Category Archives: boundaries

Just another whinging Friday

It isn’t that I think my kids are bad or anything. They are just excellent boundary pushers. I want them to push boundaries. I flat encourage them in that direction. I want children who are tenacious, stubborn, and sure that their idea is A Good One. But. But sometimes I wish I could say, “I know I’m willing to argue/negotiate with you all day every day but can I please have a friggin break on my birthday.” They just aren’t old enough to understand.

We did have good moments. I feel really bad that it seems like all I do is complain. Doesn’t anything make me happy? Am I ever satisfied? Is there any point in reaching for satisfied or is that just not something I can feel? I feel really guilty for not being able to turn this into a fun trip. It should have been a fun trip. I hate that I am such a downer all the fucking time.

But it felt really bad getting yelled at for what I wanted to order for lunch. I fucking told them four days in advance, “On my birthday I want us to have gumbo and papas fritas and beignets for lunch. That’s what I want.” They were enthusiastic and supportive until we got to the park. Then I was a mean and terrible person for not letting them have popcorn for lunch. Or ice cream. Or a Dole Whip. Or…

My kids rarely have extreme cases of the gimme’s. I don’t buy them things all that often on our outings and I’m kind of nasty about being pestered to buy stuff. Holy.Fucking.Shit. This trip was the most gimme-gimme-gimme I think Shanna has ever been. She actually sat on her ass in the middle of the store and started yelling at me because I wouldn’t buy her a FUCKING SECOND MUSIC BOX. SHE HAS ONE AT HOME THAT SHE BOUGHT WITH HER ALLOWANCE ON OUR LAST TRIP.

I almost lost my shit. If we had been within an hour of home I would have left the park fifteen minutes into the day.

The really funny thing is the DMV portion of the trip was the best natured and happiest all three of us were on the whole trip. We played games and met people and it was a really enjoyable 3.5 hours. Hell, I’m talking to a lady via email after that. She’s nice.

I think it is that whole kicked puppy thing. I was acting like a kicked puppy. I was begging them to please let me have a turn. When you act like a low status person you get kicked like a low status person. So my kids kicked me (only literally a few times figuratively much more often) all day.

It all feels like my fault. If things go badly it is because I planned wrong or anticipated wrong or… something.

Having them both scream at the top of their lungs that I was mean and nasty multiple times before 10am felt really hard. I know this is a current tick. I know that the best way to handle it is to not engage. At this point in time I am having trouble not bursting into hysterical tears or hitting them. I have strong impulses to do both. I’m not doing either but I want to.

Just breathe. This moment will pass.

I have spent ~15 hours over the past week and some working on scheduling. I’m getting close to knowing the shape of my days all the way through the end of the year. If I stick with my schedule. Ha.

In order to make it so that I can potentially accomplish what I want to accomplish I need a schedule with a lot of rest time scheduled. I need to not be booked all day every day. I have to have multiple days in a week where what I do is hang around the house and putter. I need to have scheduled “sit on the couch and read books and snuggle” time with the kids just about every day.

I have to run more. I just have to. Not running is feeling a lot worse than running. Which is hella funny. We have gone out all four of us a couple of mornings in a row. We hope to get the kids used to going for a morning jog. Noah and I take turns doing sprints up the block and back to the family because the kids are a lot slower.

Outrunning Suicide is starting to take shape. I have mostly written several chapters. I have a skeleton. This one is very different than No Secrets. The entire writing process feels different. This will feel more like a collection of essays than a story, but there needs to be some sense of story in it as well. I am trying as hard as I can to be conscious of the fact that I want this book to be appropriate for twelve year olds. Even though the mothers of twelve year olds will say that it is too mature. The mothers are wrong.

I need to start working on painting in the back yard. All of the stuff that was built this year needs to be painted so it doesn’t rot quickly. Oh man.

I don’t want to go out very much over the next few months. I want to get work done. I want to home school my kids. I need to stop looking outward for a while. We will go to park days. I will continue to try to make time for Noah’s friends who have all had kids and the few people I have hanging on who had kids.

I need to stop looking for new people. I don’t have the bandwidth. My monkey spheres are full.

I like having a lot of… I’ll call them third tier friendships. People generally don’t want to think of themselves as third tier, but oh well. At this point the only person I have near daily contact with who I don’t live with is K. Thank goodness for her. That is the first tier. Second tier are all of the people who have kept contact with me for long-stretches of time and they know real things about me and I know real things about them. These are people who very consciously schedule with me and make sure that I know that they think about me. The third tier are the people I don’t see a lot of and they know very little that is real about me but I want to feel acceptance and love so I try very hard to maintain Appropriate Behavior around them and I know there are consequences if I slip up.

The third tier is where you get into the idea of Community. These are people I want to know. They add value to the world and to my life in particular but I don’t think they actually like very much about me so I have to carefully construct what they see or I will be shunned again.

I can’t overload my second tier. When I overload my second tier then I see the ending of nearly-decade-long relationships and the backlash hurts me for years.

The third tier is where I spend most of my time. I carefully dole out just small bits of my personality to people. It all tends to feel very artificial. I know I need to be careful not to be too real. I need to not saying things that will upset people. Good fucking luck guessing who is sensitive to what.

Why is the third tier so important? Because I have absolutely stressed the first and second tiers to the limits of their ability to support me and if I have free-floating miasma of need and I get it met in bursts of random kindness from the universe. I depend on a lot of Pay It Forward. Mostly this has worked out fairly well. Humans in general are loving, kind, and they want connection.

But then we get to this punishment thing. I think that most people have trouble understanding that they are punishing people. I know that I struggle with understanding how and where I punish people. I do it but it is hard for me to understand the mechanism of it. It is hard for me to understand that I have the power to punish people. I don’t feel like I have such power. I feel weak and powerless.

My second tier has worked very hard to step up since I had kids. As much as I am still in a place of great hostility towards the idea of “chosen family” (given that most of the people who have emphatically told me that I am their family no matter what no longer speak to me I think I get to be hostile to this concept) I… feel conflicted. Clearly I have friends who have moved into family roles.

I feel like I am understanding how other peoples limitations work better as the years go on. Like, I’m not inviting people on trips. It isn’t that anyone wants to hurt me (I don’t think that the desire to hurt me played any part in people not being able to go on the trip–major health concerns came up for everyone) but I am still here hurting. How do I move towards hurting less?

I have been asking for help with things where I can’t handle the answer “no”. That is always where I get into trouble. This is consistent for me. I wait until the lack of support will be crippling then I ask for support then I get told no because other people don’t have the bandwidth and I crumble.

I need my life to require fewer spoons. I need to not need help.

Having children has been humbling and humiliating. The amount of help I have needed has been really hard. Things like going to the doctor for an ultrasound of my abdomen. That turned into a huge long lecture at Kaiser about how I need child care or I can’t get health care. I understand why my dentist pushed me to get the dental implant I needed while I was pregnant even though the pain meds aren’t optimal because “Mothers don’t take care of their teeth when they have children under ten.”

It is kind of weird and hard to talk about but since having children I am more house bound than I was before simply because of how my bathroom habits changed. I have always had a small and urgent bladder (common problem with early childhood sexual abuse) but after the kids my life-long diarrhea problem became urgent and explosive too. And then there is how my periods have changed. Having a body sucks.

Having kids is hard but I did not anticipate the specific ways this would be so hard. I anticipated getting sick of laundry and wiping up poop and being screamed at. I didn’t understand that after having children it would be a rare thing for me to be able to handle three hours between bathroom trips–I get a few freak days once in a while. I normally go to the bathroom every half hour or so. I don’t think I would physically be able to teach right now. I used to have 110 minute class periods. I can’t hold my bladder that long any more. And it is illegal to leave in the middle of a class to use the restroom. I did it anyway but you aren’t supposed to and there are severe potential punishments.

You want to know why I have so much anxiety about neglecting my children when they are playing in another room and I can’t see them but I can hear them? Because I went through teacher training and discovered just how much trouble I can get in if I don’t “properly supervise” other peoples kids. Apparently properly supervise means sit on top of the child and physically prevent them from ever breaking the rules. Good luck.

I swear this all ties together in my head.

I have historically depended heavily on the third tier. Why do I consider them third tier? What I can ask of them is much smaller and more limited and I have to be careful of watching how often I ask. The tiering is how much of my need they have demonstrated an ability to handle. It isn’t about me judging them negatively or thinking they are bad people. I’m intense. I hurt people without trying. I need to be careful to notice when I am hitting stress points for people and withdraw so there can be a next time. If I push third tier people too hard they eject me from their lives.

With children this is different and difficult. At this point I feel like a user if I ask people for anything. I try hard to bully K to let me come do work at her house because I feel like such a user all of the time given how much support she gives me. It isn’t actually a better dynamic.

I have a hard time knowing that at this point in my life I need more support than I give. It has been true for years. Maybe for all of my life. This totally plays into being financially dependent. I feel ashamed of myself. I look at the women in my life who are not dependent and I feel pathetic. This is part of that defining myself by being not-like other people. It isn’t good for me or anyone else.

I don’t feel like the things I do are good or worthy. And yet I really really really want to do the things I am doing. With fervor and intensity I want these things in the world and I don’t think anyone but me will do them. I take that as a sign they probably aren’t worth doing and I am just a waste of resources.

Part of the problem with an extensive third tier is someone always needs help. People are always struggling and I wish I could help more. I wish I had more to offer. I wish I had more energy. I wish I had more time to give them.

But instead I will stay home and weed my garden and write a book and paint. I am selfish and small. My life is limited and unimportant. I totally struggle with that Gen Y thing of, “But I am SPECIAL”. No. I’m really not. I don’t have anything unique and special to offer the world.

But sometimes I feel like I do. Sometimes I feel like I am good at helping people see their own value. Because I think so little of myself I view basically everyone in the world as higher status as me. When I explain to people all that I see about them that is good and wonderful they tend to be surprised. They are not able to see themselves that way. Isn’t that ability good and useful? Is that enough? What is enough? Enough of what? Enough for what?

I don’t know.

But I need to pull back into my little shell. I need to count my spoons and carefully lay them next to tasks. I want to read more books this year. I want to look out my back window on New Years Eve and see a rainbow castle. I want to finish writing the book that I really needed to read when I was twelve. I want to teach my children the daily habits of picking up after themselves. Even though it is hard. Even though you would rather do it later. If you do it now then you are free to go do anything you want on a whim. It takes practice to learn these habits.

I want my children to think that physical activity is just part of life. So I have to model it every day.

I want to not be fucking screamed at. I have already made a lot of progress on my own screaming. I will figure this out. It is going to be hard and it will take patience. We will figure this out. Without anyone getting beaten. There may be a fair bit of time out in our future.

I don’t think that anyone did anything wrong per se on my birthday. But I think that at this point my birthday is such a thing that I’m not sure anyone can do right. I don’t think it is anyone else’s fault at this point.

Rope bridges last a long time but eventually decay. You aren’t doing anything wrong by jumping up and down as you go across a rope bridge. Sometimes a log may break and you could plummet to your death. No one actually did anything “wrong” but there are still end results that suck.

I don’t know how to feel special. I want that feeling so bad. I want to feel loved and appreciated and like people are really really glad I am alive. I don’t feel that way. I feel like people tolerate me so long as I can fill their needs and not be too annoying. I know that people don’t actually feel that way about me. I don’t think I offer enough trade to actually justify that belief.

It isn’t that I believe that Noah and Shanna and Calli secretly hate me. It is clear that they all love me with great intensity. But something inside me is broken. It is like pouring boiling water into a tank of liquid nitrogen so that you can warm it up. That just isn’t going to work how you hope.

I feel raw. I know I am “over sensitive”. I know I “shouldn’t take things so personally”. But I am. I just am. Maybe I shouldn’t be. Maybe I shouldn’t exist. But I do. And this is how I feel. And I can’t make it go away just because it is inconvenient for me or for other people. The only thing I can do is try to stop being in a room with anyone else on my birthday so that it is very very clear that this problem is in me and not because of anyone else.

My birthday is really hard for me. I’m afraid it always will be. I desperately desperately want a kind of feeling loved and cared for and appreciated that I’m not getting. I don’t know what it is or how to get it. Everything I have tried so far has failed miserably. I really and truly have tried to change this pattern.

I wish I could stop feeling like it would be better if I was dead. Then I wouldn’t be so fucking inconvenient.

I know it isn’t “true”. I had kids so that I would know beyond the shadow of a doubt that my labor is necessary for a few decades. Nothing would be better right now if I was dead.

But I don’t know how to feel loved. I feel despised. I feel unappreciated.

Which is ridiculous. Noah couldn’t work harder than he does. And he clearly is doing it for me–he didn’t work like this before me. My Owner was a workaholic. Noah was kinda lazy when I met him. He was certainly unfocused–that is probably a better word than lazy. He works like a dog, largely because he is doing it for me. He wants to make all of my dreams come true.

And I reward him by crying and crying and crying and feeling like a worthless piece of shit. He is very confused. If I knew what to ask him to do he would do it. I don’t know. I don’t know how to stop feeling this way.

I mean, in the abstract I know how to deal with this feeling. Feel it. Cry while you have it. Wait. It will end.

That’s the awesome thing about feelings. They change.

Sometimes I do feel that Noah loves me. Sometimes I do feel that my kids love me. But somehow when it comes to my birthday that is broken. There is this big brick wall. I don’t feel attached. I don’t feel love or loved. I feel worthless and stupid and pathetic and bad and mean and unwanted and like I should just die.

And god I miss my mother. I miss my mother so much I want to curl up into a ball and never eat again. I am not worthy. I dishonor the woman who bore me. I am a piece of shit. I am not protecting her and taking care of her. I know she needs it. She has always needed it. She has always needed to be taken care of more than I need it.

And I think my kids need more taking care of than I need. Except for one day a year. Where I think I am going to need to have different boundaries.

I have started grieving really hard for the apology I was told I would get and I didn’t get. That guy in the scene I went and talked to who said he would write an apology. I’m sorry I made myself vulnerable to that.

I’m even more grateful for talking to the guy who made me uncomfortable at the wedding.

I know that I have to keep trying with people. Every relationship is unique. Every dynamic changes over time. I need people to jump over hoops for me. I need it. I’m pretty clear and direct about how and where I need it. I try not to be too demanding of any one person. But I do ask people to jump through hoops for me.

I want people to show me with their actions that I am actually as important as they verbally claim I am. I want my body to matter. This is a really dangerous kind of validation to want. Because I am not going to get it. People will say they will do ______ and not do it.

Do you know what makes people happy? Giving help to other people. Do you know what makes people feel shitty? Needing help. I hate my neediness as much as other people resent me inflicting it on them.

The kids are slightly sick. Runny nose on elder child, both are coughing. Younger child keeps telling us she needs a bucket but she isn’t vomiting. I’ve been crying so much I don’t know if I am sick or not. I scheduled a potentially light weekend because I am S-M-R-T.

I am looking forward to fall and winter. It will feel really nice after the frantic work pace of spring and summer. It is a puttering kind of day. I will go grocery shopping. I should wash the windows. Then they can color on them again. Ha. Right now they are too full to be fun.

I should stop typing. Annnnnnnny minute here……

Caved.

4 Replies

I sat down yesterday at my computer intending to buy three tickets to Texas for December. I said to Shanna, “You understand that I’m not going, right?”

Her eyes got as wide as saucers. “But you have to go. I can’t go meet new people without you. When I am talking to people I don’t know well and you are there I am brave because I know I am wonderful. When you aren’t there I am scared and I can’t do it. I need you.”

“If I went with you to Texas and I stayed in the hotel with you but you had to go to your grandmothers house with just your dad and sister would that be good enough?”

“Yes. That would be good enough.”

I’m going to Texas in three months, apparently.

I’m fucking serious about not setting foot inside that woman’s house again. Maybe I will go visit the great grandmother or great aunt instead. Or I will sit inside a fucking Starbuck’s.

I can be nice in letters–I think I am very fucking nice in the letters I send. I sent five to seven page letters about the kids a few times a year. I’m all neutral but upbeat and such.

I want my kids to know them. I want my kids to have a family. But I’m aware that they will never be my family. Such is life.

The whole rest of the year is travel heavy. So much for a save year. My end of the year reckoning on Mint is going to involve some head hanging with shame. It’s a good thing Noah is earning money at a faster rate than planned for. I’m not making every savings goal. But I do have a god damn fabulous back yard now. It’s a trade off.

We leave on Monday for Disneyland. It will be me and my girls. We will have fun together. Since Calli’s birthday Shanna has been drawing me picture after picture because she wants to decorate for my birthday. I think I will bring a stack of them and scotch tape and put them up on the windows in our hotel room. I am so fucking glad I get to be their mom.

I haven’t been sleeping well. Lots of mom stuff. The last three nights have been pretty bad. It’s lead up to my birthday so I’m not surprised. Six days and counting. I think that knowing that I will be alone with the kids is both helping and hurting. On one hand, I feel sad. But I don’t have the anticipation of waking up in my house with having it just be one more shitty day when I should do laundry and scrub the floor. (Not that my days are shitty–I like my life and I like my job. But man I’ve got this birthday thing.)

I don’t give very many birthday presents any more. I want to spend time with people on their birthdays (or near their birthdays) but gifts aren’t the thing. Only if I find something that seems talisman-like. That’s hard to just decide to find.

I have things scattered throughout my house. Talismans. I’m loved. I should keep writing. People want to know what I am thinking.

Connection. Multiplicity. Embrace plurality. So many things to think about. How to not be scary.

I feel like over the last year or so I have had to realize that all of those hours I spent during my childhood practicing my “scary” expressions worked. Becoming non-intimidating is taking a lot of conscious work.

I feel like I am walking this razor thin line. If I am intimidating then I run off the people I want to love. If I am not intimidating… well I know how that goes.

Better to be undefended and on the verge of death at any moment. That makes people like you more. Then you aren’t scary.

Maybe being scary is just one of those important parts of life. I’m pretty sure my kids aren’t actually afraid of me. When I ask them they emphatically say they aren’t scared. Shanna says, “Sometimes you startle me. But that’s not the same thing.” But I am scary to other people. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen the fear.

Speaking of fear, I bought a bicycle. One that can have a kid trailer thing on the back. First I need to take Shanna out on her bike. After she feels comfortable riding then we will get the trailer for Calli. The bike store fellas told me I can’t have a kid being pulled and a kid on my handle-bars. Just one or the other. Bah humbug. I bet it would have worked two years ago. They are a lot heavier now. I went on a five and a half mile bike ride. I haven’t done that since high school. I only felt like I was going to die for 75% of the time. Hopefully that goes down.

People in my family get hit by cars while on bicycles. It happened to both of my brothers and my dad. My mom and sister were smart enough to stay off of fucking bikes. Now I’m stupid. And risking my kids. Oh god.

September and October are probably as fully booked as I want them. November is probably already as booked as I want it. In December we will be out of state for nine days. I will probably not do very much other than travel in December. If I don’t decorate for Christmas in November I won’t do much beyond a tree. So realistically I have the next three and a half months scheduled. I won’t be bored. I have a lot to do.

It’s time to write Outrunning Suicide. I want it done before New Years. I have a rainbow castle to paint. (This sucker is huge.) I have to install a bunch of hardware for the swings in the back yard.

Not to mention educating my children. That is probably enough to do for the next three months.

Disneyland, two camping trips, over a week in Portland and a weekend in Texas. So much for 2013 being a light year.

I can’t go to Disneyland next year. (No time share points) I think the only traveling I want to do in 2014 is a half marathon in Portland with two of my very favorite ladies in the whole wide world. I hear I already have buy-in from the spouse of the one who will have to travel. This is a good sign.

I’m wussing towards encouraging the home schoolers who live within five miles of me to start thinking along the lines of a Free Democratic School. Driving is a real issue for everyone in the bay area. Having to drive 40-50 miles round trip in order to hang out for a few hours is prohibitive on a long-term basis. If you look at history a lot of who people know is based on who lives near them. It isn’t about “who is best“. Life is about making the best of who is there.

I think that part of the reason I am doing the stuff to my house that I am doing is because I think of future parties and events. I am not good at going out into the world. I am not good at feeling like the world wants me very much. If I make this a good place to be, people will come to me. That is just the nature of how things work. I feel like a spider spinning a web. Err…only I don’t want to eat anyone.

I want to know lots of kids and watch them grow up. I want to have them love visiting my house. So I build a playground. And I paint murals. And I provide endless quantities of fruit, vegetables, and cheese. I only rarely make guests eat ramen.

The part that makes me feel like a spider is how I know that I have to sit and wait. I’m not actually ready for the kinds of relationships I want to have with growing up kids. I don’t mean that my house isn’t ready–though it isn’t. If I went and grabbed people now and tried to fill my house with people… well… my kids would rapidly learn a lot of things I don’t want them to know. My kids are not yet ready to have their reality fucked with.

I’m fairly aware that I go through life with a big reality distortion bubble around me. (I think everyone does to a greater or lesser extent–you see the world from your point of view and not from an objective point of view.) Right now I am carefully crafting the reality my children will have as “baseline” for the rest of their lives. Based on everything I have read about child development and psychology this is important.

Most people don’t seem to think about this much. They just live their life and their kids share it and that is how reality is created thankyouverymuch. My childhood had no consistent reality. I moved more than fifty times. I got to see that every “reality”, every set of rules that people lived by were totally arbitrary.

That means that if I want to I can sit down and make up the rules for reality for my children in any fashion I want. There is no right way. I personally believe there are a lot of wrong ways but not any particular right way. What is right is so individual based on personality and inner strengths.

How I behave with my children is a carefully constructed little universe that isn’t a lot like how I am with the rest of the world. How I am with my children is how I am without defenses and without fear. I do not have the ability to extend that beyond my front door at this point in time.

I feel so lucky that I get to be alone with them so much. I feel so glad that we get to spend a lot of time in an environment where I set the rules. Pam says I am a permissive authoritarian. I think that will shift a lot with time. After a while it won’t be my place to set the rules with such fierceness.

Only I think in some ways I will get much more fierce. I told Shanna flat out one day when she was being very rough with me, “This is not an acceptable way to treat my body. If you continue to treat me this way as you get bigger I will eventually start hitting back. I am not your punching bag.” She stopped hitting me. She hasn’t tried to punch me over and over since.

I have no idea how this will go over the years.

I want my children to believe in the core of their body that they have the right to beat the living shit out of someone who crosses their physical boundaries. I want this to not be a question in their mind. It is just simple fact. We are animals and sometimes we have to defend ourselves. Yup. That’s part of how it works in the world.

But here in Wonderland we don’t hit. We don’t scream. This is a safe place. The violence needs to stay out there in the world. We do not hit our family members. Well, until they are clearly beating on you then go ahead and defend yourself. It needs to take a lot of provocation though. Don’t. Hurt. Your. Family. We are in this together.

I make a big deal out of this being a conscious creation because this is not like anything I have ever known. I was taught to expect people to hurt me. I was taught to hit people as a sign of affection. I was taught that the way to make yourself feel bigger is to hurt the people around you as much as possible.

It is hard for me to change. It takes so much conscious effort. But my children show me the fruits of my labor every day. It is worth it. They are worth it. This life is worth it.

I think about my mother a lot. I think about what she taught me and how she taught me. And sometimes when Calli moves her head just right I see my mother so clearly it is like she is in the room. I have no idea how this will all go.

In medias res. We are always in the middle of the story. There is no beginning and no end. My children have to go to Texas. That is part of their story. I get to choose how much disappointment mom delivers when. I will never be enough to meet all of their needs. That just isn’t how life works. But I have choices about how many needs I meet and when and which particular things I want to skip.

I have so. much. privilege.

All I’m doing right now with my life is hanging out and being available to meet their needs. This is surprisingly exhausting. And sometimes I pick up a side job or two. Mostly if I am not available to meet a need of theirs it is because I bloody well choose to not do it right now.

I sent Shanna to Texas once without me. Sending both seems different. And Shanna is a lot more sure she wants me to go. Some day she will want to do things I will not be up for doing. Then she will go without me. I can understand her wanting to stand near my reality distortion field. I am what she has always known and I have been really good to her. Other people are less predictable. She has figured that out already. I am always ready to smile at her. Other people… not always.

I will focus on this hurting me in my writing though. This is a choice. I’m not a victim here. But I’m making a choice that is questionably right for me. I don’t feel very good about having a relationship with Noah’s abusive mother after walking out on my abusive mother. I don’t know how to describe the kind of betrayal that represents.

My sister told me over and over and over “Abused children are the most loyal.” She said that consciously to tell me not to talk about what I saw in our house. I broke ranks. I broke fucking ranks. I can’t now go silently put up with someone else’s abuse. That’s just not ok. No. I’d rather punch the fucking bitch in the face. And it’s not really cool to fly from California to Texas in order to punch your mother in law in the face so I just won’t set foot in her house. I understand my triggering mechanism. I’m rather realistic all things considered.

“Just be nice” isn’t useful advice for me. Part of the reason that I don’t want to go is I know I have a rather lot of latent rage and she’s a nice safe not actually threatening target who likes to act like people are kicking her all the time. I’ve met me. If you stand in front of me and whine and cringe and cower as if I have been kicking you for hours… I will start kicking you. I understand this impulse only too well. I try to avoid kicked dogs for this reason. My experience of Noah’s mom is that she is a kicked dog.

I am a kicked dog. That is how I went through my childhood. I recognize it very well in others. Being a kicked dog is part and parcel with being a bully. You assume that people are mean to you so you push them towards being mean to you–you antagonize on purpose. Kicked dogs are the meanest little curs.

It’s a vicious cycle. I try to stay out of vicious cycles these days. I try very hard to stay in virtuous cycles.

A virtuous cycle, for the purpose of this essay, is one in which my positive behavior towards a person is rewarded by positive behavior and so on. I believe that kicked dogs need love too but they usually can’t get it from one another. They need to go find someone who isn’t a kicked dog, best if it is someone who is kind of bewildered by the experience, who will react in non-patterned ways.

Patterns are the problem. Patterns are how it keeps going. Vicious cycles. If you snap at someone and they snap back then it goes from there. If you snap at someone and they blink at you and say, “Are you ok?” well… that’s just not a similar sort of pattern. If you snap back it is obvious that you are a fucking asshole and that’s not good. Don’t do that.

Virtuous cycles involve people who are able to look at you and say, “You are having feelings. They are not about me. Would you like to talk about them?” Vicious cycles are more like, “You are clearly having feelings ALL ABOUT ME AND NOW I AM GOING TO YELL AT YOU ABOUT THEM.” Well, other people have other vicious cycles. But the ones I’m thinking about right this minute are like that. There are lots of other cycles. Don’t mistake me here as being the source of information about vicious cycles. Oh man.

I am home schooling my kids so that as they go through life they always have someone standing near them who will smile back. In my lofty experience there is always someone in the world who will smile back. Even if you happen to not be standing near that person right now. It is hard for me to keep faith in that belief sometimes. For most of my life it has been just a faith not unlike most peoples faith in G-d. Someone will smile back.

A while back I read some article about “computer face”. If you turn on peoples cameras secretly they all have the same slack jawed expression. I very consciously work on smiling the majority of the time. I try hard to have my muscles assume that position by default.

I have very deep grief lines. I turn thirty-two next week. If I am not careful I will be a very stern and unapproachable and lonely old woman. I know this to be true. If I want to have my future be the way I want it to be I will have to work hard on every aspect of my character. It feels so daunting.

I had children so I would have a permanent motivating force to change and get better. So I’m going to fucking Texas. I’m not going in the house. My reality distortion field is big enough to extend that far. Yes, Shanna. I will go so you know you are wonderful.

In the end, she won’t remember it much. I’m only kind of sort of doing this for her. I’m doing this so that I know I made all of the choices about creating space between us for reasons I feel ok about.

Recently I was talking to a mother who was not feeling happy about her day care experience in one relatively confined way. Mostly she was satisfied so she said, “I just had to decide that when you are paying someone you have to accept that they are doing their best and let it go.”

That, in a nut shell, is why I cannot put my kids in day care. I would do it if I had no choice and I had to work because I needed the money. But that is why I have made the choice to stay home. (That and ridiculous financial privilege, let’s be clear here.) I don’t want to just put up with the best that someone else feels like giving me.

I need to know that when they are eighteen and I send them off into the world (really I doubt it will be that long) I need to know that my kids have had all of the experiences they need to have in order to be competent at handling themselves. I can’t live with trusting someone else to “do their best”. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I’m glad that other people have such loving trust. I think it is quite healthy.

I don’t know anyone I trust enough to have the charge of my kids like that.

I trust the Godmamas enough that I send my kids there unsupervised and I have legal documentation saying they are the next of kin. But I still don’t want them setting reality for my kids. I love them and I want their influence… but as an add on or in case of critical system failure. Err, I’ll be a dick and say I think that I will do better. But they will be getting traumatized kids and I can’t think of anyone in the world I would trust more to adequately and lovingly raise traumatized children who started out being raised by me. They will be the most gentle adjustment to not-Krissy reality of anyone in the world. So I don’t pick them to be like me. I pick them to love the results of being like me. It’s kind of a different metric.

But geezus on toast I don’t want someone else teaching my kid how to be a kid for eight hours a day. I don’t want my daughters going through life not sure if someone will smile back.

There are a lot of gifts I can’t give them. I don’t mean financially–I mean in terms of spirit and family and community and sense of place. I can give them Wonderland. Where they are wonderful to me. We do go out into the world lots. And they are doing more and more things away from me.

I’m going to Texas because I had to rock myself to sleep crying for my mother too many times. I need to be there. Just in case. She won’t always be little. I won’t fucking do this for a twenty-five year old I shit you not. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t do it for a fifteen year old. This trip will hurt me. This trip will hurt a lot. This trip has the high potential to be miserable. I have to go through airport security. I probably should not fly with pot. Alcohol makes my stomach hurt and that makes my temper shorter. I do have trusty-dusty Lorazepam! I will have to cut the pills up substantially more to take them during the day. I take 1mg at night and that knocks me straight out. (Not every night. Thirty pills lasts me for four to five months.)

Texas really hasn’t been good to me. I don’t like going there. I must like these kids a whole lot. It won’t be very long. I will be there for moral support. I will read a book. Maybe five. Maybe I will spend a lot of quality time in coffee shops writing Outrunning. That would be kind of funny. Not ha ha funny. Just funny.

Time for breakfast. I have missed you, internet. I shouldn’t make a habit of this for a while. The book is going to eat my hands.

Walking on eggshells

Leave a reply

I do a lot of defining myself in negatives. I don’t just mean that I am derogatory towards myself. I mean that I think of myself in terms of, “I am not like _____; I do not do _____” It is one way of making yourself different. Not a useful way. It means that you are constantly placing how other people are as primary. I’m not like you. People take it as a rejection or as a negative statement about them. Going out and creating an identity without negatives is much harder. It takes tremendously more emotional and psychological energy to go create something from scratch rather than just reject everything that walks by as being “not you”.

I was asked how the party went. Well. Where in my stress cycle should I answer that question from? I think that most people had fun. I absent mindedly made a minor social faux pas early on and never stopped hearing in my head how stupid, rude, domineering and offensive I am. When everyone finally left I cried for hours because I felt so guilty for offending someone.

If you are going to move through life being an asshole but you cry every time someone lets you know that you are crossing their boundaries… you aren’t giving people a way to have a relationship with you that is not basically subservient. If I don’t want subservient relationships (I don’t) then I can’t keep doing this bullshit. It’s not ok to cause other people to feel guilty for having boundaries. They need to have them. I need to take my wrist slap and move on. That is the adult way to handle such things. That is how you have relationships.

This is why my therapist wants me to stop socializing for a while. I spend a lot of time examining all of my interactions with people and looking for reasons that person is very likely to walk away from knowing me any minute for a long list of good causes. I know that I push my luck every day and in every way. When will people be sick of my shit? I get that a lot. My paranoia is not baseless. Is it paranoia to watch for tornados in tornado country?

But the paranoia drives people away as surely and as quickly as if I was chasing them away with a fire hose.

On my last day of teaching English at the Hindu temple one of the kids brought up suicide. A kid from their school jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge last year. They are all still thinking about it. I talked to them about how hard it is to get help when you are mentally ill. It wears people out. They want you to hurry up and get better already so that you don’t inconvenience them. What do you do if you can’t just snap out of it and behave the way other people want? Either you can put up with being punished for being how you are or you do what you can do to get away from the pain. Sometimes that is suicide. Not that I know exactly why that girl jumped. There are as many reasons to do it as there are people who do it.

Walking on eggshells means trying to place someone else as the primary character in the story and not being sure what your lines are. “What do I say so that this delicate and sensitive individual is not upset?” Can’t be done. As soon as you are reacting from that place you have already assumed that offense is likely and just assuming that means that the offense is already communicated. Game over. You lose.

Sometimes people snap at my social faux pas because they are not feeling patient today but they feel patient on other days. I am probably similarly obnoxious on both days but the difference is not about me. If people try to pick their behavior towards me based on my mood they will mostly pick wrong. It drives me batshit. You can only act how you feel like acting. Faking it will make neither of us happy. And acting like you have already been kicked makes people want to kick you. Really hard.

Some days I am going to wander off and cry if someone blinks too hard in my direction. It isn’t about someone letting me know that I crossed a boundary. When I have been crying two, three, four hours a day for over a week… my emotional reaction is not about you and I’m sorry that I’m standing near you when it starts such that you will feel responsible. You aren’t. My feelings come from inside me. The kind of shame I feel isn’t something that people I know now put on me. It is about old tapes.

I don’t keep people in an ongoing way if they seriously shame me. I don’t fucking think so–I don’t need that crap.

I think very hard about every person who is in my life. If I invite you to my house (even if you think you are one of the casual people) I have spent many hours thinking about you. I have mulled over every piece of data I have ever acquired and I have carefully weighed it. I know you because I want to know you. I don’t have accidental friends any more. I have people in my life because I choose them out of a long list of ever rotating acquaintances.

I am mercenary. I do not see any benefit to being less than frank about this. I don’t pick my friends based on them being able to wait on me or do work for me or babysit or give me social status. I pick my friends based on them having character traits I desperately admire and want to be able to watch develop more closely. I don’t understand. I want to. Please let me stare at you until I understand.

I don’t think that most people in my life understand this. I want you near me because I want to figure out how and why you do _________. This is something I want to understand in this lifetime and I don’t know another way of accessing this information. I want to know why you want to do the things you want to do. I want access to your motivations. I’m trying to hack my own motivation system. What makes you do the things you do? It isn’t that I will use your motivation to do exactly the same thing as you, but clearly you have learned some neat tricks I don’t know.

I never really understand what I have to offer though. That end of the deal keeps me up at night. I see what I get out of knowing people. I see clear value. I don’t understand what I have to offer. I don’t understand why anyone bothers to know me. I don’t see how the unpleasantness of my company could possibly be balanced by anything I know or do.

I can understand that Shanna and Calli are tied to me. Children need their moms. I get that. I can certainly understand how Noah finds enough value in the trade. Past that… I don’t really get it. I think that is part of the reason I read as mean. I am sad and bitter that I have nothing that is worthy of trade for a relationship. I feel broken and angry about it. I don’t know how to build people up and make them feel happy about being themselves while standing next to me. I know how to make people feel angry and irritated and like they don’t want to stand next to me any more. It is a self-fulfilling prophesy. I do this a lot.

I can’t be perfect in order to not annoy people. I can only be. I have to accept the rebuffs when someone lets me know I am crossing a boundary without turning that into a federal case or people won’t feel comfortable communicating boundary incursions and they will just stop talking to me. No one likes drama. No one wants to feel guilty for having boundaries.

Not everything is about me, yo.

I woke up early because I have to get my crying over early before a busy day. Not many left before I hit “vacation” for a couple of weeks. I’m looking forward to this. I need to get my stress levels down to the point where I am not crying for multiple hours a day as a way of avoiding beating the shit out of people.

I cry partially from frustration. I don’t know how to let the intensity of my emotions defuse without doing something. I used to cut. I like being beaten. I have punched holes in a lot more walls than I should admit. These days I feel like I live in a glass cage. If I hit anything it will break and I will be in a shower of shards. So I cry. And cry. And cry. I don’t know if it is healthier or not but it is certainly less violent. Progress?

See, this kind of thing is actually huge progress. I don’t know that I would give myself much credit for it without writing. I have progressed past hitting other people constantly to deal with my frustration through punching walls to crying. I have progressed past cutting myself into letting other people hit me in consensual and pre-agreed ways into crying. Progress, not perfection? I am moving in a less self-hating direction.

Now I cry over someone pointing out that I said something four times. (Which is annoying. I know.) You know… at least it is much better than my previous coping methods of hitting her or cutting myself would have been much more inappropriate. Both are ways that I would have dealt with that interaction in the past.

Most of my friends have social anxiety to some degree or another, I think this commonality increases their patience for me. But it means that some days my anxiety runs into their anxiety and then things just get worse. Neither can break the cycle. Awkward.

In my life the only thing I have found that really and truly breaks the stale mates and allows relationships to continue is time. If you both continue to spend time together despite acknowledging sometimes feeling awkward… you continue to have a relationship. Not every relationship is comfortable every moment. If you choose to have the relationship then you look for ways to spend time together even if it is kind of weird. Even if you do have some defensive conversations.

I need to get my stress levels down. It is a physical limitations thing. I can only monitor my social behavior so closely if I am doing a lot of major physical work. I have been using my body unusually hard for the past few weeks. The mural and the backyard work have both used a lot of muscles I’m not used to moving. They have both taken a lot of patience I didn’t actually have going spare.

I need to figure out what it means to do projects as a parent. I’m still not handling the energy allotment thing very well.

I feel scared a lot of the time because I can’t control what other people do and I am worried about driving people away from relationships with my children. I do not want to isolate them. But it seems pretty awful for me to expect people to put up with me being an asshole just so they can help take care of my kids when no one but me and Noah owes my kids anything.

My kids are neat. They will be more neat if they know people like you. You are neat. This is all stuff that floats around in my head making me vulnerable and scared all the time. I feel my children deserve relationships that I do not have or know how to create.

I don’t think my kids want to see their grandparents because they want to hurt me. I think that one or both of them will decline to go when they finally understand that I’m not going. I will do my best to not share how I feel about the trip. What they need to know is that they have grandparents who love them and a mom who loves them and their mom is very happy to help them pack and I will kiss them goodbye and tell them to have fun. That is more or less the end of the story in our house.

But I am still going to cry when they are gone. I am still going to be very sad that it has worked out that I just don’t get extended family this lifetime. I’m grateful that I managed to get a nuclear family thing. I get to be sad about this. I get to grieve about that. It doesn’t hurt my kids if I spend my alone time crying.

If I describe visiting their grandparents… I don’t have to sell it or try to make it sound fun in a fake way. When they go see their grandparents they need to remember a bathing suit because they have an indoor pool. They need to remember clothes appropriate for riding a horse because they have horses. Not to mention cows and I don’t know what other animals. There is a whole floor of a house that is just toys. You and your dad and your sister will stay on an apartment by yourselves and you will be able to go play with the toys probably anytime you want while you are visiting.

I mean, shit dude. I don’t talk about the people much or try to predict how the relationships will be. I don’t know these people. I say that her aunts and uncles all play music–maybe she should bring her uke so they can teach her cords.

I think my daughters are very lucky to have connection to a lot of rich, talented people. She should take advantage of the fact that she was born into that family. She should go meet the old Great Aunt who has traveled all over the world doing whatever the fuck she wanted for most of her life. She’s a neat lady. Maybe if she met Shanna and Calli she would be more enthusiastic about coming to California for visits. So far she is kind of lazy. I’ve asked.

My children will not have my story. My children will not grow up without a family. They have connections. My children have people in the world tracking them and caring. I am not going to do anything to make that network smaller than I have to. I cut my family off because I don’t think my family is going to stop passing on the incest without some kind of intervention I don’t know how to do. So I’m keeping my kids the fuck away from them. I feel very sad that this is required but it is. It just fucking is.

Whenever someone tells me that I should forgive my mother because she won’t live forever I see my adult nephew breaking down as he told me about his rape experiences. No. No. No. No. My children will be kept away from them. All of them. I don’t think it is their fault that it happened to them but we haven’t had someone avoid incest in a few generations. I’m keeping my kids away from all of them.

When people tell me to just “get over it” and “stop thinking about it” I think “That shit is why it keeps happening generation after generation.”

I think about my mom a lot. I miss her. It doesn’t help that my Leather Mom is going through a lot of strife and I’m not helping very much (partially because of my limitations partially because she is telling me no). My Leather Mom and my birth mother share a birthday. I find that thinking about one or the other of them brings up a lot of really strong feelings.

Why do I think about my mom so much? Because everyone else gets to talk to me about their moms all the time. It’s just normal conversation. So I think about my mom and try to stay silent. I feel bad. I feel like a dirty terrible person.

One of the last things my mother said to me was that she would kill herself if I took my kids away from her. I keep checking on the internet and she isn’t dead. I guess that is just one more broken promise.

Broken promises are a big thing right now. What does it mean to say, “I will do _____.”

Relationships are about choices. Sometimes they are uncomfortable. Often that discomfort comes from inside me and is about the fact that I am thinking three hundred painful things all while I’m trying to have a relationship. When I can get those three hundred thoughts under control and actually focus on the person in the room I am grateful to have that relationship. I am glad it is still there. But it feels like I’ve been phoning it in from somewhere else for a while. I never understand what benefit there is to other people in putting up with me.

I am scheduled to be at Dad’s for Thanksgiving. How long is this going to continue? I have had him in my life more or less for going on fourteen years. We have a fairly distant relationship but honestly I do better with those. I have a hard time with being good-enough when people are around more often. I am able to behave perfectly appropriately for my target audience when I only see people once or twice a year. I feel ashamed that I can’t keep up the game with people I see more.

It makes me wonder if I have my anxiety as under control as I think with my kids. Some of my recent frustrations have made me realize that I need to start writing names on the white board in our room. I don’t want to discuss my relationship fluctuations in front of the kids any more. Shanna is starting to sorta follow and have her emotions influenced. I’m having to do a lot of backpedaling and defending of people with her and that’s… awkward.

I don’t want my kids to share my emotional experiences of people. My children are having different experiences. My experiences are my problem. My experiences are distinctly shaped by having an anxiety disorder. I do not want my kids learning my emotional dysregulation. If they develop their own later I don’t want it to be clearly my fault.

This is part of what I like about Unschooling. I have to pay attention to what I am doing, all DBT like. I have a bad habit of loving and hating people. My kids don’t need to hear about it. I don’t need to teach them to obsessively over analyze every conversation before and after it happens. So far they seem pretty good at talking to people.

I went to a book club meeting yesterday. I need to update my reading list, I’ve added three or four. Book club always turns into a small scale therapy/support group. I find it interesting how the folks who are consistent are unschoolers who come from abusive backgrounds. Other folks come and go. Not that I’m consistent enough to actually say that. Maybe my few attendance points are flukes. I should probably keep that up. My therapist wants me going out and doing stuff without my family. Book club is not terribly threatening. Most of the places I would choose to go involve fending off sexual advances and I’m not in the mood.

What the hell else do people do?

This is why I have a therapist.

2 Replies

My therapist told me to cancel everything I can cancel in the next two weeks. I won’t be able to get the crying under control any other way. That’s probably true. I like to keep my crying at under an hour a day. When it creeps up over three hours a day it really cuts into my ability to work.

Atypical depression is normal for PTSD. It doesn’t manifest in the “normal” ways and it can’t be cured by the “normal” drugs. Isn’t that all very helpful to know. If I am depressed, what should that mean in terms of my behavior? How come I can go move over 8,000 pounds of concrete but I’m “depressed”. Psh. I’m not depressed. I don’t get depressed. I just cry and cry and cry while I work. Oh. That’s not normal?

Well I move the concrete but I sometimes go and collapse on the couch and am unable to move for an hour. I’m not exactly asleep–I think I can hear the kids the whole time. I’m just not able to move. That doesn’t usually last more than about 90 minutes. I mean… I can move. When someone shows up and knocks on the door I can stagger to the door.

Really it doesn’t matter how shitty I feel. That’s irrelevant. There is work to be done.

My therapist thinks this might be an unhealthy thought process and one I should work on. She thinks that when I’m spending many hours a day sobbing I should probably change something.

It isn’t that moving the concrete is the problem. Moving concrete doesn’t make me feel depressed. Heavy physical exercise is generally something that is one of my most intense mood elevators. It isn’t that doing the work is a problem. It is that I don’t rest. I don’t drink enough water. I don’t eat enough. My calorie needs are probably much higher than usual right now–I’ve been doing a lot of fairly heavy work for a couple of weeks. But I’m barely eating.

Noah, I leave the breakfast dishes on the table so long because I usually barely finish eating breakfast by lunch. I eat a few bites at a time as I can. My stomach hurts too much to eat faster or larger quantities.

A lot of the day I feel dizzy and nauseated. My neck and hurt have hurt continuously for a few weeks. I’m sure my continual dehydration since I stopped drinking carbonated water isn’t helping. (pause to drink water.)

I’m thinking about my mom wicked hard. I’m trying to figure out how I am patterning off of her right now because I think that I am doing that and it isn’t serving me and I don’t know what I should be doing. I’m having a horrible time figuring out what I should be doing at any given moment.

I stop, literally dozens of times a day for the past few days, and have intense overwhelming panic attacks because I am absolutely sure I am working on the wrong thing and I should be working on something else (I don’t really know what) and I am not doing the right thing and that means I am bad bad bad and I should be punished.

This is really exhausting. I’m also not sleeping well. I wake up and then can’t get back to sleep because I cycle through various memories of times in which I was clearly bad and how it is a good thing that those people have shunned me so that I can never hurt them again and I should just stop fucking hurting everyone all the time already. Will I ever stop being such a fucking cunt?

So… yeah. My therapist told me to figure out a way of having one hour every week of having someone outside my family do something for me. Like, actually do what they say kind of do something for me. She told me to cancel all of my social stuff that I can in the next two weeks and not make more plans for a week or more after that.

I have so far maintained control in all of my social setting obligations. That is not something that I can bank on forever. My stress levels are just too high. If I want to avoid screaming at people for some stupid trivial reason, if I want to avoid having a panic attack in public and having to deal with all the horrible after effects… I need a break.

I can’t be what other people need from me right now. I just don’t have it to give. I’m sorry. I know that this is an inadequacy in me. I am sorry that I am so pathetic. But I am. If I want to still have friends in years to come I need to not blow up at people. They don’t want to hang around and let me abuse them. I agree with that basic premise. No one should hang around and let me abuse them.

I wish I was different. I wish that I wasn’t so god damned mean. But then again I’m pretty glad that I’m alive at this point. I like what I get to do during the day. I like the people in my life.

The kids started in on me this morning. They wanted to go to Fairyland after therapy. I collapsed to the floor crying. I told them that I’m sorry I can’t go do all the fun things they want to do. I’m sorry I’m so tired. I’m sorry I haven’t finished all the work yet. I’m sorry I am not able to be the mommy you want to have. I’m sorry I’m not the fun mommy.

I feel guilty that this resulted in my kids comforting me and telling me that it’s ok–I do lots of fun stuff with them. It’s ok that we can’t do it today. I *am* a fun mommy.

We were later than I intended to be because I sat there and couldn’t stop crying for about ten minutes. After a few minutes Shanna asked me why I was still crying. I told her that I was thinking about the fact that I will never be able to meet all of her needs and I feel very sad about that. I told her we were going to come up against this over and over in her life and I may cry about it a lot. But it’s just true. I can’t.

She hugged me and told me that I do my best and that’s good enough.

My therapist says that my children are “parentalized” but given that I do not allow them to do actual care taking of me and I *am* responsible for getting my shit done this is probably not a problem. I feel conflicted about this. I tell my children all the time that they are not responsible for me. I don’t know if I am in denial about my behavior though.

Every parent has behavioral expectations of some kind. I don’t try to make my kids act in a certain way to control my moods or emotions. If I’m having an off day I tell them that if I am snappish it isn’t personal and I apologize for my tone of voice if I am too harsh.

I feel very guilty for the fact that Shanna is becoming my inside voice. This is happening because I instruct her in whatever it is I’m talking about and she repeats things back to me at moments when I am err in need of similar direction. Like managing feelings. I talk to her about how to manage her feelings and she uses the same words back at me when I am having feelings. I generally thank her for her input and then I step off to go manage my feelings because she is not a grown up. I don’t talk to her about what is in my head. It is just hard to hide all the crying.

So yeah, I worry. I worry if what I am doing is ok all the time. I don’t sleep much at night for worrying if existing in a space with me will create irrevocably fucked up adults and I should not have created these poor innocent children for me to abuse.

I don’t think I abuse them. I don’t think I neglect them. But my starting standards are so fucking low that I never feel like it is possible that I am doing enough. I feel that it isn’t possible for me to do something that is good enough. I am tainted. Both of my daughters have gone without sexual contact longer than I went. Have I already won the parenting contest?

Having absolutely no standard to judge against is freeing and terrifying. I talked to a guy recently who told me that he hopes that American society will not be judged by history based on our popular culture. I said, “Uhm, what else do you think they will have to judge on? Give me a break.”

I can read books and watch movies about so-called “happy families” but the truth is I have never been in the vicinity of a happy family for more than a few hours. Near as I can tell every family becomes less happy the longer I am standing near them so even families who are supposedly just fine the whole god damn rest of the time will manage to have a huge blow up when I’m there.

I’m just that unpleasant.

I know these things aren’t actually “my fault”. It’s all just a bunch of coincidences. But I was talking to an autistic guy about shunning recently.

It doesn’t matter if it is my fault or not. The end result is that I make people uncomfortable so it is better for everyone else if I am not there. That doesn’t feel good. That doesn’t give me a lot of reason to think I should keep breathing. If just existing makes things worse for other people… that’s not good.

I am so afraid of still being alive in fifteen years. I kind of hope that my kids won’t read my book until then–the first one anyway. At some point I do actually specifically want my kids to read it. Even though it will be upsetting. Even though it will be terrible. Even if it is “traumatizing” and that makes me a selfish piece of shit.

Just once. I want you to understand your blood and why I am the way I am. You don’t need to change anything about how you treat me. But please. I hope that being nice to you and taking care of you and teaching you that your body and opinion and voice matters entitles me to you reading that one book. I doubt I will force you to read any other book in your life. Please. I need to have someone who is related to me read this book and believe me and take my side. Please. Even if you go on to have a relationship with my mother and my sister and your cousins and whoever else is still alive… please be on my side. Please tell my family that even though you love them it was right to not meet them until adulthood.

Please. I hope I am making the right choice. I don’t have any way of knowing for sure and I am so scared of doing this wrong. I am so scared. I am so fucking scared that I feel like I am going to be beaten because I was bad. Divorcing my family is such a disgusting, terrible, selfish piece of shit thing to do. But it isn’t. It is the only way I know to keep my children safe. Maybe someone else would be able to find a different way but I am limited by my abilities.

I don’t actually think I will force my children to read it. I don’t think I would ever do that to anyone. But I hope. I hope without telling them about that hope.

I don’t tell them what I’m thinking about. I don’t expect them to comfort me. I don’t require them to walk on eggshells in order to not set me off.

I think I am doing all that I can do. I feel so terrible that I cannot do more. But I’m at my limits. I either respect that or I fuck up in a way that will haunt me for years. Ok. Go to ground.

feelings exploding.

Leave a reply

I’m having a lot of intense feelings. Oh well.

Today I will go order cakes. (Multiple birthday girls = multiple cakes. I think people who ask kids to “share a birthday party” and who then make them share a cake aren’t very nice. I mean, I get it from a financial point of view… but I have birthday issues.)

I feel intense anxiety about letting Calli pick the guest lists. She kept stuff very small. She doesn’t like lots of people around. When I asked her do you want to invite ____ she said, “But we have too many people! We can’t play when there are too many people!” Standing her next to my oldest child it is hard to understand that they have the same DNA. Calli likes to interact with about five people at a time and she defends that boundary with very sharp sticks. Shanna wants to invite half the western hemisphere over to hang out.

Part of adapting to them is letting Shanna have big parties and then I have to get over my guilt at not inviting everyone we know to Calli’s parties. She started listing kids to invite on her finger and when I asked about additional grown up names she said no. I have to not feel like I am slighting people. It’s hard.

We will also pick up more lumber. Looks like the playhouse will have all but the final shade covering and paint by the end of today. That is thoroughly exciting. 🙂

Today wonderful people are coming to my house to make the big pile of concrete and debris go away! My yard will be dramatically less dangerous in only 24 hours! YAY! I worry a lot about inviting children to construction zones. My kids get hurt a lot. We’ve had many bloody feet from stepping on screws and nails. Luckily this experience has taught them that when mom says, “This is an important place to wear shoes” they have stopped arguing. The cuts were worth it. Ha. (I am normally very tolerant of being barefoot. I only break out shoes for a reason.) But I don’t need all of our friends-who-are-children going through the same right of passage at my house. 🙂

I wanted to go visit my friend’s baby today. Instead I will fill buckets with tiny little chunks of concrete and carry them from the back yard to the front yard to the big pile. The more I get out of here today the less I have to deal with later.

Today I will hang up the swings for the kids in the back yard. I am unlikely to hang the adult swing today. I am told it involves blocking the original structure and whereas I’m not an idiot and I could cut wood and do the blocking I have only hand saws so I kind of wait for the dude with the power saw to cut all the wood. Lazy woman.

Every year or two I decide to do home improvement projects. I basically always have a party scheduled as a deadline or I just..never…quite… finish… It is effective but stressful. In the future I need to remember that I should be the only one racing a time clock. No one else wants that stress.

I have September and October on the board. Neither are all that scheduled. I think I am going to deliberately not schedule more. I need to regroup. I need to think hard about who is likely to still be in my life in twenty years. Who should I be handing my energy resources to? Where will it have long-term pay off? It is mercenary, selfish, and the only way I will make it to the end of my life without hating everyone in the whole world.

For most of my life I have indiscriminately helped anyone who needed help. If someone I barely knew needed help moving I was there. Things like that. I’m not saying I have a lot of help to offer. I’m saying I have specific resources. When I hand them to people I will not have an ongoing relationship with I get a little boost but mostly a big drain of energy.

Mostly I like doing a lot of anonymous paying-forward of good things. I think that is what makes the world go round.

I’ll get back to it. It is important to me to help people I don’t know. It is a spiritual thing. But I have limited ability to just do that. Right now what I am trying to do is build community. Most people join a mostly-existent community and then try to fit in. I can’t. I am wholesale constructing my own. It is slightly different. It is a more conscious thing. It’s more work.

Taylor asked why I don’t write about him more. Because he is so deeply entrenched in my life at this point that if I accidentally hurt him by processing something in front of him then the repercussions are bigger than I can handle. I have had evolving opinions of his wife. (Never bad–I have certainly not thought DTMFA or anything.) I recognized her as disabled years before he was willing to say so out loud. That means I need to keep my fucking mouth shut because it isn’t my body or my life being impacted. My view of her is irrelevant and may make her or her husband angry.

The lines around who I can talk about and when and why shift dramatically. Mostly I find out the boundaries by no longer having friends. I get fired a lot. I’m used to it. Other people tell me that I should stop writing then if I am so rude and offensive and I want to have friends.

When I stop writing I substitute cutting and other forms of self-mutilation. I write because this is the closest I can come to convincing myself that I am important enough to not be in pain. I can see patterns and understand things when I write. I can also drive off all the people who don’t actually like me any way. It’s a double win?

I am not smart enough, clever enough, fast enough, whatever enough to deal with my emotions without writing. Well… I can. I can force myself to be silent. I can not, however, at this point, actually keep all of my pain to myself. Maybe that makes me whiny, self-absorbed, and stupid. I have to live with that. I have to live with the fact that the only people whose opinion I give a shit about would rather be offended by my writing than count my scars. They don’t need to see the growing evidence of my stoicism.

If I could cope in a different way I would try that. I have tried lots of things over the decades. Cutting and writing are the last bad coping methods still standing. I try to tell myself that my writing isn’t that bad. I worry about the future. I worry about getting to a place where I know that my writing just upsets everyone and it is all my fault for being such a bad stupid bitch. I will stop writing then. At that point I don’t think anyone will ever be allowed to see me naked again. I want to move on from cutting my thighs so much. That was how I hid it as a teenager. Now when I am upset and I think about cutting I flirt with hurting my breasts and my belly over my ribs and my calves and… I’m pretty sure that if I go down that path there is only one way for it to end.

What would it take for me to stop believing that I should die in order to make everyone else’s life better? I don’t know. But I’m not there yet.

do what you can do

Leave a reply

Looks like I won’t be putting together sex ed. *phew* When people ask me to do things I have a hard time saying no. Much like some other people I know. Do I want to be on the hook for teaching other peoples kids sex ed? Maybe? Not sure. I’m glad I don’t need to think about it any year soon. I’m glad I have less work to do.

I’m still coughing but the fever is over. Progress.

Today will be gardening and cleaning. I’m actually really looking forward to it. I get to talk to the kids a lot on this kind of day. I have been flat shocked by how much Shanna has developed the ability to be actual help recently. I know some people start chores at three or four, I didn’t. I started at five. So she’s catching up on progress that could have been made more slowly, I suppose? I just know that I didn’t think she would actually clean up her toys yesterday (she had like six different sets all dumped on the floor at once) and it took her half an hour.

I feel scared a lot of the time that I am doing everything wrong. I am going to ruin their entire lives. I am going to make it so they can’t have normal lives. It will be all my fault.

But I enjoy them so much. I enjoy spending time with them. I want to hang out with them all day talking about why different plants do different things. Huh, what is similar about these kinds of flowers? What is different? Why do you think they are different like that?

I have never had a time in my life where I haven’t been afraid and completely sure that I am bad and wrong. I have learned to kind of ignore that feeling. But sometimes I am bad and wrong. It is hard to figure out where the difference. How can I tell when I am legitimately doing something wrong and when I just feel self-hating? I don’t know very well.

My kids seem happy and like they are making progress. I’m pretty sure if I was doing it “all wrong” that they wouldn’t be blooming quite so well. Which isn’t to say that anyone else’s way is wrong. But if my kids are happy and growing and learning maybe I don’t need to feel like a steaming pile of shit.

No one is perfect. There is no platonic ideal. Not everyone would like my kids as much as I do. I have a number of friends who would probably feel like my children were a curse instead of a blessing because those folks are sensitive to noise and my kids bring as much volume impact as a ten piece brass band.

The volume bugs me and yet I want little girls who think the world needs their voice. The social consideration is an older persons game. I want them to just feel in their bones that they have a right to take up space and make noise with it. I know that isn’t a trait universally preferred among parents. That’s ok with me.

In many ways I let my children cross a lot of “rudeness” boundaries because I have never understood them. I have never agreed with them. So I don’t enforce them.

Pam told me that I was a weird mix of permissive and authoritarian. Yup. I set the boundaries. Within the boundaries I stay out of most things. They have to make mistakes. They have to do things that annoy me. For the love of Crisco I am not trying to raise little people who will “not annoy me”. Ha. If you don’t annoy me you aren’t being enough of a kid. Keep trying.

But they are going to hit the wall of other people. I can’t soften it and I can’t make it easier. The world is what it is. I can prepare them and then I have to just let them bear their own consequences. Other people have different opinions and if you want to deal with other people you have to deal with their opinions.

I don’t want to teach my kids to put people in boxes the way I do. I went to a funeral this weekend. He was a remarkable man. Partially remarkable for the sheer variety of different skill-sets he mastered in different communities. And he compartmentalized everything and very few people knew almost anything about his extensive connections. Everyone there was surprised by how he touched so many other communities. He seemed busy enough in the community I knew him in!

I have levels of trust and like and tolerance. They are all different. I wish that I trusted men more, but I don’t. I trust some men in particular ways. Even a large number of men who totally believe they have already “jumped through hoops” to prove they are safe are people I won’t be in a room alone with.

I don’t care if it hurts your feelings. I can’t. I have my own feelings to worry about. Find someone else to validate you. Someone with a lower rape count.

Women aren’t easier. Women want to nurture. So they bury their own feelings until they can’t any more. Women look trustworthy until they really really really aren’t. Whereas men tend to start out looking untrustworthy and slowly work their way up.

But my past experiences with specific people should not be a good enough reason to damn the other people I meet. Only that is how I ended up having so many problems. I kept trying to trust.

I believe I would be able to trust people more if I weren’t someone who bothered people so much. I believe that a big part of the reason people break trust with me is because I make people feel so wildly uncomfortable.

People won’t remember what you said or what you did. People remember how you made them feel. (Isn’t that Fitzgerald?) If I make people feel uncomfortable every where I go… that is what there is to remember. I am uncomfortable to be near.

Noah doesn’t feel uncomfortable. Shanna doesn’t feel uncomfortable. Calli doesn’t feel uncomfortable. They like me. They have to be enough.

I mean, what am I complaining about anyway? Everyone makes me feel massively uncomfortable. Such is life.

There is a part of me that would like to hide away from all people, basically forever. There is a part of me that wants to start opening my house once a week. But I don’t think people would come. I live in an inconvenient place. It really isn’t worth the effort.

I don’t know how to build community. I am not able to maintain the effort of showing up at a hobby to produce community. I just don’t have it. I feel pathetic, but there it is. I’m not going to get my community through any of the fair(e)s. I am not going to get my community through something I show up at once a week and pay my entrance fee.

I don’t think I am psychologically capable at this point. I get to the door, look around, note that no one here needs me and I turn around and go home.

I’m not a joiner. If I’m going to sit by myself watching other people have fun I can do that in my front yard for free without having to go any where. My neighbors are outside a lot. I don’t need to pay for dance events so that I can go cry in the bathroom.

And yet it isn’t anyone else’s responsibility to show me a good time. It is my responsibility to have a good time or not. So I don’t go. I’m not very good at “having fun”.

So I make progress on my house. It doesn’t effect anyone but me. No one else cares. But I do. I may not feel like I have community, I have friends, but it seems different. I don’t know.

I have at least two people I can call in an emergency. Depending on the emergency I could potentially go down a list of other people who could help. The last time I asked anyone but K for help it didn’t go well.

I worry about asking anyone for help too often. K saves my ass a lot. She has been the reason I can see a therapist, or do other major health stuff if I can’t work around Noah’s schedule. The kids still visit their Godmamas once a month. I hire people to do some work sometimes.

But the last time I called someone who told me “Call if you need anything” I was told no. I won’t call again.

If you can’t handle hearing the answer “no” then you shouldn’t ask. Most of the time I can’t handle being told no. So I don’t ask people for things. Hell, I’m starting to feel like I shouldn’t be inviting people over so much.

I’m afraid of letting my kids get used to having friends in their lives when I know that no one stays in my life very long. I’m afraid that if I invite families over for my kids to get to know that my kids are just going to have to get used to the disappointment that the moms are going to decide they don’t like me after a while and there go their friends.

It is hard believing that if there is a social problem it is probably all my fault. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it maybe isn’t all my fault but man isn’t that the most convenient scapegoat. I’m a great scapegoat. Everything is my fault. If I weren’t such a fucking asshole I wouldn’t have so many problems.

That thought is one that makes me want to swim out into the ocean as far as I can go.

If I weren’t so fucking bad I wouldn’t have all these problems. But it is too late to change that now. So now what?

More gardening. More cleaning. I’m pretty sure I know how to do those bits without fucking up my whole life. No promises on any other topic.

Piercing the veil.

13 Replies

I do not write as a passive aggressive way of controlling the people around me. I write because otherwise I have trouble noticing patterns of behavior in myself. If what I write makes you think hard about your life and consider some issue, great.

If you ever feel that I am saying too much about you or your family or your pet you are free to ask me to stop.

Otherwise I’m getting kind of tired of the fact that I’ve spent the last fucking month bouncing between people who are upset with me for things I write. They feel attacked.

Uhm, no one is forcing you to read. If you feel upset by what I am writing feel free to take a break. I am not feeling ok with the pressure to stop writing. I am feeling more angry by the day about how many people have gotten really angry with me in the last month as I try to deal with my anxiety.

My anxiety is not your problem. No matter who you are. I am not writing this post to one person. I have had intense exchanges of one sort or another with at least seven people in the last month.

I have to stop being responsible for other people having feelings. If my writing triggers big feelings in you that bother you and make you unhappy, stop reading it. This is an opt-in space. I do not think it is appropriate that I should have to stop and feel anxious every fucking day about the fact that me processing my shit is going to make someone else feel attacked.

I’m not attacking you. I’m sitting in my fucking garage trying to figure out how to not blow up when I am with people in person. I do this because I know in my gut that no one deserves me blowing up. I do it for environmental reasons–not usually for actual provocation. If you don’t like knowing how I go through that process, opt-out. We can have a cordial in person relationship where I can tailor what I say to your personal preferences. I can not fucking handle the stress of trying to please everyone when I write.

I am not responsible for your feelings. No matter who you are.

I have to say this.

Leave a reply

The older I get the more I learn about my own introvert nature. I always thought I was an extrovert. I needed people. I had to take what I could get in terms of company. I need time where I get to write. I have to empty my head.

Notice those days where I bop around from social media tool to social media tool? I feel lonely. I want to feel like I am seen and part of the world.

I don’t use social media more because I am afraid. I am afraid of being yelled at. I am afraid of being told I am bad and stupid. I am afraid that if I actually said more of what is in my head that people would not want to know me any more. As lonely as I feel at this stage of my life I know this is the absolute best I have ever had it. I try very hard to understand what this might mean in the scope of my life. If I blow this… I know how that goes.

I am ok with someone getting to know me and disliking something that I do. That’s fine with me. No matter who you are you do things that I don’t like. I’m fine with you feeling the same way about me.

But I desperately want people to believe that I am allowed to exist. Without having to offer sex. I want to have some kind of value in the world. I want to be needed. I want who and what I am to be useful. And without having to change so that I can be more like other people.

It is kind of funny to me when people tell me that me making the choices I make reflects negatively on them. Well, funny in a horrified kind of way. I can tell you in great detail exactly why I am bad for every single choice that I make. I know all of the arguments down the last specific. I don’t think that my choices are “good”. I don’t think that other people are bad for not being like me. I think I am bad for not being like other people.

I think I am rather pathetic for not being able to work while having children. I know a lot of women who do it and everything is working out great. I would be an abusive monster. I cannot handle that stress. I feel very ashamed of my limits.

I think it is rather pathetic that I can’t deal with hiring childcare on a daily basis so I can go get work done. I think it is extremely pathetic that I would use that time to hide and cry. But I would.

I worry a lot about isolating my children. I think there are HUGE benefits to public school. I am not sure I am doing them favors by encouraging non-conformity and inability to follow institutional rules. I’m not sure I am doing them favors by showing them that they should be very angry with any one who tries to tell them when and where they can use a bathroom. My kids think they have the god damn right to decide when and where. If you pester them to “just try” so that you don’t have to be inconvenienced later they will lash out at you. I’m ok with this. I feel the same fucking way. I don’t act like accidents are that big of a deal. I’ve had too many because of problems I have in my body due to a lifetime of malnutrition and control issues in institutional settings.

I worry a lot about being a parent with mental illness. What am I teaching my children about “normal”?

No. I don’t look down on people for making different choices.

I believe with everything I am that no one can judge what is the right choice for another person. I don’t believe I ever have enough information to judge what a different person is capable of accomplishing. For good or for ill. I under estimate and over estimate. I just can not judge. I don’t feel that other people judge me very well.

I’m going to be semi-egotistical and say that I am an extremely competent person. I know how to do a wide variety of skills at a better than average level. I have had to learn how to do things for myself and by myself. I am a ridiculously hard task master.

But I don’t think I am capable of much. Notice how I actively avoid anything in life that might lead me to having power? I don’t want to have a powerful job. I don’t want to associate with “powerful” people. I don’t especially want to have a rich lifestyle regardless of how much money I ever have. I would feel wildly uncomfortable.

When I picture my old age I would be just fine with living on a trailer on a piece of property in Oregon where I am legally allowed to decide when I die. Sure. That would be fine.

I don’t think that most people uhhh set their aspirations at such a level. I want to have enough money to never need to work again. I’m trying to use this ridiculous income of my husband’s to ensure that it happens without him having to work for many more years. I don’t want him working himself to the bone for decades to support my sloth. That’s not the deal.

I want both of us to be able to do things we want with the hours of our days. Luckily for him, the shit he likes to do for fun will probably generate a modest income. Eventually I will do something for some pay. I don’t want much. I really fucking don’t. I already have more than I need.

I feel like I have grown up in a weird space of intersection. Boy howdy have I seen the American Dream up close and personal. I see the stress. I see the trade offs. I see the A/B decisions that started with your parents decisions and I know that I will never be able to be competitive. It was done before my birth.

Oh man does that make me want to opt out of the system. I want to have my private, isolated life where I don’t have to try to step on anyone else’s neck in order to inch my way up.

I don’t have that in me. That fight was lost too long ago.

So what am I teaching my children? I worry. I worry all the fucking time.

What kind of adults will my children be? They will never experience deprivation of any kind. They will grow up with a mother who responds to any and all signs of entitlement with the nastiness of a viper. You are not fucking entitled to the labor of my body. Do for yourself. (I try to tone things down because they are kids and all but I am getting less patient by the year and by the time they are adults I won’t feel any desire to tone it down.)

You have to care about how the actions of your body effect the people around you. You have to. Period. If you are not willing to care about that, well you can bloody well stay in a room by yourself. (For an age appropriate number of minutes on a timer. Then you come out to kisses and hugs and talk about how much you are loved.)

I don’t know that I am doing anything right. I don’t really feel like I am in a position to look down on what anyone else is doing.

My life is such a bizarre mix of trauma and privilege that it is hard to tease out what is positive and what is negative. What parts of my behavior and character are positive or negative depends entirely on your point of view.

Recently (this year) a lot of my reading has been about what personality traits enable people to thrive despite adversity. I may be a whiny bitch because most of my current adversity is all in my head but other people in the world deal with real adversity. It is still relevant reading and all. (See that denigration about the mental illness bit. IT’S ALL IN MY HEAD! Well, what isn’t?)

Apparently one of the most important aspects of character is the ability to live with having conflicting traits in yourself. Be ok with the fact that you are patient AND impatient. Be ok with the fact that you are trusting and suspicious. I really am quick to judge people. I give people a lot of fucking rope. Then I hang them hard and fast and walk away.

I don’t like being alone. I find being alone significantly preferable to being in social environments where I have to try very hard to be “good” or I might be expelled. I think of basically every social space that way. I’m not invited to that many parties any more. Part of it is the kid thing. Part of it is that I make people feel fucking uncomfortable. C’est la vie.

I feel intense guilt for not being able to unschool the way I see some people doing it. I can’t have my kids involved in activities six days a week to meet social needs. I just can’t. I am not capable.

When I was a kid it was a joke in most of the schools I was enrolled in that I shouldn’t bother enrolling because I missed so much school. I have never been a consistent part of anything. I can manage a few months, maybe. I taught for 2.5 years at S.T. That is the longest I have ever consistently done anything in my life. I was technically in the graduate program at SJSU for seven years… but I attended one class a week for most of that and I had years off in the middle.

I lived with my Owner for three years and dated him for four. Outside of my mother he is the person I have lived with the longest consecutively by far. I’m not sure my mother beats him by much and after I was four years old I never lived with her for four years in a row again.

I have lived with Noah and Shanna longer than I have ever lived with my mother in a go. When I write it down it becomes a thing I can look at. Holy shit. That’s really pretty sad. When I just feel anxiety and frustration because I am having a horrible time with the pressure that comes from trying to provide stability for children I don’t think of it in such terms. Of course this is hard for me. Of course I am struggling. I’m swinging without a net. So I pursue relentless competence at a wide variety of skills. Most of which are utterly without value to anyone beyond me. I can’t care about that. People like me die if they worry too much about which skills to pick up because they will invariably make the wrong decisions.

I’m trying really hard to make my 10,000 mistakes. I’m not sure what I will be a “master” of but I think I will be much more calm. What is another mistake at that point? I can do anything and it doesn’t matter.

I want neither the path of complete disconnection from other people of Zen nor the immersion in community behavioral norms I have always known. I don’t know what my path will be.

I can neither lead nor follow. If I am making other people feel like they are wrong then I need to work on my communication skills.

I haven’t figured anything out. I just keep walking because I don’t know what else to do. I try new things because I don’t know how to do the same thing for a long time.

I want to raise children the way I am doing this because my children are going to be the only people I ever have this kind of intensity with. I have absolutely no other window into such an experience. I am a selfish piece of shit and I want it. I want it. I want it. I want to find out what it means to live with someone 24/7 for 18 years. I understand that other people get enough out of that experience with their kids being gone for school and I’m totally cool with that and I think it represents a healthy approach to life.

I can’t. I can’t miss this. I have no other way to find out what a normal childhood looks like. I want to watch this so fucking much. I am so scared that I will miss part of it and I won’t be able to understand why something later is happening. I need to fucking know what is happening to them. I NEED to know. I can’t just trust a daycare provider. I can’t. This is a failure in me.

I need to know in my bones that when they are eighteen I have kept them safe. I can’t pass the buck on responsibility. I don’t trust anyone enough. I am not saying that you don’t love your children. I am saying that I am broken.

I worry so much about what I am doing to my children. They have never had a daily relationship with anyone but me and their dad. Even when we had a housemate she did not appear during their awake hours every day. They have literally never had a relationship with anyone else where they saw them every day for two months. Not even five days a week. And I take them on trips away from their dad, sometimes for weeks.

I worry a lot. Is this ok? Is this basically broken? It makes me feel hellza better that Laura Ingalls Wilder was way more isolated than my kids. I mean… isn’t that part of the American story? We are all alone. Even when we live in suburbs shoved cheek and jowl. Most of my friends talk about a loneliness of the soul they felt because even though they went to school… they never had friends. I collect self-identified “rejects”.

This is a lot of why I am trying so hard to get to know the people who live in our neighborhood. We actually see people and have conversations with them pretty consistently.

But I’m not providing little friends. I’m not sure school would anyway. And man it would waste their time. And teach lessons I don’t like.

It all comes down to control. Do I think the American government is doing a good job in how it is raising kids? No. Ok. I’m super glad I have the privilege to opt-out then. Not everyone does. Everyone has different privileges.

My choices are about what I can bear. I know that what I am capable of is pretty pathetic in some core ways. If you go spend some time studying brain developmental stuff you might cut me a little more slack. Not a lot. I don’t need a lot. I do very well all things considered. But there is a cost to all things considered. My kids have to bear that. I can’t understand what that cost will be in advance. I am fucking worried.

Did you know that rape is down 58% since the 1970’s? (http://prospect.org/article/should-rape-porn-be-banned)

Complicated stuff, yo.

Back in my day (*cough* choke*cough) I wanted to “play act” things that are much more extreme than average. I have had the last several years of being a parent where I have done the “trapped under a baby” thing and I was alone all the time. I’ve had a lot of time to think about why I have done the things I have done. How many of them are things I will ever do again?

I will never again allow someone to put a noose around my neck and lift me off the ground because he wants to be able to look at the picture later and masturbate. The risk/reward ratio will never be tipped in that direction again. I’m really willing to go pretty far to be “good enough” for someone who wants to hurt me.

My daughters will not believe that anyone has the right to hurt them. What they go do in their sex lives will not be my problem. My children will not believe it is ok for an adult to grab them by the arm and drag them along. It is fucking assault. You see it in schools all the time.

I am not strong enough to teach my daughters how to be strong in that world. I don’t have any appropriate coping skills. My coping skills got me raped and beaten over and over again.

I worry so much. What do I have to give? Is anything about me worthy of learning about? Should I just shut the fuck up so there is never any reason for them to have to know how very self absorbed and bad and stupid I am.

I’m teaching my kids that adulthood is very free form. No one is your boss. You get to decide what to do with your time. If you need money (and everyone does in one way or another) then you need to figure out how to get it. All career paths involve training of some kind even if you are working retail or cutting hair (holy moly the training for hair dressing is intense). Lots of careers involve college. If you think you are heading down that route we will have some serious conversations in five, seven, and nine years from now about what you want to do to prepare for that experience because it will be up to you to pull it off. I won’t be part of that.

I don’t know what you will be when you grow up. Do you have ideas? What do you want to prepare for being able to do?

I’m trying to learn what I will do when I grow up too. I’m not ready. I’m sorry. I know that is a sign of my basic immaturity. I get it. But I am where I am. I am sorry that my development is so retarded. It isn’t my fault. I’m trying. I’m trying so hard. I can’t be anything other than what I am.

Life is in medias res. We are all part of the continuing story of humanity. We are part of the story of our individual families. We are bearing the body load of their deprivations, excesses, tendencies, and flat bad choices. Or you can be one of those people who is happy and healthy and your family has been for…. Well as long as any one can remember. Great. Thanks. I’m happy for you. Sigh.

Ok, well so what does this all mean for my kids? In order for me to change the narrative of my family I need to change the narrative of my family. Which I have done in some major ways of which I am proud. I continue to examine my behavior and attempt to make progress on doing course corrections.

I can’t do anything but what I am doing. Oh, that’s bullshit. If Noah died I would cope. Well, I still wouldn’t work. He made sure of that before I quit. But shit happens. I could still have to get a job. I reiterate that I would cope. I think I would not be a very nice mother any more. I think my children would effectively lose both parents and it would be horrible. I would not be able to be present for even 1/10 of what they expect. Good grief they are entitled little things.

They think they are entitled to my love and attention at absolutely every fucking hour of the day and night. Whoa. It is over whelming. After five years I have pulled back my boundaries like mad. When Shanna was born I did it twenty-ish hours a day (Noah had the other four). Calli has never had quite what Shanna had. It just isn’t possible. But they sleep together.

The three of us are a little self contained unit of affirmation and approval. We love each other and only sort of need anyone else. I feel bad about the ways in which we leave Noah out. He’s just not around enough to make as much impact on them. (I say as I hide in the garage away from them. But geez I’ve been low on personal time lately.)

I have to militantly believe that it takes all kinds or there is no chance that it is ok for me to exist. Sometimes that is hard to live with.

We all live in the middle. I come from hard core religious zealots and prostitutes–and that’s just on my mom’s side. How about you?

Three more days in the month, paint faster.

1 Reply

I am going to do 13-23 more hours on the fence. I want to finish this week. I suppose that means that I will be painting all day today and tomorrow and maybe Wednesday. The kids will *love* that. Not. They are very very done with me doing a task that requires intense concentration and that they not walk up and touch me. But it’s coming along!

Yesterday I started the work of unwinding the blackberry bramble from the trellis it has been on for the past year and a half. Hard to believe that the bush has been in my yard for only a year and a half. That’s one massive sucker. I have probably another five hours of work before it is transferred over to the new trellis structure (which mostly consists of retired Twisted Monk rope. Ha. My yard is visually full of it. My stuff is far too old for safe suspensions and I don’t do enough floor bondage to care. Not that I suspend anyone lately. Sigh.).

Ice skating was wicked fun and I didn’t fall *once*. I feel so proud of myself. I went off and did some speed laps on my own when the rest of my family was worn out from falling. I find it strange that my thirties are the decade of physical independence and strength. I have the courage to try things now. I am not so afraid of failing that I stay home and cry instead of showing up. I have always been afraid. It is weird to not let fear run very much of my life.

“Falling is part of the learning process. If you are afraid of falling you will never be good. You can’t get real mad either. You just have to accept it and try to do better.”

I learn these things as I teach them.

I went and talked to an old acquaintance who is a Contra dance leader person last night. I am curious about bringing the home school kids to a Contra dance because I think it is potentially interesting to them. It sounds like I should wait until more kids are closer to ten. That makes sense. That’s ok, I don’t need to do everything this year. I will start trying to teach some things in the park though as pre-prep.

It is kind of weird constantly thinking about scaffolding. What do I want them to be able to do when they are thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, fifty that requires preparation at this point. There are more things than anyone wants to think about.

Life is about a series of A/B choices. As you go on your list narrows. Do you want children–yes or no. Did you actually have children–yes or no. Do you want to work or stay at home–pick one. When you make choices you close a lot of doors. I get this. I don’t think that one road is morally superior than other roads. I don’t think that picking home schooling proves I love my kids more than anyone else. It is just the A/B choice I wanted.

Recently I wrote a fairly defensive six page letter to my grandmother-in-law. She has been expressing clearly that she has never seen home schooling go well and she does not approve. Ok. Well, I know a lot of people for whom it has gone well so if we are doing the anecdote thing I win. If we are looking at actual fucking data then I win and win and win and win. So fuck you. Home schooling has been around since the dawn of time so can we not act like the American public school system has a lock on education? Give me a break.

But I don’t say “fuck” in letters to the grandmother. Even I recognize some limits.

What I have been doing instead is writing long philosophical letters where I mention all the educational theorists and I talk about the strengths and advantages of different systems and I talk about schema and scaffolding and all the shit I’m doing.

I knew I wanted to home school my children when I was seventeen years old. I went to college, graduate school, and I got a teaching credential because I wanted to home school my kids and I believed it required preparation. No, I really and truly don’t believe that everyone should home school their kids. However I think I am fully fucking qualified and I’m not going to be nice to people who imply otherwise.

I prepared for this for more than ten years before having children. I did that knowing that there is the very real possibility that I will home school my kids till they are seven or so and then they will say, “Screw you mom, I’m going to school.” I did that knowing that if I had a child who was blind, deaf, autistic, fill in the blank special needs, I probably wouldn’t be able to home school. I prepared anyway and hoped for the best. My children appear to be very “normal” in terms of development. Shanna is advanced verbally but not emotionally or in terms of education. She just can talk. Calli is very on track to be average.

I can handle average kids. I really can. I understand that lots of people worry about home schooling as an educational choice–I worry too. But I have yet to meet someone who comes out of the public education without major gaps in their education… I can’t believe that home schooling would magically be worse. Not if I seriously undertake it as my profession.

I’ve tried to figure out how to use a word other than vocation. Now that I know I am using vocation wrong (it has way less emphasis than I want) I’m not even sure how to talk about it. Some children know very young they want to grow up and be a nun. It’s a calling. I knew I wanted to home school.

I want this intensity of relationship. I understand that not everyone wants it. I am not trying to claim that this intensity is the healthiest or the best or superior for everyone. Noah sure as shit couldn’t do what I am doing with the kids. He would go bananas. He gets very short with them by the end of a weekend. I would not leave Noah alone with the kids for more than a week by himself. I mean, no one would die or anything. They wouldn’t have much fun though.

I have been alone for most of my life in a way that other people can’t understand. Moving around all the time such that you literally don’t have friendships that last longer than three months is quite traumatic in and of itself without mentioning all the other shit in my life. I really am a freak. It is pretty verifiable if you go talk to medical professionals.

I want to be with people all the time. I want to be able to hug and touch people safely without them expecting me to offer blowjobs. I haven’t had a lot of that. I have spent most of my life believing that if I am not actively offering sex I should leave because no one is interested in my presence.

I don’t believe I “love my children more” because of the choices I make. I believe that I am using my children to meet my needs in some ways that could be massively unhealthy if I am not careful.

Shanna asks me why I see a therapist almost every time we go. She doesn’t want to be away from me for the hour of the appointment. She complains loudly. “You know how I cry all the time? Well, I cry because I’m thinking about things I need to talk about. No, I can’t talk to you about these things. It would be totally inappropriate. It is wrong for grown ups to bring their problems to children. I need someone to talk to. She helps me be a better mother.”

I am very careful that neither child becomes my “little mother”. That’s not what I want. I think that is very wrong. That is what my mother did to me. That is what my grandmother did to my mother. I am not passing on that generational wound. I believe that I (I’m not fucking talking about anyone else so don’t take this as a projection) would not be capable of taking care of my own shit and holding down a job. I think that if I had a job I would expect my kids to pick up a ton more slack than I do right now. I would expect them to “help me” because you have kids to help you–right? Isn’t that how the tradition goes?

I didn’t have kids to help me. I had kids because I want a life long relationship so bad it makes me shake with need. I had kids because I want a reason to not die and I don’t think I have very many good reasons. I don’t think other people are worth staying alive for. Other people don’t do much of anything to make my life a demonstrably better place to be. They can’t. It isn’t that they don’t care. It’s that they are living their lives and they can’t stop to take care of me. That’s not healthy in any way–there is even a word: codependence. I don’t expect people to do that. Hell, I don’t want anyone to stop their life to try and take care of me.

But being a parent means that I have to think about how relationships work all day every day. I have to do measurable work on myself to deserve this relationship. I have to change.

I was talking to a new person last night at a party. I don’t know how we got on this topic but we were discussing parental guidance with regard to reading. When I was eight my aunt (who was basically a foster mother) told me I wasn’t allowed to read Sweet Valley High books because they were too mature and graphic. (The kids made out in the sand at the beach or something.) I left her house and went back to my mother’s house where I read Bertrice Small books. Small is very into incest, pony play, harems, sodomy, raping, kidnapping, dildos, bestiality, LOTS of group sex.

That is, in a nutshell, the conundrum of my life. Those kind of hard-core pornography books were the only books my mom had in the house. I went between being punished for thinking about kissing a boy to being given a detailed instruction manual on how to have really graphic sex that I bloody well followed over and over.

I was eight when I started trying to memorize these books. What was I supposed to do in order to make people want me? I thought it was very important. I thought that was the only way people might let me be around. When the characters were taught how to behave in the harem I god damn took notes.

My children will not be reading Bertrice Small pre-puberty. The books are in my room up on a very high shelf. I still have them. I still wank to them. Oh man formative literature.

I no longer think I deserve to be beaten and raped. That is a fairly big step for me. That is how I found the bdsm community. I thought that was what I deserved and I went on the internet looking for men to do that to me. I was told to buy SM 101 and that was it. I found what I was supposed to be doing.

Let me tell you I have some cognitive dissonance sometimes. What am I supposed to be doing now? Well, painting a fence. Winding some blackberry bushes. Preserving tomatoes. Loving children. Teaching reading and writing and arithmetic.

I am supposed to figure out how to be stable and happy and a “good influence” whatever that means. Am I a good influence? I don’t know. I think that you, whoever you are, are someone who has unique gifts and talents and things to offer the world. I don’t know what they are so I can’t tell you what you “should” be doing. You have to figure it out for yourself.

When I was young I believed that my only talent/skill thing was being able to read fast. I didn’t see how that could possibly be a big deal later in life. I thought I was pathetic. Now I think that being able to read as fast I can has been an unbelievable gift in this lifetime. I can learn anything I want to know.

I am teaching myself gardening. It is complicated and there is a lot to understand. I’m learning it. I am teaching myself cooking. It’s fucking chemistry. I understand that these are things that humans have been teaching themselves without books for thousands, maybe a million years. But I am really progressing at these skills at a pace my forbearers could not imagine. That’s kind of cool.

It is hard believing in the pit of your stomach that you are stupid, worthless, and unworthy of breathing while also knowing that you are an unusual specimen of the species. It doesn’t fit in my brain. I am more competent at being able to learn things than average. Why do I feel so weak and pathetic? Because these things are impossible to measure in any useful way. Because the measurement of these qualities has nothing to do with feelings. Because I just think I suck. (Yes, but what do you suck? Suck is a transitive verb.)

I know a lot of people who make choices without thinking a lot about them. I’m not saying that is a terrible decision. If you are following the pattern you know and it works for you there isn’t a strong need to question the normal M.O. That’s fine. I can’t do that though.

I don’t think I am making the UNIVERSAL BEST CHOICES. I don’t think there is any such thing. I think I am making the choices that make the most sense for me given my set of issues and life circumstances.

I worry a lot about whether or not I am making the best choices for my children. I look at studies that say that children, in general, do “best” when they have a stay at home mother. I look at studies that verify that home schooled children, on average, do very well. But those things tell me literally nothing about whether or not I am meeting the needs of my children. I’m not sure if I am capable of knowing at this point.

My children are clean, well fed, and loved. That’s what I know. But that is pretty much exactly what the neighbor said about me to justify why she didn’t tell anyone I was being raped as a small child. How in the fuck do I know if what I am doing is right given that set of knowledge? Am I actually taking care of my kids? My mom thought she was and she wasn’t.

I tell my children that they don’t need to be like me even though I apparently have a desperate need to be like my mother. I am doing her job and I am doing it god damn better than she did. My children are safe in a way my mothers children were never safe. My children don’t need to grow up and do what I am doing any more than they have to grow up and do what Noah is doing. There is a whole wide world out there. There are so many people living in so many different ways. If you don’t like my approach, well let’s go study some other approaches. I can’t explain them like an insider so we will have to find people so you can ask your questions.

If I do anything right in this lifetime it will be to teach my children that being like me is not necessarily part of being an adult. I’m a special fucking snowflake. Don’t try to be like me.

It feels so sad that it always comes back to, “Don’t be like me. I am bad.” If you want people to like you, don’t be like me. If you want people to think you are a good person, don’t be like me. If you want people to let their children play with you, don’t be like me. Throughout my whole life people have been keeping their children away from me because I am a bad influence. From when I was three years old people have said to my face that they don’t want me around their children because I am a bad influence.

No, don’t be like me. There is no good to come of that road.

Am I really that bad? I don’t even know. I don’t know how these things are measured. I don’t know how they are decided. That process is invisible to me.

It’s kind of funny that I rarely decide that a person is “bad”. I frequently think that someone made a bad decision. I don’t conflate anyone else’s personhood with whether or not they make bad decisions sometimes. I do for me though. There is no redemption out of this pit.

Yesterday I worked on the fence for two hours. One of the old white guys who walks around my neighborhood chatted with me, as they all do, about the painting. He said that he recognized the Hindu Temple but “wished they would just go away.”

I went off. “Uhm, my family doesn’t share that opinion even slightly. I teach English classes there. My family has been taking Hindi classes there. We are glad it is on our street as a valuable resource to our community.” He looked gobsmacked.

I recently read a neat blog entry (I can’t find the link) about a white woman talking about her feelings of discomfort when people make racist comments to her and why she doesn’t say anything. Basically she wants to feel safe.

I don’t feel, as a white person, like it is ok for me to choose to feel “safe” rather than speak against racism. I think that is white privilege at its most insidious and disgusting. If another white person says something racist to me I do not keep my mouth shut. Silence is consent. When my neighbor told me his Hispanic gardeners trimmed his tree wrong and he threatened to kill them over it I told him that what he did was a criminal act and he should be ashamed of himself. He later told he apologized profusely to the gardner. You had god damn better. What the fuck were you thinking in the first place?

To me all of this consent-for-sex, racism, feminism stuff is all entwined. It’s not ok to have a better life at the expense of stepping on someone else’s neck.

Breathe in. Breathe out. It will be a long day of hard work. That will be ok. It will end. Tomorrow will be a long day of hard work. That will be ok too. Hopefully by the end of tomorrow I will finish the fence. *cross fingers* I want to be done in July. One month. I want to give this project one month of my life.

And my beloved husband has finished making me breakfast. This isn’t a eat-in-the-garage-alone-because-I-can’t-stop-crying morning. Time to go in and tell my children that I missed them while I was sleeping. I have hugs and kisses to give. I hear that they need them.

brain dump

2 Replies

I am on my second night of not sleeping because I am angry about the PTSD forum. Third night? I can’t even remember. This is why I backed away from facebook. Maybe my therapist is right and I shouldn’t be on this website either.

I have a chip on my shoulder the size of Wyoming when it comes to people nastily lecturing me about my behavior. You do not have the ability to foretell the future. Shut the fuck up.

But it’s all my fault if someone chooses to yell at me about how stupid I am… right? I chose to talk in public about something I did. I did not write a 20 page dissertation justifying my decision thus I am just being self-hating. If a man ever says anything sexual to a woman and she continues talking to him it will be all her fault if he later beats her and rapes her. So I’m fucking stupid for talking to this guy and asking for a boundary. Like, duh.

That sounds like a crazy person with PTSD trying to make me act even crazier than I do. Please forgive for being dismissive and nasty after you have derided me multiple times. At least I’m not doing it where she can see and I have not yet typed any of the swirling nasty names for her running about in my head.

I did go back to the thread this morning. *hang head in shame* I said that in the future I would like her to know that I am not interested in her opinion and please never comment on anything I write again. I believe her crystal ball to be out of service and I wish she would quit sharing the hysteria it is stuck on with me.

You notice how I almost never comment on other peoples writing? I probably comment on substantially less than 1% of what I read. I understand that my hysterical opinion is not usually welcome.

P, I do notice that it is a big deal that you are able to get to our house. I just think that at this point you continue to do so because you are being nice to my kids. I’m grateful that you are willing to be nice to my kids. They love and adore you and think you are smart and funny and capable. I want them to look up to women like you. I *do* understand that it is hard. I *do* appreciate it.

I just don’t know how to be unoffensive. And I don’t particularly want to offend you. So I don’t know what to say now.

I spend so much time worrying about how to not offend people. What can I possibly say or do to not offend and piss people off. I seem to piss people off by existing and breathing. (I’m not trying to dismiss the valid complaints of people who get upset with me. Sometimes I do know why people don’t like me any more. Sometimes it is very confusing though.)

I know I am a selfish asshole. I don’t know a different way of staying alive. I am not capable of living for unselfish reasons. All of my forbearance is gone. The closest I have to that left is taking care of my kids and having kids was the single most selfish thing I have ever done. So I’m not sure I can do the unselfish thing. I don’t think I would want to try. Near as I can tell the reason to live unselfishly is because your invisible sky friend told you to. Have fun with that.

I am up to twenty hours on the mural. I am somewhere between 40%-50% done. My neighbor bitched that there weren’t any people on it. My comment was I JUST FINISHED THE BACKGROUND COLORS GIVE ME A BLOODY BREAK. But he also very helpfully went and fetched a flashlight as I worked at dusk yesterday so I screeched that in a more or less pleasant way. Or at least he just laughed at me.

Yesterday he was trying to get a rise out of me (that’s basically all he does) and he was asking me if I knew anything about racing cars. After stating that I don’t watch Nascar it was kind of awesome to be able to say that I went to track school for racing Porsche’s so please don’t lecture me about how racing works. (To be clear I never actually *drove* on a track. My Owner got into that part after I left with the girl after me. Oh well. I still did the track school with him.)

So today, after the cheerful argument about racing cars yesterday, he showed up and asked me a bunch of questions. He said as he was walking up, “So now that I now I have a resident expert….”

I of course made it clear that I don’t consider myself an expert at much of anything. I am at best a dilettante. But we had a lengthy conversation and yeah I can answer a lot of questions.

Yesterday I was blessed with two (ok really four throughout the day–two adults) people coming over. One just stopped long enough to show off her HOLY SHIT DRAMATIC hair cut (she looks great) and the other friend walked around our neighborhood and looked at the fence and shared ice cream with us. The ice cream sharer brought little girls so my kids thought the day was a win.

Every day during dinner we try to go around the table sharing our favorite part of the day. My kids always say that seeing their friends is their favorite part of a day. They are really grateful when they get to see the kids they know. I am too. It is nice to still know people.

I feel really weird about trying to provide my kids steady access to people. I want them to have actual long-term relationships. I didn’t during childhood. I rarely knew people for any consistent period of time.

At this point Jenny is the person who has known me the longest and best. Everyone else comes post-bdsm period.

I went to a party recently and watched two beautiful women top a third beautiful woman. I have known the two tops for more than a third of my life.

A woman I used to date is moving back to the area. I’m having feelings about this. I’m having really intense feelings around the idea that I will never have sex with her again. It is really bothering me. I want to fuck her so bad my hands shake.

When I met my friend at the coffee shop to talk about the boundary incursion one of the things we talked about was inappropriate sexual acting out on the part of parents. That has dramatically played into his and his wife’s emotional issues–their parents not being appropriate.

I don’t think that promiscuity is always wrong. I don’t think that polyamory is wrong. I just think that I am not going to be able to model healthy versions of these. I think that *I* would be incredibly unhealthy. I am obsessive. I tend to forget everyone else in the world when I am thinking about a new (or returning after a long absence) sex partner. I think my children fucking deserve twenty years of my attention.

But good golly Miss Molly I want to fuck her. I want to. I want to. I want to. And I get the distinct impression she would really like me to. Mostly she is stone because she doesn’t trust people. (For the non-queers in the reading audience “stone” means that she does sexual things to people but she doesn’t tend to allow people to touch her genitals.) Given my long history of fucking her six ways from Sunday I’m pretty sure I would still be an exception–I always was.

I think it is that ability to side step peoples normal boundaries that drives a lot of my sex. I solicit people to actively reconsider their boundaries for me. I push them. I ask them to change the rules for me. It’s that whole selfish asshole thing.

I am having a hard time with the idea that I will never again validate someones sexuality and identity. I want to make her feel like she is beautiful and desirous and yet there isn’t a long list of people wanting to date her so she doesn’t believe me. If I’m not there to apply ego stroking… there is no ego stroking. So maybe she is only those things to me. And now I don’t want her either.

It is all very tied up in knots of shame and wanting people to feel loved and important. A lot of the reason I have always picked the partners I have picked is because I go hunting for people who are used to being told “no” and then I undo some of that damage. “Ok, maybe you aren’t a good fit with everyone but let me show you HOW AWESOME it can be to find someone compatible. You aren’t wrong or broken–you just need to find people who mesh.”

And perverts really have a hard time finding people to validate them. I’m just sayin’.

On my last trip to the dispensary I only bought edibles (not any of the sugar enhanced kinds–the variety is breath-taking these days). So I’m trying to eek them out for more than a month. So I’m under dosing for the first potion of time. Given that it is coinciding with doing EMDR again I sort of expected to hit a suicidal ideation period again. I haven’t. That is good. *happy dance* Any month without living in a multi-plex of suicidal horror is a good month. Happiness is about low expectations.

Last night putting the kids to bed was one of those magical experiences. I lay down with them for a few minutes when I got back from painting. I like hearing what they want to say as they empty their heads in preparation for sleep.

“I share my things with my family because I love my family. I share with my mama. I share with my big sister. I share with my daddy. My mommy shares with me. My big sister shares with me. My daddy shares with me. My family loves me!”

Is sharing of stuff how love is decided? I don’t know.

“I am happy! Sometimes I am sad. Sometimes I am mad. Right now I am happy!”

Yes, my beloved, feelings happen. I’m glad you are happy right now. I am too. I almost always feel happy when I get to snuggle between my two favorite girls in the whole wide world. I feel so deeply grateful that I get to have many hours a day every single day of cuddling my children. That is filling my decades old touch deficit.

I get that because Noah wants me to have it. Because I want it. He’s ok with me being selfish. I am very lucky. Not everyone wants what I have (which is more than ok–it’s kind of necessary). I feel lucky.

Ok, now I’m feeling less angry about the hysterical woman on the ptsd forum. I’m sure in her head everything is stuck on hysterical. I have totally had that feeling. I just choose to not take on someone else’s hysteria. I have enough of my own.

I think I can look at patterns and determine what will happen. I get the feeling that you absolutely MUST listen to your own impulses on this topic. Ignoring nigling feelings of worry is part of my problem. It is part of how I have ended up sexually assaulted so many times. I don’t know when to run. I absolutely get why people would want to lecture me “for my own good”.

I just honestly don’t want to hear it. You don’t know much about me. You don’t care to find out. How in the fuck do you presume to know what is good for me?

Not so good at the whole “boundaries” thing.

6 Replies

Intense EMDR therapy session today. My therapist commented, “It sounds like you are having a hard time keeping your boundaries up when other people are having feelings.” Why yes, that is a very accurate description. I feel that other people having feelings automatically trumps anything I might say or do. That’s part of the whole worthless thing. So of course when people start telling me that I am making them feel bad I agree that it is because I am a terrible person who should be driven out of all society. Not really a helpful response.

I think I should back off of the ptsd forum. I’m kind of tired of having people yell at me that they know “all about trauma” and “obviously I am making bad choices” and my problem is that I can’t “stop re-enacting trauma with untrustworthy people”. That whole set of rants in relationship to meeting someone in a coffee shop. Because obviously meeting up with a guy to say, “Hey something you said bothered me” is the same as putting myself in a position to be raped again. Same damn thing. I’m too stupid to be able to evaluate which situations are safe. I should just stay home or only talk to people who never make mistakes.

Oh, and of course anyone who is part of the bdsm community should just be shunned. They are all Bad People.

You know what, lady? I think I am going to take my experiences of the bdsm community over yours. There are decent people who happen to get off on bdsm. There are assholes and predators and rapists who are not in the bdsm community. I don’t really feel that deciding that a demographic of people is terrible is the way to have a happy life.

Of course she wants me to start with all men and move on from there. All men are dogs, don’t you know. (Ok, technically it was a man in the thread who said, “I hate to say this because I am a man… but all men are dogs.”) No, they aren’t. And fuck you while we are at it.

I don’t want to pretend all men are terrible. I don’t want to believe that all _______ whatever are terrible. The reality is that some percentage sucks and a large percentage is neutral and another percentage is great.

Why would I want to talk to men like him? Why in the hell would I want to talk to men who have experiences in the same ball park as me? Oh… maybe because when I talk to men who have known me for more than 1/3 of my life and I tell them some things about my childhood they can say, “That explains so much of your behavior for the entire time I have known you. I wish I had known earlier. Our entire relationship would have been different.”

I want to be seen. I want to matter. I want to be a full person to the people who know me. I want my story to be in the heads of people who look at me.

I don’t want to just be some chick at a party with a lot of secrets. That isn’t what I want.

I don’t think my life is well served by staying home and crying about how terrible all men are. If I do that I will miss out on a lot of joy. Many of my closest and dearest friends are men. I have no plans to abandon them–even if they say things I don’t like sometimes. I look for patterns of behavior and I have no problem with walking away from relationships that don’t work for me. I have done so over and over and over.

No one has a crystal ball. No one knows how things will play out.

My willingness to share my story has meant that I have gotten to find out the life stories of some incredibly complex and amazing people. I sincerely doubt they would have started sharing if I hadn’t brought things up. I have a list of people I can call in the middle of the night. I have a list of people who say, “If you are freaking out call and babble on my voicemail and I will call you back the second I can.” Many of them are men. Some of them are survivors of some really horrifying things.

Why do I trust them? Do I trust them? Well I will be honest and say that there are some of them I don’t plan to be alone in a room with. But I will sure as fuck call them. We have a great phone relationship. Do I actually think anything bad would happen if I was alone in a room with them? No. But I still don’t think I could do it. I don’t trust all men enough for that. I don’t even trust the men I trust enough for that. Well, maybe alone in a room if people were just on the other side of a door and I was able to scream.

I don’t want to give up on the men I have in my life. Even if other women with ptsd are absolutely certain that my talking to men is self-destructive and stupid. I disagree. And my opinion is the only one that matters about my behavior and life.

I went and talked to this guy and that other guy in the scene after fairly carefully weighing the downsides.

When that asshole Paul who raped me offered to meet to talk with me “even though he didn’t remember” I didn’t take him up on it. There was no upside for me. That would have been straight masochism. So I didn’t go.

I *do* actually try to weigh risk. My life will never be risk-free. I’m not that kind of girl. Harm Reduction not Elimination. Life involves both the risk and the certainty of harm.

I read an interesting article on misogyny in activist spaces. I cannot count how many groups I have left because of men who were extremely aggressive. I just assume they are more interesting to know than I am. That’s why they are kept around.

I feel torn between wanting to isolate myself because I don’t seem to be very good at having relationships and wanting to go out a lot and make a bunch of new connections. I offend people. I make them feel like I think they are bad. I’m not trying to but it happens anyway. Maybe they are better off not knowing me. Maybe I shouldn’t be allowed to speak any more. If I went out and made new connections (new connections are easy) then I could just walk away from my current problems.

Only my problems follow me. I am the cause of my problems, not someone else. It’s really hard to get away from being me.

I left therapy feeling pretty positive. I had a nice visit with a friend afterwards. Now I’m starting to crash emotionally again. I know that I have people who say I can call. But I don’t call much. I rarely call anyone. I assume they don’t actually want to hear from me and they are just telling me I can call because it is an empty gesture. I don’t trust that people actually like me, ever. I think I have fairly good reasons to think that people don’t like me.

But some people do. They come here and visit. Maybe I should do more of that hermit-only-talk-to-people-who-will-jump-my-hurdles thing. At least when people get sick of me and stop coming it isn’t as jarring as no longer being welcome in some space.

I like people. I like being around people. I like socializing. I just don’t feel very comfortable going almost anywhere. Some guy will say some thing and I will be “too sensitive”. Some woman won’t like me and I will spend my time there crying because I am so sorry that I am such a bad person and she doesn’t like me.

Gosh I like my house.

Sometimes people surprise me.

2 Replies

This afternoon I went to have a chat with someone I have known for a long time but I have never known well. I was scared. I wanted to talk to him about not making sexualized comments in my direction.

I started out by asking him if he knew much about me. He knew about my public bdsm play and persona. That’s it. I asked him if he knew much about PTSD. He laughed in that dry “Yes, I have lots of experience” kind of way.

We talked for about an hour. As it so happens he and his wife both have PTSD from unfortunate life experiences. We talked about the difficulty in living with hormonal ups and downs and triggers. We talked about all the god damn crying.

I did not expect to have this go well. Instead I feel like I have someone I can call if I am freaking out.

He was absolutely horrified that I spent three days crying because of something he said. He was trying to be nice. I was very clear that I am not angry with him. I was scared. I didn’t know what would happen to me. I didn’t know if I would be safe.

Women often tell me “not to bother” talking to men like this. Sometimes it blows up in my face. I’m disappointed sometimes. And sometimes I’m not disappointed. Sometimes people far exceed my basic expectations. Sometimes people are down right awesome.

I have survived by skating from one kindness from a stranger to another. It is why I keep asking.

I don’t want to say very much about the conversation because he revealed a lot of very personal details. We traded trauma stories for an hour. He has had a hard life.

I am surprised sometimes because I have low expectations. I keep asking because at heart I am an optimist. I have to believe that the main thing that has kept this race going is that we *do* love one another. We *do* form bonds.

He has known me for more than 1/3 of my life. He didn’t know any of the bad. He was trying as hard as he could to be appropriate and friendly given what he knew. If I want him to change his behavior towards me I have to explain why. So I did.

I think this will go better. *cross fingers*

Body tracking

Leave a reply

Well, I started bleeding. I’m starting to notice a distinct pattern of *flipping out* a couple of days before my cycle. I feel like the last several cycles have gone this way.

Oh shit. I have an appointment with a groin-o tomorrow. Reschedule.

I’m really scared about talking to this guy. I’m pretty sure he won’t give a shit. But I have to try.

Men tell me that when I have an issue with someones behavior I should address it. I really wish it didn’t blow up in my face so hard when I try to take that advice.

And that guy who said he would write a formal apology? Hasn’t done it. I was right about him in the first place. But I was told that I was underestimating him and I should give him a chance.

Because what I really need is more disappointment.

Unschooling

8 Replies

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.

I feel lucky

4 Replies

It’s kind of weird, but with the letter writing I find that I am enjoying Noah’s family quite a bit. I had expected to spend most of my life quaking with terror when I saw his mom’s handwriting on a box. These days I take an intake of breath and prepare to manage the arguments (she sends a mish mash of stuff to “the girls” but often she doesn’t label what goes to whom or there isn’t something obvious in one kid’s size and there are a lot of tears) but I’m grateful to get the boxes. The letters from his grandmother are really nice too. (I got one yesterday. Thus I am thinking about it.)

I have a really good time describing the kids to them. They will never really know my children. They live too far away and don’t have any interest in visiting. *shrug* I have offered. After how many times I have been rebuffed, well, I’m planning a driving trip through there in 2015 and that’s all I’m promising in the next ten years.

Turns out I *totally* didn’t need to move the concrete this week. The dude who is picking up my hot tub came over to scout but he won’t be back for it for two weeks. I feel semi-stupid but really buff and I’m still riding that endorphin high. It was not necessary but I feel like it did measurable good for my body. Which is a little weird. Maybe I should take up weight lifting? I had no idea what a high I could get from that. (Way cheaper than pot–lemme tell you. Since weight lifting I’ve used about 1/2 of what I usually do in that time period. Ok, part of the reason for that is also because I have to go to the dispensary today. But I don’t feel undermedicated. This is nice.)

Yesterday the girls and I had a really great day. Most of our days are perfectly tolerable with some highs and lows. Yesterday was just freakin wonderful. I am so happy that I get to do this with my life.

I went and taught an English class at the Hindi temple. I get the impression that if I want a job teaching English there I can have it for as long as I want. I get the impression I could even negotiate for pay and everyone would be thrilled. (This first class was a test-run of a program that a woman is putting together. I knew it was a volunteer gig and I was cool with that.) Random people came in and asked me if I would provide tutoring. I refrained from committing.

The kids are fun. They are young. The kind of young I DELIBERATELY WENT INTO HIGH SCHOOL TO AVOID. Ahem. I’m forcing them to read Sherlock Holmes. And Grimm Fairy Tales. It’s fun. I’m forcing them to find connections in their lives and write a lot. I feel drunk from the power. 🙂 But apparently the kids are having fun and parents are already asking if I can continue this series during the school year.

My kids are remarkably good while I’m teaching. Shanna sets up “her classroom” on the other side of the room. Next time I am bringing stuffed animals for students. She goes back and forth between her different kinds of toys and “teaches” the “students” how to make things. It’s really fun. Sometimes she has to come and ask me a question about how to teach something and it is more fun than disruptive.

Then we came home for lunch and we waited around while lumber was delivered and the hot tub guy came scouting. Then we went to the water park! I am having so much fun with the girls at the water park. That season pass was the right choice. Both girls went around the lazy river once without a life vest! That’s huge. Then we went and got life vests and things were easier.

Calli begged for macaroni and cheese for dinner. I thought that might make me sick (hilariously I ate a three cheese pasta instead–I just couldn’t handle Kraft then) so we went to Applebee’s. Which is, in Calli’s opinion, the Mac’n’cheese Restaurant! Sure, why not.

I have been a lot more consistent lately with, “You must fulfill your responsibilities before you get your privileges.” I feel that is making the whole house run more smoothly. I’m not an arbitrary asshole deciding if you get stuff on a given day or not. There is a WRITTEN CONTRACT! WITH PICTURES! Things are just easier. Both kids are pitching in more with less fuss. We are still a house of screamers. Sigh. We are working on it.

I’m almost done with Little House in the Big Woods with the kids. Shanna loves it and Calli seems to only pay moderate attention. That’s on target. I haven’t done any personal new reading in weeks. I’m so tired. I can’t wait for July to end. This month is just brutal. My plan for the weekend is to spend as much time painting my neighbor’s fence as I can. Once I get that off my plate, and my friend’s husband is done at my house (I feel zero crankiness at his rate of progress–I think he is a small step down from Godhood for the rate at which he works. I don’t often feel impressed by peoples work ethics. I’m a really judgmental asshole on that front. This man impresses me a lot.) things will calm down again.

I still have more stuff I want to do in the yards but I think once he’s done with his current list I should be done for the year on yard stuff. (Monetarily–not in manual labor.) I need to talk to him about his company doing the bathroom upgrade (that wouldn’t be just him) and then that is all I can do to the house this year. (The bathroom damage from water leaking is obviously spreading now. Ah shit. It is becoming a very bad idea to put off longer. Crap crap crap. Well, good thing I have a well padded savings account.)

I feel so lucky. I have things go wrong. I have things I need to fix. I have things I’m making progress on. I can fix things. I have the money to hire people to fix things. I have the luxury to sit around just making progress on my own lists of things to do. This is not a life path every one gets. I get to decide how my time is used. I feel happy in a way I didn’t expect to feel. I feel so much gratitude for my life.

I think the PTSD support forum helps me keep this in perspective. For someone who has the symptoms I have I have a blessed life. Given how “crazy” I am–I’m doing so very well. I *am* nice to my kids. I *am* nice to my husband. Ok, I get grumpy too. On balance my grumpy days are infrequent, usually not too intense, and I apologize profusely for every word out of my mouth when I can feel that my tone of voice sucks. I know that the problem is inside me and not with anyone else. I am good at separating that.

I feel so incredibly lucky that I get to have a marriage where I can’t blame any of my mood shit on my partner. My husband is so nice to me. He is patient and kind. He is affectionate and loving without being demanding or pushy. Ok, sometimes he’s pushy. But he doesn’t push me for sex. He doesn’t push me to do things I don’t want to do. He pushes me to set higher goals. He pushes me to rest. He pushes me towards believing that I am competent and talented. He only hits me if we negotiate a lot and I ask very very nicely and then he only hits me in ways that I like. (I’m telling you, endorphins are your friend.)

Girls like me don’t end up like this. I am stable. I do my god damn meal planning a month at a time because my life is so stable. Every month when I put a new month on the white board I meal plan for the whole month and I try to invite people for dinner at the rate I like and I set up events for a whole month at a time. We have like a 75% success rate of following these plans. (Ok, I often reverse which order a given set of meals happen in but I don’t feel bad about that. We follow my plan on a month level, not on a day-by-day level.)

I’m going to travel this year to Portland to see friends. It is getting closer. This on top of having a Portland friend come down TWICE this year. That was rad. And a different Portland friend may be down here in about two weeks. I will travel to see the rest of the extended clan. I feel very lucky that I have people who want to see me so much.

And I managed to get in some solid work on Outrunning Suicide this morning. I seem to be alternating between which book I’m writing. OS is very different in tone, feel, and mostly in content from Part 2.

By the end of this year I hope to have another book finished.

Sometimes I feel mighty. I know I can’t do “anything” because I have limits. But I feel like my limits are so far out there that it is almost impossible for me to reach them. I don’t hit the wall very often. I just slow down and keep working.

I have these two amazing daughters. I have to be a mighty example. I have to show them that women are powerful and smart and competent. I have to show them that even if someone is financially a “dependent” that doesn’t make the person weak, ineffectual, lazy or stupid. It just means you have a contract with another person.

I want to be a positive influence so much I feel like I am choking on it. I want to be a person worthy of respect. That means I have to behave in ways that earn respect. I have to be consistent. I don’t have to be perfect.

Where are the lines? What is “good enough”?

I keep looking backwards over my shoulder at the pergola in the back yard. (Apparently that is the most accurate name for what this structure is.) I feel kind of shocked that I wanted something there and… now there is something there. It’s like magic.

In the past week I have given two mini-lectures on the topic of grafting trees. I had no idea I knew so much. But apparently I do. I read a lot. I’m very curious about how things work. I want to be able to do a lot of things. I want to be so competent that it is incredibly hard to kill me–even for me.

Martial arts are coming. Not this month. This month I can barely hold my head above water. Soon.

When I was a child there is no chance I would have believed that I could be a bad ass. According to my wonderful Shanna there is no doubt–I AM a bad ass.

I don’t know everything. I don’t know the right path for other people. I do have a lot of useful skills though. I do know a lot about human development. I do know a lot about the limitations of safety and strength. I do know how to teach. I do know how to break things down into pieces other people can grok. I’m not always good at taking things apart the first time–I need coaxing to keep taking things into smaller and smaller pieces. I can explain almost any topic to almost anyone. But it may take me a few rounds of getting deeper and deeper into the explanation in order to find the correct scaffolding for a given person.

You have to understand schema. It’s the fucking coolest concept.

I am not perfect. I am not ideal. I am not unreservedly good. I am an asshole. I am selfish. I am self-absorbed. I also stop to genuinely look at people and evaluate them–for good or for ill. I like to believe I can see people pretty well. (Not in the needs glasses sense.)

I’m good at guessing that people are underrating themselves. I’m sure I can encourage people towards being their better selves. But only if they can handle my extremely rough form of affection. I’m not sure the trade is actually worth it.

Text has no tone.

2 Replies

No really, I worry about making my friends feel attacked. I don’t really need to alienate people I care about at this stage.

I need you to work and put your daughters in day care because I think my daughters will do that. They will need to ask you questions. They will need to ask you how you did with the mixed emotions you had–because they are really common and I can’t speak to them.

I need you to work and put your daughters in day care because without doing so YOU wouldn’t feel happy or fulfilled. I need you to be who you are. I need to see you in contrast to me so that I can understand where my edges are.

I don’t think you are doing it wrong. I don’t think you are making bad choices. I’m trying to get better about saying that you are doing something that wouldn’t work for me. That’s not because it is problematic.

Have you noticed this whole, “Krissy is crazy” thing? Maybe me not being able to do something isn’t a negative statement about the thing?

I know there is an Attachment Parenting movement and if you read about the Continuum Concept people—whoo boy. There are some extremely “attached”people.

I’m pretty honest with myself that I want this much time and intensity because I am making up for the deficit of being loved and touched that exists inside of me. Every child naturally wants to hug and cuddle and kiss. That is just normal. I wasn’t allowed to do those things as a child without being hurt for the impulse.

I want to stay home with my children because I want hundreds of hours of sitting on the couch with them sleeping on me. I want to be able to stroke their face and watch them exist. I need that time. I need to be able to sit very still and very quiet and just watch them exist and think about the fact that they like me.

When I made the crack about the mothers at the wedding wanting to stick forks in their eyes, that was their words–not mine. I can sort of grok how it would work. I don’t like doing all the physical work for my kids all the time. I get how it can feel annoying, demeaning, mind-numbing, etc.

I have something to prove to me, here. I have to prove that I can stay in one place and take care of someone without neglecting or abusing them. It is very hard sometimes. I feel like a jack ass for saying that.

I got a book on parents who have PTSD for kids. It sounds like it was written to be used by a therapist talking to kids who have parents who manage their symptoms less than I do.

Stopping and being actually aware of the fact that my children have needs is hard for me. I naturally dissociate. I am very depressed a lot of the time. Having to get up and care for my children is difficult for me. But I have to prove to myself that I can do that.

I do not have the self-discipline to schedule a two hour block in the middle of the day to do specific work. I just don’t. I have to have a full day of going from thing to thing or I never get the rhythm. I often miss afternoon engagements because if something starts after I’ve gone mid-way through my day then I can’t handle breaking my flow to go do something else.

I am limited. Everyone is–I’m not acting like I’m the only one with limits. Other people have different limits though.

I don’t think that mothers should have this freakish need to earn their childrens love. I don’t think it is psychologically healthy or anything. I’m just willing to be honest that it is where I am. I think people who are secure enough in being loved to share the care of their children have nothing to be ashamed about. I think that is probably what people should be shooting for in terms of mental health.

When Shanna asks me questions about her mothering in the future I don’t in any way shape or form tell her that she should expect to take care of her kids. I have told her that when you have kids you need to make sure that your kids will be safe and loved. If that means their mom stays home, ok. (Shanna pretty regularly says she would rather have a wife over a husband–she’d rather earn the money and have her wife stay home, ok.) If that means their dad stays home, ok. If that means both parents work and the children need alternative day care, ok. They are perfectly valid paths through life. But you will need to ask working moms for advice because I won’t be able to tell you how to manage that. Good thing we know lots of them!

I can’t teach my kids how to be everything. They have to know people who are different from me. That means people need to make choices that have no resemblance to mine.

I know that when I talk about myself I do not always use qualifiers. I don’t always say “This would be bad FOR ME” sometimes I just say, “This would be a bad choice.” I know that I sound rabid and hateful.

It is hard sometimes to make choices that seem very different from my friends. It feels like I am doing something bad and wrong. So when I talk to myself about it I am very emphatic about why it is not a good choice for me. I don’t mean to hurt anyone else. I don’t really know how else to talk to me. I can’t always evaluate whether something is in abstract a good and worthy thing I can only evaluate whether it is appropriate for me. And I sound harsh as I do so.

There is a big difference between how I evaluate things for me and how I evaluate things for other people. For me I am quick, decisive, snotty and harsh. I have to have a really firm grasp on my limits. Or I will be unable to function. If I try things that work for other people just because it works so well for them I will fuck myself over. Because I do not have that persons situation and resources.

That doesn’t mean that other people need to care or change based on my limits.

I have a husband who is able to go out and make obscene amounts of money. He is very cheerful about supporting me. That is a rather unusual privilege. Not that many people are capable of earning as much money as Noah does. That changes my whole buffet of choices right there.

But I am not an income earning person. I may never be. That means when my working women friends tell me that I deserve time off every day… well… I might agree in the abstract…

There is no right. There is no deserve. There is no should. There just is.

I know I am all melodramatic in writing and such. I know that I have bad days and I have gotten much more explicit in writing about them as the years have gone by. That isn’t because they have gotten worse–it is because I have developed the language.

I like my life. I like the choices I am making. I feel like I will be proud of myself as an old woman. I will feel like I did good things with my life. I did not waste very much of the time I had all things considered.

When you have chronic, severe mental illness you waste a lot of time. You spend a lot of time staring at the wall feeling bad and being unable to do… anything.

I work in weird spurts and starts all day with the kids. We get a lot done but not in a predictable way. We work then sit down to snuggle. Then work then break to play. Then work then go to the water park. Then work then read. What kind of work we do and how much time it takes varies a lot. I am not good at saying, “From 12-2 we will do ______”.

I have constant anxiety about the long list of projects I’m not making enough forward progress on. But getting me out of my anxiety is not as simple as providing childcare. That just means I don’t have to pull myself up by my bootstraps and look functional in front of my kids.

I think I am afraid that if no one is watching I am a clock that winds to a stop.

I wouldn’t have offered to paint the fence if I didn’t have little kids who need to meet everyone in the neighborhood. So the fucking kids need to figure out how to behave so I can finish painting. Ahem. (They aren’t actually being a problem. That was a random hyperbole sort of expletive.)

I know that a body needs rest. I understand that people who tell me that it would be ok if I paid someone for two hours a day of watching reruns mean to be supportive of the health of my body.

That doesn’t mean I am in a space psychologically to make the same priority list. Does that mean I am wrong and I should change to be more like other people? Maybe. I don’t know. But I know that what I am doing right now is putting my head down and just getting through. And it is working.

I have never met a mother who is without hard days. They happen. They are part of life. I don’t think I should be trying to get out of having them. I need to learn how to manage them. I manage them differently than other people for a lot of reasons. Is what I am doing ok? I don’t know. I honestly don’t. I just know that it is what I am doing.

Please continue telling me when you feel I am attacking you. I am not trying to. I want to know if I do so in my ridiculous self-obsessed rambling. You are not my enemy. I have no reason to attack you. I do not want to do so blindly.

I don’t want you to feel bad about what you are doing. You are making the choices that are right for you. Even if I individually might second guess some choices I wouldn’t overall presume to think that I know what is right for your life. I don’t actually have that much hubris.

I get too much wrong for me.

That was so nice.

4 Replies

We went to a wedding yesterday. It was a gathering of people I have known through the bdsm community for most of my adult life. Many of the people there I met when I was eighteen or nineteen.

These were the people who were the honored elders when I arrived in the first place. These were my Old Guard people in the leather community. These are the people who set the parameters of my world. These are the people who taught me about communication and negotiation and doing what you WANT to do.

These are the people who taught me how to manage life as a masochist–how do you find people to beat the shit out of you without sending you to a hospital? These are the people who taught me how to be ethical in my sluttery. I stopped sleeping with people who were cheating because of people in the room yesterday.

It wasn’t the entire Who’s Who of my cultural indoctrination but it was a lot of the main people. A lot of the biggest influences were there.

Do you know how they responded to me changing so much? I was told over and over what a good mother I am.

I nearly cried. I care so much about their opinion. I shouldn’t–I know I am not supposed to care about what anyone thinks of me. But these are the people who taught me my first lessons towards being a grown up. And they think I am doing well.

These kind of random moments are the closest I will have to having the feeling that parents or authority or whatever else feels like I am good.

I want so badly to feel like I am a good mother. I’m kind of banking on it this lifetime. That is my only path to the kind of relationship intensity I want.

I talked to a variety of mothers yesterday all of whom said, “Oh my God I couldn’t wait to get back to work. I love my kids but spending all day with them made me want to stick forks in my eyes.”

I don’t feel that. When I think of how many days I am going to be able to just be with my kids I feel this intense joy. This feeling of thank goodness I won’t have to be alone.

Having a job is different. Being a teacher was lonely. I had horrible loneliness as a teacher. I always know how much of myself I had to hide as a teacher.

I don’t tell my kids details about myself as a child because at this stage they don’t care and wouldn’t be able to process those details and it wouldn’t do good things for their lives. But I feel in me a sense of waiting. Someday they will be adults. They will be allowed to read books about my life. They will be able to know me for good or for ill.

My children will have the experience of me they have and then they will get to find out the back story. I have to wait for an appropriate time–which is hard–but I don’t feel invisible. I don’t feel unimportant. I don’t feel like what happened to me didn’t matter I feel like this isn’t the time to talk about it. With teaching it would never have been appropriate. That was much harder.

I don’t do very well with handling the fact that a large segment of the population likes to just pretend that “people like me” don’t exist.

Validation is one of the most potent drugs in the world. I have spent my entire life feeling unredeemably bad. I was bad so early that there is no way to change. All of the kids were told all of my life that they couldn’t play with me because I wasn’t a good influence. I wasn’t good to be around.

I was beaten and raped if I didn’t have sex willingly whenever I was told to. When I did have sex willingly there was a huge backlash and many people would shun me and punish me.

I really like this monogamy business. I feel like it is my armor against those expectations.

One guy yesterday rained on my parade. Really he is one of the people who makes me feel unsafe a lot at those parties. I don’t think he would rape me. But I do think he would do things before I could react and say no. Things like hold a knife to my throat because he thinks it is hot.

Yesterday he leaned over my chair and whispered into my ear, “You are so hot I should drag you off to the coat closet.”

I completely froze. I stared at the floor and did not respond again until he walked away. I didn’t want to make a scene. I didn’t want to be a problem.

I am so fucking tired of this shit. I have kind-of-sorta played with that man in the past. When I was younger and I believed that a bottom has to bottom to all the tops in the room and I practiced a puppy-pile approach towards bdsm he and I played. It has been many many many years. A minimum of eight years. I think longer than that.

Ok, I just emailed the bride and asked about dude’s email address. I need to talk to him. I need to tell him to back the fuck off. I don’t seem to be able to do it in the moment.

Did I think he was actually going to drag me off and do things I didn’t want him to do? No. The consequences are too high. He’s not stupid. He is a former police officer. He knows how to only do things when he won’t get caught.

That doesn’t actually make me feel safer. It makes me feel sick to my stomach. I’m aware “he meant it as a compliment.”

A FUCKING COMPLIMENT IS “THAT’S A NICE DRESS” NOT “YOU LOOK HOT ENOUGH TO DRAG OFF.”

The fact that he is a former police officer actually makes me feel significantly less safe. I don’t see how police officers usually follow the rules. And LAPD has a serious rape problem. Being a police officer doesn’t imply that someone has a higher set of moral values. It may just mean you are a fucking bully who likes to pick on people.

He said that less than half an hour before I left. I didn’t really want to stay after that.

If wearing the dress I had made for Jenny’s wedding and red lipstick makes me someone who all of a sudden should be dragged off to a coat closet and raped maybe I should never dress that way again. Maybe it was stupid. Maybe it would be all my fault if something bad had happened. See–I was dressed in a way that encouraged it.

(I had a very modest dress made. Give me a break.) I may be done with wearing red lipstick outside the house.

Sometimes I think it is very funny that I study Muslim guidelines for women and I try to somewhat follow them. Maybe if I were more hidden I would be left alone. Don’t attract attention in public. It’s dangerous. If I didn’t think it would confuse the shit out of people I would just start covering my hair full time. I don’t want to have to talk about why I want to do it.

I am tired of men looking at me and evaluating whether or not they want to fuck me right now and then TELLING ME AS IF I SHOULD FUCKING CARE.

So most of the wedding was lovely. And then there was this asshole. Story of my fucking life.

I’m happy that people have sex drives. I’m ok with talking with them in the abstract about stuff they like (I’ve been in sex communities for a long time) but I’m really past the point of feeling personally responsible for other peoples sex drives and I want to be left out of it.

Why is that so much to ask?

Must be said.

1 Reply

I vent my feelings here because, in general, I can’t talk about my feelings out loud. Small pitchers have big ears and all that. I’m not trying to needle people or cause anyone to feel guilty.

When people need a break from me I am genuinely ok with that. Do I feel sad, yes. But I have a lot of respect for people learning how to say, “I can’t handle this right now.” I hope people come back after their breaks. I don’t chase people down and beg them to be my friend because I consider that a frightful waste of energy and I have enough shit to do.

But if someone decides they were mad enough to need a break but not mad enough to not want to know me… that’s really nice. That feels like maybe I have redeeming value. It feels like maybe I don’t deserve All The Awful.

Sometimes friends come back. I try hard not to uhm emote in a way that will additionally drive people away. I may have done ok this time. That’s good.

Cryptic shit is cryptic. Some people decided they weren’t mad enough to stop speaking to me permanently. That feels good. Good timing too. I have to be kind of a tornado of productivity starting in 4, 3, 2, 1…..

No right answer.

2 Replies

I don’t know the right thing to do right now. It’s 8:40 in the morning. It is nearly late enough that it is civilized enough to go knock on doors. Back up. You don’t know what is going on.

Last week the kids played “driver”. They drained the battery in the van. Again. I have had a vague awareness of it but no need to go anywhere so I didn’t get around to dealing with it. Today we have a birthday party at 11 for one of the kids in the homeschool group. But it is, of course, a long drive from our house. So. All of a sudden it matters that I have a non-functional vehicle.

The kids arrived back from the Godmamas at 7:30. The screaming began almost instantly.

Noah and I tried to jump the van using the Prius. It didn’t work. We spent a lot of energy trying because we both got frustrated and were irritated and keeping the kids from sparking themselves took work and ugh.

All through this my youngest has been intermittently screaming at me I WANT TO GO TO THE BIRTHDAY PARTY. Yes, well you bloody well drained the battery. It isn’t my bloody fault. Only you can’t say that.

At one point I sent Calli to her room for screaming at me then I went in my room and shut the door and just slid to the floor and cried.

It doesn’t help that I’ve been crying since 5am.

I am not having a great self esteem day. At this point getting the car in functional order will require some jumping through of hoops. No, I don’t have AAA. I could knock on doors until I find someone who is home who will come jump start me. (Not as bad of an option as it sounds–I like my neighbors and a lot of them are home during the day.) I could take the wagon to the auto parts store and get my own damn charger. I could just punt on deciding and figure that I will see my next door neighbor some time soon and then I will grab him. Until then my kids just have to suck it the fuck up that they broke the car. (This isn’t the first time and I keep asking them to leave that switch alone.)

Is this where natural consequences come in? Am I punishing them overly by not wanting to jump through a bunch of hoops to fix a problem they created?

I feel very tired and sad. Today is my brother’s birthday. The one who is still alive. He is turning 39, I believe. I hope he has a good day. I hope that he has found some joy in life.

I feel thin and weak and lethargic. I feel ghostly and ghastly. I feel stupid and irrational.

So. Fucking. Irrational.

Stop feeling you stupid bitch. Just get up and work. There are things to do. You should be arranging for other people to get what they want.

I want to hide in my room between the bed and the wall and cry. I don’t want to move very much. I just want to hide. I want to cut. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. My angry mouth is hard to live with. Noah is finally showing some wear on dealing with my ambient anger. I really need to be more quiet.

The best way I know to be quiet is to cut. Because then all day when I feel tempted to speak I just put my thumb on the wound and push. Then my brain is flooded with chemicals and I don’t want to talk any more. Cutting allows me to feel cocooned in a world of my own little chemicals. The idea of connecting with another person is so foreign and alien and distant. Why would I do that? I need to stay over here. See, I have blood. Don’t touch me. Blood is a contaminent. No one should touch me.

It is weird thinking that being a cutter is a perfectly reasonable choice. I just don’t want to be the one who models it for my kids. Maybe if I knew how to have more body privacy I would just start again, but I’m naked in front of my kids too much. We aren’t really a modest house.

I feel obligated to show up at the party. People would like us there. My kids would like to be there. But my kids keep doing things to make my life much harder. Sometimes the energy of making it over an extra hump just isn’t worth it. Could I fix this problem? Oh sure. But it takes work. And right now I don’t feel like I want to do that work.

I need to make ricotta cheese and lasagna and cheese enchiladas. I *have* a bunch of work to do today. If going to the birthday party just took the number of hours it takes for the birthday party (roughly four hours with driving) it would already be a lot of work for one day. I have already put an hour of the day into trying to jump start the car. If I spend another one to two hours on that and then spend four hours at the party and then have to take Shanna to ballet and then have to make dinner (I suppose I could put off the ricotta and lasagna making but the milk will go bad if I don’t use it and we are scheduled to be out of the house for the next several days in a row and…)

Are my needs important or not? Does it matter or not that this could become a 6-8 hour affair in order to go to this party? I’m not up for that right now. I feel bad. I feel like I “Just don’t care” about people but that isn’t it. I have actual work to do. The alternative is paying money to other people so they can do my work for me. So that I can go to a party. At some point that circular privilege logic has to have an end.

I’m staying home. We’ll miss people but at this point in time I wouldn’t have fun at the party. I would be angry with my children and I’d be nasty the whole time. I’m already tired and sad.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my feelings about groups. If a group existed before me and will exist after me with no change whether or not I am there… I don’t want to be part of the group. There is no space for me. I am not needed. Noah says it is a very non-Chinese thought. I don’t want to be just the second daughter. I don’t want to be just the person who is currently doing some thing but it doesn’t matter because someone else will be there soon.

Apparently I would rather stay home and cry. Ok, that isn’t what I will actually do all day. It’s just what I did all morning. I will work. I will get things done.

I like house work. It is real work and it is in my home and only I care or don’t care if it is done so I am not really trying for anyone else’s approval. I want to make fucking cheese. Yes, I could buy it in a store. In fact, yesterday in the store Noah asked me if I wanted to buy it. I said no. I want to fucking make it. I’ve never made cheese before. I want to make it. I want to understand how. I want to have done it. If I don’t do it today, then when? Why do I have to wait? Because you would rather be idly amused by my presence?

But I’m not very amusing. I’m sad and withdrawn. I feel like anything I might say will be wrong.

Noah does a lot of playing devil’s advocate. I understand why he does it. Some times I even concede that he is right. (The new New York law that raises annoying police officers to a felony includes that someone must *know* that the person is a police officer and *touch* the officer. Ok, that’s more reasonable than my original hysteria indicated. He made me read the text instead of the spin.) Sometimes it hits wrong. Sometimes it feels like the only thing he ever does is pick every side but mine. Because I have to always be wrong. Because I am stupid and irrational. I don’t think Noah believes I am stupid. I do think he believes I am irrational and he is sometimes not very nice about expressing it.

I think I have spent my entire life praying for someone who would be on my side. Noah seems to think that it means mindlessly agreeing with me no matter what I say. I don’t think that is true. I wouldn’t pick the friends I pick if I just wanted people to yes ma’am me. Noah rarely feels on my side. Most of the time he feels like an apathetic observer who isn’t interested in being on a side but he is sure going to tell me how stupid my side is even though the other side isn’t better.

I miss cutting. I was much better at keeping my stupid mouth shut when I was cutting. Better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt. I was told that a lot as a kid.

I’ve been thinking about how often through my life I have been told to be quiet. When I was little my cousins had friends who would trade off who had to pay me to be quiet. They couldn’t stand me talking and couldn’t find another way of shutting me up. There has always been the canonical “Go to your room.” When we had twelve people sharing a five bedroom house I had my own room because no one was interested in hearing me speak.

My Owner went to work to avoid me. Puppy screamed at me to shut up because I sound just like his bitch mother. My ex-fiance would just mutter under his breath.

Sometimes I feel so uncomfortable I want to use a potato peeler to take my skin off. Surely things would be better without this shell. It doesn’t fit.

I try hard to not talk around the kids about “inappropriate” things. Basically anything I care about or that causes me strong emotion. Like prostitutes being shot in Texas. That’s ok there. I don’t talk to my children about that. I shouldn’t talk to Noah either. He doesn’t really want to hear about it.

There is a lot of bad in the world. People filter out however much of it they have to in order to keep moving. The only way I know to filter it out is to get off the internet and be away from pretty much any grown ups.

I don’t filter out the same things as Noah. He feels untouched by a lot of bad that feels very personal to me. He wants it filtered out. He’s not interested. It isn’t his problem. This is why I feel like I could have wandered off to do the lesbian separatist thing. I know there are women who are unwilling to discuss womens issues. They don’t go off and join lesbian separatist groups. He feels like not-my-culture, not-my-tribe in ways that are very hard and scary sometimes. I feel so very alone. I am not his tribe. I’m not a geek. Not really. I don’t ascribe to their values.

I think he has the right to live in an environment that does not include ambient anger that makes him uncomfortable. I just don’t know how to deal with the fact that it seems like the answer is either making sure I am not in the environment or I am not speaking.

I haven’t cried in the last twenty minutes. Maybe I can handle going into the kitchen and getting started on work. The day is a wasting. I can’t tell if I should water the yard or not. We had just a smattering of rain.

Can’t be all bad.

Leave a reply

I don’t seem to be good at maintaining intense long-term relationships. But I do have relationships.

Yesterday we had lunch with two lovely ladies from our community. They are both grandmothers who do not have local grand babies and they have a lot of love and energy to spare. I feel grateful to know them. I have known one for about six years now and the other is newer to our lives.

Yesterday my friend came to dinner. He is a good friend. He is a complicated friend. I’ve known him for thirteen years. We have been lovers and play partners. I have hurt him and he has hurt me. We have been vulnerable together. We have created magick together. Now we have an entirely vanilla platonic relationship and he is great with my kids.

Pam is having anxiety and I stepped in it so she is avoiding me along with the paper she doesn’t want to write. I hope she comes back. I think she will. She has been my good friend for fourteen? fifteen? something like that years. She knows my gentle pokes about finishing this stage are only about love. Her culture uses a lot more pressure than I do. I’m pretty sure this one isn’t on the final knell.

But every time there is a lapse or a pause or anything I have to be prepared. I have to harden my heart every time. Because I don’t know when will be the last time I speak to her again. If I allow myself to worry too much about her loving me then I will cease to function. Our relationship is too distant and occasional. I cannot need her. If I have need for her it will go unmet and I will just have to suck it the fuck up.

I am allowed to feel attached to people who are in a space with me and behaving in a positive manner towards me. If someone is not with me then I need to make the assumption that (s)he will behave in the manner that is suitable to them and there may be little overlap with what would be positive for me. That has to just be ok. I am not in every space. Every space does not have to conform to me.

I can’t feel like I need to have influence over things I am not a part of. It has to be none of my business. But that way madness lies. I am deeply concerned about people and things around me.

Shanna has been asking me “how do you know if a question is rude?” Ha. You don’t know until you have stepped in it. Life sucks that way. Some people will try and tell you that there are hard and fast rules but they are wrong. There are *no* hard and fast rules for what is polite or not.

People can ask me “rude” questions that I don’t find rude at all. I would rather be asked the questions that bother other people than the questions that make other people feel comfortable.

People differ.

I can’t be all bad. For all my existential angst I am having a bloody hard time carving out alone time because people want to see me. (I’m not complaining. I have to say no to some invitations and that’s something I have to learn. Please keep inviting me to things. It is good.)

I don’t know how to have boundaries around my energy very well. Sometimes going out is a massive drain of energy. Sometimes it is a source of energy. I also have “Don’t fail in public” energy reserves I keep around. I’m very worried about saving face. Because I know that fucking up in public is dangerous.

That tendency scares the shit out of me. I don’t like secrets. I don’t like feeling like I am skulking off to do terrible things out of the sight of other people.

That’s why I pretty much instantly confess my sins to you, oh internet. I’m not alone. I have terabytes of company.

I have two kids who want me to pull them out of the sticker puddle. Gotta go.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Category Archives: boundaries

Just another whinging Friday

Caved.

Walking on eggshells

This is why I have a therapist.

feelings exploding.

do what you can do

Piercing the veil.

brain dump

Not so good at the whole “boundaries” thing.

Sometimes people surprise me.

Body tracking

I feel lucky

Text has no tone.

Must be said.

No right answer.

Can’t be all bad.