Category Archives: fighting demons

You have no power over me.

Noah asked me why I am letting this woman have so much power over me. She responded to my first email with a short thing basically saying, “I was nine months pregnant when I sent this to you. Maybe I could have had more compassion. Can’t you forgive me?” I ranted back. I explained that I am going to spend every minute I am near her terrified that I am going to have another panic attack in front of her. I’m afraid of how nasty she will be next time because apparently I go through “chances” without ever having any idea I am doing something wrong. I told her I don’t really want to deal with that given that it took me a year to have the courage to leave the house because I was afraid of running into her.

Why am I so afraid of her? What does she represent to me? Noah pointed out that I’m creating my own self-fulfilling prophecies here. I say that people hate me and reject me foreverrrrrrr I will be aloooooooooooooone foreverrrrrrrrrrr. Ahem. Or something like that. She apologized, why don’t I accept the apology?

If she had sent some kind of an apology spontaneously instead of because she couldn’t ignore me any longer I would have had a different reaction. She didn’t want to apologize. She doesn’t think she did anything wrong.

Why does she have so much power? Why does her disapproval matter? Because I spent about a year telling her intimate things. It didn’t feel like the break up of a “friendship”. This was as emotionally intense as a romantic relationship. Since I had kids I have been bonding a lot more strongly with women. I am getting too attached too quickly, apparently. I told this woman extensively about my mental health issues and more specifically about my life. Then she shamed me.

I don’t like someone deliberately shaming me. I shouldn’t care what she thinks. I don’t have anything invested in her opinion. She is not going to be part of my life again if I can help. She responded to my last rant saying she left the Meet Up group.

She’s right that it will be hard to avoid one another given that she lives twenty minutes away. I get to ask her for space once. Past that she really doesn’t have to give me any room. She gets to live her life as well. She lives around here and there is a finite number of kid things. I can’t keep her out of all of them. That’s not cool to her kids. But I can ask her to stop showing up at my gosh darn park day, once.

There were four of us. We spent over a year hanging out together at least once and up to four times a week. When we got together we would spend at least five hours, sometimes up to nine hours. We did a lot of long-term talking about things that our kids would do. We spent holidays together. Then I got told that I was out of chances completely out of the blue after I had a panic attack.

I was punished by the removal of two peoples love because I was bad. Because I am crazy.

So what happened was I was on edge to start with. I was at the beginning of the unravel I had last year. Shanna was in a brief hitting phase (it lasted less than a month). She hit this other little boy twice and I pulled her into the bedroom and told her that if she did it again we would have to go. It was not nice to repeatedly hit someone in their own house. That’s just really over the line for me. She was two. No she didn’t “get it” but if children never have consequences for their actions they will never “get it”. Of course she hit him again. And right as I was telling her in a ranty voice that if she hits people we have to leave Calli had a dirty diaper. I tried to get Shanna to sit still while I changed it because she lost the privilege of playing. We walked out with me repeatedly saying in a louder-than-necessary voice something to the effect of “It’s not ok to hit people. When you hit people there are consequences. Get your butt out to the van. No, don’t play. You are in trouble. It’s not ok to hit people.” I never called her a name. I wasn’t demeaning. I wasn’t insulting or nasty. My tone of voice was really harsh and loud. I couldn’t breath and my heart was racing. Dealing with both kids in that moment was hard and over whelming.

That night I received an email telling me that she didn’t want to know me any more because my behavior is over the top and I am mean to Shanna. I don’t have age appropriate expectations.

Uhm, I expect my two year old to hit people. I think it is then my job to enforce consequences so she can have some idea that it’s not a great plan. I don’t hit my kids. I don’t call them names. I don’t put them down. But I do separate them from their friends when they can’t play nicely. I guess that’s not “age appropriate”.

I feel defensive and angry. I feel like for some reason she has the power to cause other people to share her opinions. I’m scared that she would join this play group and people who currently tolerate me would no longer want to because she would sit there and gossip about my faults. I’m worried because the “Attachment Parenting” community is very harsh and dogmatic. They absolutely encourage shunning people who do not completely follow the party line.

I have mixed feelings because I wonder if her nastygram was a good thing. I wonder if I really am a mean nasty person. Shanna really is a strange mini-adult. I don’t tolerate a lot of “age appropriate” behaviors most of the time. I set really firm boundaries around them. Am I somehow robbing them because I expect manners? Obviously I am insecure.

I believe deep in my heart that I am nice to my kids. I get angry, yes. My anger is bigger than a lot of peoples, yes. My kids are going to have to deal with being my kids. I have mental illness. That’s just a fact. I may always experience panic attacks. I don’t know. I have no crystal ball. My kids have to be near me. It isn’t possible for me to make my panic attacks completely invisible and silent to them. I talk to them a lot about how they aren’t responsible for my emotions and my behavior.

Awhile ago I was having a panic attack and angry with Shanna over something. She started crying. I looked at her and asked her if she was afraid. She told me yes. I sunk down to the floor and put my head down. I told her that I was doing something wrong then. Kids shouldn’t be afraid of their mothers. Mothers are never supposed to hurt kids. I sat up and pulled her into my lap. I asked her to explain what she understood about why I was upset. She did a good job. I explained the rest of the back story on why I don’t want her doing _______. I told her that I was sorry I scared her. I didn’t mean to. She hugged me and said that she would try not to do _________ again. I thanked her.

But I’m a terrible person, right? It’s not ok to ever raise your voice. It’s not ok to ever be angry.

Wait, what? Oh good grief. Why do I give this idiocy so much power over me? Partially because it feels like the drumbeat for my stage of life. It’s not as if this woman is the only one presenting that image. I spent way too much time on Mothering.com.

She was just an echo chamber for what I feel society as a whole wants from me. The vast majority of the time if I express any anger near anyone there is some comment on it. “Don’t hold back, tell me how you really feel.” “My son is an empath so you can’t get angry near him.” “You get angry really quickly.” I suppose that depends on how you look at it.

Why does she have so much power over me. Because she is able to smile and spew poison. Because I am very susceptible to girl games. Because I was taken down many many pegs. And now she has come and joined my new hierarchy. Those kinds of status things feel extremely transitory. I don’t really want to get a sudden demotion.

When I transferred to Leigh High School during my freshman year of high school I started going by a nickname derived from my middle name. After I was there for a month or so someone leaved over a teacher’s shoulder and said, “Wait. Your name is Kristine? Like Krissy? Are you Krissy Archer? That Krissy Archer?” I had sex with multiple people at my previous school. It was part of the reason I ran. I didn’t want to deal with that reputation when I moved. Abruptly I had someone calling me a whore in every class.

And women are vicious in a way that is far more hurtful. They don’t just insult you and call it a day. They get close to you and then use withdrawal of love as a weapon. They talk to your friends. They lower the general opinion people have of you. Often by repeating half-true stories. The more they smile at you while they are doing this the more problems you will have later.

My kids need a fucking stable group of friends. I really don’t want to play the social status game. I only kind of interact with the other parents. I really need for my behavior and relationship with my children to be judged based on the things we actually do. Not the things people speculate that we might do because they witness some of our worst interactions. Everyone has their worst interactions. If mine involve my tone of voice being ranty and harsh while I say things that are otherwise fairly reasonable I will live with that and consider it a life well lived. I don’t rant very often. It’s quite rare. And Shanna is quick to tell me that my tone of voice isn’t ok and I need to change it. I don’t think she is a beat down child.

Why have I set her up as a judge and jury I have to defend myself from? Because most other people don’t pay enough attention to me for me to feel like they would bother judging me? And yet mob mentality is very real. I am weird. I am reminded over and over again in a variety of ways (parenting books like this try to make it a joke) that for me to be weird is a problem for my kids. They will suffer for it. It will be my fault and that’s bad. I should be trying to blend into the crowd. That book in particular stressed how it is ok that you know you don’t fit in but you have to learn how to fake it so your kid isn’t punished. It’s true if you are in a public school. I don’t want it to be true at our home school group.

It’s kind of like playing Plants Vs. Zombies. She’s a double pea shooter walking towards me. She’s going to kill me. She feels like she can poison my environment. She was certainly good at having me like her and think well of her. Until she turned on me abruptly and was really nasty. Oh shit I don’t want that kind of poison in the well. It’s just a bad idea.

Why does she have so much power over me? Her brand of poison is pretty powerful. I believe she mostly liked being friends with me. But I’m one of those polarizing figures. She liked me a lot but the things she didn’t like she disliked a lot. I don’t need to have someone who is good at making me like them but who occasionally tells me I am a terrible person in my life. That’s kind of my crack. What’s our favorite game, Noah?

I don’t want her in the group because all of a sudden park day becomes a whole different beast for me. I no longer have to think of whether I’m up for all of the basic things. I have to think about how secure I feel that I can sit off to the side quietly and not get into a conversation that might trigger a panic attack. Because it absolutely not ok to have a panic attack with that woman nearby. Oh God. Poor Shanna might lose more friends. And it would be All My Fault.

I’m not planning to move. Shanna is stuck here. She has to make friends here. I have to not fuck this up.

Why does she have power over me? Because I’m not good at taking it back once I give it to someone. Why the fuck do I care what Tom thinks? Why in the fuck do I care what my mother thinks? Because I do. Because I love them. Because I wish with every part of me that they thought I was good. Because I am very used to people who profess to love me telling me that I am horrible. I have a magnetic attraction to this cycle. I like people who have more control than I have who tell me I am bad for not having it. It’s really pretty fucked up and self-loathing of me.

Why does she have power over me? Because in my experience, other than the people I live with, people don’t give other people second chances. Not really. She has a bad opinion of me. I’m supposed to try and prove that I am worthy of a second chance. Now she has told me that I am going through chances so I can be held to it.

Noah thinks I should just think of her as a stupid person and move on with my life not caring how she feels about me. He has a point.

Even though I feel wicked uncomfortable about having done so I created a socially safe place for me. I hope. I don’t think I will have a perfect experience without her there. But I’m not going to be judged on something half remembered from a long time ago.

I’m not at this group to make friends. I am cordial. I participate in conversations enough that I sort of look like part of the group. Mostly I play with the kids or run. People probably either think I am aloof or shy. I’m ok with either. I have told more than one person that I have horrible social anxiety. That’s as personal as I have gotten.

Where is this space in our life for acquaintances? For community? For people who are around but with whom you don’t have a personal connection? If I keep people out at arms length then they can be out at arms length forever. What they do has very little effect on me. If I let someone in closer they have to be shoved much much further than just arms length away when they hurt me. It’s not a very forgiving system. My problem is I assign too much intent to behaviors. People aren’t trying to hurt me. They are trying to express their emotions.

She felt intimidated by me. So she attacked. Normal. The person who sent the recent accusatory letter? He’s not really upset because of my actions. He’s upset about things in his life and I’m a good target. He at least thinks he is doing a good thing.

It’s not about me. Don’t make excuses. Don’t apologize. She apologized to me. Shouldn’t I take that at face value? What I should do is get off my butt and go eat a banana. Then get dressed. Then go run. Today my wonderful friend Taylor is coming over. That guarantees a good day. I’m going to stop thinking about her. I asked her to leave the group and she did. I may run into her again some day and then I will have to revisit this emotional experience. That time I won’t get to ask her to leave a group. She lives here too. It’s not ok to make her pay for the rest of her life. That’s really not cool. Hell, in a few years I may suddenly grow up and decide I don’t give a shit. Folks either like me or they don’t and I will have been part of the group long enough that it really won’t matter.

But I’m not there yet. My skin is not that thick. It’s too raw. It’s too scary. I have a hard time getting out of the house. If I knew she was going to be there I wouldn’t be able to go. I wouldn’t be able to put my kids through the experience of dealing with my panic attacks. That’s not fair.

I’m going to go now.

My local bdsm community; or Sex is complicated.

4 Replies

When I’m not writing I have a harder time remembering my resolutions and I don’t feel like I make progress in “processing” because I just say the same thing over and over. I like to pretend that when I write I occasionally mix it up and say different things and reach new-to-me conclusions or connections. This is what I tell myself to justify my continual verbal diarrhea.

My kind of rough plan at this point (in my head so far) is that I will finish editing a friend’s book by the end of June (I’m honest about my limited time available for such work) and then I need to start editing No Secrets again because I would like to put the kickstarter up during the summer. I think it would be nice to have it end on my birthday. After I see if I can get funding for a print edition (so I don’t have to front all the money [that I don’t have]) [incidentally–the ebook has paid for the editor and has mostly paid for the ISBN number. It’s only been out for nearly three months. I’m thrilled.] I will deal with that. Then I can turn my full attention to Part Two. If Noah says it is ok I want to spend October doing pre-writing stuff and then see if NaNoWriMo is sufficiently inspirational again this year. What do you think, Noah?

It’s hard trying to work on multiple projects in my head at once. Things get kind of muddled. Although I have to say that editing my friend’s book right now is ideal in terms of making me think about how I want to phrase things in Part Two (capitalized because for the moment it is the working title and that makes it a proper noun–I’m kind of obsessed with thinking about when capitol letters are appropriate right now).

I’m thinking about the bdsm community. What am I going to choose to write about? How am I going to show what happened? I don’t want this to be another “telling” book. I want this book to do more showing of what happened and that means cherry picking experiences I had and creating dialogue for them. Dialogue scares the shit out of me. I don’t want to remember something differently than someone else and be called a liar. Instead I will call it fiction and improvise freely to make my point. I’M NOT ACTUALLY SAYING YOU SAID IT. SEE IT’S FICTION!!! That’s my motto right now. And yes, I am yelling it in my head.

I came into a very particular community at a very particular time. I traveled a great deal during the four years I was heavily involved in the bdsm scene. I got to find out that people in Australia and England and the East Coast of the US treats things quite differently people do in the bay area. Holy moly the Seattle scene is different. And Portland was different again. There are a bunch more cities I could list off but that seems silly. I got out of my bubble as often as possible. At the time I don’t think I knew I was trying to learn bdsm in a studying kind of way. I wanted to find out what it meant to different people.

I only knew what my local community taught me at first. That was a fairly biased starting point. I went to the Wednesday munch in Palo Alto for four years. I rarely missed a munch in that time period. I went religiously. It is the longest period of my life of having an intensive social experience. I have certainly known people for longer than that–Britt and Jenny are the best examples of that. We have come-and-go relationships and we have rarely spent all that much time together. I saw the Wednesday munch crowd (there was a sizable ‘normal’ crowd) at least weekly and often more than once a week. That’s a lot of contact for me.

When I try to think of how to describe the crowd I am struck by how afraid I am. Most of the folks who still hang out near the munch like me well enough. I don’t want to fuck that up by writing about the experience I had. I don’t want them to know that sometimes they weren’t very nice to me and they didn’t even know they were doing something challenging. I’m pretty sure that folks were trying to be nice to me. It isn’t their fault I am damaged. I came pre-fucked up.

I’m beating around the bush and wasting time. Most of the folks who were part of that social group can be charitably described as being socially awkward. When you get together and hang out with people for years and years just because you all like deviant sex you are going to have an odd group. People different types of deviant sex, by and large. My opinion is that community focus comes about through a sort of peer pressure and exposure. Themes emerge. Seattle is known for blood play and suspension. In Australia they talk about “performing” and many people in their community will not play in private. They think it all must be done on a stage in front of an audience or you are weird for doing it. I thought that was hilarious.

In Palo Alto when I was part of the crowd there was a heavy emphasis on straight up fetish gear (mostly latex though no one scorned leather or pvc) and pushing people to the edge of their pain limits. The crowd really thrived on trying to break people. Not everyone. Just the loudest players who played the most often.

I get the impression that many of the people who were there for the social aspects were not looking to be bad ass players but they certainly were happy to egg the conversation on. I spent a lot of time there knowing that I was mostly attractive because of my age and willingness to do whatever someone wanted me to. I don’t play with safewords. In general that just means I don’t say no regardless of what someone wants to do.

But I’m really harsh and abrasively defensive with everyone I don’t want to play with. I think that got worse not better over the years of spending so much time in La Dolce Vita (the name of the café the munch was in). The group was very dismissive of the intelligence of women. Most of the men in the crowd worked in tech. Almost none of the women were computer people. As a female friend said to me years ago (roughly paraphrased because the passage of time is like that): “Of course they treat you like you are stupid. You don’t even work in the computer field.” If you aren’t a geek you are shit. Check. Got it. I wonder why I have such a fucking chip on my shoulder about the topic.

I had a bunch of men I would talk to. I did have female friends but they tended to pay less focused attention to me. The men appreciated me sitting on their laps and being flirtatious. Most of the men in that crowd had virtually zero traditional sex in their lives. I find that fascinating. There were a fair number of single guys who were single for many years and some married guys who had wives who just… didn’t. I was quite happy to fill their need for feeling interesting and wanted. I’m not very good at talking to men without acting out in a somewhat sexual manner. All of a sudden I was the best thing ever. It’s not that I was ever that hot, I’m not, and it’s not that I was ever going to fuck them, I didn’t, but I looked hard at them. I got to know them and had a consistent relationship. It was quite lovely in a variety of ways.

I’m willing to bet they would still enjoy having a friendship with me even if I didn’t sit on their laps and uhm move about. I have always had issues with compulsive sexual acting out. I was really grateful that Tom told me early on he wanted monogamy. I got to stop having to follow through on my teasing. I could tell people in advance that I was in a monogamous relationship so what I was doing had limits. When you are talking to men who aren’t getting any sexual activity and you say you will tease but not go all the way they get to make the decision and avoid anger. It stays friendly and light. They don’t start getting more interested and pushing. Monogamy gave me a lot of freedom. These guys were all good friends with my boyfriend and they had known him first. They weren’t going to push my limits because they didn’t want to step on Tom’s toes.

Once I broke up with Tom and moved around the community a bit more freely I had several sexual assaults in a short period of time. I think my local community is quite misogynistic. It is my experience that men who aggressively want violent sex often have no interest in asking for consent first because they would risk hearing “no”. Fetishists are different. Most fetishists (in my little corner of the world–who knows about your corner of the world) are not particularly aggressive about sex. There is a lot of bdsm play that lives in this weird gray area of sensory experience that feels unrelated to ones genitals. It may be pleasurable to each individual but they shouldn’t be sharing that feeling. It’s about them each having the body experience they want. Being encased from head to foot in latex makes sex basically impossible. Sure you can do some masturbation, but who counts that?

My local community had a bizarre focus on no-sex. Bdsm is not about sex! It’s a “hobby”. It’s members are enthusiasts. I know it wasn’t just Tom. I went to a party every month with this crowd. I think I can count on my fingers how many times anyone had sex at one of those parties. I went to more than fifty of those parties. If I count up all of the times someone was having sex and I was not involved the numbers fit on one hand with room to spare. That’s kind of odd for an event that is ostensibly sex focused.

That was where I spent my early adulthood in the sex community. I found a no-sex ghetto. It was hilarious. It was really weird to me that I managed to find the group that didn’t have sex. It massively shaped my attitude about bdsm. It has been a weird journey to try and combine the two. Noah is the sort who doesn’t play without sex. Sex is the point. That other stuff is kind of interesting for a bit but really we are here for sex. Let’s not kid ourselves.

It is a night and day contrast. Tom and I had sex in fewer than 5% of our scenes. Roughly. I didn’t actually count. We just didn’t have much sex. Sex was different. I think that sex was too emotionally vulnerable. He doesn’t like being vulnerable. With sex you can’t control a lot of it. Bodies are unpredictable. Tom has trouble orgasming. He doesn’t really do it any way other than masturbating by himself. Having a partner there is distracting. I am a competitive person and I learned how to get him off through oral and vaginal sex. I know I can count the number of times I achieved those goals on my fingers. It was too hard, honestly. Over an hour of oral sex makes your jaw hurt something fierce. Tom has an enormous cock. It hurts no matter where he puts it. Sex was really complicated.

So I lived in this strange world where people liked having me around to wear fetish gear in front of them because they liked seeing it and I was appreciated for hinting at sex and not delivering. It was a strange period in my life.

Tom wanted me to learn how to tie him up. He likes the experience. I was under contract so I couldn’t say no. I didn’t want to learn how to top. I was correct in assuming that once I was known for having those skills I would be asked to do them a lot. I have no sexual interest in having someone helpless. Just not my kink. But I have a lot of interest in meeting my friends’ needs and helping them have happier lives. I topped a lot. I’m sure it was a mixed bag experience for people because I’m an inconsistent top. I either broadcast that I’m doing this because I feel like I have to (how sexy is that? not at all) or I ask people how/where they want to be pushed. I like doing very intense scenes both as a top and as a bottom.

When I top I only do a few activities. I’m a very competent suspension top. I certainly can and do floor bondage on occasion but I really prefer suspension where possible. For me it is about the trust involved. Tying someone up on the floor always leaves me thinking, “Oh shit what now?” I often feel uncomfortable touching people. I don’t know what the fuck to do. I’ve never figured it out well. I was taught it wasn’t about sex so I feel uncomfortable going there. Not to mention that I don’t find submissive people sexually attractive so… yeah. I don’t want to go after peoples genitals. I actually did a lot of sex play with Tom when he was tied up. That was the big exception. (I swear to God I have asked for permission to talk about this at least three times and he says it is ok.) He liked doing the forced feminization then getting tied up and “taken” thing. I feel bad about these events in a variety of ways. He wanted to be forced to be like a woman (which I have weird feminist feelings about) and then raped. Lots of men fantasize about what it is like to have this happen.

I have this really uncomfortable set of emotions around these men thinking it might be fun to have my life for a few hours. I know that there are people who have never been raped who do rape play. I have mixed feelings about people thinking that rape is hot. There are things about rape that are hot, I get that. Power imbalance feels sexy. It’s just one way of imagining a power imbalance.

I imagine it would feel different for a woman who has never been raped to dress her boyfriend up in a dress and sodomize him. I have a whole complex swirl of emotions around, “See. I’m supposed to like it when people “rape” me. Obviously I am just interpreting things wrong in other situations in my life. I was supposed to enjoy them. Does that mean I am bad because I didn’t enjoy it when Jeremy sodomized me? Am I broken? Was I just not quite big enough? What? What did I do wrong?”

For me to do rape play as the top I have to play very carefully close to becoming my father. These things just pass right along don’t they?

And he didn’t want to be raped “as a man”. He wanted to be forced to be something weaker. Something that could be raped. I have some complex fucking emotions around that. The biggest part of me tries to believe that it is ok for people to have whatever sexual predilections they have. I just don’t need to do it with them.

I spent years at that munch listening to the loud, overbearing men lecture me about Libertarianism (I still haven’t resigned my party affiliation), cars, guns, and computers. I was welcome to develop an active interest in all of the above with them. If I had a dissenting opinion I could either deal with being shouted down (and called a bitch) or keep my fucking mouth shut. I learned to keep my mouth shut. Tom and I didn’t argue very much. We got along very well. I didn’t say a lot.

I sat on their laps and flirted and was looked at while not talking. That was what I was wanted for. That is what I felt was wanted from me. They haven’t made a lot of effort to continue to know me. When I broke up with Tom I stopped going to the munch and the monthly party. That was his space. Apparently all of those friends were his friends too. I didn’t try real hard to pull anyone out of the crowd with me and they haven’t tried to stay in contact with me. Several of them have given me half-hearted “sure we should do dinner some time” shit. When I ask for a date I get brushed off with, “I’m really busy right now and I will get back to you”. Crickets.

I didn’t really want to be the fetish doll for the rest of my life. I want to be allowed to have dissenting opinions without being told I am a bitch. I asked him flat out, “If I was a guy would you call me an asshole for saying that?”
“No. I wouldn’t call him anything. I would just think he had strong opinions.”
“Then why did you call me a bitch?”
“Because you are one.”

Why do I want monogamy with Noah? Because when I ran into that guy fairly recently I totally offered to have sex with him. I have thought about it for many years. So I told him flat out that I thought about it. For the record I did this before we agreed to monogamy. I have withdrawn all of the offers I was flinging out left and right.

I think it is time for me to move on to a new stage in life where I can recognize that people who only want to spend time with me because I will have sex with them are people I don’t actually need in my life. I have gone literally my entire life using sex as a way of developing relationships. I have a very hard time having contact with people without feeling like I owe them something for putting up with my company and I have so little to offer.

I can see Shanna figuring out how to organize groups of kids to engage in play she directs. It’s fascinating to watch. It gives me a lot of insight into how and when I locked on to sex as a coping strategy. I think that it wouldn’t have worked as well if I had been in one place. You run out of people eventually. Or you end up in cyclical patterns with one abusive partner. I had endless people to try out my opening moves on. It means I didn’t have to do the uncomfortable work of trying something else in order to make friends. I just did the same thing over and over again. When whatever sexual relationship I arranged kind of fizzled out I was dropped like a hot potato. I was usually not acknowledged again while I lived in that place.

I need to stop fucking people because then I feel shamed out of communities. I feel like if I am no longer offering up sexual interaction I don’t have a lot to offer. So I shut my mouth and feel unwanted and I leave.

There is a new family in our homeschooling group. The mom has moved a lot all her life. I’ve been talking to her about displacement and getting to know new people. It’s really interesting. She doesn’t have any abuse in her background. Her family isn’t warm but they aren’t abusive.

I have totally glossed over the beating part of bdsm so far. I grew up in the “hit her harder” school of thought. We were a crowd of very heavy players and we felt distinct pride about that. I showed up to this crowd when I was eighteen. I spent my nineteenth birthday feeling like I didn’t get to say no when everyone at the party wanted to line up to hit me. I never did a group spanking thing again. After that I learned that I was allowed to say no.

But you have to be careful. You can have rules like “I’m monogamous” because of course guys recognize that some guys are possessive of their pussy. But you have to be as available as someone else wants or you are a bitch. Telling guys no makes them hate you. There is a fine line between not looking like a good person to ask (and being roundly ignored as a result) and looking absolutely available. If he has the nerve to ask you really should say yes. You wouldn’t want to be part of the Embargo, now would you?

Sexual longing is so big. It encompasses so much of who a person is. My munch was full of male fetishists (there are not nearly as many women who are into it) who didn’t have sex. Either because they couldn’t because they didn’t have a willing partner or because they didn’t enjoy it that much. Sometimes I feel like a liar when I identify myself as part of the sex community. There wasn’t much fucking going on. But the needs came from similar places. Instead we encased one another in latex or rope. We beat the shit out of one another and called it love. “I know you have a need to feel pain, let me help you with that.”

I have a hard time with going to parties and not playing. I don’t play because I want to, exactly. I play because I feel compelled to. I feel compelled to meet someones needs. Either they want to hurt me or they want to be hurt. I don’t really play with people anymore unless they manage to hit that button. Well, uhm, before that monogamy switch. Ahem.

I don’t know how to channel this with Noah. I’m really struggling. I know that part of it is that I’m having a weird psychological reaction to the fact that I shouldn’t feel shame about what Noah and I do. What we do is given the thumbs up by every legal, moral, and ethical standpoint one can have. We have remarkably vanilla, standard PIV (penis in vagina) sex.

I’m not really a deviant any more. Was I ever one? I struggle with that. I think I wanted what I did when I was younger. But why did I run so hard and so far away from it? Why did I go find a partner who would not be capable of playing out similar roles with me forever? I often feel like I do things wrong for Noah. I’m not very good at the things he prefers. I feel like I am better suited to being in a relationship where I am continually silenced because then my depression is apparently entirely invisible. Isn’t that better? No? I don’t know.

I haven’t been hit to the point of getting a bruise in a long time. It used to be my main hobby. Well, the bruise wasn’t entirely the point. We all loved comparing our bruises though. It was proof that we could handle it. That we liked intense play. We wanted to bear the intensity that someone else wanted to dish out. That proved how submissive we were. I don’t want that shit any more. I’m tired of having to accept pain in order to prove I like someone. If you fucking like me, don’t hurt me.

But but… it gets me off. Really. I’m having a hard time with how difficult it is to get off if I am not in pain. I’ve had a long life to acclimate to believing that I should experience pain as a normal part of sexual activity and I am supposed to shut up about it and smile. And get off. Because then it is better for the person hurting me. They have proof that what they are doing is justified.

I have a lot of complex feelings about that time in my life. I used to put up personal ads for girls. They would come over and we would have awesome, wild, vanilla sex and then they would go away and never be seen again. That was the only way I could have sex that wasn’t painful at that point in my life. Tom was simply too large to ever be comfortable. It always hurt. I just didn’t talk about it. He didn’t really know. And I am god damn good actress. I should have been in porn. I pretend sex is awesome better than most people.

Tom never ever once pushed past me actually saying “no”. Our relationship existed entirely within the realm of me actively consenting to what happened to me. Most of the time I scripted the play. He told me what porn websites he liked (insex.com was his very favorite) and I spent a lot of my free time looking at the pictures trying to figure out what I could handle doing. I tried to write a story with those pictures in my head. I would then tell him the story and how I wanted to play and he would do it. I picked a lot of really brutal play. I’m always interested in proving that I can take pain. At least these days I have gotten over punching games.

For a long time it felt like I was building towards the goal of being able to take enough pain that I could lie on the floor unable to stand and still say, “Beige”.

I want to be hurt. Deep inside me I want to hurt. I want to feel pain more than I want to breathe. Tom and I had a system that worked for several years. When I was getting antsy I didn’t talk about what I was feeling, I asked for a beating. It kept me distracted. Focusing on my beatings was far more socially acceptable than cutting. This way I got to be cool at the same time instead of a damaged little freak. I don’t think it was good for me to hang out with the “hit her harder” camp. I am very competitive in my head.

I feel the need to point out that I know people who take way more intense beatings than I ever have or want to. That’s ok! I’m done trying to climb that ladder. I don’t want to be the biggest masochist. I think I only need to be picked up by my pectoral muscles before being shaken like a dog once. I thought I was going to lose my mind from pain. I couldn’t get away from it. It was every where. It chased me through every back corner of my mind and screamed pain and pain and pain. Giving birth was not that painful. During labor I always had a corner of my mind that I could hide in for brief breaks. (Unmedicated home birth, for the record. After nine days of labor. I hemorrhaged and almost died. It was festive.)

I think I am comfortable saying that I have had the most intense scenes I ever want to have. I’m done climbing that mountain. Those were my personal peaks. I want to not go anywhere near them again. That was a very dark and scary place for me. I don’t think that all masochists have as little respect for their bodies as I do for mine but I am not that sturdy. I didn’t really enjoy all that much of it. I was way past the point when I was doing it for my own masochism. I like to play with sadists. Actual sadists. The kind who like it best when their partner genuinely isn’t having fun. They are willing to really hurt me. After all the years of cutting I have done it seemed kind of ridiculous for me to explore the lighter side of beatings. I didn’t bother. I like single tail whips. I like having my flesh ripped open. I like canes that leave welts that last for weeks. If I don’t have long-term reminders it is like it never happened. It is like I am not serving my purpose.

Noah and I have a hard doing sm play together. It’s complicated.

I wish I knew what I wanted from sex. I wish I had a better understanding of what parts I am doing because I like them. What I like is that my partner is having fun. But that’s a lie. There is stuff I wish Noah did. I haven’t really been talking about them so I can’t get mad at him for not doing them. I consider that to be an inconvenient proviso for life. I can’t get mad at people for not reading my mind. I’m not sure how to find enough time to think about this in my life. I don’t think about sex much when my kids are around. That is just off-limits for me. I’m with them so much that I don’t have a lot of hours of the day when I am able to think about sex. I don’t feel like I am finding a way to figure out new things. I am stuck on old tapes because holy crisco I don’t need something else to be working on really intensely in my personal life.

This is how these things die. They become not a priority. I don’t know how to maintain balance and give everything in my life the attention it deserves. I’m not big enough. I look out at the next few years and see no sign of increased time for sex. Not really. Not for many years, probably. Between the kids and other things that pull our energy I just don’t see much happening. This is how bed death happens.

We still have sex a few times most weeks. We do skip weeks. It’s just not that high of a priority. Too many conflicting factors have to be in alignment. And then we are too tired to do anything all that exciting. I like the intimacy of sex a great deal or I wouldn’t be having it at all right now. Physically it is sometimes annoying and we have an understanding that I “take one for the team” at times. This is part of that sex that women don’t exactly want but they have any way.

This is so complicated. I love Noah. I want him to be happy with me. Noah loves me and wants me to be happy. We are trying to walk a very narrow line between his interest in having sex daily (and sex where I protest is really fairly hot) and the fact that being actually raped over and over again isn’t ok.

I have to get something out of it too. It doesn’t have to be the same thing he gets. If I don’t get anything at all out of it, then I shouldn’t be doing it. I’m ok with the fact that life has some weird trade offs. I get to pick what the hill is this time. I don’t have to have one goal at all times. I don’t get off very often. I know that I can predictably do that if I tell him how to inflict pain. I generally don’t want to feel pain so I don’t ask him to do that. As a result my body is dramatically less responsive and I often feel physically kind of uncomfortable during the act. But I love knowing that I am meeting his needs. This is something that he really needs in order to be a happy person. He will still be here whether I put out or not. But he will be sad and withdrawn. He won’t feel very loved. He will feel rejected. He doesn’t ask me for sex. I have to initiate the vast majority of our sex. I spend every day looking at him. When he is sad, I know I need to.

This sex stuff is so complicated. Noah and I are a good match largely because of the way we have complimentary compulsive sexual behavior. Woo. And we really are learning how to be nice to each other. He likes having sex with me when I’m fighting but he doesn’t push for it. He certainly doesn’t initiate it. I have to verbally request it. Usually by saying, “I want to wrestle and lose.” He perks up more than a child on Christmas.

Noah is my provider. He is my protector from the big bad world in some very material ways. Yes it is hot for him to feel like he is strong. He really isn’t the type to get into sports or other public ways of proving his manliness. He’s a geek. He’s realistic. But he does notice that he needs to work on getting stronger because I’m about to beat him.

It’s very complicated, this liking to lose. This liking of pain. It’s all wrapped up. It’s all wrapped up in thinking that taking pain is required of me. That I am only interesting if I am taking pain of some sort.

I didn’t start talking about my childhood in a public way until after I had mostly retreated from the public scene. They people I had all of my adult relationships with in the bdsm community knew very little about me. I think I talked to a few people one on one a little. I had a few conversations with motherly women. I had female mentors.

That’s all the time for today.

Sex and consent

8 Replies

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

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

We need another word.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any thoughts?

Learning and shame

2 Replies

Therapy was unusual last night in some awesome ways. I showed up half an hour early because I wasn’t sure about public transit to the new location and the appointment before me cancelled so she was just sitting around. We could have started early but instead she decided to pick my brain. She moonlights as a guidance counselor at a middle school. The school is more than 60% black and over 30% latino. They have some problems. I don’t think I can explain how good it felt to talk to her about how to handle these children. She is the “emergency” therapist who sees the kids who are in serious crisis Right Now. I had a lot to say. It was interesting how the end of the conversation was quite sad. We had to plainly discuss the fact that there ARE things that can be done for these kids, but how much time and energy do you have? What are the things that you can really sustain doing? It’s hard to evaluate. She took notes on the things I said. I felt so respected. She told me that she is going to strongly consider how she can get me up there to talk to her really at risk kids. She thinks it will be good for them to hear a white person with my history because they don’t believe a white person can understand. I used the fuck out of that misperception when I was teaching. You can’t buy tools as handy as that.

I told her about what an asshole I am being to a friend who is having issues with the public education system. I told her I don’t understand why I still have friends. This directly linked into a lot of my attitudes about education and child rearing which ties into a lot of my feelings about having less worth in society because my earning potential is really quite low. Being a stay at home mom is not a very respected position. Oh well.

We talked about my frustration and confusion that Americans don’t seem to be training their children to be adults. They prepare the kid for preschool so the kid can be prepared for kindergarden so the kid can be prepared for the lower grades, then middle school, then high school, then college, then graduate school, then a PhD program, then a postdoctoral… I suppose we should all be college professors? I suppose some people transition into working in industry. Many companies run a lot like schools. It’s odd. Outside of academia I have worked in food service. I worked in the library and the theatre in college. I have taught. Really those have been my jobs. I feed people and help them learn. I like it–mostly.

I feel a lot of uncertainty about the future. I’m sadly aware that many of the people who are alive and making decisions now care very little about the long-term consequences of what we are doing as a society. I feel like it is ridiculously important that my kids understand that we are animals that require food. What are all the steps involved in arranging for adequate, constant food. My children will probably never know food uncertainty. What can they learn and figure out about how to help other people have the same life experience? What problems are going to crop up in our food supply? I’m quite nervous about this. I want my children to be incredibly practical. One of the up-sides of doing all these home improvement projects by myself with the kids is they are seeing how to do these tasks. Very soon they will be learning how to do them.

I also think my children will need to know how to program. I suspect that will be a mandatory skill for people who want serious job prospects in the future. I want my children to have options. I want them to feel like they are prepared to take the world by storm when they are adults. I want them to know so many things that they feel completely competent to go learn whatever they need but don’t yet know. I want them to see themselves as strong and able to assimilate new information.

I struggle with learning a lot of things. I don’t have the best memory. I read extremely quickly and I can synthesize ideas quickly but I forget things. That’s kind of a problem. I hope my kids get Noah’s memory.

My therapist and I talked extensively about how I feel like the next fifteen years are a gift. I have always wanted to go learn things but I didn’t want to go alone. Soon I will be able to go to dance events with my kids. Soon I will be able to do martial arts classes with my kids. I already practice languages with my kids. I’m discovering that I remember more Spanish than I think. I’m not as incompetent as I assume. It’s nice. I have these wonderful companions to learn with.

Shanna and Calli don’t think I am lame for how little skill I have at gardening. I feel really pretty silly for the intensity of my emotions around gardening. I grew up with people who had no respect for farming as a career and as a result they tried hard to never touch anything growing. My family felt they “got off the farm” and they had no interest in looking back. My family hasn’t farmed in at least three generations on all sides. Why is there so much hostility? Such disdain? We don’t garden.

Only I’m going to have this house paid off in another decade or so and I’m going to be stuck looking out that back window for all the remaining years of my life. I’d like it to be pretty. I feel kind of vain and silly about that. I would like to look at a colorful, interesting yard. I want it so bad I ache with wanting. I want to feel like a stupid, incompetent, worthless person still gets to look at something nice because I have the physical ability to create it.

It’s always harder than I think. I forget to water. I don’t have good weeding technique. I would starve to death if I had to take care of a whole field in order to eat. I feel ashamed of that. I feel weirdly pathetic because I can’t figure out the physical motion that will allow me to do this work quickly. It’s hard. I don’t know what I can do without damaging the plants I want to keep. I’m trying things and experimenting. It’s a slow process.

When I can remove my idiotic self-deprecation from this thought process I find it really kind of wonderful that I am learning all of these things and talking them through with my kids. Calli is too young to really understand yet, but Shanna is picking things up. I am really moving at about the right speed for Shanna. I feel ponderously slow and incompetent. Really I’m just moving at four year old speed. If I went faster she would feel left out. I wouldn’t want to outpace my companion.

It’s a lot of how I think about running. How do you find a pace for running with other people? I worry about it. I have several upcoming opportunities for running with friends. Some who are far more experienced runners than me and at least one who runs less than me. I’m fucking thrilled by the idea of running with someone who runs less than me. I won’t feel like I am slowing her down. I won’t have to feel embarrassed when I need to walk. I’m scared of running with people who are honest to dawg athletes. Standing near them makes me feel like my low status in their world is blinking in neon over my head. LOSER WHO CAN BARELY RUN. Physical Education classes were never kind to me.

It was an odd experience to look around the park on Tuesday and realize that whereas the home school kids will have various “coaches” they won’t have a PE teacher. If they do that position will fall to me. What athletic activities do I think my kids should know how to do? I have to figure out how to teach them or arrange to have someone else teach them. I think I should buy a small soccer ball and bring it. I feel odd about that. I want them to love things I don’t love. I want them to have access to ideas and hobbies I am not actually into.

This was one thing that surprised my therapist last night: how focused I am on trying to figure out what I don’t know that I should be teaching my kids. I feel intense pressure to work constantly on dealing with the extent and damage of my ignorance. I feel crippled by the extent and volume of my ignorance. I am not trying to be a know-it-all. I’m trying to be an actual competent person. The problem is that I value an odd combination of competences. I am extremely specific in what I care about and I totally ignore things I don’t understand or see value in. That’s kind of a problem. I simply can’t limit my children due to my biases. I want them to be competent adults. I want to know in twenty-five years that I have loosed two extremely fucking competent women on the world and they are off building and learning things I can’t wrap my mind around. They took the genesis of information I gave them and went off to do things I can’t understand.

I like being a jill of all trades. I don’t really aspire to master many topics. I’m a generalist. I like and highly value generalists. But like many people like me I feel like my lack of mastery means I am low in status. I’m not the best at basically any task. I notice and have a hard time with that emotionally. I don’t do competitive things because I can’t handle the fact that I’m never fucking going to be first. Do you know what second place is? The first fucking loser. I cried watching people pass me during the half marathon. I’m an idiot.

I want my kids to either be such prolific generalists that they terrify people or able to become masters in something. Other than talking to abused kids, which really… I’m awesome at that, I don’t think I will attain mastery of any subjects in this lifetime. That really kind of bothers me. I’m trying to gain peace with the idea that I will never really take anything to eleven. I will never be the best. Not everyone gets to be. lame.

My wonderful daughter just wandered out to sit on my lap. Today we are going to the redwoods to cut down trees so I can build her a play house. I should really take pictures of this process. I have a vision in my head. I know what I am going to do. It’s going to be really neat. You’ll see. I’m good at taking pictures in my head and turning out a decent approximation. Heck, look at my daughters. This looks like my picture in my head of a family. We are kind to each other. Maybe I do have a reality distortion field.

Going down the rabbit hole is uncomfortable.

2 Replies

Today is going to be bad. I started my period yesterday, I’m sure that contributes to how emotional I feel, but it’s not all of it. A friend asked me if I wanted to spend brunch with her on Mothers Day. I told her I didn’t want to because it would be too hard for me, can we meet another day. She said that was fine because she was offering for my sake instead of hers. I want to beat my head against the floor and scream, “That’s why I don’t want you here.” That is what I’m hearing in my head this morning. I don’t want you here. I’m only doing this for you. I don’t want anyone to do anything for me. I want people to want to be with me. They don’t.

If she didn’t want to be with me she wouldn’t offer, right? I’m just over reacting, as usual. I feel so stupid and ungrateful and mean and vicious. I feel hateful. Why can’t I let anyone just like me? Right now my needs are so big I can barely see around them. I am so selfish.

I can’t find my sports bra this morning in the dark. I find that incredibly frustrating. It’s enough to make me sink to the floor and just lose my shit crying. I am so stupid and pathetic I can’t even keep track of my things. This morning I feel like I hate pretty much everything about myself. I am forgetful. I am bad. This is a problem because if I wait too long from when I wake up to start running then I have to eat breakfast because my stomach hurts. I can’t run too soon after eating. It fucks up the timing of my whole day.

I get the impression I cry more than average. I cry for several hours every week. I’m sure I have weeks where I don’t cry but it has been a while.

Yesterday I stopped the car while I was driving because I had to cry for a while. I couldn’t see the curves on the road through my tears and I don’t want to have that kind of accidental death. I don’t want Noah to think I killed my kids on purpose. That would be a horrible thing to live with. I can’t stop crying lately. I feel so terrible. I feel like such a terrible person. I feel like I don’t deserve to live. I think it doesn’t help that I’ve been stubborn about being sober. Needing medication makes me bad. If I don’t use the medication I am “less bad” but I feel far worse about myself. It’s complex.

I dropped Shanna off at her Godmamas’ house yesterday. She stays for the weekend frequently. Soon it will be every month. She loves staying there. She loves her Godmamas. So far they are the only people who have a regular, consistent relationship with the kids. I feel like that is my fault. That other people would be present in their lives if I wasn’t a bad person. Shanna has lost friends because of me and my stupid mouth. People no longer spend time around my kids because they dislike me so intensely. They are so angry with me that they don’t want to know my children.

Why shouldn’t I feel like a terrible person? I drive people away. I hurt them. I do bad things. I am too angry. No one should be as angry as I am. It’s apparently horrifying. Whether or not I started out deserving to have bad things happen to me I deserve it now. I have earned it by being such a bitch. I’m not good or kind or gentle or nice. I know. The only thing I can do to stop earning bad things is to never speak again. It sounds like hyperbole but I’m terrified it is true. I am terrified that I am so bad that the only thing I can do to be less bad is to simply stop speaking. My influence is bad. I hurt people. I am bad.

I feel like it was the wrong decision for me to have children. I am not good enough. I can’t change it now. I feel sorry that my children don’t get to find out what it is like to grow up with a good mother. I’m sorry that my children don’t get to find out what it is like to grow up in a family. I bring nothing but myself. There is no one who is attached to me.

Interacting with people is hard. I talked to my friend yesterday. I met her four days before I met Tom. She told me that in her opinion I shouldn’t refer to my situation with Tom as a “relationship” because to him I was a fetish doll, not a person. She said she always disliked the relationship. She explained some of his techniques when we were arguing when I saw him on Monday. He has to discount me as a source of information. My opinion is literally worth less to him. He denies it when challenged directly, but he casually mocks me continually.

I spent my entire childhood being put down. Sarcasm is generally used when someone wants to dig at someone else. To poke them. To take them down a peg. Noah is not sarcastic with me very often. He is quite careful to do it in ways I’m not going to be bothered by.

Tom was very sarcastic with me pretty much all the time. It was hard to live with. If I spoke I was inviting being taunted. He meant it all in great fun. He thinks he is quite the wit. I found it rude and dismissive. I can get him to concede an argument but it gets bloody and nasty and I just don’t want to have that kind of relationship so I get used to not being right. I get used to just closing my eyes and shutting my mouth and trying to make my face go blank while say, “Ok. Fine.” But if he’s laughing while he is saying it then it’s just a joke and I can’t get butthurt, right?

I wonder if I feel so intensely suicidal because I am thinking so hard about my relationship with Tom. I’m not sure I want to admit to myself how bad that was. I did a lot of things I shouldn’t have. It wasn’t rape. It was all fully consensual. But I consented to a lot of things I shouldn’t have. I used Tom as a way of attaining harm that was only marginally less bad than slicing my legs up. I don’t think anyone plays like I did if they aren’t very ok with the idea of possibly dying today. I’m feeling really freaked out as I think about this book. I haven’t even gone through the pictures yet. Tom took thousands of pictures of me. By far my sex life is the most photographed part of my life. I feel weird about that.

I think this book is going to be a lot harder than I thought. I should probably start looking at pictures. It is hard to know that I let someone treat me in ways that weren’t very nice. I don’t have a problem with the beatings. I had to ask for those. I have a problem with the fact that I can go to seven years of graduate school in English and teach the language for several years and he will still tell me that I am stupid for not believing him about a made up grammar rule. I’m really glad I broke up with him. I understand why I have missed him. He does feel comfortable and familiar in a way the rest of my life right now doesn’t.

I don’t think I’m going to go to the rope munch on Monday. I don’t want to see Tom. My triggers are my problem, right? No one else has to care about stupid things that set me off, right? I don’t like being treated like a lower class of person. My response to being treated that way is to feel intensely suicidal and I just can’t deal with that. I can’t deal with being told I should be cheerful about being demeaned and ignored.

I’d rather start a fight. I would rather behave in a way that is bad. I would rather tell you to fuck yourself. And thus I drive more people away. I should stay home.

Planning

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Noah is a lot smarter than he looks. He let me buy into the Disney time share program. Even though it was a lot of money. And he hasn’t gotten mad at me for not paying it off faster. He’s really quite patient with me. I say that he is smart because a lot of how I manage self-discipline is in service of some goal. I can talk myself out of eating out if I know that all of my Disneyland spending money in October and December have to just come out of our normal budget. I have to save up gas money in advance. I can’t buy a race day t-shirt at the marathon unless I save money. I have to think about these things in advance. If I want to have the money then I have to save now. Our income dropped dramatically. I can’t just doall of the things I expect in the back of my mind to do. It’s feeling hard to adjust to. We lost a big darn cushion. I always planned for us to live on his income and the reality is we spent every penny of extra income too. Some of it was shuffled off to savings/investments but not a lot. We have had a really comfortable and fun life. It’s been awesome.

Noah wants to try some big hard stuff. My role in that is to be the one to save the money in advance that will allow us to take this risk and not suffer from it regardless of the outcome. I have to plan in advance and it’s feeling hard. It’s feeling like more self discipline than I have.

Part of the reason I am walking as much as I am with Shanna is I’m trying to see if I can live without the van and be ok with the kids. Can we get to the places we want to go? I’m trying to learn what places near here we want to try. Every additional car adds a huge amount of liability: gas, insurance, repair. Saving multiple thousands of dollars a year is a lot. It just limits my range with the kids a lot. We are thinking hard about that. Things like: it would really suck to not be able to go to many home school events. I’m trying to figure out when they happen and if I could manage it. I should probably actually investigate options on the peninsula because then it makes a lot more sense to take Noah to work and use the car during the day. Most everything we do now ranges up and down the east bay.

I saw my therapist last night. Yeah. I feel like this. And that is probably going to keep happening. This is my normal. Time to move on with life. Life isn’t going to wait for me to feel better. I have to think about things that matter. Things like: what are the actual needs in this house? How can I meet them? What would a life that meets those needs look like? I need to backwards plan this. I need to draw up a long flow chart so that I can figure out what I should be doing now in order to move towards those goals. Yes, my stomach hurts. Yes, I feel like I am about to puke. Yes, I feel like my heart is racing. Yes, I am afraid.

But Noah slept in and I have to go make breakfast. That’s a lot more important. He really needed the sleep. And he will want to go in early today because we are having dinner with a friend tonight.

Everything must be bad

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There is a diner in town we go to for breakfast. Noah went there regularly even before I moved in, so we have gotten to know the staff. The two main servers have been the same for more than ten years. We have kind of a special relationship with the woman, who is probably around my mom’s age. Her grandkids live out of state so she quite dotes on my girls. Towards the end of today I got up the nerve to ask her to go do something social with me and the girls. We are going to go to tea in Niles for Shanna’s birthday later in the month. It will be really nice.

Talking to her is kind of a mixed bag. I have been crying a lot after eating there recently. I am so fucking jealous of her relationships with her children. Recently her youngest daughter decided to do a city hall wedding, last minute, with her partner of almost seven years. My friend was so excited. Her daughter allowed her to do all the doting and the silliness and traditional stuff that she desperately wanted to do but her daughter didn’t exactly want. Today we talked about how excited she is that this summer she gets to spend her oldest daughter’s birthday with her this year and she hasn’t done that in a long time. She has been very sad about that. I haven’t spent a birthday with my mom since I turned 18. I never will again.

I seem to be working hard to ensure I won’t have family at all some day. I hope I don’t fuck things up with Noah and Shanna and Calli like I do with everyone else. I ran Sarah off. I ran Alex off. I ran Andrew off. I ran Julia off. That is all in the last year. I told Noah this morning that part of why I asked him for monogamy is because I’m afraid that he will come home from a date to find me dead. I keep making it harder and harder for him to stay with me.

I’m just not worth the effort. I’m too angry. I’m too mean. I know. I drove my family away. I chose to send out a nasty message to every member of my family basically telling them to fuck off. I’m really glad I have therapy today because I would kind of like to walk in front of a bus before anyone else can leave me. I don’t know why this is so bad right now. I have nothing more to give. Why would anyone want to know me?

I know why Shanna and Calli want me. I understand that for them I am still a fucking need. They would never be whole people if I died now. That would hang over them and poison their entire lives and I am not that selfish. I don’t know why today is so hard. I have been sleeping. I’m eating. I really really really don’t need more exercise than I am getting. I’m up to running (just over 5 mph consistently) at least 12 miles a week and it is about to start increasing dramatically. I’m walking 5-10 miles a week with the kids. I really don’t need more fucking exercise. I have the house at such a state where I can clean it from top to bottom in three hours. No matter how untidy it is I have a system for doing a basic pick up in about thirty minutes. The kids are both being loving and sweet and remarkably agreeable. We are in a honey moon phase. Why do I want to kill myself? My mommy calls me a liar. I must be a piece of shit. I wish that wasn’t enough. I wish I didn’t care what she thought. I really do.

Everything is in the right place. My life is really as set up as it is going to be for the next few years. I feel like everything but me is perfect. Someone better than me should be in my place. Someone who is not spiteful and bitchy. Someone who doesn’t burst into tears just because some woman in a diner loves her kids. I feel so deeply unlovable. So worthless. Noah seems to love me. I don’t understand why. I understand the girls loving me. That is a biological self-defense mechanism. They want to god damn survive and I am their ticket to doing so. But it’s deeper than that. They are part of me. Just as I am part of my mother. And I can’t have her any more. I feel like I am on the road to ending up like my step-mom. She overdosed on heroin in the bath tub. At her funeral everyone said they couldn’t understand why she did it. They thought she was perfectly happy. She told me she wasn’t. She talked to me about being depressed. Given that her mother went through a long and messy battle with cancer and all the things in her life that bothered her I perfectly understand why she did. Perfectly.

I can’t let Noah date because he would find some nice secondary who would appear to me to be better than me in every way and he would come home to find me dead. Obviously this person is better to spend time with, so why don’t you do more of that. It’s not right. It’s not true. I suppose in this objective way. That is how it feels to me. I want him to go find someone better than me because he deserves someone better than me.

I’m having a lot of trouble with sex. I feel like he married me because I was so enthusiastic about sex and I was so enthusiastic about sex because I am deeply broken and I seem to have settled into this entirely asexual motherhood thing. In our marriage vows we specifically did not promise monogamy because I didn’t think either of us would ever do such a thing. Now I’m threatening to kill myself if he dates. To be fair, I never did that. I didn’t tell him I thought about such things while he was out on dates because it wouldn’t be fair. Why would he need to know that kind of thing? It’s emotional blackmail. I should just shut the fuck up already. I feel like writing these things in my head is a form of bullying. People who love me will feel bad. I don’t think I currently have anyone in my life who actually wants me to hurt. And I have friends. I have awesome friends.

Being an orphan is fucking hard. When I went to the grief ritual I met a woman who runs an adoption support group. I told her that I wasn’t officially adopted so I don’t count. She told me that I have absolutely been abandoned by my family of origin so I count. I think I should send her an email about that. They even meet on Monday nights and that is my night off. Done.

I feel like maybe the next big task in my life is for me to find things that I love about myself. All I see is the bad and the not good enough. Surely I do something to a degree that I am satisfied with. Even when I look at my cat, whom I rescued before her eyes were open–I am the only mama she knows. I bottle fed her and taught her how to eat food. I taught her to talk; her meows pattern on mine. Right now when I look at her I feel guilty. I am not affectionate enough. I don’t let her sit on my lap as much as she wants. I don’t clean her litter box until she yells at me. I just don’t think about it. Even though I have had her for fourteen years. I’m a self-absorbed asshole. Why don’t I take better care of her? She is a really nice cat and she has very rarely made any trouble. But I don’t clean her box until I have to and I resent her as I do it. That is what I see when I look at myself. All I do is resent everything. Every good in my life I make bad. I dislike myself for my ingratitude and hostility and resentment. Why the fuck can’t I just be grateful that my life is better now? Why do I still whine all the god damn time about things that are over?

My garage is really cool. I did a lot of really fun things here. I should feel proud of myself. Mostly what I feel is shame because I am so far removed from what is in my head. What it could be if I had more time and money. That kind of thing. I can make anything bad. Everything I do is a symbol of how I failed to do something better. Is that perfectionism? I don’t know. Noah says that I use the fact that I can find one person better than me at doing every specific task to prove that I am a loser. He argues with me a lot about my self-esteem. I’m worried about wearing him out.

I keep feeling reminded of my lack of earning potential. My life isn’t worth much to anyone. If Noah gets sick of me my life would dramatically change. It would be very hard because I’m about as dependent as a person can be. From here on out I have no source of income or any potential source of income. And I’m asking him to buckle down and stop getting a whole bunch of the perks of living with a sexual abuse survivor. I’m not doing the ridiculous promiscuous sex any more. Why in the hell would he stay? I feel like a leech. I feel like I will never be able to pay him back for how hard it is to put up with me. I feel so god damn mean.

But if I am so god damn mean how come people stop me on a regular basis to tell me that they enjoy hearing me interact with my children? But if I was so god damn mean I might run four chosen family and my entire biological family out of my life in a year. I’m that talented.

Today is going to be a long and hard day.

Food comes from a can

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Today was the kind of “running” day where I mostly walk. I try to consciously go slower when I am crying. I don’t want to trip and injure myself. Today I thought about my mother. I thought about the way Shanna begs me to never leave her. Maybe she will go to college, but she plans to come right back and “take care of me”.

I remember promising my mother that once I was an adult her life would be better. I could help. Things would be better. I suppose that depends on what you mean by “better”. My life is better. I have no idea how her life is going. I have no idea. I wonder if she is proud of me. I wonder if she knows that I grew up into a strong, good person. I wonder if she is glad that I can defend myself now and I can stop being a victim. Somehow I doubt it.

I don’t know how to reconcile in my head that my mother, the person who was responsible for taking care of me when I was helpless, prefers that I not grow up to be strong enough to defend myself. She thinks I should be defenseless. At least within the family. Should I fuck my sister too so she can finish moving through our family? Maybe she isn’t bi. Maybe I should just be fucking my sister’s boyfriends. They all tried. They tried long before I hit adult height. Watching my kids is hard. I’m not sure how to explain this.

I want my kids to travel so much because I want them to actually see how different the world is from their home. I mean the whole bay area. It’s fairly safe here. We have managed to create this little bubble where we are safe from the natural world and even the other humans aren’t that dangerous. The police are far more dangerous to us than our neighbors because I take my kids to protests. Welcome to modern America. My kids are white, upper middle class, and female. Other than sexual assault, which won’t fucking happen on my watch, my kids don’t really have much to fear. Cars. Abstract concepts. Stories. The unknown.

I want my kids to understand what it means to survive. I feel like a privileged asshole. I want to take my kids to other countries so they can play tourist on actual hard lives. I want them to not have to have hard lives but still understand the spectrum. Me telling them stories and showing them pictures isn’t good enough.

I want to know what it feels like, as a rational adult, to have to eat what food is put in front of me or go hungry. I want to change how I feel about this. I’m terrified that it means learning to eat seafood. The texture fucking bothers me. I don’t want to be that American. I don’t want to feel like a snob. I don’t want to deal with that rejection pattern. I don’t want to go to other countries and come home to hide in my house and declare that every one every where in the world dislikes me. I’m too difficult. I shouldn’t bother trying to do anything with my life. Obviously I suck. I can totally see me doing that. I could be that asshole.

The problem is, that means I didn’t really survive. That means I died a long time ago and there is nothing left in me. Because it’s just not true that I am disliked and reviled.

I am thought about.

If that is happening, and a lot of it is positive, that means maybe I’m not too hard. It’s ok to be different. It’s ok to have preferences. But when I am imposing on people I need to learn how to accept with gratitude what people choose to give me. My needs are my own to meet. I need to not act like other people are responsible for meeting them. It’s my problem. If the best I can do is a fish and rice at a given meal I need to eat the fucking fish and smile.

I want that for my kids. I want to show them what that is like. I remember my mother and feel sad and anxious. Food was so hard for me as a kid. It was bad. As an adult I’ll say that my mother was a fairly bad cook but everyone we knew loved her food. That makes me wonder. My family has all gotten to the point of heating up preseasoned food at every meal. We didn’t eat produce, and certainly not good produce.

I feel like my life is consumed with my body lately. I am trying to learn how to meet my needs. I wasn’t taught. I wasn’t taught to check in on my body and see how different parts of me felt. I was taught to ignore my body. My body wasn’t important. Anyone was allowed to do anything they wanted to my body and I was expected to just accept it. Food was what I could control.

I don’t think I’ve ever thought of it that way before.

My food life is unlike any that I have ever experienced before. Since I had kids I have radically changed how I eat. But I’m not interested in getting to a point where I’m supporting my family on my farming efforts in my backyard. Just to put a scope on this. I recently read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and all I have to say is sweet sunny Jesus NO. I felt anxious pressure reading the book. I’m an idiot. She grew up farming and married someone with a similar background. That’s just not something I will ever try.

So that leaves me in a weird position of feeling like I don’t know what I want to accomplish. I swear to G-d this post has a cohesive theme. I have to actively decide which of my behaviors in life are about what I was taught to do by my mama and which things are right for me. I also need to think about what is right for the other people in my family. We all have different needs. I wasn’t taught to think about people that way. I’m training for a marathon. My body is going to have different needs than the other members of my family. Why do I plan to feed us all exactly the same way? Because when I try to do that I end up snacking in the garage.

I resist eating the food in the house. I don’t actually like the crap I make my kids eat. I really honestly think vegetables and fruit are pretty gross. I only like the heavily processed with corn syrup version of fruit because that is what my mama likes. I don’t really want to teach my kids to be like my mother. Her version of surviving looks a lot like death to me.

I have less than eight years to really get my shit together so that I can take my kids around the world to find out how other people live. My kids will find out what it means to have to work in order to eat. I will find out what it is like to have to work in order to eat. I want to show up and not feel ignorant as a pig. I don’t want to show up ashamed of myself for my ignorance. But neither do I want to show up and act like all they need is a honky.

I want to feel like the labor of my body and the work of my mind has some value. I can accomplish things. I can work. I am not fucking useless. I try not to bullshit myself. I am not going to learn what it is like to have to do manual labor to survive. That is the understanding of a lifetime of work I have not had and won’t have. I feel weird about that. It is hard to keep in mind. I can’t keep my yard weeded–yet. I think that is probably what I have eight years to build towards. I need to be able to physically do all of the labor in my yard. I probably should get a bit more ambitious in that department. I want to be able to do farm labor. At the moment I would be annoying and useless.

In eight years I will still be very ignorant. I will be moving to different climates. I will be moving to different plants. I will know nothing. All I will be able to do is go out and try over and over and be publicly bad and I will probably be laughed at. I need to have that experience as a rational adult. I need to learn to not break down in tears just because people are laughing at me.

For my mother food comes from the freezer and cans. I was not taught how to cook food. I have a hard time eating seasonally. For many seasons of the year there aren’t very many products I recognize as food. I’ve learned to shut up about this and eat what is put in front of me.

I need to learn how to eat more food. I want my kids to have more options than me. I want them to develop a broad palate so that we can be polite guests who do farm work in exchange for being allowed to learn about people. We can be company for a while. We should be polite, grateful guests. That is hard to think about.

I have to believe my labor is such that it is worth putting up with my company. I want to have something to talk about other than what a sad terrible life I have had. I want to have something to talk about other than what a devoted slave I was. I want to have something to talk about how much I enjoyed that short stint of teaching. I want to talk about something other than just being a mother.

What else am I? Food is going to be a big part of this journey. I want to find out where food comes from. I want to teach my daughters where food comes from and I feel ashamed of myself for knowing so little. I think food comes from cans.

We should be learning languages. I suppose that means picking areas already. Oh goodness.

I cry when I run because I wonder if my mother will feel proud when she hears about me some day. This valley isn’t that big. I tremble in fear when I am in San Jose. I’m terrified of seeing her. Will I pass her in silence like somebody that I used to know? Will I introduce my kids? Will I introduce her as Vivian? I have trouble saying her name without crying. I haven’t said it much in my life. She’s my Mommy.

I do have to think about things like this. I have to decide in advance what I will do. I have to play it in my mind so that I don’t freak out. I have to decide in my head and in my heart what an appropriate adult reaction is to my children. What is it going to be like to move through the world for a whole year that I don’t have to check over my shoulder for my mother?

My mother knows where I live. I wouldn’t put it past her to show up some day. How do I want to behave? Do I want her to show up? No. Not really.

If I showed up she would pretend to be nice for a while. Then she would feel comfortable. Then she would proceed to talk about how disgusting the food is.

Learning this is too hard. I have to take feedback if I want to improve but not from her. She can never again be allowed to weigh in on any part of me. What she thinks of me is not my business. Never the less when I run I cry so hard I can barely see because I want her to be proud of me. I hope she is proud that she did manage to raise kids who can survive even if she couldn’t keep them safe.

My mother drove adult men to my house when I was a young teenager because those men wanted to have sex with me. My mother manifestly didn’t care for me. She did not teach me survival skills. She taught me skills that will kill me.

Why? Why did she do that? Is that all she knows? Was I really so hard to teach? I can’t know. I expect I was nearly as high needs as Shanna, maybe more given the abuse. Do I really want to model how my mother dealt with it? Now I understand it more. It’s complicated.

All of this is so complicated. How do I stop looking at all of life as one big mass of things that I don’t know yet and therefore I can’t know and I am trapped? When do I learn how to fail in front of other people? When will it be safe to try things in front of people without being told I am pathetic for being bad on my first try? I don’t have a safer audience than my kids. I feel bad that I don’t get to teach them very many things that I am already good at. I feel kind of sad that their entire lives will be a journey through my learning experiences.

I wish I had “become” a bit more before having kids. I wish I had been less resistant to learning. I wish I didn’t feel humiliated when I don’t know the answer. Maybe that is how my mother felt. How do I want to feel?

This is all so very complicated. And I should go in because Noah has to go to work.

You are good. You are smart. You are kind.

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Noah agreed to be married to me for better or worse. I think he might actually mean it. I think that even though I’ve been miserable and mean and sick for almost five years he shows a remarkable resiliency in cheer. All I have to do is have sex with him and he’s suddenly good to go again. It’s kind of weird. I don’t have quite the same system. I need so much support in so many areas and I am deeply ashamed of that need. I feel like my need is a sign that I am pathetic and lazy. I feel like I am a failure because I cannot completely do every thing in my life by myself. I’m a stay at home mom. I don’t have a job. All I have to do is keep the house clean, the kids fed and clothed, and at this stage… play with them. It’s not exactly hard. Right?

It’s really fucking hard because it takes so much patience. I am not a very patient person. I am a very demanding and exacting person. I don’t like delays at all. I spend most of my days wanting to bash my head through a wall as a pressure relief. Instead I take a deep breath, count down from ten silently, then I try to smile and say, “Let’s try again.” That’s my fucking job.

I have always been very clear about the fact hat I behave differently “at work” than I do “in my life”. In my life I do a lot of things I have to hide from my work. When I was teaching I was not particularly “out” about talking about my queerness or sexual history. I didn’t talk about going to raves and doing drugs on the weekends–although I did. I think that being in the closet about those things was wise. It meant that when kids started talking about things I understood the language but I wasn’t their “buddy” because I wasn’t an obvious peer. I’m not sure I am phrasing this right–I need to make my mistakes past-tense. I can’t talk about them while I’m doing them because then I get muddled up and unable to be honest about my mistakes. I know that I am doing stupid shit but I can’t admit it yet because I want to keep doing it for a while. I didn’t need to tell students I did that.

Noah came in to talk to me so whatever train of thought I had was gone. As Calli likes to say, “Whoops!” She also spreads her arms and yells, “Ta da!” I can’t wait until she can really talk. End sidebar.

And a new day dawns. I still don’t know exactly where I was going with that train of thought. I’m going to keep going instead of hitting post because I don’t get comments anyway. So what if things are long and complicated. I’m apparently just writing for me. And Noah. He talks to me about my writing. That feels like a manipulative ploy but I don’t mean it to be. People talk to me about my writing when I can get them in person. I’m not subtle in asking for feedback. I really like finding out what my writing makes people think about.

My wonderful complication was over for dinner recently and she told me that she thinks about me. It was said in the context of, “I’m glad it is ok that we don’t IM very frequently because you just know I think of you.” No, actually I didn’t know that you think about me. Wait. You think about me? Oh shit. What do you think?! When I get to that point I am trying to learn to reference something I got from Ashley Judd “ I hold that it is none of my business what people think of me.”

That’s hard for me to wrap my head around.

I was taught that it is my responsibility to influence and control what other people think of me. I should be careful what I reveal. I should tell different people different stories so that I evoke the right reactions from people. It’s a lot of why I do large information dumps on people and then run away. I believe in the core of my being that I am “doing it wrong” and I am bad for what I am doing. It is bad for me to be rude and inflict my inner stupidity on other people. No one wants to hear about how pathetic I am. No one wants to read the same whiny bullshit year after year. Grow the fuck up already. Stop being sad. But I can’t. I can’t stop. I wish I could stop. I don’t know how to stop being sad. I am sad. I just am. And while I am sad I have to make believe that I am happy and cheerful and that we live in basically a good world. That’s my job.

I need to have some place where I can say over and over again that I was hurt very badly and it still hurts. I would give anything to make this pain go away. I would give anything if I no longer needed to sit in a room by myself and cry every single day because I am so fucking sad. I cry and cry until I am dehydrated. I drink nearly a gallon of water a day. I shouldn’t be able to get dehydrated. But that pee doesn’t lie. (See, there I go with the tmi.)

It hurts. I miss my mom. I’m horrified every day because I look at Shanna and I think, “I was out having oral sex with multiple children already.” My mother didn’t keep me safe. I look at Shanna and wonder what I would be like if I had been allowed to be innocent. What would I want in life? How would I feel about the world? How would I be different? And it bothers me. It bothers me all the time.

I feel like I am a dirty, bad, mean piece of shit. I’m really glad that other people tell me, often, that they do not have that experience of me. I feel pathetic and stupid for needing to be told that. I’m told that you have to say ten nice things to balance out every bad statement to a person. That’s kind of the way it affects your sense of self.

I spent my whole childhood being told I was stupid and bad and a whore and little bitch and worthless. I’m thirty years old and I still sit alone in a room and cry about it. Because it still lives in me. I was told those things so many times that I agreed. I thought they were true. If fucking everyone tells you the same story how can you believe anything else? If it walks like a duck and it sounds like a duck and it swims like a duck? It’s probably a duck–right? If one person tells me to buy horse shoes I’m going to look at him funny. If two people tell me to buy horse shoes I’m going to think about it. If three people tell me to buy horse shoes I am going to get moving towards the store; I probably need them, right?

I spent my whole childhood being told I was stupid and bad and a whore and little bitch and worthless.

It still hurts. I’m not a fan of that old saying, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” I have healed from every broken bone I have had. My arms work fine. My hand works fine. I have been hit with sticks. I have been hit with stones. Those things heal. I can forget that kind of pain. It isn’t important. I believe I am a worthless piece of shit. I believe I am dirty and bad.

Noah gave me shampoo and conditioner for Christmas. This is kind of funny because I haven’t used such products in years. Since my hair is hella short I’ve been using them because it really doesn’t matter if my hair frizzes. I’m discovering something I had forgotten when I switched to baking soda and vinegar. It doesn’t matter how many times I “soap” my hair it always feels dirty to me. Dirty in that way that indicates “not washed”. I feel like there is no way to get the dirt and the bad off of me. It is a physical feeling. I remember my mother complaining about my hair. The only way my mother liked my hair was about an inch long so that she could ignore taking care of it. She was very resistant to me having long hair even though she complimented me on how I looked far more when I had long hair. Hair has such a weird place in my life. My mother was always thrilled when I wanted to play with her hair. Sissy loved to have her hair brushed. I don’t like having other people care for my hair because no one ever wants to be gentle enough. It hurts when other people touch my hair. My mom and sister liked it when I did their hair because I was more gentle than them. I was taught to touch my head and hair roughly. To treat it like something gross. Because I am dirty. When I switched to baking soda and vinegar I had a feeling of at peace with the feeling of my hair. It didn’t feel “clean” but it did feel soft. It’s interesting to use shampoo and conditioner again. My hair feels rough and dirty again. Specifically dirty. And I think it is making my dandruff worse. See, more tmi.

I feel stupid because I want to talk about how bad I feel about being an animal and having hair and being dirty. I need to talk about this because I don’t want to teach my daughter to feel this way. My brother is a stupid moron because he thinks the way to break behavior patterns is to not talk about them and pray they go away. Yeah. That doesn’t work. Not talking about things creates a festering wound because GUESS WHAT?! It is still a wound. It still hurts. Just not talking about it isn’t working.

I have to work very hard every day to decide what I want to teach my children because what I was taught was that I am bad, dirty, worthless, useless, and a whore. I know that I must be something else. I must be other than just what I was taught to be. Somehow I did that. How did I do it? Where did I do it? What should I do instead? I don’t know what to do. You can’t deal with a problematic behavior by just “not doing ‘x'” you have to replace ‘x’ with something. You have to have some idea of what you are moving towards. I don’t know. I don’t have very many good examples.

I don’t get to watch other parents very often. When I do I spend most of the time thinking, “Oh they do ________ better than me.” Of course this means that I offer criticisms. Because I’m like that. I expect that they are judging me so I start first. Just to get this going. I guess. I need to hear peoples criticisms of me. I suppose this is why I am asking people for feedback in person. I don’t need to hear the random criticism of people on the internet who don’t know me or what I actually do. When you only know me through my writing you are hearing a very random sampling of things from my brain. It’s a poor example of my life. That’s the joy of mental illness. I can be totally fucked up in my head but life just keeps plugging right along. I’m doing my best to be functional at my job and how that works is going to change over time. I’m trying to figure out the right way to act. I’m trying to figure out my idea of the best mother for my kids. It’s not exactly like me. I’m having a very hard time figuring out how it will interact with my sex life. We have a lock on our bedroom door.

I feel disgusting for needing sex. I am developing more of a complex as time goes by. Noah is, understandably, not thrilled. This is going to be hard to work through. For some strange reason he seems to be willing to go through this with me. I ask so much of him. Far more than I should ask. I know that it isn’t ok to need as much support as I need. That doesn’t change the fact that I need it. And he is willing to give it. He says. We’ll see. I’m so scared. I hurt so much. I need so much. I know I’m not supposed to talk about it. No. That’s not true. I’m supposed to talk about it one hour a week in a therapists office and then be all better. Right?

I hurt so much. I cry so much. I am so fucking sad. But my personal time is long over. Really I’m being kind of an asshole to Noah right now. I need to cry though. I have to. I can’t not cry today. And I don’t like doing it in front of the kids more than necessary. They will see enough sadness from me this lifetime.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Always with the defensive, this girl.

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Yesterday was one of those magical running days. The kind where the beat of the music and my grief match up perfectly. It’s hard to describe what I enjoy about running. There are several stretches of blocks in my neighborhood that I use for sprinting. The lines on the sidewalk just require it. When I get to those specific streets I pray for the right fast song. I run until I can barely breathe. I run until I am gasping out sobs and I can barely see anymore because I am crying so hard. There is so very much to cry about.

I have so much grief. I feel like I will never stop grieving. I will never feel like I can move past these feelings. I’m trying to trust the process. I’m trying to believe that even though this cycle of mourning isn’t over it will end some day. I just don’t know when. It’s hard to keep going.

Why was I crying yesterday? It’s hard to remember specifics because I cover so many topics in my head. I spent a lot of time thinking about why I am the sort of person to send nasty judgmental shaming letters to. I get them every so often. I trigger the shit out of people. It’s the same reason my former therapist fired me. I don’t do things how other people think they should be done. In the process I am deeply distressing. People don’t like feeling distressed by how “off from the norm” I am. They want me to fall back in line, damnit. I should do _________ in order to be acceptable to them. I can’t.

I can’t ever be acceptable to everyone in my life. That isn’t an option open to me. I will always bother people in some way on some level. Pretty much everyone. I will always talk about subjects that make you uncomfortable, no matter who you are. I will search for that topic that bothers you the most and then I will harp on it constantly. I do this on an unconscious level. I default to challenging people. A lot of the time I’m not doing it on purpose. I believe with every part of me that I would not have survived if I was willing to let other people set the terms of my reality. I would have crumbled a long time ago. I would have to believe that I was who they say I am.

This time I would have to believe I am an addict. I am bad. I am helpless before these things that control me. My cutting, anger, drug use, and sexual activity are bad. I am bad for being addicted to these things. Bad. Bad. Bad. I know. I’ve always known. I know that you think I am bad. That doesn’t mean that you are right or that I have to agree. That’s an opinion not a provable set of facts. I’m obsessive (even though I hear this kind of pedantry means you lose the argument I am going to do this anyway because it is my fucking blog and I’m only arguing with myself which means there is no such thing as losing) so here’s a definition for you:

Addiction is defined as the continued use of a mood altering substance or behaviour despite adverse consequences.^[1] This can include, but is not limited to, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, exercise abuse, and gambling. Some defining characteristics of addiction include: impaired control over subtances/behaviour, preoccupation with substance/behaviour, continued use despite consequences, and denial.^[2] Habits and patterns associated with addiction are typically characterized by immediate gratification (short-term reward), coupled with delayed deleterious effects (long-term costs).^[3]Physiological dependence occurs when the body has to adjust to the substance by incorporating the substance into its ‘normal’ functioning.^[4] This state creates the conditions of tolerance, and withdrawal. Tolerance is the process by which the body continually adapts to the substance and requires increasingly larger amounts to achieve the original effects. Withdrawal refers to physical and psychological symptoms people experience when reducing or discontinuing a substance the body had become dependent on. Symptoms of withdrawal generally include but are not limited to anxiety, irritability, intense cravings for the substance, nausea, hallucinations, headaches, cold sweats, and tremors.

That’s from Wikipedia. I use marijuana under medical supervision to deal with psychological issues. Yes there are technically adverse side effects because smoking is bad for your lungs. Overall it makes my life so much better it isn’t funny. I repeat that it has fewer side effects than any other drug I could be on.

Cutting, sex, and anger are all in a hand wavey category. I have a problem with the 12 step language of weakness. “I’m not responsible. A higher power has to save me.” Well… I am certainly addicted to harming myself. I do it in a variety of ways. I don’t give any particular method much higher billing than any other. I think that is what he really meant by saying I am addicted to these things. But of course he’s blowing hot air out of his ass so he doesn’t quite see the pattern. I go through long periods without cutting. I have gone many years between periods where I feel bad enough about myself to need that release. I can easily channel that frustration and rage into other areas if given the slightest chance.

Cutting works to put an end to bad emotional states that would otherwise lead to suicide. Is it a great approach? No. It isn’t. But for an awful lot of my life I didn’t have a better choice and I think that cutting was significantly better for me than suicide. No one is going to take that belief away from me. I had to cope. I managed. I survived. The last time I cut I had kind of an epiphany that it wasn’t working any more. I threw away my scalpels. I have moved beyond the utility of that as a coping method. I didn’t stop because someone shamed me or told me I was bad for doing it. That kind of response is only likely to cause me to go do it more and more and more. I stopped because I realized it was insanity to continue. Insanity in the sense that it doesn’t make sense to keep doing the same activity and expecting a different response.

I no longer have a life where I need a physical outlet for my emotional pain. Thank you, Noah. Thank you for being my bulwark against the dark. Thank you for providing me with a safe place to live for the rest of my life. Thank you for supporting me so that I can do work I am better suited for and I don’t have to go out and “get a job” to prove I have worth.

The emotional pain I feel now I can talk about and find solutions for. I think the only place where the language of addiction is particularly useful for me is where it talks about the diminishing returns issue. Or if you talk about the cost being too high for the benefit.

I asked Noah for monogamy partially as a way of providing myself an ‘out’ on dealing with a lot of my problematic behavior. I’m not good at self-regulation when it comes to sex. Now I am safe. Now I will always be able to say, “I’m in a monogamous marriage; I can’t have sex with you” instead of having to be able to say “I don’t want to.” Saying I don’t want to have sex with someone is hard. I feel unworthy of doing so. I feel like if someone is suffering for lack of sex it is my job to fix it. I can be a sacred whore, that’s fine–but I must be a whore. I don’t say no very well. I am going to hide behind monogamy and be grateful for it. I feel guilty that I am dragging Noah behind me kicking and screaming into this change. I feel like I am unfairly punishing him for a problem he doesn’t have. But I asked and he agreed and he doesn’t really want to talk about whether it is fair or not. It is. Move on.

I cried yesterday because I feel terribly bad that in order to protect myself from my own impulsive behavior I have curtailed Noah. It seems selfish and immature and just flat mean. I am such a bitch. And I’m trying to learn how to tell him “no” in general. I no longer close my eyes and go away and let him have sex with me. It’s hard. It’s hard to feel like I am not breaking rules. It is hard because I feel like I am bad for not giving him release when and how he wants it. I am not holding up my end of the deal. He is supporting me–don’t I owe him? I told him that thirty years of being a whore is enough for anyone. It’s time to retire.

Noah isn’t attacking me. Noah doesn’t require that I put out because he wants me to. I project that onto him. I fear that belief. I have it. That’s enough.

Am I an addict? Maybe? Yes? It seems to be an irrelevant question. Unless you believe that someone who takes thyroid medication is also an addict it is simply a innate bias to say that the pot is a problem. It’s not your preferred kind of medication but I’m a hippy and my doctor agrees that it is good for me. Imagine me sticking my tongue out at you. I also see a massage therapist and an acupuncturist (ok, not since pregnancy but I will get back there some day–I believe in the benefits). I think I should see a chiropractor about something going on in the lower right hand side of my back. That has been a problem since Jeremy sodomized me when I was like ten. I have never been able to get it to stop hurting. Running is teaching me a lot about my body. I think I have a better idea of how to deal with the pain.

So! Am I an addict when it comes to pot? Wikipedia says no. I’m going to go with that. Sex? Well… obviously I’m doing as much “recovery” from that as I can do. I am not actually interested in celibacy and trying to be celibate just because someone else might think I should be would result in me not being married any more. Noah wouldn’t tolerate that. He’s dealing with me saying “no” a lot and he’s dealing with not being allowed to have sex with other people. I think he’s a god damned stand up guy. No more can or should be asked of our marriage as I’m figuring out this shit with my relationship to sex. So am I addicted to sex? Maybe? But it doesn’t matter because I’ve figured out how I can have a healthy relationship with it and I’m moving forward. Kind of a useless thing to sit around and go to meetings on at this point. Just sayin’.

I haven’t cut in nearly a year and I no longer have my favored cutting tool. I could some day acquire another one, sure. I don’t think I will though. I don’t want that modeled for my children as an option of coping mechanisms.

It’s interesting to me how this evolution has happened. I cut for many years. When I stopped cutting my body as a teenager I started cutting my hair. It got shorter and shorter till I shaved it when I was seventeen. My mother was so angry with me it wasn’t funny. I felt like the whole world was radiating anger with me for cutting my hair. I was told constantly how ugly I was and how unflattering my “new look” was.

It’s been very weird and uncomfortable that people keep gushing about how good I look with a shaved head/short hair this time. It makes me cry. Because when they say it I hear my mother ranting in my head and I want to hit them and cry that they are lying to me. I feel rage that this person is lying about finding me attractive this way. I try to not do more than clench my fists. I try to not stomp away. I smile. I say thank you. I think that I flinch sometimes and then people simply become more emphatic. Noah certainly tells me that he likes it often. That is one of the things I cried about yesterday. “Hair” was on.

I wonder if my family hated this as a hair cut because of how intense it makes me look. I feel like I have to plaster a fake smile on my face all of the time or I look like I might punch you in the face as soon as say “hello”. It’s weird. I feel like the effects of aging are doing interesting things to my face. I am going to wrinkle like fuck. All the women in my family have deep lines of care from a fairly young age. We live hard lives and it shows. I look at my hands and I see my mothers hands. I see the rope appearing. My hands are the hands of someone who does manual labor. Well, I don’t have deep callouses yet. But I will as soon as I get up the energy to do more gardening. I would have done anything to prevent aging the way I am if I had stayed in a relationship with Tom.

One of the things I cry about when I run is thinking about how resentful Tom would be of the changes in me. It’s strange. I cry because I loved him so much and he wanted such a small piece of who I am. I feel bad that after my family he felt so very good to me but we didn’t know how to be real people together. Tom lives in a world where “pretty” and “sexy” are such a high bar that they become a vocation. I’m naturally pretty lazy. I don’t think I am that pretty and I don’t see much point in dressing up a plow horse to take it to town. I know I am attractive but it’s different. As I age it becomes more dramatic to me. I am intense in a way that precludes pretty. Pretty is about unoffensive and I will never be that. My perception of the world Tom lives in is honestly kind of bleak. I would not be happy in it. I can’t stay dedicated to something I feel like I will never actually attain. It involves a lot of specific activity and specific idleness that I just don’t want. I think back over how I lived my life and I feel glad that I made most of the choices I made. I was always running.

A boyfriend from high school sent me a congratulatory message about the half marathon and sent me a link to a marathon training program that is way more awesome than what I had been doing. By which I mean I am so grateful that this program wants me doing two miles for the first few weeks because it feels like such a wave of relief I can barely stand it. Doing only two miles for the last two days of running has meant I have practiced sprinting. It uses different muscle groups and it feels good to stretch my legs once in a while.

I lost my train of thought a while ago because my cat jumped on the keyboard and then I got mad at her. We had to pause and have a negotiation wherein she glared at me and looked sad that I had thrown her the floor. I sighed deeply and went and got a blanket to prevent her from drawing blood and I moved my computer so she could lay on my lap. Puff’s mother gave her to me when Puff was only a few days old. Her eyes were still closed and I bottle fed her to keep her alive. Puff’s mother brought us the babies to save them from a rain storm that would have drowned them outside. The feral mama wasn’t willing to come inside and care for the babies and she didn’t want anything to do with them later, but she did save them. That feels important. I have had Puff for fourteen years. My niece named her. T said, “She looks like a puff of clouds.” She is white with grey nearly-Siamese markings. For a couple of years after Shanna was born Puff avoided me. I feel like our relationship has deepened a lot over the last year or so. She doesn’t mind Calli the way she minds Shanna. She loves that I sit in the garage alone. I attribute a lot of our relationship growth to the smoking, actually. It keeps me away from the kids and she is quick to remind me that our alone time should be special, darn it!

I feel the need to apologize for my many typos. I stop writing when I am abruptly pulled away to do something else and I really don’t have time to edit. I’m not a professional writer so it feels ok to be sloppy.

I love getting mail. Sometimes.

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Yesterday I got a letter. Normally I am thrilled by such instances. In this case I believe the person sent a letter because if he sends a letter I can only respond on his terms. If he sent an email he knows I would just argue with him and refuse to let him set the terms of the conversation. As is, I don’t feel like this letter deserves a letter back of its own so I’m just going to ignore it. Well, maybe “ignore” is a bit strong. I’ll stew about it but I’m not going to respond to him. I hear he has me blocked all over the internet. Hallelujah.

I would like to say in public that I am under the care of a licensed psychologist, psychiatrist, and I do actually have a general doctor as well. The folks who “take care” of me are professionals in good standing in their various professions. They all agree that I should be on some kind of psych med at this stage and if pot is working, why bother replacing it with something that has more side effects. Does that make it an addiction? Is someone who takes thyroid medication an addict? It’s an interesting question.

I certainly need pot. I feel a grotesque amount of shame about that. I’m aware the 12 step folks want me to get off it entirely. Obviously that would make my whole life better. Given the magnitude of my mental health issues I would need to turn to western medicine and pills. Seriously, they make everything worse. But obviously I am a disgusting low life addicts. Obviously.

And because I am obviously I am an addict, that means I am bad and abuse, right? I have anger issues. I’ve had anger issues for a long time. I must be addicted to anger, right? It totally makes sense. I’m comfortable in that emotion so I default to it and if nothing happens for a while to make me angry I’ll go find some moron on the internet to argue with. Since I was eighteen I have kicked holes in drywall twice and punched a hole once. I kicked the cabinet doors off. That is the entire extent of property damage done in my life. That is manifestly an anger problem. I don’t hit people at all any more under any circumstances. I don’t do that “girl” thing of whacking people when they are irritating. I married someone who finds it offensive so I stopped. I’m not going to be doing bdsm play with anyone else again so I don’t think I will ever hit a person again in my life. It’s kind of weird to think about.

But obviously my anger is running my life. I’m angry all day every day, right? No? Wait. What?! You mean the gross assumptions about me might be incorrect? I spend all day every day in a mellow and cheerful mood. I am edgy and anxious when new people come around and I feel uncomfortable. I have this constant fear that people are judging me (but I get a letter ever year or so from someone telling me that I am disgusting and abusive so I think that isn’t a paranoia on my part) and it makes me more prone to fight with people I think don’t like me anyway. The best defense is a good offense. If you strike me as someone who is likely to shame me and put me down I am going to attack you and be on offense from the beginning. It isn’t always perfect. But then I get letters like yesterday and I’m glad I have that approach.

I’m not going to do what people tell me and then they get butt hurt and *I’m* the one with the anger problem. Right. Obviously if I don’t want to do what he says when he says it I am in denial.

I am not at a place in my life where I can start going to a bunch of meetings in San Francisco. Not even to make other people feel better about my “sobriety”. I can’t bring my kids and telling me that I could get childcare from someone who thinks I am disgusting is hilarious. I would rather drop my kids off to play in the park alone. They would be safer.

A lot of the reason I have no contact with my family isn’t because I am paranoid about them sexually assaulting my kids during an Easter Egg Hunt. I don’t allow my children around my family because my children don’t need to sit and listen to people talk shit about me. I’m far from perfect and I deal with that. My 19 month old and my nearly four year old don’t need to be in the house of someone who feels quite free to put me down and talk badly about me. Hell fucking no. That is a hostile environment for me and mine. Calling it “support” is pure hypocrisy and it sickens me. No you don’t want to support me. You want to shame me and insult me. I’ll pass.

Anger is absolutely the monkey on my back. I deal with it by trying to figure out why I am angry and changing the part that feels like an attack so I can stop feeling defensive. There isn’t a chance in hell I am going to go visit the house of someone who has shamed me up one side and down the other and not feel angry. Then he will take that as more confirmation that he is right. No thanks. That is a lose/lose situation for me. Shaming isn’t love or concern.

That’s the part that matters. When people come to me in love and concern to “talk about my behavior” (it happens) I try to meet them where they are and listen. I don’t think I am perfect. I listen to advice when it is given appropriately by people I respect. Someone who sends me a nastygram letter unsolicited where he recommends that I go stay in a residential rehab facility because I smoke pot? Yeah. Kiss my ass. I’m fairly unlikely to smoke for the rest of my life. But it is a drug I need right now. I guess I’m bad for that. I guess I should abandon my children to the mercy of people who think I am bad and head off to a place that will cause me massive panic attacks as soon as I walk in.

And after I walk in I won’t be able to go to the bathroom when I want. And if I don’t draw pictures when they tell me to draw pictures all hell can break loose. Oh wait. I’m just being paranoid. That doesn’t happen to people. Oh wait. It happened to me. Uhm, no. No thank you. I don’t think there is a chance in hell that residential treatment would improve my life. I think that would be the thing that sent me over the bend and I would never be released because they would be pumping me full of frightening chemicals just to get me to stop screaming. I will never go back to a treatment facility. I would rather kill myself. My therapists know this. They don’t think I need to go to rehab. My therapist thinks that rehab would be an entirely inappropriate place for me because I am not hurting my life. I am appropriately using a medication that my body apparently needs right now so that I can go on to be a (mostly) happy, highly functioning adult. What is the problem?

The problem is that someone is mad at me. He has shit going on in his own life that he is upset about and he wants to vent his spleen on someone. I’m a convenient target. This is what being the scapegoat means. This is how such patterns continue on and on in life. He acted like the bringer of truth. “You’ve surrounded yourself with friends who don’t see you(sic) addictive behavior as anything unusual, and with a husband who is a hard core enabler.” Yes. I have chosen to surround myself with people who are nice to me and who do not send me nasty letters. You illustrate nicely why I do that. You are not right. You have an opinion.

I’m addicted to anger, cutting, sex, and drugs. Apparently. Sure. Why not. All of these “addictions” spring from the same basic place of feeling unsafe and like I deserve to hurt. I’ve been looking into the treatment for these issues for some time. Guess what the first step is?

Safety. Safety, for me, includes not talking to people who are going to send me long letters about how bad I am. Whether I have issues or not it is not the job of anyone to send me nasty letters about my issues. This isn’t how you help someone. But it is how you contribute to the surrounding feeling of unsafe. I guess I shouldn’t let go of that paranoia of people sitting at home thinking nasty thoughts about me. I have yet more evidence. Shit dude. He felt motivated enough by his hostile judgment to print out a letter, find an envelope and put three stamps on it! That’s commitment! It wasn’t even an off-hand email in a bitchy moment. He put effort into it. He didn’t open a dialogue about, “I’m feeling worried about you. Are you open to talking about some of the stuff that is going on for you?” He has no interest in my consent. He’s just interested in telling me how bad I am.

“A while back you wrote about how outraged you were when you discovered that there were adults who knew that you were being abused as a child and didn’t do anything about it. Another time you wrote something to the effect that at least your kids were not being brought up by totally fucked up addicts, they were being brought up my(sic) a high functioning addict. I like Shanna a lot, and if we ever meet when she is grown up, I don’t want her to be able to say to me, “If everyone knew my mom was an addict, how come nobody did anything about it?”

This is for Shanna.”

Bam! That’s class A perfect color shame. He’s not telling me these things because he is a judgmental asshole! No! He’s doing it for Shanna. He thinks it would be far preferable to be on western meds so that I can sit on the couch and stare at a tv and not do anything self-destructive and recover from my “addictions”.

I feel the love in every line. Don’t you? I was raped over and over. I was moved more than 50 times. I was not allowed to develop any normal attachments in life and I’m bitter about it. Obviously he needs to step in because I am a stoner. It’s the same thing as rescuing me when I was a kid. I’m just as bad.

I’m sure I am not reading this is the best possible light. I hear that 80% of all things read in text are read with the wrong tone. I guess it is too bad that this person didn’t have the respect for me to ask to talk to me in person, you know, if he was serious about wanting to help me. Instead he sent an aggressive and hostile letter (you can’t miss that even if you tone down my paranoia) and I’m supposed to just… what? Smack myself in the forehead and say, “You must be right! How have I lived without such sage advice commanding me how to get my life together!”

Why do I write about these things? Because if I didn’t write about it I would mutter under my breath all day. I would slam cabinets. I would be pissed off as fuck because this fucking asshole just god damn ruined my day. But if I come and write about it I can let it go. I went through all the thoughts. Now I can stop talking about when the kids are around.

There are always going to be people who dislike me and disapprove of me. If I let that ruin my day I can just go kill myself and get it over with. There are enough of those people for every day, forever.

In the best light I can see this letter as him trying to say that he misses having me as a friend and he won’t hang out with me until I get treatment so please hurry because he misses me. There is definitely a way to see it that way if I’m generous.

But this is a whole lot of shaming. I don’t need people in my life who shame me. I don’t need to be made to feel bad. That’s not ok. That’s not an acceptable thing to do to a friend. If he wanted to talk to me about these things he could have. He didn’t. He wanted to sit on high and give me judgments and orders. Well who died and made you the king of anything?

Don’t worry. I’ll tell Shanna you sent me a nasty letter trying to protect her. I’m sure it will make her feel much better.

If someone actually wants to talk to me and offer polite conversation about their concern, I promise I won’t write a hostile blog post about it. If you treat me like a reasonable person I’ll treat you like one. If you send me shaming text, I might print the whole thing verbatim and I might keep it private. You are taking a roll of the dice. I don’t keep secrets very well.

It’s an interesting week

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This has been a freakishly social week. I’m thrilled. It’s like I’m not a parent again, only people are coming to my house because I’m a parent. It works.

I’m recovering from bronchitis. I didn’t appreciate it when the urgent care doctor told me I would have been better off with pneumonia because that would have healed quicker before the half marathon I am running in four days.

I’ve been thinking really hard about the ways in which I feel alone and unconnected, which is slightly ridiculous given that I’m fueling these thoughts with stuff people tell me when they come to my house because they like me. Last night my friends were telling me about their marathon experience. They ran with Team in Training to raise money for cancer research. They both have experiences in their backgrounds that made it a very poignant, specifically relevant thing for them to do. My grandmother, the one I am named after, died of cancer. I don’t know what kind.

I wouldn’t be able to train for the marathon as part of a group. It’s not really just the timing issues. It’s because I’m not running a marathon for anyone but me. I feel like a selfish piece of shit. I know a lot of people who are very outward focused in the “why” behind them doing things. I can’t be. I feel so very self involved. I want to run a marathon to prove to myself that I can. I want to run a marathon because I want to show my brother that I can even though I don’t particularly want to speak to him at the event. I’m actually terrified of running into him and I hope the crowd of 5,000 people will be enough to hide in.

I want to run a marathon for the same reason I wanted to be hanged by the neck. To prove that I can survive doing things that are too hard for most people. I feel like I shouldn’t admit that out loud. I don’t want to be part of something bigger than me because I never will. I will always feel like I am there on a temporary pass and I’m not really part of it. I don’t know how to feel connected to people.

Yesterday someone told me that for a very young child to be overly affectionate with people they don’t know is a sign of an attachment disorder. I did that. I went to anyone who was even vaguely affectionate towards me. The problem is that most people don’t keep coming around and the result is that I have learned to be bitter and not try to join anything.

I have been trying to let my lungs heal this week so I have not been smoking pot. It is remarkable what that does to my mood. I’ve had a lot of suicidal thoughts. I’ve had a lot of intense feelings of worthlessness. I will never actually be good. I will never be someone who contributes in positive ways. I will always be a drain. I will always be unfit and unworthy. I’m not even sure what I am unworthy of.

A friend said something to me this week that I have always felt but not had the nerve to say out loud: my story is mostly remarkable because it happened to a white girl. There are many tales of horrific incest and abuse from women of color. White girls either don’t experience it or don’t talk about it. I’ve never known how to feel about that. I’m very aware of my privilege. I’m very aware of the fact that I would not have gotten the help I have gotten if I hadn’t been white. I don’t know how to feel about that. I never have known. It’s not like I think I understand the black experience, I’m not that stupid. But I am often only willing to accept advice from people who aren’t white. Advice from white people often feels irrelevant to me. Either they didn’t ever live in the gutter so what the fuck do they know or they didn’t really crawl out.

My experience of advice from black women has been intense. They aren’t going to give me a pass for suffering. Everyone suffers. Black women have to live every day with the fear that their son might be murdered for having the audacity to walk home from a convenience store with a bag of Skittles and an iced tea. That is honest to god fucking fear. That is real.

I told Noah this morning that the current debate about abortion in this country scares the shit out of me. It scares me in a visceral, personal way. The reason it scares me so much is because Noah has had a vasectomy. My intention is to be monogamous. If I ever get pregnant again it will probably be the result of being raped. I don’t have the hubris to think that won’t happen to me. Instead I have the life history where I feel like I should never leave my house again if I want to avoid that possibility. I should only see people I carefully prescreen and invite to my house. That is the only way I won’t have to deal with the potential consequences of a child I would not be able to raise with love.

I have had a transvaginal ultrasound. It wasn’t pleasant. The doctor was a stupid bitch and I didn’t want to do it and she insisted and I was stupid and didn’t feel like I could really say no. It was when I was pregnant with Calli. I got pregnant the cycle after a miscarriage. There was the potential that the previous miscarriage was a twin loss and I needed to know that information. That could have been determined by blood tests. She insisted up one side and down the other that I allow her to check with an ultrasound. I knew I was less than a month pregnant and she wouldn’t be able to see anything any other way. Even with the transvaginal ultrasound she couldn’t see much of anything because Calli was still about the size of a pea. I left the building crying because I hadn’t wanted that woman to penetrate me. Unfortunately I’m not very good at saying no when people want access to my crotch. I don’t ever feel like I really get to.

I know that right now I am feeling unstable. I know that this is why I am “mentally ill”. Because even though I have a great life and I “should” feel safe I don’t. Is this really mental illness or is this simple pattern recognition? I don’t feel like I even know.

I’m working on part two. I’m thinking about who were the important pivot people in my life. I’m thinking about where I learned different ideas. Where did I learn that I was supposed to exist for other peoples entertainment, not my own fulfillment. I’m thinking hard about how I was shaped. And this time I want it to sound like a story not a bare recitation of facts. I’m scared shitless of writing dialogue. How do I characterize these relationships? Oh god.

I’m really glad people are coming to visit me this week. That’s why I argue with myself about my “value”. Obviously people do see value in me. Obviously they think I am worth putting in some effort–they have already done so. But why? What value could they possibly get from knowing me? That’s what is interesting about writing part two. It’s not just thinking about what people have done to/for me. I have to acknowledge what I have actually done. How I have been a person that others want a relationship with. Unfortunately being sober means I feel like I should just write over and over and over about how all people want is access to the hole between my legs.

Broken promises

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My mom likes to make promises she can’t keep. Oh she always intends to do it when she says it. She just isn’t very good at taking stock of what things are realistic and possible in life. And she rarely has the willpower to deny herself something in favor of a later pay off. It’s all stupid shit, right? She promised she would take me to Magic Mountain every year from when I was eight on. My siblings grew up with season passes and I heard the stories and I felt envious. I went by myself when I was twenty-one.

One of the talents my mom has is sewing. She’s a fairly talented seamstress. I still have things she made from me and I wear them when I get the chance. I have a Snow White costume and an Ariel (from The Little Mermaid) dress–you know the one when she comes down to dinner and brushes her hair with a fork? That one. My dress is awesome. And my mommy made it for me which makes it extra special. She made my Dickens costume. I wish she hadn’t told me to buy the pattern and material for three separate Dickens costumes because then in the long run I feel bitter that (as usual) she doesn’t follow through completely on what she says. I should just be grateful she did one. Usually she doesn’t get through one.

I focus on the fact that in everything she said to me there was always a lie. I always had to be careful not to get my hopes up when she said anything. I would say I had less than a 50/50 chance of her following through. That wears on you decade after decade. I wish she had promised less.

“I’ll pick you up from school” was one of those ones I wish she had promised less of. I would not be able to add up all the hours I sat around waiting to be picked up. I understand. She always had a reason. It’s not her fault. Ever. It is always someone or something else’s fault. Always. Always. Always.

I hold the people in my life to a higher standard of truth telling because of this. Approximations are not good things. Over-promising is the worst thing you can possibly do. I try very hard to keep my expectations and hopes very low. Too many people are fucking liars who are too self absorbed to even admit to themselves that what they are doing is lying.

There are sins I forgive easily and barely notice; there are sins that cause me to feel like I have to smite someone from the earth because they are hurting me. The real solution isn’t to smite anyone. I’m terrified that the solution is simply to never trust a word that people say unless they prove over years that they aren’t a liar. Unfortunately I tend to trust more than I should. I get lied to a lot. Oh of course it is never a lie it’s just that people don’t think they need to have a lot of integrity in what they say. They feel no need to be impeccable with their words. Close enough is good enough. And I die of a thousand paper cuts.

I don’t want my children to have this hostility and rigidness around promises. I know it isn’t healthy. It is isolating. I certainly can’t hang out with people much. I’m trying to figure out how much I can handle really having steadily in my life. I want there to be a predictable pattern. I want to have a pattern, damnit. I’m really struggling because nothing else in the world wants me to. Stupid life just keeps happening. I really do want to see people and so far that has to be a flexible thing.

It is hard to be this lonely and angry at the same time. I know that I have to be careful not to get too angry when other people are around. I manage this with the kids by not talking at all. It’s hard to do that with adult visitors. Then they become discomfited and I have to try to knock it off. I can see the visible discomfort spread over people and I feel a wash of shame. Yup. That’s me. The angry one. Then I feel so much self loathing that I am always the angry one that I just feel more anger. I’ve been told a lot of times that feeling that angry around people is basically abusive. I’m a monster no matter what. I just am. It doesn’t matter what I do.

Ok, I kicked the cabinet door off the wall. I suppose that is something terrible and horrible. Because more shame really makes everything better.

I have had trouble running since the grief ritual. I feel so overwhelmed with anger that I can barely see straight and it makes me stumble so I am running more slowly and carefully. I don’t want to injure myself; I truly don’t. I don’t want running to become my latest method of self-injury. I want to find joy in my body. It’s hard to do in the dark and cold. I miss the afternoons.

I feel stuck in this anger. I am so frustrated and anxious. I need to go proofread six more chapters back from my editor and that’s scaring the crap out of me. I am so tired of reading this story. I want to avoid it and I want to get this done and over with.

When I say I follow the scorched earth path I mean that I will forever say anything I want about someone and shun that person from my life. I will be as harsh as I feel the need to be. I can be a very harsh person. It is obvious when I am truly done.

I am struggling with some things in my close personal relationships. I don’t want to regret the things I write, ever. I want to always know that I am writing a truth I feel comfortable standing behind. Right now I am having a lot of very strong irrational emotions. I don’t know how to deal with them. I am already saying things that are impossible to take back. Dear sweet Jesus at least I will keep them off of my blog. I’m struggling.

How can I talk about what I am experiencing without giving any information or judgment. hm.

I feel unappreciated and used. I feel like I am getting the realistic version of an impossible situation. I feel tightness in my throat. My neck aches. My shoulders ache. My lower back aches and I can feel how bad my posture is right now. All right, I made a few chair adjustments and that is slightly better. I feel empty and drained. I feel abandoned and untrusting. I feel exhausted in a way that isn’t going away with more sleep.

Recently I heard someone describe it as being “pregnant” with her book and I kind of feel like that. I’m getting a lot of harsh physical symptoms and emotionally I feel like I am living on the memory of fumes because I ran out of gas long ago. I am at a time and place in my life where I feel like I need an endless stream of support but I am too ashamed to ask for it. I don’t have a family and people like me have to just figure it the fuck out because we are too unpleasant to be around. I feel so pathetic and needy. I feel so very lonely. But I don’t feel like I get to talk about that because it is my own damn fault that I am so fucking unpleasant to be around and that’s why I am alone.

Sometimes I wonder what it is like to be part of an extended family. Thinking about it makes me cry. What would it be like to have people who know me and want to spend time with me? I have friends, yes. But my friends go see their families on holidays. I notice. I tend to feel like it isn’t possible for me to stop being angry so I should stop attempting to spend time with people at all because no one should have to deal with my fucking mouth.

It’s probably a good thing I see my therapist tonight.

Grief ritual

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I was surprised by how much crying I ended up doing for my family. It was different than I expected. I thought I was just here to mourn how shitty I was treated. Instead I cried and cried and cried for whatever happened to my different family members to cause them to become the kind of people who related to me the way they did. I cried for generations of women who were beaten and raped and told they had no alternative. They were to be seen and not heard.

I cried because my father must have felt a great deal of pain otherwise he wouldn’t have hurt so many people. I had all these thoughts about his parents, whom I never knew. What did they do to him as a child? How did he come to believe that female family members were fair game for raping? What I was told this weekend is each person has to deal with his/her family’s grief going back seven generations and what you incur in this life is going to be passed on for another seven generations. Nieces/nephews count as the next generation. Even if you don’t have children your karma can still be sent on for many many years.

I cried because my sister is so buried under her grief that she turned around and hurt her children.
Anger is healing and inspirational but if you don’t do something with the strength it gives you then you risk burning up in the flames. Today I found a place in my heart for forgiveness for Denise. I didn’t know I could do that. It took me emotionally hitting a place where I realized just how young she was when she had different experiences.

According to the Burkina Faso traditions when someone in your life dies they hand you their spirit and life so that you can accomplish more. They had you, essentially, a golden ticket. Suicides are viewed as a very powerful way to grant someone else your spirit (my understanding is) because the person escaped great torment and brought that with them. They learned a lot in the process and once they are on the other side of death they can help you better.

My maternal grandmother committed suicide when my mother was pregnant with me. My paternal grandmother (whom I am named after) died a year or two before my mother had me. My paternal grandfather died days before my brother Tommy was born. If Orlando gave Tommy his spirit, maybe that is part of why Tommy was so fucked up. My maternal grandfather died right before I saw my father for the last time at Jimmy’s wedding. Right before I told my mother that she had to take my father back to court in order to get him to stop touching me.

When I was pregnant with Shanna I lost both my adopted step-mom and my beloved therapist to heroin overdoses. Two of the women who were among my strongest bulwarks against the dark. They both suffered terribly from their internal wounds. They were not strong enough to fight back their demons.

Unsurprisingly I arrived at a place of deep anger. I raged and screamed and started beating my fists on the floor. The wonderful facilitator had someone put a thick cushion in front of me. I would have cheerfully broken my hands to pieces and enjoyed the pain manifestation. Later in the day I told her, “I have a habit of beating my hands and head against concrete floors. I really appreciate that you put a pillow in front of me.”

Apparently the concept of “personal problems” simply doesn’t exist there. All problems are problems of the community because if the community was functioning appropriately the problems wouldn’t exist. That made me ache with loneliness for someone who would give a shit about me enough to want to actually help me with my problems. Not just one person at a time. I wish all of Lakeside School would gather to hold me in their arms and let me sob out my grief. I wish they had stepped in and helped me instead of saying that people like me don’t exist.

It was interesting to think through the level of responsibility I bear for my niece and nephew being sexually assaulted. My brother thinks it is enough for our generation to shut up and not talk about the incest. He thinks that will solve everything. Thus our grief has already passed on to the next generation. We did not take responsibility for speaking the truth about our family. Silence is consent. If my understanding of the situation is correct I was twenty-one when my sister assaulted her children and taught them how to give one another oral sex. I was living with Tom. I had almost no contact with my family because I was not ready to have boundaries with them. I never stepped in on behalf of the kids. I didn’t tell my story to a CPS agent and get a case opened on my sister early enough. There were already many HUGE issues at the time that would have been enough to open a case. Maybe if Denise was being watched more closely it never would have happened.

I don’t know. I will never know.

This is where the twelve step programs tell me to trust God. Well fuck God. No. I need to let go of responsibility for my family. I can’t save them. I don’t have enough of me to give to fill their malicious black hole of need and pain. They have to find a way out of that on their own. If they come find me I don’t know what I will do. I know one thing I will avoid doing: letting them develop a relationship with my kids. My family doesn’t get to know my kids until my kids are adults. If they want to go meet my family then I will drive them over. I probably won’t get out of the car… but I’ll drive.

I grieved for my mother. I thought about the smell of her and the comfort of her body against mine as we slept together. I thought about how very much I love my mother. I idealize my mother. It always felt like she was so talented and wonderful and beautiful. I will never compare favorably to my mother. Only at the same time I think she was a weak monster. I think she was shaped by ignorance and pain. You don’t know what you don’t know, right? I don’t think I can remain angry with my mother much longer. I need to treat her as already dead. I need to move forward in my heart to a place where I no longer desire vengeance. She is my mother. She carried me in her body. She nursed me. When I think of what my daughters mean to me I know that my mother is already in enough pain. She has lost three of her children, two to desertion. I’m sure she has already had enough pain this lifetime.

I feel so very sad for my mother. She was abused and abandoned over and over. Her father was a nightmare and he loathed her for the divorce. Vernon treated my mother like a cockroach because she had committed the sin of leaving her husband. Who cares what he does to the kids, right? My mother was feisty and mouthy; her Mennonite family thought she should be taken down a few pegs! See how it starts? My mother used to come home from school as a child and have to clean up from her mother attempting suicide. Again. My grandparents fostered and my mother was never allowed to have any special toys because it “just wouldn’t be fair” to the transient kids. My mother was never given a Christmas stocking until I was sixteen and I did it.

And I abandoned her too. Even though I was supposed to be her comfort. Even though I was the good and affectionate child. I was so fucking devoted to my mother. I can’t allow her to teach my children that they are small and bad and dirty and they deserve to be tortured. I just can’t. I was given a sacred trust by the God I don’t believe in to guard these people. My only job is to raise them in safety and love. I’m not about to fuck up my job. Not even for someone I have loved more than life.

I think the oddest part of today was the random older woman who came to join us. She likes to just sit in on these rituals. She was probably in her seventies with broken, missing, and severely discolored teeth. Her hair was a mixture of grey and white and tied into a braid that went down past her waist. She had these interestingly bright blue eyes. She mostly looked like she was in a stupor, honestly. But if you sat down next to her and looked at her with respect she came alive.

I don’t want to give her name because that seems like a violation. We talked about anger. She looked at me and she said, “Oh you are vibrating with anger.” It was less obvious than usual, in my opinion, so it was both startling and not. I felt calm and like I was in a decent mood. Given how much time I do spend vibrating with anger I just said, “Yes.” I can’t possibly remember the exact wording, today has been intense and full of new impressions, but she looked at me hard and didn’t ask any questions. She volunteered these…I don’t want to say fortune cookie comments. It’s kind of like reading the Horoscope. Any of them can fit, right? Only it wasn’t really that. It felt more like she was getting something from me. God I feel stupid talking about this woo woo shit. She asked me if I was selected for suffering every time. It’s not unreasonable for me to feel like that. It’s not true any more, but it was. She told me very clearly that I escaped because of my anger but now I have to be careful. She said that there are two emotional experiences that come up completely unprompted: anger and laughter. She said that I have gotten what I needed from the anger and now I need to laugh.

I cried. I cried and screamed and ranted about how much I fucking hate them and I am glad they are dead. I told him that if he wasn’t dead I would kill him myself. I beat the floor until my arm muscles spasmed too hard for me to lift them. I beat my head against the floor until I could no longer lift it from the pillow. I lay there and cried and cried and cried for hours lying on my side because I could no longer hold my neck up because I was in so much pain. People took turns sitting with me to share my grief. Mostly I could not allow them to touch me. There were a few specific women who felt safe. Two. I let them hug me.

I feel humiliated admitting that in this room full of people having this emotionally bonding experience I could let two of them (three including the instructor) touch me. I feel like this distance that I keep is part of my problem. I feel so deeply unable to allow people to love me. I don’t know how. That is not a skill I possess.

I understood more about my mother today. I understand her scars and wounds in ways I didn’t before. I love my mother so much. I understand her frustrations and anger and thinly veiled violence. I understand why she was so frantic when I misbehaved where anyone could see. She told me constantly that people would judge her by my behavior so I had to not fuck up. I understand now why she reacted the way she did to my unpredictability. Now I have children. Now I can think about her father and what kind of man he was. Now I can think about Aunt Vonnie’s dark references to terrible beatings.

Sobonfu’s tradition believes that diabetes exists in the body because of an inability to truly accept love. Vernon, my mom’s father, is the oldest example of that in my family I know. And I know he treated his daughters like shit. He never wanted their love; he wanted their silence and obedience. Sound familiar? I was actually rarely hit as a child and my mother took flack from fucking everyone over that. The whole family was ready to line up and beat me with sticks. I have never been popular. My mother defended me. My mother defended me in so many ways. She saw me as being like her. We were both the youngest girl in families of four. We were both raised very separately from our siblings. We both felt like the black sheep.

This life business is complicated. I’m starting to understand how compassion is part of this story for me. I can have compassion for my mother and her suffering and still refrain from contact because my children deserve a childhood safe from people who are likely to tell them things they shouldn’t be told. My mother likes to blame people for things that aren’t their fault. My children will not learn shaming from their family. They’ll have to figure that out somewhere else.

Part of my ancestral grief is our constant desire to have shit roll down hill. We always pass the blame for our emotions. I wouldn’t feel this way if you hadn’t made me. This is why I cannot be angry with Calli for throwing my wallet out of the wagon. She is a baby. She is not responsible. I should have bloody well put my wallet somewhere secure. When Shanna is doing stuff that drives me nuts I have to ask her why she is doing something before I react. 9/10 times she has a reason that is totally fucking logical from her world view. Her world view and mine have only occasional overlaps, mostly things like “ice cream is good” though we strongly disagree on how often we should eat it.

I don’t want to teach my children that they are to blame for my rage. They aren’t. I have a whole god damn book about why I feel so much rage. I have no ability in any way to blame my emotional reactions on them. That’s kind of annoying, actually. In my family I was the scapegoat. I wonder who is getting it now? Someone is at the bottom, I promise you.

And I spent a long time today thinking about everything I know about my ancestors. I can see why my family culminated in the horror that was my life. I can have compassion for all of our respective victim-hoods. I would kind of like to stop being a victim and they don’t even know enough to understand that it is an option. That’s quite sad. Today I thought hard about the fact that my sister wouldn’t do the things she does if she was in less pain. She was harshly rejected by two fathers. Her birth father rejected her before birth and then again in her thirties. He didn’t want to know her despite the fact that she did 100% of the effort to have a relationship. I pity her.

If the book pays off the editor I’m going to use that personal money to go to another grief ritual. I have many more layers. But I feel like I can perceive the beginnings of a path. I think I am going to find somewhere to put an altar in my house.

It’s time to wash this grief off and go to bed. I need to scrub my entire body with salt first.

frustrated

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I feel like I haven’t been blogging much lately. There are a bunch of things happening I feel like I can’t talk about. I’m really bad about that. If I have to censor what I say and speak carefully I don’t see much point in talking at all. If I have to do those things then my point of view isn’t actually desired and I’ll just shut up. It’s part of why I don’t follow social conventions much on “appropriate topics”.

Life involves an awful lot of work. I can only do so much and feel good in my body. There needs to be a balance of different kinds of work: mental, physical, emotional. Without balance it all falls over.

I’m trying to edit the book. I have 13-14 pages left. I’m struggling. I’m feeling a lot of tremendous anxiety about the end of the book. How do I ensure that all the right elements are in place to honestly lead to the rest of my life?

I’m thinking hard about the foreward. Ok fine, I wanted to write this. Reasonable, fine. Why do I want to publish it? Why do I want other people to know this story with me? Because I’m tired of being alone with it. I’m tired of having people giving me entirely inappropriate advice because they assume my life was like theirs.

Other people grow up with families who pass their stories on. People know what “Bob” acts like; you can tell because they say things like, “Well you know how Bob is.” No, I don’t know. I have never been around long enough to find out. And people haven’t really been around me long enough to understand me either.

No one can ever know these things about me unless I tell them. I have spent my entire life feeling isolated and alone and scared. Once this story has been set down there is no fucking way I wouldn’t publish. I want to be known. I want to be seen so much it makes me ache. I’m publishing because I want to. Because it is an interesting story and I want to share it. Because people will finally understand my vague allusions. When someone wants to give me advice I can ask them if they’ve read the book and then let them say what they want. I don’t have to follow the advice. But I get to know that this isn’t some random passerby who doesn’t know shit about me. This is someone who cares enough to go read the backstory so that (s)he can be part of my life.

That feels really different. Most of my family will be shocked if they ever read the book. They have no idea about most of it. They don’t know me and I savagely resent them for this. I savagely resent that god damn everyone in my family will get to say, “But we never knew!” and be telling the truth. I think that is what I can’t forgive them for in the end. They managed to silence me such that I was never able to get proper help from all that psychiatric care for fifteen years. They can’t silence me forever. I want to tell my story. I want to get very clear about what happened to me and I can’t do that in private.

That’s strongly related to why I am upset about some other things in my life. I’m not happy about how I am being treated and I feel like I can’t talk about it in public and I don’t have anywhere else to talk. I am talking in therapy and to Noah about this situation but that’s the limit of my talking to people. I literally just don’t do much else of it lately. All of my IM buddies have disappeared. Fuck you all. (I’m kidding. I love you and miss you intensely while you are having Real Lives.)

It’s time to go parent.

Perspective is everything.

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Jenny’s father is dying. It’s at a somewhat unexpected time because he isn’t that old but he had a weird injury and it wasn’t treated and… that’s how life works. There is nothing I can do to help her with this. This is her own journey of grief. I imagine what it would be like to lose a father at this age after having had a relationship with him, having lived with him, for so many years. I can’t imagine that. Not really. It’s going to be bad when my mom dies. I will feel so much guilt. I don’t even know if I will be told. For all that Jenny isn’t close with her family she has never broken contact. She has always treated them appropriately and with respect.

Everyone has a complicated relationship with their parents. It’s a difficult relationship. I understand it more from the side I am on now. It seems to me that parenthood is a relationship based on temporary, stored power. Right now I have incredible power over my children. I get to decide pretty much everything about their lives. In fifteen years Shanna will be an adult. My power over her will be limited to the amount of influence she chooses to allow me. It will depend on how well I have earned that respect.

Yesterday I spent my off hour reading/watching videos about Steve Jobs again. I like his Stanford commencement speech and his sister’s eulogy is gut wrenching. I also watched a few random videos about happiness because D sent them to me. What does it mean to live?

When we were up in Portland I broke a large relationship rule. This is part of why I say I am not good at monogamy. Noah was right next to me and handed me the implement so he’s not as angry as he could be. What happened is we were at Dad’s birthday party (non-bio dad) and I got to talking to one of my sisters-in-perversity. Dad has a whole harem of daughters you see. The one in question is the youngest in terms of being newest to the family but she is a year older than me and thus technically the oldest of us. I refer to myself as the senior daughter for clarity. He adopted me first. We like to ignore the one he adopted second. She’s not my favorite sister.

I don’t keep in close contact with this sister most of the time. Her life is in a very different place than mine and we are both busy. It’s not a slam or a negative judgment. It’s nice to catch up when we can. At this party I heard a lot about this guy she had fairly recently broken up with–see, there he is. She spent a lot of time watching his scene with another woman. Her heart was on her sleeve. One of the things that breaks my heart faster than anything is seeing a woman I love pining over a piece of shit man. And from what I saw of this guy… yeah… he’s a piece of shit.

I don’t like men who pursue mastery to be degrading to women. If you only want to own women you can insult then I have a low opinion of you. I don’t mind that you want to use those names sometimes, but if that is what you think of your partners I think you have a personality disorder you fucking piece of shit. You are not better than women.

My sister managed to kind of get involved in the scene. She really wanted to play with him. The girl he was playing with was slightly less extreme of a bottom than my sister and my sister pretty obviously wanted to show off. The guy demurred. He had been using his belt as a whip. He gave it to his slave/submissive/bottom/partner/whatever her chosen identity label thing is. He then taunted and forced her to hit my sister. She did, but it was lackluster and obviously not that intense. It was a giggly good time. The guy started encouraging fairly random other people to hit my sister. One got her in the eye because he didn’t know what he was doing. I felt like I was watching a train wreck.

I nudged Noah and told him to give me his belt. He did. See how it feels kind of fuzzy for him to get mad at me for doing it? But I’m not supposed to play with people any more. It didn’t feel like a scene, exactly. I sure didn’t do it for my sexual gratification. I did it because I didn’t want to listen to those asshole men tell her that she was a dirty whore. They didn’t mean anything nice by it.

My sister has had times in her life when she needed to feed her kid and she didn’t have a job. She has sold her body to put food on the table. I felt such an explosion of anger when he was picking on her for it. They dated. He knows her history. He was explicitly picking on something that is a mixed circumstance in her life.

I changed the intensity of the scene. I only used the belt and I stayed on her thighs: the fronts, backs, and sides. I hit her hard and I hit her fast and I forced her emotional reaction towards panic as hard and fast as I could. And while I did it I started a litany to her. You are not bad. You are good. You are strong. You are brave. You are fierce. You have survived things that would take down lesser people. You are strong. You are good. She tried to interrupt me and tell me that she was a whore. I paused long enough to hold her face in both of my hands and tell her that even if she has had to prostitute her body to survive she isn’t a whore. You are not defined by what you do. She is a bad ass mother fucker. She sobbed and clung to me.

Bdsm is rarely about sex for me. That is not how I grew up in the scene. I made every top who was kind of sort of leaning in to get in on the hot available action flinch and back off. I was not going to be one more person starting a pile up on a poor girl. I was nastier and meaner and harsher. I kind of like being the visiting bad ass. This wasn’t a game. It was very serious business.

I do bdsm because it is one of the best ways I know to force the body to get rid of the excess energy that poisons people. There is atonement and release and a journey to find the core of yourself. When you are in the middle of a very intense scene you can’t hide who you are. You react from the animal core of yourself. I am a vicious animal who will strip you down to the bone and show you what it looks like. I will tear the flesh from your body so that you know that I can see all the way through you. I see exactly who and what you are.

And you are beautiful. Your strength amazes me. That you can allow me to do this to you amazes me. I worship you. I adore you. I love you. Thank you for showing me this fierce core of strength and intensity that other people simply don’t have. It takes a warrior to experience pain like that over and over and over. We don’t have a good place in our current world for people who have to suffer. Even being a soldier is more about being a cog in the machine.

I see in my sisters-in-perversity a desire to be made clean through suffering. Not all people in the bdsm world are after the same thing. But I know my sisters when I meet them. I see the same need in men, but I am less able to address it. It has long felt like a flaw in me. I can’t offer the same experience to men. I am too locked in being afraid of men. I can’t look at them the way I can look at a woman. I can’t identify in the same ways. I have always believed that is a grave failure. I’m sorry for it. There is a part of me that understands men as other and I don’t know how to change that. I see a specific wildness in women. I see women in bear traps thrashing about. I understand their feelings. I don’t have to know all their feelings. I don’t have to really know everything about their lives. I know that trapped. I know that desperate need for release.

I know how to rip someone down until they can no longer stand nor defend themselves. I know how to make them cry and hurt and wish they could do anything to get away from the pain. The pain I am giving is just a stand in for all those things they can’t change in their lives. All the things that hurt and hurt. All those other things make you feel worse about yourself. Because it hurts and you can’t stop it. It weakens you over time because no one can stand up forever under an onslaught.

My beatings are short in duration. And the whole time you are taking it you are being coaxed and reassured and told that what you are doing is impressive. You are showing your mettle. You are proving how very strong you are and I will delight in building you up with it. By the end you know that you are an intensely strong person and you can go do fucking anything. Anything in the whole world. Most people are cowards compared to you. Not very many people will permit a beating like I give. I only hit the girls who can’t say no. They have outrageous pain tolerances. Other people want warm ups and I’m not here for that shit. I’m here to prove that I can take you apart but it will be a lot of hard work for both of us because you are so god damn intense.

I always stay in contact with my sisters-in-perversity for a while after a visit. It seems important. They see a part of me I don’t reveal much in life. It’s interesting for me to get perspective on how we are changing over time. I learn a lot more from brief flashes of my wounded warriors than I do from dozens of conversations with people who have never been hurt. This is the part I hesitate to say because it sounds so awful. I learn what mistakes are there for me to make. When I see my wounded warriors I see There But For The Grace Of God Go I. In their struggles to perceive themselves as valuable I see what could happen to me if I had a lower opinion of myself. I know that I was brought up to be one of them. I was quite literally brought up to be competitive about being able to take more pain during sex. Thank you, Jim. You were an inspiring father.

I have been binging on sugar for the past few days. It’s kind of obscene. I came home from Portland and both girls are acting out in various ways. I feel trapped and angry and frustrated. My life fucking sucks. But my life only sucks because I have a bad attitude. I look at my sister-in-perversity and I have to understand that my life is quite cushy in terms of me having everything I want when I want it. Sure, I have to do it with my kids along. That just means I need to figure out how to work with my kids.

Someone on facebook linked to an article about why French parents are happier. Apparently in French they do not have the concept of “discipline” the way we do here. They constantly think that they are educating their children. My entire life right now is an education to my children. What am I teaching them? Dissatisfaction. The funny part about sitting in the garage as I write… it’s a constant reminder that I get work done with my children around. I didn’t have child care when I insulated the walls and put dry wall up. I didn’t have child care when I painted a mural. I had help sometimes. I had friends who did it with me. But my children were around and under foot and I cared for them. I had help for all the stuff that was genuinely beyond my ability to do it alone. I could not have done the drywall without the consistent and reliable help of T. He saved my ass. I’m going to owe that man for a few lifetimes. He doesn’t understand what he is to me.

I have been struggling for a long time with feeling trapped. It’s been a lot of … well… all of it. I have a lot more freedom than most. More than most people for all of history. I am somewhat unique in being financially secure in a tumultuous period of history. Yes, we could be hit with disaster. For now I am going to continue with the fact that I am ridiculously safe. I have a lot of options. Even as Noah and I fuss back and forth about the fact that we have to carefully budget… we have a lot of options. Noah only gets $600 to spend on a weekend trip with his buddy. Cry me a river. We have a really good life.

In every relationship I have in my life there is a mixture of uplifting and wearying. I need to start thinking a lot harder about the uplifting or I am never going to get out of this muck. I have a marathon to run. I can’t be hanging out in the muck. It’s too tiring. I will injure myself. I have to run five miles today. You know–just get up and do it. And tomorrow I’ll run three miles. On Saturday I will run seven miles. Next Saturday eight miles. So on.

When I run I feel strong and capable. What I used to get from getting my ass beaten. I don’t know how to get it from getting my ass beaten any more. Now I’m always mad that Noah isn’t doing _______ exactly how I would. It’s kind of sick.

I don’t know how to be a follower right now. But we don’t have room for much else in our relationship and I don’t know how to guide us. I don’t know how to guide Noah. That’s an interesting thought. I resent being the guide for more than a couple of minutes. I’m impatient. I want to be lead. There are journeys Noah simply can’t lead me on. He doesn’t know how to get there. I’ve had kind of this dawning horror around this topic recently. I have some ideas. I’m not ready to spill them yet.

I don’t know what the future will bring. I hear that if you spent more time focusing on the positive you can change your life. You can actually make things better. I am fairly uniquely positioned to do so. Dr. Frankl taught me that if you have something you are burning to do you can get through any circumstance. Some dude on a Ted talk yesterday brought up the idea that everyone desperately wants to live. Then I listened to Steve Jobs talk about how much he wanted to live.

How does one go about finding their own path? Well, I think by definition I can’t ask anyone else. Whatever it is they did or would do will be wrong for me. That’s why I’m not fond of advice. I do like hearing stories though. I like finding out what other people have done and why. I’ve been reading a lot more recently.

When I feel fussy about what I am doing I need to decide what I would rather be doing and do that. That’s part of the binge eating of sugar. The kids are pestering me for sugar. We have a lot in the house that we don’t normally have. I am tired of fighting the kids off of it. I’m tired of being whined at for it. I’m eating it with them them till it is gone. Then we don’t get dessert unless you can talk me into making some with sweet behavior. I like doing it when I have a cheerful house to do it for. I won’t do it for whining. It has worked for me in the past. I think we ran out of chocolate last night. Now the sweet snack in the house is fruit. When the answer is, “We don’t have any chocolate in the house; would you like an apple?” The response is more positive than you think. And then we just don’t think to buy it at the store. It works out. One of these days she will remember to ask for it at the store. That will be figured out later.

I’m getting defensive already. That’s lame. I felt cheerful through most of the writing. I’m tensing up as I think about going in. The family is awake now. The girls are extra clingy right now. I will miss these days. It’s a lot of physical contact for me. I feel bad about how difficult it is for me to handle physical touch sometimes. I wish I liked it more. This is part of my feeling of inadequacy. I’m not sure why I feel inadequate though.

I’m supposed to think about three things I am grateful for. I’m always grateful for a white wall in my house. I like thinking about how I will paint it. I think I should paint it next month after I get the book edited and up on Amazon. We’ll see.

I’m grateful that I get to raise two daughters in an environment where I am not under ridiculous stress all the time.

I’m grateful for stories to think about. Something is bubbling in my head. I’ll think about it on the long run today. I’m going to run to Lake Elizabeth. It is just over five miles roundtrip. I hope it warms up soon. I have to leave by nine. Noah is having a late start day. I should probably go see him for the time I can today.

Running and singing and whining and kids.

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When I sing I listen to my ‘healing’ playlist. Mostly women. Mostly at least semi-introspective music. Lots of relationship stuff. Lots of anger and lots of sadness. There are happy songs too. One of the main reasons I don’t think I run very fast is because I can still sing along sorta pretty much the whole time. I pant the words out during sprints. Just like labor, I never lose the ability to talk. I keep hearing about how something doesn’t qualify as heavy exercise unless you lose the ability to talk. I hear that serious labor inhibits the ability to talk. I never lost my ability to communicate. I don’t get silent.

I used to. I used to experience everything scary or hard or painful as something that caused me to withdraw. Now the harder something is the louder I want to be while doing it. I just can’t suffer in silence any more. This means that my neighbors look at me funny while I run around singing fairly loudly. I smile and wave. I decided that if I am going to run in a Cheshire Cat hat complete with ears I am required to be cheerful. People stare at me a lot. If I take the hat off and run with the super short hair they stare just as much. Early in the running I felt kind of defensive and weird. I doubt my facial expression was cheerful. People used to look at me warily. Now I run along singing, at about a normal conversation volume, and I smile and wave and interrupt myself to yell, “Hello! Nice night, isn’t it?” Then I go back to singing loudly. Now people laugh and wave and answer me with some appropriate comment.

I think people dislike me because I project hostility so much of the time. Mostly people don’t have an opinion of me. But I’m a polarizing figure! Whatever. Mostly people don’t have an opinion of me. They don’t care enough to have an opinion.

I’m not sure I can actually wrap my head around that.

Yeah, no. Can’t do it. I have an opinion about everything and everyone. Only I don’t actually. I think I’m lying again. I’m sitting here trying to force myself to have neutral thoughts. It’s more difficult than one might think. If I look around my garage I can think that I don’t have an opinion on the quality of most of the books (I share library space with people who have a lot of books I haven’t read) but I have an opinion on how much room they take up and where they are stored. Is it a neutral impression? Well… if I see the book dropped somewhere else I will have very strong negative opinion about the book. So I think that all of them are just on the negative side of neutral for me which means I have an opinion.

Yeah. I don’t think I can imagine what it is like to go through the world with actual apathy. Do you want to know the problem? The problem is that I have this weird little piece of me in the center and it decides if my opinions are positive or negative today. Pretty much across the board. Today I’m feeling hostile and pissy; I don’t even know why. I could come up with candidates, but they aren’t really big enough. I have too much good coming. I should be excited. At this time tomorrow I will be on an airport shuttle with Noah and we get three full days of no kids.

The running is hard. I’m tired. When I arrive back I am in high spirits. Then I crash the next day. It’s fairly consistent. I am not explosively angry I am just kind of short in temper. Snippy. I feel bone weary exhaustion and the kids aren’t happy unless I’m running with them. I really can’t right now. I’m so tired. I’m not always. I won’t feel like this all day. But it feels like the core of me is just barely on the negative, whiny side.

Noah is trying to express appreciation for me. For all the work I take off his plate. I hate feeling like it isn’t enough. I don’t feel appreciated. I don’t feel valuable. I don’t feel effective. I feel plodding and stupid. I feel like I am barely going through the motions. I feel like I’m looking at everything through a dense cloud bank. I feel like gravity is too heavy. I think that is what I feel. Gravity is too heavy. That makes it harder to do everything. I have to decide if it is worth the effort. I still haven’t started packing. Not for us and not for Shanna. Shanna is getting picked up at two this afternoon. I should probably get started.

It doesn’t help my overall feeling bad that last week Shanna was helping me with cleaning. I didn’t like how nasty her tone was and her word choice in describing the activity. Do you know where she learned it? Watching me. I didn’t say anything to her about it. She was just reflecting what she sees. But I’ve been thinking about it. I haven’t described her toys as crap since. She doesn’t have crap. She has high quality neat toys in a dizzying variety. It’s really not crap.

I’m cheerful sometimes. I’m not sure why it is so hard right now. I’m grieving; I think that is part of it. Grieving for so many things. I’m more than half way through the first round of editing the book. I really don’t want it to be an angry book. I want to tell the story in the most simple and direct way I can. I don’t want to flail around and be angry forever. I just want to get it right. I want to have other people know the simple facts. I don’t want to be alone with my story. It’s scary. I can’t handle being alone with it.

As I run I think about a lot of things. I think about the one who got away. Ha. I have several. I think about the many possibilities I had open throughout my life. I think of what choices I made and where. Which were the most important ones? Where was the tipping point?

I have the life I wanted. I really do. Why aren’t I happier? Why is everything viewed in terms of me failing? How have I really failed? How am I bad? I’m not really engaging in questionable activity any more. I think this is as close to the center of the bell curve as I will ever be. I still feel bad. I still feel like I am bad. That’s what makes everything just negative of center. Because I am. I can’t help it. I was born bad. This is why I run as far and as fast as is safe for my body on a training schedule and I yell out the words to Born This Way.

I’m not bad. I have done a lot of things that other people don’t do. That doesn’t mean I am bad. The balance of my life is heavily skewed towards doing and being good. Why do I still feel so unworthy? I feel terribly unworthy. God knows I don’t deserve Noah. He is far nicer than anyone like me deserves. In this mind frame I even know that he wasn’t trying to cheat. He did act like a jerk, but good grief how much do I expect one man to put up with while never ever doing anything to retaliate? I deserve a good smack down now and then. I get too demanding and pushy and uppity.

I don’t like it when I think this way. I know these thoughts are fleeting. I know this isn’t how I always feel. It’s how I feel today. I’m enjoying this part of growing older. I feel a lot more security around the fact that I won’t feel this way forever. And I really do know that I have far more good than bad in my life.

Today my baby goes to her Godmamas. She is excited. She loves these visits. Recently she asked me if we will be together forever. I told her that depends on how we define it. I told her that we will always be together again but we won’t do everything together all the time. Sometimes we will be in separate places but if she thinks about me real hard and knows she will see me again soon it’s like being together at all times. We will always be together again very soon. She said that works for her.

Calli has changed dramatically recently and I don’t talk about her in writing much. My experience of parenting her has been different. She needs me in very different ways. For the past few months she needs much more intense physical contact than she seemed to want when she was small. She is very serious and when things don’t go how she wants she gets this stricken expression on her face. It’s really pretty hilarious. I love watching her play with things. She looks like she thinks more like an engineer. She isn’t a dilettante. She wants to sit and figure something out. That’s not how her sister approached objects so it’s neat to watch. She makes me understand how uncurious I am. She also makes me understand that I know so much more than I think I know. She holds things up and grunts at me. She wants me to explain. I always start at the most concrete level with name, color, size, that kind of stuff. Eventually I get to imaginative uses. It generally takes several options before I find the right one for her. Then she nods and runs away. I’m not sure if I have finally given her sufficient data or if I finally said the right word. I won’t know until she can talk.

Calli is going to talk on a very different curve than Shanna. That’s ok. It means that she feels much less there and I think I’ve been underestimating her for a while. Her comprehension is fairly astounding. I think she understands a lot more than she obeys. She is willfull. In a very different way than Shanna. If I try to prevent Shanna from getting what she wants she responds in a very wild, free-swinging way. She always has. Calli clenches her fist and shakes with fury. She may or may not release a few ear-drum-shattering shrieks but mostly she just looks like a bull about to charge. She doesn’t swing out but she may lean over and bite. Calli is a runner. Letting her walk on her own is dangerous. She won’t come back and she is going faster by the day. Shanna never went far from me and would come back when I called. This kid doesn’t feel as strong of a leash to me.

Today I need to pack. I should probably go do that. Everything takes a really long time so I had best get moving. Any second now. Don’t wanna.

I’m sorry

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Today isn’t starting off well. I think these physical symptoms are stress not “sick”. That doesn’t make them better. We kind of sort of tried to have sex today and Noah finally stopped when he noticed how much I was flipping out. He’s a kind sort.

I started thinking about how much Noah really wishes he got to go from girl to girl. He wants that so much. From the outset, with that want, I can never be enough. No matter what. I can’t be multiple people. I can’t give him that thrill. I could stand there and watch (or not) him have it. I can’t give it to him. Given how much trouble I’m having with sex right now it feels like I have completely cock blocked him in every way. He didn’t promise celibacy.

I feel like such a failure. I’m feeling eaten away by stress and failure and all the things I will never be good enough for. This morning as I was crying at Noah I told him that whenI was a kid I would say: “I’m sorry”, the response was: “Yeah, you’re sorry. You are the sorriest piece of shit ever born.” I’m realizing why I don’t notice that I am expressing contempt. I don’t know much else.

This book is very hard to read. I don’t really want to think hard about the fact that this is my life. How can I have these experiences and come out anything but a piece of shit. An angry waste of air. Yes, yes, happiness is a state of mind, not a circumstance. I don’t know how to forget everything that happened and just go on to be happy. I’m hopeful that some day other people will know the story. Enough people will tell me that I’m not bad that maybe I will believe it. I still feel like I deserve everything that happened. It wouldn’t have happened to a nice person. Someone who was good. Someone kind. Someone who wasn’t a piece of shit. Instead it happened to me. That must be how it is supposed to work.

Today is going to be kind of rough. I had planned to take the girls to Fairyland. But I’m dizzy and weak. I don’t think that is a good idea. I wish the stupid place was open during the week. I’ve been taking sleeping pills for almost two weeks. I’ve gotten 7.5+ hours for almost that many nights. I wish my body felt better. Everything hurts. I remember my stomach hurting like this when I was a kid. This was usually my reason for staying home from school. My mom would always yell at me that I was a hypochondriac or a liar. At least she let me stay home anyway. I’m scared. I’m so very scared.

I just sent an email to some of my co-owners in the coffee shop. I guess that money is going to be a donation after all. I asked to have my name taken off the ownership paperwork. I don’t want the stress going forward. I bought it when I thought I had more help. Things change. If they could give the money back some day that would be great but I won’t be holding my breath. I wasn’t looking for that. I wanted to do good in the world. I hope I did.

I want to be someone who can take care of a lot of people and fix a lot of problems. Unfortunately I only seem to be able to fix knots in capes. I can clean up toys. And three people is the absolute physical limit of how many people I can take care of. I wish I didn’t know that for sure. I wish I hadn’t hit that wall. I wish I got to still have the fantasy of being very competent. I’m very competent on my best days. I don’t have best days very often. I have to plan my life around my very worst days. Because I have to determine what I can truly carry on my own. Because I have things I have to carry no matter what. I have to take care of my family. I have to. There is no one else to do it. No one else is available to just come take care of my kids. I tried to see if it was possible. It’s not. Well, I could pay someone but that would require getting a job. No thanks. Once you start upping the ante like that it isn’t figuring out how to adapt my life it is going out and getting a whole new life.

I like my life. I like hanging out with my kids. I like writing. I’m even quite house proud. I like looking around and seeing the things that bring joy to me. I’ve created my house very intentionally. I didn’t pick it but it’s mine. Maybe the only house I will live in for the rest of my life. I want it to bring me joy. I’m pretty selfish. Luckily Noah doesn’t seem to worry too much about what I do. For some odd reason he trusts me. Or he just doesn’t care. Either way.

Noah told me that he isn’t sure what to say. I’m convinced I have no value. He disagrees. I told him that I’m afraid he is lying. I am. I’m terrified.

I don’t feel much pride in myself. All I see are my failures. It’s interesting how differently Noah and I view failures. He tells me often that you learn more from doing things wrong. It feels like such a privileged thing to say. It may be true, but only some people keep getting second chances. I think that’s part of it. Noah rarely fails at anything that matters. I do. When I fail I have to once again deal with the consequences of the fact that I am a piece of shit and everyone is going to leave me in the end for being a nasty, angry, bitter person. My mistakes in the past twelve months have cost me three friendships. I run people off. My mistakes mean that I spent seven years in graduate school but I have no degree to show for it. Yes, I learned things. That’s still an awful lot of time and money to spend. I’m glad I was able to pay off my student loan debt so fast. If I was still paying for it I would be much more bitter.

Only time will tell how I am as a mother. I’m afraid. The stakes are so high. Even if some day I manage to run Noah off, which I think is more possible than he gives me credit for, I really am afraid that I won’t deserve my children. It was decided so long ago that I am bad. What hubris do I have to think I can change that?

Today I hate me. And I’m sorry. So very sorry.

Anything is possible

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Tonight I’ve been working on editing the book. Reading this makes me feel like I have been kicked in the stomach. It’s hard to wrap my head around these things happening to me when I am not sitting very still and concentrating on the story. I dissociate so well.

Sometimes Noah says things to me that really bother me. He said that it isn’t actually surprising that things started so bad so early because otherwise I never would have adapted. If you are treated well at all you can’t handle being hurt like I was when I was older. You just don’t have the instincts for it. I feel rather mixed. Ok, that’s not what he said word for word. But that is as close as I remember.

As I’m editing this book I’m thinking hard about what the next book will be. I think it should be a children’s book. I want to find a way to explain me to my kids in a way that is appropriate for very young children. Sometimes My Mommy Gets Angry is a good book, but it doesn’t feel all that applicable to my kids. If I want them to have a story I think I have to write it. I want to find a way to introduce the issues around my anger and defensiveness in a way that clearly lets them know it is never their fault and never about them. It really isn’t. I have issues. That happens sometimes. How do my kids grow up understanding that not everyone is like me? Mostly they will meet lots of people and just notice on their own. I don’t want to excuse my behavior. But I do want them to have a chance of understanding.

I don’t take it for granted that I will have a relationship with any of the people I know today in twenty years. Not Noah, not my kids, none of my friends. I am still in contact with very few people I knew twenty years ago. B. That’s it. Our contact is kind of tentative and nebulous and often absent for months or years. I hope I deserve to still have a relationship with my daughters in twenty years.

I’m struggling emotionally with the vast array of things I have no control over. Right now I am appreciating my therapist. She’s good at kind of smirking at me in a way that lets me know that I am over-extending my desire to control. There is so little I have actual control over in this world. It’s hard to admit that out loud. It’s galling.

I’m not sure if I am getting sick or if I am just having physical symptoms of stress. I fell down today after a lovely dizziness episode. I wish I hadn’t done it outside on a gravel bed, but oh well. After that my abdomen was so sensitive my pants felt horribly tight. I felt like I was very pregnant trying to wear too-tight pants. That feeling seems to have stopped. I have had a blinding headache since yesterday. The muscles in my neck are locked up tight and spasming. Good times. I think I’ve been remarkably chipper. I won’t be taking the kids to Fairyland tomorrow by myself. Holy moly am I not up for that right now. I didn’t even run today. I’ve been managing three days a week of running pretty well but I am having a nasty transition to running four days a week. I also feel kind of weird about my continued weight loss. Today I dropped below 150 pounds. That’s thinner than I thought I could maintain while actually eating food. As I sit here about to polish off half a box of cookies… I’m just not concerned. I primarily eat locally raised organic vegetables and fruit, local pastured meat, and a mildly excessive amount of noodles. It’s ok that I eat cookies sometimes. I’m dropping weight like I made a New Years resolution. I swear I’m not trying to lose weight.

I feel really weird about how my body is changing. I feel like I have lost any right to ever talk about my body experiences as a fat person. I’m not fat any more. I can’t use the terms for myself I am used to using. I have been this thin as an adult. The last time I was this weight my stomach was concave and you could count my ribs. That isn’t at all what I look like this time. I don’t understand bodies. I’m not even eighteen months postpartum. I still have a fair bit of belly, though it shrinks by the day. I have had these firm beliefs most of my life that I simply couldn’t be a thin person. My German-peasant-stock body just wasn’t going to do that. I was wrong. Apparently it just takes 10+ miles of running a week. No wonder I never bothered doing this before.

I am finally getting to the point where I can attain runners high. I’ve never pushed myself that hard before. It’s an interesting experience. I don’t think I am going to ever be passionate about running. I’m doing it because I want to know that I ran in the same race as my brother. I did it. I can do this with him. I am really and truly part of that piece of shit family. It hurts to feel like you are never going to be allowed to think of yourself as part of the family. Even though I don’t want them. Even though I am going to avoid contact with my family for the rest of my life. I love them and want them so much. I wish they wanted me. I wish they saw me and were proud. I wish that at the end of the marathon my brother would smile at me and hug me. I’m not going to hold my breath.

My brother believes that the only way for people like us to be good parents is to keep our fucking mouths shut and just not pass on the trauma to the next generation. I disagree with him. I think that part of being a good parent is talking about things. I also think that part of being a good parent is going out and doing very hard things and showing your children that it is possible. Anything is possible if you want it bad enough. Even though I feel like a piece of shit now, I can change that. I can find a way to have worth in my own eyes. Eventually I will be able to feel like I am a good person. Anything is possible if you want it bad enough.

Ok, I actually only ate two cookies. But they were hella good.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Category Archives: fighting demons

You have no power over me.

Learning and shame

Going down the rabbit hole is uncomfortable.

Planning

Everything must be bad

Food comes from a can

You are good. You are smart. You are kind.

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

Always with the defensive, this girl.

I love getting mail. Sometimes.

It’s an interesting week

Broken promises

Grief ritual

frustrated

Perspective is everything.

Running and singing and whining and kids.

I’m sorry

Anything is possible