Category Archives: chosen family

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……

Walking on eggshells

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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?

Oh no.

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If you are familiar with EduKink then you should know that Iain, one half of that team, passed away yesterday.

Today will be a day for tears. He was kind, giving, and loving. He provided education, mentorship, and wisdom to hundreds of people embarking on their path through life. I feel like a big piece of the puzzle of life just fell out. There is a big hole. Oh no.

My leather mom is now bereft of her partner. I am so sorry.

Goodbye, old friend

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But you’re not sexist or racist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or I stay home. Alone.

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

I’ll stay home.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think this is what self-care is?

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

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

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

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

I think today will move very slowly.

Everything must be bad

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There is a diner in town we go to for breakfast. Noah went there regularly even before I moved in, so we have gotten to know the staff. The two main servers have been the same for more than ten years. We have kind of a special relationship with the woman, who is probably around my mom’s age. Her grandkids live out of state so she quite dotes on my girls. Towards the end of today I got up the nerve to ask her to go do something social with me and the girls. We are going to go to tea in Niles for Shanna’s birthday later in the month. It will be really nice.

Talking to her is kind of a mixed bag. I have been crying a lot after eating there recently. I am so fucking jealous of her relationships with her children. Recently her youngest daughter decided to do a city hall wedding, last minute, with her partner of almost seven years. My friend was so excited. Her daughter allowed her to do all the doting and the silliness and traditional stuff that she desperately wanted to do but her daughter didn’t exactly want. Today we talked about how excited she is that this summer she gets to spend her oldest daughter’s birthday with her this year and she hasn’t done that in a long time. She has been very sad about that. I haven’t spent a birthday with my mom since I turned 18. I never will again.

I seem to be working hard to ensure I won’t have family at all some day. I hope I don’t fuck things up with Noah and Shanna and Calli like I do with everyone else. I ran Sarah off. I ran Alex off. I ran Andrew off. I ran Julia off. That is all in the last year. I told Noah this morning that part of why I asked him for monogamy is because I’m afraid that he will come home from a date to find me dead. I keep making it harder and harder for him to stay with me.

I’m just not worth the effort. I’m too angry. I’m too mean. I know. I drove my family away. I chose to send out a nasty message to every member of my family basically telling them to fuck off. I’m really glad I have therapy today because I would kind of like to walk in front of a bus before anyone else can leave me. I don’t know why this is so bad right now. I have nothing more to give. Why would anyone want to know me?

I know why Shanna and Calli want me. I understand that for them I am still a fucking need. They would never be whole people if I died now. That would hang over them and poison their entire lives and I am not that selfish. I don’t know why today is so hard. I have been sleeping. I’m eating. I really really really don’t need more exercise than I am getting. I’m up to running (just over 5 mph consistently) at least 12 miles a week and it is about to start increasing dramatically. I’m walking 5-10 miles a week with the kids. I really don’t need more fucking exercise. I have the house at such a state where I can clean it from top to bottom in three hours. No matter how untidy it is I have a system for doing a basic pick up in about thirty minutes. The kids are both being loving and sweet and remarkably agreeable. We are in a honey moon phase. Why do I want to kill myself? My mommy calls me a liar. I must be a piece of shit. I wish that wasn’t enough. I wish I didn’t care what she thought. I really do.

Everything is in the right place. My life is really as set up as it is going to be for the next few years. I feel like everything but me is perfect. Someone better than me should be in my place. Someone who is not spiteful and bitchy. Someone who doesn’t burst into tears just because some woman in a diner loves her kids. I feel so deeply unlovable. So worthless. Noah seems to love me. I don’t understand why. I understand the girls loving me. That is a biological self-defense mechanism. They want to god damn survive and I am their ticket to doing so. But it’s deeper than that. They are part of me. Just as I am part of my mother. And I can’t have her any more. I feel like I am on the road to ending up like my step-mom. She overdosed on heroin in the bath tub. At her funeral everyone said they couldn’t understand why she did it. They thought she was perfectly happy. She told me she wasn’t. She talked to me about being depressed. Given that her mother went through a long and messy battle with cancer and all the things in her life that bothered her I perfectly understand why she did. Perfectly.

I can’t let Noah date because he would find some nice secondary who would appear to me to be better than me in every way and he would come home to find me dead. Obviously this person is better to spend time with, so why don’t you do more of that. It’s not right. It’s not true. I suppose in this objective way. That is how it feels to me. I want him to go find someone better than me because he deserves someone better than me.

I’m having a lot of trouble with sex. I feel like he married me because I was so enthusiastic about sex and I was so enthusiastic about sex because I am deeply broken and I seem to have settled into this entirely asexual motherhood thing. In our marriage vows we specifically did not promise monogamy because I didn’t think either of us would ever do such a thing. Now I’m threatening to kill myself if he dates. To be fair, I never did that. I didn’t tell him I thought about such things while he was out on dates because it wouldn’t be fair. Why would he need to know that kind of thing? It’s emotional blackmail. I should just shut the fuck up already. I feel like writing these things in my head is a form of bullying. People who love me will feel bad. I don’t think I currently have anyone in my life who actually wants me to hurt. And I have friends. I have awesome friends.

Being an orphan is fucking hard. When I went to the grief ritual I met a woman who runs an adoption support group. I told her that I wasn’t officially adopted so I don’t count. She told me that I have absolutely been abandoned by my family of origin so I count. I think I should send her an email about that. They even meet on Monday nights and that is my night off. Done.

I feel like maybe the next big task in my life is for me to find things that I love about myself. All I see is the bad and the not good enough. Surely I do something to a degree that I am satisfied with. Even when I look at my cat, whom I rescued before her eyes were open–I am the only mama she knows. I bottle fed her and taught her how to eat food. I taught her to talk; her meows pattern on mine. Right now when I look at her I feel guilty. I am not affectionate enough. I don’t let her sit on my lap as much as she wants. I don’t clean her litter box until she yells at me. I just don’t think about it. Even though I have had her for fourteen years. I’m a self-absorbed asshole. Why don’t I take better care of her? She is a really nice cat and she has very rarely made any trouble. But I don’t clean her box until I have to and I resent her as I do it. That is what I see when I look at myself. All I do is resent everything. Every good in my life I make bad. I dislike myself for my ingratitude and hostility and resentment. Why the fuck can’t I just be grateful that my life is better now? Why do I still whine all the god damn time about things that are over?

My garage is really cool. I did a lot of really fun things here. I should feel proud of myself. Mostly what I feel is shame because I am so far removed from what is in my head. What it could be if I had more time and money. That kind of thing. I can make anything bad. Everything I do is a symbol of how I failed to do something better. Is that perfectionism? I don’t know. Noah says that I use the fact that I can find one person better than me at doing every specific task to prove that I am a loser. He argues with me a lot about my self-esteem. I’m worried about wearing him out.

I keep feeling reminded of my lack of earning potential. My life isn’t worth much to anyone. If Noah gets sick of me my life would dramatically change. It would be very hard because I’m about as dependent as a person can be. From here on out I have no source of income or any potential source of income. And I’m asking him to buckle down and stop getting a whole bunch of the perks of living with a sexual abuse survivor. I’m not doing the ridiculous promiscuous sex any more. Why in the hell would he stay? I feel like a leech. I feel like I will never be able to pay him back for how hard it is to put up with me. I feel so god damn mean.

But if I am so god damn mean how come people stop me on a regular basis to tell me that they enjoy hearing me interact with my children? But if I was so god damn mean I might run four chosen family and my entire biological family out of my life in a year. I’m that talented.

Today is going to be a long and hard day.

Family and friends

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I think today is the day to finally write about how I feel about “family” I think that will involve a lot of changes in perception in my head. I’m going to have to wrap my heart around how alone I feel. It’s a question of definitions. I have a lot of friends. I have fiercely loyal friends. I am blessed and lucky in my friends. It’s different. People don’t return to me as the default experience of “of course you have to be with your family on this day.” That means I’m not family. I am not invited. I am not part of your family. “Oh, you could come if you asked” is not being part of the family. No one is doing anything wrong or bad. I’m not angry. I’m just not part of your family. That’s ok. That is life. Not everyone is family. I kind of feel like this focus on “chosen family” is because the word “friend” is used for people you have barely met. We have lost the experience of having acquaintances.

I’m aware that I have had a lot of extreme thinking for the past few days. I’m aware that this feels much worse to me than usual because that is just the mood swing I am in. People spend holidays with me when they “don’t go home”. People spend time with me rather be alone, yes. People spend time with me. They spend time on their “hang out with friends” days rather than their “hang out with family” days. I have a rotating queue of people who spend a holiday or two with me before going back to their families.

Why do I think that people are my friends instead of my family? Because I have spent very little time with most people and I unable to usefully predict how they might feel, talk, or act in any useful way. I almost always feel uncomfortable because I have no way to predict how that person might feel about things I might say and do so I am always tense. I don’t know what I’m allowed to say. I really hate how people tell me that I don’t censor. You have no fucking idea how much I censor. Noah gets more of it than any one else. After tipping the bucket he is getting a lot less of my internal monologue than usual and he can tell. It’s weird how good he is at reading me.

(Side note: I feel like I am going to start using the phrase “tipping the bucket” a lot to talk about tests of trust. A friend told me a cool analogy: trust is like water dripping into a bucket. When there isn’t much water in the bucket it is hard to spill water out if the bucket tips a little. If the bucket is full it is easy to dump water out.)

Anyway.

I’m not very good at expressing my needs on a day to day basis. I will work myself to exhaustion and tears before asking for help. My experience of life is that there isn’t much point in asking for help. If I ask for help it is because I am fairly desperate. That’s not always true. I usually only ask for help if I am ok with being told “no.” If I need to hear “yes” then I am fucked. I can’t ask because I can’t deal with possible rejection. The issue is too important to me. I can’t risk being told that my needs aren’t important. So I won’t ask for help. Until I’m in a bad spot and then it all comes out in a rush and people can’t really help me even if they want to—it’s too late.

Noah is willing to flat out tell me all the ways in which I am hard to get to know. I am very picky and specific about a wide variety of topics and life situations. He can fucking list things off. He knows how to make me feel comfortable because he has taken the time to learn. I don’t have that with anyone else. It feels very much like he is the first person in my life to know me. It’s bittersweet. I don’t expect my friends to know my “triggers” or care. But I will start avoiding people if they hit too many of my triggers.

It has taught me what family means.

Shanna is so polite because I model that all day long. We are both quick to ask to help one another. We are both quick to get up and do something for someone else. I teach Shanna how I want to be spoken to. It means that she knows how to get under my skin, of course. She generally doesn’t want to though. She likes how I treat her. She wants to be nice to me. I like how she treats me and I want to be nice to her. Even when I’m feeling not-nice. I feel safe with asking her to do things for me. Of course they are stupid, little things. “Will you please get me a diaper?” She often just does it. It’s not like I want everyone to follow me around fetching for me.

That’s not it. Family is full of people who understand one another’s needs and try to meet them just because they want to. Just because there is a long history of mutual support and care. Needs are quirky things. Everyone is sensitive in different ways and to different degrees. With your family you don’t have to constantly be defensive and give the long stupid story about why you are defensive. You get to just relax and know that people won’t say ________________. I’m hard to get to know. It takes a long time before I trust people enough to give them all of my stupid defensive stories. Mostly I just get my feelings hurt and figure it is my problem and other people don’t give a shit. I don’t give people the opportunity to know me.

I don’t think I will ever have family beyond Noah, Shanna, and Calli because I don’t think there will ever again be anyone who considers my house their home. I think I am too hard to live with. I am too difficult to get to know and I blow up when people get things wrong too many times. I don’t blame people for not continuing a close relationship with me. People want to drop in to my life. They want the highlights. They don’t want the grinding need. I understand. I don’t either. But opting out makes it a friendship, not family. Which isn’t to say that I think my family should or could meet all of my needs. They are not responsible for doing so. Full stop. But they have a good idea of what my needs are and they help me have the space to take care of myself. I know that a lot of people don’t like to define their relationships the way I do. They need to let things be fluid. That is how they set their expectations so they can have a happier life. I have to define my relationships so that I can set my expectations. That is how I can have a happier life.

Depending on people is a bad choice for me, by and large. I can depend on random one off acts of kindness from people who are strangers. If I scream out my need into the void there are enough people who want to do random acts of kindness that I get a remarkable amount of help. My friends are generous and wonderful people.

I really have good friends. They try very hard. Dear god I don’t understand why they try so hard. They give me what they have to spare. I know that I am lucky. It’s a bittersweet kind of lucky. I get to know the kind of people who have family. I get to hear about it. I get to see what kind of amazing people come out of families. I get to see what I am trying to create for my children. I have wonderful models in my life. I am so grateful to have them. My friends come through in consistent ways when I ask them to. My friends show up when I invite them—most people are even shockingly punctual. I have the best friends a person can have. They really care about me and work very hard to understand me. But I am an alien creature. They don’t get me and they probably never will. They love me any way. I am very lucky.

I think, given how much I plan to shelter from my kids, Noah will be the only person who ever gets me. And I’m not sure that he does. People often comment on how not-sarcastic Noah and I are with one another. We both heavily use sarcasm with other people but not with one another. No. I don’t want to deal with sarcasm in my family. In my family I know that people will speak the truth to me the best they can at all times. That does not include mocking me. Ok, we have our moments—they are deliberately rare.

What does family look like to me? What do I see in my head when I think of the word “family”? I see comfort. I feel the anxious ball in my stomach relax. I know I am allowed to take up space here. I don’t have to carefully count how many words I have said because I have to “leave time” for the other person to talk because we will only spend about six hours in one another’s company this year. I can say all of the things I want to say instead of only the things I think this person wants to hear. I am allowed to cry whenever I need to. I don’t need to worry about “socially appropriate” times because it makes other people feel uncomfortable. In my family people know that I am sad and I cry sometimes. In my family it is ok that I like to talk a lot because we all talk a lot and we all take turns listening because we have enough time to talk that we don’t have to rehearse in our head while we pretend to listen. That is a weird sentence. I have so many words in my head. It requires a lot of talking before I get to the still place where I can really listen to someone. Here in my home with my family I talk and talk and talk until I find the still space. Then I can really hear Noah. I can listen to minutiae of computer stuff and not feel angry. He is trying to involve me in his thinking process not his hobby. He doesn’t care that I don’t share his hobby. He wants to think out loud and I like being his black-box-in-life. I want to know everything that goes on in his head. That is family to me.

Family knows which facial expression goes with which topic in your head. I am told constantly how hard I am to read. I’m difficult to predict. My mother complained constantly about having to walk on egg shells. You have to be careful around me. If you aren’t careful I will stop holding back and I’ll tell you how I really feel. Do you know why people have to walk on egg shells? Because they don’t want to know how I really feel. They want a polite masquerade. They want to have a relationship with the nice and patient side of me.

The problem is that with my friends I decide how much energy I have to go spare and I see them only when I have that much energy left to give to someone. With my family I need there to be sufficient reciprocation that our relationship can survive me opening the flood gates. I don’t have the same kind of boundaries with my family. I take care of them and they take care of me. There is a lot of inter dependence with Noah. With the kids it is different; I am actively working towards inter dependence, but of course right now they are still quite dependent on me.

There are exceptions though. I have dumped heaping lapfuls of need on people and they have come through for me. Doesn’t that count for anything? Don’t they get to be grandfathered in forever? Kind of? Maybe? Jenny is grandfathered. I still talk to her nearly daily. I know all about the antics of her cats even though she lives in another country. She hears anything and everything I want to say about any topic. She doesn’t let me in to the same degree and I constantly fret about offending her. I just haven’t yet so I keep going and pray I never hit the wall. The Godmamas are certainly working on being family for my children. They show up.

This is something else that is bothering me. Children count time differently than adults. Shanna is nearly four. Not very many people have spent much time with her. That makes me sad. The Godmamas want her company and seek it out. I’m grateful every single day that she gets to have this relationship with them. Family is not made of blood. Family is made of time spent. They are learning one another. They are learning how to manage one another’s needs. No one is doing anything bad. None of my friends owe my children a relationship.

And I think that is a lot of the difference. My children are people with personalities and spirit. My family would know my children. My family would take delight in talking about how my daughters do _____ like me and _______ like my mom and _________like Noah. They would understand why I want to feel like I am part of something. Instead I only comment to my children about these things. My knowledge of my relatedness in the world is limited to the people in these walls.

These are the things that never get said with friends because there is never enough time. With your family you spend so much time together that you get all the thoughts out. With friends you search your brain for the highlights, because that is all anyone wants to hear anyway, and you gloss over these small things. They aren’t important enough to talk about. So they become invisible. Meaning that these people do not have the opportunity to even know my relatedness in the world.

If I come and write about it, does that change it and make it better? Err, no. Writing is a false intimacy. True intimacy is reciprocal, not one sided. I am alone in this room. I will never be able to stop noticing that.

Why is it important that I think about this now? Why do I have to decide to kind of roll back a thinking schema? Because this isn’t serving me any more. I have a lot of needs. I have a very high intensity life. This will always be true. I am just that kind of person. While I leave space in my head and my heart where I am supposed to be considering the needs of people I love because they are family and with family you want to help meet other peoples needs then I am over-drawn. I can’t do this. I can’t meet my needs this way. I need more space in me. I need to understand that most of the people in my life have very little to give me in terms of support. What I give to them has to be a gift with no expectation or need for reciprocation. I do have expectations of family. I need to stop thinking that the people in my life are reliable sources of support. They aren’t.

That doesn’t mean everyone I know is a flakey bastard—far from it. But my friends give what they can when they can. They feel no obligation to be here every week. I promise you that I have needs every week. They go unmet. This parenting gig is hard. I picked the high intensity version. I’m just that kind of person.

I have to stop looking outside of myself for support. Well, I need to stop looking outside this house. Noah and I need to figure out a way to go through this life together where I have the ability to meet my own needs. I can’t expect that from anyone else. No one else will try to help meet my needs in a consistent and predictable way. That means I need to slow down what I give to other people. I have far less to spare than I thought. It will all be okay in the end.

I have always poured a lot of emotional and mental energy into my “chosen family”. What could I do in life if I put that energy into me in a consistent way so that I can benefit instead of other people? I think I should probably find out.

Broken promises

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My mom likes to make promises she can’t keep. Oh she always intends to do it when she says it. She just isn’t very good at taking stock of what things are realistic and possible in life. And she rarely has the willpower to deny herself something in favor of a later pay off. It’s all stupid shit, right? She promised she would take me to Magic Mountain every year from when I was eight on. My siblings grew up with season passes and I heard the stories and I felt envious. I went by myself when I was twenty-one.

One of the talents my mom has is sewing. She’s a fairly talented seamstress. I still have things she made from me and I wear them when I get the chance. I have a Snow White costume and an Ariel (from The Little Mermaid) dress–you know the one when she comes down to dinner and brushes her hair with a fork? That one. My dress is awesome. And my mommy made it for me which makes it extra special. She made my Dickens costume. I wish she hadn’t told me to buy the pattern and material for three separate Dickens costumes because then in the long run I feel bitter that (as usual) she doesn’t follow through completely on what she says. I should just be grateful she did one. Usually she doesn’t get through one.

I focus on the fact that in everything she said to me there was always a lie. I always had to be careful not to get my hopes up when she said anything. I would say I had less than a 50/50 chance of her following through. That wears on you decade after decade. I wish she had promised less.

“I’ll pick you up from school” was one of those ones I wish she had promised less of. I would not be able to add up all the hours I sat around waiting to be picked up. I understand. She always had a reason. It’s not her fault. Ever. It is always someone or something else’s fault. Always. Always. Always.

I hold the people in my life to a higher standard of truth telling because of this. Approximations are not good things. Over-promising is the worst thing you can possibly do. I try very hard to keep my expectations and hopes very low. Too many people are fucking liars who are too self absorbed to even admit to themselves that what they are doing is lying.

There are sins I forgive easily and barely notice; there are sins that cause me to feel like I have to smite someone from the earth because they are hurting me. The real solution isn’t to smite anyone. I’m terrified that the solution is simply to never trust a word that people say unless they prove over years that they aren’t a liar. Unfortunately I tend to trust more than I should. I get lied to a lot. Oh of course it is never a lie it’s just that people don’t think they need to have a lot of integrity in what they say. They feel no need to be impeccable with their words. Close enough is good enough. And I die of a thousand paper cuts.

I don’t want my children to have this hostility and rigidness around promises. I know it isn’t healthy. It is isolating. I certainly can’t hang out with people much. I’m trying to figure out how much I can handle really having steadily in my life. I want there to be a predictable pattern. I want to have a pattern, damnit. I’m really struggling because nothing else in the world wants me to. Stupid life just keeps happening. I really do want to see people and so far that has to be a flexible thing.

It is hard to be this lonely and angry at the same time. I know that I have to be careful not to get too angry when other people are around. I manage this with the kids by not talking at all. It’s hard to do that with adult visitors. Then they become discomfited and I have to try to knock it off. I can see the visible discomfort spread over people and I feel a wash of shame. Yup. That’s me. The angry one. Then I feel so much self loathing that I am always the angry one that I just feel more anger. I’ve been told a lot of times that feeling that angry around people is basically abusive. I’m a monster no matter what. I just am. It doesn’t matter what I do.

Ok, I kicked the cabinet door off the wall. I suppose that is something terrible and horrible. Because more shame really makes everything better.

I have had trouble running since the grief ritual. I feel so overwhelmed with anger that I can barely see straight and it makes me stumble so I am running more slowly and carefully. I don’t want to injure myself; I truly don’t. I don’t want running to become my latest method of self-injury. I want to find joy in my body. It’s hard to do in the dark and cold. I miss the afternoons.

I feel stuck in this anger. I am so frustrated and anxious. I need to go proofread six more chapters back from my editor and that’s scaring the crap out of me. I am so tired of reading this story. I want to avoid it and I want to get this done and over with.

When I say I follow the scorched earth path I mean that I will forever say anything I want about someone and shun that person from my life. I will be as harsh as I feel the need to be. I can be a very harsh person. It is obvious when I am truly done.

I am struggling with some things in my close personal relationships. I don’t want to regret the things I write, ever. I want to always know that I am writing a truth I feel comfortable standing behind. Right now I am having a lot of very strong irrational emotions. I don’t know how to deal with them. I am already saying things that are impossible to take back. Dear sweet Jesus at least I will keep them off of my blog. I’m struggling.

How can I talk about what I am experiencing without giving any information or judgment. hm.

I feel unappreciated and used. I feel like I am getting the realistic version of an impossible situation. I feel tightness in my throat. My neck aches. My shoulders ache. My lower back aches and I can feel how bad my posture is right now. All right, I made a few chair adjustments and that is slightly better. I feel empty and drained. I feel abandoned and untrusting. I feel exhausted in a way that isn’t going away with more sleep.

Recently I heard someone describe it as being “pregnant” with her book and I kind of feel like that. I’m getting a lot of harsh physical symptoms and emotionally I feel like I am living on the memory of fumes because I ran out of gas long ago. I am at a time and place in my life where I feel like I need an endless stream of support but I am too ashamed to ask for it. I don’t have a family and people like me have to just figure it the fuck out because we are too unpleasant to be around. I feel so pathetic and needy. I feel so very lonely. But I don’t feel like I get to talk about that because it is my own damn fault that I am so fucking unpleasant to be around and that’s why I am alone.

Sometimes I wonder what it is like to be part of an extended family. Thinking about it makes me cry. What would it be like to have people who know me and want to spend time with me? I have friends, yes. But my friends go see their families on holidays. I notice. I tend to feel like it isn’t possible for me to stop being angry so I should stop attempting to spend time with people at all because no one should have to deal with my fucking mouth.

It’s probably a good thing I see my therapist tonight.

second chances

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There are a bunch of people I “should” email right now but I’m not going to. I don’t have a lot of time free today and I have stuff in my head I want to get out. Maybe I’ll respond to emails later.

I have screwed up a lot of money stuff this month. I’m experiencing a lot of anxiety around that. It’s all stuff that will even out and be ok in the long run. I feel stupid though. I feel wasteful and inattentive and bad. I think it might be harder that Noah isn’t mad. I spend a lot of time feeling like I don’t deserve someone who will be this nice to me. He really is just plain nice. I feel like this nasty bitch he got saddled with. I can’t understand why he would take pleasure in the company of a miserable harpy. That’s what I feel like when I get to the point of being able to loudly put my foot down about my boundaries. I don’t know how to do it in a friendly and loving way.

I ignore things until I blow up. That’s not useful. I’m handling things badly with Sarah because I don’t know what to do. I’ve said my part of things, badly and with hostility because I’m a piece of shit, and now I wait. There is nothing else I can do. I’m not good at waiting. Waiting makes me edgy. Waiting makes me feel like someone doesn’t think I deserve to be answered which escalates my fuss. I feel ignored and unimportant. Ignoring a situation I am heavily involved with means that I feel ignored. And that makes me angrier and harder to talk to. It’s not a great cycle.

I’m reading a book about successful marriages. I’m generalizing a lot of the advice to other areas of my life. I’m not very good at a lot of parts of relationships. That makes sense. You learn how to have relationships by watching the people in your family. I’m worried about my explosive anger because even if I never do anything that qualifies as textbook abuse to my kids I’m still teaching them how to be an adult. I’m still teaching them how to have relationships. I feel quite guilty that someone as fucked up and pathetic as me is their example. I’m sorry I’m not better at this.

When I was pregnant with Shanna a long time friend told me that she thought someone with my emotional problems has no business being a mother. I don’t think I will ever get that out of my head. I feel like such a horrible person. How dare someone as pathetic and awful and broken as me think they have the right to pass on how to be a person. It seems like such a horrible offense. It can never be taken back.

It’s hard knowing that I’m not the only person who thinks I am a piece of shit. I’m not the only person who thinks I am awful. I’m not the only person who thinks I am bad. I don’t really want my children to grow up knowing beyond the shadow of a doubt that someone like them deserves to be looked down on and loathed.

One of the things I fucked up this month was billpay. I sent extra checks to the maid who quit in December. I sent her emails asking her to not deposit the money. She deposited the money and told me it was all my fault and I brought it on myself. I investigated my options. I probably can’t get the money back. She is currently in a homeless shelter. I could press charges and make it so she can’t get a decent job. She graduates from college in February. I can’t have that on my soul. I can’t take her life away from her over this. She broke the law. She committed a crime. But I think she committed the kind of crime I can’t judge her for. She is trying desperately to survive. I can’t turn around and make that harder for her. The deck is already stacked against her in every way. I can’t live with having ruined her life. Yes, she brought it on herself. I still get to decide what kind of person I am.

I don’t want to be angry. I don’t want to go after vengeance. Justice, sure. Not vengeance. I can’t get justice by ruining the life of a twenty year old homeless girl. That’s not justice.

I have a hard time feeling like I’m a sucker. I’m doing this because when I was fifteen the police officer told me very clearly that he should arrest me for grand theft auto. Instead he called my mom. That was a time and a place where punishing me wouldn’t have improved my life. If I had been “held accountable” for my actions it probably would have prevented most of the good that came later. I was given a chance. I was told very clearly what the consequences of my actions should be. Then he let me go home and sob and cry and feel like a terrible person. I have never fucked up that big again. From that day forward it wouldn’t be a mistake again. It wouldn’t be a fuck up. It would be a choice to not care about how my actions affect other people. I can’t live with that on my conscious.

It’s going to be hard to stop reacting to Sarah in angry ways but I need to do it. I need to do it for me first and foremost. Sarah is one of my closest friends and I don’t want to lose her. I love her very much. The fact that I can’t handle living with her does not make her a piece of shit. It just means I can’t live with her. I’m having a hard time because with my family in order to keep myself safe from them I have to be actively angry. When something isn’t working for me I don’t know how to stop it other than this extreme anger. I have to feel like my personhood is being insulted. But Sarah isn’t insulting me. She isn’t trying to hurt me. She is trying to get through her life as best she can. Sometimes her ways don’t work for me. If I manage to remove the franticness from my longing for family I can feel ok with the fact that I just can’t live with Sarah.

Sarah is amazing and wonderful. She is talented and kind. She is patient. She is also not me. Her priorities are not mine. That’s probably a good thing. As I am going full-speed-ahead on my life I can’t expect someone with wildly different priorities to be able to just do the things I want done. It’s not reasonable. A lot of why I am so angry is because I wanted this to work so much. I feel so much disappointment. I don’t react to that well. That’s on the long list of things I need to improve on and fast. I have already done major damage to our relationship. If I don’t want to be responsible for ending our friendship I need to get my shit together now. Sarah will not be able to survive my hostility. She doesn’t have that in her. If I want to still have her in my life in ten years I need to grow the fuck up.

What do I want from a relationship with Sarah? Instead of being so angry about the parts I don’t want it is time for me to figure out what I really get from the relationship and work towards that. There is so much good there. I’m really not in a place in my life where I should be pissing all over a good thing.

Breakfast is ready. Cinnamon bread french toast. My husband loves me.

Long-term friendships.

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I was talking to a chick I met when I was fifteen yesterday. She’s one of my closer friends. We met while we were each hot for the same guy. She initiated the conversation yesterday because she wanted to tell me the results of some personality test thing she did in a grad school class. It ranked her best attribute as the ability to *be* loved and to inspire love. It was kind of funny to explain to her that it really is a skill and one I am singularly bad at. When people love me I tend to be quite hard on them and not permit them to love me. I will hold up your faults to a mirror as often as I can and tell you, “Can you really love me while doing _________.” The results are mixed. I expect people to put a lot of thought and energy into making sure their words match up with their actions. So I’m pretty hard to love. I’m effort. And not an especially fun kind.

I told her that she is easy to love. We still know each other because she is easy to love. Not because I am so worth loving. She is blessed with a thick skin, short memory, and the rock solid belief that people only say harsh self-improvement things with the best of intentions. Yeah, we can stay friends. Because you believe that when I point out bad things I’m doing it because I love you.

Yesterday I was talking to her about a different conflict in my life. One I’ve written about. One I very carefully write about. I was telling her a different side to the story. Being the girl she is her response was, “Whoa. That’s a much bigger thing to feel ________ about than everything you have written. The fact that this is going on makes me think this is the real issue. And the fact that you won’t write about it… that’s big. Yeah, this is probably the real crux of the issue.” My jaw actually dropped. I’m not completely sure she’s right, but she’s mostly right. That was interesting for me to note for several reasons. First and most importantly, holy shit she can play me. I have deep respect for that in my friends. That means they have paid attention.

I have had several big issues with my “chosen family” in the past year and a while. I found the breaking point. I have an increasingly interesting thought process around the things I used to put up with and things I am willing to model putting up with in front of my kids. I’m having a hard time with those differences. I don’t want my kids growing up with the idea that its ok to use me, everyone else does. I’m not a fan of being the one who does all the work for a bunch of semi-grateful people. I don’t get off on that. I get nothing but exhaustion and anger that no one fucking helped. Again. But I want to see people. Apparently if you want to see people it requires doing a lot of work. Fuck that. I’d rather not see people. Attempting to put my foot down on this issue is not going well.

Most of my best friends are hoarders who need people to sit around and tell them how awesome they are. I could go down a list. It’s actually pretty funny. If someone is not a hoarder who wants me to come clean their house for them we probably won’t build a friendship. What can our friendship be based on if not my work? Or there are the guys I fuck. I have one or two fierce women friends I pretty much exclusively talk to online and I don’t clean for them. But I don’t see them either. Maybe once a year.

If people are hoarders who need me to clean up after them I have a pattern for that. I have a whole broken dynamic I picked up in my family of origin around this issue and I moved it forward. It’s interesting to think about. I’m not sure if I’m an enabler or what if I come over and force them to get rid of a bunch of shit so it can’t be as big of a mess for a while. My organization systems usually last at least months if not years. They just put new shit around what I organize. It’s hilarious to watch.

All of them remind me of my family. If I speak of the hoarders as a collective I can come up with: charming, manipulative, lying, alcoholism, drug addiction, severe avoidance issues, agoraphobia, racist, sexist, cheating, everything is always someone else’s fault.

Once we had some former students over (that’s actually happened a bunch–they are great people) and we were all drunk and Noah got a bit overly intense when he was explaining to one of them how she was helping to create abusive relationships over and over. He was outlining how her behavior correlated with stuff that is known to be a problem. She was visibly uncomfortable and I made him stop. But I do that. I’m ridiculously codependent. I don’t have the energy to care for more people and I have no desire to do so in the first place, but I really wish I had people in my life. I only seem to make friends with people who want me to do a lot of work for them. I am having a hard time changing this pattern. And in the process I seem to have to put some dynamite in my chosen family and find out if anyone is still around in a few years.

So far it looks like unless I call and make invitations I won’t see some of them. I’m sad but not surprised. That is the pattern. Others have changed the dynamic. We are trying to find a balance. I need support and have none to give. They are trying to work with me. It’s hard to accept help. It’s very uncomfortable. Times up. Gotta go start kid time.

D– don’t you admire how I still avoided that one issue?

Mostly parenting babbling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time to go inside.

Inadequate to the task

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just life

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Yesterday I had a weird realization. I read back a bit in my blog and I noticed that for all I discuss my mental state (obsessively, constantly) I say very little about my life. This was interesting to me to note as I also got to a place where I had to talk to Sarah about my plans for the yard. They are connected, bear with me.

I get up every morning and I look at the stats page here on blogger. I feel lame admitting that. I can tell which traffic sources are probably just spam and I sigh. But I look at the other ones. The numbers are growing. Every day I close my eyes and I smile and say thank you. Even though these people are not talking to me, even though they feel no motivation to contact me in any way… someone sees me. I’m not invisible. It’s hard to admit how visceral and important that is to me.

How often do you call your mother? How much do you resent talking to her? I think about my mother every day. I think of the things I would like to tell her. I think of the off-hand comments I would like to make about my daughters because my mom would understand them. Most of the time I just bite my lip. I know that her responses would vary from completely on the same page to shaming and horrified. She has always reacted like that to me. I last spoke to my mother in May. It had been many months since the previous contact. I have barely spoken with her at all in twelve years.

What is my life actually like? I clean a lot. It’s a lot of how I deal with my compulsive tendencies right now and given the ever-present terror of losing my children for being an unfit mother. I think I read MDC too long. I worry that if I have a basket of laundry sitting out I’m screwed. I read books to the kids. I play a lot of Lego’s and blocks and Play Doh and I draw and I dig in sand. I haven’t been gardening recently. Running has been taking most of my physical strength. I’m doing more of it than I post on facebook. I always want to put a smiley when I am being defensive and I have a firm commitment to myself that this journal will be smiley free. It’s awkward relinquishing that desire to appear friendly.

I don’t mean to be as harsh as I sound most of the time. I spend a lot of time apologizing for my tone and I worry about that, actually. I hate that I apologize for speaking so much. I speak quickly and directly, why is that so bad? I’m not attacking. I’m really not. I’m left feeling like there is nothing I can say that will be taken well so I should just shut up. It’s not my favorite.

I’m glad that Sarah is here now. I’m not alone. I have had people ask me, when I’m discussing issues I have with Sarah, if Noah would allow me to make Sarah leave. I thought that was hilarious. Sarah is mine, not Noah’s. I don’t know what Sarah is to me, but she’s mine. And that’s that. I don’t know what that is going to mean going forward. She has an awful lot of needs I can’t and won’t meet. Life is complicated. Right now we are just trying to raise these babies. We’ll see what the future holds.

It is interesting that for me “closeness” is out of sight and out of mind with some people and not with others. I feel betrayed by the fact that people didn’t make an effort to see me when I was a child. That I went all those lonely years without continual on-going relationships. I would meet people once or twice and then maybe never see them again. I barely saw my brother Jimmy. I rarely saw my father. Aunt Vonnie and Uncle Bob were weirdly intermittent, hell–so was my mom.

I have been sitting here working on my running schedule for two days. I am going to be ready for a marathon in October. Damnit. It’s just a matter of making the schedule and then doing it. Once the schedule in place it’s just fill-in-the-blank. This was part of teaching that I loved. I love knowing what I am going to do on so many days in the next year. I love that I don’t have to wake up and decide. I’m going to make up another hidden calendar for housework. I’m going to start tracking it and schedule it more. If I have a schedule and I’m just keeping my schedule I don’t feel resentful. If I have to look around the house and think, “Well what’s a mess now?” I feel pissy. I feel angry. I feel god damn sick of cleaning up after these fucking people. When I’m just keeping my schedule and doing the job-of-being-me I don’t mind. It’s a mind-trick. It mostly works. Until I slack on my schedule and then I resent the schedule and then I stop following it and instead I am resentful of the housework. Cheers.

Life is what happens when you are killing time on your way to dying. Being suicidal means not wanting to kill the time anymore because it is so unpleasant. If you have something to do instead of killing time you are building something you feel proud of. I really did pay attention Mr. Frankl. Thank you for giving the world your insights. It’s not just about building something like a building. What are you living for? What is your purpose? “The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” That’s from a picture on facebook. I don’t know who actually made it and it’s been reposted so many times I’m going to admit that I’m a lazy fuck and I don’t know who started it.

There is such a high burden in conversation these days. Every single fucking thing you reference must have a citation. I don’t think that we would have ended up with T.S. Eliot this way. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe I’ll start a revolution. When I’m not trying to prove a specific point and instead I’m babbling I’m allowed to just say what is in my head without worrying about who said it first. Maybe I’ll just start adding little things at the bottom of all posts: I plagiarize at will but since I make no money or fame off it I don’t care. I won’t bother. But I should.

What is my life like? Noah makes me breakfast most days. It feels really sweet. My kids climb on me and love me and scream at me (volume control is a few years away) and run around in circles around me. My life is quiet. My life is slow. I feel like I alternate between getting very little done in the greater-good-sense and periods of intense productivity where I remodel the house or do a bunch of yard work.

Now I have scheduled running into forever. It’s time to start thinking about how I will balance my energy load. I am going to build a playhouse for She-Ra (we have capitulated to her requests) and Calli this month. It will be cute and little and very rough and rustic. Simple plans mean I can follow through. Excellent. It’s time to break ground outside and start prepping for this year. I need to talk to Sarah. She is going to be doing starts in the house. I have no idea how much work I’m signing on for. But given that we can’t spend any money, why the heck not? We can’t go elsewhere and do stuff this year.

This is going to be a save money year. Even stuff like gas really is significant when we go anywhere. So it’s time to stay closer to home for a while. We’ve been gallivanting a fair bit. I’m thinking about my financial goals for the year. I should say “our” and pretend this decision involves Noah and/or Sarah but I suppose that just means that this is my opinion and our actual household decision may or may not look like this.

Right now I have the budget set such that we can save $1470/month. It’s not a very friendly budget but it does have perks and fun money in it. It’s not oppressive by any measure. I would like for us to get to $2,000/month in saving. But that’s where it starts feeling oppressive.

And it feels like every single day just involves more things we “should” buy. Why do I want to save this much money every month? Because it is stupid not to if we can. Because we didn’t fund the college savings last year and that’s really not ok. Because I didn’t pay off DVC with the annuity fund and it needs to go away. Because we own a house and eventually we will have to do major repair work again and we have almost no buffer.

Really, if I save $24,000 next year this year it will be not even close to as much as I should have saved/paid off last year. I’m behind in my long-term goal reaching. Damnit. And it’s because we had a really fabulous trip to Scotland, I gave away a lot of money, etc. It was a really expensive year. If I want to do the things I say I want to do long-term I need to stop bullshitting around and start doing them. The first step is to stop spending so much money. That means that we don’t get to have everything we want. Far from. It means doing without things that might be convenient or nice because we don’t need them. I will say as diplomatically as I can that Sarah and Noah tend towards “Let’s throw money at this problem” in ways that give me hives. I love them both. We can’t keep spending money and that means choosing to simply not think about the wide variety of under-$5-things that “could” make our life better. What makes our life better is not spending money. Really.

We want to have $100,000 per kid for college. We need to be saving a lot faster if we want to get there. We have fifteen years until we need to have most of that ready.

We want to travel the world for a year in less than ten years. We have to get ready.

We want to pay off a $19,000 loan this year so that we don’t have to pay more interest on it.

We want to remodel this house some day, maybe. We have to do prodigious maintenance whether we like it or not. That’s really expensive, every year.

We really need to save money.

But I was writing about my life, not future goals.

Right now my life is about going in and playing with the kids. Bye.

Good thing I have therapy today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time to move on

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Saturday night we held a surprise dinner party for a friend’s birthday. She seemed pretty excited about being the center of attention finally. I think everyone should get the limelight on their birthday. It was one of the best parties I’ve ever hosted. I think it was a raging success. An awful lot of the reason for that is I didn’t feel any pressure to be “on”. People weren’t there to see me. Maybe the secret is to invite other peoples’ friends over.

It was neat partially because this was a bdsm crowd of type I don’t hang out with much. This was a Master/slave sort of gathering. And Daddy energy. Lots of Daddy energy. I got to talk about my opinions about those sorts of relationships. I got to talk about my experiences with people I have seen around in the scene for over a decade but never before have they noticed me. It was a weird kind of arriving moment. It was interesting.

I really enjoyed getting to explain some of my opinions. I don’t get asked about these topics much any more. I have a lot of opinions. The M/s portion of my relationship with Tom was the middle two years out of four. So we had a year to ramp up and a year to ramp down. I have a lot of perspective on that situation at this point.

And after they left Noah and I had crazy hot sex where he explained what he would like from our relationship in the future. I’m considering his words very carefully. It’s a lot more complicated for me to change the nature of my relationships now that I have young children and a marriage and a mortgage to consider. I’m not just thinking about what I want and what will feel good. I have to seriously stop and think about whether or not any given set of choices is sustainable for me. Without sustainability there is no future for any set of behaviors.

Last night in the middle of that crazy hot sex we had to stop for a while because I was crying too hard. I was crying because it has cost me a lot to maintain training that Tom gave me. It is humiliating to have to explain to random pick up partners that they have to give me permission to orgasm. Not only do they have to give me permission they have to kind of do it in a certain way. Most people guess close enough, but some people say things that make it so that I can’t. Or they think it is funny to tell me no. I feel like I don’t get the final say on what happens to my body and that really bothers me. I am tired of having no choice but to submit this ownership of my body to anyone who touches me. I’m tired of being unable to have a private sexual experience inside my brain. I’m tired of constantly having to offer up my desire to someone else. Someone who doesn’t even understand what this gift costs me.

I am a slave without an Owner. I’m kind of tired of it. It is starting to feel demeaning. It is starting to make me feel like this enormous pearl is being cast before swine. They do not understand or appreciate and I feel cheapened by the experience. I want to figure out how to not need permission any more.

I’m 30 years old. I have not had control of my right to orgasm since I was 19. Maybe it’s time. I had a brief period where I started to figure out how to turn this off. It lasted a couple of months. Then Noah came back. It’s one of his favorite party tricks. It’s hard to tell him I don’t want to give this to him any more. I am tired of having to feel subjugated to new partners. It makes the barrier of sex very different. It’s a lot of why I sleep with assholes.

Assholes know how to use this. They don’t need me to stop and give an explanation of how I became so broken. They just want to play with it as a toy. Let’s press the button and see what happens! I’m tired of having my right to pleasure be out of my control. It feels like part of the larger patterns of me doing sex constantly for some perceived exterior motivation.

I want to have some idea of what sex is like for other women.

I told Noah last night that I can’t tell if part of me is breaking or mending. I don’t know what it means that I feel so strongly about getting rid of this now. I want my freedom, damn it. I’m tired of having to explain to every vanilla person about my former Owner training. I can never tell the story right in the moment. It always feels rushed and I’m trying to change gears and be a different person and it doesn’t feel like a good conversation to have.

How many other people have to stop and tell the story of their sex life going back to when they were 19 forever? I wonder how much this feeds my inability to get over Tom. I’m reminded of him every single time I have sex. I know this was done for him. I could never forget it. This is such a huge part of my body and my life. He caused this change in me. What am I like without Tom’s training? I don’t know. I’ve never been able to find out. It’s time.

Different facets.

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Today is hard because I have already been a friend, a lover, and a therapy client. Any second now I need to be a mother. I need to be a partner. I need to be a wife. I need to be a boss.

It’s hard to be these different parts of me. They feel like they don’t add up to a person. I’m not sure if they are less or more than a person, but not really a person. A host with many guests. I hurt. I hurt inside my heart. I am all these things and more and it feels like a terrible thing I am doing. I am supposed to pick. Ok, probably not one. But just two or three. Fine, I can be a mother and a therapy client and a wife. Those are supposed to be my priorities, right?

But I really enjoyed being a lover today. Today I felt beautiful. Noah tolerates a lot of my derogatory self-talk. Well, he ignores me. He tells me I’m beautiful. He tells me he likes me. Today my Daddy made me stand in front of a mirror and he touched me and made me look and told me that I am beautiful. I feel like I can still barely lift my head. I can’t look up at someone saying that about me. I’m not. I’m so ugly and mean and bad. You don’t know how bad.

Maybe. There are parts of me that are ugly and mean and bad. I have done things I am ashamed of. I have hurt people. But maybe this isn’t an ‘or’ situation. Maybe I’m ugly and I’m beautiful. Maybe the most beautiful thing I have done in my whole life was standing up to my family and prosecuting my father and preventing him from ever victimizing another person. I did that. All by myself. My father was a serial rapist. He had molested many people from childhood to adulthood. I. Got. Rid. Of. Him. As sure as if I put a gun to his head. I made sure he could never hurt anyone again. Ok, so I didn’t expect him to kill himself, not really. I was surprised. I was devastated. I knew it was a risk. Everyone thought he would put a gun in his mouth. But he didn’t. He sat, like a chicken shit, in his garage and ran his truck. While he sat there he wrote notes of hate to me and my mother. I burned that note many years ago after Tom urged me to. It ate at me. He told me, essentially, that he was committing suicide because I was an evil liar and he didn’t want to go to hell for the sin of murdering me because I murdered my brother. Did you follow that? His grammar (and spelling) was worse. But the hate was god damn obvious. What a piece of shit. He sent that note to his daughter.

It’s not like he could tell himself that he was innocent. Give me a break. He didn’t want to go to prison. He was too fucking chicken shit to accept the consequences of his actions. I’m not. My father is dead. I’m glad. I made the world a more beautiful place by effectively killing him.

But I am still what he made me. I still thrill to the touch of my Daddy. Maybe I can find a way for that to be ok. Maybe that’s just one way that my friends can love me and touch me and heal parts of me I can’t reach by myself. Every man I call Daddy has been in my life for a long time. Specifically, Dad has been active in my life for nearly as many years as my biological father. I stopped seeing my biological father when I was thirteen. I have known Dad for eleven years. I have spent considerably more time in Dad’s company than I did with my father in my entire life. Dad is also a really good grandpa to my kids. He loves them.

And Daddy? Well, he sure knows how to make me come. And he is ok with me waking him up in the middle of the night when I need to talk. He has been for more than seven years. I have done so, whenever I needed to, for over seven years. And I’m crazy and bossy and difficult and he loves me. It was really nice to come home to my Daddy today. I am feeling pretty shocked by how this feels.

Maybe the only kind of love I have ever known how to get from a dad will be met. And it will be met in a way that allows me to be healthy and whole. I’m not a hole. My Daddy may be a big slut, but I’m special. I always have been. And Dad? I’m his first daughter. He introduces me that way, which is funny because he has a biological daughter. He’s had several girlfriends after me who are also “daughters”. But everyone knows it’s different with me. I’m not a girlfriend and I never was and I never will be. He just takes care of me when I don’t know how to do it for myself.

I feel very little. And happy and sad at the same time. I feel like I am holding the hand of my best friend at the funeral of a very bad person. I am safe now. I will never be hurt by my dad again. I may be single tailed by my Dad. I may be fucked by my Daddy. But my dad will never hurt me again.

Maybe I’m not over the incest thing.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Category Archives: chosen family

Just another whinging Friday

Walking on eggshells

Oh no.

Goodbye, old friend

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

Everything must be bad

Family and friends

Broken promises

second chances

Long-term friendships.

Mostly parenting babbling

Inadequate to the task

Just life

Good thing I have therapy today.

Time to move on

Different facets.