Category Archives: food issues

Thankful

I think yesterday is going to be a shining memory for me. That was one of the least stressful and least anxious holidays I’ve ever had. My kids got to watch cartoons on grandpa’s giant tv screen which seemed like a ridiculous luxury to them. My lovely men cooked me dinner. (I did a little prep work but they did all the cooking.) I cleaned up because it seems all nice and such.

Dad and I are still working out our little I-have-anxiety-so-I’m-a-control-freak issues. It is a more relaxed process than it sounds like. “Oh. You have strong opinions about how this soup gets microwaved. Ok. Show me how you want it done then. No, I’m not cranky–I just don’t know what you want and you have a specific process in mind because you complain when I deviate. Just show me the process.”

We don’t actually know one another that well. If you add up all the hours we’ve spent together in all the years it is a lot less than a month of time. Getting to know someone is effort.

I went on a run. This place is fucking cold and I hate the hills. I love Fremont more with every passing year. Lovely perfectly flat Fremont. Ahhhhh. But I could feel my ass muscles going, “Oh YES! THIS IS WHAT WE NEED” so it was kind of weird.

Dad is trying so hard to make me feel comfortable. He flat asked why I was reacting so anxiously. I think I managed to explain sufficiently that he understands that I vibrate with anxiety when I’m alone in a room. He doesn’t have to do anything for me to react anxiously. When I’m kind of freaking about my kids playing with the random glass “art” shit you have sitting around? That’s not because you have been a stress monkey. I just do that.

It was a really peaceful, nice day. The three grown ups were mellow. The kids played and seemed pretty happy all day. We had extremely tasty food. Most of it made by Dad.

I somehow managed to escape feeling like I did everything wrong. I’m nervous about our plans for today. I am afraid of a misstep around this family. I like them so much. I don’t want to become uninvited because I screw up around a member of the extended family.

I can usually manage to not horrify people who like me. I’m not so suave at meeting the extended families of my friends. I often manage to say something horrifically inappropriate and then I’m not invited back again. Woo anxiety.

The stakes seem so much higher now. I don’t want to uninvite my kids. Every person I offend and run off from here on out is an injury I am doing to my children.

Dad and I were talking about how perception of risk changes over time. He made a comment about how I’m feeling my mortality. Oh, we were talking about seeing a doctor and doing the elimination diet stuff. He said that of course I care more about my body now because I recognize that I’m mortal.

I said, that’s not it. Before now I wanted to die so much that being in pain was just part of the process. I didn’t care about maintaining my body because I hoped I would die. It isn’t that I thought I was immortal. It is that I wanted to die. Right now. Today. So why fix things?

Now I want to see my kids grow up. Now I know that I have to stop feeling this much pain in my body so that I can be a nice person with them. I don’t have enough reserves of patience to deal with chronic pain and be nice. Some people can. I can’t. You have to know your limits. I need to feel less pain.

In general I feel that 2013 has been one of the kindest years I have lived through. Fewer big blow ups than usual. Less drama. More effective planning and work. I don’t think I have done anything to earn additional opprobrium this year. It hasn’t been my highest sex-having-year ever but it would be hard to top the first year of my marriage. Really hard. We would have to consciously work for a whole year in order to beat that year. It was a really good year. That will probably be a project one year. Just for fun. When the kids are older.

Life is always about moving towards new things, right? You can’t spend your life focusing on what is behind you.

But what is behind you shaped who you are. If you never figure out why you behave the way you do then it is harder to adapt to your current circumstances.

I’m trying. I’m trying as hard as I can.

Next year I need to figure out how to manage my shit without pot. The money I save on pot can be spent on a big fancy Disney cruise for my 10th anniversary.

I have things to look forward to. I want to figure out how to hurt less. I don’t want to need a crutch.

My life is really good. I need to walk unassisted now. Even though it is scary.

When I am feeling kind towards myself I acknowledge that for me to want the degree of control over my anxiety that I want will be not that different from people who are severely disabled working towards the Paralympics. My brain was severely damaged by my childhood. What I want it to turn around and do is hard for people like me.

I’m going to do it anyway.

Didn’t wake up crying.

Leave a reply

I’m up to 38, 471 words. It is getting harder to think of topics I should cover. Almost through the process. Thank goodness.

Therapy was good yesterday. I got to have some time off afterwards because K told me not to come home until two. Yes, ma’am. I sat and ate and wrote. Good thing because I was falling behind in word count.

I have a blank white wall in my garage. Noah suggests islands. My garage is much warmer now. The wall is tilted because it was built around the garage door in such a way that I could believably tell the city inspector that I can dismantle it myself in an hour so SURELY this isn’t a permanent room and thus breaking city code. But it is much warmer now!

Today I need to put plant bulbs in the ground. Daffodils and tulips of joy oh my. So “need” is probably a strong word. They are in the fridge and according to planting guides they want to go in the ground sometime in the next five days. Today is the best day. The lovely rain softened up the ground for me. How convenient.

My therapist and I talked about the whole unmet needs thing. I told her that I’m struggling with the fact that I have actual needs at this point in my life but they are going unmet and they will continue to go unmet and at some point my kids will grow up and I won’t have these needs anymore and hopefully it will be easier then.

I’m kind of used to having needs that aren’t met.

But sometimes even when you have actual needs they will never be met and it won’t kill you. And you have to just get up and keep moving anyway. Even though your needs aren’t being met.

I keep checking the internet. My mother told me that if I took my children away from her she would kill herself. She isn’t dead yet. I guess the need for my children wasn’t as strong as she thought. I think I’m glad. I’m not sure.

I have a lot of good reasons for being an angry person. That doesn’t make it easier for anyone to put up with. That doesn’t mean that people should put up with me lashing out at them.

I asked Noah if I am still harsh with him. He said not anymore but I used to be. I used to be that harsh when I didn’t believe that he would respond well to boundaries or support me or believe me. But I’m not harsh any more. I stopped a while ago.

I blog the way I do, in this stream of conscious sometimes I regret volunteering all of my inner drama to the world sort of way because people like me usually never find a voice.

Being inside my head is not pretty. I really and truly want to accurately reflect it. Being a real person means that you are not always what other people want you to be. That means the difficulties and the good things too.

When I die it will be possible for people to still know a lot about me. The good, the bad, the ugly. It is really important to me for reasons I couldn’t possibly explain. It just is. I hope I am this obnoxious for the rest of my life. Not because everyone deserves to be trashed–that’s not the point. I’m not trashing people.

When I complain about issues I tend to complain about larger patterns and not particular people. I have had a large number of people over the years tell me that they have thought about helping me and they decided not to. That pretty much exact exchange has happened numerous times. I don’t think I have ever blogged about it before (can’t recall off the top of my head) so it is this invisible pattern in my life. It’s a pattern that is causing me problems.

I haven’t talked about it because I know the people involved “mean well”. I don’t actually want to hurt people. I have way more tact than anyone would believe.

But sometimes I am not able to put my head down and shut my mouth and just smile and say thank you. Sometimes I can’t. I regret my lack of control but I’m not sure mastery of this subject is within my grasp in this decade. Maybe later.

If you need to exist out in public that means you will be judged and that means that sometimes you will fuck up in public. Sometimes people will not like how you are acting. That has to be part of the process.

I don’t promise to talk nice in my blog. I promise I will do my best to always treat you exactly how you deserve in person. I’m very sorry that knowing about the difference between what I think and how I act is hard. I am trying to learn how to not be offensive. I don’t know how to turn my brain off though.

I am looking forward to planting and spreading some mulch today. I’ll move slowly.

I’m not going to paint the garage wall this winter. Can’t do it. That means the garage is put back together for a few months. Today I will attach the bookshelves to the wall. That’s the non-self-hating thing to do. I hear.

I’m very glad I get to pick what I do in a day.

I’m very glad I get to spend today with my girls.

Yesterday I spent a lot of time thinking about the fact that when I was Calli’s age my parents divorced. My mom moved a boyfriend in to support her and I was “mean to him” and he left resulting in my mom and sister hating me. We became homeless. I was sent off to live with the first in a long string of homes. That was when I started rocking and crying myself to sleep.

I’m glad I get to be with my kids all day. I want this life so bad.

The house is clean so the kids can help with cooking stuff. There is room and space and I won’t freak out as I trip over things. I can be patient enough to let them make another mess.

I’m not teaching them to be kids. I’m teaching them how to be an adult. Adults have to go do a lot of different things. You have to have skills. We’ll get to academics. Later.

Today will probably be good. I’m almost done with my reading list. I’m almost done with my gardening projects for the whole year. I’m done with house stuff for the year.

I want to put up the outside Christmas lights. We haven’t gotten a tree yet but we’ve done the rest of the decorating. (I had to move the cabinet the decorations were in–I might as well put them up at the time. Also we will be out of town for 10 days of Christmas. I’d rather not have to do the decorating during the shortened time period. I instead get to come home to Christmas. Yay!)

Noah is making cookies already. I should freeze some. He’s made three kinds so far. Sugar is love. Ha.

My house is already clean enough and set up enough for the party in a month. I will only have to do flight of the bumble bee.

We are in the process of eating all the carbs in the house (almost done with the backlog in the freezer) because come January I will have to do an elimination diet. Yes I will work with medical professionals. I need to need less pot to deal with the pain in my body. I need to stop paying for the ability to eat. This isn’t working. It is too expensive. I need to do something else.

I would like to be fully off of pot before I go on the cross country road trip with the kids in 2015. I don’t think I should be driving during the days and getting stoned every night while I camp alone with my kids. That strikes me as wildly inappropriate and unsafe. So I have to be functional in my body alone before then. I have a year to make it work. Ok. That’s what next year will have to be about. Shit.

Some people need a crutch for their whole life and there is no shame in it. Sometimes you need a crutch for a temporary period. I went about 25 years unmedicated (there were some stupid periods mid-way where I tried meds–I was so sick the whole time) so I will have to get back to that. Stress management has always been how I have done it.

Sex, exercise, better food choices for my body (which I don’t have a fucking clue about right this minute), and I don’t even know what else.

I feel good about the fact that my life is so clearly plugging along. I may be whiny but I get shit done. Things are changing.

I will have tulips in the spring and for every spring afterwards.

I don’t know how much gardening this year will bring. I may be growing very different foods next year if I can’t have nightshades any more. We’ll see.

I am trying to organize some local families into a fruit gleaning group. I have buy-in and initiative. I just need to figure out the details and do the back end work. That will probably be part of next year.

Next year I am going to have to find the courage to go get rejected by a bunch of publishing houses. Woo. bleh.

Good thing next year is next year and this year is this year and I am almost DONE WITH MY CHORE LIST!! Ahem. I uhh probably take too much self-identity from this.

I have completed 50 new-to-me books so far and I am more than halfway through two more.

I really changed the yard this year. Man I’m grateful for the help I got. I sing hallelujahs and praise the names. Paying for help does not invalidate that it is help.

I’m happy with the house progress. I’m overjoyed that my garage will no longer flood. I like the pantry set up a lot more than I did. This is better. Once I have the boxes outside for the tools I think the pantry will be perfect for at least five minutes. Then I’ll find a reason to whine. I’m talented.

No, I’m kidding. I think I may have found a configuration that can just last for years. I feel… way more feelings than I should about this. I’m happy with the idea that my house is settling into a shape where I might stop ripping it apart constantly.

I get to be here. I get to stay here. I’m allowed to make this into what I really want. Nope, it isn’t polished and perfect and an expensive looking house. I’m kind of a cheap date. I’m happy with cotton batting over the pipes as a line of clouds instead of a wooden enclosure. I think it is pretty fun.

I don’t need perfect. I’m not perfect. I’m having fun.

I am so proud of me.

4 Replies

Noah and I got into a huge argument last night about obesity. The person we were arguing with started out with “Obesity is the problem” and by the end apologized for his fat shaming. In between was an hour and a half of passionate back and forth with no name calling or raised voices.

I love arguing with Noah. He’s good at pinning people down and forcing them to fully explicate the random shit they are spewing. “No no no, you don’t get to get away with being vague. When you say “the problem” what exactly do you mean?”

He tried to transition into “Obesity is a symptom of the problem and we need to get rid of it.” No no no. That’s not ok either.

Either it is ok for people to exist in whatever body they exist in or it isn’t. Would it make their lives perhaps easier if they were thinner? Maybe. But that still doesn’t make them a problem and fuck you for saying so. (I never once said fuck you to him. I was really good.) How are they a problem? Because they cost money? So do skinny people.

He even tried to tell me that “It’s a bunch of bullshit that being fat doesn’t cause health problems.” When I almost levitated off my chair in anger he barely blinked. This is a man who is used to arguing.

It was a long argument. At one point he said something about how this isn’t an argument anyone could win. Noah countered with the fact that he (the guy we were arguing with) wasn’t going to win this argument but I (Krissy) already have won because my goal was to change the opinions of people who fat shame.

Bodies are ok. Whatever they look like. Period.

fake it.

Leave a reply

I worry about how much I worry about how I affect other people. I don’t work nearly as hard on being nice to my body. I pay a lot of attention to how my behavior impacts my kids. For a while now Shanna has had an occasional eye tic. It is a stress response. I feel that this is a sign that I am not behaving how I should.

It is hard having to pretend that I experience less stress than I do just because it hurts other people that I run so hot. Hot in the sense of high stress load.

I feel very guilty that I had kids because I wanted to have a relationship that was intense and all day every day. I wanted to have the company. I wanted to have to learn how to be nice. I wanted to learn what it means to teach people without shame and resentment. I want it still.

It feels like I created people just so I could perform a science experiment. That doesn’t seem like a nice thing to do. But I’m not sure that the reasons that other people have kids are “better”. I know that I feel guilty that I am not better. I am not fully arrived at behaving how I should for my kids. I don’t deserve them.

I tell myself that my kids are having a good childhood in the scheme of their species. I am nice to them. I do take care of them. They have a wide variety of healthy, good tasting food. They don’t get yelled at much. They have appropriate clothing for the weather. They are allowed to play all day almost every day. (By “allowed” I really mean “forced”.) They are given all the kisses and hugs they want every day. They are allowed to tell me to stop doing anything except for cleaning their bodies. And I don’t even do that much. Usually I default to “fine if you want to be dirty it is your body.” Once in a while the filth gets to be a bit much. And I’m fanatical about teeth care.

I’m doing “better” than I used to be able to do. But it really doesn’t matter. I need to be enough better to stop scaring my kids. If I am producing stress in my kids then my behavior is a problem. I am not behaving good enough. It’s not ok.

My kids should not have to watch me like a weather vane hoping to determine how difficult I will be to put up with that day. That’s not ok. That is a level of crazy I don’t get to inflict on them. I actually really appreciate that Shanna has such “tells”. She is not nearly old enough to talk to me about the stress she is feeling. But I can just look at her face and know whether I am “soft” enough. When she looks nervous I have to visibly calm down and retract the energy I am sending out into the room. It is hard to do. It is a very conscious decision to “look” like I am not angry or upset or anxious.

I can’t just decide to not feel angry or upset or anxious. I feel that way most of the time. I feel scared. I feel like everyone is going to be angry with me soon because I am going to break a rule and then they won’t want to know me any more. I am scared shitless my kids will grow up and not want to know me because I am such an asshole.

But I can’t act like I am having the feelings I am having. I have to fake it.

I saw a friend yesterday I don’t see much. Usually I contain my shit better. This time she saw me right after therapy. She got to see all the messy shame and crying because I don’t know to be “better” already. I feel pretty pathetic that I have been in therapy for almost three decades and I’m still crazy. I still spend a lot of my time shaking in fear. I still spend a lot of time hiding in dark rooms so I can sob uncontrollably. I hide it better. I keep it in a box better.

I fake it better.

Not well enough. My kids see the stress. It isn’t ok for my stress to impact them.

My shrink wants me to look for a meditation class to attend with my kids. I wish that such a thing would not involve a drive to Berkeley. I will look though. It is a good suggestion.

Shanna has been asking more questions about my mom. “Did your mom love you?” “What good things happened to you when you were a kid?” “What did your mom do that was so bad?”

I told her that I don’t actually know if my mom loved me or not. I think she did. I hope she did. I believe she loved me as well as she could and it is really hard when that isn’t enough. I wrack my brain trying to come up with positive stories. Sometimes I’m not sure if I’m just a whiny bitch and someone else would have been able to find a lot more joy in my childhood or if it was really bad enough that I should have trouble remembering anything positive. I tell her flat out that she isn’t going to know about the really bad stuff until she is an adult. I told her she doesn’t need to think of me that way.

I’m not always very rational about food so I talk about the food insecurity issues a lot. I feel relatively unashamed of them. The more I read about foster children the more I feel “ok” about having the food issues I have. They make sense in context.

I talk to Shanna about control. Like I ask her how she feels about being directed and forced to do what other people want during a specific period of time. I ask her how she would feel if she never got to pick what she was doing. I ask her how she would feel if she came home and ALL of her toys were gone. Stuff like that. I talk about how when I was a kid I felt very out of control so I controlled what I would put in my mouth.

I talk to her about how sad it is for me that I didn’t get to have any of these good foods when I was a kid. She pities me. I talk about the ways my body has problems because of the food I have eaten. My kids are very aware of nutrition and the things they need to eat. “You have to eat green stuff because it helps you poop!” We do talk about other aspects of nutrition but that is their favorite. Neither of my children have my constant-diarrhea problem (I am hoping this is because of lower stress). They instead are mildly prone to heading in the other direction so I repeat things I have learned from friends with constipation issues.

My shrink says I should answer every question and not dance around things. Well, she doesn’t think I should say I was raped until they are more like puberty age but she is less convinced I need to wait for the magic number of 18. We’ll see.

I cancelled park day for next week. Half of playgroup for next week cancelled. I won’t be sad if the other half cancels. Having five kid-social events in a two week period is too many for me.

I am doing too much. I can’t keep doing these 12+ hour work days. Social time counts as work time whether I like it or not.

I’m having a hard time with the balance of life thing. I have a lot of things I want done. I am having trouble with the fact that it takes a while to get all the things done. In order to put it in perspective I asked Noah about how many man-hours it takes to produce an iPhone for people to bitch about not working magically enough. He said probably in the neighborhood of 500 man-years not including factory work. That’s software/hardware design.

Stuff takes time. Not everything that can be done by a group of humans can be done by a singular human. No matter how much you want it. There just aren’t enough hours in a life. Figure out what you want to build and how you want to spend your time.

Sometimes Shanna asks me about my crying. I tell her that every body is different. When I feel too much emotion inside my body I cry no matter what the emotion is. Sometimes I’m happy; sometimes I’m sad; sometimes I’m angry; sometimes I’m frustrated. My body has just decided that all of these things come out as tears. Sometimes I am crying because bad things happened a long time ago and I was not allowed to cry then and my body needs to let go of that piece of being sad or scared so I’m doing it now. I’m safe now. It’s ok in my life now to just have feelings, so I do.

She gives me a lot of hugs. I am trying so hard not to turn her into a major source of emotional support. I don’t talk about specifics. I talk about how to be an adult and deal with the body you have. I’m very afraid of emotional incest. I know that it is a common “next generation” away from incest mistake.

I am an intensely overly sexualized person. More than that, I tend to not know how to be friends without sexualized touching. I have a lot of big needs that have gone unfilled for my entire life. I feel kind of desperately needy sometimes.

I can’t treat my kids like they are here for my support. I created these relationships because I need to learn how to give support, not because I think I can or should get much back. I’m here for the satisfaction of giving. I have to have the quiet glow that comes from a job well done. I am not going to get a lot else. Not from my kids. Well…. years of kisses and hugs. That’s nice. But at some point they will pull back and that has to be ok.

It is hard learning to be this kind of self-contained. It means I am talking to Noah a lot less about what is going on with me. I can’t breach the defenses at all. We don’t have time. What time we are together we mostly talk about his work and the basics of project stuff or kid stuff. I am very much hiding in the roles I created for myself. I don’t have room for my crazy there. I have to mostly take the crazy off-stage.

I can’t just make the crazy go away this way. But I can damn it up until I have a better space to deal with it. I had better let steam off once in a while or I will be sorry. Very sorry.

I woke up this morning dreaming about cutting. I don’t dream much any more. I rarely remember them at least. Not since I started pot. But this morning I woke up with my hand already moving along my other arm. I’m not sure where that came from. I stopped cutting my arms by early high school. I moved on to my legs because that was easier to hide.

My therapist wants me to go find more things to do as “self care” and I wake up wanting to cut. I do need more stress relief. That has always been my tool of serious self care. That is how I let the steam off. I go off in private and I make sure I am not anyone else’s problem. And I let myself feel how much I hurt all the time. But I have to hide it because it makes other people feel uncomfortable.

Fake it till you make it.

I’m not making it.

If I knew what I “needed” I would do whatever I had to go get it. I would do it. Even if it sucked. Really if you could arrange extra suck just for me that would make me feel better.

Sometimes it is hard knowing that the journey is the point. I am making it. I am nice to my kids and random people in restaurants and my neighbors when they aren’t being racist assholes. I only yell about things that need to be yelled about. Silence is consent. I am not going to leave people ambiguous about how I feel on some topics. Even if that means I’m not nice. If you have never upset anyone then you have never stood for anything.

I have nothing to lose at this stage.

Sometimes it is kind of weird knowing that Noah is the linchpin. All of the luxury and privilege of my life is based on his ability to earn money. I groom him like a friggin race horse. He has more than doubled, nearly tripled, his salary since we met. Because I’m pushy and I give him feedback on what he should or shouldn’t be doing. That’s kind of weird. We really are good for one another.

I’m having a lot of anxiety about spending all of the money Noah earns. I’m not looking forward to my end of year reckoning on Mint. I mean, in terms of petty cash we are higher than we were at the end of last year. We retired a lot of extra mortgage. But I did not save all that I wanted to save.

I kind of went nuts in the back yard instead. And this Texas trip isn’t cheap. I’m going to have to deal with my anxiety. I am fucking thrilled with my yard. Not a single dollar was wasted. I am ecstatic. The only thing between me and what I see in my head is a lot more work on my end. I’ll get there. It will be really pretty. But it is man-years ahead of me and that is sitting hard. It feels like I wasted the money because I didn’t finish the project and now it’s just kind of half-way and limbo sucks.

I do this. Don’t mind me.

At the end of the year I always feel like I am a bad person for spending money on things I wanted. I don’t deserve all the money I spend. I feel really bad that I am not more frugal with Noah’s money. I should make it spread farther. I should be saving more for the kids. I shouldn’t be so selfish.

But really… is building a playground in my back yard purely selfish? My anxiety yells at me that I shouldn’t be doing the work. I’m stupid for adding all the work.

But I want a pretty yard. I didn’t inherit one. I have to make it. Yeah, it will be back breaking work for a decade or so. Stop bitching and do the work. Don’t feel bitter you twit. This is a choice. Beauty doesn’t just happen automatically for most people. And most of what I want is stuff that wouldn’t have been in place anyway.

I’m just being a whiny bitch.

I’m thinking that there will be the Friday Funhouse version of Wonderland. I close my eyes and see kids running around in packs. I hear the laughter and shouting. I turn around and see grown ups playing games and talking and laughing.

I want the laughing so much. I want it so much I ache inside. Crying isn’t really the way to get people to feel good. Laughter doesn’t come from the places I dwell.

It is a little weird to me sometimes that my therapist knows so little about me. Ha. She continues to be shocked by how many people I know. People with as much trauma as me usually hide in their houses for the rest of their lives. They don’t go out and meet social group after social group. People like me usually can’t fake it well enough.

Am I faking it or am I “learning social skills”? I’m not sure they ever really feel natural for anyone.

One of the things I like the most about Noah is that he doesn’t flinch around me. I don’t scare him. I don’t intimidate him. I go back and forth between wanting my kids to have a similar level of toughness and knowing that it usually comes from trauma. And I just can’t traumatize them. I can’t.

Stop clenching your jaw, Krissy. Deep breaths. Whatever you are feeling is just a feeling. It will pass. This moment isn’t forever. You aren’t faking it. This is the process. The frustration is part of the process.

Time to stop typing.

Feeling useful

1 Reply

I spend a lot of my life feeling useless and worthless. I have nothing of any value to contribute. I have no skills worth having. I tend to assume that if something is a skill *I* am capable of picking up it can’t be that hard or interesting.

Then I go out into the world and I find out that the reality is that I just have no self-esteem. Different. My whole neighborhood is excited about the fence. People are thanking me profusely. Everyone is so glad that they get to look at the painting. They don’t care if it looks like a “professional artist” did the work. They care that someone had an idea to spruce up the place and just started in on working.

It really is a relief to be copying drawings from children. It gives me a tremendous amount of wiggle room in terms of artistic technique.

I helped my friend with her graduate school paper last night. We have time scheduled for a month. She *has* to finish. And I understand the writing process and I can push her through it. If she manages to write a good paper and get her degree I’m going to be patting myself on the back for years. I can’t get my own graduate degree but I can help other people get theirs.

I am prepared for the English classes I will be teaching. I don’t know how many students. I don’t know what grade levels or reading/writing levels the kids will be at. I have enough work to keep a slow 5th grader busy or six months or a smart high school student for a solid two weeks. Let’s see how much work I need to do after this. Today is mostly diagnostic.

When I say that I don’t want to do something unless it is a vocation I mean that I’m not willing to go do something for pay that I won’t do for free. I’m not willing to take care of someone else’s kids right now. I would not be able to do so in a loving way–not full time. I would be a monster. I am not willing to teach full time for pay–I don’t have that to give. I am not willing to work for a company that will earn money from my hard work. I want to remodel my house and put in a garden that will feed me for decades.

I have luxury and privilege because of Noah. I get to make “choices” that aren’t available to other people.

When I was younger I did a tremendous amount of volunteering my time. I have always become uncomfortable the minute I am paid for something. If I’m not willing to just go do it because it is fun then it feels like a serious problem. If you have to pay me to do this then I don’t want to do it.

Apparently our belief that women don’t ask for the money they are worth isn’t as firmly based on research as one might assume. I like the whole idea, “Maybe the problem isn’t that women don’t ask for enough maybe the problem is that men ask for too much.” How’s that for spin?

Noah walks in and asks for outrageous salaries these days. I stand back and feel utter horror that someone could be such a presumptuous schmuck. Then they give him how much money he asks for.

Many of the neighbors have expressed shock that I would paint the fence for free. That seems utterly bizarre. I get to look at it every time I walk through my neighborhood for the next goodness knows how many years. That is a reward. That is something I lacked before painting it.

I feel like a complete asshole sometimes. I have the luxury of donating my time and materials (paint ain’t cheap) because I have a husband who can ask for a lot of money. Doesn’t that make me a using piece of shit? Noah doesn’t hate me.

After looking up the word vocation it just means a strong feeling of suitability. Well that explains why I am using it differently and wrong. I don’t mean just that it feels suitable. I mean that I must do it. I suppose I should pick a different word.

One man said, “How did you get permission to do this?” “I asked.” He looked floored. Really? All I did was ask? Ok, so I asked a friend who is fluent in Chinese to help me write a letter and her whole family ensured that I was sucking up properly and that’s how I got permission. Let’s be clear here.

I’m not making the whole world better. But I’m making my neighborhood better. I’m not a big fish in a big pond. I never will be. Does that mean I have less value? Is the good I bring into the world of no merit just because it will only be felt by a few people? I don’t know.

How much good do you have to produce in the world in order to not be a waste of oxygen? I don’t know. I know that I consciously consider this question. I know that I look around at a lot of people I know and consider them a waste of resources. (Yes, I *am* that big of an asshole.) I’m not going to go tell them to commit suicide or anything. I assume they provide some value that I just don’t see.

Every person on this planet is valued for what they can do. Sometimes all they can “do” is look pretty and that causes other people to feel good. I uhhhh don’t want to be in that cohort. I understand that it is what some people have to offer–I just don’t prize it much. Good thing I am unusual and everyone else thinks those people are AWESOME or maybe I would cause people to have low self esteem.

When I’m having my existential crises about whether there is any point in continuing to live (It sounds really lame and whiny when I’m not feeling suicidal.) I very consciously evaluate whether I make more good in the world or bad. I know I make bad in the world. Do I do enough good to make up for it?

I am increasingly more ok and less ok with judging people as I get older. On one hand I understand the scope of someone else’s life better as I get older–it makes me more patient and sympathetic. On the other hand I think most people don’t do half of what they are capable of and I’m kind of sick of this shit.

I’m processing some stuff with friendships that have ended. I still feel like shit. I feel like it is all my fault even though I can make lists of things that went wrong and my column isn’t the only one with entries. I’m not saying that it is all someone else’s fault. I’m saying we are all human and we all fuck up.

How do you learn how to talk about “triggers”? When I read on the internet about people feeling “triggered” I think it doesn’t mean what I think it means.

In retrospect I can see how my ability to be “ok” with someone will unravel if they repeatedly promise to be responsible for giving me food and they don’t. I have a problem with that going back to early childhood. I’m not worth people bothering to feed. I should just die. After a fairly brief period of time if someone jerks me around over the topic of food I am not going to be able to treat that person like a neutral party. I am going to treat them like someone who wants me to die and I am going to get violent and angry. If I think really hard it has happened more than once.

I have watched this as my relationship with my kids has changed over the past five years. I am like a dog who cannot be approached while eating. I have a lot of food issues and I get angry and violent when people say they will give me food and don’t.

Sometimes I feel like a petty piece of shit. My mom used to eat at Orange Julius a lot. For most of my life just thinking of the name or seeing the logo is enough to make my body go haywire. I am instantly full of adrenaline and I’m ready to attack someone.

I ate fucking ramen every fucking meal and she went out to eat.

I ate leftovers that weren’t that good and she went out to get a smoothie because “she didn’t feel that well”. I don’t feel that well either. And I don’t like this food. But I have to eat it even though you won’t even fucking eat it. Fuck you you fucking fuck.

None of this is rational. At this point in time I just make sure that there aren’t many people responsible for providing me with food. When I went camping with my friend and her family I freaked out about a lot of the same stuff.

Wait, my end of this bargain is something I don’t like and I will have to do whether it is shitty or not and you get to just sit there and watch me do this shitty thing? You get to opt-out though? Oh wait. You are *special*.

I hate you. I hate you. I hate you. I want to break your nose. I want to punch you in the kidneys until you pee blood for a month you piece of shit.

Entitlement. I have too much entitlement. I think that if I am suffering someone else better fucking be suffering too. Or I will make them suffer.

No, I’m not nice.

Do I do this to my kids? I don’t think I have so far–they don’t feel like responsible parties. I think I get mad at responsible parties–people who can and should be held accountable for their own actions.

That makes me feel nervous about them growing up. Am I just waiting until they hit some magic age to blow up at them? I hope I get this under control before then.

If I manage to find a way to not depend on my kids then it will work out. That sounds like a terrible set-up. One of my many problems is that when someone promises that they will take care of me but they are lying…. I can’t reconcile that in my head.

You want to take care of me. But you don’t take care of me. You lie to me. You lie to me over and over. You think it would be nice if the universe somehow magically took care of me but you are going to fuck me over. You are selfish and self-absorbed and you only care about yourself. You are not capable of evaluating what you are actually capable of. You over promise and under deliver over and over and over.

This is why I am so afraid of promising anything. I don’t want to be like you.

If I promise something I am going to kill myself getting it done. Why do you think I have given up just about everything else in my life to parent? I said I would do this. I decided at the beginning what standard of behavior was ok from me and I have a ridiculous success rate on hitting my prescribed metrics.

I am doing what I said I would do.

It means that I can’t have a lot of other things. It means that many other dreams must be deferred or abandoned. Life is about choices.

I can choose to think that “my” stuff is more important or I can choose to think that my commitments are more important.

Do I have this hubris because I am able bodied? Mostly able bodied? I have times in my life where I end up laying on the floor sobbing for hours because my back is spasming. When I am alone with my children it doesn’t matter that I feel unable to function. I crawl to the kitchen and they get their fucking food.

Ok, so this abdominal pain thing isn’t a hernia. Other possible suspects include IBS. Guess what? I started drinking carbonated water after my kids were born. Carbonation is a known irritant to IBS. (I switched to carbonated water because I was trying to get off juice because sugar is bad for you–right? This was a big step down from my early life of living on soda. I have never drunk still water by habit. Ever.) I haven’t had carbonation in over a week (pretty amazing for me) and probably 75% of the pain is gone. That horrible throbbing thing right in that one spot just isn’t hurting.

However, in researching what this is I found out that it probably isn’t normal that I have had diarrhea for most of my life and I live my whole life around knowing where bathrooms are because I need to pee and/or poop so frequently. Apparently eight loose stools a day is probably a sign that I am not healthy. Well, shit. (pun intended.)

It is probably time for allergy testing.

I don’t take care of my body very well. I don’t know how. Looking around at my culture I can see why. People reap what they sow. I don’t think I will use the family recipes that my mother so laboriously hand copied for me almost ever in my life. I don’t cook with canned food. I don’t depend on bottles of “sauce” for my calories. I don’t put Crisco in everything.

There were reasons they did. But I don’t want to be like them.

Kids are waking up. It’s going to be a very busy day. Time to stop whining.

fast check in

3 Replies

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

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

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

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

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

Busy but standing still.

Leave a reply

Woke up at 4am. For the first few hours I wasn’t real productive. I read. I blabbed on the ptsd support site. Then was breakfast. Then I made dinner (yay crockpot). Then I started laundry. Then I did the first round of dishes. I watered the front and back yards.

After that I scooped the cat box and gave her new food and water. Then I took out the garbage and recycling. After that I got to settle in for two hours of weeding.

Lots of kid drama and screaming. I feel like a big asshole but I also feel like OH MY FUCKING GOD DO WE HAVE TO DO THIS EVERY DAY?!

Then I rotated laundry. Then I made lunch. Lots of bitching at me over lunch.

Then we slowly cleaned up the living room and got the kids redressed (Calli was on her fourth g-d outfit) and switched laundry again.

Then we walked to Home Depot for hasps so that I can lock the fucking food cabinets. (There are foods you can eat all you want of and there are foods you need to eat in moderation. Any time Shanna is out of sight of an adult she is sneaking into foods she knows she isn’t supposed to free-feed. I can’t take the screaming and she shows no sign of being interested in stopping.)

Then we walked to dance class. This walk was three miles to get from our house to this point. Calli and I hung out during class and did ok. After class we got to walk another 1.7 miles home (up the big darn hill). Then I got to finish making dinner.

After dinner I folded three loads of laundry, brushed/flossed Shanna, did thirty minutes of kitchen cleanup (more fucking dishes). I made new soda water bottles for tomorrow.

It’s weird how I feel like I do a lot yet feel like I don’t do anything. I don’t feel useful. It’s going to take at least another one hundred hours before the yard is properly weeded. I’m about eight hours in. I want to cry. Instead I will work. Before and after engagements for the next couple of weeks. I would like to get some seeds in the ground (I’d really like corn this year) so I need to get my ass in gear. I need everything in the ground and ready to go before we go camping or I will miss the growing season. So that’s three weeks. Good thing the girls go to visit their Godmamas this week. I may spend the entire time weeding.

I’m tired.

I can’t help thinking that the best part of my day comes in the middle of the night. Post-kids I have to wake up for the bathroom multiple times a night. When I come back to bed Noah grabs me like I am his security blanket and makes soothing sounds and starts massaging me basically in his sleep. I feel wanted and loved and secure. I feel so lucky to be married to him.

Now I understand “fuck cancer”

6 Replies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life goals:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perspective if everything.

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

I hope she will forgive me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ok, run.

Plants are personal.

3 Replies

Not eating sugar is hard. There is hidden, extra sugar in freakin everything. I’m trying. And I’m not being a fascist with the kids. When other people hand them sugar when we are out I don’t say anything.

Today is a gardening day. And my friend’s husband is coming tonight. I’m going to get a whole bunch of work done. I can feel my heart go pitter patter. It is hilarious how happy getting work done makes me. Slowing the inevitable decline of my house makes me feel better about living in it. It’s a thing.

I’ve been doing a lot of gardening. I really want to put up pictures of my yard. If I’m good I may do it today. I’ve made a lot of progress lately. I will be putting out word that I have more starts than I need pretty soon. The lavender is taking off. I’m going to have almost a dozen plants out of this batch. I’m going to have 40+ tomato plants. Over a dozen chard plants. Those are the ones I have massively popping up so far. I think the parsley is taking off. Lots of carrots are coming up outside. The celery looks happy. Artichokes are doing great. We pulled the flowers off the blueberry bush because you shouldn’t let it fruit the first year.

Lots going on in the yard. I would really like showing off. But I’m bad at taking pictures so I dislike posting what I take. Oh well. Get over it.

I need to write the Easter egg hunt email. I’m thoroughly excited about this year. This is our fourth hunt. I think this will be the first one with a lot of kids. I’ve been hoping that one of these years we would hit critical mass. The hunt is the day after I drive back from Portland. I think this year will be pot luck. And I have to have the house completely ready before we leave. The only thing I will have to do is get up Sunday morning and hide the eggs. You can’t do that in advance anyway. It’ll be fun.

I feel like I live my life preparing for events. That’s how I structure my time. “X event is in Y days so I should do Z work so I am ready.” I check in with my calendar multiple times of day. I keep long task lists for separate areas of endeavor (yard, cleaning, crafty-schtuff, cooking, etc) and I move back and forth between the lists as my priorities shift. Sometimes, when I’m feeling lonely I think about taking pictures of alllll the lists next to one another because it amuses me. But I feel weird about it so I don’t.

Which is to say: I live in an era of over-exposure and I know that everything I put into the world becomes part of how people judge me. How much of my insanity do I want to reveal? Shaping an identity comes in inches. I think it is funny that I have considerably less compunction about writing graphic sexual stories than I have about posting pictures of my gardening.

My gardening is actually personal. I am slowly working towards an image in my mind. I have plans. I am creating something. I am creating something that I want to see for the sole reason that I want to see it. I am being very selfish. I am using a tremendous amount of time and energy.

It feels really good. I will get to hide here for the rest of my life. And I will make it beautiful. That is personal.

Most of the time when I have fucked people it hasn’t been very personal. Probably 80% of my partners were fewer than four uhm occasions. Around 60% were once. I didn’t know them. They don’t know me. They don’t want to know me. I have had sex with somewhere between 120-130 people.

Sex is a physical need. Also, I have spent a lot of my life trying to get through one more night. I grew up with the belief that I should be constantly searching for a sex partner and tolerating inappropriate contact from men. Being married and having kids means that I have the “acceptable model” to kind of default into. It does happen to be a relatively healthy model.

I’m not interested in spending all of my time out being entertained. That sounds like a lot of work and a lot of money to me. I don’t want my children to look at the environment around them as owing them entertainment. They need to create their own entertainment. That’s life. You have to create what you want to see in the world. How are you going to do that? My kids do some really cool things with play silks. They have a lot of time to fill.

I’m excited about the idea of charter school money. I know what the standards are. I know how to measure them. I know how to introduce concepts. It doesn’t require curriculum. It can just happen.

And I forgot to hit post again. That’s ok. Tomorrow will be festive as well. Tomorrow is my last day of incest support group. I’m relieved.

Leave a reply

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It will be fun.

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

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

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

And breakfast is ready.

The first visit with the Dr was good so I should go back.

2 Replies

I went to an incest survivors support group for the first time on Tuesday. It went well. No histrionics. The other three participants have been together for over a year. I swear to god I am a professional new kid.

At one point we went down a checklist of all the various symptoms and physical problems that Early Childhood Sexual Assault (ECSA) survivors have. With the exception of a shy bladder (I can pee anywhere) I have everything. If there is something bad associated with ECSA I have that problem. I am completely textbook. I spend a lot of time feeling fairly ashamed of this.

Stomach and GI problems are big for us. My stomach has hurt my whole life. As an educated adult I will label it anxiety. As a kid all I knew was that I kept being told over and over again, “Oh quite sniveling everything will be fine” and then someone else would beat the shit out of me. I have no idea how many times I was beaten as a child. I went to 25 schools. I didn’t get into a fight in any of the last five high schools. By then I had managed to avoid that specific issue. I got into fistfights–several in both middle schools. That leaves the 18 elementary schools. I don’t have any memories of elementary school that are not tied up in people physically hurting me. The teachers beat me (in Oklahoma and Texas) and the students beat me everywhere.

My mom would tell me that people would like me more if I didn’t dress like such a freak. From when I was very young I dressed like an orthodox conservative religious group. If I had been able to get away with covering my hair I would have. I wore long dresses. No one saw my skin.

But I still got raped over and over. My dad sexually assaulted me/raped me over and over for more than a decade. Before I stopped him. First by requesting no more visitation and then when I prosecuted him.

The other eleven people who raped me all started out as “friends”. They were going to “help” me. They “loved” me.

My stomach hurts all the time. I live my life in an incredible amount of fear.

When I turned 18 I decided that since being raped and beaten was unavoidable I was going to try and figure out how to control it. So I got into the bdsm community. I played with all the Big Names. I was an extremely heavy player. I have safeworded exactly once and that was when someone used a cattle prod on my vulva after I had specifically told him that my three hard limits for the scene were scat, water sports, and cattle prods. He saran wrapped me to a table so I couldn’t move and then got out the cattle prod and said, “I hear you don’t like these.” I was 19. I had been in the community for less than three months. He was a Pillar of the Community. Of course I didn’t make a stink.

That’s just how shit happens in my life. I say: don’t do ______ and then someone immediately does it. It is far safer for me to not think about the things I don’t want to have happen to me. If I say, “I don’t want to have sex with you” it is nearly inevitable that I will be raped.

No wonder I don’t leave the house much.

So I need to talk to a doctor about my stomach and GI issues. A big part of the reason I smoke as much pot as I do is because I use it as an appetite stimulant. Most of the time my stomach hurts too much to eat. I feel cramping and waves of nausea on a daily basis. My stomach hurt. When I’m stoned I feel fine. I can even eat vegetables. Trying to eat vegetables sober means I will be in horrifying pain. It hurts so much to digest. And when I eat a salad completely sober I have burning painful diarrhea not long afterwards.

This is why I didn’t eat vegetables as a child.

Over the past few years of being a heavy stoner I have managed to get my diet to a place where pretty much any nutritionist would say, “Well done!” I get a weekly CSA box. We eat absolutely all of it. We eat pasture raised, humanely treated meat. Maybe slightly more than strictly necessary… but I don’t think so. I eat a lot of fruit. We eat some starch still, but not even with every meal. White flour and white sugar are now things that are more like sometimes foods.

But I can’t really eat sober. It hurts too much. I can take a few bites. I can never eat enough.

When I was a kid I solved this by living entirely on carbohydrates and staying so full that my stomach never had the chance to get this empty painful feelings. Getting hungry is agony. Simple carbs are the primary thing I can eat without pain.

And I’ve almost entirely cut them out of my life because they are “bad for me” so when I’m in pain and I’m hungry and I want to eat I can sometimes end up sobbing and sobbing because either I can eat something “good for me” that will hurt me more or I can eat something “bad for me” that will long-term hurt me in another way but provide instant relief.

I’ve been doing some googling on chronic bronchitis. I have to stop smoking. I have ordered a vaporizer and I will have no choice but to completely stop smoking. (It should arrive on Monday.) I grew up in a house where you couldn’t see the opposite walls because of the haze of smoke. My lungs came pre-damaged. My mother was a chain smoker. Auntie smoked heavily during my early childhood but quit by the time I was in middle school. Uncle Bob smoked longer than her but I think he stopped when I was in high school. Our house was incredibly difficult to function in. Apparently chronic bronchitis is one of those incurable it can kill you super fast if you keep fucking with it sorts of things. I want to see my daughters grow up. I have to stop.

I think it is pretty reasonable for me to be scared right now. I don’t know what the next step is. I need to be able to talk to a doctor about this. I need to try something else. This is something where I really don’t know what to do. I have tried so many things over my lifetime.

And there’s the weird pulsing thing that feels vaguely like trapped intestine in between the walls of my stomach muscles. That kind of shit sometimes happens after pregnancy. But I don’t know what has been going on with that. Since I stopped marathon training the pain has gone down dramatically which makes me want to JUST NOT MENTION IT. SEE–IT’S FINE. Now it’s genuinely in the 1-2 range for pain. It hasn’t spiked up to 5 since October. Obviously I healed myself. It’s fine. I can ignore it, right?

I’m not sure how to write this script for a doctor. I think of these problems in context of my life. But if I tell people about my life they respond with, “that is unbelievable” and there we are.

I tell Shanna that my problem is that a long time ago I had good reasons to be scared and my body has never managed to really understand that I don’t need to feel scared any more. Something in my brain broke and that feeling just keeps happening even though it should stop.

I don’t know how to make my stomach stop hurting. I don’t know how to be able to just eat food without thinking the whole time about how much pain I will be in when I have to shit it out.

Having children has been the best thing that has ever happened to me in terms of food. I don’t have crap in the house because I don’t want them to eat it. Well, we eat ramen a few times a week because like always that is one of the primary things I can handle eating without pain. Yay simple carbs. When I am really really anxious it is one of the only things that doesn’t cause violent stomach cramps.

Doesn’t everyone spend all day every day fighting with how much pain they are in because they were stupid enough to eat vegetables?

Eating vegetables hurt as a child. So I wouldn’t eat them. So people hit me and told me I was bad. And ungrateful. Let’s not forget ungrateful. I am ungrateful stupid bitch because I won’t eat what someone has made for me. Even though it will cause violent stomach cramps and horrible burning diarrhea. stupid stupid stupid bitch.

When people tell me to just “get over” my childhood I don’t even know what that means. Should I have a lobotomy? Should I surgically cut out all of these memories? There will still be all the damage to my body. I don’t know how to undo it.

I feel so scared.

Yay Disneyland

1 Reply

I am on the iPad. This won’t be my normal length.

If you add up the past two nights I’ve gotten 13 hours of sleep. But I got 9 of them last night. That was a very caffeinated drive. We had a great day in California Adventure. I think that next year I will have to have check in times and let Shanna run. Keeping her close is getting hard. (like within the Wilderness Camp Explorer area-not the park at large).

Thank you D for the stroller. They are alternating and fighting over who gets to ride. That is a first. Usually they scream and kick when I ask them to ride in strollers or wagons. I think they are tired.

We were in the park for hella longer than usual because we got there early and had a long wait till check in. I think we were in the park for 5 hours. The whole last hour Calli kept saying “hotel?” “bed?” she was tired too.

I turned the lights out at six because play was getting meaner and meaner. No, you cannot play a game where you pin your sister down and slam stuffed animals into her face as hard as you can. That is not a good game.

We went for lunch at a fancy restaurant because we were on that end of the pier and I didn’t check how expensive it was before we sat down. Whoops. Luckily that $78 lunch came with enough food for dinner and breakfast too so I boxed it up. Yay for having a fridge and a microwave. Next time I will have to bring my own dishes. They provide a couple paper bowls and a few glasses. Most unsuitable. Makes sense. There isn’t a dishwasher and most people seem to act like it would break their hands to do dishes and the maid staff can’t time efficiently take care of it in the studios.

The sixth is my moms birthday. She turned 64. My dad would have been 64 yesterday. I didn’t cry over them this year. My dad has been dead for 14 years. In three years he will have been dead for me as long as he was alive for me. On my next birthday I turn the age they were when I was born.

I don’t think I am much like them. I hope not.
It is so awesome to deal with Shannas”gimmees” by saying that everything is too expensive. She didn’t hoard her allowance this time. She is quite pissed that everything is too much money. Ha.

I went outside and smoked yesterday afternoon because I ate approximately four bites of breakfast and maybe seven bites of lunch. My stomach hurts so much. I am going to need to this morning if I want to eat. I am clearly hungry but I want to curl up into a ball and sob because of my stomach. This is awful. I could suffer through this. But I can’t eat. Going longer and longer without food makes me dizzy and nauseated. I didn’t smoke much yesterday. I didn’t want to spend much time. I’m on the first floor and my balcony is next to a public walkway. Awkward.

So we will see how today goes. Right now I want to puke on the floor and my throat feels like it is closing and I would rate my stomach pain at a six. It is hard to think. Maybe I will go freeze my ass off outside for a bit. Then maybe I could sleep a bit more too. That would be excellent.

Haunted

2 Replies

Running is getting harder. There are a few things going on. For one thing I am dealing with the cumulative of suddenly doing massive amounts of exercise when I have never done so before. It’s an experience. But mostly I am struggling because of how my body is changing. As I lose weight/change shape/harden/whatever I can feel the bones of my brother Tommy coming through in my face.

This is weird and hard to describe. The more time I spend looking at Calli and the more time I spend running the more conscious I am of how my skull resembles my brother. And my running gait is embarrassingly like his. Embarrassing because Tommy had a severe traumatic brain injury. He didn’t run. He lurched. He looked awkward and weird. It was a miracle he walked at all so folks considered it a real big deal.

One year, in Apple Valley, he was on a disabled kids sports team, softball. I remember how Tommy looked running the bases. I move like that. I feel weird when I run. I lurch awkwardly to the side. I have trouble figuring out how to balance my weight. I almost trip a lot. I kind of go back and forth on the side walk.

Except for sometimes when I hit my stride just right and I feel like I am flying. Then I feel Tommy. Then I remember how he would smile the few times he really managed to get going quickly. That wild ebullition on his face. I feel that way when I am running really fast.

I often wonder what my life would have been like if I had lived in one place. If someone had looked at me as a small child and said, “Running quickly makes you feel good. Let’s work with this.” I was told to go to my room with a book and shut up. So I’m pretty awkward when I run. I have run more this year than the entire rest of my life combined.

Tommy hated me. Before the accident he was nasty and mean, “No one wanted you. Why were you born? Can’t you die already?” After the accident he was brutal and vicious.

Tommy’s speech was very difficult to understand. He had trouble enunciating and an average sentence would take multiple breaths and minutes to deliver. He hated me because I could hear the first three words and finish his sentences. “You rude, stupid bitch.” He hit me a lot. A really lot. When I think of myself as “not being all that physically abused” what I mean is my mom gave me four really memorable beatings and that’s it. My siblings hurt me all the time. That “didn’t count.”

Once, Tommy was screaming at me. I don’t remember what I did. Maybe nothing. Maybe something. I don’t know. He got as far as, “You are” and I finished, “a stupid worthless bitch, yeah I know” and I didn’t even look up from my book.

I remember the sound of inhaled breath. Then I don’t remember anything until I woke up on the floor. He hit me in the head. I don’t know how long I was unconscious. No one paid attention or cared. I don’t think I was unconscious very long. I think I managed to scramble up and away before he managed the physical dexterity to kick me. Either that or he did it once before I was awake. Regardless I got away just as he was trying to deliver a hard kick. He fell down. He crawled after me screaming that he was going to kill me. He wasn’t going to deal with such a stupid bitch any longer. He should have killed me a long time ago.

That was why I spent a lot of time in the willow tree in the yard. He didn’t have the arm strength to climb any more. I love climbing trees. I still love climbing trees.

That was Tuesday.

Essentially what I’m saying is: having running be a constant reminder of my brother is a mixed thing. I kind of wish I knew what Jimmy looks like when he runs. I’m not sure I have ever seen him run. In high school he was a state finalist. He was quite good.

Running fast is a gene. You have it or you don’t. (Based on what I’ve read.) I don’t know if I truly have it or not but I know I have never tried. It’s not until you are an adult many years later that you can admit to yourself that as a kid you never tried. You never really gave it a go. You have to be honest with yourself.

The only time I ran was when someone was chasing me. I rarely got away. Usually I was caught and had the shit beat out of me.

I think I am afraid of Shanna getting older. She is so like me. I’m afraid she is going to be a lightning rod for people who want to beat the hell out of her as well. I hope not.

When I was nineteen I asked Tom to crucify me. We used rope instead of nails (I’m not that hard core) and we built a padded back board with a cross piece together. Even if you are just tied to a board, being suspended in that position with all of your weight hanging is rather intense. Especially if you stay up for a long time. I certainly got to the point of hallucination from insufficient air and blood circulation.

I saw Tommy and I saw my dad. At that point they had been dead for about three years. The hallucinations didn’t talk to me at all. They just looked at me kind of dispassionately. I am not theirs but I don’t belong to any one else. When I was nineteen I felt it was pretty clear that I was good for one thing–being hurt a lot. That was the one currency I had to buy affection. I can take a lot of pain. I can take a lot of degradation. It just feels normal to me.

I’m having this weird body experience as I run. I can tell where my body is going to start siphoning energy from fat stores. I’ve watched the various fat pockets on my body (I have a lot of them) over this year. As I run the fat jiggles, quite a bit–really. On a scale of 1-10, 1 being you can barely feel it and 10 being “cut my leg off because it hurts so much” then my fat jiggling is normally in the 2-3 range. I can feel it but it doesn’t hurt. Except when my body is nursing from a given area. I can’t find a better way of thinking about it. We are actively stealing from that spot right now. When I can feel my body stealing from a spot that fat pocket starts hurting at more like the 4-5 level. It starts to feel like pain. Then a week or so later I notice that it is a lot smaller. It’s kind of weird. I didn’t know bodies did this.

I am doing a lot of compensatory eating. I’m a little more than ten pounds heavier than I was in March for the half marathon. I’m very depressed. I’m eating a lot of sugar and crying while I do it. I don’t want my body to be smaller. I hate that I feel more and more like Tommy. Fuck that. I’ll eat ice cream. There’s a lot of ice cream in this world. I don’t have to fucking feel Tommy’s bones coming through. Fuck him. Fuck him. Fuck him.

Yesterday was an eight mile run then the girls and I did a round trip three mile walk for the park. I’m sore and tired. But I’ll do five miles today. And eighteen miles on Saturday.

I’m not going to let Tommy take this away from me. I’m pretty sure he has hurt me enough for one life.

Stupidly defensive.

1 Reply

I feel strangely guilty for liking Disneyland as much as I do. I really do. I’m not alone. This is a grand passion that many people share. But I feel vaguely ashamed of being part of the cult. I’m even part of the time share. Cue jokes about lame people.

When I go down for the marathon I am getting an annual pass with Shanna. This is the last year Calli is free. Shanna and I will go four times if I get my way. I think I will. With an annual pass and a time share the only unusual expense is gas. And I have a fund for that. It’s less than $100 round trip in the blue car. I put about $40 extra every month into a fund for Disneyland travel. I don’t feel too guilty.

Disneyland is pretty much the only place I feel like I can trust people to be really nice to me. I spend my life on edge waiting for people to snap at me. That’s part of why Disneyland Paris is so awful. You go there expecting, you know… Disneyland and instead you get France. Fuck yourself very much.

I haven’t had an annual pass since before my parents divorced. I had one when I was three. That’s not true! I have the vague memory of buying one on the Christmas Day I spent there with friends after Tom and I broke up. I didn’t actually make it back to Disneyland that year–unsurprising I was busy figuring out being a teacher–but I bought one as a self-comfort thing. This time I have three sets of reservations so far. The fourth will be easy.

I am going to be there for the anniversary of my father’s suicide. I’ll be there on my father’s birthday (missing my mom’s birthday by three days). I will be there for Shanna’s birthday and I think I will go again for the fourth trip for my birthday. I have given other people trips to Disneyland for their birthday but I haven’t been for my birthday… ever. I really should stop giving other people things I want. People always leave me. Then I get to remember that I will go through great effort for other people and it’s not reciprocated. Fuck them. I should save my energy for me.

All told that will be nineteen days of travel. Noah will be there for the marathon and I suspect he will come down for my birthday. The other two trips I will be alone with my little girls. I can’t wait. I like traveling with them. I pare down my needs until we can move at the same pace. It’s a lot of fun. Watching Shanna and Calli navigate new situations and people are some of my greatest joys in life. Seeing them exist makes me feel very good about the world. See, I did make it a better place.

I like watching their joy and eagerness. I like watching Shanna run until she is so tired she can’t walk any more and she must be carried. I like watching Calli be brave and fearless… as long as she is standing behind me. Otherwise she is cautious around new people. I like watching my solemn, intense little girl light up like a roman candle when I walk into sight. I like being loved. I like watching how my children believe that love is absolutely limitless. Shanna goes back and forth between which kid she is going to grow up and marry. So far she is not picky between boys and girls. Sometimes she talks frankly about how she is going to have a wedding with one person and a hand fasting with someone else. (Thanks to Grandpa J, his wife C and his hand-fasted partner D.)

Shanna likes people of all races and physical abilities. If you will sit still and talk to her she likes you. Sometimes she seems to disconcert the large black men on BART. I beam benignly from behind her. The conversations are great. “Does your mother know you are talking to me?” “Yes.” “She doesn’t mind?” “Why would she? Are you a bad person I shouldn’t be talking to?” Then they blink in kind of confused/bemused horror. Then they just talk to her. It’s great.

I used to think Shanna was extremely physical. It turns out I was a first time mom who had never been around a baby. Who knew? From birth Shanna was obviously trying to pattern off of me. She wants to be like me. Calli wants to be like Shanna. Only she’s hitting milestones a lot faster than Shanna. If it weren’t for the difference in leg length I don’t think Shanna could catch Calli. Calli is starting to get mad if I don’t let her practice running with the group. “Me hurry!” Of course with emphatic scowl and pointing to the ground. Yes ma’am.

That’s one of the things that I think makes the biggest difference in how my kids speak on a regular basis. I say “Yes ma’am” to things. I use a lot of weird speech patterns, basically on purpose. I like playing with accents. It makes me happy. I use funny accents because then I consciously think about what I am saying and how I am saying it. Then I don’t snap. I’m not nasty. I use a lot of polite words in theatrical, emphatic ways.

I’ve never understood why other people think I am as rude as they seem to. I try. I really do.

I think people who are on the fence shouldn’t have kids. It’s a huge commitment. It’s a lot of work. If I didn’t feel like I was alive for this very purpose I don’t think I could do this. I would hate them and hate my life. But this is the life I want. So I’m trying to figure out how it goes.

I’m struggling with finding the last granules of patience I have left in me for a baby. Calli is still a baby. She gets a while longer. I told her that milk will be all gone on Tuesday on her birthday. Even though she is potty trained, even though I can’t handle nursing her any more… she really does still feel like a baby. It’s funny, when Shanna was that age I marveled at how kid-like she felt. Now that I have a kid I look at two and think, “Baby!”

I’m basing this intense belief on different developmental stuff I’ve read about. Kids’ brains work one way before three. It’s a large developmental stage. Then three to six is another big period. I’m not going to get into it. If you are interested there is a lot of research.

I’m thinking about pacing of the day and learning activities, that may not be obvious. I have a hard time with baby-pace. I don’t like it much. But I follow it. It’s not like I run my home like a daycare or anything like that but I consciously think about what kinds of interactions and reactions are appropriate. I can say things to Shanna I just can’t say to Calli yet. I feel like it requires intense concentration in my mind to censor things to an appropriate baby-place.

I am a volatile person. It has been very difficult for me to be mostly level and calm and happy for more than four years running with my babies. I freak out on the internet because this is the only place I have to put those feelings, those words, that part of my existence. People who watch me interact with my children who do not read my writing have no idea that I am depressed and suicidal unless I tell them. When I have told people (seriously, I think part of the way I am handling my mental illness is building up the responsibility to my community to not die) they are shocked and surprised. They never would have guessed! I think people aren’t very observant.

Everyone is motivated by different things. Part of what I like about staying at the Disney time share is the way it will push the kids into a foreign environment and they will get to find out which parts of their lives and routine is place dependent and which things are all-the-time-required. Like brushing your teeth. You do that no matter where you sleep. You have to eat no matter what. But things like clean clothes? Well… it varies. How you wash. If you wash. How dirty you get. There is a lot of variation possible in life. How do you roll with differences? How do you learn how to observe local customs and adapt to be like the natives? Even things like how do you learn how to use different versions of what you have–like a dishwasher.

When we are alone and going at their pace my kids can do at least half and sometimes all of the work to feed themselves. They can deal with a lot of minor cooking stuff (ok, Calli isn’t there yet–Shanna makes enough for two) and it’s easy to get them to do other cleaning stuff if everything is kept simple and slow. Calli sets the table while Shanna makes food. I think about how I learned to do things. I think about what it is they need to learn.

I think my kids will know how to cook more at five than I knew how to cook at eighteen. That is really kind of weird to me. I knew how to make ramen. I could open cans and microwave things. I could follow the directions on the back of a tv dinner. You can hand Shanna a (small) pile of vegetables and she’ll fucking make you soup. It feels weird to me that these things are so important to me. My kids will know how to handle food. My kids will know how to make a meal plan and go to the grocery store and come back with ingredients instead of boxes and make food. I learned it slowly over time as an adult. It’s been hard. It’s been embarrassing.

I have weird issues around food. If that’s not obvious by now. I feel very differently about what I/we eat when Noah is home than I do when he isn’t home. Taking his preferences into account messes me up. I have to think a lot harder about food and process because I’m trying to take a lot of different things into account.

When I’m alone with the kids I let Shanna do the best she can for as long as she can. She generally finishes enough for her and Calli. Sometimes I finish Calli’s share. Then I do mine. I don’t have to think about mine. It’s automatic and easy. I get territorial about feeding Noah. And if I have to take the time to do two adult portions it is a lot faster and easier for me to do basically three adult portions and call it a day rather than let Shanna slowly and ponderously do everything she wants to do. (cutting, cleaning veggies, breaking things up, assembling plates, whatever food task) Calli helps as she can. Mostly she sets the table and yells “Me do!” without being able to figure out which side of the plastic knife is sharp. It’s a process.

I’m looking forward to being alone with the girls for a few days. I’m looking forward to sleeping with them in the big hotel bed. I’m looking forward to simple foods Shanna and Calli can get on their own. I won’t bother too cook meat while we are gone. I may not cook much at all. We like fruit and raw vegetables with dip and bread and cheese and lunch meat and cereal. That sounds like a vacation to me. A glorious vacation. If I put a bowl of fruit on the table my kids would eat it. No matter how big the bowl was.

Abrupt topic switch: Noah timing stuff and my complaints about losing a year. I was told that bit was unclear. A while ago Noah and I sat down and fleshed out what he would like to do career wise over the next few years. Where would he like to end up. What is our plan for retirement (says she who doesn’t work)? If you are going to be my provider forever then we need a god damn plan because things don’t always work out just for hoping. If you want to get somewhere it’s probably a good idea to make sure you take steps in that direction.

For all that I am so rebellious and anti-authoritarian… I do have a high school diploma (this was complicated to get and I am the only one of my siblings with one–I am the youngest of four), BA, and teaching credential. I failed the MA, but I can jump through hoops. I usually don’t want to.

What path are we on? Where is this hand basket going and who is driving? So we made a plan. Then Noah had someone bring up an interesting idea. But it takes a year away from me. And leaves me standing with a year left in the baby stage and only a couple of drips of patience left and my husband about to make me a work widow. Apparently my response to this is, “Fuck you then I’m running away to Disneyland.” It’s ok. I’ll come back. I think it will be fun.

I think I will slowly replace my memories of my mother in Disneyland with memories of my daughters. It will be good. I will get to share my good memories. Shanna asks me a lot if I used to do ___________ with my mom when we are doing stuff. I try to answer simply and honestly without a lot of detail when it is bad. “No, doing this with my mom wasn’t a lot of fun. She didn’t have patience left by the time she got to me so it was hard to learn. I got in trouble every time I did anything even slightly wrong. I hope you feel like this is going better.” Said after Shanna had dropped about 1/2 a cup of flour on the counter, step stool, and floor. My mother raged. My mother screamed at me and told me I was a disgusting brat.

When Shanna has mastered a skill I feel a relief of fear. I no longer feel tensed up waiting for a blow. I feel like I am waiting for her to grow up without being abused before I can really trust that it can happen at all. I’m waiting for the abuser to show up. I’m waiting to get in trouble for her mistakes. I’m waiting to be told that obviously my daughter is a loser like me. Only it isn’t coming. I got us away. We can hide away and do things at her pace and move slowly and feel safe. It’s really nice. We can learn things at the pace we learn them instead of trying to hurry up or slow down on someone else’s agenda.

I think this last year of babyhood will be the last year that Calli is less capable than Shanna physically. I think that when her proportions lengthen out she will be a force to be reckoned with. I’m looking forward to it. I want them to run with me. I want them to challenge me to work harder. I want to learn how to run from joy instead of fear. I have spent my whole life running away. I don’t want to run away any more. I want to stay here. Except for trips to Disneyland. That’s just going home for a few days (as they like to say–it’s awesome).

My kids have to learn how to stand in line politely. They have to learn how to look at a barrage of options and make a choice. We live in the world we live in. Disneyland is not the world. But it’s a very safe testing ground of a lot of basic skills for very young children. I can relax and not worry about the assholes who feel inconvenienced by me having young children out in public. Shanna’s friendliness bothers people sometimes. They chew her (and me) out for it. I think she needs to learn how to deal with those assholes, yes, but man it will be nice to be in Disneyland. It really will be magical for my kids. I can. Why not? Why do I feel defensive? Because I don’t approve of all of the everything associated with the Cult of Disney™? I’m not even sure. I know it is wasteful of resources. It’s clearly a first world evasion of stress.

I don’t live in poverty any more. Why do I feel so ashamed of that? Why do I feel bad about being secure and having things? I feel absolutely required to believe that my preferences are wrong and bad. What other people want is more important. More relevant. More… just more. I don’t know. I am less. I should shut up. I should stay home and not spend money. Between the annual passes and gas Disneyland is going to be ~ $1,000 for the year of going. (Uhm, on top of paying the time share. Musn’t Forget That. It will probably not be fully paid off this year. It almost certainly will be paid off next year.) I get $100/month to spend on anything I want. We also have a $100/month “entertainment” fund. And Shanna’s spending money comes from her allowance. She has been saving up. She’s really proud of herself. I can afford this. It is within my means as a hobby. Why does it feel so much more extravagant than other things? I don’t know but it’s silly. I have small children. It’s a fucking great hobby.

Whatever. I should go start breakfast.

Chemical states and relationship transitions

Leave a reply

Something that probably isn’t obvious is: the frequency I write is largely dictated by how much shame I feel about what is swirling around in my head. I haven’t been writing as much. I feel too much shame. I feel ashamed of who I am and how I experience the world. I shouldn’t talk about how I am experiencing things because that is drama. Which means I am running in little hamster circles in my head. It’s almost fun only it isn’t.

I think I am depressed. If I look at my physical activity lately and my attitude I have (for me) almost stopped moving. For normal people this means I am still fairly productive. I do this by sitting down in the morning and drawing up a schedule for the whole day and marking by the half hour what I should be doing. I put in a lot of reading on days when I have to do this. I can follow a schedule and “do what I am supposed to do” if I am just following a set of instructions. I no longer have to think during the day. I check the posted schedule at least five times an hour because I can’t remember what I should be doing.

I feel very sad and disconnected. On one hand I am seeing friends and trying to deepen relationships. On the other hand I spend all of my time with people experiencing a lot of physical distress because I believe in the core of my being that people actually think I am a piece of shit and they are just tolerating me because that is what you do in life. It’s what I do with the pieces of shit in my life. I don’t tell them I think that about them. But I think it. So I firmly believe I am not the only one in the world.

I’m trying. I’m trying to ignore the irrationality in my head but it comes at a fairly high cost. My stomach hurts right now. It has been hurting for quite a while. My throat hurts. My arms even hurt from clenching. My jaw hurts. I can taste the bitter metal of fear and adrenaline a lot of the time. I can’t help but feel like living with this much stress will kill me whether I commit suicide or not. My body is simply working too hard. And I won’t give myself much of a break on the other activities in my life.

It is my job to show my kids how to be productive, sensible, functional adults. That means I can’t really model getting depressed and sitting around with my books and movies for months. Even though I know I used to do exactly that for long stretches. I’d go to roost and avoid people. I can’t any more. My kids can’t deal with that kind of isolation. They actually need people.

I suspect that part of my issue is around money. I use money to fill in the cracks on what I have to do versus what I want to do–I expect that is standard. Right now and for a while I can’t do that. I have to stay home and not spend money. That’s hard because it means I am making today and yesterday and tomorrow a lot harder than they “have” to be so that some day off in the distant future we can do as ok as we are right now while we have a dip in income. Self discipline is hard. It wears through my willpower. I get physically tired. And knowing that I can’t do much of anything with money to make my life better triggers a lot of feeling hopeless about situations in my life. Either I can figure out how to do everything by magic with no money or I can deal with them just not happening. Things won’t get fixed. It makes me feel bad.

I don’t like feeling thwarted. It makes me want to stop trying. But I can’t. It’s not fair for me to stop trying. It’s not fair for me to stop hoping. I provide the structure of everything for my kids. They need to understand that frugality is not a death sentence. They shouldn’t view it with abject horror as making their lives terrible. You need to live within your means. It’s not a harsh sentence. It’s life.

My tomato harvest will once again be epic. I anticipate begging access to a pressure canner this year. I have frozen enough fruit to get us through the winter. I feel good about that. We will need more meat before the end of the year. Ok, I just set up a beef pickup in September. I believe the internet is Magic. This means I can save up the $600 for the meat over more than one month. Woo. I am starting to build my stockpile again. I cleaned out all the food in the house for Sarah so we could build a stockpile of foods we both like to cook with together. That didn’t really happen and I haven’t had a full larder in a year. I have a fair bit of stuff in the freezer I will probably never use because it’s not stuff I like and I have otherwise been just trying to make up the deficit in the food budget for a long time. We’ve been buying week to week until last month. I would like to spend the summer/fall stocking up so that over the winter I can lower the food budget and eat out of stores. We’ll see. Temporarily I raised the food budget by taking it out of other places. Money is not infinite.

I think it is kind of weird that I feel bad for feeling frustrated about money. I have access to far more money than anyone in my family. By far. My mother broke $30k/year for the first time the year she turned fifty. My sister I think got up above $60k/year. Noah makes more than twice that by himself.

When people tell me that they don’t see any relevance for feminism in the current era I think: “Why is everything that women do esteemed so little and why is the stuff men do esteemed so highly?” If you think it is because the men stuff is more important I might kick you in the shins. If the poorly-esteemed work that women do stopped happening then all of a sudden you would have MUCH BIGGER PROBLEMS than if your god damn magical phone stopped working. Or if you didn’t have a computer oh no what would you do?! What your fucking ancestors did for millenium. Stop whining.

We have an interesting way of deciding what is important and what is worth money here. I’m grateful that I get to be on the receiving end of that money but I feel pretty ashamed of the fact that I would never have had a life this comfortable without Noah. No chance. Comparatively I am worthless. That feels bad to me. If I didn’t have Noah I would probably have to go on welfare for a while. I can’t just go get a teaching job. I would have to go back to school because my credential lapsed.

I know that all of my status is worthless if I stop having this man stand next to me. I feel thin. I feel unimportant. I feel permeable and insignificant. So of course I’m binge eating and I’ve gained weight.

I am only worthy of low status occupations and activities. It’s certainly all I do with my time. I garden and clean. I play with my kids. Shouldn’t I pay a gardner and a housekeeper and a nanny so I don’t have to sully my hands with those activities? Ugh. Yet more evidence of my class issues; I suppose. I feel strongly pressured to be idle. That should be the point of all this status I inherited from Noah. Only I physically cannot handle idleness. It makes me feel terrible emotionally and physically.

If I am not working to make my home nicer then I sit here and stare dejectedly at all the things I can’t fix right now and I cry. It’s not better.

I feel really bad because I can’t handle dealing with new people right now. I am slowly moving around the people I’ve known for many many years deepening relationships but I’m terrified of new people. I don’t know how to act around them. I feel so physically bad that the experience is really unpleasant. I feel guilty about this. I don’t believe I am done finding the people I will be close to this lifetime. I’m just really scared right now and I can’t do it.

Well I know one thing I’m doing today. I’m getting rid of the spider web right above where I write that is currently home to a spider the size of the tip of my pinky finger up to the joint. That’s rather disturbing. Awesome.

I feel bad because Noah takes my fussing over money as sign that he is not providing well enough. I’m having trouble convincing him that I believe he is a good provider. I think that is kind of funny. He is supporting me with a degree of luxury I have never consistently experienced in my entire life. Yes, it’s adequate. Really. When my petty cash runs in the tens of thousands no one should feel guilty. Holy fucking shit. We have a high burn rate. In order to ensure that we will actually be ok in case of a temporary set-back we need a very large cushion. It’s simple mathematics. Why does it feel so emotionally complicated?

But he grew up with parents who didn’t work at all and dealt with family investments. It’s a whole different world. He grew up with parents who didn’t have jobs and still paid people to clean their house and work on their property. It’s a whole different world.

I think I don’t want to have an outside job partially because I don’t want my kids to believe that cleaning up after themselves is beneath them and should be done by a menial laborer who cannot aspire to better for complex reasons of race, class, shame, and bigotry. I don’t want to get a job so I can have enough money to pay someone to be beneath me. I never get what I want from those relationships and then I hate people. It’s not a good system. You can’t pay someone enough to care about doing their job. People are either interested in their work or they aren’t. I’m interested in the work of maintaining my house. No one else is. I have to live here. I don’t want to live in a piece of shit house that is falling down around my ears. Maintenance is god damn mandatory.

Part of what I am struggling with right now is the fact that I want my kids to have relationships with people. That means they are going to have to deal with the fact that people are not reliable. They can’t be trusted to tell the truth. You have to be very careful how you partition out trust. Look at what people do and not what they say if you want to know the truth of a person.

This is what I tell myself because I try so hard to do the right thing even though I feel my speech is often offensive and wrong. I say inappropriate things. But at least I am physically doing all the right things at the right times of the day. Sometimes it feels like all that I have to prop up my self worth. Of course I value it highly.

I have been thinking about storyboarding for the book but I haven’t picked up a pen. I’m afraid. I have ideas and I’m afraid I’m not good enough to complete them. I think the best thing about NaNoWriMo is the structured pressure of it. Produce, motherfucker. I am really looking forward to being post-marathon and in a writing phase again. I need a better ergonomic system before November or I am going to damage myself. My arms are tingling as I type. Shit.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the structure and nature of my compulsive sexuality. When do I do it? Why do I do it? What are the lead-up events? It’s a group coping activity. I don’t do it one on one in the same way–even with prey. I do it as a way of finding a position in a group of people. I know how to be the slut. It’s pretty much the only group role I feel comfortable in. As an aging woman it is one I need to get out of before I look more desperate and pathetic than I already do.

I slept. I swear I did. I still feel tired. I feel exhausted in the marrow of my bones. I’m going out tonight. Sigh. Like, after bed time tonight. I leave at dinner time. Lately I have been finding it very important to financially prioritize supporting the endeavors of long time friends. I’ve paid to attend several shows/events recently just because I wanted to be in the same physical space as specific people. I don’t care much about the activity. I never really have. I want the people. I want to stand in close physical proximity to people who know a lot about me and like me. I ache for it. Being an audience is a fairly comfortable role right now. Little is expected of me but I get to make someone else feel good by being present. Nearly half of the fun money I have had for the whole year has been spent on going out to see two people in particular. I like them. I need them. If you add in this one other friend you get to more than half of the money I have spent other than the book. That’s been my money for the year. I don’t go to Starbuck’s. I don’t treat myself to books or music. I did take Shanna to see Brave. That is our movie for the year. We go to the park and to the kid places we have memberships to. We pack lunch. I severely limit my driving. Yesterday we drove to Oakland then Oakley then Vacaville to see people and I don’t think I can drive much the rest of the month. I’ve used more than half of my monthly gas allotment on one day. Well, ok. It was worth it. I only see them two or three times a year. I only drive up once. It’s worth it. That is how I am setting my priorities.

I like relationships that have a lot of hurdles to existence. If they continue then I feel like someone truly loves me. It is hard for someone to prove they love me. I get into trouble with expectations. I try to keep them low but once in a while I am foolish and I expect more from people than they are going to do. I recover from that with ill grace. I’m never thrilled when someone shows themselves to be not worthy of trust I have given them. It causes me to feel a lot of self-doubt about my general worth. I thought I could trust this person to do what they say and I can’t. It must be because I am not worth telling the truth to. It must be because I am not worthy of even thinking about long enough to follow through on commitments. That must be it. I am so fucking pathetic.

At this point I can’t talk about my anger and frustrations about these situations because I can’t express it in front of my kids. My kids get to have their own reactions. They don’t need to learn my anger. So I am doing a lot of stuffing. That means it creeps out in little insidious ways. I’m snippier and shorter of temper. It feels so unfair to my kids. I’m not mad at them. I’m just out of patience because I wasted it on adults.

I feel like I should hide in my house with my kids and not deal with people because that is the only way I can ensure I am just reacting to my kids and not the other people in the world. Only it only kind of works. Because then I bring the trouble home. The kids need relationships too.

This too shall pass. One of the greatest gifts of getting older is I trust that this phase will end. I won’t always feel this way. It’s a cycle. I still don’t think I have bipolar disorder. This is why I put myself on a schedule when I feel like this. If I haven’t gotten anything done by nine in the morning I have to write up a schedule or it will be a couch day. I know it. I have occasional couch days when I believe that physically the rest is probably a good idea. I try to keep those to once or twice a month. I don’t want to teach my kids that a great big part of life is just sitting around not being productive in any way. You need rest, sure. But find a way to get your rest in while still doing something. Reading does count as an activity. It’s a great excuse to rest. Watching movies… well, sometimes. When you are sick, sure why not. Otherwise you need to move your body more than that. We don’t stay in one position while we read.

I love seeing my kids develop my physical mannerisms. I feel affirmed and loved and seen. They read like me. We like to change positions a lot. Sitting still is quite hard. We squirm and wiggle and roll over and over. We stretch at the same time. They get books and do yoga with me. I get to set normal for them. They will grow up believing that what I do is right and good. It makes me cry. I have always been different from everyone around me and I was viewed as bad and a threat to be stomped down. I was supposed to be more like them. My kids think I am great. They don’t know that I have never fit in any of the molds I have been shoved towards. They don’t care. We fit.

I strongly encourage my kids to be different from me. I support them having different opinions. I talk to them (mostly Shanna still) about how I have control over them for a very short period and then they get to make all of their own decisions. I talk about how I don’t want to have control over them because they will have different ideas and opinions than me and they should do what will make them happy. I also talk about how to coexist peacefully. I talk about having respect for people around you. I model what that means. I really love my kids. I get to be good and kind and respectful towards people who absolutely deserve it and have no ability to let me down. My expectations of them are that they are helpless little amoebas at this point who will flail and be random. I’m pretty much right. But they will become adults who understand in the marrow of their bones what it means that Mom does what she says.

That freaks me the fuck out. That pressure. That is what gets me out of bed every morning. That is why I make schedules and get shit done no matter how I feel physically. I god damn need to have more people in the world who believe that I am trustworthy and good and kind. I say some very harsh things and as a result a fair number of people think I am an asshole. I can’t really say they are wrong. But that is such a small part of me. I feel defined by the negativity in me. With my kids I have a perfect chance to have a different experience.

I must say it is going well. This is one of the hard phases. I can objectively understand that my emotional cycles and their behavior cycles are being wonky and I’m being patient with all of us. That is what a good mother does. Well, I’m not patient with the screaming. I will put my hand over a screaming mouth because otherwise I get horrible headaches to the point where I can’t really see straight. If I have to drive I cannot allow them to hurt me in that way. I just can’t. Why do I feel so guilty about covering their mouths? I don’t make it hard to breathe. I am not cruel. I don’t do it for an extended period of time. I don’t shake them. I don’t hurt them. I don’t yell at them. I try to calmly say, “That’s an outside voice. Inside you have to be more quiet.” “No really, that hurts me so you cannot scream in my ear.” I have to teach them boundaries, right?

I don’t feel worthy of defending and my kids are pushing boundaries all over the place. It’s a hard combination. I’m trying to live up to my end of the bargain. I have to teach them how to be respectful of other people. It’s my fucking job. One for which I have managed to trade having a very cushy life. I have an easy job. I shouldn’t bitch about it.

It’s weird to think about how I would handle these emotional cycles if I had a job. I think I never would have found time and space to really write. I think that would be one of the things I had to drop. I would be more volatile. When Noah showed up and asked me to marry him I was trying to work up the courage to ask him to raise a child with me but I thought I had no right to ask him for what I have now. I planned to work and raise one kid by myself. That would have been a very different life. I’m really glad Noah actually wanted me.

It’s really odd to me when I think about how to write about the journey from eighteen to now. My different phases seem extreme. When I was eighteen I was engaged to Stephen and supporting myself by working in the library and the theatre. I planned to make theatre my life. I really wanted to run a spotlight for Cirque du Soleil someday. I knew I wanted kids but I had things to do first. I thought college was a good idea but I was nervous. I really wanted to go to CMU for technical theatre.

Then I left Stephen and found Tom and the bdsm community. I transferred to the English department. I went to college but I did not have the immersive college experience; I was a commuter student on campus two days a week and I took classes straight through from ten in the morning till ten at night. When I finished my BA I had a choice to make. If I wanted to be active in the bdsm community and be an Adult all the time then I should probably go through graduate school and try to work at the college level. Then I don’t have to be as paranoid about being outed. Or I could decide that I wanted children and go for a degree that will give me a schedule more potentially compatible with theirs. Tom was not open to me being a stay at home mom. I went through some graduate school. I decided that kids were more important than Tom. I broke up with him and started the credential program. In order to transition out of that relationship and emotionally distance myself from him I started having sex with a lot of people. It worked.

I dated Noah for the last six months of my relationship with Tom. I think that Noah was probably a lot of the reason I finally had the nerve to end things with Tom. Noah doesn’t permit me to be unaware of why I am doing what I am doing. He’s kind of annoying. I broke up with him for a lot of reasons. I can’t sum that up.

I went through the credential hunting hard for someone to have kids with. I wanted to start soon and I knew it. I was very frank about it when I talked to people I was having sex with. There are some men who ping hard for the idea of having kids and there are some who are repulsed. I needed to know who was potential prey. I was hunting.

Puppy was a mistake. I thought he was like Tom only younger and wanted kids. I was quite wrong. I should have never tried to date someone who thought it was funny that I was an actual Californian and would mock me and my vapidness for living here. And he thought I was fat even though I was at my lowest adult weight. He was very harsh about my body. He was very bitter because of his ex-wife and has a lot of mommy-issues. That relationship didn’t stand a chance.

After that I had a few months where I stopped hunting. Then I met Spot. I knew he wasn’t The One to have kids with. I made up my mind to ask Noah about having kids with me even though I didn’t think he was interested in the kind of relationship I wanted. He wanted the kind of relationship he wanted and I was not going to fucking be the Other Significant Other. Hell Fucking No. I’m not going to make someone my priority as long as I am their option.

But out of the blue he asked me to marry him. Just like that. Five months later we eloped. I moved into this house more than six years ago. Our sixth wedding anniversary is in September. I have to say that it is going well. I have the wonderful four year old and two year old of my dreams. My two year old is currently yelling “baby! high!” because she wants to be pushed on the swing. I should go before she slams the laptop screen on my fingers.

But I’ll come back to edit and tag and add that it is because my life is so good that I feel so bad about feeling bad. I need to stop feeling like someone who has had my life. It’s really hard.

In one of those festive bad moods.

Leave a reply

Right now I feel like I am being batted back and forth between “shoulds”. I should be working on this part of my life or that. I should be more patient. I should be. I should. I should. It’s hard to be ok with just being. It doesn’t really matter what I should be doing it matters what I am doing. Is what I am doing good enough? Why do I feel like there should be more? Why do I persist in feeling unworthy, bad, inadequate?

I don’t know but I’m kind of sick of it.

Kids go through periods of disequilibrium and then they get back to equilibrium. Both kids are off kilter. There is a lot of screaming in Wonderland. Not very much of it comes from me. I feel like my ears will bleed soon. My patience runs thin. My screaming is usually at the fifteenth time of saying, “I said stop kicking me” in a fierce and slightly escalating objectionable volume. Then I get smart and get up and walk away. Parenting is hard.

I spend a lot of time thinking about perspective. And about the plotline of the book to come. And myself as a character. And about sex. I think about sex with lots of different people in lots of different ways and I wonder about the sex that other people have. What is sex like for most people? When I read pornographic stories I have to wonder. What is this biological urge we have?

I’m thinking about how I feel about projecting my version of the truth on events that other people perceive differently. I have to deal with the potential outcome of people being mad at me. Far easier to not speak.

But I can’t. I really can’t. I finished editing my friend’s book.. I need to do some editing on NS, NS, NS so that it can move towards a paper edition. I also need to start doing the storyline for the book. Because I want to combine people and have a few composite characters it means choosing events from my life and figuring out how to tell them and when and how to integrate all of the supporting people. One of the big difficult-to-understand parts of the first book is the lack of explanation of other characters. They just came and went. That was how life felt. Things were different once I became an adult. I have many relationships that date back to my teenage years. I am experiencing development from my friends. It’s actually kind of weird. People are changing. I’m having to adapt to that. It’s probably all healthy and shit. I’m not sure I believe it.

For the last several days I’ve been simmering in my own bile. I’ve been seething. My jaw aches from clenching. Today when I was running I tried to put it into perspective. I thought about my day. I asked myself what parts of it I would take away and why? I don’t want to change what I am doing. So why do I feel so hateful? Because I can imagine someone else feeling very resentful. Because I know that a great many people feel above the work I do and think of people like me as being beneath them. Oh, but I’m different because I spent more time in college.

The arbitrary reasons people decide that other people are better or worse than other people are interesting to me. On one hand I have a number of traits, skills, attributes, qualifications, whatever of “high class” people. I’m still white trash. It doesn’t matter. I can still offend the shit out of you in five minutes flat if I want to. Just try me. I can find your buttons, motherfucker. I want to get in a fight. I want to be hit. I want to hit back. I don’t think I want to lose this time but I’m ok with it as a risk. I want to hurt someone. I want to damage someone. Luckily I married someone who doesn’t like to be hit so I don’t have to worry about being all “safe” or “sane” as I beat the shit out of someone. I have to just sit on it. I have to just be with this anger and hatred and rage over… nothing.

I’m kind of tired of being told these horrible generalizations that totally include me and then being told, “Well you’re different.” Most homeschooling parents are abusing/neglecting their children because they aren’t qualified to educate their kids but I’m different. Enh. Whatever. Maybe. I don’t know. It depends on what you think people need to grow up and be capable of doing. The whole point of education is to teach children how to be adults. Everyone grows up to be something. Why do we have a meritocracy where we only value people who attain “higher education”? Is that the only kind of life worth having? Really?

I hate that I feel like I am failing strangers by not being all that attractive. I make up for it by being friendly and personable when I’m in the mood to get along with people. I hide behind it and my towering hostility when I’m not in the mood. Regardless people comment.

Sometimes I wonder about the freedom of hijab. I wonder what it would be like to not feel like I have to live up to expectations of my appearance. Noah and I talk about the invisibility, the feeling of completely being unwanted in the world he experienced as a teenage boy. As a teenage girl I didn’t know how to keep them off me. Saying no didn’t matter. Now I avoid people and flash my big shiny wedding ring. Taken. Not looking. Not available. Safe. Really. I am. I believe it. I hope.

Reading Mo’s book made me think a lot about M/s. What I have sought from it. What do I want from it? How does it work?

Today I talked about my feelings about G-d and connection and universality and the purpose of figureheads. I don’t usually have the balls to talk about my way of living in the world.

Lately when I start running I listen to Dolly Parton tell me that I Better Get to Livin’. When she gets to the part about falling on your knees to pray every day I think about the fact that I don’t really kneel before anyone’s idea of the Christian G-d. I like to kneel in front of a mirror. The only person who is going to be with me every day is me. If I feel like I can’t walk then I had better start crawling. I’m it. If I’m not ready to roll over and die then I need to get the fuck up and go. I have to. No one is going to rescue me. I don’t think there is some omnipotent force that is going to save me. If I don’t get up every day and work on my attitude and do what I believe is fucking right then there isn’t much point in anything.

Right now the right thing is getting up with a smile. And doing laundry. And dishes. And playing games. It really is. Learning patience and humility is part of learning to be stronger–it really is. I need this. I need to find it in myself to have the perspective to understand that the people in my life now have never hurt me I need to rely on the safety and certain truth of that statement to learn how to stop acting like a wounded animal.

Running is starting to feel good again because it is starting to feel hard in a way that makes me have to decide many times to put my head down and go. Just don’t stop. That’s what you have to do. Put your head down and go. That’s all I have to do in order to log the miles I need on my body. I don’t have any time goals. I don’t have any other commitments. I just have to move my body over a given distance. That is my only obligation now. I’m doing it slowly and proving to myself that I can. I am strong. I am more capable than I ever dreamed.

Even as my psyche tries like hell to find a way to make me feel bad and hurt myself and feel sick. Noah didn’t tell me to eat the fucking muffin. He just said eat the muffin. But I heard it with more harshness. More negativity. More anger. Because I hate myself for being hungry. Because I hate myself for having needs.

Right now what I need is to go to bed. I need to be up and out the door running in eight hours. I need sleep.

anxiety purge

Leave a reply

Living with Noah has changed how I think about computers. I don’t think of them as magic anymore. I think about them as the result of a large set of mathematical equations. I’m getting closer and closer to being interested in thinking about that. Right now my brain is pretty full.

I’ve been thinking about what the gardening represents for me. It’s a combination of learning biology, which feels like an intimidating “science” thing for me, and learning how to do manual labor. I haven’t done this sort of physical movement much in my life. Uhm. It’s hard. I feel like a tremendous loser because it is so hard. A lot of the time I feel frustrated and scared because I don’t even know how I should begin. I feel like I am doing it all wrong. I lost two plants this year. Well, I wanted a place to put yellow roses any way. Noah’s mother sent me $75 as a congratulations for finishing my book. I want to buy yellow roses with that money. It will make me happy. It will make me think of her gratefully when I am outside of my house. It will give me a reason to think of her positively.

I’m not going to have a relationship with Noah’s mother. Not really. Noah totally has an Oedipal Complex because he went off and married his mother. When he talks about his childhood it sounds like something I could easily do if I didn’t deal with my mental health issues. It sounds like it is hard to be his mom. Being in her head must hurt. She feels a powerful fear all of the time. I can understand that. I can’t have a relationship with that. I have too much fear as well. Neither of us has the ability to make the connection.

The one time I went out to meet his family his mother spent three hours telling Noah how inappropriate I was. We were already married. I am poor white trash and his mama knows it. We will never have a relationship. I was out fucking every kid in the trailer park when I was young. They don’t like my kind where his family comes from. Really, what mother wants a girl like that for her son?

So his mother and I will never have a relationship. There is too much fear between us. Too much judgment. Too much crazy. We are both wounded animals. I don’t know what wounded her and I really can’t care. I’m too busy tending my own wounds. But I want to plant yellow roses in my yard and think of my mother in law in Texas sending me a very lovely gift.

I hate the color yellow. I have since I was a kid. I had a yellow dress and yellow earrings and a yellow headband and my mama told me, “Oh God. You’re just like your father. You like yellow. Ew. That’s his favorite color.” I have had a hard time with yellow since. Occasionally I get yellow clothing as hand-me-downs.

I stopped dressing in hand-me-downs when I had kids. No one gave me adult sized clothes any more. Now I buy them. It’s weird. I feel like I am supposed to develop “taste” and I don’t know what that even means. I still want to dress like Punky Brewster. I want to go shopping each time and buy something weird and colorful and end up just… not… owning neutrals. I’ll look weird. That will be ok.

But it isn’t. Because I’m ugly and my mama dresses me funny. I was told that over and over and over and over.

Today isn’t shaping up so good. I have a lot of insecurities. It’s hard to access them one at a time. They are all interconnected. Why am I so afraid of rejection? Why can’t I let that woman be part of the park group? Because I can’t be near someone who is going to send of pot shots. I just fucking can’t. I don’t want positive comments from an insincere person. I want to be invisible. I’m really not invisible. I don’t want to become invisible so that I avoid comments.

I know how to dress in ways that will not attract attention. I’ve been doing it for a while. I wasn’t ok with that whole “I can touch you because you are pregnant” thing. So I can dress in ways that don’t attract notice. Why should I have to? Because I don’t want people to comment on me. But I like it. Oh fuck.

I don’t want to have to think about how my actions are going to effect someone else. I want to just do what I like. When I know I am going to be around someone who is quite happy to be vicious and spiteful in my direction I am immediately hypervigilant and I have to think about every fucking aspect of this interaction from what I wear to what I say. I pick my kids clothes out. They are neutral and subdued. Gender neutral, even.

My kids pick their own clothes out 99% of the time. They are not remotely subdued or gender neutral. They both like dresses in neon shades of pink. I think it is hilarious given that Shanna didn’t have them when she was smaller. I only had boy hand me downs for a long time.

I always liked wearing bright colors. I’ve always liked the casual, easy, positive interactions I get with value neutral people in public when I dress the way I like. I don’t like comments from people I know. I don’t want to have to store up in my head that they said something nice to me now I am expected to return the favor and next time I should probably start the nice exchange and. No. Just no. I can’t. I have no fucking interest in getting on the manners bandwagon at this stage of my life. I have to stay here. My kids get to grow up in one place.

It is challenging to manage my emotional needs as my relationships get longer and longer. I have to not expect anything from people in order to continue to know them over time. It’s a very hard line for me. If we are doing an activity together and have no outside connection it is easy. I have no expectations of people I see at an event. They don’t owe me a smile or a conversation. Friends are hard for me.

It is hard having people visit my house. Part of the reason I stress about housework is because I want to have a house that is “company ready” all the time. Not for them, exactly. My friends don’t give a shit. I’ve seen their houses. When my house is “messy” it’s really not bad.

My friends are busy. They have shit to do. They hold down jobs. They have vibrant social lives. I uhhh hang out in my house with my kids. We do go places. But it goes in waves and it’s rarely for more than four or five hours. We are here a lot. If I leave the house messy then I have to live in that mess. I have to work and think in that mess. I find it horribly distracting. I don’t go to Noah’s job and pick up all the stuff on peoples’ desks and throw it in the air. That would make doing actual work hard.

So I sit here and think. What is my job here? To educate my children. Basically. What do I want to educate them in? I want them to have the ability to have any kind of life they want to have. That means they need to start off in a whole lot of directions at once. Sure, we can do frilly princess and makeup. Her best (girl) friend is always the prince. They think role is about personal preference not about gender identity. That’s fucking awesome. But I’m not trying to bring up a little gender queer so I can have street cred in those communities. I need to not be invested in any results.

I’m teaching the kids that your body has to be active if you want to engage in a lot of activities. I want us to go work on farms for a year. It would not be a kindness to bring the average kid around here to a rural farm where they don’t speak the language. We have to be ready. We have to think about this in advance. What will that mean for our bodies? We should probably find a way to actually get ready. Which means that step one is for me to learn a whole lot more about gardening. Which is intimidating.

If you hadn’t noticed I’m flooded with a lot of stress chemicals. Being in that state makes it harder to learn. This is a lot of how I live my life. But I really want to do this. I don’t want to fail. I want to be able to be a productive and useful person on a farm. It’s important to me. When people talk about their “roots” well, working on a farm is part of most of our roots. You may have to go back a bit, but really. People have to eat. Food has to be provided.

I didn’t think about it very much until I had kids. I didn’t think hard about where my food came from. When I look at their bodies I want to give them food that will help them grow up as strong as possible. I want them to be able to handle anything that life gives them. I won’t be able to protect them forever. I have to do what I can now.

I don’t understand how blasé other people seem to feel about parenting. When I talk about feeling insecure or doubting myself people quickly tell me they don’t feel insecure. They must be lying. I can’t be the only insecure person. Give me a break.

I talked about feeling kind of insecure about unschooling the kids. I’m going to spend a lot of time revisiting that concept. I’m going to think hard about what that means to me. “Back in the day” people raised their children to be just like them. Uhm. I don’t want to raise my kids to be just like me, thanks. I want my children to live with fear like I do. Bad things happen. Then you move on. Normal people don’t get caught in these loop tapes. Normal people have some normal to fall back on. Some sense of themselves that was formed during the long stretches of their lives without trauma. Depending on how you think about consensual bdsm I haven’t had a period of my life without traumatic events. Hell, even having my second kid almost killed me. Woo.

I live in stress chemicals. They are all I know. I’m trying very hard not to teach that. The problem is, living in stress chemicals makes it hard to learn. All I am doing with my life right now is helping my kids prepare for life.

So I was looking at the California Content Standards for grade K. If I’m going to prepare her for being part of this society part of that includes having a vaguely similar knowledge base with her peers so that if anything happens she can transition back into a schooling environment. Things happen. I could have to work some day. Within the next two years (because she isn’t old enough for kindergarten anyway) she has to learn hygiene and how to stand in line. She’s otherwise pretty much there on the kindergarten standards for my subject. She has letters, morphemes, basic introduction to syntax, grammar… Math she isn’t quite there yet on all of it. She’s halfway there with two years to go. Obviously I have not failed her horribly so far.

Part of my weird social anxiety is that I really like being a teacher. That feels good to me. I don’t like being didactic with peers so I feel like I have nothing to say. I don’t know how to have conversations among peers. I can be a student or a teacher. That was, really, the primary positive relationships I had. That was my “normal” period that could be good. I had a lot of teachers who liked me. I had a lot of teachers who hated me.

There is a feeling I have when teaching. I am allowed to have intense bonding conversations within that format. I know there is a time limit on it. I know that the exchange is limited to what we are doing. I have no further expectations.

I get into a lot of trouble when I have expectations of people. I have to keep them further out at arms length. I can’t handle being told “no”. So I just can’t ask. I think the intensity with which I feel this is somewhat higher than average but there is a constant component of it in my head. I have to keep in mind that I can’t ask people for things. If they freely want to give me something I can take it, but I can’t ask. It’s hard to ask people to come over for this reason. I wouldn’t want to insult something I have worked so hard for by having a messy house. I have no idea why I have picked this standard of measurement because I am otherwise a specifically crappy host.

I don’t want my house to broadcast my social class. I want people to be continually surprised when I talk about how bad it was. That means I am living right. In my head I can’t separate out the messy house from the overall neglect and abuse and poverty. In my experience my friends who have decidedly messy houses have issues with their mental health and/or control. That’s not a nasty statement. *wave hand in friendly way* Whether people want to admit it or not, your perceived social class has distinct influence on your life. I am a stay at home mom. If I didn’t clean my house that would have social class implications. There is still a very strong element of “What the hell do stay at home moms do anyway?”

The point here is to teach them to be functional adult. If you have your house so messy that you constantly have to buy new things to replace things you have lying around somewhere and you don’t have the money to really support this behavior then you aren’t functional. That’s broken. It’s not a huge broken in the scheme of things but it’s a behavior I specifically don’t want to model or teach. We don’t have the money to be callous with our things. We can’t just go out and replace things right now. I mean we have money in savings but we don’t have any spare money in our set budget. It is not a responsible or mature decision to be callous with our things. We don’t have extra any more.

When you live in a messy house you break things and lose things. Ask me how I know. I don’t want to teach that. I really don’t. That means modeling doing things differently and not being a preachy asshole about it.

Now I’m just ranting. Ugh. My stomach hurts. Time to go look for food.

Food comes from a can

2 Replies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am thought about.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mom Pledge

Leave a reply

I was reading up on the Band, because they matter. And I foundThe Mom Pledge. Text is:

The Mom Pledge

I am a proud to be a mom. I will conduct myself with integrity in all my online activities. I can lead by example.

I pledge to treat my fellow moms with respect. I will acknowledge that there is no one, “right” way to be a good Mom. Each woman makes the choices best for her family.

I believe a healthy dialogue on important issues is a good thing. I will welcome differing opinions when offered in a respectful, non-judgmental manner. And will treat those who do so in kind.

I stand up against cyber bullying. My online space reflects who I am and what I believe in. I will not tolerate comments that are rude, condescending or disrespectful.

I refuse to give those who attack a platform. I will remove their remarks with no mention or response. I can take control.

I want to see moms work together to build one another up, not tear each other down. Words can be used as weapons. I will not engage in that behavior.

I affirm that we are a community. As a member, I will strive to foster goodwill among moms. Together, we can make a difference.

Part of what makes this kind of thing so weird is, what is “rude, condescending or disrespectful” according to this code? I’m afeared that an awful lot of what I say would be one of those words. I’m not trying to be rude. I reign in my condescension as hard as I am able. I’m afraid it pops out occasionally when I’m not looking. People often think that me questioning them at all is disrespectful. Pointing out inconsistencies in a story is disrespectful. On one hand I want to say, “That sounds great!” But I’m afraid it’s just one more way that I feel like I can’t hold up the original spirit of the thing so I don’t join. I’m a snarky bastard. Most of my friends are.

I don’t really think of myself as a “Mommy blogger” despite the fact that I have crotch droppings and mention them here. I feel like I write about my mothering shit the same way I write about me just existing. I happen to be a mother. But it’s not all that much of what I want to think about during my off-time, you know? I have to write about being a mother in so far as I’m trying to hack the experience. I am trying to dissect it to see how it works so that I can put it back together in a different way.

Inviting Sarah to live with me is part of mothering. Even though Sarah is inconsistently available at times she is still stable in her moods. When she is here she is here. Part of being a mother is recognizing that children need to have people in their life who are rock steady dependable in their affect. I’m not and I never will be. I talk about me not being steady. I talk about how to cope with that. And I fucking well moved someone in who was stable. Noah is also more emotionally stable than me. I worry. Specifically, to pull from that last link:

“This handling of mental illness (there were several negative examples) tends to present it as something out of control, scary, and dangerous. And also very, very selfish. Mentally ill people in pop culture are often deeply self-absorbed, wrapped up in themselves and their disorders, which means they have no time for anyone else. When it comes to parents, pop culture implies that mentally ill parents are too broken and damaged to possibly provide the level of care and support their children need. When this is the understanding of mental illness that many people have, it sets dangerous precedents.

Finding positive depictions of mentally ill parents is an uphill struggle, let alone depictions of parents who are members of Mad Pride movement, who may reject conventional treatment approaches to mental illness. For people with mental illness who want to be or are parents, pop culture provides ample reminders that this is a bad idea and should be reconsidered. For people without mental illness, pop culture provides ample judgment fodder and this can be a big problem when those people are decision-makers, the people who, for example, get to evaluate whether a parent should be allowed to keep a child after a report to child services expressing concern, or who sit in judgment on a jury.”

I worry a lot. I worry about talking about my mental illness because I don’t think I can get away with claiming to myself that I don’t have mental illness. There are legitimate names for my experiences. The whole thing can be codified as a case study. But it’s my life. I speak overly harshly sometimes. I don’t have the self control not to. My option is to never speak again. *I* feel like my behavior is perceived as being outside the bounds of that pledge up there. *I* feel like my behavior is perceived as “rude, condescending or disrespectful.” I don’t mean to be though. This truly is my polite voice. I am what my life has made me. I am frequently harsh in tone. I do it meaning well. I am not trying to be a didactic asshole.

Bad situations in my life have been really bad. When I say that I was at an important crossroads, I was often making a choice that resulted in a more dramatic shift than most people have as an option. That’s convoluted. Not very many people can talk to a rape crisis clinician for five minutes and be told, “You should be dead.” That’s happened to me when I have talked to a lot of different people. My choices kept me alive. I chose life. Over and over. That sounds melodramatic and I want to punch myself for using that particular cliché. It’s true though. I self harm because it is choosing life. It is choosing to allow myself a small amount of relief from the pain rather than actually relieving the pain. I got away from my father. It was hard. It took fighting off my family, but I did it. I got away from my family. I could be another drug addict loser. Instead I’m a drug addict with a functional life. I am a drug addict with elaborate checks in place to ensure that I am not permitted to be erratic around my children. My drug addiction is what allows me to be consistent. Without it I am swinging too hard right now.

But sometimes I come in here to the internet and I vent my frustration. MDC is really hard to read sometimes. The problem is that my life choices have been between really really bad things that seemed ok to outsiders and things that looked bad to outsiders but was actually great for me. My whole view on life choices is skewed far off to the left from everyone else. For most of my life if you had offered me the chance to die on any given day, I would have taken it.

I had children because I choose life. When people ask me why someone like me had kids, and I get asked, I say that biological compulsion is a big deal and I was a lot more stable then. I don’t say, “Fuck you for implying that I am too broken to have worth on this planet you fucking asshole.” I had children because I desperately want to spend most of my time with them. Because I like seeing them change day by day. Because even when Shanna or Calli are doing something that makes me want to put my fist through a wall I would cut my hand off before I would slap them in the face. Because they are mine. The first people who love me without any hint of judgment. That will come later. They will judge me. They will judge my behavior as a mother. They will judge me as a person. It’s my responsibility to make the choices that will allow us to have a good relationship.

I don’t accept it at face value that I will have a relationship with my grown up children. I’m aware that there are conditions on such love. It’s hard. Do you know why people stay in relationships with their abusers? Because if you walk away from that love, what will you do about the aching loss it creates in your life? I had children and I went around and deliberately chose adults to help me raise them. Adults who are just as intent as I am that our children be kept safe and healthy. Adults who hold me accountable for my behavior. I’m not actually taking the risk that other people think I am taking.

If anything I am too hard on myself and I demand an unhealthy amount of 24/7 cheer from myself. It’s getting better. Normal, healthy people have mood variation. Right now I do not get consistent sleep and I haven’t in a year. I have outsourced feeding me to other people and that’s a mixed bag. They aren’t actually aware that I stopped tracking that because I’m kind of a shitty person. If I don’t tell them that I have abdicated responsibility to them then I get to be mad at them a lot when they fuck up. Control games are awesome.

This is hard to talk about. Because I can describe it that way, as a control game, but it’s not like I’m experiencing it that way. I focus on taking care of my kids. I get them through their day. They eat at regular intervals. I uhhh don’t like a lot of the food they like to eat. I have texture issues. It’s not even that I don’t like those foods. If someone else took those foods and cooked them till they were mush I’d cheerfully eat it. Shanna and Calli like crunchy things. That feels bad in my mouth. I usually come in and get food for them quickly and then get to the point where I probably should shift gears and make food for me… only I get distracted and do something else. I “forget” to eat. It’s partially a consequence of my weird picky food preference issues.

When Noah or Sarah want to eat then there is pretty much always a way for me to feel like something I want in my mouth is an option. They like things that are spiced closer to how I want it (I like slightly less salt than Sarah and slightly more salt than Noah) and it works. Even if it pings me as being slightly over or slightly under salted… that’s a small sin. That’s how food works when Sarah or Noah is cooking. I can eat it.

For example, I can’t handle eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches very often. The oil from the peanut butter stays in my mouth and bothers all the other flavors for days. And the jam often tastes too sweet. But I can’t handle eating peanut butter plain because the flavor is too intense and it makes me feel icki. On some days I can handle eating nuts plain. Most days the idea of crunching a nut between my teeth will give me shivers down my spine like nails on a chalk board.

But given how many things I feel I must do in a day… I don’t want to go through the effort of making a meal for Shanna and a meal for Calli and a meal for me. Given that my meals are a lot more work. I just don’t eat. Because I’m not really worth it. But Noah and Sarah think that feeding me is worthwhile. Hey! I know if I wait a bit longer Sarah will want to eat and it will be easier to just make one mess for the both of us and… It works until it doesn’t work. When it doesn’t work I generally get pretty grumpy. And that’s how a lot of my self regulation goes.

Ok, this is a problem. I need to fix it. It’s hard to get to the point where it feels like I have any more ability to do “care” for a body. Even my own. I get really angry with myself for how long it takes me to poop now that I have kids. That’s weird. The whole gestating/labor thing changed my plumbing in ways I am not appreciating. And it doesn’t help that we are eating so many vegetables that my digestive system is on protest. I don’t believe all the people who say this is a healthy diet. I never had to poop this much when I was living on top ramen. That has to be easier on my system. Ahem.

People are whole systems. I’m kind of a mommy blogger. I’m kind of a mental health blogger. Kind of feminist. I’m just me. I don’t think I am going to post the Mom Pledge thing on my site permanently. I will agree in my head that I should follow those rules. I will think they correctly describe my approach to life. But I won’t publicly join a group about it. That sounds like behavior policing to me. I can’t handle it.

Whiner be thy name. Or mine. Whatever.

1 Reply

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?

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Category Archives: food issues

Thankful

Didn’t wake up crying.

I am so proud of me.

fake it.

Feeling useful

fast check in

Busy but standing still.

Now I understand “fuck cancer”

Plants are personal.

The first visit with the Dr was good so I should go back.

Yay Disneyland

Haunted

Stupidly defensive.

Chemical states and relationship transitions

In one of those festive bad moods.

anxiety purge

Food comes from a can

The Mom Pledge

Whiner be thy name. Or mine. Whatever.