oh fuck. *beat head on wall* Wait. I’m not supposed to do that any more.

Maybe I should get dressed and run. That would be all healthful and crap.

I want to live. I have stuff to do. I’m scared. Fuck cancer. I can’t be strong enough to outrun it. No one can. It just happens. Am I going to instantly stop smoking so I can lessen my risk of lung cancer? No. I wouldn’t be a nice person. (Vaporizer is still impact on the lungs. My lungs will tell you.)

On the way I will eat more Easter candy. My body says: “Hey, I know-instead of crying: sugar rush and endorphins!” Is this ideal? Nope. We recognize two candy-holidays a year in this house. Otherwise I would get in a long of trouble. I didn’t eat candy like this when I was a kid. It’s kind of weird.

Ok, run.

Intersection of privilege, feminism, and being “retro” as we head into the future.

8 Replies

I went and read the NY Magazine article on Feminist Housewives. I understand that some people feel insulted by the piece. I thought it was hilarious. Holy tomato do I fall into the demographic she is lampooning. Upper middle class and white. We started into this demographic when I was 27 (right in the middle of the 25-30 age group that is the fastest growing segment) when our combined household income was between $75,000 and $100,000. Over the last six years Noah has nearly made it to $200,000. We are absolutely the “kind of people” this article is trying to insult.

Wait, you didn’t think the author was trying to be insulting? Oh. I read it as if she was trying but failed because I really don’t care about her evaluation. Yes, I am a feminist who does not have an out-of-the-home job. What does being a feminist mean in my position? It means I lobby the shit out of my friends-in-similar-dynamics for them to have the autonomy and freedom I have.

On some levels my marriage is quite “retro” and in other ways it is anything but. Folks wouldn’t look at Noah and I and confirm that the patriarchy is in full force. I have agency. I make decisions.

If I were to work out of the house we would be in a worse place financially than we are right now. My salary would not cover how much we would end up spending on daycare, better clothes, eating out, a house cleaner, or a more active gardner. Let me tell you–if I had a job I would quite certainly do less cooking for the house than Noah does while having a job. My job was more hours in the week than Noah’s… for a lot less money. Really about like the social worker that was lampooned in the article.

I went into teaching for the express purpose of learning how to teach my own kids. I became a teacher because I knew I wanted to homeschool my kids someday and I wanted to be able to do so well. I did not go into a helping profession because I wanted to make the world better. I went into teaching to fulfill my own selfish desires and my own plans for the future.

I didn’t really live with my mother full time when I was a child. I grew up in extreme poverty and that means I often had to go live with virtual or literal strangers because she couldn’t care for me. This has created an ache inside me that time doesn’t seem to dull. I did not learn how to be a person from my mother. I learned how to be a person from books while I was alone in a room. I feel a physical need to have specific one-on-one relationships that facilitate personal growth. I need to see what it looks like when people go through the normal changes. I don’t need to spend the rest of my life looking at one cross section of life and only adapting to that. I was great with teenagers–I need to learn how to deal with all ages. I need to be exposed to all ages.

My life journey will never look anything like the typical journey. Even though I fall into specific demographics of high privilege now I will never be able to change who I am or where I come from. I am not like the other women in my demographic. Often I freak them out.

I can say without reservation that I have an uncommonly feminist marriage. My husband has permitted, encouraged, shoved me towards a degree of autonomy that I just don’t see in other marriages. It isn’t that he makes me do things by myself, though he does. It is that he has taught me about his own journey of aloneness. It is that he has made me understand why he has the limitations he has and he understands why I have the limitations I have and we seamlessly step in and rescue one another. He cares about my individual issues and he never assumes that I am a certain way “because I am a woman”.

I do not believe in biological determinism. I know men who are wonderful stay-at-home-dads (my brother has actually been a SAHD for the entire lives of his children) and I know women who are so non-maternal that I don’t understand why they had children. Because that biological clock thing is No Joke. These women wisely find very nurturing caregivers to provide most of the care for their kids and their kids grow up feeling loved and cared for. That’s what life is about, right?

There is no one path. I want to be near my children because it satisfies deep emotional needs for me. I was deeply neglected and abused as a child. I have baggage I am learning how to work through.

I have to stay home and take care of my children myself because otherwise I will never have the impetus to work on my hatred and rage towards working in groups. Without doing this I am unlikely to value the input of other people. Let me tell you I will never change my opinion if I just take a job where I have to work with people. I hate working with people. That’s my idea of hell on earth. I can be the boss and steer the ship in a group–but that’s different. I’m a harsh taskmaster.

I don’t want to be a harsh taskmaster with my children. I want them to learn how to be functional people. That means I have to model being a functional person. One of my biggest gripes about the American educational system is that we are turning out people who know how to be cogs in the machine–not people who can deconstruct the machine and build a new one.

I don’t know about you, but I think we need a new one.

I went on to read The Retro Husband and thought ouch. He’s talking about Noah. Only he isn’t.

Noah and I met during a period in our lives when we could lovingly be called fuck ups. We had a lot of relationship instability and we both treated people like they wouldn’t be in our lives very long. Mostly we were right. When we got married we both had to abruptly change a lot of things in our behavior. We went from not dating/just friends to engaged to married in five months. Our lives changed fast.

I picked a mate who has a profession that is best served by a combination of locking himself in a room to work alone and going out and teaching what he has learned while being locked in a room. Strip clubs don’t feature heavily. I’m pretty sure he has only been in a strip club once in his life. We went together on the first anniversary of our marriage. We had a lot of fun. (I’ve been to a lot of strip clubs and I love them.) We came home and conceived our first child. Amen.

I picked someone who has a dad who has never left his crazy mother. He understands what “for better or worse” means. I looked at the guys in my generation (and two generations above me) and found such understanding to be thin on the ground. I picked someone from inherited wealth who has a chip on his shoulder and something to prove. He was taught how to make money. That is a set of skills you either have or don’t have. I quizzed a lot of men. Let me tell you: financial acumen is thin on the ground. He wasn’t taught how to budget money. That’s one of the big downfalls of growing up with more money than you know what to do with. However he doesn’t track our money; I do. I budget well. We are very good partners.

I am self-aware enough to admit out loud that I would probably not be as happy if my partner made very little money. I would have different expectations. I think that when you look at the demographic of “men who do very little housework have more sex” you have a combination of: women who are lavishly provided for feel grateful and men who philander. That’s my experience.

When I was eighteen I was engaged to my high school sweetheart. That was the price of shacking up and we both wanted away from our parents. I didn’t marry him because even though he made more money than me I paid more of our expenses and I did all the housework. He was really lazy at home. I went from that to a D/s or M/s relationship. (That’s Dominant/submissive or technically Owner/property in our case.) I have always fucking cleaned house for people. I’ve been doing it all my life. I even pick fucking friends who want me to come over and clean for them. (I offer. I am really good at organizing people’s stuff.)

I clean because I am an order Muppet. I have to see order in the world around me or I can’t focus and I can’t relax. I think I clean for other people because I am trying to bond with them. I am trying to offer what I have in terms of “benefits” so people will put up with being my friend. I believe I am intrinsically unpleasant. I must offer something in trade or being around me isn’t worth the cost.

I don’t want my children to feel this way. If I had to put my head down and work a full time job and take care of my kids and take care of my house and provide food… I would certainly never ever have reason to believe that people wanted me around for any reason other than I had work to do for them. “The worst burden for a woman is no burden.” She’s talking about privilege and idleness. She can’t shame and say it bluntly. I should be serving other people, not myself. I shouldn’t just exist for the pleasure of my company. Ha. I appreciate how much she believes women should be out working in the world–but I notice that in order to do it herself she had to give up on the marriage/kids thing. I wanted kids.

I don’t think the author of the NY Magazine piece means that I should be working for other people in order to help support the world. I just don’t.

What is the point and purpose of feminism if I am not allowed to say, “I have the financial privilege to stay home and be the primary caregiver for my children and more than anything in the world I want to do it” and have that be acceptable. I don’t want to have 18, 19, and counting so I am a perpetual breeding machine who never has to do anything else but be mommy.

I will engage in the world again. I will do it as a very different person. I am not allowed to fuck my way through the rest of my life. I spent my childhood assuming I would be a sex worker for most of my life. That was my actual plan. I decided to do something else because I didn’t want my children to believe they had to do it. I changed my behavior in large and dramatic ways because I wanted to be able to look my children in the face and say that acting like me is appropriate. Does that mean I think promiscuity is terrible or bad? No. But they should not expect it of themselves because it is not mandatory. It is not common. It is not standard.

I used two forms of birth control very consistently after I was eighteen (I was on hormonal birth control and ALWAYS used condoms for casual sex and used a diaphragm with longer term fluid bonded partners who refused to wear condoms any more because let’s be honest that is how that shit happens) until I was sure I wanted to have kids. I was not going to get caught with some kid I would resent and a lifetime association with a loser ex-partner. I was smart enough to fucking recognize that at twelve years old. That’s when I went on the pill for the first time. I sometimes used depo provera (to my detriment–that shit is bad for you) then I went back to the pill.

No one sat me down and taught me the facts of life. I found things out piece-meal. A little bit at school (I will say that Los Gatos had adequate public health education–that is a huge advantage not everyone has) but mostly through talking to people. I found out most of it by making mistakes. I made a lot of mistakes before I was eighteen. I had a lot of very risky sex. I made a number of stupid choices.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this rape/not rape thing. How do I differentiate between bad sex and rape? I don’t think it crosses the line unless I was saying “no”. I believe that I have to say “no” or it is my fault that something happened. I ascribe the responsibility and agency for such acts to myself.

When I was twelve I asked a twenty-five year old man to fuck me. That wasn’t rape. But it was still a crime. It was still illegal. It was his legal responsibility to tell me no. I was still a child and he is responsible for his actions. That other twenty five year old I dated when I was twelve. He was at least nice enough to not pressure me when I said I wasn’t ready to have sex yet, but he asked me to at least give him a blow job. I felt kind of guilty because he had taken me out to a meal (Johnny Rockets. I had a grilled cheese sandwich, fries, and a milkshake) and he bought me a Christmas present so… didn’t I owe him? So I gave him the blowjob he asked for. It wasn’t rape. But it was a crime.

This is where rape culture blows my mind because of how pervasive it is. It’s all my fault those poor men committed a crime. I asked them to do it–literally in the first case and by inference in the second when I said I wasn’t ready for sex yet.

I brought it up, you see. I was out on a date–of course there were expectations, duh. How stupid am I to not have stayed home. My mother had given me permission for the date. She met him. She saw us off. I was home by curfew.

I know the difference between rape and not rape. If I said no and lay there crying while someone fucked me that is rape. Even if we are both adults now and I would have consented to the sex if he had just put a condom on. That’s not a mistake on my part. That is not something I invited. Unprotected sex is not a right that a man has. He does not have the right to risk inflicting a child on a woman. Period.

I think in my little corner of the world a rapist is somehow less of a piece of shit if he at least keeps his future-children to himself.

I stay home to take care of my children. They are my whole world for this brief window of time. I don’t think I would be able to handle raising the child of my rapist. My mother had a hard time raising me. She did not bond with me as much as she did other children. She had her tubes tied when I was born. You know how “some women rape easy”? That’s my family. We rape easy. I’m trying to do something different with my children. I am escaping into a different kind of social dynamic.

I really have a feminist marriage. Why do I say that? Because I started off in a marriage where it was ok to beat and rape me and then I decided those things weren’t ok and I put a stop to them. (Let’s be clear that I was ok with it to start with–I gave active consent. Well, ok I gave consent in advance for the rape and then changed my mind because I didn’t really think it would turn into a violent rape because I didn’t know I had been dealing with mostly wussy-assed-pansies trying to “play rape” in the past. Hoo boy.)

Folks have called my husband “whipped” and his response was, “damn right”. Only he is a very autonomous being. I don’t have a lot of control over him in general. I have a ridiculous amount of influence on how he treats me. And other men/boys feel the need to let us know that I shouldn’t have so much influence on how he treats me. He should instead align his preferences with those of other men/boys and treat me how those men/boys feel I should be treated.

I really like my husband. He is self-interested in a way I can work with. I can predict how he will react because he is consistent. He has stated goals. When he starts wandering off from them a brisk reminder gets him back on track. He isn’t particularly pulled towards any boys club. He has been alone too much. He has no faith that the boys club will really be there for him.

I have been with him more for more of his life than anyone else. I like him more than anyone else ever has. I really appreciate him. My life has gone from being a nightmare to being the punchline because I am so vapid and privileged. It is… interesting.

When people mockingly say that I am trying to live how my grandmother lived I would laugh and say that I picked an atheist–not a Mennonite or a Catholic. One grandmother was a printer in Pasadena after WWII (she was enlisted) and the other was the wife of a boxer turned dairy farmer. No, I don’t live like them. I neither have to work as hard nor am I oppressed as much. The Christmas before I divorced my family my mom made me a wonderful book. She hand wrote, in her beautiful hand writing–my mother has the most beautiful writing in the world–all of our family recipes into a recipe book. She gave me what she has to give.

I am a much better cook than any of them. They used shitty ingredients and too much sugar in freaking everything to cover up the bad quality of all the canned produce. I have had to learn how to cook from The Joy of Cooking and the internet. I live in an era where there is no fucking excuse for saying “I don’t know how to do _______.”

Yes, I choose to be a stay at home mom. I choose to homeschool my children with the financial support of my husband. I don’t want to have it all. I don’t want the pressure of more people having expectations of me right now. I only have so much energy to give. I know that makes me fairly pathetic but that’s just how the cookie crumbles. I am privileged. I am lucky that I get to make this choice. I wouldn’t have been able to do this in this way with someone who made a lot less money.

Only I probably would. I would live in a cheap rented apartment and I would probably never own a house. But I would still want to take care of my kids. I don’t live in a nice house now. I will never live in an expensive neighborhood. I would feel unwanted and like I didn’t know how to behave in that kind of environment. Here the kids play on the streets and we hear lots of loud music and lots of people. I feel comfortable. I see signs of people living and laughing and putting down roots.

Yes, I want to be a stay at home mom so I can get to know the seventy-six year old man down the street. I wouldn’t have time to stand around and pass the time of day hearing his stories if I had a job. My life would be less full if I had never heard his stories. I would understand people a little less. He is helping me hate men less. He feels pretty safe to stand around and talk with. He has no designs upon me and he would probably freak the fuck out if I made a pass at him. It is a very comforting exchange. I really value having him around. I think I am shoving him in the role of my Uncle Bob. I’m going to freak out when he dies some day. I’m glad my kids are getting to hear from him. They are learning a lot of history.

Speaking of Uncle Bob. Not mine. Uncle Bob Martin is a technical guy who absolutely means well but has a humorous opinion of women. I’m not a fucking lady. Ladies are expected to act in very proscribed ways I will never agree to behave. Men should not treat me like I am a lady. I want them to treat me like a person-who-is-not-like-them. Like a human from another culture. I am a person who has had a very particular set of lifetime experiences. I am not like other people. I am not like other women. I am not like men. I am also not working in the technology industry so obviously I don’t matter–right?

Only I’ve been coding some in secret (not a secret any more) because I didn’t want to tell Noah at first. I’m still not sharing. I am who should be courted into such an industry but they treat me like an insect. They treat me like my brain is rotting inside my skull because I am so mentally deficient as to want to be near children all day. Oh go fuck yourself. Mostly women are treated like they have no value after they have stayed home to take care of children. Only Uncle Bob wants us to be the ladies and spiffy up the place and nurture our cwute widdle pwojects along to help them actually happen. The boys club has noticed that when you get too many boys in one place you need a den mother.

Well he is asking women to come work in a hostile work environment. He isn’t really acknowledging how or why. At the edges of that hostile work environment (the gaming community is kind of the bastard son of the technology community) we have Anita Sarkeesian speaking about what happens to women who have the audacity to look at how women are treated in the gaming community.

I could stay in an underpaid, unappreciated profession where I get to care for other peoples children all day but not really form bonds because the kids are leaving at the end of the year–so I don’t have to grow as a person. I can remain static as I stand there doing the same thing year after year. Like I’m perfect already. ha.

Or I could stay home and raise children and figure out how to grow fruit and vegetables so that when I am old my property will be fairly self-sufficient. I am contributing to my long-term future. Could it all be yanked away from me? Anything could. You don’t have to tell me that. I don’t think many people understand having an uncertain future more than me. But things really and truly have improved. I have changed. I have learned from my mistakes.

Yes, I’m a feminist and a house wife. Being in this position allows me to acquire skills that I want to have. Having a career would not allow me to develop these skills. I want them. I want them with every fiber of my being. I want to have survival skills that are not taught in an office or a school. Those environments are artifacts of a culture that is dying. I want my children to be able to do something else.

We are at a turning point. We have to change. If that makes me “retro” then I’m ok with that. This essay from Michael O. Church is fifteenth in a series (now of sixteen and counting…) about how corporations need to shift from being part of an industrial model to being part of the technology era. He’s talking about getting rich. He’s not talking about my life any more than Sebastian Marshall is talking about my life. I am not part of the technological revolution these men are portending. Yet I am. I am raising the children who will carry it out.

I believe that women have as much of a place in the world as men. I believe that women are as intrinsically valuable as men–not “because we nurture” but rather because if the human race is to continue it requires men and women. We have not found a way to get around that yet. It’s not because we are both awesome “in our own ways” it’s because we simply cannot continue as a race without both genders. And subjugating women isn’t going so well. We live in an era where silencing us is harder than it has ever been before. We fight back now. And bear the consequences of that too. It’s still better than it was. There have always been consequences for standing up for yourself–that is not a man or a woman thing. Unfortunately the consequences for women tend to involve threats that involve her gender, especially rape.

I have never met anyone who has been actually raped more times than I have. Either that or no one has been willing to say it to me. Some day I will meet someone. I have very real reason to fear reprisals for speaking out–the threatened torture has already happened to me. What makes me think I will avoid it in the future?

Because I have learned more about privilege. I was silenced previously in my life because I was young, ignorant, and too weak to protect myself. I am no longer in such a position. Most women and girls do not understand what the process of learning how to protect themselves means. Unfortunately “protecting yourself” often means staying home and not getting to be part of communities and hobbies you would like to join because if you have a bad experience you are on your own. If you defend yourself people may threaten to kill and/or rape you.

In many ways I feel very consciously like I am choosing a life more like a religious life–I am mostly cloistered and I mostly have contact with women and children. I’m doing it as an increasingly zealous atheist which is kind of awkward.

There are many studies that say that men/women in highly defined relationships do better and are happier. So far in history those relationships have followed a pattern of men work- women raise children. It was a biologically unavoidable task. We no longer live in that world. Now men are no more suited to the weird ass work people do in offices than women are–often men are not as well suited. A great deal of technological work involves a kind of multi-tasking that women are shown to be better at. And as my husband shows me week after week after week in our marriage–he is a better cook than I am and he is quite capable of bathing children and changing diapers and cleaning the house. He doesn’t do as much of it as I do, no, and that’s ok with me. Doing those tasks requires time. I have more time to kill than he does. He is genuinely working his ass off for more structured hours of the day than me. I can pick up slack and increase our mutual leisure time because it makes my life better.

I don’t see how these choices are unfeminist. I am being cold, calculating, and I am serving my interests and the interests of my progeny. I am, however, not serving the interests of an Industrial Age leftover feminism. I am not trying to stamp out home life in service of people living in dormitories and working in factories. I don’t want my children to imprint on a group of people exactly their age so they have no perspective on how dramatic the changes in life are. I want my children to grow up understanding that people change constantly. They don’t settle in and “be the same” for decades. You have to grow.

I don’t see a structure for that in the current set-up. So I’m going to go make it up as I go. I understand that has been the normal human path since the beginning of time. I’m ok with being on The Road Not Taken by other people. I will always be weird. That’s unavoidable.

I wish you knew that you were actually on that road too. You are not actually on the same road as other people and you shouldn’t try to be. What do you want to do with your life? That’s what feminism is about.

At the end of that rant the kind of logical next question is: so what about all the people who don’t have my privilege? Fuck if I know. That’s a really hard question.

I feel soft and badass at the same time.

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My skin is so nice. Oh man. Of course the woman giving me the treatment turned out to be my tribe. I didn’t press for specifics (uhhh it seemed inappropriate) but she said enough things that I know it to be true. I just know.

The first half hour I spent in the hot tub or sauna. The room was beautiful and huge. I felt small and I don’t very often. Then I moved into the treatment room. That was more to a scale that felt reasonable to me.

First she scrubbed me really forking hard with salt for a while. I rinsed that off. Then she slathered me up in mud and wrapped me up like a burrito. Then she did stuff to my hair and my feet and my face. Then I took another shower. Then she put oils on me. A few stages of this were billed as “massage” and given who I normally get them from it just didn’t rank as obviously meant to be therapeutic. It felt soothing though. Soothing can be nice.

We talked about intentional parenting. We talked about viewing your children as autonomous beings who do not owe you a relationship. We talked about modeling and mirroring and learning and the pressure of being on all the forking time. She is on the fence. She thinks she might want kids but she’s not sure she can handle them. She’s thirty-six. She’s running out of time.

If you don’t wake up in the morning and cry because you wish you were holding your baby then you probably don’t want to be a mom bad enough to go through the process.That’s how I feel about it.

We talked about having children to give yourself a reason to live and the problems and benefits of doing so. The only ethical way to do it is to think of your children’s needs above your own. Yes, they give me a reason to stay alive. That isn’t their problem. All they should see is that they have a wonderful mommy who loves them more than ice cream. In our house the measure of true affection is how it compares to ice cream.

We talked about hiding yourself in travel and needing roots at the same time. We talked about how you have to hide yourself in order to have “relationships” because if you are damaged and angry every problem will be your fault. It cannot be apparent that you are so angry. How do you mask it? How do you get along?

How do you get over hating everyone else who got to have a mother who loved them? How do you not take that hatred out on them?

I told her that I think very hard about how many people I want to have at my fiftieth birthday party. I want to still know these people. I want to still live here. Ok. What am I going to have to do in order to end up with that happening? It’s not a guarantee for people like me. I’m a runner.

And this conversation came in brief bits and spurts. It was never intense. It was a few sentences at a time here and there over two hours.

She asked me how I hurt my arms so I talked about writing my book and destroying my arms and doing it practically in the middle of the night because I didn’t have any other time and I fucking had to do it. She commented on how I seem to be a very driven person in general. I have managed to do a bunch of things–right?

She said, “I guess people like you are the ones who get things done in life. If you have to do it in the middle of the night you will because you want it done and that is just that.”

At the end she told me that she didn’t think she had ever spoken to a client as much as she spoke to me and she thanked me for coming in. She said that I gave her a lot of things to think about that are really important in her life right now and she’s glad that she met me.

That’s a well spent day, no?

Suicidal ideation

4 Replies

I love getting eight hours of sleep by 3am. It makes my whole day better. It makes my whole life better. Then I am more cheerful and enthusiastic about what I have to do. I consider it the first thing I must do in a day in order to have a good day. The second thing I must do in order to have a good day is get more than 75% of my chores done by 9am. I have a thing in my head.

I participate in a variety of online support groups–or rather I have over the years, not so much at this second–and it has been a fairly big thing for me over the past ten years “I am more productive by 9am than a great many people are all day.” It’s a thing in my head. I work very hard on it. That way I feel I have the freedom to do with the rest of the day as I please.

Pretty much every online support group has strict rules about talking about suicide. Really, pretty much everyone everywhere believes it isn’t ok to talk about–especially if you are seriously thinking about it.

My furnace dries out the air terribly. I’ve spent all winter coughing and hacking and feeling unhappy about it since I moved into this house. Now my kids join me. So they’ve been waking up a lot at night. It means I have a lot of time in the middle of the night to think about them and to think about suicide and for me to think about what happiness means.

There are a lot of parenting books on the market that will tell you that you are bad bad doomed if you have children because you want to give yourself a reason to live. BAD. DON’T DO THAT! That’s what the books say.

To that I say: becoming a parent is always a selfish decision. Why is my selfish decision worse than yours? I have promised myself and my kids that I will absolutely not kill myself until they are adults because they require care and I am the one who has to give it. I have to say that it gets easier by the year. I’m learning what happiness feels like.

I know a lot of people who work very hard to ensure that they don’t have to “deal with” their kids in the middle of the night. Gosh that is my favorite time. I love feeling like my mere presence keeps the monsters at bay. Because I do. In Calli’s mind and in Shanna’s mind if I am in the room then they are safe and life is good. That’s just the end of the debate.

That feeling is better than every drug I have ever taken and I’ve tried a really lot of drugs. A lot. A really lot. Ha. But I did the vast majority of my drug taking (other than this stoner thing) in under two years after I was a college graduate. Let me get on my pulpit for a second to lecture anyone younger than me about how you should wait until your brain is done forming before you use drugs. Wait until your brain decides which connections it wants before you break sections. Just do. I’m serious. You have a long fucking life in front of you. You don’t need to try everything in the first twenty years. Good grief.

I have never believed that I had a long life ahead of me. I have wanted to die since I was seven years old. For the past twenty-four years I have wanted to be dead more than I have wanted to be alive. Well, I would say that the percentages kind of rock back and forth staying in the 40’s and 50’s. I wanted to die a lot and I didn’t want to live very much but actually killing yourself is harder than it looks sometimes. I did not overdose as a teenager as a cry for help. I simply vomited up the drugs and was found before I could finish dying. Different.

Now I’m really glad I’m not dead. I feel like getting to sleep with my little girls, with their faces pressed to mine as they mumble over and over while falling asleep, “Mommy love you so much. So much. Sooooooooo much” this is the reason that people live. This feeling of love and happiness. This is why people stay alive. The hope of this. The belief that some day they will get to have this feeling. This is the increased joy that parents have that non-parents don’t get. That is one of those things they find in studies. Over a lifetime parents have more joy than non-parents–a shitload more stress too… but it’s worth it.

I never thought I would actually experience having someone love me like this. I believed this would always be for someone else. I’m very concerned that I not alienate my children… ever. I have to behave appropriately in order to deserve a relationship with them. But I’m not very good at acting appropriately.

Sometimes I feel like the biggest fucking hypocrite in the world when I get mad at my kids for breaking rules. Ha.

I told Shanna, about the stealing candy thing, it is my job to teach you the rules of society. I get angry because I feel afraid. If you steal as an adult there are serious consequences. I have to teach you that it is not a good thing to steal or the rest of your life will be harder and you will have a lot of very unpleasant experiences. I don’t want you to suffer. How can we work on you not doing this? I told her that I really don’t know “how this should be taught” because when I was a child the way I was taught was to be hit. I don’t want to hit her and I’m not really sure what the other options are and I feel kind of overwhelmed sometimes as I try to deal with it. I’m sorry I scream so much. I know it is annoying or scary depending on the day.

I asked her if she knew that how much I love her is completely unaffected by whether or not she perfectly follows the rules. I do not perfectly follow the rules and I hope she will always love me. She told me that somewhere else there are kids who always do exactly what their mothers say and they never break rules. I laughed and said those must be the most boring, uncurious children on the planet and how sad for their mothers’. She looked very confused.

I have not thought about killing myself in a bit. Certainly weeks. But I was asked to reaffirm that I understand and will follow the rules of forums and I WILL NEVER POST THAT I AM FEELING SUICIDAL. Thus I am thinking about the concept though I am not experiencing it. I have felt shamed and bad for being suicidal for pretty much my entire life. I’m aware that people are uncomfortable with the fact that I feel this way and their discomfort is the most important thing here.

Talking about it, or not, has not even slightly increased my self-harming behaviors. Over time my self-harming behaviors have kind of melted away. I’m not hurting myself anymore, I’m really not. It was a process I had to go through. I had to be whiny and angsty and I had to really process how much I wanted to die. This process is simply part of being alive for me. I understand that other people don’t like it. I feel very uncomfortable about being told over and over and over and over that because I make other people feel uncomfortable when I talk about it I shouldn’t talk about it.

Well, how much do you enjoy being surprised by someone offing themself? Wouldn’t you have preferred a warning? Dude, seriously.

P!nk has a song on her new album about drinking and doing drugs and running away and I feel suicide is strongly implied. I really appreciate it when people admit in public that this struggle is part of their life. The song is The Great Escape and I listen to it a lot right now. I’ve been thinking about how I understand this whole “creation of something new” thing now that I didn’t understand before. I have a family now. I have never had one before. Oh wow. This is how they are supposed to look? I’ve been thinking about having something to live for.

It’s really interesting watching how the percentages change. Feeling suicidal vs. wanting to live. That’s a ratio I’ve been actively tracking for most of my life. I have visualized it a lot of different ways over time. These days I think wanting to die falls into the teens. I’m very happy about that. That’s a ridiculous amount of progress for me.

But I’m not supposed to talk about it. I’m not supposed to be graphic about my ongoing struggles to not kill myself. Someone else might feel uncomfortable. Welcome to my sandbox, motherfucker. Here the rules are that I get to talk about whatever gets me through the night. If I am sitting here and writing something then I am not cutting. I am not hitting my body against a large blunt object. I am not soliciting some piece of shit to hurt me. I am not offering up sex to people I don’t know just to get through the night without having to be alone.

I’m not alone. I really love that my kids need me in the middle of the night because I need them in the middle of the night. I need to feel love in the middle of the night. I need to feel wanted. I need to feel like it matters that I not die.

The passion and the pain are going to keep you alive someday. I honestly don’t know how someone in my position would work through this without children. I can understand putting off the decision to die because you still have things you want to do–that is more or less the path I was on pre-kids. I made deals with myself, “I want to do ____. ____. and ____ then it doesn’t matter.” I was very selfish and random about the deals over the years and that’s ok. It was a deal with me about how much pain I have to endure.

That’s the plain and simple reality behind my suicidal ideation. Do I or don’t I get to decide how much pain I have to be in? Am I or am I not in charge of this decision? I think this is where I make the jump to atheism entirely.

I want to be the one who decides when my pain ends. I hold that right. I consider it one of my basic rights. Other animals do the same thing. It is natural just like infanticide is natural. It exists in every species. In America there are approximately thirty seven children killed by their parents every week. You don’t see headlines very often. Every fucking week.

Parenting is hard but I fucking guarantee you that no part of this journey has been remotely as difficult as what came before it so I’m still coasting. My second labor was nine days long followed by a blood hemorrhage that left me unable to walk to the bathroom for weeks. I crawled. Otherwise I simply did not leave my bed. But my friend K delivered enough food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for three weeks. It was a calm but peaceful period. I learned my baby. I didn’t mind the work. It was nice.

Life is about work. Life is about creating and the things you want to do. I freakin love Richard Scarry. Everyone is a worker. All the work must be done. Some of the work is not more honorable than anything else. There is a hierarchy in pay–that tends to exist because some jobs can be done by many people and some jobs can be done by smaller and smaller groups of people and when you have to compete for the talents of a small group… you have to pay a lot of money.

You have to think about those people. The ones who are so selfish. Wait… that’s my husband. He has spent our entire marriage working his ass off to increase his income. Isn’t that selfish? He didn’t do it until he had a reason to. He didn’t care enough to bother. He wasn’t driven by love of acquisition on its own. But now he has this wife with really expensive travel interests and uhm he has decided that he wants to provide for me. He knew that was who I wanted to be before we married.

He doesn’t want me to spend time wanting to die. He wants me to have a list of things I want to do that is really long and complex and it’s ok if it is also expensive–he knows I am overall frugal and I am providing for our long-term safety before I take travel money out. It’s cool. He told me so. Explicitly. He reminds me every few months. It’s weird but really cool. I appreciate how explicitly my husband wants me to be happy.

He wants to keep me. He thinks that the likelihood is higher if I have a sandbox where I can say whatever I want and not get kicked off a support forum for it. He gives me resources I don’t have to have in my head.

I feel like both of us really changed when we got married. We have someone to work for and that is a powerful motivator for both of us. It has been interesting to see as a progression. We get better and better at not hurting one another as we make mistakes and learn how to talk about them. We really don’t keep making the same mistakes over and over. We make new ones! heh

So, to continue on the P!nk trend: Slut Like You is fun. When you are looking to ensure that you don’t have to be alone tonight it dramatically changes how you act. The stakes are different. You’ll worry about tomorrow tomorrow. You have to get through tonight in order to get there.

I’m trying to figure out what mental hurdle I have to working on the books right now. I know I’m overwhelmed by life. I think that I’m just too tired to think. I need to have some reason for a deadline so I can plan around it. I’ll figure it out. I need to decide how much I want to have done by December so I can backwards plan.

I need to feel like I am moving towards what I want to be moving towards. Right now I feel pretty out of control of my schedule. I’m not sure how to change that. Well no. That’s a big fat lie. I know how to change it. I am changing it. This is a process. The schedule will be back to being shaped how I need it to be shaped in about another two weeks. Then we leave town for a week. See how this goes? Oh man.

Portland, we are practically doing a drive-by. March 25th we drive north towards Eugene. We are sleeping there because the kids will be sick of the car. We are aiming to arrive at Dad’s house at 6pm on Tuesday the 26th. We are spending the day with Aunt Cookie, a truly delightful woman. I have an intense interest in hearing stories about Noah’s family. They shape my story now. I don’t have many sources of information.

Wednesday during the day we don’t have plans and we will probably want to go do something fun. Not sure what yet. Wednesday we should hang out with Dad. Thursday and Friday we are hanging out with A. Ha. I haven’t even emailed her to confirm that yet. But she offered it to me. I’m taking it. (pause. email sent.) We will spend Thursday and Friday nights walking around Dad’s neighborhood talking to him and playing with kids. On Saturday we drive allllllll the way home. With four kids who have had a long week and who will not be happy about being in the car. Thank goodness for iPads. Ha.

What we ask of our children is not natural. How we have to deal with the constraints of their lives is not natural. But beating them isn’t a better option. Sometimes you can’t let them have the pace of travel that is appropriate for them. You have to just get there. It is hard but life is that way sometimes.

Once upon a time travel involved physical exertion… even sitting in a wagon is fairly labor intensive compared to a car. We provide these children padded worlds of strapped in boredom. I am not capable of being entertaining for a twelve hour drive. Not even in shifts because then my “off” shift would be driving and I would have a stroke from road rage. That is not in anyone’s best interests. No, my kids can’t entertain themselves for that long. I understand that this is a tragic failing. Never the less… we are going to use them. They can’t use them for the whole trip so there will be other entertainment involved. It’ll work out. It will be one long day of our lives. No big deal. I’m trying to psych myself up for the trip. I’m trying to lay out in advance how much energy I am going to need for various stages. I’m trying to figure out how I will do it without getting punchy about having to teach my kids new situational manners over and over and over for a week solid. It’s a pain but worth it in the long run.

I need my kids to understand how to evaluate for situational manners. I need to consciously talk about how I am evaluating everything around me for clues about how I should behave. I do this every time we travel. It’s a lot easier at Disneyland because there are a lot of “let loose” places. We are going to be moving between environments that will have wildly different “grown up” rules that are going to feel unfair or inappropriately constricting because they aren’t used to those rules. I’m going to be tested over and over. It’s going to be fun.

But this is the whole process of life. I want to teach them how to do this while smiling. I want this trip to be a happy and joyful memory. Shanna is probably going to actually remember this trip for a long time. We will take pictures. She may eventually remember the pictures more than the day but she will have the same kind of connection to these people that I have to Brittney, the little girl who was born four months before me across the street from my family. I was set in my baby carrier next to her in her baby carrier. I have pictures of us when we are two and three and four and seven and and…

I want my kids to have that. I hope they never lose it.

I didn’t think I would lose Brittney. It is hard finding out how unforgivable existing is. Oh, that’s not true I would be told. I am allowed to exist. But I must be silent so no one ever has to actually find out the specifics because oh man that is over the line. The book. The fucking book. I’m having trouble going back through and editing. This is why I paid an editor. Unfortunately after reading the Kindle edition I am entirely unsatisfied with the job she did and I feel fairly back at square one. I thought I was getting an editor but what I got was a copyeditor and that’s a different job.

I wanted technical editing. I wanted someone to give me feedback on flow and let me know where I am being vague and random. I wanted someone to look at it as a work of art to be made better with a few tweaks. Ahhhhh. I get it now. I did get that. That’s what I asked for. She didn’t make many suggestions for changes. She treated it like it was sacrosanct as a poor incest victims story. It was allowed to ramble and be weird.

Ack. But then people don’t want to buy it and it isn’t actually telling the story I want to tell. I can’t always see when I’m doing that without this ridiculous analytical reading that is really hard to do. A page takes me multiple hours. Actually reading something and dealing with the errors is god damn fucking hard work. Why do you think the overall production values of everything in the everything has gone down? (And why I make no promises about my blog entries. These are not polished pieces, yo.)

But the book was supposed to be. And it so clearly isn’t. I feel kind of morally offended by that. In order to motivate that kind of interest you either need a True Fan or someone who is going to make money off the writing. I had neither. Such is life. I’m slowly progressing on editing. It’s hard. I need to set specific goals and plow through it though. Bleh. Yuck. Bleh.

I am running. I’m tired and I’m switching my days for workouts around like crazy but I’m getting through everything. I have a 10k at the end of April. So far my standard for 5ks has been “I pray for under forty minutes”. I’m hoping to do the 10k in eighty minutes.

That means maintaining a standard pace just barely faster than 1km in eight minutes. That means .62 miles in eight minutes. That means I’ll have to run at least 11:50 through the whole damn race. That is way way way faster than I did the marathon. (My marathon average was 15:40/mile. I’m serious when I say I walked a marathon. I’m still hella proud.)

This pace is going to be a huge stretch for me. My race partner may have a different set of goals and staying together is more important than time to me. Additionally: I’m all for wimping out at mile five and crawling the last mile if I feel bad. Flexibility.

What is the goal: the method or the result? Let’s be clear that when it comes to crossing six miles of distance speed vs. just reaching the finish line is a very different set of goals. I no longer fear not reaching the finish line physically… unless I push myself too hard. I am not in amazing physical shape. I’m in good shape. But I’m not an experienced athlete. I have ramped up at a pretty reasonable rate all things considered.

Every body is where it is. You can’t be too hard-lined about “goals” because progress not perfection kind of trumps any stuck on points. It is quite possible I’m not physically capable of running that fast for that long… yet. I may have to work longer before I reach that goal. I sure as fuck would not have been able to do the marathon at that pace. Not given the conditions (high eighties in temperature, high eighties in humidity, really terrible air quality, I started my period at mile thirteen along with horrible cramps). I just couldn’t expect different from myself that day.

I have to still be alive tomorrow to try again. I have to make it to today. If the pace is more important than anything else I might injure myself and then there won’t ever be another try no matter what. And maybe the rest of my life will be a lot harder. Because I was stupid and careless because I don’t care very much if I continue to stay alive.

I really can’t do that any more. Not if I want to be here for more nights of “I love you soooo much”. I want that more than I want anything else. So I will learn how to be good to my body. So I can have as many of those nights as I can.

The passion and the pain are going to keep you alive some day.

I should probably go start breakfast.

No one ever knows the long-term value of what they do. That knowledge is given to no creature. If I want to be a character that has existed then there must be record of that. Only I care to create that record. Noah is invested in supporting this branch of growth on his family tree. He sees it as vital to his long-term success. I’m not sure how I snow balled him.

I think that talking about suicide is something I need to be able to do. My grandmother killed herself. She overdosed. She had been trying for decades. My mother has stories of cleaning up blood after she got home from school because her mother was cutting her wrists again. My brother killed himself. He left the residential care facility where he lived because he had a severe brain injury and would never be able to care for himself again. He walked to a gas station and bought a can of gasoline. He went behind a local grocery store and lit himself on fire. My father sat in the garage with the motor running.

Have I mentioned that I have turned my garage into a really nice room? Ok, technically I have done nothing permanent because city ordinance says it must be able to hold a car at all times and my response would be “give me three minutes and a person to help me move furniture”. That’s not a permanent room. But it’s a really nice place to hang out. There are not likely to be cars in here.

Harm Reduction means being honest about the patterns of behavior in your life. It means setting specific goals and working to reduce the harm you are inflicting on yourself. Usually you are inflicting the harm (hair pulling, cutting, biting your nails, drinking alcohol, picking at scabs, doing most recreational drugs including pot, any obsessive repetitive damage to your body really) because you are trying to relieve stress from some other place in your life.

Noah said he read an article claiming that the first person likely to live over a thousand years is probably alive today. Think about mortality. It’s changing. The brackets are shifting. Where do I want to be on that scale? I don’t want to live a thousand years. That sounds like work. I would rather just live. But I have a rather lot of decades of work in front of me.

What am I going to do when I grow up? I will probably experience an unprecedented to my species amount of freedom after my children are adults. I will still be married to this guy who thinks I am the best thing since sliced bread. I know the deall: there is some travel he wants to do and otherwise I have to do it alone and not be gone too long or too often. Too long is going to be tested a lot over the years as we figure out what that means.

Statistically speaking I am extremely likely to die by my own choice. Sometimes just sitting with that in the pit of my stomach is very hard. You know what they say about statistics? There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.

I believe in self-fulfilling prophesies. I believe the only thing that ever can or has changed the world is someone deciding they want to do it. Yes, of course coalitions are awesome and all… but it takes individuals having a specific vision. A dream, if you will. Otherwise there is no call to exit one’s torpor and do anything. If you are not living up to your vision of yourself… what are you doing instead? Why is there a discrepancy? Are you realistically going to change your life?

Then either change or decide to be happy, right? Happiness isn’t about getting what you want it’s about enjoying what you have. I think I saw that on Pinterest recently.

I want security. I want to have roots. I want a place to come back to. I want community. I want to be allowed to exist without carefully following the rules about what I am or am not allowed to talk about. I like fully informed opt-in relationships.

Now I’m just procrastinating. It was nice to write. I haven’t spent this much time on it in a while. Sometimes it is funny to me the way that writing is one of the most purely satisfying activities I do. I have thought. There. Evidence. Ha. Take that Universe. I have taken up space. In a technological world I have taken up a space smaller than a pin head. Whoop.

But we never know what our impact will be. We have to just exist. And get out of our houses. That’s important whether you like it or not. To be honest I don’t like it very much but I try hard not to take my dislike out on the people who are randomly unlucky and happen to be standing next to me. It isn’t dislike of the people. It is dislike of being out of my house.

It took me a long time to understand that and really fully feel it. I enjoy my work here. I enjoy feeling like I am doing things to work towards my long-term happiness. I am enjoying the physical work and when I am older and less able to work hard I will get to sit in my garden in the shade and enjoy a lifetime of work. Hopefully while babysitting for grandkids who will visit a lot so that I get to know other children deeply.

Now I get it. Now a lot more things make sense to me.

But I have other things I need to do first. Like breakfast. Ugh.

If you build it, they will come.

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I think I’m figuring out what I want to do. February is a bust. I’m going to survive it and get on with my life.

I’m going to keep seeing my therapist every other week and I am not going to continue the group. I don’t have it in me to try and guide them towards being a semblance of support for me. Right now they aren’t. It isn’t their fault. It’s that whole GU(Geographically Undesireable) thing.

I like where I live. I want to build community here. I am trying. I am working hard on that. There are a few projects I have in my head. One involves asking my next door neighbor and probably Tay if they will donate a few hours of labor towards building a play structure in the back yard. I know what I want. It isn’t that complicated. They both have more tools and experience doing what I want to do. They won’t do it for me but they will guide me through doing it. But that’s in the summer when my neighbor has more time. He is drowning right now.

What I can do right now, is go talk to my other neighbor. I don’t know her name yet and I’m going to have to figure out how to memorize it. I may ask her to write it down for me and I will call Pam and ask her to help me practice so I can be not-insulting when I try to speak to and about her. I want to talk to her because her fence faces the elementary school and is a regular target of graffiti. I would like to talk to her about painting some kind of mural there. I will pay for all of the materials.

Let me break the plan down more. If the woman agrees to that I would like to walk across the street to the elementary school and conveniently talk to my next door neighbor (who is a lovely woman–we exchange a lot of food through the year because of gardening) who works at the front desk. I will tell her I would like to put forth a contest open to every child in the school. The best design for the fence will be painted on the fence and the say… top three best drawings otherwise get to help me paint it on the fence.

The parameters are: the picture needs to be simple and clear. I’m not good at fancy shading or anything you can do with a pencil. This will be done in fairly simple paint. Unless you are that good with spraypaint–which I’ve never used so I would hesitate to use it for a project like this. So it has to be something that will handle the transfer of medium. There have to be clear lines.

I would like it to be about living around here. What are the things you like to do that people can walk to. Why is living here fun. Why do you want people to like it and be nice to our neighborhood?

I’m still working on the exact phrasing of that. It has to be something where potentially a kindergardener could produce something workable or it isn’t fair.

We will do the painting as it can be scheduled with the kids sometime around April or May when it is dry enough to let the paint dry. I have no idea what would be best in terms of the school schedule. Maybe they have a week of minimum days at some point and this would be a great time for a project like this?

I think it is bad advice to always tell people to run away from their problems and only be around people who make your life easier. It isn’t anyone else’s job to make my life easier. I don’t live in a culture who grants that to women in my position. Sometimes I seriously wish I was Chinese. My close friend is Taiwanese and when she talks about her family I feel a lot of envy. I wish there were people in the world who love me the way she is loved by her family.

But I compare my envy of that and my relative position with articles like this one about lynching in America. It is very weird thinking that the right to grow up and walk away from all the terrible evil shit from my childhood is a right I have because of my face. Watch the music video at the bottom of that article.

There are a lot of people in my neighborhood who don’t look like me. I could choose to feel uncomfortable about that or I could work to meet their children through community projects and get to know them as human beings.

I’m going to ask permission to use the school parking lot for a block party after graduation (not the same day. obviously.) because I want the parents to meet one another. I like that so many kids in my neighborhood ride bikes outside in the afternoon. I wave at a lot of runners.

I want to live here. I want to keep getting ridiculously unhealthy frugal advice from the dear lady a few blocks away. She lives on a very fixed income so she tells me about every deal. I thank her. And bring her oranges.

I think I feel mortally offended by the idea of leaving the trees I planted. I want to eat that god damn fruit. Some mother fucker would buy this house, chop the trees, level out the dirt and put in a god damn lawn.

No. Those are my roots. I planted them. If I want community it has to be near me. It has to come to me. Sorry. That’s just how life works out sometimes. It’s not a personal affront. I just find I don’t enjoy travel much. It takes a really lot to justify it. I need to believe that and make a choice. It’s not that I will never visit anyone or that I will never leave my house except on foot.

I need to act like staying home is a conscious priority. It’s a choice. It’s something that dramatically makes my life better. If I am not home I can not do my work. If I can not do my work I feel rather bad about myself as a person. LIfe is not meant to be a long string of tiring days spent “entertaining” myself or my children.

I have a few painting projects in the house I’ve been thinking about. Doing them will make me happy. I have to be home in order to do that. I have to choose to not have engagements.

I need to not blow with the winds of change. Change needs to happen in the world around me. I need to keep to my work. I need to make measurable progress in my own estimation or I won’t respect myself as a person.

My daughter is right on the very cusp of being able to go run around playing out front basically unsupervised. She’s not quite trustworthy enough. She’s close though. I don’t taunt her with this difference I just think about it. It’s time for me to get my head out of my ass and meet the neighbors.

The awesome thing is we have a family to model off of who live (depending how you count) three or four perpendicular blocks away from us who have behaved the same way. They have already talked to the city about this kind of organization stuff.

I need to start building more community where I am. You were right K. I need a project.

Homeschooling and hubris and motherhood is not a career

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I’ve had several prods recently to think about why we are homeschooling. Oh my goodness. The reasons are so many and varied. First and foremost we homeschool because I decided when I was seventeen that I wanted to homeschool my kids. Let’s be honest here.

Because I have always known that I wanted to homeschool my kids I got a BA in literature and a teaching credential and went to graduate school (no degree there). I wanted to feel like I knew enough. I desperately wanted to feel qualified. This is a fairly unusual route to take towards homeschooling. I have seen some mention in writing that “former teacher” is one of the fastest growing segments of the home schooling community. I don’t know if that is true or not. Even when I talk to other former-teachers they didn’t start out teaching in order to homeschool. They move to hoomeschooling because they feel their child needs something that isn’t otherwise available and they are trying to meet the needs of their family.

I have more hubris than that. I want my children to be unschooled while they are young. I want them to think learning is an amorphous non-linear process that happens in weird spurts and starts because that is how brains operate. Very few people really learn best lock step rote memorization. I live in California. I can promise you that lock step rote memorization is a big part of the educational philosophy. It’s the best way to baby-sit a bunch of potentially unruly kids.

When I was a teacher I handled unruly kids by giving them Legos and Play-Doh in class and I kept them after school for academic detention and we sat down and figured out where the holes in their knowledge was. Many of my teacher peers were quite frustrated with me. I was teaching these little brats that they get to run the show and demand an endless amount of my time and I should respect myself more than that.

No, I was teaching them that some people need to be physically moving in order to access their brain and that is ok. I was teaching them that some people take a little longer to pick up concepts and that is not shameful it is just something to accommodate.

I decided to homeschool my kids because my own public school experience was so overwhelmingly awful. I do understand that my children are not me and will have their own experiences–but big parts of the experience don’t change.

When you are bored in class you are expected to stare straight at the teacher and feign attention and not allow yourself to get distracted. You are not allowed to go actually learn anything–you have to pay attention to the teacher because (s)he is talking. Being in public school dramatically slowed down the rate at which I learned. I went in and out of twenty-five schools and really got to experience what it means to be educated in California. I wasn’t around long enough to experience much long-term benefit. Maybe if I had learned to feign boredom better I would have had a better experience.

My experiences outside of California involved me being beaten at least weekly and usually more like daily. My attitude sucks. I’m distracted. My handwriting is terrible. Obviously the best way to educate children is to make sure they are so afraid they cannot dare move or wiggle during class.

Regardless of the fact that I hear there are excellent teachers in the system (I’ve even seen a few) they are in the dramatic minority in my experience.

When I read people say, “I can’t make my kid learn anything so we can’t homeschool” I want to respond, “So your child is still lying prone in a crib somewhere unable to move or walk or talk or eat food or use the toilet?”

I make my kids be polite. Past that I don’t make them learn a whole lot. They learn how to clean up after themselves because I model it. I don’t force them. I talk about the process and why we engage in it. I did the work until my kids hit a level of competence where they wanted to do it for themselves and now I don’t do it. It’s great.

Shanna is counting higher and higher by the day. Occasionally I will correct one prononciation out of the 50+ numbers and she almost always skips one or two somewhere and I don’t say anything about that. Sometimes she makes it to seventy. She has almost entirely taught herself to read. She has actively rejected any vague attempts to help her. She wants me to read to her and not slow down to be didactic. It’s annoying. Ok.

My kids have high motivation to read. I spend many hours every day reading. I read books to them, books to myself, and the computer every day. I talk to them about what I am reading and why. Now that I am not on facebook or mothering.com at all I am spending about four hours out of every day reading actively-informational books/websites. I’m learning. I’m getting up and using what I learn. I’m talking about broad connections between different areas of our lives.

I’m not worried about my kids learning math. I’m about to get up the courage to build a big play structure in the back yard because that is the only way to get a slide to our property. I have all the technical knowledge for how to do this. I have a next door neighbor who owns all the equipment and is happy to help me for a few hours as I get started–the rest I will do with my kids. They really do help.

I talk about geometry and force. I will talk about why you need cross-braces under the platform. I will talk about distribution of weight (a frequent topic in this house anyway) and I will talk about the benefits of screws and nails and I will talk about treated and untreated wood. It will be an edu-tainment because they will always know that they helped build it. That they are competent people who can just do stuff because that has always been true. That has simply been what they have done with all the days of their lives.

Can people do similar projects with their kids and go to public school at the same time? Sure. Of course. But your kid is spending 6+ hours a day having to stare forward with at least a faked expression of interest. Man. What a waste of a life.

I hear that time spent in school is really important. But I also hear that if you subtract for transition time, recess, and discipline there is somewhere between forty-five minutes and ninety minutes of actual honest-to-dawg instructions in a full day.

And on the socialization front–it has not been the norm in our species for children to spend all day every day locked in a room with twenty to thirty people their age and only their age for more than about one hundred and fifty years. I have not been convinced that this grand sociological experiment worked out the way folks hoped it would. I mean–I don’t think it is actively evil… mostly… but I get why people use it.

I so get why people don’t want to do what I am doing. I absolutely get that. This is hard. Trying to figure out what to go learn next so I can model learning is hard. It requires a specific way of thinking that is extremely high energy intensive. I feel very overwhelmed by how hard it is and I have reason to believe that this specific sort of thinking is much easier for me than it is for most people. That’s not a snooty statement–it’s what people have told me repeatedly and emphatically.

I specifically went through a lot of training so I could understand the real eventual goal of education. What does it really mean to expose children to information and expect them to become “educated”? I’ve tried as hard as I can and I’ve worked for more than ten years to find out what breadth and depth of knowledge is actually expected out in the world. Did I go out and actually learn all of it? No. But I have worked very hard to create a model in my head of how information flows. What knowledge leads to what. When you talk to extremely smart people–what got them started. Where did their passion begin? How were they exposed?

My kids may grow up to be a hairdresser and a burlesque dancer, respectively. They may grow up to be scientists or mathematicians. Or writers or carpenters. My kids will almost certainly know how to program–maybe they will just stay there. I don’t know. I don’t have a very accurate crystal ball.

But in homeschooling my children I am committing to expose them to the depth and breadth of life experiences. They need to find out what their options are. I feel that one of the potential worst experiences of the hubris involved in homeschooling is that in modeling so strongly one way of life–how will our children really understand how it is ok to live? They don’t need to grow up like me.

Other than having a kind of adorably off-beat sense of style they are both experiencing a life that is about as far from everything I knew as a life can be. They won’t want to grow up to be me. That is not only acceptable it is wonderful.

I have to teach them how to wonder and explore and how to evaluate if the consequences for being caught breaking a rule outweigh the awesomeness you will get if you break the rule.

Seriously–that’s one of the biggest life lessons I will consciously teach. There are a lot of rules in society. Some of them you can break basically penalty-free and some of them have catastrophic results. How do you decide which sets of only annoying penalties you want to put up with?

Everyone should teach their children that. That is part of the process of deciding how many homework assignments you can blow off and still get the grade you want.

That is what I don’t want. I don’t want my kids to care about working for a grade. Once you finish school they stop handing out those grades. It’s been hard to figure out if I am really learning or if I deserve to be allowed to speak on topics I have read about if I don’t have a degree proving I have read those books and gotten passing grades on the tests.

What is this fucking bullshit. Wake up America. Socrates did not have to pass a god damn written exam before he was allowed to teach. I’m just g-d sayin’.

Not that I’m Socrates–nothing of the sort. But this is a very weird very modern American invented way of thinking. It wasn’t long ago that most medical doctors never went to college. They apprenticed. Or they just read some books and started doing it.

That is what “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” partially means. It means thinking, “I want to do _____; ok what do I have to do to get there?” And then you independently educate yourself. We live in the era of the internet and free public libraries. There is no excuse for ignorance.

Well, that age old excuse “I don’t have time.” I… Yeah. I make the time. My life is about that time. I think it is very important. If other people do not do it do I care? No. But I agree with them that they probably shouldn’t homeschool. Which I never suggested or thought or tried to imply that they should but I am often defensively told why other people could never do it.

Here’s this: I believe you. But guess what? I can.

That’s the hubris. It’s a flat statement of competence. Ok, you may not be competent at this–I am. I am very good at it, in fact. So far. I don’t have a strong agenda for most of their lives. I have extremely strong backed-up-by-research opinions on why I absolutely do not want them in a formal schooling environment until after age ten or so and then I will listen to them. They will have options and I will be supportive. I want them to set their own educational goals. It’s not my life to lead.

But it is my job to teach them how to learn and how to actively work really hard towards creating new things in the world. I want them to think of themselves as Makers. I want them to believe that they are strong and smart and competent because they can point at things they had to struggle to make, but look they did it.

I don’t want my children to waste their childhood staring straight ahead in a class room. I want them to be out running for miles with me talking about the plants we see–which ones are edible and which ones are not. We pick up garbage in our neighborhood (I need to do this more often because I write about it and then feel guilty that I haven’t done it all that recently). My children are learning what the rest of their lives will look like. They are training to be an adult. When adults have time they have to fill it. My children are learning how to fill that time, fill that hole in life. How do you spend your days?

My children are basically never bored. If they are bored I say, “Excellent! Time to get dressed and go into the back yard!” We don’t stay bored long. There is always a long list of things to do. Keeping a home is work. Having a pretty yard is work. Getting to look at lovely flowers is work. Growing food is work. They participate and help and grow more competent constantly. They are learning fine motor coordination. We have so forking many tea parties it’s unbelievable. Sometimes like six a day. They move around the house. The children are almost entirely capable of making a real one by themselves.

By the time my eldest is six and the youngest is four I anticipate that they will be able to create nearly all of the food and set the table for a large group of people. They practice over and over. They handle more steps each time. They want to. Because if all the work is dumped on me they don’t get a tea party. I get tired. It tends to mean a third or fourth time making a mess in the kitchen in a day.

I need them to understand what it means to keep your workspace clear so that you can continue to work on it later. I need them to have an investment in that state of being. We all help clean up after all of us. We are a helpful family. I say that over and over. So they do it.

I feel like I spent my late teens and early twenties studying how to be a truly great governess. It was a specific course of study. At this point in time we are unschoolers. Not Radical Unschoolers. We have limits here. But I don’t introduce academic book work artificially. I do a lot of specifically educational speaking but it is as I narrate what I’m doing anyway. I’ve been doing exactly the same kind of speaking to my kids since the day they were born.

I have taught my kids how to drink from an open cup, how to use a toilet, how to get dressed. From the day they were born I have been talking to them about their surroundings and experiences all day every day.

A great many stay at home mothers have the experience that when their children are very young getting out of the house is often an unsurmountable task. They spend a lot of days just kind of stuck at home bound by nap schedules. I remodeled my house and did extensive gardening. I couldn’t really go anywhere and I was bored.

I have slowed down on the rate of home improvement in the last year. Instead we have been venturing out more and more into the homeschooling community. My kids will have friends. They will grow up running in a band of kids. They will have ups and downs and trials and tribulations. They won’t always have a good time. Good. That’s how life is supposed to work.

I really and truly understand the arguments against homeschooling. The one that has the most merit, in my opinion, is the notion that people like me are the ones with the passion to change the system. To that I say–maybe. But in the meantime my kids would suffer through years of what is the worst education ever offered in the history of my country. Oh dear G-d no. I know those standards well. I’ve taught them. They have very little to do with learning except in a round-about back-hand way.

Opting out is a position of ridiculous privilege. Having someone available with my work background and education is extremely unusual. I get that. Not everyone knows that they have to raise themselves as they raise their kids and that it will take a lot of time and a lot of not-formally-structured consistent time. We have a very consistent life but we don’t have much formal structure. We do not live by the clock much.

One of those hard facts of life is that my desire to homeschool my kids intersects with the fact that I have a rather lot of psychological problems. I have PTSD and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I experience depression and suicidal thoughts with great frequency and I have been a self mutilator since I was a young child.

Raising my children really and truly is the only way I can see forward to really raise myself. I’m trying to do so in a way that is off-screen for them. Time will tell if I am successful or not. It is hard having patience and giving myself room to be imperfect while still truly progressing forward at a rate of development that exceeds theirs. It’s… an experience. I don’t get the impression this is the standard approach to home schooling.

One of the best things about being an American is that you have the right to live a life of which other people disapprove. You’re just allowed. It’s in our Constitution. We have the right to pursue happiness. No one promised you’d get it–but you are allowed to pursue it. You are allowed to structure your life around pursuing happiness.

The way I see forward to maximize my lifetime happiness is to take this opportunity to appreciate the time I am privileged to have. Not everyone has this much time during the day. Most of the people who have the time during the day have worries that simply do not trouble my mind. That is a burden I do not share so I don’t get to judge how hard it is to carry. I’m a fucking lucky bitch.

I get to spend the next fifteen years playing and building and learning. Then I get to decide what I want to do when I grow up. This is part of why I do not think mothering is a career. Mothering is about learning how to see the world as an experience that must be past on. I know it is work but it is the work of life. It is the work of becoming a whole, individuated person.

I say this is the journey of mothering because it my journey as a mother. I do not know how it might be similar or different for fathers. I feel like I have had a profound life changing experience where I understand exactly how and why I am a product of the abuse I endured and I have had to consciously teach myself new behaviors at every stage of their development in order to appropriately parent them.

They keep changing the damn target on me. I get a handle on one kind of difficulty and then it changes and isn’t difficult any more. I see more and more of my control issues. I see more of my frustration and helplessness. I see more of my inability to control anything or anyone.

I’m sure there are other life experiences that teach similar types of humility but I don’t have experience with them and I’ve never even heard them spoken about in real life. When you are responsible for the 24/7 needs of a child for year after year after year it’s an endurance test. We were meant to raise children in communities. We were meant to have a grandparent living in the house who could walk the baby while mom rested some nights.

Right now I feel like mothering is the journey towards understanding your place in the scheme of things. Ok. In history I am daughter of _____ wife of Noah. Mother of Shanna and Calli. Sister of. Cousin of. I actually have a large family when you look at it all written down on paper.

And I can’t give them that community. It does not exist to them as a resource because of something that happened long before they were born and is not about them. That feels like an unfair burden. The result has been that I have cared for them mostly alone for years.

I get more help by the year. I trust more. I know that my children require a family to go to who would love and accept them no matter what so they visit their Godmamas. It’s kind of like a shared custody agreement. For the rest of their lives they will have had these years of being cared for by gentle, loving women. Both of whom have conflicting feelings about never having children of their own but it is highly unlikely they will. Life choices are complicated. And they love my daughters. They have extensively remodeled their guest room to be a kid room. It’s a really beautiful set up. They live in the mountains and they go for long hikes and learn about the flora and fauna of my childhood. They are only a few miles away from where I lived for most of my childhood, in the house where they all still live. I sometimes drive almost right past it. I do drive by other houses we used to live in. There are a bunch.

On the direction without the kids I drive a route past a former home and I sit and think really hard about how my life looked when I lived there. How old was I? Where did I go to school? How was my mother currently behaving?

I catalogue these things endlessly. It helps that we moved a lot so there are a lot of places to pull over for a think.

I have to think about what I was taught and unlearn it. I have to consciously go figure out what the correct response should have been. I have to say it to myself.

I have to. No one else is ever going to. No one else gives a shit. Not really. Not to the degree that a mother is supposed to care for her children.

Sometimes I think of things done right and I try to add them to my toolbox. My mother was not a complete fail. No one is.

This conscious choice of deciding who and what you want to be is the real work of motherhood. It is becoming the person you actually want to look at in the mirror. Does every woman have to become a mother in order to go through such change? Oh of course not. Don’t be silly. But motherhood is a slap in the face that can’t be ignored. There are mothers who choose to ignore this process. They neglect their kids. I don’t think they will be able to read four thousand words to get pissed off by me insulting them.

I’m not saying that there is anything terrible about daycare. There isn’t. But it isn’t what I want for my kids. I don’t want them to be peer centric. That is a specific lifestyle choice I don’t want to make. I don’t think it is wrong or bad, but I have a lot of privilege to decide and I don’t want to do that. I have never wanted to be separated from my young children.

I will be the one packing the suitcase when they are seventeen years and eleven months though. Not really. But I will start charging rent. And board. I’m serious. I am trying to train adults. If you are not able to be an adult then I have failed and we need to get moving on fixing this fast.

I can’t promise to always be available. I won’t promise to always take care of my kids. I have seen that go extremely badly. My entire life experience makes me absolutely gut level terrified of creating dependent adults. But I treat my babies and young children like they are totally dependent. The shift starts happening around puberty. Then they get to start deciding the course of their life. Until then it is my job to keep them safe and protect them. No one else will care as much as me. No one else will want it with the fierce intensity that I want it. My children will not be victimized as children.

You’d never know I was so paranoid if you met me in person. My children walk up to every single person they walk by and say, “Want to play?” or “Hi, my name is (name of the day). What’s yours?”

They are not sheltered. They are escorted. They talk to obviously on drugs people because those folks just live in our neighborhood and have to walk to get to the bus. I don’t mind. When Shanna snuck out every house on her route ratted on her. It was great. They made sure to tell me that she stayed on the side walk like she was supposed to. It was hilarious how they didn’t want me to get mad at her.

Kids are supposed to try to test the limits of their parents. That is the whole nature of their life experience. And parents are supposed to grow and change over and over and over and over as they define who and what they really are.

This is the work of every truly-lived-life. I obviously have strong specific philosophical roots. Only the examined life is worth living. Only that isn’t even it.

I need to have a safe place to grow up. I’ve never had it before. I understand that other people had it while they were children but I didn’t. I’m doing my work here, but give me a break. Yeah it takes a while. It’s hard. It hurts. Yes, it is a river of self-pity. Someone has to have pity for me. Even if it is only me.

I need to have the whole experience of a life that happens without terror and horror and shame and blame and guilt. I need it. I know it is selfish of me to keep my kids home so I can see theirs. I’m not trying to co-opt their life. I’m not forcing them to be like me. I’m educating them. In actually traditional ways instead of in the manner of the current fad in public education. I only feel a little guilt. I only feel that guilt because this is such a wonderful experience–of course I should be denying it to myself because I don’t deserve it. I should be trying to force them to be just like their age and location cohort. Gosh. Aren’t I terrible and selfish.

No life is without bumps or course corrections. No one is born a finished product. I knew before I got a fake high school diploma (in my opinion getting a high school diploma after three semesters of attendance is a joke) that I wanted my children to have a life that was more consistent with the lives I read about in books. Those people seemed to turn out better.

Maybe they are all right. Maybe the answer is that women shouldn’t be allowed to read. Before you know it they get ideas and they start thinking and then we get uppity women who don’t do what they are told.

The whole world might explode.

Poverty, religion, and community building

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The last article I read on HuffPo was about how atheists should care more about poverty. In my head that lead to this whole leapfrog experience of thoughts about things that have been happening in my life lately. A bunch of things happening off-line mostly to other people. So I can kind of comment in person but writing about other peoples lives is rather rude. See, I do have tact.

Recently I was reminded that one of the big upsides of Catholicism over the Protestant approach is that Catholics believe you are not saved by faith alone–you have to do good works. I feel like telling the Protestants that they don’t need to behave like Jesus, just believe in him, was one of those crucial “missing the point” movements in history.

At this stage of my life I am standing very near the cliff of atheism. I think that if someone is as angry at G-d as I am can’t really fall off that cliff. It’s like having an airplane cable around my waist as I try to jump off the cliff. I won’t get far enough and it’s going to fucking hurt trying.

And by the way, if you have ever said, “Catholic or Christian” then you can picture me screeching at you with great fervor for at least half an hour about how ignorant and stupid that sounds. Just sayin’. You believe in and follow Christ? Christian. Moving on.

I believe that nothing and no one is going to save me. No one is watching me and giving a shit. If someone had been watching me through my whole life with dispassion I would have a nice big scythe with that persons name on it. My life is, in my opinion, proof that there could not be a compassionate all knowing G-d. It’s enough proof for me at least.

That means I am left in this position of not being good for my big invisible sky friend. Why should I be good? Who defines good? Ah… now we get to the crux of the question. Most people live according to moral structures they have never really thought about. What does being good mean anyway?

I will say that I know profoundly ethical sex workers. I believe they are good people providing a service human-kind needs. If it weren’t such a needed field it wouldn’t have existed for all time. Give me a break.

I know people who are “good” in my estimation who regularly break the law. The law does not define good for me. The law is a codefied way of protecting assets not a way of ensuring that people are nice to each or that we each have a minimum amount to survive. The law protects people who already have power and mostly screws over people at the bottom. I don’t have that much respect for the law.

The law cares way more about the rights of rapists than rape victims. And everyone you can talk to about this will tell you that it should. It must. Otherwise there would be a complete breakdown of law and order. We have to assume innocence. But we must not protect the innocence of young girls and boys who are raped. They are on their own.

We will blame their parents for not cloistering them. We will blame co-ed education. We won’t blame the completely idiotic school system that will not allow adults to talk frankly about sex. We won’t actually teach these children the difference between consensual sex and rape. We won’t talk to the girls and teach them, “If you don’t want it you really and truly have to say NO because he won’t understand on his own. You will be thinking, ‘Can’t he see that I don’t want this?’ and you will cry later because no he won’t see. What he sees is that his dick might get wet. You don’t really matter. If you want to matter you have to matter to you first and you have to defend yourself. Start by saying ‘no’.”

Why don’t people say this to young girls? Why don’t people sit and talk to children for years and years beforehand about consent? Why don’t we talk about self-sovereignty? Oh. Because then we might give the children the idea to have sex–right? They won’t come up with it on their own. Whatever.

When I was younger, before I knew my sister had raped our brother or her children, when her kids were in the 7-11ish range I started pulling the kids aside and talking to them about consent and sex. I showed my nephew how to put condoms on a banana and I made him practice till he could do it without faltering. I told him I’d be happy to give him boxes to use while masturbating so he could continue practicing and get proficient so he doesn’t feel silly once he has a partner. He said no thanks and looked freaked out.

My understanding is his step-father raped him within six months of that conversation. Based on my memories and the stories I was told. I guess he didn’t need to worry about being awkward with his first partner. That was all awkward.

My sister’s loud public attitude was that “there should be a veil between the knowledge of parents and children. In the mind of a parent every child should die a virgin.” But she raped her children. The public discourse and the private actions don’t line up even slightly. Honestly, to me this kind of attitude is pretty much what I hear when I hear Protestants talk about the poor. When I hear my atheist friends talk about the poor.

“The government shouldn’t steal my money.” Because it is better for you to have a second fancy sports car than for some kids to eat. Right.

There has been wealth distribution since the dawn of time. There have always been rich people and there have always been poor people. But in some eras the difference is less stark.

We have more wasteful shit in our lives than was ever fucking possible at any other point in history. What do we do with this wonderful excess? We hoard it. We are stingy and selfish. We are short-sighted.

I get the short-sighted self-absorbed attitude on the parts of my atheist child-free friends. In very specific ways they are only kind of part of the human race. They are an end point. They are not part of the future and they know it. Why should they care?

I don’t get it from parents. I don’t at all. Your children will have better lives if there is less distribution of wealth. Not if they have more and more and more compared to those around them. Their lives will become increasingly a slice of humanity. You can’t associate with people who are too socio-economically different from you. That’s scary. People in different classes behave differently.

I like living in a not-great neighborhood. I like that my kids are meeting a very wide range of people. Our neighborhood is definitely *not* primarily white. Some of the folks around here are comfortable financially but they are in the minority. We have a lot of vacant foreclosed houses. We have a lot of derelict houses kind of falling apart. We talk to everyone. My kids are learning how to behave with as many people in the world as I can possibly expose them to.

I want my children to have an in-their-gut understanding that having “things” is not because of entitlement or privilege. You don’t automatically get these things in life. Some people make the choice to prioritize having things–that’s a choice not a right. And if they don’t get it–that’s the breaks. There are no guarantees. There are no promises. And Paris Hilton no more “deserves” what she has than I deserved to be raped over and over.

It’s a lottery. It’s not about deserve. Things just happen.

I have to believe this. This is the entire foundation upon which I build my survival. I don’t deserve things. If I have them it is an accident. If I have knowledge within my head that could make someone else’s life better and it’s doing nothing for me–isn’t it selfish nearly to being criminal to withhold it?

I believe that we are social animals. We are a social species. We need community. We need to belong. Unfortunately people usually choose “people who feel like me” without ever really examining what that is founded on. Are you saying you only want to know people who were fortunate to have parents who were born into a certain class? How un-American of you.

It’s funny sitting near geek culture. I’m not really a geek. I’ve lived in the Silicon Valley my whole life and I’m only quasi-participating in making my first website. Mostly I’m making my husband do it. But I have watched this culture emerge. I have seen it from the outside since I was twelve.

I hear the Oppression Olympics a lot. When geeks get together the subject of childhood bullying comes up constantly. No one remembers the times when they were taunting people because they were smarter and they weren’t going to be stuck being losers like those other kids. I remember hearing that. The geeks who got beat up used to sneer when tests were handed back. See, here’s proof that even if you can beat me up I am better than you and I will be through my whole life. So that childhood bullying, that largely grew out of the rage of frustrated children, is carried forward in life. Only who is on top changed.

In America we are very careful about Might Makes Right at this stage. We want it for the police–thus we are increasingly militarizing them. That’s the wrong direction. People listen to rules that feel fair, not to things that are imposed under military guard. We like having our rights, motherfuckers.

I watch my kids moving through our neighborhood and I wonder what kind of adults they will be. Will they be selfish? There is no way to predict. Will they feel this terrible compulsion to build community? Will they already have that community?

I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what I should do to find a way to fit into the community I have more. I don’t mean the people I know. I live somewhere. I live in a place and a time. How do I fit in this? If you restrict your friends to only people who are like you and you spend all your time in the car going from very carefully selected place to place… that’s not community.

Community is the weird neighbor we always have long conversations with as we walk to and from the store or park. He gives my kids advice and talks to them about what it was like to work for PG&E as it was really spreading through the state. He’s in his 70’s and he worked for them for decades. He has great stories.

Months ago the topic of suicide came up kind of randomly. I was blunt, as I am wont to be. Since then he makes a point of saying, “Gosh I’m glad you are still here so I can talk to you. And your babies still need you. Keep going.”

That’s community. I don’t have to go out of my way to see him. I don’t have to laboriously schedule around our “activities”. We just see him in our life. It feels good. I’m trying to get to know more neighbors. I think that at some point I may offer tutoring at the elementary school across the street. It would be fun. It would be a really nice way of getting to know more of the neighborhood kids. My children will need to know those kids whether they go to school with them or not.

Everyone is on a different path. I understand that everyone has a different load to carry. Different things they could share. Different needs and wants. I do understand that. But everyone has something that they could give to make someone else’s life better. Not in a codependent way. I’m not recommending one more poly enmeshed hysterical relationship.

There are people in this world who are almost certainly actually suffering because they do not have a piece of information that is in your head. Is that your responsibility? Only if you want it to be. Only if you want to be part of something bigger than yourself. Only if you want to be humble about the fact that maybe all you have to give is that scrap of information and you can’t construct an identity around helping people all the time.

Anger, frustration, entitlement, privilege–I believe they are all so entwined it is almost impossible to take them apart.

Privilege, in my parlance, is the lucky accidents in your life. Maybe you are white. Maybe you were born to wealthy parents. Maybe you were raised in an area with excellent public schools. Maybe your parents could afford to put you through college.

Can you see how these things don’t just happen to everyone? That makes having them double plus awesome. Only if you were handed a huge bag of candy when you were five and you refused to ever share it you would be kind of an asshole. Privilege is like that bag of candy. You can share it. I’m not saying give up on having things or benefiting.

I own a house–well, there is still a mortgage. It will be paid off in less than ten years. Someday I will own a house. Because my husband bought it and paid for it and lets me live in it. I don’t really feel like I should get too cocky about this.

Humility. I didn’t do it. Taking too much pride in it–as if it were my accomplishment–would be ridiculous. This will be Noah’s accomplishment. I can be proud of him and I can be grateful I benefit but I can’t act like it is my right or just or natural that I get this.

Most of my anger displays come at the heels of feeling thwarted. My need for control is interrupted and the fireworks inside my skull are fantastic. I’m not trying to claim that I am superior or above these things.

But what do I do once I feel like that? When my privilege feels attacked? When I feel like I’m not getting something I feel entitled to?

That is what decides what kind of human being I am. I don’t think that all child-free people are dead ends in the human race. I believe that a great many of the most important people throughout all time were child-free. But they made a choice to be part of something. Something that actually makes the world a better place.

I’ve been watching Burning Man for years. It makes me feel sick to my stomach to think about how many millions of dollars have been spent on a temporary city that damages the natural environment and is basically just about distraction.

If you need that kind of display and outlay and expense in order to find your “tribe” then I argue that your tribe is pretty artificial. That is not a sustainable kind of community. That is a mass waste sort of community. Welcome to America.

How many cities or even small poverty-stricken countries could be run for a year on what is spent on Burning Man?

Which isn’t to say that I never entertain myself. I spend money I don’t need to spend. I bought into the freakin Disney time share. That’s elite privilege at its very snootiest if you ask me. I don’t think that everyone who goes to Burning Man is bad. I don’t think that everyone who goes to Disneyland is bad.

But what could we be doing with this time and money that wasn’t so completely selfish? What could we be doing with this time and energy that isn’t just about being entertained for a few days?

I’m not trying to sit on a high horse. I am part of my cohort. I pick up trash and talk to my neighbors. It’s a slow start on building community. I donate a lot of money. I try to help people one-to-one whenever I can.

But I have to have resources to draw from in order to have anything to give. Honestly the trips to Disneyland make me feel more cheerful about the endless amount of giving I have to do in the rest of my life. Burning Man provides a lot of people with massive emotional support–I hear. Or it’s a total flop. Apparently it’s a coin toss year by year. But people still go back–like addicts.

What does caring about the poor mean? What does caring about someone other than yourself mean? Caring doesn’t accomplish a lot. You have to work. What can you do to make the world better?

I keep trying to remind myself that I am not really past the point where I have to be completely focused on my kids. It’s a privilege. It’s a species-preference for children to be intensely cared for in the first few years. My oldest is almost five. My youngest is two and a half. I only have a couple more years before I won’t be nearly as necessary.

What will I do with my time and energy? I don’t think it will involve getting in my car and driving thirty or forty minutes until I get to a white neighborhood so I can feel comfortable. I wouldn’t. I want to find a way to matter where I am. I may not be willing to enroll my kids in the school directly across the street but I want my kids to spout off, “My mom knew she wanted to homeschool her kids from when she was seventeen so please don’t think this is any kind of negative judgment on the school–it’s just a personal choice.” And yes, it is a weird choice. Ask questions about it.

Part of the problem with “helping the poor” is that most of the time there is this tension between helping individual people and helping a systemic problem. The approaches are completely different and going in either direction means that a lot of people fall through the cracks.

What is the road forward?

I was having a chat with some women this weekend. One of the comments that sticks in my mind is a woman was saying that she has evolved in her life to the point where she doesn’t feel like there is much point in being angry about injustice and trying to fight. Just love. Go through your life doing what you think is right and loving people and it will all work out.

I… I don’t think I am capable of believing such hubris. Unless the “all work out” is that we all end up dead. Sure, that I believe. What will the world be like in fifty or a hundred years? I want to influence that. I truly do. And I don’t think that sitting in my house or school in a carefully chosen neighborhood and driving in my car to meet up with carefully pre-selected people is the way to do it.

Chaos theory. Maybe I should study some.

My local police force doesn’t suck.

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I went to the police station this morning.

I dressed up. I wore a nice skirt and a button up blouse (with pinstripes!) and a blazer and nylons and heels. I looked like a proper grown up. I looked respectable.
When I got there I found out that no officers hang out in the police station. Whoops. I was asked if I wanted to go home and wait for the officer there and talk about it in a more comfortable setting. That was the closest I got to crying. I said that my children don’t need to know about this part of me.

I spoke with a lovely officer. It’s all information-only at this point, as it should be. But they know I exist. They know my family exists. They know that there is a long history of me being assaulted. Saying things like, “I prosecuted my father for rape in San Bernadino County when I was sixteen” made my story much more credible.

The officer told me that coming in was the right choice. He was glad I did. He was very sympathetic and supportive. I was expecting a more dismissive reaction so that felt ridiculously nice. I felt very grateful.

My breath got a little shaky but mostly I stayed very calm. I did not cry. I was not overly emotive.

The whole conversation was under fifteen minutes. We talked about my safety options. He told me again that he applauded my courage.

He seemed to be a little curious why I wrote the book if I am afraid of my family. I told him, “Being out is the only protection I have. They got away with my childhood because it was all hidden. I don’t let anything be hidden now.”

He nodded but didn’t say anything. I’m sure the psychology of trauma victims is something that police officers don’t like to think about more than required.

I did the right thing. I’m not being neurotically paranoid. When you can talk to two therapists, a social worker and a police officer and they all say, “You are not being paranoid” it’s validating.

I hate my dependence on validation.

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Last night was a slight change in how we have been doing therapy. I told her I needed to take a break from history because I am struggling with boundaries in a few places in my life and I need help.

About the doctor–she says that I should carefully rehearse exactly what I need to say about this specific stomach pain, “It started right after my second daughter was born about two and a half years ago. It is a very specific sore spot that often feels like it is pulsing. It is usually in the 1-3 range of pain with it being more intense while I lie down. It isn’t majorly painful but it is tender and prevents movement in some directions and it causes me to be stiff and awkward so I don’t twist which is hurting my back. So yes, this spot riiiiiiiiiight here probably needs an ultrasound.”

She said to very consciously and deliberately decide for myself that all of the other parts of my medical history are a distraction to dealing with this problem and I don’t need to mention them until and unless I want that doctors help. She said if they try to shunt me off to psychiatry give them her number and she will deal with them.

I will feel like a deceitful liar but that is the least anxiety-producing way to get through this. I will actively feel like a lying liar but oh well. It will be ok. I can probably live with being a lying liar with people in the medical community.

We talked about friendships and how those are working for me. How I feel very obliged to offer help and assistance and compensation–essentially–in order to beg people to be my friend. I have a bad habit of “giving till it hurts” because I don’t tell people on day one that I can’t do what they really want to have someone do. Everyone needs support. I am not in a good place to support people. Not really in any way. I have to be ok with the cycle of life I am in and not beat myself up for how little I can do for people.

We talked about how when I think about people in my head and I kind of do the weighing and measuring sort of shit that I do I can think I am “higher” on 99 different topics but I will always be able to find some specific thing that makes this person is “better” than me. More essentially valuable or useful. More lovable. More worthy of help and assistance.

If I can’t handle driving I need to not feel like a pathetic person who is unworthy of relationships just because I can’t drive to people. I need to just deal with where I am.

We went through people in my life and made specific lists for her records of “I react to this friend like my sister. I react to this friend like my mother. This friend reminds me of my brother (now deceased). Etc. I did that because I feel like I put people in categories and then I just react to them without examining what I am doing. It’s not positive.

Side note–P, of course you are grandmotherly. You are extremely grandmotherly and wonderful. You are part of a small pool of women who kind of interchangeably provide similar sorts of interactions with my kids. You do it when you have time and space and energy–not when I need it per se. WHICH IS OK! This is what I am trying to figure out how to accept emotionally. My kids don’t have a “grandmother” who is specifically invested in their welfare. They have wonderful and kind women who for whatever reason love me and by extension are nice to my kids–absolutely. We have good and kind people.

There is a difference in actual family and people who are good friends who visit once or a couple of times a year. For one thing, I can’t talk about most of my friends with my kids. I don’t know stories about my friends lives that are appropriate to share with my kids.

My adopted Dad sent me an sms asking what stuff he should send to the kids. I called him back and left him a voicemail saying he isn’t getting the easy way out of this. He needs to talk to me. I’m not sending an sms list.

We had a lovely phone call over the weekend. I told him the best thing he could do for his relationship with my kids is to send them pictures of himself and his life along with little stories explaining the pictures.

The only stories I know about my Dad are stories I can’t tell my kids. They don’t want to hear about how hilarious it was that Dad went to a leather con in Denver Colorado and his biological brother ended up at the same event and found him while he was doing a labial inflation. And his wife was on stage (with me) screaming her fucking head off while I beat on her like a piñata and tried to all but rip her nipples off. It was a heavy scene.

Those are the kinds of things I know about my Dad. I can tell you his entire Leather history start to finish. I can describe who he has played with and what he specifically did. I know his partners and their partners and and and.

Not things I’m telling my kids.

Most of my friends come from sex communities. I have pretty much the same situation with most of them.

P–when I talk about the lack of grandmother I am not trying to demean our friendship nor how kind you are to my children. I am trying to explain that there is still a hole for me. You are good. You are wonderful. I am so grateful that I have you in my life that I would quite cheerfully kiss your feet. Please for the love of shiny green apples don’t decide that I am an ungrateful bastard who is unworthy. It may be so but I hope our relationship is little enough work for you that you can overlook that flaw.

I desperately need what you have to spare in your life. But beyond that I still have this cavern of need. You aren’t available to fill it. That is appropriate. I try very hard not to be bitter or demanding or difficult about the fact that my friends are clearly giving me the limit of what they have to give.

I am at a place where I don’t think any friendship can give me what I need. Having a mother is simply different from having a friend. That does not mean my friends are not doing their jobs. They are wonderful and kind and supportive.

You are still supposed to have a mom. And I don’t. And it hurts a lot. I know my whining gets old. I know that I am over thirty and I’m not supposed to still be whining about how much I miss my mommy. But I do. I started missing my mom when I was three and have never stopped.

I can only do what I can do. I have no one to catch the ball if I drop it. Thus I need to decide for myself what I can and can’t be responsible for. I can’t feel like I owe people things. Not reassurance, not comfort, not support. I don’t have enough reassurance or comfort or support for me. If I turn around and hand off what I have that is actively self-sabotaging myself and that’s not ok for me to do to my kids.

Even though my inability to follow through on relationships feels to me like absolute proof that I am a piece of shit I need to ignore that. I have to leave a lot of run-off room for my kids’ needs. They spike unexpectedly sometimes. I have to just have slack sitting around. I can’t run near capacity all the time. I just can’t.

My therapist and I talked a fair bit about how I value other people for having knowledge but I devalue everything I know. She asked me if I think a professor is a low status position. I laughed and said that I try to give occasional professors respect but mostly I’m not real flattering in their direction.

I read a lot and I know a fairly ridiculous array of things. Sometimes, like yesterday in my kitchen, I get to show off. I am perceptive. I can listen to under two minutes of a conversation other people are having and then go through and fill in the blanks on a whole bunch of behavior patterns in the life of someone I have never met before. That’s kind of cool.

That’s why I talk so much and so loudly about rape and incest and ptsd and all the other things I talk about as loudly as I can. Because I am not actually a special snowflake (Even though Lisa made me a very nice special snowflake ornament to argue with my premise.) because the things I experience are textbook and happen to other people too. And those people rarely have spent as much time reading about it as I have. Not very many people are as dedicated to studying their body as I am without getting into a profession where you settle in to one specialty and become a specialist in how you deal with people and their issues. You narrow down what it is you know.

I’m not a specialist. I can’t dive deep into one subject and immerse myself in the way that true professionals do. I’m not a doctor. I don’t have the memory or attention to detail. I will frankly say that when there are two things that have perhaps vastly different functions but nearly identical names… I’m almost certainly mixing a lot of those up. I’m sure I have mistakes in my brain. I am sure I read so fast that I kinda skim sections and miss important details.

I am not a doctor. I am not a psychologist. I am not any kind of specialist. But I’m good at recognizing my tribe. I can recognize our behavior and smell. I think it kind of weirds people out that I meet them and talk to them for a few minutes and decide, “Ah. You are my tribe. Ok.” because then I speak very familiarly. I make predictions. I talk as if I know things about them. I’m usually right.

I do get it wrong. Not everyone is my tribe. I have shitty luck predicting people who are not my tribe.

I obviously derive a lot of feelings of positive self-esteem from this knowledge. I obviously feel an elevation in worth or value or status because I really and truly can, occasionally, make peoples life better just by talking about things that I like to talk about.

Tell me there isn’t a career somewhere in that.

Bucket List (first draft in this journal)

~~run a marathon~~
~~have kids~~
travel for a year outside the country
live for one year in one place in a foreign country
hike a substantial portion of the Appalachian trail
drive cross country with my kids studying historical sites
do the training to be a first responder
reach at least the penultimate belt in a martial art
someday I want to read a whole new book every day for a year. this will have to be fluffy shorter books, obviously–yay for libraries.
I want to write a novel–like… fiction.
I want to write a graphic novel series. No, I’m not trying to be Neil Gaimon. I see pictures in my head and I want other people to see them and that is probably the best format.
I want to write a childrens book.
stop smoking or needing any anxiety medication–I will fucking shrink my life.
go to the Michigan Womyns Music Festival with my kids
go to all of the Disney parks in one year, err… maybe not Paris again.
go to all 50 states (I have seen 27 so far)

Those are all things I have already told Noah about. Well, I’m not sure he has been told about the hiking part. He has this magnificent coworker who did that after college. She has no idea how much she inspired me. As much as I overall am not in love with Noah’s current employer I have to admit that his coworkers here are way cooler than average.

On the train yesterday I was at the part of The Moral Animal where he talks about low self esteem as a survival trait. Ha. It is very probable that this pervasive belief that I am worthless is my way of trying to convince people that they no longer have to kick me to knock me down any pegs. I’m at the bottom. It’s cool. I know. Just leave me alone.

Then I came home from therapy and talked to Noah. I asked him to explain what kind of intimidating I am. Once a student (who was a large football player who dwarfed me) slowly backed away from me and told me that I looked like I was about to rip his head off and piss on his neck. What in the hell do I do that causes people to say things like that to me?!

He told me it isn’t that I am that intimidating looking. But I am very unpredictable and startling. I don’t fall into any of the obvious patterns for people who look like me and I very carefully mask how far off from the norm I am until I explode because I have carefully learned how to mask all the small distress signs. There is no sign whatsoever that I am feeling even slightly off until I am hysterical or screaming or something.

He said it is kind of like if a big guy was kind of vaguely menacing in the direction of a little bitty old lady and she turned around and snarled like a tiger and pulled out a large knife.

Clearly the guy is no longer in control here despite outward appearances of being more intimidating. Now there is no obvious script to follow. Oh shit. He says I’m like that old lady.

I didn’t say thank you.

I am so difficult to predict and when I explode it is so intense that people can’t handle it. They have no coping methods for people like me other than avoidance. And by the time the old lady pulls the knife–should you have been running thirty seconds ago? oh shit.

When I was a child I was literally taught that there is no such thing as a fair fight. If you fight you fight to win. You fight to cause as much injury as possible. You have to escalate with as much force as you are capable of instantly because otherwise someone will want to slowly escalate and walk up the ladder to find out what you are capable of and they will eventually find the ceiling. If you come back with an overwhelming show of force they don’t try again.

I want to learn a martial art because I have been practicing my physical approximation of the movements I will need since I was a child. Stomp their toes. Everyone has weak feet. If you are close enough and the need is dire enough pull your fingers in to make a hard line on your hand and you have to hit really hard to break their nose and hurt them enough to let you get away. Knees are weak.

When I used to walk through the mountains past kids who gave me shit I carried a stout stick. I took out several much bigger kids by hitting their knees.

I’m not trying to make it sound like I won most of the time. I didn’t. I lost. I got the shit beat out of me because there were almost always more of them and they were bigger. But I made sure they fucking hurt.

Now, as an adult, if someone attacked me I would find a way to rake them with my fingernails. That’s DNA. Even if it does result in a more severe beating. No one is getting away with it again. I will have evidence.

Sometimes I don’t like where the rabbit hole goes.

have to unload brain.

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Sleep was very out of whack. I’m out of it. I have little time for writing. I used up most of my time responding to emails. I go through phases of being able to respond quickly and periods where I cry thinking about responding and can’t do it. Today is functional though exhausted.

I babysat for a friend last night. I feel greatly relieved that there is less screaming as time goes by. We are adjusting to one another. It helps that he does genuinely like me–it’s getting easier to bear being away from his mother. It is so hard to be away from your mother. I think it helps our relationship that I get that. I understand him getting upset and I don’t feel mad at him for it. I feel bad that I can’t make it all better.

He does let me hug him and kiss his head and play with him. It’s not that he dislikes me. It’s hard to not take screaming like that personally–but it’s important. He’s not trying to hurt me. He’s not trying to frustrate me. He has no way of coping with these humongous feelings inside his body. I get it. So we can sit together and he can cry and tell me he is sad. I tell him I understand. He has the best mommy in the whole world and she isn’t here right now–that is very sad. Luckily sand storms of blocks chased the tears away last night.

I think last night was the most comforting he has ever accepted from me. That felt really good.

His baby sister is a doll. She is super sweet and cuddly. She’s six months old and just getting mobile and frisky. I don’t have to live with her so her general lack of sleeping isn’t an issue for me. We had a late night dance party together. It was fun.

Being able to care for people and comfort them has value. It is worth doing. I wish I was able to see how that fits into my concept of self. If these are valuable skills then they should convey status of some kind. That is how valuable things work.

I am very good at sitting with people who are hurting and ignoring my own shit. I can just empathize with what they are feeling. I have felt bad a lot. It’s easy for me to project that other people have similar kinds of bad feelings and I try hard to do the things I wish people did for me.

I think I wrote half of a childrens book in my head while I was playing with the kids last night. I should write it down on paper today.

I was asked if I look at these sweet innocent little boys I know and see potential rapists.

Uhm, yes. Don’t you? You don’t? Really? You think your little boy would never? Oh. well then. I should probably stop talking and walk away fast.

I have known a lot of rapists. I have had a lot of explicit conversations with them about where/why/how and as a result I see pretty much every boy and man as a potential rapist. The men I know who have never raped are generally a kind of paranoid I have trouble with (if they are out in the sex communities–I assume a large number of men have two or fewer partners so they have a very different lifetime experience of rape) so I get why men rape. I do.

Because of my life experiences I don’t call something rape unless I have actively said no. In cases where things were squidgy and I didn’t consent but I didn’t say no I don’t use the word rape. I just don’t. That’s my personal line.

That’s uhm, not the life experiences of a lot of women. Because they are trained to not say no to things in general they just don’t deal with the consent issues around sex and they feel raped.

I believe that if you did not actively consent to sex and you don’t want the sex to happen then you are allowed to call it rape. I don’t do that in my life because, quite frankly, even with the much harsher line my life is still hard to believe.

When I was teaching the concept of rape came up a couple of times. An awful lot of the ways I personally talk to teenagers about rape and consent are deliberately manipulative. When I have a group and I am”lecturing” the boys I am really talking to the girls; when I am “lecturing” the girls I am really talking to the boys. This is because, in my experience, people blow off a lot of what they are told to do but they are kind of nosy about what the other side is told to do. They will think about, “Huh- why was I given different advice?” Then I get follow up questions.

It varies by age and my level of closeness so these conversations are kind of weird to generalize about.

I think the way to greatly lessen the number of rapes is to get men/women/boys/girls more towards the ideas that bodies are wonderful fabulous private things you should only share by choice. And you should own that choice loudly. You should say YES! to sex you want. None of this hard-to-get shit. I mean, you don’t have to jump in bed right away or anything. But the more clear you are about what you want the more likely you are to get it. If you aren’t both on the same page… well…

This is where the hard part comes in. If the girls wants a relationship and the boy just wants sex then we run into the Embargo and bitterness and entitlement and rage and just not-noticing those subtle body signals.

I want girls to be more explicit with their no’s and with their yes’s. I want boys to think about the fact that sex often has very different consequences for girls and if you are not a fucking asshole you will behave respectfully.

I encourage girls sharing information about boys being safe or not. I do it blatantly. “If you are raped no one will know but you. If you have problems with a boy who rapes you he is very likely to go on to rape more girls. Tell. Tell someone safe first. Probably tell the police. If you can’t handle prosecuting I won’t hate you and I’ll still support you. That’s a rough road. But you need to talk about it. There need to be consequences for those kinds of actions.

I want boys to have this thing in the back of their head, “Ah. If I act inappropriately I will no longer get the sex I want. Got it.”

I also tell teenagers that mutual masturbation is pretty much all of the fun of intercourse for the first few years with much lower chance of pregnancy or STIs.

I don’t say that to little kids.

What I say to little kids is, “If you don’t like how I am touching you, please tell me. I want to make you feel comfortable.” I give them a lot of feedback about how they touch me. I want that kind of conversation to be casual, comfortable, and instinctive. “Oh gosh. When you touch me like that it hurts. Please stop.”

Most of the violent rapists I know were terribly abused. That’s a lot of why they hunt for me. I see the hurt little boy still. So yes, when I look at sweet little boys–I see what they could become.

I feel very blessed that I am allowed to have relationships with little boys. Whether I am lying to myself or not I feel better about the world knowing there are little boys running around who have started their life journey around body autonomy hearing my message of consent. I’m a good story teller.

My favorite part of teaching (in retrospect) is how many students have come and found me to tell me about their intense memories of me and they credit me with helping them learn how to make decisions.

I did actually influence their lives.

One of the things I like about not having a set and solid place in any specific community is that I have very few expectations to live up to. I’m allowed to reinvent myself every time I show up. If there are many years in between visits then I get to select which stories to tell.

Unless you decide to wade through my blog it is very hard to tell how crazy I am. I mean, there are signs. But not really. People tend to be shocked when they start reading.

I write because otherwise I don’t exist as a whole person. I’m a set of semi-fake semi-forced behaviors that I have somehow weirdly associated with groups of people in specific communities.

When I was a child the normal I learned was that my mom had to go have sex with my father in order to get money for food. Even though the court system said he owed us that money no matter what. “It may be illegal but no one will prosecute.” Yes, I know.

I have to try to pretend I understand other peoples normal. I have to try to blend in. But when you move through communities people are so wildly different. And they all get upset if you are too weird and aggressive. At this point I’m fairly aggressive.

So I’m trying to be better about keeping up with email so that I can have one on one relationships with people since on an individual basis people have very little invested in maintaining that ‘other’ group identity.

Two people sitting in a room together form a ‘we’. There is the desire to probe for similarities and minimize differences. I know how to fish. I know how to let someone else do a lot of the tone setting. I don’t always do it, but I know how.

Yesterday I was talking to a mom from the homeschooling group. She was relaying that a young girl (I was confused about what the relationship was) went on a sleep over and in the morning woke up before everyone else and went to get donuts with the dad. My mom friend felt bothered by this. She won’t let her daughters be alone with men.

I think “floored” is the best word for how I felt. I… I can’t imagine living in a world where I would never allow my daughter to be alone with men.

Don’t I seem like that type though? I can’t. Often men have been the reason I limped along and did better for a while. Like Joey? My brother Tommy’s friend who brought me to the Seventh Day Adventist church for a while. He unquestionably made my life better. I was alone with him a lot. Uhm we prayed a lot. And read the Bible. And he was so very nice-without-touching. Awesome person. I hope his life is going well.

I don’t want to deny my daughters relationships with men. I want them to not look like prey. Different.

I think that boys, girls, men and women are all animals. We are part of the animal kingdom and all. Unless we are specifically domesticated and socialized then we revert to self-serving behavior. Yes, I think pretty much any boy or man is capable of rape.

And then I start to get around in my head to DAs questions. And it’s 10 and I have stuff to do. Tomorrow I will answer his questions.

I’ve been having trouble getting past “Other than you no woman has ever asked for my consent.” I think it is not obvious in my writing that I think women are equally as capable of being predators but their hunting is different and I have never been their prey. It is hard for me to write about. But I definitely have some things to say.

And buddy–I have fucked some 3’s. You aren’t a 3. Knock off the self-denigration. It isn’t helpful.

I should have seen this coming.

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I have had several men ask me in the past day if they would be on the list of people I pulled into a room to “have a talking to”.

I can’t answer and that is really intense feeling. I want to answer. I desperately want to. I want to be able to absolve of guilt. I want to be able to hand down sentencing.

These aren’t my secrets. If I go about telling men, “You but not you” then I risk revealing what has been told to me in confidence. The women who have confided in me did so with the rock solid belief that I would never betray them. I have to continue to earn that trust even though it is driving me insane.

I can’t answer any of you. I can’t say, “Oh of course I haven’t heard anything about you!” because even if that is true–that just means I haven’t heard anything. I can’t give anyone a gold star that says, “Certifiably not a rapist” unless I go talk to every partner you have ever had.

Unfortunately in my little world the burden of proof isn’t that I haven’t yet heard anything. I have to know it is true or I won’t say it is true. The emotional burden of guilt from being wrong is simply too high. The absolutely strongest recommendation I can give is, “I haven’t been told anything about you.”

And even that reveals the fuzzy outsides of what I have been told. It starts to narrow the field. What if guys start comparing notes to see what I said to whom? That’s completely conceivable. How can I maintain confidentiality that way?

I just can’t respond about this topic. Not really. I will respond to each of you individually (probably after finishing this blog–I haven’t been at a computer since I hit post yesterday) because I appreciate that you are someone who cares about my opinion. But I can’t answer this question. I just can’t.

My honor doesn’t look like the honor everyone else carries around but I will defend it tooth and nail. I gave my word that I was a safe space for these women. I can’t dishonor that.

Even though I want to go beat some people over the head with big sticks because of what I know. I have to keep my fucking mouth shut. I have to smile and give that asshole a hug when he comes up to me at a party because if my behavior radically changes towards him he will probably figure it out.

I can’t out people.

I can tell my secrets. I can tell my secrets all day and all night. I can write or scream them as much as I want. I can’t tell other peoples secrets. That is an individual journey. If someone is forcibly outed that becomes a new trauma. It can’t be a healing process. I don’t get to hurt people like that.

The shape of this community role was actually discussed in my last therapy appointment. She asked me what I take pride in. I told her that I take a lot of pride in the fact that traumatized women find me and feel comforted by me. I wanted and needed someone to go to. I had no one. I have become what I needed. I work very hard at it.

Maintaining confidentiality is part of that. I cannot be trusted if I cannot keep my fucking mouth shut.

Have you noticed how hard it is for me to keep my fucking mouth shut? Oh man.

I was asked several specific questions by a good friend that he felt self-conscious leaving in comments here (totally ok!) about how consent works. He has had a very different set of life experiences than me (women don’t tear my clothes off much–at one point in time I was very upset about that) and he has to cope with things I haven’t imagined yet.

I think it is going to take a couple of days before I can fully answer the questions. I don’t want to give a half-assed reply. I think it deserves serious thought. When men I already love bring me questions about how they can better understand consent in their life I feel a great responsibility to answer in a way that is a)useful b)non-harmful to the man (they do matter too) and c) something that has an actual set of logic behind it.

Thank you for caring about my opinion of consent. I am going to think very carefully and answer you fully. I don’t want to be unclear or unable to explain my thinking. I hate it when I do that.

I have a ridiculously busy day off-line ahead of me. It is going to be a day that combines a wide variety of different high anxiety situations for me. But a kind of anxiety that centers around am I really good enough to be the person in this position in this interaction?

Today I have the opportunity to have a sit down with an eighteen year old girl with borderline personality disorder who is getting into drugs and casual sex via the internet. When she leaves me she is going to stay with her Master overnight.

I can barely stop myself from rubbing my hands together with glee. I have trained for this. I can’t control her. I can’t decide how her life goes. But what I wouldn’t give to have had someone like me when I was that age.

Then I get to go to Dickens Fair and apologize to the friend who kind of catalyzed my leaving Facebook because I deeply value the relationship and I don’t want their to be hurt feelings over my deleting the stupid account. If I can’t keep my emotions in check it is my responsibility to deal with the kinds of input I allow into my life. Facebook, for a variety of reasons, makes me significantly more unstable. I need to eliminate it from my life. I’m sorry she was the one standing closest when I noticed but it is really not her fault.

And she is one of the fucking coolest people I have ever met in my whole life and I don’t want to drive her away because I am crazy and unstable and dramatic. How about if we just have those in person interactions that make us both feel good about ourselves. Facebook is not good for me. It’s not about her. I have those kinds of issues with lots of people online. I don’t read tone well. I hear it with the voices in my head.

Pretty much all the voices in my head hate my guts. Everything I read comes through that filter. It’s very hard to circumvent.

I like in-person interactions. They are real. They aren’t about me fighting with my ghosts while someone else is trying to have a conversation.

I don’t want to detonate that relationship for a laundry list of reasons. In person I don’t freak out about what she says to me because I can hear her voice. I hope that it will be ok that I can’t handle facebook.

Sometimes it feels very humiliating dealing with the limitations of my brain. That is what this is. I have to accommodate what I need even though I am having a completely irrational reaction. Whatever. I can’t rational my way out of it. It happens over and over uncontrollably. The only thing I can do is remove the stimulus.

And then enjoy people in person instead of clinging to facebook as a way of holding on to a thread of contact. I can’t weave a tapestry out of those threads. I need the in person. I need to change what I have been doing. I hope this turns out to be a positive step.

And even if that friend decides she can’t handle my drama (reasonable) I will still be at Dickens with someone who has a current higher thresh hold for my shit. I will accept the grace while I receive it. She knows she is chaperoning me so that I feel safe.

That’s a pretty big gift. I need to walk through the day feeling that gift. When I feel really scared I know that I was given a participant pass by one friend and another friend is keeping the dark at bay. I am not the untouchable I believe I am.

These lies will pass.

I was asked for more information.

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I was asked to give more information about the situation with Kevin. I don’t know how to do that without telling a story, so here I go.

In August of 2004 I realized that my relationship with Tom was over and I broke up with him. I met a man named James at a sex party and we talked online for a few weeks before having a date (or any kind of sex for that matter). Our first date was the first weekend in October and he brought me down to Red White and Blue Beach in Santa Cruz–a nude beach. It was basically a regional Burning Man event. I met a lot of people that night and started doing a lot of drugs. Ecstasy was my favorite. I did it every 4-6 weeks for about nine months.

Not long after I started dating James I met Kevin. I don’t remember where exactly for sure. I suspect it was at a mutual friend’s house who hosted a lot of hot tub parties. We always danced around boundaries. We warmed up to one another slowly and built a friendship. I was very lonely and I didn’t have many places to go. Most of the people I knew either didn’t invite me over to their houses or I didn’t feel like they would accept my invitations. So I spent time with the people who invited me.

Kevin often offered me massages. He also listened to me talk about various questionable things and tried to sound supportive. It was always tricky because he would simultaneously tell me me that he respected me and he was glad that I spoke up about my boundaries but he would “oops forget” over and over. I brought it up more times than I can count. He would sometimes say he “understood” and sometimes express confusion over what I was talking about. He is quite good at making people feel crazy. Even though his hand was just inside my vagina he would deny it adamantly and express concern for why I was over reacting to a massage.

Eventually I started dating someone else and faded away from the Burner community. I wanted to stop doing a lot of drugs and I wanted to stop feeling like I had to defend my body with force. I stopped coming to events at all after a female friend of mine lead a class on “boundaries” meant to help the women who were sexually assaulted at beach events pulled me up in front of the room and mocked me for “how good I am” at defending myself. She said that not everyone needs to be a bitch like me. I didn’t see a good reason to come back.

I stopped going to those events because my experience of heavily nudity focused events (and Burning Man stuff seems to be) involves a lot of men who feel like me saying no is doing something rude and mean. I can’t live with that. I am one of those stupid girls who is easy to peer pressure. When people pressure me I cave. I shut my mouth and close my eyes and put my head down and accept what is going to happen. My experience of resisting pressure isn’t good. Either I’m publicly mocked for being a bitch (usually by women) or I am raped.

I stay home.

Sex and consent

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I believe there needs to be another word. It’s not “rape” if you never say no. But is the sex actually consensual if you have never said yes? There needs to be another word.

Last night a friend came over. I’m going to call her Popcorn, because I can. She was telling me about a situation with her lover where she said no to something and it happened anyway. While she was talking I could feel my stomach explode with acid. I felt scared and upset. Honey, don’t you know that when someone does things to you after you say “no” that is rape? But I didn’t say anything for a few seconds. When I spoke I very calmly asked if they had a consensual non-consent relationship. She said that the deal is she puts up with what he wants to do or he walks.

We need another word.

We need another word to explain how badly we want to feel that people like us and love us and want to be around us so we tolerate things that make us feel bad. We need another word to explain the intersection of scared-little-girl-who-knows-saying-no-won’t-stop-it and the adult woman who is allowed to make odd choices. I think that people are allowed to choose consensual non-consent relationships. I know people who desperately want to be in no-safeword relationships. Well, ok. If that works for you and you want it very badly, rock on. Not everyone has made that conscious decision. An awful lot of women just think there isn’t a point in saying no. It won’t stop what is happening and if you say no things will get worse, not better. Better to shut up and just take it. The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know.

Last night I masturbated right before going to sleep. I thought about domestic discipline stuff. I thought about what it would be like for Noah and I to come up with “rules” and for me to be held to them. I think that more than anything in the whole world I want concrete proof that someone is watching my behavior and giving me the equivalent of a gold star when I am good. It feels like no one notices or cares. I have a lot of hard days when getting through my basic list of tasks feels harder than running a marathon. I want someone to notice and comment on whether or not I have completed the tasks that make me “good” enough. I try so very hard. When I am not good enough I want someone to care enough to give me a way to earn back my goodness by submitting to correction. I want to be good enough so much it makes me cry. I don’t feel like I am.

I should just tolerate whatever someone wants to do to me. I’m not really good enough to ask for things to be different. I’m not really good. My behavior isn’t good. I think rebellious thoughts all day long. I want someone to know that I am feeling rebellious and tell me that they see that I am still doing the right thing even though I am struggling internally with the process. I want it so much.

Noah told me point blank that he is not willing to discuss “rules” at this stage of our life because right now I have too much pressure on me and he’s not going to be the straw that breaks my back. He’s a very schmott guy, that one.

I struggle with admitting to myself that I do things because I want them. I am so house proud it is kind of silly. I desperately want people to come over to my house and gasp because my garden is so pretty. Wow–I’ve obviously put a lot of work into it and it’s lovely. It’s stupid to work so hard so that phantom people who don’t really care will some day give me a pat on the back. I am doing it for me. Why the lie? I have a powerful need to control the world around me.

It’s all complicated, isn’t it? Wanting love and approval. Yes, Popcorn, being alone is safer. But we are social animals. Being alone isn’t actually safer. So many things can happen while you are alone and there is no one around to help you survive. I want you to survive. I want to survive. We are social creatures. It means different things to different people, yes; I know.

I think about these things so hard because I think about what kind of grown up I want to model being for my kids. I want my gorgeous daughters to believe that it fucking matters when they say no. I want my daughters to believe that no piece of shit man is worth putting up with if he is going to rape them. Complicated. I have some complex feelings about my sexual activity. Do I think Noah is a piece of shit man? Do I think Noah is a rapist? I think about it. I think about what the word rapist really means. Noah has had sex with me while I fought him off–because he had explicit permission in advance to do it once. He doesn’t deserve punishment for doing what I negotiated with him. It was a consensual non-consent scene.

Only that shit fucks you up. That shit fucks up your brain and your body. I consented to it. Did I consent because I think piece of shit girls like me should permit anything and everything to happen to me no matter how much it hurts? I’m not sure it mattered. It was a number of years ago. I went to intensive therapy over that–two or three times a week for a while around that event. It helped me break through a lot of walls around all of the other rapes in my life. I got to find out that I’m not physically all that strong and I can fight as fucking hard as I want to and I still can’t defend myself. I still can’t prevent someone from raping me if they want to.

It’s complicated. At this point in time Noah is very cautious with me. If he senses even mild hesitancy he pulls back and stops touching me and asks for verbal confirmation that I am ok. This man is trying as hard as he can to help me pick up the pieces of my life. This is his life too and he doesn’t want to live with someone who is continually damaged and redamaged. He wanted to have an experience. He wanted to know what something felt like. We found the wall together. We found out what too far felt like. Now he’s careful. I’m not sure he would be able to be careful if he hadn’t found the wall. In the long run I suspect that we will have a better marriage because we shared that experience. We have learned a lot together.

Do I think other women should do it? Well… it doesn’t matter what I think, right? I don’t want my daughters to feel like they need to be violently raped as an adult to prove to themselves that they have no ability to defend themselves. How about if we get them into intense martial arts and self-defense classes at five. Sure, everyone can lose to someone. But let’s improve their odds. Motherfucker. I want my daughters to know how to stand up straight and say, “No I don’t want this” and back it up with leaving because no fucking man is worth putting up with shit that hurts. (Unless they want to consent to SM. I’m not a hypocrite. That’s different.) I want my daughters to feel loved and confident and built up and like they have status and worth and they don’t need a fucking man. Does that mean I want them to be alone and lonely? No. But I want them to communicate about their needs. I want them to believe that their needs are important and I want them to hang out with people who agree that their needs are important.

I like having daughters. It challenges me to think very hard about what kind of woman I want them to see. Do I want them to grow up to be brittle and delicate? I can’t decide who they will be, not really. But I can decide who I want them to see. Who they eventually become is up to them. I can make sure that they do not learn from me that they should tolerate whatever someone wants to do. It’s complicated.

I strongly dislike the idea that people “shouldn’t judge”. Fuck you motherfucker I’m going to fucking judge all I want. I’m going to judge if things are safe or smart. I’m not going to try and control you because you have to make your own choices and live with the results. But I really should judge in my head what is going on. I should evaluate things and decide if that is something I think is a good plan or not and I should think about why. I don’t need to share this process, unless people want to hear it, but I really should judge. Saying that people shouldn’t judge is a good way of saying, “I’m not going to bother thinking about actions in advance and I will be a victim all my life.” No thanks.

If a man tells you he doesn’t care about your needs you need to believe him and get the fuck away from him. He probably won’t wake up every single day and look in the mirror and have to deal with the consequences of your interactions. You will. You have to look at yourself every day for the rest of your life. Do you want to be proud of yourself or ashamed? How do you feel about yourself right now? I’m not real fond of my hair this short, I’ll be honest. Overall it is getting easier to look at myself in the mirror. I know I am actually behaving in a way that is consistent with my values. I am judging the fuck out of myself and using that judgment to change my behavior and mannerisms. I’m changing how I experience my life because I want to model for my children what having a good life means. I tell them actively that people live all kinds of good lives. There isn’t one blue print. But for me, I’m very serious about following a fairly distinct progressive path towards being a better person. I will fuck up along the way, but I’ve already come so far.

Even though I really wish I was I’m not a special snowflake. I’m not ever going to be the best. But I’m ok. Everything will be ok in the end; if it’s not ok it’s not the end. I have to be good enough. I have to keep my kids safe enough. We are an accident prone family and we all get a lot of small injuries. I shouldn’t try to prevent that. But I am careful to ice my injuries now and talk about what things I should change and do differently in the future. I no longer sit around extensively talking about how stupid I am when I get hurt. I turned that tape off. That was a strong tape from my childhood. Only stupid people get injured. Only people who aren’t good at (insert activity) get hurt doing it. Incompetent people. When I had to go see the doctor as a child for injuries I was yelled at.

I think I deserve bad treatment. I have to judge how people talk to one another and decide how I would feel about that treatment being given to me. If I don’t do that I have no perspective whatsoever on what things might be like in the lives of other people. All I know is what I know and what I know is that I deserve bad treatment. I deserve to not be able to say no when someone wants to rape me.

I think we need another word. How can we talk about this rape that is not rape? How do we talk about this lack of sense of self that causes women to not even try to prevent bad things? How do we convince our girls that they should learn these self preservation skills? What does that even mean? It all feels so complicated.

I think that part of it involves learning to tell the difference between fantasy and reality. I think if you really and truly believe that you should be raped over and over again you should probably work on that. I don’t care if it makes me a judgmental asshole or condescending or whatever. If you think you deserve to be raped over and over… you should work on that. If you want to play rape games with your lover but you have a safeword for when things get too intense, that’s fine. In my judgmental asshole opinion. As soon as you lose the ability to say no or use your safeword then you shouldn’t engage in the play. In my opinion. We need a word for that kind of sex. I don’t know what it should be.

Any thoughts?

That’s why.

6 Replies

This morning I had an important thought. If I stop smoking pot now I am going to start cutting frequently. The Ativan is not a choice that works as well. I’m not willing to be on a daily pill, even though I probably should at this point. My mood cycles have been horrible in the last two weeks. Pot levels it all out and makes me cheerful and just barely stupid. I am in a great space to sit and play with Play Doh for hours. I can build with Lego’s all day. I’m noticing what things I didn’t get Shanna that I probably should have.

I’m enjoying how cuddly and affectionate Calli is… when I’m stoned. When I’m sober it bothers me and I want to get up and walk away. There is something wrong with me. When I am sober it hurts. She bangs her head on me, she scratches, she steps on me awkwardly or knees me or or or or… I kind of hate it. When I am stoned I just mumble, “oooph, gentle with Mommy”. I’m so glad to be near her that I don’t mind her rough antics. She doesn’t mean anything by them. She’s just a baby.

My body isn’t a good place to be lately. I have to spend a lot of time dissociated if I want to function at all. It’s hard. Most of my body hurts most of the time. My stomach hurts terribly from stress, pot also levels that out.

Pot allows me to put aside my grown up concerns and worries and just be present and happy in the moment with my kids. Most of the day is really quite pleasant. I only think about things that are relevant to what is in my line of sight, quite deliberately. That’s how I manage to be a good mother. I think only of our immediate house and my kids most of the time. I don’t divide my energy well. I can work on house stuff like cleaning with the kids around, but that’s the limit. Sometimes they let me read. They hate the computer and mostly I have to be in a different room on a break in order to use it. That’s when I smoke pot.

I go think about grown up things for brief periods behind closed doors during the day. That is what having Sarah here gives me. Time to walk away from the kids when my thoughts become intrusive. When I am starting to feel edgy I can ask for a break. I’m trying to have the breaks be as effective sober and they just aren’t. My emotions are too intense.

I have ridiculous self-control and ridiculous patience… within small tight boundaries. My kids will grow up being told frankly that I smoke because I need the medicine in the plant and there isn’t a better way to get it out for me. Why do I need the medicine? Because of something that was broken when I was a little girl. They won’t be broken in that way so they won’t need the medicine. It’s rather unpleasant to do, so I don’t recommend it. Shanna will cheerfully lecture anyone within hearing on how disgusting and unhealthy smoking is. Yay California.

But sober, I’m edgy and raw. I cry a lot. I can’t stand to let anyone touch me and when my kids grab me my entire physical reaction is to want to shake them off like a dog. I loathe being touched. It feels like such a disgusting and horrible incursion into my body. Every touch feels bad right now. Everything hurts. The most gentle of caresses feels like a slap. I can mostly dissociate away when sober, but not enough to smile or pretend I am enjoying it.

I don’t want my children to grow up with a mother who flinches away from them constantly as if they are terrible people for wanting to touch her. I think I should get stoned instead. It doesn’t really matter that I feel bad about doing it. It doesn’t matter that the stupid bitch at PAMF looked at me like dirt because I have a medical card. It allows me to be a good mother. I feel so ashamed of myself for needing it. I guess this makes me an addict? Officially? I don’t know.

It seems to me that most of life is about walking a series of thin lines. I am more ashamed of cutting than I am of smoking pot. The specific reason I think it is worse is because I will be more strongly judged and censured for cutting. I don’t know a lot about tribal cutting, I’ve never bothered to find out. I can imagine there being places in the world where my desire to cut myself to deal with my emotional experience would be viewed differently. If I were to lose my fear of judgment, I would be able to represent myself in a way that would feel more honest. I am a person who has experienced a lot of pain. But I did it in a way that is invisible and hard to ignore. There are scars all through my vagina. I think the scars should be on the outside so that other people can see them. I think that marking yourself in proportion to the pain you feel is a way of identifying yourself so that you can find other people to talk to who can hopefully give you relevant advice beyond, “Just cheer up!” Yeah, fuck you too.

Pot keeps me from feeling suicidal. I’m just not desperate enough. It really pisses me off that I can never really be a martyr for any cause ever in my life because if I go in a way that is not completely fucking random people will assume I killed myself. It’s just got to be the base assumption forever.

I’d really like to kill myself. But in my personal hierarchy of needs it is far far more important that I never give my children the experience of parental suicide. Jimmy thinks that just not talking about things and not doing the same things will break the chains and he’s wrong. The only thing that will break the chains is consciously talking about what we are doing and then choosing to do something else. It is hard to be a different person. It doesn’t happen by sitting back silently and hoping it happens.

Who do I want to be? I want to be someone who doesn’t need to be apathetic all the time in order to function. This stage of processing won’t last forever. What do I need to change about my life in order to not get back to feeling this desperate and hurt? Can I change enough? Is this just something that is part of me because of my previous trauma? Will I always find a new trigger somewhere down the road? I don’t know. I really don’t.

I’m just bitchy and mean and bored and antsy and angry and touchy when I am sober. I feel so dissatisfied with everything in life. I hate that in myself. And when I’m stoned I’m fine. No really. I am doing exactly what I said I would and I do enjoy it when I can focus on it. There must be something wrong with me if I need pot to focus. That’s not very functional, only it is. I’m functional, I really am. I beg the internet to believe me. Why do I care so much? Why do I feel like I constantly have to prove that I have some value. I am not just a worthless piece of shit. Even if I do smoke pot. Even if I am just a disgusting whore.

I think I’m ordering more pot today.

You cannot evict Occupy Oakland

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Right now there are a ridiculous number of cops attacking Oscar Grant Plaza. I feel sick to my stomach. The beautiful people I have been getting to know gradually as I have the courage are going to get hurt today. I feel so sad. So disappointed in my country. How dare we treat people this way? I wonder how many peaceful protestors are going to be shot today?

I am so fucking embarrassed to be an American today. What a piece of shit country.

You want to know why I am so embarrassed? Because this is theatre. The Occupiers will be back. Mayor Quan is only wasting taxpayers money. They will just.come.back.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Category Archives: activism

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You cannot evict Occupy Oakland