Category Archives: depression

Marking time

Yesterday as we were driving a song came on the stereo. Travis Tritt singing Great Day to be Alive. I have so many layers of association with that song. When I was twelve and I dated the twenty-five year old DJ from KRTY Travis Tritt was his favorite singer. “The only fan club he will ever join.”

One of the lines is “It’s been fifteen years since I left home.” Holy crap. In October it will be fifteen years since I left home. In October it will be ten years since I left my Owner. My brother Tommy has been dead for sixteen years next month–officially half of my life. October is sixteen years since my father killed himself. Not quite half my life yet because of that annoying birthday in September.

Wow things change. It was hard leaving home. It was hard leaving my Owner. Both times I was afraid that I was leaving looking for something better and I didn’t know that I would find it.

I’ve always been fond of the devil I don’t know.

It has seemed to me throughout most of my life that I have no recourse for moving backwards. The resiliency books told me that people who succeed are people who have no real back up plans. They must succeed.

Fifteen years ago I knew that I would have to get out of my family’s home and stay out. There was no going back for me. I knew I would not be able to take support from my family as an adult. That support is a poisoned pill.

My Owner said he wanted to remain friends. By which he meant that if I showed up at the events he liked to go to he would be happy to continue to objectify me and talk about me like I was slightly stupid furniture forever more. (I spent a lot of that relationship tied up being used as actual furniture. I didn’t think he would suddenly start respecting my brain post-dumping.)

I can’t go back. Every step in my life has been a step towards being less abused. Less objectified. Less taken for granted.

Why does my stomach hurt so much? Why am I so afraid? At this stage I’ve pretty much done it. No one is hurting me any more. Sure, sometimes I deal with assholes, but it’s never ongoing persecution any more.

I haven’t been hit nonconsensually in a long long time. Part of it is that I’m getting older so I just look less like a target (being a kid is so shitty) and part of it is the confidence that financial security brings. I’m not a good target any more. Not only am I happy to viciously physically attack someone who is physically aggressive but I have the money sitting around to pay a lawyer–which is a privilege. That’s a big fucking deal.

I will probably never be helpless again. Sure, I will always have to deal with assholes once in a while. That’s just part of life. I’m an asshole so I can’t really act like I deserve better or anything.

My stomach hurts because I’m in one of those phases where the chemicals in my brain tell me that the people who tell me they love me are lying. It doesn’t count. It isn’t real. It… it will change. They won’t love me for very long. I’m not good enough. Everything changes for me. Over and over again. I have not had a life with consistency.

The great part about being the age I am now is that I have enough experience to know it is a lie. Not everyone who tells me they love me is lying. Noah is not lying. Jenny isn’t lying. Hell, Sarah isn’t lying. Several people have emailed me lately to let me know they are thinking about me–even people who don’t read my blog so they aren’t on the roller coaster of whine with me.

I am *not* trying to say that I want people to jump through hoops to prove anything to me. If I can’t see something that is already there… other people can’t help me much.

I don’t actually think those people would bother to lie to me. Lying to me about loving me would take will and effort. They have to go out of their way to talk to me. I don’t suspect anyone of having a lot of energy for willfully deceiving me. Come on, I’m not that important.

But I’m scared. I’m so scared.

Deep breaths.

Reality and illusion are harder to separate than you might think.

It is hard to go through the motions of acting like I believe people when I don’t. That takes a lot of energy. It takes a lot of conscious act of willpower. I’m kind of afraid I’m in a chemical depression right now. Every single fucking thing I’m doing right now feels so physically hard. My entire body hurts a lot of the time. Maybe I’m sick. But I don’t know. This has been going on for a bit and I don’t have a lot of concrete symptoms beyond “feeling like shit”.

Moving feels like walking uphill through a river of molasses. It is a huge act of will to move my legs at all, then I can barely make progress.

(Yes, I know I went running last night and maintained a decent pace. It hurt. I have learned that something hurting me is irrelevant to whether or not I do it. Lots of years of training behind that bit of logic.)

My chest hurts. My throat hurts. My back hurts (upper and lower). My sides hurt. My hips hurt. My arms hurt. My shoulders hurt. My knees are feeling kind of whiny. I may be ready to switch to shoes with more support.

Today is a field trip to the beach. Weeeee. A field trip where I had to set the boundaries and tell several people, “Actually if there is a waiting list and people are being denied access to the event it’s not cool that you just “bring along a friend”–sorry.”

I’m struggling with that aspect of the home school community. Frequently the group events have a limit of number of bodies, for a wide variety of reasons, and people regularly think those rules shouldn’t apply to them. Then they want to come ask me for an exception. This has happened with a bunch of different events. I’m kind of bitch-tastic. “Uhm, no. I told other people they weren’t allowed to come because we were full so you don’t get to queue jump because you are fucking special.”

We are home schoolers! We are all special snowflakes!

Yeah, that’s nice. Sometimes there are still limits to the number of bodies we can accommodate for a lot of reasons. Today the limit has nothing to do with me or my preferences–someone else set the limit but I’m going to bleepin’ enforce it.

I am so weird about rules. On one hand I am a contrary bastard and if you tell me a rule I will probably immediately break it unless you can convince me not to. (The kids and I had a long, earnest conversation in the car yesterday about why I am fanatical about following the correct rules for driving [Helloooooo…. people die if you fuck that up. It’s not a god damn game.] but other rules are almost always negotiable or flexible.)

So I’m not saying that the people who ask for exceptions are terrible people. Just that they are breaking a rule I don’t want broken. Which is random and arbitrary and I’m a major rule breaker most of the time. I don’t understand my priorities sometimes.

I suspect that part of it is, as a teacher: I know my limits. There are times when I can only handle teaching x bodies. If someone wants me to do x + 1 it will make the whole thing unravel and I will be unable to do what I wanted to do. Which fucking pisses me off. Is it lame that sometimes I just can’t absorb another body? Maybe. Oh well. It’s where I am.

People are allowed to ask for special exceptions. I’m allowed to think they are kind of assholes in that moment. Just like I’m an asshole every time I ask for special exceptions. Which I do all the time. Because I’m a self-involved asshole. Just like every one else.

So when you say there is no harm in asking… well… sometimes it harms peoples opinion of you. I understand how that can suck. I deal with similar backlash for my own asshole behavior.

Hey, I’m not saying I dislike assholes or that I don’t want to know them or anything like that. I’m just saying that I’m capable of seeing more than one side of a person. We all have a potential asshole inside us. Not just cause we sit on one. Sometimes advocating for yourself can’t be done without being an asshole.

Go ahead and advocate for yourself. I’m serious. Be ok with being an asshole sometimes.

If people can’t handle you being an asshole sometimes they probably are too high maintenance to be worth a relationship anyway. Man I can’t take that kind of pressure.

I like complex people. I like having years and years to study people and figure out why they do what they do. People are mostly internally consistent. They have justifications and reasons for what they do if you sit down and listen. I find the stories endlessly fascinating.

So when I say I’m struggling with boundaries around these things it isn’t that I think other people suck and should die in a fire for making me enforce boundaries. That is very much not what I mean.

I just mean that sometimes enforcing boundaries makes my stomach hurt. Which makes me glare in grumpy fashion at the person who needs a boundary enforced. I don’t begrudge them. I try not to complain in the moment. But I get to bitch in my journal. This would be why it exists.

I really hate these periods of irrational thinking. Where everything feels weighed down with “No one could possibly actually like me.”

All of those small boundary incursions feel like massive disrespect and dislike. They feel like people are assholes because I am a piece of shit who deserves to be walked all over. I understand that it isn’t personal. They aren’t asking for an exception because they want to be annoying for me they are asking for an exception because they want to be part of a group event and not feel left out.

That’s kind of the opposite of hating me if the event is at my house. Yet these feelings persist.

Sometimes it feels like I am looking at my friends through a glass wall. I can feel the affection I have for them. I can’t feel any affection from them. It feels like all I can see is a masquerade of affection. I know I am the problem and not them–but I don’t know how to change it when I am in it.

Mostly I try to not blow up my relationships and keep my mouth shut till this phase passes. It always has before.

Fifteen years since I’ve been gone. I never would have imagined that I could accomplish all I have done. When I was eighteen it was not a goal to be a writer. Isn’t that kind of funny? I knew I wanted to train as a teacher as a back up career but what I wanted was to home school my kids. That was what I wanted to do with my life.

It isn’t enough now.

I will start getting editorial feedback on my second book in a few weeks. Then I get to start hunting for a publisher. I have to be brave. Even though it is scary.

Too many scary things lately. Maybe that’s why my stomach hurts and I feel so paranoid. Or I’m just in a cycle, like I do. Noah says these cycles are not very predictable in terms of timing. Bummer.

I’m aware it will be a good day. I will forking force it to be a good day.

Yesterday had peaks and valleys but mostly it was a good day. We went to the mall after the park and looked for a present for Shanna. We stayed in Claire’s. She was very clear what she wanted. Good grief.

I feel weird about raising little girls who are coding girl so hard. How did I get ultra femmes? Then again I obsessively played with makeup when I was little. I don’t care about it now. Most of the people I know who are obsessed as adults weren’t allowed to play with it as very small children. Maybe there is a motive to my madness in supplying them with makeup.

Things that are taboo hold a lot of allure. Things that are matter of fact parts of your life are less obsessive. I just don’t see the need to fight my kids on things that don’t matter.

Well, why do the limits matter so much on home school events? Depends why that event has a limit. For home schooling events we are often depending on moms to supply lots of other children with education/entertainment. Everyone has the limit of size of crowd they can effectively reach. That varies from person to person and event to event.

I can only run a sit-down event for about 20 people. That’s the limit of my space. I can handle open-ended parties of 150 people. I feel very comfortable directing large groups through actions when I am out in public. Like, I have no problem trying to corral 30 or 50 kids in a park or museum or something like that. I can do that kind of crowd management.

Not everyone shares my limits. Some people can handle talking to a maximum of a dozen people before they start kind of freaking out. Some people can handle crowds of thousands before they feel panic. Everyone is different.

When you are going to an event… you need to be nice to the person who is kindly providing you an experience. Don’t demand something they can’t provide. That’s all I’m saying.

Ok, I stop typing now.

Drips, drabs, ups, and downs.

6 Replies

We went up to San Pablo yesterday to see some friends. This is after that specific friend coming to my house monthly for ohhh four years now? I am starting to try and do some trips up there in exchange for all the trips to my house. The distance between us is not shorter just because he is a guy with no kids. I can do effort too.

And when I drive up there I get to spend time with his lovely wife. I find the visits to be highly educational in diverse arenas. For one thing: she knows way the fuck more about gardening than I do and she’s happy to talk about plants. Lately getting near someone with lots of plant knowledge who does not eschew my children is somewhat tricky. I’ve tried to sign up for gardening classes THAT ARE BEING ADVERTISED ON AN UNSCHOOLING MAILING LIST and I was told I would have to get babysitting. Stop fucking advertising in this space if my fucking kids aren’t welcome you fucking fuckers. I didn’t say fuck to the people in question. I just dropped it.

Beyond the gardening stuff, I am having a bit of trouble with Callidora. Well, phrasing it that way sounds more extreme than it is. Many of my parenting approaches work really well for Shanna and don’t work at all with Calli. Luckily my friends’ wife seems to identify really strongly with Calli. They are very similar temperamentally and she is giving me a lot of feedback for how to tweak our interactions so they work better.

I feel so much gratitude I don’t have words. Someone is willing to look at me and look at my daughter and look at our relationship and say, “You are doing ok, but you both might be happier if you did……”

Err, in defense of my hubris more than once I have said, “I’m afraid I am going to have to do ____” and her response was “Yes. That is exactly what you have to do.” So she isn’t entirely telling me new information. But she is very good at skimming out the bullshit and getting to the heart of the matter. “This is failing because of x.”

I don’t trust many people to give me feedback. I’m not sure why I trust her feedback as much as I do. For one thing she doesn’t use the word “should” and I’m not sure if that has become a specific trigger. Maybe I explode at people for that word rather than because I am completely unwilling to accept advice? It’s hard to tease out.

Also, she tends to say “Calli seems to be a lot like me. When I was a kid I had x and y and z experiences and this is how it went well and this is how it went badly. If Calli is as much like me as she seems right now, you are going to have to deal with a and b and c. It’s not a good idea to do d.”

I guess there is an implied “should” in that but she doesn’t say it.

It also occurs to me that I push Calli in a way I have never pushed Shanna. When Shanna was three I had a one year old. We did not spend a lot of time pushing the absolute physical limits of what she could accomplish until she collapsed in frustrated tears.

I’m having a hard time understanding fully that Calli wants to be able to do things she isn’t ready to do yet and I need to find a tactful way of bailing her out even as I push Shanna to try. Differentiated instruction is a bitch.

(Err, the bicycle riding project is coming along. We’ve hit a few hiccups. As my wise new running mate commented, “Dude. You’ve been out with them four times? Relax and do more low pressured practice.”

Yeah yeah. You may have a point. But we bought the bikes because we want to ride to the park. I need to decide in my adult brain that even if that is the eventual goal… we sure as shit can’t start by doing that. I should probably not try to leave our housing development again until June. We need more low-stakes practice than we have had. Hours and hours and hours and hours.

It is not just a form of transportation. It is about entertainment. It has to be about entertainment at first or they won’t gain enough proficiency to use it as transportation later. The transportation part doesn’t have to be worked out at three, instantly. Relax you bitch.

Medication has been spotty this week. I (re?)noticed a pattern. Whenever I get to the point of using sufficient medication that I actually feel good instead of having just the edge of the pain taken away I punish myself for days with under medicating so I feel a lot more pain. I’m not supposed to be using pot like a pot head. I’m not supposed to be trying to get high. I’m supposed to be just managing the pain.

I think I am too much of a Puritan. My sister told me I had ancestors on the Mayflower (Not her–different fathers.). Maybe it is too deeply buried within my DNA? I can’t stop believing that I must suffer. Anything that feels good MUST BE BAD.

I have been very consistent lately about giving up my morning “off time” to wake up with the kids. I’m not sure if this is good or bad. On one hand I’m more frazzled and I’m not taking a compensatory amount of time later. On the other hand… we are getting along better. When the kids open their eyes in the morning to me in their bed smiling at them… the whole day is easier. The first thing they hear every day is, “Good morning. I’m so glad to see you again. I’m looking forward to our wonderful day together.”

They smile back and say, “Me too!” then grab my neck and pull me close. Then I get a sleepy “Good morning.”

Sometimes it feels weird knowing that I do this as a parenting gesture in large part to make up for the hole in my heart. No one was ever happy to see me during my childhood. I was a terrible, unwanted burden.

I completely support mothers who need to abort children born of rape. I wish my mother hadn’t allowed her religion to force her to keep me. I was not wanted. And they made my life hell.

Now I have something different. It is so very nice. But it’s a lot of emotional and mental and physical work. And I get really tired.

When I’m tired it is harder to be consistent. When I’m scared I start screaming. That’s consistent.

Calli has asked me to stop raising my voice at her when I’m repeating orders/requests/whatever you want to call them. Demands? She told me (while making eye contact so this is serious as a fucking heart attack) “I will be able to listen to you better if you get close to me and whisper in my ear that it is important.”

If a three year old can so clearly ask for the kind of interaction she needs then I am a fucking asshole if I ignore the request. This is how I teach them ownership of their body and consent and boundaries.

I’ve been working on it. I kind of feel that I should create some accountability tool for myself. Maybe another sheet of paper on the wall. I can ask Calli to help me decide whether I approached her correctly or not and we can decide if I get a mark in the “right behavior” column or the “not so right” column. It will also help her clarify which aspects of the raised voice stuff are a problem for her.

My kids are not going to grow up thinking adults are perfect and kids need to bend to the adults around them. Ha. Ha. Ha. No. We want to live together. We need to adapt to one another.

I’m happy about the upcoming social stuff. I’m feeling a little overwhelmed that people are agreeing so delightedly to come to my events. My RSVPs fill up fast. (Err, RSVP for Easter if you are coming… not many spaces left.)

I have had something like six people in the last two weeks get really excited when I confirm that I’m hosting Easter again. “OH! You throw the best parties!”

I do?

Oh.

Well that’s awesome. How do I do that? What makes them “the best” for you? Because I spend my parties in kind of an anxious hell hoping I don’t offend everyone and run them off such that they never want to come back.

And yet I keep hosting. Irony.

I don’t seem to be running people off. I mean… I do… but I don’t. I run some people off.

I feel very guilty when I admit to myself that I run off people who need things from me that I can’t give. My anxiety and shame around not being able to meet their needs makes me angry and cruel. It isn’t my fault I can’t meet their needs. It isn’t their fault I can’t meet their needs. It isn’t their fault they have needs. I have needs they can’t meet either. But I get mean. This is a major character flaw of mine.

I don’t do this with people who have small needs I can easily meet. If people need something from me that is going to be an up to five hour commitment one time… I love doing that. That helps me feel like I am part of a community and I’m useful and all kinds of good feelings. When someone starts to need 3-10 hours of work from me every fucking week in order to have a relationship with them…

I get mean. I am awful. I am not a nice person. I don’t know how to have healthy limits without being an asshole. I’m not making excuses or justifying my behavior. It’s wrong.

I have been talking to a friend a lot about how different it is in America versus other more crowded countries. Americans apologize for bumping into someone. In China you would never say any word other than “sorry”. So they don’t bother.

I spend a lot of time apologizing for taking up space. I spend a lot of time apologizing for being inconvenient. I spend a lot of time apologizing for not being able to do/be what someone else wants/needs.

I am sorry I am so inadequate. I clearly see that I am.

Right now I’m having anxiety attacks because some folks are mad at me. Folks I don’t really need to “care” about per se. They aren’t my friends. They are the close friends of one of my friends. They are mad at me because my vomiting on Friday caused them some inconvenience. I have apologized profusely for inconveniencing them. I’m sorry they were brought into the situation by our mutual friend. But yeah. I’m the bitch.

And I feel consumed with shame and I have for days. I inconvenienced them. I stole hours of their life and made them about me when they already kind of hate me. I’m really sorry. I did apologize. I have not been acknowledged and that is what I assumed would happen.

I get into these situations. I’m sorry I inconvenienced you. I have very little control over when I vomit. I’m just glad I didn’t make a mess on my floor.

But it impacted your life. And you wish I didn’t impact your life. So you are angry with me because I popped up and existed in a way you couldn’t tune out.

I’m really sorry.

This is more or less why I avoid that whole segment of the “community”. I don’t really like feeling like I am doing something wrong by breathing in a way they can hear.

So yeah. I don’t think I will teach with my friend again. There is a bunch of stress in the lead up and if I get sick there is lots of acrimony, blame, and anger. Not from my friend. He was mellow about the situation. But he didn’t feel qualified to handle the class alone and those are the other people he has in his life to turn to for support.

Yeah well, me hanging around near them feels like an abusive family reunion where they all wish I would drop dead. The sooner the better.

More one of them than the other but… well that’s not a story I’ll write down yet. Maybe a few more decades. It being thirteen years ago still isn’t long enough. Some day.

It’s not all her fault. I was a bitch. But man. Oh man. Ok. Shiny change of topic.

I’ve been having a lot of feelings all week over that. I was doing great last week until I started vomiting on Friday.

I associate vomiting with letting people down and being a bad and weak person. When I get sick my association is that I will also be in trouble for some reason. I am inconvenient when I’m sick.

Noah is working hard to change some of these patterns. He’s nice when I’m sick. He does a lot of telling me that it isn’t my fault and I didn’t do anything bad. I feel really pathetic for needing it. But I do. And he does it. I am so grateful for him as a partner.

I like teaching though. I will look for more opportunities to teach. Just no co-teaching in a situation potentially wrapped in shame-inducing trauma. When I had to cancel a class as a professional teacher… no one made me write a formal apology. I’d like to go back to that kind of treatment. Thanks.

My running mate wants me to stop thinking of writing as a hobby and start thinking of it as a business. I’ve sold enough forking copies of my book that I can stop pretending I’m not a real writer. I shouldn’t have to pay for my book editing and publishing stuff out of my “fun money”. It’s not my hobby. Noah doesn’t take his business expenses out of his fun money. It’s a separate category in the budget. It’s not very healthy for me to demean myself in this fashion.

I will severely limit my career as a writer if I can’t employ an editor until I save up enough fun money by denying myself everything. Denial as a full-time lifestyle in a household that otherwise has a lot of privilege… that’s kinda self-hating. It’s being weird. It’s unhealthy.

Why do women do this to themselves? My writing “doesn’t count”. It’s just… something I do. Like the laundry. And when there are expenses for it, well, they are “mine”, right?

I developed a lot of habits over the years of having the annuities and living with men. What I could have was very strictly limited to what I had in that $1200 every month. I didn’t over extend. And now I have no real personal income and… I’m flailing. The $100/month of fun money is… not enough. Not for me to feel like I can track all of “my” spending separately from household stuff.

We just have a clothes budget. It is for all four of us. If someone gets something then the other three have to wait a while. *shrug* But it changes how I think of things. Although… when I bought the pretty clothes in Portland I took a big chunk out of my personal money. I spent more than $500 on two items of clothing. It didn’t seem fair to make my family give up that large a share of the clothes budget on me getting two items. So more than $300 came out of my fun money. That seemed fair to me.

When the kids really get a big clothes splurge… it goes in the “kid” section even though mostly they come out of the main category.

The kids have a big section of the budget that is amorphously used for classes, home school supplies. books, toys, gear of whatever kind (was baby carriers and diapers now it has moved on to bikes), and rarely clothes.

A long time ago I consciously went out and started spending time with older men. They could talk to me about money. How they got it. What they did with it. I made my own judgments about who lived in which kind of house and who had how much money. I’ve always been tactless as fuck. I would point blank ask them how much cash they had in the bank and whether or not they had investments.

I didn’t understand most of what they told me. But I remembered it. It’s kind of funny to have little memories float up now and again as I’m trying new things with investing.

Be sure you are right, then go ahead. I will, Davey. I will research and research and research and I’ll figure out what I think is right. Of course I know I could always be wrong. Some minute change in my life might make all of my careful risk calculations moot and irrelevant.

I have no way of predicting that. So I have to just act and hope for the best.

Save.

Debt is evil.

Make your money work for you.

Pay yourself first.

Sometimes I think I turn to these mantras as the only way I have of blocking out all the voices in my head who want me to think I am stupid and a bitch and I should just stop inconveniencing them by breathing.

I’ve been really stunned by the intensity of my suicidal ideation this week.

I also haven’t been doing my daily check in calls with my friend. She’s really busy on a project. She’ll be back in a week or so. I support and respect her participation in this event and that means she has no time to think about me. I am a big girl and I’ll keep my big girl panties on.

It is interesting how suicidal ideation is not always about depression. I don’t feel like I am feeling depression symptoms. This is more on the anxious/overwhelmed side. Manic is a word people like. But I’m not… doing anything manic.

Just out of the blue driving on the freeway I see a weird opening where it would be possible to turn and be hit by a semi-truck and I want to do it more than I want anything in the world. I want in that moment to feel a lot of pain and then die. I want it as much as my heart wants to beat. It is immediate and visceral and all encompassing.

I have to breathe very lightly and lift my hands so I have a very light guiding pressure on the steering wheel. Sometimes I get off the freeway to breathe and stretch my neck and remind myself, “Not today.”

The reasons I don’t like driving are varied and complicated and… I’m willing to bet that someday I will not be able to drive any more. It is part of the reason I am as strongly motivated to make friends near my house as I am. Walking will always be a good idea. Forever. For my health.

Thanks, Pam, for letting me write this morning.

My head feels better. I feel a lot less shame. Writing it down helps.

I don’t need to feel shame because other people would prefer that their world didn’t overlap with mine. I could reject our mutual friend so that they never have to hear about me again, but given that he values his relationship with me that seems kind of awful.

But I think I should have different boundaries. Still working on where those need to be. Boundaries are tricky things. You only find out you have them when they are transgressed. Ha. THAT WAS THE WHOLE POINT OF THE CLASS. And what I got out of it is: I need to make sure I never have to deal with your extended friends again. Awesome.

That’s a lesson I can learn.

They aren’t going to like me. No matter what. Ever. I need to not care about that. They are allowed to have their experience of the world where I am… something. I don’t know what. I shouldn’t speculate. I would surely overstate my importance. I certainly don’t suspect that either of them while away hours just hating me. I’m not that important.

So I don’t need to feel shame because they are feeling irritation. That’s not something I need to take on. I gave an apology. I offered restitution to the best of my ability. That’s what I’ve got. Move on. I didn’t vomit on purpose.

And when I feel shame for my social behavior I rush home to assure myself that I am managing my money properly. No one is going to be able to force me to move. I’m allowed to stay here. I’m jumping through all the hoops that actually matter for my life. I don’t have to care that they dislike me. There won’t be any consequences.

And then I can stop thinking about it.

Thank you internet. That’s the end of my confession for today. I have some dirt to play with and a fence to sand. Tomorrow a bunch of little kids are going to come paint a few sections. We are adding more year by year. Drips and drabs. It’s really fun.

Saturday is the Girl Genius Volume 1 read aloud. Email me for details if you want to come hear Noah do all the hilarious voices.

Medication and mood.

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Now that I’ve been not stoned for a long while I’ve got to say that this sucks. A lot. I miss being stoned. I miss the feeling in my abdomen of lower stress and less pain. I miss the automatic pause in my thinking before I react to anything that happens to me. That few seconds of “Must process what I think of this before I react” was awesome. The hypervigilance means I react without even thinking about what I want to do. My startle reflex is so fast. Which means I have banged the kids around a bit in the last two weeks on accident. Like, they jump on me and my body instinctively kind of blocks it so they fall off and hit something.

I’m not saying I’m shoving them or anything. I’m not being violent. I’m just recoiling and trying to avoid getting hurt. Instead they get hurt and then yell at me because I’m SO MEAN. When I was stoned all the time I didn’t have the quick recoil so they would hurt me instead of me accidentally hurting them and then we could talk about why doing ____ wasn’t a great idea. I feel like that was probably overall a kinder trade but they are jumping on me with slightly less force after a few weeks of falling off and it hurting.

The marks on the paper on the wall are really working as far as helping me control my volume. I haven’t screamed lately. I did yell at Shanna once yesterday. But all I said was her full name and “go to your room” after I’d been asking her nicely to leave the muffins alone for like an hour. (She grabbed one off the counter when I was trying to put them in bags. After her time out she came out and said, “Mom you misunderstood. I wasn’t going to eat it. I was just going to hand it to you. I don’t think I deserved time out for that.” I said, “Did you wash your hands with soap before you grabbed food that would be shared with other people?” Her eyes went big. “Ohhhh. No. I didn’t. That was a mistake. I’m sorry.” “I don’t always yell at you just because I’m a big meanie head. We have rules for a reason.” “Ok.”)

I’ve been working hard on inculcating them with the mantra of “before we prepare food we wash our hands with soap.” I have a variety of tunes I sing the process to. “Before we can prep our food we must wash our hands wash our hands. Before we can prep our food we must wash our hands and always use soap.” That one is more or less to the tune of “The wheels on the bus.”

So if that is the only shouting in a day I feel that I could continue to improve but I’m not doing shitty. I’ve been around other mothers lately. That always resets my bar on “Oh yeah. I’m not actual much of a yeller in the scheme of things…”

I feel weird about the way I’m kind of two faced about rules. On one hand I feel like we don’t have a lot of house rules. On the other hand holy shit we have a lot of house rules. Things like washing your hands before you prepare communal food. Is that a rule or a habit I’m trying to instill? I can’t really tell how to think about these things. I spent too long in the poly community. I have a lot of anxiety and guilt around imposing “rules” on people. I’m “inappropriately controlling people by putting my rules on them.” But these are my kids! I’m supposed to create the rules!

I have a lot of rules around food. No food on the carpet. You have to wash your hands before you prepare communal food. (If you are making a pbj for yourself and no one else I don’t actually care–if you want to eat your own filth that is your business.) No licking communal food tools–that’s nasty. I’m inconsistent on table manners. On one hand my children have experienced a fair number of lectures about “proper” behavior at the table. On the other hand I tell them that there are a lot of circumstances where it doesn’t matter how gross you eat and at home the rules are a lot more relaxed than they are when you are at someone else’s house or when we are at a restaurant.

My kids have been very carefully exposed to a lot of different kind of restaurants and they understand that some restaurants they can fuck around in and on some they have to be on their absolutely best behavior. I have no fear of bringing them into expensive chi-chi restaurants. They do better than the average adult. But I coach them in advance and I talk about why it matters and I talk to them the whole time they are in the restaurant and I keep them engaged. It’s a lot easier to follow the rules when you are having fun and you want to be where you are. My kids treat going to different environments like games. “How do we act when we are someone who goes here?”

I’m tense and anxious but I haven’t been simmering with rage. That’s a great step for me. The inappropriate anger is a serious problem for me. That I’ll medicate for and not feel super guilty about. It’s not ok to take my random ambient anger out on my kids. It isn’t their fault I’m angry and I’m not going to take it out on them. In this house shit does not roll down hill. Calli has enough trouble dealing with Shanna. I’m not going to be mean to them because Calli would not handle being at the bottom of the shit hill well.

When I clean my kitchen lately I spend a lot of time crying and apologizing to my in-absentia mother. I’m sorry I hurt you so much. It’s my fault. I’m sorry I wasn’t a good daughter. I’m sorry I betrayed you. I understand that you weren’t the one who hurt me, but you did fail to protect me and I’m sorry that you have gotten the life you have gotten. I’m so sorry you went from a family where you were treated badly to a family where you were treated worse. That’s not fair. And then your reward in your old age is ungrateful children who have all abandoned you. Life is genuinely not fair. I’m so sorry.

(Today is a therapy day so I have to figure out how to talk about this.)

My frightening thoughts are not as bad as they are sometimes but with less pot they are more dominant. Probably only like a 3-4 severity.

I can’t tell if I count as “avoidance” behaviors in a lot of cases. I am avoiding people and situations I used to go to but mostly I don’t think they are appropriate for my kids and I don’t want to waste my few hours off on going to pursue people who are living lives I can’t be part of any more. I have a lot of guilt, depression, and worry. Not about tangible real stuff. My life is very (blissfully) stable right now. So depression/guilt/anxiety symptoms are probably riding in the 5-6 range as far as causing distress.

My startle reflex is through the roof. I’m tense and on edge a very high percentage of the time. I’d say up in the 7-8 range. I feel like I have to be prepared and ready to fight all the time. Luckily I’m not having outbursts of anger. *phew*

I feel like I am managing my anxiety symptoms by doing the future-tripping stuff I do. Planning for things I will do in the future gives me more of a feeling of control over my life. I can’t control what happened to me in the past. But I can make sure my future has the shape I want it to have. I need to think of the 3,592 things that could go wrong and have contingency plans for all of them and then I can feel ok for a little while.

Future tripping isn’t just about travel planning. Garden planning. Meal planning. Setting up schedules for when I will pay what bills or deciding when I should transfer money for x event.

I am ridiculously proud that Shanna’s 529 is already 1/4 funded. She’s only five and her college fund is 1/4 of the way to where I want it to be. Because it is invested (and investments grow all by themselves like magic) I may be close to done contributing in her name. This year I will be contributing a lowly $1200 towards Shanna’s fund and Calli is getting more like $5000. Gotta get the ball rolling. Calli has nothing so far. I try to justify this to myself as “Well, we will be done with the mortgage for like ten years before Calli goes to college. If I don’t save enough in advance we should probably be able to pay it as she goes.” *cross fingers*

Sometimes I feel weird about the avoidance symptoms of PTSD. I can’t tell if my behavior is avoidance or if I’m just continuing the patterns begun in my childhood. We did stuff for short periods of time then we moved. These patterns were set by my mother, who almost certainly has PTSD. I only spend time with people for fairly brief periods of time then I don’t know them any more. Or if I do know people it becomes distant. Most of the people who have been big parts of my support network over the past 15 years are people I sorta still know in a distant way. But being close with people is hard. I’m bad at it. At this point it feels like I am just bad.

I don’t know how to behave in a way that makes other people feel comfortable. So I deserve to be alone. Many of my relationships have historically depended on me chasing people and I can’t any more. So they are mostly over.

I treasure the people who invite themselves over. I feel slightly more confidence that they actually like me. I don’t feel very likable. I feel like a nasty, stupid bitch.

Sometimes I wonder if I will get past the child-rearing intensity and just withdraw entirely from the world. I go out as much as I do because I have to provide my children with community. When I am no longer home schooling and hanging out with the home schooling people will I stay home and just not see anyone? I’ve read 16 books so far this January. When I no longer have children will it be a solid 23 books so far?

I don’t know.

I’m not going to be clingy with my adult children. I will encourage them to go or stay as it suits them. And when they go I will do my crying in private. It will not be their problem. I am not their problem. But I don’t know what I will do.

I’m scared.

One day at a time.

Depression vs. Boring Adulthood

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I’m having a conversation with someone about what constitutes depression.

If you are exercising, making food three meals a day, cleaning your house, playing with your kids, writing books, and reading a wide variety of topics… it’s kind of hard to call you “depressed”. Maybe you’ve just hit Boring Adulthood.

I think that people who grow up with dysfunction expect a level of “excitement” from life that isn’t healthy or happy. Sometimes when we settle down we want to call it depression and “liven things up a bit” with some well placed drugs (often given by doctors).

I’m not sure this is depression. If you are getting All The Things done then I’m not sure you should be on medication for depression. Maybe this is just a boring phase of life. Those happen and they are healthy and appropriate.

Maybe not being able to plan for the future is more about your current life being unpredictable. One is not always in a space to be able to predict the future. Sometimes if you work too hard on preparing for the future you will waste resources you can’t afford to waste as you prepare for things that will never happen.

Sometimes you have to just let the days flow by and trust that things will change. Sometimes that is the right thing to do. I don’t have to be Preparing For The Future! every second of the day. Some days I’m just doing my chores and hanging out with the kids. That isn’t always the same as depression.

Depression is when you are too sad/lethargic/empty feeling to be able to function. When you can’t think. When you can’t process the basic parts of keeping the boat afloat. When you HATE everyone in your life for requiring you to make three meals a day.

If you feel ok but kind of bored… that’s probably not depression. Maybe ennui. Sometimes learning to live with even those uncomfortable bored feelings is where you are. It’s part of life too.

I’m definitely in Boring Adulthood. I have gone from using about 10% of my previous amount of pot to more like 25% of what I had been using. I’m struggling with nightmares. At this level of pot usage I’m not getting stoned I’m just barely taking the edge off of my anxiety. At this level I no longer have that lovely fog to block out my dreams. Instead I have some nightmare every night.

I’ve done well with the kids for the past week-ish. I haven’t been yelling let alone screaming. I’ve been patient and “happy” seeming. We are getting along well.

I’m afraid of the future. There are things I can plan for (mostly this means: save money) and things I can’t. I can’t do any big projects any time soon. My body hurts too much. I need to just… be. But I exercise and do my chores and get my shit done. Sometimes that’s life.

Marital Discord

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(Not looking for advice.)

You know how I don’t complain much about Noah? Mostly this is because I don’t have a lot to complain about. I’m a complainer. I like getting things off my chest. I feel better afterwards. So the lack of complaining is noteworthy.

Things are hard lately. My parasympathetic nervous system is shot. Which makes things like sex really hard. I don’t orgasm much at all. We can count how many times I have gotten off (other than masturbating) in the last year on one hand. That sucks. I can masturbate. But partner sex isn’t really doing a lot for me. Partner sex is about gritting my teeth while Noah uses my cunt to masturbate. I’m not feeling very good about myself. I have to grit my teeth because frequently it just flat hurts and I’m trying to bear it. I’m not even really lubricating very much.

Noah periodically says, “We could stop having sex for a while” and that makes me feel worse. I have been very aware from early childhood that marriage meant having sex. That’s why you get married. So you have someone around to fuck whenever you want.

I feel like the biggest asshole ever. Noah married me largely because of my hypersexuality. It’s gone. Well, I bet I could go pick up a casual sex partner and be fine but man I can’t get it up at home. This is hard.

I’m not really sure how to create more space for feeling like sex is a good thing in my life. Right now there just isn’t space. I spend all day being whacked as people whine “Mooooooommmmmmmmmmmy”. No, I don’t feel fucking sexy.

Pretty much every time anyone touches me I flinch. I’m having a hard time. I don’t really know what to do about this other than wait it out and hope it gets better as the kids get older.

At some point I’m going to be able to sit my kids down and beg them to stop hurting me all the time but they still aren’t to a point where they are even capable of understanding what that means. I’m struggling. I feel like the physical experience of the world my body has is the least important priority for everyone in my house. I’m having a hard time.

It doesn’t help that my ambient pain is really high even on pot. Most of my joints hurt a fair bit of the time. My muscles hurt. Pick a random place on my body and poke it and you have like an 80% chance I will say, “Yup that hurts.” Everything hurts. My fucking eyes hurt. I’ve had a headache for months. My arms, legs, and torso fucking hurt. No, I don’t feel very sexy.

In my head I keep praying that maybe if I work with a doctor and change my diet it will help. Maybe. January.

None of this is Noah’s fault and I feel like a ridiculous asshole for withholding sex. I feel like a really bad person.

The part that is bothering me the most is that when I think about sex I think about cutting. But not my normal leg-grid-pattern. When I think about sex and how little it matters how it feels to me I want to cut on my arms. I want to start right at the elbow and pull down to the wrist. Which is more of a suicidal gesture/attempt than just stress relief. I feel very upset with myself for that happening.

Noah is not pressuring me. This is not Noah’s fault. This is just happening. This is just how my brain works.

Sex is one of the primary ways that Noah gets his “cup filled” if you know that whole metaphor. That’s how he feels loved. That’s how he feels wanted. That’s how he gets energy to go out and do the death march that is his life.

We aren’t doing very well right now. We are both tired in this existential way that goes far beyond the sleep deprivation we have had in the past six years (I didn’t sleep much while pregnant).

I think that part of our problem is we keep coming to arguments that center around the fact that we are on very opposite ideological grounds about a great many things.

Noah was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and he deeply identifies with the plight of rich people trying to run companies. When you speak badly about rich people/people with privilege… you’re talking shit about him. I’m the kind of person who has a lot bad to say about rich people and people with privilege.

This gets complicated and hard. We both acknowledge that we are better about this strife than we used to be. But it is wearying and hard. These arguments are extremely depressing for me, I think they are for him too.

It is very hard knowing that I have the life of comfort and privilege I have because of someone who falls into a category I talk a lot of shit about. That doesn’t say nice things about me.

I just can’t get into the mindset of arguing from the point of view of the rich and privileged. Whether I currently have money or not. I will pretty much always take the side of the less advantaged in any fight. No, I can’t get into arguing that corporations are doing great things. And I totally understand the impulse to go burn down the houses of the people who own Wal Mart.

(I’m not advocating arson.)

It means that sometimes I have the active feeling of “sleeping with the enemy”. I’m a fucking sell out.

This isn’t helping our sex life.

I would be less grumpy if my entire body didn’t hurt every minute of the day. Err, I hope.

It is very hard for Noah that I actually hate whole categories he belongs to. That makes him feel pretty bad–which makes sense. I don’t hate him. I love Noah very much. Noah is the only person in my entire life who has ever really wanted to know me. I love Noah. I even like Noah. But man we struggle sometimes.

I feel guilty. I feel like if I could just get the fuck over myself everything would be fine. I really have the ideal set up for me. Just relax. Stop being so fucking hateful. I’m not sure how to let go of this resentment I have. This hatred of everyone everywhere who “has” what I don’t have.

It’s not about the money, not really. I think money is the strawman. Security. Safety. Feelings of belonging.

We had a great party last weekend. Those people were here to see me and Noah. They like both of us. I spent a lot of the party feeling like *I* should leave because I am such an unpleasant stupid bitch.

All of my internal dialogue lately is about how stupid, worthless, and unlovable I am. I keep trying to interrupt it. “If you wouldn’t tell your best friend these things don’t say them to yourself.” It doesn’t help that I totally don’t believe that these things are true of anyone else in my life, just me. Of course I wouldn’t say them to my best friend. Just me.

Christmas will be a lot smaller next year. I’m having waves of feeling really upset that almost everything I got under the tree were things I either sent Noah a specific web link “buy this” or I dragged him to the mall and put things in a bag and told him to pay for them. I’m done. I can’t do this again. I feel so bad. (In his defense he did pick which books off my wish list. I am happy about his choices.)

Noah has too many things to think about. Gift shopping for me doesn’t make it to the top of the priority list unless I force it. So I think I am done receiving gifts. I can’t do this again. I feel like a worthless piece of shit.

I’m going to medicate to get through today. I’ve had several unmedicated days lately. I can’t do today without. I don’t think I would be able to stop crying.

Tell the truth. For the last day or so I have felt very suicidal. Lots of images in my head. I don’t want to admit it out loud because I feel like a pathetic attention whore.

It doesn’t help that someone came on the PTSD forum complaining about how her partner talks about her trauma a lot and this supporter says, “She’s just doing it for attention.”

Why the fuck doesn’t she just shut up. Why the fuck don’t I just shut up. All it would take is a little while with a razor blade. I’d shut the fuck up.

I feel so very worthless and stupid and bad. Why can’t I do anything right? Even when people are very nice to me I turn it into a reason to feel bad. I am so fucking pathetic. I hate myself so much.

None of this is Noah’s fault. But he lives with it. That makes me feel very bad about myself. He deserves better.

Sometimes I think there is no such thing as pleasing me. That I am just an asshole. I could come up with a whole long list of other disparaging things to say. I should probably stop though. I’ve made that point. I suck. Moving on.

I want to cut really badly. I want it so much. But today I wouldn’t actually trust myself to just stay on my leg and that is bad juju. I think that when I can confine myself to my leg and fairly shallow cuts as stress relief it’s not the worst coping method in the world. Today I don’t think I could. Today I want to die. No cutting today. My kids still need me.

It is hard feeling like I only exist as a support unit for other people. I take care of my kids. I’m a hole for Noah to fuck. I don’t feel like there is any me that matters in that equation. It’s not a fair characterization of my relationship with Noah. I “know” that. I just don’t know that.

I feel so sad. I want my mommy. It is all my fault I can never have a relationship with her. I walked away. I have no one to blame but me.

I felt pretty hurt by the 1 star review on Amazon saying that I don’t take responsibility for any of the shit in my life. Oh man. I feel responsible.

It is my fault that I have such negative experiences. If I knew how to act proper things would work out better. If I could stop flinching and freaking out all day long then I could probably enjoy sex. It is my fault I can’t control my body. I feel very guilty for every argument I have where I refuse to concede that all we need is another fucking honky to solve the problem.

I don’t feel like I am fighting the good fight. I’m fighting the stupid, irrelevant, no-one-cares-anyway fights. I’m mostly just fighting myself. I’m losing.

This is post-period so I can’t blame it on PMS. I just feel this way. I just feel like a worthless whore.

I’m sorry Noah. I know you deserve better than this. It seems like telling the truth is still a good policy. I don’t think I can just pretend to be what you want.

violence

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Yesterday I bought more than $100 of vitamins. I have ~ 7 days of pot left. I think that will be when I stop. I’m not going to get more to make it through the end of the year. With the break for the Texas trip (I’m not flying to Texas with pot even if I *do* have a medical prescription) That will get me to the 20th or 21st. So Christmas will be interesting. But you have to just go at some point.

I took my vitamins yesterday. I rested yesterday. I didn’t run because for some reason my hip decided yesterday that it hates my guts. My plan for today is yoga, baking gingerbread for tomorrow, and swinging. I may or may not pick up the garage. I haven’t decided.

We went Christmas caroling with the home school group yesterday. I was nominated as choir director at the last minute because the person who had volunteered let us know that she only meant she would run the rehearsal. Uhm, ok then. Pretty much what that meant is I counted off the beginning of the songs. We were not good singers. But we had fun.

Being in a senior assisted living place was kind of hard. Some of the people in the locked dementia ward cried when we sang. I can only imagine what was going on in their heads. I don’t think we cheered them up. One woman was mostly muttering under her breath with occasional louder shouts about how we were all liars and bastards. I don’t blame her for that opinion when we are singing Christian songs about hope and how everything will be awesome for Christmas.

I got bitchslapped on the ptsd forum. I talked about my uncanny ability to figure out that people have been sexually assaulted. Some woman spent way too much time telling me how inappropriate and terrible I am for being able to tell that about people. I should certainly never let on that I have such suspicions or I am violating their privacy. You know… I can see why you are over sensitive. My most frequent experience is that people cry and hug me and are grateful to be seen. I’m not going to stop because someone on the internet objects to my behavior. It is working for me.

Yesterday I was sitting on the floor and my mind was wandering and Shanna wanted my attention. She walked up and flicked me in the face. It was a very near thing for me hitting her. At this stage of my life the flicking in the head leading to violent reaction thing is a reflex. I don’t think about it. That came from many years of abuse.

I talked to her about it then and again at dinner. Noah had the brilliant idea of comparing it to accidentally kicking someone when they tickle you. It’s a reflex. You aren’t consciously deciding that you want to kick someone. It just kind of happens. When someone flicks me in the face I just react. Please don’t do that to me any more. Please. Please. Please. I don’t want to ever hit you and I’m terrified that if you do that to me it will happen before I have the ability to stop myself.

I am really sorry I live in the body I have. At this stage of my life, just don’t fucking flick my face, ok?

Shanna said I scared her when I talked about it. I was trying hard to not be scary. I’m so sorry. But I’m very serious. Don’t flick my face. Truly. Don’t.

I woke up thinking about how after reading eight books on codependence I don’t think I know the difference between codependence and interdependence. I’m still scared I am “inappropriate” all the time. I grew up being told that “we” were just codependent–like it or not. That’s what my mom and sister said.

I feel so guilty for needing things from Noah. I feel like I am suffocating him. He tells me he is fine but when you lie the way I do all the time about being fine you tend to not believe other people either.

I don’t want to hurt my children the way I have hurt other people. I think my kids deserve better. I feel guilty for the fact that I didn’t think my friends deserved better. I shouldn’t have cracked ribs. I shouldn’t have hit people so much. I shouldn’t have tried so hard to make people bleed.

I’m not even talking about the bdsm. Those people consented. I don’t feel guilty about beating someone until they lie sobbing on the floor in front of me if they asked me very nicely to do that to them. I feel very guilty, still, for all the fights as a kid. I was so god damn mean.

I’ve only cracked one set of ribs since reaching my majority. Uhm, progress? That time the person even went to the doctor and had x-rays to confirm it. Yup. I cracked their ribs. When I was younger people just dealt with months of pain instead of going to the doctor.

I regularly talk to men who are very dismissive of whatever “power” I ascribe to them. They don’t see themselves the way that I see them. They think they are powerless. Naw, you’ve just never really learned that you aren’t ten years old any more. I understand that no one likes young men. I get that. When you are a young guy you have the opposite of power, no matter what color you are. But things change.

I haven’t cracked any ribs in ten years. I should stop feeling bad. I did stop. I haven’t made anyone bleed in… about the same length of time if memory serves correctly. I’m getting close to being out of the scene (mostly) for almost ten years. I still bottom to Noah but I’m not in the scene and I don’t top any more.

I am somewhat unlikely to ever viciously beat someone again. That is weird. I have done it so many times over my life that I don’t know what to do with all those feelings. I really am a vicious, nasty person.

But you wouldn’t know it to look at my kids. I’m nice to them. But today I scared Shanna. She kind of melted out of her chair to hide under the kitchen table.

I’m so sorry Shanna. I wasn’t trying to scare you. I don’t want to hit you. Please don’t flick my face. I don’t have time to think to stop myself from reacting. I’m trying. I have worked so hard on my reflexes. I no longer hit instinctively when someone startles me. For many years there if someone thought it was “funny” to jump out and startle me they were as likely as not to walk away bleeding.

I *have* learned a lot of control.

My biological father used to flick me in the head. It usually came along with some deprecation about my intelligence. I learned to fight as hard as I could when I was flicked. You are not going to treat me that way any more.

The last time I hit someone was up in Portland. (She’s a friend. She liked it.) It’ll be two years in February. That was when Noah and I agreed to stop that part of our relationship.

I think a lot about what it means to stop being violent. I have a lot of compassion for military veterans. I can only imagine how dangerous I would have become if I had entered the military. (When I was 17 a number of “official” sort of school people tried to talk me into the military. I was seen as very suitable. That would have destroyed me.)

Life is about a series of choices. Sometimes some people pick violence. Does that mean you are stuck being violent forever? Malcolm X managed to (relatively) calm down.

Maybe I will get to the point where I can say that I haven’t hit anyone in twenty years. Maybe my guilt will reduce over time.

I still feel bad for fracturing Jason’s ribs in high school. He was on the wrestling team and was bragging about how if he took me on he would win. No, he really didn’t. And he paid for months.

That was more than half my life ago. He didn’t hate me forever. He did try to act inappropriately the one time I have run into him as an adult. But that was a different issue. That was sex and alcohol and bad boundaries.

I’m glad I’m off facebook. I’m harder to find. I am less likely to run into random people I hope I won’t run into again.

Sometimes there are downsides to knowing so many people. Sometimes there are downsides to having such a history of hurting people. They find me years later and I get this new rush of shame. Yup, I’m that kind of person. Or I was. Do you ever actually change?

I don’t hit my kids. The worst I have done is smack feet that were viciously kicking the car seat. I was going to drive off the road if I didn’t stop the kicking.

I don’t want to hit my kids. But inside me there is always the potential. I don’t really know how to live with that.

Do you know that the US refuses entry to people from other countries who have documented issues of depression? A Canadian woman was going through the US to get to a cruise. She was blocked from her vacation. Because she was stupid enough to think that a crazy person gets to have normal life experiences.

I don’t imagine the biases against “people like me”. They are well documented. That doesn’t mean I personally experience that much discrimination at this stage.

It’s a lot like white men thinking they have no power.

All of these things are so complicated. Power. Safety. Violence. They all entwine.

I don’t feel good about the progress I’ve made. I don’t feel like I have come far enough. Really I don’t think I will ever give myself much slack because I have already done what I’ve done. I can never undo it.

Are monsters ever redeemable?

I was asked why I won’t consider working Dickens. I can’t deal with my rapists. Sorry. I know that nothing will ever happen to them. They will continue to be Fine Upstanding Members Of Their Community. They have a lot to offer. They are important. They are worthy.

I just…

Just another whinging Friday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just breathe. This moment will pass.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I swear this all ties together in my head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I should stop typing. Annnnnnnny minute here……

Caved.

4 Replies

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

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

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

“Yes. That would be good enough.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have so. much. privilege.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That gratitude stuff.

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Today I feel lucky to have so many people who love me even though I am so broken and so difficult. High Maintenance they call it.

My husband is going way above and beyond the call of duty lately. He has broken concrete, made breakfast every day, made dinner most days, swept and mopped the house, and moved over 500 lbs of sand so I didn’t have to. These are all things he doesn’t especially like or want to do. But he is helping me. And he did all that outside of his work hours, where he earns enough money to support me in a lifestyle I never previously imagined. (Jenny said she would show she loved me by paying someone to do this labor rather than doing it. It’s a love language thing. I can’t pay someone to do work how I want it done–this is something I learn over and over again. Having Noah just help me do it is really a big thing for me.)

I do not feel like I deserve this. I’m grateful anyway.

Many of my friends are finding ways to hang out and talk to me or be supportive. I am grateful that people stare at me hard enough to say, “You are clearly in a depressive state. I can tell based on ____ and _____ and ____.”

Holy shit. You care. That’s… that’s… whoa. Ok.

It is hard to believe that I am a piece of shit and have people treat me this way. It feels wrong. It feels like I should hurry up and do something awful so they recognize that helping me is the wrong decision. I am not worthy. Self-sabotage is kind of my MO.

That’s part of why my therapist wants me to stop socializing for a bit. When I bounce between lots of people I feel like I am supposed to be trying to figure out how to please all of these people and that takes a lot of thinking and emotional energy. When I am consumed by feelings of worthlessness it is much harder to figure out what is “appropriate” behavior.

Yes. I have to work on my behavior all of the time. You have no idea how much profanity and nastiness lives in my head. I consciously choose what I say or I say things that are really mean and critical. Even if I like something very much I can always tell you 4,920 things that are wrong with it. Whether that is a person, a place, or a thing. Or an idea. Just to cover all the nouns. It doesn’t matter how strongly positive my feelings are there are still more negative things I could say. I have to consciously choose to not be like that. It’s hard.

Right now my friend is reading to my kids. I’m going to have a hard time when she leaves California again. I know she loves me no matter where she is but having her nearby feels like such a blessing. I don’t have to try to please her. I can sit still in a chair and she pays attention to my kids and loves on them and I don’t have to worry about my behavior.

I feel grateful for friends who put up with how loud we are. I know that the volume in our house is very challenging for a few of my friends. (Oh.Forking.Man. The last place we went for a playdate [K-babysitting is different] had hardwood or tile floors throughout with very high ceilings. I no longer think my house is loud. My house is awesomely sound dampening. YAY MY HOUSE. I no longer want hardwood floors or high ceilings. I would lose my fucking mind. I like my house more with every year. <3

I need to go out back and tack down the landscaping fabric. Then I will fill the sandbox. Then I will take a shower and get ready for teaching. After teaching I need to come home and start preparing food for the party tomorrow. Oh man.

I feel very lucky to have the people I have in my life now. I know that I am crazy and all, but not everyone has as many people who love them fiercely as I do. Even if I don’t feel loved I know that I am. I see the actions of the people who show up in my house.

I’m trying to see you for who and what you are instead of the projections from my broken brain. I’m trying. I’m trying.

Tomorrow will be a kick-awesome party. Just sayin’. Not many kids coming, this is the “grown ups who show up to see the kids all the time” party really. Calli listed the people she wanted to invite. Only one person who visits regularly isn’t coming and that is because he doesn’t like the noise much. He and his wife were invited but not pressured to come. They don’t like crowds.

It is really neat finding out who Calli feels attached to. She has a varied and dear family whether I understand it or not. I’m really glad that my daughters feel so loved in this world. I’m doing something right.

This is why I have a therapist.

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My therapist told me to cancel everything I can cancel in the next two weeks. I won’t be able to get the crying under control any other way. That’s probably true. I like to keep my crying at under an hour a day. When it creeps up over three hours a day it really cuts into my ability to work.

Atypical depression is normal for PTSD. It doesn’t manifest in the “normal” ways and it can’t be cured by the “normal” drugs. Isn’t that all very helpful to know. If I am depressed, what should that mean in terms of my behavior? How come I can go move over 8,000 pounds of concrete but I’m “depressed”. Psh. I’m not depressed. I don’t get depressed. I just cry and cry and cry while I work. Oh. That’s not normal?

Well I move the concrete but I sometimes go and collapse on the couch and am unable to move for an hour. I’m not exactly asleep–I think I can hear the kids the whole time. I’m just not able to move. That doesn’t usually last more than about 90 minutes. I mean… I can move. When someone shows up and knocks on the door I can stagger to the door.

Really it doesn’t matter how shitty I feel. That’s irrelevant. There is work to be done.

My therapist thinks this might be an unhealthy thought process and one I should work on. She thinks that when I’m spending many hours a day sobbing I should probably change something.

It isn’t that moving the concrete is the problem. Moving concrete doesn’t make me feel depressed. Heavy physical exercise is generally something that is one of my most intense mood elevators. It isn’t that doing the work is a problem. It is that I don’t rest. I don’t drink enough water. I don’t eat enough. My calorie needs are probably much higher than usual right now–I’ve been doing a lot of fairly heavy work for a couple of weeks. But I’m barely eating.

Noah, I leave the breakfast dishes on the table so long because I usually barely finish eating breakfast by lunch. I eat a few bites at a time as I can. My stomach hurts too much to eat faster or larger quantities.

A lot of the day I feel dizzy and nauseated. My neck and hurt have hurt continuously for a few weeks. I’m sure my continual dehydration since I stopped drinking carbonated water isn’t helping. (pause to drink water.)

I’m thinking about my mom wicked hard. I’m trying to figure out how I am patterning off of her right now because I think that I am doing that and it isn’t serving me and I don’t know what I should be doing. I’m having a horrible time figuring out what I should be doing at any given moment.

I stop, literally dozens of times a day for the past few days, and have intense overwhelming panic attacks because I am absolutely sure I am working on the wrong thing and I should be working on something else (I don’t really know what) and I am not doing the right thing and that means I am bad bad bad and I should be punished.

This is really exhausting. I’m also not sleeping well. I wake up and then can’t get back to sleep because I cycle through various memories of times in which I was clearly bad and how it is a good thing that those people have shunned me so that I can never hurt them again and I should just stop fucking hurting everyone all the time already. Will I ever stop being such a fucking cunt?

So… yeah. My therapist told me to figure out a way of having one hour every week of having someone outside my family do something for me. Like, actually do what they say kind of do something for me. She told me to cancel all of my social stuff that I can in the next two weeks and not make more plans for a week or more after that.

I have so far maintained control in all of my social setting obligations. That is not something that I can bank on forever. My stress levels are just too high. If I want to avoid screaming at people for some stupid trivial reason, if I want to avoid having a panic attack in public and having to deal with all the horrible after effects… I need a break.

I can’t be what other people need from me right now. I just don’t have it to give. I’m sorry. I know that this is an inadequacy in me. I am sorry that I am so pathetic. But I am. If I want to still have friends in years to come I need to not blow up at people. They don’t want to hang around and let me abuse them. I agree with that basic premise. No one should hang around and let me abuse them.

I wish I was different. I wish that I wasn’t so god damned mean. But then again I’m pretty glad that I’m alive at this point. I like what I get to do during the day. I like the people in my life.

The kids started in on me this morning. They wanted to go to Fairyland after therapy. I collapsed to the floor crying. I told them that I’m sorry I can’t go do all the fun things they want to do. I’m sorry I’m so tired. I’m sorry I haven’t finished all the work yet. I’m sorry I am not able to be the mommy you want to have. I’m sorry I’m not the fun mommy.

I feel guilty that this resulted in my kids comforting me and telling me that it’s ok–I do lots of fun stuff with them. It’s ok that we can’t do it today. I *am* a fun mommy.

We were later than I intended to be because I sat there and couldn’t stop crying for about ten minutes. After a few minutes Shanna asked me why I was still crying. I told her that I was thinking about the fact that I will never be able to meet all of her needs and I feel very sad about that. I told her we were going to come up against this over and over in her life and I may cry about it a lot. But it’s just true. I can’t.

She hugged me and told me that I do my best and that’s good enough.

My therapist says that my children are “parentalized” but given that I do not allow them to do actual care taking of me and I *am* responsible for getting my shit done this is probably not a problem. I feel conflicted about this. I tell my children all the time that they are not responsible for me. I don’t know if I am in denial about my behavior though.

Every parent has behavioral expectations of some kind. I don’t try to make my kids act in a certain way to control my moods or emotions. If I’m having an off day I tell them that if I am snappish it isn’t personal and I apologize for my tone of voice if I am too harsh.

I feel very guilty for the fact that Shanna is becoming my inside voice. This is happening because I instruct her in whatever it is I’m talking about and she repeats things back to me at moments when I am err in need of similar direction. Like managing feelings. I talk to her about how to manage her feelings and she uses the same words back at me when I am having feelings. I generally thank her for her input and then I step off to go manage my feelings because she is not a grown up. I don’t talk to her about what is in my head. It is just hard to hide all the crying.

So yeah, I worry. I worry if what I am doing is ok all the time. I don’t sleep much at night for worrying if existing in a space with me will create irrevocably fucked up adults and I should not have created these poor innocent children for me to abuse.

I don’t think I abuse them. I don’t think I neglect them. But my starting standards are so fucking low that I never feel like it is possible that I am doing enough. I feel that it isn’t possible for me to do something that is good enough. I am tainted. Both of my daughters have gone without sexual contact longer than I went. Have I already won the parenting contest?

Having absolutely no standard to judge against is freeing and terrifying. I talked to a guy recently who told me that he hopes that American society will not be judged by history based on our popular culture. I said, “Uhm, what else do you think they will have to judge on? Give me a break.”

I can read books and watch movies about so-called “happy families” but the truth is I have never been in the vicinity of a happy family for more than a few hours. Near as I can tell every family becomes less happy the longer I am standing near them so even families who are supposedly just fine the whole god damn rest of the time will manage to have a huge blow up when I’m there.

I’m just that unpleasant.

I know these things aren’t actually “my fault”. It’s all just a bunch of coincidences. But I was talking to an autistic guy about shunning recently.

It doesn’t matter if it is my fault or not. The end result is that I make people uncomfortable so it is better for everyone else if I am not there. That doesn’t feel good. That doesn’t give me a lot of reason to think I should keep breathing. If just existing makes things worse for other people… that’s not good.

I am so afraid of still being alive in fifteen years. I kind of hope that my kids won’t read my book until then–the first one anyway. At some point I do actually specifically want my kids to read it. Even though it will be upsetting. Even though it will be terrible. Even if it is “traumatizing” and that makes me a selfish piece of shit.

Just once. I want you to understand your blood and why I am the way I am. You don’t need to change anything about how you treat me. But please. I hope that being nice to you and taking care of you and teaching you that your body and opinion and voice matters entitles me to you reading that one book. I doubt I will force you to read any other book in your life. Please. I need to have someone who is related to me read this book and believe me and take my side. Please. Even if you go on to have a relationship with my mother and my sister and your cousins and whoever else is still alive… please be on my side. Please tell my family that even though you love them it was right to not meet them until adulthood.

Please. I hope I am making the right choice. I don’t have any way of knowing for sure and I am so scared of doing this wrong. I am so scared. I am so fucking scared that I feel like I am going to be beaten because I was bad. Divorcing my family is such a disgusting, terrible, selfish piece of shit thing to do. But it isn’t. It is the only way I know to keep my children safe. Maybe someone else would be able to find a different way but I am limited by my abilities.

I don’t actually think I will force my children to read it. I don’t think I would ever do that to anyone. But I hope. I hope without telling them about that hope.

I don’t tell them what I’m thinking about. I don’t expect them to comfort me. I don’t require them to walk on eggshells in order to not set me off.

I think I am doing all that I can do. I feel so terrible that I cannot do more. But I’m at my limits. I either respect that or I fuck up in a way that will haunt me for years. Ok. Go to ground.

Text has no tone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I get too much wrong for me.

Thank you, hormones, that’s better.

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I participate on a support forum for PTSD. I was just refreshing my memory of how PTSD effects body stress levels and coping. It is hard not to feel ashamed of being broken in the ways I am. It isn’t my fault though.

I haven’t thought about killing myself in over twelve hours. I track these things not to make other people nervous but rather because I have to believe there is enough of a pattern that I can make sense of it over time even if it never makes sense to anyone else.

My friend K has talked me through some blow ups with the kids over the past few days. She came and spent Wednesday with us because she was worried about me. I appreciate her a lot. She talked to me about how it is actually ok to have consequences with your kids and I’m not a meanie head. Life has consequences. Not punishments–that’s a horse of a different color–but there are sometimes unfortunate results to your actions. Bummer.

Having to be the heavy significantly depresses me. It is a fat load of stress and it feels terrible. I prefer it when my kids just kind of go along and do as they are told. Ha. Specifically at 9am the house was clean and I said, “Ok, remember that when you play with stuff you have to put it away when you are done. We are leaving in about three hours for an event and I do want the living room neat when we go.” I went to take a shower in the last half hour. Apparently Barbie needed a pixie cut. And some confetti. And and and and and and and. When I walked out and nearly had a heart attack my dear daughter smirked at me and said, “This is too much for me to clean up. I guess you are going to have to do it.”

We didn’t go to the event. Once she had the consequence and we talked about it and I had the few minutes of being mad while I did indeed clean up the mess we talked about responsibility and consequences we had a better day. It was like we needed to have a blow up. Then we got along. I don’t mean she did what I said for the rest of the day. (Cue hysterical laughter.) I mean that getting to say, “No. If you ignore your responsibilities there are consequences” made me more patient with the other boundary incursions all day. I got to put up one brick wall. This is a line. I WILL DEFEND IT. Then I felt better for the rest of the day. I could be more gentle.

We were sad to miss our friends. I think that was actually a lot of why the day went well after that. We did a lot of commiserating about how much we miss our friends and how sad it was that we didn’t get to visit with them yesterday. We were “on the same team” about being sad about not going. We had another chat about who is responsible for doing what in this house. “No actually it isn’t my job to follow you around all day picking up after you. It is your responsibility to clean up after your stuff. If you can’t clean up your stuff clearly you have too much and we should get rid of a bunch of it. What would you like to start with?” I do a lot. And often I am happy to help with stuff that isn’t “my job” just because I’m a nice lady–do not take advantage of me. I won’t be real friendly.

Alright, confession time. I left the room where the kids were and I put another dent in the drywall yesterday after I came out and saw the Barbie hair everywhere. (Really child. If you are going to give a haircut STAND STILL AND DON’T WALK AROUND THE WHOLE LIVING ROOM WHILE YOU DO IT.) I didn’t mean to. I was barefoot and I didn’t actually feel like I was kicking with force.

We went to Home Desperate and got drywall patch. I fixed the new one and the hole that has been in the wall for about five years now. While I fixed the holes I talked to Shanna about consequences. See, I have consequences for my bad behavior too. I have to fix the holes. It is a very bad idea to put holes in your wall. I am not being very responsible when I do it. I have to fix them now and that is annoying and inconvenient. But–better walls than people. Walls are easier to fix. You never never never kick a person when you are angry. Or hit a person. Walls don’t have feelings. It isn’t good to hit or kick them but better than a person. I waked into the wrong room.

I have been trying not to walk into the garage every time I get upset. The punching bag is in the garage. Unfortunately pot is also in the garage and the associate me going in the garage with smoking and I don’t want them to think that every single time I get upset I smoke. I don’t. It’s hard having this feel like an image problem.

I think that having kind of a scene was what broke the suicidal ideation this time. I don’t like that as a pattern. I don’t need to blow up at my kids in order to convince myself that I shouldn’t die. To be fair I don’t think it is a major pattern at this point. That hasn’t happened many times–specifically blowing up at the kids to deal with being suicidal, I mean.

But I do need some kind of stress-clear-the-air thing sometimes. How can I do that and preserve my relationship with the kids? So far they don’t hold a grudge against me for getting angry. It doesn’t happen all that often and it always blows over quickly and I don’t hold a grudge against them. I don’t stay angry with my kids. That’s a big thing for me.

Right before dinner I asked if the kids were upset with me for not going out. I was told that they missed their friends but they weren’t upset with me. Consequences happen. Both of them said it. I understand that they are at an age where sucking up to me is a survival trait. I hope I am not teaching them to squash their anger or upset because only I am allowed to have feelings. I comforted them when they were sad about not seeing their friends. We talked about when we will get to see them soon. We talked about how to ensure that we don’t have to miss out on seeing our friends again.

I also didn’t let them have the screen. We did have dessert and all other privileges. I don’t want to be too over-kill. But if you get in so much trouble you can’t go play with your friends I’m not going to give you the iPad to distract you with. Hell no. I talked about how I have to create my own entertainment and so does their dad. They have to learn how as well.

I don’t feel ashamed of how I handled it overall. That’s good. No, I’m not perfect. There is always room for improvement but I did ok. I have to understand that given how hysterical I was on Tuesday during the EMDR that my mood on Wednesday and Thursday was close to unavoidable. It will happen again. Welcome to deep trauma work. It has consequences.

How do I apply the principles of harm reduction to this new stress? Well, I’m only seeing my shrink twice a month because I can’t handle more. I feel like doing as much EMDR and as much group work as we have done is causing me to feel really emotionally guarded with my shrink. I feel besieged. I am very used to client directed talk therapy. Therapist directed EMDR heavy therapy is… different. I’m having a hard time adjusting to this whole, “Here. We’ll do this EMDR on you for basically all of our time together because that is a magic button that will fix you even though we don’t have a relationship.” It feels a lot like a fuck buddy, really. Here, let’s get together to do ____ together because even though _____ is fun on your own it is more fun with someone else! Now go away because I don’t actually want to talk to you afterwards. Err, maybe I don’t think about processing like other people do.

Just keep swimming, right? I’m busy. I’m keeping very busy. Only a few people have RSVPed for the Easter party even though I have had a lot more people get excited in person. I don’t know if people are coming or not. Maybe we will end up with ten pounds of sugar for five kids. That would be scary. Could be up to thirty kids. I guess I’ll find out the morning after a hellish drive. Ha. I’m pretty stupid. (Yes, 1/3 of a pound of sugar per kid is still a lot but I figure the parents will steal some as well.)

Today is my last full work day at home before I go to Portland and before the Easter party. That’s kind of intimidating. I am technically capable of doing work on days when I have other obligations but if I want to be nice to my kids I keep it to a bare minimum. It will all work out.

Drywall patching. Laundry. Clean the kitchen. Put out Easter decorations. Make lunch and dinner. Fill eggs with candy. Clean bathroom (really). And I’m sure my kids will want me to read to them and play with them and snuggle them. That sounds like a full day. I’m already tired. I haven’t slept well all week. I feel bad when my discombobulated cycles coincide with Noah having a rockin sort of week (he was interviewed by this internet business guru guy and he’s selling a lot of books) because then he feels guilty.

I don’t want Noah to feel bad about being successful because I am a loser. That’s not a healthy dynamic. I specifically and directly benefit from him maximizing his awesome. I don’t want that to be a fuzzy thing.

And all of a sudden I am having a full stream of words in my head for the wedding ceremony in May. I’m going to close this window and go work on that.

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I want to believe that most parents have vague expectations/hopes/dreams about how this process of parenting will go because then I don’t feel like an asshole. I don’t have hard core expectations of my kids like “You will grow up and be a lawyer” but for most of my life I kind of fantasized about stroking my little girl’s hair and helping her fall asleep. Cue birth of first daughter. From about three months of age little S has been slapping my hand and glaring at me if I stroked her hair. I feel a degree of sadness about this that is entirely out of proportion but there it is. Then I had C. She loves having her hair stroked. I’m so glad I had two daughters so I could spread out my expectations and not ask too much of either one of them individually.

We are off sugar. It doesn’t effect the kids but I’m also off caffeine and alcohol till Easter. I think that harm springs from excess. Moderation is very important in life–moderation in everything! Even moderation. Which means that I am bad at keeping things like sugar/alcohol/caffeine as a sometimes treat and they start creeping in more and more. So I periodically take a while off then I try to go slow when I start again. Then things get out of hand and I take a break. I’m not sure it is “ideal” but it is how I get through. My kids hate me. My husband isn’t too sure about me. Why did I make everyone else do it with me? Because sugar is literally a drug. If you look at studies of what it does to your brain it’s not a joke. I want my kids to grow up knowing that you have to consciously look at your consumption of things that are bad for you and take breaks. Your body needs them. It’s not about punishment. This is a big part of my food religion.

I am too mean and nasty to be a vegan. I honestly don’t care enough about animal rights to do it. I am, however, not a big fan of factory farming or most of our current system of producing goods. I’m not a vegetarian because my diet is not diverse enough to provide me the nutrients I honest to dawg need so I eat meat to fill in the gaps. It’s not a perfect system but it has obviously worked for many species for a long time. I don’t need perfect–I need to not be dead. And when I read things about how consumption of quinoa is probably going to contribute to the destruction of a Latin American country I can’t help but be reaffirmed in my belief that if it doesn’t grow within 100 miles of my home I probably shouldn’t eat it.

But that springs from my hubris. I live in Northern California. More food grows here than anywhere else. The only thing I would have to give up from my regular diet in order to eat entirely locally is bananas. Whoopie. Most of the people in the entire world can’t have my hubris.

Ok. So my food religion doesn’t actually scale. Or make sense at all for large populations. If you look at pretty much every religion of every kind I feel that way about it. They don’t scale. They make sense for whoever they make sense for and not at all for the rest of the world. That’s kind of how things work.

My food religion partially springs from the fact that I live in a place where this is possible. It is disgusting, ethically, to be completely aware of all of my resources and make different choices. In my entirely judgmental opinion. But I know almost no one who has my degree of resources in this area. So it gets trickier almost immediately.

Understanding what privilege means, what having money means, what having resources really means is this constant slow-dawning process for me. What things are actually secure for me and which things aren’t.

I have been participating in an incest support group. Next week is our last meeting. They aren’t a bad group of women but I can’t deal with a support group that far away. It takes too much of my life to participate. In order to spend six hours a month with them I have to spend $240 and spend eight hours driving in miserable traffic. I don’t get enough out of it to balance the cost. Not when I also have to arrange child care and deal with stress around that. My friend who has been watching them is quite sick. I don’t feel ok asking her for this as a permanent favor. She can’t truly commit to doing it and I don’t want to get into the situation of being mad at her because her body is doing what it is doing. That would make me a serious asshole.

I did that with my former housemate. I thought I was agreeing to a trade of work. But I had an expectation level that was higher than her body could provide. Not because she didn’t want to. Not because she wasn’t trying. Bodies betray us. And I was an asshole. So I lost my friend over it. I can’t keep doing that in my life. I will end up totally alone. So I can’t ask too much of anyone.

I also participate in an online ptsd support forum. That is, uhm, more at my participation level and spoon level. I can do it in my garage at 4am and not trouble anyone at all. It’s fucking great.

But both groups function to scare the ever loving shit out of me. Given my level of trauma I am unbelievably productive and functional. At least that is how it appears to my judgmental eye. That’s… kind of scary for me.

Am I just in a good period? Am I going to crash like they did? Many of them didn’t truly lose control of their lives until they were in their 40’s or 50’s. I’m not past falling yet. I was reading today about why a woman became homeless at 49. I’m not past that yet. I can’t lose vigilance.

I live with extreme mental illness. I have studied the field enough to be utterly confident that the devils chasing me are much larger than most people deal with. I’m able to put that mental illness in a box and study it from the outside. I’m able to see where my behavior is broken and just decide that I have to alter that pattern. The mental illness is still there but the behavior is corrected.

I’m able to consciously try and see from other peoples perspectives. It’s empathy. My shaman laughed at me and told me that I act autistic but I don’t know that he is right. I make a logical decision… sorta. But I’m acting from the ability to guess what someone in that position would want. I’m kind of mind reading. I’m going through my film rolodex in my head, “What do I know about this person. Play entire film of life in fast forward. Go.”

What would someone who had that life want? I fucking guarantee you it is different from what I want. From what the monsters in my head are screaming at me to do. Doing this is very tiring. If I don’t do this in full detail with each person as an individual I fall prey to stereotypes and then I offend the shit out of people so I have to be careful not to do that. Or to blatantly say, “So if I were to treat you like person of _______ group the answer would be _______ but obviously you’ve had personal life experience that differs from your group. What do you say?”

I’ve fallen into Pinterest since I ditched Facebook and Mothering. I still feel that is a good decision. But I’ve been a bit more bored. I’ve also been rewatching The West Wing during break time. It’s less diverting. And less connecting. But I’ve been thinking about me more. So who knows.

Winter will always be a fallow period for me. I think I’m actually categorically ok with the idea that as an animal I want to take some time off from my most tiring work in the winter when my body aches and I’m stiff and uncomfortable all the god damn time.

So I was reading an article that was adamantly about Self-Reliance as opposed to Survivalist in nature and hanging my head in shame. I’m that kind of nutcase. I totally am. My uhh future planning is increasingly of the self-reliant nature. And travel. I want to root firmly then run away and know I can come back. It will always be here for me. I don’t know why I need to do this. I just do. I have to see things. I have to experience them myself. I don’t learn enough from reading about them.

I want to talk to people in a lower stakes environment. The thing that is hardest for me about my life is the degree of censoring what I say I have to do. Have I mentioned the extreme mental illness part?

My kids know that sometimes their mom is sad and cries. They know that a long time ago bad stuff happened but we are all safe now. They know we don’t have contact with my family because they are not nice people. That’s all they know.

I need to travel because I need to have the experience of being able to reinvent myself as new and interesting over and over. It is comfortable and safe. It makes me feel better about myself. I know how to do that. I have finally gotten good at it.

I have been thinking almost constantly about how I got good at that specifically because I was training myself for prostitution. When I first saw the movie Pretty Woman and Julia Roberts said something about how no little girl wants to grow up and do that I consciously thought, “Well I will charge more than you.”

I absolutely expected I would end up a prostitute until I was 19. Then I met a prostitute. One of the high charging kind. Ok, she wasn’t still a call girl by the time I met her. She was a pro domme. But she had done every kind of sex work there was and I ended up in her house over and over again. That sounds kind of funny. My boyfriend was best friends with her boyfriend and we visited them from out of state. So we had kind of an interesting relationship. Not exactly friends

She explained to me what was necessary for a girl to keep herself safe. She talked about a kind of trusting your instincts that I don’t have. I literally am not physically capable of doing what she talked about. I am specifically drawn to people who will damage me instead of people who will honor agreements.

That is a lot of why it has scared me so bad when Noah had done things that have pushed boundaries. Life is very scary. I am very dependent.

Those conversations with her are really why I never got into sex work. I was asked. I actually think that I gained so much weight because I was trying to avoid that fate. The last thing I wanted was to be attractive and stand near the people my boyfriend knew. As a fat girl I was invisible and left alone. I saw what happened to the thinner and more attractive women. I saw how they were rotated in and out of the community if they were bottoms. Only the tops survived.

I didn’t want to do that to people. So I got fat. Then I got out.

I’ve had a lot of time lately to think about my relationship with my body. I kind of wish I hadn’t let the doctors office weigh me. Going off sugar is letting me see my emotional pattern with regard to eating lately. If I’m hungry enough to eat some nuts then I do. Mostly I’ve just been eating a lot less and feeling fine.

Since I went to the doctor I’ve been eating a really lot. I thought I weighed more than ten pounds more than that and by golly before I go and see the bastard again I will weigh what I think I weigh. I will have the body I think I have.

It’s really kind of weird. I’m pretty afraid of being thin. I’ve been looking at my therapist and feeling twitchy lately. She is uhm a stones throw from my body. She is my body if I never had kids and I had exercised more starting earlier. So yeah. So I eat. And miss my old therapist who was a motherly alternating warm and stern black woman with a full figure and a rich laugh. When I was being stupid she called me on it. When I was doing well she was really enthusiastic and told me why I should feel good about myself.

I don’t have that kind of relationship with my current therapist. I don’t feel warm. I feel defensive. I feel like she is very agressive in pursuing her agenda. I’m having a hard time with therapist directed therapy. Ha.

I’ve been reading a lot of therapy comparison stuff lately and man are people against folks having a “paid friend”. I kind of think that is what I want. I miss Traci so much. I think Traci would be delighted with how my life is going.

I’m going to visit Dad soon. He has another new girlfriend. I was just getting to know the last one. I miss Francesca. I’m so sad that she doesn’t get to know my children. I think they would have filled a big void in her life. She had so much love to give. Grandkids who visited every other year? She would have been thrilled. She liked sending me presents every year as his “daughter”. My relationship was an entangled mess between both of them.

Traci was my therapist for seven years. She died of a heroin overdose just about five years ago. Francesca was Dad’s wife. I knew her from when I was nineteen. I met her long before they were married. Before they were even solidly together. She overdosed five years ago. Pain medication for cancer. She had gotten addicted while treating her mom. It looked like an accident. Kind of. But she was a recovered heroin addict.

Traci and Francesca were two of the people I looked to for a lot of support. They both died right around Shanna’s birth. I totally enmeshed with Shanna as a result in that first year. I tried reconciling with my family because I was lonely and needy. I paid for Conflict Mediation and was soundly manipulated.

I didn’t divorce my family until Uncle Bob died. Not until my sister asked me in a condescending voice if anyone close to me had ever died before. Because my brother and my father don’t count.

I feel like every relationship in my life has a shelf life. Brittney left at thirty years. Her family is angry about the book. Ok.

I look at Noah and my kids and I feel throat wrenching fear. I feel like I have a fifteen year year of reprieve and then oh holy hell what is going to happen to me? Sometimes I feel very ashamed that I “pull of normal” such that people are surprised at how broken I am. It’s complicated. I contribute to the invisibility of “people like me”. I feel a lot of pressure to maintain a specific front for the benefit of everyone but me. It feels invalidating all of the time.

Sometimes I just like staying home for a while. That way the level of censoring is automatic. We talk about what they want to talk about and it all works out. Other grown ups bring up topics. I spend a lot of time in my head. I have strong opinions loosely held. I’m ridiculously picky about how I am challenged though.

I’m starting to look at who is good at challenging me and getting me to actually change. That’s useful data for me to have. I like pushy people. Holy potato do I like me some pushy people. I combine that with requiring them to recognize specific “I’m done” signals and being willing to go with “Shiny Change Of Topic Please”. That’s a hard combination.

It’s kind of funny watching The West Wing. I have a lot of authority issues. I neither want to be the President nor serve anyone else. I don’t want responsibility for other people and I don’t want them to have responsibility for me. I want things exchanged to be gifts. But I’m really not into Burning Man. I think that is pretention not a gift economy. I need to travel. In other places they have gift economies. Yes, I will read about them before I go so I won’t be too gauche. I hope. I’m sure I will be. But I will be able to apologize for living in the native language.

I want to meet people who are nothing like me. I want to hear as many stories as I can hear. It is hard maintaining relationships with people who live near me. I feel afraid of the eventual brush off. I really need to travel.

I’ve been feeling a lot of guilt because the kind of travel I want is just not something Noah is interested in. And it will make this monogamy stuff more complicated. We also have stern agreements about celibacy. Complicated.

I’m dependent so I want to run away so I can prove that I’m not really in a cage. I am still free. Or some stupid shit like that. Or I want macro scale view on my country. I want to actually understand it better. And other countries. I want to talk to people. I need to. I need to hear their stories. I need to hear what life is like for other people. I need other models in my head. I need alternatives to what I know.

What I know isn’t good enough. I need to know more. I don’t learn as well from reading or from taking classes in school. I like talking to people. I want to know about them.

It feels like looking at the future destruction of my life. How far will I run? How many people will I hurt in the process?

I don’t know how I am going to balance everyones needs but I’m going to have to figure it out.

For a while there I was looking in the mirror a lot. I enjoyed watching my hair grow–I shit you not. I’m past that phase, mostly. Now when I look in the mirror I feel dismay at being untidy. But if I try to fix it I’ll make it worse; I promise. Curly hair is just like that. So I’m not looking at myself again.

And we come back to body issues. It’s just been that sort of week. I’ve been thinking. How am I going to wreck my life? My health? My relationships?

Participating on a ptsd support website and being in a support group for incest survivors is giving me a dizzying array of options to work with. Many/most of the issues being accidents because man do we not have control of our bodies. We just don’t.

I have a pretty ridiculous amount of control near as I can tell. I’m not sure why. I just do. I know that this role requires this behavior for this amount of time and you just fucking do it.

Two of my potential biggest supporters through this phase of my life were taken from me right at the beginning of the journey. I’m one quarter of the way through the expected time of specific duty. I’m doing ok. I’m trying to not be demanding or too taxing on any source of support but that balance often makes people feel unwanted or unappreciated or something.

I feel like I understand why I am taking winter off of people. I am not going out much. It is a good thing. Spring is coming. I have busy times coming. Lots of work to do. I won’t be able to sit around in my head. I want to seriously produce this year. I need to. I need to root. I have mother-in-law money set aside for it.

It will be fun.

Privilege. Responsibility. Curiosity. Sustainability. I don’t have any answers. I am, however, a wasteful American. I look at my habits and I think about what it will be like to live differently at this point.

I have been homeless. We lived in our car so I have not had the experience of living on the street. I have been sent to sleep on the floor or the couch in a series of homes of people I didn’t know. I was often not with family for extended periods. Given what I have read about attachment theory I cry for the child I was. No wonder I fucked everything that moved. Please, please love me. But I ran away right after the sex was over because I made sure that no one could leave me ever again.

Puppy did me a huge favor by being the only boyfriend I’ve ever had as an adult who has broken up with me. He wasn’t a good fit and he recognized it. He could have been more gracious–I’m just saying. But that needed severing and I’m glad he did. Things are certainly working out really well.

And breakfast is ready.

At swimming.

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I have approximately twenty minutes until I am back on duty. I haven’t been productive today. I have hung out with the kids. It’s interesting trying to determine how much work I “have” to do before I “deserve” rest. And what is the difference between working at a slow pace and not working at all?

Forward progress. Always forward progress.

I’ve been busy and seeing people. It is making it so I am not really in my head even though I am in my head. I can’t complete my thoughts. I can’t figure out why I’m in a specific mood. I have to just ride it out.

I didn’t think about Monday being my brother’s birthday until 2/3 of the way through the day. Then I felt like I got punched in the chest. 36. Happy Birthday Tommy.

I am not supporting Noah how I should. I feel a lot of guilt about that. I feel like I have nothing more to give. I know he needs support. I know he needs more direct affection. I just feel like I am choking and gasping and going under the water for the third time.

I don’t even feel exactly sad. I feel flat lined. I feel like a heavy weight is sitting on my chest. I feel like I am swimming through molasses. I think this is “depression” but what it feels like is wearing a 50 lb. baby in an awkward carrier in front of you. It’s terrible for your back and balance but it’s not impossible.

I don’t feel sad exactly. I feel so grateful that I get to spend my days the way I do. I’m so grateful that I get to see Shanna and Calli all day and watch them grow in slow motion. I’m glad I get to play and worry about food and make a box house and that’s all I have to do in a day. (We are getting around to building with the boxes we have been given. The structure grows daily.)

I feel like I am on pause. I am waiting for life to start. I don’t know what I should be doing. I don’t know what I should be saying. I just know I’m going to do it wrong so I feel paralyzed with fear. I don’t know how to take the first step–won’t I break everything? Won’t that be the end?

But I’m gardening. I want to paint. I don’t even know what. I want to work on a book and I don’t have time.

Time. Time. Time.

I feel like I chase time. Up the stairs down the stairs out the back door and down the mountain. Time, get your ass back here. Do I need to count? 1. 2. 3. Fine you get time out.

It doesn’t work that way.

I exist in between. I am neither this nor that. I am neither here nor there. I am in limbo. I am just a mom. I am nothing on my own. I am a support structure. I am scaffolding. I am hollow. I am stronger than I look. Like hollow steel tubing. It’s bad ass stuff.

I feel weak and I feel strong. I feel like this feeling of hollow is my entire body and mind and soul waiting for whatever is going to come next. The past two years have been intense. Come May it will have been two years since Uncle Bob died. This period of freak out is just about over–right?

What’s next?

What grief is next?

What will I stare at next?

What will I do? What will I make? What will I say? Will it matter? Will anyone listen? Will anyone give a shit?

I don’t know. I have to matter to me even if I don’t matter to anyone else. That’s the first step and I’m having a bitch of a time making it. I get mattering to other people. I get trying to fulfill obligations to other people. How do I act worthy of me.

How do I decide that I deserve the things I have in my life now? How do I settle in and get comfortable with my overwhelming privilege? How do I learn to feel like this is really my life and no one is going to drag me out of the house by the hair soon. No one will throw me out. I get to be here. I’m allowed.

The next couple of rounds of EMDR I want to focus on two things: feeling more permission to live in my house. It has been the home of my family longer than it has been anything else in the memory of anyone I know. Can I let go of the ghosts of the girls who came before me? Because I still feel like if they wanted to come back I would have to go and give them back their place. Even though Noah sure as shit doesn’t feel that way. I do. I feel like it isn’t my place. Still no. I’m trying.

I seriously need to do work on my birthday. I asked a friend to go with me. Then she had the audacity to go and get pregnant. Whatever. Luckily I have this other friend who is not breeding and she is available to come with me instead. It was hard asking one person and harder asking a second person. I’m glad I asked both people. I would have had fun with the first person and I’m actually glad she is getting the child she wants. I’m always thrilled to pieces about more wanted children. But I’m glad I have another friend who has more time. That’s hella convenient and all.

I know I matter to people. Kind of–I know it abstractly. I wish I felt it. I wish I felt like it was ok to ask people to do things with me. I’ve been trying really hard to put myself “out there” and I have solicited a lot of socialization recently. The turn around is I spend a lot of time crying hysterically when no one is around. Whoo.

Ok, that was 18 minutes and she’s about to get out of the pool. Time to stop writing.

I’m coming to Portland. I’m looking forward to seeing people. It’s weird trying to understand that people really and truly do like me. I can’t see why.

Had a good day.

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Yesterday was the best day I’ve had in a long time in terms of anxiety. It’s kind of funny that it worked out that way because I started out the day freaking out. Night before last I posted something on facebook about processing while crying and three very helpful women told me that it was common and normal. I had been relaying that my therapist was congratulating me on how unusual it is that I can do what I do. But these three women wanted to make sure I didn’t think I was a special snowflake. That’s not what they thought they were doing so I decided not to debate.

I kind of think of it like someone in North Carolina telling someone in NYC, “Shoot we get storms all the time. Why are you people whining about a little water?”

Scope. It’s about scope. And I’m not going to get into it on facebook. I feel character limits there. Plus I was on the ipad. So I deleted the post and went on with my day.

It was a great day. I went up to my friend Kira’s house. In the way of everyone who loves me she and her husband have something of a hoarding problem. Hoarders fucking love me and I don’t know why. Nearly all of my close friends over the year have had similar issues. Anyway. Apparently I was the first person to point out the connection between severely messy homes and mental illness to a few friends. I feel surprised that they hadn’t made that connection already.

Hoarders don’t feel loved by people so they collect things. That is my off-the-cuff semi-dismissive view of the people I have known who have this problem. I’ve known several dozen honest-to-dawg hoarders.

I like people. I like being around them. I like feeling useful and helpful and like I have something to give. I think I find the hoarders because they lack a specific skill set I excel in.

Holy shit can I clean and organize. I am not attached to things. Things are the opposite of safety for me. Things mean Problems. GET RID OF IT seems to be my obsession going through life.

So I went up to Kira’s house yesterday. We’ve worked on it a few times over the past two years of friendship. I anticipate many more days doing similar things. Mostly because I had such a great time. I didn’t medicate and I was more relaxed than I can remember being in years. I was useful. I was good. I was doing stuff that will have reverberating effects on their day to life for a long time. I probably did stuff that will make their marriage better (everyone has fights about messy houses) and it will be easier to parent.

That makes me feel good. The problem comes when I get too enmeshed and I either want to help more and fix more (what I did with Sarah) or I realize I am in over my head and I shove them away really hard (more complicated than that–but that’s basically what I did with Alex).

I’m scared of the process of finding appropriate boundaries. How much help can I give? Well, let me tell you, it’s probably good they live in Oakland. I don’t feel compelled to help very often so I don’t get overwhelmed. It’s just too far. The hurdle of helping is so high that I can’t do it much. When I do show up I move 1/3 of the furniture in the house by myself and move dozens of loads down the (frightening and perilous) steps into the basement.

I feel like fucking Superwoman. Kira took care of the kids. I would totally be the man in a dyke society. I have a hard time sometimes with how “womens work” my life is because I would rather be a construction worker. I kind of fucking hate cooking.

Cooking is endless fucking drudgery and making new messes that i will fucking have to clean alone so that people can uhm not notice that I did it. Whatever. In ten minutes this is out of existence and doesn’t ever fucking matter again.

When I go clean someones house and get rid of many years of piled up paper their house feels dramatically different and their life tends to feel more positive and easier for a while. They literally have less work looming over their head.

When you supply a meal you just need another fucking meal in four hours. I hate cooking.

I’ve been thinking about my negative feelings about my house. I’ve been thinking about the fact that I probably wouldn’t be able to afford going out and buying what I see in my head anyway. It only kind of exists. I’ve seen things that are similar but not quite.

Noah actually will be able to give me the house I want. It’s just going to take about twenty-five years because first we have to finish paying off the mortgage and then we have to wait until we need a new roof. I’m not going to tear off a perfectly good roof on a whim let-me-tell-you. When I think about it that way it just means I have more time to get the design right. I have more time to decide what I really want and that feels really exciting. At that point in time our kids will be mostly done with college (if they go–we’ll see) and we will have had the house paid off for a long time. That will be the first time we have had “extra money” in our marriage.

I want what I am doing so bad. I need this. It’s ok that I have a crappy ceiling (I may figure out how to fix what is bugging me so I can stop the internal whine track) because I have lived in this happy home for longer than I have lived anywhere in my life.

I really like my kids. I was so proud of them yesterday. I worked for a solid eight hours. They had to play in a back room by themselves and they did it. They were so good. When they had needs they came out and cheerfully asked for what they needed. When they were feeling like they missed me they would come ask for a hug then go back to playing.

Kira’s husband kept trying to get me to carry things through the front door because there are fewer stairs. I liked going through the back because then I got to see the kids.

At the end of the day Shanna told me it was sad that I didn’t get to watch them play so she hopes the next time we go up I can stay with them. That feels really good.

I’m going to change topic and go back in time chronologically. In the morning we first had swim class (Calli was freezing and upset the whole time) then we went back to the house so I could move the laundry into the dryer and get food for the kids to eat as we drove up to Kira’s because it was already a bit late for them.

I feel terrible guilt that I leave my kids in their car seats in the car with the windows cracked for about five minutes at a time sometimes but I’m not going to stop doing it. It takes fucking forever to get them in and out. A four minute errand becomes a twenty minute errand and I am screaming and them to hurry up and move. It’s really stressful and shitty. So I don’t do it. I deal with guilt instead.

As we drove up to Kira’s house Shanna told me how nice I was for getting them food because they were really hungry. I said, “I try.” She said, “Did your mom feed you?”

I assume most children ask these kinds of questions. I feel like I am hit in the stomach over and over. I laughed and said, “Of course she fed me. I grew didn’t I?” But I thought about it. I added, “My mom gave me ramen. She couldn’t afford things like fruits and vegetables. As a result I had a lot of stomach and body pain my whole life. I have terrible teeth. In general I am not in good health and some of it is that I wasn’t fed the things my body needed when I was a child. I’m trying very hard to ensure that you have a different life experience.”

“That’s very nice of you.”

“I think so too.”

I love talking to Shanna. I feel like Shanna is the only one who can say things to me without me feeling minimized or dismissed. I’m not mad at the women who commented on facebook. But I freaked the fuck out when I read their comments.

It has been a very long and very hard journey for me to get to the point of understanding that for me to do things is not the same as other people doing things. My brain and body work differently for a wide variety of reasons.

When I say I cry and process emotions I mean that sob hysterically and type one to three thousand words an hour (depends on how easily accessible the memories are–if they are right on the tip of my tongue then my fingers fly) while physiologically having the experience of having a heart attack. I have terrible panic attacks. I hyperventilate and gasp and panic and feel like I am dying.

Not very many people spend many hours at a time feeling like they are dying from a heart attack and just continue to think about what they are thinking about. That kind of experience is very overwhelming. It’s not the typical “crying”. Yes, I understand that people cry and talk about their feelings all the time. Uhm, scope.

It has taken a long time for me to have the courage to say, “My life experience is different and harder and I get to say that without having to feel like I am exaggerating.” Not every part of my life. I am really god damn good at cleaning.

Most people who feel like me just die. It hurts so much to live as me. I am in a fairly tremendous amount of pain basically all the time. It is extremely bad for your body to live with how much fear I feel. Organs are significantly impacted. Stress will kill you and I live with an amount of stress most people only get from living in an active war zone. And I have felt like this for about twenty-five years.

I am moving hell and high water to ensure that my kids do not understand this stress. That this is not passed on. I live a fairly ordinary life. I do have an extensive and varied social network. There are a lot of people who are close to my kids. Not every day close. I have to learn that most people don’t have much of that. My kids are active in the community we live in and our homeschool group and Noah and I have a lot of friends who are talking to our kids a few times a year. Not a lot, but relationships build over time. It’s normal to have a period where you stay home a lot after having babies.

Part of the problem with PTSD is that it triggers atypical depression. I’ve been looking more into this part recently. It’s probably why it is so easy for me to “turn off” being depressed when I want to. It isn’t true chemical depression it is my bodies coping mechanism for stress when I am stuck in one place. It keeps me from hyperarousing myself into death.

The brain is fascinating to study. I think it is interesting to read papers that I would previously have been convinced I was too stupid to understand. I just had to build a shared vocabulary.

I’ve been thinking about my discomfort with not knowing lately. It’s not like being a know-it-all has been good for me socially.

I was a “know-it-all” in school after school where I got beat up for paying attention in class. But now I have strangers arrive in my inbox, “Hi my name is _____. I am friends with _______. I told her that I was raped/attached/abused/experienced incest/etc and she told me to come talk to you.”

That feels like a lot of responsibility to know things. I have to learn more. If I am going to help people I have to know more. If I am going to show up and tell someone that I can completely reorganize their life I have to be telling the fucking truth. I can’t fall short. I can’t be almost good enough. I have to deliver. Or I am a failure.

Kira you want to know where I get my energy? From the driving terror to prove I can do what I say I can do. You notice how I don’t often show up and say, “I am committing to __________ work.” That’s because I take those kinds of promises ridiculously seriously. It’s really most of what I build my sense of self on. I am able to accurately predict what I can do. Then I’ll kill myself getting it done or I will feel gnashing anxiety until it is done.

I am so glad I painted the stripes in my laundry room after more than a year of waiting. I seriously felt bothered all the time. I feel a lot more relaxed. That’s why I haven’t yet decided what I am doing to deal with the insulation on the garage door. I don’t want to commit to anything yet because then I will hate myself until I get it done. I bought myself a good year of procrastination without anxiety. I don’t know what I want so there is no internal push to move forward.

Today I get to bring baby clothes to two friends who are expecting. Wonderful women who have blessed my life. I don’t see either of them very often (I think once so far this year) but I have known them for many years. I’m trying to understand in my gut that relationships wax and wane. If I’m a nice person the relationships will grow closer when they have kids. If I’m an asshole they would be wise to keep their kids away from me.

I don’t think very many people want to think about themselves that way. If I am a bad influence for your kids, by all means keep them away from me. I try very hard not to be. I try very hard to ensure that, partially because I have limited contact with most people, I am a good influence. I try to model good behavior. I consider modeling good behavior to be my primary job for the next fifteen years.

My kids were ridiculously good while I busted my ass for eight hours yesterday. I wish I could extract this emotion and freeze it in amber so I could put it on a string and wear it around my neck always.

Someone asked on the PTSD forum I frequent if anyone consciously re-parents themselves. I said, “Oh yes. I know that my voice is the voice that is going to be playing inside my kid’s head when they are adults. I’m trying to replace my mother’s voice with my daughter’s voices. So I’m really nice and have firm with boundaries with my kids and they do the same right back at me. I win.”

My kids are my reward for living right now. I am ridiculously grateful that I get to have the life I have. If Noah didn’t happen to be a rich guy I would probably be in a really bad spot right about now. I wouldn’t have the safety I have. I can’t imagine how bad my body would feel if I actually had to worry about money. And yet I’m turning down every invitation from the home schooling group that involves money. That raises my stress level every time.

I tell myself that they are two and four and won’t remember anyway. I tell myself that they are much better off staying home to play with me not feeling more stress all the time. I am an awful lot of fun when I’m not feeling extra stress. Driving is extra stress.

I love the parks we can walk to. Yes, we walk two and a half miles to the park. What else should we do with our day?

That’s the vacant void of guilt. What else should I be doing? Well, today we are going to drive Noah to work and use the Prius to visit mamas-to-be who live near where he works. It will be quite cheap as our excursions go. That eliminates 75% of the stress I feel around driving. I really hate spending money. It’s a fierce nasty knot in my belly. I don’t want to. That’s why Noah feels like he should make more money. Naw, I’d be like this even if you made millions. I just hate spending money. We have enough. I just want your time. I swear.

I’m really excited that I’m pretty likely to have two excellent days in a row. That’s a blessing.

P.S. Judith-the braces make all the difference in the world. Thank you.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Category Archives: depression

Marking time

Medication and mood.

Depression vs. Boring Adulthood

Marital Discord

violence

Just another whinging Friday

Caved.

That gratitude stuff.

This is why I have a therapist.

Text has no tone.

Thank you, hormones, that’s better.

At swimming.

Had a good day.