Category Archives: community

Get over yourself.

So like yesterday when I post something ranty about other people I then have this huge rush of shame and guilt. Who the fuck am I to judge other people? Why in the god damn hell does my fucking judgment matter? Who the hell wants to hear it anyway.

It’s weird writing about what I see in the world. Because a lot of the writing process for me is narrowing down who I want to be. I get the impression that other people can do this narrowing down without being a judgmental asshole out loud.

I don’t think I am better than anyone else. I do think I have a strangely functional marriage–I take very little credit. Noah is amazing and flexible and supportive. That isn’t about me. That’s luck. I found someone who is worried enough about his own future that he will defer a lot of short-term satisfaction in favor of future success. That’s not about me.

No one has to change their behavior to make me happy. No one has to alter the course of their life for me. I am aware of this. I don’t think people need to change because of me. I write because these are the things in my head and if I don’t write them down I feel like I have these fifteen different television stations all playing loudly in my head simultaneously. I can’t hear what I am supposed to be doing over the cacophony.

I hope like hell that I don’t hurt peoples feelings by saying stupid self-absorbed things. I’m afraid I do sometimes. I’m really sorry. I am not trying to hurt anyone.

I want there to be room for me to exist and room for other people to exist. I want it to be ok that I have my opinions (even if my opinion is negative about someone’s behavior) and it isn’t something that people have to take personally.

I don’t think you (generic you) need to give a shit about whether or not I judge you harshly. I truly don’t. I know that I am not the judge nor the jury. If I make you angry I’m sorry.

I want to be allowed to have strong opinions and be a judgmental asshole without actually being an asshole. I really want my writing to be the place where I get to be as loud and offensive as I want.

I promise I will try harder to reign in my mouth when I am in other peoples houses. You did not invite me over to hear my asshole opinions. I hate it when I fail at the basics of civility. It feels like proof that I am a worthless white trash asshole. I am not capable of being nice to decent people.

I swear to god that I walk into some houses and I feel like, “Oh my god these are decent people” and I feel my hackles go up. It isn’t their fault. It is not anyone else’s fault that I walk into their house and feel like I am a lower class than them. It is not their fault that feeling lower class makes me hostile and nasty. I know I have to “get over” this. I really do. I’m better than I used to be. I know that isn’t adequate. I can’t take my class issues out on people and have friends.

I have learned to stop picking on Noah because I developed some enlightened self-interest in that department. I need to understand how other people fit into this. I feel like a complete failure because I am not yet good at understanding in the pit of my stomach how important each different piece of the puzzle is. I still don’t value the contributions that other people give sufficiently. I need to learn how to do that. I need to learn how to stop judging everyone for their ability to meet *my* needs. My needs are not the only important needs in the world.

I’m sorry I am such an asshole. Thank you for tolerating me. I’m really sorry it takes such effort.

Before you speak evaluate if what you want to say is: true, necessary, kind. If it isn’t all three it had better god damn need to be said. It has to be really fucking necessary if it isn’t kind. Mostly saying unkind things is just a way of kicking people. I have to stop kicking people verbally. I have stopped hitting people with my hands. I need to stop kicking them with my words.

End rape culture at the playground

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Sometimes I feel a little weird on park days. I make a conscious effort to always trudge out and rough house with the boys. Ok, I do miss some days when I’m being whiny and want to talk to grown ups. But I try to do at least a little rough housing every week.

I talk to all the little boys. They are getting used to me. I’m pretty different from their moms–that’s cool. We wrestle. Some new ones got brave yesterday and joined in. We had to negotiate. I talked about how breasts are really sensitive so be careful not to whack them and never grab a woman or girls breasts without permission. That’s a private area. But I did it with a smile on my face and a gentle voice and I went right back to wrestling and rolling around like puppies.

I think this is what really influences character. I feel like a lot of the rape culture ranting that yells at adult men about how terrible they are for the patriarchy is missing the point. I don’t want all of the adult men in my life to feel terrible and guilty for having a penis. That’s not what I’m interested in. That won’t make anyones life better.

One of my buddies in the home school group told me that she likes talking to me because I am very opinionated and very different from her but I’m not trying to convert her–I have no interest in having her be like me. So she gets to listen to things that are totally outside her experience and think about them without feeling pressured to change. I feel like that means I am doing exactly the right thing and I am tuning my message appropriately. Good.

I want to exist loudly in front of people. I want people to understand just how different from them the people around them actually are. I want it to be ok that I exist. I don’t need a whole bunch of mini-me’s running around. I’m not trying to become the dominant culture–I’m trying to be allowed to exist. I’m trying to stop feeling like I should die.

Playing with the little boys is part of this. I hug them. I will even kiss the top of their heads when they are being very affectionate (Err, this has only happened with boys I have known multiple years or who were under one year old I’m not incredibly creepy or anything.) I don’t kiss their faces. I don’t get into long embraces and I talk about body autonomy all the god damn time. I am very conspicuous about asking for hugs before I touch them. I model how I want to be treated. How else can they learn?

I have been seeing a lot of things on the internet advising parents to work on boundaries with their own kids–I agree with that message whole-heartedly. I just think it doesn’t go far enough. I don’t have responsibility just to and for my children. I need to talk to the kids at the park. I need to talk to talk to the kids in our neighborhood. I need to talk to all of the children who could be the ones my kids will sneak off and play sex games with.

I need for everyone to be playing by the same rules. No one but me is standing up to loudly announce the rules so I’m happy to do it. I go to the park and I don’t care if I know the kids or not I referee. I don’t micromanage or anything–I stay out of 80% of the arguing. But I intervene when they can’t share. I intervene when hitting starts. I intervene when someone is on the side-lines crying because they are too young to understand how to join the game.

I don’t favor my kids–Shanna is pretty bitter about that–because I care a lot about being neutral. I don’t pick sides. I model how to work things with words. I give lots of examples, “So you could say____ or ____ or ____ what feels closest to what you are actually feeling? Or something else entirely! I could be wrong.”

I tell them over and over that they own their body and they have the right to dictate how people treat it. I say that the other kids they are playing with are in the same spot. You can’t touch someone without consent. You have to ask. Don’t assume just because you are “friends” that it is ok to touch someone.

(My kid is not picking this up fast. Oy. Touchy thing.)

I’m trying very hard to create the idea that everyone has preferences and you must follow peoples preferences–which means asking questions.

One of the boys was playing with my belly jiggle yesterday. He said, “You have fat.” He was smiling and laughing and delighted by life. Clearly he didn’t see this as a problem. I bet his mom has done exactly the same thing to his belly.

I laughed and said, “I do! I do have fat! I looooooove fat. Mmmm tasty delicious fat! Fat! Fat! Faaaaaaaaaaaaaaat!!!!!!!” Then I grabbed him and rolled around on the ground with him. Other boys jumped on the pile, also laughing and started offering up types of fat:

“Like bacon?”

“Yes! Like bacon! And ice cream! MMMMMM”

Everyone was overjoyed.

A few minutes later after the crowd had dispersed one of the boys lingered and said, “I don’t think it was very nice of him to call you fat.”

My response was something close to: “Well he didn’t call me fat. He said I had fat and that is true. If he had said,” I deliberately made my voice all sneering and nasty, “‘Ewww you’re fat’ then I probably would have hurt feelings. Because he would be trying to make me feel bad about myself. But he wasn’t. He was just commenting on me. It’s like saying I have brown hair. I’m ok with him saying things that are true.”

He looked so confused. I’m sure he and his mom talk about me outside of actual interactions. Ha.

The reason going to the park is so “high spoons” for me is I believe with every fiber of my being that I am obliged to be nice to the kids. They are just learning and if I can seem positive and loving while I am giving instruction they will remember it and imprint on it more deeply. I am consciously didactically teaching children basically every time I am near them. It’s exhausting.

I think that’s what home schooling community is about. I think we are agreeing to teach one another’s kids. I realize not everyone feels the same way so I try not to say it too loudly. Ha. I’m not forcing them to memorize times tables or anything neurotic like that but I use group social outings as time to consciously work on the rules of society.

What the hell else are such times for? And if kids have to learn every rule completely on their own without adult help things turn all Lord of the Flies. Judicious adult intervention while mostly letting the kids direct and handle things is the optimal learning environment.

Studies god damn prove this.

It made me really happy when I commented to some of the moms that I was talking to their sons about boundaries and touching stuff she said that I’m going to teach sex ed when the kids are a little older. YES! Please! I’ve been training all my life. Ha. *beat head on wall*

The thing they don’t understand is I won’t be starting when the kids are older. I’m starting now. I’m starting when they are 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, ,9, 10, and 11 because that is how old the kids are in our group. I’m talking to all of them about touching and consent. There are slightly different explanation levels–I don’t talk to the three year olds about nerve endings. I say sensitive.

Sex is part of life because touching is part of life. If you want your kids to grow up to be healthy adults who are good at sex then they have to be good at touching–that is how things work. I understand that most parents feel kind of nauseated at the idea of their kids growing up to have sex but I have my eye on the end goal.

I want healthy adult children.

I have to teach my children and their peers about healthy touch if I want that to be the norm for their world. That means I have to be didactic. I have to choose to send on a message. I can’t just ignore things and let them slide or I don’t get to be upset when the culture isn’t what I want it to be.

Am I changing the world? If my little cohort of kids manages to grow up together and everyone gets a fresh healthy launch together to go out and feel like they are allowed to have the sex they want within the boundaries they choose then maybe I will have done something.

You don’t know what someone wants by looking at them. You only know what they want if you ask. If you have never asked what they want then you have no business having your hands on them.

If people believed that in the core of their being–how would the world be different?

There’s a first time for everything.

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NSFW.

A long time ago in a life I used to have I hit girls a lot. I don’t mean that I gave them playful slaps on the arms. I mean that I liked to make them scream and cry and beg me to stop. That’s kind of my thing. I don’t care how hard or how soft I have to hit you–we will be doing so until you beg me to stop.

That sounds pretty bad, right? I negotiate up front. I tell people what they are in for. I like to punch and slap and pinch and kick. I don’t like using instruments. I want to be in as much pain at the end of the scene as the person I am playing with. Ok, maybe not quite as much.

There was this one time. I was in the middle of my Cheers-period of attending the local fetish club. I went every Wednesday. I had been involved in the bdsm community for five or so years at that point. I had been broken up with my Owner for a while. I was hunting. I went out a lot.

So there was this one time I was there and a friend came. She was someone I had known for many years. We had been slaves together. We were both no longer with our former Owners. That’s complicated shit, yo. She had even been married to her Owner which is even more brutal.

One of the thing about the serialist nature of relationships in the bdsm community is there doesn’t look to be much room for depending on being interesting if for any reason you need to develop lots of limits. People with limits aren’t interesting. Newbies–fresh meat–are interesting because they say they want to try everything.

So when I saw this friend on that night we had a conversation. She and I had played a fair bit back and forth. I’m not sure that we ever crossed to what the vanilla’s would deem lesbian sex but I beat her, she beat me, her Daddy beat us both, my Owner tied us together (clothed because he’s into clothes) and “made us” kiss and wiggle for their entertainment. That sort of thing. We were friends, after all and isn’t that how friends behave?

She and I had a similar problem. We don’t safeword very well. Safewords are generally thought to be the way you signal “I’ve had too much and I need to stop.” We have both incurred physical damage because of play that has gotten too intense and we both have differently troubled psych histories. So we bond and all that. And when you bond and like someone you want to make them feel good. We were taught that the way we were supposed to make people feel good is through a mixture of pain and pleasure.

Culture is complicated.

So I don’t even know how things got started on that exact night. We didn’t play every time we saw one another–it was more sporadic than that. She mentioned that she was having trouble with her ongoing inability to safeword or something like that.

“Well… have you ever actually said “red” during a scene where that was a prearranged conditioned? Wait–no. Let’s back up. Have you ever said “no” to someone who was beating you?” (I have the background knowledge of knowing that she plays with the biggest, baddest, nastiest people in the community. Sure they are teddy bears on the inside and all that but they fuck people up.)

“Uhm… no.”

“Ok, we’ll start there. That’s what we are doing tonight. I am going to hit you until you tell me to stop.” Then I smiled and grabbed her by the hair and pulled her roughly into the play area. That was a very short negotiation. Usually I go on and on but I’ve played with her a lot and we had a history of experience to build on. I wouldn’t do that with her now. Even if it were permitted within the boundaries of my marriage I haven’t played with her in more than seven years. I don’t have the right any more. It worked then.

I slammed her really hard against the St. Andrew’s cross. I grabbed her shoulders and pulled her forward then repeatedly slammed her back again and again.

She kind of gasped and made thumping noises. Intermittently she giggled. We like to have us a good time.

I started in with light punches on her upper chest. I thought long and hard for maybe a minute about whether or not I should properly warm her up.

If you want to be nice to a masochist you start out with a series of light blows and you slowly wake the skin up and get their endorphins running. These hits don’t hurt. It’s just patting the skin. It’s a very kind gesture and all.

If you don’t want to be nice to a masochist (or if you want to be very nice to a masochist) you don’t bother and you hit them beyond their ability to read something as “strong sensation” and well into the realm of “holyfuckingshit that hurts” pretty much instantly. I may have even given ninety seconds of consideration before I started slapping her hard enough to leave large hand prints.

Upper arms, sides of hips, upper thighs inside and out/front and back, chest and breasts. Not as hard on the breasts. Cysts are bad things. Be gentle with breasts.

I didn’t even bother to take her clothes off. I wasn’t here to get her off–I’d do that somewhere other than a bar with random lookieloo’s. I was here to teach her a lesson. We all have to learn how to say no. There is a god damn first time for everything.

If you are cautious and want to extend the length of a scene then you give people time to breathe in between blows. You let them “process” the pain. Folks who are being hit usually appreciate a bit of time in between strikes. I didn’t really do that.

I beat her hard and fast. I switched off between slaps and punches. Sometimes I would pinch a section of muscle in my hand and pull her forward before slamming her back.

I could see her panic response rise.

The whole time I was doing it I was leaning in and yelling (the music was loud) as softly as I could into her face so no one nearby could hear (ha) what I wanted from her. I took her on a journey.

“It hurts, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Do you like it?”

“Yes.”

“Ok, then I’ll switch things up.” I do know what she likes after all. “Uhm, so are you still enjoying it?”

“Not so much ma’am, not so much.”

“Then we are finally getting somewhere!”

All of this probably only took about five minutes of hitting. I’m really mean when I want to be. In between taunting her I like to try and build her up. We had a lot of the conversation go more like:

“I think you are beautiful and I love you.” (She cries harder.)

“I think you are worth protecting. When you stop wanting this I want you to tell me to stop.” (She cries harder.)

“Please, please tell me to stop when you don’t want it any more. I don’t want to hurt you. I love you. I only want to do things to you that you want. Please please tell me when to stop. I love you. I love you.” (I beat her harder and she cries harder.)

At some point I have to back off because she is hyperventilating–I don’t want to kill her after all–and I just stand there holding her hands while she gets her breath settled down. Then she nods at me again and says the fucking hottest thing I’ve ever heard:

“I want more.”

I beat on her until my fists were bruised and mangled. The beating lasted something like forty five minutes. When I was done we were both sweaty sobbing balls on the floor.

I could see it coming. I wasn’t allowed to cry till the finish and I could feel my composure slipping and I could see her finally see that.

“Stop! Stop! Please stop.”

I grabbed her and hugged her and we fell to the floor and rocked each other and cried and cried. She thanked me and I thanked her.

When you are in a bar you can’t sit on the floor very long and “process” after your scene so we moved over to a booth. We didn’t talk we just held each other. There aren’t words sometimes.

When I think about missing bdsm what I think about is that feeling of transformation. Before that moment she had never said no. After that moment she had. If she does it once she can do it again.

I’ve learned how to say no. I have boundaries that I previously didn’t believe I was allowed to have. My life has changed.

Nothing is set in stone until you are dead. And even then the bastards keep re-writing history.

GAD sucks.

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I need to leave in forty-five minutes. Book club. We read Outlander by Diana Gabaldon. Woo! One of my favorites. I’m excited.

Then I will come home and get the girls and go to a fantasy faire. So like a Renaissance Faire (has anyone ever told these people that the Renaissance mostly took place in Italy?) but even more obviously based on people just liking the clothes. Fairy tales and princesses and pirates. It’ll be fun.

I ran. 5.85 miles in 80 minutes. I will be more enthusiastic at the race because I will be trying not to hold my friend back so I think it will be fine. *cross fingers*

My inadequacy is trying to drown me lately. Every playful jab feels like a slap in the face and a refresher of the idea that people don’t like me. People aren’t trying to hurt my feelings. I’m just over sensitive don’tyouknow? I don’t feel likable. I feel like the cracks about, “Wow. You’ve got some issues to work out” just don’t really seem necessary. I want to turn around and snap, “What’s your fucking point? Just because you don’t want to work hard that doesn’t mean you should fucking mock me for doing so.” (Err, we were weeding at an apple tree orchard. It was an off-hand comment. No one meant any harm. I shut my mouth and put my head down. I didn’t say a word.)

No one ever seems to mean their harm. So if you are harmed shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up.

I can see myself hiding in a lot of corners. I am worried about people being behind me. I feel unsafe. I feel like people are going to talk badly about me. I hate feeling like walking into a room is going to result in a rush of whispering as people talk shit about me. I understand that at this stage of life a lot of this is paranoia. But it isn’t all paranoia. I piss people off.

And they don’t ever have the fucking balls to talk to me about it. I hear about it through back channels and gossip. It insults the fucking shit out of me. It makes me feel much less happy about seeing people at all.

If everyone expects me to yell at them all the time I feel like there isn’t really a point in showing up. Obviously my company can’t be much of a pleasure. I’ll stay home and not inflict my unpleasant nature on anyone.

I’m sorry I exist.

I know I’m too loud. I know I’m too harsh. Why do you think I consciously identify as white trash? I’m explaining to you that I do not share your middle class values. I do not think I should be quiet. I do not think my household should be quiet as people tiptoe around trying to “not bother” anyone.

If someone is fucking bothered they either need to god damn deal with it or not snidely fucking imply that I should fucking share their culture. I don’t. I don’t know your fucking culture and I couldn’t fucking conform to it if I wanted to. I don’t have the instincts. I will never have the instincts. I don’t want them.

I don’t want to be like you.

It’s not because I think there is something in particular wrong with you. You are fine and all. But I can’t be you. If I tried to be like you I would have to sit down and consciously think all the time about how I had to behave. I would have to work really hard for months or years on learning to modulate my voice–all activities you did in your culture in the first five years or so of your life.

I learned that I had to yell or I would be hurt really badly. I learned that I had to make some fucking noise. I have to be obnoxious and pushy and difficult and demanding. I have to or I will die. That is what I learned.

It’s interesting as I study child development and as I watch my kids and as I think about my own life.

I won’t ever be like you–whoever you are. I can’t. I don’t have your culture. That has to be ok. It has to be. I can’t change it.

fast check in

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I called to schedule physical therapy two days after the rec expired. I’m so slick. I emailed my doctor. I sent out at least ten other scheduling emails. I’m booked until June unless people want to come visit while I do yard work. Or come to dinner. That’s ok. But I think I have my leaving-the-house-plans.

I don’t believe I deserve a community. But it seems to me like people look around and see that they could form community with me or have less community so maybe I’m tolerable. I’ll take it.

I know I’m volatile. I try to keep most of it online. (Except for when I show up at the park and someones kid is on top of my car in under two minutes. Then I yell.)

I have been talking to Shanna about the locking food up issue. I am having intense internal conflict around this. I haven’t installed the locks yet. In a basic moral way it offends me. But I’m afraid that if I don’t put locks on the cabinet I am going to lose it and slap her in the face one of these times. That seems like a non-acceptable possibility. Locks seem so much better compared to that. My control is not perfect and is not endless.

I know they’ll grow up. This stage has ups and downs. They all do. The locks aren’t permanent. Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.

My ego: wanna stroke it?

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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.

Dear anonymous person on the internet,

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You challenged me on Twitter. You told me that Occupy was dead and why should you care about some guy being tortured by the Police in Maine–it’s not your government.

Given that we live in a country where part of our civil war was based on the fact that some states were engaging in inappropriate activity and other states decided to stop them… I can’t imagine not feeling like part of the United States. Maine matters to me like California matters to other people.

Do you think that everyone else in the country watched the Rodney King riots and thought, “Good thing it isn’t my government doing this to someone.” Whoa. I can’t understand that thought. The militarization of the domestic police force is of enormous national concern. It quite literally keeps me up at night. How the police act in one city influences how they feel it acceptable to act in all other cities.

I have been thinking for days about how to talk about this subject. I have a strong tendency towards tl;dr so I’ve been struggling to find a pithy argument. It is quite frustrating that someone on the internet argues with me and demands a counter argument but I can’t count on someone to read more than three or four hundred words. That’s not an argument it is an exchange of theme songs.

For me, not caring about the police in Maine is like someone in Germany not caring about the first few train loads of Jews being abducted. I understand that I just lost this argument based on Godwin’s law. I spend my life living as if I am one of the first ones called. I can’t afford to think that the first few groups of people the police harass are acceptable collateral damage. My life won’t let me think of any situation like that.

I have had extremely damaging run-ins with police in my life. White trash whores are not really respected by local police forces–they decided who and what I was before I hit puberty. They were not interested in protecting me from rape or sexual assault from childhood. I live enmeshed in rape culture in a way that very few people can understand because very few people have more rapists than fingers.

I believe that a boy being tortured by the police in Maine matters because I have to believe that I would matter in his place. That it wouldn’t be ok for them to do it to me. I live in a time and a place where I can not have the hubris of saying, “Oh it wouldn’t happen to me so it is ok that they do it to someone else.” If they were going to do it to someone they just might do it to me. It wouldn’t be the first time I have had my rights taken away and I’ve been strapped down by government forces.

I understand that my life experiences are unique and unusual. My opinion intensified by one hundred after having children.

My then three year old marched with the Port Shutdown in Oakland. She remembers Occupy. We talk about it. I was one of the first people at the General Strike port shut down. I watched the thousands of people stream into the port. I watched what happens when people say, “It doesn’t matter that you say this doesn’t effect me and I should shut up–I have a voice and you can not silence me.”

I hear that Occupy is dead. I do not believe this. I believe that Occupy lives in the heart of every person who will not be silenced. This summer I will be painting a mural on a neighborhood fence because some kids keep putting graffiti on it. The elderly lady who owns the property is not up to maintaining a fence free of graffiti. I’m going to use neighborhood children to help me paint.

Occupy is not just about living in tents and existing to annoy city hall. Occupy is about seeing something in your community and trying to fix it. Maybe I would feel less personally connected to the boy in Portland Maine if I had not just mapped out how I would drive there a week before seeing this video clip. I was specifically planning on going to that city. In my country. In my car with my kids. How could I not feel like what happens to him matters to me?

Why should you care? I haven’t been able to figure out how to convince you. I ask that you be polite about my belief. I should get angry when the government tortures people because it is wrong. That is just how the world should work in my head. Ok, that’s as pithy as I can manage. You see why I didn’t respond on Twitter.

Now I understand “fuck cancer”

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For most of my life I have been kind of confused by the “fuck cancer” emphasis people have. They seem to be more upset by it than other kinds of death. I’m a death-is-death-how-doesn’t-matter person. Only in the past couple of weeks Kate Bornstein (who is one of the most important voices in gender deconstruction) has had a crowd source fundraising effort because she has cancer–we need her. She has the courage to speak about things that must be spoken about. She is really important.

And another person I know has 6, 4, and 2 year old children. Kate is very likely to survive. She has a very survivable kind of cancer and now the outpouring of love and money she will need to fight for life. His survival chances are in the single digits.

I can’t stop weeping. I “know” my grandmother died from cancer. I don’t know what kind–not breast cancer. I know that much.

The kind of knowing I want my children to have for me is something that cannot come until they are adults and putting it all together in retrospect. I think that I all of a sudden just received a catapulted stone of fear in my belly. How will his children know him?

He told me just before he found the lump that I had inspired him to start marathon training. That process was more or less how the lump started bothering him. That’s why they found this. I told him to start making videos for his kids. One for each birthday up until they are 25 or 30. They need to know you and get the advice you would give them.

Shanna was asking me about parents yesterday. Kind of the standard kid question kinds of things: do only Mommies take care of babies? Oh dear goodness I hope not or a lot of kids would starve to death. I told her that some babies have only one mommy or only one daddy and some babies have a mommy and a mommy (or mama) and some babies have two daddies and some babies have more than two parents of any possible gender consideration. What matters to a baby is that consistent grown ups hold and care for and love the baby. That is all that is needed to make a parent. Not biology. Not anything else. I said that babies are designed to fall in love with the grown ups who care for them because that is how the baby will ensure survival. Mutual love with a grown up means the grown up becomes invested and puts a lot of time and energy towards the baby.

She said, “So it doesn’t matter if it is a boy or a girl?” I asked her how many times it has mattered whether I have a penis or a vulva while I change diapers. I asked her if she thinks our female friend K is too stupid to figure out how to clean her son’s penis. Shanna laughed. I asked her if her father has ever had trouble wiping her butt. She confirmed that he is a poop wiping expert. I said, “Anuses are universal.”

She asked if girls are supposed to stay home with their babies. The timing on this conversation was just hilarious considering what I have been reading on the internet lately. I said girls are supposed to do the things that make them happy. By being happy in front of their kids they are teaching their kids the right way to live. For some mothers this means staying home and for some mothers this means working outside the home for a company. All mothers work. All mothers do a back breaking amount of work. If a mother has an outside job then the children can either stay with dad (I cited families we know) or if both parents work day care of some kind can be arranged (I explained several different examples we know).

Every family looks different because every family is made up of different people. Different people are made happy by different things. That is what makes life beautiful. If everyone was exactly the same life would be really crappy. Every person is on a completely individualized path through life.

I said that different people have different advantages. I talked to her about money. I talked to her about how some people have large extensive families and that is a different very important kind of support. It gives different life options. For example: single parenting is a very different experience if you are rich than if you are poor. Single parenting is a very different experience if you have a large and involved family than if you have no family support. I went on and on. She asked more questions. It kept going.

I tell my children frequently that while they are children they have a few specific jobs they have to work on. Their primary job is to play with the world. The process of play and exploration is the primary thing that children should be focused on. After that you have to learn how to have relationships with people; you have to learn how to be considerate. But the third thing is: with great privilege comes great responsibility. I tell my children explicitly that they are part of the most privileged cohort that has ever been born. They have more access to information and the ability to learn than any person has ever had at any point in history. And my kids have free access to it all day every day because they are not locked in an institutionalized setting following some bullshit agenda that is the resort of so much compromise nothing real is taught. I expect them to take learning seriously.

I talk about how the world is changing and there are a lot of people in the world who do not have access to information. There are a lot of big problems to be solved. People will have to be exceptionally able to synthesize large amounts of data in order to solve these problems. People will have to learn a bunch of cross-disciplines in order to solve these problems. The only way is to start young and take it seriously. Learn.

I tell my kids that I want them to grow up and be fierce and sure of their opinions. They should not believe they are “always right” because that is hubris–no one is always right. But listen to Davey Crockett: Be sure you’re right and go ahead. Plan at leisure; act with haste. If you hesitate then some someone less qualified will speak first and set the plan. That’s really not a great situation. If you can’t find a way; make a way. You will make mistakes or you will never learn and grow. You must make big mistakes. That is part of life.

Even if I get upset with you over a mistake I will get over it. I love you more than I love breathing. More than I love any thing in the whole world. I will get angry with you. I will shout at you. I will never hit you. I will always love you.

Thinking about cancer makes me feel so very afraid of my children not knowing me. Shanna proudly informed me that she was going to grow up and be a bad ass just like me. I laughed. I told her that would make me very happy. I want to see that. I want to see what she is going to be like. I want to know her. I want that so fucking much.

Getting to see what Shanna will do in the world will be my entertainment and reward for still being alive.

And that’s before I even get to Calli. Calli is a born engineer. She is going to need to have a woman behind her saying, “You can do it” for a great many steps in her life. She is going to live in a “man’s world”. Hell she already wants to be Diego–not Dora. Not Alicia. She’s Diego. She’s the god damn main character who rescues everyone.

They need me. It is so clear. Like my friend’s children need him. And I start weeping again and I understand fuck cancer.

There is no right. There is no should. There is no deserve in this life. There just is.

On April 1st it will be the birthday of one of the awesomest women I know. I’m sorry I won’t be in Portland with her. That would have been wonderful.

In other news I am exchanging books with a friend who is also a writer on April 1st. We are essentially work-shopping one another’s books. You know, a real forking editing job. I’m ridiculously excited. I want No Secrets to be finished and I have stalled. It has been almost a year and a half since I wrote it and it still isn’t in paper. Erf.

In September Noah is officially off the leash and he gets to start being a mostly absentee father/husband while he works on whatever he wants to work on. I’m thinking about treating July like my own personal NaNoWriMo. I want to write Outrunning Suicide before I have a hard time negotiating for time. A lot of the shape of it is working itself out in my head. Stylistically it will not resemble No Secrets. That’s for the best. I’ve been reading reviews of writers differently lately. “What will they bitch about with my content–repetitiveness. I can’t just tell the same stories. Hm. Interesting.”

Sometimes it is kind of convenient that I have been through such a ridiculous variety of kinds of extreme trauma. I always have another fucking story. Ha.

A few times lately I have thought about my mother. I’ve thought about what will happen when Shanna is eighteen. Shanna might want to meet my family. She will be allowed to. I’ll drive her to the house and wait at the bottom of the hill for her. She doesn’t have to share my views on them. She didn’t make my bed; I did.

Shanna asked me if I loved my mommy when I was a little girl. I told her that when I was a little girl I thought my mommy was the best thing in the whole universe. I loved her with my whole heart. She was my sun and my moon. Shanna then pointed out that I don’t feel that way now. I said, “No. I don’t. You will have different opinions when you are in your thirties than you have right now too.” She looked thoughtful.

It is really hard giving space for beliefs that are not your own. If I break the incest chain in my family I have absolutely done a measurable good in the world. I just found a biography from someone in the middle of a six generation chain. My stomach hurts too much to read it right now. At some point in the not-too-distant future I will have read everything easily findable on this topic. That’s a little weird to know. It makes me want to create more data.

Life goals:

I want to deepen and broaden the scope of information known about incestuous families. At some point I will figure out a measurable goal around this topic. I don’t have it yet.

I want to live outside my country of origin for a minimum of five years, preferably in one year chunks. I’ll get homesick bad.

I want to see what Noah can do. He has really impressed me so far. I want to see what he and I can do together.

You outrun suicide by giving yourself full permission to do it, but you keep moving the goal posts. “Ok I can do it. But first I have to do…” It’s on the to do list. But a lot of other things are going to happen first.

I want my children to be adults and to be able to say, “Yeah. I agree. It’s time. I love you. Do what is right for you.” Maybe I will have to move to Oregon once I hit 70. When I get there I will get to be near a friend of mine. She is partnered with one of the people who pushed that law through. I feel so grateful that I get to know people who change the world. They give me the courage to keep trying.

Holy fuck. I just had a thought. What age level is Outrunning Suicide aimed at? If I want a lot of people to be able to read it I have to think about that. My writing is rather obtuse most of the time. Well that will take some thought.

When I was a child there were very few periods of time when I didn’t want to die. I stayed alive mostly because I was too depressed to be expeditious. I didn’t know anything other than pain. I was not permitted to act like I was in pain. That was rude.

My life is different now. I didn’t understand what a life free from pain was. It was a myth. I wouldn’t say that I am exactly pain free at this point but I am probably at the lowest level of pain and the highest level of joy I have ever had. These are the best days of my life. And I know it while I am living them.

I keep wandering in my head to a Madeleine L’Engle book A Wind in the Door. The mitochondria are in trouble! The farandolae aren’t deepening! I just read Collapse by Jared Diamond. Help! The planet is in trouble! The humans aren’t deepening!

I don’t know. Lots of feelings. Today I don’t want to die. And I weep at the loss of a great mind. I hope he doesn’t read this. My grief is not his problem. I’m glad his wife has a very supportive family. I’m glad they live near her family and not his. I am so sorry it is happening.

I’ve read tragedies for years. I’ve taught units on tragedy. I never really got it before. I’ve never been deep enough into a community to really understand what the loss of a person means before.

He’s going to fight. He’s that kind of guy. My grief is entirely premature and I need to stfu. But this is where I feel.

I have spent most of my life believing very firmly that for me cancer was one of the goalposts. I wouldn’t fight. I would go quietly into the dark night because I’m not interested in more suffering.

Life is pain, highness. Anyone who tells you different is selling something.

Now I don’t know. When I think about the things I want to do. When I think about not seeing my daughters grow up to be fierce and bad ass? (She-Ra is pretty bad ass is a frequent comment around our house. I said it once. Oy.)

There is no right. There is no should. There is no deserve. There is only what is. And what you go do with it. We live in a time of practically preternatural access to science. If you have money. If you want to fight something bad enough we live in a time of honest-to-goodness miracles.

How much do I want to see my daughters at thirty? Forty? Fifty? Sixty? What will they do with their lives? I want to know so very badly. I am curious. I want to know. I want to see what this being I have unleashed on the world will do.

Somehow I don’t envision her walking onto the family compound at eighteen and not coming back. It’s thirteen years away. She’ll be able to evaluate people on her own at that point. She will have had a lot of practice with a lot of different kinds of people. She will be able to read people well. My family isn’t subtle. Even if she does want to get to know them–and why not, they are interesting people–she won’t want to stay.

She will have shit to do. My family has nothing to do but be unhappy. They will sit in one place doing that until they die. I don’t understand why. It’s like a clock that has run down. Poverty, physical health, mental health, and a kind of apathy I don’t understand. An anger about entitlement and responsibility I don’t understand.

I have had such a ridiculous amount of privilege. I’m only starting to understand the shape of it.

I have had the privilege of being able to set the goal post of “I’ll kill myself if” pretty low but I’ve been healthy enough to always meet a really ableist centric attitude. I have been able to be an asshole about independence. I’ve also had a guaranteed income for most of my adult life. I’ve been financially stable without having to have a job. That’s so fucking ridiculous.

I have no safety net though. I don’t have Bank of Mom and Dad. I don’t have emergency reserves beyond those I create. For most of my adult life I was inches above the poverty line living in one of the most expensive places in the world. I have never come close to bankruptcy and my credit score is ridiculous. I did that with a lot of seed capitol. I feel like an asshole for being glad that pit bull attacked me. It made the whole rest of my life better.

Perspective if everything.

I’ve been thinking about my mom. I have been specifically thinking, “I forgive you. I hope you forgive me.” If my kids ever go and meet her I hope my mom understands why I kept them away. My kids will be different. They will not have broken spirits. I hope she will be able to see that and be glad. I hope she will forgive me. I hope she understands wanting to keep your kids safe.

I hope she will forgive me.

I hope she will still be alive so that she will be able to meet my kids some day. I hope my kids want to talk to her a lot for a while. I bet she won’t live long after that but she will die happier than she has been in a long time. They will be like her. They will be able to ask her questions about things she has had great skill at doing. They will think she is an interesting person.

It’s kind of a weird balance. I have to tell the truth to my children. The truth is that no one is all bad. Everyone has good parts. The thing about life is learning how to find the good that balances the bad and evaluating if the value is high enough. In most families people decide that the kin alliance is worth putting up with the bad. That’s normal and right.

When my kids are adults they will not be children who are easy to mold. They will not be instructed in how sex is natural and fine between family members as long as you don’t breed because it is only in breeding too close to the line that you develop problems.

I hope that when my daughters are eighteen they will have the ovaries to say to a biological family member who solicits sexual contact, “You are a disgusting piece of shit and I hope you rot in hell.” Because yeah. That’s the reaction you should have to incest.

But I don’t think my family would dare at that point. And if everyone keeps their britches on, it’s fine… right? Oh fuck. *beat head on wall* Wait. I’m not supposed to do that any more.

Maybe I should get dressed and run. That would be all healthful and crap.

I want to live. I have stuff to do. I’m scared. Fuck cancer. I can’t be strong enough to outrun it. No one can. It just happens. Am I going to instantly stop smoking so I can lessen my risk of lung cancer? No. I wouldn’t be a nice person. (Vaporizer is still impact on the lungs. My lungs will tell you.)

On the way I will eat more Easter candy. My body says: “Hey, I know-instead of crying: sugar rush and endorphins!” Is this ideal? Nope. We recognize two candy-holidays a year in this house. Otherwise I would get in a long of trouble. I didn’t eat candy like this when I was a kid. It’s kind of weird.

Ok, run.

therapist and motherhood

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I sent my therapist an email and she predictably responded with horror. “Oh shit, I made you feel how?! Oh no!” (To be clear I said, “I am not saying it is ‘all your fault’ I am saying this approach isn’t working for me.”) We will talk on the phone this afternoon. EMDR is just going to be stopped indefinitely.

Yesterday I had one of those weird days where I understand that becoming a mother is the first time in my life I genuinely feel “in the club” and no one can kick me out. Even if someone else doesn’t think I’m doing it “good enough” I’m a mother. I’m not a dancer because whenever I go to dance events I have to listen to assholes tell me how not-good I am. Fine. I’m just not a dancer then.

Motherhood is different. It’s better. There isn’t a set yard stick. It was kind of fun to get into the debates that rage so fiercely in that world. I tried hard to say that all choices are fine. Do what makes sense to your life circumstances.

The path I am choosing through parenthood involves as few extra steps on my part as possible. No, I am not going to puree your food. It’s food. Eat it. No I am not going to go buy you a special “kid proof” cup. Here is a cup. Use it. No I am not going to deal with having to come help you five times during the night while you are somewhere else–I’ll just sleep with you. I’m lazy. Let’s be clear that I don’t think these are moral choices. This is about parental choices and personalities. We’re all different. That’s cool. I can see the advantages of other choices–but they come with work/expense I don’t want. *shrug*

Someone with a harsh background said she was about to start therapy for the first time. I gave her a rather long lecture on how she needs to prepare herself for working on issues. If you don’t show up in therapy with a specific agenda it will probably be a waste of your time. The therapist doesn’t know you or what you need to work on. You need to decide. I talked about EMDR and CBT and more general talk therapy models. What will help you?

Meds aren’t the answer. You need to change your life. Meds can be a crutch to get you through a hard transition– but if you want to make lasting happiness happen in your life you need to go through a pretty major transition. Obviously what you are doing isn’t working.

I say that with no judgment. It’s hard to make the changes one needs. I do understand that.

I’m glad I told my therapist how bad EMDR is making my life. That was the right choice. It’s hard for me to confront people who feel like they are “in charge” and tell them they are wrong. I have a very fearful approach to hierarchy. I am evasive then belligerent. I’m working on it.

I know that I don’t have “good reasons” to be suicidal at this point. I get to wake up every day surrounded by an intensity of love many people never get to experience. I am one of the luckiest bitches on the planet. This is “mental illness”. It’s not about what is logically happening to me right now. My brain is broken. My brain believes that I should always be afraid. That I should always expect people to be nice to me at first so that I will trust them so they can hurt me much much much more very soon. For me to stop believing this would be for me to stop believing that my life experience has any validity at all. I’m in kind of a bind.

I have genuinely had a life where most people are unsafe and dangerous to me. Their apathy towards what is going on in my life has caused me to endure outrageous trauma. Because no one wanted to get involved. Because no one wanted to look. Because it wasn’t their problem. For me to actually believe that I am safe and people will help protect me or that my life will be better would be the same as me deciding that there is a whole human race on Mars and we just haven’t met them yet.

I will have to make up that belief despite having no solid reason to believe in it. Shit, I’d rather believe in an omnipotent G-d and I don’t see that happening.

But motherhood is this weird club. They aren’t my “friends” but they clearly respect me and listen to me in a way I’ve never experienced before. It’s fucking weird.

Living in one place is weird.

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I went for a run yesterday. It was a very interrupted run. First a guy stopped me to flirt with me. (That was weird. But he was quite hot so I wasn’t upset.) I ran from that conversation (because I was on a run not because I was scared) playing with my wedding ring. “Soooooo married. Not available. Not hunting. I SWEAR.”

Then I went to the ATM. That adds a lot of minutes to my run time. Then I ended up in several long conversations with other neighbors. One saw me out and about. “Hey! We haven’t seen you in a while! I thought you were mad at me!” Clearly by the facial expression this is something he has experienced severe anxiety about. Whoa. No. I just hibernate in winter. Since we live near one another we should talk about it so that next year you don’t feel upset again.

Another neighbor said he knows the lady with the fence I want to paint on well. He is going to walk over and talk to her with me today so that I look less like a random crazy nut. That project idea might actually work out. I’m pretty excited.

The neighbor who will help me ask about the fence also spent a long time telling me stories yesterday. About WWII and about growing up on a subsistance farm going to a one room school house. I told him that I should come over with a tape recorder so I can transcribe his stories. They shouldn’t be lost to the world and he’s getting really old and worrying about his mortality. I get the impression he is already much older than he expected to get. He’s looking forward to dying.

It’s really weird being as “out” as I am. It’s weird having my late 70-something neighbor say, “So, what do you write? Novels?” Err, no. “So it’s a journal?” “Well I do that too but that’s not exactly what the book was. The book is about incest and rape. I have to process all that happened to me when I was a child. When I talk to women like me they say that you either have to get this processing over with in your 30’s or it will haunt you in your 60’s. I don’t want to be haunted forever. I want to do my work and move on.”

His expression was uhm incredulous? Shocked? Horrified? “If you have things like that you need to work on then yes this is a good time to work on them. Wait. You are in your 30’s? Oh good grief.”

So the incest part was sorta skimmed over but the fact that I am only 31 blew his mind. People are funny.

One of the reasons that believing you are unliked is a problem is because it leads you to treat people dismissively. If you assume that you don’t matter to people then one is rarely considerate. One becomes considerate about ones own impact after one has learned what that impact is.

These guys like seeing me. We aren’t big parts of one another’s lives but they feel sad when I don’t come by. That’s… kind of weird. Oh. How did I become a fixture in your life? How did I become something that you kind of depend on? I don’t know how to manage that. I manage my relationships by ensuring that no one depends on me to “just show up” because often I can’t. That’s the thing about just living near someone. Relationships work out randomly. You get what you get.

So far there are approximately thirty walking kids invited to my house for Easter. Let’s see how this goes. There are more babies invited as well but I don’t count them in my egg number. Right now I have five eggs per kid. I’m sure I will turn up with a few more eggs for hiding. How did we come to know so many kids? Wow. And I did *not* just invite the whole home schooling group. I invited everyone I could think of off the top of my head. Which means I probably missed some people and I will hurt some feelings. I swear to goodness I was trying to just do a sweep of kid-having people. Yes, some of you won’t come. Well sheesh for being Jewish and having relatives in a different state. It means people aren’t at my beck and call. What’s up with that? I’m kidding. You are invited because if you are available I want to see you. Not being available isn’t my business.

This is our fourth Easter egg hunt. Whoa. My yards are way cooler this year than they have ever been before. I will have a lot of fun with the hunt. The party will be anxiety city (This is a remarkably diverse group of people I have invited. Ahem.) but watching the kids will be fun. I just have to pray that none of the parents end up hating me for knowing such a diverse group of people. Ha. Some of the people from the home schooling group I don’t know well yet. Who knows what might offend them. Oh well.

The neighbor with the cool story has lived in his house since 1973. Before Noah or I were born. I want my house to look very different after I have lived in it for forty years. It won’t be a boring tract house with a plain lawn. No thanks. Not my style. I can’t afford to go buy a house that is as interesting as I would want. So I’ll build it. Good thing I’m handy and have time to spare.

I have been having fun lately with revealing things I’m good at. People are surprised. Why is it so fucking surprising that I am good with power tools? Freakin sexist men. “Wow. You finished your garage?” Yes. I had help from someone bigger and stronger than me (read: an AWESOME guy) because I simply can’t lift drywall over my head like that but I did a lot of the work, yes. It’s not rocket science. (For the record: I know rocket scientists. If I felt like it I could totally learn what they know. They aren’t intimidating any more once you talk to them for a few minutes.) Then I did the painting. A few friends helped with painting the ceiling. I look up and see clouds and smile and think of those friends. Even though he doesn’t like me any more.

I had a terrible dream about P!nk getting in a car accident. I almost never dream so this bothered me a lot. I think I worry about her kid not getting to grow up with her. I don’t know why I personalize it but I do.

It’s fun trying to figure out how I am going to live here and take up space here. I don’t know what I will be when I grow up yet. But I will be quite distinctive. I know that much.

Suicidal ideation

4 Replies

I love getting eight hours of sleep by 3am. It makes my whole day better. It makes my whole life better. Then I am more cheerful and enthusiastic about what I have to do. I consider it the first thing I must do in a day in order to have a good day. The second thing I must do in order to have a good day is get more than 75% of my chores done by 9am. I have a thing in my head.

I participate in a variety of online support groups–or rather I have over the years, not so much at this second–and it has been a fairly big thing for me over the past ten years “I am more productive by 9am than a great many people are all day.” It’s a thing in my head. I work very hard on it. That way I feel I have the freedom to do with the rest of the day as I please.

Pretty much every online support group has strict rules about talking about suicide. Really, pretty much everyone everywhere believes it isn’t ok to talk about–especially if you are seriously thinking about it.

My furnace dries out the air terribly. I’ve spent all winter coughing and hacking and feeling unhappy about it since I moved into this house. Now my kids join me. So they’ve been waking up a lot at night. It means I have a lot of time in the middle of the night to think about them and to think about suicide and for me to think about what happiness means.

There are a lot of parenting books on the market that will tell you that you are bad bad doomed if you have children because you want to give yourself a reason to live. BAD. DON’T DO THAT! That’s what the books say.

To that I say: becoming a parent is always a selfish decision. Why is my selfish decision worse than yours? I have promised myself and my kids that I will absolutely not kill myself until they are adults because they require care and I am the one who has to give it. I have to say that it gets easier by the year. I’m learning what happiness feels like.

I know a lot of people who work very hard to ensure that they don’t have to “deal with” their kids in the middle of the night. Gosh that is my favorite time. I love feeling like my mere presence keeps the monsters at bay. Because I do. In Calli’s mind and in Shanna’s mind if I am in the room then they are safe and life is good. That’s just the end of the debate.

That feeling is better than every drug I have ever taken and I’ve tried a really lot of drugs. A lot. A really lot. Ha. But I did the vast majority of my drug taking (other than this stoner thing) in under two years after I was a college graduate. Let me get on my pulpit for a second to lecture anyone younger than me about how you should wait until your brain is done forming before you use drugs. Wait until your brain decides which connections it wants before you break sections. Just do. I’m serious. You have a long fucking life in front of you. You don’t need to try everything in the first twenty years. Good grief.

I have never believed that I had a long life ahead of me. I have wanted to die since I was seven years old. For the past twenty-four years I have wanted to be dead more than I have wanted to be alive. Well, I would say that the percentages kind of rock back and forth staying in the 40’s and 50’s. I wanted to die a lot and I didn’t want to live very much but actually killing yourself is harder than it looks sometimes. I did not overdose as a teenager as a cry for help. I simply vomited up the drugs and was found before I could finish dying. Different.

Now I’m really glad I’m not dead. I feel like getting to sleep with my little girls, with their faces pressed to mine as they mumble over and over while falling asleep, “Mommy love you so much. So much. Sooooooooo much” this is the reason that people live. This feeling of love and happiness. This is why people stay alive. The hope of this. The belief that some day they will get to have this feeling. This is the increased joy that parents have that non-parents don’t get. That is one of those things they find in studies. Over a lifetime parents have more joy than non-parents–a shitload more stress too… but it’s worth it.

I never thought I would actually experience having someone love me like this. I believed this would always be for someone else. I’m very concerned that I not alienate my children… ever. I have to behave appropriately in order to deserve a relationship with them. But I’m not very good at acting appropriately.

Sometimes I feel like the biggest fucking hypocrite in the world when I get mad at my kids for breaking rules. Ha.

I told Shanna, about the stealing candy thing, it is my job to teach you the rules of society. I get angry because I feel afraid. If you steal as an adult there are serious consequences. I have to teach you that it is not a good thing to steal or the rest of your life will be harder and you will have a lot of very unpleasant experiences. I don’t want you to suffer. How can we work on you not doing this? I told her that I really don’t know “how this should be taught” because when I was a child the way I was taught was to be hit. I don’t want to hit her and I’m not really sure what the other options are and I feel kind of overwhelmed sometimes as I try to deal with it. I’m sorry I scream so much. I know it is annoying or scary depending on the day.

I asked her if she knew that how much I love her is completely unaffected by whether or not she perfectly follows the rules. I do not perfectly follow the rules and I hope she will always love me. She told me that somewhere else there are kids who always do exactly what their mothers say and they never break rules. I laughed and said those must be the most boring, uncurious children on the planet and how sad for their mothers’. She looked very confused.

I have not thought about killing myself in a bit. Certainly weeks. But I was asked to reaffirm that I understand and will follow the rules of forums and I WILL NEVER POST THAT I AM FEELING SUICIDAL. Thus I am thinking about the concept though I am not experiencing it. I have felt shamed and bad for being suicidal for pretty much my entire life. I’m aware that people are uncomfortable with the fact that I feel this way and their discomfort is the most important thing here.

Talking about it, or not, has not even slightly increased my self-harming behaviors. Over time my self-harming behaviors have kind of melted away. I’m not hurting myself anymore, I’m really not. It was a process I had to go through. I had to be whiny and angsty and I had to really process how much I wanted to die. This process is simply part of being alive for me. I understand that other people don’t like it. I feel very uncomfortable about being told over and over and over and over that because I make other people feel uncomfortable when I talk about it I shouldn’t talk about it.

Well, how much do you enjoy being surprised by someone offing themself? Wouldn’t you have preferred a warning? Dude, seriously.

P!nk has a song on her new album about drinking and doing drugs and running away and I feel suicide is strongly implied. I really appreciate it when people admit in public that this struggle is part of their life. The song is The Great Escape and I listen to it a lot right now. I’ve been thinking about how I understand this whole “creation of something new” thing now that I didn’t understand before. I have a family now. I have never had one before. Oh wow. This is how they are supposed to look? I’ve been thinking about having something to live for.

It’s really interesting watching how the percentages change. Feeling suicidal vs. wanting to live. That’s a ratio I’ve been actively tracking for most of my life. I have visualized it a lot of different ways over time. These days I think wanting to die falls into the teens. I’m very happy about that. That’s a ridiculous amount of progress for me.

But I’m not supposed to talk about it. I’m not supposed to be graphic about my ongoing struggles to not kill myself. Someone else might feel uncomfortable. Welcome to my sandbox, motherfucker. Here the rules are that I get to talk about whatever gets me through the night. If I am sitting here and writing something then I am not cutting. I am not hitting my body against a large blunt object. I am not soliciting some piece of shit to hurt me. I am not offering up sex to people I don’t know just to get through the night without having to be alone.

I’m not alone. I really love that my kids need me in the middle of the night because I need them in the middle of the night. I need to feel love in the middle of the night. I need to feel wanted. I need to feel like it matters that I not die.

The passion and the pain are going to keep you alive someday. I honestly don’t know how someone in my position would work through this without children. I can understand putting off the decision to die because you still have things you want to do–that is more or less the path I was on pre-kids. I made deals with myself, “I want to do ____. ____. and ____ then it doesn’t matter.” I was very selfish and random about the deals over the years and that’s ok. It was a deal with me about how much pain I have to endure.

That’s the plain and simple reality behind my suicidal ideation. Do I or don’t I get to decide how much pain I have to be in? Am I or am I not in charge of this decision? I think this is where I make the jump to atheism entirely.

I want to be the one who decides when my pain ends. I hold that right. I consider it one of my basic rights. Other animals do the same thing. It is natural just like infanticide is natural. It exists in every species. In America there are approximately thirty seven children killed by their parents every week. You don’t see headlines very often. Every fucking week.

Parenting is hard but I fucking guarantee you that no part of this journey has been remotely as difficult as what came before it so I’m still coasting. My second labor was nine days long followed by a blood hemorrhage that left me unable to walk to the bathroom for weeks. I crawled. Otherwise I simply did not leave my bed. But my friend K delivered enough food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for three weeks. It was a calm but peaceful period. I learned my baby. I didn’t mind the work. It was nice.

Life is about work. Life is about creating and the things you want to do. I freakin love Richard Scarry. Everyone is a worker. All the work must be done. Some of the work is not more honorable than anything else. There is a hierarchy in pay–that tends to exist because some jobs can be done by many people and some jobs can be done by smaller and smaller groups of people and when you have to compete for the talents of a small group… you have to pay a lot of money.

You have to think about those people. The ones who are so selfish. Wait… that’s my husband. He has spent our entire marriage working his ass off to increase his income. Isn’t that selfish? He didn’t do it until he had a reason to. He didn’t care enough to bother. He wasn’t driven by love of acquisition on its own. But now he has this wife with really expensive travel interests and uhm he has decided that he wants to provide for me. He knew that was who I wanted to be before we married.

He doesn’t want me to spend time wanting to die. He wants me to have a list of things I want to do that is really long and complex and it’s ok if it is also expensive–he knows I am overall frugal and I am providing for our long-term safety before I take travel money out. It’s cool. He told me so. Explicitly. He reminds me every few months. It’s weird but really cool. I appreciate how explicitly my husband wants me to be happy.

He wants to keep me. He thinks that the likelihood is higher if I have a sandbox where I can say whatever I want and not get kicked off a support forum for it. He gives me resources I don’t have to have in my head.

I feel like both of us really changed when we got married. We have someone to work for and that is a powerful motivator for both of us. It has been interesting to see as a progression. We get better and better at not hurting one another as we make mistakes and learn how to talk about them. We really don’t keep making the same mistakes over and over. We make new ones! heh

So, to continue on the P!nk trend: Slut Like You is fun. When you are looking to ensure that you don’t have to be alone tonight it dramatically changes how you act. The stakes are different. You’ll worry about tomorrow tomorrow. You have to get through tonight in order to get there.

I’m trying to figure out what mental hurdle I have to working on the books right now. I know I’m overwhelmed by life. I think that I’m just too tired to think. I need to have some reason for a deadline so I can plan around it. I’ll figure it out. I need to decide how much I want to have done by December so I can backwards plan.

I need to feel like I am moving towards what I want to be moving towards. Right now I feel pretty out of control of my schedule. I’m not sure how to change that. Well no. That’s a big fat lie. I know how to change it. I am changing it. This is a process. The schedule will be back to being shaped how I need it to be shaped in about another two weeks. Then we leave town for a week. See how this goes? Oh man.

Portland, we are practically doing a drive-by. March 25th we drive north towards Eugene. We are sleeping there because the kids will be sick of the car. We are aiming to arrive at Dad’s house at 6pm on Tuesday the 26th. We are spending the day with Aunt Cookie, a truly delightful woman. I have an intense interest in hearing stories about Noah’s family. They shape my story now. I don’t have many sources of information.

Wednesday during the day we don’t have plans and we will probably want to go do something fun. Not sure what yet. Wednesday we should hang out with Dad. Thursday and Friday we are hanging out with A. Ha. I haven’t even emailed her to confirm that yet. But she offered it to me. I’m taking it. (pause. email sent.) We will spend Thursday and Friday nights walking around Dad’s neighborhood talking to him and playing with kids. On Saturday we drive allllllll the way home. With four kids who have had a long week and who will not be happy about being in the car. Thank goodness for iPads. Ha.

What we ask of our children is not natural. How we have to deal with the constraints of their lives is not natural. But beating them isn’t a better option. Sometimes you can’t let them have the pace of travel that is appropriate for them. You have to just get there. It is hard but life is that way sometimes.

Once upon a time travel involved physical exertion… even sitting in a wagon is fairly labor intensive compared to a car. We provide these children padded worlds of strapped in boredom. I am not capable of being entertaining for a twelve hour drive. Not even in shifts because then my “off” shift would be driving and I would have a stroke from road rage. That is not in anyone’s best interests. No, my kids can’t entertain themselves for that long. I understand that this is a tragic failing. Never the less… we are going to use them. They can’t use them for the whole trip so there will be other entertainment involved. It’ll work out. It will be one long day of our lives. No big deal. I’m trying to psych myself up for the trip. I’m trying to lay out in advance how much energy I am going to need for various stages. I’m trying to figure out how I will do it without getting punchy about having to teach my kids new situational manners over and over and over for a week solid. It’s a pain but worth it in the long run.

I need my kids to understand how to evaluate for situational manners. I need to consciously talk about how I am evaluating everything around me for clues about how I should behave. I do this every time we travel. It’s a lot easier at Disneyland because there are a lot of “let loose” places. We are going to be moving between environments that will have wildly different “grown up” rules that are going to feel unfair or inappropriately constricting because they aren’t used to those rules. I’m going to be tested over and over. It’s going to be fun.

But this is the whole process of life. I want to teach them how to do this while smiling. I want this trip to be a happy and joyful memory. Shanna is probably going to actually remember this trip for a long time. We will take pictures. She may eventually remember the pictures more than the day but she will have the same kind of connection to these people that I have to Brittney, the little girl who was born four months before me across the street from my family. I was set in my baby carrier next to her in her baby carrier. I have pictures of us when we are two and three and four and seven and and…

I want my kids to have that. I hope they never lose it.

I didn’t think I would lose Brittney. It is hard finding out how unforgivable existing is. Oh, that’s not true I would be told. I am allowed to exist. But I must be silent so no one ever has to actually find out the specifics because oh man that is over the line. The book. The fucking book. I’m having trouble going back through and editing. This is why I paid an editor. Unfortunately after reading the Kindle edition I am entirely unsatisfied with the job she did and I feel fairly back at square one. I thought I was getting an editor but what I got was a copyeditor and that’s a different job.

I wanted technical editing. I wanted someone to give me feedback on flow and let me know where I am being vague and random. I wanted someone to look at it as a work of art to be made better with a few tweaks. Ahhhhh. I get it now. I did get that. That’s what I asked for. She didn’t make many suggestions for changes. She treated it like it was sacrosanct as a poor incest victims story. It was allowed to ramble and be weird.

Ack. But then people don’t want to buy it and it isn’t actually telling the story I want to tell. I can’t always see when I’m doing that without this ridiculous analytical reading that is really hard to do. A page takes me multiple hours. Actually reading something and dealing with the errors is god damn fucking hard work. Why do you think the overall production values of everything in the everything has gone down? (And why I make no promises about my blog entries. These are not polished pieces, yo.)

But the book was supposed to be. And it so clearly isn’t. I feel kind of morally offended by that. In order to motivate that kind of interest you either need a True Fan or someone who is going to make money off the writing. I had neither. Such is life. I’m slowly progressing on editing. It’s hard. I need to set specific goals and plow through it though. Bleh. Yuck. Bleh.

I am running. I’m tired and I’m switching my days for workouts around like crazy but I’m getting through everything. I have a 10k at the end of April. So far my standard for 5ks has been “I pray for under forty minutes”. I’m hoping to do the 10k in eighty minutes.

That means maintaining a standard pace just barely faster than 1km in eight minutes. That means .62 miles in eight minutes. That means I’ll have to run at least 11:50 through the whole damn race. That is way way way faster than I did the marathon. (My marathon average was 15:40/mile. I’m serious when I say I walked a marathon. I’m still hella proud.)

This pace is going to be a huge stretch for me. My race partner may have a different set of goals and staying together is more important than time to me. Additionally: I’m all for wimping out at mile five and crawling the last mile if I feel bad. Flexibility.

What is the goal: the method or the result? Let’s be clear that when it comes to crossing six miles of distance speed vs. just reaching the finish line is a very different set of goals. I no longer fear not reaching the finish line physically… unless I push myself too hard. I am not in amazing physical shape. I’m in good shape. But I’m not an experienced athlete. I have ramped up at a pretty reasonable rate all things considered.

Every body is where it is. You can’t be too hard-lined about “goals” because progress not perfection kind of trumps any stuck on points. It is quite possible I’m not physically capable of running that fast for that long… yet. I may have to work longer before I reach that goal. I sure as fuck would not have been able to do the marathon at that pace. Not given the conditions (high eighties in temperature, high eighties in humidity, really terrible air quality, I started my period at mile thirteen along with horrible cramps). I just couldn’t expect different from myself that day.

I have to still be alive tomorrow to try again. I have to make it to today. If the pace is more important than anything else I might injure myself and then there won’t ever be another try no matter what. And maybe the rest of my life will be a lot harder. Because I was stupid and careless because I don’t care very much if I continue to stay alive.

I really can’t do that any more. Not if I want to be here for more nights of “I love you soooo much”. I want that more than I want anything else. So I will learn how to be good to my body. So I can have as many of those nights as I can.

The passion and the pain are going to keep you alive some day.

I should probably go start breakfast.

No one ever knows the long-term value of what they do. That knowledge is given to no creature. If I want to be a character that has existed then there must be record of that. Only I care to create that record. Noah is invested in supporting this branch of growth on his family tree. He sees it as vital to his long-term success. I’m not sure how I snow balled him.

I think that talking about suicide is something I need to be able to do. My grandmother killed herself. She overdosed. She had been trying for decades. My mother has stories of cleaning up blood after she got home from school because her mother was cutting her wrists again. My brother killed himself. He left the residential care facility where he lived because he had a severe brain injury and would never be able to care for himself again. He walked to a gas station and bought a can of gasoline. He went behind a local grocery store and lit himself on fire. My father sat in the garage with the motor running.

Have I mentioned that I have turned my garage into a really nice room? Ok, technically I have done nothing permanent because city ordinance says it must be able to hold a car at all times and my response would be “give me three minutes and a person to help me move furniture”. That’s not a permanent room. But it’s a really nice place to hang out. There are not likely to be cars in here.

Harm Reduction means being honest about the patterns of behavior in your life. It means setting specific goals and working to reduce the harm you are inflicting on yourself. Usually you are inflicting the harm (hair pulling, cutting, biting your nails, drinking alcohol, picking at scabs, doing most recreational drugs including pot, any obsessive repetitive damage to your body really) because you are trying to relieve stress from some other place in your life.

Noah said he read an article claiming that the first person likely to live over a thousand years is probably alive today. Think about mortality. It’s changing. The brackets are shifting. Where do I want to be on that scale? I don’t want to live a thousand years. That sounds like work. I would rather just live. But I have a rather lot of decades of work in front of me.

What am I going to do when I grow up? I will probably experience an unprecedented to my species amount of freedom after my children are adults. I will still be married to this guy who thinks I am the best thing since sliced bread. I know the deall: there is some travel he wants to do and otherwise I have to do it alone and not be gone too long or too often. Too long is going to be tested a lot over the years as we figure out what that means.

Statistically speaking I am extremely likely to die by my own choice. Sometimes just sitting with that in the pit of my stomach is very hard. You know what they say about statistics? There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.

I believe in self-fulfilling prophesies. I believe the only thing that ever can or has changed the world is someone deciding they want to do it. Yes, of course coalitions are awesome and all… but it takes individuals having a specific vision. A dream, if you will. Otherwise there is no call to exit one’s torpor and do anything. If you are not living up to your vision of yourself… what are you doing instead? Why is there a discrepancy? Are you realistically going to change your life?

Then either change or decide to be happy, right? Happiness isn’t about getting what you want it’s about enjoying what you have. I think I saw that on Pinterest recently.

I want security. I want to have roots. I want a place to come back to. I want community. I want to be allowed to exist without carefully following the rules about what I am or am not allowed to talk about. I like fully informed opt-in relationships.

Now I’m just procrastinating. It was nice to write. I haven’t spent this much time on it in a while. Sometimes it is funny to me the way that writing is one of the most purely satisfying activities I do. I have thought. There. Evidence. Ha. Take that Universe. I have taken up space. In a technological world I have taken up a space smaller than a pin head. Whoop.

But we never know what our impact will be. We have to just exist. And get out of our houses. That’s important whether you like it or not. To be honest I don’t like it very much but I try hard not to take my dislike out on the people who are randomly unlucky and happen to be standing next to me. It isn’t dislike of the people. It is dislike of being out of my house.

It took me a long time to understand that and really fully feel it. I enjoy my work here. I enjoy feeling like I am doing things to work towards my long-term happiness. I am enjoying the physical work and when I am older and less able to work hard I will get to sit in my garden in the shade and enjoy a lifetime of work. Hopefully while babysitting for grandkids who will visit a lot so that I get to know other children deeply.

Now I get it. Now a lot more things make sense to me.

But I have other things I need to do first. Like breakfast. Ugh.

If you build it, they will come.

2 Replies

I think I’m figuring out what I want to do. February is a bust. I’m going to survive it and get on with my life.

I’m going to keep seeing my therapist every other week and I am not going to continue the group. I don’t have it in me to try and guide them towards being a semblance of support for me. Right now they aren’t. It isn’t their fault. It’s that whole GU(Geographically Undesireable) thing.

I like where I live. I want to build community here. I am trying. I am working hard on that. There are a few projects I have in my head. One involves asking my next door neighbor and probably Tay if they will donate a few hours of labor towards building a play structure in the back yard. I know what I want. It isn’t that complicated. They both have more tools and experience doing what I want to do. They won’t do it for me but they will guide me through doing it. But that’s in the summer when my neighbor has more time. He is drowning right now.

What I can do right now, is go talk to my other neighbor. I don’t know her name yet and I’m going to have to figure out how to memorize it. I may ask her to write it down for me and I will call Pam and ask her to help me practice so I can be not-insulting when I try to speak to and about her. I want to talk to her because her fence faces the elementary school and is a regular target of graffiti. I would like to talk to her about painting some kind of mural there. I will pay for all of the materials.

Let me break the plan down more. If the woman agrees to that I would like to walk across the street to the elementary school and conveniently talk to my next door neighbor (who is a lovely woman–we exchange a lot of food through the year because of gardening) who works at the front desk. I will tell her I would like to put forth a contest open to every child in the school. The best design for the fence will be painted on the fence and the say… top three best drawings otherwise get to help me paint it on the fence.

The parameters are: the picture needs to be simple and clear. I’m not good at fancy shading or anything you can do with a pencil. This will be done in fairly simple paint. Unless you are that good with spraypaint–which I’ve never used so I would hesitate to use it for a project like this. So it has to be something that will handle the transfer of medium. There have to be clear lines.

I would like it to be about living around here. What are the things you like to do that people can walk to. Why is living here fun. Why do you want people to like it and be nice to our neighborhood?

I’m still working on the exact phrasing of that. It has to be something where potentially a kindergardener could produce something workable or it isn’t fair.

We will do the painting as it can be scheduled with the kids sometime around April or May when it is dry enough to let the paint dry. I have no idea what would be best in terms of the school schedule. Maybe they have a week of minimum days at some point and this would be a great time for a project like this?

I think it is bad advice to always tell people to run away from their problems and only be around people who make your life easier. It isn’t anyone else’s job to make my life easier. I don’t live in a culture who grants that to women in my position. Sometimes I seriously wish I was Chinese. My close friend is Taiwanese and when she talks about her family I feel a lot of envy. I wish there were people in the world who love me the way she is loved by her family.

But I compare my envy of that and my relative position with articles like this one about lynching in America. It is very weird thinking that the right to grow up and walk away from all the terrible evil shit from my childhood is a right I have because of my face. Watch the music video at the bottom of that article.

There are a lot of people in my neighborhood who don’t look like me. I could choose to feel uncomfortable about that or I could work to meet their children through community projects and get to know them as human beings.

I’m going to ask permission to use the school parking lot for a block party after graduation (not the same day. obviously.) because I want the parents to meet one another. I like that so many kids in my neighborhood ride bikes outside in the afternoon. I wave at a lot of runners.

I want to live here. I want to keep getting ridiculously unhealthy frugal advice from the dear lady a few blocks away. She lives on a very fixed income so she tells me about every deal. I thank her. And bring her oranges.

I think I feel mortally offended by the idea of leaving the trees I planted. I want to eat that god damn fruit. Some mother fucker would buy this house, chop the trees, level out the dirt and put in a god damn lawn.

No. Those are my roots. I planted them. If I want community it has to be near me. It has to come to me. Sorry. That’s just how life works out sometimes. It’s not a personal affront. I just find I don’t enjoy travel much. It takes a really lot to justify it. I need to believe that and make a choice. It’s not that I will never visit anyone or that I will never leave my house except on foot.

I need to act like staying home is a conscious priority. It’s a choice. It’s something that dramatically makes my life better. If I am not home I can not do my work. If I can not do my work I feel rather bad about myself as a person. LIfe is not meant to be a long string of tiring days spent “entertaining” myself or my children.

I have a few painting projects in the house I’ve been thinking about. Doing them will make me happy. I have to be home in order to do that. I have to choose to not have engagements.

I need to not blow with the winds of change. Change needs to happen in the world around me. I need to keep to my work. I need to make measurable progress in my own estimation or I won’t respect myself as a person.

My daughter is right on the very cusp of being able to go run around playing out front basically unsupervised. She’s not quite trustworthy enough. She’s close though. I don’t taunt her with this difference I just think about it. It’s time for me to get my head out of my ass and meet the neighbors.

The awesome thing is we have a family to model off of who live (depending how you count) three or four perpendicular blocks away from us who have behaved the same way. They have already talked to the city about this kind of organization stuff.

I need to start building more community where I am. You were right K. I need a project.

I don’t think group therapy is working out.

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My kids are 2.5 and 4.5. Saying that they frustrate me sometimes is like saying, “Hey! They’re still breathing!” They are very developmentally appropriate–I read lots of books to check. I am extremely clear that my anger over their behavior is about control not really about them. And for a couple of months here I have managed to over schedule us. It was an accident–I swear. We will ride it out and change our approach after February.

The first thing to go will be group therapy that I have to drive a cumulative more than two hours for. I don’t need to spend $50 and I don’t know how much on gas so I can listen to three people talk about their lives in that kind of detail. Yesterday I listened to a twenty minute recital of the fertility history of this woman’s dentist. I watched the god damn clock. I understand that she was trying to place context on how this story overlapped with her life and all but man. I’m an asshole and I don’t give a shit how many times your dentist has done IVF and how many failed adoptions have happened. I mean, in the vague sense of the ether “I’m sorry and that sucks” but I don’t need the specifics.

And we had another twenty minute digression about whether the extra-sexin lover of one of the group members should tell her new boyfriend that she is lovers with the group member now that she is *pregnant*. So far the plan was for the boyfriend to just not know that the good friends who hang out together three times a week are…. just friends. They don’t have sex regularly what’s the big deal?

I flat said, “This woman is now pregnant with this guy. She will know him for the rest of her life. This kind of thing comes out. The only ethical option is to tell him now and deal with it. Otherwise your friend is a lying liar.” I don’t think you are obligated to tell every fling about every other fling in your life. Once you are procreating the rules change. If you don’t like that maybe you shouldn’t be having such risky sex.

The kicker was when I got to my turn and I relayed a few of my frustrations with parenting that have been keeping me on edge lately. The advice was obviously well meaning. A lot of it was “Hey! You should use ______________ service!” that does not exist within a thirty minute drive of my house. If I have to drive more than an hour round trip it’s no longer a good resource because my stress from driving outweighs the half hour of not really being “off” I would get in trade for the discount childcare.

If I lived in Oakland or Hayward I would be closer to my networks of support. I would have a lot more other resources as well. So my therapist said, “I know you have painted the walls and all but why don’t you just sell the house and move.”

That was the point when my neck muscles locked and I literally screamed, “This is not up for a fucking committee consensus.”

As if moving is that easy. From the word “go” moving would cost us around $70k in realtors fees. Do I have an extra $70k sitting around I don’t mind losing? Not so much. I kind of have a life plan. Being $70k behind all of a sudden would put rather a big crimp in my plans. That’s a lot of forking money to come up with all of a sudden. That’s *if* we could find a house in our price range to make a lateral move. I doubt it. Given how small and unimpressive our house is I don’t anticipate us being able to buy a better property for cheaper so we are going more into debt either way.

No. No. No. No. That interferes with pretty much all of my plans. And I’m furious with the therapist for acting so off-hand about it. I miss my last therapist so much. She is no longer listed as being involved with any organization I can find online. I’m not sure this therapist is working out.

She isn’t interested in encouraging me into working things out on my own. She wants me to bring my life to the committee so they can vote on which approaches they feel are most appropriate. Half of the group has DID. The remaining woman is extremely non-functional in life. They are nice people. I like them. But I honest to god don’t want to be like them. I am not going to be fifty and still chasing the next easy lay.

They keep telling me what I “should” do as if they had any idea of what would be best for me. Fuck them. Fuck them with a fucking two by four. How in the god damn hell do you think you are even vaguely capable of advising me. How do you dare to have such hubris as to feel you understand what is best for me. You don’t fucking know me.

And as we were walking out I was invited to walk the lake with them. It’s four miles around–a nice distance. Usually I would say yes. But I wore the wrong shoes. I looked down and said, “Enh, I can’t. If I try to walk long distances in these shoes I will limp for three days because my knee will hurt.” And the fucking response was “Oh come on. It will be fine.”

Cue head explosion.

I’m ok with saying, “I’m too big of an asshole for group therapy.” I can live with that if it is true. I have lived with knowing much worse things about myself. I get the general impression that the group facilitator is trying to turn the women in this group into a family because they are all very lonely and isolated. I am not going to move to Oakland so I can start hanging out with them. That isn’t going to make my life better.

And someone acting like the six years of hard labor I have put into my house and yard are no big deal? Oh man. I feel pretty insulted. I shouldn’t feel any attachment to the fact that I have put so much of my time and energy and soul into my property. It doesn’t matter right–it’s just a house. Move on.

I have moved and moved and moved and moved and moved and fucking moved. Don’t try to fucking tell me what moving is like. This is the house where my children were conceived. My daughter was born here. I have painted several murals so far. I intend to paint more. I have planted trees. We have a heavily fruiting orange and young apple, cherry, and plum. I have a blackberry tangle to make you weep with jealousy. I have grapes. I’m starting asparagus amongst other wonderful additions in the front yard. I do a lot of cooking with the sage and rosemary in the yard.

“I know you have painted the walls and all but why don’t you just sell the house and move.”

*explode*

This is my home. This is the home my husband gave to me. He has worked very hard to pay for it. He has been very supportive every step of the way with me changing it to suit me. Sure, it isn’t all that large but such is life. It’s a size I can keep clean. It’s a size of yard that keeps me busy but doesn’t overwhelm me.

Just up and sell my fucking house. Maybe I should get a shotgun so I can stand around declaring “Over my cold dead body.”

I’m not sure when it happened. When did this go from being Noah’s house that I am camping out in to someplace that I mortally offended when someone tells me to treat it casually. This isn’t just where I live. This is the first place in my life where it has been ok for me to behave how I want. This is the first place I have been safe. I have lived in this house longer than I have lived anywhere in my life. When I am an old woman my yard will be wonderfully fruitful and I won’t have to do a lot of work any more. But I will get to look out at the things I find beautiful forever.

I think I will always have weird niggles of feelings about the ghosts in the walls–the ghosts of time before me. But by the day that time recedes further and further into the past. I’m just left with all the wonderful memories I make every day.

“Gud mownin! I mithed you. I wuv you.” I need to get a video made of her speech impediment. It is the cutest fucking thing in the history of ever. She is currently lying next to me. I’m not sure why Noah is sleeping on the couch (we aren’t fighting or anything) so Calli asked if she could climb in next to me. Of course baby. I’d be happy to feel you heavy against my side while you sleep. I don’t think there is much in the world that can make me happier.

I was told I need more down time. Tell me something else new. This phase of life is not forever. I feel like that was a lot of the problem with the group. Never once was I asked why I have arrived at the bizarre combination of factors I have right now that is freaking me out. They just jumped straight to telling me what I “should” do instead of what I am doing. Because of course there isn’t a careful thought process behind what I’m doing. I should just up and change so that I can be more suitable to them.

Geez. Why am I so resistant to change.

Poverty, religion, and community building

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The last article I read on HuffPo was about how atheists should care more about poverty. In my head that lead to this whole leapfrog experience of thoughts about things that have been happening in my life lately. A bunch of things happening off-line mostly to other people. So I can kind of comment in person but writing about other peoples lives is rather rude. See, I do have tact.

Recently I was reminded that one of the big upsides of Catholicism over the Protestant approach is that Catholics believe you are not saved by faith alone–you have to do good works. I feel like telling the Protestants that they don’t need to behave like Jesus, just believe in him, was one of those crucial “missing the point” movements in history.

At this stage of my life I am standing very near the cliff of atheism. I think that if someone is as angry at G-d as I am can’t really fall off that cliff. It’s like having an airplane cable around my waist as I try to jump off the cliff. I won’t get far enough and it’s going to fucking hurt trying.

And by the way, if you have ever said, “Catholic or Christian” then you can picture me screeching at you with great fervor for at least half an hour about how ignorant and stupid that sounds. Just sayin’. You believe in and follow Christ? Christian. Moving on.

I believe that nothing and no one is going to save me. No one is watching me and giving a shit. If someone had been watching me through my whole life with dispassion I would have a nice big scythe with that persons name on it. My life is, in my opinion, proof that there could not be a compassionate all knowing G-d. It’s enough proof for me at least.

That means I am left in this position of not being good for my big invisible sky friend. Why should I be good? Who defines good? Ah… now we get to the crux of the question. Most people live according to moral structures they have never really thought about. What does being good mean anyway?

I will say that I know profoundly ethical sex workers. I believe they are good people providing a service human-kind needs. If it weren’t such a needed field it wouldn’t have existed for all time. Give me a break.

I know people who are “good” in my estimation who regularly break the law. The law does not define good for me. The law is a codefied way of protecting assets not a way of ensuring that people are nice to each or that we each have a minimum amount to survive. The law protects people who already have power and mostly screws over people at the bottom. I don’t have that much respect for the law.

The law cares way more about the rights of rapists than rape victims. And everyone you can talk to about this will tell you that it should. It must. Otherwise there would be a complete breakdown of law and order. We have to assume innocence. But we must not protect the innocence of young girls and boys who are raped. They are on their own.

We will blame their parents for not cloistering them. We will blame co-ed education. We won’t blame the completely idiotic school system that will not allow adults to talk frankly about sex. We won’t actually teach these children the difference between consensual sex and rape. We won’t talk to the girls and teach them, “If you don’t want it you really and truly have to say NO because he won’t understand on his own. You will be thinking, ‘Can’t he see that I don’t want this?’ and you will cry later because no he won’t see. What he sees is that his dick might get wet. You don’t really matter. If you want to matter you have to matter to you first and you have to defend yourself. Start by saying ‘no’.”

Why don’t people say this to young girls? Why don’t people sit and talk to children for years and years beforehand about consent? Why don’t we talk about self-sovereignty? Oh. Because then we might give the children the idea to have sex–right? They won’t come up with it on their own. Whatever.

When I was younger, before I knew my sister had raped our brother or her children, when her kids were in the 7-11ish range I started pulling the kids aside and talking to them about consent and sex. I showed my nephew how to put condoms on a banana and I made him practice till he could do it without faltering. I told him I’d be happy to give him boxes to use while masturbating so he could continue practicing and get proficient so he doesn’t feel silly once he has a partner. He said no thanks and looked freaked out.

My understanding is his step-father raped him within six months of that conversation. Based on my memories and the stories I was told. I guess he didn’t need to worry about being awkward with his first partner. That was all awkward.

My sister’s loud public attitude was that “there should be a veil between the knowledge of parents and children. In the mind of a parent every child should die a virgin.” But she raped her children. The public discourse and the private actions don’t line up even slightly. Honestly, to me this kind of attitude is pretty much what I hear when I hear Protestants talk about the poor. When I hear my atheist friends talk about the poor.

“The government shouldn’t steal my money.” Because it is better for you to have a second fancy sports car than for some kids to eat. Right.

There has been wealth distribution since the dawn of time. There have always been rich people and there have always been poor people. But in some eras the difference is less stark.

We have more wasteful shit in our lives than was ever fucking possible at any other point in history. What do we do with this wonderful excess? We hoard it. We are stingy and selfish. We are short-sighted.

I get the short-sighted self-absorbed attitude on the parts of my atheist child-free friends. In very specific ways they are only kind of part of the human race. They are an end point. They are not part of the future and they know it. Why should they care?

I don’t get it from parents. I don’t at all. Your children will have better lives if there is less distribution of wealth. Not if they have more and more and more compared to those around them. Their lives will become increasingly a slice of humanity. You can’t associate with people who are too socio-economically different from you. That’s scary. People in different classes behave differently.

I like living in a not-great neighborhood. I like that my kids are meeting a very wide range of people. Our neighborhood is definitely *not* primarily white. Some of the folks around here are comfortable financially but they are in the minority. We have a lot of vacant foreclosed houses. We have a lot of derelict houses kind of falling apart. We talk to everyone. My kids are learning how to behave with as many people in the world as I can possibly expose them to.

I want my children to have an in-their-gut understanding that having “things” is not because of entitlement or privilege. You don’t automatically get these things in life. Some people make the choice to prioritize having things–that’s a choice not a right. And if they don’t get it–that’s the breaks. There are no guarantees. There are no promises. And Paris Hilton no more “deserves” what she has than I deserved to be raped over and over.

It’s a lottery. It’s not about deserve. Things just happen.

I have to believe this. This is the entire foundation upon which I build my survival. I don’t deserve things. If I have them it is an accident. If I have knowledge within my head that could make someone else’s life better and it’s doing nothing for me–isn’t it selfish nearly to being criminal to withhold it?

I believe that we are social animals. We are a social species. We need community. We need to belong. Unfortunately people usually choose “people who feel like me” without ever really examining what that is founded on. Are you saying you only want to know people who were fortunate to have parents who were born into a certain class? How un-American of you.

It’s funny sitting near geek culture. I’m not really a geek. I’ve lived in the Silicon Valley my whole life and I’m only quasi-participating in making my first website. Mostly I’m making my husband do it. But I have watched this culture emerge. I have seen it from the outside since I was twelve.

I hear the Oppression Olympics a lot. When geeks get together the subject of childhood bullying comes up constantly. No one remembers the times when they were taunting people because they were smarter and they weren’t going to be stuck being losers like those other kids. I remember hearing that. The geeks who got beat up used to sneer when tests were handed back. See, here’s proof that even if you can beat me up I am better than you and I will be through my whole life. So that childhood bullying, that largely grew out of the rage of frustrated children, is carried forward in life. Only who is on top changed.

In America we are very careful about Might Makes Right at this stage. We want it for the police–thus we are increasingly militarizing them. That’s the wrong direction. People listen to rules that feel fair, not to things that are imposed under military guard. We like having our rights, motherfuckers.

I watch my kids moving through our neighborhood and I wonder what kind of adults they will be. Will they be selfish? There is no way to predict. Will they feel this terrible compulsion to build community? Will they already have that community?

I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what I should do to find a way to fit into the community I have more. I don’t mean the people I know. I live somewhere. I live in a place and a time. How do I fit in this? If you restrict your friends to only people who are like you and you spend all your time in the car going from very carefully selected place to place… that’s not community.

Community is the weird neighbor we always have long conversations with as we walk to and from the store or park. He gives my kids advice and talks to them about what it was like to work for PG&E as it was really spreading through the state. He’s in his 70’s and he worked for them for decades. He has great stories.

Months ago the topic of suicide came up kind of randomly. I was blunt, as I am wont to be. Since then he makes a point of saying, “Gosh I’m glad you are still here so I can talk to you. And your babies still need you. Keep going.”

That’s community. I don’t have to go out of my way to see him. I don’t have to laboriously schedule around our “activities”. We just see him in our life. It feels good. I’m trying to get to know more neighbors. I think that at some point I may offer tutoring at the elementary school across the street. It would be fun. It would be a really nice way of getting to know more of the neighborhood kids. My children will need to know those kids whether they go to school with them or not.

Everyone is on a different path. I understand that everyone has a different load to carry. Different things they could share. Different needs and wants. I do understand that. But everyone has something that they could give to make someone else’s life better. Not in a codependent way. I’m not recommending one more poly enmeshed hysterical relationship.

There are people in this world who are almost certainly actually suffering because they do not have a piece of information that is in your head. Is that your responsibility? Only if you want it to be. Only if you want to be part of something bigger than yourself. Only if you want to be humble about the fact that maybe all you have to give is that scrap of information and you can’t construct an identity around helping people all the time.

Anger, frustration, entitlement, privilege–I believe they are all so entwined it is almost impossible to take them apart.

Privilege, in my parlance, is the lucky accidents in your life. Maybe you are white. Maybe you were born to wealthy parents. Maybe you were raised in an area with excellent public schools. Maybe your parents could afford to put you through college.

Can you see how these things don’t just happen to everyone? That makes having them double plus awesome. Only if you were handed a huge bag of candy when you were five and you refused to ever share it you would be kind of an asshole. Privilege is like that bag of candy. You can share it. I’m not saying give up on having things or benefiting.

I own a house–well, there is still a mortgage. It will be paid off in less than ten years. Someday I will own a house. Because my husband bought it and paid for it and lets me live in it. I don’t really feel like I should get too cocky about this.

Humility. I didn’t do it. Taking too much pride in it–as if it were my accomplishment–would be ridiculous. This will be Noah’s accomplishment. I can be proud of him and I can be grateful I benefit but I can’t act like it is my right or just or natural that I get this.

Most of my anger displays come at the heels of feeling thwarted. My need for control is interrupted and the fireworks inside my skull are fantastic. I’m not trying to claim that I am superior or above these things.

But what do I do once I feel like that? When my privilege feels attacked? When I feel like I’m not getting something I feel entitled to?

That is what decides what kind of human being I am. I don’t think that all child-free people are dead ends in the human race. I believe that a great many of the most important people throughout all time were child-free. But they made a choice to be part of something. Something that actually makes the world a better place.

I’ve been watching Burning Man for years. It makes me feel sick to my stomach to think about how many millions of dollars have been spent on a temporary city that damages the natural environment and is basically just about distraction.

If you need that kind of display and outlay and expense in order to find your “tribe” then I argue that your tribe is pretty artificial. That is not a sustainable kind of community. That is a mass waste sort of community. Welcome to America.

How many cities or even small poverty-stricken countries could be run for a year on what is spent on Burning Man?

Which isn’t to say that I never entertain myself. I spend money I don’t need to spend. I bought into the freakin Disney time share. That’s elite privilege at its very snootiest if you ask me. I don’t think that everyone who goes to Burning Man is bad. I don’t think that everyone who goes to Disneyland is bad.

But what could we be doing with this time and money that wasn’t so completely selfish? What could we be doing with this time and energy that isn’t just about being entertained for a few days?

I’m not trying to sit on a high horse. I am part of my cohort. I pick up trash and talk to my neighbors. It’s a slow start on building community. I donate a lot of money. I try to help people one-to-one whenever I can.

But I have to have resources to draw from in order to have anything to give. Honestly the trips to Disneyland make me feel more cheerful about the endless amount of giving I have to do in the rest of my life. Burning Man provides a lot of people with massive emotional support–I hear. Or it’s a total flop. Apparently it’s a coin toss year by year. But people still go back–like addicts.

What does caring about the poor mean? What does caring about someone other than yourself mean? Caring doesn’t accomplish a lot. You have to work. What can you do to make the world better?

I keep trying to remind myself that I am not really past the point where I have to be completely focused on my kids. It’s a privilege. It’s a species-preference for children to be intensely cared for in the first few years. My oldest is almost five. My youngest is two and a half. I only have a couple more years before I won’t be nearly as necessary.

What will I do with my time and energy? I don’t think it will involve getting in my car and driving thirty or forty minutes until I get to a white neighborhood so I can feel comfortable. I wouldn’t. I want to find a way to matter where I am. I may not be willing to enroll my kids in the school directly across the street but I want my kids to spout off, “My mom knew she wanted to homeschool her kids from when she was seventeen so please don’t think this is any kind of negative judgment on the school–it’s just a personal choice.” And yes, it is a weird choice. Ask questions about it.

Part of the problem with “helping the poor” is that most of the time there is this tension between helping individual people and helping a systemic problem. The approaches are completely different and going in either direction means that a lot of people fall through the cracks.

What is the road forward?

I was having a chat with some women this weekend. One of the comments that sticks in my mind is a woman was saying that she has evolved in her life to the point where she doesn’t feel like there is much point in being angry about injustice and trying to fight. Just love. Go through your life doing what you think is right and loving people and it will all work out.

I… I don’t think I am capable of believing such hubris. Unless the “all work out” is that we all end up dead. Sure, that I believe. What will the world be like in fifty or a hundred years? I want to influence that. I truly do. And I don’t think that sitting in my house or school in a carefully chosen neighborhood and driving in my car to meet up with carefully pre-selected people is the way to do it.

Chaos theory. Maybe I should study some.

Thinking about marriage.

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I was asked to perform a wedding ceremony; two of my former students asked me. It’s a bit weird but I think I’m going to grill them first.

You need to seriously talk about expectations about money and house work. Have you done so? No? Let’s do it now. Let’s talk about sex–I don’t want any specifics but do you both feel like you are happy with what is going on. No really, you need to talk about it now. Don’t be wishy washy. Don’t be embarrassed. Dude–you are about to sign a legal fucking contract that lasts for the rest of your life. You have to talk about these things. How do you feel about children? How secure does “financially secure” mean? How do you plan to go about earning this money. How will childcare be divided? How do you feel about breastfeeding? Circumcision? I don’t need to approve of your answer but you need to agree.

Noah and I really sat and talked about this stuff before we got married. It shocks the shit out of me when I hear people say that they got married without discussing these things. Holy fuck. Why not?!

Do you agree about degree of religious involvement for your children? Do you have expectations about how your children will be educated? How do you feel about home ownership? How are you going to make that happen?

The Tracy Chapman song Fast Car is on most of my playlists. I think about the future and how to prepare for it.

Marriage at its best is when two people who could be ok by themselves come together to be more than they can be apart. It’s not about dependency. Even if one partner does not have a job. If you do not have a job because you are taking care of children you have a responsibility to your family to maintain skills that will enable you to reenter the work force should something catastrophic happens to your husband. Being a stay at home mom is a luxury. It is great when you can afford it. You can’t assume you will always be able to afford it. When your children are under five you have the sure fact of having to pay for day care if something happens to your husband’s income and you have to work. It feels like “your” responsibility. Or even if you just want to return to work.

Do you think of money as a pooled resource or are you possessive about how much “I’ve” earned. Be honest. There is no possible benefit to answering falsely. You have to live with this forever. You have to find a solution that works for both of you or you will fight forever. Talk about it now. I mean, not necessarily in front of me. But go home and work it out before the wedding. Spend all your spare time talking about these topics.

It’s important. This is your life. Do you want it to be one where things just kind of fall into place because you both have the same expectations or do you want to be constantly bitter that things aren’t working out how you thought?

Where do you want to spend holidays?

How do you feel about travel? How do you feel about expensive hobbies?

I know everything is lovey dovey and perfect and shit. How would you react if _____ cheated? It happens in a high percentage of marriages. Y’all have been together since you were fifteen. Statistically such things happen. How would you treat it? Do you think you could live with, “You get one fuck up this marriage. You need to be honest about it. I’d prefer to know before/after.” How do you feel about pornography? Violent sex. You don’t have to tell me. You need to explicitly talk about this. If you think a little light spanking that is obviously between people who are giggling and having a good time sounds hot don’t go along when she says, “Violence is disgusting/horrifying/always degrading/whatever.” Tell the fucking truth. You have to live with this. Be who you are. “I want to be open to the idea of possibly not always being monogamous but I think I want to establish a really firm basis in our marriage first–like ten or more years. Let’s get through the early part of the kids thing.” Or whatever. I don’t need to know the answer.

We are no longer in the position of needing to marry our neighbor to combine estates. We don’t have to marry someone who will be good at working on the dairy we already own. In what ways do you support one another’s in growing towards your best selves?

How do you feel loved the most? (even though it’s cheesy I’ll mention the five love languages crap.)

Both kids are up and clamoring for my lap. Ack. Joy.

But if you try sometimes you just might find you get what you need.

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First and most importantly: meeting him went fantastically well. I told him, “I want to ask you a couple of questions, then tell you a story, then ask for a personal favor.” He agreed and settled in to listen to me.

My first question was, “Do you remember the first time we played?” “Uhhhh we played a few times but wasn’t the first time at that Odyssey event when I screwed up with the taser?”

I felt like a weight tumbled off my chest at that moment. Ok. This will be fine.

I told him that him using the phrase “screwing up” means this is going to be a lot easier than I thought. He repeated all of the concrete memories he has of the night (it was twelve years ago–it’s a bit fuzzy). Then I asked him what he knows about me and my life. He knows there were problems with my family and an estrangement–probably abuse and that’s it.

Ok, now I know what he knows.

I started giving him the readers digest version of my life. I talked about trauma for under ten minutes so it was necessarily only some highlights. “I’m the product of rape. My mother didn’t want me. If she hadn’t been Catholic she would have aborted me. I was told that my whole life. My father started raping me when I was a toddler and he kept at it including festively on one occasion holding a gun on my head right after raping me and asking me if I deserved to live.”

He interrupted and said, “Wait–how old were you when he held a gun on you?”

“Nine, ten. I’m not completely sure. It was within a few month period.”

“Holy shit.”

“Yeah. I prosecuted my father when I was sixteen. Just over two years before I met you. In the time between the start of pressing charges and the court date my brother went behind the local grocery store and doused himself in gasoline and lit himself on fire. He didn’t want to deal with what might happen next. He had been attacking me and trying to rape me for over a decade. Luckily he wasn’t big enough to win. I’m a scrappy fighter. My father sat in the garage with the motor running on the first day of the trial. So my family says “He wasn’t found guilty.” And given that my sister has passed the incest on to her kids for the fourth generation in my family I have no more contact.”

“Then, two months before I met you I picked a guy up for a date and had one shot of tequila and I promptly remember nothing from the night. In the morning I was sick as a dog–I spent the whole day vomiting over and over (in port-a-potties at San Francisco Gay Pride–that was fucking festive) and there were three condom wrappers in the trash. I called the police and tried to report being raped. I was told “We aren’t going to ruin that nice boy’s life for you.”

“Between when I was 2 and 25 I was raped by 12 people. The last straw was Paul Nathan. That one just flat drove me out of the community. Done now.”

“I understand that in the scope of my life what happened between us was maybe a 2 on the trauma scale. I have experienced much worse in my lifetime than someone putting a taser on my vulva for one hit. That’s just honestly not that bad in my life.”

“But I need someone who has violated my boundaries to know and care and feel bad. I need it like I need to breathe. I am coming to you, largely as an elder in my community. The rules of the community are that the difference between WIITWD (what it is that we do) and abuse is CONSENT. I was very clearly not consenting to what happened with you. I told you I wanted to stop at no/stop and not play with safewords and you kept going while I hysterically begged you to stop.”

“What I really want from you is a public discussion about what tops should be doing to fuck up less. You have made mistakes. One more hysterical submissive coming along with a story about consent violation is ignored. I promise you. It doesn’t help anyone really. You have a big name. If you really talk about your mistakes and how you have grown and changed that stands a big chance of helping people who need to be helped.”

“If you do research into trauma you will see that one of the most important factors in recovery is community support and validation. Folks who don’t get any… generally don’t recover. You are an elder and a highly respected member of my community. You hurt me. I believe you that it was an accident but there was still result. I have had nightmares about you for years.”

At about this point he stopped me to apologize over and over.

We went minute by minute through the scene using both sets of memories and talked about why the breakdown. “I said this was a hard limit so you immediately pulled one out of your bag.” “Oh, I knew you liked violet wands and I think of these tools as being on a continuum so I tried to get you to find out if you really disliked it or if you just thought you did.” “So you pressured me like fuck to let you try it on my arm. I felt like I couldn’t say ‘no’ and still have a scene.” “Oh that wasn’t well done. Well, once you let me try it on your arm you said it wasn’t as bad as you thought. I thought that was a green light to use it.” “Oh holy hell no.” “And at that time there was a big push for submissives to use their safewords to protect themselves because working through the fake no/no/no was something a lot of people were doing at once and I was used to trying to get girls to defend themselves by using safewords. I was just wrong to do it with you.”

I have never hated him for this.

He asked why I played with him after that. I told him I played with him three more times because I was trying to see if the first scene was a mistake or if you were that kind of scary asshole. If you were that kind of scary asshole I probably would have found a way to hurt you. But you never again made anything resembling a mistake. You did precisely what we agreed to and it was fine. I felt very confused as to whether you were covering yourself better or what.

He asked me to give him specific details about what I would like him to write about publicly and he offered to let me proof it before he goes public. He said, “I have no ego in this. Everyone makes mistakes and if people can learn from me messing up then I am happy to share how that worked. If it will make you feel better, especially given that I had no idea that you as hurt as you were, then it’s the right thing to do.”

I almost curled up and bawled. That was not what I was expecting. I thought he would be a horrid douchebag. He wasn’t. He was a really nice guy.

The early bits only took about 20 minutes. Then we talked for another 40 minutes about how kids change you (apparently his wife has some background information that is like mine) and what he has learned over the past few years. He asked me why I want to homeschool and was impressed that I’m obviously well informed about all of the weird little decisions I make but man would they not be good choices for him. He was positive and cheerful and encouraging. More than once he said, “I feel like this is an interesting conversation but we have reached the edge of what I can usefully contribute so I’m going to just nod for a few minutes and it’s not because I am ignoring you or bored. I just know less than you.”

This was not what I expected.

I told him that I know I am laying an inappropriate amount of grief at his feet. I was very broken long before I met him. The damage is not his fault. But there is this long pattern in my life of people hurting me and justifying it as things I deserve and I need to get past a place where I agree that I deserve to be hurt and I believe my consent is irrelevant. I have to change that if I am going to teach my daughters anything different. He started talking fast about how of course I don’t deserve any of the abuse I have experienced. He went into specifics and talked about how fucked up it was that someone could do those things to a child. There is no way to deserve such treatment as a child.

We talked about psychologically healthy masochists and psychologically unhealthy masochists. We both have views. We talked about how he keeps himself safe at this point because unhealthy masochists generally have a lot of collateral damage. Not necessarily on purpose–but crazy people need specific support not to be told to shut up and bend over so they can be hit. Just sayin’.

I am so glad I went. I feel a lot more calm. I was cycling through panic attacks really fast for a few days. My heart was starting to hurt.

He gave me several big hugs and very sincerely wished me all the best when we parted. He will write something within the next week and get it up on the internet. (He moved house two days ago so he’s really busy–I’m impressed he’s willing to do it within a week.)

Sometimes people surprise me in wonderful ways.

I believe "brave" is a synonym for "stupid".

5 Replies

It looks like I have plans for Friday afternoon. I am going to talk to someone who once seriously crossed my boundaries.

So when I was 19, two years after prosecuting my father for rape which resulted in my brother lighting himself on fire and my father sitting in the garage with the motor running, and two months after I was raped and the police told me they wouldn’t “ruin that nice boy’s life for me”, I joined the bdsm community. In my first six weeks I asked someone to play. We met through IRC and we did most of our negotiations online.

That sounds pretty dodgy. Even though I was meeting people online they were all people with serious real-life presence in the scene. All of the people in this particular IRC channel were very active in the real-time bdsm community. Many for a decade or more. So I was new but they all knew one another.

The negotiations were: no scat, no water sports, and no cattle prods. I don’t do safewords. If I say “no” or “stop” I mean it.

Of course that means he saran wrapped me to a table and put a tazer on my genitals. “It’s not a cattle prod.” I was hysterically screaming “no no no no” and “please stop” as fast as I could. He turned the tazer on and told me he wouldn’t stop till I safeworded. I did instantly. I believe my phrasing was, “Then safeword you son of a bitch.”

The San Jose PD were watching. The DMs (Dungeon Monitors–the people who ostensibly make you “safe” in the public community) were quite concerned that I not make a scene because the police were there. Shut up already.

A few times over the years I have made bitter references to this with the person in question but I’ve never really sat down to talk to him about it.

I’m going to see him tomorrow. He doesn’t know why we are meeting. I told him that Patti B put me up to it. I told him that I wanted to talk to him about something too complicated to put in writing (not true but I’m not going to ask him to read 50 pages of text) and he agreed to meet with me.

The funny thing is, his son and Shanna were born three hours apart on the same day. The day before our due date.

The kids will play at the park and he and I will sit on a bench.

Why am I doing this?

I’m bringing an amount of grief to this that isn’t fair considering what happened. I will almost certainly tell him so.

I hope to Christ he apologizes. More than anything in the whole fucking universe I want one man who has hurt me to actually apologize. I have an agenda. That’s why I’m going. I want to tell him a little bit about myself (I’m pretty sure he knows basically nothing) and I am going to ask him to apologize. Frankly I would love it if he would be willing to publicly talk about this mistake and what he has learned from it.

If someone who has violated my boundaries was willing to do that–just fucking one–I think I could be a lot less bitter. I think I could believe that not everyone is shit.

Sorry people, you aren’t enough to convince me. I’m sure that is annoying.

I need to have someone feel bad for hurting me. I need it more than I need food. I need to have one person say, “I didn’t do that because you deserved it. I did it because I’m an asshole/I fucked up/whatever.”

I don’t know that I’m going to get any validation whatsoever. I could leave this meeting more suicidal than I’ve been in a while. Who knows. My friends who know him have said I’m underestimating him. Give him a chance.

Ok, I will. But I’m scared. I don’t know how well I believe this will go.

Other than Noah I no longer have contact with anyone who has raped me. And he had permission. So he doesn’t really feel guilty either. How can you rape someone with permission? Well we negotiated that some day he would get to ignore me when I said no. I didn’t know he would pick such a bad day. I thought it would be an easier rape. Oh well. I’m often stupid and wrong.

Mostly the only thing I can do to protect myself is hide and just not know people. I’m kind of hiding in the home school group now. Maybe if I just don’t talk to men anymore…

My fear is irrational I’m told. I’m really weird when it comes to fear. The more afraid I am the more I want to take action. The more I need to do something. I am not going to yell at the guy I’m meeting on Friday. My goal isn’t to be mean to him or take anything out on him. I’m going to find out if he is the sociopath I assume he is or if he is the person other people believe he is. Maybe he will be willing to apologize. It was twelve years ago. Yes, I should be “over it” but I’m not. I have nightmares. I fucking think about this as a perfect example of why I learned not to bother saying ‘no’. It’s hard to have boundaries with Noah.

Although when I’m thinking about this shit we don’t have sex for days. I can’t handle being touched. This still has a noticeable impact on my life.

We’ll see if he cares. I didn’t press charges. I didn’t make this a big thing. I have never publicly dragged him across the coals–mostly I don’t even mention his name when I talk about this. And that’s a level of discretion I don’t give everyone.

If I have any karmic credit he will tell me he is sorry that he hurt me. If my life continues to be true to form he will give me a dismissive lecture about how I was an adult and I asked to play so I deserved what I got.

We’ll see. I’m told I’m underestimating him. We’ll see.

I heard from my brother; Christmas loot; bdsm semi-graphic recollections; and asking for what I want.

7 Replies

Last night my brother sent me a text message. “Merry Christas. I heard you put out a book, can you send it to me.”

I haven’t spoken to him since right after Uncle Bob died. Not since he told me that telling my story was just melodrama.

I responded “Google: “No Secrets, No Shame, No Silence.”

Now I’m scared. I feel like I should have just ignored it. But I can’t. Fuck him. I don’t need to hide. I told the absolute truth to the best of my memories. I acknowledge in multiple places that I might be making mistakes in details because it was all so long ago–this is what I remember about my life.

I’m not making mistakes about being raped or molested. I’m just not. I’m forgetting the order of when I lived places. I moved more than fifty fucking times. I challenge anyone to keep that straight when they are talking about their lives between the ages of birth and eighteen. Impossible.

I’m shaking. I wonder if I will sleep again tonight. I feel like I am going to vomit. I have the bucket with me. Oh my trusty bucket.

I’m scared. But strangely I want to find the self-motivation to start editing again. I know I’m not done. I know I have more work to do to make it actually polished. It is still kind of hard to follow. I can do better. I know it. How in the heck will that fit into the schedule next year? Who knows. But I need to do it. Maybe that can be what I mentally put into my “break time” during the day. (The kids get two hours of iPad usage from 2-4 so I can have quiet in my brain and not kill anyone as I’m making dinner.)

I want the book in paper. People have suggested a Kickstarter campaign to me. I’m thinking about it. It honestly isn’t quite good enough yet. There are a lot of stupid mistakes I PAID AN EDITOR TO FIX AND YET HERE THEY FUCKING ARE. Sigh. Oh well. I’m reread sections on my phone when I’m feeling freaked out by other people getting to read it. “Oh shit, what did I say?!”

Now my brother knows. He isn’t talking to the rest of the family (last I heard) so who knows how this will go.

But now he knows. That can’t be undone. If you haven’t bought the book or left a review go do so. Please. Somewhere between one and three people buy the book every week. I’m up to almost 1700 downloads. That’s pretty cool. But mostly people won’t know about it unless you tell them. I’ve told the people I know. Now it’s about other people telling the people they know.

And don’t freakin tell me “I don’t have a kindle“.Whatever. They have an app for that.

I finally had that crying jag. The one I predicted a couple of days ago. Noah took the kids to the park for a few hours and I spent the time wandering around in chores. In the middle of trying to fold the clothing I noticed that I was crying so hard I could barely see. I set the clothes on the bed then I noticed that I was thinking to my knees. I could feel myself starting to crawl towards the side of the bed but there is always this other part of my brain off on the side that says hey Krissy maybe you should use the bathroom and get a few napkins for your nose. So I did that first with tears streaming down my eyes then I went straight back to the side of the bed. The side of the bed next to the window is barely big enough to walk through when I’m scared it seems like a good place to hide. It isn’t a lot bigger than my body when I was younger I would have been under the bed.

I cried and cried and cried. I thought a lot about my mom; I miss her so much. It’s worse at Christmas. Really I thought a lot about everyone in my family. I feel like all of their stories are so sad. I think I found the “can’t commit suicide point” though. if I ever commit suicide my family will rush to tell their side of the story and they will try very hard to make me look like a liar. I am not a fucking liar. I have to outlive them, all of them. If I don’t they will try very hard to make sure I don’t exist; they will erase me. No.

I haven’t been sleeping well. Not nearly enough sleep. I’m tired and sleepy all day long. Because Noah is here I’m taking more naps than usual.

I feel like a ghost. I feel like a strong wind could push me away. I don’t want to die. But I want to stop fighting. I want to stop defending my right to live. I want to stop having to earn the right to be not hurt. I am tired of trying to beg and beg and beg for people to love me and not hurt me. I’m so tired. So very tired.

It’s hard for me to read more than a couple of pages of my book at a time. I don’t want to identify with that story. Mostly I kind of put it out of my head. I am not that broken, destructive little girl anymore.

Yesterday my daughters broke the light fixture in their room. Glass showered a huge pile of stuffed animals, bedding, Lego’s, Barbie clothes, etc. Double Plus Not Good. Noah helped me. Cleaning it up wasn’t that big of a deal. Having help changed the scope of the problem significantly.

When I was a child I would have been beaten and screamed at for hours. We shook our heads and told Shanna that this was “not good” then we sighed and cleaned it up. We talked about why it wasn’t a good idea. We said we hope she doesn’t do something like this again.

That’s it. Moving on.

Every day that I am in this life feels like a fraud. I am not nice. I am violent. I am angry. I am mean and hateful. But I just can’t be with my kids. That’s wrong.

Noah gave me a parenting book for Christmas. Giving the Love That Heals so far it seems reasonable. But then I got to the part where they explicitly say this is not a book for people who have been severely wounded by their childhood–that is a different journey. Should I just quit reading? I feel so bad. I spend a lot of time feeling like the universe wants me to quit. I am broken beyond redeeming.

Fuck you all. as

I want my brother to know what I said about him. I don’t mean to hide anything. I have no secrets, right? I have a lot of stories I haven’t told yet but that is different.

Sometimes people ask me if I am afraid, what with being so out and all. They ask me if I am afraid of being stalked. Not really. If someone comes to my house intending to scare me I might walk outside with a baseball bat and say, “Unless you start running really fast you won’t be walking away from here.”

I’m not very scared of random people any more. Unless they want to shoot me there isn’t a lot they can do to scare me. And I’ve been very suicidal for a long time. I’m not going to run away from someone threatening me. That’s a way to die without having the whole guilt of suicide. It wasn’t my fault–it was some crazy gunman. That will be much easier for my kids to live with.

What, you don’t think about this shit?

I am afraid of being ostracized. I am afraid of being alone. I am afraid of being unloved. I’m not afraid of dying. I think I will welcome that.

It makes for a very different set of behaviors.

I’m afraid of ending up like Puppy’s mom. She has a job she is ok with but doesn’t love. She sits at home and reads books and chain smokes and drinks coffee and eats cookies. She doesn’t do a lot else. She is bitter and angry. She has been treated quite badly in life though I don’t know or care about the whole story. (Puppy was the serious boyfriend right before Noah asked me to marry him. He dumped me on Thanksgiving. Good riddance.)

Wow. Puppy dumped me more than seven years ago. Time sure flies when you are having fun. Tom and I broke up more than eight years ago. A different lifetime. Ten years ago for Christmas I was given a new ball gag, a portable tens unit, and the Uncle Kracker album with the song Follow Me. This year I was given bath scrubs and parenting books and an egg beater. I begged for the egg beater. That is the thing I have missed the most this year since Sarah moved out.

Once Shanna turned on her chair and sighed deeply and said, “Getting stiff peaks with a fork is sure a bitch.” She said it on the exhale of a sigh. It was hilarious. I almost fell down I was laughing so hard. Luckily she hasn’t said it again.

Oh! I got the dress I’ve been wanting for more than five years! I found it on etsy right around when we were starting to try and get pregnant. I decided I couldn’t have it till I had some idea what size I would be long term. I like it as much as I thought I would and it looks as good as I thought it would. Win. Noah did not nearly score so well.

The kids… well, they have generous grandparents. They made out like bandits and don’t appreciate it particularly though I have seen most of the new dress up clothes cycled through. Shanna is in love with the bead set–I thought she would be. She’s making jewelry constantly. It is great hand eye coordination practice so I’m trying to be permissive.

Really all of the new stuff is appreciated but they don’t react particularly in the ways I (apparently) “expect” children to act and that’s weird for me. I’m trying hard to just accept them and not try to direct this. That’s not useful. They are having the experience they are having. Go with it. I am making more comments than I should. It is hard to be as silent as I know I should be. Noah is continually pointing out my inherent hypocrisy; living with him is a mixed blessing sometimes.

He keeps me honest. I don’t want my kids to be particularly attached to things. And they aren’t. They don’t think that getting “more things” means someone loves them more. They just aren’t swayed by it. I should push them into that mindset. Not one little bit. LA LA LA. Move on Krissy.

My mom was very much of that mindset. I was pushed towards that mindset. I kind of have it but mostly don’t. Mostly I am quite low in my attachment to things. Except that egg beater. I really missed having an egg beater. But I don’t care much about which one I have. I’m not particular about “things”. If someone told me I had to walk out of this house with the clothes on my back I would probably clutch my laptop and go. I can deal with the loss of everything else. I would probably want to get dressed very carefully–I would wear several layers… I’m just sayin’.

I look forward to living out of a suitcase. When we went to Scotland for a month we had one large rolling suitcase and I think three small-ish backpacks. For a family of four. It would have been far less if I hadn’t needed all the baby shit. And we were going for a wedding so we needed fancy schtuff.

Someday Noah and I will go on long trips with a couple of backpacks. Well, they might be rolling bags because I am old and my back hurts. Maybe. We’ll see. Backpacks are better.

Notice how this digression happens? I start off with an SMS from my brother and I end up talking about how badly I want to run away. Predictable. I suppose that when it comes to my family I will always want to run away. That is predictable.

I did something brave. I invited someone not already in my completely comfortable zone to go on a trip with me. I get to do a lot more in-advance negotiation than usual this time. (*wave to person*) I feel like most of my problems while traveling happen because I don’t negotiate my boundaries well enough. I also don’t anticipate a problem because this person is not someone who walks into my life and drops work on me. I’m trying to be more paranoid about that kind of thing. (No leaving two bowls to wash after making banana bread doesn’t count as dropping more work on me. It’s about scale.)

I’ve been listening to Mean by Taylor Swift on repeat for a few days. (Tay–I think you will like this a lot more than you like Lady Gaga. Ha.) I don’t want to be mean. I know a lot of mean people. What does it really mean that I get to pick who I know? Don’t you have to take the bad with the good if you want community? It’s all or nothing–right?

That’s why I like having parties.

Sobonfu told me to make my own community. She told me I would never fit anywhere and that’s fine–make my own. Bruce told me to start a religion. Noah gave me a book for Christmas about how people should be starting their own Tribes. I don’t think I want to start a religion. Sorry, Bruce.

Several times I have had people tell me that I inspire them. That they think of me when they are scared or weak and that helps them find the strength to go on. It is a staggering thing to be told. I don’t feel worthy. Heh. That’s kind of part of the whole thing–right?

Being told that is intoxicating. It is far more potent than any drug and I’ve tried a lot. Having in the back of my mind if I keep going maybe I will hear that again is heady. That’s an addiction too.

Part of the reason that I’m weird to Noah is when guys want the way I want it comes out very differently–it’s a very different search for status for a guy. They have to have money or position or esteem or something before they can have pretty much anything so their want gets directed toward things. (Of course this isn’t universally true: missionaries!)

When I try to think about what I want it is generally in the vague sense of relationships. I have caused quite a few people to not be interested in relationships with me because I like labels that are denotative rather than connotative. If you know what I mean. If you don’t, what I mean is: they say, “We are friends” and what that means is they will think about you when you are right in front of their face and at no other time.

I wish people were honest about that up front. If people referred to me as an acquaintance then I would have such an expectation. They know nothing about me and do not think of me but they have seen me and been introduced. I wish that word was brought back into wider usage.

I like having a large and charming social of social acquaintances. I don’t like having many friends. I am too demanding. I have too many little ticks and irregularities. People have to be willing to take notes and modify their behavior in order to become people I feel comfortable around. Folks who think that isn’t worth their time or attention aren’t actually my friends. If you know what I mean.

But that’s ok! There is this large miasma of people in the acquaintance category. I don’t expect them to give a shit about me. I don’t expect them to modify themselves for me in any way. I just privately (or not so privately) think of them as assholes. I’m civil. Barely. I just try to avoid them.

I have those specific coping methods from the sex communities. It is weird coming into the home schooling community. I have to change how I talk to people. When I take something badly I have to say, “I’m sure that I am not understanding you correctly but I thought I heard you say ____ and to me that sounded like ____ but I’m sure I am misunderstanding. May I ask you to explain?”

It’s fucking hard and embarrassing. But I have to do it otherwise I will start avoiding gatherings because people are there. I can’t do that to the kids.

I want to feel safe from sexual assault. I am going to be avoiding the sex communities for a while and I’ll see if it helps. (Not that I actually feel afraid of anyone in particular at those parties. I haven’t run into anyone who has assaulted me at a party since it happened.) But I’m obviously having conflicted feelings. I don’t need to feel pressure to be there. It’s an opt-in space. I’m doing something else.

It is giving up another piece of my identity. Am I not kinky any more? Am I no longer a pervert? Can I ever undo the things I have done. THAT’S WHY I LET HIM TAKE PICTURES. None of it can ever be completely forgotten. I have pictures. Hundreds. I have a lot of pictures of me fucking girls too. I had a really fun early twenties.

I’m not worried about blackmail because if someone released some of them publicly and it caught wind I would say, “Ooooh! It’s part of a set! Would you like to see the rest?!” Then I would send a lot more.

I used to sleep in a steel cage. I hear he finally made a more comfortable bottom for it. I had my ex-fiancé Steve make it–he was a welder by trade. With one inch steel tubes. It was a grid. It was 2′ x 2′ x 3′. It was a birthday present for Tom the year he turned thirty-two.

I need to not hear these things any more. I don’t really want to hear that Tom had a floor made for it because the current girl wants it more comfy. I want to pat her on the shoulder and say he is in the honeymoon phase. Be careful.

Edge play is something that is talked about a lot in the bdsm world. It is usually treated as what people should be trying to graduate towards. It is often used to mean heavy play. I wish it weren’t. In my opinion edge play is doing something that has a measurable risk of ending your life.

In the past few years a couple of close friends sat me down to lecture me on the escalating risk of me continuing to do breath play–you know, being choked out. It can be done in a variety of ways. I had to, in turn, go to Noah and talk about it. I have had to remind him a few times. It is hard. It is hard to have tears running down my face and have to say, “If you don’t want me to die while we are having sex then you should probably stop doing that.”

Yes, it turns you on. Yes, you want to do it to me. You can’t. Not if you want me to live. I am an animal. I have limits. I am skating near the edges of the amount of trauma a body can absorb. I wish that wasn’t true. But it is.

I have a lot of pictures of my life being risked so that someone could look at me and masturbate.

I have some interesting feelings about that. Ok, most of our play was extreme but not life-risking. We saved that for special occasions.

And I’m not saying it is his fault or that I was abused. My ex emphatically did not abuse me. I scripted most of our intense play. I’m not blaming him. I’m really not. I helped him build a lot of the equipment we used. I gave it to him as presents. I was not abused. I went to fucking Great America and had the bemused air brushing artist paint slave on my back. I wasn’t being abused. I was very proud of what I was doing.

Why did I want that so much?

When I look at the pictures (err, not that I do this often) I’m usually struck by how sad I look. Resigned. As a result he mostly liked to cover my face. He was into hoods. Made of leather, plastic and duct tape, rubber, vet wrap… whatever. As long as he didn’t have to look at me.

I like living with someone who likes looking at me. I like living with someone who likes listening to the sound of my voice. I get three of them. It’s like a god damn miracle. But in order for it to work I have to be just as interested in them.

How do you live like a main character in an ensemble cast? How do you balance all of the needs?

But that’s kind of a lie. Our needs are food, shelter, and water (even though Yakutat freaking Alaska thinks you just need food, shelter and booze). Noah would be supplying those needs if he slacked at work; I promise. But he does a lot more than that. And he comes home and works hard on having relationships with the kids even though he’s an introvert who would really like to be in a quiet dark room.

Because we need love too. And the only way for us to have it is to give it. And give it. And give it long past when we feel like we want to. Because the kids need it right now. They won’t always–eventually it will be cloying and stifling and inappropriate.

It feels really good that we get to be spending so much of our life on a love-in. I know that not everyone gets that.

I had this horrifying childhood but I always felt like there was a way out. How would life work if I didn’t think that?

Privilege. I have so much of it that it is coming out my ears. With great privilege comes great responsibility.

One of the movies I watched recently, I think Winter’s Bone had a scene that is sticking in my head. I couldn’t easily find it on youtube. The kids haven’t seen their father in weeks. Their mother is mentally ill. She hasn’t responded or moved in months. The oldest daughter is trying to figure things out. The three kids are standing near their house watching a neighbor butcher a venison he hunted. The son suggested that they should ask for some meat. They were starving. But the oldest sister said:

“Never ask for what ought to be offered.”

That has been rolling around in my head like a marble. Never ask for what ought to be offered.

But that assumes that everyone around you has the same culture and knows which things ought to be offered.

Tricky.

My culture is white trash. What is yours? Tay–if you say you are white trash I will smile, exclaim “brother!” and hug you to me. It’s an opt-in label. No I don’t get to define it for anyone else.

I just have to figure out who and what I am and what I need. Then I need to figure out how to meet my needs on my own. I understand that this should be obvious and all but it isn’t. I didn’t grow up like that. Now I have a great series of child development books and I get to find out how to forgive myself for being a child.

It is hard being endlessly nice as my kids do frustrating things. But childhood is full of such errors. If you make your kids feel bad for making mistakes then they will be afraid to try things. I don’t want my kids to be afraid to try. I want them to get better at risk evaluation. Different.

I want them to know lots of different kinds of people. That means I have to be able to figure out how to meet my needs no matter who is around. I don’t. Right now I hide behind needing to model for the kids.

I’m bad. What kind of model could I be? As long as all they see is love am I really bad? Do the things I have done define my worthiness to love now?

I hope to fucking hell that I will be good enough. I know I don’t have forever just because I want it. When I’m really maudlin I worry about the kids reading this whining some day.

The uncontrollable crying is because I hurt my mommy. I rejected her. Partially because of things that were outside her control. It’s not just that though. I rejected her because I don’t like being blamed for everyone else’s problems. It is not my fucking fault that my father raped my sister for three extra years.

But having kids who are 2.5 and 4.5 and thinking about my life then and what happened when I was a child…

I don’t need to forgive them. I need to forgive me. It was an accident. It isn’t your fault that they are so mad. They just aren’t allowed to be mad at anyone else.

I’m not allowed to be mad at my kids. And I’m not allowed to be mad at my husband. And I’m not allowed to be mad at my friends. And a parade of therapists, my husband, my friends, and my kids if they ever find out will all join the shouting that I must stop being mad at myself and I must stop hurting myself.

But I’m so fucking mad. I’m not even supposed to be mad at the people who hurt me? No. Being mad is poison. It does nothing to them and it hurts you.

It’s ok to remember and forgive myself for being a child. I don’t need to waste time thinking about whether or not I forgive my family. I don’t. They won’t accept responsibility and they won’t change. I won’t be at the bottom of the shit hill any more.

Good grief. Two hankies of crying. That’s probably enough for one day. I woke up earlier than usual. Wow. More than 4500 words. Don’t you wish you had that time back? Today friends will come over. I will ignore the fact that I wish I was hiding under the desk in the garage sobbing and beating my head on concrete. It will be fine. It will be a lovely day.

It really doesn’t matter how I feel. I want community. This is how you act if you want community. If you deviate you don’t have community. How badly do I want it? Enough to function? Well. Put on your game face. It will be fine. Really. Go in, Krissy. Everyone is awake now. (4635. Ha.)

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We’re told women want sex as much as men. As far as I can tell, it’s true. So why don’t we see more equality? When somebody is paying for sex, why is it always a man paying? When you go to a singles bar, why is it that more men are so often cruising fewer women instead of the
other way around? And why is asking and trying to get attention the default and expected behavior for men, and a stigmatized sign of being “too desperate” in women?

Why, in other words, are men pushing for sex and women acting as gatekeepers when women want sex as much as men do? Shouldn’t women be pushing and men resisting about as often?

I do push. The reactions suck. Here’s what happens to me, as a woman who pushes for sex. I go out on a series of first dates with guys who want me to be their dream come true. They see one side of me and decide that I have to change my whole life to accommodate their preferences. Guys are really nasty when you are not instantly available to them in any capacity they want. And that means being the perfect level of busy. Because if you have less or more going on than them that is supposed to automatically happen. Your schedule is supposed to give way to theirs.

It’s just assumed. I know chicks do this too. But when chicks expect more time than a guy wants to give she is labeled as “clingy” and too “dependent”. It’s a massive character flaw.

It’s true in some cases and not in others. But near as I can tell most men don’t want sex as much as we’re told men want it. More equality in what? I cannot count the number of married women I know who whine and bitch and moan about not getting enough sex. Once people are trapped in marriage it really is a toss-up who actually wants more sex. It’s immediate access to sex that is less guaranteed. A lot of this is that many women tend to be turned on by different things than men. Often things that take more time and emotional connection to establish. They may want sex, but not right now and not with you.

There is a physical component of need to sex and there is an emotional component. The general norms indicate that men and women have different levels of trust-need in order to have physical attraction. It may be a cultural construct, but we live where we live.

Why are women gatekeepers? Because if they have sex they are often shamed, humiliated, and later violently assaulted for being stupid enough to say yes. If a high school girl says “yes” in any context other than a committed long-term relationship she becomes a slut. Once a girl has the reputation of being a slut she is in active danger. Boys will follow her around and strongly imply, often backed with physical intimidation, that since she said once she is required to say yes again, to him. It is terrifying to open the gates of sex when you are a teenage girl. That road is littered with violence.

Shame

Here are some standard non-answers: “men are dogs” or “men are perverts” or “men have no shame.” Those are euphemisms we use for “men show that they want sex, right out in public.” If desire is equal and universal, why is it shameful to say so? If it’s not shameful to say so, why do we use shaming words for people who do?

Here are more standard non-answers: “women aren’t slaves to their base urges.” “Women are too pure for that.” These are actually the same non-answers, phrased passive-aggressively – wanting sex is shameful, and only men do that. That is, also false and also shaming.

Part of this is the idea that pleasure is sinful. We are a religious country whether we want to admit it or not. As a collective group the Judeo-Christian crowd has decided that if men have a little fun on the sly it can be ignored. If a woman does she should be shunned. This is hearkening back to the era where if a girl lost her virginity before marriage she no longer had market worth and she would be treated badly permanently. Even if she lost her virginity through rape. It really is a tough line that women have to walk. We are supposed to constantly appear sexually appealing, because after all if we aren’t sexually appealing we have no intrinsic value, but be careful about not spreading it around. If you spread a commodity amongst too many people it is no longer valuable.

Why Buy the Cow?

We mean that sex should happen in a tight, monogamous bond, preferably marriage. We also mean that women should enforce that — wait for the ring, wait for the commitment, make him buy gifts and act thoughtful and show how much he wants it. Women are thoughtful and give gifts too, of course. But if you look at what gifts cost and who is coercing who, it’s pretty clear that women can strong-arm men much more often than vice-versa.

In fact, sex is considered incredibly valuable for the woman acting as gatekeeper — so valuable that it’s often treated as a woman’s first and most important asset, and not just by men. Women remind each other that he won’t “buy the cow” if you just give sex away — make him earn it with a powerful commitment and many gifts, over and over again.

If sex is that valuable *only for women*, that’s a huge imbalance.

Why are men expected to spend more money? Uhm, maybe because they make more? Maybe because they will permanently, always, be privileged when it comes to being a provider? The purpose of giving gifts in the courting stage is to show that you will be a good provider. Given that many women still feel nervous about being able to provide for themselves financially, it’s a reasonable worry.

Picking the right mate is the difference between a life of luxury or a life of misery. Ask me how I know. What would my life have turned out like if I hadn’t been such a good whore I managed to catch a rich husband?

Working Girls

We don’t like to admit these things in conversation, but actions speak louder than words. We act like sex is a valuable commodity that must be paid for by men. The world’s oldest profession is also one of the most universal. Yes, men can be prostitutes too. But overwhelmingly their clients are other men, not women.

Feminists dispute some of these points – which ones depends on which feminist you talk to or read. But they dispute what *should* be the case more often than they dispute what *is* the case. And many modern feminists believe prostitution is just fine… That when women have
something of such value they should be free to sell it if they want to.

Mostly women don’t know that they have any commodity to sell other than their body. We are not brought up to cultivate our minds. We are not taught business skills. We are not taught how to be successful. We are taught to shut up and suck smoothly. The reason that a lot of women don’t “put out” early on in courting is because when they do they are abandoned. Many men believe that the kind of woman who will put out quickly is one you should despise. You never know until it is too late what kind of man you are sleeping with. It’s a dangerous risk to take.

Pater Noster

But isn’t it the Patriarchy or The Man holding women into these rigid roles, and forcing sex to be sold by women? In a word, no.

The Patriarchy is real, alive and well. But why would it enforce roles on women that force men to pay constantly for sex, whether from prostitutes or with constant and expensive gifts to a single wife? If The Man was in charge of this specific effect, wouldn’t he follow the lead of the Middle East and keep a harem or several wives? He’d pay, yes, and continue buying gifts, but the focus on monogamous bonds keeps him from playing one wife against another, inhibits his chances to find dalliances outside his home and generally holds him back if what he wants is constant and uninhibited sex. He has many better models of sex and marriage to choose from than the modern American one if he’s being properly self-serving. The Man may have chosen this from among his various available choices… But women *do* get to restrict his choices, or he’d have made a different one.

Vast cultural differences, that’s why. Although you are fooling yourself if you think that rich men don’t already have this. Not every guy. But enough that it is kind of silly to imply that we actually follow monogamy in this country. American women have learned to put a higher price on themselves. I’m all for it.

Follow the Money

Here’s the question to ask: who benefits? People are often selfless individually, but they’re generally ruthlessly mercenary in groups and over long times. A large group’s habits and customs mostly work to their collective advantage, even when individuals are selfless,
self-sabotaging or self-sacrificing.

Who benefits? Women wind up holding an extremely valuable commodity, and eventually being paid handsomely for it.

Traditionally speaking this was the only means of survival. To act like there is something wrong with it is short-sighted and self-absorbed. Things have changed substantially over the last few generations, but women still have to worry about pregnancy. Women will still bear the burden of work if a man happens to knock them up. You don’t know until it is too late how much responsibility a man will take for his actions. Yes, this is true of women as well, but it is pretty ridiculous to act like the responsibility for the outcome of sex falls primarily on men. No, it’s on women. And men are upset that women don’t sign on for a whole lot more of it? That shows that they aren’t bearing as much cost for the decision.

If a woman chooses to have sex she is going to have to deal with the consequences. Perhaps pregnancy and motherhood. Perhaps an abortion. These are both significant decisions that have lifelong consequences. Men prove early and often that they don’t have to be bound by the same rules. Yes, some men are responsible. What is a woman’s guarantee?

Devil’s Bargain

But don’t women lose a lot? Well, if they’re interested in sex, sure. They get less sex. They get less variety in sex. They get partners who are *desperate* for sex, which is not a recipe for *good* sex in the same way that a starving person isn’t going to pay much attention to the effort you lavished into getting the sauce right on the roast lamb.

But then, if sex is held as a commodity in public, desiring it has been defined as weakness. Admitting you *want* sex is already a betrayal. So you’re only losing what it’s now low-class to admit wanting. So everybody “wins”, right?

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Category Archives: community

Get over yourself.

There’s a first time for everything.

GAD sucks.

fast check in

Dear anonymous person on the internet,

Now I understand “fuck cancer”

therapist and motherhood

Living in one place is weird.

Suicidal ideation

If you build it, they will come.

I don’t think group therapy is working out.

Thinking about marriage.

I believe "brave" is a synonym for "stupid".

The Embargo