Category Archives: girding my loins

Not sleeping well.

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I don’t sleep much while it is hot. My err internals are unhappy. I worked on a book for a while this morning. *pat self on back* Now if I can just keep this up I might be more than a one hit wonder. Not that my book was a hit. You know what I mean.

I’m kind of tired and mellow feeling. It is actually nice. Noah is going to take Shanna to camp today (she said please and all) so I will be at the nursery at 8:30 when it opens. A friend asked to come over and garden with me today. I can barely contain my squee. We will be weeding and mulching and such. (Yes, Pam I saw your note about “just use cardboard.” All of the cardboard on my property is still in good shape and the kids play with the boxes.)

I absolutely HAVE to work on the fence today. No excuses! I was productive all of yesterday… just not on the fence. This is going to be difficult to force myself to do. I can tell. I’m terrified of fucking up and having people make fun of me or hate me. Oh well. Keep working.

This morning I was foolish and I read some of that nasty anti-home schooling stuff. Oh boy are some people pissed off about even the *idea* of home schooling. Has someone tried to force you into something? Is there a reason you are SO ANGRY with people who make this choice? No? Ok then.

I get the logic that putting my kids in school would be better for the other kids in the school because then I would be forced to be involved with the school and I would make it better for not just my kids. I absolutely agree with every step in that process.

I just can’t get onboard with the part where I am supposed to throw my kids under a bus because it would be better for someone else. My experiences of public school have been bad. Not just for me as a student, but as a teacher and as a person in the credential program.

I won’t force my kids to be part of that system. I don’t believe it is healthy for our species to be forced to sit in chairs for 6+ hours/day while quietly listening to someone else. Nope. Not what we are meant to do this lifetime.

I understand that this is a privileged position. I believe that I am stinking with privilege. I have choices that many people can’t even dream of. I think that is positive and I am not going to give up my choices just because they aren’t available to everyone.

I don’t see 5 star restaurants going to a McDonald’s level of pricing (and food quality) just so that it is faaaaaaiiiiiiiiirrrrrrrr to everyone involved.

Life isn’t fair. At all. Ever. There is no fair.

That said, I am pretty happy that Noah’s obscene raise came with a much lower than expected amount of money. Ahhh skipping tax brackets. That’s ok. We don’t actually need all of the money. It’s ok that it is being used for services for people who need them. I feel pretty good about that.

I can give some things in some ways. I can’t necessarily give what someone wants or needs. I don’t want to be responsible. I am too selfish. I will donate money and food. I will assist with my labor when I have extra spoons and not when I don’t. I am not going to be forced to sign up for working all the god damn time for someone else’s benefit. I don’t care enough about other people.

I can say that out loud. I don’t care enough about other people to give them the time and energy I want to use on my own selfish pursuits.

Could I donate more time so that I am making other peoples lives at least slightly less awful if not better? Probably. Almost certainly. There is no shortage of suffering in the world.

Some people feel motivated to help a lot a lot of the time. That’s awesome. I’m glad you have so much to give. I don’t have it. If I try to do that I end up spending a lot of time cutting my body to remind me that I don’t matter so I don’t forget who I am supposed to be focusing on.

Cutting really is a useful tool. I think about it a lot. I think about what it does and why it is useful in the ways it is useful. Self-control is both under rated and under valued by most people. Very few people have the self-control to abruptly shift large chunks of their behavior. It is the same thing as not that many people are truly good actors. Same mechanism.

Cutting influences a lot of brain chemicals. Cutting is a dramatic shift to the body chemistry makeup. It induces calmness and a feeling of focus–tunnel vision, really. When your body is in shock it tends to shut down a lot of your nerve endings. You stop getting a lot of distracting messages from your body.

Cutting allows me to borrow spoons of self-control. I don’t really have that kind of calmness in my body without something to trigger a much-larger-than-usual grab of chemicals. Yay drugs! Due to experimentation I have learned a lot more about what my base level is vs. what is my elevated mood vs. what is my depressed mood. It’s a process.

Sometimes it is very powerful to stop and really concentrate on how powerful my brain is (your brain too; just sayin’). The brain scans they are doing these days feel like magic to me. You can see what is happening. The most magical part is you can see how people have the sheer willpower to change things.

I believe that my brain was altered by trauma. What I mean by that is I believe my brain adapted to living in an environment with a freakishly high level of stress. That is the level of stress my brain believes is necessary/appropriate to common life.

If my brain adapted to stress, how can I consciously choose to change the adaptation again? Studies show that mostly people don’t change much. It is hard. It takes will and effort and work and misery.

Being inside my brain sucks bowling balls through a hose. It isn’t fun. The difficulty of changing things is really hard to notice when stacked up to how shitty it is to live here.

I believe in magic. I believe that people make things happen when everyone else believes that it can’t. It happens all the time.

I have had the good/bad privilege of spending a lot of time with people who have experienced severe traumatic brain injuries. I have seen people survive the most horrifying accidents with terrible injuries. Their lives are forever altered. They can’t get back to being who they were.

I have no before picture I am struggling towards. That isn’t part of my story. I don’t have a base line to return to. All I have is the absolute all encompassing belief that I can change the story. I can learn how to be a good parent and I can be present through a healthy and happy childhood. This is not about a return to anything. This is about consciously choosing something different from my life.

Last night we read the part in the Little House in the Big Woods where Pa teases Laura about the kids getting only a switch in their Christmas stocking if they are bad. Shanna’s eyes went wide.

“Those parents hit those kids?”

“Yup. A long time ago people believed that if a kid did something bad the parents were required to hit the kid to teach the kid a lesson. It never worked very well.”

“Gosh I’m glad that no one has to be hit in this house.”

Me too. She cuddled up really close after that and told me that she would never hit me because I have been hit enough. I didn’t really know how to respond. I kept reading.

I’m reading my friend’s book. It is a rather fun read so far. I’m about 20% into it. He combines irreverence and history in his fabulous manner. (He intersperses national/international news events on the time lines to let people get a scope on what is happening. He said which year (I’ve already forgotten–1800’s, I think the last number is a 4 or a 6 but the decade escapes me and that is pretty important.) that Beethoven began de-composing. Similar gems are liberally sprinkled. I’ve always liked his writing. That’s why I know him in the first place. Yay for internet friends.

Why is it that I feel like I am standing still and free falling at the same time? I feel like I am not doing enough and I am terribly bored and I feel like I am doing too much and I am so overwhelmed I cannot possibly keep functioning at this rate.

I’m not balancing the marathon vs. sprint timing thing very well. I’m not actually talking about running–it’s one of those metaphor things.

Gardening has a rhythm and I am struggling to learn it. Some months of the year I need to spend 40 hours/week in the garden. Some months I spend more like 1-2 hours/week. I don’t yet feel this rhythm in my bones but it is coming. Spring is like a drug for me these days. Must move. Must plant. It is weird and primitive.

Summer is feeling different. I am a delicate and trembling flower and I wilt in the heat. More accurately I have attacks of horrifying bowel pain. I HATE SUMMER. I spend hours a day not sure if I am on the verge of spontaneously vomiting or shitting my pants because I won’t make it to the bathroom in time. It is hard to keep a schedule when I feel like this. (For the record I have only had one bathroom accident since childhood. The first day Noah went back to work after Shanna was born I had not yet learned that post-children the urgent signals are uhhh less timely and more actually urgent. Eww. Eww. Eww.)

But I have managed to go to the water park at least one day a week since it opened for week days. *pat self on back* That is a summer routine that I want to start. We only stay for an hour to an hour and a half. We might stay longer if the kids could do more swimming on their own and I had to do less work. As is I don’t have the physical ability to manage entertaining them in water for four hours. I take this as a sign that I am out of shape.

I feel like what I should do is make up a variety of different schedules–the way I did when I was teaching. Year planning was my favorite step. <3 It is like a puzzle! What do you want to do and when? How does it all fit together to make a cohesive picture of education? How do I fit in all of the standards and methods of teaching I want to hit?

I used to list: poetry, grammar, writing, reading boring analytical non-fiction, reading novels, reading short stories all as separate units. How many weeks to spend on each? How many hours in those weeks? How do I pre-test to figure out what people already know so I don’t bore the shit out of people? How do I evaluate people accurately to find out what they really learned?

If I had a dick this process would give me a hard on. It is a control thing. I like feeling like I am dotting all of my i’s and crossing all of my t’s. (I understand that in that case the apostrophe isn’t strictly appropriate but it looks bad any other way of writing it. See, this is what many years of obsessively worrying about grammar gives you. You know the rules and don’t follow them any way because the rules suck. Go English?)

I probably should get out some paper. It is easier without typing.

What are my categories now? Gardening, schooling, social activities, making food, cleaning house, money (there are a lot of once a year payments, for example, so budgeting is kind of weird), kid-separate-from-adult-time (my kids are *not* actually attached to me at the hip very consciously), reading, writing, running, hygiene (this takes time! Every Damn Day!), and I could come up with more if I tried.

They are all on slightly different schedules. Some things are scheduled and balanced on a month to month basis, some things are scheduled and balanced weekly or even daily. How do you balance all of the daily obligations against the weekly and monthly and annual?

Near as I can tell most people do more or less what their parents did because that is what they know of life. Thus I do a lot of robbing Peter to pay Paul because that is what I learned. I do it while squirreling away a lot of money which is, strangely, also what I learned.

I don’t usually mention that my father was rather well off throughout my childhood. I lived in poverty. I ate nothing but ramen and free lunch. I moved every three months because we were couch surfing and my mom couldn’t pay rent. He would tell my mom he was too poor to pay for things but he had a lot of savings. My mom just flat never had enough money to live.

Shanna sees me play with Mint a lot. She asks what it is. I talk to her about the balance of wants and needs and future savings. I tell her, “If you save money and you have a buffer then you don’t have to feel afraid when unexpected things happen. You can just shrug and move on with your life. Not having savings is one of the scariest things in life. It means you can not go out and solve the problems that come up and that is really hard.”

When I lived on $1200/month I had $3,000 in the bank at (almost) all times in a savings account I otherwise didn’t touch. My theory was that I might have to leave suddenly at some point in time and I needed a buffer. I burned through the buffer when I left my Owner. I got down to the point of my bank account only having four digits.

My friend offered me $100. He said that was his friends-need-help emergency fund. I wouldn’t let him give me money. I told him that I would make it come out ok in the end. I was right.

It is harder to deny yourself things you can afford to buy than it is to not buy things when you have no money. That has been my experience. It is harder and harder for me to save money. (In my defense the largest chunk of my spending is going to paying the mortgage off faster. I shouldn’t feel so upset with myself for not “saving” when I am spending the money on debt pay off instead of consumer spending but there you go.)

A while back I read a book, Raising the Perfect Child Through Guilt and Manipulation and whereas I am not up for adopting most of her methods or practices (I’m not taking up Catholicism nor sports) I really latched on to a few important points in the book. If you are really nice to your kids and you are interested in them and you share things with them then they will want you to like them. If they want you to like them then they will make choices that are in line with your values.

Oh man.

What are my values then? I want my kids to be interested in life and in people. Most people are good. Most people are pretty kind when given the opportunity. If someone is not kind to you, pull back first but be able to attack to defend yourself. You are worth defending. Read as much as you can–as many different kinds of things as you can. I believe that there are more things to learn than there is time in the day to learn it. I want my children to believe that their body is theirs to do with as they please–not as someone else pleases (unless it is fun and then I just don’t want details–m’kay?). I want my children to believe that work is necessary and fun. I want them to understand that different people are good at different kinds of work and that is no judgment one way or another on the people or the work. Do what you like.

I want my children to understand that they have privilege. That their ancestors have been privileged for quite some time. What does that mean about our place in the world and in history?

I check a lot of books out of the library that deal with African American issues. Seeing my little Aryan baby read, “A long time ago before you or I were born our people were enslaved” makes me wince. I told her that actually her ancestors were the slave owners. She asked if my ancestors owned slaves and I got to say no. (Yankees, more-recent-immigrants, and prostitutes for the win.) There goes white guilt in full form! But it’s true. Noah’s family owned slaves.

I find that as I get older and as I read more feminist writing I realize that if I were to fall into the most obvious trope presented to me I should hate Noah. I should hate everything he stands for and everything about him.

That is really hard to live with. I’m sure that is as hard to live with as the trope that women are just meant to be props for a man’s life.

I don’t hate Noah. I like Noah. Having the life of privilege he has had has made him one of the kindest and most considerate people I have ever had in my life. But maybe he just treats me that way because I put out. I’m only sort of kidding.

I am nice to Noah and he is nice to me and we have a whole virtuous cycle thing going on. Different people care about different kinds of “being nice”. Different people want different kinds of support.

In the past three days I have talked to four different women who have all been extremely upset with their (male) partners because of a lack of support. In most of these cases the woman can’t even put her finger on what more support would look like but they know they aren’t getting it. (Mothers of many children can come up with a list of what they want without having to pause for breath.)

When I think about how upset these women are I stop and think about how tired Noah is. Then I cycle through my male friends who are working as hard as they physically can to support their partners.

Yes, yes I know that the “love languages” crap plays in with it but it feels bigger than that. I think that evolution wants us to feel like what this person is giving us isn’t enough so that we will go shopping for someone who provides us with more. I think that it is just a good bet in terms of producing prosperous off-spring.

Only it doesn’t work. Because splitting up families is hella complicated. I think about the interweaving needs that exist in a family. I think about how children learn to care for themselves and for one another earlier when there are more of them around.

Then I come back to the fact that Noah started off in this world no bigger or stronger than me but he is now in some ways. He may or may not have a higher IQ. I definitely have a higher EQ. He has a higher earning potential at this stage. I can run farther. We are different. We are not equal.

How does one measure worth? I can hate him as a symbol of oppression or I can recognize that he personally isn’t oppressing anyone and he hasn’t spent a lot of time actively doing any oppressing. Living with me has dramatically changed how feminist he is at work. (I feel damn proud of that.)

He is moving in the direction of having power and influence. And I stand behind him filling his ear with my opinions. Does that make me a prop? Is he a prop? Is he just a paycheque to support my lavish lifestyle?

We are good at very different things. We like very different things. We complement one another. And because we are white that means that we have what is sometimes presented as the widest array of options in life.

My demographic is mocked up one side and down the other in the media. I am an upper middle class rich white liberal. I am a stay at home mom and I home school my kids. I am a punch line and a punching bag. Waa waa poor me.

Do I want to be a caricature? Do I want to treat Noah like he is a caricature? Noah is an upper middle class rich white liberal gamer geek. Doesn’t that make him kind of icki by definition? And don’t let that sicko watch My Little Ponies!! Ahem. Sorry.

What does being anything mean? I never identified as trailer trash despite living in trailers off and on and despite white trash being so much less “ok”. I am not defined by the box in which I sleep. Or in which I fuck random men I just picked up.

What am I?

I told Noah the other day that most of the people in my family would describe themselves as good people who sometimes do bad things. They are rapists and pedophiles. Ok, most of them aren’t rapists. But even the non-rapists adamantly defend the rapists.

I think of myself as a bad person who doesn’t really do bad things very often. I believe I am inherently unworthy of any relationship. It is inevitable that I will kick the cabinet off the wall. Duh. Being the kind of person who can, has, and may do so again means that I am just bad.

Do I rape people? Well, I’m pretty confident that I have not raped anyone since I was eighteen. I am pretty sure that I did commit rape before then. I am so sorry. I didn’t understand what I was doing. I didn’t understand power differentials. I didn’t understand that I was ever capable of having power.

Sometimes I look at Noah and I understand on a gut level that he doesn’t see himself as someone who has or has ever had power. He is still in that timeless place with the little boy who wasn’t treated all that well.

I mean, not that he’s immature or anything–that’s not what I’m trying to say. I’m saying that ones internal perspective doesn’t much resemble other peoples view of one. See how that non-gendering thing is awkward?

I do not believe I am a good person. It is, frankly, freeing. I get to make selfish and self-interested choices without caring that much about the effect. I generally do take the effect into consideration because I will have to live with it and all. That is one of the best parts of getting older. You have had a chance to learn from more mistakes.

Every time someone tells me not to dwell on the past I wonder what they mean by that. The people I know who tell me, “I don’t think about the past” are people who have the same little cycle of life over and over with people who are practically paper dolls. People who are roles.

I don’t hate Noah. I don’t feel I can. The longer I know him the older and more grizzled he becomes. (He’s got quite the beard these days.) But I see him as younger and softer as time goes by. I see more of his innocence and his desire for simple connection. I see more of him wanting to be liked and feeling sad because he knows most of the world doesn’t like him very much. (I mean, he’s charismatic and has friends and all–but he’s a symbol to be hated.)

What does any of it mean? Nothing? Everything? Who knows. I like him. I like the life I get to share with him more than I have ever liked anything in my whole life. I feel grateful for the peace and joy in my life. I have stability, safety, and privilege. I can write for six hours straight (in various places on differing projects) when I have insomnia (or intestinal pain–let’s be clear here) after getting almost six hours of sleep because my husband helps so much.

I can invite two kids over for the weekend and trust that my husband will just be around making food and cleaning up messes and playing with kids as much or more than I do.

Sex. That is the thing to schedule that didn’t make the list. I’m sorta interested in my cycles around that as well. Obviously I am more interested in sex around ovulation. We often have most of our ten times a month sex in a four day period. It’s awesome. But he would prefer other spacing. I struggle internally with treating sex like a chore to cross off the list like brushing my teeth.

And yet.

Why am I having sex ten times a month? (Ok, I’ve actually had at least two months in the past year where I didn’t put out ten times and I’ve had paroxysms of guilt. I try to compensate by some months getting up to more like fifteen. Noah agrees that it balances and all is copacetic.) Because sex is a lot of where Noah gets positive energy. He is drained and tired all of the time. If I put out more he would have more energy. This is a pretty trackable situation in our life.

But it is different for me. Sex is different than it has ever been. HA! I’ve been trying to think for days what base lines I have in my life. People revert to base line when they are under stress. I finally came up with one: picking up strangers for sex. That is probably the primary base line behavior I have had in life. I did it for 27 years.

Monogamy is weird. I’m not even going to call it boring because it isn’t that it is boring. It is consistent, but not boring. It feels different in a lot of ways I don’t feel up to putting into words right now. I hear breakfast finishing up and my arms hurt.

And then I’ll just abruptly stop. Because I can’t end for shit.

And the storm passes.

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Yesterday I felt sad and drained by the suicidal ideation slowed down. In the afternoon I talked to one of my favorite men in the world. He helps me gain perspective on life. We talked about shame and pain and being a problem vs. having a problem. We talked about what it means to be trying to change. We talked about how very hard it is to change.

This friend has dealt with a lot of suicide. Three people in the last two years. Now his dad is talking suicide in the “threatening” sort of way. My friend called the police. He told his father that either his father start a) going to therapy, b) seeing a psychiatrist to discuss medication, and c) find some sort of peer support group that my friend will have his father declared incompetent and he will sue for guardianship. That’s kind of intense to hear from my friend.

I asked him how he feels about me talking about my suicidal ideation. He said, “Do you see a therapist?” Yes. “Do you see a doctor for medication?” Yes. “Do you have peer support?” Well… the support group didn’t work out but I have very close friends some of whom I speak to daily and I can call them in any crisis. “Then you ARE DOING what you are supposed to be doing. You are allowed to talk about how it is going.”

He pointed out that I’m not threatening to do it. I’m saying that I want to but know I can’t. I absolutely never fucking ever say, “If you (whoever) do/do not do ___________ then I will kill myself.”

That’s not the point. I don’t think that any one else needs to change what they are doing. I feel like a chicken shit for whining about being in pain. Isn’t every one in pain? Well, why do we act like everyone must suffer all the time? Why?

I don’t suffer all the time. I am in some kind of pain basically every minute of every day but I don’t think about it. I try to ignore it. That isn’t the focus of my life. I’m also breathing air and pumping blood and blinking my eyes and producing saliva. So what?

I don’t always have the standing-in-the-center-of-a-bunch-of-movie-screens feeling in my head. That just isn’t here today. Today it is pretty quiet upstairs. I wouldn’t say I feel “relaxed” but I have more or less decided that given how much I was screamed at today I’m not jumping through hoops to entertain my kids so I don’t have a lot to worry about.

I don’t have a big terrible anniversary looming. Not till October. I have Calli’s birthday and my birthday to get through before then.

Last night my therapist and I talked about my compulsive sexuality. She hasn’t had a lot of details outside of what is in the book. I’ve only been seeing her since October 2012. She has only known me as monogamously married. Hell, she thought we started monogamy at the beginning of the marriage. Snort.

No, actually not following the guy home from the grocery store is brand spanking new. For basically the first twenty-five years of my life I would have. I said yes all the time because saying no frequently resulted in my being raped and that process is pretty terrible so if a guy hints that he wants to have sex it is just a better idea in every way to say yes. Saying no is just flat dangerous.

I only want to be beaten when I ask nicely and say please. In any and all other circumstances I’m not ok with it.

My big girl came in to put her head on my chest while I type. Not a great angle for my arm. But gosh this is good for my heart.

I want to see what they are like as adults. I want to find out if they are going to be slutty or very monogamous. I don’t want to tell them to do either. I want to find out what they want for themselves.

My therapist asked me why I stopped being promiscuous. I told her I didn’t want to model it for my children. I don’t want to teach my kids that they should spend their entire lives hunting for sex. They can learn that lesson from someone else, not me. That’s not my role.

It is really fascinating listening to other people talk about their marriages and sex lives. I feel so grateful that I found someone who is extremely sexually compatible with me. I feel like that alignment isn’t actually common. This is why I test-drove so many people. Ha.

I should get dressed and water the yards and finish sanding the fence. Then I can bring some pencils over and start sketching. I bet I could get a lot of the layout done today and tomorrow if I tried hard. Then I would have next week while Shanna is in day camp to paint. I’ll have to think about how to entertain Calli. I’m not thrilled with the idea of just bringing the iPad but I might. She will have a hard time keeping herself busy without Shanna for three days. Stuff to ponder.

I was lying in bed the other night, crying–of course. I was thinking about how my entire life has involved crying myself to sleep while rehearsing all of the memories other people tell me to forget. Other people want me to pretend that my life never happened. They want me to swallow all of the poison down deep inside of me so that it is buried in the darkness of my belly. There they are safe from the poison. It only hurts me and that is not their problem.

I wonder if that is why my abdomen hurts. It is all the secrets I am not allowed to tell because they are too shameful. I eat them. I swallow the poison as fast as I can but it isn’t fast enough. I don’t do it completely enough. I am not able to do it while smiling and making other people feel good about themselves.

I am a failure.

I am supposed to take all of the suffering away from other people. It is not their responsibility to hurt. I should hurt.

But then I stop and think, “What a self absorbed stupid bitch.”

I haven’t spent more time crying about my friends miscarriages than they have. Who in the hell am I to think I am taking pain away from any one else? I don’t take anyones pain away. I wallow in my own.

I sit and wallow in shit and misery. Because I am too stupid to understand that I am in the pig pen. All I have to do is get up and climb over the fence and take a shower–right?

But this is the only home I’ve ever known.

My friend told me (and my therapist said she was so happy he told me this) I am changing my brain when I parent the way I do. I am creating the possibility of a different future for myself and my children. I am changing the pattern of my family.

My parents both had really bad childhoods. My mother cleaned up after her mother’s suicide attempts after school. My father had a violent, abusive alcoholic in the house. My mother was the youngest child and her older siblings were contemptuous and vicious to her. My father raped his sister.

What the hell happened to my grandparents that they would produce children who would act in such a way? One grandmother was the illegitimate daughter of a prostitute. One was the descendent of Mayflower Pilgrims. (My sister claims she saw records as a kid before my parents divorced.) One grandfather was a second generation immigrant born on a Mennonite colony. One grandfather was a Catholic printer from LA. His family had been in the printing business and in the military as long as anyone could remember.

For my children three our of four of their grandparents are mentally ill though I doubt my mother in law would like me saying so. My children have a great grandparent, grandparent, and uncle who have all committed suicide. They don’t need a parent too.

If I manage to have a happy sixtieth birthday that will be absolutely miraculous by the standards of my family.

And Noah would be really nice to me for all of the years in between. It’s nice to think about.

No right answer.

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I don’t know the right thing to do right now. It’s 8:40 in the morning. It is nearly late enough that it is civilized enough to go knock on doors. Back up. You don’t know what is going on.

Last week the kids played “driver”. They drained the battery in the van. Again. I have had a vague awareness of it but no need to go anywhere so I didn’t get around to dealing with it. Today we have a birthday party at 11 for one of the kids in the homeschool group. But it is, of course, a long drive from our house. So. All of a sudden it matters that I have a non-functional vehicle.

The kids arrived back from the Godmamas at 7:30. The screaming began almost instantly.

Noah and I tried to jump the van using the Prius. It didn’t work. We spent a lot of energy trying because we both got frustrated and were irritated and keeping the kids from sparking themselves took work and ugh.

All through this my youngest has been intermittently screaming at me I WANT TO GO TO THE BIRTHDAY PARTY. Yes, well you bloody well drained the battery. It isn’t my bloody fault. Only you can’t say that.

At one point I sent Calli to her room for screaming at me then I went in my room and shut the door and just slid to the floor and cried.

It doesn’t help that I’ve been crying since 5am.

I am not having a great self esteem day. At this point getting the car in functional order will require some jumping through of hoops. No, I don’t have AAA. I could knock on doors until I find someone who is home who will come jump start me. (Not as bad of an option as it sounds–I like my neighbors and a lot of them are home during the day.) I could take the wagon to the auto parts store and get my own damn charger. I could just punt on deciding and figure that I will see my next door neighbor some time soon and then I will grab him. Until then my kids just have to suck it the fuck up that they broke the car. (This isn’t the first time and I keep asking them to leave that switch alone.)

Is this where natural consequences come in? Am I punishing them overly by not wanting to jump through a bunch of hoops to fix a problem they created?

I feel very tired and sad. Today is my brother’s birthday. The one who is still alive. He is turning 39, I believe. I hope he has a good day. I hope that he has found some joy in life.

I feel thin and weak and lethargic. I feel ghostly and ghastly. I feel stupid and irrational.

So. Fucking. Irrational.

Stop feeling you stupid bitch. Just get up and work. There are things to do. You should be arranging for other people to get what they want.

I want to hide in my room between the bed and the wall and cry. I don’t want to move very much. I just want to hide. I want to cut. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. My angry mouth is hard to live with. Noah is finally showing some wear on dealing with my ambient anger. I really need to be more quiet.

The best way I know to be quiet is to cut. Because then all day when I feel tempted to speak I just put my thumb on the wound and push. Then my brain is flooded with chemicals and I don’t want to talk any more. Cutting allows me to feel cocooned in a world of my own little chemicals. The idea of connecting with another person is so foreign and alien and distant. Why would I do that? I need to stay over here. See, I have blood. Don’t touch me. Blood is a contaminent. No one should touch me.

It is weird thinking that being a cutter is a perfectly reasonable choice. I just don’t want to be the one who models it for my kids. Maybe if I knew how to have more body privacy I would just start again, but I’m naked in front of my kids too much. We aren’t really a modest house.

I feel obligated to show up at the party. People would like us there. My kids would like to be there. But my kids keep doing things to make my life much harder. Sometimes the energy of making it over an extra hump just isn’t worth it. Could I fix this problem? Oh sure. But it takes work. And right now I don’t feel like I want to do that work.

I need to make ricotta cheese and lasagna and cheese enchiladas. I *have* a bunch of work to do today. If going to the birthday party just took the number of hours it takes for the birthday party (roughly four hours with driving) it would already be a lot of work for one day. I have already put an hour of the day into trying to jump start the car. If I spend another one to two hours on that and then spend four hours at the party and then have to take Shanna to ballet and then have to make dinner (I suppose I could put off the ricotta and lasagna making but the milk will go bad if I don’t use it and we are scheduled to be out of the house for the next several days in a row and…)

Are my needs important or not? Does it matter or not that this could become a 6-8 hour affair in order to go to this party? I’m not up for that right now. I feel bad. I feel like I “Just don’t care” about people but that isn’t it. I have actual work to do. The alternative is paying money to other people so they can do my work for me. So that I can go to a party. At some point that circular privilege logic has to have an end.

I’m staying home. We’ll miss people but at this point in time I wouldn’t have fun at the party. I would be angry with my children and I’d be nasty the whole time. I’m already tired and sad.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my feelings about groups. If a group existed before me and will exist after me with no change whether or not I am there… I don’t want to be part of the group. There is no space for me. I am not needed. Noah says it is a very non-Chinese thought. I don’t want to be just the second daughter. I don’t want to be just the person who is currently doing some thing but it doesn’t matter because someone else will be there soon.

Apparently I would rather stay home and cry. Ok, that isn’t what I will actually do all day. It’s just what I did all morning. I will work. I will get things done.

I like house work. It is real work and it is in my home and only I care or don’t care if it is done so I am not really trying for anyone else’s approval. I want to make fucking cheese. Yes, I could buy it in a store. In fact, yesterday in the store Noah asked me if I wanted to buy it. I said no. I want to fucking make it. I’ve never made cheese before. I want to make it. I want to understand how. I want to have done it. If I don’t do it today, then when? Why do I have to wait? Because you would rather be idly amused by my presence?

But I’m not very amusing. I’m sad and withdrawn. I feel like anything I might say will be wrong.

Noah does a lot of playing devil’s advocate. I understand why he does it. Some times I even concede that he is right. (The new New York law that raises annoying police officers to a felony includes that someone must *know* that the person is a police officer and *touch* the officer. Ok, that’s more reasonable than my original hysteria indicated. He made me read the text instead of the spin.) Sometimes it hits wrong. Sometimes it feels like the only thing he ever does is pick every side but mine. Because I have to always be wrong. Because I am stupid and irrational. I don’t think Noah believes I am stupid. I do think he believes I am irrational and he is sometimes not very nice about expressing it.

I think I have spent my entire life praying for someone who would be on my side. Noah seems to think that it means mindlessly agreeing with me no matter what I say. I don’t think that is true. I wouldn’t pick the friends I pick if I just wanted people to yes ma’am me. Noah rarely feels on my side. Most of the time he feels like an apathetic observer who isn’t interested in being on a side but he is sure going to tell me how stupid my side is even though the other side isn’t better.

I miss cutting. I was much better at keeping my stupid mouth shut when I was cutting. Better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt. I was told that a lot as a kid.

I’ve been thinking about how often through my life I have been told to be quiet. When I was little my cousins had friends who would trade off who had to pay me to be quiet. They couldn’t stand me talking and couldn’t find another way of shutting me up. There has always been the canonical “Go to your room.” When we had twelve people sharing a five bedroom house I had my own room because no one was interested in hearing me speak.

My Owner went to work to avoid me. Puppy screamed at me to shut up because I sound just like his bitch mother. My ex-fiance would just mutter under his breath.

Sometimes I feel so uncomfortable I want to use a potato peeler to take my skin off. Surely things would be better without this shell. It doesn’t fit.

I try hard to not talk around the kids about “inappropriate” things. Basically anything I care about or that causes me strong emotion. Like prostitutes being shot in Texas. That’s ok there. I don’t talk to my children about that. I shouldn’t talk to Noah either. He doesn’t really want to hear about it.

There is a lot of bad in the world. People filter out however much of it they have to in order to keep moving. The only way I know to filter it out is to get off the internet and be away from pretty much any grown ups.

I don’t filter out the same things as Noah. He feels untouched by a lot of bad that feels very personal to me. He wants it filtered out. He’s not interested. It isn’t his problem. This is why I feel like I could have wandered off to do the lesbian separatist thing. I know there are women who are unwilling to discuss womens issues. They don’t go off and join lesbian separatist groups. He feels like not-my-culture, not-my-tribe in ways that are very hard and scary sometimes. I feel so very alone. I am not his tribe. I’m not a geek. Not really. I don’t ascribe to their values.

I think he has the right to live in an environment that does not include ambient anger that makes him uncomfortable. I just don’t know how to deal with the fact that it seems like the answer is either making sure I am not in the environment or I am not speaking.

I haven’t cried in the last twenty minutes. Maybe I can handle going into the kitchen and getting started on work. The day is a wasting. I can’t tell if I should water the yard or not. We had just a smattering of rain.

How does your garden grow?

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If I’m feeling blue I just need to think about what I am growing. For edibles I have (in no particular order): tomato, celery, spinach, mustard, sweet peppers, chard, potatoes, sweet potatoes, apple tree, cherry tree, plum tree, orange tree, grapes, blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, artichoke, asparagus, corn, parsley, oregano, basil, sage, rosemary.

Today I added pumpkin and carrot and cucumber and watermelon seeds.

In the non-eating realm I have blue potato vine, seven different kinds of roses, jasmine, marigolds, mums, japanese lanterns (that’s what I’ve been told to call them), several kind of lily’s, geraniums, many cacti, and a few I can’t remember the names for them. I have a few other trees and a privet hedge.

I don’t live on a big piece of land. I just use what I have.

I don’t feel capable of figuring out human relationships very well. So I will grow things. I’m not good at keeping house plants alive but I like to grow food. Maybe I will get into house plants once my kids are bigger and less likely to throw all the dirt on the floor. We’ll see. Life is long.

Things are growing well here in Wonderland. It is hard to keep that in mind sometimes. Despite my emotional turmoil and tumultuousness–my life is going really well. I like my house more by the year. I may forgo a trip to Portland and stay home this summer and paint my house. Going to Disneyland reminded me that if you want things to look pretty good all you need to do is refresh the paint.

I feel like I am constructing my nest. I am constructing my frame. If I am going to exist in the world I want there to be a place that exemplifies me. I was here. I touched things. I changed them. Maybe I made them better. I don’t want to be easy to wipe away.

When my uncle died I bet it took them at least six full dump truck loads to get rid of all his shit. But once you finish the dump truck loads it is like he was never there. He didn’t make anything. He just held on to stuff for a while. None of it was his, really. His stuff owned him.

If you want to get rid of all the impact I have on the world all you will need is a few coats of paint and/or a bulldozer. But I hope that the first impulse people have is not to haul away all the crap.

I hope that when I die people will be glad to have well established food plants and a piece of property that was lovingly maintained. I hope that someone values what I have done with my effort.

If I get to write the story that is how it will go. I will live in this house until I am a very old woman. I will change it. When I either die or decide I don’t want to cook ever again I hope that a young family will buy this house. I hope that children will eat the blackberries and blueberries and be glad that I planted them.

That is what I hope.

My children are enjoying the food in the meantime. I’m trying to talk them into letting the berries ripen but so far stuff isn’t making it full to ripe. There is much joy to be had in any case.

We have lots things to do. Lots of plants to plant. I’m totally not using my yard efficiently. Give me a few decades. I’m not done yet. When I close my eyes I know what it will look like when I am old. I’m working for that. This feels like the only thing I get to decide to HAVE CONTROL OVER in this lifetime. I don’t get to decide much about anything else–I’m just along for the ride.

My garden is more beautiful by the year. Time. Effort. I have those to give. I have at least fifteen more years of being in the house a lot. I really hope I am mostly done planting by then. Or at least I will know the schedule well. It will be in my bones.

I want that feeling. I want it as bad as I’ve ever wanted anything. I want to feel that connection to a place progressing through the fullness of time.

I will have it, damnit.

Self control sounds hard

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What I know about my father is: he was tall, 6’7″. He liked to read science fiction books. (If you want the real reason I avoided sci fi for most of my life… knowing he liked them was enough.) He liked taking baths. He was a printer. He was from Pasadena. He was mean. He liked to rape his children.

I was reading about Buddhist meditation retreats. I’m not sure how I would handle having to sit around and just be still. I would spend a lot of time thinking about my dad. Watching my husband with our kids is like the bitter mixed with the sweet. I feel over and over every day, why didn’t I deserve to be loved? I keep wondering when people are going to realize they should stop. I don’t deserve any positive emotions from anyone. It has always been true.

I feel like a fucking asshole because I got angry about not being loved and I ripped the whole fucking house down. I prosecuted my father and I divorced my mother after loudly and publicly humiliating and shaming her.

Don’t fuck with me.

Ok, I don’t do that to everyone. I haven’t been quite so hostile with all of the people who have hurt me and not loved me. Usually I just put my head down, accept it as the natural order of things, and start walking.

It is very scary trying to be emotionally attached to my children. Every part of me screams not to. Don’t invest. They will just leave you and hurt you. Families are bullshit. No one really gives a shit about anyone but themselves.

I care. I take care of them because I love them. Not because they do anything for me. Well, they hug me. That’s nice.

Apparently my father pestered my mother for a threesome for many years. I wonder if she had given in to that would he have left her daughters alone? There is no way of knowing and no sense in blaming. I doubt he would have left us alone.

My experience of men who rape and men who hurt little children is that they are deeply wounded. They feel small and weak. They do not know that they are so strong they can crush the person with one hand. In their minds that transformation never happened. They believe they are still weak like I believe I do not deserve love. Most of them believe they do not deserve love either. Most of them understand that they should shut their mouths and look down and never expect anyone to love them but everyone gets sick of doing that.

So when someone shows signs of love it is hard to stop. It is hard to keep from pushing harder and harder in your excitement. Oh my goodness this person loves me. If the recipient decides to say “no” and pull away… that’s dangerous and bad. No. They are just kidding. They want to love me. See, they do. They are still here. They want me to be happy. This is what will make me happy.

One of the hardest parts of all day every day is balancing all of the needs in my head. I have to be important–I can’t be a martyr. But I have to look really hard at the people around me and meet their needs. Often when they can’t express the need on their own.

It is hard to not be selfish. It is hard to not take. It is hard to not be self-centered. But I can’t be. That’s what fucks kids up. I have to fucking care about my children and their needs. No one else will unless I do. If I don’t treat them like people of status it is unlikely someone else will.

People get the treatment they expect. People get the treatment they accept.

I don’t know how to defend myself without being angry. I don’t know how to take up space and be allowed to be without setting fire to earth and eliminating every one and every thing near me. That’s not a useful skill right now in my life. It is kind of the opposite of useful, really.

If you don’t like the paths you know go find a new one. What would it be like to not be angry? I haven’t had very many days in the past twenty years when I haven’t felt simmering rage. It kind of blows my mind.

What I know about my father is that he was angry and entitled. I worry about myself. I don’t want to act entitled. I’m not. I worry about the men I know who rape. They are angry and entitled.

You can’t persuade someone to change by yelling at them. Not really. You can cause them to cower and lie and cover up. But that’s not what I want. I want people to understand how big and strong and powerful they are… and to consciously choose to not hurt people. I don’t think that is something I am going to be able to do by being nasty.

I’m really scared of not being angry any more. I know that has to be part of the next step. But I’m afraid that without it I will die. I’m afraid that anger will kill me. (Yes, that was a contradiction.) Being angry is a tremendous load on the body. It is slow suicide. Being this angry allthefuckingtime is a way of killing yourself. But being angry is what motivates me to defend myself.

What is the point of living in preparation for death? Death is part of every life. I’m not sure that anyone should focus on that being the whole point of every day.

I have a lot to do today. I’m feeling overwhelmed already. Weeding, make lunch, park day (there seems to be more and more drama-I think I will do a lot of Shiny Change of Topic), reply to about ten emails with scheduling foo, make phone calls (I am going to schedule physical therapy. I am going to schedule physical therapy. I am going to schedule physical therapy. soyouknowhowmydoctortoldmetodothisinJanuary?YeahI’mbroken.

Make dinner. I’m already in progress on (yet more fucking) laundry. I’ll be happy when younger daughter outgrows the four-outfits-a-day stage. Older daughter has. But then again they have different body temperatures. Younger daughter changes her many layers of clothing as often as I do. We’re in trouble.

When I think about why I am doing things (cleaning the house, weeding, whatever) I think that I want my children to say, “My mom likes to work.” That’s a description I will have to fucking earn. It will be harder given that I don’t have a tidy outside job to at which to point. Lots of people claim to work hard while doing less in a day than I do in most hours. It’s kind of perplexing to me. I could not handle a job where I sat around kind of waiting for something to happen. Not even the kind of waiting/work firefighters do. I have to work more than that. Nervous energy.

It is weird trying to appreciate the difference between mental and physical labor. They are both serious effort. Many people are capable of one but not the other. I’m trying as hard as I can to walk down the middle of the aisle. I want to learn things today that I did not know yesterday. I want that to be true every day. I want to have moved my body around and improved the nature of something pretty much every day. (Ok, I understand that some people don’t consider cleaning to be improving the nature of things and yet those people seem to get pissy about not being able to find things.)

I like resetting the space. In our home there is a place for everything and I can get everything in its place. It all comes down just about every day because living is like that. But I can reset. I can get to baseline. I don’t do it over and over all day. Ok, I skip days of cleaning my kitchen when I am enmeshed in projects elsewhere. It gets gross.

But as long as it is in disorder I can physically feel it and it bothers me. So I don’t leave things messy for long. The idea of going out and buying nail clippers over and over because you can never find them turns my stomach. I have no idea why but that is a little microcosm of first world consumptive waste for me. No. I just can’t be part of it. Clean up your fucking house and you will be able to keep track of your belongings. If you can’t keep track of your belongings clearly you have too many.

I think this makes me a “minimalist”. But I don’t even feel like a minimalist. I have too much shit for that.

Wow this got rambly. This is all connected for me. This is what I fear facing in meditation. I only face this flow of thoughts for a few hours of writing a day. It’s kind of intimidating to think of going at this speed for a day.

The retreat center spoke of accessing your wisdom. To me that clearly means “people shouldn’t come until they are over fifty”. The internet tells me: “Wisdom is the judicious study and application of knowledge. It is a deep understanding and realization of people, things, events or situations, resulting in the ability to apply perceptions, judgments and actions in keeping with this understanding. It often requires control of one’s emotional reactions (the “passions“) so that universal principles, reason and knowledge prevail to determine one’s actions. Wisdom is also the comprehension of what is true coupled with optimum judgment as to action. Synonyms include: sagacity, discernment, or insight.”

I’m in that needing control stage. Shit. I hate this part.

My ego: wanna stroke it?

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I went out. To a munch at a bar. It was made clear to me that I could have gone home with at least three people. Apparently folks missed me. I was offered beatings and cuddles and kisses and bondage. I could really have an ego if I wanted one. It’s kind of mind boggling how I maintain such low self esteem.

I’ve been having a rabid argument on my ptsd support site today. Can someone “heal” while using drugs or must they be completely sober before the journey can begin. Discuss. I have strong views. I am not on AAs side.

I have been reading a lot more about men hating women. You know, stuff written by men. It’s like visiting crazy town. I think I understand a bit more about why they don’t like me though.

I’ve been reading about consensual incest because it occurs to me that if I am going to try and collect real stories and serious data I will have to be completely accepting of whatever I get. And people are going to have a very serious range of backgrounds.

Tonight, at the munch, as I was on my way out a woman asked me for advice on how to handle advances from men. How do you deflect attention you don’t want? What things do you say? How do you deal with them? I told her I have a nasty history of sexual assault so I’m not sure my advice is the best. And then I told the story about being humiliated on the beach.

So, years ago I was brought into an extended part of the Burning Man community. I participated in a particular local burn every month. I never went out to the playa–I’m not a dusty girl. The one year I bought a ticket I gave it to my friend Mo and ran off to marry Noah instead. That was the right choice.

Long before I married Noah, right after I left my Owner (I literally moved my stuff from my Owner’s house on a Thursday and left on Friday for my first camp out with the group) I went on my first date with someone and spent the weekend doing ecstasy and nitrous for the first time and drinking a rather lot of alcohol. In the first weekend I fucked six people. I liked that group a lot.

After I had been part of that group for a year or so there started to be increasing problems with men being overly aggressive with women. The burns had gotten more popular and it was held at a nude beach so things got heated. This was in the height of the tribe.net days. Oh I miss tribe. It was decided that there would be a workshop on how to deal with sexual advances.

The woman who ran it pulled me out in front of the group and identified me by name. In the next few minutes she said explicitly that it was possible to have boundaries without being a bitch like me.

So tonight when I was asked for advice on how to handle unwanted advances I had feelings. Mostly how I handle them now is by holding up my big shiny ring and saying, “Monogamous!”

But before that. What did I do?

First, think about it from the male point of view. He is experiencing chemistry with you. He is in an at least mildly heightened arousal. And men are socialized to know that if they don’t push aggressively for sex they probably won’t get any. Any sign of equivocation or hesitation is a signal that you are just hoping that he’ll try harder.

So you need to be very clear. Never apologize. Acknowledge and be polite. “I’m not hunting. I’m really not looking for anything but friends.” You don’t need to feel responsible if he gets butt-hurt. That’s part of his growing process. Everyone gets rejected sometimes. I have kind of a ridiculous success rate (err, historically) and I get rejected tons.

It’s ok for guys to ask. It’s ok to not be interested and just say no. Don’t apologize. Never apologize for not wanting to have sex with someone. It is not their right. It is not something they have a basic set of permissions to access.

It was hard tonight to figure out the right mix of behavior. I flirted. I flirted with people I have a very long history with (my wonderful Daddy was there or I wouldn’t have gone) and I felt safe. I felt pretty and fun. I don’t feel fun very often. Usually I feel boring or bad. I kind of alternate between them.

I feel like my stories are all sad and full of woe. I feel like I am pathetic and uninteresting. When people ask me what I have been up to I know they only want the highlights so I go with: “Gardening and home schooling my kids and painting murals in my house.” That certainly isn’t lying. I don’t mention the book much. That’s a downer. WHICH IS WHY IT DOESN’T SELL. Silly girl. Ack.

But it was nice going out to the munch. It reminded me that there is a critical lack of mentor-like people who are without agendas in my community. My community is primarily a place where people go to hunt and hunt hard. There are monogamous people but they are kind of weird.

I think we are good for the community. I think it is good to understand that you can have boundaries and closeness. You don’t have to fuck everyone you love.

That’s kind of a weirdly intense thing for me. You don’t have to fuck everyone you love. I was supposed to fuck my brother. I was supposed to fuck my dad. But you don’t have to fuck everyone you love.

It’s ok to leave doors closed. I know this shouldn’t be epiphany territory. Maybe you aren’t compulsively sexual.

And also:

“Compulsivity model of hypersexuality

Compulsions are behaviors a person performs in order to reduce feelings of anxiety or tension. According to this explanation of hypersexuality, persons engage in whatever sexual behavior in order to reduce feelings of tension, instead of to express sexual desire. Because engaging in the behavior can worsen the situation causing the tension, the person experiences a longer-term increase in tension, despite the shorter-term relief, resulting in a self-perpetuating cycle.”

Yeah, that’s me.

Part of the reason that I “rape easy” is because I have a lot of compassion specifically for men who are very frustrated by sexual rejection. I find the sex addicts. I understand why they feel like someone like me should exist. It was really intense for me when I read the Kushiel series. I have felt like I was required to take in the pain of other people since I was a small child. For a long time I felt like it was more or less my duty to make their lives better.

It doesn’t hurt me to have sex with lonely, frustrated men. And it makes them so happy. Don’t I owe them that happiness since it is so easy for me to give and they want it so badly?

It feels weird when people ask me for advice on how to handle men. What the fuck do I know? How to get raped over and over. Because I am stupid and I keep standing near dangerous people. I stand near them because they understand the game and for most of my life I needed to have someone acknowledge to me that the game existed. (I don’t mean you lost the game. That’s different.)

Life presents you with teachers in the right times and in the right places. I have learned from prostitutes and drag queens. I have learned from old leather fags and rednecks. I have learned from WASPs and the projects.

One of the most important bits is stay away from anyone who makes you nervous. That’s where I get hosed. The ones who make me nervous intrigue me. I’m stupid. Let me tell you the rapes were uninventive enough that I mourn for their other partners. They wouldn’t be fun to stand next to for long.

But I feel bad for them. Because they so obviously feel pain. I want to help. Codependent dumbass. I want to be liked. That was what was on offer.

It is nice knowing that I don’t have to hope anyone else will like me every again. I get to just exist. But how am I going to deal with advances? You don’t have to be a perfect ten in my community in order to be considered interesting–it’s an awesome community.

It is all so complicated. How does one develop an actual clear way of managing oneself? I can’t pretend I’m not hot (I totally am) just because not every person on the whole planet wants to have sex with me. But I have self esteem issues. (Not body issues exactly.)

I will say that it was kind of weird having people plot porn out on the table in front of me. Other than my recent foray into tumblr I don’t look at a lot of visual porn anymore. I stopped that when I stopped having partners who were aggressively interested in porn. I presume that Noah looks at porn occasionally but I know for a fact he doesn’t have time to do much of it.

I was reminded what world I was in. I was repulsed and comforted simultaneously. I will note that the people in the pictures represented a fabulous array of sizes, shapes, and skin tones.

Oh yeah. I forgot. People are really beautiful. I haven’t looked at them like this in a long time.

I think I will go out wearing red lipstick again. I liked the reaction. It was really nice not feeling invisible. And it was nice being with friends. And, let’s be honest, it was nice feeling like I could crook my little finger and disappear with any number of people.

Ok. I think my libido is starting to reappear. This life business is going to be interesting. Monogamy is a conscious choice for me. It is a decision I make over and over and over like I make the decision to stay married and I make the decision to not run away from home and take my kids and start over somewhere new. Not because Noah has done anything wrong–I’m just crazy.

Being in love is, in my opinion, largely a choice. I could choose to nurture resentment. Instead I choose to be grateful that I have an exceptionally giving partner and I know I won’t find better. Sure, I could find someone to fuck me or hit me… Noah loves me. Noah loves me enough to give me his name and his babies and all of his spare time and mountains of money and all of the property he didn’t have to share because it was from an inheritance.

Should money matter? Enh, it’s not the money. If I left I would leave with little more than the clothes on my back and I would laugh at his attempts to give me money. I wouldn’t starve my kids but I’d get independent real fast and I’d stop cashing checks. I’m like that.

It’s the trust. It’s the commitment to making me safe. It’s the commitment for seriously investing in me.

Whoa. Holy fucking shit. How did I inspire that? I know that people get married all the time. I’ve spent enough time on the internet reading about dysfunctional relationships to understand how good I have it. Noah is probably glad that I no longer troll single parenting forums obsessively reading threads like “What do you wish you had known before you negotiated for custody?”

Ok, I think the caffeine has worn off. I wanted to make sure I could drive home safely. Woof. Tomorrow will be interesting.

Usually when I get this little sleep it isn’t because I was having fun. I think I will be able to smile tomorrow. I will remember watching the very pretty women doing terrible things to one another and I’ll smile. No one will need to know why.

Emotional dysregulation for the lose.

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Today I am angry. I am so angry I want to punch holes in walls. I am sad. I am so sad that I want to crawl under my bed and stay there for days sobbing until I am completely dehydrated.

I can’t do either.

I feel bad. I feel bad about myself for being someone who has these emotions. I feel angry with myself for being so petty and pathetic and stupid and hateful. God I feel hateful. I don’t even know who I hate. But I hate someone–anyone–everyone.

I want to cut. I want to cut so much it hurts already.

Yesterday we had a really great party. The weather cooperated. Everyone had a good time. I feel like a fucking asshole because I made comments to people about things that are none of my fucking business.

Hell, last night friends called me wanting advice on labor/delivery stuff. That’s flattering. Obviously other people don’t think I am a piece of shit. I do.

Today it feels like there could be no possible reason that I should stay alive. I am obviously inadequate and pathetic and bad. I kind of understand that this is fleeting. That I don’t always feel this way. I feel like I have nothing to give. And I feel like that means there is no reason for me to be here.

When I was reading the book about survivors it struck me that part of the difference between female survivors and male survivors is they often (not always–of course) women have to put their heads down and shut up and accept an evil overlord sort of presence because that is the only way they can raise their children.

I absolutely believe that the usefulness of my life at this point rests in my ability to turn out progeny who will be better, faster, stronger, and smarter than me. I could have decided to turn my prodigious educational gifts on other peoples children but I am selfish. I know that in the fullness of time I will feel more satisfaction from being able to see the tangible result of my efforts in the form of adult children who are able to go out into life and be successful. I will take it personally if I teach them something else.

Does that mean that I think that all people need to be motivated in the ways I am motivated? No. This is my personal problem. This is my journey. I do not believe that anyone else needs to be on my journey.

I think I am alone. And I feel angry about it. I don’t want to be but I am. I can’t handle what it would take to have people more actively in my life. I can’t handle getting up every day and having to deal with other people. I can’t handle a co-op preschool. I can’t handle doing outings every day with the homeschool group.

I feel brittle and broken and stupid and mean. I feel impatient and nasty. I feel bad.

I know it’s not ok that I place such importance on my children. I’m supposed to care about other things. I don’t know what I should build on. I feel kind of ridiculously angry with myself for fucking up the tomato starts. Stupid stupid stupid mistake. Well, I won’t make it again. Fuck. I can’t particularly base any self esteem on that project this year. Shit. Shit. Shit.

I need to go weed. I’m supposed to let that be enough for today. I’m supposed to let/make the children play outside. I’m too angry to be patient. I’m not angry with them. I can’t stand real close to them right this minute. I radiate anger. It makes them feel upset. It’s not about them.

I’m supposed to be loving. I don’t feel loving. I feel like I am bad. I feel like I have nothing to give. I feel like a defective person who is incapable of loving anyone. I used up a lot of spoons yesterday and I still fucked up repeatedly. I’m really not good at saying the right things. I feel mean-spirited. I don’t mean to be.

This is where the Generalized Anxiety Disorder part kicks in.

I am not being mean to the kids but I am not up for cuddling today. They are feeling pretty upset about that. I have to live with them being upset sometimes. And they have to live with me being upset sometimes. I’m sorry for that. I know this is the downside of this home schooling business. I know that this is the reason folks thinks folks with mental illness shouldn’t be parents. These mood swings are ridiculous.

I told the kids I needed to go sit in the garage and watch a grown up movie. I need to have my break early in the day. I’m watching Double Jeopardy with Ashley Judd and Tommy Lee Jones. Why do people act the way they do? How do people develop their own different obsessions and needs?

I will take my kids out to play and I will make jokes and interact with them. I will snuggle on demand. I will weed and I will be thrilled if they join me and provide a bunch of alternatives so they don’t have to.

It doesn’t matter how I feel. It matters how I act.

It’s ok for me to say, “I’m tired. I put out a lot of energy yesterday and I’m being grumpy with you because of that. I’m sorry I’m snapping. I’m going to go watch a movie and try to relax. After that we will go play.” I put out a plate of snacks. I refilled the water bottles. They are just having the ipad in the morning instead of in the afternoon today. That’s fine.

It doesn’t matter how I feel. It matters how I act. I want to have a relationship with these people. That means I have to be the fucking grown up. I don’t really want to be. But I signed on for this gig. Only fifteen more years until I am off duty. fuuuuuuck.

I will figure out what I want to live for at the end of the term of duty. Until then–time to go be a good example. Or some shit like that.

Intersection of privilege, feminism, and being “retro” as we head into the future.

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I went and read the NY Magazine article on Feminist Housewives. I understand that some people feel insulted by the piece. I thought it was hilarious. Holy tomato do I fall into the demographic she is lampooning. Upper middle class and white. We started into this demographic when I was 27 (right in the middle of the 25-30 age group that is the fastest growing segment) when our combined household income was between $75,000 and $100,000. Over the last six years Noah has nearly made it to $200,000. We are absolutely the “kind of people” this article is trying to insult.

Wait, you didn’t think the author was trying to be insulting? Oh. I read it as if she was trying but failed because I really don’t care about her evaluation. Yes, I am a feminist who does not have an out-of-the-home job. What does being a feminist mean in my position? It means I lobby the shit out of my friends-in-similar-dynamics for them to have the autonomy and freedom I have.

On some levels my marriage is quite “retro” and in other ways it is anything but. Folks wouldn’t look at Noah and I and confirm that the patriarchy is in full force. I have agency. I make decisions.

If I were to work out of the house we would be in a worse place financially than we are right now. My salary would not cover how much we would end up spending on daycare, better clothes, eating out, a house cleaner, or a more active gardner. Let me tell you–if I had a job I would quite certainly do less cooking for the house than Noah does while having a job. My job was more hours in the week than Noah’s… for a lot less money. Really about like the social worker that was lampooned in the article.

I went into teaching for the express purpose of learning how to teach my own kids. I became a teacher because I knew I wanted to homeschool my kids someday and I wanted to be able to do so well. I did not go into a helping profession because I wanted to make the world better. I went into teaching to fulfill my own selfish desires and my own plans for the future.

I didn’t really live with my mother full time when I was a child. I grew up in extreme poverty and that means I often had to go live with virtual or literal strangers because she couldn’t care for me. This has created an ache inside me that time doesn’t seem to dull. I did not learn how to be a person from my mother. I learned how to be a person from books while I was alone in a room. I feel a physical need to have specific one-on-one relationships that facilitate personal growth. I need to see what it looks like when people go through the normal changes. I don’t need to spend the rest of my life looking at one cross section of life and only adapting to that. I was great with teenagers–I need to learn how to deal with all ages. I need to be exposed to all ages.

My life journey will never look anything like the typical journey. Even though I fall into specific demographics of high privilege now I will never be able to change who I am or where I come from. I am not like the other women in my demographic. Often I freak them out.

I can say without reservation that I have an uncommonly feminist marriage. My husband has permitted, encouraged, shoved me towards a degree of autonomy that I just don’t see in other marriages. It isn’t that he makes me do things by myself, though he does. It is that he has taught me about his own journey of aloneness. It is that he has made me understand why he has the limitations he has and he understands why I have the limitations I have and we seamlessly step in and rescue one another. He cares about my individual issues and he never assumes that I am a certain way “because I am a woman”.

I do not believe in biological determinism. I know men who are wonderful stay-at-home-dads (my brother has actually been a SAHD for the entire lives of his children) and I know women who are so non-maternal that I don’t understand why they had children. Because that biological clock thing is No Joke. These women wisely find very nurturing caregivers to provide most of the care for their kids and their kids grow up feeling loved and cared for. That’s what life is about, right?

There is no one path. I want to be near my children because it satisfies deep emotional needs for me. I was deeply neglected and abused as a child. I have baggage I am learning how to work through.

I have to stay home and take care of my children myself because otherwise I will never have the impetus to work on my hatred and rage towards working in groups. Without doing this I am unlikely to value the input of other people. Let me tell you I will never change my opinion if I just take a job where I have to work with people. I hate working with people. That’s my idea of hell on earth. I can be the boss and steer the ship in a group–but that’s different. I’m a harsh taskmaster.

I don’t want to be a harsh taskmaster with my children. I want them to learn how to be functional people. That means I have to model being a functional person. One of my biggest gripes about the American educational system is that we are turning out people who know how to be cogs in the machine–not people who can deconstruct the machine and build a new one.

I don’t know about you, but I think we need a new one.

I went on to read The Retro Husband and thought ouch. He’s talking about Noah. Only he isn’t.

Noah and I met during a period in our lives when we could lovingly be called fuck ups. We had a lot of relationship instability and we both treated people like they wouldn’t be in our lives very long. Mostly we were right. When we got married we both had to abruptly change a lot of things in our behavior. We went from not dating/just friends to engaged to married in five months. Our lives changed fast.

I picked a mate who has a profession that is best served by a combination of locking himself in a room to work alone and going out and teaching what he has learned while being locked in a room. Strip clubs don’t feature heavily. I’m pretty sure he has only been in a strip club once in his life. We went together on the first anniversary of our marriage. We had a lot of fun. (I’ve been to a lot of strip clubs and I love them.) We came home and conceived our first child. Amen.

I picked someone who has a dad who has never left his crazy mother. He understands what “for better or worse” means. I looked at the guys in my generation (and two generations above me) and found such understanding to be thin on the ground. I picked someone from inherited wealth who has a chip on his shoulder and something to prove. He was taught how to make money. That is a set of skills you either have or don’t have. I quizzed a lot of men. Let me tell you: financial acumen is thin on the ground. He wasn’t taught how to budget money. That’s one of the big downfalls of growing up with more money than you know what to do with. However he doesn’t track our money; I do. I budget well. We are very good partners.

I am self-aware enough to admit out loud that I would probably not be as happy if my partner made very little money. I would have different expectations. I think that  when you look at the demographic of “men who do very little housework have more sex” you have a combination of: women who are lavishly provided for feel grateful and men who philander. That’s my experience.

When I was eighteen I was engaged to my high school sweetheart. That was the price of shacking up and we both wanted away from our parents. I didn’t marry him because even though he made more money than me I paid more of our expenses and I did all the housework. He was really lazy at home. I went from that to a D/s or M/s relationship. (That’s Dominant/submissive or technically Owner/property in our case.) I have always fucking cleaned house for people. I’ve been doing it all my life. I even pick fucking friends who want me to come over and clean for them. (I offer. I am really good at organizing people’s stuff.)

I clean because I am an order Muppet. I have to see order in the world around me or I can’t focus and I can’t relax. I think I clean for other people because I am trying to bond with them. I am trying to offer what I have in terms of “benefits” so people will put up with being my friend. I believe I am intrinsically unpleasant. I must offer something in trade or being around me isn’t worth the cost.

I don’t want my children to feel this way. If I had to put my head down and work a full time job and take care of my kids and take care of my house and provide food… I would certainly never ever have reason to believe that people wanted me around for any reason other than I had work to do for them. “The worst burden for a woman is no burden.” She’s talking about privilege and idleness. She can’t shame and say it bluntly. I should be serving other people, not myself. I shouldn’t just exist for the pleasure of my company. Ha. I appreciate how much she believes women should be out working in the world–but I notice that in order to do it herself she had to give up on the marriage/kids thing. I wanted kids.

I don’t think the author of the NY Magazine piece means that I should be working for other people in order to help support the world. I just don’t.

What is the point and purpose of feminism if I am not allowed to say, “I have the financial privilege to stay home and be the primary caregiver for my children and more than anything in the world I want to do it” and have that be acceptable. I don’t want to have 18, 19, and counting so I am a perpetual breeding machine who never has to do anything else but be mommy.

I will engage in the world again. I will do it as a very different person. I am not allowed to fuck my way through the rest of my life. I spent my childhood assuming I would be a sex worker for most of my life. That was my actual plan. I decided to do something else because I didn’t want my children to believe they had to do it. I changed my behavior in large and dramatic ways because I wanted to be able to look my children in the face and say that acting like me is appropriate. Does that mean I think promiscuity is terrible or bad? No. But they should not expect it of themselves because it is not mandatory. It is not common. It is not standard.

I used two forms of birth control very consistently after I was eighteen (I was on hormonal birth control and ALWAYS used condoms for casual sex and used a diaphragm with longer term fluid bonded partners who refused to wear condoms any more because let’s be honest that is how that shit happens) until I was sure I wanted to have kids. I was not going to get caught with some kid I would resent and a lifetime association with a loser ex-partner. I was smart enough to fucking recognize that at twelve years old. That’s when I went on the pill for the first time. I sometimes used depo provera (to my detriment–that shit is bad for you) then I went back to the pill.

No one sat me down and taught me the facts of life. I found things out piece-meal. A little bit at school (I will say that Los Gatos had adequate public health education–that is a huge advantage not everyone has) but mostly through talking to people. I found out most of it by making mistakes. I made a lot of mistakes before I was eighteen. I had a lot of very risky sex. I made a number of stupid choices.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this rape/not rape thing. How do I differentiate between bad sex and rape? I don’t think it crosses the line unless I was saying “no”. I believe that I have to say “no” or it is my fault that something happened. I ascribe the responsibility and agency for such acts to myself.

When I was twelve I asked a twenty-five year old man to fuck me. That wasn’t rape. But it was still a crime. It was still illegal. It was his legal responsibility to tell me no. I was still a child and he is responsible for his actions. That other twenty five year old I dated when I was twelve. He was at least nice enough to not pressure me when I said I wasn’t ready to have sex yet, but he asked me to at least give him a blow job. I felt kind of guilty because he had taken me out to a meal (Johnny Rockets. I had a grilled cheese sandwich, fries, and a milkshake) and he bought me a Christmas present so… didn’t I owe him? So I gave him the blowjob he asked for. It wasn’t rape. But it was a crime.

This is where rape culture blows my mind because of how pervasive it is. It’s all my fault those poor men committed a crime. I asked them to do it–literally in the first case and by inference in the second when I said I wasn’t ready for sex yet.

I brought it up, you see. I was out on a date–of course there were expectations, duh. How stupid am I to not have stayed home. My mother had given me permission for the date. She met him. She saw us off. I was home by curfew.

I know the difference between rape and not rape. If I said no and lay there crying while someone fucked me that is rape. Even if we are both adults now and I would have consented to the sex if he had just put a condom on. That’s not a mistake on my part. That is not something I invited. Unprotected sex is not a right that a man has. He does not have the right to risk inflicting a child on a woman. Period.

I think in my little corner of the world a rapist is somehow less of a piece of shit if he at least keeps his future-children to himself.

I stay home to take care of my children. They are my whole world for this brief window of time. I don’t think I would be able to handle raising the child of my rapist. My mother had a hard time raising me. She did not bond with me as much as she did other children. She had her tubes tied when I was born. You know how “some women rape easy”? That’s my family. We rape easy. I’m trying to do something different with my children. I am escaping into a different kind of social dynamic.

I really have a feminist marriage. Why do I say that? Because I started off in a marriage where it was ok to beat and rape me and then I decided those things weren’t ok and I put a stop to them. (Let’s be clear that I was ok with it to start with–I gave active consent. Well, ok I gave consent in advance for the rape and then changed my mind because I didn’t really think it would turn into a violent rape because I didn’t know I had been dealing with mostly wussy-assed-pansies trying to “play rape” in the past. Hoo boy.)

Folks have called my husband “whipped” and his response was, “damn right”. Only he is a very autonomous being. I don’t have a lot of control over him in general. I have a ridiculous amount of influence on how he treats me. And other men/boys feel the need to let us know that I shouldn’t have so much influence on how he treats me. He should instead align his preferences with those of other men/boys and treat me how those men/boys feel I should be treated.

I really like my husband. He is self-interested in a way I can work with. I can predict how he will react because he is consistent. He has stated goals. When he starts wandering off from them a brisk reminder gets him back on track. He isn’t particularly pulled towards any boys club. He has been alone too much. He has no faith that the boys club will really be there for him.

I have been with him more for more of his life than anyone else. I like him more than anyone else ever has. I really appreciate him. My life has gone from being a nightmare to being the punchline because I am so vapid and privileged. It is… interesting.

When people mockingly say that I am trying to live how my grandmother lived I would laugh and say that I picked an atheist–not a Mennonite or a Catholic. One grandmother was a printer in Pasadena after WWII (she was enlisted) and the other was the wife of a boxer turned dairy farmer. No, I don’t live like them. I neither have to work as hard nor am I oppressed as much. The Christmas before I divorced my family my mom made me a wonderful book. She hand wrote, in her beautiful hand writing–my mother has the most beautiful writing in the world–all of our family recipes into a recipe book. She gave me what she has to give.

I am a much better cook than any of them. They used shitty ingredients and too much sugar in freaking everything to cover up the bad quality of all the canned produce. I have had to learn how to cook from The Joy of Cooking and the internet. I live in an era where there is no fucking excuse for saying “I don’t know how to do _______.”

Yes, I choose to be a stay at home mom. I choose to homeschool my children with the financial support of my husband. I don’t want to have it all. I don’t want the pressure of more people having expectations of me right now. I only have so much energy to give. I know that makes me fairly pathetic but that’s just how the cookie crumbles. I am privileged. I am lucky that I get to make this choice. I wouldn’t have been able to do this in this way with someone who made a lot less money.

Only I probably would. I would live in a cheap rented apartment and I would probably never own a house. But I would still want to take care of my kids. I don’t live in a nice house now. I will never live in an expensive neighborhood. I would feel unwanted and like I didn’t know how to behave in that kind of environment. Here the kids play on the streets and we hear lots of loud music and lots of people. I feel comfortable. I see signs of people living and laughing and putting down roots.

Yes, I want to be a stay at home mom so I can get to know the seventy-six year old man down the street. I wouldn’t have time to stand around and pass the time of day hearing his stories if I had a job. My life would be less full if I had never heard his stories. I would understand people a little less. He is helping me hate men less. He feels pretty safe to stand around and talk with. He has no designs upon me and he would probably freak the fuck out if I made a pass at him. It is a very comforting exchange. I really value having him around. I think I am shoving him in the role of my Uncle Bob. I’m going to freak out when he dies some day. I’m glad my kids are getting to hear from him. They are learning a lot of history.

Speaking of Uncle Bob. Not mine. Uncle Bob Martin is a technical guy who absolutely means well but has a humorous opinion of women. I’m not a fucking lady. Ladies are expected to act in very proscribed ways I will never agree to behave. Men should not treat me like I am a lady. I want them to treat me like a person-who-is-not-like-them. Like a human from another culture. I am a person who has had a very particular set of lifetime experiences. I am not like other people. I am not like other women. I am not like men. I am also not working in the technology industry so obviously I don’t matter–right?

Only I’ve been coding some in secret (not a secret any more) because I didn’t want to tell Noah at first. I’m still not sharing. I am who should be courted into such an industry but they treat me like an insect. They treat me like my brain is rotting inside my skull because I am so mentally deficient as to want to be near children all day. Oh go fuck yourself. Mostly women are treated like they have no value after they have stayed home to take care of children. Only Uncle Bob wants us to be the ladies and spiffy up the place and nurture our cwute widdle pwojects along to help them actually happen. The boys club has noticed that when you get too many boys in one place you need a den mother.

Well he is asking women to come work in a hostile work environment. He isn’t really acknowledging how or why. At the edges of that hostile work environment (the gaming community is kind of the bastard son of the technology community) we have Anita Sarkeesian speaking about what happens to women who have the audacity to look at how women are treated in the gaming community.

I could stay in an underpaid, unappreciated profession where I get to care for other peoples children all day but not really form bonds because the kids are leaving at the end of the year–so I don’t have to grow as a person. I can remain static as I stand there doing the same thing year after year. Like I’m perfect already. ha.

Or I could stay home and raise children and figure out how to grow fruit and vegetables so that when I am old my property will be fairly self-sufficient. I am contributing to my long-term future. Could it all be yanked away from me? Anything could. You don’t have to tell me that. I don’t think many people understand having an uncertain future more than me. But things really and truly have improved. I have changed. I have learned from my mistakes.

Yes, I’m a feminist and a house wife. Being in this position allows me to acquire skills that I want to have. Having a career would not allow me to develop these skills. I want them. I want them with every fiber of my being. I want to have survival skills that are not taught in an office or a school. Those environments are artifacts of a culture that is dying. I want my children to be able to do something else.

We are at a turning point. We have to change. If that makes me “retro” then I’m ok with that. This essay from Michael O. Church is fifteenth in a series (now of sixteen and counting…) about how corporations need to shift from being part of an industrial model to being part of the technology era. He’s talking about getting rich. He’s not talking about my life any more than Sebastian Marshall is talking about my life. I am not part of the technological revolution these men are portending. Yet I am. I am raising the children who will carry it out.

I believe that women have as much of a place in the world as men. I believe that women are as intrinsically valuable as men–not “because we nurture” but rather because if the human race is to continue it requires men and women. We have not found a way to get around that yet. It’s not because we are both awesome “in our own ways” it’s because we simply cannot continue as a race without both genders. And subjugating women isn’t going so well. We live in an era where silencing us is harder than it has ever been before. We fight back now. And bear the consequences of that too. It’s still better than it was. There have always been consequences for standing up for yourself–that is not a man or a woman thing. Unfortunately the consequences for women tend to involve threats that involve her gender, especially rape.

I have never met anyone who has been actually raped more times than I have. Either that or no one has been willing to say it to me. Some day I will meet someone. I have very real reason to fear reprisals for speaking out–the threatened torture has already happened to me. What makes me think I will avoid it in the future?

Because I have learned more about privilege. I was silenced previously in my life because I was young, ignorant, and too weak to protect myself. I am no longer in such a position. Most women and girls do not understand what the process of learning how to protect themselves means. Unfortunately “protecting yourself” often means staying home and not getting to be part of communities and hobbies you would like to join because if you have a bad experience you are on your own. If you defend yourself people may threaten to kill and/or rape you.

In many ways I feel very consciously like I am choosing a life more like a religious life–I am mostly cloistered and I mostly have contact with women and children. I’m doing it as an increasingly zealous atheist which is kind of awkward.

There are many studies that say that men/women in highly defined relationships do better and are happier. So far in history those relationships have followed a pattern of men work- women raise children. It was a biologically unavoidable task. We no longer live in that world. Now men are no more suited to the weird ass work people do in offices than women are–often men are not as well suited. A great deal of technological work involves a kind of multi-tasking that women are shown to be better at. And as my husband shows me week after week after week in our marriage–he is a better cook than I am and he is quite capable of bathing children and changing diapers and cleaning the house. He doesn’t do as much of it as I do, no, and that’s ok with me. Doing those tasks requires time. I have more time to kill than he does. He is genuinely working his ass off for more structured hours of the day than me. I can pick up slack and increase our mutual leisure time because it makes my life better.

I don’t see how these choices are unfeminist. I am being cold, calculating, and I am serving my interests and the interests of my progeny. I am, however, not serving the interests of an Industrial Age leftover feminism. I am not trying to stamp out home life in service of people living in dormitories and working in factories. I don’t want my children to imprint on a group of people exactly their age so they have no perspective on how dramatic the changes in life are. I want my children to grow up understanding that people change constantly. They don’t settle in and “be the same” for decades. You have to grow.

I don’t see a structure for that in the current set-up. So I’m going to go make it up as I go. I understand that has been the normal human path since the beginning of time. I’m ok with being on The Road Not Taken by other people. I will always be weird. That’s unavoidable.

I wish you knew that you were actually on that road too. You are not actually on the same road as other people and you shouldn’t try to be. What do you want to do with your life? That’s what feminism is about.

At the end of that rant the kind of logical next question is: so what about all the people who don’t have my privilege? Fuck if I know. That’s a really hard question.

Dreaming of the Mouse

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I have been talking to people about my travel plans. That means people have been indicating interest. This pleases me. I have a friend going to Disneyland with me and the girls this year. I don’t have 2014 in Disneyland locked in yet. Someone said that she and her family might be willing to meet me at Disney World for part of our time there in 2015; I know that a friend in Georgia wants to meet us there for part of that time too.

In either 2016 or 2017 I will spend two weeks in Hawaii in a really nice resort for my birthday.

This is why I bought the time share. If I only have to come up with air fare and food it’s not nearly so hard. I like running away from home. And it’s really nice running to places where I know the price I have to pay in order to have people be nice to me.

I don’t bring up the idea of traveling with people more because I’m really difficult and particular. I figure I’ll spend a lot of time with my mouth sutured shut for the rest of my life. That’s the price of having friends, right?

I know people with a wide variety of destressing activities. I plan Disney vacations. Yay prepaid vacations for fifty years. That’s a lot of destressing.

If you have too many projects going then you can’t die.

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I spoke with my therapist on the phone. She’s thrilled that I sent her such an email. She said, “When a client can get mad at you and articulate it–that is often a good sign. It means you actually trust me.” We’ll see. We are going to continue working together. We are going to change the structure of our sessions and the content of what we are processing. I’m willing to keep trying.

I feel bad when I write about being suicidal because I know I worry people. I know it sounds a lot like the boy who cried wolf. The big reason I want my own domain is so I can talk about feeling intensely suicidal without violating a TOA or getting a smack down from a moderator.

I know it is hard to know someone as specifically unpredictable as I am. Bonding to me is foolish. Goodness knows when I will blow up and hurt you again. I’m just like that. And I’m selfish–so very selfish. If I weren’t selfish I would be dead.

When I am not feeling suicidal I know that I am a rule breaker. I know that there are taboos around talking about suicide for a reason. Why do I think I am so god damn special that I should get to break that taboo? I literally believe I will die if I try to follow the taboo. I can’t.

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night to a beautiful girl saying, “I need you.” Then there is cuddling and kissing and stroking as we go back to sleep. I need you, too. I need you so much I feel like my heart will explode.

I used to not talk about being suicidal. Instead I cut myself and burned myself and overdosed on pills and took whatever drugs people handed me and fucked anyone who was even vaguely interested. Anything to not have to think or talk about how very suicidal I was.

I don’t do any of those things any more. I’m just left with the fleeting feeling of being completely overwhelmed by pain and wanting to escape.

Today is starting off ok. My neighbor told me I can paint her fence. The school is happy to go along with the contest idea after STAR testing in May. Frankly I’m glad of the delay. It gives me time to get organized.

My therapist asked me if I feel I got value from the group therapy experience. I told her, “I already knew the outlines of my tribe. I already understood the commonalities of our experience–even if I don’t understand each specific member of my tribe. I won’t keep these women in my life due to geographic constraints–it’s no insult towards them. I didn’t learn anything particularly new and I didn’t form relationships that will change my life. It was a neutral experience.

I was watching an interview with Amanda Fucking Palmer (Supposedly I will be going to a backyard concert with 49 other rad people sometime this year. I am trying to learn more about her. She commented that she believes the human brain is not meant to know 50,000 people and care about them and their problems and their sister’s problems. Our brains were meant to care about a few hundred people. It’s an interesting problem on the modern scale.

How do you pick who to care about? Most people just get who they get. They grow up around a set of people and they never move that far away. You know who was born near you. My life isn’t like that. The people who are keeping threads in my life have scattered to the winds. They are not day-in-day-out dependable. They are all busy and spread out geographically. How is the human brain meant to adapt to this? I’m not sure but I’m trying.

I’m reading more about resilience and getting pissed off. I’m tired of statistical everything acting like I shouldn’t exist. Statistical anomaly. That’s me. I just shouldn’t happen. People can’t do what I can.

Aut viam inveniam aut faciam. I shall either find a way or make one.

I’m just about done with Collapse by Jared Diamond–author of Guns, Germs, and Steal (which I haven’t read). I’m having a bitch of a time keeping up with reading new books. I don’t like reading new books. I like rereading old books and visiting my friends. I finished Outlander again for my book club and I have to sit on my hands so I don’t read the whole damn series again before book club. (I have like three weeks. I could totally read the next six books that each are over 1,000 pages long in that time but I wouldn’t read anything new and if I want to read 52 new books this year… oh man. Get crackin.)

Today we are going to learn about local weeds with the homeschool group. And have dance class. And swim class. And our back door will be sealed against the coming rain (it’s a process). I need to wash one load of laundry and fold three. I need to start thinking about packing. Ugh.

It’s just another day in paradise, right?

Post-EMDR: birthday edition

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When I try to think backwards in time about my birthdays mostly I think of crying. I have cried through most of my birthdays. Today I was specifically asked if any of them were good and I can come up with my 21st birthday (400+ perverts sang to me in a sneak preview of The Secretary which is pretty much the perfect movie to release on my birthday) and that’s the absolute highlight. 23 wasn’t bad. Tom threw a party for me three weeks after I broke up with him. The most attention he paid to my birthday in our years together. 30 was pretty good. My party was both good and very weird.

But let me tell you I arranged to go to the movie when I was 21 and I arranged the party when I was 30.

As far back as I can remember my birthday is a reminder of the fact that I’m not particularly likable. People (my “friends” who were invited) have decided that my birthday party is a great time to sit down and tell me everything they dislike about me. It’s happened over and over. I tried to change that with 30. It was such a weird night. And then the creating a household thing exploded. So it’s kind of a mixed bag.

This year I am going to Disneyland with my kids and a friend. I’m not inviting Noah. Like, specifically if he asked to come (which I anticipate snowballs falling in hell before he asks to come with me on a trip) this time I would say no.

If I’m not going to be the special pretty princess at least I don’t want my face rubbed in it. I will never be the special-center-of-attention. That’s not a role I get this lifetime. I understand that most people don’t get it.

For most of my birthdays I remember things like my mom getting me  chocolate cakes because no one else wants to get stuck eating vanilla even though that is my favorite flavor. No one else likes it so it isn’t coming into the house.

On other peoples birthdays I try hard to pay attention to them. I want them to know that I am grateful that they exist. I want to buy their love–let’s be frank. I want people to know that I think they are worth buying love from. It’s kind of nice to experience, you know?

My birthdays feel like a reminder that I was never wanted. I am the product of rape. If my mother hadn’t been Catholic she would have aborted me. Happy Fucking Birthday. I don’t know how to feel wanted. Mostly I understand that it isn’t anyone else’s problem to deal with my insecurities so I try to not talk about them.

I’m actually pretty good these days at not actively bribing people to come pay attention to me. I get enough that I no longer value myself and my time so little that I am willing to beg people for their attention. It happens or it doesn’t. I have to consciously stop myself from grilling people about why do you want to talk to me? Don’t you find me unpleasant? I think I’d give just about anything to not have to be with me for a day. I find me incredibly unpleasant.

Sometimes it is kind of weird knowing that I could train myself to be nicer. It’s just behavioral conditioning–no big deal. I have the wrong instincts to get through the world safely as a “nice” person. I gravitate towards people who need boundaries expressed with hurling knives. I like them. I just plain do. And way more than I like them I want them to like me so I have traditionally just not said no.

My therapist, like everyone else who knows me and Noah, after listening to me talk about birthday stuff for a few minutes said, “Wait… isn’t that unusually inconsiderate from him?” “Yup.” “Hunh. Why is this a thing? What kind of trauma does he have around birthdays?” “None that I know of in particular.” “Hunh. Weird.” “Yup.”

That’s how discussing birthdays goes with everyone. Why is Noah really excellent at being considerate about almost everything else but has uhm not prioritized my birthday? How the fuck should I know. I’ve asked and haven’t gotten a great answer.

I think it’s the pressure. He’s nice to me all the time because he wants what it gets him. On my birthday the pressure is kind of insane. Failing to act is at least on a different scale from doing “something” that I find disappointing. I can be honest and say that on occasion I have been disappointed in gifts in my lifetime. He’s probably noticed. I’m sure that’s not his favorite thing to deal with.

I really think that part of it is about him not wanting to feel like he has to jump through hoops. He cooks breakfast every day because logistically it is a really great thing for him to do. My birthday probably has less obvious benefits.

I don’t think that one session of EMDR made this issue resolve in my head. I have a long life of birthdays ahead of me. I’m feeling very frightened by the idea of ending up spending my birthday alone every year once my kids are a bit older. Once I’m no longer so interesting and all.

I’m not going to be willing to wake up on my birthday and have everyone in my house act like it is every other day. I can’t do that any more. I’m tired of not fucking mattering. I’m not going to coax and beg my kids to pay attention to me. The only other adult in their life with such influence is going to teach them that my birthday doesn’t matter. I need to not be here while it happens.

This is the kind of thing that makes me not want a long life. I generally start crying about my birthday in August (my birthday is in September) and do it pretty solidly until November. Noah not doing anything last year hit me harder than normal and I’m still crying about it in March. That feels pathetic.

He married me. He had children with me. He works like a dog for me. He cooks me breakfast every day. He stopped sleeping with other people. What more does he bloody need to do to prove that he likes me? I don’t know.

This ache isn’t about him. I don’t know what could fill it. I don’t know if he would be able to if he wanted to but he doesn’t want to so it doesn’t matter. Every year my birthday feels like a reminder that my mother never wanted me. That my father was a monster. That I was just born to be a worthless whore.

I’m really glad that I never actually did sex work. I think that for me that would have been emotionally problematic. As a sex worker you can be an expensive well treated one or you can be a badly treated poorly treated one. Guess which one I would have headed for?

This whole birthday thing is not about getting stuff. I’m really not looking for more crap in my house. I’m not especially materialistic and I have all of my needs met and then some. I absolutely know the extent of my privilege. I am not acting like my husband is inadequate at providing. He’s a fantastic provider. No complaints there.

I want to feel special. Most every day I feel like my presence is in large part tolerated because I am willing to do enormous amounts of work in exchange for people tolerating my presence. I know I owe people something for putting up with me. They sure as shit aren’t doing it for the pleasure of my company.

People who don’t want anything from me confuse me. So I avoid them. Right now I have nothing to give so I avoid the people who want something from me too. I don’t go out as much as I did in the past.

I feel like a selfish piece of shit. I am seriously only hanging out with people who have something specific they are offering me. They come and find me and ask to hang out with me. And I’m still fucking whining on the internet and crying for more than 1/3 of a year because I feel unwanted and unlikable.

That’s broken. I don’t know how to fix that. I see the parameters of what is broken and where but I don’t know how to fix it yet.

Ok, it’s not true that I only use people. Hyperbole is my friend and all. I have highly reciprocal relationships with some people. Mostly though I’m a using bitch. I feel bad about it. I have never been this friend before and I remain quite confident that once I get through this small children phase I will no longer be a using bitch. I anticipate me doing a lot of kid-care for other people in the future.

I don’t feel like my being here on the planet matters very much. My birthday is kind of the chance to say that I am special and every year I am slapped really hard in the face with the fact that I’m really not very important.

Let me throw into this rant the many odd feelings I’m having because Noah’s parents send us so many gifts. In terms of adding random novelty and beauty to my house really they have me covered for the year. Ok, some of their stuff isn’t a hit. Mostly their taste has improved to the point where I write long gushing thank you letters detailing how I’m using all the presents.

So this weird birthday thing really isn’t about being mad about not getting presents. Presents aren’t the point.

I don’t know how to experience my birthday and think, “It’s a good thing I’m alive”.  I go through each one knowing that I shouldn’t be here. It’s kind of like permanently living in It’s a Wonderful Life. I feel like I am always kind of simultaneously viewing both options at the same time: I am alive and I am having this life where clearly people do love me–I did manage to find people vs. I was not wanted from the moment of my conception in every way. How can someone conceived in such hate and rage and violence and anger and humiliation ever be worthy of anything else?

That’s what EMDR helps me put into words. This separation of where the emotion is evolving towards vs. what the trigger is about.

I don’t know what will change how I feel about myself. I don’t know if I will ever stop wanting to hurt myself. I don’t know if I will ever be able to stop hating myself.

I tattooed on my back that the thing I want the most is forgiveness. I think that something more akin to an exorcism would be necessary to get rid of how much hate I feel for myself.

I don’t remember what I was watching but the adult child of an incest survivor was speaking about what it was like growing up with his mother. He said something like, “The thing I remember the most about my mother was that she was always just a little sad. She would stand off to the side in every gathering and watch like she wished she was invited but she never felt she could join.”

I’m scared my kids will say that about me.

I kind of feel like life is a party I wasn’t invited to. I kind of heard by word of mouth that it was happening and some people not connected with hosting have said, “You should come!” but I wasn’t actually invited… you know?

But no one is invited. Well, my kids have been. Holy tomato. I work hard at that. It’s very funny hearing the lectures I give them.

My kids don’t know that I’m roiling in self-hatred. It’s completely outside of their scope of the universe and it’s going to gosh darn stay that way. Well, till they can read at any rate.

I want… I want… I want.

I want to stop hurting like this. I want to know how to actually feel valued and loved given that I have a number of relatively sane non-user people working really hard to ensure that my company is desired. And I’m only having sex with one of them. It’s pretty weird. I don’t really know how to handle this.

It is very weird trying to psychologically get my head around the fact that the internet is permanent. Well, until an energy crisis. But let’s assume it’ll last my lifetime. I think it will. Why is that in this post? I’m starting to think about mortality differently. I have never before seriously entertained the idea of living into my 70’s, 80’s, or beyond. Given my life experiences I am unlikely to make it that long. But I will almost certainly make it into my 60’s.

That’s a lot of birthdays to worry about facing. I try to tell myself that the only thing that stays the same is that everything changes. I won’t always feel how I feel right now. Right now I am very deep in that miasma of shitty feeling. I feel stupid and immature for wanting to talk about these things in public. I feel like I should hit delete and walk away because I am wasting peoples time by writing this inane drivel. And I go on and on and on. Shut the fuck up already.

Geez inside voice, I haven’t even hit 2500 words–what got stuck in your craw? (Have I mentioned that I am in love with WordPress telling me word count as I go?)

I think I am going to stop though. We are going to go out to dinner to celebrate Noah’s last day at his old job. He is starting a shiny new upgraded position at a new company next week. Things are exciting here.

I really have nothing to complain about. My ingratitude is staggering. But there it is.

Suicidal ideation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I should probably go start breakfast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Homeschooling and hubris and motherhood is not a career

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I’ve had several prods recently to think about why we are homeschooling. Oh my goodness. The reasons are so many and varied. First and foremost we homeschool because I decided when I was seventeen that I wanted to homeschool my kids. Let’s be honest here.

Because I have always known that I wanted to homeschool my kids I got a BA in literature and a teaching credential and went to graduate school (no degree there). I wanted to feel like I knew enough. I desperately wanted to feel qualified. This is a fairly unusual route to take towards homeschooling. I have seen some mention in writing that “former teacher” is one of the fastest growing segments of the home schooling community. I don’t know if that is true or not. Even when I talk to other former-teachers they didn’t start out teaching in order to homeschool. They move to hoomeschooling because they feel their child needs something that isn’t otherwise available and they are trying to meet the needs of their family.

I have more hubris than that. I want my children to be unschooled while they are young. I want them to think learning is an amorphous non-linear process that happens in weird spurts and starts because that is how brains operate. Very few people really learn best lock step rote memorization. I live in California. I can promise you that lock step rote memorization is a big part of the educational philosophy. It’s the best way to baby-sit a bunch of potentially unruly kids.

When I was a teacher I handled unruly kids by giving them Legos and Play-Doh in class and I kept them after school for academic detention and we sat down and figured out where the holes in their knowledge was. Many of my teacher peers were quite frustrated with me. I was teaching these little brats that they get to run the show and demand an endless amount of my time and I should respect myself more than that.

No, I was teaching them that some people need to be physically moving in order to access their brain and that is ok. I was teaching them that some people take a little longer to pick up concepts and that is not shameful it is just something to accommodate.

I decided to homeschool my kids because my own public school experience was so overwhelmingly awful. I do understand that my children are not me and will have their own experiences–but big parts of the experience don’t change.

When you are bored in class you are expected to stare straight at the teacher and feign attention and not allow yourself to get distracted. You are not allowed to go actually learn anything–you have to pay attention to the teacher because (s)he is talking. Being in public school dramatically slowed down the rate at which I learned. I went in and out of twenty-five schools and really got to experience what it means to be educated in California. I wasn’t around long enough to experience much long-term benefit. Maybe if I had learned to feign boredom better I would have had a better experience.

My experiences outside of California involved me being beaten at least weekly and usually more like daily. My attitude sucks. I’m distracted. My handwriting is terrible. Obviously the best way to educate children is to make sure they are so afraid they cannot dare move or wiggle during class.

Regardless of the fact that I hear there are excellent teachers in the system (I’ve even seen a few) they are in the dramatic minority in my experience.

When I read people say, “I can’t make my kid learn anything so we can’t homeschool” I want to respond, “So your child is still lying prone in a crib somewhere unable to move or walk or talk or eat food or use the toilet?”

I make my kids be polite. Past that I don’t make them learn a whole lot. They learn how to clean up after themselves because I model it. I don’t force them. I talk about the process and why we engage in it. I did the work until my kids hit a level of competence where they wanted to do it for themselves and now I don’t do it. It’s great.

Shanna is counting higher and higher by the day. Occasionally I will correct one prononciation out of the 50+ numbers and she almost always skips one or two somewhere and I don’t say anything about that. Sometimes she makes it to seventy. She has almost entirely taught herself to read. She has actively rejected any vague attempts to help her. She wants me to read to her and not slow down to be didactic. It’s annoying. Ok.

My kids have high motivation to read. I spend many hours every day reading. I read books to them, books to myself, and the computer every day. I talk to them about what I am reading and why. Now that I am not on facebook or mothering.com at all I am spending about four hours out of every day reading actively-informational books/websites. I’m learning. I’m getting up and using what I learn. I’m talking about broad connections between different areas of our lives.

I’m not worried about my kids learning math. I’m about to get up the courage to build a big play structure in the back yard because that is the only way to get a slide to our property. I have all the technical knowledge for how to do this. I have a next door neighbor who owns all the equipment and is happy to help me for a few hours as I get started–the rest I will do with my kids. They really do help.

I talk about geometry and force. I will talk about why you need cross-braces under the platform. I will talk about distribution of weight (a frequent topic in this house anyway) and I will talk about the benefits of screws and nails and I will talk about treated and untreated wood. It will be an edu-tainment because they will always know that they helped build it. That they are competent people who can just do stuff because that has always been true. That has simply been what they have done with all the days of their lives.

Can people do similar projects with their kids and go to public school at the same time? Sure. Of course. But your kid is spending 6+ hours a day having to stare forward with at least a faked expression of interest. Man. What a waste of a life.

I hear that time spent in school is really important. But I also hear that if you subtract for transition time, recess, and discipline there is somewhere between forty-five minutes and ninety minutes of actual honest-to-dawg instructions in a full day.

And on the socialization front–it has not been the norm in our species for children to spend all day every day locked in a room with twenty to thirty people their age and only their age for more than about one hundred and fifty years. I have not been convinced that this grand sociological experiment worked out the way folks hoped it would. I mean–I don’t think it is actively evil… mostly… but I get why people use it.

I so get why people don’t want to do what I am doing. I absolutely get that. This is hard. Trying to figure out what to go learn next so I can model learning is hard. It requires a specific way of thinking that is extremely high energy intensive. I feel very overwhelmed by how hard it is and I have reason to believe that this specific sort of thinking is much easier for me than it is for most people. That’s not a snooty statement–it’s what people have told me repeatedly and emphatically.

I specifically went through a lot of training so I could understand the real eventual goal of education. What does it really mean to expose children to information and expect them to become “educated”? I’ve tried as hard as I can and I’ve worked for more than ten years to find out what breadth and depth of knowledge is actually expected out in the world. Did I go out and actually learn all of it? No. But I have worked very hard to create a model in my head of how information flows. What knowledge leads to what. When you talk to extremely smart people–what got them started. Where did their passion begin? How were they exposed?

My kids may grow up to be a hairdresser and a burlesque dancer, respectively. They may grow up to be scientists or mathematicians. Or writers or carpenters. My kids will almost certainly know how to program–maybe they will just stay there. I don’t know. I don’t have a very accurate crystal ball.

But in homeschooling my children I am committing to expose them to the depth and breadth of life experiences. They need to find out what their options are. I feel that one of the potential worst experiences of the hubris involved in homeschooling is that in modeling so strongly one way of life–how will our children really understand how it is ok to live? They don’t need to grow up like me.

Other than having a kind of adorably off-beat sense of style they are both experiencing a life that is about as far from everything I knew as a life can be. They won’t want to grow up to be me. That is not only acceptable it is wonderful.

I have to teach them how to wonder and explore and how to evaluate if the consequences for being caught breaking a rule outweigh the awesomeness you will get if you break the rule.

Seriously–that’s one of the biggest life lessons I will consciously teach. There are a lot of rules in society. Some of them you can break basically penalty-free and some of them have catastrophic results. How do you decide which sets of only annoying penalties you want to put up with?

Everyone should teach their children that. That is part of the process of deciding how many homework assignments you can blow off and still get the grade you want.

That is what I don’t want. I don’t want my kids to care about working for a grade. Once you finish school they stop handing out those grades. It’s been hard to figure out if I am really learning or if I deserve to be allowed to speak on topics I have read about if I don’t have a degree proving I have read those books and gotten passing grades on the tests.

What is this fucking bullshit. Wake up America. Socrates did not have to pass a god damn written exam before he was allowed to teach. I’m just g-d sayin’.

Not that I’m Socrates–nothing of the sort. But this is a very weird very modern American invented way of thinking. It wasn’t long ago that most medical doctors never went to college. They apprenticed. Or they just read some books and started doing it.

That is what “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” partially means. It means thinking, “I want to do _____; ok what do I have to do to get there?” And then you independently educate yourself. We live in the era of the internet and free public libraries. There is no excuse for ignorance.

Well, that age old excuse “I don’t have time.” I… Yeah. I make the time. My life is about that time. I think it is very important. If other people do not do it do I care? No. But I agree with them that they probably shouldn’t homeschool. Which I never suggested or thought or tried to imply that they should but I am often defensively told why other people could never do it.

Here’s this: I believe you. But guess what? I can.

That’s the hubris. It’s a flat statement of competence. Ok, you may not be competent at this–I am. I am very good at it, in fact. So far. I don’t have a strong agenda for most of their lives. I have extremely strong backed-up-by-research opinions on why I absolutely do not want them in a formal schooling environment until after age ten or so and then I will listen to them. They will have options and I will be supportive. I want them to set their own educational goals. It’s not my life to lead.

But it is my job to teach them how to learn and how to actively work really hard towards creating new things in the world. I want them to think of themselves as Makers. I want them to believe that they are strong and smart and competent because they can point at things they had to struggle to make, but look they did it.

I don’t want my children to waste their childhood staring straight ahead in a class room. I want them to be out running for miles with me talking about the plants we see–which ones are edible and which ones are not. We pick up garbage in our neighborhood (I need to do this more often because I write about it and then feel guilty that I haven’t done it all that recently). My children are learning what the rest of their lives will look like. They are training to be an adult. When adults have time they have to fill it. My children are learning how to fill that time, fill that hole in life. How do you spend your days?

My children are basically never bored. If they are bored I say, “Excellent! Time to get dressed and go into the back yard!” We don’t stay bored long. There is always a long list of things to do. Keeping a home is work. Having a pretty yard is work. Getting to look at lovely flowers is work. Growing food is work. They participate and help and grow more competent constantly. They are learning fine motor coordination. We have so forking many tea parties it’s unbelievable. Sometimes like six a day. They move around the house. The children are almost entirely capable of making a real one by themselves.

By the time my eldest is six and the youngest is four I anticipate that they will be able to create nearly all of the food and set the table for a large group of people. They practice over and over. They handle more steps each time. They want to. Because if all the work is dumped on me they don’t get a tea party. I get tired. It tends to mean a third or fourth time making a mess in the kitchen in a day.

I need them to understand what it means to keep your workspace clear so that you can continue to work on it later. I need them to have an investment in that state of being. We all help clean up after all of us. We are a helpful family. I say that over and over. So they do it.

I feel like I spent my late teens and early twenties studying how to be a truly great governess. It was a specific course of study. At this point in time we are unschoolers. Not Radical Unschoolers. We have limits here. But I don’t introduce academic book work artificially. I do a lot of specifically educational speaking but it is as I narrate what I’m doing anyway. I’ve been doing exactly the same kind of speaking to my kids since the day they were born.

I have taught my kids how to drink from an open cup, how to use a toilet, how to get dressed. From the day they were born I have been talking to them about their surroundings and experiences all day every day.

A great many stay at home mothers have the experience that when their children are very young getting out of the house is often an unsurmountable task. They spend a lot of days just kind of stuck at home bound by nap schedules. I remodeled my house and did extensive gardening. I couldn’t really go anywhere and I was bored.

I have slowed down on the rate of home improvement in the last year. Instead we have been venturing out more and more into the homeschooling community. My kids will have friends. They will grow up running in a band of kids. They will have ups and downs and trials and tribulations. They won’t always have a good time. Good. That’s how life is supposed to work.

I really and truly understand the arguments against homeschooling. The one that has the most merit, in my opinion, is the notion that people like me are the ones with the passion to change the system. To that I say–maybe. But in the meantime my kids would suffer through years of what is the worst education ever offered in the history of my country. Oh dear G-d no. I know those standards well. I’ve taught them. They have very little to do with learning except in a round-about back-hand way.

Opting out is a position of ridiculous privilege. Having someone available with my work background and education is extremely unusual. I get that. Not everyone knows that they have to raise themselves as they raise their kids and that it will take a lot of time and a lot of not-formally-structured consistent time. We have a very consistent life but we don’t have much formal structure. We do not live by the clock much.

One of those hard facts of life is that my desire to homeschool my kids intersects with the fact that I have a rather lot of psychological problems. I have PTSD and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I experience depression and suicidal thoughts with great frequency and I have been a self mutilator since I was a young child.

Raising my children really and truly is the only way I can see forward to really raise myself. I’m trying to do so in a way that is off-screen for them. Time will tell if I am successful or not.  It is hard having patience and giving myself room to be imperfect while still truly progressing forward at a rate of development that exceeds theirs. It’s… an experience. I don’t get the impression this is the standard approach to home schooling.

One of the best things about being an American is that you have the right to live a life of which other people disapprove. You’re just allowed. It’s in our Constitution. We have the right to pursue happiness. No one promised you’d get it–but you are allowed to pursue it. You are allowed to structure your life around pursuing happiness.

The way I see forward to maximize my lifetime happiness is to take this opportunity to appreciate the time I am privileged to have. Not everyone has this much time during the day. Most of the people who have the time during the day have worries that simply do not trouble my mind. That is a burden I do not share so I don’t get to judge how hard it is to carry. I’m a fucking lucky bitch.

I get to spend the next fifteen years playing and building and learning. Then I get to decide what I want to do when I grow up. This is part of why I do not think mothering is a career. Mothering is about learning how to see the world as an experience that must be past on. I know it is work but it is the work of life. It is the work of becoming a whole, individuated person.

I say this is the journey of mothering because it my journey as a mother. I do not know how it might be similar or different for fathers. I feel like I have had a profound life changing experience where I understand exactly how and why I am a product of the abuse I endured and I have had to consciously teach myself new behaviors at every stage of their development in order to appropriately parent them.

They keep changing the damn target on me. I get a handle on one kind of difficulty and then it changes and isn’t difficult any more. I see more and more of my control issues. I see more of my frustration and helplessness. I see more of my inability to control anything or anyone.

I’m sure there are other life experiences that teach similar types of humility but I don’t have experience with them and I’ve never even heard them spoken about in real life. When you are responsible for the 24/7 needs of a child for year after year after year it’s an endurance test. We were meant to raise children in communities. We were meant to have a grandparent living in the house who could walk the baby while mom rested some nights.

Right now I feel like mothering is the journey towards understanding your place in the scheme of things. Ok. In history I am daughter of _____ wife of Noah. Mother of Shanna and Calli. Sister of. Cousin of. I actually have a large family when you look at it all written down on paper.

And I can’t give them that community. It does not exist to them as a resource because of something that happened long before they were born and is not about them. That feels like an unfair burden. The result has been that I have cared for them mostly alone for years.

I get more help by the year. I trust more. I know that my children require a family to go to who would love and accept them no matter what so they visit their Godmamas. It’s kind of like a shared custody agreement. For the rest of their lives they will have had these years of being cared for by gentle, loving women. Both of whom have conflicting feelings about never having children of their own but it is highly unlikely they will. Life choices are complicated. And they love my daughters. They have extensively remodeled their guest room to be a kid room. It’s a really beautiful set up. They live in the mountains and they go for long hikes and learn about the flora and fauna of my childhood. They are only a few miles away from where I lived for most of my childhood, in the house where they all still live. I sometimes drive almost right past it. I do drive by other houses we used to live in. There are a bunch.

On the direction without the kids I drive a route past a former home and I sit and think really hard about how my life looked when I lived there. How old was I? Where did I go to school? How was my mother currently behaving?

I catalogue these things endlessly. It helps that we moved a lot so there are a lot of places to pull over for a think.

I have to think about what I was taught and unlearn it. I have to consciously go figure out what the correct response should have been. I have to say it to myself.

I have to. No one else is ever going to. No one else gives a shit. Not really. Not to the degree that a mother is supposed to care for her children.

Sometimes I think of things done right and I try to add them to my toolbox. My mother was not a complete fail. No one is.

This conscious choice of deciding who and what you want to be is the real work of motherhood. It is becoming the person you actually want to look at in the mirror. Does every woman have to become a mother in order to go through such change? Oh of course not. Don’t be silly. But motherhood is a slap in the face that can’t be ignored. There are mothers who choose to ignore this process. They neglect their kids. I don’t think they will be able to read four thousand words to get pissed off by me insulting them.

I’m not saying that there is anything terrible about daycare. There isn’t. But it isn’t what I want for my kids. I don’t want them to be peer centric. That is a specific lifestyle choice I don’t want to make. I don’t think it is wrong or bad, but I have a lot of privilege to decide and I don’t want to do that. I have never wanted to be separated from my young children.

I will be the one packing the suitcase when they are seventeen years and eleven months though. Not really. But I will start charging rent. And board. I’m serious. I am trying to train adults. If you are not able to be an adult then I have failed and we need to get moving on fixing this fast.

I can’t promise to always be available. I won’t promise to always take care of my kids. I have seen that go extremely badly. My entire life experience makes me absolutely gut level terrified of creating dependent adults. But I treat my babies and young children like they are totally dependent. The shift starts happening around puberty. Then they get to start deciding the course of their life. Until then it is my job to keep them safe and protect them. No one else will care as much as me. No one else will want it with the fierce intensity that I want it. My children will not be victimized as children.

You’d never know I was so paranoid if you met me in person. My children walk up to every single person they walk by and say, “Want to play?” or “Hi, my name is (name of the day). What’s yours?”

They are not sheltered. They are escorted. They talk to obviously on drugs people because those folks just live in our neighborhood and have to walk to get to the bus. I don’t mind. When Shanna snuck out every house on her route ratted on her. It was great. They made sure to tell me that she stayed on the side walk like she was supposed to. It was hilarious how they didn’t want me to get mad at her.

Kids are supposed to try to test the limits of their parents. That is the whole nature of their life experience. And parents are supposed to grow and change over and over and over and over as they define who and what they really are.

This is the work of every truly-lived-life. I obviously have strong specific philosophical roots. Only the examined life is worth living. Only that isn’t even it.

I need to have a safe place to grow up. I’ve never had it before. I understand that other people had it while they were children but I didn’t. I’m doing my work here, but give me a break. Yeah it takes a while. It’s hard. It hurts. Yes, it is a river of self-pity. Someone has to have pity for me. Even if it is only me.

I need to have the whole experience of a life that happens without terror and horror and shame and blame and guilt. I need it. I know it is selfish of me to keep my kids home so I can see theirs. I’m not trying to co-opt their life. I’m not forcing them to be like me. I’m educating them. In actually traditional ways instead of in the manner of the current fad in public education. I only feel a little guilt. I only feel that guilt because this is such a wonderful experience–of course I should be denying it to myself because I don’t deserve it. I should be trying to force them to be just like their age and location cohort. Gosh. Aren’t I terrible and selfish.

No life is without bumps or course corrections. No one is born a finished product. I knew before I got a fake high school diploma (in my opinion getting a high school diploma after three semesters of attendance is a joke) that I wanted my children to have a life that was more consistent with the lives I read about in books. Those people seemed to turn out better.

Maybe they are all right. Maybe the answer is that women shouldn’t be allowed to read. Before you know it they get ideas and they start thinking and then we get uppity women who don’t do what they are told.

The whole world might explode.

I’m really tired.

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I’m in a very bad mood. And a lot of people are coming over today. People from the home schooling group. People I am getting to know, not because I am hunting for friends, but because I am trying like fuck to have my kids grow up in a community of people. I can’t be a problem person or people won’t come over.

It doesn’t fucking matter how I feel or what is going on in my head. No one here is to blame and I may not vent my spleen at little kids. Or the parents of little kids. I have to smile. I have to be polite. I have to look relaxed. If you checked my pulse you would get a different story.

It depends on how much pressure I feel to behave around a specific group of people. Sometimes I consciously decide I don’t give a fuck if these people like me I am under stress and I don’t have the extra spoons to hide it.

I can’t do that today. I am in a very bad mood. I think that after the people go home and Noah gets home from work I am going to spend a lot of time crying. This is going to be pretty bad.

I did EMDR on Tuesday (err, obviously with a trained professional). I still can’t figure out what that means or how that works. But I am having a lot of turmoil. I am very edgy and angry. I feel like I always misunderstand trauma. I always get upset by the wrong thing.

I don’t feel all that traumatized by the dog bite. I have gone on to have cautiously good relationships with other pit bulls. I’m not much of a dog person but that’s ok. The settlement for that injury made my entire adulthood possible. I just… yeah. I don’t actually feel traumatized by the dog bite. I feel pragmatically grateful for the lesson in the school of hard knocks.

I feel extremely traumatized by the fact that my mother set a mirror in front of me and told me to look at how disgusting I was. I had to stare at myself so I would learn a lesson. I would never put my face in another dogs face. Actually, I have. More than once. Even with pit bulls. Guess it didn’t work.

But I still think I am disgusting.

I am very careful what I say to my children. I have to be. The inside voices I hear are so fucking mean. I want to be so nasty all the time. That is what I hear. That is what I am already arguing with in my head.

I have to be good today. I have to be good today. I have to be good today. I have to be good today. I have to be good today. I’m not even hitting cut’n’paste. I have to be good today. If you want to learn something you have to use repetition. I have to be good today. I have to be good today. I have to be good today.

My problems are my problem. I have to be good today. I should probably stop writing and start working. I can’t let the tears start until tonight. I should probably have some caffeine. That will make the suppression easier. And it will make me feel more frantic about having the house ready for people to come over in less than seven hours.

I didn’t do anything yesterday after swimming. I sat on the couch. I let the kids have the iPad and I napped. They like sitting on me while they watch so I feel pretty confident that I’ll notice if they take off.

So the house isn’t as clean as usual. I haven’t gotten to cleaning at all this week. That’s part of the exhaustion.

My body is telling me to slow down. My body doesn’t understand that I don’t really care that it is tired. I want this in my life too much. I am not going to be the flakey asshole. I will motherfucking perform. Does it matter? No. Only if I start pulling away now just a little (flaking on hosting the cookie exchange would be pretty nasty–it’s not like I’m sick) then I will feel ashamed and not come back. This isn’t a big deal but it is my task of the day. I do need to do it. That is what being functional means.

I have to be good today. I will be good today. That’s probably better. I will be good today. I will be friendly and polite. I will seem upbeat and cheerful. I can say that my twitching is because of caffeine. They don’t need to know who is screaming at me in my head.

I’m starting to realize that a number of them are in the same boat. It kind of sucks but it is comforting. Maybe I will get friends after all. But they will be real friends online and I will be a good girl in public.

I will be. I need my kids to have a community. I can’t get us kicked out. I can’t pull away because I’m having feelings. That’s not fair. It’s just not.

My kids deserve better than that.

Put your big girl panties on. Have some tea. A lot of tea. I hear they built the British Empire on the shit. It’s got to have some merit.

The social mask

7 Replies

In the past three weeks I have had three people comment on the difference between what I write and what they see when we are together. That makes it something worth writing about.

Of course there is a difference in how I act in public and the crazy shit I write about. If I acted in public the way I write about on my journal I would be in a lot of danger. If I was unable to mask my craziness it would be extremely unsafe for me to go out in public. I would risk being 5150’ed again. I never want to go to a hospital again. I can’t lose it where anyone can see.

If you look at the whiteboard in my room there is a lot written down but if you notice very little of it is outside my house and even less than that is any kind of social activity. I generally keep my “socializing” to under twenty hours in a week and most weeks I’m under eight hours.

That is how much “playing the game” I can do right now.

On the occasional week when I try to push it and do more because that week just happens to be busy I am usually sorry. I will have to spend a lot of time in the bathroom crying for all the hours over my “maximum” I am actually out. It is embarrassing and humiliating and I feel ashamed of myself the whole time.

Being around people involves a lot of active and conscious thinking about “what I am allowed to say”. The consequences for getting it wrong include being asked to leave, being asked to never come back, or if I genuinely lose it and start freaking out I may lose my kids or get arrested.

I’m not exaggerating and I’m not wrong.

I’m aware of how “hysterical” women have been treated throughout history. I have done a lot of specific research. In olden times I may have had to walk around with my tongue in a heavy vice for days or had to wear a collar with spikes on the inside while tied to a post in public so other people could remind me how bad I was.

The consequences in the modern area are downright soft and fuzzy in comparison–I get that. Nevertheless I don’t want them.

I don’t want them. I don’t want them. I don’t want them.

I’m awake in the middle of the night because my stomach is hurting because I didn’t smoke before bed. By 2:30 my stomach hurts and I can’t sleep through it. Then I start having racing thoughts because that is just what I do when I am in pain. Then I risk being a mess tomorrow. Lots of breakthrough crying.

My kids know I cry. I can’t hide it from them. I try my best to present it as, “Everyone is different. I cry a lot–most people don’t. That’s ok. People vary.” They are still young enough that they don’t really ask questions about why.

Noah deals with/occasionally sees me crying as I’m going about my day. I wander around working and crying at the same time. That’s just life for me.

Yes, I believe this is something that I have to carefully keep people from seeing. This is probably, by hour, the biggest part of my life and I have to make sure no one else sees it happening. Or I will get in trouble for being bad again.

The fact that I wander through life feeling very sad and crying for many hours of most days is something I have to carefully hide and prevent people from seeing or I get in trouble. Over and over and over.

It’s not hyperbole. I can tell stories all day and all night long.

I’m at a very low ebb on my ability to “play the game” with other people because I require so much of myself for my interactions with my kids.

My kids know I cry. They know that I have wonky chemicals in my brain that make me prone to have my eyes just start watering and it’s not a big deal and they know that sometimes I think about things that happened long ago and it was bad and I’m really glad that my life is different now and I’m so glad that I know my kids. They know that they are nicer to me than anyone has ever been and that I am grateful.

Well, so far Shanna parrots these things back. I say “them” but I am still working on brainwashing Calli but Shanna is pretty ingrained at this point.

I feel really stupid sometimes but when I am saying in a calm and clear voice, “It’s ok to be mad at me. I do things you don’t like. You are totally allowed to have those feelings but it is not ok to call me names and it is not ok to scream at me. Try again.” I still have tears running down my face. I can keep control of my voice at this point–it is great effort but I can prevent myself from descending into the ragged sobbing sort of breathing that makes talking hard. I sound “like a teacher should” but my eyes are watering.

I feel weird knowing that my children are going to grow up thinking that your mom crying all the time is normal and something to ignore. I feel very ashamed of myself. I feel like I am proving those people right who told me that I should not be a mother because someone like me isn’t capable of being a good mother.

I’m not selfless enough? I don’t have enough self control? For the past couple of years of “bad cycle” which probably actually started as postpartum depression after Calli was born combined with Shanna hitting the age I was when my abuse started so I started having daily intrusive flashbacks.

That was not long after Traci–my therapist of seven years–OD’ed on heroin and I ended up finding Sharon who totally sucked and tried to talk me into believing that I had Disassociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personalities) because of how I segment my behavior when I am around people.

I don’t think I really took the placenta pills as long with Calli. I stopped taking fish oil. I haven’t started again even though I know it is a mood stabilizer. I have other supplements my therapist wants me to start and when I think of the act of swallowing pills I start to gag and my stomach aches just thinking about it.

By the end of the time I was taking all the god damn supplements my midwife wanted me on (15 fucking pills a day) I was frequently spontaneously vomiting them up.

My body knows that when I take a lot of pills it is because I want to die. That is what my body thinks is happening because I was dumb enough to treat my body disrespectfully enough that it doesn’t trust my intentions anymore. Smart body.

I really am not so good at taking pills. And the idea that I should take a handful or so every day for the rest of my life is something that I don’t think I can get my gag reflex to move past.

Even though everyone keeps telling me that if I only swallow this pill my life will be magically better. It hasn’t worked any other fucking time I’ve tried some fucking magic pill. I’m still me. I’m still completely broken. I still don’t have a family or very much consistent support–I am building it. I’m trying. But it is dependent on having people in my life who actually show up to do it. I don’t have many people volunteering for that role and of the people volunteering I have to evaluate for them if they really have enough spoons to be dependable *for me* because I am a god damn special snowflake with standards through the roof.

If I know I will have an out of proportion negative reaction to someone acting how they typically act I need to be very careful how much time I spend around them. It is not their fucking problem I’m crazy and that I have had “bad life experiences” that cause me to want to yell at them. If I can’t be tactful (otherwise known as keep my fucking mouth shut or on trivial topics) then I can’t be around people. I silently back away from most relationships because I don’t think I have the right to hurt people by being mad at them for being them.

I don’t know how to reconcile the fact that it isn’t that I actually think they are wrong it’s that it is very hard for me to keep straight in my head what kind of commentary is appropriate in which settings. I’ve been introduced to a much larger number of social situations than most people. I have moved somewhere between 60 and 70 times in my life. Each of those times involved meeting somewhere between five and hundreds of new people all in a big rush. I have lived at every socio-economic level from the projects to multi-million dollar homes and I went to school with Steve Wozniac’s kid. His son was best friends with the brother of the girl I was best friends with. Many of my friends had server space hosted by Woz because that’s just how things worked. That’s where I lived.

I could pull out my sock puppet prime minister (it’s a long story–maybe I will tell it some day) and name drop all the long list of two degrees of separation I have with “important” people.

So uhm yeah. I walk through life feeling like I am the lowest status person in every single room I walk into. I assume that if I say the wrong thing and offend the wrong person (and I have no god damn idea who the “important” people are–I constantly fuck that up) I will be told to leave and all of a sudden there will be a tidal wave of nasty gossip about me behind my back.

How many illustrative stories do I need to have? I could start with less than two years ago and move backwards over thirty years and have many dozens.

Being the scapegoat is hard. I have a lot of behavior patterns that get me into trouble. I don’t understand exactly how they work. I don’t understand why I am so god damn offensive to people but I am.

I tend to go through life believing that people who are still here are the ones around whom I have been most successful at wearing the right mask. I look for signs that I am breaking their social contract and I try very hard to apologize for fucking up before they have to call me on it because I don’t want to be rejected just because I said or did something that was inappropriate for someone in that kind of relationship.

I hyperventilate over this and hyper-analyze every thing I say or do after the fact and try to look for reasons I might have crossed a line and pro-actively send an apology. I really can’t handle losing many more friends. It devastates me so much.

Oh for the love of toast of course I hide “what I am really like”. I am unpleasant and needy. No one likes people like that. I really can’t handle having more people decide they don’t like me en masse. So I need to be god damn careful about everything I say and do.

After smoking for half an hour I think that the stomach pain has changed enough that I can try eating and see if that will help.

I have been trying to track my marijuana usage more. Why am I using it. When. What, specifically, is it doing for me that I need? Mostly it is the end of the year and I am freaking out about how much I spent (I used edibles basically exclusively for about two months while I was training for the marathon to clear some of the lung funk–yes smoking is disgusting and I would like to stop–and those two months cost as much as the whole rest of the year combined and gosh it sounds like way too much money for any medication and… accompanying shame cycle.) thus I am beating myself up about how much I need to stop using it.

If I’m going to damn myself it will at least be with accurate data.

I go through ~ 1/8 of pot/week. I wake up earlier than everyone in my family and I have some then. It calms my stomach pain enough for me to eat. On days when I don’t smoke before breakfast (often out of impulses of shame because I am a disgusting person for needing a “drug” I should just “willpower” my way through after all) I generally am unable to eat because the stomach pain is such that I have constant nausea and I have a ridiculously strong gag reflex. If I try to eat I have a lot of violent stomach pain because my stomach is not fucking interested in accepting food.

If I am in a restaurant this is when I have to get up and leave the table. I either go to the restroom or I go outside because I need to cry. I need to cry because it hurts and because I am ashamed of myself for crying in public just for something stupid that someone else would be able to hide. I know I am not exhibiting the proper social behavior and if I keep that shit up in public I will be fucking sorry.

At home that is when I say in a small voice, “Excuse me” and I go smoke enough to relax my nausea and deal with my gag reflex. I usually feel better after eating. But I am also still stoned after eating. So who the heck knows exactly where the better comes from. But on days when I don’t smoke I probably don’t consume a full meal worth of food in a day. I physically can’t. It hurts too much.

So a year ago when I went to the doctor I layed out all my issues and I was told she wouldn’t deal with my stomach until I dealt with psychiatry and psychiatry told me to take a pill I didn’t want to take, stop breastfeeding instantly (because this new magic pill is extremely toxic to me and the baby), and stop pot instantly or psychiatry would not work with me.

Uhm. No. Fuck you. I know what those side effects will do to my life. They will make it so I can no longer play the game when I have to because I will be debilitated by the side effects. I have watched this effect cascade with person after person in my life. No. No. No.

I will not work with a fucking doctor who spends five minutes talking to me and then wants to prescribe a medication that will destroy every coping method I have and tell me that I just have to “deal with it” while smirking at me. That is demeaning. You have studied what trauma does to the brain? Well so have I, motherfucker. You have not done a single fucking blood test. You have not done a brain scan. You have not taken a full medical history to find out how bad the side effects have been every time I have been forced onto a drug “for my own good” and how often that has lead to significant public blow ups and more trauma.

You don’t give a shit. It shows on the fucking smirk on your face. I don’t fit into your mold of a good person so you want to drug me into a stupor so that I stop doing what I am doing and blindly do what you say. No. You don’t know what I have to react to or why.

Fuck you. You want me dead. I can’t come to any other conclusion and continue to survive.

It took twenty-five minutes (I’m uhm babbling paragraphs in between random distractions else-net Oooh shiny! That’s a lot of why it sounds so incoherent and random-ha.) but I finished a piece of string cheese. Minimal gagging but I haven’t been able to eat any nuts yet. And my graham cracker is untouched.

We will have new insurance cards soon. I promise that as soon as I can log into the new insurance system I will make an appointment. I promise me.

An awful lot of why I am smoking the pot is to deal with my massive stomach pain. I feel very scared because if I reveal that there is an anxiety portion to the pain I risk not being treated again but if I don’t tell the doctor that I may not get appropriate treatment.

I feel like I am in a bind and there is no way for me to get out of it. I have to just throw a dart at a dart board and pray that I get a doctor who will want to help me without requiring that I instantly trust them enough to send my entire life headlong. No one deserves that kind of trust from me. Give me a fucking break.

I know that my intense fear of having to deal with a doctor for this is making the pain escalate unbearably. I understand that link. I understand that for most of the year the pain has stayed at a consistent 1-3 with spikes up to 5 or so when I try to eat without smoking but since I have been actively been thinking about the fact that I have to deal with this soon the pain has been spiking to 8 and 9 and causing me to nearly vomit spontaneously in public–which is kind of embarrassing. And shame producing. Knowing that my body may betray me at any moment and make me a public spectacle makes me feel constantly ashamed of existing. I should just fucking die so that I don’t have to go around inconveniencing people all the time.

When I vomited on the floor of the hospital when I was twelve, when I was waiting in the lobby to get a cast on my broken arm, my mom grabbed me, hit me and hissed: “You just did that to get attention.”

Over and over I sobbed “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.“

The nurse tried to tell me it would be ok but I couldn’t stop crying.

When I go out in public I generally did not smoke because I don’t do so before driving. Which means I have to get through breakfast without smoking if I want to go to the park. I generally don’t eat much or sleep properly the night before with anxiety about the spike in stomach pain and the increased difficulty in being patient with the kids.

That’s a lot of why I limit excursions out of the house. Those days are ridiculously hard on my body. When people come to me I evaluate how offended they will be if I am stoned and I try to uhm match expected tolerance because generally what I think other people will be ok with is lower than what I actually usually use.

This is the big problem with using any medication so sporadically. The effects are needed when dosage isn’t present. I have many days where I wake up and I let the negative thoughts get too entrenched before I start smoking (it is an unpleasant process and I don’t enjoy it and I don’t like being “the kind of person who smokes pot” and and and) so often I have to kind of psyche myself up first and bribe myself with the idea of being in a more pleasant mood.

The amount of conscious dealing with shame I do every day is really hard. I have to consciously deal with it or I will not eat and not sleep and get weak to the point where I am not physically able to complete my chores without slowly dragging chairs all over the house so that I can move from chair to chair to finish my cleaning.

Because I am that compulsive and crazy. I have to “appear” functional. I “have to” maintain certain appearances or I risk terrible consequences. I don’t know exactly what they will be or from whom. Sure as the sun will rise I will have someone else in my life whom I trust a great deal turn around and tell me that I am abusive and terrible and they are disgusted by me. It is going to happen again and again because that is something that people just feel free to say to me.

That is part of what I mean when I say that I am the lowest status person in every room I walk into. I am a white trash whore and I can never undo that. In any room I walk in to someone may decide to go off on me. It happens when I happen to say something I shouldn’t say.

Usually that means I answer a question honestly. People ask a wide variety of questions in the casual chit chat process that if I answer honestly the person will respond with horror and disgust and move away from me exhibiting great hostility. I have to guess which lies to tell and when.

When my mask is slipping, like it was this weekend, I went to a friends baby shower. Want to know my connection to the group? I knew the host from working together (where deliberately obscured) and the party was at the house of someone she has known since middle school–they were both around our mutual place of employment. I went out with both of them like twice. I uhh begged to eat out my friend’s friend. She let me. Then never talked to me again.

Till I walked into her house this weekend and she didn’t remember me even slightly (or at least gave no sign of remembering me–she certainly didn’t know my name).

This uhm, happens to me pretty regularly. I’m very careful what questions I answer when I talk to people in general. I uhm was kind of stupid.

So the father of the host (he has known the mom-to-be since she was a kid, remember) was chatting me up and he told me that his wife wrote a book but she is afraid to publish it. I uhm wasn’t thinking so I said, “I actually wrote a book and self published. If you look at places like Amazon publishing or there is a wide variety of competing models you can be e-published for practically nothing and you can get books in print and deal with hawking them at book stores yourself for fairly little money. That is how publishing often works, actually.”

So then he asked me about my book. He had to prod me more than once. “Oh you wrote a book? I bet it’s a lovey dovey romance isn’t it? I bet it’s all cutesy schmoopsy and adorable right?” heh heh.

Cue my not amused face.

“No, actually it’s a memoir about the first eighteen years of my life.”

*snicker* “No eighteen year old has done anything worth writing about.”

By that point in the conversation my heart was racing and I was breathing fast and I could feel the flush rising. I had been kind of avoiding eye contact. Then I looked straight at him and said, “Well I I was moved more than fifty times, I was homeless, I stole to eat, I went to twenty-five schools in diverse combinations of socio-economic levels and race: everything from the projects to graduating high school in Los Gatos after only going to that school for my sophomore year and only three semesters of high school total. (said to someone whose kid went to one of the worst schools in the east side of San Jose [these two places are right next to each other and Los Gatos is where all the rich people live]) I was raped or sexually assaulted dozens of times over more than twenty years, including my father and my brother extensively abusing me, along with a bunch of random neighbors. I self-mutilated for decades as part of how I dealt with what was going on with me and every mental health professional I have worked with has been freaked out by the variety and range of trauma I have been through.

I had enough happen to me to justify a book.”

At this point picture him kind of mouth agape blinking kind of fast. “Oh uhm. Wow. Yes. You would have enough to write about.”

We didn’t really talk after that.

I let my mask slip. I did not tightly contain my answer enough. I wasn’t appropriate enough. Mostly because I didn’t give a shit. I will probably never see this man again. My connection to him is tenuous enough that I just don’t have to fucking care if he thinks I am awful for unloading on him like that. (You wouldn’t fucking believe how often people screamed at me for uttering even four sentences of the above paragraph in a challenging voice. I should not be speaking. Shut up. I don’t have the right to make people think about unpleasant things.)

The conclusion I draw from this is I shouldn’t exist. Or I should simper and play stupid and lie and answer questions in evasive ways and for the love of crisco stop writing and talking about this shit.

So I do my very best to force my lips to be literally closed for as much of the time I am with other people as I can. I end every social interaction with sores on the inside of my mouth from chewing it so hard to keep from saying anything that might be inappropriate.

Yes. It is enormous physical strain.

I can’t tell how these descriptive/prescriptive things work about labels. People tell me that I should eschew thinking of myself as bad and stop thinking about my behavior as bad. But I regularly get into trouble I don’t want to be in because I don’t have appropriate filters. Bullshit I’m not bad. I’m punished for being bad often enough that it seems imprudent for me to stop trying to filter.

I want to be a nice person. I really fucking do. I am tired of being told I am not wanted and being abandoned. I am tired of people kicking me really hard and feeling free to tell me that I am a disgusting piece of shit but they still love me and if I start jumping through x, y, and z hoops then they might be able to have a relationship with me or help me. But not until I jump through all those hoops without support. If I don’t do that first I won’t be able to prove that I deserve them bothering to waste time and energy on me.

I uhm can’t bend to whims like that. I have to live in my body 24/7 and deal with the consequences. I have a very tightly controlled life that I can manage because I limit it so severely.

But when I say, “I stay home” I don’t mean that I hide in bed crying all day. I mean that my kids and I play in the yards and garden and walk for miles around our neighborhood when I stay regularly medicated thus I can sleep and eat in a way that allows me to be physically able to.

Since the marathon I have been fucking around with almost not using pot to see how this works for me. It’s going really badly. I need to see a doctor.

The reason I don’t just “get a vaporizer” to try it is because when I spend money on something believing that it is unlikely to solve my problem and it is money I don’t want to spend… it’s kind of doomed before I start. I can’t be on marijuana forever. I do have to figure out how to live life without it in order to do the things I want to do.

But what does that even mean? Part of it is that my stomach god damn hurts and I have to heavily medicate in order to deal with the pain and nausea in order to eat and sleep like a “normal” person and have any appearance of functionality.

Being in pain actively triggers my PTSD symptoms and causes flashbacks because I have such a long history of being in pain and that being something I am not allowed to talk about or deal with because “You aren’t really in pain–you are just a whiny hypochondriac.”

My mother screamed at me and threatened me that “my arm had better fucking be broken or she would break it herself” because I asked her to leave work early and come home (I was 12 and alone all day every day because I was on year round school and had no friends or family) to take me to the hospital. It was broken.

Something is wrong in my body. Something that I can’t fix. Something that I am self medicating (said with substantial scorn and derision) to deal with because doctors have actively told me they will not provide service until I jump through hoops I can’t jump through.

I can’t abruptly switch psych meds right now because I have no reliable help with my children. When I go through med rounds the side effects make me extremely unpredictable and historically very violent and my self-harming goes through the roof and my ability to function completely disintegrates and I spend hours every day literally hiding either in closets or under beds because I want to kill myself so much.

I literally cannot do that to my kids. There are reasons I’m not on psych meds. If someone bothered to ask me what those reasons were I would be happy to explain and I am willing to bet a compassionate doctor would hear my history and agree that it probably isn’t the best idea to try to force me to take a psych med as step one of any and all physical care.

That is not a way to establish trust because my behavior will abruptly be destroyed and out of control and erratic and I will completely associate it with my relationship with that doctor and have to stop association because I can’t continue to listen to the advice of someone who is going to force me to go through that given that I don’t have the fucking resources to deal with dropping the ball on the ways I am currently functional.

It feels humiliating. But that is the reality of my life right now. I stay home so that I can always handle talking to my kids in the tone of voice I want them to talk to me. I have to keep my physical stress levels down enough to not freak out when we are in an environment where I have less control.

Watch me at parties. If I stay seated the whole time I have a much better chance of being able to have conversations because being there makes me physically weak because of the strain on my body of having to be hyperaware to such a level. If it is a stand-and-mingle sort of party I am going to spend a lot of time walking in and out of the room because I have to go find somewhere to sit down and sob hysterically because standing in that room and trying to talk to people hurts my body so much.

No, this isn’t something that is obvious to people around me. If I was visibly contorting with pain people wouldn’t talk to me. If I said anything other than “Oh I’m fine” “Great!” when people ask me “How are you?” then they won’t ask me any more. And they won’t talk to me about anything else either. They try to keep a wide distance between them and me because I have revealed that I have needs and they are very fucking sure that isn’t their problem and they don’t want to get involved. That’s a direct quote. I get told that a lot. “I’m sorry. You have a lot of needs and I don’t want to get involved.”

Uhm, I didn’t ask you to do anything. I don’t fucking ask people to meet my needs. I can ask for help with wants–I have to be very ok with hearing “no” or with the fact that there is a better than 50/50 chance that I will be stood up because that is just my historical percentage. Because if I ask someone for help with a need all hell breaks loose when they let me down. My relationships don’t last through me asking things of people other than the pleasure of their company on sporadic occasions. I am doing my very best to ensure that I understand my place and stop fucking up this boundary.

Having this sort of level of need as a background thead in my life why won’t anyone help me means that I don’t understand how hard it is for people to meet my needs. I am not good at understanding the limits of how I should ask for things. When I ask for actual needs to be met I have to understand that the person may just not show up or may not feel like it any more once the time comes or have some emergency in their life that is more important than me so I have to suddenly scramble for how to figure things out at the last second without the normal planning time I give myself. It feels very unfair at the time I’ll tell you.

I go through life knowing that I am “not rational” and I am “over-sensitive” thus pretty much no one needs to give a shit what I think or feel because I’m a piece of shit.

No, I do not act in public like I have the thoughts I have. It would be incredibly dangerous. It’s not hyperbole; it is simply true.

have to unload brain.

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Sleep was very out of whack. I’m out of it. I have little time for writing. I used up most of my time responding to emails. I go through phases of being able to respond quickly and periods where I cry thinking about responding and can’t do it. Today is functional though exhausted.

I babysat for a friend last night. I feel greatly relieved that there is less screaming as time goes by. We are adjusting to one another. It helps that he does genuinely like me–it’s getting easier to bear being away from his mother. It is so hard to be away from your mother. I think it helps our relationship that I get that. I understand him getting upset and I don’t feel mad at him for it. I feel bad that I can’t make it all better.

He does let me hug him and kiss his head and play with him. It’s not that he dislikes me. It’s hard to not take screaming like that personally–but it’s important. He’s not trying to hurt me. He’s not trying to frustrate me. He has no way of coping with these humongous feelings inside his body. I get it. So we can sit together and he can cry and tell me he is sad. I tell him I understand. He has the best mommy in the whole world and she isn’t here right now–that is very sad. Luckily sand storms of blocks chased the tears away last night.

I think last night was the most comforting he has ever accepted from me. That felt really good.

His baby sister is a doll. She is super sweet and cuddly. She’s six months old and just getting mobile and frisky. I don’t have to live with her so her general lack of sleeping isn’t an issue for me. We had a late night dance party together. It was fun.

Being able to care for people and comfort them has value. It is worth doing. I wish I was able to see how that fits into my concept of self. If these are valuable skills then they should convey status of some kind. That is how valuable things work.

I am very good at sitting with people who are hurting and ignoring my own shit. I can just empathize with what they are feeling. I have felt bad a lot. It’s easy for me to project that other people have similar kinds of bad feelings and I try hard to do the things I wish people did for me.

I think I wrote half of a childrens book in my head while I was playing with the kids last night. I should write it down on paper today.

I was asked if I look at these sweet innocent little boys I know and see potential rapists.

Uhm, yes. Don’t you? You don’t? Really? You think your little boy would never? Oh. well then. I should probably stop talking and walk away fast.

I have known a lot of rapists. I have had a lot of explicit conversations with them about where/why/how and as a result I see pretty much every boy and man as a potential rapist. The men I know who have never raped are generally a kind of paranoid I have trouble with (if they are out in the sex communities–I assume a large number of men have two or fewer partners so they have a very different lifetime experience of rape) so I get why men rape. I do.

Because of my life experiences I don’t call something rape unless I have actively said no. In cases where things were squidgy and I didn’t consent but I didn’t say no I don’t use the word rape. I just don’t. That’s my personal line.

That’s uhm, not the life experiences of a lot of women. Because they are trained to not say no to things in general they just don’t deal with the consent issues around sex and they feel raped.

I believe that if you did not actively consent to sex and you don’t want the sex to happen then you are allowed to call it rape. I don’t do that in my life because, quite frankly, even with the much harsher line my life is still hard to believe.

When I was teaching the concept of rape came up a couple of times. An awful lot of the ways I personally talk to teenagers about rape and consent are deliberately manipulative. When I have a group and I am”lecturing” the boys I am really talking to the girls; when I am “lecturing” the girls I am really talking to the boys. This is because, in my experience, people blow off a lot of what they are told to do but they are kind of nosy about what the other side is told to do. They will think about, “Huh- why was I given different advice?” Then I get follow up questions.

It varies by age and my level of closeness so these conversations are kind of weird to generalize about.

I think the way to greatly lessen the number of rapes is to get men/women/boys/girls more towards the ideas that bodies are wonderful fabulous private things you should only share by choice. And you should own that choice loudly. You should say YES! to sex you want. None of this hard-to-get shit. I mean, you don’t have to jump in bed right away or anything. But the more clear you are about what you want the more likely you are to get it. If you aren’t both on the same page… well…

This is where the hard part comes in. If the girls wants a relationship and the boy just wants sex then we run into the Embargo and bitterness and entitlement and rage and just not-noticing those subtle body signals.

I want girls to be more explicit with their no’s and with their yes’s. I want boys to think about the fact that sex often has very different consequences for girls and if you are not a fucking asshole you will behave respectfully.

I encourage girls sharing information about boys being safe or not. I do it blatantly. “If you are raped no one will know but you. If you have problems with a boy who rapes you he is very likely to go on to rape more girls. Tell. Tell someone safe first. Probably tell the police. If you can’t handle prosecuting I won’t hate you and I’ll still support you. That’s a rough road. But you need to talk about it. There need to be consequences for those kinds of actions.

I want boys to have this thing in the back of their head, “Ah. If I act inappropriately I will no longer get the sex I want. Got it.”

I also tell teenagers that mutual masturbation is pretty much all of the fun of intercourse for the first few years with much lower chance of pregnancy or STIs.

I don’t say that to little kids.

What I say to little kids is, “If you don’t like how I am touching you, please tell me. I want to make you feel comfortable.” I give them a lot of feedback about how they touch me. I want that kind of conversation to be casual, comfortable, and instinctive. “Oh gosh. When you touch me like that it hurts. Please stop.”

Most of the violent rapists I know were terribly abused. That’s a lot of why they hunt for me. I see the hurt little boy still. So yes, when I look at sweet little boys–I see what they could become.

I feel very blessed that I am allowed to have relationships with little boys. Whether I am lying to myself or not I feel better about the world knowing there are little boys running around who have started their life journey around body autonomy hearing my message of consent. I’m a good story teller.

My favorite part of teaching (in retrospect) is how many students have come and found me to tell me about their intense memories of me and they credit me with helping them learn how to make decisions.

I did actually influence their lives.

One of the things I like about not having a set and solid place in any specific community is that I have very few expectations to live up to. I’m allowed to reinvent myself every time I show up. If there are many years in between visits then I get to select which stories to tell.

Unless you decide to wade through my blog it is very hard to tell how crazy I am. I mean, there are signs. But not really. People tend to be shocked when they start reading.

I write because otherwise I don’t exist as a whole person. I’m a set of semi-fake semi-forced behaviors that I have somehow weirdly associated with groups of people in specific communities.

When I was a child the normal I learned was that my mom had to go have sex with my father in order to get money for food. Even though the court system said he owed us that money no matter what. “It may be illegal but no one will prosecute.” Yes, I know.

I have to try to pretend I understand other peoples normal. I have to try to blend in. But when you move through communities people are so wildly different. And they all get upset if you are too weird and aggressive. At this point I’m fairly aggressive.

So I’m trying to be better about keeping up with email so that I can have one on one relationships with people since on an individual basis people have very little invested in maintaining that ‘other’ group identity.

Two people sitting in a room together form a ‘we’. There is the desire to probe for similarities and minimize differences. I know how to fish. I know how to let someone else do a lot of the tone setting. I don’t always do it, but I know how.

Yesterday I was talking to a mom from the homeschooling group. She was relaying that a young girl (I was confused about what the relationship was) went on a sleep over and in the morning woke up before everyone else and went to get donuts with the dad. My mom friend felt bothered by this. She won’t let her daughters be alone with men.

I think “floored” is the best word for how I felt. I… I can’t imagine living in a world where I would never allow my daughter to be alone with men.

Don’t I seem like that type though? I can’t. Often men have been the reason I limped along and did better for a while. Like Joey? My brother Tommy’s friend who brought me to the Seventh Day Adventist church for a while. He unquestionably made my life better. I was alone with him a lot. Uhm we prayed a lot. And read the Bible. And he was so very nice-without-touching. Awesome person. I hope his life is going well.

I don’t want to deny my daughters relationships with men. I want them to not look like prey. Different.

I think that boys, girls, men and women are all animals. We are part of the animal kingdom and all. Unless we are specifically domesticated and socialized then we revert to self-serving behavior. Yes, I think pretty much any boy or man is capable of rape.

And then I start to get around in my head to DAs questions. And it’s 10 and I have stuff to do. Tomorrow I will answer his questions.

I’ve been having trouble getting past “Other than you no woman has ever asked for my consent.” I think it is not obvious in my writing that I think women are equally as capable of being predators but their hunting is different and I have never been their prey. It is hard for me to write about. But I definitely have some things to say.

And buddy–I have fucked some 3’s. You aren’t a 3. Knock off the self-denigration. It isn’t helpful.

Brain dump + Bonus question.

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Occasionally someone will say something to me along the lines of them being worried about Noah being supportive enough.

I just yelled at Noah for almost two hours straight about how mad I am at all men and how angry I am about the current ways of dealing with rape in larger society and I said a lot of thinly veiled mildly implicating things that were quite harsh about all men. One time he slapped the arms of his chair and had a sharp intake of breath and he stood up and took two steps around in a circle then set his face in stern lines and settled in for more listening.

And over and over he patiently explained all the flawed results of my incoherent half-plans. He wasn’t dismissive but he was insistent. I’m just not looking at the whole picture. He’s right. He wasn’t even slightly demeaning. He was measured and careful in his tone. His facial expression was carefully monitored.

And when I cried in frustration and said I don’t know what to do he shook his head and sadly said he doesn’t either.

Noah has limited capacity to support me because he is a human being. I can consciously see how he is working as hard as he can to be supportive. It’s not his fault I have this hole in my life that is supposed to be filled by other people. I can’t do anything about that either.

Shanna told me yesterday that she wants to see the Eiffel Tower some day and she doesn’t care that I don’t like Paris I will have to go with her and she will make sure I have fun. I bet you she would be right.

I don’t run in Fremont again before the marathon. I am supposed to walk nine miles in the next five days. We leave for Disneyland Tuesday morning. Piece of cake. The marathon is pretty much exactly seven days away. Nearly to the minute.

I feel disembodied and empty. Drained.

One thing Noah promised to do for me (we’ll see) is set up a website and a mailing list. I’m going to start writing again soon. I have two very specific book ideas I’m playing with and I’m having trouble deciding which to write next.

My relationship with Tom will be a book by itself. It will be incredibly graphic and highly sexual.

The other book is one that Noah is encouraging me towards: Outrunning Suicide: A Harm Reduction Approach to Life. I already have the starts of the table of contents and multiple chapters partially written. I’ll be going through and examining all the ways I distract myself from killing myself. I think it is an interesting topic and so does Noah.

What do other people think?

don’t be mad

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So I found a ptsd sufferers support forum. Want to know what they recommend? That I get more obsessive about house cleaning. Yes!

I feel weird and bad about my depression. It feels quite shameful to be this depressed. I am one of the most fortunate people to ever live, how fucking dare I get depressed. When friends in the mental health field start openly worry I feel quite bad. I shouldn’t be worrying people. It’s not very kind. I’m fairly sure I will manage to avoid killing myself for another fifteen years at minimum.  Even though I’m depressed. It feels more polite to just shut up about how I am feeling. If I don’t think I am actually likely to do something suicidal I should shut up about feeling like I want to. It’s a “cry for help” and that’s lame. It’s not actually. I don’t expect any one to do anything. I don’t expect anything to change because I am talking about how I feel. I don’t think I do it because I want help. Well, I do.

When I explained to my friend K how I was feeling she said, “How about if I take the girls for Saturday. You have enough on your plate.” I don’t particularly feel like I want people freaking out and panicking over the idea that I might kill myself presently (really I’ve been suicidal for decades there is no sense in getting extra nervous about it now) but it feels nice that people think, “Gosh you feel stress. Here is a bit less stress.” It feels like a gift.

I feel less helpless today. I don’t feel like an animal caught in a steel trap today. I think my body is too exhausted to manufacture those chemicals. I’m pretty fucking tired. And when I was exhausted and past capacity yesterday I didn’t have to also dig deep and find a way to kindly and gently meet the needs of my children. I got to be a selfish bitch just kind of wandering through the world.

Holy shit it feels good. I’ve been doing more of it just lately. Consciously putting myself in the mindset where “I am just a person existing and I only have to care for myself.” It’s weird. Do you know what I do when I only have myself to care for? I clean the house. OF COURSE I WOULD.

It honestly felt good that I got to greet Noah and the girls in a house that was clean and ready for anything. I could react to any request without having to do a bunch of prerequisite steps. That is what drives me crazy. “No, we can’t bake because I have to do dishes and clean off the counters and go to the store first.” Those beginning steps are doozies. If you don’t have anywhere to work you can’t work. If you don’t have ingredients it’s a non-starter. I’m having a hard time with adjusting to what “prepared to work” really means.

Abrupt topic shift: I’ve been told that I should be mad at Noah. Which feels pretty funny given how much time people spend telling me I shouldn’t be an angry person. The thing is: getting angry with Noah serves none of my goals.

I am absolutely willing and able to see that Noah goes above and beyond for me. No one is perfect. Somehow I feel like we fit together so well because no one else understands our shortcomings and properly appreciates us. Noah told me he was over committed. Noah told me that he can’t keep up what we are doing. I have to believe him when he says that. Immediately. Instantly. With love and support. I can’t get mad at him for telling me in a small little boy voice that he can’t do everything he would dearly love to be able to do. When he takes his courage in his hands and tells me that he is going to fail me… he already feels bad. He doesn’t need more shit from me.

Noah works like a demon for me. For us. For our family. When he hits a wall that is because he is cruising along at 80 trying to be everything and do everything for me.

Noah has a full time job that requires more than 40 hours a week and between 5 and 10 hours in commute. Then he has this book he is writing (I’m mildly shocked and appalled by how much money that has earned so quickly) and he is an adjunct professor for CMU on the side. And he does a lot of solo kid care (around 20 hours a week). And he wakes up every day and makes breakfast. He does a fair number of dishes. When I am fussy and whiny and the house is a big mess he cleans up. He comes home from work and makes dinner several nights a week.

When Noah comes to me and tells me in a very sad, very small voice that he can’t keep up what he is doing… I can’t come down on him. I can’t get mad at him. He is working at an unsustainable pace. I know that. When he falters it is normal and natural–not shameful.

It’s still very disappointing. And it’s hard that I have these expectations in my head he can’t meet. It’s not really his fault that he is so busy working on my other expectations that he doesn’t have the time or energy to get through all of my expectations. I have a lot of them. I need to be responsible for most of them. He truly can’t bear any more weight.

I feel lucky. When I met Noah he was kind of a slacker. Not really, but he wasn’t exactly motivated. He worked because he liked what he was doing but he wasn’t goal oriented. In the almost eight years I have known him he has changed. It’s hard for me to reconcile the boy he was with the man he is. I need to not act like he is a boy anymore. He truly isn’t.

When my man runs as hard and as long as he can to take care of me it isn’t right for me to sneer and call him a boy who isn’t living up to expectations. Near as I can tell that won’t lead to a happy marriage. I would honestly really like to have a happy marriage.

But I still have these expectations. And sometimes I am disappointed. Right now I feel like I should think of some more creative solutions beyond “be mad at Noah” to solve this problem. I don’t feel like that would actually help.

I can be honest and say that I try to avoid getting mad at Noah. I will pay a very high cost to avoid being mad at Noah. It is far easier and more comfortable to be mad at me for wanting too much. That’s an old reason to despise myself. My mom spent two decades telling me that I want too much. I’m selfish. I’m self-absorbed. I’m too needy. No one will ever give a shit about me. I know. It’s a lot easier being mad at me than him. It’s comfortable and familiar.

I use Noah up. I wear him out. I wring him dry. I feel like it is my fault he has nothing left by my birthday. Maybe if I wasn’t so fucking needy the other 364 days he might have some “want to” left by my birthday. I doubt I am going to be less needy any year soon. Actually, I think I will. I am far less needy than I was two years ago. I’m going to need less support from Noah fairly soon, actually. Shanna already does for herself. Calli is trying.

Sometimes it feels like running is a lot easier than standing still. I ran 23 miles yesterday (I actually ran for a surprising amount of it) and that was easier to do than filling the hours until Noah and the kids came home. I didn’t know what to do with myself. So I sat down for a bit and I ate and I smoked and then I cleaned. I spent hours cleaning. I don’t feel like I am capable of sitting down much any more. No matter how tired I am. I have to keep moving. Keep doing. I’m not sure why I have ever thought of myself as a low energy person. That was part of my story “I have to have my kids early because I’m a low energy person and it will be much harder when I’m older.” On crack.

Yesterday morning when I was about to head out the door (I was quite decadent and lazy and I didn’t leave the house till 6:30 because I didn’t feel like running in the pitch black) both little girls woke up just as I was leaving. Calli hugged me and kissed me several times and said, “Bye mama. Mama happy.” That’s her way of saying, “Goodbye and have fun.” Shanna said, “Do you have any food with you? It’s going to be a very long run today and you can’t get through a run like that without food. Have you packed food yet?” Yes I packed food, thank you for checking on me. I really appreciate it. I started crying. I told her that I appreciate her thinking about the needs of my body. Sometimes I’m bad at that and I’m glad she cares.

Ironically, I gave my huge bag of trail mix to a homeless guy. I stopped and took the pot edibles out first because I’m not that nice. But he was there. And he had a dog. And he looked so much like Stephan that my heart broke. When I see homeless guys who look like him I feel my heart jump into my throat. (He just looked like a homeless guy in the making. I think he’s gotten a hair cut since then.)

As a result when I was ~4 miles from home I stopped at KFC. I think that I could have gotten home noticeably faster if I hadn’t stopped and bought a mashed potato bowl on the way. Mmmmm. There is something about walking and eating at the same time that I like. I always have. From when I was a little kid walking and eating at the same time feels like a decadent treat. It feels like proof that I am more highly evolved and AWESOME than other species. Squirrels can’t do what I can do with food while moving with the same kind of speed and agility. Maybe monkeys but I’m pretty sure they don’t.

For some reason just knowing how many processes are going on at once in my body excites me. I am breathing. My blood is flowing. I am walking quickly so many muscle groups are responding quickly. I am eating. I am coordinating my hands and my mouth. My stomach is working. My throat is working. AND WHILE I’M AT IT MOTHER FUCKER I WILL SING. I’m not sure why I like it so much but I do. It’s this weird feeling of satisfaction. I am one of the most complex organisms ever. THAT IS SO FUCKING COOL. Let’s feel a little gratitude we weren’t brought into this life as an amoeba, ok? This is better.

It’s hard to feel like a depressed loser when you are sauntering up your street telling every neighbor, “I haven’t finished mapping it yet but I’m quite certain I covered twenty two miles today!” I feel a lot of pride. It’s weird feeling how the pride lives in my chest with the shame. It’s like they are next door neighbors in a condo complex. They take turns who is leaning over the back fence shouting.

Yesterday I talked to one of the neighbors for a while. Little M who isn’t allowed to come over anymore was apparently throwing rocks and dirt at her house. She told me she was thinking about calling the police over the vandalism. She threatened M to her face. Apparently M broke down sobbing hysterically and begged to not be sent away. I had a long talk with her about how she needs to never threaten that kid again because she has a hard enough life and for an adult to keep picking on her is cruel and unacceptable. Every fucking five year old throws rocks and dirt. It’s not vandalism. It is being a kid. Give her a fucking break. The neighbor seemed very inclined to listen to me once I started talking about the abusive alcoholic father. I think she will be nicer to M. I’m not saying let the kid get away with shit–but you don’t need to call the cops.

When did we become a society that wants to call the police because a five year old throws dirt? I feel so sad. I feel like there is no way for people to grow up and try things and see what happens in the world.

The other day Shanna got her hands on the last rogue bag of cookies and brought it into her room. I yelled at her, of course, because crumbs in your room attract ants ohmyfreakinggoodness how many times do I have to say this? When I finished dealing with the cookies I came back into her room and sat next to her. I said, “I have been so busy yelling at you for making messes lately that I haven’t stopped to say that it is really cool how much you have grown. You are very good at taking care of yourself. You are very good at figuring out what you need and how to get it. Most of the time you make very good choices both for your body and for being polite to me. Thank you. I do see it. I appreciate you a lot. I think it is wonderful watching you grow up. You surprise me every day by learning new things and I’m so glad I get to watch you.” She told me, “Thank you for noticing. I’ll learn about the crumbs one of these days.” I laughed and hugged her. I told her I believe so.

It feels like depression is this binary switch in my brain. It goes on and off many times a day. There are many things that bring me joy and when I feel those things I am distracted and the depression switch goes off for a bit. But I can’t do this on purpose. I’m not a rat and it isn’t a food pellet button. I can’t just decide to keep myself distracted. I can’t decide to feel joy. It just happens. Often in connection with my kids.

I feel like the most prideful person on earth when I look at my children. I feel like I will explode with good feelings when I look at them. How did something so wonderful come out of me? I am so grateful that I get to know them. Even though they make my life harder (and holy shit they do) I wouldn’t have it any other way. Without them I don’t have this joy on tap.

So I spend my days walking between depression and shame and anxiety and anger and joy. I can’t just sit down and decide how many minutes of a given day will be spent on which emotion. I can stack the deck in my favor. There are stress relieving choices I can make. But the stress relieving choices are unfortunately often choices that lessen my joy. It’s a weird balancing act. Less bad might mean less good too. More good might well mean a lot more bad.

Today I feel quite confident “not today”. Today is a day of rest. I will spend today with Noah and the kids. Noah will rub my feet because he is nice. We will cuddle and read together. I will get to touch Noah. This morning I am typing from bed instead of the garage because I haven’t been touching Noah much lately and I feel this aching emptiness without him. I like keeping my foot on him. He’s there. He’s real. He’s mine. I’m not alone. No matter how I feel, no matter how I think–he is here. I can touch him.

Noah has spent years trying to get me to understand that I shouldn’t have put up with things from Tom that I did. It wasn’t a “good” relationship it was just a lot better than what I had previously known. I don’t know if I put up with things from Noah that I shouldn’t. I know that, unlike Tom, Noah is working on things that benefit both of us. Noah is very serious about everything he has being for me. It’s a weird feeling. Someone wants me to have as much as can be given to me. I feel constantly unworthy.

I have been diagnosable as “mentally ill” for a long time. It’s not Noah’s fault. I don’t really want to come down on him for the results.

Awake but too early to run.

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Today is only fourteen miles. When did more than a half marathon become “only” fourteen miles? It was a gradual process. In my mind and body I am already looking ahead to running twenty miles in seven days. I want it. I want to run the marathon. I want it. I want to do it. I want it so bad I itch and twitch and nervously sweat thinking about it.  Twenty-nine days and counting.

I can tell that right now my depression is pretty bad. I kind of hate everyone and everything in the world. I hate that I am told over and over that I an only ______ if I have __________ and I never fucking have the prerequisites. I will never have “the support necessary to heal”. I will always be alone. No, I don’t have a higher power to depend on. At this point in my life that isn’t going to work.

Because when I think very hard about it–I am getting it done. But I’m getting it done with a lot of fear and effort and work and crying. But it’s getting done. I’m already 20% through my parenting time. This phase of my life is not going to be forever. I believe in my heart of hearts that once I am done with the baby phase things will be easier.

Babies and toddlers are triggering. Arwyn wrote about that first. Babies and toddlers hit you and scream right into your ear over and over. They hurt you and you can’t do anything to defend yourself. My relationships with Shanna and Calli are the last fucking time in my life I will god damn let any mother fucker hit me. Well, maybe Noah–but that’s different.

If anyone other than my kids treated me the way my kids do I would give them a black eye. I’m fucking serious. If a god damn adult or teenager hurt me casually, fucking constantly, I would deck them. This isn’t ok. But it’s not on purpose. It’s an accident. They don’t mean to be so rough. You can’t get mad at a baby. Thus I stay stoned. So I’m not angry. So I’m not hateful. So that my brain is able to understand, “Oh, you aren’t attacking me. You aren’t a threat.” Plus having my sense of touch deadened by the pot is a great thing for me. Heightened arousal is kind of a nightmare after a while.

I love them so much. I have to believe they are worth the time and energy I put into them. I have to. It means I don’t have much left for myself or any one else.

Shanna keeps asking me about my mom. And about us. “What do I do if when I’m a grown up I dislike you the way you dislike your mommy?” “Well baby, if you decide you feel about me when you grow up the way I feel about my mommy I’m not sure I am the right person to ask. You will need to ask Marcie and Kitten and P and K and those other people who love you very much to help you. You are not going to be alone in this world, ever. There are people who love you and who will help you. And I don’t dislike my mom. I’m just not going to let her hurt me or you and she can’t really help hurting people. I hope I never treat you the way my mom treats me. If I do you will be right to protect yourself. I hope you never need to.”

What else can I say? It’s hard. It’s so very hard. I miss my mom. I miss my mom in ways large and small. I don’t dislike her. How can I explain? My mom told me over and over from when I was tiny that I was bad and that everything was my fault. If there is a fucking tsunami is southeast Asia it is my fault for being disgusting. I am aware that she wouldn’t make Shanna or Calli the scapegoat–I would still be that. I don’t want her to teach my kids that I am to blame for everything bad in the world. I’m not. I’m really not.

I am not doing well with that whole “making friends” part of life lately. Talking to adults is hard. How do you carry on a conversation when all you can see in your head is slow moving pictures of all the gore involved in shoving a head through a window. I know what it does quite well, actually. That’s why Tommy had to start wearing a helmet. He put his head through several windows. I know exactly what it does because I have cleaned up blood and glass and hair matter before. This is not news. I want to hurt. I want to make a big mess. I want to fucking inconvenience people because I am hurting. But I won’t. I’ll just see it in my head a lot. To the point where sometimes it is kind of hard to see the people in front of me, honestly.

I’m having a very hard time with not mutilating. In my head the things I “should” do are escalating terribly. I want to hurt me so much I can barely breathe. I feel like I am choking on the need to feel pain. I am disgusting. I am bad. I need to stop looking for help. The harder I look for help without finding it the more I believe I am worthless. No one will help because I don’t deserve help. Maybe other people do, but not me. I should just die. It would be better for the entire species.

I’ve sent out a bunch of emails looking for therapists. I’ve left messages. I don’t get calls back. I really am just too much trouble. I really hate me right now. I feel like all I want to do is go through the litany of why I hate me. Why I am disgusting and bad. Why I deserve everything that happens to me. Why I deserve so much more bad than I have gotten lately. Why it is time for someone to brutally hurt me–because I’m a piece of shit and that is what I deserve.

This is when I used to describe really elaborate scenes to Tom. Then he would act them out and hurt me as much as I wanted to be hurt. Noah isn’t Tom. Things work differently between us.

I don’t know what the road looks like. But it’s 4:51 and I would like to be on the road around 5. I should probably stop typing and start getting dressed. I’m giving myself four and a half hours to leisurely stroll down the fourteen miles. I’m hoping I beat people there so I can sit on the ground and stretch for a while first. That makes the food experience more pleasant.

A friend said on facebook that she will meet us at the restaurant. It is still continually surprising to me–I have friends. I don’t really understand this “friend” thing. Friends give you what they have to spare. A different friend gave me arm braces (thank you J!) so I will hopefully not kill my body on the next book. I don’t understand people giving their spare to me. Shouldn’t they give it to someone who is capable of giving them something back? I feel like I have nothing to give. I feel like an empty shell. I try to just decide that I don’t need to decide what other people get from a relationship with me. If they pick a relationship with me they probably know what they are getting. I don’t really do a lot of misleading advertising or anything.

I am a needy piece of shit. I have nothing to offer. I’m hostile and angry and tense. My experience of the world has been pretty unpleasant and it shows. I try to hide it but I can only do so much. I don’t understand why anyone would want to know me. I’m not sure I would want to know someone as angry as I am.

I think this is going to be a very crying filled fourteen miles. Slow. Just walking. It will be fine. Even though I feel sad, even though I am going to move slowly I will still be going towards Noah. Noah wants me. Noah wants me more than he has ever wanted anything or anyone. (Ok, maybe he wants to be a programmer more than he wants to be with me–maybe.)

When people in the recovery world ask about “support” and I say “I have a husband” it’s not really what they mean. It’s not good to be as dependent on a partner as I am on Noah. But he’s all I have. He is the only person on this planet who picked me and wants me. It makes it a lot easier to keep going because I know he will be on the far side. I can’t repay Noah’s support by forcing him to clean up bloody messes as I hurt myself. He deserves better.

I hate limbo.

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But I love having a plan. I have thirty days left until the marathon. If the kids want to watch the ipad, fine. I’m too tired to be entertaining. I want to be able to stretch without being knocked over. I’m also trying to not smoke. That leaves me dependent on edibles/pills and that’s a different experience for mood control. I think my lungs deserve a break this month. The hacking cough is really gross.

I think I should try not to type much. I need to find arm braces. I need to start icing my arms and stretching more consistently. Otherwise NaNoWriMo will wreck me. I’m looking forward to this book. Smart ass working title: Mary Sue’s Love Story

It’s weird thinking of myself as an animal training for a performance event. It changes how careful I am with myself. I give more respect to an animal than I do to myself. It’s not like I think I am an expensive race horse or anything, but I am being nicer to myself than I was and improvement is the point.

I finally set up the drop keyboard stuff on the desk. Maybe I won’t fuck up my hands by typing at a surface 6″ too high this year.

I gave away all the last of my tomatoes because K likes green ones. She makes a relish with them. I am planning to rip out all the tomato plants today and do a bunch of digging and maybe some planting. I am having a hard time with everything being waiting.

But holy christ do I not have the energy for people. I can barely be nice to Noah. I’m nice to the kids but I’m distracted. I feel far away. I think that is one of the big differences between the edibles and smoking. I get far less of this complete dissociation with smoking. I also get fewer panic attacks this way. I’m kind of looking forward to a few weeks of being this kind of stoned, honestly. It feels really nice for my nervous system–like a vacation from being me. I don’t have the heart pounding and the skin tension and easy startle. I feel really guilty when I am stoned like this. Like it is a cop out. I’m not learning how to really live. I’m not so stoned I am sitting on the couch and staring at the tv. But I am moving slowly and stopping to stretch a lot. I feel able to pay attention to the weird knots in my neck instead of just feeling angry with myself for not being as stretchy/bendy/flexible as I wish I was.

But I feel like I am breathing under water. I feel just a slight heaviness on my chest. It’s still easier than the panic attacks. But I can’t drive this stoned. I know I am reacting a few seconds too slow. I’m not stupid. Which means for a few weeks I can’t drive much. (No, I don’t drive after smoking either, but I can come home and immediately smoke and feel relief from the anxiety and edibles work differently in my system–it’s less of a push-the-button-get-medicine effect. It’s global or nada.)

There is a part of me that looks at the time line of my life and mentally stocks up pot for the crisis points–the anniversaries. The specific new, big traumas. I think I will be able to get to a point where I’m ok for weeks or months in between trigger points. I’m starting to wonder if I should even be trying to “not react” to trigger events. It seems like I spend a lot of time and energy trying to not get upset by things that would make any rational person upset. That’s silly. If I just batten down the hatches at those points, maybe there will be “ok” in between.

Less than seven years. I have to be completely functional without any medication to help within seven years. If I can’t go for a year completely sober here then we can’t travel internationally. Sober sooner would be better.

I’m scared.