Category Archives: codependence

Just another whinging Friday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just breathe. This moment will pass.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I swear this all ties together in my head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I should stop typing. Annnnnnnny minute here……

Caved.

4 Replies

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

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

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

“Yes. That would be good enough.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have so. much. privilege.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Walking on eggshells

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not everything is about me, yo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the hell else do people do?

Three more days in the month, paint faster.

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

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

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

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

I learn these things as I teach them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Text has no tone.

2 Replies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I get too much wrong for me.

My ego: wanna stroke it?

5 Replies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But before that. What did I do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And also:

“Compulsivity model of hypersexuality

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

Yeah, that’s me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not competent enough.

3 Replies

Yesterday we were scheduled to go to two parties. I wanted to go to two parties. We went to one party. The kids were normal, healthy, active kids. By which I mean it was invasion of the brats. As we were getting in the car to head to the second party Shanna collected a whole big pool of saliva in her mouth and spat it on her sister. Then started laughing. That is specifically why I don’t hit my kids. Because in my heart of hearts I believe that is not worthy of being hit for but in the moment I had to clasp my two hands together because I wanted to slap her face.

This was after a day full of Shanna beating on people and occasionally getting hit back. She has a huge scratch down her face and she spent almost twenty minutes crying after she was kicked in the stomach. Of course it is all his fault only the moms were standing around watching. She ran up to the kid and hit him five times before he finally reacted. I’m just not mad at him for defending himself.

I didn’t stop hitting people until Noah. I used to hit people a lot. Ask Jenny. For years she flinched around me constantly. I was extremely violent. Noah hits back. Not over and over but once, decisively. Much like the kid who was getting sick of Shanna yesterday. Ha. Shanna is so much like me.

There was a laundry list of other similar preschool drama. It was just a bratty day. She was sneaking a lot of sugar–all the kids were. There were a lot of kids we didn’t know well. All kinds of stuff. I’m sure I wasn’t being appropriate with the kids either. I certainly did a lot of snapping out orders and telling Shanna to either help or go to her room as we were getting ready. That never sets a day up to go well. That’s my fault.

So I decided it was better to go home and have a quiet night so that I didn’t start screaming at them or inappropriately punishing them. Even though we all wanted to go to the party. It wouldn’t have gone well. When Shanna gets into the hitting stride she starts hitting every kid she sees–basically to learn what happens. I understand it as a learning technique. But I lose my patience and one of these days she will pick the wrong kid and end up with a bloody nose. I will not be indignant on her behalf and I think that is going to piss her off. I will of course talk with the kid and parent about it–but not from an indignant point of view.

Kids do this stuff. Let’s talk about it and try to avoid it happening again because it’s not ok to hit people. I do not think it is wise, reasonable, or even possible to prevent it happening entirely.

Part of the problem is that they both need a lot of active supervision and I’m one person. I get mentally fried trying to track them both in a large crowded area. That uses a lot of circuits at once. After a while I start shaking and crying when it is bad.

Part of the reason I bailed on the second party is because my kids don’t know those folks. Not really. No one would have really been able to help.

The main reason I had fun at the first party is because we have been playing at the park with those families for almost a year now. There is a particular family with two older girls who come and take Calli away from me. They adore her and play with her for hours. She loves them. She walks around the house practicing their (hard, many syllables and consonants) names.

That is what community is for. That is how it is supposed to exist. Kids have lots of people they like to talk to. They don’t have to be on top of me 24/7.

At the second party there is that community for other people. It is a party for a close knit group. I peripherally know a few people. The host and I adore each other–that’s why I go. But I think I will email him and ask about a visit while he is on vacation next week. We can handle that. A big party full of the people he knows is harder.

I feel like that is because I am a failure. I know a lot of very social people. And they bring their kids. If I could handle going eventually those people would love to be the kind of community I have with the home schooling group. They feel like they have been that community to me in the past.

I have a weird bonding experience that seems to be partially based on exchanged work. If I feel emotionally connected to someone I want to work for them. I come over and clean peoples houses. I bring food. Now I offer to baby-sit. Taking care of kids is brutally hard work and I try to help my friends who are freaking out. And I have a few who have helped me.

It is weird how baby sitting works. It is pretty rare that I find someone I exchange kids with. Usually it primarily goes in one direction or another and I think that creates (in me) weird feelings of not knowing how to trust the situation. I can only ask for help when I am ok with the answer being no. If I actually require a yes then I have a much more difficult time with asking at all. That’s dangerous. If someone tells me no to meeting a need then I hate that person and I don’t want to talk to them any more. It’s not particularly rational or nice. If I manage to keep my mouth shut and not burn any bridges I generally get over it with time… but it seriously takes me a while.

So I have to keep my needs small. I have to only share ‘wants’ with people. It’s a trust thing. It isn’t because anyone is doing something wrong or bad by saying no. I think people need to say no when they need to say no. I really do.

I don’t understand how other people manage to believe that everything that happens to them isn’t personal and doesn’t matter. It is happening to me of course it is personal. I don’t think it is mean or vindictive or calculated or anything like that. But it is personal. It is happening. I have been told that I am over-sensitive by entire fucking life. People told me that after sexually assaulting me. Just get over it. Don’t be so sensitive. It’s not a big deal.

I don’t react to anything like it is a small deal any more. My life is happening to me and it has to be important to me whether it is important to anyone else or not. Or I spend a lot of time cutting to remind myself that I am not important. That is part of how I keep myself in that box. Remember Krissy, you don’t matter. You don’t matter. You don’t matter. When I would start to get uppity in conversations and defend myself and people would get mad I would reach down and push on the cuts. That was how I could keep my mouth shut and my mind distracted.

I know that feeling as much anger and hatred as I do when someone can’t meet my needs is inappropriate. I don’t voice it much any more. I have learned how to silence that. It’s a set of feelings. It passes. I can’t help the fact that I have a lot of years of issues around no one being able to meet my needs. I’m sorry that my life has hurt me so much that I have really thin skin.

I wish I took things less personally too. I wish I was less sensitive. My life would be less tumultuous.

I frequently come back to this white trash thing. I identify my culture of origin as white trash. If I’m in a “consciousness awareness group” sort of thing (I live in California, this shit just happens here) and there is an ice breaker so people can start to understand one another and people talk about ethnicity or culture I always say white trash.

You should see the expressions on peoples faces. It’s an experience. I think that mostly people just dismiss it in their minds and ignore me. Often people will say, “I grew up in a trailer/poor/rurally/whatever and I’m not white trash so you aren’t either.”

I love how that works for people. Good luck with that.

I am white trash because not hitting people is constant all day effort. I want to jump on people and beat them to bloody pulps on a very regular basis. I have to consciously think about not hitting pretty much all the time.

I will never own a gun because I do not believe I have enough self-control. There are people in this world I would like to see dead and I would really like to be dead. It kind of seems like a no-brainer that I should avoid guns. If something inside me ever snaps and I beat my sister to death with a baseball bat to prevent her from ever raping another child I will be surprised. That’s a lot of hate. I will be surprised if I can summon the will to do that. It’s extreme. Shoot her? Oh shit yeah. That can be done impulsively with very little actual effort… if you have a gun.

Wait… not everyone thinks about this? Oh.

I have spent a lot of time studying the psychology of pedophiles. It seemed important. My sister is unlikely to ever stop. She is, essentially, a rabid dog. And there is nothing I can do about it. That scares me. My brother threatened to leave his wife if she pushed him on the issue of adopting a little girl. He doesn’t think he should live with a little girl. Ever. He believes they had three sons together because God knows he can’t have a little girl.

I’m not trying to say that everyone who grows up poor or everyone who lives in a trailer or everyone who is homeless or or or or or or or is white trash. I am saying that I am. I am saying my family is. We have a violence in us–a twisted perversion. A lot of it comes from entitlement. I deserve to have therefore I will take.

I feel very weird about having the life I have had and then marrying Noah. He didn’t tell me he was a trust fund baby until we were engaged. It was after I moved in and like a month or so before we eloped. We were having a conversation about long-term safety–specifically financially. He asked me how much money it would take before I felt “safe” quitting my job and staying home to take care of kids. How long I worked was going to be directly determined by how fast I could pay down debt (I paid off $100,000 in debt in the first year of our marriage–we lived on my teaching salary) and when we had enough of a savings buffer. He told me to give him a number. How much did I need to have before it would be ok. I told him that I really want to have a minimum of $250,000 in some kind of investment account before I will feel ok quitting.

He said, “Hold that thought” and left the room. He came back holding a piece of paper and said, “this isn’t actually all of it–but this is one account” and he handed me an account statement. He had like $257,389. I think. I may be mixing up a couple of numbers in the tens or ones column. Fucking close enough.

I almost had a heart attack. I started hyperventilating. Are you for fucking real? You want to marry me and hand me everything I have ever specifically planned how to get all nice and neat wrapped up with a pretty little bow?

After we were married and he heard me reading (cause I read out loud and react to things) MDC in the single parent forum about all the things women had wished they had done before they headed towards divorce (this was while I was pregnant with Shanna. When I tell you I plan ahead I’m fucking serious.) he grew concerned. He figured out how paranoid I actually am. When Shanna was under a year old he dragged me to a lawyer. He put all of his inheritance and pre-marriage money into a family trust so there is no chance in hell I can ever walk away from him legally with less than half his assets. (I think he’s wrong. A judge would let me walk away. But I digress.)

Noah is very serious about wanting me to trust him. He works very hard at being dependable–something that is specifically challenging for him. I’m a kind of consistent he just isn’t naturally. But he does it for me. Because he loves me so much.

I feel so much guilt for needing so much help from him. I do need it. He is so patient with me. I don’t tell him about my needs until I am at the point of shaking and freaking out. He doesn’t take my behavior personally. I don’t really understand how he does that.

I feel a lot of guilt about asking him for more at any point in time. I know that when I complain bitterly about being a lot less interesting than _____ that in pretty much every case he places the needs of his physical body way below me. He hurts himself to do things for me. The things he places in his top priority spots are things that earn money.

He feels very driven by my insecurity. I feel like that is not a good thing. We are certainly long past the point where more money buys us more happiness. We have specific goals, yes. We are on track to meeting them. I think I’m the kind of crazy where I could die a billionaire but clutch a dollar bill to my chest and say, “Well at least they didn’t get all my money.” I don’t think Noah should feel like he has to work harder. Good fucking grief man.

More money won’t fill my needs. That’s not the point. What is the point then? I don’t know. The point is somewhere long out of focus. I will probably decide what the point was and construct the story around it in my seventies. Until then it’s a mystery.

I’m kind of ridiculously glad that it is pouring rain (and lightning! and thunder!) because now I don’t have to go to Fairyland. Yay.

I could decide that “God” wants me to stay home. See how this works? I don’t think I should start having an invisible sky friend to blame everything on. That could go badly. Sometimes things happen. It’s not about deserve. It’s not about what is right. They just happen. There isn’t a plan. I can’t believe there is a plan that involves raping little girls. I just can’t.

Have to think about the quota

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If one is going to have a quota for how much sex one has then one should occasionally examine how such a system is working. In my opinion.

The kids were gone for almost 48 hours so we spent more time than usual talking about sex. I feel really grateful that despite how hard I hunted in the bdsm community I ended up with someone basically outside that world. Don’t get me wrong–Noah likes kinky sex. He likes hitting someone who is ok with it. He likes being mean when he has permission. I have yet to know anyone within the community who is actually as good at reigning it in as Noah is. Noah is not driven by his desires. They are small and subtle accents on his overall sexuality. Hurting someone isn’t the point of sex for him.

It is weird when I think about my ex. My Owner. I wasn’t a real person to him. He didn’t know much about me and he actively shushed me because he didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to talk about his life much. He worked 60-80 hours a week. He wanted a slave to take care of details he didn’t like bothering about. He didn’t want to know me. He didn’t even particularly like having sex with me. We didn’t have much sex–he did it because I wanted to and mostly he wasn’t interested in meeting my needs. He liked tying me up and hurting me while fully dressed then he would masturbate. I was more or less live action porn.

Noah doesn’t treat me like that. Noah is quite clear that I am more interesting to him than any other human being has ever been. He likes talking to me. He likes knowing what I am thinking. He appreciates it when I tell him what is going on. He likes having sex with me. He would do it all day every day if we had time and no friction burns.

It’s different. Dealing with them is so different. Everything I learned for my Owner is irrelevant in the course of the rest of my life. I feel like I have gone through life trying on personalities. Who am I allowed to be around this person? What do they want to know about me? Mostly very little.

I started dating Noah for the first time when I was still living with Tom. They overlapped for months. Hell, Noah came over and slept with Tom and I. (I slept with Noah and his girlfriend too.)

I met Noah in February of 2004. I broke up with my Owner in August and moved out the first weekend in October. That first weekend I had my first date with my Daddy J.

Daddy J liked to bring people home with us. Between when I left Tom and when I married Noah in September of 2006 I slept with more than eighty people. Most of them were because Daddy J would bring people over to me and say, “She has an empty hole. You should fill it.”

I didn’t date him very long. I couldn’t handle it. That was so much worse than Tom not wanting to fuck me at all. I felt so very worthless as a person. All he wanted from me was access to my cunt and my ass and my mouth. He could avoid getting to know me by ensuring my mouth was never empty long enough to talk.

Noah feels so very nice to me. Noah was enthusiastic and ok about the idea of me sleeping with other people but he never pushed for it or watched or controlled it. He was ok with me doing that if I wanted to but it wasn’t about him.

I don’t want to any more. I feel so used up and abandoned. I feel like the vast majority of people who have fucked me have ended up not being very nice to me. They certainly don’t feel any kind of bond.

If I’m at all honest I think part of the reason I am going to be thrilled when Noah migrates away from his current company is he works with a lover. One who wasn’t just once. One who was almost a one night stand until I ran into him a few years later and all of a sudden he was so impressed with my sense of boundaries that he wanted to have an occasional thing on the side more often because I was good at not invading his life. I knew I was only supposed to show up for sex then leave and be silent. He wanted more of that.

I am so tired of people wanting access to my genitals while feeling like the right way to handle my mouth is to duct tape it shut.

I lived for four years with someone who thought it was great fun to put plastic bags over my head and then wrap my neck with duct tape. He liked watching me cry through the plastic. No, he didn’t want to know what I thought or felt. Eventually when I started freaking out he would poke his fingers through the plastic over my mouth. Usually followed immediately by kissing me so that I couldn’t actually breathe. It was hotter that way.

So now I’m married to this guy who seems practically angelically nice in comparison. He doesn’t pimp me. He doesn’t degrade me. He wants to know about me.

And I’ve got this quota. I kind of tried to explain it on MDC and failed. It isn’t at his initiation. Noah is a simple creature. I can look at his life and judge how much stress he is under. Sex has a specific trade value. It reduces his stress level by x%. If I want him to keep functioning then I have to help him with the stress balance in his life. I know how much sex makes him able to work how hard. I’ve been watching him for six years. Compared to everyone else I have tried to learn he is dead easy.

But that means I’m having sex because it is stress relief for Noah. Not because I want it per se. Post kids sex is just weird. I’m not getting off like I used to. It’s not that I can’t at all (this weekend was awesome we went to a sex party and had lame awkward sex [because I felt uncomfortable] and came home and had ridiculously hot sex and I got off multiple times. That doesn’t happen much anymore. Woo!) it’s that it works differently.

I’m not who I was. Not at all. I am struggling with how much change is permitted in a partner. If he married me because he thought it was hot to be with someone very promiscuous then we have problems. I can’t be that person forever. It is too hard on me.

I don’t think promiscuity is a problem per se I feel that I don’t have enough of a support system in my life for me to pour out my physical energy on something that does nothing for me. I don’t get energy back. It makes it harder to go do my life. I have too much to get done. I have nothing more to give in that department.

So sex doesn’t (usually) feel very sexy any more. It’s stress relief for Noah. That’s what I’m there for. It’s uhm, well… he is quite nice to me. I like that. I really appreciate that in order to feel like he has “the right” he spends a lot of time gently touching my body. I have never really experienced anything like this before. He is so nice to me. I feel like I don’t belong here. He should be giving this treatment to someone who deserves it. I’m the stupid whore. Why is he wasting time being nice to me? I don’t matter.

So things are muddy lately.

When you come out as a survivor of early childhood sexual assault (and ohman INCEST) and especially when you have major adult promiscuity people always want to talk to you about celibacy. Maybe you should try it. The prevalence of this response is annoying. I can’t possibly “work on my issues” unless I stop having compulsory sex.

Ah. I see. All this work I’ve done “doesn’t count” because I haven’t done it how you think I should do it. Right. Tell me again why I should care about your system? Oh, yes. You read an “Expert” so now I have to listen to you. You don’t even know for sure that your “Expert” would react to me how you are reacting so how about if I turn and walk away now.

The day-to-day life I lead now bears absolutely no resemblance to anything I have ever lived before. It is hard to believe that one life can encompass so much change. And I am going to change more. I am going to learn more. I will get better at a lot of things that I currently suck at.

I don’t think that celibacy is going to be part of it. I care too much about that stress relief function. I need to have Noah continue to feel invested in me. He bonds through sex. Oh baby does he bond through sex. And sex is much better when I tell him what I am thinking about. I’m not used to that. I’m used to people wanting to hear a narrative I make up. Usually what I’m “thinking about” is a story deliberately suited to that person–it has very little to do with me.

Noah is different.

It is weird to try to parse out the differences between my compulsive sexuality and my feelings of obligation and trying to earn someone liking me. Noah really likes me. To the point where when the kids are gone he follows me around with large fawn eyes because he is so happy that he can relax into adoring me without the risk of anyone screaming suddenly near our heads. The screaming totally harshes our mellow. Six years. He still follows me around because he wants to listen to what I’m babbling while I walk around doing random things.

I can’t express how overwhelming this is. Why does he care? It feels so good. Part of it is the sex. He wants me to feel loved and wanted all the time, not just when we are having sex, and we have a lot of sex so he feels pretty required to be demonstrative all the time. So I don’t feel bad about him only validating me during sex.

He brings me flowers. Yes, I’m going to keep a quota so this man stays happy. I think that taking sex away from him would be like kicking a puppy. It makes him so very happy. He’s not demanding. He phrases it as, “As always I would be entirely interested in sex. It is totally ok if you would like to just snuggle. I just wanted you to know.” When I say no, he still rubs my back. He still talks to me. He still strokes my hair and soothes me to sleep. There is no punishment. No revoking of love. No lessening of attention. He still likes me.

The only time Noah yells at me is when we are on opposite sides of the house and we just can’t stop talking to each other. We are a loud house. We like talking to one another and we like getting up and doing stuff. So we just raise our voices to carry on the conversation over greater distance. No big deal.

I feel so loved in this house. It is very hard that feeling loved is so alienating. I wish it wasn’t. I don’t always know how to engage.

I told Noah that the quota is a reminder to me that I have to hit the stress relief button a certain number of times every month if I want him at full capacity. I know that when stress is lower in our lives I can dip down a bit if I feel like it (and I do some months) and I know when I have to up the quota. I watch his life. Deliverables at work. The kids hitting a challenging milestone. His additional projects. I watch what he is eating. I adjust his diet as much as I can given that he eats at work.

He is able to be calm and happy and patient with me and the kids if I hit the stress relief button enough times. If I don’t then he gets tired and run down and kind of sad. He doesn’t get angry. He just moves slower. He looks wasted. He looks like he is literally running out of gas. Just add sex. It’s like a miracle drug. I’m going to keep doing that.

It is a pragmatic choice. I don’t feel exploited. I find it kind of happily fitting. I am unusually well suited by my life circumstances to benefit from having a partner who has this much of a connection between sex and well being. And it’s vanilla missionary sex and he’s gentle and nice and it’s really just not a big deal to do a lot of taking one for the team. Honestly it’s sweet. It doesn’t rock my world, but it makes me feel good about myself.

I feel like I have changed the deal on Noah to such a degree that consideration on my part is a good idea. Once upon a time in our marriage we had a set up where I could revoke all sex and that would be something he could live with–he was allowed to fuck other people if he needed to. He can’t do that any more.

It seems to me that marriage has to be good for both parties. I don’t feel used or exploited by Noah. If anything I feel overwhelmed by shame because he married down in pretty much every way. I don’t feel competent enough or smart enough or worthwhile enough for him. BUT I CAN HAVE SEX. I’m not going to strongly consider celibacy any decade soon here.

I feel bad about being this way. I feel like it would probably be a good idea for me to have some kind of idea of my body as a closed system I don’t owe anyone access to. But I don’t anticipate actually feeling that way until or unless Noah was out of the picture. I got married. That changes things. I’m no longer a closed system. I am part of a unit. I’m married.

Whether it is philosophically a good idea to feel like a closed unit or not it is specifically unuseful in my current life. It would be destructive. It would be harmful to my marriage to try hard to close off from him. I don’t want to. I like him. I don’t want to hurt him. I am not being harmed in any way and I like being part of this unit. This is the most positive experience of my life. I don’t see the benefit in trying to close off.

He isn’t harming me and he wants to know how I am doing and he adjusts his behavior based on my requests and he isn’t demanding and he isn’t pushy. I am not going to punish him just so I can have a philosophical conversion at this point in life. It wouldn’t make my life better.

I’m not worried about being forced. When I say, “not tonight” he backs off completely. I know that if I tell him that his needs aren’t important and I am not going to meet them he will put his head down and accept that as natural and right. I don’t need to be another big source of that in life for him. I married him because I wanted to be part of a family where we help one another be bigger and better than we can be while standing alone. I really want the mutual exchange of support. It allows me to do things I simply can’t do alone. I want to be part of a unit. That means consideration. A quota isn’t romantic or sweet but it reminds me that he has needs. He matters. Meeting his needs is a good idea if I want him to be able to continue to meet my needs.

That’s probably enough defensiveness for one day.

The loyalty trap

2 Replies

Recently a friend tactfully and gently pointed out that the way I write about family isn’t exactly standard. The kind of help I think I would get is fairly unusual. I couldn’t name a close friend who has the kind of relationship I write about wanting. No one has family who just shows up to take care of you–that isn’t how things work in America.

To this I reply: Ahh. You think that I have a mental model of a healthy family with boundaries. Hahahahaha. No. I come from a crazy enmeshed codependent family. What I talk about wanting is what I have seen. I get my longing for family from watching how people treated my sister having kids. Quite frankly folks worried about her being incompetent and immature. So they just showed up and helped. My mom did. My aunt did. My brother did. I did. Sometimes cousins helped too.

I’ve been watching a lot of movies lately trying to figure out what I mean when I say “white trash”. I’m trying to figure out how to explain it. Some day I want to have a concise definition that really explains what it means to me. I’m not there yet.

Movies I have streamed on Netflix recently: Winters Bone, The Poker House, The Burning Plain. All featuring the same actor (Jennifer Lawrence) and I feel kind of weird about her going on to be an action star. I probably won’t get around to watching the action movies any year soon. I care about the depictions of violence and family.

If you care about movie spoilers don’t read the rest of this post. That is your warning. That said, I think all three of those movies would be useful for people who want to understand me. Of course none of them is exactly right but there are interesting elements in each.

In Winters Bone she is trying to track down information about her father. She has to ask nosy questions. She lives in the Ozarks and she has to pester extended kin that don’t like to be pestered. She gets beaten by a group of women who do it so that her uncle can’t get mad at the men. There is this strong pressure through the whole movie that the police are the enemy. Drugs. Drugs. Drugs. My family used to do drugs like that. These days everyone has prescription meds.

In The Burning Plain you see seemingly disconnected stories that eventually make sense. It’s about mothers and daughters and feeling invisible and accidents and hating yourself and running away to deal with how much you hate yourself. Charlize Theron manages to look as empty as I feel. The way she self harms, the way she runs away because she is bad… yes. I understand that.

The Poker House is the most recent one. It is based on Lori Petty’s actual life. (The chick from Tank Girl.) Holy shit for shoe shine. My mother never prostituted herself and my mother never did drugs in front of me, so I had a very different set up than this movie. Nevertheless I had similar levels of neglect. Similar kinds of being abandoned in unsafe environments. I thought the rape was extremely well done and non-graphic but accurate. That is the truth. That is how fast and how easy it happens. I actively dislike the fact that Lori Petty’s take away message is “Don’t hold a grudge–forgive people for hurting you because they were hurt too”. To that I say: “Bullshit. I have children to protect.”

When I gave up on my family I gave up a lot. I gave up a support network that hasn’t worked in years and fucking loves hanging out with little kids. My family loves children under about eight. They are still cute and fun. Especially little girls. And my little girls are so angelic and wonderful that they would have done well.

But three people in my family have told me that my sister sexually abused them. I have fairly good reason to think that my kids would be good targets for her. The price of all the support is that you have to keep your mouth shut and understand that “people make mistakes” and ignore horrifying behavior year after year. If you need the support and you cannot survive without it this is the bargain that must be made.

I don’t fucking need the support that bad. I can sit home and cry from being overwhelmed instead. It’ll all work out. They are less overwhelming by the month. Shanna is much better at picking up after herself and my life is getting much easier on a day by day basis. Before too much longer they will actively make my life easier. They want to. They understand that doing so leaves me with more energy to do the things they want to do. Their mama didn’t raise no fools.

My sister hasn’t had a job since around when Shanna was born. She was laid off and lived off unemployment. I have the general impression that they are waiting for my mom’s social security to come in. She’s going to get my dad’s because they were married long enough. I think that is totally fair and it means that her retirement will be the most financial security she has had since divorcing him. I hope she finally settles down. I hope my sister isn’t molesting the kids she baby-sits. That’s what she does with her time. She stays home and takes care of little kids so their teen moms can go to school and/or work.

But I know she is a pedophile. I know how inappropriate she was with me. We didn’t have sex. But she did start telling me when I was four years old what I had to do to relax my anus so anal sex didn’t hurt so much. It was actually a thing for me for years. I didn’t manage to successfully have anal sex until Noah. (Violent sodomy as a small child doesn’t count. No, I didn’t relax enough to make it hurt less then either.) He was the first person who could work through that fear. A number of people tried before then. It always hurt too much and the hysterical crying freaked people out.

I felt specifically bad and like a failure because I was not able to have anal sex with the people who wanted to before Noah. I have had a lot of intense feelings of lack of worth because I was not able to do what people wanted. I was supposed to.

My sister is probably really who taught me this. I think she was the main consistent source of this. She talked about sex all the time and had sex in front of me and consciously and deliberately told me what I should go do.

I can’t play the game any more. She’s not ok. And my children do not deserve to be exposed to her.

But I’m losing out on cousins who fix my cars. And cousins who know how to help with plumbing. And all the free babysitting I want. And holidays full of people. And a niece and nephew who really need my help.

I can’t play the game any more. I’m not at the bottom of the shit hill any more and I won’t allow them to set the terms of reality. I just can’t. But it is hard.

You know how I moved around a lot as a kid? I was often staying with relatives. I didn’t know them well and I didn’t stay long so I never got to know them… but they took me in. Over and over. My family takes care of children. They would have been very happy to know my children.

But it’s a trap. It’s all or nothing. You have to play the game and keep the silence or you are out.

I’m out.

probably a good decision process

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I am at a weird stage of thinking with regards to bdsm. I feel like I am slowly migrating into thinking that it’s pretty broken and fucked up to be pining for people who will let you hurt them a lot. I mean, I get it as an urge. But it’s broken.

What these people is for there to be more people who are broken inside who want to be hurt. Not every masochist is broken–but honest-to-dawg masochists are rare in my experience. Mostly if you want to be heavily beaten or made to bleed you are pretty broken. Sometimes it isn’t directly related to any specific trauma–many masochists come from reasonably great homes. But they got broken somehow.

I don’t feel equally about all kinds of pain. I’m thinking specifically about the heavy players. The ones who have less of a “let’s play a game together” and more of a “I’m going to put you in your place.” Traditionally I don’t play very well with the “let’s play a game together” people. I’m not playing a game. I think I should be hurt.

I feel very confused when someone “gives me a spanking” that doesn’t even turn my ass red. I feel like, “Well there is an hour I can never get back.” I feel compelled to hunt for the bruises. I’m not a stoic bottom so it takes someone who really wants to make someone cry for me to get there.

I want to digress and give a disclaimer: I use very heteronormative language most of the time. This is because I have had an easier time finding guys to play and/or have sex with. In my experience women and transpersons (going in either direction, with or without surgery) take a lot more energy from me to woo them. They want to be sure I like them before they give it up. I often go hunting with very low energy because I want the hunting to replenish my energy. Guys just need me to show up and not say no. So my language is very heteronormative. I don’t know what to do about that. By the numbers I have slept with ~125 (+/-5ish?) people. I lost my excel spreadsheet years ago so yes it is approximate. I have slept with 5 glorious people who fell somewhere not on the binary and with 40-ish women. If women and people not on the binary were easier for me to pick up I don’t think there is any chance the numbers would skew so high towards men. Anyway!

So when I talk about feelings about predatory people I am talking about my experiences with men and why those experiences bother me.

I wish it didn’t come with a general distrust of men too. I truly do. But whether you like it or not I need to keep me safe. It is a slow and gradual process for me to trust a man. Mostly the harder I try the further away from trusting them I get. Very few men actually strike me as non-threatening. There are very few men I will cheerfully leave alone in a room with my kids.

Want to know the weird thing? I am ok sending my kids on a walk with someone I know to be a tremendous pervert because I know they will never be alone inside a private space and I know my neighbors are watching and I know my kids know their routine and Shanna is not ok with deviating from it. But I feel mixed about the conversations inside.

Every few years I have to drop a lot of balls. I think that is ultimately how I keep from killing myself. I just walk away from relationships and communities. I feel guilty for culling the bdsm community and I’m not sure why. Am I doing it because I think I’m better? I don’t think so. I don’t want my daughters to learn that women should be hurt at home. Including because my friends think it is fucking funny to insinuate all the fucking time.

But I’m too sensitive. Maybe so. Maybe I just can’t accommodate your issues because I have to deal with my own.

I don’t want to do the polarizing thing. I need this specific characterization of women to disappear from my life and that doesn’t mean that all of the people who do it are terrible people who deserve to die or anything dramatic like that. What does rejecting/pulling back from the community even mean?

The vast majority of people involved in the bdsm community like to play games while having sex. Most of them are perfectly normal, happy, well adjusted people. Why am I tarring them all with the same brush? Why am I being like that? Because you still follow the trope that says it is fun and funny to hit people.

My kids don’t hear that shit. In our life you learn how to hit people because you will, unfortunately, at some point need to defend yourself. There are bad people in the world who are not interested in respecting you or your body and you need to be able to handle that.

She can find out if she likes being spanked once she can kick the shit out of somebody who ignores her “no”. And I feel weirdly like I hope she feels ok with talking to me about the experience and like I hope I never hear about any part of her sex life. I think that is a normal dual thought process and I can live with that discomfort.

I am having a hard time with how often conversations come up with some people. I feel like it is “my fault” because I bring it up. I don’t think I always or even usually do. Sometimes I am stupid and I make the joke because I fell into feeling like I was one of them again. I am so institutionalized it’s kind of ridiculous. I think I should be hurt.

Noah describes himself as being calculatedly self-interested. He isn’t like the people who genuinely want to hurt people. I mean, we have done some fucked up shit–don’t get me wrong. (And honey–don’t try to prove you can ok?) You don’t pursue doing that to the point that it drives people from your life over and over. You were overly aggressive and intense for a lot of the people you dated, yeah, but not because you were beating the shit out of them.

It’s different.

I know a large number of men and women who feel they cannot be happy unless they have many people in their life to beat at a moment’s notice. I kind of feel live and let live about it. I mean I don’t think they need to stop wanting what they want because I have issues with it. But I don’t want to stand near it right now. It makes me feel intensely bad about the world and the people in it.

My masochism springs from a very deep self-hatred. This isn’t true of all masochists so my opinions and experiences are far from universal. I want people to hurt me because I believe I should be hurt. I can come up with dozens of people in under a minute who would agree that I should be hurt. Just knowing that makes me want to walk in front of a truck.

I think I hate that they want me to be hurt even more than I hate myself. I am running out of feelings of compassion. I am running out of feelings of trust and friendliness and love. I can’t keep ignoring how much this hurts me.

I don’t think it has always hurt me like this. I think this is part of this whole identity crisis thing. Being a mom is very all encompassing. I can’t model how to be a healthy whole person while nurturing the constant desire to experience pain. In order for me to figure out how to stop hurting myself I need to stop being around people who tell me continually that I should be in more pain. That really my life is not complete unless they get to hurt me. Preferably while I am sucking their dick.

I can’t do this any more. Maybe I would hate men less if they fucking talked to me differently. If I am not supposed to generalize to all men then I do not understand how I am supposed to keep myself safe. How am I supposed to go out and figure out who the problematic people are? How am I supposed to identify danger if I am not allowed to talk about it or address it as an issue?

The bdsm community is very broken. And I can’t fix it. I have other shit to do. That’s not my battle this lifetime. Unfortunately it is a kind of broken that is a specifically delicious poison for me. I want it. I miss it. I am not willing to model this kind of life in front of my children.

What does that mean? Does that mean I will never go to parties? No. I will probably go to parties with Noah. We like to play games. I can’t make much noise in our house because at this point we know all the neighbors and I get embarrassed. It’s hilarious. And I do like having sex in public.

I showed up in the bdsm community looking for sex. I found something different and went with it. I ended up in a relationship with someone who would far prefer to masturbate while thinking about fetish items than have sex. Noah says that one of the reasons he married me is because I instituted a quota for sex in a previous relationship. After my long-term bdsm relationship I told my next serious relationship, “If you want monogamy that is fine. But I need to have a lot of sex. Either you do it or someone else will.” Noah thought he could live with that.

All community, all family is a mixture of good and bad. If you throw out the bad you throw out the good too. But the ratio of good to bad has changed a lot for me. I need to keep my energy and my intentions to people who actually are part of my life. I need to stop waiting for people to care more and find time and… I don’t know.

I am busy enough. I have a full enough life right now. I deleted my facebook account because at least once a week I end up sobbing about something from there. I feel minimized or dismissed and it’s my own fucking problem. I read things wrong. I put half-assed stuff on there and people snap back. If I could shrug it off then it would all be fine. I can’t. That means I need to be a grown up and stop putting myself in that situation.

I want to keep my friends. That means I need to keep them in the size and shape of container I can handle them in. I am over-sensitive to things I read in text. I pretty much always put the most hostile spin conceivable on anything I read. When I listen to someone speak I am not able to overlay their words with the hostility in my head in the same way. It makes me like people much more.

I’m mostly up because I’m basting the turkey soon. Noah has to do the next shift because I need the sleep.

It is not anyone else’s fault that I hear a nasty, hostile track when I read things on the internet. I need to limit what I read on the internet. It’s not about people being mean to me. This is a consistent problem I have.

I already limit my social life a lot. I think that I need to stick with how limited it is. I need to stop listening to the people who believe I should be hurt a lot more. What that means, exactly, I’m not sure. Does that mean severing contact? Ending relationships? I don’t think I need to be dramatic about it. No one has done me wrong. I don’t put a lot of energy in that direction already. I am not sure that anyone will notice if I drop what I still put in that direction.

Noah is the only one who gets explanations about this sort of crap. I don’t tell other people that certain topics are off-limits. I just stop hanging out with them. I can’t change anyone. I can just choose to be around people who are appropriate for my kids.

I don’t want to be a grown up that bad it seems.

I think that when someone’s words and behavior show me that they think my life would be “better” if I was less happy and in more pain then I don’t have space for that any more. Is it mean of me? Maybe. But I need to matter some year.

I’m trying to stop wanting to be hurt. It is hard. I need to not be around people who tell me I should be hurt. If that bothers you, well, uhm, not to be an asshole or anything but go suck an egg.

That’s the line. If people have these urges about other people that’s not really my business. If it is kept away from my kids–whatever. Once you start talking to *me* about what I should do for *you* then I’m done.

I don’t owe any one any more god damn pain.

Maybe if I leave the monsters here I can sleep.

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I can’t sleep. I don’t feel good about keeping Noah awake with my crying. Ok internet, you can keep me company. I have done the best that I can with my ergonomic set up. I hope I don’t regret tonight. My arms hurt.

I can’t sleep because when I lie in bed I acutely notice this spot deep in my belly that has hurt since Calli was born. It hurts when I twist at all from a prone position. I’m kind of worried something is wrong.

I tried seeing a doctor a little over a year ago. I was told by the general doctor that she wouldn’t do anything for me until I dealt with psychiatry. Psychiatry told me they wouldn’t work with me until I stopped nursing and stopped smoking pot and start taking pills that will make my life a living hell.

I need a new doctor.

The problem is that finding a new doctor is kind of a nightmare of humiliation and expense. Doctors like to give me transvaginal ultrasounds despite knowing I am paying out of pocket and don’t want the procedure–I asked to just have a blood test. “Oh I just want to check.”

And I shut down. And I do what I am told. And I have to listen to a nasty lecture about how my previous miscarriage was my fault because I am still nursing Shanna and I will lose the baby I am carrying right now if I don’t stop nursing her immediately.

I didn’t stop nursing Shanna. She didn’t stop nursing until she was three. A full nine months after her sister was born.

Doctors are just people. But they think they are Smarter and Wiser than stupid little me. Even though this is my body.

I was told that my grandmother (father’s mother) died of cancer. It wasn’t found until it was too late for treatment. She was a stubborn woman and even though she was told she would die immediately she held out long enough to gather all of her grandchildren together one last time and then sit down with all of her sisters and do a crossword puzzle. It took a few months to arrange, apparently. Then she died.

I can’t help but wonder if she felt the pain inside her and thought, like me, I hope this kills me. Then at least my kids won’t have to deal with my suicide.

This is not a good approach to health care management. I really hate dealing with doctors. I find the entire process degrading and insulting. I never get adequate treatment and I always end up shutting my stupid mouth and consenting to procedures I initially protest. Not because I am convinced they are necessary–because when a sociopath tells me to shut up I do. I know I am at the bottom of the caste system. I shut up when I am scared. When I get to the point of going to see a doctor I am scared.

I don’t feel I can ask my midwife about it. She badly handled my labor. Really badly. She was burnt out on driving to Fremont. She shouldn’t have taken me on as a client. She didn’t really have the patience for dealing with me. She kept me from dying as I hemorrhaged in my bed so I feel like she fully earned her fee and all. But I don’t trust her any more. I will never ask her for help of any kind again.

I don’t want to keep Noah up as I cry because when you have mental illness you have to be aware of the cost on the people around you. I have to be careful not to overburden him. I can’t be too dependent on him. It’s not his fault that I don’t really have anyone else.

Noah and I are having a lot of hard conversations. And I’m not going to give details about them on the internet. He doesn’t get a lot of privacy in this lifetime but he gets a little.

Hard shit is hard. And tonight I’m having quite a pity party. I want to say that it feels like my whole fucking life has been hard. On one hand I want to berate myself for my hyperbole. On the other hand… can’t I justifiably say that? I mean, I do have easier periods. I’m drowning. And it’s my fucking problem.

And the lady who actually likes me in the home schooling group is telling me she might stop coming. (btw Lisa–don’t bloody tell anyone about the shit I write here.) That makes my throat close with fear. I wish the universe would stop fucking kicking me.

I feel like I must not be fit for human companionship. Otherwise I wouldn’t manage to drive people away so effectively. No one seems to be able to bear very much of me. They only want small pieces.

I had a hard time at the convention for a variety of reasons. I couldn’t be the performative whore. I am not hunting. I am trying to actively discourage people. I had to turn down multiple requests to play (which shocked the fuck out of me–that is not usual) which is kind of awkward. “Sorry but you don’t get to beat me in pay back for me beating on your (wasn’t then) wife many years ago.” Awww. Sad face. But but… I would look so cute bruised.

Yeah. A lot of people have thought that. A lot of people have wanted me to be in pain.

I feel like I am drowning. A nice bus to the head sounds really good right now. And close by. I think the best part of suicide is you don’t have to deal with the consequences of your actions.

I know someone who jumped in front of a train and survived. He lost the bottom part of a leg. He went on to become a minister. I fucked him in the dorm building of his seminary school. He was one of the most brutal people I have ever had sex with. He had an incredibly strong upper body (duh–he had to walk with crutches most of the time and he was a big man) and he really wanted to bruise me.

I was lying on the bed on my side. I was trying to look tempting. He mocked me and asked if I was playing my whore game. I kind of sputtered. Then he slapped his hands down on my side just below my armpit and my upper thigh really hard and picked me up and threw me against the wall.

I lay there and convulsed until he started hitting me again. He really liked slapping my face.

I chanted in my head, “I’m supposed to like this. I’m supposed to like this.”

After a few minutes of alternating between slapping my face and my breasts and my thighs and my belly he spread my legs open. He started hitting my cunt.

I didn’t really keep track of how long that went on but I just about levitated off the bed. It fucking hurt.

Then he put a condom on. Then he picked me up by the hips and flipped me over to my front. He yanked me up onto my knees and he entered me from behind.

It hurt. I wasn’t particularly well lubricated and condoms tear me internally during the best of times. Legacy of a network of scars that line my vagina. I was raped a little too much a little too early. I’ve seen the scars. A gynecologist used a clear speculum and a light and a mirror to show me why sex hurt me so much when I was 22.

I always thought it was just supposed to feel that way.

Being at the con this weekend was hard in a variety of ways. When I think about the things I have done I feel a wide variety of emotions. I don’t know what my core values are. I don’t know what I am most proud of beyond my children. I feel dead inside. I feel like I am nothing. I have nothing to give. I am a bottomless pit of need and that will always be just my problem. I don’t live in West Africa. We don’t consider stupid bitches like me community problems. (Errr–note to new readers: I participated in a grief ritual facilitated by a West African woman who talked about her tribe. It was a life changing experience. Sobonfu Somé is the name of the woman who presented and if you ever get a chance to work with her do it.)

My community is only interested in me if I want to dress like a whore and be beaten so they can watch and beat off. Or at the very least pawn off my kids on babysitters multiple nights of the week so I can “go out and have fun”. No.

I’m not interesting as myself. I have to play their games. I’m busy. I think my children deserve this span of time. They won’t be with me forever. In the long run, this is absolutely worth the sacrifices.

I hope. I pray to a God I would like to spit on. I think I am kind of officially “agnostic” at this point. I am trying to hope that science is right. Otherwise there is some all knowing “benevolent” person who wants me to suffer a really lot.

See Noah–I’m not just crying because of you.

I keep trying to tell myself that mental illness is a liar. This will pass. I will not always feel this way. I objectively know that I have non-depressed periods. It has been a bad three years.

I’m tired of being lied to. I’m tired of feeling abandoned and unwanted. I’m tired of people telling me how bad I am. I’m tired of being afraid of the next lie. How am I going to be hurt next? I HAVE GOOD FUCKING REASONS FOR BEING PARANOID. GIVE ME A GOD DAMN BREAK. But I hear I need to get over it anyway.

I think the stress is going to eat me alive. There isn’t much of my body that doesn’t hurt.

Noah is about to go through open enrollment at work. Our insurance is probably going to change again. I will probably not see a doctor before that happens.

I don’t think it is serious. But it feels like something pulsing. Like a piece of intestine got stuck between the abdominal muscles when they healed after the pregnancy. It’s a very dull ache. If it was sharp and piercing I would go see a doctor immediately. I tell myself that it could be referred pain. It’s nothing. I’m fine. I’m just a hypochondriac–just like my mama always (and I mean fucking always) said.

I have all the old goodies playing tonight. I hate my mother and I miss my mom so bad I feel like the top of my head is going to explode with pain. I have a blinding headache. I’ve been crying for a long time really hard. I’m probably getting dehydrated. And it’s not like I’m sleeping when I should be sleeping. And I’ve been sleep deprived for years.

Did I mention that the kids are going through a boundary testing phase and it is hard to not scream at them all day every day? I am not doing so. I’m not entirely sure that letting them watch the ipad for many hours a day is a great solution either. I don’t have a better one.

It was really weird being at the con. It’s really weird thinking about the things I have done. I don’t think I regret any of it. I learned from it. I learned what I specifically needed to learn from it.
Today I saw people I have beaten and tied up. People (male, female, other) I have had sex with.

It is so completely removed from my life now. I have done stage performances of bdsm with some of the people I saw this weekend. I didn’t see many classes. I have had contact with the presenters of all of the ones I did see for a decade or so.

In the class on erotic humiliation the presenter asked the audience to insult her core values (her Japanese-Americaness, her worthiness of being loved, her desirability, and her intelligence) in a sentence. After I listened to the audience fumble and lamely half-ass it for a few minutes I yelled, “Who would ever want an ugly, stupid, worthless Chink like you.” Her head whipped over. She told me to stand up and yell it louder. I made my voice get mean. I said it again.

Then I sat down really fast and my face was read and my heart was pounding and I was out of breath. She and I communicated about how much saying that affected me. She talked about how it effected the other people in the audience. Fucking awkward. (She was thrilled. That was exactly what she was fishing for.)

Do I still want to be this person?

Tried something different.

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“Do you know why I usually don’t touch you when I cry?”
“No. Why?”
“Because my mom used to hit me when I cried.”

Last night I cried on Noah’s chest. I’m not 100% sure but I’m pretty sure that you can count how many times I have done that on one hand with fingers left over. We have been married for six years. I cry nearly every day. Often for many hours. I cry alone.

“No one wants to see that Kristine. No one wants to hear it either. Didn’t I tell you to shut up? Fine. I’ll give you something to cry about.”

The fact that I was raped over and over wasn’t good enough. The fact that people chased me home from school throwing rocks at me wasn’t good enough. The fact that I moved constantly and didn’t have friends or toys I could trust owning wasn’t good enough. The fact that I usually didn’t know if we would have a place to live next week or if we would be homeless wasn’t good enough either.

I cry alone. Often (though not always anymore–I kind of glory in being able to make noise when I cry now) I cry completely silently. Even my breathe barely raises in volume. I shared a bed with my mother till I was sixteen. I know how to have tears run down my face and slowly control the sobbing with breath so that I don’t get hit again. Mostly I just prefer to be alone in a room.

I was always told that I wasn’t allowed to cry unless I was hit–that’s the only good reason. Sometimes I wonder if I found the bdsm scene because I knew I needed to cry and I’m just not allowed to cry without being hit.

When other people think of “bdsm” I’m not sure what they think. I think there isn’t a lot of point if someone isn’t crying. A lot. Mostly uncontrollably. As a top I am ridiculously sadistic. Don’t play with me unless what you want from today is to end up curled in the fetal position on the floor sobbing your heart out. That is what I have in me to give. I prefer when my play partners nearly kill me. I want them to hurt me terribly and risk my life. I know I am not important. I know that very sick people exist in the world. I hope that if I can give them a cheap thrill they won’t hurt someone important.

When Noah raised his hand to stroke my face I flinched.

I was kind of randomly curious tonight so I looked it up. I’m pretty sure that I qualify for SSI for disability due to PTSD. If I had to hold down a job right now my life would be pretty nightmarish. I have continual flashbacks. I have a lot of panic attacks. I barely leave my house. I have to talk myself into believing there are “safe” people on the other side who don’t hate me before I manage. Going to the grocery store is hard. I understand that it is for most parents. But when other peoples kids misbehave in public they don’t crumple to the floor crying because it seems so overwhelming to deal with. I feel like a very pathetic person.

In order to figure out how to talk to my kids I sat around reading Jane Austen books. That is the language Shanna learned. That is why she is so excessively polite. I model it all the time. I made sure that for the first few years of her life she rarely heard anyone but me talk and I modeled extreme manners constantly.

I am trying to figure out how to shape the voices in my children’s head. I know I don’t control who they become. But I *do* control the messages they get about themselves right now.

My children believe manners are not optional and the world will crash to a halt with horror if you are rude. So they don’t do it. Except for the one big exception. “If anyone is ever touching any part of your body in a way you don’t like you need to ask them politely to stop once. If they continue, hit them. Scream. Run away. You are allowed to defend you.”Shanna is extremely aware that her vulva is a private space and that no one should touch it until she is full grown and has asked them politely to touch her there. I told her the “whys and whens” around sex are conversations we will probably have in more like ten years. She tried to ask for more information. I said, “At four all you need to know is no one can touch you there. You won’t be grown up for a very long time.” She’s ok with that for now.

It was weird to cry on Noah. I felt really bad about getting him all wet. The snot flows like a river. Mmmm sexy.

One of the things that is hardest for me about being rich is how isolating it is. I feel like I have gotten to know my neighbors to an unusual degree. They are certainly all shocked that I am attempting to do so. My experience of poverty (I understand that my life is not universal and I do not have the “universal poverty experience”) was that people had a lot more time on their hands. There was a lot of time to kill and no one had any money. People had to either fall into a depressive rut in order to survive or they had to get creative.

I am very creative. Unfortunately I hate working alone and I am really struggling with the period of time when my kids are no help and instead a bunch of extra work. I’m willing to bet that in two or three years Shanna will be able to do most of the things I like to do. She helps a little now.

I like building things. I like having a concrete change on the world. I often get very frustrated with myself because I am a perfectionist and I get little practice to practice so I’m not improving at skills at the rate I want to.

Noah not wanting to build with me is hard. He doesn’t want to do any kind of physical labor on the property. I feel like I am having to drag him kicking and screaming (by the god damn hair) towards the idea of doing any help with homeschooling beyond teaching programming. It is feeling very invalidating of the “us” label.

I feel like I subsumed who I was into my family. My life, my time, my work are all spent on things that directly benefit people in my family other than me. It feels like. Because I am self-serving like everyone else and I enjoy lying to myself.

I do home improvement stuff and I cook and I clean.

It is kind of funny because I feel a little competitive because many of my friends have kids in the same age range. Shanna is behind most of the kids we know academically. (I am tracking various kids in my head. It’s interesting.) On one hand I feel like this means I am failing as a homeschooling parent. On the other hand I have the belief that early academic instruction is a bad idea. I am making a conscious decision. It still feels weird that all my friends kids knew their ABCs faster, can count earlier and higher. Blah.

I believe, because research tells me so, that early introduction of these concepts does not improve IQ or overall achievement down the line. I still feel kind of weirdly insecure about my kid and what I am doing. I don’t exactly think my friends are drilling their kids. Why are they picking things up so much faster? I have no idea. But I feel insecure. That is one of the many things I am just going to have to live with being insecure about. I made a decision based on sound principles I still believe.

What I specifically miss about having community was there were always two or three women in the kitchen talking. I thought that was what the future looked like. I’m very sad because my life won’t look like that for another fifteen years. And then they may very well want to go off into the world and spread their wings. I may do all of these years hoping for that and not get it. I have to be ok with it. I can’t spend my life wishing for that. I would be doing something inappropriate. It’s so hard to know that I can never hope for that. I tried to have that with Sarah. She hid from my anger in her room. I don’t blame her.

I don’t share my anger with my children. I share it with the adults in my life. I’m afraid that if I have hopes for what they will do as adults I will get very angry with them for disappointing me. Talk about poisoning the well. I try very hard to not have expectations of them beyond how they are treating me right now. I treat them how I want them to treat me and by and large it works out. When they are having a bad day and they freak out and cry a lot I comfort them even though my head hurts so much I start to cry too. I rock with them. I tell them it is ok to cry.

I tell my kids over and over, “When you feel sad you are allowed to cry.” I will be their inside voice whether they are with me or not. I want them to believe it is ok to exist. I don’t want them to feel like me.

I tell them it is ok to be frustrated. It’s not ok to shout at people. Let’s figure it out. And mostly we do.

I feel like oozing toxic waste. I feel like poison. I am so sad and so angry. I miss my mom. Isn’t that crazy? Shouldn’t I just be glad to be away from her? But she’s my mommy. I ache for her so bad I feel like I can’t breathe. I feel like my organs want to go into failure. I want my mommy. I have been crying for my mother my entire life. Even when I had her I didn’t have her. My mother didn’t take care of me. My mother damaged me.

My mother told me I wasn’t allowed to be angry when I was raped. She told me I wasn’t allowed to yell or scream or cry. I have made my bed and now I have to lie in it. Silently. While men do whatever they want. And I still miss her. Sometimes that feels like the most fucked up part.

I am sad about not having a father. I do not miss James Archer. I didn’t know him. I don’t even remember what he looks like. That part makes me sad. Sometimes I think of writing Jimmy a letter and asking for a picture. I don’t know if he would send me one. I feel very sad about not being allowed to know what my father looks like. My mother gave Jimmy all the pictures of him many years ago. When I was still a child. I don’t even know if he kept them.

I don’t miss my sister. I think a wall came up when I found out about her forcing my niece to give my nephew a blow job. She became the living enemy. Being in a room with her and not spitting in her face is tantamount to supporting her behavior. No thank you. I think she is a piece of shit I stepped on.

I wish I felt like people loved me. I wish I could feel loved. I think part of the reason I cried on Noah last night was because I wanted to feel like he loved me. I didn’t feel that way. I feel dead inside. I feel like I went on an extended vacation to Chernobyl and my insides are radioactive and not quite functioning right.

I feel hollow and empty. I feel already dead. I feel like the cessation of breathing is a mere formality.

I have been here before. I know that how I feel right now is not how I feel all the time. I am dimly aware of that. I did have the chutzpah to up and get married. I felt loved. But mental illness is a liar.

When I was in the teaching credential they told us that a child has to hear ten positive things to cancel out everything negative said to them about themself.

When I think about what my mother said to me I cry. My inside voice is strong and loud and dominating. Shut up Kristine. No one cares, Kristine. Shut up.

I’m very ready for this cycle to change.

chaperones and resiliency

1 Reply

This morning I read another article by Rebecca Watson. She is active in the atheist/skeptic community and the guys are trying hard to run her out of town on a rail because she is talking about sexual harassment. Let me contain my shock.

She is really defensive about it being her community too. That is a hubris I lack. I don’t have a community. I’m aware that if I go out into any community alone I am fairly likely to have someone say something impolite at best. At worst guys rape me. This is my real life experience. I was telling Noah the other night that one of the things that is hardest for me about our marriage is he doesn’t have any interest in going places with me. Either I go alone or I don’t go. I don’t want to be raped any more. So I don’t go.

I feel angry and betrayed by all of the cultures that tell me the way to be safe is to have a chaperone. Only girls who matter have chaperones. You only have people to protect you when your pussy is special. Mine isn’t. I am the one who is supposed to accept that bad shit so it doesn’t happen to nice girls. That is why whores like me exist.

I don’t go out a lot. I hide a lot. I go to a lot of therapy and have people bring up this word “resiliency” a lot. re·sil·ience

[ri-zil-yuhns, –zil-ee-uhns] Show IPA

noun

the power or ability to return to the original form, position, etc., after being bent, compressed, or stretched; elasticity.

ability to recover readily from illness, depression, adversity, or the like; buoyancy.

So, what is my original shape? I think it is more that I don’t have an original shape I am trying to get back to. I adapt freely to wherever I find myself. I do not return to normal. I just act like the new normal is all I have ever had.

I hear: “We don’t really understand resilience but it is clear that it is necessary for recovery from trauma. It is clear you have it in spades.” Usually said with eyes wide. How can someone survive what I have survived? You put your head down and keep walking.

I get the impression I am unusually willing to accept fault for the things that happen in my life. I can fairly clearly see how and where people react to me differently than they react to other people. People are influenced by my presence in the room–often in ways that seem to be negative.

I have one F on my transcript for my entire life. It was graduate school. A professor was so unpleasant to me that I withdrew from the class and let it turn into an F rather than deal with her. She is infamous in the department for being a problem. Other students in the class took me aside and gave me pep talks about how I should let her obvious hate bring me down–she’s not the best judge of character in the world. It was really funny seeing the other students react to her picking me as the person to pick on. I got a lot of advice on how to be quieter and avoid her attention so she would stop being so mean. I’d rather have a fucking F.

I was thinking about parenting and teaching this morning. I was a really good teacher. My kids worked themselves like dogs for me. They came in voluntarily on the weekend when I gave them an upper division college level assignment. We had to use multiple classrooms to seat everyone who came in for extra help. Their test scores all went up. I had an unusually low absence rate. I had the problem kids who hardly ever go to school. They would come to my period and no other.

When a “problem kid” started acting out I would semi-make a scene in class kicking them out. I was very clear that my “authority” must be respected. Once we got outside I would sit next to them and only barely look at them. Then I would start fishing. “You aren’t freaking out because of what that idiot said to you. I know you better than that. What is happening? Why are you upset?”

I carry with me the belief that I am not very important and my behavior has a fairly limited effect on the world. People are not upset because of me. They are upset because the things I say make them think of things. They are upset by what is in their head–not me.

I called the parents of gang-bangers into class and gave reports about how awesome their kids were. My students tried. One time I gave a test and the highest grade was a C-. I stood in front of every period and cried. I apologized for wasting their time. I apologized for being such a bad teacher that I failed to usefully present the information. I explained what I had done and why. I explained various ways we could try to represent the material and I asked them to vote on approach. Everyone passed the next test–and it wasn’t because it was easy.

I think I write that I stay home because I am afraid of being raped because that is the part that I can really understand. No duh. I don’t go to dance events because I can’t deal with how inconsequential I am. That makes me sound like a whiny baby. It’s hard for everyone to be new. No one gives much respect to people they don’t know and I’ve worked hard at making sure not many people know me.

I have spent my life as a girl and then as a woman. Outside of sexual attractiveness it has been made quite clear to me that my duties are to be: pleasant, charming, gracious, and complimentary towards men. If you don’t play this game then men don’t have time to talk to you. Or dance with you. They snub you openly. I used to get around this because some of the horniest men like feisty women. If I am not looking for sex I find that I don’t get a lot of tolerance. My brand of being annoying isn’t worth putting up with if I’m not going to put out.

The last time I went to a dance event alone it was awful. (When I went with DSH and blacksheep it was wonderful.) I love to dance. I love the feeling of ballroom dancing. It makes me giddy and happy in a way that few activities can. But it’s partner dancing. When I go and ask men to dance they pull back just a hair, I see the corner of their lip pull up in a sneer, then they tell me no. Then I see them proposition a younger and prettier woman. I do dance with women, but I’m not a good lead. I don’t have enough experience. I try but it’s obvious that the experience lacks the crucial elements that makes dance fun.

Noah hates to dance. Years ago he dated this woman. She brought him to dance events and told him that people would be thrilled to have him there and they would welcome him. She uhhh was lying through her teeth (with the best of intentions) and he had a much less warm experience. Instead he found out that he was a bad lead and not that good looking so women spurned him.

I’ve been noticing a lot lately that Noah and I are both funny looking in very complimentary ways. We are similarly awkward. I suspect that is why we make one another feel good. I’m really glad he likes looking at me. I like looking at him. Soon we have to decide if we are going to doom our kids to being funny looking like us or if we are going to cough up for orthodontics. I feel fairly angry by the current meme that you can’t be attractive if you have less than perfect teeth. I have funny looking teeth. If you don’t like them, fine. I won’t fucking smile at you.

Lately I spend a lot of time feeling like I am drifting with the days. I haven’t had a car in a week. That changes our life. I actually like it–I feel less harried. We should be picking it up this afternoon. Weeee.

I want to feel like we get to have a break from the cramming-for-a-test phase of our life. We need to settle in and relax. What does that mean? How is that sustainable? I don’t know. But I need to expect less of myself for a while. I’m very good at being more and more and more productive. But I cry a lot.

What does resiliency mean? It means that no matter how hard someone hits me or how brutally someone rapes me or if someone up and moves me hundreds of miles away where I don’t know anyone I insure that I can return to being calm if needed. I am careful about what things actually need to be in my day and which things can go. I refuse to be a “modern woman” and use makeup and style my hair. It’s a waste of time and it depends on time and equipment I don’t always want to carry around. Just no. I don’t care that other people do. But having that kind of affect requires time and energy and money. I don’t have any to spare on such activities. Not to mention that I cry every fucking day. Hell no I’m not wearing eye make up. Are you insane?

Resiliency means that I know what is important to me and I know that most of the time other people don’t share my priorities. I can’t let that matter. I have to be functional. I have to be able to deal with food for myself and other people. I can do x number of things in a day. Doing my hair rarely makes the list. Hell I rarely shower. No I don’t brush my teeth three times a day and floss twice a day. I am too busy devoting cycles of my brain to not becoming hysterical in public.

I get the impression that I think about my face about as much and as often as a highly-functioning person on the ASD. I’m aware that if my face looks hostile I will have problems. I have worked very hard on having a calm, neutral facial expression that isn’t intimidating. It’s easier for me than for guys. I have more problem with not being intimidating enough when I want to be.

The first supervisor I had as a student teacher was a wonderful old Sicilian guy. He was a bit taller than me and about two hundred pounds heavier than me. (I’m not skinny and never have been.) He told me that I would have problems with discipline because I was such a tiny little thing. I never had discipline problems. I am quite effective at becoming a force of nature when I want to. The problem is limiting that energy. Limiting that hostility and anger is a constant effort. At any moment of the day you could say one or two sentences to me that will cause me to want to jump up and start punching holes in the wall. I am always on the verge of rage.

Resiliency is being able to mask what I am feeling so well that people don’t have any idea who I am or what I am like. When they find out they recoil. A lot of the point of going out in public with a chaperone is so that you always have someone to moderate for you. Someone who kind of keeps an ear out for how you are talking and how you are being talked to–someone who wants to keep you safe. I do it for my kids. No one has ever done this for me.

I have always been dropped into new social groups where I am unknown and I have to carefully suss out who is ok with talking to me. I’m not good at the generic social warm up. It is both why I am attracted to facial piercings and why I don’t have any. They would advertise for me in ways that would make it easier to find tribe and harder to pass when I am feeling unsafe.

I have resiliency because I always know that I will find a quiet dark room to hide in. I will always manage to find somewhere to hide and lick my wounds. I’m competent at that. I will always find a way to have a space that is mine and I will defend it with vigor. I will limit who is invited to come over. I’m quite fussy about people in my space.

As more and more years go by I know enough people that I could probably find de facto wingmen for events. It’s not the same. I don’t have a bestie. I don’t have someone who knows me intensely well and kind of runs interference. I hear that is “unhealthy” yet when I look around it is an awful lot of how people adapt the world to them. They carry a reality distortion field around with them because they travel in groups and therefore wherever they are there is a substantial representation of their world view. Near as I can tell no one shares my world view. I am always the dissenting opinion.

I’d rather stay home than not speak. I’m not always up for being shouted down. Gosh my house is nice.

I am apparently feeling shy about pictures of my house. I can’t seem to bring myself to take them. My house is pretty shabby and I don’t feel open to criticism. I choose to do silly things rather than standard things. I am ok with lots of big chips in my paint because the kids draw on the walls anyway so I’m not going to try and fix anything right now. My baseboards are coming off the wall. All of the screens were ripped off by lovely destructive daughter. I could go on and on. I see all the “wrong”.

But I really like the lights. And I like the things I paint. I like looking at them. I feel happy when I do so. I like my yard more by the year. I’m kind of glad I don’t have more land to work. God that sounds like work. I think I would be a lot more angry about Noah’s complete lack of interest in helping if I had more land. This is the right amount for me to work alone. I’m trying to figure out how I am going to put in a hundred (or two hundred) strawberry plants this spring. A friend is looking for people to go in on an order. I may not buy a massage package from her husband for a while in order to fund this. But we go through strawberries like nobodies business. I’m thinking about it. I want to decide by tomorrow.

I have been feeling very whiny about the winter this year. I haven’t turned the heaters on yet. I’m trying to be stubborn and get to November. I think I am really trying to be stubborn because I want to see Shanna wear some of the damn clothes I buy her. She runs very warm. I am wearing knee socks and a long sleeved shirt under my footed fleece jammies. She has on a light sundress. I’m not sure I have the fortitude to out wait her. Goodness knows our heating bill could use it. We’ll see.

I should go start breakfast. Noah went in early so we can pick up the car this afternoon.

I feel like I can only describe this by saying that I feel like I am trudging uphill through a molasses swamp. With every few steps a new load drops on my head from a new tree. I don’t want to get up. I want to sit here on the floor and cry. I’m not going to. I’m going to work on that half smile. I will sigh deeply. I will stand up. I will go in the kitchen. Shanna asked for pancakes. We’ll see.

New therapist

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I feel like part of what I get out of seeing a new therapist is being able to go find someone who specializes in issues like mine and ask, “So have you worked on cases as complicated as mine before?” One therapist one time said, “Oh sure” but then she fired me a couple of months later because actually I freaked her out. This therapist has so far said that she has worked with ritual abuse survivors who have multi-layered trauma like me but they probably still had far fewer traumatic events.

I feel pathetic about my need to play Oppression Olympics. I try not to play it with individual people one on one. I need professionals to pat me on the back and tell me that it *should* be harder for me that it is for most people because my life experiences were worse. Otherwise I feel very pathetic because I don’t feel very functional.

I’ve been thinking very hard about what it means to lead an ordinary versus an extraordinary life. I think that technically it is too late for me to be ordinary. I am just weird.

Resiliency. That is the word people use for me the most often. “Wow. How did you come by such resiliency?” Do you mean why didn’t I lay down and die many years ago? I have shit to do. I seriously think that is why. I have stuff I want to see done in the world and I just can’t bring myself to leave them undone. No one else will fucking do them.

But that is the ordinary struggle of my species. How do I fit into the destruction/creation cycle? Humans tend to like to destroy things or build them–the same person rarely likes to do both. I am an order Muppet. I have a strong need to create and bring patterns out of chaos. The play house in the front yard is coming along and it looks really neat.

I don’t think I will change the world. I don’t think I am that special. But when people who have a lot of experience with trauma meet me they tend to tell me quite quickly, “Have you thought about writing about why you survived?” Yes. I am half-heartedly starting to work on that book right now actually. My husband and the few readers who gave an opinion think it is a better idea to write that one instead of porn next. Boring.

I’m having a hard time figuring out how writing it will look in my life. What shape will my hours take. I’ll figure something out. And I’ll have a mailing list soon. I hope I will feel a wave of energy when that arrives. Why do I want a mailing list? Because I’m going to start asking people to share with me how they have outrun suicide. Blogger’s system rarely allows people to comment. I will be migrating away soon.

I’m not saying much about the first therapist. She is reading my book. She is working hard on learning history right now. I like therapists who want to get a good overall picture before they get into the nitty gritty. I feel weird when therapists want to hear just enough details to talk about one situation and then stop therapy. That’s not how or why I go to therapy.

She wanted to know who Traci and Francesca are. She wanted to hear about Uncle Bob. She wanted me to tell her about my sister and my grandparents. She has read up to 1987 but she still wants more information. So I proceeded to tell her a lot that isn’t in the book. Her eyes go wide a lot. I’m not sure how I will work with that long term. We’ll see. Maybe I’ll stop shocking her.

She asked how I met Noah. And if it was love at first sight. Ha! “I came to his random house party as person A’s date (I was living with person B) but I was really hunting for person C. Person C had shared two previous lovers with person B, whom I was living with. Person C is now living with the woman Noah broke up with to marry me. And person A is married to one of my closest friends. Noah was the creepy guy who was overly aggressive in the kitchen. He barely got a first date and it went questionably. He really barely got a second date. Then I dated him for nine months then dumped him.

No, it was not a foregone conclusion when we met.

Why does it work? Because he is nicer to me than any other person ever. Does that mean he is always nice to me? Hell no. If you haven’t noticed I kind of have low standards for how people treat me. I don’t know how to feel about our relationship. It works for me. I feel weird about how poorly it would fit anyone else. We are both so weird. Whatever. We are happy enough.

What is enough? How do you determine that someone is good enough to keep forever? I think it is a decision to spend time together. I think it is a decision to stay in love.

I feel lonely in a way I can’t explain. I feel empty and unable to try. But I have Noah. I’m trying to figure out how this will work. I feel bad because of how much contact I want with him–but I know of other families that spend far more time together than we do. We are actually fairly low in the time-spent-together column. We don’t see one another much. It has to be enough. It has to.

Whereas it is very nice that Taylor and P come to visit me a lot I can’t sit here and wait like a wound-down clock in between those visits. It isn’t fair to my kids. I feel like I do a lot of waiting to do things. I am waiting until I have company. I’m waiting until I feel safe. It’s hard to explain that part of the reason I don’t go do things by myself is I have legitimate reasons for knowing it isn’t safe for me to be out in the world alone. And I don’t seem to be able to make it work to go with anyone. I didn’t manage to find a partner who wants to do things with me.

Sometimes that feels like exactly what I deserve. Why would he want to do any of the stupid things I find interesting? I don’t know. I think that is a lot of what I was doing with Sarah. On paper she wants to do all the stupid shit I want to do. Unfortunately she is not physically able to keep up with the things she wants to do. And she doesn’t want to deal with what that means for her so she makes promises she can’t keep. And I explode. And I stop trying to do things because it is just too hard. The price is too high. I feel worse because I was stupid enough to persevere instead of better. I feel like the whole thing is an uphill slog and it just isn’t fucking worth it.

My kids are getting better at cleaning. “We aren’t going anywhere unless you do your share” is an effective tool. I’m god damn serious. I’m not your fucking maid. I don’t give them a big share, but they have to help. It’s becoming more automatic and streamlined.

I am looking into doing things with the kids by myself. So far the kids are so much extra work that I have trouble going out. As they are increasingly able to handle their basic needs my scope of support changes. I like going places with them now. It is a lot more fun than going places two years ago. Not having to carry a diaper bag has made my whole life better. I feel less angry about life now that I’m not a pack animal with a sore back all the time.

I feel scared to pull them into the hobbies I like. I find a lot of rapists when I go out into the world. I’m afraid to introduce my kids to people I know. It won’t be many more years before those rapists look at my daughters. I feel like the best defense they have is for people to know that they are my children. It would not be wise to mess with my children. I will end you. And I won’t feel bad about it. But do I even want them to do the things I do?

I’m not talking about bringing them to bdsm clubs. I’m thinking about things like Renaissance Faire and Dickens Fair and dancing. I like doing these things. I know a lot of rapists in these communities. And no one fucking gives a shit. I stopped going out because I couldn’t deal with fending people off. I just find these bastards. How is someone like me supposed to keep little kids safe?

I try to hide behind other mothers. I don’t think that women understand that I am doing this. I use you as a shield. I don’t have to talk to other people in the world if I don’t want to. Having company makes me feel more safe. It makes me feel like if something bad happens and I start kicking and screaming to defend myself someone might notice. Mostly I think people don’t care. Statistically I am right.

I stay home and garden (barely–I don’t have money and I own few tools so my efforts are slow) and try to teach the kids how to handle their own needs. That’s what I do right now.

Maybe some day I will feel less scared and I will be able to go do something more interesting.

don’t be mad

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So I found a ptsd sufferers support forum. Want to know what they recommend? That I get more obsessive about house cleaning. Yes!

I feel weird and bad about my depression. It feels quite shameful to be this depressed. I am one of the most fortunate people to ever live, how fucking dare I get depressed. When friends in the mental health field start openly worry I feel quite bad. I shouldn’t be worrying people. It’s not very kind. I’m fairly sure I will manage to avoid killing myself for another fifteen years at minimum. Even though I’m depressed. It feels more polite to just shut up about how I am feeling. If I don’t think I am actually likely to do something suicidal I should shut up about feeling like I want to. It’s a “cry for help” and that’s lame. It’s not actually. I don’t expect any one to do anything. I don’t expect anything to change because I am talking about how I feel. I don’t think I do it because I want help. Well, I do.

When I explained to my friend K how I was feeling she said, “How about if I take the girls for Saturday. You have enough on your plate.” I don’t particularly feel like I want people freaking out and panicking over the idea that I might kill myself presently (really I’ve been suicidal for decades there is no sense in getting extra nervous about it now) but it feels nice that people think, “Gosh you feel stress. Here is a bit less stress.” It feels like a gift.

I feel less helpless today. I don’t feel like an animal caught in a steel trap today. I think my body is too exhausted to manufacture those chemicals. I’m pretty fucking tired. And when I was exhausted and past capacity yesterday I didn’t have to also dig deep and find a way to kindly and gently meet the needs of my children. I got to be a selfish bitch just kind of wandering through the world.

Holy shit it feels good. I’ve been doing more of it just lately. Consciously putting myself in the mindset where “I am just a person existing and I only have to care for myself.” It’s weird. Do you know what I do when I only have myself to care for? I clean the house. OF COURSE I WOULD.

It honestly felt good that I got to greet Noah and the girls in a house that was clean and ready for anything. I could react to any request without having to do a bunch of prerequisite steps. That is what drives me crazy. “No, we can’t bake because I have to do dishes and clean off the counters and go to the store first.” Those beginning steps are doozies. If you don’t have anywhere to work you can’t work. If you don’t have ingredients it’s a non-starter. I’m having a hard time with adjusting to what “prepared to work” really means.

Abrupt topic shift: I’ve been told that I should be mad at Noah. Which feels pretty funny given how much time people spend telling me I shouldn’t be an angry person. The thing is: getting angry with Noah serves none of my goals.

I am absolutely willing and able to see that Noah goes above and beyond for me. No one is perfect. Somehow I feel like we fit together so well because no one else understands our shortcomings and properly appreciates us. Noah told me he was over committed. Noah told me that he can’t keep up what we are doing. I have to believe him when he says that. Immediately. Instantly. With love and support. I can’t get mad at him for telling me in a small little boy voice that he can’t do everything he would dearly love to be able to do. When he takes his courage in his hands and tells me that he is going to fail me… he already feels bad. He doesn’t need more shit from me.

Noah works like a demon for me. For us. For our family. When he hits a wall that is because he is cruising along at 80 trying to be everything and do everything for me.

Noah has a full time job that requires more than 40 hours a week and between 5 and 10 hours in commute. Then he has this book he is writing (I’m mildly shocked and appalled by how much money that has earned so quickly) and he is an adjunct professor for CMU on the side. And he does a lot of solo kid care (around 20 hours a week). And he wakes up every day and makes breakfast. He does a fair number of dishes. When I am fussy and whiny and the house is a big mess he cleans up. He comes home from work and makes dinner several nights a week.

When Noah comes to me and tells me in a very sad, very small voice that he can’t keep up what he is doing… I can’t come down on him. I can’t get mad at him. He is working at an unsustainable pace. I know that. When he falters it is normal and natural–not shameful.

It’s still very disappointing. And it’s hard that I have these expectations in my head he can’t meet. It’s not really his fault that he is so busy working on my other expectations that he doesn’t have the time or energy to get through all of my expectations. I have a lot of them. I need to be responsible for most of them. He truly can’t bear any more weight.

I feel lucky. When I met Noah he was kind of a slacker. Not really, but he wasn’t exactly motivated. He worked because he liked what he was doing but he wasn’t goal oriented. In the almost eight years I have known him he has changed. It’s hard for me to reconcile the boy he was with the man he is. I need to not act like he is a boy anymore. He truly isn’t.

When my man runs as hard and as long as he can to take care of me it isn’t right for me to sneer and call him a boy who isn’t living up to expectations. Near as I can tell that won’t lead to a happy marriage. I would honestly really like to have a happy marriage.

But I still have these expectations. And sometimes I am disappointed. Right now I feel like I should think of some more creative solutions beyond “be mad at Noah” to solve this problem. I don’t feel like that would actually help.

I can be honest and say that I try to avoid getting mad at Noah. I will pay a very high cost to avoid being mad at Noah. It is far easier and more comfortable to be mad at me for wanting too much. That’s an old reason to despise myself. My mom spent two decades telling me that I want too much. I’m selfish. I’m self-absorbed. I’m too needy. No one will ever give a shit about me. I know. It’s a lot easier being mad at me than him. It’s comfortable and familiar.

I use Noah up. I wear him out. I wring him dry. I feel like it is my fault he has nothing left by my birthday. Maybe if I wasn’t so fucking needy the other 364 days he might have some “want to” left by my birthday. I doubt I am going to be less needy any year soon. Actually, I think I will. I am far less needy than I was two years ago. I’m going to need less support from Noah fairly soon, actually. Shanna already does for herself. Calli is trying.

Sometimes it feels like running is a lot easier than standing still. I ran 23 miles yesterday (I actually ran for a surprising amount of it) and that was easier to do than filling the hours until Noah and the kids came home. I didn’t know what to do with myself. So I sat down for a bit and I ate and I smoked and then I cleaned. I spent hours cleaning. I don’t feel like I am capable of sitting down much any more. No matter how tired I am. I have to keep moving. Keep doing. I’m not sure why I have ever thought of myself as a low energy person. That was part of my story “I have to have my kids early because I’m a low energy person and it will be much harder when I’m older.” On crack.

Yesterday morning when I was about to head out the door (I was quite decadent and lazy and I didn’t leave the house till 6:30 because I didn’t feel like running in the pitch black) both little girls woke up just as I was leaving. Calli hugged me and kissed me several times and said, “Bye mama. Mama happy.” That’s her way of saying, “Goodbye and have fun.” Shanna said, “Do you have any food with you? It’s going to be a very long run today and you can’t get through a run like that without food. Have you packed food yet?” Yes I packed food, thank you for checking on me. I really appreciate it. I started crying. I told her that I appreciate her thinking about the needs of my body. Sometimes I’m bad at that and I’m glad she cares.

Ironically, I gave my huge bag of trail mix to a homeless guy. I stopped and took the pot edibles out first because I’m not that nice. But he was there. And he had a dog. And he looked so much like Stephan that my heart broke. When I see homeless guys who look like him I feel my heart jump into my throat. (He just looked like a homeless guy in the making. I think he’s gotten a hair cut since then.)

As a result when I was ~4 miles from home I stopped at KFC. I think that I could have gotten home noticeably faster if I hadn’t stopped and bought a mashed potato bowl on the way. Mmmmm. There is something about walking and eating at the same time that I like. I always have. From when I was a little kid walking and eating at the same time feels like a decadent treat. It feels like proof that I am more highly evolved and AWESOME than other species. Squirrels can’t do what I can do with food while moving with the same kind of speed and agility. Maybe monkeys but I’m pretty sure they don’t.

For some reason just knowing how many processes are going on at once in my body excites me. I am breathing. My blood is flowing. I am walking quickly so many muscle groups are responding quickly. I am eating. I am coordinating my hands and my mouth. My stomach is working. My throat is working. AND WHILE I’M AT IT MOTHER FUCKER I WILL SING. I’m not sure why I like it so much but I do. It’s this weird feeling of satisfaction. I am one of the most complex organisms ever. THAT IS SO FUCKING COOL. Let’s feel a little gratitude we weren’t brought into this life as an amoeba, ok? This is better.

It’s hard to feel like a depressed loser when you are sauntering up your street telling every neighbor, “I haven’t finished mapping it yet but I’m quite certain I covered twenty two miles today!” I feel a lot of pride. It’s weird feeling how the pride lives in my chest with the shame. It’s like they are next door neighbors in a condo complex. They take turns who is leaning over the back fence shouting.

Yesterday I talked to one of the neighbors for a while. Little M who isn’t allowed to come over anymore was apparently throwing rocks and dirt at her house. She told me she was thinking about calling the police over the vandalism. She threatened M to her face. Apparently M broke down sobbing hysterically and begged to not be sent away. I had a long talk with her about how she needs to never threaten that kid again because she has a hard enough life and for an adult to keep picking on her is cruel and unacceptable. Every fucking five year old throws rocks and dirt. It’s not vandalism. It is being a kid. Give her a fucking break. The neighbor seemed very inclined to listen to me once I started talking about the abusive alcoholic father. I think she will be nicer to M. I’m not saying let the kid get away with shit–but you don’t need to call the cops.

When did we become a society that wants to call the police because a five year old throws dirt? I feel so sad. I feel like there is no way for people to grow up and try things and see what happens in the world.

The other day Shanna got her hands on the last rogue bag of cookies and brought it into her room. I yelled at her, of course, because crumbs in your room attract ants ohmyfreakinggoodness how many times do I have to say this? When I finished dealing with the cookies I came back into her room and sat next to her. I said, “I have been so busy yelling at you for making messes lately that I haven’t stopped to say that it is really cool how much you have grown. You are very good at taking care of yourself. You are very good at figuring out what you need and how to get it. Most of the time you make very good choices both for your body and for being polite to me. Thank you. I do see it. I appreciate you a lot. I think it is wonderful watching you grow up. You surprise me every day by learning new things and I’m so glad I get to watch you.” She told me, “Thank you for noticing. I’ll learn about the crumbs one of these days.” I laughed and hugged her. I told her I believe so.

It feels like depression is this binary switch in my brain. It goes on and off many times a day. There are many things that bring me joy and when I feel those things I am distracted and the depression switch goes off for a bit. But I can’t do this on purpose. I’m not a rat and it isn’t a food pellet button. I can’t just decide to keep myself distracted. I can’t decide to feel joy. It just happens. Often in connection with my kids.

I feel like the most prideful person on earth when I look at my children. I feel like I will explode with good feelings when I look at them. How did something so wonderful come out of me? I am so grateful that I get to know them. Even though they make my life harder (and holy shit they do) I wouldn’t have it any other way. Without them I don’t have this joy on tap.

So I spend my days walking between depression and shame and anxiety and anger and joy. I can’t just sit down and decide how many minutes of a given day will be spent on which emotion. I can stack the deck in my favor. There are stress relieving choices I can make. But the stress relieving choices are unfortunately often choices that lessen my joy. It’s a weird balancing act. Less bad might mean less good too. More good might well mean a lot more bad.

Today I feel quite confident “not today”. Today is a day of rest. I will spend today with Noah and the kids. Noah will rub my feet because he is nice. We will cuddle and read together. I will get to touch Noah. This morning I am typing from bed instead of the garage because I haven’t been touching Noah much lately and I feel this aching emptiness without him. I like keeping my foot on him. He’s there. He’s real. He’s mine. I’m not alone. No matter how I feel, no matter how I think–he is here. I can touch him.

Noah has spent years trying to get me to understand that I shouldn’t have put up with things from Tom that I did. It wasn’t a “good” relationship it was just a lot better than what I had previously known. I don’t know if I put up with things from Noah that I shouldn’t. I know that, unlike Tom, Noah is working on things that benefit both of us. Noah is very serious about everything he has being for me. It’s a weird feeling. Someone wants me to have as much as can be given to me. I feel constantly unworthy.

I have been diagnosable as “mentally ill” for a long time. It’s not Noah’s fault. I don’t really want to come down on him for the results.

I don’t think that getting over my anger is the point.

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“Get busy living or get busy dying.”- Shawshank Redemption.

Sometimes it feels like life is about learning how to come to grips with your wasted potential. I could do _______ if only ___________. It’s a long series of conversations with yourself as you narrow down possibilities in life until the only path you could possibly take is completely obvious. Look, you’ve been working towards this all along. You did ______ and then you did _____ so obviously ______.

But believing that requires some underlying belief in a greater plan. Things are not inevitable. Things are changeable right up until the second they happen. It’s random. It has to be.

It has to be for me because otherwise there would have to be some specific reason I was picked out of a hat to suffer far more than other people. I’m sorry, there is no Kushiel looking out for my well being. I’ve read the Bible. I’ve read big parts of the Book of Mormon. I’ve read books by Martin Buber and St. Thomas (Aquinas, of course) and Sr. Thomas More and and. I did all the classes required for a masters degree in English. I got good grades. I read. I studied. I didn’t know I was supposed to be practicing handwriting. Whoops. Anyway.

I am educated. I have read what the masters think of the world. Sometimes I agree with them but often I don’t. I have had significant personal experience that disagrees with their beliefs.

I have two ways I can handle that. I can decide that they are right or I can decide that I am right.

Now, I like to hedge my bets. I have strong opinions but I’m willing to reconsider them given reason. It’s very rare that I bother to try, I am human after all. But when something challenges my belief structure I have to think about it very hard. I know I am not always right (really, D).

I kind of feel like I should stay off social networking sites for a while. I am feeling too many “shoulds”. I need to do what I am going to do and not worry about whether other people approve or not. Of course there are lots of people who don’t. Will I let that stop me? No. Then why let it bother me?

Because when people I love reject me in harsh ways it bothers me. When people I love tell people they think I am dangerous it bothers me.

Are they right?

I’m told I need to get over my anger. I’m not sure that it is anger I need to get over. I need to get over wanting things from other people. I need to really and truly not give a shit if a given person likes me or not. I know who my friends are.

As the legal next-of-kin I think I feel very reasonable about treating the God-Mamas as family. They take the kids every month. They have a very serious on-going relationship. They are invested and serious about it. That’s the last time I am going to do that to my kids. My family unit is closed. I can care about me. I can care about Noah. I can care about Shanna. I can care about Calli. I should not try to make sure there is stuff left for other people. Maybe there will be and maybe there won’t. My friends understand. They really don’t have high expectations of me–which should be depressing only it isn’t. They like me anyway.

Anger and anxiety are both emotions that are about energy flow. (In my opinion. I’m going to babble even more whacko than usual tonight. Sorry. It’s been a very long and very sober day and I’ve had time to sit with my anger more than I usually do.) I have a lot of energy. I have spent my entire life feeling like I am sitting with a burning wire of energy in the middle of my body. It churns my stomach. It constricts my throat and my lungs.

People are monolithic for me in a way that I don’t think most people understand. My life has always changed a lot. Every so often I up and move either geographically or in social sphere. As I age there is more and more overlap in communities. I’m having a harder and harder time going out. It’s scarier than I like admitting.

If I had been funneling my whole life towards what I am doing now the path would have looked different, don’t you think? It all depends on how you frame it. I’m a stay at home mom. I used to be a high school teacher. I’ve been married for nearly six years (anniversary is in a couple of weeks). I live less than twenty-eight miles away from my elementary school (well, one of them). My middle and high schools (at least five of them) are slightly closer to me than that. I’m a hippie. I dress very conservatively most of the time. I don’t have a television or watch anything approximating television programming on a computer. I garden a lot. I homeschool. I do building projects.

I am angry. I stay home a lot because I am afraid and I am fucking angry that I am afraid. Today we went to the post office. It went fine. The kids started to get into things but were easily distracted. Nevertheless I spent the whole time feeling very anxious. I was afraid my kids would get yelled at. I was afraid I would get yelled at. I was afraid the woman helping me would be mean. Good freakin grief. It’s ridiculous. I started crying and hyperventilating and the woman helping me told me it would be ok. That’s god damn embarrassing. I’m a fucking adult.

You want to tell me I should just get over it again? Oh fuck off. But the whole episode was under a minute. It’s not like it is a big deal. Only it hurts. It hurts my stomach. It hurts my heart. It hurts my throat. It hurts my head. It hurts my lungs. I feel like I am dying. If I could just stop it I would. There is no magic drug for me. The only thing I can do is dope myself to get the panic to stop. Look at any psych drug on the market. That’s what they do. They do it in different ways, but whatever.

I don’t really see a point in trying to live a long life if I am going to spend a lot of time every day in pain because my brain doesn’t understand that I am not in danger. It’s not like she had the power to prevent me from sending my packages. If she was really bitchy I could have gone to UPS. (But I’ll say: the gruffness from the ladies in the Mountain View USPS is just a front. They are softies.) She had no power to hurt me. Someone feeling irritated by my kids in the fifteen minutes we are in the post office is really not my problem. Why do I care?

Oh wait. That’s called trauma. Sort of. Kind of. I’m not sure. At some point I have to get it through my fool head that there are assholes in the world who are going to be rude to me and mine. It’s not about anything I’ve done. Well, not necessarily. For an awful lot of people I just have to exist. I have to have the god damn audacity to open my white trash mouth. I am offensive.

People like it when you are afraid of them. It makes them feel protective. It makes them feel big. It makes them feel powerful. People like it. I have spent a lot of time afraid and I can see how people react.

I feel like I am searching, always searching, for what I supposed to be doing. How am I wasting my potential? I don’t know. I look for seeds in my life to help me tell the future but unfortunately the future hasn’t been written yet. I have to write it.

It means I’m not looking at right now. It means I’m scared. I’m angry because a lot of people want to tell me things that all boil down to being raped is a womans own fault because the only logical conclusion I can come to is those people believe I deserve to be raped. I cannot put my mind around that. No. I can’t. It’s not possible. No one is born to be raped. Just because I have a cunt that does not decide my destiny.

I am a stay at home mom. I am a stay-at-home-a-lot mom. Well, I like taking BART on outings. Then we can take the bus and I can be stoned all day. I can be calm. I can let the children go at their pace. I don’t feel anxious about being in other peoples way. I don’t feel guilty that I am sitting when obviously this more deserving person (like a guy in his 50’s) should be sitting. No. I have two squirming kids. I should be fucking sitting. Otherwise they will fall and hurt themselves. That’s just stupid.

But I worry. I worry about offending people. I worry about making other people feel annoyed by my physical presence. You’d never guess by how I write, would you? In the privacy of a room by myself I have the biggest cojones of them all. Please join me in a derisive snicker, right?

I have nothing to offer the world to justify the worth of my opinions. I am fairly unlikely to pursue further academic studies. At this moment in time that sounds like hell on earth. Which unfortunately may mean I do it some day. I’m stupid like that. Next time I will practice my handwriting. And it won’t be English. Fuck English.

I don’t think that I need to get over my anger. I need to find a way to use it. I have a lot of energy. When I decide to get going on a project I work like a demon. I get a very large amount done in a short period of time. But I’m a woman. It’s fairly unlikely to ever be noticed. It helps that I pick lame menial jobs because I think that is what someone like me should be doing. I think I never noticed that I stopped working at Boston Market. I still think I am an ignorant fool who cannot be right. Look, all these people tell me I am wrong.

Well, fuck them. I don’t like their system. There is no way for me to win in their system; I was born damned.

Before you tell me to stop being angry let me hit you as many times as I have been hit. Let me rape you as many times as I have been raped. Then I will put you into a culture that tells you it is all your fucking fault that it happened. Then we can talk about anger.

What else did you expect to have happen? Do you know how many people in uniform I’ve had sneer that at me when something inappropriate and illegal happens to me? I can’t really remember. For a while there I was put on drugs against my will when I was a teenager and I can’t remember that period so an exact number is truly beyond me.

I have been told to sit down and shut up and don’t get angry all my life. I don’t think that is a message I should listen to. I think that is a message that seals my doom. I’m not saying that everyone has to be angry with me. I’m saying that once you are marked as prey–once you are truly afraid they smell you. If I am angry enough I can drive them away. I no longer look like easy prey even though they know what I am. I finally got close enough to the herd to not be the weakest link.

And now that I am closer to the herd the mother fuckers around me are going, “Oh shit, who let her show up?” It’s interesting to watch. I just piss people off. I don’t even have to try. I just have to say what I think. I make people angry. Even if I wasn’t angry to start with. It’s interesting.

I make people angry when I speak to them. Maybe I should just stop speaking to them. I don’t mean become selectively mute, that’s a bit extreme. I mean that maybe I should stop setting the bar so god damn low on who I try to become friends with. I should act like I’m worth jumping through some hoops. People do it. They really do. It’s kind of weird.

I think I should stay of social networking sites for a while. Outside of my house there is nothing but bad. Inside my house I live in Wonderland. It’s really nice here. We sing and play games. We dance and should and run around. We paint and cook and garden. We grow up together. We learn how to do things together. We learn how to gently coexist with another human being. When someone slaps you in the face while you are sleeping it is perfectly acceptable to yell, “What the hell are you doing?!” before you are actually awake. (I am very articulate while mostly asleep.) It’s not ok to yell such a thing while fully conscious. We have Rules. No name calling. No hitting. You can’t put anyone down. Everyone deserves to have space but we need to be careful how our space effects other people. Every day involves “I love you” and “I am really glad I know you” and hugs and kisses.

But I know with every day that marches forward that two of these relationships are going to change. They are going to go off into the world. They are not going to stay with me and meet my needs. I have to do that for myself.

Some people can wait until the kids are teenagers to worry about it. My kid is about to turn two. Oh shit. I only have sixteen years to plan. I’m not sure that is long enough. I’m not sure that is long enough for me to finish growing up. I feel guilty because Noah is my provider. Because we have decided that his salary is good for both of. We don’t want another thing pulling from the available energy in our lives–probably ever. I feel like I am wasting my potential. I feel like I am letting down my feminism. I feel like I am setting myself up for a fall. I feel like…

I feel like I am waiting for the inevitable conclusion of the life of a girl like me. What terrible thing will happen next? How will Noah turn on me? Will he wait until a year or two after the kids are gone and say, “I just stayed for the kids.” I don’t think so. I don’t think he could fake that facial expression. He’s a good liar, don’t get me wrong, but not that good. Not with me. I know when that face happens. It isn’t in company. I’ve been watching this man for a while now. I intend to keep watching him. My very survival depends on him.

That’s the bit that is weird and hard to swallow. Basically because it is a crock of shit. Whatever. I wouldn’t necessarily like everything I had to do, but if I had to do it I would.

It’s not that I need to stop being angry. Anger happens. It stops when it stops. But I do really need to stop looking for it. I investigate the candidates before every election and beyond that I need to just live in my little bubble. I feel like we exist outside the modern world with the glaring exception of the glowing box I am staring at. Ok, not really outside the modern world–give me a break. But we do live with a shocking lack of popular culture. Of any kind, really. I suppose we listen to some music but certainly not every day. I would say not every week. Ok, that’s not true for me right now. I listen to music while I run. That’s a new hobby this year. I’m not sure how that will go long term. And my phone battery can’t play music through a whole long run so my phone is now annoying useless on runs. Bummer.

People are going to think I’m a trainwreck. To that I cock my head to the side and say, “Have you ever seen a train wreck?” Things have settled down in my life remarkably over the last few years. Cutting off my family was hard and caused a big bump, yes. I was abused as a child, yes. I haven’t been raped in more than five years? Something like that. That’s the longest stretch of my life. I’m waiting for the next thing that will hurt me. It is very confusing to my brain that I have this nice man in the house.

I would have been fine today if I was able to cut before going to the post office. Because when I start to feel panic I press on the fresh wounds and that keeps me level. It’s more reliable than any drug I’ve ever tried. But people get quite upset with me, so I stopped. I think that really I just don’t want to teach my children to do it. I don’t want them to learn my panic and fear and need for pain.

It’s not that those monolithic “them” are actually all bad. But I have no reason to go fishing to find out. It’s kind of freeing, really. I don’t have to care if people will want to do me ill or not if I don’t give them an opportunity.

What does it feel like to have distant community? I only sort of know. I get it somewhat in the Leather community. I really need some place I can belong with my kids. I’m trying to build places. We are consistent (mostly, barring various events like a washing machine flooding my garage). We have patterns. We have friends. We have relationships.

What is it I am supposed to get over my anger for? What is it that I am supposed to do? Ahhh grasshopper–what I should do is not make people feel uncomfortable. Sorry mate, that ship sailed. I’m going to make you uncomfortable.

I make plans. And I make plans. And I make plans. When you call the suicide hotline one of the first thing they ask you is if you have “a plan”. I laugh. I have plans. I have worked out so many ways to die that I can’t casually list them all. First I do this and then I do that and then I have to look at this and then… I know the dozens of steps involved in any number of ways to die. How accidental can I make it look? Where should I leave the consolidated list of passwords so Noah isn’t screwed? Where… etc.

But the point isn’t to stop being angry. Or really even to stop being afraid. That can’t be the point. If that is the point I will always fail. You can’t decide to stop something. You have to decide to do something else instead. I decide every day over and over. It’s exhausting. It’s hard. I have to sit here all day every day thinking carefully about what I say and what I do. You have read this far in my blog. Surely you think I am a psycho about to fly off the handle any moment now. I’m truly not. I’m pretty quiet. Sometimes I speak unexpectedly sharply. Sometimes my tone of voice is more harsh than seems appropriate to the topic. If I am alone with my family I instantly say, “Oh I’m sorry that came out harsher than I meant it. I’ll try again.” I expect my kids to do the same thing. I say, “Try again.” Shanna says it to me now. It’s interesting to negotiate.

My children are not in charge of me. My children are not responsible for me and they never will be. But they get to have preferences to. How do I sit back and very slowly learn someone like this? I don’t know. I’ve never done very well at close intimate relationships. I just know how to spend a lot of time alone in a room. But I’m trying. I get a couple of hours of sitting alone in a room every day or I feel like I am going to lose my mind.

I didn’t used to be this way. It feels like the anger is the war between my need for people and my terror of them. I don’t want to have any of the feelings I have about people and I can’t make them go away just by wishing and I am fucking angry about it. I hate that I cry over stupid things. I couldn’t figure out a form. It wasn’t a big deal.

The last time it was truly a big deal was when Denise said, “Have you ever had anyone close to you die.” I didn’t let her set the terms of my reality then–she doesn’t get to tell my my father and brother were not close to me–and I don’t think I should let random assholes on the internet. That seems kind of stupid and weak minded, don’t you think?

There is a lot of “you” tonight. I don’t think I do that very often. I don’t even know who I am writing to. I periodically rotate through various people in my head and no one fits. I’m not ranting at anyone. I’m ranting at the unseen you. The one who hurts me. The one whose plan it is. The one I don’t believe in.

I’m very angry at God because I can’t be an atheist. I have known things. I have to believe in my own experiences or I’m fucked. But I don’t think there is a plan. I don’t think it’s the Christian God. I don’t know what it is. But something knows I am here. I’m not sure it cares much one way or another. But it knows something more than me. I don’t know how much more. And it’s probably fallible. Isn’t everything?

I feel like I have no culture to retreat to. I am not Christian. I am currently upper middle class according to my bank balance. In attitude and behavior I am white trash. I don’t know how else to be. I offend people. I have always offended people. I have the audacity to be raped and complain about it. Don’t I know I should shut up?

I live for Sundays.

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On Sundays Noah doesn’t have to work. Ok, that’s not true. But he doesn’t have to leave the house and he doesn’t get as cranky with me wanting to be in the same room distracting him.

I like the way he looks at me. When he looks at me I feel washed clean. I feel like I must be ok or he wouldn’t look at me that way. I feel like I do good in the world. I feel like I am good. I feel loved. I feel important. You don’t look at a pretty flower the way Noah looks at me. You look at things that change your life the way Noah looks at me.

I can feel the panic and the fear quiet down when he looks at me like that. That smile shouts louder than all the evil little voices in my brain. I can’t hear them over him. It’s hard that he doesn’t spend very much time looking at me. He’s busy. He has a lot of things he has to spend his time looking at. I live for those moments when I get his full attention.

Noah holds me together and tells me I am worth knowing. He thinks I should take up more space in the world. He likes being married to a writer. He tells people about it eagerly. He admires me. I inspired him to go write a book. (Then he promptly made far more money than me in far less time. I feel slightly huffy. But my writing isn’t stuff people will pay a lot for.)

It’s hard that I constantly feel reminded of how I am less than him. My labor is worth nothing compared to him. He has value. He is appreciated. He is high status.

I’m that freak crying at home.

I don’t understand why he likes me. Well, I do. He feels distinctly alienated from society as well. Last night he told me, “I never have to worry about you turning to me and saying, ‘Why can’t you be normal?'” I laughed. No. I don’t need you to be normal. If you were normal I’d be waiting for you to fetch a pitch fork and come after me. Normal people all seem to hate me after a while. I do things wrong. I make them feel bad.

When I am with Noah I feel safe. It’s not that he is protective–he isn’t. But he is my provider. He is my helpmate. He cleaned the house while I napped on the couch yesterday because he knows I try to go through and do it every evening and I was too tired. That kind of thing makes me cry. He knows it is important to me to clean up right before bed otherwise I trip in the morning because I walk around in the dark. Technically he trips more often than I do. So it was kind of selfish. But not really.

Noah could scorn the household tasks. He is supporting me in a lavish lifestyle. Noah could look down on me so easily. Noah could think that I owe him. And he doesn’t. Near as I can tell it doesn’t cross his mind. Sure we make jokes about trading sex for heavy lifting and every so often I find something so unpleasant I tell him, “I’ll give you a blow job if you do that.” I feel slightly mixed about it but only slightly. I’d give him a blow job if he hinted he wanted it so it’s not like it is a big bar.

In other news I found my leather ball gown yesterday. The one Noah gave me for my 23rd birthday. I played for a bit with him. He was very excited. I am glad I get to wear it for him.

Shanna woke up. Time to go.

Sex and consent

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

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

We need another word.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any thoughts?

If you can’t work it out with your family…

1 Reply

Someone on the internet said that if you can’t work things out with your family you will never be able to truly love anyone. My response to that: horse shit.

I think that if you want to be able to truly love someone you have to start with loving yourself. You have to start with figuring out what love means. Love doesn’t mean that you do whatever someone wants. Love doesn’t mean that you take care of someone. Love means that you figure out where you end and the other person begins and you find a way to pad that difference with understanding and compassion. It doesn’t mean that you always work it out.

I love my mother. I think about her every day. We can’t work it out. We can’t work it out because her version of understanding and compassion involve telling me that I must keep my mouth shut about the ways in which I was damaged by my childhood. In her version of understanding and compassion the only thing that matters is that you never make people feel uncomfortable. I make people feel uncomfortable. Thus we will never be able to heal that breech. I can’t be quiet and she can’t tolerate being uncomfortable.

Does this mean I will never be able to love anyone? What about my kids? What about my husband?

I feel like I have had to recreate from scratch what it means to love my kids. I certainly don’t have a good, automatic way of showing such feelings. In my family love was equally mixed with violence and anger. It means that if I want to truly love my kids I have to stop and think every single day “How can I love my children without violence and anger today?” It means I think very carefully about the words I use. I don’t call them names. I will never be able to get it out of my head that my mother thinks I am a stupid little bitch. I don’t want my daughters to have those words in their heads.

Working it out with my family doesn’t work. The only way for me to be part of my family is if I shut my mouth and pretend that reality didn’t happen. The only way for me to be part of my family is for me to turn a blind eye to continual sexual assault. As an adult I found out that the generation after me was hurt too. I didn’t do anything to protect them. I didn’t know how to protect them while maintaining the code of silence I was required to maintain while living at home.

I’m not at “home” any more. Or, rather, I have created a new home. As usual it isn’t a home of my choosing. But unlike every other time I am choosing to stay. Even though I didn’t get to have first choice, I get to decide whether I stay or not. It’s rather novel.

I think that in order to love yourself you have to take a good long look at your life and decide if your interactions help you become a better or worse person. I run because I have to be strong and able to handle anything that happens to me in life. I have to be stronger and more fierce than average. I simply do. A marathon seems like a pretty bad ass way to work on being strong and fierce. I garden because I need to learn patience and consistency. Learning to water plants has been one of the most important lessons I have learned this lifetime. Everything needs care. Even me.

I am learning how to look at my husband as a wounded young man who was desperate for love. I don’t think I saw that before marrying him. He was strong and sure of himself and utterly cocky. I didn’t see all the worry and fear and loneliness. Why did he need someone who was so driven and alone? Why did he need someone who came with a barge-load of baggage and a fierce need to survive? I’m not sure yet. But I know that he and I hold back the dark for one another. We are both used to being alone and terribly lonely. We don’t have to be any more. There is so much gratitude mixed in with our love that I don’t know how to separate them. Someone wants to see me every single day. Someone thinks I am pleasant company. Someone thinks that I am a worthwhile person to spend a life with. How in the hell did that happen?

How do you learn to love yourself? By learning how to say no to things that hurt you. By learning how to tell people that the way they are treating you isn’t good enough. You deserve better. Even if you don’t believe it you have to say it. You have to be able to say, “I can’t do what you want me to do. I have to take care of myself instead of you.” It’s hard. It’s terribly hard and lonely most of the time.

I’ve been reading a lot about attachment theory lately. No wonder I have so many issues. I read that people have to depend on one another. This is a biological need. We have to have people in our lives to work with and be interdependent with. This is deeply at odds with the maxim of, “Never do for other people what they can do for themselves.” That is what I have heard from codependent circles. It’s a hard balance.

How do you have healthy dependence? What is the line? How do I love myself and the people around me enough to care for them and let them care for me? What is a healthy level of dependence? I care for my children and teach them how to do things on their own. I care for my husband. I do his cleaning and laundry and I cook for him. He also cooks for me. And he cleans up after me. And he massages me. And he supports me financially. I “can” support myself. Is there something bad about him supporting me? I think it depends on who you ask.

In my opinion there isn’t a problem with someone deliberately exchanging work. There is more work in a marriage than really should be done by one person. I don’t think that 50/50 parenting/work/etc is mandatory. It’s ok to choose to have different percentages.

The problem, in my opinion, comes when you make an agreement and then don’t follow through. If you say you will do something and you don’t, that’s a problem. If someone else has to come along behind you and get your work done then you aren’t actually in a partnership. I am not going to try and name what it is, but it isn’t a partnership. If Noah told me that he would bring home the paycheck, sure thing, but then he didn’t we would be in trouble. If I told Noah that I would care for the kids but I didn’t put food on the table that would be a problem. In order to love myself I have to only partner with people who are going to keep their agreements.

How does this tie in with my family? You don’t partner with your family anyway, right? If I stayed in contact with my family I would have to agree to being devalued constantly. I would have to be around people who would do absolutely nothing to care for themselves and anyone else while loudly proclaiming that they do everything. Uh, no. I’m not going to do that. I can’t work things out with people who are going to tell me implicitly and explicitly that what they do has more value than what I do when I am doing the vast majority of labor to move life along. I just can’t. That’s not a way to learn about love. That is a way to learn that I deserve a lot of bad. I really don’t.

I think it is funny how many people I know are rabidly anti Ayn Rand. I’m no Philip Reardon–I haven’t gone out and built a business empire. I don’t even feel particularly successful. I’m secure and stable but I will probably never have millions of dollars. I will never be important financially. But I do have a family that will happily drain me dry while talking shit about me the whole time. I have a family who would cheerfully take every dollar I earned at a job while telling me that what I am doing is less important and valuable than what they do. I could never figure out exactly what it is that they did that could hold value. Watch a lot of tv? Just existing is enough for some, I guess. Not for me. I was supposed to earn my place. I was supposed to clean and provide money.

In fact I think that part of learning to love myself going forward is learning how much value my labor has. I should not work night and day for unappreciative people. I should teach my children that we rise or fall together. We should all work together. There should not be one person working and another person watching. Hell no. I don’t think that anyone should be allowed to effectively steal from me.

But then I come back to this idea that I will never be able to “truly love anyone” if I don’t work things out with my family. What I need to work out is the ability to say, “I have limits. I can’t support you.” Once I figure out my limits and can communicate them in a healthy way with my children I will have figured out how to work things out with my family. This is the only family I have obligation to. The family I choose, not the family I am saddled with. As my kids grow up I will change how much I am willing to meet their needs. That will be unavoidable. That’s my job, really: to teach them how to meet their own needs. I can’t teach an adult how to do this. An adult isn’t interested in changing the patterns they have formed. An adult is comfortable. An adult has learned how to cobble together enough in life.

I have learned how to cobble together enough support. When I can emotionally handle it I ask for support from other people. When I can’t handle it I maintain silence about my needs. If I never mention them then I don’t feel disappointment about people not meeting them. Ok, that’s not true. But the disappointment is far less when I don’t say anything.

How do I learn to love me? By knowing that I don’t want my kids to remember me calling them names. So I don’t call them names. By knowing that I want my kids to keep their promises so I keep my promises to them. I am very careful with what I say I will do. If I don’t think I can follow through on something then I don’t bring it up. Or I say in advance that the possibility is low. I make this an ok thing for myself by ensuring that my energy load is such that the needs of the helpless people in my life come before every other thing I spend energy on. I don’t get to run or garden or clean or be social until my children have their needs met. That is the hierarchy of needs that I observe. Sometimes I feel like a martyr but that is how I know that I will not be neglectful. There have been too many neglectful adults in my life who cared more about themselves than the children in their care. I can’t be one of them.

I learn to love me by recognizing that I and the children in my care deserve better treatment. We deserve to be important and prioritized. So I do. I am deliberate in how I choose to divide my time.

There are more things to do than can ever be done. At the end of my life, which things are going to feel more important than others? To me the most important thing I will do is prove that I can adequately care for children. I will do this right. My kids won’t have to deal with financial instability because the grown ups spend money like it grows on trees. My kids won’t have to deal with food insecurity because the adults don’t want to be bothered with thinking about the food needs of growing children. My kids will not be left with unsafe caregivers.

I love my children as a proxy for learning to love myself. I see in them the vulnerability and weakness I must have had. I will keep them safe. They will not think they are bad for being children. I will love them, and myself, enough to allow us to make mistakes and grow. I will love us enough to think hard about the right choices before I make a choice at all. I will choose to be alone instead of being with people who are unable to be honest about their own actions. I have Noah and Shanna and Calli. I’m not really alone any more. I have so much more than many people ever have. It has to be enough.

Long-term friendships.

2 Replies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Category Archives: codependence

Just another whinging Friday

Caved.

Walking on eggshells

Text has no tone.

Not competent enough.

Have to think about the quota

The loyalty trap

probably a good decision process

Tried something different.

chaperones and resiliency

New therapist

don’t be mad

I don’t think that getting over my anger is the point.

I live for Sundays.

If you can’t work it out with your family…

Long-term friendships.