Category Archives: fighting demons

Anxiety, spike.

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Today I am going to go see a psychiatrist.  The medical group I work with made it very difficult to get this appointment.  I was interrogated by multiple people and it was very obvious that if I didn’t answer in a way they liked I was going to be locked up whether I like it or not.  Self-harming is illegal, you know.  It’s pretty terrifying to me that I have to be careful in how I word things or I won’t be coming home today.  The terror is enough that I kind of want to cancel the appointment and continue to hide in my house forever smoking pot.  At least right now I don’t have to worry about someone else deciding they know what is best for me and forcing my lock-step through their program again.

For me the institution and the group home and public school were all pretty much cut from the same cloth.  Obviously there were degrees of seriousness for how they slapped people down for stepping out of line.  For the whole god damn rest of my life “help” means people doing things to me against my will.  That is what help is.  It doesn’t matter if I am crazy or sane, it doesn’t influence how people treat me.  Do you know what does influence how people treat me?  How much they actually listen to me before they start acting.

I don’t know how to make any part of my life or experiences or needs or whatever into brief little sound bites that keep me out of trouble.  That is a lot of what other people seem to have that I don’t.  It’s not that no one else had anything shitty happen to them.  It’s that no one else seems to have diarrhea of the mouth and the compulsive desire to tell everyone in the world, “My dad raped me and I still can’t sleep at night because of it.  It’s not so bad really.  I can’t imagine what it would be like to live in a world where I don’t wake up at 3 am unable to go back to sleep because I am no longer stoned and I can’t bear the nightmares.  Luckily I went to bed at 7 last night.  I got in a lot of sleep.  It seems to be the only way to hack the system.

I am afraid that if I tell the truth today I won’t be coming home.  I have responsibilities.  I have people to care for.  An institution isn’t a “break” it is a horrible rending and tearing of not allowing me to have contact with the few people in the world who love me and are nice to me.  Please God, I never want to be in an institution again.  Never.  Never.  I am really afraird of talking to a psychiatrist today.  I know that if I’m honest about how I have been since April they will talk to me about my “options” by which tell me what they are considering forcing me to do.  Because the minute I walk into this doctors care I no longer get to have the final say about my mental health.

I feel like I am about to puke on the floor.  I have six hours of terror to get through until I meet this doctor.  How this goes depends on the psychiatrist I see.  If this is an open minded person who believes there are many roads to an acceptably good life, I might get some actual help.  If this person believes that all people must be like _____ or they need “help” I might be walking into an actually dangerous situation for me.  And I don’t know in advance what kind of person this is.  And dear god the power she will weird.  I’m actually more scared because it is a woman.  Despite the fact that every sexual assault was perpetuated by men, I still feel much more terrified of women.  Women are meaner.  Women hurt other women and girls just so they get the rush of feeling bigger.  I have some issues with women.

I am aware that the most likely result of today is that I will come home with a prescription of some sleep and/or anxiety medication.  I’m willing to bet money that the doctor will be fine.  That I will talk about my horror story of a life, say that I self harm in limited ways because of a life of horror and right now the pressure is simply too much for me to cope with “healthy” coping mechanisms on my own and I need help.  This doctor would probably be ok with drugging me into a zombie state for the rest of my life if I need that to stop being angry all the time.  I don’t want that either.

What do I want?  What do I hope for?  If I don’t know I can’t ask.  I want to sleep better, longer, and in the middle of the night rather than through the evening.  I miss Noah on nights I go to bed with Calli.  I want to be able to control my anger.  I want to not hide at home because I am terrified people will dislike me and be mean to me.  I am so afraid of people being mean to me.  Sometimes I think I have picked the wrong friends groups.

People I know hurt my feelings a lot.  I’m really over sensitive.  I try hard to keep it as just my problem because I know I am over sensitive.  But that means I don’t go out.  Because people hurt me casually without noticing.  I notice.  I stop going out.  This is the flip side of “blunt”.  An awful lot of things that people say attached to the phrase, “I’m just being honest” are awful.  Awful.  Awful.  “I don’t think you are a bad person or anything, I just think it is a sign that you have no respect for yourself if you have slept with so many people.”  I don’t think that is true.  If it was true, thank you for telling me that you think I treat me like a piece of shit because I don’t have the same attitude about sex that you have.  Obviously us whores are lower life forms.

I do speak negatively about women who have sex with the guys I sleep with.  Not to put them down, but rather I refer to us collectively as whores.  I’ve noticed lately that I am inadvertently thinking negative-ish things about women I really have no negative thoughts by.  Especially over the past three years, I just don’t have negative thoughts about the women Noah sleeps with.  D is not a whore.  She’s a very nice lady who sometimes sleeps with my husband when the idea of sex makes me cranky.  The only exchange is stress relief.  That’s not being a whore.  It’s being an unconventionally awesome friend.

I have some mixed feelings about sex.  I can’t imagine why.

That last sentence makes me smile.  People like to talk about the things that are important to them.  Most people seem to find books, movies, their kids, their jobs, and their hobbies to be the extent of what they do with their talking.  I’m important to me.  Trying to figure out how to hack my system and behave how I want to behave is my hobby.  Other people seem to not have the road blocks to existing that I have.  I can get things done.  I can be productive.  I can even seem happy.  But I have to rig the game.

I can visit with friends.  I can deal with all the stuff that needs to be done to keep two little kids growing like weeds and healthy.  I can’t go meet new people by myself.  I can’t handle things that feel high pressure.  New people are terrifying.  New people represent this constant low level risk of nastiness.  Either I will be stupid enough to say something about myself and they will be disgusted and not like me or I will be stupid and comment on their life choices in a way that is inappropriate.  The internet is not doing wonders for my social skills.

There is a local meet up group for home schoolers.  Sarah tried to go to one of their events yesterday and missed them in the crowd.  The organizer sent me this email asking if Sarah is…. part of my family?  Because then she can just be accepted into the group instead of being a provisional member.  They’ve met me and the kids and if she’s attached to us she is obviously not a predator or creepy person.  They don’t have to meet her first if she is attached to us.

That honestly makes me feel weird.  I told her, “Yes Sarah is part of our family.  I’m sorry we don’t get to more events.  That is when the baby naps.  We are hoping that now that she has crossed into toddlerhood that naps will drift and we will be able to come to a lot more events.”  That’s a good way of not sounding like a crazy fuck up.  “Actually I usually skip your events because there is this one cunt I am afraid of meeting up with and it keeps me at home shaking with terror.”  You know that friend who dumped me with the nasty dear Jane email?  She’s active all over the bay area with anything vaguely crunchy and parenting.  I don’t really want to run into someone who will tell me that I am such a bad parent she doesn’t want to know me.

All of these things are related and combined in my head.  People are terrifying.  At any random moment people who are staunchly my “friend” will turn on me and start telling me how bad or gross or wrong or… something.  I’m inappropriate.  I should be kept away from decent people because I am so bad bad bad.  That’s why I am so afraid of the institution.  It feels like just one more way that society wants “people like me” to be eliminated.  If I can’t control myself well enough to pretend that I am just like everyone else they are going to put me in a place where I will god damn get control.

It’s hard to explain to people what the institution was like for me.  You can’t go to the bathroom without permission.  You can’t eat without permission.  When food is put in front of you, you are required to eat all of it or you get punished.  A lot of the girls in psych wards are there for eating disorders.  As a result every person there is given the same food and you have to eat every bite whether you like it or not.  I was told very clearly that if I refused food I would be strapped to a table and a feeding tube would be inserted.  That was what I was told when I said I didn’t want to eat the scrambled eggs because they were too soft and I thought they tasted bad.  All of my life I have hated scrambled eggs that were too soft.  I like them burned.  I like them absolutely hard.  The institution made them really runny and slimy in a huge batch.  They wouldn’t even microwave the fucking things for me to cook them more.  The employee told me that I had to eat all of it or I would be forced to eat through a tube.  When I started eating with tears running down my face and I was actively fighting my gag reflex… the employee smiled and called me a good girl.

That’s fucked up.  I’m sorry.  That is not about helping me be “better”.  That is about helping to break my spirit and force me to conform to someone else’s idea of being a good person.  Seriously?  My mental health is related to me being able to choke down under cooked eggs?  Why in the fuck was that important?  Why was that a battle?  Why did I have to eat or risk more invasive medical procedures?  Why should I believe anything other than Western Medicine is Evil.  Giving that much power to people is wrong.  No one should have been able to do that to me.

I’m sorry, but suicide and self-harming should not be punished the way they are.  Do you know why people are punished this way?  Because it is disruptive to society for people to be unpredictable.  People who commit suicide or self-harm are likely to be different and cause waves.  We certainly must stomp that right the fuck out.  No disruptions of routine.  Everything.Must.Flow.Like.Clockwork.  Or you are bad.  And we will force you back into line.

You can’t eat when you want to.  You can’t go to the bathroom when you want to.  You can’t sleep when you want to.  You can’t play games when you want to.  You can’t listen to music when you want to.  You can’t decide who you talk to.  You can’t decide what you eat.  You can’t decide what clothes you wear.  You can’t decide how to treat your body–your decisions are substandard.

That’s what an institution is like.  You are expected to slowly shuffle from activity to activity (eating is an activity) exactly how and when they say.  You cannot question anything.  You cannot have a body that likes to eat every four hours instead of eating at 6:30, 12:30 and 6:30.  You cannot have any privacy in your head.  If an employee (it probably is only supposed to be the therapists, but the orderlies are assholes too) decides to start interrogating you about what you are thinking you had better have an acceptable answer.

When I was institutionalized the story was that I had a rough life but no one knew what that meant.  They knew I moved around a lot.  They knew that my brother had been hit by a car.  There was some vague talk that maybe some sexual abuse had happened.  I hadn’t told anyone about being raped.  Not by anyone.  I went into the institution and was told to lay out all my secrets on a table for them to judge and decide about.  Of course I didn’t tell them shit.  They were forcing me to eat runny eggs and walk from room to room under their command.  There was no safety.  There was no room for me to exist at all.  I’m just glad it was only two weeks.

I can play the game if I have to.  Of course I can.  I wouldn’t be alive and outside of jail if it wasn’t true.  But I break the social contract in a lot of ways.  A lot of ways that are easy to ignore when I am at home by myself in the garage.  No one will hurt me here.  No wonder Alex’s therapist said I am like the crazy ass Vietnam vet who stockpiles food and ammunition.  I don’t think our larder is especially bursting with stores and I don’t own a gun.  But I do very careful limit how much I deal with people.  I only invite a few people to my house and I don’t go out often.  You never know who is going to be nasty to you.

I remember not caring about the fact that people judged me badly.  I mean, I can deal with the random public and I do.  I go to the grocery store and have pleasant interactions.  I can take my kids to the zoo or museum and we do fine and have fun.  I can’t go to a big party with a bunch of “friends”.  I can’t go meet a medical practitioner because this person will abruptly have “authority” over me.

I’m tired of feeling like I am wrong or bad just for existing.  For saying the things I say.  For taking up the space I take up.  Even if I do go to an event I feel this constant pressure to sit in a corner and not say anything awkward or uncomfortable.  This is hard.  If someone says, “So what have you been up to lately?” it’s a huge anxiety bomb.  Well I’ve spent most of 2011 having a mental breakdown and I wrote about it on my blog extensively.  Want to hear about my long list of rape experiences?  No, no one wants to hear that.  But it’s what I want to talk about.  So I stay home by myself and I write.  I can’t offend anyone if I am writing alone in a room.

Cue chorus of snickers.  Ok, if people are offended by what I write when I am alone in a room I don’t feel much responsibility for that.  Stop reading then you stupid asshole.  No one is dragging you to a computer and chaining you there until you read all my inane drivel.  My whining.  I’m not feeling good about myself today.  I’m really afraid of this doctor.  I’m really afraid that this doctor has the power to say, “You know how hard you are working on being a stable mother?  Well… someone like you shouldn’t have had kids and we are going to protect your kids from you.”  I have to be careful what I say in front of this doctor or I risk CPS.  I’m afraid that it doesn’t matter that I only self harm behind closed doors away from my children.  I’m afraid I am going to be told that someone like me is too toxic to share the same air.  It’s for everyones good that I be removed from the home.

I was often taken away from my family as a child “for my own good”.  I was always sent back after a while because there aren’t enough tolerance for me anywhere else either.  Difficult.  That’s me.  Always have been.  Always thinking I get to have an opinion and preferences.  Always thinking that it matters what I want.  Stupid me.

There are few things in my life more terrifying than the institution.  I know it would be a different one this time.  A “better” one.  It wouldn’t really be better though.  It would just be the system trying to convince me that as long as they don’t force me down on a table we are all doing what we want to do.  It’s a lie.  Me doing what I want to do involves hiding in my house and beating my head on the concrete floor when I can’t handle the anxiety.  Ok, that’s not really what I want to do.  But I prefer beating my head at home to beating my head in the institution and I wouldn’t stop just because they told me to.

In fact if a group of doctors told me I had to stop or else… all of a sudden my skull would be covered with scabs because I would do it a lot harder.  Or else what?  What are you going to do to me that is going to be worse than what has happened to me?  Do I really need more people hurting me?  Do I really need more people trying to impose their will upon me?  That is how to make me a healthy person? For yet more people to try to control me when they don’t know what happened to me?

Coping mechanisms can be good and useful and necessary at one time and become less good over time.  Self harming has kept me able to function and go about life.  It *is* a stress relief.  I have done a lot of good in my life.  Why is any of it negated because I had to self harm in order to have the focus to work? Why?  I can see telling me that there is a better way and offering me other options.  That’s awesome.  I want to have other fucking options.  I’m tired of my head hurting.  But I can’t just find this self control out of thin air.  I’m out of will power.  There isn’t enough lemonade in the world.

I don’t self harm every day.  Unless you count pot, which is kind of a weird thing for me.  On days when I am stoned I don’t self harm at all.  I haven’t beat my head against the floor in almost a month, actually.  Not since the day of the party.  That morning I lost it and I haven’t since.  Having all those people come over was… challenging.  It went well and everyone had fun.  I still spent most of the time freaked out waiting for something awful to happen.

Since then I say, “Sarah I need to tap out” and she says, “Ok!” and I go sit down and smoke and think for thirty minutes.  Then I’m cheerful again.

I want to work with a psychiatrist because I don’t know much about mood stabilizing drugs.  I need to learn.

Bad decisions

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In life there are trade offs.  You only have so many resources at any given point in time.  I feel like an awful lot of the problems in life are because of the fact that there are insufficient resources.  And I don’t mean oil–I’m talking about time and attention.  I’m talking about the fact that I don’t keep up with my friends as well as I wish I could because I cannot handle the fact that I am already touched and pawed at all day long.

A friend else-net got very drunk last night.  She’s at a hard spot in her life and she wanted to drink to forget.  Of course she now believes this has destroyed her value as a person.  On the kind of nights where you drink to forget you tend to believe your value was gone before you started.  I make bad decisions.  I don’t want to add an adverb describing when or how often. Because the reality is I probably make bad decisions about as often as average and maybe less.  Do you want to know why I say that?  Because something being a bad decision or not depends on your perspective.

Getting shit faced drunk and passing out seems like a bad decision.  Until you realize that the alternative may very well be ending your life.  When you realize that choosing to get shit faced drunk so that you can make it through the one bad night is actually a good choice.  At the crisis point, get drunk.  That’s ok.  Really.  It’s not a bad decision.  If that is how you are going to still be alive in the morning it is a good decision.  It’s a bad decision to do it every night.  It is a bad decision to make it a lifestyle.  Anesthetics have their place in life.  I believe it is ok to self-medicate.  But be very careful.

Does that mean it is the safest choice?  Of course not.  Drinking until you pass out is dangerous and I don’t really think people should be doing it.  Much like cutting.  It’s not a great thing to do.  I don’t recommend it as a coping strategy for people who are looking for new tools.  Sometimes people do make mistakes while cutting and accidentally die.  It is not beyond the realm of possibility.

A lot of my friends point out that their lives “weren’t that bad” so they shouldn’t be upset.  I honestly don’t know a lot of people who experienced more abuse than me… and I still don’t feel entitled to be upset.  Not really.  To me that means that it doesn’t matter whether I am entitled to the upset or not.  I am upset.  I need to not worry about whether or not I should be.  I need to not focus on how my being upset affects other people.  I need to look at how being upset affects me.  It’s hard because for all that I have been talking constantly about being narcissistic… I’m truly not.  I have a hard time paying adequate attention to myself.  I worry constantly about the happiness of those around me.  I work extensively to build up other people.  That’s just an insecurity.

It’s just as true for everyone else though.  Ok, there are people who are actually narcissistic.  Most people are just existing though.  You get upset.  It’s ok to deal with being upset.  If that upset goes on for weeks, months, years… you use up your resources.  When you are low on resources sometimes you hit the bottom of the barrel.  It’s ok.  That’s why it is there.  It is still a tool.  The bottom exists for a reason.

Why am I babbling about this.  Because I can say this emphatically when I am speaking with my friend in my head.  When I picture my beautiful, wonderful friend who is going through a very hard time and there is nothing I can do to help… that feels like I am failing in my life.  I don’t want my friends to suffer.  I want to take it away and make everything better.  I want to help build my friends up so big and so strong that they cannot be hurt any more.

I’ve been reading more in TCTH (The Courage to Heal–I’m sick of typing it out.)  I think it is funny that every time I read it I get to a few pages past where I feel emotionally that day.  When I come back and catch up I get to read on the page these testimonies from all these women describing their emotional processes and I could have written them.  It feels really hilarious and predictable.  This experience of going through this book is ensuring that I know I am not a special fucking snow flake.  Ha.  It’s nice though.  I now have this invisible group of women who know what I have been through. Healing from incest is a fairly predictable path.  I’m not lost and wandering and doing it wrong.  I am working the steps.  I really and truly am doing something that is worth doing.  As hard as this is sometimes, as bad as some of my mistakes are… I am improving.

My momentary bad decisions do not negate the fact that I am a good person.  That it is worth getting up every single day and continuing for as long as my body will let me because I add good to the world.  Far, far, far more good than bad.  I haven’t been sleeping enough and my emotions are very close to the surface.  I feel very upset when I see my friends self-flagellating in ways I also do.  It hits home for me what I need to start working on doing and that’s hard.  I kind of don’t need more pressure to work, you know?  I’m very tired.  I feel so flawed.  I feel like I will never be good enough.

And TCTH tells me that is part of the process.  It will pass.  This day will end.  Today I will get good and stoned and I will wander around the house puttering and singing and talking with my babies.  If I just putter around absent mindedly all the rest of the cleaning will magically happen.  But I have to be very stoned.  Or I will be a stress monkey and twitch and be unable to complete tasks and cry and probably scream at both kids.  I have a choice, right this minute.  I can continue to distract myself with the internet because I believe smoking marijuana is a bad choice and I am a bad person for doing it, or… I can shut up and do it.  And have a really nice day.  Bye y’all.

Can’t.Get.Out.Of.Head.

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I’m not so good at this sleeping thing lately.  I’m thinking a great deal about my role models.  People who are alive, people who are dead, people who were dead before my birth and people who have lived only in the mind.  I spend a lot of time feeling like I should apologize for who I am and what I do.  Not because I really believe that I am wrong.  But because I feel like I do not have the right to make choices that differ from the people around me.  The thing is, everyone does things differently and that’s how it is supposed to work.


Ok, I’m beating around the bush.  A while back I had a conversation with a friend/former lover in which we both kind of nudged the other to test the waters.  Nothing came of it that day and that’s ok.  He brought up a really important point though.  He breaks condoms.  Due to a wide variety of factors (size, piercings) he has an above average number of breakages.  He *is* careful.  He has had multiple accidental pregnancies because of this.  Uhhh… my baby factory is closed.  After careful thought about how much I loathe everything about being on duty 24/7 for an infant I never want to have another child.  I love my children.  I’m fucking done.  So I’m thinking about permanent birth control.  Not in the next three months or anything, but I think it will be done soonish.  I want to never have to worry about that again.  The thought of pregnancy fills me with revulsion and horror.  I’m done.


I have then been thinking a lot about safer sex.  It’s complicated.  What does one mean by “safer” sex? Blah blah blah.  Near as I can see it there are a few reasons to use latex (or equivalent) over all contact between bits: disease, pregnancy, or show of good faith.  Most everyone is pretty loud about the disease one and I agree with it.  I have been pretty rigorous throughout most of my sluttery with barriers.  It’s important!  I drank that kool aid.  I think it’s a good flavor.  I’m going to deal with that pregnancy bit forever.  Then there’s the good faith bit, and that’s tricky.


If you are a slut you are supposed to tow the party line about doing it safely at all times in all ways.  SSC is based on that. used as a battering ram by people who claim that is what it means.  What an awesome history piece.  The opening of the RACK definition mentions my historical associations.  I guess I was ignorant.  It’s interesting how often that is coming up lately, my ignorance.  Anyway.  I’m avoiding again.


I’m thinking about how I feel about unprotected sex with people other than my husband.  I haven’t done it.  This is still hypothetical in the future.  I’ll tell you that the sticking point is the word husband.  I have been told that baby making sex is husband sex and at this point unprotected sex = baby making sex.  I’m a big fan of two forms of birth control.  If I am sterile and a guy is sterile then pregnancy is such a low possibility that I’m willing to risk it.  I’ll say that flat out.  I’m brave enough to trust two surgical operations.  Then comes disease risk.  Unless you believe that diseases manifest out of nowhere, there are ways to ensure that people are not carrying diseases.  It’s really simple actually.  You just go down to your local clinic before engaging in activities and voila!  


But oh man.  Then there is that party line.  I probably don’t mean it in the way you think.  However you think it.  I worry about not representing the “right kind” of promiscuous sex.  I’m pretty defensive about my behavior and all.  I worry that sex with Noah will feel less special.  I don’t honestly think it will.  I’m pretty base about such things.  I’m pretty darn sure that I will think it is hotter than the sun to come home after sex with someone else.  Uhm.  Yeah.  I actually really like that idea.  I think that idea is so fucking hot that I am going to take a break to masturbate.  I’ll be in my bunk.


Thanks to the internet I know that lots of other people feel the same way.  Either that or one person has been very prolific at writing stories.  This is a fairly basic biological urge.  Evolution programmed me to think this is hot.  Why should I carry shame for enjoying it?  Seriously.  At this point it is still hypothetical and I already feel guilty.  Ridiculous.  I’m a smart girl.  I want to lead a long and healthy life.  I promise you, oh internet, if I sleep with someone without using a condom I will do my preparation work.  I will ensure that the person in question is not a disease risk and I will prevent pregnancy at all costs.  And then I will decide if it will add more drama to my life to use or not use a condom.


It’s fairly reasonable to ask why I don’t just default to using condoms because that’s a good idea and all.  There are some downsides to being raped repeatedly throughout your childhood.  And bodies were designed to glide on other bodies, not on a piece of rubber.  Condoms hurt and I am at a point in my life where adding any more pain to my body is repugnant.  I have had tearing and resultant burning for over a week with each time I’ve used a condom recently.  It’s almost enough to make it not worth having the sex.  Dilemma.  


I’ve been thinking a lot about my position as a sexual outlaw.  I use that mockingly because I have never done sex work and I’m pretty sure it is considered part of the deal.  But I break laws with sex.  I have sex in public places.  I am always very disappointed when I have a partner who isn’t up for it.  I suspect that one of Noah’s biggest appeals is that he really and truly is up for doing anything and everything I want from him sexually.  That’s useful.  But there are parts of unlawful sex he cannot help me with by definition.  


The thing is they are crimes because if someone accidentally finds us then we have harmed those people by engaging in the act we are engaging in.  Which makes what we are doing dirty.  You know that scared nervous feeling you get when you make out with someone just out of sight of people?  Doesn’t everyone do that at some point when they are young?  Ok, the geek boys will smack me and shout that not everyone spends time making out when they are young.  Whatever.  I can’t explain exhibitionism but I presume I don’t have to.  If what I am doing is perfectly fine behind closed doors then it is probably more exciting for me to do it in public.  It’s a wiring thing.


So yeah.  Unprotected sex.  Public sex.  Taboo sex.  I really miss the part of me that is willing to take very calculated risks with self confidence.  I take fairly big risks.  Kind of.  Not really.  I take risks that sound really bad but aren’t once you listen to the details.  I’m very logical about the risks I take.  Which is kind of hilarious.  “Don’t knock rationalizations. I don’t know anyone who could get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations. They’re more important than sex.”  But what happens when my rationalizations are trying to make it so I can have sex?


So I’m up late at night thinking about how I can feel more comfortable in my skin with the decisions I make.  Even though I’m not making choices that would be right for other people, I’m making choices that are ok for me.  There isn’t a One Twue Way.  My personal religion seems to be formed around a bastardized notion of gnostic sin I got from Noah.  Something is only a sin if you are ashamed to talk about it.  He told me it was the basis for his open relationship with a previous partner (*wave*).  I’ve been thinking about it a lot.  


I’m thinking about the possibility of unprotected sex with men other than the one I am married to.  My husband (within certain parameters) is fine with it.  Why am I worried about breaking the sanctity of my marriage in this one more way?  Partially because I’ve been told quite clearly that it would be bad.  I would be bad.  That’s dirty.  I would be defiled.  Just go read a message board anywhere.  Oh man.  But I wouldn’t be.  That’s the thing.  No one would know unless I told them.  I would still be just me.  With upgrades.  I think this is what being an adult actually means.  I get to make decisions.  I get to make choices amongst a dizzying array of options.  I am not at the mercy of my fate.  I do not have to do what people “do” just because it is “done”.  


The trick is to do it and not feel shame.  The shame is poison.  If you feel shame about what you are doing you should not do it because shame gets into the water and the soil and the air and it is poison.  I feel shame because other people tell me that my choices are wrong.  “Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.”  Dr. Seuss told me that.  I worry because anxiety was taught to me.  I’m supposed to be afraid of what people think of my actions.


And here is where the fun part goes away: my sister raped my brother almost thirty years ago.  My sister allowed her husband to rape her son almost ten years ago.  My sister taught her daughter to perform oral sex on her son about ten years ago.  I have no idea what she has been up to since then.  It scares the shit out of me.  According to my brother he hasn’t told people that she did it.  Until me.  And I have told the whole damn internet.  My father spent decades raping his daughters and no one stopped him.


I am very good at putting on my public face and having my public persona.  But with the intense pressure to behave “appropriately” comes this simultaneous backlash of anger that makes me compulsively want to break rules.  I have broken some pretty big ones.  I stole borrowed my mom’s car when I was 15 before I had a license because I promised someone a ride and I couldn’t back down.  Want to know how I got caught?  I uhhh forgot to put my headlights on as I pulled out of a lighted parking garage after Rocky Horror.  And the registration was expired.  That incident is why I couldn’t get a license until I was 18.  You see, I gave my mother the money to pay the fines and she bounced the check.  Once you do that the fees go up and I was well aware my mother would just bounce the second check.  I had to put on the public face of not acknowledging the fact that my mother was literally stealing from me.


If I said anything about it I would endure a tirade of hysteria about how I blame everything on her even though she is the victim in life.  I see that pattern emerging for me with Shanna.  I don’t vocalize it, but I think it.  But I’m not the victim any more.  I now hold absolutely all of the cards.  I have all of the power.  Do I want to use my power for good or evil?


At this point in my life I am neither a victim nor a martyr.  I’ve made choices to end up where I am.  I’m pretty fucking thrilled with my life, actually.  I’m still slowly trying to sort through the house.  I’m not doing anything wrong.  I’m trying as hard as I can not to hurt people.  Sometimes that isn’t good enough and I’m sorry for that.  I really like fucking multiple people. I’m going to keep doing it.  I’m going to make my decisions about safer sex based on actual risks not perceived status around said decisions.  And I’m going to let go of feeling bad because I’m breaking this taboo.


And what is up with this shit about me feeling like I don’t get to consider myself a sexual outlaw because I’ve never been paid.  Oh man.  I spent years in a relationship that was pretty extreme trying to keep up with the bad asses.  But I’ve never liked actual pain all that much.  It’s kind of funny.  I want to be an edge player.  I don’t want to be in a lot of pain.  It’s a competitive thing.  I can cop to that.  Not many people eroticize things like being suspended 75′ off the ground.  I learned to orgasm only with permission and on command.  I have been hog tied in a bath tub and tied so I could barely breathe.  We did a lot of breath play.  I have been well hanged.  With pictures to prove it.  Because without pics it didn’t happen, right?


There is this idea in my head about absence of self without a consistent mirror.  That’s convoluted.  I don’t exist if I can’t see me in other people.  In other words, whatever group I am standing near I will try as hard as I can to conform.  When I notice that I am really different from the people around me I feel as though I was just publicly shamed.  Because there will be people who disapprove of me in any group.  There’s a lot to disapprove of, yo.  So I run away.  Because I cannot conform to the norms of any group I have ever been part of and I don’t know how to feel like it is ok to deviate from the norms.  I assume people dislike me despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.


So coming back to this idea of gnostic sin.  I’m very certain that I am not hurting anyone right now.  And if no one is getting hurt (physically or mentally) then I think the activity is ok.  I do not participate in any formal moral structure that judges any of my actions.  My only judge and jury is whether or not I can look at myself in the mirror.  Have I done right by the world.  Have I done my best to make this world a better, happier place?  Then I’m ok.  And there is no cookie anywhere in the world big enough to make me feel like I have the external validation I need.  I have to just accept that I am going to do what I am going to do and it’s ok.  In 100 years no one will remember or care.  So why not?


My body’s talking to me
It say,’Time for danger’

It says ‘I wanna commit a crime
Wanna be the cause of a fight
Wanna put on a tight skirt and flirt
With a stranger’

The problem is finding balance.  And the first towards balance is sleep.  Night.

Sex is complicated

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The super frank way I handle my sexuality is not appropriate for children.  The way I talk about it.  The way I pursue it.  Not. For. Children.  The way I handle my sexuality makes a fair number of adults extremely uncomfortable.  How do I raise kids who can have a more “normal” view of sexuality?  I don’t have a normal view of it.  Growing up it was pretty clear that my options were celibacy (my mom and mostly Aunt Vonnie–it was a running joke that she didn’t put out) or being the kind of whore who ruins my life regularly with toxic men (go Denise).

The idea of not knowing what sex is till 10 or so really weirds me out.  I don’t know what it will be like to grow up with children who are ignorant so long.  I taught my niece and nephew how to use condoms way before then because it was necessary information in our family.  And no one else would talk about diseases or contraception at all.  I have books on what age appropriate sexuality is, but it’s still a weird concept.

You see, because I’m the kind of person who wants to host sex parties.  Let me just take a moment to say that hosting a sex party is very complicated.  There are a few other layers of things going on that make everything way way way more complicated.  Because really what I want to do is have a woo woo sex magic ritual and that’s an even more specific kind of event.  That kind of event requires rather a lot of thinking, planning, discussion, etc.  But I have these little kids around.  At this point in time I’m aware that some day soon Shanna is going to turn around and ask me point blank what a sex magic ritual is.  As I sit and think about it right now I think my answer should be, “Sex is something you do once your body is physically mature and you want to.  Magic is a way of thinking about what you want really hard.  And a ritual is where you think really hard about something you want with other people helping you focus more on what you want so that you think about it harder than you can alone.”  That’s an ok answer, right?  Because I don’t believe there is any chance we will just stop talking about it at all.

And holy shit.  How do I feel about my child growing up knowing that her parents are into sex magic rituals?  No, she doesn’t have a clue what it is about now.  We aren’t graphic in the slightest.  We talk about people and emotions.  We don’t talk about sex acts.  Shanna is going to grow up hearing a very odd therapy sort of talk.  I mean, we sit around and talk about the people who are involved in the ritual and what their various potential levels of involvement could be (nothing graphic) and try to get a sense of what to expect.  A lot of what is going on here is that I can’t be in control of everything in the world.  But I can be in control of this very small setting on this one day.  I can be in control of who comes.  And that has been a rather fraught process.  I may have lost a friend over it and that makes me sad.  I have had to deal with the overwhelming guilt and shame that I went from in-my-head having a fairly ordinary party to these increasingly complicated layers of intention and want and overlapping needs.

I didn’t realize up front that I was doing a sex magic ritual.  It wasn’t until I did extensive negotiations with most of the people coming that I realized I was trying to set the stage for that.  I have only done sex magic explicitly with one person.  I think of him as my personal shaman.  Our relationship has gotten very complicated over the more than 10 years he has been in my life.  Some day I should send a thank you message to the woman who connected us.  Ok, done.  I kind of like reflecting when and where I walk away from writing in the blog to do other things.  I don’t know if it is ADD or what but I really can’t finish something in one go.  I just can’t.  I peck at everything.  I don’t think it is perfectionism because it’s not that I’m trying to be perfect.  I just have to think about the next step before I can have it.

I’m going to be a big judgy bastard.  I think there is a big difference between people who are sex positive and people who actively hunt a lot for new partners.  I know people who hunt.  I don’t like how they parent.  There.  I said it.  I like the children of monogamous households.  Which really this is selection bias.  I don’t know very many children who have grown up in poly households.  Very very few.  I know a few adults who were children in poly households.  They are neat.  But uhm… I like the children of monogamous parents because I feel more comfortable with the kinds of acting out they do. Which is to say that in the far less than 500 hours I have been around “children of poly households” in aggregate over my entire life I had feelings of discomfort and I blamed them on the kids.

And that is the kind of judgy bastard I am.  Ok, fine I’ll deconstruct this again.  Why do I have a problem with poly parents?  Because I think my sexuality is something that should always be on the side of a closed door from my children.  I do not flirt in front of my kids.  I cannot be a sexual person in front of my kids.  I cannot hunt.  I do not want my extra “partners” around my kids because I am uncomfortable having that energy around children.  I have felt really uncomfortable when I am dating someone and they want me to hang out around their children.  In almost every case (with one huge exception and I really respect him) there was more hand holding and hugging and PDA type behavior than I found appropriate.

Where is the line of what is ok to do in front of your kids?  Or even where in my house?  When I am interested in sex I want to have a lot of very heavy groping in my life.  It’s awesome and fun.  I am very uncomfortable with the prospect of trying to be secretive about it around my kids.  That’s not a good feeling for me.  I have been secretive about my sex life since I was two years old and I shouldn’t have had a sex life to be secretive about.

When I am otherwise doing well emotionally I get off on every part of being sneaky about sex.  I fucking love that I am the chick who sneaks off at parties.  And yet that is clearly acting out behavior and there are places I am not welcome because of it.  Awkward.  Shouldn’t I have to give up on that kind of acting out now that I have kids?  Large swaths of society thinks I am inappropriate for doing that.  I could even link to a very old blog post with a poll about it.  Fully 1/4 of my friends thinks that is not an ok thing to do.  And these are the people who are open minded enough to be friends with me in the first place.  Let’s not ignore that incredibly high bar here.

25% of my friends (who responded to that poll) disapprove of a very consistent part of my behavior.  That’s absolutely a high enough percentage to make me go into convulsions of shame.  Because that (to me) means if that was more of a general humanity sort of poll it means more like 80% of people will think I am disgusting.  Cue bad self talk tape I don’t want to play today.

Why do I feel I have to be celibate because I am a parent?  Oh let me see.  Maybe because the parts of my sexuality I enjoy the most are the parts that push the boundaries of what society considers acceptable.  Silent quickies on the couch are really shitty.  I’m fucking tired of them.  If that is all my god damn sex life is supposed to have for the rest of my life you can take this job and shove it.  Cue running away and engaging in acting out behavior.

But how did I act out?  I went to an adult only party.  Where people were already naked.  And heavily indicating that they like extra marital sex.  And I went to a former partner (who has loudly stated he is still interested) and I suggested running off because I hardly ever get to be in an environment where there are no children so I never enjoy sex.

I feel like a dirty disgusting whore.  And sometimes that is really hot and sometimes it makes me cry.  I feel so much shame for wanting sex the way I do.  I feel like I am obviously dirty.  I am contaminated.  I must be sick for wanting this the way I do.  And then I won’t let anyone touch me in any way because I feel like they will be made dirty by touching someone who wants sex the way I do.

So I kind of want to have a sex magic ritual.  I kind of feel like there might be some worthwhile emotional work to be done in this area.  Kinda.  And on one hand I feel like I should only be saying this to the very short list of people I feel comfortable engaging in this kind of party with.  But on the other hand, continuing to believe that I should be ashamed of talking about this part of my sex life is a lot of the point.  Let me restate: I have already lost a friend over this party.

Why do I feel like I have to be celibate to be a good mother?  Oh man.  Because being queer and kinky and poly means not only that I have sex with my husband (I feel ashamed of almost any touching around my kids so our marital sex is rather limited right now) and I occasionally sneak out in a way that I can completely hide from my kids and keep secret (limited primarily to heteronormative behavior because casual sex with women is way more complicated than I have time for, men can get it up on demand if you select carefully) but I am being flagrant to the world about things that I feel I have to hide.

The closet sucks.  I do talk about being queer, kind of, in front of my kids.  It really doesn’t come up.  I have friends who are queer, so obviously my children see examples of it.  But I don’t engage in any behavior that would look queer to them.  Kinky is something that I have put on hold 100% until my kids are older and can be left alone longer.  I don’t feel ok having that in my house and I get very little time off.  Poly?  Dating feels like the same thing.  I don’t want to take that much time away from my family.

It’s not that I don’t want these things in my life.  But I have massive issues around my kids seeing any of it because I feel ashamed.  It feels like I am supposed to.  When I make the decision to take people off the guest list because they do not feel safe enough to have a sex magic ritual in front of I lose friends.  It really really feels like I should be ashamed of having these things in my life.  If I am doing something at all, ever that some people won’t like then I am bad.

Why do I think I have to be celibate to be a mother?  Oh I don’t know.  Maybe because I can’t be satisfied with the limited shitty sex other people want me to have so it is easier to just shut the whole system off.  And just not be me.

Whiner be thy name. Or mine. Whatever.

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Tonight I went to one of those kind of events.  If you don’t know what that means then you probably don’t want to.  Err, how to discuss this in a global way.  Uhh. Hm.  Oh I don’t give a shit.  So I went to a party hoping to do some kind of sex play with someone but then I acted like a hostile bitter wallflower and I left feeling depressed.  There.  That is tonight’s stupid.  I’m not mad that Noah had some chutzpah and went and found play.  Go him.  He’s a fun sexy guy and I’m glad someone is noticing.  Because I’m not.  I don’t flirt with Noah and he doesn’t flirt with me.  He’s afraid to approach me because I am broken.  Because when I don’t want to have sex I say yes anyway and he feels like a rapist.  So he doesn’t ask very often.  And we only have sex when I initiate.  And it often feels kind of uncomfortably perfunctory.  I’m sad that this is who I am right now.

I’m sad that I feel no desire.  I’m sad that I exude disinterest because I honestly feel no interest.  And it’s not because of anyone else.  It’s just in me.  On the way back from the party Noah told me that I had this problem until about 18 months postpartum the first time.  So like 7 months to go.  I hope.  This is not my happy face.

I’m also experiencing some noticeable grief about my family.  Not only did Uncle Bob die but I actively took steps to kill off any chance of reconciliation.  I am now dead to them.  I feel like a big part of me died.  I love my family.I feel very loyal to my family.  I feel like a traitor. I feel like I should be shot for treason  Ok, that thought made the waterworks flood.  Yeah.  I hurt my mommy.  You aren’t supposed to do that.  Even the bible says to honor your mother and father.  I effectively killed my father and I just yelled about as loud as I could that my mother is a child abuser.  I don’t want to think that about my mommy.  I truly don’t.  Do you want to know what is making it feel real?  When I say things to Shanna in that tone of voice and I see her cringe.  I know that voice.  That’s my mom’s voice.  My mom didn’t hit me.  She didn’t have to.  She could make me feel like I was 3″ tall.  I feel that I am teetering on a precarious edge because at this point Shanna turns around and yells at me that it’s not ok to talk to her in that tone of voice so uhm, yeah.  She’s pretty clear that she’s not 3″ tall.  And go fucking her.

I feel like I’m 3″ tall.  I’ve been sniping at people lately.  I have no patience and I really want to hurt people who are close to me.  I’m doing it to absolutely everyone.  And I’m having an explosion of guilt and anxiety.  I feel tremendous social anxiety and I’m able to make the most positive situations seem like a tacit rejection of me.  That’s pretty ridiculous.  I’m really not rational.  I’m struggling with body issues.  My little sprint on wikipedia called it Eating disorder not otherwise specified which, to be fair I’m not actually looking for a label because I want one.  I was actually looking for a word and I never did find it.  So I have the self image of being a fat person.  I think it is one that I actively want to have.  I think I want it for a myriad of reasons.  I don’t think it is actually all that good for *me* to be fat because I have to be fairly sedentary to do it.  When I exercise I get smaller.  It’s usually pretty dramatic and given that exercise is good for everyone, blah blah blah… No really, if I’m currently heavy that means I am extremely sedentary.  And that’s not a healthy choice for me.  Not saying this is the truth for every body out there.

So uhm I’ve been binge eating since I noticed that I was getting “too thin”.  I have been feeling like I am eating a lot and my clothes are getting tighter.  I feel like I have some weird subconscious thing going on that I associate fat with happy and maybe if I’m eating pleasure signal inducing foods constantly I will like myself more.  Hasn’t worked yet but I keep trying.  Maybe I just haven’t done it right yet.  Anyway. The part that I get hung up enough on to avoid talking about my mother at all costs (see how I did that; I’m good) is: I weighed myself tonight at my friend’s house.  I am lighter than I’ve been since I got married.  I am certainly at what I consider a perfectly reasonable size.  But it’s freaking me out and I’m binge eating to try and not stay in these clothes.  It’s complicated.

But back to that mother thing.  Because yeah I’m going to have to figure out a healthy relationship with food and stop alternating between treating it like a punishment (through lack of it) and a reward (through excessive amounts of it).  Jesus I’m broken.  But I’ll deal with that bit another day.  Maybe.

Years ago I wrote a story for a writing class that detailed some of the biggest sexual assaults I experienced from non-family members.  Some.  I had my sister read it and her first response was that I couldn’t tell mom.  Mom wouldn’t be able to handle this.  It wasn’t fair for me to burden mom.  I went against orders (because I promise you that my sister considered them on that level) and I had my mom read it.  My mom was strangely sanguine.  Like, this definition: Anticipating the best; optimistic; not despondent; confident; full of hope.  By which I mean she apologized for not being there for me.  She cried about her weaknesses as a mother.  Then she went on to fairly casually talk about how we can move on now because the past is behind us.  WTF?!  (And I do actually say W- T- F.)  Yo!  Bitch!  It’s not that easy.  I don’t believe there is any reparation she could do for what her negligence did to me.  I really don’t.  That’s not about my overwhelming bitterness.  That’s about the fact that there is nothing in the world she could do to earn my trust.  And if I think you are a rattlesnake, well… you really aren’t someone I want near my home or my kids.  I don’t know what you might do.  That tears it and buries it.  (Where the heck do I get these expressions?)  Yeah.  No.  Which means I have to deal with the results of that on my end.  I have to deal with the loss of my mom.

It really sucks.  Just sayin’.  There is no way for her to be a person I can have a healthy relationship.  Ok, how can I go about the business of just being healthy instead of being fucked up now that I am removing the fucked up influences?  I’m not really sure.

Areas That Could Use Improvement:
-my overall disposition. I act like everything and everyone is an inconvenience.
-my relationship with food and my body.  Making choices other people disagree with is ok.  Making choices I don’t agree with because I am so uncomfortable in my skin… not so good.
-liking sex again.  That would be kind of nice.
-my tremendous social anxiety that is creating a brick wall between me and people who like me.
-my willingness to see myself as having worth.

And you know, could I start providing my children with a more stimulating mental situation so that they can be properly socialized… right.  Not that I’m under. any. pressure.  I’m sure I’ll make a fabulous first impression with the local homeschooling community.  Ah shit.  I’m really afraid to get involved with the local homeschooling community right now because I’m afraid that people won’t want their children to socialize with my kids because I am broken and bad.  Like, this is seriously keeping me up at night.  Shanna asks about R a lot.  She asks when she can see him again.  She asks why she can’t see him any more.  I feel pretty shitty that the answer is I made R’s mom so uncomfortable that she won’t let him be friends with you.  I don’t want to fuck things up for my kids this early in life.  I want to wait until they are a little older.  I already had a best friend by Shanna’s age.  I feel like I am denying her some crucial life experience and isolating her unreasonably.  But she’s 3.  I haven’t ruined her life yet, right?

Privilege

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I’ve been thinking a lot about privilege since reading this blog and I think I hit on part of it this morning.  I was talking to someone recently and I was trying to explain the pressure of meeting new people and how it is better or worse depending on how much they will matter in the long-run.  Meeting Noah’s friends is stressful because I will have to deal with them for years… I’d better not fuck up.  Which means I inevitably will feel like I did no matter how I actually behave.  In the course of this conversation I said that I can’t handle the pressure to be “nice” when I meet someone.  She seemed shocked, aren’t I nice whenever I meet new people?  I actually laughed out loud.  Of course not.  I walk into every new association wondering if I am going to feel disliked because I am bad.  Whether this person will be “big enough” to overlook how fucked up I am and give me a chance anyway!  (This is said in a cheerleader voice.)

That shit gets old.  Privilege is feeling like you deserve to be breathing the same air as everyone else.  Privilege is growing up in a place that is safe and secure enough that you never freeze up in blind panic when your husband raises his voice the tiniest bit because surely this will be the time he makes you leave.  I believe there is no way that people could love me unless I change myself to meet their needs.  I believe that who I am, at a basic level, is wrong and I deserve to suffer for being wrong.  Because I cannot just “be nice” when I meet someone new.  I can’t do that.  In order to just be nice to other people I would have to first stop expecting them to be vicious to me so that I can stop feeling defensive.  Given what did happen to me I’m really glad that I was good and vicious in response.  It was literally a survival mechanism.

But how do you just stop feeling defensive and vicious?  It’s not as simple as anger management.  It’s not as simple as just meditating and staying in the here and now.  Not for me.  Because the point of all those techniques is to let you relax into the assumed basic training of being a polite person.  I have never had that.  No, that’s hyperbole.  That is not what I had as a child.  That is not my default at rest position.  I can actually get to a place where I feel calm and relaxed.  Sort of.  Briefly.  I can suppress my feelings with the best of them!  But then I am always paying in some way.  I’m hypersexual or asexual.  I’m binge eating or starving myself.  Privilege is thinking that “stopping my anger” will solve my problems.  No, it just moves the focal point of my current problem area.  I am broken and I have to figure out how to fix it.  Being quiet doesn’t work.  Being quiet means passing on broken patterns on to my children even if they are never abused.

Denise’s drug addiction would go in spurts.  She used intensely for a while then she blew up her life and was clean for a long period, or she used so minimally as to be functional.  My anxiety goes in hormonal spurts like that.  I can tell that I’m having totally irrational emotions.  If I can tell that they are totally irrational I can often talk myself through them.  When I suppress my memories and I refuse to work through them as they come up I am left sitting on a powder keg.  I don’t think it is actually reasonable to ask me to deal with as many triggers as I have by just meditating.  Give me a break.  That might work for someone else, fine.  It doesn’t work for me.  I just can’t.

I feel like white trash because as I move through the world something about my physical presentation makes people wince.  Not all the time, I can control it with enough effort, but often.  It’s something about my tone of voice, my looks, my word choice… I don’t even know exactly.  Even when I am not cursing. Even when I am “trying to be nice” people still jolt at me.  I don’t think I am actively yelling all the time. But people react visibly to me.  And it is common for people to comment on the fact that I have a lot of class markers of being poor.  It’s excellent.

That is my basic self image moving through the world.  Then I read news articles about finance talking about how Noah is in the top 5% of the country financially.  I feel this simultaneous shock and horror.  How in the hell can that be me?  I feel like now that I am in this different class I should suddenly know how to behave as if I am of this class.  But I don’t.  I feel awkward and uncomfortable.  I feel fake and deceitful.  How dare I come among good people when I’m obviously common trash.  As a result I am usually rude when I meet people because I have it so deeply ingrained in me that I am bad.  I don’t know how to be anything else.

These are the things I think about when I think about privilege.  Because I have the unimaginable privilege to sit here at my computer whining about my pain when at this point in my life I have it easier than the vast majority of people ever in the history of the world.  That’s perspective.  My problems are so small and so petty.  Why do I act like I’m important?  Because I have to.  Because everyone has to be concerned with themselves first and foremost or they have nothing to give.

Why aren’t I “nice” when I meet people?  Because I am white trash and I don’t know how.  No one ever taught me.

Suppression has limited usefulness.

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It’s interesting.  People keep asking me how I am doing, that’s predictable (and appreciated!).  I’m not sure what to say a lot of the time.  “Well, I’m behaving as if I feel more cheerful.  I am less explosive.  I am not nearly as angry.  I also feel completely dead sexually.  When people touch me I feel my skin crawl.  But I’m way more calm with way less time in time out!”  Is that a win?

A number of people have expressed how impressed they are that I can simply suppress these memories.  I can stop having flashbacks.  I can black the body memories.  But it comes with a price.  I don’t get to really be me when I’m doing this.  I’m just a shell.  You see, my therapist is on vacation till August 1st.  Perfect timing.  I don’t really feel up to seeing a new person right now.  I’m… yeah.  I’m just not up for that.  I miss people and I miss going out but I am so happy to be home that I’m kind of afraid to leave.  I haven’t even been up to Oakland yet to see the friend I normally see at least once a week because leaving the house is insurmountable.

Why is leaving the house insurmountable?  Because I only have so much patience right now and at home I can ask Shanna to do a very limited number of things so we have a limited number of fights.  Once we leave the house all bets are off.  We might have a great experience; we might have a horrible time.  By “horrible time” I mean that she will pick a fight in front of other people and I will feel intense shame and humiliation that my child is such a brat.  And I will end up yelling at her with far more intensity than the situation warrants because I am feeling shame and humiliation.  So I would rather not take her out.  It’s not that I never yell at her at home, but it’s far less.  And when I can tell that I am starting to internally escalate things that don’t need to escalate I can safely separate us until I calm down more and can talk.  It’s seamless and non-dramatic at home.  Well, three year olds are dramatic.

I’m experiencing a lot more sympathy for why other people give in to their kids to stop the freaking constant whining.  I still won’t, but my alternative is to send her to her room until she can talk in a tone of voice that doesn’t sound like nails on a chalk board.  I don’t have that when we are out.  Oh it feels like pressure.  It feels like overwhelming-I’m-drowning-where-is-the-air pressure.  It’s not a rational reaction.  It is, in fact, completely irrational.  I am comforted by books that tell me that three is just like this.  Get through the year and it improves.  Please G-d.

At home we do ok!  Really!  We have have far more good days than bad.  Even our bad days at home aren’t that bad because I am way more liberal with “room time” than any “real” crunchy parent would be.  What the hell is gentle discipline anyway?  I don’t hit her.  I do my best not to yell.  But oh man I need space and the only way I know to get it is to tell her that she has two options: she can be civilized and polite, or she can be in her room.  It’s not that all expressions of emotion are uncivilized or impolite.  However, if you have to reach volumes that are harming my ear drums in order to express yourself you can do that outside the main room, sorry.  No, I don’t think that children deserve to terrorize everyone around them as they develop emotions.  And I cannot sit down and patiently let her do everything she wants to do.  Sometimes things have to get done.  I’m almost sorry.  But mostly because it means that not only do I have to do an avalanche of work, I have to argue with her all day about whether or not she will let me do it without being a whiny brat because she wants me to do nothing but pay attention to her. Ugh.

I swear to G-d I do things with her.  I play games.  I teach her gardening stuff.  We play on the swing.  I read to them.  I bake with her.  Et cetera.  Nothing is enough so I need to just say that I’ve had enough.  My needs matter too.  And she needs to deal with that disappointment because life is going to hold a whole lot more disappointments in it.

I think that is what the current rash of articles on over attentive parenting is saying.  I feel like I am trying (and failing) to meet all of her needs because my needs were so extensively ignored and unmet.  But there is a happy medium.  My family didn’t know how to meet my basic needs and Shanna is not in that position.  Shanna never has to wonder if she will have a place to live, food to eat (that is palatable), if she will see her mother or father or sister, or if she will get several hours of positive attention every day, or if she will be abused.  Shanna is safe.  Shanna really and truly is getting the basics that I didn’t have.

It impacts the whole rest of your life to not have those things as a child.  That is why I still identify as white trash even though I feel guilty given the extensive privilege I enjoy now.  I still feel like I’m not sure I will have a place to live or palatable food (this is a serious issue at this point in my life).  Noah went to great lengths to create a family trust and he put all of his separate property I was previously not entitled to, all the inheritance stuff, into community property.  No really, all stay at home moms are not created equal.  I am not taking the risk that other people take.  He truly can’t screw me, no matter what.  I will never be destitute again.  But I still go through periods where I am afraid to do things in the house because I think I will get in trouble.  I angst and dither over doing things because I fear that everyone will be mad at me and make me go.  This is not rational.  This is in my bone marrow.  This is why I feel like white trash.  I feel like a dirty little imposteur and at any moment I will be made to go away from decent people.  I’ve been told I wasn’t welcome before.

I was asked to leave the Seventh Day Adventist church when I was a kid.  As an adult I would say that a small minded bully with no actual authority told me that she didn’t like me… but that’s not how it felt at 12.  I was pushing to do a lock-in with the youth group.  I had been to one at my friend Yvette’s church and I really wanted to do it again.  A woman in an authority like position in the group took me aside and told me how offensive and inappropriate that was.  It was disgustingly sexual and then she told me that I would feel more comfortable in a place that was less Godly.

So I went and fucked Sean.  That’s pretty much the timeline on that.  Super Bowl Sunday was a few weeks after that.  I went and visited family friends who were not making great life choices.  Lots of drugs.  Lots of risky behavior.  My family thought it was great for me to go stay with them!  They were also hosting a different family friend for the weekend.  He also happened to be their drug dealer.  On Superbowl Sunday I told him that I wanted him to do something to me.  He asked what.  I said I was too shy to say the word.  He asked me what letter it started with.  I said “F”.  He started saying the predictable ones: fondle, feel, finger… then he got to fuck.  I said yes.

He turned all the lights off.  He did basically no foreplay.  He didn’t use a condom.  I lay there and physically did all the things I “knew” I was supposed to do.  All the things I had learned from years and years of reading porn romance novels, and stealing my uncle’s pornography.  But I cried while I did it.  I kind of thought that was just how it was supposed to go.

Apparently I unsuppressed some memories.  I don’t want to be dead inside.  I don’t want to feel like I am buried under the weight of all of the bad things.  If I suppress them I say that they are unimportant.  Not worth looking at.  But it is important that these things happened to me.  Maybe it is only important given the whole scope of my life, but that’s ok.  Maybe it wouldn’t be the end of the world story for someone else to say that the cried through losing their virginity.  It’s kind of a different story for me.  I was told over and over from when I was a baby that my only value was in having sex.  At 12 I felt like my attempts to be good and I really and truly was trying, resulted in being kicked out and told that God didn’t love me.  So I turned around and fucked a 25 year old drug dealer–without a condom.  That’s why mental health professionals think I should be dead.  If I started off making choices like this when I was 12?  12!  Oh my fucking god.  I always thought I was so adult.  That I was so mature.  Everyone agreed that I was precocious, advanced, remarkably adult… No.  I was heinously abused.  It’s different.

When I kick myself over and over for sending my daughter to her room because screaming when you dislike something is not an option… I feel like I am crushing her spirit.  I feel like I am abusing her.  I feel like I am not just on a slippery slope, but rather everything I do is inherently abusive because I am an abuser.  No matter what you do as a parent you can find someone to flog you and tell you that you are ruining your children.  I insist that she not yell at me, not use a volume that causes me physical pain, and that she not hit or kick anyone.  Ok, let’s tack on pestering.  I really don’t allow pestering.  Pestering is given warnings.  If you cross these lines, that means you need some time to see if you like being alone more than you like being polite to me.  No no no no.  I AM NOT ABUSIVE BECAUSE I HAVE BOUNDARIES.  I’m not.  I’m not.  I’m not.  I feel like me asserting myself is bad.  Like I don’t deserve to do it.  Like when I inconvenience the people around me for my own comfort, “Shanna you don’t get to play the screeching game inside” I am doing something terrible.  If I have to physically carry Shanna outside or to her room because she has decided to grab onto furniture and get louder?  Well… I still don’t think I have crossed the line of abusive at that point either.  I’m not going to be chased from room to room in my house by a screaming child.  Just no.

Let me break to say that I don’t think she is being malicious.  She’s enjoying the feeling and trying to get a rise out of me.  I still don’t have to like it or tolerate it.  But I worry about my reactions when we are out.  Like on the train when she wants to get to me the easiest way is to start getting loud.  She knows that it is a huge hot button.  So I picked her up and carried her to the vestibule area.  So far still ok.  But then she wouldn’t stop screaming and I wouldn’t stop yelling either. So I made her stand in the corner.  Which she didn’t want to do and she fought me.  Thankfully Noah interceded because it wouldn’t have been pleasant for either of us if he hadn’t.  I got my back up over something stupid.  That was not the hill to die on because I had no method of enforcement that was appropriate and safe for all concerned.  So I was going to lose no matter what.  But the real problem was that we hadn’t given her proper breakfast and she was hungry.  And that’s all our fault.  And the real solution was to be more patient with her when we had inappropriately taxed her physically.  But instead I hissed unpleasantly at her “You are in public and you need to be quiet.  No.  You don’t get to make the people around you miserable.  That’s not ok.”  Over and over. That’s not an acceptable reaction.  That reaction is coming from my own intense fears about being looked at.  That is me being told that I was never allowed to talk about the abuse or unpleasant things in a way that would make people look at me.  I’m passing on that abused feeling.

I think that “abuse” makes you feel smaller, weaker, and less than.  Abuse is being told in some way that you are a less than person.  I feel like I don’t deserve to take up space in the world.  That’s a lot of my suicidal feelings.  I feel like I am a toxic force.  Like I am a toxic waste dump that should be eradicated for the good of the herd.  That’s how I feel about myself.  No, I don’t have the expectation that I will be “nice” when I meet new people.  I expect that I will feel awkward and uncomfortable and I will act out in some way because I am just that kind of stupid fucked up loser and I always make bad first impressions because I am just bad bad bad bad.

I don’t know that I’m going to have a good day.  Who knows.  Maybe I will purge my bile on the internet and then go on with my day.  It could happen.  I’m hoping that purging my bile works.  Noah is home and my no-t-twin is having a house warming.  Maybe we could have a good day and go after nap time.  That would be really nice.  I can do two things at once when I am out in public.  I can watch one child and interact with an adult or I can watch two children.  That means that socializing in public is hard.  But life is hard and this is really a first world problem.  Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean you stop doing it.

I’m watching the sky.  I’m torn between disappointment and elation.  Lately the mornings have been feeling like a beach summer.  It’s slightly humid but very chilly.  It’s uncomfortable to move around the house in summer clothes.  But it’s summer, damnit!  And I keep wearing my summer clothes with layers because I am so eager to strip down to as little as possible.  I miss warmth.  I want it on my skin and I almost never feel this way.  It’s really bothering me this year in a way it never has before.  So the thing is, I want it to be warm in the morning so that I feel comfortable moving around and doing my work and then I can have the afternoon sloth to lie on the couch or play with the kids.  I do most of my big chore jobs in the mornings because the children have more patience and I’m tired of having freezing cold toes.  It’s freaking July.  What the heck.  Right now it is 57 degrees.  That’s pitiful!  (I’m working on the distracting part of suppressing.  The kids will wake up soon.)

I spend a lot of time thinking about why I feel the need to process what I went through the way I do.  It’s not exactly the most pleasant thing to do.  At this stage of my life I feel like I am not in a position to take up a spiritual leader because I would need an intense cult… and yeah.  Like that’s a good solution.  I don’t want a religion to give meaning to my life.  I am not a glory to anyone else.  I can’t come up with any way in the whole fucking world to talk any kind of good about a spiritual practice that does not tell me to pick up a big stick any time someone from my family comes near me.  No, I don’t need to turn the other cheek.  And I’m not in a place where there is enough value there for me to deal with my current issues with organized religion.  Really.  In the cost benefit analysis, I lose.  Just no.

But there has to be some fucking meaning in this story.  Something.  Some reason I did this and survived.  I have to find something worth knowing in the mess.  I have to find a way to believe that being me and existing is a right and good thing.  That I am the right kind of me.  Because being a mother is not going to cut it forever.  I have to be alive and living in my body for me.  And I don’t know a way to be me other than to tell my stories.

The part of me that I like the most is the part of me that looks at my behaviors that I dislike and I try to figure out why I do them so that I can either figure out how to stop doing them –and for real stop doing them, with accountability–or change my opinion of doing the behavior.  In some way it is kind of awful.  I’m developing situational ethics.  But I am trying to reframe it as, “I want to do this, but it is at priority level 9 and right now 3 conflicts with it.  Ok.  Well… shit.”  Because then I have reason to examine my options more carefully on how I am doing 3.  Sometimes I am going to feel like a terrible person and feel a lot of guilt because… 9 is still a priority and I’m failing.  I’m bad.  I’m terrible.  I deserve all manner of evil and badness rained on my head.  That my friends, that is the crunchy guilt for me.  If I do something in a less-than-crunchy way… say only use a plastic bag once and then throw it away.  I have horrible anxiety and terrible self thoughts.  If I only cared more… Ugh.  There isn’t enough time in the day for me to handle my mental health shit and my crunchy guilt.  Ha.

Talking about these things in the ways that I do is part of being me.  I need to stop feeling like I should be silent in public; it’s not like I ever really followed that rule anyway.  Rather I need to stop feeling guilty for taking up space.  Other people are just going to have to deal with their own feelings of shame when I talk about their actions.  That’s not my responsibility.  If you feel ashamed of the things you did to me when I was a child it is right and just.  I get to be that judge and jury.  I’m the only one who experienced it.  There will be people who agree with me and there will be people who disagree with me. That’s life.  And in order to be me and find my own reason for living, I have to learn how to live with that.  I have to stop feeling terrified of the fact that people will disagree with me and dislike me.  I hide at home because I am white trash.  Because I am dirty.  Because I am low class in public.  I explode and yell.  I never can make my children look clean and put together.  I can’t look clean and put together without professional help.  The less said about my husband the better.  *ahem*  (I’m kidding!  I like my husband!  It’s just kind of rare for him to shave.)  We all fit in well together.  We are all similarly messy looking.

That was anxiety producing for me in the UK.  The only time I saw a family that kind of resembled my mental picture of mine in terms of being messily put together they were… very attention grabbing in obviously low class ways.  I had to stop and breathe for a moment as I realized that I shush my children in public and try to talk very quietly when I’m out because I don’t want to be that any more.  I experience so much shame when I feel like people are looking at me the way I look at that woman.  That was my experience of growing up.  My sister was the loud “mother figure” bossing everyone around in this over the top domineering voice so that she could “sound like the boss”.  She’s got a complex.  Oh wait!  She is probably acting like my dad.  I was never really around him so I actually don’t know.  I don’t know what my dad sounded or acted like around people.  I don’t think I saw it more than a few times.  I can’t remember living with him.  So yeah.

My journey is really about finding balance between sharing the stories and working on my behavior while still having control when I need to have control.  Which is pretty much all the time right now.  Rats.

Not sleeping

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I realized tonight that part of the problem is, I’m still grieving and freaking out. And I don’t get *any* time to sit and process during the day.  So as soon as the kids are safely in bed all of the thoughts come out.  I spent a lot of time in the hotel in London in the middle of the night trying not to be very aware that we were 8 stories up and our window was definitely big enough for me to go through.  I’m really glad the window in this hotel isn’t big enough.

I’m not doing well and I don’t know what to do about it.  Pretty much the only reason I am typing instead of jumping is because I can’t do it to my kids.  But I’m running very low on reserves of desire to live right now.

A few hours later and a whole lot of crying.  I looked into it and I think we will be leaving France tomorrow.  It’s not going to be a financial hardship, really it’s about the same price as staying the whole time.  I’m done.  I can do something about feeling shitty in France.  I’m going to.  I don’t have to be a victim.  I’m not trapped.

It’s a process

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I keep getting stuck on “I was raped””I was raped””I was raped””I was raped”.  Ok.  So what?  What does that mean?  Why is that the sticking point?  What is rape?  Why do I get to make rape jokes and no one else does?  Because every time a different survivor starts making the (really good) case for why rape jokes are never ok… I get my hackles up.  Hmm.  That’s interesting.  There is a lot of competition between my family members.  There is one victim at a time.  No one else is allowed to have needs while that one person is being the victim.  I would be lying if I said I never had my turn.  My family acknowledged, sometimes, that something happened to me.  Sorta.  Really what they acted like is that it was a shame I was such a precocious whore, but they’ll try not to hold it against me.

My body.  This frail shell that houses a tremendous spirit was violated.  Things were put in me.  Fingers.  Penises.  Tongues.  I was not allowed to have the sacred space of my own person.  My body was made to hurt.  I was taught to hate my body and use my body.  I struggle with dealing with my body.  I don’t mean, “Man, I think I’m ugly.”  I mean, my back and neck hurt very badly right now.  I just finished a massage.  He did help, but I still hurt quite a bit.  I have bruises all over.  I don’t know how or when I got them.  I don’t shower regularly.  When I am in a young place I have to be careful what clothes I wear because if something is even slightly uncomfortable it will send me into a rage.  Because something has happened to cause me pain again.  Kind of weird from a masochist.  I have food issues.  When I am young like this I eat about as much as Shanna.  And society thinks that is great.  I’m not sure.  I need to figure out the doctor situation.  I am so very uncomfortable working with anyone in that kind of authority.  They scare the ever-loving-shit out of me.  And I feel like a complete nutcase saying that.  I used to scoff at people who admitted they felt that way about doctors.  I didn’t feel that way.  But I also have never been able to see a doctor in a consistent, healthy way.  Hell, even my beloved midwife isn’t so happy with me these days.  I soured the end of that relationship, with help.  It feels like my body is more of a deficit than an asset in life.  It’s too much work and only brings me pain.

But I was taught to suck dick while my father held a gun to my head.  I had tears running down my face and snot dripping and mixing in with the semen and saliva.  I was nine.  Is it any wonder I like violent sex?  Is it any wonder that I want my lovers to hurt me in ways I frankly hate to prove that they love me?  I’m not even sure I am a masochist exactly.  It hurts and it is horrible and I want it to stop.  But I want to date people who want to do that to me.  I want to find people who literally get off on watching me suck their cock while I sob and cry and snot mixes in with the semen and saliva.  That’s pretty broken.  [Disclaimer!  Not all people who are into bdsm had horrific childhoods!  Do not use my case as an example of how no one who does this can be healthy!]  *ahem*

Do you know what is really awesome about dating men who get off on treating me that way?  When they don’t do it… they are making a special effort for me.  They are showing me that even though they are absolutely monstrous they care about me more than they care about getting off.  It’s pretty odd.  Because, if you do it right, bdsm involves a lot of communication.  I was shown porn, raped, molested, given graphic historic romance novels to read full of really kinky shit.  I was allowed to read those books when I was eight.  I was absolutely being primed to be ruled by my sex life.

That’s why my sister is a whore and my mom is celibate.  Those were presented as my options.  Which would you choose?  I have a high sex drive.  Pre-kids my sex life was shaped primarily about dealing with the demons in my head even though I usually didn’t tell my partners that.  That’s where Noah comes in.  I don’t know how to describe my experience of Noah.  I’m not even sure if I should try.  If I do it badly he looks like shit.  We are intense people.  But he isn’t shit.  He is wonderful.  And he loves me so much.

My husband married a tremendous pervert.  Now I kind of want to take it all back.  But that’s not how it works.  I don’t know what to do.  I don’t like being touched much.  Having someone touch me is scary.  I try to have sex even though it is hard.  We have to stop a lot.  We are definitely only having fluffy gentle bunny sex right now.  That’s not something I have much experience with.  Sometimes having gentle sex makes me cry.  Because I realize that is probably how most people learned about their bodies.  Other people mostly discovered sex as something kind of weird and awkward but fun.  I think.  I’m guessing.  I don’t know.  Mine was pain.  Because once I got past the point of being raped and I asked to have sex I was too young.  It hurt so much.  But that is what I was brought up to do.  So I did it.

Today is a hard day.  Today I have no defenses.  Today I feel sad and scared and like any minute now someone is going to turn around and hurt me.  Want to know how today has really gone?  I woke up at a normal time and did some writing.  Then everyone else woke up.  Noah decided that he just didn’t feel like cooking so we went to our local breakfast place.  Shanna was a bit moody and particular about things, but not that bad.  And when I made my boundaries clear she figured out how she could deal with her part of it.  (Yes, you can be sad about something.  No you may not scream in the van or in the restaurant because you are sad.  That hurts.)  We did ok with breakfast.  I was overly touchy and edgy but I didn’t blow up.  I didn’t let it escalate.  I said I couldn’t continue a chain of conversation instead of yelling or being nasty.  At home I had a massage and ate lunch.  There has been various talking to people in there.  But I had to tell Noah and Taylor that I was feeling young and I needed them to be careful with their tone of voice.  I had to say that.

Because I was raped.  I remember.  When I was very very young, must have been four or five, my father would pick me up and swing me through the air and I loved it and then he would lower me to his lap.  If I had pants on it was a little bit of rubbing and it felt good and I didn’t say anything.  If I had a dress on, which was basically all the time.  My mother describes me as refusing to wear pants.  She says, “Oh you were such a girl.  You wouldn’t wear pants at all.”  And when I wore a dress my father would support me on his leg with his hands on my hips.  I remember the feel of his knuckle shoving deep into my thigh as he tried to get the right angle.  It hurt and I would bite my lip.  If I cried out with the pain he would flick me in the head and tell me to stop whining.  Then he would go back to holding my hips.  Sometimes he would stay external and play with my clitoris.  I hope I don’t need to explain the basic human physiology of why that feels good.  That is where I learned about sex.  And I feel so very dirty.  Because I liked it.  Because I still like sex.

I think I like kinky sex because as long as someone is hurting me at the same time it’s ok for me to like it.  I have to have that trade or I don’t deserve it.

What is rape, anyway?  Is it just penis in vagina intercourse?  Do fingers count?  I say they do.  I say that when you are four and your father puts his finger inside your vagina and makes it hurt deep inside you and then punishes you for reacting to the pain you are raped.  And sometimes my body remembers.  Something I’m really glad about is since Calli was born sex doesn’t hurt as much any more.  I no longer get the tiny little tears all through my vagina during sex.  You see, when your father starts raping you that young you develop a lot of scar tissue.  A gynecologist who specialized in dysfunction once used a clear speculum and a flash light to show me the spider web of scar tissue all the way deep into my vagina.  That’s not normal.  Those little scars become little dotted lines that break over and over and over again.  But if you do deep enough massage you can break up scar tissue.  It’s possible that having kids healed that pain.

Before children I had physical discomfort with basically every sex act to a greater or lesser extent.  But I didn’t cry during sex.  I felt ok with myself because I dissociated away from that pain and I didn’t notice much.  It’s different now.  I’m trying so hard to not dissociate and sometimes it doesn’t feel worth it.  I’m tired of trying to force myself into a body that hurts this much.  But I have to because that is the only way to deal with this shit.  I thought that being a grown up was supposed to make this easier?

Sexual abuse

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Right now my extended family is closing ranks against me.  I am the problem.  Right.  I shouldn’t have said anything because I have hurt people who didn’t need to be hurt.  Wow.  Because it’s totally my fault that I was raped as a kid.  But they think it is my fault.  And I can explain!

I have been a sexual aggressor since I was a small child.  I was taught to give blow jobs and to be obsessed with sex.  When I say that my mother and my sister participated in my sexual abuse, sometimes my violent sexual abuse I don’t think people are picturing the right thing.  English is kind of useless that way.  I am not claiming that my mother or my sister ever touched my cunt.  There.  That’s been said.  But when my mother violates court orders to send me to my father over and over, and when she ignored frantic phone calls to pick me up… she is just as much to blame as my father.  She chose over and over to leave me in situations that were very dangerous.  She refused to accept parental responsibility.

Most of the people who know me now probably think of me as being sexually adventurous in an at least mostly healthy way.  Some people have their doubts, but I think that overall people think I’m not still acting out constantly.  Seeing as I’ve mostly been vanilla and monogamous except for a few very brief, very safe forays for almost five years means that I feel like I am probably past the dangerous choices.

I don’t even know how to tell this story.  I want to show what it was like to grow up being brain washed that I was supposed to have sex any time any one else wanted.  I wasn’t supposed to consider my needs.  But part of it overlaps with Tom and I feel kind of bad combining those stories.  Ok Krissy, just start.

From when I was an infant I was constantly exposed to people having sex.  I have independent verification that I was shown a lot of porn and many adults flagrantly had sex in front of me as a toddler.  After the intense conversations with my brother I think that my father was already touching me, but it was the least of my problems.  I remember my father touching me from my earliest memories.  He wasn’t extreme early on, but he liked to uhm, make sure things were developing ok.  This would be why I can barely handle wiping my daughters when they have a poopy diaper.  When they pee mostly I change without looking or touching because I don’t know what an appropriate level of touching is.  I’m afraid to keep tabs on what is happening with their labia.

Anyway.  I grew up in an atmosphere that breathed sex.  Adults (who were on drugs) would have sex on the couch while watching porn.  While the kids played in the living room.  That is what my baby/toddler experience was like.  Why did I start giving blow jobs at 3?  Because 3 year olds mimic what they are shown and I was constantly shown that girls are supposed to go down on boys.  It was talked about in front of me like, Oh of course!  That is what you do.  And when I said things that were considered less than acceptable, like if I said I didn’t want to… I was hit or sent to my room.  My mom isn’t going to remember it that way.  Because my mom was the adult and my mom exerted no control.  My mom refused to set the boundaries.  She numbed her pain (because there is no fucking way she thought this was ok) and checked out mentally so that she wouldn’t have to be responsible for anything.

I’m not real interested in granting her that grace.  My mother has spent her whole life trying to evade responsibility.  And so I tried desperately to pick up responsibility as a child.  My mother would do the same shit I am doing.  She would get locked in her memories and start blurting out inappropriate things.  My mom would tell me intense scary stories about my father raping her.  My mother told me from when I was very little that I was the product of rape and if she hadn’t been Catholic she would have aborted me.  That wasn’t a common thing.  She didn’t say that a lot.  And to be honest she usually had to be pushed to say it.  When I was fishing around to figure out what the fuck happened in my parents marriage, because nothing was talked about in a straight forward way, she would drop in little bits about how horrifying things were.  And he is a monster.  And he did all these terrible things to her.  Then she would cry.

Then I had to be the adult and comfort her.  I listened to her stories.  They became my stories.  When my Aunt Vonnie tried to outlaw Sweet Valley High books for being too graphic my mother turned around and let me read graphic historical romance novels that talked explicitly about pony play, sodomy, rape, harems, incest…  My mom thought those were perfectly appropriate reading for me at 7/8.  And she didn’t talk to me about what I read.  She just had the books all over the house and she ignored me reading them.

That wasn’t ok.  That was my mother abdicating responsibility for me.  I was a child.  I should not have been reading pornography.  My children will not be allowed to read books that are primarily pornography before they hit puberty.  I just don’t fucking think so.  But she feels like she did nothing wrong.  I was a reader and that was all we had in the house.  It wasn’t her fault.

My sister brought men to our house.  Basically all of those men propositioned me in some way.  Many of them explicitly.  My sister would say it is my fault!  Because when those men came over and my sister had sex with them with the bedroom door open… I watched.  My sister talked to my about anal sex when I was really little.  She would talk about how awesome it was when he was fucking you really slow and gentle and he pulls all the way out and pushes back quickly and oops it switches holes and it hurts but it feels so good that you don’t mind that he’s hurting you.  That conversation happened in the downstairs bathroom of my Aunt’s current house.  My sister lived in that apartment when I was in the 11-15 range.  That was a sick thing for her to tell me.  I mean, it’s true.  But she should not have told me that when I was a child.  She gave me extensive stories about her sex life and the drugs she took.  My sister was thrilled that her tubes were tied because she had no interest in using birth control.

This was the environment I grew up in.  I acted out.  In kindergarden I took a little boy behind the book cart and I gave him a blow job.  When I came back to that school in sixth grade I found out that little boy told people I raped him.  I called his mother and told her that he was a disgusting liar.  I am a sexual predator too.  I was raised to be.  I was taught to push everyone near me’s sexual limits.  I was the aggressor with my high school boyfriends, most of whom were virgins when I met them.  Pretty much all of them quickly backed away from me because I was too intense and scary.  I wasn’t having sex because exploring sex was fun and exciting and new.  I was having sex because otherwise I was invisible and I felt like no one in the world loved me.

Which is to say, an awful lot of my youthful encounters can be read as sexual assault.  Either me doing it to other people or them assaulting me and me not saying no.  I feel sad and scared.  For my first 20 year I acted out the programming my family gave me because I didn’t have much choice.  How much responsibility should I hold for what I did?  Well, I tracked down the guy I went down on in kindergarden.  I told him that what I did to him was wrong and I was a very messed up kid and I desperately hope he has found someone to talk to about it.  I am so sorry I hurt him when I was flailing around from being hurt.

I am a monster too.  And I have to live with that.  Apparently my brother’s wife has been begging to adopt a daughter for years but he doesn’t want to have a girl in his house.  His plan is to wait a few generations and then the taint will be gone.  But it doesn’t work that way.  I have to look at myself in the mirror every day.  I did these things.  This legacy is not over by me not molesting my kids.  It’s deeper than that.  I have to learn where I end and other people begin.  I have to learn how to hold the right boundaries for my kids.  The right answer isn’t locking them in their rooms till they are 18 so they are safe.  The right answer isn’t even sheltering them completely so they are safe.  The right answer is asking questions and not volunteering information that is too adult and inappropriate.  The right answer is exposing them to many many kinds of people and talking to them about what they see so they learn how to evaluate people.  My daughter’s will not know how to spot a sexual predator when they see one.

But I do.  And I need to teach them how to be safe without teaching them to be afraid or teaching them to go looking for danger.  That’s hard and scary.  That is the last hurdle preventing me from emailing my friends and saying not to come today or tomorrow because the crisis is over.  I do not yet feel like I have control over my mouth.  I had more than one day where I was terrified I would hit my kids.  Right after seeing my mother and my sister and having them do the “We are such a great family” act I freaked out and wanted to come home and beat the shit out of my children.  That is why I freaked out so badly this time and went to such a deep, horrifying place.  My family is that toxic to me. So the pain of staying broken, of keeping contact with my family became much much harder than blowing everything sky high and saying, “Ok mother fucker!  You want to start cycles with me!  All right!  Let’s talk about some cycles!”  I am not going to step blindly into what they are doing any more because I am able to step out.

But right this minute that used all of my reserves and I don’t know how to maintain boundaries with my babies.  Because my boundaries with my babies are different than my boundaries with my family.  And never the twain shall meet.  With my family I have to be loud, aggressive, angry, and borderline abusive in order to prevent them from hurting me.  I’m sure people will think I should find a better way.  But I survived being raped, beaten, molested, and thrown into houses alone with sexual predators.  I needed every ounce of righteous fury in the world to know that what they did to me was wrong and I should not have gone through it.  My family would love it if I killed myself so they could point to me as a victim of my father’s abuse and canonize how I went down in the struggle but look!  They are so much better off than me.  Fuck them.

Instead I will take a couple more days to blurt things out inappropriately.  Then I will get around to scrubbing my bath tub (it’s pretty gross) and I will take a long bath.  And I will recite my memories to myself because I don’t want to forget them.  As weird as that sounds to everyone else, they are part of me too.  If I try to forget them or act like they aren’t important I am negating most of what shaped me.  I am not a strong vibrant person in spite of what happened to me.  I am a strong vibrant person because I went through just about the most horror a white person in America can go through as a child.  And my response was to say, “Fuck all of you.  I’m going to go do better.”  And my family is rotting on a mountain top.

And I am free.  Now I just need to stop talking about my hurt in front of my kids.  And I will.  But not today.  That sounds like I am talking about my stuff in front of my kids now!  Oh man.  That’s the wrong impression.  I sort of am.  I come out and I talk to my friends about things in chunks.  But my friends are watching me and listening and I am watching me and listening.  When I start to get intense I just walk away.  Because that is what I can do when memories are hitting me this strong.  Suppressing them really isn’t a good idea at this stage.  It’s rare for me to have this much.  But I’ve had a bad week, you know?  And this week will end.  And next week is Shanna’s birthday week.

I can’t be broken on Shanna’s birthday week.  That would be placing my needs above hers and I’m not going to be like my mother.  My children deserve better than that.

I hate Texas

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I hate Texas.  I hate Texas with a burning, flaming passion.  Someday I should get over hating Texas; it is stupid to hate a whole state for what happened to me.  Bad things can happen anywhere, but for some reason a lot of horrible things happened in the six months I happened to be in Texas.

I was seven and my mom and I shared a trailer with my sister and her husband.  My mom spent most of her time on the phone with my dad trying to talk him into allowing my brothers to come join her in Texas.  My parents have always played against one another to get custody of my brothers.  Neither of them seemed to ever care where I was though.  The boys were the significant ones.  Even if my mom had managed to get my brothers that time, where would they have slept, on the living room floor?  We didn’t even have a couch; mom and I shared a bed.  I hated my life and I hated just about everyone in it.   

     The son of the trailer park manager was named Michael.  I had an enormous crush on him.  He was cute, in that skuzzy “The Outsiders” sort of way.  I was angry at the world and rebellious boys appealed to me.  He was mean to me; I think I wanted him to pay attention to me so much because he treated me so badly and everyone in my family that I wanted attention from treated me badly.  I wanted to make him like me; make him want to be nice to me.  Maybe if I could get some kid to like me I would be able to make my mother like me and be satisfied with having me and not want the boys so much.  I would go over to Michael’s house and spend the afternoon waiting on him and whatever buddy was with him.  I was willing to do just about anything for attention.

 One day he and his cousin were playing video games and they started talking about sex.  Michael was 11 and I’m pretty sure he was exaggerating his experience.  His cousin was 14 and probably did already have some experience.  The cousin turned and looked at me, he asked Michael if I was a decent lay.  Michael said he didn’t know.  The cousin asked if I at least gave good head.  Michael said he didn’t know.  The cousin started mocking Michael at this point.  He told Michael that the only reason to let me stick around was if I was any good.  I knew what they were talking about and I was scared.  I was afraid to leave though.  This was probably the most attention Michael had ever really paid to me.  Most of the time he just ordered me to get something for him as I sat quietly in the corner.  In some sick way it was almost nice having him know I was in the room.  The cousin called me over and told me to kneel in front of him.  He pulled his dick out and told me to suck on it.  He didn’t even stop playing the video game.  I felt dirty and humiliated and I started crying, but I did it.

     I cried the whole time and I felt disgusting.  I thought I would throw up when he came in my mouth.  The cousin told Michael that now I was ready to be fucked.  So Michael put the game on pause and pulled me over to the bed.  He pulled my dress up and took my underwear off.  He didn’t touch me anymore than he had to.  Before he penetrated me I started begging him to not do it.  I was still crying and I started crying harder.  He told me to stop crying because I looked like a disgusting snot-nosed kid and I should be grateful he was going to do me; I just kept crying and begging him not to.  The first thrust hurt so bad I screamed.  He reached over and grabbed a handful of the sheet and shoved it in my mouth.  His mom walked in at about this time.  She looked at what we were doing, shook her head, and walked out.  I couldn’t breathe because I was choking on the sheet and crying so hard I couldn’t catch my breath.  When he was done I rolled off the bed and stumbled out the door.  I cried as I walked home and the whole lower part of my body hurt so bad I thought it would never stop hurting again.

     Michael and his cousin followed me home on their bikes.  They rode in circles around me taunting me.  They said I wasn’t a very good lay so they weren’t going to let me hang out with them anymore.  I didn’t know how to respond; I was so angry.  Finally I screamed, “Fuck you!  You fucking assholes!” and I ran the last way into my home.  My mother had been standing at the window and saw me scream at them.  She got really angry.  She yelled at me for swearing.  She picked up a flip-flop from the floor and started hitting me with it.  She yelled that she was not going to put up with that kind of language from me.  If I ever did it again I would get it even worse.  Her hitting me hurt, but not nearly as bad as the rape had hurt.  How could I tell her what had just happened though?  Was I supposed to tell her to please not beat me for swearing minutes after I had been raped?  Should I have told her that it was ok for me to cuss out those boys because they had just violated me?  I couldn’t say anything.  I lay there and took the beating.  She wouldn’t have understood, maybe she wouldn’t even have believed me.  I didn’t have the words yet to properly explain what had happened to me.

I felt like I was on complete meltdown for days afterwards.  I didn’t want to move around or do anything.  Between the beating and the rape my entire body hurt and ached.  My sister got angry with me and yelled at me for being so lazy.  I didn’t want to go to school because I would have to see Michael on the bus.  He told people that I asked him to fuck me.  He was patted on the back and told what a stud he was.  I was told that I was a complete whore and girls like me go to hell.  I didn’t know what to say.  How could I defend myself?  He was popular and I didn’t have any real friends. 

Not long after I started to recover from the rape I had a horrible dream.  I saw my brother in California get hit by a car in my dream.  I saw him go to the hospital.  I saw him lying in a bed for a long time with my mother sitting next to him in a chair reading.  I saw him in a wheel chair.  I saw him using a walker.  I heard him talking in this strange voice.  He sounded different than he ever had before.  His speech was slow and garbled and I could barely understand him.  People who are really drunk sometimes sound a little bit like he did—the really slow and careful speech.  When I woke up I felt really scared.  I told my mom about the dream.  She called my dad’s house and no one answered the phone.  For the next few days she couldn’t get a hold of anyone in California.  She finally managed to talk to my dad’s girlfriend and she found out that there had been an accident.  My brother was in a coma.  Things started happening very fast.  My mom got on a plane to go back to California.  She left me with my sister and her husband. 

My sister tried to explain to me what happened to my brother.  She said that everyone’s brain is like a tape recorder.  It records all the thoughts you have, all the experiences you have, and all the abilities you have and when you need these things your brain plays them back to you.  Our brother’s brain was erased.  He won’t remember things and he won’t be able to do anything—not even eat or go to the bathroom by himself.  I was really scared.  She said that it is like he is a baby again and has to start over doing everything from the very beginning.  Now I have a big brother who is like a little brother.  I didn’t want a little brother though; he was bad enough when he was older than me. 

The first step.

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I feel like I spend most of my life lately saying, “It’s complicated” because no matter what subject I am looking at there are many different things that could be combined/fixed/told.  And I don’t know how to begin.  Luckily I have the internet, and friends who are awake.  My friend Peter pointed me towards the class where I met him.  There is material there.  And he’s right.

My first semester of graduate school was in 2003, before I met Noah, right after Tom ended our M/s relationship.  Before Tom and I were poly I started grad school.  Naw, that’s not even true.  That’s when I applied to grad school.  I started spring semester so I started grad school in January of 2004.  I met Noah in late February.  So this story is going on concurrently to me starting to tell the story of my abuse out loud in the context of my relationship with Noah.

I went to a fiction writing class.  Honestly I picked it based on when I wanted to be on campus.  Always the best selection criterion, I tell you.  I did write some fiction for the class but all of the fiction I chose to wrote was borderline pornographic (or very explicitly pornographic depending on which story) or I wrote creative non-fiction.  I didn’t tell the class that I was writing about my own childhood abuse.  I did not explain that the horrific, gut clenching story about a 7 year old being raped was my story.  I kept distance there.  Most people in the class responded just fine and they gave me very valid feedback on my writing.

But there was this one woman.  Liz?  I think her name was Liz.  She didn’t like me much.  She didn’t like my stories.  She didn’t like my attitude.  She was one of those out and proud lesbians who acts like all heterosexual sex is rape.  I doubt she would have actually said that, but that’s pretty much the place she was in.  Now, like 7 years later, I can see why she was the way she was.  Then she just felt mean.  She picked on me when I shared my stories.

What do I mean by that?  I mean that when I was visibly upset when people were workshopping the story about my rape she was very hostile.  She specifically said, “This story is ridiculous because this kind of thing doesn’t really happen to people.”  Now I kind of wonder if she was denying her own abuse.  Her response was really hard for me.  I brought stuff that was too intense to class and I felt like I got screamed at for it.  To be perfectly clear, the professor was awesome.  I’m quite sure he had strong suspicions about me because he gave me great writing feedback and he gingerly patted me on the shoulder and told me I would make it.  Men like him have been the rock I have built my life upon. Women rarely manage that kind of support properly.

But oh man.  I’m not over Liz.  How dare she tell me that my story was unrealistic?  That’s not fucking writing feedback.  We had a guy in class writing stories about people who were kidnapped by aliens!  She chose to tell ME that my story was unrealistic!  Ok.  Fuck her.  I feel like she is part of the great evil cabal that wants me to kill myself instead of speaking because she doesn’t want to hear about my pain.

But I’m in a lot of pain.  And that’s a hard thing to talk about.  How do you express your pain properly without hurting anyone else?  I mean, the problem with Sharon and Liz is that they feel I am overstepping their (or someone elses) boundaries and I don’t have the right to do that.  Thing is, I don’t have any clue whatsoever where boundaries are supposed to go.  I flail and I fuck up.  Sometimes they are really far away from me and no one can get close enough to have a conversation and sometimes they are in so close that I can’t defend myself when someone rapes me.  I do not know what healthy boundaries feel like to naturally have them for ones own body.  I don’t.  I pretend.  I try to make it up. My boundaries shift depending on time of day, how many people are around, how recently I have thought about my family, what I’m eating, how often I sleep…

And that’s not cool for the people around me.  That’s messy and abusive.  Because then I go off on people for correcting my grammar.  I saw that I know it is a little thing, but it felt abusive.  It felt over the top.  It felt like you were trying to publicly humiliate me and make me look small and stupid and you look big and powerful.  Thats not what was happening, but that’s how muddy my boundaries are. I can KNOW things and not feel them.

I hate being sober.  I can’t tell the stories.  See how I am dancing here?  But Sharon made a crack about the marijuana and how I should stop using it and go on psych meds.  Despite the many many many years of problems I had trying to get psych meds to work.  Despite the fact that the people who are in my house with me monitoring my behavior tell me adamantly that marijuana is the right decision right now in this crisis point because it is clearly helping me and it does not have the miserable side effects.  But someone in authority, someone I feel “knows more than me” told me that I should stop.  So I am not smoking this morning.  Even though I am going round and round in circles and winding myself up.

I don’t know how to get past the anxiety and look at the stories without it.  My brain is too effective at shutting down those avenues of thought.  When I try to sit here and think about being raped when I was 7 years old my stomach starts to hurt, my neck hurts.  I feel tense.  I am breathing fast and rapid.  If I were trying to speak out loud I would be doing it so fast and so quiet that people probably wouldn’t really be able to hear me.  I’m scared.  I’m small.  And I have no real voice.  Even if I could start rattling off the facts, I was 7 years old when a neighbor raped me.  There was a witness in the room and another witness (his mother) came in and saw what was happening and then walked out leaving it to continue.

Many many people saw my story.  People were there watching it while it happened.  People actually physically saw me being raped and didn’t stop it.

Why shouldn’t I be angry again?  Why in the hell is it surprising that I have rage issues?  Why in the hell should I learn to tell my story in a small, inoffensive way so that other people don’t have to be hurt by my story?  Why is that my responsibility?  I didn’t do anything.  All I am doing is telling the truth.  All I am doing is saying, “Hey I was a little kid and people hurt me” and people then react to me as if I am a monster.  They want me to shut up.  They want me to be little and silenced.  They want me to make my story palatable.

Well fuck you, none of this is palatable.  This is disgusting and horrible and I had to live through it.  How fucking dare people tell me that I don’t have a right to speak.  How dare people tell me that I have to make my story palatable.  I had no choice.  I was raped.  I was raped over and over during my formative years.  I was programmed to think that my value was in sex and I should be silent the whole rest of the time.

But I am not that person.  I am loud.  I am here.  I have a voice.  And I’m not going to stop using it.

In May of 1989 my brother Tommy was hit by a car.  My entire childhood is told in relationship to that event because that is the Big Obvious Date that I can remember.  I turned 8 in September of 1989. Tommy was in a coma for five months so he woke up in October.  When he was hit by a car we were living in Texas.  I dreamed about the accident and woke up and told Mommy that I saw Tommy get hit by a car.  She told me it was just a dream but couldn’t get a hold of my dad for three days to find out how Tommy was.  I have no idea how long this lasted, but my mom was there for a bit before rushing back to California to sit at Tommy’s bedside.  She left me with Denise (my sister) who was pregnant and her then husband Bobby.  I was raped after my mom found out about the accident but before she left.  So I am pretty sure I was 7.

This is how it works with all of my memories.  I have to stop and think of all the collaborating details or I am afraid I am making it up.  I have to be able to list off long, extensive lists of things that happened the same day to prove that I was alive and I had that day and I saw those things and other people believe me about all the other things (often these details are verifiable) so therefore they will believe me about the abuse.  But people don’t.  People tell me that I am lying or exaggerating.  That my stories cannot be real.  But they are.  My stories are real.  I am real.  This was my experience of the world.  It is bad and scary and hard.  But it happened.  Dirty things were done to me but I am not dirty.  I am not bad.

His name was Michael and I had quite the crush on him.  I followed him around.  I was desperate for any sign of love and affection.  I was willing to do anything he wanted me to do.  I don’t think I told that part in the story in class.  This event wasn’t the first time Michael and I had sexual contact, it was just the last.  One day when we were in Michael’s room and he and his cousin were playing video games in between saying degrading things to and about me.  I can’t tell the whole story right now.  Not right.  Not the real thing.  I can’t.  I want to but I don’t feel safe.  I feel like if I tell the whole story again someone will be nasty, and they might and I can’t control that.

I feel like it is my fault Michael raped me because I put myself in the dangerous situation.  I went after him.  I pursued him.  I am in the phase of recovery where I can’t tell the story from the point of view of a victim.  I am the monster.  Right this minute I want to tell the story as a bragging story.  I want to talk about how I am so into sex that I knew when I was a little girl that I wanted it.  That I picked a boy I wanted and I went after him.  I didn’t let any obstacle get in my way.  And I fucked him.

That’s all I want to say.  I want to sound tough and bad ass and brave.  I want to sound like I had choice.  I want to sound like I was active player.  I wasn’t a victim.  I wasn’t abused.  I wasn’t raped.  I was just ready for sex earlier than other girls.  Do you know how many times I have told that story?  More times than I can count.  That is how I survived.  That right there.

I have been raped so many times in my life I’m not sure I can count them any more.  The vast majority of the sex I had was only consensual in the sense that I got into a situation where a guy wanted sex and I didn’t believe I was allowed to say no.  I wanted to be touched.  I wanted physical contact and I knew no other way to get it.  When I was a toddler and I sat on my fathers lap he would put his hands under my panties and slip his fingers into my vagina.  That was love.  They showed me porn.  My mother started giving me tips on blow jobs when I was 11.  It was my fault, of course.  I brought it up.  I asked.  She didn’t initiate that conversation so she feels like she is innocent.

But my mother gave me advice on better blowjob techniques when I was 11.  That’s not ok.  She needed to hold that boundary.  That is how she continued the cycle.  That is why I do not trust her.  My mother does not know what kind of boundaries other people have either.  But she is in her 60’s and she still doing things that are that kind of inappropriate and if you call her on it she goes into this long explanation of why she isn’t responsible for her behavior.  Bullshit!

I am responsible for my behavior.  Me.  Not God.  Not my father.  Not my mother.  Not my sister.  Not my therapist.  Not my husband.  Not my children.  Me.  Me.  Me.  At the beginning of the day, at the middle of the day, at the end of the day… I am with me.  I always have been.  I always will be.  I am not looking to be any one else’s ideal of the right person.  I’m afraid that right now I am at the point where I have to stop relying on anyone else.  Maybe I can find the right therapist if I keep looking but it will really and truly have to be the RIGHT therapist.  Sharon isn’t it.  Sharon wants to make me into her image of the perfect post-abuse mother.  No.

Why do I want to recover these memories.  Why am I doing this to myself.  This is horrible and I am beating myself over the head with it.  I am very good at forgetting.  I was told I have to forget.  I was told to be quiet about what I do remember.  But instead I am completely structuring my life right now so that all I can do is look at these memories.  But I’m letting the memories control me.  I am letting personal time become all the time.  Why.  That’s a big thing to do.

I’m afraid that if I let myself have these memories fully, if I really examine them I will become the people who hurt me.  When the people around me react with horror I feel silenced.  I feel like I am driving myself insane.  I have to say these stories.  I have to tell them in all their tear filled agony and I cannot bear to see peoples reactions.  I think that officially makes me a writer.  Right now Noah is making breakfast and my babies are playing and singing with him.  I am not allowing my rage to destroy my family.  My family is beautiful and strong as I am beautiful and strong.  Most of the time I bear my burdens lightly.  I do not feel weighed down by the weight of incest.  I know the right road for me and I am on it.  I don’t want to change who I am.  I really like me.

I want to feel like it is ok to be me.  I want to feel like who and what I am is right.  I want to feel like it is ok that I am different from everyone else.  I want to feel like it is ok that I am special.  That sometimes I need to say, “Hey can people use gentle voices with me even when I try to escalate things” and have the people around me understand that saying that is humiliating and embarrassing and I feel like a disgusting person for saying it.  I need it to be ok that I talk about my past.  I need to get to a place where I know in my heart what the right amount of information to give my children is.  I do not want my children twisted by my legacy of shame.  I want my children to continue to grow in the absolute safety I have provided.  My children are a strange mix.

So here’s my thing.  My daughter is verbal.  Astoundingly verbal.  Exceptionally verbal.  Who knows what that will mean in terms of her overall achievement in life.  That’s not the point.  It’s not about competition and I don’t know how to talk about it without it sounding like I am being an asshole.  So I don’t speak about this problem.  This is a problem.  I am having a very hard time with how verbal Shanna is.  Shanna asks me questions and she mentions things in off-hand ways that sound like they might maybe be questions and I don’t feel like I know what the appropriate amount of information to give her is.

Shanna wants to know why I am sad.  Shanna is acting out being sad and I feel horrible about it.  So far I have told her that I am sad because bad things happened to me a long long time ago and I think about them sometimes and that’s hard for me.  I have described my anxiety as “I have a lot of work to do.  And you know how you feel when you are tired and really hungry?  I feel like that all the time when I am trying to do this much work.”  I have no idea if I am doing this right.  I honestly think that I am freaking out so much because I feel like I have to hurry up and get over feeling like this because otherwise my kids will grow up with someone like me who just checks out for a while.

And I have a lot of shame about that.  That is what my mother did.  My mother was on so many drugs to numb her pain it was absolutely ridiculous.  She popped so many pills it was unreal.  That was normal.  I grew up convinced that I wouldn’t do that.  And I have such an aversion to taking pills that prenatals were nightmareish for me and I have now stopped taking them because I simply cannot do it even though I should take them as long as I am nursing.

Instead I am smoking pot.  I’m not drinking.  I’m not taking pills (and I won’t), but I’m smoking pot.  I am having a hard time with that.  I am not a lifelong pot smoker.  I really don’t enjoy doing this.  I’m not enjoying how it feels.  But it keeps me level.  It keeps me from snapping while I can’t get the memories under control.  It is making me go flat line.  And while I am doing it during the day I have people here watching my kids for me.  That is the difference between me and my mother.

I cannot meet all of my children’s needs by myself right now.  I am having a crisis.  But I am dealing with it.  I am dealing it with it in a way that is safe for me, for my children, and for the people who are offering help.  I am not stepping on anyones toes.  I am not doing something bad by asking for help.  I am not imposing.  I am not hurting anyone.  I am weaker than normal and I cannot carry my load.  People with room to spare, people who love me are helping me.  I am doing the right thing for me.  I am.

Believing that is the first step to recovery for me.  That’s it.  Right now, for this moment of this crisis that is my step.  I have to believe it is ok for me to be weak and need help.  I have to believe that it is ok for me to ask for help.  I need to feel like I can allow other people to help me.  I need to actually accept the help.

Baby steps, people.  I see several of the offers and I love you and I want to respond and I can’t right now.  That is too big of a step.  I don’t yet believe I am allowed to take it.

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Right this minute I am stone cold sober.  I slept for more than 9 hours.  I am trying to get through some thinking before the kids get up.  An online friend mentioned that when you go through stuff like this you want to harm the people who hurt you.  Your body gets all of this energy so that you can fight off an attacker.  But no one is attacking me.  No one is hurting me.  But my body doesn’t know that.  My body feels like I am a tiny child and people are horribly abusing me.  It’s a weird kind of regression.  My children are major triggers right now because little kids are rough.  They crawl all over you heedless of sharp elbows and knees, they pinch and grab, and just generally they act like I shouldn’t have feelings.  Like I am invisible.  Kind of like my dad.  When he paid attention to me he brutalized me.  When my mom paid attention to me she complained that I wasn’t doing enough work.  Yeah, I have some anger.

I fired my therapist yesterday.  After an exchange that made it sound like very different approaches to healing I decided that I need to find someone who is more like me.  I don’t do well in the nice clean office in the nice part of town with the nice upper middle class woman who wears pearls.  I think I have a nasty attitude before I walk in.  That’s my shit and my baggage and stuff I can mostly deal with most of the time.  I don’t think I can right now.  Right now I need a therapist who is used to dealing with addicts and people who don’t have their lives together even slightly.  Because right now I am reverting to shit with my family and no matter how many high fallutin psychology “experts” you can quote long passages from, if you don’t know what a seriously abusive family is like… I don’t think I can talk to you right now.

My therapist had fuzzy boundaries.  She made a big deal in group about how it is specifically illegal for her to share her story… but then she dropped details.  She is not rigorously accurate with her word.  She thinks it is ok to say, “Ok, person A will go tonight and person B will go in two weeks” and then something happens in the intervening week and she decided that person B wouldn’t go in two weeks.  I was person B and she didn’t tell me that she decided that we should do something else on Monday.  That’s why she didn’t give me room to speak.  Because she didn’t understand that I was clinging to the ability to speak.  That was the only reason I crawled my way out of my house shaking and upset.  And then she expected me to sit there and listen to everyone else process and only take my short turns and be appropriate for the group.

I can’t do that right now and the fact that she acts like I am a problem because I can’t?  Yeah… not a good fit.  Most of the time I am highly functioning.  Most of the time I can sit there and explain why she is totally right.

I have been awake for ~40 minutes now and I’m sober.  The longer I think the harder I shake.  I’m scared because I know that I do have rage issues.  I know that I am angry with my entire family.  I think that is why I am sitting out here shaking.  Someone HAS to be in a lot of pain as their punishment for me hurting so much.  And the only people here are my kids.  This is how the cycle goes on through generations.  I am not able to hurt my father because he is dead.  I have cut off my mother and sister and quite frankly the only damage I was able to do to them was to refuse to keep my silence.  That is the only tool I have.  This therapist does not understand that being able to speak my truth regardless of how or where or how appropriate it is, that’s what is keeping me alive right now.  The fact that I am allowing myself to express what happened to me.  The fact that friends are coming out of the woodwork to listen?

Maybe I can’t walk into a group and find the support I need.  Maybe I am too broken.  This isn’t the first group I’ve terrified.  But if I am too broken to go find a group because the people in a group are too broken to support me… it’s hard.  I get good support from my friends.  Sometimes I feel like it is better than I deserve.  But I don’t have people in my life who were abused like me.  I actually just sent an email to a woman I used to be close with.  She has a horrifying background of sexual assault, prostitution, drug abuse, etc.  I hope she responds.  We’ve kind of lost contact.

I know why I am afraid to be cold and why I keep my house so warm.  When I get cold I start shivering and I feel like I am going into shock.  When I feel like that I have a harder time keeping the memories at bay.  I used to sit in our house in the mountains under a pile of blankets and think about my abuse.  My mom and my sister went back and forth between telling me I was an abuse victim and saying I was just a whiner.  The story was always that what happened to me wasn’t as bad as what happened to my sister.  So I shouldn’t complain, because look!  She’s fine!  Only she’s not.  She can’t hold down a job usefully.  When she manages to get into a relationship with a nice guy she destroys their life until they stop dating her and go off and fix the damage.  She is a very broken person.

So I keep my house warm so I don’t have to sit here and shiver and feel scared.

A few minutes ago I had to break and go nurse Calli for a bit.  Of course I felt like I was a better mother because I was sober.  But there is this thing that happens when I nurse, I don’t know if it’s common and it’s weird body tmi.  Nursing makes me have to poop.  For the 5am nurse, if things are timed badly, I sometimes lie there in agonizing pain trying to not shit the bed because I need Calli to go back to sleep and she won’t let go of my nipple so I can go to the bathroom.  During this time period, honestly it’s only like a 2-3 minute of crisis feeling, I sit there and visualize the ways I want to hurt Calli in response to her hurting me.  Because I feel like it is her fault that I am in so much pain because it hurts only when I’m nursing her.

Maybe the right answer is to let her scream and get up and use the bathroom.  Today what I did was I told Noah that I was in a lot of pain because I have to use the bathroom and she won’t let go.  And Noah stayed up late last night so I didn’t want to bother him and I was feeling really upset about the fact that I was in pain and wanting to hurt my baby because of it.  Noah told me, “It was my choice to stay up late.  I’ll take the baby.  Go.”  I love him so much.  He is so good at giving me permission and space to have whatever feelings I need to have.  I don’t know what I would do without him.

So I have some rage issues.  Ok.  When folks like Sharon (or my ex-boyfriend) tell me that I am destroying my life with rage I feel confused.  I get the impression I feel way more rage than other people.  But I don’t really see how it is destroying my life.  I have bad periods where it puts my life on hold.  I am out in the garage right now and I am absolutely not part of my life right now.  It’s sad.  I’m not happy about it.  But I don’t see how I am destroying my life.  I am stepping out of my life for a little while and I am having my rage issues come out by myself with a computer in the garage.  No really, that is about the best kind of control anyone can ask of me.  The alternative is to tell me I’m not allowed to feel the rage at all.  Excuse my language, but fuck off you fucking cunt.  Don’t tell me that rage is destroying my life because it isn’t.

Rage is causing me to sever the bonds with an abusive family.  Rage is causing me to admit out loud that my father raped me.  Rage is causing me to have the strength to stand up and say that my mother and my sister are evil.  That they are child molesters.  That my sister is a rapist.  I need to say those things and I do not have the courage to say them without this level of rage.  Not really.  But given that I am surrounded by people who love me and support me, and given that I am extensively checking in about my mental situation (I feel more than a little uncomfortable with the fact that I am live blogging my breakdown, and yet… I feel like I am being very accountable so I know that I am not crossing any lines) I don’t feel it is in any way shape or form appropriate to say that I am destroying my life.  To be clear Sharon said, “Your rage is going to burn you and your family alive if you don’t get some support.  Expressing the rage is fine for a start, but you can’t sustain this level of fury on a moment-to-moment basis forever.”

Forgive me for laughing as I think about the idea that maybe I should get some support.  I have many many people checking in with me as I do the hard work.  Maybe I’m just doing it in a way that doesn’t work for her.  But I am doing it.  I’m tired of feeling invisible.  I cannot see a therapist who sees no value in the way I am processing.  The way I am processing has allowed me to have a very good life and very good friends.  I am no longer in an abusive situation.  At this point in time I am surrounded by people who love me to distraction who want to give me every ounce of help they can.  And I’m letting them.  People are coming over and caring for my kids and doing my laundry.  People are showing up with food.  People are calling and leaving comments and texting me and emailing me and…  I have support.  I am not past (See Ali, I do listen) the crisis yet.  But I will get past it.  I will.  I have done it before.  I’m not sure if this is the darkest place I’ve been, but it’s pretty bad.

Let me state this pretty clearly.  I am not dead because I will not do that to Noah or my kids.  My will to live is a flickering flame right now.  But god damnit I am going to get through this.  Those mother fucking pieces of shit aren’t going to kill me.  They aren’t powerful enough.  But I’m still scared.

I think I should fall down the rabbit hole and tell stories.

This is the bottom.

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Right now I feel so desperate that I feel like if I back away from any part of recovery work, any part of speaking my story that I will hit bottom.  The only place I see to go from here is to beat the shit out of my kids so I can prove that I am a monster.  Until this crisis passes I need to not be alone with my children.  As humiliating and pathetic as I feel.  That is what I need.  I need help.

I have friends coming to spend time with my kids while I hide in the garage.  I should contact a few more people.  This is very hard.  But I have support and I will figure this out.  But it’s really hard.

The difference

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I should have been removed from my family of origin because I was not safe.  No one protected me.  That is a failure on the part of my entire extended family and the system.  The difference between what happened to me and what is happening to my daughters is I know I am in a place right now where I am not competent to care for them as they need so I asked for help.  I went out and I admitted out loud that right now I need other people to care for my children so that they can come out of childhood unscathed. I may be fighting demons but they don’t need to get hit in the cross fire.

That is what my family doesn’t understand.  My sister and my mother have gone through these periods.  I’ve seen this from the kid side.  But what my mother and my sister did was scream at me, bring people home and have sex in front of me, basically they did anything to prove that they were bad.  But they didn’t start out bad people.  They started out good people who were making mistakes.  They became evil because they kept doing it.  Because they shame their victims and require silence about what they did.  I have that potential in me.

I feel the urge to harm them.  I visualize how I should do it.  I have detailed pictures in my head of what I should be doing to them.  And that is why I am freaking the fuck out.  The images are getting more intense.  I am fucking terrified of hurting my children and I don’t feel in control right now.  This is the cycle.  That is what is going on.  This is what my mother and sister were to weak to do.  They were too weak and to stupidly prideful to say, “I am weak and broken and I need help.”  So they perpetuated the abuse on to the next generation after me.  In the approximately 6 years since my brother broke contact with the family I have had conversations with my niece and nephew where they detailed their own sexual abuse history.  My nephew was raped.  That’s not my story to tell but I’m not keeping silent any more.  I was told I have no right to reveal his pain.  But I do.  Because he was abused by the same people who abused me and I have the right to stand up and say that my sister is a disgusting monster and she should be shunned.  She should be in jail.  She is not a good person who makes mistakes.  She is a child molester.  She is filth.  She deserves every bad thing in the world.

And my family is siding with her.  And I sit here and freak out with these pictures in my head.  I want to abuse my children the way I was abused.  And I pray that my friend drives very very fast on her way to care for my children today because I am very close to the edge.  I am not going to fall over it.  I can hold out long enough.

Because that is how you stop this.

And I’m glad I didn’t hit send.  Because I went in there and I dressed my baby more warmly because she was slightly chilly and I nursed her and I put her to bed and my older daughter asked me a bunch of questions and I answered them and then she told me to go away again because she likes watching her movies in private.

Why do I believe I am a monster who is going to harm them any second?

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Last night I went to my support group.  It was more or less “my turn” to share my story but that was not given support or space.  I was expected to give short sound bites in ways that didn’t scare the horses.  But I don’t have that kind of story.  It’s hard when the act of speaking my story traumatizes people around me.

This is more of that “what to say” thing.  When I get up the nerve to say these things out loud, with my voice, it is a big deal.  I don’t do that.  As loudly as I trumpet Radical Honest Damnit!  I don’t actually describe these things out loud very well.  And I need to.  Ok, maybe not every incest survivor needs to, but I need to be able to speak about what happened to me.  It is not fair that I have to continue bearing this in silence.  Silencing me means telling me that I am wrong for talking about myself.  Silencing me means that I am invisible.  Silencing me means I deserve it.

When I finally get to the point of sharing my story I need people to look right back at me like I am still clean.  Like I am still worth seeing.  That’s why I want people to talk to me about my story.  I leave details out every time.  Often on accident.  But when people ask me questions I realize what pieces I am conveniently telling and what pieces I am conveniently leaving out.  I figure out a lot more of what scares me.  But people have a limited capacity for that.  I can only ask the same people to listen to the same stories so many times.  But I have to tell them.  I can’t be quiet and nice about it.  I can’t keep my voice silent so that other people can ignore that horror exists.

The family members who are upset with me?  The ones who sent me long and impassioned, or angry and defensive messages?  Yeah.  They don’t get me and they can’t.  My niece sent me a message saying she hopes I can get over my father some day and return to the family and she doesn’t understand why I am hurting her so much because of things that happened before she was born.  My cousin is saying, “All of that shit happened before I was born and now you are being mean to me so fuck you.”

I am not allowed to have my feelings and processes.  It’s not ok that I view my mother and my sister as culpable.  I am supposed to “let it go” which means forgive and forget and move on with the victimization stuff.  How do I tell my niece that I have to cut her off because of the ways her mother sexually assaulted her and her brother.  Because I need to ensure that people like my niece, who have been pretty badly sexually abused, are not an influence.

I just did a nasty thing.  I sent my niece a response and I shouldn’t have.  I told her that this, right now, actually has very little to do with my dad.  This is about my mother and my sister sent me off to be raped and my sister participated in the rape and molestation of her own children.  As long as people continue to talk to my mother and sister like they are normal people I can’t stand near any of them.  Because they are acting like my mom and my sister ate good people who made a mistake.  I’m sorry but systematically sending your daughter off to be raped means you are not a good person.  You lose the chance at good person status for this lifetime.

And I told my niece that as long as she wants to continue to act like her own abuse didn’t happen and she can go about her normal day to day life with her mother and my mother acting like they are ok reasonable people… I can’t know her.  Because she obviously feels like that kind of abuse is ok and she continues to take whatever people dish out.  And therefore I don’t want her interacting with my daughter because she will pass on the feeling that girls deserve that treatment and you should keep your mouth shut when it happens.  Not my fucking babies you pieces of shit.

I am frantic, scared, and angry.  And I feel like it’s not ok to say what happened to me.  I feel very unsafe.  I feel very attacked.  Even here, within my family in my home.  In my sanctuary I still feel like someone will show up at any second and do horrible things to me.  Want to know why I feel that way?

Because I am in a place where emotionally I am a small child.  But I have small children.  And they have needs.  And small children don’t give a shit about anyone but themselves.  Small children want to be protected and to sit and stare and dream and become.  I can’t be the grown up right now.  Thank god I don’t have to.

As I sit here and spin my wheels getting more and more upset with that group and my niece and my cousin and…  I realize that I am trying to look around me for unsafe people and then getting mad when they are unsafe.  My niece isn’t even close to going through recovery.  She’s too close.  And I need to leave her alone because sharing my story in the way I am is kicking her.  Maybe she doesn’t deserve to have me take on the abuser role too.  I do think I’ll be able to long term live with myself though.  I didn’t say that Tyra was bad in and of herself.  I said that as long as she associates with them she will accept their reality and it is broken.  She doesn’t get to pretend that they are not monsters with me.  With everyone else, fine.  Not with me.

Now I’m drifting off into thinking about my kids.  I need to have chats with my friends.  As much as I am a raging pervert, I’m also the victim of incest, rape, and molestation.  I need to not have sex stuff around my kids.  I need that to not be part of their existence in any way.  And people think Shanna isn’t listening.  It’s not ok.  I have been interrupting people for a while, but I need to take a more proactive stance.  I need to talk to people before the conversation gets going about what is ok in my house.  Because that is how you break cycles.  My daughters will not learn what a blowjob is at this age range.  That will not be part of their world.  And when my daughters do learn about blowjobs it will be because we are having an age appropriate discussion about sex with our clothes on and there will be no porn to demonstrate.  I am not going to lock up my books about being a survivor of sexual abuse but I want to get through this awful period of recovery so that I can stop talking about it around them.

My children cannot support me.  It does not matter that I feel like a small child right now, I’m not.  And my children should not have to support me in any way.  That is not the role of a child.  I’m hurting but they cannot fix me, nor should I in any way ask them to try.  I’m not going to an extreme so don’t get paranoid.  I’m not going to be able to help the fact that I cry randomly sometimes.  But what I say is, “I’m thinking about stuff that happened a long time ago.  I should probably start thinking about you though because you are awesome.”  Then we run off and play.  But I can’t do that today.

Today I am too small.

I’m on vacation.

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That’s what I call it when I go behind closed doors and don’t really respond to requests.  I’ve already done once since becoming a parent and I kind of expect it to continue.  I’ve been through these kinds of super intense freak outs before.  I did a few while I was dating Tom.  And I wrote about them then.  I need to go read my archive again.

Everything is all jumbled up right now.  I’m sad about my uncle dying.  I’m sad that I didn’t know it was time to say goodbye because no one thought to tell me.  I’m sad that my mother used his death as a chance to ambush me so that she could try to get her own needs met.  I’m proud that when my mother called me I told her she needs to go to therapy and say out loud many times that she sent me to my father so he could rape me.  She did that.  She has to say out loud, “I sent my daughter to her father so that her father could rape her.”  She has to say that.  If she doesn’t say that, there is nothing.  Ever again.  I cannot acknowledge that she is alive.  Until the day my mother can say, “I allowed my daughter to be raped” I have nothing to say to her.  It is her fucking fault.

I called my mother in the middle of a horrific sexual assault and begged her to come get me and she told me no.  She bears the burden of that guilt.  I want to punch her in the face.  I want to run her over with my car.  That fucking horrible disgusting repulsive excuse for a mother.  I think she should be dead.  I hate her so much.  My mother sent me to my father over and over.  The custody agreement said he should NEVER BE ALONE WITH ME.  And I was.  Repeatedly.

My brother told me that our father didn’t explicitly say it but he made it very clear it was perfectly ok for my brothers to have sex with me if they wanted regardless of whether I wanted it or not.  Let me say that another way.  My father told my brothers that it was ok to rape me.  My brother told me that it was very understood in the household that if my mother wasn’t up for sex my dad would fuck my sister.  If my sister wasn’t up for sex… guess who that leaves.  Me.  I was three years old when my parents divorced.

What the fuck happened to me.  I can’t remember it very clearly.  I was too little.  There is court documentation of my fathers confession.  The detective on my case told me that my father confessed to far more than I remember and he was horrified by what my father said.  Let me say that again, a professional police detective who works on many many many abuse cases.  That is his job.  He was horrified by what happened to me.  But I don’t remember it.  It scares the shit out of me.  What the hell other memories are lurking in my body and in my brain.  When I am 75 years old will I wake up and say, “72 years ago my father raped me and I’m not over it.”

I am so fucking pissed off at my mother.  She wants to deny that it happened.  She doesn’t want to admit her guilt.  It is her fault.  She was my mother.  Her whole job was to ensure that I reached adulthood in relative safety and she failed.failed.failed.  I get to be angry about that.  I get to take her to task for that and no one gets to intervene.  No one, including my co-dependent, enabler, abusive sister, get to tell me that I have to change how I feel about my piece of shit mother.

Abusive.  My mother told me that if she hadn’t been Catholic she would have aborted me.  My sister told me that my mother was packed and ready to leave my father when my mom turned up pregnant with me.  There was always the very clear implication that it is therefore my fault that my sister was raped for three more years.

Maybe that is why that stupid, worthless piece of shit never said anything about my mom sending me off to my father’s for the weekend.  Maybe she just thought it was my turn.

My father raped me

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Edited to add: this post is about to hit 6,000 views. If you are looking for pornography, please keep looking. Heck, you can even look around this blog. I write pornography sometimes. This post is not about pornography. This is my life. I was a brutalized child. Please don’t beat off thinking about my father raping me. I don’t mind in the slightest if you kind of imagine that kind of thing in abstract, please have enough respect not to use my actual trauma.

If you are a rape survivor there are much better posts here for you than this one. This one just makes you sad.
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Oh fuck.  I remember.  I remember how it happened.  After he gave me the milkshake that tasted funny, I’m sure it was spiked, and after he took me to bed and made me sleep naked and fingered me and after I got up to throw up in the bathroom…

I remember and I wish I didn’t.  He came to get me.  He asked me why I was sniveling in the bathroom.  I told him I had been sick.  He made me clean up.  Then he told me I needed to apologize for making a mess.  He walked over and sat down on the couch.  He sat down and then I noticed a gun in his hand.  He set it down pretty obviously on the seat next to him.  He told me to crawl to him.  I did.  He told me to apologize while I was sucking his cock.  And I did.

And I’m not allowed to feel anything about this memory right now.

But now I am because it is 2:30 am and I just sent Noah to bed.  I forced him to hammer out with me what memory was surfacing right now, why is it triggering me so hard, and how can I get through it a bit faster, damnit.  I am now re-reading The Courage to Heal and mocking myself for how very classic my pattern is. Yes this is a spiral, and yes I am in recovery, Chris.  I am the survivor of incest.  Tonight I said out loud to my husband that my father raped me.  I am pretty sure that is the very first time in my life I have ever said that out loud.  And oh my fucking god now I feel about it.

This feels overwhelming and horrifying and awful.  I am drowning.  This hurts so much.  My father held a gun to my head and told me to suck his cock.  And I was supposed to get up the next day and go to the amusement park with him.  I asked him to take me home instead because I was sick from the alcohol poisoning he had given me.  I couldn’t tell him that.  And that is why my stomach hurts so bad if I have much alcohol.  The sensation scares the ever loving shit out of me.  When I was 18 years old I was given a date rape drug by someone I was out to have a one night stand with.  I intended to have sex with him anyway but I doubt he knew that.  I sincerely doubt he knew I was a sure thing.  I’m pretty sure he thought I was the normal sort of stupid 18 year old who invites a guy up to a drinking party in a secluded mountain house and intends to say no.  You know, one of those stupid women who have never been repeatedly raped from toddlerhood.

Right.  You can see the problem there.  And you can see how I can get away from this feeling.  There are a lot of fucking valid reasons I want to derail from going where my head is heading right now.  That’s a god damn terrifying place to be.  I am trying to talk myself into releasing into the horrible body memories of my father raping me.  And maybe I will have to pause and I will have to tell Puff about it.  Maybe if I quiet my fingers I can find my voice.

Oh my fucking god.  My mother told me that she breastfed me longer than any of her other children because, “It was the only way to keep them off of me.”  I think she means my father.  I think my father started actually raping my sister after I was born and that is why she resents me so much.  But that’s a story I’m making up and I have no reason to think it is true.  That’s trying to explain her actions with motives that make her actions justified.  No.  No.  No.  I am not to blame for my father molesting my sister.  It is not my fault that my mother stayed as long as she did.  Women in domestic violence situations often have to try leaving several times before they manage to get out.  Even once they get out there is a ridiculous legacy of guilt and shame to deal with around allowing your FUCKING HUSBAND TO RAPE YOUR DAUGHTERS YOU PIECE OF SHIT CUNT.  I don’t have to be diplomatic here about my mother.  I don’t need to find a way to excuse the fact that she is the most disgusting, pathetic, worthless example of mothering I have ever fucking seen and I think that if she dies in a lot of pain it is exactly what she fucking deserves.

I called her on the fucking phone and begged her to come pick me up.  She told me that I made my bed so now I have to lie in it.  That was a consistent theme, sadly.  I was often left with my father in a way that was phrased as me deserving him because I was a little kid and I asked to see my daddy.  When I asked to see him she dropped me on his lap and said, “Fine!  You want the bastard!  Fuck you then you little bitch!”  No really.  My mother said that to me, verbatim.  That was how she sent me to my father’s house.  And then he molested me.  And I called her and asked her to intervene because I was a god damn outrageously precocious child and I knew that what was happening to me was wrong and my mother told me that I made my bed now I have to lie in it.

Then my father raped me.  And then he wanted me to get in the car the next day and go to the amusement park with him so he could show the world what a good dad he was.  I’ve told the story about him insisting on me wearing short dresses with zippers so he could molest me in public, right?  Yeah.  And on the car ride home he screamed at me for being an ungrateful, pathetic, useless bitch because he already had the theme park tickets and he fucking wanted to go and now I’ve ruined everything and it is all my fault for being such a horrible, selfish, stupid bitch.

That is my story.  That is the tape I hear in my head.  I want to start listing off when… but I’ll only list the times that make my story seem better.  But it’s totally fucking random.  Sometimes it’s at times when it’s convenient and sometimes it is a nightmare.  To continue setting the stage, it is now 3:00am.  I took ~5 minutes off to visit the restroom, find carrots for mindless eating that will allow me to focus without contributing to my negative self esteem issues, lots of water, and I’m now out of excuses for not going down the rabbit hole.  I’m sitting in my little corner under the cave next to the flowers.  It’s not ready yet… but I’ll post a picture tomorrow.  I hadn’t even realized what I was building until I typed it in this paragraph right now.  I have a pretty sledgehammer like subconscious, don’t you think?

Oh my god.  Why is that the first thing I say when I think of my father raping me.  Why do I cry out to god to save me?  Am I searching for that higher power?  My therapist clearly thinks so and she’s pushing me loudly towards Wicca.  (I saw what you did there, Sharon.)  Which is a very clear choice.  I was systematically told throughout my childhood that I was evil and bad by every one around me and I didn’t realize how blatant it was until Noah listed it off tonight.  I don’t realize it until people express shock and horror that I don’t just know that my childhood was off the charts brutal.

My father gave me an alcoholic milkshake then penetrated me vaginally while rubbing himself vigorously against me.  And right now I have the most overwhelming urge to masturbate it isn’t funny.  I feel like I cannot continue telling this story because I have to go masturbate because it is so fucking hot that he did that to me.

That is why I am a disgusting piece of shit.  That is why Femme Car does her stuff.  Ha.  Enh, Or maybe that’s me projecting my story onto other people I don’t know.  That’s the annoying part of this introspection stuff.  I am realizing that I don’t even know my friends.  Most of the people I have been bonding with lately are big, physically intimidating men who were themselves hurt as children.  I am solely interacting with people who identify as survivors.  I am testing people out, slowly, one by one, seeing if they understand my language.  Because only other survivors know what I’m talking about.  And I’m text book.  And that bothers me.

I feel offended by the fact that I am a text book incest survivor.  God damnit don’t I think I am more special than that?  Oh shit now I’m trying to get nasty with myself rather than feel this.  See how this goes?

I’m going round and round in circles because I don’t know if I am actually breaking cycles or if I just moved them somewhere else.  I’m desperately looking for proof that I am not like my family.  I have to trot out these long list of examples of horrible exchanges.  They aren’t horrible (uhm, mostly) in and of themselves if any of them had been one thing in my entire childhood.  But it’s kind of a …  wait.  What the fuck am I saying.  No.  They were god damn horrible.  I was heinously abused.  I was horrifically, over the top, ridiculously abused.  I was blamed for events that happened before my fucking birth.  I have confirmation of this from my brother.  He said it once, I can never ask him for that validation again.  Now I have to just go on with my life believing my side of the story.

But first I have to hate my mother for a while and that’s hard.  I love my mother a lot.  I desperately wish that I got to be in a relationship with her right now.  I want support desperately.  No, let me rephrase this.  Right now I am in a period of intense stress.  Culturally I was brought up to believe that when you are in periods of intense stress and you need to ask for help you should first ask your family.  Only my family would respond to my response for help by bringing the Titanic over and dropping it around my neck.  And saying it that way makes it sound like I don’t care about their suffering, and I do.  But nothing I do can fix their suffering and standing near them will allow them to hurt my children.  So they can fuck off and die.

Earlier this week I was losing it with the kids.  I was not in control of my emotions anymore.  As the book calls it, I was in the emergency phase and I needed to call in as much help and childcare as I could. And I did.  Before I picked up the book even, go me.  And by losing it with the kids I mean that I got a bit ranty when Shanna was standing in the door way screaming at me because she wanted me to stop working but I was trying to paint.  You can see how the conflict of needs here could feel intense.  Maybe.  Or maybe you think I am fucking nuts.  But you are going to be in one of three camps.  Either you will understand because you have also seen something hard and you have that monster somewhere inside of you and you are afraid of it, or you do not understand and you think that having that kind of monster inside of me makes *me* a monster, or you are a fairly empathetic person and you extrapolate from your own childhood (which was whatever it was) and you then react to how extreme my life was compared to your own life.  I think most people are in the third category.

And that means that no matter what, forever, my discussion of my abuse has to be a private journey.  Because it doesn’t matter where someone is in that trifecta of approaches, they can’t help me.  Only I can.  And my mom and my sister have to help themselves.  And this is the 12 step talk stuff that I pick up in the water living in California.  It’s just here.  People talk about them as if they are things that everybody just knows.  What does it say about me and my friends and my life that absolutely all of them know the 12 step language?  All of us are in abuse cycles.

And I’m getting off topic and I’m getting tired.  But this is something.  This is a start.  My father raped me.  I don’t seem to be ready to feel it yet, but I will get there.  And I feel in this moment like I have no choice but to recover the body memory of that.  Why do I feel like I must go through intense personal discomfort (I was planning to stay up ALL NIGHT) in order to force myself into a weak enough physical state where I could no longer fight off the terror of feeling abused.  My throat closed while I was typing.

And I had to pause right there to go check facebook and see for myself that the person who said he would come back and help me paint tomorrow responded and yes he really will be coming back.  And the friend whose birthday party I am skipping said she understands.  And I believe her.  I don’t think she is lying and secretly fuming.  I think she is probably sad for me that I am in a place where I am hurting like this.  Why do I want to think she is mad at me?  Because I want to start the cycle where I am begging people for reassurance.  I feel like it is ok for me to ask for small amounts of reassurance constantly from the people I live with (We say “I love you!” multiple times a day and that counts), but not big displays.  I need to keep that to a minimum.  I seem to feel like it is ok for me to ask for help from the community in a big open way where anyone who wants to come shows up and does whatever kind of help they kind of halfheartedly get done because I feel bad directing them.  I feel like I shouldn’t be bossy.

I get to the point of having panic attacks when I think about directing people right now.  Dude.  I taught high school.  If anyone can direct large groups of people it’s me.  Only I can’t.  And I’m not sure how I feel about that.

I am sitting at home feeling upset that my friends are out at a dance event, or rather just getting home, and I’m sitting here obsessively writing on the internet about how broken I am.  My father raped me.  Not saying that out loud is ruining my life.  I guess I need to start saying it then.  After I go to sleep.

Beginnings and endings

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This is blitz week, so all of my energy has been going towards trying to get house stuff done as quick as humanly possible.  It’s been rather stressful.  And then today, my uncle died.  My uncle raised me.  I was very close to him until my niece was born and I became not-the-favorite and I was just never very important again.  My family took great pains to remind me today when I went to the hospital to say goodbye.  I didn’t arrive until after he died because no one felt they needed to tell me they were taking him off life support.  All of a sudden I have grave doubts about whether I will finish this project this week like I wanted.

I choose life

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As of Saturday morning things were not so hot with my dear friend.  However, on Saturday evening I got a phone call from that friend.  He called me to tell me was sorry for the ways in which he was derailing the conversation.  The stuff I was talking about made him think about very uncomfortable things from his own life and he couldn’t handle it and he wanted me to stop talking.  He admitted the whole thing top to bottom.  I laughed and I cried.  I thanked him for trusting me enough to be honest with me completely and totally for the first time in our friendship.  Then I bossed him around (see how that works) and I told him to come back over.

Noah, my friend and I sat around and talked about broken dynamics.  We talked about where we are reacting to old baggage and where we have created new stuff together.  We talked about the parts of our dynamic that are good and healthy for us and we talked about the parts that are not healthy for us.  Then we tried to figure out how we can get more of the good and less of the bad because we are ready to grow up.  We are ready to stop hurting the people we love so much.

And I can’t get very detailed because an awful lot of what we talked about isn’t my story.

And Sunday we had brunch with another very long time friend.  I like to call him the California Mindfucker because he is very interested in getting into peoples brains and playing with the goo.  Not to mention that he was one of my first lovers/play partners in the bdsm scene and he has done a fair bit of fucking with my brain.  But the ways he does it are so screamingly over the top weird California new-agey feeling.  I love it.  Of course we did more spelunking into brains but this time, for the first time ever, I paid attention to his story.  That feels horrible to admit.  I feel like I should not be the one who “takes” in a given interaction.  But I often am, and that feels bad.

But oh man.  Since I have started consciously trying to ask for and accept more help I have seen a dramatic increase in the intensity of my friendships in a really wonderful way.  I am allowing people to do things for me I’ve never allowed them to do before.  I didn’t realize how lonely I have been my entire life.  No wonder I pursue sex with such vigor.  It’s the only time I let myself have a close, mutual relationship.  I don’t let anyone I am not currently fucking do anything for me and I make those people go through hell before I let them do stuff for me.  Instead I set myself up as the victim/martyr with all the need.

Interesting.  Enh, sorta.  Ok that’s hyperbole too.  But that’s my story about myself sometimes.  Anyhow, at this point I am trying to change up how I relate to people I love the most.  It’s an interesting process because almost all of the people I love the most have some fairly major issues.  That’s the whole “prickly and difficult” thing.  In order for us to get to a place where we know how to be more respectful of one another I have to start to look at my friends more.  I have to actually see them in a way I have never looked at them before.  I need to figure out where my defensive mechanisms are and actively try to change them.

I’m not really going to be able to go where I originally thought I was going with this post.  I got derailed by a wonderful, awesome person.  I got to go talk to an old friend and tell her about the highs and lows of our relationship and she gave me feedback on her perspective of them so I could figure out where I end and she begins.  And she tolerated a lot of babbling.  It was nice.  She has been my friend for so very long.

I’m starting to realize that anyone who is in my life at this point is fucking serious about loving me or they wouldn’t be in my life.  It takes intense effort and tolerance to be my friend.  And lots of people do it.  No really, lots of people.  I am putting out feelers for my birthday party and fixing my house and people are showing up.  Not hundreds, but lots.  Lots and lots.  More than I imagined.  I am really lucky.  I am really blessed.  I want to figure out where I end and they begin.  I want to see them more clearly.  I want to stop seeing ghosts.

I choose life.