Category Archives: co-parenting

stream of conscious

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This has been one of those thinking-heavy but writing-little sorts of weeks. I feel busy. I feel tired and stretched thin. I will be glad when training is over. My race is in nine weeks and two days. The running takes so much out of me and I’m just going to be increasing mileage from here. I feel kind of weird about it.

We’ve had some discipline issues this week. On Tuesdays we are supposed to go to the park with the home schooling group. I feel this socialization is very important. But while I was making lunch (it took an hour because Shanna had a lot of requests–I made scones from scratch, cucumber sandwiches, cut up a bunch of vegetables for dipping and made guac, and and and) Shanna went around the house destroying it.

I’m not sure how other children function. When I describe Shanna as a tornado I’m not kidding. In the hour I was busy in the kitchen she dumped the drawers in her room with clothes, the linen closet, took everything out of the toy box, took several games off of high shelves she isn’t supposed to access and strewed them between multiple rooms, dumped the Lego’s and spread them between multiple rooms, dumped many shelves of books onto the floor, and broke apart the foam letter mat in the garage in addition to dumping all the puzzles off of shelves onto the floor.

I started crying. I can’t go spend hours in the park physically wearing myself out and then come home to that mess. I just can’t. I’m tired. I’m running twenty-five miles a week or more. It’s not like I need my house to be museum tidy but I need to be able to walk through my home without injury. I told Shanna that there was zero possibility we could finish cleaning the house by time to go to the park and I was going to be tired enough after that much cleaning that I was not going to be willing to go late. I would need to sit down and rest.

She cried and screamed and told me I was mean and not fair. I looked at her carefully and then I went to the garage and started cleaning. When she followed me screaming at me I carefully walked her back into the house and shut the door behind me. I’m not going to be screamed at while I clean up after someone. I don’t fucking think so. I was very careful not to yell or scream.

Shanna has been asking me a lot lately how my mother would react in situations. It’s hard. While we were cleaning (after she calmed down) she asked me what my mother would have done. I looked around the house warily and said that my mother would have hit me over and over and told me I was disgusting and bad. She looked shocked. She asked me if I think that about her. I said no. I told her that her behavior isn’t very considerate but that’s about as bad as it is. She thought about that for a while.

A few times lately she has engaged in behavior that would have earned me a beating. I’ve been thinking a lot about that topic as a result. I “wasn’t hit much” by the standards of my family but I was also willing to be told to sit in one place and not open my mouth. I was willing to sit in a chair and read and not move or inconvenience anyone. That’s why I wasn’t hit as much.

Shanna did something, I can’t even remember what, and I felt very frustrated. I started crying, as I am wont to do when I am deeply frustrated. She asked me why I was upset. I told her, “Sometimes I feel very frustrated because I’m not sure what to do when you engage in behavior I dislike. My mom was very mean to me and I don’t want to do that to you but I don’t know what I should be doing and it is very very frustrating.”

Now she has taken to giving me advice on how I should handle things. It’s kind of funny.

I feel like Calli has exploded on the scene recently. Now she talks. A lot. All day. I have no idea how many words she has picked up. I couldn’t begin to count. I think back with nostalgia to how I wrote down every new word I heard from Shanna. I had a list. I don’t have that kind of time or attention now. She adds so many words a day that I have no perception of how large her vocabulary is. Somewhere between 50 and 500. If it isn’t 500 yet it will be this week at the rate she is going.

She signs a lot more than Shanna ever did, and I don’t think it is just because of the videos. She has a lot in her head and a lot of trouble with her vocal cords. She’s annoyed by her speech impediment. She knows she is saying words wrong. She tries to get sounds and can’t. I smile and pat her on the head and say it’s a matter of practice. It’ll come.

Calli is independent in ways Shanna has never been and that means I misunderstand the depth of her attachment to me. Calli runs away faster and farther and doesn’t look back… until she has to be on me for multiple hours and cries and whines if I put her on my back because then she can’t see my face. She has a really strong need to be physically near my face looking at me. She does it for many hours a day. She gets very agitated if she doesn’t get it. I smile at her as much as I can physically force myself. I love her so much.

It’s neat trying to teach them how to be friends. As I’m reading developmental stuff sometimes I feel guilty that I’m not providing Shanna nearly as much peer interaction as would be good for her (she kind of sucks with kids her age) and I hope that Calli and Shanna will be enough company for one another. Yes, we do see other kids. We still spend a very lot of time at home alone. I need to.

I feel very weird about balancing our needs. I need a fair bit of time at home. If I am out of the house too much I am exhausted and I cry inappropriately in public. Crying is a much bigger part of my life than it is for “normal” people, near as I can tell. Being too tired or hungry or stressed triggers tears for me. I don’t have to feel additionally sad. I have enough background sad in my life that I’m always up for a good cry. It’s very embarrassing and hard to control when I’m in public.

It’s a fairly predictable pattern for me. I can schedule things in advance around my needs and I can generally get through an obligation if I make it. But I don’t schedule anything else that day–including dishes. I’m trying to consciously learn more about how this works for me. I need control over this.

It is hard to explain what it is like to be in my body. Based on what I understand from books my body is not typical. My heart races a little frequently during the day. I feel waves of terror spontaneously and randomly. I have long periods of intense negative thoughts while I am engaging in just about any activity. Randomly cutting paper just to practice using scissors with Shanna can trigger a diatribe in my head.

I have a lot of control. These things don’t get expressed very often. But the cost is so high. I feel like thin, like when you wear through the sole of a shoe and can see the sock. Too much friction. Can’t keep going.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the long-term effect being a stay at home mom will have on my life. I’ve been thinking very hard about how worthless my society thinks I am. I’m thinking of the scorn I sometimes see on peoples faces. To be fair if I tell another mother that I am staying home with my kids 75% of the time they say, “Oh you are lucky.” I like that. I am. I am very lucky. I am so very lucky that I get to have the life I have now.

I tell myself that this stage of my life is my gift for surviving my childhood. I went through hell, sure, but now I have this. I feel ashamed of the extent of my negativity and depression and anxiety because I am one of the luckiest people ever in the history of human kind.

I am safe. I have a partner who adores me and helps me. I stopped working in the middle of pregnancy. I came home and sat and read. I didn’t clean. I didn’t cook. He either made dinner or we went out. I sat in a torpor and cried while he was at work. I felt horrible. But he came home to me every day. He took care of me. I will never be able to repay the debt of gratitude I feel towards this man. During the physically weakest part of my adult life he was a gentle and loving care giver. I’ve never had that before.

I have two daughters who see me and feel like the world is wonderful. I have been very nice to them–not that they are spoiled. Well, they are. But they have very nice manners. I’m pretty rigid in my expectations.

I spent my pregnancy reading and thinking about what kind of interaction I wanted to have with my kids. I worked out the details of how I would have to react to various kinds of stimuli. I have to plan in advance how I will react under stress because in the moment I can’t. I can’t plan when I am upset. And I have to react to my children full speed all day long. It’s fucking terrifying.

When you are under stress you revert to your earliest training. What was your earliest training like? You don’t want me to talk about mine.

So! We’re not doing that any more! I mean, I still do it in my head. I still have these horrible tapes playing in the background. I still have all of the same impulses and inclinations. But I don’t do it. And it is physically hard. It is work. All day every day. So I like spending a lot of time alone in a room. It feels so fucking good. I even get pissy about the cat sometimes.

While I run lately I’ve been thinking a lot about my relationship with God. I’ve been seeing the door to door missionaries a lot more. I don’t believe there is an omnipresent anything that decided long ago that every so often there had to be a kid brutally raped by her father. Sorry, no.

I believe it is random. I really do. I believe that life is terribly unfair. I recognize that most of my situational good fortune in my current adult life would not be available to me if I wasn’t white. That bothers me. I don’t think that I can believer in someone stronger than me controlling things and look around at the world and continue to keep going. That is too god damn depressing.

I am a not-so-dumb animal. I want to continue to eat and shit and mate and have non-sexual touching with people I exchange caring with. That’s what I god damn want. These are instincts. I want to be a human being worth knowing. What makes someone worth knowing? Damned if I know.

I don’t turn over any control of me to a Higher Power. It’s the big reason I will never try any of the “Anonymous” shit. Fuck you telling me I can’t do something by myself. Ha. Watch me, motherfucker. Have you met me? Can you really think of something that I am likely to want that I can’t do? There are physical feats I am not likely to accomplish–sure. I won’t be in the NBA this lifetime. I’m really ok with that. I don’t feel like that fact is a reflection of a failure of will power.

I can’t decide to be someone else. But I can be me without any help. I don’t need anyone to decide for me what is right or wrong. I can do that. I know what they feel like in the pit of my stomach. The problem is that I feel a lot of fear when I don’t have enough information. How can I make a decision when I don’t know enough about the situation to know what the right decision is? Oh god. But you can’t go through life that way. You do the best you can with what you know.

I do a lot of research. I don’t hesitate to say, “I don’t know yet but I will get back to you.”

But when you are dealing with children all day every day… yeah. It’s a mixed bag. Some things you can put off and a lot of things you need to react to immediately. I script. I do a lot of research around child development is happening with my kids so that I can react appropriately. I really want to be appropriate.

I don’t believe that anyone is controlling me except for me. Then what about these pervasive horrible thoughts? It’s random. It’s the natural reaction of trauma. I will never undo my life. I can just write scripts for the future that suck less.

I have a really good life. I am treated very well. I’m actually glad that Noah and I are having this period without the raunchy sex. It’s nice for there to be at least one period of my life where liking me means everyone around me is gentle and kind with me. Writing that sentence makes me cry. I have certainly had relationships and people in my life who have never hurt me.

I feel like I have a running calendar in my head: last self injury on _______ date. I’m not telling you the date because I feel embarrassed about this count. I have categories you see. It’s all split up into “well this counts for this but not for that” and I dicker about what I am allowed to do to hurt myself. Like I haven’t cut or hit my head or burned myself or anything like that in a long time. But I’m having a lot of food issues.

It’s complicated, yo.

But Noah is very gentle with me these days. I’m terribly sexually bored by it, but emotionally it feels really important and good. We are going to have to figure out the balance there eventually. I feel like the kids still provide enough physical stress that it isn’t a good idea. The kids are getting less rough with me–we’ve been specifically working on it a lot for the last couple of weeks.

I am not someone who would feel good about being one of the brick makers for the pyramid. I wouldn’t feel like I was awesome and doing something great. And yet someone has to be the brick maker. It’s a required job. I think that people who believe in a Higher Power make great brick layers.

I don’t believe there is a plan. I’m not willing to do something I find awful because it is part of something bigger than me. Fuck you I have suffered enough. Not that brick laying is awful. I’m not suited to being an NBA player either.

Thing is, I don’t know what I am going to be when I grow up. I’m not sure what I’m building towards. So I’m picking things up almost at random. I don’t know very many people like me.

I have had an unusual life. I have done things at the wrong stages and the wrong times but mostly it works for me. I am sexually wired towards some really disturbing things. Whether it is my fault or not is immaterial. It is. I am currently in a phase of my life where I am trying to build non-sexual relationships with two people in a very intense way. There isn’t a lot of me left to go do deviant stuff. It is physically hard on me to not fulfill those needs but emotionally I don’t have the ability to handle more pain right now. I need to know that Noah does not just want me around as a cum dumpster and thing to objectify and hurt. I need to be something more than that to him. But we will get back to playing with that some day.

Fulfilling your dreams is hard because in your head as you have the dream you fixate on looking/being a certain way. Doing things at certain stages. Some people solve this by not growing up in their head. I don’t have any interest in being anything like I was pre-twenty-five. Maybe I’ll think of myself as thirty forever. The year I trained for a marathon. That was the brutally hard thing I did that year.

I just mutate my self injury. I have to get it somewhere and running is enough. Holy shit.

I say I don’t know many people like me because I don’t know anyone else who mutates as fast as I do spurred by fear. That’s not a terrible judgment on people. Most people tend to be paralyzed by fear. Fear makes me move. It makes me change. I have a hard time when I find out that people I know are doing the exact same thing they did ten years ago. It freaks me out. I feel like maybe I’m defective. I seriously doubt there will ever be a period in my life where my days look the same from one decade to the next. Maybe when the fifteen years after the kids move out? I doubt it.

How I am is not good. I am not consistent enough. I am not strong enough. I am not I am not I am not.

Never the less I have to go start today. We are going to meet a friend with little kids at Habitot. I hope it goes well.

Mostly parenting babbling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time to go inside.

Inadequate to the task

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The specific incident

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So that’s the problem.  That other post.  Then there is trying to figure out why I want Sarah here so much.  After she explained to me yesterday that she can’t live with my explosive anger because it is too much like her mother I went over to my friend Wikipedia.  Borderline personality disorder.  Oh that is so me.  Yeah.

Thing is, I have been absolutely over my stress point for a long time.  I don’t know how possible it is for me to get my anger issues under control without getting my stress levels under control.

So what happened is once we got home and I saw the kitchen in that state I walked into Sarah’s room and she was asleep.  I stomped into the kitchen and started cleaning.  I did so with a lot of banging and slamming.  I basically threw the asparagus pot into the cabinet and in the process I broke a glass pan.  Sarah says she cleaned that up for me.  I then slammed open the other cabinet door and clipped Calli’s fingers because she was closer than I thought.  It barely touched her, but it scared the crap out of her.

I honestly can’t remember the next sequence of events very well but I exchanged words with Sarah and she responded with hostility because she didn’t feel she deserved my anger and I kicked the cabinet doors off the wall.

Full stop that isn’t acceptable behavior.  I need to never do anything of the kind again or I should probably not be alone with my children.  I don’t believe in pie crust promises.  You don’t say you are going to do something and then just carry along with your life.

I have to lower the stress in my life.  One of the things that Sarah provides for me is that she has lived with an emotionally unstable mother and I feel very uncertain about the amount of time that Noah is gone.  I feel worried about how I will be later.  And yet having Sarah here makes everything harder and makes me feel constantly closer to the edge than I did before she got here.  There is so much more volatility with her here.  Because either I have to nitpick and remind her of everything or I have to do it or it doesn’t get done.

Is it getting better?  Is she noticing more and doing more?  Well… yes… but she is about to go from being home pretty much all the time to having two days a week where she is voluntarily on campus for 12 hours.  And she’ll still have a meds day.  I anticipate a sudden and dramatic drop in what she does around the house.  And I’m going to either have to nitpick her or roll with it.  I’m feeling very trapped.

It doesn’t help that part of the reason I feel ok doing Noah’s share of the work is because we have specifically negotiated things around the fact that he bloody well supports me in a life of lavish luxury by my standards.  I feel a lot of gratitude for that.  I’m fairly happy to do extra work for someone who provides me with a life this good.  I don’t have such an attitude towards Sarah.  I feel like I am working myself this hard for nothing.  So that she doesn’t even have to send me a text message saying that she isn’t feeling well or ask when should dinner be ready.

And yet, I kicked the cabinet door off.  No one should live with that.  My children should not be exposed to that.  I’m going to buy a punching bag.  I have a powerful need to hit and there are appropriate ways to deal with it.  I need to just do it.

It was interesting reading the BPD article.  This part near the end was interesting to me:

The features of BPD include emotional instability, intense unstable interpersonal relationships, a need for relatedness and a fear of rejection. As a result, people with BPD often evoke intense emotions in those around them. Pejorative terms to describe persons with BPD such as “difficult,” “treatment resistant,” “manipulative,” “demanding” and “attention seeking” are often used, and may become a self-fulfilling prophecy as the clinician’s negative response triggers further self-destructive behaviour.[102] In psychoanalytic theory, this stigmatization may be thought to reflect countertransference (when a therapist projects their own feelings on to a client), as people with BPD are prone to use defense mechanisms such as splitting and projective identification. Thus the diagnosis “often says more about the clinician’s negative reaction to the patient than it does about the patient … as an expression of counter transference hate, borderline explains away the breakdown in empathy between the therapist and the patient and becomes an institutional epithet in the guise of pseudoscientific jargon” (Aronson, p 217).[84]
This inadvertent counter transference can give rise to inappropriate clinical responses including excessive use of medication, inappropriate mothering and punitive use of limit setting and interpretation.[103] People with BPD are seen as among the most challenging groups of patients, requiring a high degree of skill and training in the psychiatrists, therapists and nurses involved in their treatment.[104] While some clinicians agree with the diagnosis under the name “borderline personality disorder”, some would like the name to be changed.[105] One critique says that some who are labeled “Borderline Personality Disorder” feel this name is unhelpful, stigmatizing, and/or inaccurate.[105]

Sarah and I are each working through our mother-issues.  I don’t know how to work through mine without writing.  And that’s not always a fun experience for people standing near me.  My mother denies all blame or responsibility for everything that happened during my childhood.  She was always quick to blame other people for what happened.  I have inappropriate coping mechanisms around that. Because if I got angry as a child I could get people to do what I needed them to do for a while.  Yeah, it was the whole walking on egg shells thing.

That’s not very useful as an adult and it isn’t what I want to teach my kids.  What do I want to teach my kids?

I don’t know.  But not what I am doing.  And before people provide me with a list of “stop ____” admonishments… the problem is you have these coping methods for a reason.  You need to find a different way of coping, not just stop what you are doing.  My methods have been steadily increasing in intensity for a while here.  I need to express a whole lot of limits and see how that lands.  I have to stop hurting myself so that I can let people encroach on me in ways they don’t even know they are doing.

It’s really easy to feel like the whole problem is my fault.  If I only did _____ everything would be fine.  But that’s not true either.  I really can’t fix everything.

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.

Just life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We really need to save money.

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

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

That’s why.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think I’m ordering more pot today.

Good thing I have therapy today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fun plotting.

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I’m drawing pictures of my imaginary house.  I like to think about what I would change.  It’s kind of daunting to think of paying for it.  I don’t want to finance it.  I’m really repelled by the idea of paying interest on things that I want.  It strikes me as the wrong approach to life.  It is going to cost at least $250,000.  Realistically, a shit load more than that but not everything has to be bought at once.  That’s about the original asking price of the house.

My neighborhood is full of renters.  This area could change for better or worse easily.  I have no guarantee of recouping my investment.  That will be an easier pill to swallow if I save up the money in advance and have it to spare.  The problem with loans is that you are signing on to always and forever have this obligation.  It makes me uncomfortable.

A lot of it could be done for cheaper if I wanted to do it myself and deal with “close enough”.  After looking around my garage for a few months I can tell you I won’t be happy with “close enough” forever in my whole house.  I’m kind of tired of living in a cage.  I want a house with a lot of light.  My entire childhood I lived in close dark cramped quarters.  I don’t have to do this forever.  As my children grow and invite friends over… I am going to need to have somewhere to go other than my bedroom.  If I want my kids to have friendships that do not bend at my whims, I have to have a place to be away from them.

When people glorify the Noble Savage and idealize that behavior into AP dogma things get twisted.  I don’t live in a tribe.  It’s not possible for me to give as much constant contact as that requires.  AP as preached by the extremists on MDC (just to be clear who I am talking about) is pretty restrictive.  And the choices they advocate can be right given a very narrow set of circumstances which apply to their lives.

I honestly believe that if I lived in po’dunk North Dakota I would not have vaccinated my kids and I would have laughed my ass off at people who told me my kids were at risk for the diseases that are mostly wiped out in this country.  If I lived in Missouri… I’d look at what diseases are happening in Mexico and I’d vaccinate based on that.  I like international travel.  I like going off and creating stories.  I feel absolutely driven to be an interesting person.  Damnit.  My kids need to be vaccinated.

But not for chicken pox.  Or rotovirus.  Or the flu.  I think we overmedicate as a country.  I will tell my kids about chicken pox and try to expose them when they are young, but if we don’t catch it in the wild I will vaccinate them at 12.  Earlier if they tell me that I am nuts and they don’t want chicken pox.  I get the impression Shanna will be the kind of girl who speaks her opinion.  At least occasionally.

Anyway.  All this to say that I think we will get along better as she grows up if we have a bigger house.  I have issues.  I know this.  The thing is, all those Noble Savage societies have a very different structure to their entire community.  They have more support than a nuclear family does in America.  It’s an apples to oranges comparison.  It’s not that a child must have mommy 24/7.  A child needs to be cared for by consistent caregivers 24/7.  It’s not the same thing.  I can believe that an infant in the first few months may fare better with just mommy.  I now have a toddler and a kid!  I don’t have a baby any more!

The upside of having married Noah is… I can have dreams and know that I don’t have to be the only road to accomplishing them.  I can’t express the safety that feels like.  It makes my breath come short.  When I’m hiding by myself of course I dream of having the book I write in November be good enough to publish.  It’s a nice dream.  But I spend about five minutes doing that.  I don’t think it’s good to think too hard about that.  I think about what I want to say.  And why it’s worth saying.

I have a lot of format ideas that I’ve been noodling with for years.  Noah has listened to more teary conversations where I sob that I want to write a book about everything that has happened than I care to count.  I need to do it so I can move past this phase of my life.  I’m not over it.  I haven’t said enough about it.  There isn’t anyone in the world who knows the story from start to finish other than me.  I lost the people who were my witnesses.

I have to write it down.  I can’t be the only one who knows I exist and why I exist the way I am.  It’s not fair.  They can’t do that to me.  They can’t take away my right to have eople in the wolrd who know know me.  They can’t isolate me.  They can’t tell me I am a liar.  They can’t take my story away from me and call it a lie.  Fuck them.

I want to write my story because it is true.  And it fucking bothers me that no one but me saw it.  I’m tired of being told that I am lying.  I need to feel that intimacy with people.  And a few people will read it.  I hope it will be told in a way that is good enough to publish and a lot of people will read it.  I hope people will get an edutainment out of it.  It’s not that I’m always right.  I’m not.  It’s that my perspective is different.  It is jarring to people.  That is why I identify as white trash.  I have a way of speaking, of presenting myself into the world with aggression.  But not just that.  I call attention to myself with things that are kind of tacky.

Just wait till I’m done with my house, y’all.  It’ll be great.  Do you know what I’ve learned sitting here in my wonderful garage?  I’m not satisfied with close enough.  I despise the unfinished wires.  I loathe the exposed pipes.  I have a friend who offered to help (he means do all the work; he’s sweet) me fix a lot of that cosmetic stuff.  But none of that would change the fact that the city of Fremont says this can’t be a living space.  It’s a garage.  That’s why I won’t call it a den or office or whatever.  It’s a garage.  It’s a great garage… but it’s a garage.  I want to move up in the world.  This will never be good enough for me.  I will always feel like I am hiding in the dark.  I need more light.  The living room isn’t really good enough either.

I won’t ever be happy in this house until there is a lot more light and higher ceilings.  It’s too claustrophobic and dark.  It reminds me of the house in the mountains.  It’s not the color of the walls–which I like.  I am not a tall woman.  I can touch my ceiling.  I have tall friends.  I dislike that they have to duck and be made smaller in my house.  It’s a standard ceiling.  I have to jump.  I don’t care.  It’s like trying to get around in a 6′ town when you’re 10′ tall.  I hate it.  I would never have picked this house.  And moving isn’t the right option for a variety of reasons.  A more expensive house would still be wrong because what I want is a custom house.  I can do that here.

So how the fuck do I raise that much money.  Well, as it so happens, I married this geek.  He makes a decent salary.  If he keeps going at the rate he is going financially it can happen in about 13 years.  That’s a long time to be impatient.  How much do I want the money?  When would I like to do the remodel?  These are interesting questions.  The big structural stuff I simply can’t do.  I can’t add a second story full of windows and reinstall the solar panels.  I’m good, but I have my limits.  We just replaced the roof.  Most of the stuff I’m seeing says that I can expect it to last 15-20 years.  Tap fingers.  It’s been on for two years.  Twitch.  Well.  That gives me a lot of time to save money.  There is no chance I will tear it up in the next ten years.  That’s a kind of wasteful that would turn my stomach.

Ok.  I can fuss with the garage.  And try to be frugal.  And put money away.  I can have that dream.  It’s just long-term.  I kind of hate the long-term.  Ack.  It’s terrifying to think of committing, truly committing, to being in this house in ten years with a track record of maintaining the same financial pattern for that long.  It makes my blood run cold.  That’s a lot of fucking pressure.

Side note.  Right now I have Rascal Flatt’s song Stand on repeat.  


On your knees you look up
Decide you’ve had enough
You get mad, you get strong
Wipe your hands, shake it off
Then you stand, then you stand

Learning to marathon means that some goals are just not a high priority.  No matter how intense they feel in some moments.  I will have to learn how to live in close quarters with a lot of people for a while.  I do need privacy.  I need to learn how to create that space for writing.  I need to get the book done and over with.  I have too many uuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhh I wannnnnnnnnnna in my brain.  I need to get one of them done.  I have proven to my own satisfaction that I know this story.  I can tell it.  And I can certainly do it quickly.  I can write the whole thing down in one go.

But I can’t blog it.  Blogging is different.  Every time I blog I write to a different person.  I have a different ideal reader and I’m trying to coax a different reaction.  I need to write the book for Noah.  And I can’t do it with him reading and nodding and changing his behavior in random ways near me.  I would be influenced.  It’s really hilarious to me to think that.  Noah is too important to me in a global fashion.  If I want to truly create something for him I have to do it in complete absence of his knowledge of it.  Otherwise he will come home from work grump on a day when I posted something I am particularly proud of and I will feel crushed and I will stall on writing.

I use blogging as a crutch.  I have learned to write in blogging.  I don’t know if that will translate to a book.

Take what you are given before it is gone

I have a story to tell.  Not telling it is interfering with my life.  That means it is time to stop medicating to prevent my story from being present.  It means telling it fully from start to finish.  And then stopping.  And letting it go.  Maybe only Noah and Sarah will read it and care.  I don’t believe that is true.  I’m actually terrified.  I’m afraid only Noah and Sarah will read it and care.  I’m afraid that it will only influence them.  Because it will influence them.

Writing this book will change Sarah and Noah.  Eventually it will change Shanna and Calli.  I won’t tell either of them about the book until they are adults or until it is so famous I have no choice.  But this having this book in existence in complete form means that I can have people who can fully speak my verbal shorthand.  I can create a way to be fully present in all my broken glory with the adults in my life without having to constantly think about it and try to keep it away from my kids.  Blogging isn’t enough.

I want stories to be comfortable and familiar.  I don’t want to feel like I am unmasking more abuse constantly.  I want the adults in my life to be able to help me censor for my children.  I want to be able to say that I am thinking about Tommy and have them be able to ask, “What about him?” and be able to give them a useful answer.  One that will allow them to be present with me as an adult as someone who sees me without me having to tell this long gory story in front of my kids.

I feel this constant pressure to monitor every word out of my mouth.  I feel horribly uncomfortable because I want to feel this intimacy with Noah and Sarah and it eats me alive.  I can rectify this problem. I can spill my guts.  And then I can relax and listen to them talk and stop feeling so driven to share my story all the time.  I want to be able to listen.  Right now I don’t listen.  I blog and then I nod along waiting for them to mention it and help me process… only those bastards have lives.  My writing is for me.

I need to just write for me.  It’s not working how I want it to work.  Let’s try a different approach.

Life’s like a novel with the end ripped out.

It’s time to go do life.

The Mom Pledge

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I was reading up on the Band, because they matter.  And I foundThe Mom Pledge.   Text is:

The Mom Pledge
I am a proud to be a mom. I will conduct myself with integrity in all my online activities. I can lead by example.
I pledge to treat my fellow moms with respect. I will acknowledge that there is no one, “right” way to be a good Mom. Each woman makes the choices best for her family.
I believe a healthy dialogue on important issues is a good thing. I will welcome differing opinions when offered in a respectful, non-judgmental manner. And will treat those who do so in kind.
I stand up against cyber bullying. My online space reflects who I am and what I believe in. I will not tolerate comments that are rude, condescending or disrespectful.
I refuse to give those who attack a platform. I will remove their remarks with no mention or response. I can take control.
I want to see moms work together to build one another up, not tear each other down. Words can be used as weapons. I will not engage in that behavior.
I affirm that we are a community. As a member, I will strive to foster goodwill among moms. Together, we can make a difference. 

Part of what makes this kind of thing so weird is, what is “rude, condescending or disrespectful” according to this code?  I’m afeared that an awful lot of what I say would be one of those words.  I’m not trying to be rude.  I reign in my condescension as hard as I am able.  I’m afraid it pops out occasionally when I’m not looking.  People often think that me questioning them at all is disrespectful.  Pointing out inconsistencies in a story is disrespectful.  On one hand I want to say, “That sounds great!”  But I’m afraid it’s just one more way that I feel like I can’t hold up the original spirit of the thing so I don’t join.  I’m a snarky bastard.  Most of my friends are.

I don’t really think of myself as a “Mommy blogger” despite the fact that I have crotch droppings and mention them here.  I feel like I write about my mothering shit the same way I write about me just existing.  I happen to be a mother.  But it’s not all that much of what I want to think about during my off-time, you know?  I have to write about being a mother in so far as I’m trying to hack the experience.  I am trying to dissect it to see how it works so that I can put it back together in a different way.

Inviting Sarah to live with me is part of mothering.  Even though Sarah is inconsistently available at times she is still stable in her moods.  When she is here she is here.  Part of being a mother is recognizing that children need to have people in their life who are rock steady dependable in their affect.  I’m not and I never will be.  I talk about me not being steady.  I talk about how to cope with that.  And I fucking well moved someone in who was stable.  Noah is also more emotionally stable than me.  I worry.  Specifically, to pull from that last link:

“This handling of mental illness (there were several negative examples) tends to present it as something out of control, scary, and dangerous. And also very, very selfish. Mentally ill people in pop culture are often deeply self-absorbed, wrapped up in themselves and their disorders, which means they have no time for anyone else. When it comes to parents, pop culture implies that mentally ill parents are too broken and damaged to possibly provide the level of care and support their children need. When this is the understanding of mental illness that many people have, it sets dangerous precedents.
Finding positive depictions of mentally ill parents is an uphill struggle, let alone depictions of parents who are members of Mad Pride movement, who may reject conventional treatment approaches to mental illness. For people with mental illness who want to be or are parents, pop culture provides ample reminders that this is a bad idea and should be reconsidered. For people without mental illness, pop culture provides ample judgment fodder and this can be a big problem when those people are decision-makers, the people who, for example, get to evaluate whether a parent should be allowed to keep a child after a report to child services expressing concern, or who sit in judgment on a jury.”

I worry a lot.  I worry about talking about my mental illness because I don’t think I can get away with claiming to myself that I don’t have mental illness.  There are legitimate names for my experiences.  The whole thing can be codified as a case study.  But it’s my life.  I speak overly harshly sometimes.  I don’t have the self control not to.  My option is to never speak again.  *I* feel like my behavior is perceived as being outside the bounds of that pledge up there.  *I* feel like my behavior is perceived as “rude, condescending or disrespectful.”  I don’t mean to be though.  This truly is my polite voice.  I am what my life has made me.  I am frequently harsh in tone.  I do it meaning well.  I am not trying to be a didactic asshole.

Bad situations in my life have been really bad.  When I say that I was at an important crossroads, I was often making a choice that resulted in a more dramatic shift than most people have as an option.  That’s convoluted.  Not very many people can talk to a rape crisis clinician for five minutes and be told, “You should be dead.”  That’s happened to me when I have talked to a lot of different people.  My choices kept me alive.  I chose life.  Over and over.  That sounds melodramatic and I want to punch myself for using that particular cliché.  It’s true though.  I self harm because it is choosing life.  It is choosing to allow myself a small amount of relief from the pain rather than actually relieving the pain.  I got away from my father.  It was hard.  It took fighting off my family, but I did it.  I got away from my family.  I could be another drug addict loser.  Instead I’m a drug addict with a functional life.  I am a drug addict with elaborate checks in place to ensure that I am not permitted to be erratic around my children.  My drug addiction is what allows me to be consistent.  Without it I am swinging too hard right now.

But sometimes I come in here to the internet and I vent my frustration.  MDC is really hard to read sometimes.  The problem is that my life choices have been between really really bad things that seemed ok to outsiders and things that looked bad to outsiders but was actually great for me.  My whole view on life choices is skewed far off to the left from everyone else.  For most of my life if you had offered me the chance to die on any given day, I would have taken it.

I had children because I choose life.  When people ask me why someone like me had kids, and I get asked, I say that biological compulsion is a big deal and I was a lot more stable then.  I don’t say, “Fuck you for implying that I am too broken to have worth on this planet you fucking asshole.”  I had children because I desperately want to spend most of my time with them.  Because I like seeing them change day by day.  Because even when Shanna or Calli are doing something that makes me want to put my fist through a wall I would cut my hand off before I would slap them in the face.  Because they are mine.  The first people who love me without any hint of judgment.  That will come later.  They will judge me.  They will judge my behavior as a mother.  They will judge me as a person.  It’s my responsibility to make the choices that will allow us to have a good relationship.

I don’t accept it at face value that I will have a relationship with my grown up children.  I’m aware that there are conditions on such love.  It’s hard.  Do you know why people stay in relationships with their abusers?  Because if you walk away from that love, what will you do about the aching loss it creates in your life?  I had children and I went around and deliberately chose adults to help me raise them.  Adults who are just as intent as I am that our children be kept safe and healthy.  Adults who hold me accountable for my behavior.  I’m not actually taking the risk that other people think I am taking.

If anything I am too hard on myself and I demand an unhealthy amount of 24/7 cheer from myself.  It’s getting better.  Normal, healthy people have mood variation.  Right now I do not get consistent sleep and I haven’t in a year.  I have outsourced feeding me to other people and that’s a mixed bag.  They aren’t actually aware that I stopped tracking that because I’m kind of a shitty person.  If I don’t tell them that I have abdicated responsibility to them then I get to be mad at them a lot when they fuck up.  Control games are awesome.

This is hard to talk about.  Because I can describe it that way, as a control game, but it’s not like I’m experiencing it that way.  I focus on taking care of my kids.  I get them through their day.  They eat at regular intervals.  I uhhh don’t like a lot of the food they like to eat.  I have texture issues.  It’s not even that I don’t like those foods.  If someone else took those foods and cooked them till they were mush I’d cheerfully eat it.  Shanna and Calli like crunchy things.  That feels bad in my mouth.  I usually come in and get food for them quickly and then get to the point where I probably should shift gears and make food for me… only I get distracted and do something else.  I “forget” to eat.  It’s partially a consequence of my weird picky food preference issues.

When Noah or Sarah want to eat then there is pretty much always a way for me to feel like something I want in my mouth is an option.  They like things that are spiced closer to how I want it (I like slightly less salt than Sarah and slightly more salt than Noah) and it works.  Even if it pings me as being slightly over or slightly under salted… that’s a small sin.  That’s how food works when Sarah or Noah is cooking.  I can eat it.

For example, I can’t handle eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches very often.  The oil from the peanut butter stays in my mouth and bothers all the other flavors for days.  And the jam often tastes too sweet.  But I can’t handle eating peanut butter plain because the flavor is too intense and it makes me feel icki.  On some days I can handle eating nuts plain.  Most days the idea of crunching a nut between my teeth will give me shivers down my spine like nails on a chalk board.

But given how many things I feel I must do in a day… I don’t want to go through the effort of making a meal for Shanna and a meal for Calli and a meal for me.  Given that my meals are a lot more work.  I just don’t eat.  Because I’m not really worth it.  But Noah and Sarah think that feeding me is worthwhile.  Hey!  I know if I wait a bit longer Sarah will want to eat and it will be easier to just make one mess for the both of us and…  It works until it doesn’t work.  When it doesn’t work I generally get pretty grumpy.  And that’s how a lot of my self regulation goes.

Ok, this is a problem.  I need to fix it.  It’s hard to get to the point where it feels like I have any more ability to do “care” for a body.  Even my own.  I get really angry with myself for how long it takes me to poop now that I have kids.  That’s weird.  The whole gestating/labor thing changed my plumbing in ways I am not appreciating.  And it doesn’t help that we are eating so many vegetables that my digestive system is on protest.  I don’t believe all the people who say this is a healthy diet.  I never had to poop this much when I was living on top ramen.  That has to be easier on my system.  Ahem.

People are whole systems.  I’m kind of a mommy blogger.  I’m kind of a mental health blogger.  Kind of feminist.  I’m just me.  I don’t think I am going to post the Mom Pledge thing on my site permanently.  I will agree in my head that I should follow those rules.  I will think they correctly describe my approach to life.  But I won’t publicly join a group about it.  That sounds like behavior policing to me.  I can’t handle it.

Food, Glorious Food

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I’m pretty excited about the party today.  I probably should be off starting to prep for it right now.  The reason I am not doing so is because it is still pitch black outside.  I think the first thing I do should be to hide the eggs so the girls aren’t woken up by me moving around in the house before then.  Excellent.  Time to think.  One of the things that has been on my mind a lot lately is food.  Seems normal, I think everyone focuses on food.  Especially when they are about to host a party.  But that isn’t really what I mean.  I mean that I’m thinking about food in the abstract.  I’m thinking about what it means to me.  See, I’m doing that because I’m not really eating.  Yesterday I had an egg mit from Noah’s Bagels and a 16 oz drink from Jamba Juice for breakfast.  For the entire rest of the day I had a slice of cheese, a couple bites of sausage, half a bowl of ramen, and about 5 bites of meat at a Japanese restaurant.  I am not a small chick.  I am breastfeeding.  That is simply not an adequate number of calories for a day.  Right before going to bed I asked Noah to bring me food and he did and I ate a sandwich.  I did that because I knew Calli would be up all night nursing (I was mostly right) and I didn’t want to deal with the level of stomach pain I get if I let her keep nursing when I’m over hungry.

Maybe that is part of why I hate nursing her so much.  And that’s why my jeans are falling off.  It’s this weird thing.  I am so clearly punishing myself.  Wait.  I’m getting ahead of myself.  I’m not telling the story right.

I’ve been thinking about food a lot.  I’ve been thinking about food a lot because I’ve been playing games with denying myself food.  This feels unsettling and weird to me because… it’s not October.  I accept that I do things like this every so often, but it never crossed my mind until this morning when my wonderful online girlfriend asked me about it.  My father committed suicide in the beginning of October.  I think I have spent every October since his death not eating.  This was actually an issue with Tom.  He got very worried and upset the first two years of our relationship when I didn’t eat for a month.  I mean, I do eat some.  But I eat 25-50% of what I normally eat.  And my weight tends to plummet rapidly during this time.  I’ve always gotten a lot of positive feedback about that and uhm, that’s weird.  It’s weird that I get so much overt societal approval for being that specific flavor of fucked up.  Society as a whole would love for me to develop this kind of overwhelming shame at all times so that I could finally have the appropriate body size.

And yet I’m not real inclined to do that.  I have very quiet anxiety that I don’t express to almost anyone about being “too fat” where I don’t know where the line is.  And I don’t even know exactly why I feel so bad about this anxiety.  Ok, here’s the thing: my actual shoulder bones are very narrow.  And for whatever reason I don’t tend to put on much weight in the very upper arms/shoulder/upper back areas.  So my upper body is always going to look funny in larger sized clothes because they hang wrong.  And I feel like I can never look attractive in my clothes.  And that really bothers me.  It really and truly bothers me that when I am heavy it is literally impossible to find things that fit me in the shoulders.  I’m starting to wear strapless dresses/shirts because then I can wear an open size medium sweater that doesn’t hang off my shoulders.

So obviously this is a complicated issue.  Food is love for me.  Very very much so.  I love to feed people and I surround myself with people who think food is love.  And then I do things like telling Noah last night that if he ever tries to get me to eat Japanese food again it will be proof that he is a terrible person who doesn’t love me because something in the flavor palate really bothers me.  Ok, I didn’t use exactly those words but that was strongly the gist of it.  And for the record I apologized as soon as my brain caught up with what my stupid mouth had just said.  I was horrified.  Oh man.  For the record the Japanese food thing is almost certainly connected with my overall food issue right now.  Nothing tastes good to me these days.  It’s complicated.

And that’s a lot of why I feel so awkward right now.  I’m really nervous about my ability to pull off being adequately social for the party today.  I don’t know how to talk to people because I am leapfrogging from one yucky thought to another about food stuff.  Why do I surround myself with feeders and then refuse to eat?  Because I don’t deserve love.  Because I’m saying bad things about my Daddy.

And that is why I don’t eat in October.  I am paying penance for killing him.  Without ever having considered if I should or shouldn’t, I am.  That’s an awful thing to think about.  I don’t think he deserves it in my big kid brain.  I don’t know where to begin to find a road around this obstacle.  Even if he doesn’t deserve it the little girl inside me is really upset about hurting her Daddy.

I’m kind of twitching about using that name for him.  You see, I tend to refer to him as my father.  Because he fathered me.  He spawned me.  That sort of thing.  I have had multiple Daddys at this point and they’ve been good men.  It’s kind of an odd story really.  Even I am not slow enough to have missed the connection between me having multiple friends and lovers I call Daddy and thinking about my father molesting me.  It’s kind of odd that the process has healed me in many ways.

Side note: I noticed that it was 5:30 and that I was kind of hungry.  I made a conscious decision to get up and get something to eat because it is absolutely mandatory that my mood be stable today.  I don’t want to eat it.  It actually tastes disgusting enough that I am having difficulty chewing and I feel nearly unable to swallow.  I’m eating a Vanilla Chip Chewy Granola Bar made by Cascadian Farms.  Normally I think these things are just about heaven on earth.  Right now my mouth feels coated and waxy and I feel repulsed and I am having minor gag reflex responses at the idea of taking a third bite.  But I don’t want to be a nasty bitch to my friends today so I took my damn third bite and I will just try not to think about the taste.  Because if I do this, if I allow myself to sit in this cycle today, I will cause a nasty big blow up fight in public and I will feel humiliated and proven right that I am an unstable bad person.

No thanks.  I’ll eat the fucking granola bar.  And every time someone tells me to eat today I will.  Because even if my little girl thinks I deserve to lose all my friends and be punished because I am a terrible person for prosecuting my father my big girl says fuck that shit.  I am not going to do this to myself any more.  I have people in my life who are just itching to feed me and love me.  I really should let them do both.  Even if I can’t love me when I am breaking family taboos and talking about family or relationship secrets.  But I don’t even know if that is it.  I just know that I feel upset enough when I am processing abuse stuff that I begin to withhold food from myself.

Hmm.  Interesting thought.  I wonder if part of the reason I am so prone to attach strongly to people who show love with food because I know I do this to myself and I know that *for me* it is necessary for me to have a cushion of fat to deal with these times of punishing myself.  Years ago I did Weight Watchers and I lost 50 pounds.  It was rather dramatic.  I was also doing a lot of intense exercise and I got into rather good shape.  (I realize now as I mourn that vigorous body.)  I’m trying to get back to feeling like I have that kind of energy.  Though now it occurs to me that it will probably not happen as long as I am waking up at 4 in the morning to write about being sexually assaulted while I was little.

But I have to wake up at 4 and write about it or I will answer cashiers in grocery stores with, “Hi, I’m Krissy and I’m a sexual assault survivor.  Specifically incest that primarily happened in the first ten years of my life, and multiple horrifying rapes when I was 7-10 years old, and a few date rapes and near misses as a teenager.  And then I prosecuted my father and he killed himself and I’ve been a hot mess ever since.  But thanks for asking how my day is!  I hope you are having a good one!”  That wouldn’t be ok, you know?

I hold that boundary.  And I don’t talk about my abuse and trauma very much during the day.  Even though this is an intense period of processing I don’t allow myself to talk about it during the day outside of therapy much because it isn’t appropriate for my kids to hear.  That has to be a boundary.  So instead I just punish myself.

And I grow to resent my children.  Especially nursing.  They are taking so much from me right now but I keep picturing this wonderful scene from a movie I recently watched.  The movie was Mother and Child with Annette Bening.  I sobbed my heart out through the whole story.  But specifically towards the end a woman is successful in adopting a baby after great personal sacrifice trying to do so.  She calls her mom in the middle of the night and throws a temper tantrum about how needy the baby is.  The grandmother in question, S. Epatha Merkerson, pulls back into this stern dignified look.  She then proceeds to tell her daughter off up one side and down the other for daring to have the gall to complain about a baby having needs.  These days when I start to feel pissy with the girls I close my eyes and picture that stony face of disappointed fury telling me to get off my ass and take care of the god damn baby.  And I plaster a smile on my face and get over myself.  I am not always as fast in some of my responses as I would like because I have to stop and take deep breaths to deal with my frustration level sometimes.  But everyone here is happy and healthy and growing and feeling really loved and supported as part of a whole unit.  A big part of that is I have decided that the version of Attachment Parenting we want to practice does not involve all the extremism that some loud voices in the “Natural Family Living” community think it should.  And that’s ok.  I don’t have to think that everything in the mainstream is wrong just because it is a common thing to do.  That is conforming to a specific kind of non-conformity and oh man it is killing me.  So I’m not doing the perfectly available 24/7 thing anymore.  And you know what?  It’s helping a lot.

You can see why I feel that thinking about food is complicated?  But the sun is stealing slowly over the horizon.  I can now clearly see the outline of the tree in our yard.  It is time for me to get up and go hide Easter eggs for a party.  I have something like 12 kids coming on a hunt today.  It will be super fun.   Luckily 5 of those kids are too young and 1 is probably mostly too old because I only have 48 eggs.   Always look on the bright side I say.  The kids will all have a wonderful time and it will be a great party.  I will eat every time someone mentions that I should.  The awesome thing is, no one who loves to feed me will have a chance to read this journal entry before the party.  But they will read it later.  Then the game becomes, do I tell them this morning what stupid destructive game I am playing so they can help me break the cycle?  Or do I act like a crazy person and create drama.  Yeah.  I think I’ll be talking to them as soon as possible.  I wish I didn’t need as much support as I do but I’m really glad that I can get it since I need it.  I am very lucky.

Personal time

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This morning I am enjoying my personal time while doing reading on the internet. I am appreciative of that for a few reasons. I’m going to be going over to try on the mock up of the bridesmaids dress that is being custom made for me. I cannot express the excitement I feel at the thought of having a custom tailored dress. And it will be a 50’s style dress. And it will fit me. And I can nurse in it. And I like it. And I like the material. And I like the color.

I think I just died and went to femme heaven. You see, I’m not normally much of a femme. I’m actually a low maintenance girl in that way. But, like most every woman, I have a funny shaped body and clothes are rarely comfortable. I talk to Noah dreamily about a custom made wardrobe all the time. It just occurred to me that it doesn’t have to be a lottery fantasy. If I do it slowly, one piece at a time… why not? The clothes I am ordering from a website are nearly as expensive. If I find a seamstress who is interested in a steady commission it’s totally possible. And that sounds really nice. I would like to be comfortable in my clothes for once.
I don’t even know where that came from, but I like it. I like that I have time to sit here this morning and think about taking on that kind of many-year-long project because I will be here. This will be my life going forward and I’m allowed to have things I like. Once we get through this early childhood period we will even be able to have extra time so things like that are easy to do. Oh that sounds wonderful.

I like that I have requested that I am not “on duty” until 6:45. If I want to hang out in a closed room by myself doing whatever it is I want, I get to do that. (OF course this is after nursing Calli.) I can sit here and stare out the window and watch as the sky gradually changes from black to purple to navy blue to a saturated blue with white showing through, and now I can see the shapes of the clouds. It will be very cloudy today and probably rain. I think the sky will stay at a blue tinted gray.

I was thinking about that faith in gray thing again today as I watched the movie The Karate Kid. It’s cheesy, but I feel vaguely inspired to do more reading about Zen Buddhism. I’ve been doing a lot of focusing lately on the task at hand as a way to stay balanced and focused. I like having my early morning time be fairly quick reading of the people I enjoy on the internet. I have a lot of time during my day when I have moments of being trapped under Callidora. I am really struggling with my resentment of nursing right now. If I have something to think about, something that connects me to the outside world then I don’t feel trapped and angry. This allows me to have a part of my brain that always feels like me and I can settle into having the whole rest of my attention focused only on the kids. I imagine it works the way I used to use knitting in class. If I have one other track plugging along I can settle into focusing hard on one big one. I am not good at having just one focus at a time if I dislike the task. I have to have something that makes me want to keep enduring. That is carrying and building part of me. If I don’t have this time then I spend Calli’s nursing sessions trying to surf the internet and she interrupts and I am angry the whole time and I resent her.

I like that I have this time to come in here and try to relax into the knowledge that I am not the only responsible person in this house. I don’t need to feel anxiety at all times that I have to be responding in whatever way my children want whenever they want. I don’t have to have a child centered house. Ok, maybe that sounds obvious and preferable to many if not most other people. I grew up in a child centered home. I think a lot of the problems in my family were because we moved at the whims of children. In order to have a peaceful house we need larger and longer patterns. Those can’t be set by children. That’s my job. Oh man. I’m not sure I’m ready to be a responsible adult yet. I have 16 more minutes! Until then, I can be as big of a slacker as I want. So I’ll close this, send a good morning message to my wonderful online girlfriend and have a great day with my friends and my kids.