Category Archives: class issues

In one of those festive bad moods.

Right now I feel like I am being batted back and forth between “shoulds”. I should be working on this part of my life or that. I should be more patient. I should be. I should. I should. It’s hard to be ok with just being. It doesn’t really matter what I should be doing it matters what I am doing. Is what I am doing good enough? Why do I feel like there should be more? Why do I persist in feeling unworthy, bad, inadequate?

I don’t know but I’m kind of sick of it.

Kids go through periods of disequilibrium and then they get back to equilibrium. Both kids are off kilter. There is a lot of screaming in Wonderland. Not very much of it comes from me. I feel like my ears will bleed soon. My patience runs thin. My screaming is usually at the fifteenth time of saying, “I said stop kicking me” in a fierce and slightly escalating objectionable volume. Then I get smart and get up and walk away. Parenting is hard.

I spend a lot of time thinking about perspective. And about the plotline of the book to come. And myself as a character. And about sex. I think about sex with lots of different people in lots of different ways and I wonder about the sex that other people have. What is sex like for most people? When I read pornographic stories I have to wonder. What is this biological urge we have?

I’m thinking about how I feel about projecting my version of the truth on events that other people perceive differently. I have to deal with the potential outcome of people being mad at me. Far easier to not speak.

But I can’t. I really can’t. I finished editing my friend’s book.. I need to do some editing on NS, NS, NS so that it can move towards a paper edition. I also need to start doing the storyline for the book. Because I want to combine people and have a few composite characters it means choosing events from my life and figuring out how to tell them and when and how to integrate all of the supporting people. One of the big difficult-to-understand parts of the first book is the lack of explanation of other characters. They just came and went. That was how life felt. Things were different once I became an adult. I have many relationships that date back to my teenage years. I am experiencing development from my friends. It’s actually kind of weird. People are changing. I’m having to adapt to that. It’s probably all healthy and shit. I’m not sure I believe it.

For the last several days I’ve been simmering in my own bile. I’ve been seething. My jaw aches from clenching. Today when I was running I tried to put it into perspective. I thought about my day. I asked myself what parts of it I would take away and why? I don’t want to change what I am doing. So why do I feel so hateful? Because I can imagine someone else feeling very resentful. Because I know that a great many people feel above the work I do and think of people like me as being beneath them. Oh, but I’m different because I spent more time in college.

The arbitrary reasons people decide that other people are better or worse than other people are interesting to me. On one hand I have a number of traits, skills, attributes, qualifications, whatever of “high class” people. I’m still white trash. It doesn’t matter. I can still offend the shit out of you in five minutes flat if I want to. Just try me. I can find your buttons, motherfucker. I want to get in a fight. I want to be hit. I want to hit back. I don’t think I want to lose this time but I’m ok with it as a risk. I want to hurt someone. I want to damage someone. Luckily I married someone who doesn’t like to be hit so I don’t have to worry about being all “safe” or “sane” as I beat the shit out of someone. I have to just sit on it. I have to just be with this anger and hatred and rage over… nothing.

I’m kind of tired of being told these horrible generalizations that totally include me and then being told, “Well you’re different.” Most homeschooling parents are abusing/neglecting their children because they aren’t qualified to educate their kids but I’m different. Enh. Whatever. Maybe. I don’t know. It depends on what you think people need to grow up and be capable of doing. The whole point of education is to teach children how to be adults. Everyone grows up to be something. Why do we have a meritocracy where we only value people who attain “higher education”? Is that the only kind of life worth having? Really?

I hate that I feel like I am failing strangers by not being all that attractive. I make up for it by being friendly and personable when I’m in the mood to get along with people. I hide behind it and my towering hostility when I’m not in the mood. Regardless people comment.

Sometimes I wonder about the freedom of hijab. I wonder what it would be like to not feel like I have to live up to expectations of my appearance. Noah and I talk about the invisibility, the feeling of completely being unwanted in the world he experienced as a teenage boy. As a teenage girl I didn’t know how to keep them off me. Saying no didn’t matter. Now I avoid people and flash my big shiny wedding ring. Taken. Not looking. Not available. Safe. Really. I am. I believe it. I hope.

Reading Mo’s book made me think a lot about M/s. What I have sought from it. What do I want from it? How does it work?

Today I talked about my feelings about G-d and connection and universality and the purpose of figureheads. I don’t usually have the balls to talk about my way of living in the world.

Lately when I start running I listen to Dolly Parton tell me that I Better Get to Livin’. When she gets to the part about falling on your knees to pray every day I think about the fact that I don’t really kneel before anyone’s idea of the Christian G-d. I like to kneel in front of a mirror. The only person who is going to be with me every day is me. If I feel like I can’t walk then I had better start crawling. I’m it. If I’m not ready to roll over and die then I need to get the fuck up and go. I have to. No one is going to rescue me. I don’t think there is some omnipotent force that is going to save me. If I don’t get up every day and work on my attitude and do what I believe is fucking right then there isn’t much point in anything.

Right now the right thing is getting up with a smile. And doing laundry. And dishes. And playing games. It really is. Learning patience and humility is part of learning to be stronger–it really is. I need this. I need to find it in myself to have the perspective to understand that the people in my life now have never hurt me I need to rely on the safety and certain truth of that statement to learn how to stop acting like a wounded animal.

Running is starting to feel good again because it is starting to feel hard in a way that makes me have to decide many times to put my head down and go. Just don’t stop. That’s what you have to do. Put your head down and go. That’s all I have to do in order to log the miles I need on my body. I don’t have any time goals. I don’t have any other commitments. I just have to move my body over a given distance. That is my only obligation now. I’m doing it slowly and proving to myself that I can. I am strong. I am more capable than I ever dreamed.

Even as my psyche tries like hell to find a way to make me feel bad and hurt myself and feel sick. Noah didn’t tell me to eat the fucking muffin. He just said eat the muffin. But I heard it with more harshness. More negativity. More anger. Because I hate myself for being hungry. Because I hate myself for having needs.

Right now what I need is to go to bed. I need to be up and out the door running in eight hours. I need sleep.

Hand-me-downs

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I think I know eight pregnant women right now. And a close friend has a one month old. And there are lots of slightly older kids. It’s weird thinking about getting rid of things, now. There are a few ways I can go about maintaining sanity in my house. I can ensure that we have a small enough number of items that cleaning it takes very little time or I can allow items to creep in and spend more and more and more time cleaning. It’s time to purge.

This is more complicated now that the stuff is “Shanna and Calli’s”. I really shouldn’t just raid their stuff all the time getting rid of things. That’s rude. Sorta. Letting them make my life shitty is far more rude let me tell you. I have no fear that the river of stuff will run out. More will come, inevitably. They age out of things anyway. How do I allow them to form sentimental attachments and yet bow to the inevitability of life that stuff comes and must go? I think we are going to go through stuff today and make piles. Shanna loves giving gifts. How can we be generous with our bounty?

This leads to all kinds of maybe-not-polite-but-necessary corollary conversations. One pregnant friend has few friends and no family. Others have many friends and large, wealthy families. We have people in our lives who have very different levels of need. That makes a very large difference in how I behave with people. I offer to treat friends who are barely surviving. I let friends who have more money than me pay for me. I smile and say thank you. I don’t offer to return the favor. For me I am very ok with accepting favors from people who have a lot to give. Sure, no problem. I struggle with allowing friends who have more need than me do things for me. It’s complicated.

I feel like it is important for me to be very clear what my values are and why. I’m teaching how to be a part of society. What part do I play? To have great privilege is to have great responsibility. What does that mean? What does that mean in terms of our life? What does it mean that the people around us have equal and sometimes greater privilege? How do I think responsibility trickles around us?

Part of what I am teaching is responsibility to the household. It is not fair that I have to spend so many hours cleaning up messes I am not making. If she can’t clean up after herself we need to start scaling back so that she can. She needs to learn how to take care of the amount of space she can handle. I need to give her a smaller scale so that she can succeed. Right now I am failing her by giving her a task that is far too large for her. I am not properly scaffolding her learning experience. That’s fine. We have pregnant friends.

Today is going to be one of those structured learning days, as I am starting to think of them. I have a specific lesson I am working towards. We are all responsible for maintaining our stuff. How much stuff do you actually think you can handle? I am going to do a preliminary pull of stuff that will be good to give away. We’ll negotiate from there.

It’s going to be a long day. It will be a good day. As long I remain patient today will be fantastic. Shanna is really happy to work with me towards goals like this, at least for now. She likes making decisions. She likes being generous. It makes her feel good to think about other people being happy to “get” her stuff. I talk about how neat it is that objects can take on a history and a story. “Oh this used to belong to ____ and then it went to _____ and now it is _______’s.” We have things like that. We tell those stories often. I constantly talk about the origins of objects. Shanna thinks her grandparents in Texas are the most generous people in the world because most of her favorite clothes and toys arrive magically from them. She thinks about it a lot. I have feelings about that but I keep my mouth shut about all of them. What I say to the kids is, “Your grandparents love you.” That’s it.

Shanna and I will have fun going through the clothes pile and deciding which pregnant woman needs that item more. She gives good “why’s”. Not all needs are financial or material. With most people I expect the story of items to be lost. When the story of an item is important I have to be careful who I give it to. We have a lot of clothing from Noah’s family. We may be the second or third in hand made clothes. That story matters to me. It’s not particularly rational. This is the story my children are being born into. This is what they have of their family on that side. I want them to know where it goes once it leaves them. I just do. That means I need to be careful where I send it.

I want to send the clothes to people who will take pictures of their children wearing it and give them to me. I want to be able to send them to Noah’s mom and show that things she made are still being used and loved. That is all the family relationship I will ever have. That depresses the fucking shit out of me. I feel like I come from nothing and I will become nothing and there will be no trace of me. I have no connection to anything that will outlast me. I want other people who touch me to understand that the touch carries on. They are still actively doing good in the world by having done this thing years ago. Thank you for doing that. It’s a thing. Maybe it isn’t a rational thing. But this is what I have right now. It’s the best I can do.

So when I think about pressuring my daughter into going through her belongings so we can give them away it’s kind of a loaded thing. This is going to be a long and emotional day. Which things can I give to people and have no expectation of the story carrying on? Which things do I have an attachment to the story moving on? How will I deal with it?

This is why I normally give stuff to a thrift store and come home and cry. Letting go is hard. I do understand attachment. I just can’t function and be a nice person when I have to clean all the f’in time. No. It’s just not necessary. We have to figure this out. Ok. I think I have girded my loins and set my purpose and all that shit. Time to go mommy. Oy.

More on anger.

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Right now I’m having internet connectivity issues. I read comments on my phone but the interface on blogger and lj mobile suck. I’m not going to type responses with my thumbs. Especially because my thumb bloody hurts. In the past week I have cut it more than once and I have a nasty thorn or splinter or something I can’t get out. I’m not going to write elaborately on my phone. On the computer I am composing in Word and then when I get five minutes of being connected I hit post. Which is a long winded way of saying this post will hopefully include the things I would say to people individually and I like comments.

I think that class things play in as well as gender things, yes. Men and women talk down to me differently. Men treat me like I am stupid. Women treat me like I am not important. Men know that I have some use at least.

I grew up in a very female dominated environment. Men came and went and weren’t big influences. I lived with my mom and my sister and Auntie and my cousin and her daughter. The boys were Uncle Bob, my nephew Denny (who is eight years younger than me), and my male cousins would rarely show up for dinner. The avoided the hen house. Uncle Bob thrived in an environment where he was the only cock. It allowed him to strut and act like he did the important male jobs and we were all weak and stupid. The important jobs like sitting in his chair and waiting to be served. Awesome.

Over and over my experience of men is that they talk down to me and expect me to be grateful that they are imparting wisdom. It’s not just an engineer thing. I get the same kind of condescension from the maintenance guys at the local elementary school (That’s what Uncle Bob did for the last ten or fifteen years he worked). I am more surrounded by engineers these days than I used to be and the feeling has intensified. I feel like being an engineer takes male bravado from seven to eight. They are just slightly more full of themselves. Either way I’d like to walk around with a baseball bat taking out kneecaps. Maybe they would stop fucking looking down on me.

Not really. I’m kidding. Mostly. The thing is, I like men. I find them comfortable to be around. Men think I’m not as smart as them so they don’t expect much from me. When I do things they are surprised and complimentary. Wow! You can do that? Why always the tone of surprise? Oh yes. Because it is a shock that I’m not sitting at home waiting for a man to deliver. Right.

I used to work technical theatre. I had two bosses. The technical director is a sweetheart and I adore him still. He is equally insulting to everyone who walks through his door. He does not treat women as less competent. I thought it was beautiful to watch him interrogate boys the way I normally only see women be questioned. “Have you ever used a drill?” He assumes everyone who walks through the door is completely unskilled because otherwise his liability lawsuits would be enormous. I can respect that. He works with large saws all day long. The other boss was in charge of more hand-wavey shit like lighting design and painting and directing. He is a piece of shit misogynist. He openly made nasty comments about women and he and the “boys” would sit around laughing. He was constantly rude to me because I was doing a “man’s” job.

I was one of two people trained to work the rail. The rail is the system used to hang the large backdrop pieces. It is a very carefully balanced pulley system that involves a lot of loading 10-50 lb bricks onto the device from a platform 50’ in the air. It’s not for sissies. The boss I liked thought I was one of the most attentive people there and it was safest for me to be in the air. The other boss would do things to make it harder for me. Like stop in the middle of the ladder right in front of me in order to have a conversation with someone. I just had to hang out on the ladder indefinitely. He would hear I was up at the rail and make loud comments about how we should evacuate the building before I kill someone. To be fair, before I figured out a way to attach the wrench to my belt loop I dropped it once. That was a dangerous mistake. He didn’t attack any of the men the same way. Even if it was their first time walking into the building and they didn’t know an Allen wrench from a Philips head screwdriver.

It’s not just about sex. It’s about the meeting point of class and gender. That’s where I feel stuck and angry today. Men and women manifest the ways they look down on people differently. I have different kinds of anger at them. Women are more subtle and horrible. Men talk to you like you are a piece of shit. Women will smile prettily and spew poison behind your back. Women are afraid of direct confrontation so you have no idea what to expect from them, ever. Women will lie and use relationships to manipulate people. Women get people to “take sides”. I do it too. I’m not going to lie.

My experience of the difference is that men charge through life just asserting that they are better whether it has any reflection on what they have actually done or not. Women go through making sure other people can’t buck the system. They impose order. Once you are at the bottom of the barrel women don’t tolerate social climbing. You are bad and they won’t let you forget it.

I say these things and wonder how defensive my friends feel. Obviously I don’t want to set the whole world on fire with a torch or I probably would have. I’m expeditious. There are people of both genders who are not terrible people. Most people are not terrible people. Most people are self-obsessed and just don’t bother to notice how they are treating other people. I think that is part of what makes me so god damn mad. They aren’t trying to be mean. They just don’t bother to think about how they are acting. People really don’t put any thought into their tone of voice by and large. And the ones who say they do? They are often the worst. God save me from men who consider themselves feminists. It can go strongly one way or another. Either they are genuinely willing to consider me an equal human being (rare) or they like to tell me how evolved they are and that means that sex with them will be better. To this I say: Bitch, please. The sex is better with raging misogynists and I know it. Why are we lying here?

I think that is a lot of the problem. I do think the sex is better with misogynists. That is a lot of why I have kept my mouth shut in the ways I have. Men who carefully treat me like I am breakable don’t hit my radar. There is an assumption of basic competence when someone drags you through an experience because that is what they want to do right now. There isn’t a lot of room for, “But I have this weird little quirk”—they don’t want to hear it. They don’t want to hear about how easily my vaginal tissue tears. They don’t want to hear about the various health issues I have as a result of violent sex. They just want to get off. There is this assumption that my body is going to handle whatever they feel like doing whether I enjoy it or not.

What? Not everyone has their father train them that all sexual contact is supposed to hurt and you are supposed to learn how to keep a straight face the whole time? That’s not what toddlerhood is like for most people?

I’m broken. I’m broken because I like people who want to hurt me. In a deep animal way I can respect them. In an animal way I don’t have a lot of respect for the people who use kid gloves even though I desperately need the kid gloves at this point in my life. I am so terribly wounded. I don’t think I can continue to just get up and moving on while people hurt me. At some point you lose the will to live. I need to stop accepting what I am used to accepting.

I feel deeply confused by how other people manage these things. For the life of me I don’t understand why I have the friends I have. I have quite a few really intense relationships. They enjoy my company for no reason I can fathom. I’m trying to just show up. I’m trying to trust them.

I hate how much dissociation I still have from my body. I am not interested in soft gentle bunny sex because I can’t feel it. My body doesn’t pay attention, mostly, until pain is applied. I feel very broken.

I have trouble with women, I perceive, in large part because of the Embargo. I’m hoping that fades as I am no longer competition. I can’t count how many women have told me, “I hated you when I first met you but then I started to kind of respect you.” Oh thanks. I’ll try not to let my head expand from that praise. People really don’t give a shit what they say to you. I’m so glad I have earned some grudging respect. That makes me feel better. I earn respect, near as I can tell, from trying to very seriously to do what I say. It’s unusual. I don’t stop doing things because they become annoying or difficult or unpleasant. That is when I feel a rush of adrenaline. I fucking said I would do this and I am not going to god damn fail. I don’t very often. It’s why I don’t casually say I will do things.

Men and women are different kinds of liars. There is overlap, of course. Men are more likely to trash talk you while giving you a chance to do it anyway. Women will gently put their hands over yours to prevent you trying because you don’t want to be humiliated when you fail, right? They are just trying to be kind and save you from your own failure.

The flavor of the condescension changes a lot as social status changes. Low class men talk down to women differently than very educated men. It’s easy to argue with low class men. I suppose I should say that it isn’t hard for me to convince a low status man that I am higher status than him. I can get them to back the fuck off. I am smart and extremely well educated on an unusual arrangement of topics. Low status men can be convinced that I am useful. Once they see that I have skills they specifically respect (no shit, I can build things) then they mellow in tone.

This is where my anger and rage at the engineers come in. They have no respect for all those low status skills I have. They really don’t care that I can do a wide variety of low status low paid jobs. It’s just more proof that I am not as good as them. If I can’t sit there and pretentiously spend my life talking about some minute thing they learned in college I am not as good as them.

And as much as I like all the people in my life who went to CMU or Stanford or whatever Ivy League school I’m really pretty tired of them spending parties talking on and on and on about their teachers. Isn’t college over? Can you move on? Yes, we are all aware that you went to this bad ass school. That’s nice dear. Have you done anything since? Get over college. Seriously. If it was more than ten years ago it is probably a good thing to talk about something more recent. Those of us who are not in the clique are heartily sick of it. We talk about you behind your backs. We are sick of hearing about your college experiences.

Why? Because my college experience was kind of shitty. I went to CSU Hayward before it gave up its place identity. I knew the names of three fellow students when I graduated because those were the ones who talked to me during classes. I lived with Tom. I was a 24/7 slave during college. I went to class, sure. But I went because there were hoops I had to jump through on my way to having the life I wanted. Not because college was so awesome. I went there after junior college. I certainly have stories about the college period of my life but the fact that I was in college wasn’t really the point.

When I deal with people who had transformative college experiences I have trouble being patient. They tend to overinflate the importance of that experience. Like you can’t truly grow up unless you go through an experience like that. But I didn’t have an even remotely similar experience. I read my books and wrote my papers and argued more in class than the teachers liked but it wasn’t my life. It was background noise to my life. It feels like one more way there is something wrong with me.

I didn’t have the same kind of experience other people had. I can’t talk about that period in the same way. It feels alienating. It feels like once again I did it wrong. I’m kind of tired of having to hear people over and over and over describe how awesome college was! Really? Uhm, whatever.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad that people have good experiences. I’m glad that other people have transformative experiences. I’m just tired of having to listen to the same ones over and over while knowing that my transformative life experiences are ones that I should keep my fucking mouth shut about otherwise people will be appalled and horrified. My life experiences are disgusting and inferior. Can’t I shut up about them already? I would harp on that less if I was told to shut up less. I am told to shut up and give everyone equal time to talk. So I can listen to forty people tell me the stories of their college experience and they can all tell me the same stories about the same professors and the same papers they had to write. But sweet Jesus no one wants to hear about my shit. It’s just too hard.

In graduate school I wrote about some of my early life experiences. I was told it wasn’t realistic and I should try to write about things people will believe. I really can’t get over that. I can’t get over being told that I should make up a life story that won’t offend people so that I can participate in the vapid cocktail chat. Fuck no.

Men and women talk down to me differently and I hate them differently for it. I suppose that part of the problem is a big part of me accepts that men will always look down on me. When women do the same thing I can’t contain my rage and violence. It feels more visceral, more offensive, more shocking. When I say, “Can’t contain” what I mean is I say very mean things in my head, silently.

When a man talks down to me I can roll my eyes and shrug it off. When a woman talks down to me I want to punch her in the face because doesn’t she fucking know better than to act like that? What is her fucking problem!? I think there is a part of me that is just as big of a misogynist as anyone else. I hold men and women to different standards. I expect women to have a better idea of how to talk to me and they really don’t. It’s not fair or appropriate.

I suppose I expect women to give me the same tolerance I give men. Ignore my attitude and tone of voice and we will do fine. But I don’t give them the same tolerance. I think it is because they do it differently. If a woman is the same kind of angry-tetchy I am we can normally figure out how to get alone. There is a lot of bluntness available and we can muddle through how to relate. It’s the ones who have a high idea of protocol in their head that I will never measure up to that I have trouble with.

I deal well with other wild animals. I can respect that. It seems to be a harshness of spirit that I can recognize from a ways away. Very wounded people all seem to move or smell the same. It transcends gender in a variety of ways. There are two kinds of wounded people, in my experience. There are victims and there are wild animals. Victims think that they are wounded because they were terribly treated. Wild animals think that life is hard and sometimes you don’t get out of the way fast enough. There is a basic acceptance of brutality that I can work with. I don’t have a lot of patience for victims. Victims seem to think that the world is basically a just place so why were they treated badly—it’s not fair!

I have never had someone who was black hear about my life and tell me, “You should be dead.” That has only come from white people. Only white people seem to think that the indignity of what I experienced is such that I simply should not keep going. People of other races nod and say that shit happens. Now what am I going to do?

It’s a very complicated intersection of race and gender and social class that drives my anger. I’m tired of being treated like a delicate wilting flower. I’m tired of being told that I should not survive what happened to me. I should lay down and die. I should shut up. I shouldn’t offend people. I should accept my place in the pecking order and stop being angry about it. There isn’t a point. Actually there is a lot of point. I’m glad I have enough anger to walk away from tense interactions more determined that these fuckwads are not going to kill me. They don’t get to win.

Sometimes I’m angry with people I don’t need to be angry with. That is unfortunate. But it’s life. Sorry. I apologize a lot. I think I’m quite the sorry individual. And that is why I am so angry. I believe I am low status. Despite all kinds of markers in my life that might indicate otherwise. I am completely convinced that there isn’t a lot of point in me continuing to waste oxygen. Ok, at this point someone has to raise my children but wouldn’t they be better off with someone who was less disgusting? Someone who was more appropriate?

I think a lot of this anger is all self-directed. Why can’t I be what I see in my head? Why can’t I be just a good upstanding citizen? Why do I have to fight all the damn time? Why do I have to argue? Why do I have to deal with men telling me that I am willfully blind if I do not see the world exactly as they do? I don’t think I am the blind one. But I seem to have bought into the idea that I am less than them. And I hate them for it.

Angry

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Yesterday I was angry all day. It is fairly rare for Noah and I to fight. And when we do we don’t raise voices much any more. We have quiet, intense conversations about things that are normally more emotionally intense for me than Noah. I assume. Based on the fact that I’m the only one crying.

It wasn’t that many years ago, I was an adult, when my sister snickered at me and said, “Still cry when you are frustrated, huh?” Yeah. I do. When I am frustrated tears flow down my face. I don’t sob, but tears come. It’s not real fun. I can halt the process but I have to find a place of coldness in my heart. I try not to live there.

Most of what Noah and I struggle with is the fact that I have a major chip on my shoulder towards many things he represents. It is hard to not take my anger out on him as a representative member of groups. I am really angry in a visceral way that most of the world (or at least my country) considers what I do with my time worthless or a waste of time but oh man… Noah is smart and high status. Because he helps make it possible for people to watch ESPN videos online over and over. Yeah. The world fucking needs that. It is sooooo important. I don’t object to him doing it. It pays the bills. But I resent like fuck the fact that I am shit when standing next to him. I am angry that I am discounted and unimportant compared to an engineer.

I have lost my feeling of impressed with engineers over the years. I see the ways in which they don’t function all that well. They just don’t seem as super human to me. I know what kind of slack-jawed morons sometimes graduate with engineering degrees. Mostly even the fucking morons treat me like they are much smarter than I am. They have a degree in something “real” not something lame like English. A language they are dubiously acquainted with even if it is their native language.

I deal with a lot of men who seem to think “engineer” means “always right”. Yeah, it doesn’t. If I want to get an opinion in your narrow little specialty, sure I’ll ask you. Otherwise I’m going to feel angry when you pull out that condescending “I know everything” tone. You aren’t my father, stop fucking lecturing me. For the record, Noah doesn’t lecture me like this any more. We have worked on that. But he is a representative member of a group I have a problem with. This gets complicated.

Noah has done very little maintenance on this house since he bought it. He did a few things right when he moved in and then just let things be. Things are degrading. Things are going to need to be fixed and/or replaced. Noah feels that such work is not something he has to do. Someone else should be paid to do it. But we don’t have the money for that. We won’t for ten years. With each passing year I watch the spread of the black mold in the bathroom and watch the chinks in the grout grow. I’m sure we are doing damage to the wall. I’m terrified of what I will see when I open the wall. This is going to be hard to fix. I’m scared. Luckily I have a great relationship with the local building department (they know me!) and they are happy to sit down and explain things to me for very long periods. I will find out what all the city codes are and I will do the job right. I will cry a lot in the process. That will be ok too.

I feel like part of my anger is anger that I mostly get the 1950’s ideal situation where I am the “little woman at home” only my husband doesn’t do yard work. Or fix things. That’s on me. I can do it. I’m god damn competent. But sometimes it feels like I’m getting the worst end of 1950’s living and modern relationships. I get all the low status and lack of respect but I am expected to way the fuck more. I am expected to be a massively competent individual while being treated like an incompetent child. No Noah, not you.

Noah doesn’t understand what it is like to move through the world with a different status. I run into men who talk down to me fucking constantly. I’m a mommy. I must be brain dead. He thinks I should just ignore it. It’s not important what those idiots think of me. It’s a broken and crazy system. That’s a really fucking convenient thing for him to say when he doesn’t regularly run into the problem of having to play the game or not be able to get shit done. I can’t always say, “Wow. You are a condescending jack ass. Can I work with your manager, please?” If I am curt in response to someone being demeaning I generally get a fat load of hostility and they don’t actually help me. I have to suck up to those assholes. How in the fuck can I just ignore them?

Noah doesn’t understand because if I send him then their tone of voice changes. He can’t see the problem. I must be imagining things. “If I can’t see it then I can’t judge it.” He thinks I am over sensitive. I think most people aren’t sensitive enough.

And then the Godmamas came over. Marcie asked me if I drill Shanna in numbers and I could feel the spout on the top of my head go off. I wanted to break something. She didn’t mean it like that. We had a tense few minutes as I explained that I had already been angry before they arrived and I was having a hard time listening after that word because I felt really angry. She clarified that she hadn’t really meant “drill” and she explained in detail what she did and how. We had a long conversation about educational stuff I do with Shanna. It was just tense. And I hate that I do that. I hate that I am so angry all the time.

I hate that I feel like I have no worth other than what I produce by “earning money”. To be fair most women in my position go off and find social status in other ways. They become the organizers or the ones who do the grunt work.

I’m in a bad spot. For the next fifteen years of my life I’m going to have to deal with the parent community. The parent community is kind of a nightmare for me. When the other parents start spouting off shit like, “Marriage is between one man and one woman” I can’t really say much. Because if I make those parents uncomfortable then they won’t let their kid play with mine. I can’t do that to Shanna. So I have to shut up and sit there.

When people tell me to find a different parenting group I laugh. It’s been nightmarish finding one as local as this. And it isn’t local. I don’t really relish spending many hours in the van with Calli screaming at the top of her lungs so I can find a more on-the-surface liberal parenting group somewhere more expensive to live. Every option carries advantages and disadvantages. I can consistently get myself and the kids to these events because they are close enough. That means I have to not talk.

I’m angry. I’m kind of tired of being shamed into silence by society at large. Most of my life experience revolves around sex in some way. I had a lot of sex. I can’t talk about most of my relationships or relationship structures. When I say that I am friends with my husband’s ex-girlfriends people look at me like I grew another head. What? Occasionally I am asked how I can be friends with someone my husband has had sex with. I am truly bewildered by that question. Uhhh if I thought people who were former lovers had to be shunned I would have to leave the state. And be careful which state I picked to move to. I never have been to Ohio.

Noah tells me to ignore what people think about me. But what people think about me will determine a lot of how they treat my children. No, I can’t ignore it. I truly can’t. For me to not care and do whatever I want whenever I want would be for me to teach my children a not particularly functional way to live. There are certainly people in the world who like me plenty. I’m god damn careful how I act around them. Very few people find out my unfiltered thinking. It’s not worth the hassle.

Everyone is socialized. I am a lot closer to being a wild animal than most adults. I wasn’t properly domesticated as a child. When Noah says that I shouldn’t think about what other people think it feels like lying. It feels like a manifestation of his god awful heap of privilege that he thinks I can get away with that. I can’t. I can be “out” in some ways at some times in some places. I have to mostly keep my mouth shut.

I can’t tell the women at the mommy group, “Gosh it seems kind of silly to worry about the people he has slept with when I have way more friends that I have slept with.” I care about who he sleeps with going forward quite a bit. The past? I have to let that go. That’s not about me. I’d like to lecture them about how ridiculous they are being.

The thing is, if I get in with the group and I keep my fucking mouth shut for five or ten years and they get to know me then I can “come out”. Then it will be fine. People will have learned how to tolerate me already. But I can’t fuck this up for my kids. I have to be quiet for a long time. I have to care what they think for a while.

I have to very carefully figure out what things I’m allowed to say. This is a homeschooling group. It’s diverse.

I think I am partially so angry right now because I have kind of gotten used to being talked down to by men. When I show up in a group of women and get the same shit I want to break things. I think I hate women (in large groups) more than I hate men. I’m fucking tired of being shoved down the pecking order.

That is not really it though. I’m mad at Noah and I can’t even figure out all of why. I think I am mad at him for not being able to rescue me from every hard thing. And honestly his advice on how to deal with them kind of sucks. I should probably take the other Godmama up on her offer to put me in touch with her mother. The godmama grew up with three parents in the house. That’s complicated.

Noah does things. Noah works hard. I seem to have this giant chip on my shoulder because he doesn’t do something that I have the expectation that he do. Unspoken expectations are bad news.

Noah appreciates me. He is nice to me. He is kind. He helps with a lot of chores. He tells me that he does the low status ones, like dishes. To that I think, “Scrubbing the toilet is much lower status.”

I’m feeling scared. If I have no worth other than what I do as my “work” then all I am is a mom. That’s not really a fair burden for my children. They should not be my entire prop of self-esteem. That’s not functional. That’s not healthy. I sure as shit am not going to keep having kids so that I can keep that role in my life forever. (Five kids! And counting! I’m keeping my mouth shut.)

When I was eighteen I bought a Hyundai Accent. I really liked that car. It gave me freedom and independence. I paid it off quickly so it wasn’t even that much of an on-going expense. I covered the back of it with bumper stickers. Things like “I’m the one your parents warned you about.”

I don’t know how to deal with being the kid that everyone was told to stay away from because I was dirty and bad now that I am the parent. I still have those behaviors that got me ostracized over and over starting at three or four. I don’t know how to do this. Joining groups is hell on earth. I have to care what these people think because I don’t want my kids to have the same life I had. I want them to have stability. I feel broken. I feel bad. I want to sit there saying “fuck fuck fuck fuck” at the park. Seriously. That’s what I want to do. I want to give everyone the heebie jeebies so they stay away from me and I don’t have to smile and nod when they go off on their bigoted bullshit.

I’m mad at Noah because even he is a liar. Even he is wrong. He’s not supposed to be. I’m supposed to be able to believe him. He is doing the best he can given his life experience. It is hard nearly every day. I have to stop and think really hard, “If I was a functional person what would I be doing?” Every day is a conscious choice to do a certain set of behaviors. I pick them as a compromise between what I want, what is best for the kids, and then I have to compromise between what I want and what other people will think.

I don’t wear my “badass as a honey badger” shirt when I am out with my kids. People would treat my kids differently. I don’t want that for them. It’s stupid shit. But it’s there. Always. I am rebellious and inappropriate. You have no idea what my unfiltered thoughts are. I am a very angry person.

Noah doesn’t understand because he has his “work persona” which is different from the rest of his life. But he doesn’t filter as much for random people. He doesn’t understand that my “the rest of my life” is my job. And I don’t know what the tolerances are on my behavior yet. I don’t have a good way to figure out the group.

Other than teaching I haven’t had a phase of my life that wasn’t centered around someone I was fucking in a social group. Not so much an option in the mom-group. Just sayin’. But that tension is there. It’s hard.

I went in and renewed my medical marijuana card. When I was talking to the doctor (who is starting to recognize me after so many times of seeing him) he asked me how I handled dealing with talking about pot with my kids. “There are only so many times you can tell them a skunk was in the back yard.” I told him that I don’t lie to my children. I tell them I use a medication because chemicals in my brain are kind of wonky. That happens sometimes. If you do not need a medication it can make you very sick so never take a medication unless you know for sure that you need it. That is what I tell my kids about pot. He said it was just like being age appropriate when talking about sex. I started crying.

I have to look up in books how to be age appropriate about sex. When I was Shanna’s age I was offering up blow jobs to the neighbor kids. I don’t know what “age appropriate” is. I truly don’t. In the pit of my stomach I know that what I know is bad. That’s all I know. It’s hard. It’s scary.

Shanna knows that her nipples, vulva and butt are off limits to other people. They are just for her. If anyone touches them she needs to let me know because it is my job to help her stay safe. Mostly she just doesn’t spend unsupervised time around people. Shanna knows that sex is for grown ups because kids have delicate bodies and they aren’t ready yet.

I feel scared because I am bringing up children in a country that is moving backwards. I’m watching my rights recede as ignorant men vote them away. I’m scared. I’m scared to travel because I have to submit to intimate touching that feels degrading. I’m scared that something will happen and I will have depended on Noah and then I will get screwed. Because I was stupid enough to think that his status transfered to me. I’m a low status person. I really don’t think I will ever cease to be white trash. That’s just going to be life for me.

How do I keep the filth off of my kids? How do I let Noah make them more like him than like me without feeling invisible and unimportant and stupid and wrong and bad. I don’t know.

Status

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I finally found one of the threads in my brain I’ve been trying to turn into a full tapestry. Let’s see how this goes.

How much do other people think about status? I think about it a lot. I think about who has it and why. Status is far more important than people want to admit in pretty much every area of life. Dancers try to tell me they aren’t status whores but they have spent many thousands of dollars on costumes to be impressive. Really?

I’m status obsessed. I can say it out loud as well as in writing. I think about the potential status repercussions for my actions. I like to toil in isolation and show up with something cool. I don’t like being seen sucking. If I can’t do that, well, I guess I don’t need to come out of isolation.

I’m a weird place socially. I am not present in any community enough to be an Alpha. I know it. I accept it. I don’t really want to be a leader. It’s a lot of pressure. But I’m not really a group member. I suck at that. My experience of being part of the hierarchy is that I have to be on the bottom and shut my fucking mouth about it.

I re-watched the movie Whale Rider recently. The little girl was explicitly told she had to sit in the back and not participate while the boys were trained. Obviously she wasn’t as good as them. They had dicks. They are better.

That was really and truly how my childhood was oriented. If someone had a penis and he wanted to be “right” you had to let him. I certainly went off and lived that experience again with Tom. I don’t do that any more. I argue with Noah. I am kind of an asshole when I am right. I have a lot of years of bitterness around being told I am wrong. It’s not fair to Noah. He thinks it is a small sin in the scheme of things. I have gotten much more polite over the years.

Noah and I have long, complicated conversations about status. In terms of income we are in the top 10% of the country. In the bay area we are fairly median. We consciously choose to live in a smaller, cheaper house than most of our friends want to live in. Noah deals with a long commute so that he doesn’t have to spend way more money on a mortgage. This was what he could afford to buy ten years ago. I’m told we should upgrade now. My thought is, “Nah, I can remodel when the mortgage is paid off.” I won’t be able to buy a house that feels perfect. I’ll have to change it too. Why not just put all the effort into this house? Why leave my garden? I’ve done a lot of work here. This is my piece of dirt. I have changed it.

Because where I live is rather low status.

People snicker occasionally. You live in Fremont? I don’t really understand the sneering. Mother fucker my family is from Bakersfield. This is a step up. I promise. It helps that even my neighbors think we are on the low end of things. We don’t spend money in flashy ways. I think a month-long trip to Europe is a high status thing to do. I’d rather do that than spend more money on rent.

Noah was talking to me about how people want to be able to identify very high status people and very low status people and they don’t really want to think about the bits in the middle. That’s sticky. I’m in the middle these days. I have been on the bottom. I know very well what it feels like to be looked at and judged to be less of a worthy person just because of the things you don’t have. The rest of my family has standard poor-person-values in terms of wanting status symbols. You may live in a roach infested dump but damnit you have expensive shoes. Or a big car. Or something. I don’t want to have. I want to do.

Most of the people who inhabit my world are fairly bright. I know a lot of ivy-league-educated people. I live in that kind of place. I always know I am not one of them. I know that I am a social climber. I know that I really belong on the lower end of societies scale on most things. I spend my time around people who are demonstrably higher status than me wondering when they will look down on me. I didn’t go to CMU or Stanford or MIT or… They still talk about it all the time. Clearly it is a big part of their self-perceived status. If it is such a demonstrably large part of their perceived status it isn’t much of a jump to think that they therefore judge other people on the same criterion. All I have to say is that my university was named for a city when I went there. Now it’s just “East Bay”. Woo. That’s pride to have. Even the school isn’t proud of being in Hayward. Let’s try to pretend we have some relevance compared to places like Berkeley. We’re part of the bay area too! Ugh.

I forget that the ivy league educated people aren’t any smarter than I am. I feel intimidated by them. I never even took trigonometry. Obviously I am as stupid as a rock. At least that is the attitude the geeks have. In their little status hierarchy I am extremely low status.

I think I married Noah because, near as I can tell, he has a higher opinion of my status than anyone else. Even before marrying me. He thought my experiences and strengths add up to a person of considerable value. I think he married me because I look at him and see very high status. I can’t believe someone like him would want someone like me.

I crawled out of the gutter. I come from uneducated people with no work ethic to speak of. I come from drug abuse, alcoholism, and heinous abuse of various flavors. It feels like I am an untouchable. How could a trust fund baby from an ivy league see anything worth having? Status is a complicated thing. If you are sufficiently mobile you can trick people into only seeing your current life situation. If you do that then you can have some degree of social mobility in the middle. You will never be high status that way. Such assignments carry longer term consequences. They are for people who are fairly consistent in their life. You can carry low status with you. I feel like I am trying to outrun mine.

How much do I have to do? How much do I have to accomplish? What do I have to learn? What do I have to do to throw of the stink of being low status? I don’t know. These days it seems like the stench is only in my own mind. I have managed to learn how to pass. People don’t question me about my status unless I tell them I am white trash. Maybe that is why I do. I’m fucking tired of how these middle status people don’t want to honestly talk about what that means.

I’m in the middle. Probably lower than you. And sometimes I can’t help myself but I hate you for it.

A Tuesday morning ramble.

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I’ve had several nearly-fully-formed posts running around in my head for days. Now that I am at the computer? Nada. Typical.

I have been increasing the amount I socialize lately. That is a mixed bag. It means more dealing with people. That’s hard. Being around large crowds of people who are questionably friendly to me is exhausting. The funny part is, one of my default “I’m hiding how I feel” mannerisms is to smile and nervously giggle a great deal. It seems like other people can’t tell the giggling is nervous. So they think I am having a fabulous time. It’s a great cover and I have been working on it for a long time.

I went out dancing on Saturday night. I explicitly told the two friends I was meeting there, “I am here because you two will keep me from hiding in the bathroom and crying.” They were shocked to find out that was a possibility. I don’t have the heart to really explain that without them doing that it isn’t a possibility it is an inevitability. Getting to the dance event is hard. Once I’m there it’s not like I’m out of danger.

I asked two men who were strangers-to-me to dance. Both of them looked at me, kind of twitched, then said they were sitting this dance out and walked away from me quickly. After the second one I didn’t ask again. I danced with my two girl-friends, and three male friends who remember me and generally try to get in a dance with me when they see me. I was grateful for dancing at all. When I come alone, I don’t always get in 1/2 of the dances I did on Saturday.

Sometimes I picture that seem from The Cutting Edge (a cheesy partner ice skating movie) where the coach says about the bitch woman, “We should have been making her a singles skater.” I wish I liked more solo dancing styles. I kind of hate that I like partner dancing and thus I have to deal with other people. It doesn’t help that I will probably never get Noah past his innate feeling that dancing is horrible. A long time ago he tried the dance community and discovered that they are all liars. I’m not going to argue with him, not really. Dancers say that they are happy to see new people and dance with them. In practice this is not so much. They want to dance with the good dancers–the ones they see all the time. Their friends. It’s ok. I just wish they wouldn’t lie about it.

I’ve become cautious over the years. I no longer can act like my actions will have no long-term effects. I want to raise my children in this area. I really can’t continue to just act however I please. It has consequences. I’m left in this place where I don’t know how to behave. I’m afraid. I don’t know what I am or am not allowed to be without the consequences for my children being terrible.

Those same two girl-friends ran a 5k with me on Sunday morning. All three of us kept up a nice steady 5 mph pace the entire way without walking at all. I’ve never run that far without walking. It felt really good. Maybe I should pay more attention to pacing, eh? It seems to work fairly well. Normally I mix in sprints randomly and I have to walk after them to get my breath back. This felt really good. I felt like I could run forever.

And there was a handfasting this week. I got to see all the people who chat with me during the day (*wave*) as well as a lot of People I Kind Of Know. Which is to say, people I have seen around in communities for about a decade but I don’t really know them. I’m fairly certain people think I’m snotty but most of the time I don’t talk to people because I’m not interested in being criticized or told I am wrong. I’d really rather stare at the wallpaper, thanks. It feels like I already, long ago, figured out who would tolerate me and I just don’t talk to new people much.

I have to say that Sarah moving in renewed a bunch of tentative distant connections and they have greatly increased in intensity. I finally had a reason to get over the hump with a few people. That’s good. I’m trying.

It’s kind of weird how much time I spend around former lovers when I go out in public. That’s what happens when you fuck your way through every community. It’s harder to deal with them now. Monogamy is… different. I was “monogamous” with Tom. But girls didn’t “count” and he didn’t care about anything shy of a penis in my vagina. That’s not what Noah and I are doing. I’m no longer really supposed to sit on laps and wiggle. Kissing is out. It’s different. It’s a whole different way of thinking about relationships. I feel terribly uncomfortable. For the love of Christ what else do I really have to offer?

That’s the crux. I offer sex because I believe I have nothing else. That I am nothing else. The reality is I don’t have the time or space in my life to be that any more. I consciously chose to stop offering that. To stop being that. I’m left with not knowing what to do. I have been having sex by choice (rather promiscuously) for my entire life. I go out and find it. When I am not looking for sex and I try to deflect it I usually get raped. So I stopped deflecting. Going out in public is terrifying. I don’t know what to do now. It’s hard and scary telling men to desist in doing things that I used to tolerate. They protest–I like it don’t I? That means they should do it. Even though I said “no”. They know more about what I want than I do, right?

Poly gatherings feel like a meat market even when one isn’t at a sex party. There is a lot of frank appraisal in the gaze. People are hunting. They act available. It’s an undercurrent. When people are interested in sex I can tell. I used to feel like those people were looking for someone like me. Now I don’t. I don’t know how to relate to them any more other than to avoid them. There is no good to come of having to point out that they don’t want me. How could that help anything? Just don’t talk to them.

It doesn’t help that I like talking about sex. It’s one of my favorite topics. I know a lot about it and I like broadening what I already know. It makes life awkward. I have consciously sought out knowledge and experiences my whole life. I fell like sex is one of the strongest biological impulses I have and I like thinking about it and talking about it. I like talking about food, too. Why is one shameful and the other isn’t?

I feel like I am badly adjusting to the concept of having a private sex life. That must sound odd to people. Isn’t sex usually private? Well, not for me. Not really. I don’t want anything I do to be a secret. I used to write scene reports and send them in to mailing lists. (I should probably ask Marcie if I can access those archives and find the scene reports. I lost them many hard drives ago.)

I do not yet have a mental picture on what kind of person I will be in ten years. It’s kind of scary. I know that I will still be a lot like me. I hope I will be better. I hope I will have made progress I can feel proud of. Ending a sentence with a preposition is wrong. I want to feel pride in myself. I don’t want to be an asshole. I don’t want to brag. But I want to know that I can look around my life and see frequent signs that I am a competent human being.

Change topics. Food. I didn’t grow up around people who cooked. In my house dinner was taken out of the freezer and unwrapped before it was microwaved. That’s food. Or you just open a bag and eat. Sometimes you have to boil water first and then let the noodles “cook” for three minutes. No shit dude, top ramen was cooking compared to everything else I ate.

When my mom occasionally felt like she should do more it generally involved one step meat in the oven and opening a few cans of vegetables and microwaving them in bowls. No really, we didn’t cook. I don’t understand what that even means until I try to cook for my family. Yesterday was a great day. In the morning I put another trellis in the ground and yanked the blackberry shoots over so that they can start growing how I want. I spent a while trimming the rose bush. I’m not done because that sucker is huge. (Thanks, former housemates!) It’s an ongoing project. Then it started raining and I came in.

I took the bones out of the fridge and made stock. I put a whole bunch of spices and other vegetable remnants in the pot. I had to think really hard about what I was doing. I had to recreate in my head what I have seen other people do. I let that cook for hours. I started making cupcakes. It took me about two hours because the butter was cold and creaming cold butter by hand is kind of a nightmare. I kept covering the bowl and scooting it closer and closer to the simmering stock pot. Melt! Damn you! Eventually it worked out well. The cupcakes are awesome. I know because I ate four last night. I just couldn’t stop. Holy cow those are good. I don’t make cupcakes very often because four in one day seems a bit excessive. But on the first day, oh man. Have to.

Then I had to do a whole bunch of dishes. Then I immediately started the next few steps on making soup. I was in the kitchen processing food and dishes for at least six hours yesterday. To make cupcakes, stock, and soup. I did sit down in the middle and eat lunch. But that’s a full freakin job right there. No fucking wonder my family didn’t cook. They didn’t have that kind of time and energy to spare.

Cooking is so weird. It feels like an act that is either done from desperation because one is poor and can’t do anything else or it is an act of privilege. Only people have had to cook for a very long time. I don’t know why it feels this way. Why does it feel optional? Why does it feel non-mandatory if you can find a way out? I used to eat out a lot. Other people did my cooking. Cooking is low status unless you do ridiculous over the top stuff.

I feel so weird about food. It feels strongly related to class. It doesn’t help that I visit the kinds of playgrounds where people have to agonize for an hour over what they brought. “I know this isn’t good enough for ________ reasons but this other thing I brought is far superior to what that other woman brought. Can you believe she is letting her kids eat __________?” I don’t talk to other moms much. I read my phone or play with the kids. It seems for the best. They don’t want to god damn hear me tell them what I think.

It’s not that I never have those thoughts. I frequently have the thought, “Holy shit, that woman is letting her kid eat what?!” I’m ok with that. I don’t say it out loud where someone can hear me and feel scorned. I suppose that saying it on the internet isn’t really better. Doesn’t that make me two faced as well?

Women talk about that shit at the park so they can shame other women into getting into line. I talk about it because I want to decide what I want to do. Sometimes I think, “Holy shit, that woman is letting her kid eat what?!” and I decide that maybe I’ve been hyperventilating over something I can relax about. I don’t need to shame people into sharing my values. They might have perfectly fucking good reasons for what they are doing. My values tend to be so at odds with everyone around me that I don’t really want to talk about non-involved people. I can’t judge someone I’m not even in a conversation with. I will talk about my opinions with people, sure. I will share what I do and why. But I’m not going to evaluate a stranger and give them some kind of “score” to a third party. I see no benefit.

Today is park day. I’m feeling nervous. It will be fine. I doubt anyone will even know that I told that woman to take a hike. Lots of people show up once and never come back. I don’t think I am going to get into trouble. We’ll see.

Hm. I just had a thought that should be it’s own separate post. I’ll do that.

Mostly parenting babbling

2 Replies

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.

First world problems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shorter and shorter.

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I’ve been pulling at my hair for an hour in that way that means I will cut it again today. I have Hair on repeat. Really if you think about it, Lady Gaga singing about hair is somewhat ironic. She wears wigs. As she says over and over, “I am my hair” she is saying that she is something that is external. She has so much control over who she is that she decides differently on a daily basis. Does that mean that people who have abrupt changes in their appearance are changing who they are?

This is all too angsty; I know. I love semi-colons. Damn you, commas. Jenny likes to remind me that the “rules of writing” were just randomly invented by some twat one day. Ok, that’s not exactly what she says. But it is what I hear. It makes me smile every single time. Because if some twat just made it up one day I don’t need to feel bound to it. I can do whatever I want. It’s a fun kind of rebellion–normally invisible.

Along with my hair getting shorter I notice how my field of vision is shortening. I’m not responding to emails or text messages unless I have seen the person recently. Recently as in seeing them within the last month. People I haven’t seen in many months… I don’t know. I just never seem to remember when I am at the computer. Or it is something like right now where I am actively avoiding. I don’t know why I am actively avoiding. I do. I don’t want to say why I am actively avoiding.

I’m not at ease in my skin right now. I feel not-ok in a way that I can’t ignore. I feel like a thousand monkeys are jumping on my chest. It hurts just behind my breastbone. Right now I don’t feel like I can look people in the eye. I feel dirty. Small. Less than. It’s not anyone else’s fault. At this point in time I don’t think there are very many people who know me even casually who think that of me. Not really. Sure, there are people who dislike me.

Outside of my family I don’t actually believe that people wish me ill. And they all feel very guilty for wishing me ill.

I am trying to see my shaman on Thursday. Since our babysitter quit I’m not 100% sure that is going to happen. And I may have to reschedule with him because of a meeting in the city anyway. It feels kind of like the universe doesn’t want me to see him. I want to see him.

I’ve got my bangs too high that I don’t stand a chance. I think I need to ask my shaman to shave my head. There. That is the compulsive. Why don’t I ask Noah? Why do I want to keep this away from him? Why is my shaman more appropriate?

Well didn’t I just fucking load that question. What does ownership mean? I don’t know. I really don’t. I am very much like a wild animal. I run off and do things by myself sometimes. I can’t accept having everything in my life have to come from Noah. Right now there is so very little in my life that isn’t for him. That plays a part in why I was dating too, I think.

Noah doesn’t have the same wounds in identity because of his appearance. I don’t see the deep fractures in his soul from feeling bad about how he looks. My shaman has spent a fair bit of time being upset with his physical body. Even my use of male pronouns is part of that fight. I feel like it is a failure in me that I cannot default to gender neutral pronouns. They all feel wrong, false, not grammatical. Not allowed.

Does that mean that people who are not easily labeled by one of those correct pronouns do not exist? It certainly feels that way. I suppose that since the dominant name and label is generally male it is close enough. That is awkward to say and write about. I feel like I am jumping on the crazy train, but who am I kidding? I was already here.

I want to see my shaman. I want to talk to him about my shifting sense of self. I want to talk to him about feeling so very bad about existing. I don’t have a church. I don’t have a congregation. But I do have a shaman. I’m not sure how these things happen. How does a life get built, anyway?

The part of me that is fighting with my compulsion admits that I want to use sex to get close to my shaman. I want to feel connected with him. Given our history I know it wouldn’t work in the way I wanted it to, anyway. We have an odd time connecting that way because we go at very different speeds. We are not a match or it never would have fallen off. But I feel like I should do it anyway. I love him so much. I feel like I have to earn the honor of his regard. I have to prove to him that I do want him. I do love him. There is nothing else I have to give that has any value or worth at all. Absolutely never is the pleasure of my company a possible exchange. I know there is no pleasure in my company. I am too mean. Too sharp. Too vicious and unpleasant.

I take comfort in getting to explain to him that I am not allowed to have sex with anyone else anymore. It’s not my fault. I’m sorry I am changing the deal. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry that I will never meet that need again. Please, please don’t reject me now. He won’t. But I feel absolutely terrified anyway. Hell, he doesn’t remember the last time we had sex. I was not pleased when I figured that out. Butthead. Apparently he doesn’t value me based on the things I think he does. He doesn’t even remember the parts that I think are the most important thing I have to give.

What the fuck is it that he is getting then? I need to ask. I need to go to him and talk to him about starting to dye my hair when I first started pulling away from my mom. The colors have gotten increasingly bolder and more odd and aggressive as I have felt angrier and angrier with my mother. The bleach is kind of a bitch though. I had a temper tantrum while trying to comb my hair one day because I couldn’t get the knot out. I cut it out. I did a bad job. It was fun for several days to try to even it out and giggle because with the curls and the weird dye job (I think five colors in splotches) it really doesn’t matter much if it is “even”.

But I’m tired of going out in public and hearing the comments. I smile at the children who ask. I frown at the boys who snicker “clown”. It’s like fucking junior high all over again. I’m done. I’m not hunting. I’m done. I feel like that part of me is gone. I miss my hair. I miss being able to turn my head and get a curtain to hide behind. It was part of how I dealt with my vast discomfort in public. I lost my veil. I feel exposed in a way that feels deeply uncomfortable. I have nothing to hide behind except my eyelids. They do not feel like adequate cover.

I feel like me shaving my head will happen like all the cutting. In the bathroom by myself. I know my shaman doesn’t keep up with my blog. He frankly tells me he doesn’t have the time to read my ever-increasing flood. That’s ok. It means I can talk about him all I want.

I feel like part of what is going on with the less-than is I feel so very weird about my place in the social hierarchy lately. I don’t feel like I am behaving. I fit nowhere. It was a true thing I said when I told my therapist that the only way I will ever fit into a group is if I leave Noah and am a poor single mother. They just don’t make groups for me any more.

What does that mean? I guess that means this is the American Dream then. Solitude. More of it. I don’t understand why. I’m not sure where I got broke and I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t fit. I feel wrong. I feel like everything in me is wrong. I still feel bewildered by my lack of anger. I don’t have that energy right now. Anger is normally a big spur to me getting off my fucking ass and getting shit done. It’s one of the things I use to fuel my productivity and I don’t care if that’s healthy or not. Everyone dies, right? I could very carefully never ever use my body harshly. I don’t think I would be very proud of my life.

What am I proud of? I kind of want to go ask my shaman to bait it out of me. He drives me insane. He says irritatingly true things. One right after another. It’s hard to not hate him sometimes. I would ask him to take the last of this shame from me when he shaved my head. But I don’t think I am going to ask. Because this is one of those things I have to do alone. He can’t take shame from me. Not really.

Shame is something that I own all by myself. I have to learn to wear it or I have to take it off. I don’t know how to take it off right now. I feel stuck. I feel too little and small. I haven’t done anything to really be proud of. I have done things that other people do and I expect far more support for it. I am small and selfish and petty. I am weak. Really? Am I? Maybe. Yes? Of course?

I recently saw this picture, one of the canonical “starving children in Africa” pictures. I feel terrible describing it that way. But these pictures are used as bludgeoning tools. You can’t ignore the fact that seriously, right this minute a small child is starving to death in another part of the world. While you wear big fur boots and lots of makeup and talk about how pathetic they are. It’s kind of an American trope, this guilt.

If I ever feel bad for myself I am supposed to remind myself that I am at least not a starving child in Africa and go on about my life. Well doesn’t that just support the status quo. I don’t much like the status quo.

The thing about guilt and shame is they aren’t useful. They are paralyzing. They rarely spur people to much action beyond denial.

When the children hiss hostile words at me I hear my mother telling me that all the people in the world think I look stupid. Everyone thinks I am ridiculous. Why? What have I done? Why is it ridiculous to play with your appearance? Why is it expected to be a set thing that doesn’t modify as time goes by? Why can’t I change? Why am I to be mocked?

But you know what? I’m a fucking grown up. My triggers are mine to manage. I am not going to get all the children in the world to stop making fun of me. They are little assholes. They can’t help it. So are their parents.

I have a lot of interesting feelings emerging as my hair gets shorter and shorter. My mother liked my hair short. She wanted me to look like a boy. She commented openly on it. I’m really intrigued by how harsh my face appears with short hair. I’m not sure how I feel about that as a lifestyle choice going forward. I am going to have an interesting time as it grows out. I want my veil back. It’s interesting knowing that if I want long hair going forward in my life I have to stop doing anything to it. I’m stuck with baking soda and vinegar for the rest of my life. I will have gorgeous hair again.

It’s weird learning what self-care means. It’s weird thinking about learning to take care of my body. It’s weird learning what it means to be gentle with myself. It’s happening in unexpected ways. I don’t feel bad about the cutting. I hope I don’t do it again because the marks aren’t fading fast and I don’t want my daughters to learn it as an appropriate coping mechanism. It means I need to figure out what to do. I don’t know right now. So far the answer seems to be, “Don’t hate yourself.” I’m not sure what that actually means as something to teach my kids. How do I do that? For the love of shiny green apples, how can someone like me teach anything other than hating yourself?

I’m going to a homeschooling meet-up tomorrow with the kids. We will be doing Sharpie tie-dye. I won’t shave my head before then. They deserve to know what they are getting into with our family. We are weird. Get used to it.

I am my hair

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Last night Noah finally talked about his areas of insecurity. It makes me feel like perhaps I shouldn’t have put the trampoline in the exact location I did. There is a really lot of “But I thought you wanted…” in my marriage. That’s not good.

No matter how much I am hurting, I want Noah. Noah sees me in a way no one else does. He wants me more than anyone else ever has, and I don’t mean just for sex. Noah lies to me because he wants to be perfect for me and he’s afraid he’s not. He’s afraid to tell me he isn’t. Oversimplifying, but true. I think that’s never ok. You have to tell me the truth, for better or worse.

No one promised me more better than worse. Mostly it has been more better than worse.

I told my therapist yesterday that I don’t fit in groups. She tried to argue with me until I leaned forward and intently told her, “If I left Noah tomorrow and all of a sudden I was single and poor I would find dozens of groups that would take me with open arms. As a married, rich, seemingly heterosexual, who looks the way I do and acts the way I do with the trauma history I have… No. I don’t fit into groups. She closed her mouth and nodded. She told me she can see my point. My therapist also took a new job. She will only have hours on Thursday or Friday nights. Thursday’s Sarah is going to be taking a class and it’s Noah’s night off. Not to mention that I don’t think I want to fight rush hour traffic to Oakland. And having therapy on Friday night would wreck the whole fucking weekend. I cry enough. I guess this means I am going to be between-therapists. Shit. Perfect timing.

It feels like petulant whining for me to be upset. I have such a comfortable, easy life right now I shouldn’t whine so much about anything that is going wrong. How can it be that bad? I feel really weird about the fact that I still have loud, messy poor people problems. The way I throw temper tantrums feels low class to me. I have only witnessed the “public” faces of homes with more money. I can’t act like them. I can’t produce children who act like them. I can’t even have a middle class attitude about infidelity. I want to go jump off a bridge. I’m so melodramatic. It’s all so very intense. I can’t have “normal” “acceptable” feelings. I don’t feel angry and upset. I feel like (and do) cut up large swaths of my body.

What exactly are people supposed to do with anger? I’ve never been able to figure this out. You’re allowed to feel anger you just aren’t allowed to show it. How the fuck does that work? I don’t think other people get as angry as me.

Side note: the dry cleaners who got their window broken at the General Strike? $620. I feel thrilled that I did that. The family who owns the business almost cried. The building management was going to make them pay it. Do you know why I did it? Because I really want to break windows and it is only the thinnest veneer of control I have over that urge. I can’t feel angry with whoever broke the windows. I understand.

I just honestly think I am smarter and more willing to think about long-term consequences than him. (I know it was a him because J.P. Massar watched the kid do it.) I understand ignorance. I think that people should be working a lot harder to learn about different points of view. I know it is hard. I struggle with feeling safe being myself around other points of view. I start to feel like I meld in and disappear. Until I do something Wrong and I feel ostracized.

I don’t go dance because there are too many people who won’t look me in the eye. I feel unwelcome. I’m not mad about it. I’m resigned. This has been my whole life. I understand. I’m not someone that people want to look in the eye. It’s ok.

It’s approaching the end of funny colored hair time. The bleach is destroying it. Yesterday I cut off several inches in the front at a funny angle with wisps every which way because I couldn’t comb the knot out. I should probably straighten my hair cut a bit today. In front of a mirror this time. It’s time to stop bleaching and let it grow. I’m also at the perfect point in my cycle to kind of want to shave my head so I will have a weird reason to hide at home again for a long time. That’s the kind of thing I want to do and I don’t want to deal with the social consequences of doing. Boy howdy do you get comments when you shave your head as a girl. I’m trying to decide how short I am willing to go this time. I have a lumpy head. I went down to nothing when I was seventeen. Not long after my father killed himself. So
thirteen years ago I shaved my head and like a year ago my hair was nearly to my waist. If I ever want long hair again it will be a long, slow slog. Like, when I’m fifty. We’ll see.

My heart hurts.

Irrational feelings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These irrational feelings are hard.

Sacred cows

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I’m trying to decide what mood I want to be in for today’s writing sprint. My first date yesterday was an only date. That’s ok. I’m glad I had the “I want to be chased” thought yesterday. By the time I got to the date I was real clear that I was uninterested in being the one to do 100% of the physical aggression. I’m happy to do 50%. But I’m not running the fuck. You don’t want me bad enough. No more pity fucks.

I don’t need to go have pity fucks with strangers. I had sex with Noah twice. It was hot.

I was thinking about the fact that a lot of folks have been discussing “appropriate topics” lately. Over here at Soggy in Milk we are the all-inappropriate-all-the-time channel so I’m going to wax poetic for a few minutes. Bear with me. So imagine you had this nice normal life. You have great parents and a couple of siblings you adore. As you go through your life you get to spread daisies and sunshine and shit when you mention your euphoric family. Everyone compliments you and tells you how wonderful you all sound. Then I want you to stop for thirty seconds and think of what you have read from me here. Man I really want you to do this again after you read the book, if you want to.

Now. How the fuck do you think I feel when people talk about their families? What exactly should I say if in response to questions about my family? Should I lie? Evade? Be as curt as possible so as to minimize the damage I am invariably going to do? Be honest and watch as people all but run as fast as they can to get away from me?

Seriously. Where is my good fucking option. Because you assholes seem to think that the topic of “childhood” and “families” is perfectly appropriate in public. Oh, people will tell me, “Well you can talk about Noah and the girls!” How generous of you. I’m so grateful that I have a pat answer now that will satisfy your need for idle chit chat about things you are uninterested in. Let. me. make. you. more. comfortable. I live to serve.

I am angry about the so-called polite conversational topics because they exist to silence people like me. They exist to make people like me invisible. And powerless. They exist to make it impossible for most people to successfully prosecute their attackers because it’s not ok to say what has happened to you. Ever. People who say, “Well it’s ok to say it to the police” have obviously never pressed charges for sexual assault. I have. Do you know how the police treat you? They say that you have mental problems and you should be in therapy. Despite the fact that the next door neighbor heard the whole thing and reported it to the police. I was still dismissed as crazy.

Fuck appropriate conversation topics. Do you know what is an appropriate conversational topic? Police brutality. Incest. Rape. Poverty. These are things that can and must be talked about as often as necessary. In any circumstance. Ok, not in any circumstance. But in any circumstance where there are only adults present. I don’t think every five year old needs to hear about incest. But every child should grow up hearing frank conversations about police brutality and poverty. They should know that these things exist. This should be part of their lives too. Because it is part of being aware of the world around you.

If someone brings up a topic you don’t like you can try to change the conversation and make it all about you, or you can engage in a dialogue. If you are feeling massively uncomfortable, say that. Look at why. If your upset is about your irrational beliefs being challenged… fucking go with it. Get over yourself. Seriously.

Things don’t change until people are upset enough to make them change. The longer you brush uncomfortable conversations under the rug only to be had at rare, carefully pre-selected, never risky times you are growing at a snails pace. That’s not something that fuels real personal growth, I’m sorry. I’m that kind of control freak. I can do that. I love doing that. It means I don’t do any personal growth. It means I hide in my little freak ghetto and get into a rut.

I’m better than that. I need to go have the uncomfortable conversations. I need to be honest. I need to exist in the world. I need to demand the right to take up just as much space as everyone else. I’m not going to evade or give a half-truth when someone asks about my family. I will answer questions honestly. I will act like I have nothing to be ashamed of. “Oh, what’s your family like?” “Incestuous rapists.” And I will take the blinking eyes I get. I will take the look of shock and horror. And I will try not to flinch. And I will try not to cry. And I will try not to run away. And I will try to answer the following questions graciously without my voice cracking.

I’m not doing something bad by telling my story. I’m just existing. Yes, it’s a harsh story. Sometimes life is harsh. Sometimes people have harsh lives. It’s far more common when you live in poverty. That is a big part of the story. Why did I move so often? Because my mother was running away from my dad and from one abusive situation to another. Because we lived on charity. Because we had no choice. Because we were evicted repeatedly for non-payment of rent.

I’m tired of trying to make up a story that will make other people feel comfortable around me. I have spent my entire life trying to figure out how to lie well enough to be able to talk about myself. I’m really tired of it. I’m really tired of trying to invent a me that is good enough to be in public. If I carefully censor myself enough, maybe I will be a good enough person to deserve to be part of public discourse. This feels really shitty you know.

This wouldn’t be such a big part of my story if other people didn’t require that I tell elaborate lies in order to appear “normal”. It’s not lying! It’s just… not mentioning things. Uhm. If you don’t know that my family is full of incestuous rapists then you don’t know anything about them and I shouldn’t bother talking. Because it affected everything. It makes a big difference when I talk about my mother hating that I swore if I mention that I was raped about twenty minutes before she beat me for cussing. It gives a whole new perspective. That was my life. I was raped and then I came home to more poison. Multiple times. It’s kind of weird that I would come home from being raped and be mean and nasty and full of rage, right? But that kind of behavior was not to be tolerated and I was to be brought down a few pegs.

It’s time to go start writing on the book for today. For better or for worse I found my tone. It’s time to go put a narrative on this bastard.

I think talking about money is important.

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So after covering the checks I have already written for Occupy I have ~$32,000 sitting in my bank account. Do you know how much money I have to pay this month for various expenses? I owe $17,000 on credit cards. That will be paid off this month. I still haven’t paid property taxes or the mortgage or the domestic help or my therapy. That’s another $9,000. This is an unusually expensive month. Our income is settling in to about $8,000 per month. I am waiting to write checks for $17,650. That means that on the 30th of this month, if I succeed in giving all the money away, I will only have around $6,000 in cash. We have months that cost $15,000 on a fairly regular basis. We pay for a lot of things.

People who know me know that having a large financial cushion is kind of a ridiculous driving force for me. It’s unhealthy. I grew up in a kind of poverty I honestly don’t like thinking about. But holy fucking shit is my life different now.

That money was originally earmarked to pay off the Disney timeshare. I bought the timeshare when I realized it was only took four trips of the kind Sarah likes for her birthday to pay off the investment and we really do want to be at Disneyland every year… I bought it for Sarah and me. Noah wasn’t thrilled. Noah is not interested in spending that much time at Disneyland, thankyouverymuch. He’ll go. But not every year.

I have done Disneyland with Sarah enough times that it is worth it to me to buy the time share. Do you know why? Mostly because she is disabled. It is hard for her to expend the energy to travel long distances, sometimes even with motor devices. If we are in an apartment that is just a few yards away from an entrance she can afford the spoons to rest in the middle of the day and really enjoy evening stuff. It feels loving to be at Disneyland with Sarah. She appreciates it the same way my mom does. Just sitting on a bench with a book while people walk by makes her happy. Disneyland is a place to just sit and feel joy.

So I bought a fucking Disney time share and I feel like a privileged asshole. I feel strangely embarrassed that I bought this stupid thing. What a dumb fuck am I, right? Only dumb fucks buy time shares. It’s a racket. Geez. What a fucking waste of money. A number of people have told me off for this.

Do you know how many weeks of joy this has already brought me? Sarah and I get to dream about future vacations. They are paid for. I will have to pay for park tickets and gas to drive there. Otherwise we can cook in the apartment and it’s not any more expensive than being at home. Really.

It’s financed at 10% and I’m pissed off with myself for continuing to carry that debt. I wanted it paid off in a year. Err, that hasn’t happened. Other things keep coming up. Like getting my heart Occupied. Why is this so fucking important? Because people matter. We need a William Wallace. We need someone to step up. This is a Revolution. Hell, we need everyone to step up. What can you go do, today, tomorrow, and the next day to make the world a better place? Stop sitting in your house whining about your problems.

Says the whiny blogger who has barely left the house in months. Cause Jesus Christ, if anyone should stop whining it’s me. My life is the fantasy. My life is the mythical American Dream in all of the particulars. Oh, except that pesky PTSD shit. How do I fix me so that I can enjoy the American Dream?

Well, I’m writing. I think good will come from it. I think that is one of the gifts that was given to me in this lifetime. I can give people things to think about. They won’t always agree with me, probably rarely. But I want them to get to the point where they say, “Ok, I guess I can see why you feel the way you do.” That’s what I fucking want. I don’t need to have other people agree with me. I need them to understand WHY I am different. Why my opinion is different. Because maybe that will ripple. Maybe other people who have different opinions are ok too. Can we stop beating the shit out of political parties? What is the fucking point? Grow up you stupid babies.

People are people. I’m neither a Democrat nor a Republican. I kind of hate you all equally. And don’t get me started on how I feel about socialists. Or the members of my own, Libertarian party. I feel pretty embarrassed to be associated with them. Good grief. But it is the closest to what I believe.

I’m getting away from the point. When my heart was Occupied my priorities shifted. Noah is never going to want to stay home with me while working a part time job. He doesn’t want to. Ok. The dramatic need to lower our monthly expenses so that can happen… doesn’t really need to happen. If it takes longer and I pay more interest in the time share, that will be ok. Really. I can deal having to “tighten my belt”. We are part of the 99%. In order to maintain all the insurances folks consider necessary we have more than $6,000 of our income promised before it arrives. It’s $8,000. We have months where we put $17,000 on the credit card. You do the math. No really, that’s going to require some belt tightening. But I don’t exactly feel like I can complain about that.

And I have the money to spend. Occupy needs it more than I need to be able to have the lifestyle to which I have become accustomed. The fact that I can preplan 50 years of vacations means that my life is already as good as it needs to be.

The reason I feel I need to give the money is because people need a spark of hope. They need to see things being done. I can’t be the William Wallace for this movement. I really kind of wish I could. But that’s not my story. I’m trying to bait other people. I’m trying to push them to expand their dreams. Whoever is going to be the firebrand to lead this Revolution, (s)he will not have much money to start with. But there will be so much hunger. So many dreams. That person will say, “Yes give me your money so I can change the world.” I hope. I really hope.

In the meantime I took my family to a park clean up day in Oakland the Occupy folks organized. I have marched. I sit in the encampment and eat lunch and talk to the people who live there as I feel I can emotionally. I think my next clean up day should be in Fremont. I think that I’m about out of spoons for driving to Oakland.

I think maybe I should just open my front door and walk out it. I think I should Occupy the space I am in. Why am I trying so hard to give this money to Oakland? Why am I beating people over the head asking them to please please please take the money? Why don’t I start my own fucking occupation. Hm. It’s an idea. What would I do if I occupied Fremont? Hmm. I would start putting up notices for neighborhood clean up days. I’ll be surprised if I’m the only one out there. This is a small town in the middle of a big urban sprawl.

I’ve been surprised by how many of my neighbors have lived here for more than twenty years and they don’t know any of their neighbors. There is so much hostility and fear and isolation here. Why? I feel sad saying that I sat at the local diner and listened to the waitress be casually racist with the other customers. Despite the fact that I actually know a fair number of people in Fremont… I don’t see them. Pretty much ever. If you live in Fremont and you are “interesting” you spend your life in your car trying to get anywhere but here.

I’m getting tired of this attitude. Fremont is beneath people. I’ve done it too. I spent the first many years of our marriage being fucking pissed off living in this fucking house in fucking Fremont. This is one of the lowest socio-economic areas. Not the lowest, by any stretch. This is more like what I grew up with. My friends keep telling me to move to Alameda. I really don’t want to. I’m neither interested in the housing cost increase nor the insularity. I actually like that my neighborhood is not predominantly white. But I’m scared here. This is not really the safe bubble people think of in the bay area.

I’m in the closet. I can go protest in Oakland and be a radical and a pervert and a queer and whatever. People here just see me as that nice weird lady. I’m really polite to people in my neighborhood (uhhh except for the one time I yelled at a guy for wasting water while he was trying to deal with his lawn; long embarrassing story). I’m getting to know my neighbors very slowly. Very distantly. I’m trying to be consistent in my behavior over a long period of time without exposing them to my mood swings. I can’t afford to piss off my neighbors. Do you know how much pressure that is for me?

How in the hell can I expect my really diverse neighborhood to be thrilled about having a whore who writes about sex on the internet in their neighborhood? I’m out with the kids all the time. Aren’t they going to start looking at me as if I am dirty if they find out? Don’t I need to hide?

I think it is interesting that my friends think the Occupy movement is about money. I think it’s about pushing for the right to exist and be different and have a different life. Whatever the fuck that means. Our entire culture is set up around streamlining people so they can be more and more similar. I’m not fucking like the folks who grew up in small town Duluth (love you). And that’s more than ok. It’s awesome. I had different experiences so I got to go off and become a completely different kind of person. I’m not like the people who grew up in Rotorua, either. Or London near as I can tell. I go a lot of places and I meet a lot of people. I never fit. Nowhere.

Maybe I need to stop going out into the world trying to find someplace that is right. I think the Occupy movement is about seeing that something that needs to be changed and doing it. That will be financial for a lot of people. But it’s also about recognizing that we have abdicated a lot of responsibility to the system. Any system. How’s that going for folks? Maybe if we want something we have to just go fucking do it.

I want to feel ok in my town. I have to live here. But I can’t stay in the closet. This is horrible. I’m not much like most of the folks around me. But I’m not like folks anywhere. That’s ok. I may not be the right kind of Fremonter, but I’m the right kind of me. Yeah, it’s a stupid stupid little thing I say. I say it because I hope it’s true. I’m trying to convince myself it is. It’s very hard to believe that who and what I am is ok. That feels like a lie. So so so so so so many people tell me that I’m not ok. Not directly. Not to my face. But in the very air I breathe in this culture. I am so fucking wrong.

The General Strike showed me that I don’t feel that way because of the incest. I feel that way because I am an American. In fact, that seems to be our national culture. Anything different is wrong and bad. People, you need to lighten the fuck up. Maybe instead of sitting in an encampment in solidarity with people in Oakland I should be organizing a neighborhood group to figure out a way to meet the needs of the people within walking distance of me. That’s a significantly better choice for the planet.

But I will have to do that alone. I won’t be able to throw money at that problem and walk away. I will have to find the drive and determination to do that. I will probably mostly be the one doing that, if I think it should happen. It makes me tired. I can’t do that yet. I feel like I am failing my human beings. I feel like every day that I allow children to walk past my house on the way to school who are going hungry and I ignore that I am just as bad as the people who didn’t help me. I have so much rage at all of the people who didn’t help me.

Who the fuck am I helping? I don’t know. I hope that the RV comes through. That would be something. I wish I knew where my life was going. I feel like I am littering the path with burning ambitions. Things that hurt me that I am not focusing on them exclusively. You can’t focus on a dozen things exclusively. There isn’t enough me for that.

I really hope this movement spreads. Please people, you can change the world too. It doesn’t actually take money. It takes the desire to do good. You’ll find a way. Please?

It’s not what you know it’s who you know

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I used to have a coworker, Christina. We were hired for the same department the same year. I think in our first semester of being teachers together I subbed for her one period. That is a common thing for teachers to do. For things like doctors appointments, it’s easier than finding someone outside the school. You generally don’t get extra pay for it, but the goodwill is huge.

We were both still learning how to put together curriculum and we had very different styles. She was going from the textbook. I never checked the textbook out of the book room. I ran my classroom as close to a college class as I could get away with. I followed the state standards for educational guidelines, here let’s look at one set as an example (these are the official standards for the state of California):

WRITING (Grades 11 & 12)
1.0 Writing Strategies
Students write coherent and focused texts that convey a well-defined perspective
and tightly reasoned argument. The writing demonstrates students’ awareness of the
audience and purpose and progression through the stages of the writing process.
Organization and Focus
1.1 Demonstrate an understanding of the elements of discourse (e.g., purpose, speaker,
audience, form) when completing narrative, expository, persuasive, or descriptive
writing assignments.
1.2 Use point of view, characterization, style (e.g., use of irony), and related elements for specific rhetorical and aesthetic purposes.
1.3 Structure ideas and arguments in a sustained, persuasive, and sophisticated way and support them with precise and relevant examples.
1.4 Enhance meaning by employing rhetorical devices, including the extended use of parallelism, repetition, and analogy; the incorporation of visual aids (e.g., graphs, tables, pictures); and the issuance of a call for action.
1.5 Use language in natural, fresh, and vivid ways to establish a specific tone.
Research and Technology
1.6 Develop presentations by using clear research questions and creative and critical research strategies (e.g., field studies, oral histories, interviews, experiments, electronic sources).
1.7 Use systematic strategies to organize and record information (e.g., anecdotal scripting,
annotated bibliographies).
1.8 Integrate databases, graphics, and spreadsheets into word-processed documents.
Evaluation and Revision
1.9 Revise text to highlight the individual voice, improve sentence variety and style, and
enhance subtlety of meaning and tone in ways that are consistent with the purpose, audience, and genre.

To me there is no part of that needs to include dead white guys or boring work sheets. I want to talk about controversial books, stories, songs, news articles. Ok, some of the dead white guys are ok. I am a big fan of Mark Twain. I really enjoyed teaching Huckleberry Finn even though I’m sure I wasn’t PC. I made ever white kid in the class read aloud until they could stop stuttering when they said nigger. It’s just a word. Then the black kids spontaneously decided to talk about how it felt. There were fewer jokes after that day.

Anyway, Christina. When I subbed for her I made fun of the poem we were reading from the textbook. I did it reflexively. I did it because I had an instinctive hatred of the textbook. Of course word got back to Christina. She was cold to me for years rather than tell me that what I did was unprofessional. In the week or two before I quit I came into the break room. She was sitting there alone. I sat across the table from her and I said, “I feel that I must have wronged you. I’m not sure what I did. But you’ve been very angry with me for a long time and I was hoping you would tell me why.” She tried to deflect me. Naw, she’s got no problem. Then I told her the story I just wrote. I got to the end and I said I was sorry that I poisoned the well when I was an insecure new teacher. I did it because I was trying to bolster my sense of myself and in the process I damaged hers and that makes me a bully. I’m sorry. She cried.

She told me it was hard to keep hating me because I said things that were so funny and then she got mad at herself for laughing because she was supposed to dislike me. I told her I understand. People often feel that way about me.

Like they are supposed to dislike me, but they don’t and they aren’t sure why. I’ve been told that more times than I care to recall.

Yesterday we had our first visit from a housekeeper/babysitter person. She’s young and in college. She’s not white. The things she has mentioned so far make my heart beat faster. She was turned out at 13. She has been homeless for most of the time since. She made it through DeVry under extremely suboptimal conditions because she wants to be a Systems Administrator.

Some of the things she said remind me strongly of Christina, who was also not white and from a less than privileged background. It’s a specific quality. If I follow the textbook I will be doing it right. I have to do what the textbook says. They are both climbing the ladder by doing things right. I have always known that there must be an easier way. And because I was white and I lived in Los Gatos and I was invited into the homes of very rich people and I got to listen to the way they just randomly talk around the house…

Yeah, it’s different. My family taught me I had to conform and be like other people. A very firm caste system, if you will. I had to be who I was born to be. My circumstances of birth should have dictated my actions. But you see, I have always been able to find the ability to ‘pass’ around people of higher social class for at least a little while. I can’t maintain it for long and it feels like incredible strain. But all those bits and pieces and glimpses have shown me that the people who make it really far are people who believe that their circumstance of birth are irrelevant to their potential. They simply have a larger hunger than that.

Christina and the housekeeper and me are all hungry in that way. We want something more. This is very common. I’m hitting writers block because I feel like I want to say something that sounds bad or mean, but it’s still true. I’m paralyzed with fear.

Ok. I think that Christina and D (chick from yesterday) are afraid to go off book because otherwise they would have to start making up their own path. They have never been encouraged to do so. Everything in their lives has pushed them into a fairly narrow walkway for “success” but neither is going to actually reach success that way.

This is my big judgmental mouth here. This is hard to admit out loud that I think. Ok. I feel like they both need to go off book. If you are always afraid of failing you never commit yourself foolhardily to the most important decisions.

I called the Sheriff’s department and reported my father and had everything set, done, rolling before my mother got home from work. I knew that if I talked to her she would try to talk me out of making waves. I was just imagining things. According to my mother nothing was that bad; there was nothing to report.

I think that Christina needs to learn to stick up for herself and tell coworkers, “What you did was unprofessional and rude” because she needs to learn that she’s worth that. It will make her a better teacher. I think D should find a way to live and breathe Sys Admin shit for a few months in someones garage and not bother with DeVry. She needs to go talk to real live people who do this shit.

In both cases I am struck by their unwillingness to assert themselves with power. They both wait to be told what they should be doing and how they should do it. I don’t do that. I don’t think it is because I am white. I think it is because I was shown that rich people are assholes and they do whatever the fuck they want whenever the fuck they want. They can get away with it. I wanted to learn how.

In Los Gatos High School the kids all got away with murder. It was eery. I watched kids be disrespectful in ways that made my eyes bug out. But the teachers were powerless in terms of discipline. It was really obvious to me that the teachers were only going to be effective if they form a personal bond. And you can’t do that with everyone.

Christina isn’t a bad teacher and she doesn’t need to do anything different from what she’s doing. Her kids will learn just fine. But she’s not the right teacher for people who are hostile to working from a textbook. Early on when I was teaching it made me angry that she followed the textbook because it felt like a personal injustice that she was perpetuating the lie that people need to know the stupid shit inside that book. No one ever needs to read a god damn textbook ever in their lives in order to be educated.

This is my dirty street kid talking. I didn’t ever read the textbooks. I didn’t do homework. I was socially progressed through elementary and junior high because I did no work. Looking around the room I always felt like the other kids must be smarter or better or… something than me. For whatever reason I was never willing to do what I was told. Ever. I have had several teachers (in public schools) beat me trying to get me to change my behavior. It only ever made me more stubborn.

It’s scary to stand near people who take up a lot of space. It feels like they encroach on me and try to make me more like them. It’s scary to stand next to people who invite boundary incursion. I don’t want to push anyone to be more like me, either. I’m pretty fucked up. Why in the hell would anyone want to be like me.

But I went from the bottom 10% to the top 5% in a time when my generation is crying out against the injustice of lack of social mobility. It’s hard to not feel like a whore. I am this rich because Noah fell in love with me. He wanted a wife who was sufficiently slutty and fun. He encourages me in doing every transgressive thing I want to do. Because he thinks there isn’t actually anything wrong with anything that I’m doing.

I think it was easier to go find other groups that would encourage healthier behaviors because I looked enough like the groups that I wanted to be part of. When I was in neighborhoods where I was the only white kid, I wasn’t invited into the homes of nice families. I never had the experience of nice families in a multi-cultural setting. In Los Gatos it took a while for people to notice that I didn’t fit in and then they would stop inviting me. So in the poor, non-white (the specific concentration depended on where we were living) areas I spent all my time alone. Occasionally I wandered out for a sexual assault. When I was in white areas I was surrounded by very affluent, quirky people.

It’s had an effect on me. So yesterday when this nice girl was helping me clean my house we sat and talked a lot about her school experience and how she feels quite sure that they aren’t teaching her what she needs to know.

You know, I can’t foster children in a house this small. But I sure as shit can have a long string of people who need money work for me and I can help them network. You want to be a Sys Admin, honey? Let me introduce you to some nice girls I know.

Why I want to be a stay at home mom

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So I was watching the Steve Jobs speech at Stanford and it occurred to me that I should spend some serious time thinking about why I am a stay at home mom. I’ve been having internal pushback towards my decision making process lately and I think I need more clarity.

I view parenting as accompanying your child through an apprenticeship to adulthood. One that my mother failed at. My mother gave me adult responsibilities when I was very young. I had to be responsible for myself in a way that was not appropriate or fair. And I failed often. The result was that I got hurt often. I don’t instinctively know what skills a child would have to avoid problematic people. I don’t want to teach my children to be just like me.

I don’t think my aggression is an ideal life attitude. And I want my kids to be allowed to be them. I don’t know how to do that without looking at them all day long. I don’t know how to bond in a shorter time span than that. I believe that working mothers love their children just as much as I do. I don’t know how they find time in the day to deal with that much emotion. I can’t. It overloads me. Having to be patient and interactive with them is incredibly difficult. If I had other things adding stress to my life (like a job) I would be nasty and mean and vicious pretty much all the time. It is hard for me to be nice and I find that embarrassing.

I only know how to get through the bad days by having a lot of control over every single solitary thing I say and do all day. You can’t do that and have a job. So really, I just don’t want to have a job. No. That’s not true. I do not believe I am capable of managing the stress of a job and the stress of children. I would not be pleasant, ever. Dealing with my mental health takes up too much time, honestly.

And I am getting to discover what it is like to unfold in a safe, gradually expanding environment. I am watching how Shanna changes. It’s amazing to me to look at her in all of her grumpy glory and think, “That is in absence of any external stress whatsoever. Hunh. How does that jive with what I remember doing/being/saying?” I’m learning what it means that someone else can’t “make” you feel something. My children get on my nerves. That is kind of their job. When I lose my temper and start yelling at them I have this huge hammer in my brain hitting me as hard as possible saying, “She’s a fucking three year old! She doesn’t know this is an annoying thing to do! You are supposed to be helping her learn not berating her for her inadequacies!!” I feel like my anger is not supposed to be part of the equation.

Do you know why I feel that way? Because in my family you weren’t allowed to address small injustices or issues. You were required to stay silent through small problems and big problems alike. I was supposed to just smile and “be pleasant”. “Why is your tone of voice so nasty all the time” was the favored thing to tell me. I learned that I was simply an unpleasant person because I wanted them to stop “playing” with me in ways that hurt me. I was a whiner. At least according to them. And looking at Shanna… I can understand why people around me didn’t notice that anything wrong was happening.

If I put my hand around Shanna’s hand to hold it when she’s not in the mood it doesn’t matter if I am holding her with so little pressure I barely encircle her hand. “It huuuuuuuuuuuurts.” I feel like I’m going to lose my mind. She is constantly whining about how much I am hurting her, when I am not even touching her body. When I am walking towards her with the hair brush she starts crying and clutching her head and rolling around the floor sobbing because I have hurt her. When I haven’t touched her yet. I did that too.

Do you know what my mom did? She probably thought she was just trying to get it over with as fast as possible. Oh how I screamed. I have done the same thing to Shanna. You pull them over to the couch, hold them between your knees, and as fast as possible you get the knots out no matter how they squirm. But my would start with a fine tooth comb at the top of my head and yank. I have a baby brush with soft bristles and I start at the ends and I pull knots apart with my fingers. I don’t think Shanna is reacting to what I am doing less than I reacted to my mother. I sincerely believe that Shanna experiences actual physical pain for less than 10% of the time I am brushing her hair. My mother could be gentle but when she was in a hurry… well… that was that. And she was in a hurry a lot. I was the youngest of four. She worked most of my life.

If I had to hurry and get Shanna ready for daycare before I got ready for work we would not have a pleasant relationship. She wakes up slow. We generally sit in a chair for half an hour cuddling before we do anything at the beginning of each day. Calli is joining us now. Then Noah makes breakfast and the kids go back and forth between us. If I also had to get ready for work then, that would be the end of my writing and relaxing. That is when I have that time. The other tasks would get managed somehow by someone else. I would just lose writing.

It’s hard for me to actually admit that I need this writing. It feels so banal, so unimportant. Why would anyone ever care about anything I have to say? Who the fuck am I? Because if I’m telling you the truth I want people to read this. I want people to give a shit what I say. But I’m not sure anyone should. Have I thought anything useful? Have I taught anything? I don’t know. Not enough, I’m sure. What is teaching anyway? When I worked as a high school teacher my goal was to have the kids be able to argue with me more by the end of the year. I want them to be ever increasingly sure of their own opinions. I want them to be able to talk in finer and finer detail about what they believe. Because only once they can talk about it can they really be a fully integrated person and deal with their little hypocrisies.

I actively want to avoid being a hypocrite. That means being very sure what my priorities are and changing my behavior when it’s not in alignment. It’s hard. It means I don’t get to coast for long. What are my priorities.

Me.
Noah, Shanna, Calli, Sarah. Not necessarily in that order. Spending time with them.
Writing
Learning/Reading
Socializing with other people
Gardening
Housecleaning
Cooking

It’s a short and broad list to start with. That means that when I sit down to read a book to Shanna I am not evading my housekeeping duties. I’m following my priority list. I want to stick my tongue out at an imaginary person now. I feel like there is some judge and jury out there who is going to tell me I am a bad mother because I want to sit in the garage and smoke pot instead of clean my house. Seriously. Who the fuck wouldn’t agree with me? I’m writing, damnit. Why am I writing. Why does writing matter.

Writing lets me get out the stupid shit I am thinking about into a format where I can see it, understand it, and recognize that it is idiotic. If it is just running around and around and around in my brain… I don’t know how to get off the train. The writing changes it from a train on a circular trap to a traffic loop. Yes, it is possible to get caught in the center if you are being dumb, but there are exits all fucking over the place. Just pick one. Are any of them really worthwhile? I don’t know. I don’t know if anyone will read my writing one day and feel like I made their life better. I gave them an idea they didn’t have before and it made their life just a little easier. I feel like it is so hard for me to “act normal” that certainly some other people are also just acting and they might like a trick.

I loathe when people say, “Be yourself!” Yourself is a bizarre construct of all the different influences you’ve had in your life + personal taste. It’s pretty vague. And let me tell you, when you do things you genuinely like (like making your hair increasingly AWESOME) people are quick to remind you that you are stepping out of the herd and you should stop that. I think I dyed my hair because it makes me visually a freak but it doesn’t cause any more pain to my body. I think that is a god damn excellent direction of progress.

I want to be a stay at home mom because some accident of fate handed me a partner with sufficient money to support me all my life in a manner to which I would like to become accustomed. We’ve been married for five years. Until now I have contributed enough to pay for my truly unnecessary stuff. I was self-sufficient enough. Now I have no form of income. Now I am completely dependent on someone else for the first time since I was 15.

Of course I’m secretly having a fucking heart attack and hoping that I do a good enough job in November that I can sell the book. I don’t want to be a god damn dependent. But I don’t want to do anything that requires me to deal with other people. Err, well, that kind of limits the options. And honestly I wouldn’t take a random retail job right now. For one thing it would be hard to get someone to hire me because I am so overqualified. I think I could overcome that though. It’s called lying. But I would feel guilty for taking that job away from someone who needs it more. I don’t want an office job. I don’t want anything where I have to be doing additional work. Ha. I feel like being the housefrau maid for my family is enough fucking work this lifetime, thanks. And I want to write. And my husband wants me to write.

I have such intense feelings about Noah’s perception of my writing. He takes it more seriously and gives it more respect than I do. I think that Noah is the one who convinced me that I am a writer. That anyone who compulsively feels the need to write 10-20 pages a day is a fucking writer. That’s just not normal. Normal. Normal. Normal. I hate that word so much and I use it constantly. I think it goes a long way towards wrecking the meaning I am going for.

Why am I so god damn compelled to be just like everyone else? When I stand near people too long I start acting like them. I conform. I do it in subtle ways at first, then loud, then I explode and yell at them and make it seem like I was being oppressed by the ways I was conforming. Even if the other person was unaware of the whole situation. They are just standing there confused. In my family the constant chatter is about telling you what to think, when to think it, how to think it. So someone sitting there and telling you something about how they handled a situation is fairly explicitly giving you directions on how you are expected to handle it in the future. You know that whole, “Childhood as apprenticeship for adulthood” thing I have?

Until fairly recently my aunt and uncle were supporting their three adult disabled children. And a bunch of grandkids and SOs. Because they reinforce one another’s behaviors. They will rise or fall as a unit. They are all so ridiculously similar it isn’t funny. Like obsessions with collecting useless things. Everyone has a different animal. For every holiday under the sun people compete to find you something with that animal on it. But they are all dirt poor. So all the stuff is cheap, ugly, and really pointless. And they have LOTS of it. That’s one small point, but they do the same thing with everything.

When I walk into a middle class persons house I instantly put on my ‘acting’ face. I start to imagine, “How would people who live here behave?” Do you want to know why I paint my house really dark colors? Because I grew up in houses with dark wood paneling. They were caves. I don’t know how to cope with relentlessly white walls. We had relentlessly white walls in a series of depressing, horrible rental places. Or ugly paneling that turned the house into a dark cave.

So I painted my house purple and cornflower blue and green and raspberry and navy blue…. among other colors. They are dark enough to make me feel calm and settled. Aunt Vonnie’s houses were the home base. That was as much of a home as I knew. That feeling is in a dark house… even though it bugs me. I don’t want to be the kind of person who has a uniformly dark house. It feels oppressive to me. But I like darker, more saturated colors. Who says a house has to look like the materials came that color direct from nature? I never got that memo. I guess I ditched that day at school.

This constant attempt to conform to whomever I am standing near creates problems. Because then I get angry at the person for “making” me feel like I have to conform and be like them. I have had this problem in particular with a couple of female friends. We will be having an intense conversation about something and they are giving advice and all of a sudden I go ballistic and start screaming because I don’t want to be like them.

I don’t know how to handle those feelings very well. That sudden explosion of fear that they are trying to wipe me off the planet. I know that it was that fear that got me out of my family. I respect that fear. I respect the fact that my individuality comes with a rock solid fist to defend it. But I really wish I wouldn’t hit my friends. They haven’t done anything. This is my fuck up.

I am struggling with the fact that my self control runs out. I have too many things I am trying to control. I don’t know how to relax and let go of the anger in the moment very well. It cycles so fast out of no where. When I am at home I take a time out. It’s not perfect because I’m doing too much stomping away/slamming doors.

The only normal I care about is the one where my kids aren’t afraid of me. I don’t want my kids to quake with fear from my voice. That is not a relationship I want. But I want to be effective. Three sucks.

I want to be a stay at home mom so that my kids and I can learn how to be nice to each other without outside pressure. We can learn how to be a family together. Because really I don’t know much more than them. Luckily Shanna is an excellent teacher. She’s having an emotional period, but mostly she can talk about her preferences and make requests and follow directions. She is in a rough phase (the book told me to expect it! I love that book) and that’s ok. Hormones are rough. I try to be gentle and understanding. For her, this is just a phase because nothing bad has ever really happened to her. Minor injuries and scrapes. Losing her friend Rowan was the biggest loss she’s been aware of. If I am patient and loving, she will come through this and on the other side she will hopefully understand that three year olds are assholes and I was really nice to her. This is part of the circle of life. I wish I could apologize to my mother for some pieces of it.

But that is when we jump on the merry go round again. I don’t think my mother abused me as a small child. I think she neglected me to such a degree that it becomes criminal. I think she tried to enculturate with the only thing she knew… and it worked. I am indeed, white trash. Even that didn’t go how she planned. One of the strongest and most defining things about white trash as I understand the concept is the fierce loyalty. Blood is everything. How do you think they get away with incest? If you are related to someone you are obligated to do anything they want… forever.

Excuse me while I pause to vomit on the floor. I respond to feeling like I should conform with hostility and aggression because it was a very useful tool at one point. My friends aren’t trying to convert me though. Gah.

I should stop writing. It’s already too long. But I don’t want to. This is the problem with trying to do shorter entries. I don’t always see a clear stopping/starting/dividing line. How do I talk about things in separate posts when it is all one big concept in my head? But then I ask and people tell me, yes they would prefer shorter posts. And then I feel like I am failing to deliver something that people want. I wish I didn’t do this to myself. Shit. This is over twelve pages long. Ok, I’ll stop. And it took me just over an hour. That’s actually kind of hot.

The American Dream

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The media is telling me constantly that the American Dream is dead. That no one can better themselves. That no one can succeed. I feel so confused. Then how did I go from being the kind of kid who stole food to the kind of kid who gives people thousands of dollars when they are in a car accident just because I like them and otherwise they won’t be able to pay rent. How did that happen? Noah. I married up.

I feel weird guilt and shame over having access to Noah’s money. I feel bad talking about anything related to class because I am no longer poor. I will never be poor again. Noah comes from the 1%. He isn’t there himself… yet. But from everything I understand about human development and financial success, Noah will probably get back there. People who grow up with that kind of money learn how to make it. They learn how to be the kind of person who has it. And I’m just desperate and needy and I have a broken compass. I don’t have the ability to tell when something is “enough” sometimes. Not money, drugs, sex … Even though I’m not an “addict” by the classic definitions I still have a broken compass. I don’t know how much is enough or too much sometimes.

I don’t have very many friends who are willing to live like Noah and I do. We live really far away from everything. We live in a house that is much smaller and crappier than we could technically afford. We live here and we will continue to live here pretty much forever because I’m not willing to spend more money than the astronomical amount already spent on this house. Noah mortgaged over a quarter of a million dollars on this house. I think that’s insane. But it’s really cheap for a house here. It will be paid off before I am 40.

I got lucky. I married Noah. That was kind of sort of how I reached where I am. But I also went to college and worked. It’s not like I would have been this wealthy as a teacher, but I would have done just fine. I still would have felt like I made the American Dream. Because my goals would have been smaller. I got out of poverty. I became the first one to be educated (high school diploma, BA, teaching credential, and 7 years of MA work). To me that feels like I am done. I reached the American Dream. I went to college and I’m not in debt! I paid it off within a year of being done with classes. Because I was married to Noah and when I was working and he was working we had an obscene amount of money.

This is the part that is odd to me. Noah doesn’t make more money than our friends. Most of our friends have combined househole incomes that are much higher than ours. We live in the bay area. Our friends are the ones who went to fancy schools and became computer people. But no one else I know thinks they are filthy rich. People complain about not being able to do everything they want or having to compromise on things.

I feel so confused. I have to wonder if my compass is the broken one. What do people think the American Dream means? Do you think it means everyone gets to retire at 35 to free health care forever? Permanent jobs with a high chance of retirement? I don’t consider it part of the American Dream that people have to own a house or make a lot of money. I consider the American Dream to be the willingness to change your stars.

Everyone is born with a future that looks like it is obviously theirs. They can take it if they want. Or they can go make their own future. They can be whoever they want to be. They can rise in the world. It doesn’t mean that everyone will be filthy rich, but people who hustle can improve their lot. I’m told it doesn’t work that way for everyone. That I am a fluke.

I get told that a lot. Everything about me seems to be a fluke. Why did it work out for me then? Why do so many things work for me that other people say cannot be made to work ever ever ever ever? For me this is part of feeling invisible. I never know how to respond when I read things that say it is not possible for me to have done what I’ve done. Do you want me to burst into flames?

Whenever I think of the American Dream I think of teaching The Great Gatsby. Gatsby wanted Daisy. He wanted to be rich too…. but mostly he just wanted Daisy. He got rich because he was trying to earn Daisy’s love. Noah seems to feel the same way about me, which is odd. It’s weird living with someone who thinks he has to earn me. I’m shit, aren’t I? Why would someone want to earn me? Does that mean you try to coat yourself more heavily in flies? Of course not.

Noah sees me as high status. That is the American Dream, really. It is the ability to change your social status. I don’t understand for the life of me why anyone would associate me with being high status. Ok, I have access to a hefty bank account. I didn’t have that before Noah, though. Why does that raise my status? Why do I magically become a better person?

Why will people look at me when I am dressed nicely. Why will people talk to me more now, even though I look increasingly weird? Sometimes it seems like there is an aura that comes along with financial safety. And other people recognize it. It is a relieving of anxiety. It’s practically a difference in smell. As if people who have to worry more have a more acrid body odor. I don’t think that’s literally true or real. But there is some strange wall.

The idea of the American Dream mixed with being white trash is the crux. It’s about being told that I can’t do things that I already have done so fuck you very much. It’s about feeling like it’s not ok to be who I am because I am weird. Because I have done things other people haven’t, for good or bad. Because I am just plain different and I don’t know why. It is hard to talk about difference without making it sound like being superior or better or aggrandizement.

Some people like chocolate. I don’t. I like vanilla. For variety, maybe peppermint. Does that mean that vanilla is truly qualitatively better because I like it more? Demonstrably not. I don’t think I am a better person than most other people. Better than my sister, yes. Better than mom, probably. Other people? Enh, not so much with the comparison. I don’t know what road they walked. I don’t know who tried to knock them down or how. I’m not better. But I have done different things.

I want to understand why I make different choices. I want to understand that about myself. I want to be able to hack the system. I have big life goals. If I want to reach them I am going to have to work very hard for a very long time. I cannot believe the attitude that it is hopeless. I can’t. I can’t have the feeling about myself that seems to be common for my generation. I think I can do fucking anything. I already have. I don’t identify with deserving anything. I don’t think I deserve universal health care. I think that when I needed insurance I had to find weird jobs that would offer insurance that I didn’t really want to do. But I had different options.

I benefit from enormous privilege. I’m sure that most of the reason I was able to succeed is just because I am white and slightly above average in attractiveness. I’m not stunning. I’m not gorgeous. But I’m cute. And I’m bubbly. And I’m a hard worker and a people person. I had advantages.

I talk about being white trash because I don’t think it is possible for someone of color to do the same things I did because I see how the deck is stacked against my friends. They are fighting different wars. They have to fight at all times covertly because they are watched. They can’t directly cause fights the way I can get away with. I feel deeply uncomfortable with this knowledge. That as I sit here in my smug pretention of “Well I succeeded!” Yeah… I did because of an intersection of lack and privilege. I don’t know that any part of my life is relevant to anyone else.

Who the fuck am I to talk about succeeding when I had the dog bite settlement that paid for an awful lot of my life. When I smugly talk about cobbling together insurance I honestly feel kind of sick to my stomach. I did it. But I always had $14,400/year to live on. Ever since I was 18. Because I was attacked as a kid and half my face was ripped off. I had a good lawyer. I think I only had a good lawyer because I am white.

The girl who was born across the street from me. B. Her father was my lawyer. He was my very best friends father. B wasn’t hanging out with the non-white kids on the street (her New York Jewish parents moved her out of that neighborhood when we were four). He is an excellent lawyer. I don’t even think he took his full fee out of my settlement. It was less than $100k in settlement but he invested it well for me. I took that money and I changed my whole life.

My brother Jimmy was hit by a car when he was a kid and got a settlement when he was 18. He spent the money on a raised truck, a killer stereo (that was stolen a couple months later), and a lot of drugs. It was gone in a few months.

My brother Tommy was hit by a car when he was a kid and got a settlement. Technically there is $6,000 left of it somewhere. I’m thinking about claiming it as my father’s dependent. As an inheritance. Jimmy calls it dirty money and says he doesn’t want it. I think that money is fucking useful.

I suppose at this point my dream is to stop feeling so angry. I want to be able to talk and think without being so full of bad feelings. My stomach hurts. I’m really tired of my stomach hurting. I’m not special. I’m not better. But I did things that other people couldn’t do. I feel like I should be proud of myself. And I simultaneously feel like being proud of myself is somehow wrong or bad. I should be ashamed of myself because I think I have done anything worth noticing. What kind of self absorbed bitch am I? Who the fuck am I to look down my fucking nose at anyone else?

I’m not looking down my nose. I’m trying to figure out why I made different choices. I wish I understood better when the choice moments were. I am not responsible for where I ended up entirely. It’s accident as much as planning. But if I wasn’t in this house right now having a good life I would be in a different house having a good life. My teaching job would still be stable financially even if the work was shitty. I lived in an apartment I could afford on $20k/year and by now I would be making about $60k. It would have taken a while, but I probably would have bought a house in cash in ten years. About when I’m going to pay this one off instead.

Because somewhere, at some point I crossed a line. I will never be poor again. I have lost the habits. I make different choices. I can be broke. It feels like a difference in attitude. Do you know why I am not worried about my ability to succeed? Because I walked into my first real job interview and said, “I know I am the first person you are interviewing and you have three days of interviews to go but if you don’t hire me today I am not available. Sorry.” I was offered the job an hour later. I take a lot of pride in that.

Because the only time in my life I have ever failed at something I wanted to do was passing the MA final exam. And really I probably psyched myself out so bad that I’m not surprised I failed. Ugh. It’s obvious I know the material but I can’t write enough for academia. I never wanted to be part of academia, not really. Having an MA would change my life. I didn’t want it bad enough to make that change. That is how I feel about it. Almost like the lit MA was wrong for me. It would have changed my life choices in a way that would have been ultimately less helpful.

I’m starting to wonder if someday there is social work in my future. That would be a different MA. Ugh. I’m not sure I can handle more school. Ever.

I feel weird because I am alive during a Revolution. These are interesting times. And I don’t feel like I have much to say as part of the Revolution. That’s weird and uncomfortable. It’s not like I’m watching Fox news or agreeing with them. But I don’t agree with a lot of the politics I’m hearing lately. My opinions are just different.

I want to stop being so narcissistic and notice that other people aren’t as similar to one another as I project. I’m not a special snowflake. I’m not more different. But I think I am. This is where the hubris comes in. How can you believe with intensity that you are different without believing it is superior? Do I think that other people should try to be like me? No. Things that work for me won’t work for most other people. I don’t think other people would be ok with the amount of intense emotion my life contains. I get the impression other people are more calm.

I feel like the American Dream was always a sham. Look at Death of a Salesman. Right there. He believed that who you know and charisma will get you where you need to know. It won’t. I only occasionally have charisma, mostly I alienate the shit out of people. But I work fucking hard. I work hard and I know how to game the system. I wish I could teach other people the rules of the system so they could game it as well. I don’t think this should be a unique ability.

As crazy, as unstable, as difficult, as confrontational as I am… I do know how to shut up when necessary. I just don’t think it is necessary nearly so often as other people do. I, in fact, think that everyone should make a lot more waves than they do.

I don’t think I have “figured things out” or done things in some magical right way that other people don’t do. I think there is a way of developing your intuition so that you learn which choices are really not safe. I avoid the unsafe twinges. I kind of wonder if that is how I survived. I was afraid at the right times.

I don’t think that people necessarily understand that rage is often, at least for me, the flip side of terror. I spend my life horribly terrified that something bad is going to happen to me again. I am genuinely scared. I shake. It makes me angry that I feel this way. That I am so scared of everyone and everything in the world. I don’t like that when people say things that make me feel invisible I want to hit them. Obviously I don’t do so. That would be problematic in a whole new exciting way. But I’m often not nice.

Nice. There is that word again. I wish I was unoffensive. I wish I was nice. Somehow it is magically better to be nice. There is that American Dream again. You are supposed to be a nice, quiet, middle class person. But I’m not. I’m loud. I’m brashy. I’m aggressive. I’m trashy. I like loud upbeat country music. And Lady Gaga and Pink. I like Steel Magnolias unapologetically. I grew up rural and don’t know city manners. I really don’t understand why my city gives a shit if I grow vegetables in my front yard and I think they can fucking sue me if they want me to stop.

Being nice feels like lying. It feels like constant low level lying. It means you never tell the full truth because the full truth is often uncomfortable. You always leave stuff out so that other people never have to feel bad. I FEEL BAD MOST OF THE TIME. Why shouldn’t I tell people the truth about how I feel? Why should bad feelings be hidden? Should they? Is that what people want?

Let me tell you, if there is a time and a place where it is appropriate to sit around and tell stories about incest I’ve never found it. Even therapy is only kind of sort of the place. Because just sitting around and telling the stories seems to be un-useful. But I sit around and drop those mentions into casual conversations. Because that is what is in my head. And it alienates people. It’s my truth. It’s my story. I’m not actually hurting anyone by letting people know it exists. But it feels not nice.

It is because I think my mental health is more important than other people feeling comfortable that I describe myself as white trash. There is a self absorption that I witnessed in my family. A way of seeing yourself as the central figure in this terrible tragedy. A way of acting like everyone in the whole world is out to get you and everything bad that happens to you is part of this giant conspiracy. Everyone is out to get us! They all hate us! They think they are better than us just because they have money! Well fuck them! We at least have pride!

It’s weird and kind of sick. There is an abnegation of responsibility for everything that happens to you that I don’t understand. Sometimes I want to slap my sister and say, “Ok so our dad raped you. Time to stop dating men who are drug addicts because you are trying to get daddy to love you.” That. That is a lot of what this comes down to.

Do you know how I survived? Do you know how I attained the American Dream? Because people told me that I was shit and I didn’t deserve it. And my response was to fight back. It’s not that I think I deserve anything. I don’t think I have stuff because I deserve it. I have stuff (college education, money, no car loan) because I made them my top priorities and I didn’t let anything stop me. I want to say that nothing catastrophic happened to prevent it, but that’s a lie. Tommy’s accident. All the rapes. Going to 25 schools before dropping out of high school at 16. I did have catastrophic things happen to try and stop me as a kid. But you just keep getting up and doing things.

And then some day you are 18. And you leave. And you never look back. And with every choice I make I think, “What would my sister do?” Then I do the opposite. That’s not actually true, but it’s kind of funny to think about. I did get out. Do you know what my family gave me for high school graduation? Pots, pans, a crock pot, towels. They wanted me the fuck out. They wanted me to go. Because I was different. Because I caused problems.

I don’t even really feel like my family is white trash, per se. When I’m being an asshole I include them in the collateral damage. Mostly they don’t want to be like me though. They have other dreams. They are hick and redneck and poor. But they aren’t white trash. Mostly they don’t have my aggression. My sister does. I would say without reservation that she is also white trash. Not my aunt or my cousins. They are just standing too close to evil, manipulative people.

So maybe being white trash is relegated to being an incest survivor? That’s not really it, but it factors in. It’s so many things all at once. It’s not one thing. When people feel defensive and try to tell me that my qualifiers aren’t the right ones because they also fit those qualifications… Oh gosh. I’m not trying to make you feel defensive. I’m not trying to be not nice. I don’t know that at the end my definition of white trash will ever be useful for anyone but me. I’m not sure it is applicable. Ok, for my sister too. But past us? I can’t know enough of someones story to judge.

I say I am white trash because I am always going to say things about myself that offend the shit out of the people around me. They will always feel hostile about me saying the stuff I’m saying. I can only control whether I say it or not. And sometimes I can’t control whether I say it or not. I don’t really understand why trauma has affected me in these ways.

I listen to Adele singing Someone Like You a lot lately. I’m scared that some day my mom will show up on my doorstep. I’m afraid she won’t.

“I hate to turn up out of the blue uninvited
But I couldn’t stay away, I couldn’t fight it.
I had hoped you’d see my face and that you’d be reminded
That for me it isn’t over.”

The problem with having PTSD is that it is never over. I have to deal with what happened to me forever. It will never be over. I will never be over being a survivor of incest. I will never get over being a dirty little street kid. I will never be over being moved around constantly as a child and being prevented from properly bonding with people. I will never be able to have that stop being true. I will always have this part of me that feels empty and bad and like I am shit.

It’s not over for me. And it spurs me. It makes me angry. It gives me wings. And I flew away. For all that it isn’t over, it is. I have this husband who thinks I hung the moon. I have wonderful children who love me and adore me. I have already made other peoples lives better.

But as I watch the sun come up I question what this American Dream was meant to be anyway. It’s not the house that matters. It’s not the money. The freedom I have is the freedom to say, “No. You cannot invalidate me. I exist. I am different from you. My life experiences have shaped me. And I’m ok. I do not need to change.” I’m white trash and I’m proud of it. I’m proud of my ability to fight and over come adversity. I’m fucking proud of myself. I think I’m bad ass. Noah thinks so too. Does it really matter if anyone else does?

No. But that’s my American Dream. I don’t abandon my self label with my change in financial status because that would be too convenient for everyone around me. They would like to pretend that people like me don’t exist. I feel like most of the people who are big parts of my life are fairly sheltered people. Even the ones who were abused tended to grow up in mostly safe, stable places. They had dads who were emotionally abusive assholes. That kind of thing. But they had consistency. They still only know people who are mostly like them. Except for me.

I still have to say that I am white trash because people try to excuse my behavior as being some sort of byproduct of unavoidable trauma, the poor dear. People love me and want to comfort me and tell me that things that happen to me aren’t my fault. I’m a victim. Well, sometimes. But an awful lot of my current problems are my fault. They are my fault because I choose to be aggressive and hostile. Because I choose to remain white trash instead of catapulting to being middle class. It’s kind of a choice and kind of not a choice. I’m not middle class anyway, I’m nouveau riche. I skipped the middle class. That is kind of weird in and of itself, isn’t it?

When I try to think about what I want from my life I’m pretty happy though. Everything I want is something that I could have. I want to write and grow. I want deeper friendships. I want to have hard conversations with my friends about class. I love my friends. I want to find the ability in myself to feel like I have enough. Like I am not still yearning. Really, there isn’t much left that I have to do. Write. Publish. Wash. Repeat.

But first, I have to go cuddle my perfect daughter.

White trash

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Somehow I feel like the definition of white trash is very important to my personal lexicon. After all, it is my self-identity. What do I mean by it? I mean that I startle people. I mean that I experience sudden rage and lash out at people in socially unacceptable ways. I mean that many of the things I like are demonstrably low class.

Uncle Bob, when I was a little kid, would spit out the car window when we drove past the house where the black guy lived. That’s all I knew about “the black guy” who lived in the canyon. When I was in high school and I lived in Bakersfield I was accosted on the bus by a black girl who yelled at me that I was a racist because I was reading a book and giggling. I think the only reason she didn’t kick my ass is because my response to her yelling that I was a stupid bitch was to say, “Come on! You haven’t even met me. Normally it takes someone at least five minutes to decide I am a bitch.” Her boyfriend said I was alright and to leave me alone.

I don’t know why that story stays with me so much, but it does.

It’s hard to talk about different things from my childhood happening because I know the stories are confused in my head. I know they are confused because sometimes I know things happened when I was living in a certain house but I can’t remember when I lived there. I’m afraid of trying to take the pieces apart. I’m afraid of trying to make this a real narrative.

I’m afraid of remembering something wrong, writing it down, and being called a liar. I’m not lying. I’m just trying to remember things that happened a long time ago. I’m trying to string together why they are important. Why is my life worth reading about? It’s kind of weird as I look at my over crowded bookshelf and think most of them are not better writers than me. But they are published and I’m not. I think that’s the biggest difference.

I’m terrified of trying to publish. I’m terrified that I won’t have the drive to push it through. I can’t expect to be magically “discovered” and babied through the process. I will have to make it happen. I will have to shop around for an agent and a publishing house. It scares the pants off me. I am going to have to actually deal with being judged. I’m not so good at that part. I have to feel like this is really and truly honest to god worth doing.

It’s hubris. But I think people would… if not enjoy… then at least appreciate reading this story. I think that even though a lot of people will hate me and revile me and say nasty things about me… I think somewhere there is a young girl who will get out of an incestuous family because of me. Some day some girl is going to say, “You saved my life.”

That’s reason enough to do something hard and scary. One life is enough. Well, I’ve already saved mine. I suppose by that metric it’s enough. But it’s not. I want to be a hero. Ok, that made me smile. I do, I want to be a hero. I want to learn how to say just the right thing to make people know that no matter how bad you feel about yourself, there is hope.

I kind of hate Elizabeth Wurtzl. I think Prozac Nation was a horrible book about mental illness. I spent the entire book wanting to bitch slap her and tell her to stop whining about her cushy life. For the record, should Elizabeth Wurtzl ever come read this… I wouldn’t ever say that to you in real life. Pain is pain. But seriously dude you had an easier life than me and I’m allowed to be pissy in my blog about it. It’s not personal.

The reason it bothers me so much is because I have a hard time with pampered rich people who get to be depressed and non-functional. I’ve been depressed most of my life and I’ve been more functional than most people. Depression makes everything harder. It doesn’t make it impossible and it bugs the shit out of me when people say it does. Ok, maybe it does for you. I can’t know what it is like to be in other peoples heads. I know that I have not had the luxury of being non-functional while depressed. I’m too busy surviving. No, I wasn’t happy, but so what? Who the fuck was promised happiness or a good life? Not me.

When people talk about how we should have universal health care I laugh. It’s not nice of me, but I do. I feel like universal health care in this country is a pipe dream. We have too many people. Unless you, generic person who is espousing universal health care, want to go become a doctor and work pro bono for the rest of your life, how do you think that doctors should be paid for their time? How should medical equipment be paid for and acquired? Should everyone in America get to have million dollar surgeries when they get sick?

Money is finite and people die. I think that even if America managed to get the basics covered, I would be opposed to absolutely across the board health care coverage. I think we are all living too long. Honestly. I think that humans were meant to die a lot earlier than we do now and make room for new people. I don’t like most life saving operations.

My personal experiences with life saving operations gave me back Uncle Bob and Tommy. I’m not sure either were good uses of money. How do you say in the conversation about universal health care, “Actually the reason I oppose universal health care is I think they shouldn’t have brought my brother back to life so he could beat me and attempt to rape me for nine more years. The piece of shit should have been allowed to die when he was twelve and it was his fucking time.” How do you say that about your brother? How do you form a political opinion that endorses other people dying? Because I endorse my family and me dying in the same way. I’m ok with it. I’ve made my peace with death. It will happen when it happens. I don’t want to cause my death right now, but I don’t know that I would fight cancer.

Humans are meant to die. I can’t help but think that I’d rather die of whatever disease strikes me than miserable old age and being lonely. I only want to live to be 80 if a million people will light a candle for me. Otherwise, well, whenever it happens is ok. That’s life.

I think the only part of death that bothers me any more is knowing how devastating that will be for my family. I cry and smile at the same time thinking about it. Now there are people who would mourn. It wouldn’t be like Tommy’s memorial up in Redwood Estates. By the time he died he only had one friend outside our family because everyone else abandoned him. People aren’t nice to disabled kids. He was an asshole too, but people aren’t nice to those who are disabled.

I hear people talking about how things should be “fair”. To whom? Why? What the fuck makes you think that? What does that even mean? Does that mean everyone gets the bare minimum? Does that mean everyone gets what they want? I don’t know. I have an easier life than I’ve ever had. I just went out and bought a bed last night for the garage so we have a more comfortable place to have sex. That’s fucking spoiled. I don’t know how to reconcile my unwillingness to share with the fact that I’m very willing to share.

I’m ok with paying high taxes. I think we should. I like roads and fire fighters and schools. They should exist. I like being the one who can give my friends financial support when they need it. I feel kind of weird about the word charity but I give a ton of money away. Only occasionally to organizations. Mostly to individual people who need help. It feels related to me. If I am giving it to an individual person I know if I approve of how they are likely to use it. I do give or not give based on my judgment. I will admit that. It also depends on how close to my monkey sphere someone is. I can handle that.

It’s kind of hard having a different opinion than most of my friends. I feel like I should apologize. When people get all huffy about human rights I want to laugh. I think that I no longer have the same entitlement as my friends. I don’t believe I deserve good treatment. I like it. I want it. I don’t think it’s about deserve. Not really.

That said, if I win the lottery I am starting a domestic violence shelter. I do believe that people should help people. I feel weird about the government doing it.

Whenever people tell me that welfare fraud doesn’t exist I laugh and laugh. Bullshit. It depends on what you mean by “fraud”. Are there people who get welfare and buy drugs instead of food. Yup. My sister did. I’m tired of having my liberal, upper class friends talk about the poor as if they are some deserving group on the mist who should be cared for.

The poor are the people on the bus in your town you ignore. The poor are the people with ill behaved children in the store that you glare at. You think you are better than poor people. Well, a lot of people in my social group do. I am white trash because I am still fucking angry at all the rich people I hang out with. I resent them. I resent them for acting like I pass. It doesn’t matter how much money I have in the bank I will always feel like the dirty little girl you people walked by without meeting my eyes.

I am white trash because white trash take care of their own. Near as I can tell middle class values are shit. I have no respect for them. It involves a lot of “being polite” for the sake of not ruffling feathers and blending in. No thanks. I don’t blend in. Not once I open my mouth. These days not at all. I love my hair.

(Err, uhm, disclaimer: I don’t actually hate or resent my friends. I have emotional issues. I write about them because I’m trying to work through them not because I am trying to alienate people or say they suck. I don’t actually hang out with people I don’t like. I like my friends. But I have mixed feelings about some of the things they say and do unconsciously. That doesn’t make them bad.)

I am white trash because I can’t let the little classist and racist and feminist things go in conversation because I believe direct confrontation is preferable to being passive aggressive. And I’m ok with shouting. A lot.

I’m white trash because when I speak about myself in public people quickly dart their eyes away. They can’t look at me. Not always, not everyone. But the vast majority of people I meet. I haven’t met very many people in my life who can hear me talk out loud about incest and look me in the face without flinching. I’m sure I shouldn’t take that personally. But I do. Things that have happened to me mean that sometimes people can’t look at me without flinching away. I do that. I can control whether or not that happens. I can decide what to tell people. I can decide to pass and be nice and middle class and stop making people flinch.

Only I can’t. Because I’m white trash. Because I will always blurt things at uncomfortable times that make people flinch. Because I will always be just a bit dirtier and worse and more disgusting than everyone around me. Because who and what I am seems to be an affront to so.many.people. I am white trash because I think it is sporting to warn people that if I think they are a fucking asshole I just might tell them so. While I am visiting their house. In another state. I’m just kind of awesome that way. I don’t seem to be able to control my rage after a while. I have to say that my outbursts have gotten way more socially acceptable over the years. Yelling at Rebecca’s dad was really rude, but he deserved it. He was a twat.

Do you know why I blow up at people who are in authority? Because blowing up at people in authority saved my life. No. That’s not hyperbole. Think about my parents. Think about being brought into the world to parents who are ok with me being raped by every male member of my family. I was born fighting.

That is why I am white trash. Because I’m ok with that fight. Because I accept that fight as being just life. Because I don’t think I deserve anything better. Because I don’t really think anyone else does either and fuck you if you think you deserve better treatment. I did not god damn deserve being raped over and over and over. But it happened. I can’t let it end my life. I can’t sit around and whine about how not fair life is. If I had done that as a child I would have died. There is no fair. I did not deserve being raped.

How many times was I raped. I try not to think about it. I don’t think I’ve had a number in my head for it in a long time. Michael, Jeremy, I’m blanking on that guys name in high school. Memories are awesome. The guy that I met at Lauren’s house. The one I thought was safe. The guy from the coast guard. My dad with the gun. My dad all those other times I can’t count. That’s only five. That’s not so bad, right? Oh, and Paul. And countless times when I lay there and cried and didn’t bother saying no. That’s been a lot of people.

I don’t think that people understand that I take pride in being white trash. I take pride in my strength. It’s gotten me a long way. I will always disconcert people, I have no interest in being a different person. That’s the hard part. I don’t want to be anything other than who and what I am. But people tell me I should. I shouldn’t call myself trash. It’s not nice.

Uhh, piss off. Life isn’t nice. I can deal with that in the ways that work for me, thank you very much. Life isn’t nice and life isn’t fair. See, these are the things I don’t want to say in an actual conversation with a friend. When they tell me, “Oh don’t call yourself that” I have to bite a hole in my tongue to not respond with, “Who the fuck died and made you the fucking arbiter of what I should mother fucking call myself?!” It’s not very nice. And I try to be nice to my friends, mostly. But I feel these things. That’s why I call myself white trash. Because that is my emotional process around people telling me not to call myself white trash. I want to cuss them out and say I will do so if I please. And that’s why I’m white trash.

Hm. I’m not just trash. I’m not and I know it. I’m not garbage. But I am a specific cultural construction that I refer to as white trash. That’s a useful way to think of it. Gotta make breakfast.

Being other

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I’m going to do NaNoWriMo this year. I’ve never done it before. I’ve always been too intimidated. I want to write honest to goodness fiction. But because I’m me it will be creative non-fiction instead. I want to rewrite my life. I want to take the time to play in my head with some of the “might have beens” in my life. Stephen King says that if you want to write a book you have to do it in private, so the blog will see very little traffic in November. I sort of feel like October is necessarily my time to do more of a run through of what happened for real and all. Mmmm writers block. I remember your sweet smell. You always bring cookies.

I feel really weirdly conflicted about what I am trying to do, what I am trying to say. Why does it have value? Why does it have worth? Why do I need to justify my life choices? What am I doing? Why am I important enough to talk about? At this point I have to do it and get it over with because I have several hundred friends on facebook and even if only ten of them actually read the announcement, come hell or high water at the end of November I will have a book done. I have been talking about doing this all my life. Some day I will write down my life story. It will be a terrible book. I want to get past the terrible parts of my life so I can enjoy the parts that are really pretty wonderful.

I believe in the pit of my stomach that there is a story in me waiting to get out that many people will want to read. Millions. I’m afraid that I am too afraid to write it. I am afraid that I am going to look for evasions. I’m afraid I am going to instead write 3 million blog posts full of unuseful and misleading digressions. I have something to say. It will take a lot of words to do it. But there is something useful in it. It matters. I tell myself that when I have insomnia at 5 am at least. It’s hubris. But I want there to be an awful lot of people who will cry when I die. That will give me a reason to keep fighting. And I’m too fucked up to have that as something I can deal with much in my day to day life. So I have to keep people far away from me.

Viktor Frankl says that people can survive anything, anything, if they just have something they are living for. People survived Auswitch because they wanted to find their mates, children, etc. I didn’t survive torture. But I did survive a pretty ridiculous amount of trauma. When I talk to people about my life they react with horror, pity, disgust, sadness, and unfortunately sometimes empathy. The degree of their reaction usually depends on how much detail I offer. When I say, “I was abused” I get a lot of “Me too” from other people. Then I keep talking. There have only been a few women in my life who have met me head on and looked me full in the face while I have related anything like details. I think Noah and Chris are the only men. My story is too disgusting to tell.

That means that all the people who spout platitudes about how abuse sufferers shouldn’t compare trauma because people process things differently are actively damaging me. I can not figure out how to go about living my fucking life because I’m told over and over again that abuse is abuse it is all the same and people tell me to just meditate and all my troubles will be over but the worst thing that happened to them is that their daddy touched them once through the sheet when they were 13. I’m sorry. My brain doesn’t work like yours.

I’m not coherent enough to delve into medical research, but I know that the research is there. Trauma rewires your brain. I am different from most people. I think differently. Throughout my entire life I have had issues in just about every place I go because my opinions are always off from the majority of the group no matter what group I am in. I am discordant. I don’t do it on purpose. People tend to strongly dislike the discordant energy I bring. Some of this is my imagination, some of it is true. Being this kind of person is what allowed me to get away from my family. It is why I am not wallowing in poverty with the rest of them continuing the abuse on to future generations. Why the fuck should I have to feel bad because I think things other people don’t?

I survived. I survived being raped over and over. I survived being raised in a family with rampant drug addiction and alcoholism and my big problem is that my one year old and three year old trigger flashbacks so I anesthetize myself with pot so my time doesn’t wander. I barely drink and it can’t be a bigger factor in my life because it hurts me physically too much. Harder drugs just aren’t appealing because I don’t have the recovery time. I’m turning to marathon running, which will require not smoking and dear god I don’t know what I will do.

This is what an honest to god healthy life looks like. This is what the 95% have. This is what normal people experience. People like me don’t get here. And I’m only kind of here. I can’t be part of the 5%. Because any time I chat with my neighbors I have to be very careful not to mention my sex life or my childhood. Because even with our weird ass house… we are probably still normal, right?

If I write a book as good as my hubris tells me I can, my neighbors will figure something out. Seriously. And that means that when people walk by my house they will whisper about me. Oh bullshit. They will talk loudly so I can hear it. There will be people who think I am disgusting. My children will have to face that. Right now in this minute my friends who love me tell me that isn’t true. I tell you it depends how many people read the book. It depends if I actually get published. If the book is published, I think it will sell. If fucking lame ass Elizabeth Wurtzel can publish Prozac Nation… Good God. At least something actually happened to me that vaguely justifies my whining. *ahem*

Who would I be if my life had taken different paths. I don’t think that most people have as many wildly diverging options as I have had. I can even imagine a fun, less self-destructive, path that would still lead to Noah. I should write that tangent down. Done. That’s if I want to play with the idea of my One Twue Love. He is pretty spiffy and all. I don’t think I could do better no matter which rabbit hole I wander down.

As I’m thinking about how to write this book I realize how much my choices are influenced by the people who are standing closest to me. I’m trying to think about what kind of people could have come into my life to lead it in a very different direction. Like that girl I was friends with in Whittier. When I lived in Whittier that was one of the darkest periods of my life, to use a Shamus Young phrase, and there was a girl who was my friend. I can’t even remember her name. She was the daughter of missionaries. Her family was staying in a shitty house the church organization rented for them in between over seas placements. She is the one who introduced me to books like A Wrinkle in Time; Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry; The Secret Garden; The Island of the Blue Dolphins; Sideways Stories From Wayside School and biographies like Anne Frank and Helen Keller. I was in 4th grade and I was in a serious rut. I read nearly exclusively The Babysitters Club and I could read a new book in 20 minutes. The other options in my house were pornographic romance novels. I moved around so much that libraries weren’t really an option. If you only stay in one place for three months as a young kid you don’t get around enough to go to libraries. My mother didn’t consider such activities necessary. That makes me think I should add the library to our weekly activities schedule. Anyway.

So this one little girl, who happened to be the only other white kid in my class, talked to me. She introduced me to classic childrens literature without knowing what she was doing. She was just being near me. I didn’t know many kids like her. She was quiet and introspective. Because of her upbringing she was unfailingly cheerful and big on advocating for Jesus, but that was worth the price of admission.

The first time I was invited over to her house after school was the last. She stopped talking to me at school after that. I went back to sitting on the edge of the playground alone. I lived in that house for 18 months. That was one of the shittiest periods of my life. Third and fourth grades. Tommy lived at home with us after he was released from the hospital. He spent a lot of time trying to either kill me or rape me, he would probably have been happy to do either or both. I bet he would have kept fucking my corpse.

The other kids at school taunted me about my “retarded” brother. He would do things like run down the street naked. He tried to attack kids. Oh man. I haven’t explained what Tommy was like after the accident. Tommy was hit by a car May…something…1989. He was in a coma for five months. I was brought back to California by family friends (we had been living in Texas) because my mother flew out in advance to sit by Tommy’s bedside. Because that is what you do when you are destitute and you have other kids to provide for, right? You sit distraught next to one off-springs bedside and you completely abandon the rest of your obligations.

We lived with a lot of different people taking whatever hand outs were available. When we got back to California it was a while before we found the house in Whittier and Tommy moved in with us. I don’t know how much my dad paid but my mother eventually found a job. I’m not sure how long we were homeless between Texas and Whittier. My mom would try to claim we weren’t homeless, but we were couch surfing with friends and family. I was watching my mom fuck a series of men to earn the shelter over our head. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t want me to admit that out loud. But that was my role model. My mom went from guy to guy in between periods where she tried to feebly provide for herself and her kids and invariably things went badly. She couldn’t earn enough money to make ends meet. Only a couple of the people we stayed with were guys she was sleeping with (one was an old childhood sweetie and come on if you can’t leave your abusive second husband and run away to your old childhood sweetie, who can you run to?) but the other one I remember distinctly is my uncle–my father’s brother. So it wasn’t incest. But it was awkward. My fathers family appeared to me to have a pretty strict code that if a man was present it was the responsibility of whatever woman is present to fuck them. My brothers expected it of me. My father expected of me, my sister, and my mother even after they divorced. My uncle traded sex for a roof for my mother and I.

These things are more complicated than they sound. “My brother was in a horrendous accident so we stayed with my uncle for a while because his house was closest to the hospital.” That sounds fine. It doesn’t sound like we didn’t have anywhere to live. Our stuff wasn’t with us. I didn’t have my belongings and I was living out of a suitcase. My mom was fucking my uncle and they weren’t quiet. There was a lot of drinking. My uncle kept his screwdrivers premixed in the fridge and that is the first place I got drunk. When I was seven or eight. No one noticed or cared. For every age and stage of my life there is this easily apparent level of fucked up, and then there is all the stuff that happened in private.

I’m not doing that though. For all that I am obsessed with transgressive sex… my kids sure don’t know anything about it. Our conversations about all things sexual have so far been limited to things like, “Don’t put your finger in your anus or your vagina if it is dirty. Go wash your hands first. You don’t want to stick dirt inside your body because it will get itchy and painful. And wash your hands afterwards because bodies have germs in different places that are supposed to stay in that place and not get spread around to other body parts.” That’s ok, Jack.

How did I learn to be this? I’m weird, to be sure. But despite the incessant words in my brain, I’m not bad. Not really. I like to play at being bad. I like doing things that are bad for some people or are bad in some ways. But I always skirt a line. I flagellate myself horribly if I feel I have gone too far over the line. I kind of feel like hypervigilance is kind of the antithesis of being comfortable with your choices and uhm… I’d like to stop feeling it. I want to be just comfortable in my skin. That means accepting that some people are always going to dislike me. I honestly feel like a lot of it is just because I smell funny. I smell like not-them. It’s not an actual odor, mind. It’s a feeling that I am not part of their tribe. That is the best way I can explain it.

Luckiest girl in the whole world

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We kind of ignored our fifth wedding anniversary. We were busy. I’m not actually sad about that because the party was fun. Last night I was told extensively how much I have changed since marrying Noah. I agree. For the first time in my life I know what it is like to have someone unreservedly like me. It’s a novelty. And Noah doesn’t just like me. Noah is kind of obsessed with me. We have spent hundreds of hours talking about my life and history and psychological health. There are not enough hours in a day for me to tell him more about the inner workings of my brain. I was informed that is not normal. Ok.

It’s weird to live with someone who likes me but has no compunction pointing out where I am doing something badly. It’s refreshing. After five years together, I even prefer his voice in delivering criticism. When he’s consciously trying he’s good at being gentle with me. We have a lot of verbal conversation short cuts that help with my layers of emotional baggage. That was hard to build. It is amazing that at this point we can have these massively intense conversations because we can reference this long history of conversations. I’ve never really had that before.

It’s weird how this relationship is really my “college” education in the sense that most people have them. Noah has encouraged me to learn about things I actively shunned. He has read books to me and articles and blog posts and comics and we have watched movies together. We have built this weird unique little subculture just for us. I imagine this is what growing up in a family is like, because we include the kids whenever we can. This will be their weird little subculture. I think about that. My children will never have normal. My children will be in the 5%. Probably. Maybe. I hope. I hope they know that the 5% exists and that they have the courage and fortitude to do anything they want to do. I want children who are so courageous that there really isn’t much chance they will meld into the crowd. I have that already.

Noah encourages me to feel really happy about being me. He thinks I should grin when I think of something clever I said. It’s kind of an odd feeling. He likes it when I am cocky and arrogant. But then I later collapse in private and have to breathe through my panic attack. Noah is definitely a mixed bag for my personal development. Sometimes I wonder if part of what makes me so uncomfortable when I go out into the world is the fact that I know that no one has ever liked me how Noah likes me. I feel like other people dislike me in contrast. It’s not true. But it is true that I am starting to run into conflict with friends because Noah has influenced my behavior.

I have Noah at home telling me that conflict is an ok thing. It’s hard to believe him. It’s hard to believe that getting better at arguing is really going to earn me more friends. Noah is trying to convince me that it will absolutely chase off some of my current friends but it will earn me friends who actually like me more rather than what they are projecting on to me. I think that is what he is trying to convince me of. I could be wrong. There is no way for me to remember everything we talk about with super concrete details. I am out of tapes.

Why is being avaricious in a woman so threatening? I’ll tell you flat out that if Noah gets to the point where he is offered $250k/year in salary, hell yes I’ll do anything he wants. That kind of power and influence is highly erotic to a dirty little street kid like me, what can I say? He can have a weekend where I do anything he wants. And the current potential ideas are the kinds of things nice normal housewives should be degraded by. I should feel devalued and lessened. Cheapened. Instead my response is: hawt. It gets me off to think about it now and it will really get me off to do it.

My marriage wouldn’t work for everyone, but we’re having fun. I can’t really see another way for me to deal with my class issues, really. I could pretend they don’t exist… but they do. We like looking at things head on. I don’t see the value in pussyfooting around my stupid little landmines. If I’m going to set them off, let’s go kablooie. Why not do it in a way that maximizes the fun. Seriously. I don’t consider that a real question. This is work I need to do in my life. I need to deal with my class issues. Mostly I talk about them in therapy, on the internet, with friends, with Noah, and I think constantly about them. Ok, not constantly. But they come up and I address them. And every so often I go and play some dramatic game about sex exploitation. So what? I think that giving my husband a weekend for sex that we will both find really hot is a pretty reasonable reward for him being a fan-fuck-ing-tastic provider. I don’t really care if anyone disagrees. (Then why am I writing about it on the internet. *sigh*)

I want to try to explain how I see Noah. I really do. I don’t have the words this morning though. He’s such a big concept in my mind. I watched this bad bad movie recently about 20’s relationship angst and the big whore butch dyke finally settles down into a monogamous relationship because “You hold my interest.” I like the fact that sleeping with other people reminds me that I married the right person. I enjoy it. I want to do it again. But I married the right person. Never before in my life has anyone cared enough about me and my happiness to change their behavior for me. That’s the part that other people don’t get. That’s why I keep them at a distance. They think I have to just “learn to accept them”, which means that I have to change to suit them. Noah looked at me and thought that keeping me and making me happy was worth making dramatic bone deep change.

I am the luckiest girl in the whole world. He has absolutely changed for me. Yes, I’m going to change for him too. Because I want to validate the important parts of him that much. Because I think he is worth it.

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I want to try to explain how I see Noah. I really do. I don’t have the words this morn

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Category Archives: class issues

In one of those festive bad moods.

Hand-me-downs

More on anger.

Angry

Status

A Tuesday morning ramble.

Mostly parenting babbling

First world problems

Shorter and shorter.

I am my hair

Irrational feelings

Sacred cows

I think talking about money is important.

It’s not what you know it’s who you know

Why I want to be a stay at home mom

The American Dream

White trash

Being other

Luckiest girl in the whole world