Category Archives: goals

Evading laundry

I just had a really good idea. Some day I want to remodel my kitchen. It will happen when I’m in my fifties and THAT’S FINE. There is a wall I plan to tear out. A wall that is constantly spattered with food and grimy and nasty. I hate looking at it because I can’t properly clean it. It makes me feel pretty angry sometimes because I scrub and scrub and it is still scummy and gross.

I can learn how to tile on that wall. I don’t want to keep it permanently so I am completely free to make weird choices and mistakes.

Oh man.

I think my brain just exploded with joy.

I think I’m weird.

I think I am the luckiest person in the whole world because I have stupid intense urges and an indulgent partner who can afford my fairly cheap DIY projects. He doesn’t care what I make the house look like.

In fact, he likes finding out what I want to see in the world. He says, every so often: “I didn’t believe you that _____ change would work the way you said it would but you were right.”

I soar.

I feel like my “art” is my house. And I’m really not normal so I don’t have or want a house that looks particularly normal. It would be false advertising.

Welcome to Wonderland.

You would be amazed how often people try to turn the doorstop in my house so they can walk through a wall. I painted a hobbit hole under a rainbow and used the doorstop as the doorknob. People can’t tell that it’s just a painting. I don’t think it’s that realistic.

My in-laws told me to “buy something for myself”. I think I see an increase in the “home” budget for a little bit. I’m going to eek it out and keep myself busy.

That probably isn’t what they meant. But it is what will make me happy. That’s why I’m glad they sent money.

I’m sure that is a rude thought. Oh well. I’m pretty excited about having a whole bunch of extra money that I can spend on art projects that make my house better for me.

I have to figure out how to involve the kids or it won’t work. This is going to take planning. Luckily that is my favorite part.

This is what me distracting myself from feeling bad looks like. I have an idea! But I can’t sprint right now. I told Noah that I really want his time. That means no sprinting. That means figuring out how to do the projects entirely with the kids in a way that is fair (and educational) to the kids.

This is going to take planning and thought. What projects to do first–well, first I’m waiting to get the logs back so I can finish the playhouse. That will take about a week once I get the wood back. I will be glad to get all the debris up. Finally. Well, most of it. There is still a huge branch in the back that is waiting to be dismantled. The guy who helps me with my yard had problems with his chain saw last week. I think he doesn’t mind how eccentric I am because I actually don’t ask him to do much. Trim the front hedge and clean up my messes. I don’t even ask him to weed. But he faithfully comes twice a month.

I don’t know why I am being evasive on the internet. I’m feeling intensely lonely and yet like I have positive feelings. Not feelings that incline me towards folding the four baskets of laundry at my feet. I’m tired and whiny. I have been doing a lot and we are going out tonight. I am burning a lot of spoons today and this weekend is going to be overwhelming. I will get through it but I may not be talking much by the end because I will be bitchy. I hate that. It feels not fair to the people who see me on the end. But it will be what I have to give.

I will be polite but not chatty. I will make a few awkward positive comments of gratitude about being invited because I am really glad that I am invited. I like them. I am really enjoying watching their life from this distance of rare visits. But I don’t have anything else to give and big events are not a time to talk about any of the shit that I think about all the god damn time.

I get low on ability to remember what “polite” language is like. Noah and I don’t talk like that.

God I love Noah. And he’s in a phase where bugging him at work all day isn’t polite.

Thank you internet. I love you. You are always there for me.

I was thinking about how maligned short stories and novels were in their initial heydays.

Blogging is a terrible horrible low-brow writing form.

I’ve been doing it for what? Ten years.

Where am I going with this?

I’m going to tell you a secret, internet. I really want my whole story to be one that is one that can be picked up and read in its entirety. I think I am interesting. I feel like an asshole right now. That’s kind of awesome. I don’t think you will all like me. I think you will often think I am a fuck up. But I’m an interesting fuck up. I think.

I just don’t have time to tell you the story yet. And that means you get weird snippets. I feel weird that you read this year after year. I know that some of you have been following for a long time (btw–it is now a serious pain in the ass to find comments on livejournal. I won’t be responding or able to read the syndicate comments for much longer so don’t bother leaving them there. Soon-ish I will have an actual website and then I don’t know what will happen. ) and I don’t want to lose you.

I feel weird about that. I’m trying to figure out how to put my entire blog archive together. I have already told a lot of stories and I don’t really have the hand-strength to type them all again.

It would be fun to reread and figure out where the most interesting stories are. Lisa–I will find the story of the Dear Jane lady and re-post it. It is on livejournal.

Now I’m babbling. Ha. Talk to you later internet. You just became too personal.

Bucket list: Run a marathon

3 Replies

For many years I have said, “Some day I will run a marathon.” I’m aware that a lot of people say that. My ex-boyfriend said it all the time. He still hasn’t. I suppose the idea came into my head because my brother Jimmy is a runner. I asked him in February of 2011 to commit to doing a marathon with me. It was a tentative step towards developing a relationship. We have never been close. Kids in families like ours aren’t allowed to be close.

In May of 2011 my Uncle Bob died. Uncle Bob was the man in my childhood who loved me and cared for me without sexually assaulting me. My family didn’t tell me he was in the hospital or that they were taking him off of life support. My niece decided I should know and she called me. He died while I was stuck in traffic less than five miles away from the hospital.

Something inside me broke. My sister asked me if I had “ever lost someone close to me before” and turned red with fury when I responded, “like our father or our brother Tommy?” I wasn’t allowed to bring them up. They “didn’t count” because they both abused me and sexually assaulted me. I went home and outed myself as an incest survivor on the internet. My brother Jimmy didn’t think that was ok. He told me I was melodramatic and looking for attention. I haven’t spoken to him since. Since my family all decided they were done with me I figured it was a good time to finally write the story of my childhood. I did so in November of 2011.

In January of 2012 I asked my housemate/co-parent to move out, which was stressful and emotionally hard. I also started running. I decided that even though I wouldn’t actually be doing it with Jimmy I was going to do the marathon anyway. We were planning on Long Beach because it is one of the flattest marathons in the state. I registered. I looked up training plans and put them on my Google Calendar for the next ten months.

When you decide to do something there is this waiting period. You want to do it and it is going to be ridiculously hard—how do you get there? I’ve never done anything physically taxing like this before. The only running I previously had done was getting away from people who wanted to beat the shit out of me. I did one year of t-ball and less than a full season of little league. I was “catcher” for one pitch. I missed and it hit me in the stomach and made me puke and cry. They stuck me in the outfield and I got sick of going after a couple of weeks. So I had no basis of “fitness” to build on.

It’s probably worth mentioning that I am a stay at home mom with two kids. They are two and four. So I’ve been doing this running while trying to manage them. Finding time has been interesting. For the first five months I ran in the afternoons after my husband got off work because none of my runs took very long. Once the runs started getting longer and longer I switched to leaving my house by six in the morning. I have no childcare. I have to make use of what little time my husband has available. He is a software engineer so he is out of the house a minimum of 45 hours a week and often more than that. And he wrote a book this year so he doesn’t have a lot of time available for helping me. It’s been stressful.

I hear a lot of people talk about how running is supposed to improve a persons mood. I have no idea who these people are but it doesn’t bloody work for me. I have spent the year crying. I cry before I run. I cry while I run. I cry when I get home. I have a lot of grief. I’m crying for Uncle Bob. I’m crying for my father. I’m crying for my mother. I’m crying for my sister and my brothers. I’m crying for my niece and nephews. I cry and feel worthless and empty. It doesn’t matter how I feel on any given day. I know what I have to do. I schedule things so I don’t have to wonder what a day will require.

I have asked myself over and over all year why this is important to me. Why am I torturing myself? Am I running because my brother is a runner? Because I want to prove that I am a fucking Archer whether my family wants to acknowledge that I am alive or not? Because I want to be a bad ass? Because… I don’t even know. I said I would do it. If I quit or stop then I become just one more person who makes promises and doesn’t keep them. I said I would run the Long Beach Marathon.

About a month before the event a good friend ran a twenty mile race near her home in Portland, Oregon. I was kidding when I said, “Hey if you trained up to this mileage then a full marathon is easy. Come do it with me!” Surprisingly she said yes. Within hours she had talked to her husband and booked a flight.

The last month of training was both the hardest and the easiest. All of a sudden I wasn’t on this terrible solo death march of feeling abandoned. I had to keep training because Ali was coming. Ali loves me. I still had a lot of days where I cried so hard my knees buckled and I fell to the ground and cried until I couldn’t cry any more. Then I got up and ran again. The good days came more often.

Six days before the race I drove to Southern California with my family. We were off to Disneyland! The girls and I had a lot of fun getting in my last walking miles in the park. The day before the race Ali was supposed to fly down first thing in the morning. Her flight was delayed. At the first notice I started feeling a little worried but I thought she would make it and it would be fine.

Six hours later they cancelled her flight entirely. I was afraid that was the end. I didn’t sob on the phone to Ali. I only freaked out a little in text. Her amazing husband jumped on the internet and booked her another flight. It was later and going into a different airport and it would be a lot more complicated—but she would get to SoCal. Unfortunately she would get there too late to pick up her race bib. She emailed me a picture of her ID and her husband emailed me a waver to print so I could pick up her bib for her. We live in the future!

I drove down to the Expo by myself. I didn’t want to be focused on my kids while I was trying to figure out where to go. I wasn’t feeling patient. I checked the lists of people registered. My brother’s name wasn’t on it. After a year of heart pounding anxiety worrying about seeing him that was rather anticlimactic if you ask me.

So I picked up the bibs and went back to our hotel room. I angsted and fussed. Ali got to her moms-in-law’s house. I arrived around 7:30. We talked more than we should have. It would have been impossible to avoid. I hardly ever get to see her. Talking to her feels really good. So we didn’t get to sleep till around 11 pm. I slept till 2:30 am. Then I woke up to use the bathroom and the crying started. I cried until Ali woke up around 5:30. I cried because I didn’t have one more chance to see anyone in my family. They are just done with me. I think there was some big part of me that was praying that Jimmy would see me and hug me. I haven’t said that out loud all year. I was afraid to hope. I was smart.

We woke up and piddled around getting ready. Ali had trouble forcing her way through her breakfast so we left about fifteen minutes after we were supposed to. That’s ok, we left a little bit of a buffer. Then it turned out that the person driving the vehicle had a different opinion about the optimal way to get to the race grounds. An opinion that was unfortunately not born out in reality. We were blocked continually by the race track. Whoops. Eventually we went around on the freeway (what Ali was campaigning hard for from the beginning, apparently—I was fairly unaware of this subtext) and arrived at the race. We had just enough time to stop at the port-a-potties before the last wave started. We hurried. We made it into the last wave and settled in for our run.

I’d like to say it was wonderful because I was with Ali and in many ways it was. She sang me silly songs. She encouraged and coaxed. She helped me through the rough parts. There were a lot of rough parts. The first big problem was the air quality. I am not used to SoCal air quality. I felt like I had to chew each breath before swallowing. It was really hard to run. I was dizzy and nauseated. We walked a lot. It was also almost twenty degrees hotter than either of us are used to running in. Oh and the humidity. The humidity was nightmarish (thus the bad air quality). We were wet all day and crusted in salt. But the real kicker? I started my period at mile 13 along with terrible cramps that made me want to go to bed and curl up and cry. Luckily Ali had extra tampons. Yay for planning ahead. A medical station provided some ibuprofen. I had to finish.

It was beautiful traveling along the ocean. The city of Long Beach is certainly picturesque. One of the most disheartening moments of the race was when the half marathoners split off and we went from being part of a large crowd to being one of the stragglers. It was a little sad for me to realize how far behind the pack of “runners” we were for the marathon. Really we mostly walked. I ran as much as I could but I didn’t want to faint or puke so it wasn’t that much.

In the end our running time was 6:47. We finished seven and a half minutes before they closed the finish line. We were part of the last wave and they only keep the finish line open for 7:30 hours. It’s a darn good thing we weren’t just a hair later and that I managed to run as much as I did.

I did it. I finished the Long Beach Marathon. Thank you Ali. Near as I can tell this is the hardest thing I have ever done with another person. I’m so glad I had you. I won’t forget.

The flea had a gleam in his eye. (Silly song Ali sang.) I think it was because he was plotting. He was wondering how hard it was going to be to run. He wanted to know if he could keep up with you too.

I won’t do another marathon with you. Can we do a half next time? That’s only half as crazy. Next time on your turf with better air quality.

PS- Sharing is caring.

Stupidly defensive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whatever. I should go start breakfast.

Compulsions

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I’m obsessively staring at my training schedule. I’m scared. This week I run twenty miles for the first time this round. Woof. The peak of training gives me forty miles in a week. I am lovingly and loathingly (yes I know that isn’t a word) noticing that hell week is my birthday week. I turn thirty-one and then immediately have to run forty miles in the five days following. I don’t fuck around.

I’m scared and elated. I’m going to do this. It can be done by a human being therefore it is god damn going to be done by me. I will. I won’t fuck this up. Perseverance is one of my more admirable attributes. Tenacious as a honey badger. I tell myself while running in my “Badass as a Honey Badger” tshirt. I’m the exact opposite of sexy.

I don’t know how to be this person in the world. I don’t know how to be open to people and yet not available. I have committed my life and all that I am elsewhere. How do I have time for other people? You just do. You have to. You have to be part of something bigger. At least I do. I need to have friendships. I’m having trouble keeping my panties on. I have a hard time not sitting on peoples laps. That is how I break the ice. But that’s ice I don’t need to be breaking ever again. Awkward.

There is this reserve developing. Now there are parts of me I will defend with a machete. Off limits. It is scary for me to think about having to say no at some point. I am nervous because I like to stand in places where asking is significantly more friendly than not asking. Most folks go out to hunt. I don’t even know what I’m hunting for.

I want people who want to know my kids. Who want to part of my familial dynamic. Who want to have a real space in my life. Most people fill these roles with family. Most people think of friendships as low stakes. I will always be a low stakes relationship. I will always be who they see when people are “avoiding their family”.

Part of what I have been thinking about while running lately is how it isn’t my fault I don’t have a family. It’s not like I am less deserving than other people. But you roll the dice and you take what you get. There is no deserving in life. I am not physically capable of keeping the silence my family of origin required of me. That just can’t be asked of me. Too late. I’m an evil liar, blah blah, whatever. It doesn’t matter what I deserve. It matters what I can create with my hands and my mind. It matters what effect I have on the world.

When I ask former students what I taught them they say that I taught them to like themselves. That’s a fuck load more than my family did for me. My family taught me that when the men and boys in my family couldn’t find a willing pussy it was my job to lie down and provide.

What can I create? What can I be? What matters? If you can’t be a good example be a horrible warning?

I don’t know. I’m afraid to take pride in anything. I don’t want to develop a weak spot where I can be attacked. I don’t want to feel insecure about someone letting me know that I actually really suck at that thing I think I am good at. I am terrified to build myself up.

I’m well into training for a marathon. I don’t talk about it much in person. I don’t think anyone gives a shit. I think they listen with glazed eyes so I should just shut up and let them tell me what they are doing. That’s all they care about anyway. Why don’t I brag about this? I’m fucking doing it. I’m out running four days a week and stretching and doing strength training. I’m doing it. I’m not going to win speed records and that’s ok! Doing this is a fairly big deal. Why do I minimize this to myself? Why do I act like I’m not doing this good enough? Why do I feel like if I am doing it then it must not be that hard. I’m nothing special. If I can do it then it must not be a big deal. Talking about it is rather fraught, so I don’t.

It’s kind of weird, this being a writer. I have been blogging fairly consistently for nearly nine years. A number of people have read basically all of it. That’s a large body of knowledge about my life. But it was acquired in a room without me in it. There was no shared intimacy. This is very similar to the sexual exhibitionism. I feel like a freak because I can’t talk about a period of my life without talking about how and why my sexuality went through a massive change. And for me that has meant a lot of different partners and different approaches to sex. I understand why my former therapist asked me pointed questions about multiple personalities.

If I make sure people only see me in a certain set of circumstances with a certain environment I can tailor my behavior. I can be appropriate with great effort. If I keep people out at arms length. That’s kind of awkward with this whole out thing. Now I don’t really know what people are thinking about when they look at me. Oh holy fucking shit. For most of my writing life I’ve known the dozen or so people who seriously followed my writing. We had dinner so that I could fill in the bits on the stories I won’t tell in public. I tailor what I share with the world. I feel odd wondering what that actually looks like. How close is it to me?

What is more real, after all? The image that I carefully construct in writing (or rather the image that free form spews out of my brain never to be looked at or thought about again–I couldn’t reread the volume I produce; there isn’t enough time in the day) or how I behave? I’m never really sure. If you are judging me by how I behave then which group of friends will you judge by? I’m very different in different settings.

Compulsive hypersexuality is kind of a funny thing. If I think back I can see parallel lines between when I started smoking pot and when I stopped sleeping around. I guess I traded addictions. I am a very compulsive person. Right now I’m having a hard time with food. I’m having trouble respecting my body’s “full” signal. I’m making myself hurt. And I’m gaining weight… while training for a marathon. I’m eating a lot.

I’m scared because I think I’m getting closer to one of those periods where I feel the need to experience pain. That was how it worked with Tom. That was what our relationship did for me. I stayed with Tom instead of cutting. He was a reliable source of discomfort. He provided the hogties that fueled his masturbatory life and he was willing to play a lot harder to meet my needs. I think I came up with most of our heaviest play. In no way shape or form was I a victim. But I’m very compulsive. And I have a strong disinterest in my continued physical safety. Or had, anyway.

It is weird looking over at Noah. He’s biting his finger nail. He’s the only person I will ever have sex with again. Well, barring early death. If he kicks the bucket I’m not staying celibate for his memory. I’m not that devoted. He wouldn’t either and fair is fair. It’s weird looking at him. I get to sit here and have this intense feeling of power and ownership. He is mine. I don’t have to check his google calendar so I can schedule a date with my husband. I don’t have to know when he is out dating and fill that time carefully in a way I can handle without crying or freaking out. He does go out and do things occasionally, but it is rare. What he is doing with his time is hanging out with his kids and his wife. I feel really special. This really amazing person wants me. He does have kind of a funny hunch back. I guess we truly are perfect for each other. I’m not quite Beauty and he’s not quite the Beast. He’s not all the way to Quasimodo either so he still works for me. Definitely cute enough to be the hero.

While I’m running I’m playing over the years in my head. What am I going to write about? Which relationships are the most important? How can I show the pivotal times and places and people? How am I going to set the different tones of the different parts of my life? How am I going to make it obvious in text that my behavior radically changes based on where I am standing? How do I make an image of me that is real and true?

The first book was what happened to me. A lot of it I couldn’t change. I could have made different decisions, maybe. Whatever. It’s over. What happened when I was an adult is different. I had agency. I made choices. I acted. I wanted. I was compulsive. I learned to manage my compulsions in a variety of ways. What did that trial and error process look like? What bridges did I burn and when and how and why in the process? I’m trying to get my head around the whole story arc and it feels so large. So complex. I feel like a freak as I carefully compare the continuing evolution of my behavior in separate, non-adjacent parts of my life. What did I learn? How did I learn it?

I don’t know. I can’t find an object lesson in my life. I survived. I just did. That was all I did. I can’t make a lesson out of it. Maybe it is closer to a horrible warning. I feel bad about that though. I’m not. I have had a fairly decent adulthood. I want to explain why rape is just such a casual part of my life. I want to really work through all the connections between different parts of myself growing up.

Tom gave me a safe space to grow up. He hurt me when I asked nicely so that I could deal with my urge to self mutilate. After Tom I went on to drugs and a rather indecent amount of casual sex. And graduate school. And teaching. And dancing. More travel.

I’ve done a lot of things. Not all of it has been sex. Yet when I think of myself I see nothing of potential interest outside of sex. That says a lot about my priorities.

I am trying to figure out how to be proud of myself without sounding like I am bragging. I’m not bragging. I’m telling the truth. Sometimes the truth sounds cool and sometimes it sounds fucking embarrassing. Bah humbug. It’s time to go to sleep.

frustrated

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s time to go parent.

I’m sorry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anything is possible

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First world problems

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Life is what you do while you are killing time until you die. Really, that’s all it is. Maybe you’ll die soon, maybe it will take a long time. Maybe you will know lots of people. Maybe you will spend all of those years alone; lonely is strictly optional. Happiness is a state of mind, not a circumstance. And yet, we expect people who are financially secure and stable and married and _______ to be happy.

Seeing my shaman was a good choice. I have a lot of oppositional defiance response to people. To him, in particular. Oh man he triggers all of my, “No no no no no no no” buttons. And no matter how frustrated I get with him I will always go back for more because I learn so much about me being with him. I learn more about the shape and size of me. I learn where I need to push back because I really truly believe something. I know something is true no matter what his opinion is.

He tried to tell me that I have previously been just fine with Noah dating. Uhm… no. I have written records. See, this is why I write. I was fine with Noah dating other people during the first six months we were dating and I was living with someone else. That’s true. But I was poly and Tom was monogamous because I couldn’t stand him being intimate with anyone else. He wasn’t real motivated to go find another sexual partner either. He wanted companionship more than sex and I still provided that.

Noah has different needs. No, I’ve never been happy about him seeing other people. I’m not shy with that information. I have tried to accept it as part of him. But I measure his dates in cuts on my legs. I don’t actually think it is good for our marriage for us to do nonmonogamy. If something hurts me that much, he really shouldn’t be doing it. I am totally fine with it in theory. I don’t have a problem with other people doing it. But knowing that my partner would rather be doing that with someone else rather than me? Yeah. That bothers me. I don’t say no. Ok, I do. But it’s pretty rare.

My shaman contends that the real solution is for me to just work on being bothered until I’m not bothered anymore so that Noah can keep doing what Noah wants to do. To be fair, he thinks that I should work on it because I also have trouble with monogamy.

I think it is more useful this lifetime for me to work on other parts of my life that are causing me strife. I only have so much time to spend beating my head against walls of shame and terror and anger and hatred. It’s going to come up around other issues whether I like it or not. Nonmonogamy is complicated. It takes a ridiculous amount of time and energy. I don’t have it to spare. And I won’t invest in this relationship fully if I know that I am just waiting for when he is going to pull away from me so that he can give a big chunk of himself to someone else. Fuck that shit. I guess I’m a selfish piece of shit but I think I deserve better than that.

The thing about first world problems is: they still hurt. And you still have to live with them day in and day out. No one expects anyone to be cheerful about third world problems. But you are god damn expected to just suck it up for first world problems. I certainly expect people to. I will probably die like my grandfather having a heart attack out in the yard while working. He was in his 80’s.

Ok, I’m going to take the first world/third world out of this for the next part because it sounds dismissive and snotty and I don’t mean to be. I’m talking about my perception of the difference between rich problems and poor problems. I’m using the phrases first world/third world reflexively because it is a common dismissive thought process. But I should be better than that.

When I was a kid surviving was different. The life I lead with my mother was different. Being alive day by day was different. Now that I am an adult I have a completely different situation in life but I am still the same person. Surviving my childhood took a very different skillset than … what am I supposed to say about adulthood? I won’t survive adulthood. Ha. What am I going to do with my adulthood. How is the pattern of my days going to look in comparison to all I know.

What I know is a disjointed life. What I know is work that comes and goes. Unending sorrow and bitterness. Trauma. That’s not all I know though. I know how to work with my hands. I know how to build things. I know how to build people. Shit dude, I made two of them. That’s pretty fucking cool if you ask me. I’m defensive about being a good parent because that is my primary job. I feel like I have to be judged on something and apparently that means I will some day be judged on whether or not my children are… I don’t know. Appropriate? Kind enough? Successful enough? Smart enough? Uhm. Yeah. I have no control over those things.

How do you talk about these subjects without blame? Happiness is a state of mind, not a circumstance. Uhm, yes. But if I had been happy during my childhood I wouldn’t have gotten out. My niece is as smart as me. I’m worried she won’t be able to get out. And my nephew won’t get out. At this point simple economics will bind them all together.

I feel I have satisfied any debt I owed my mother for the care she gave me as a child. I have given her thousands and thousands of dollars, often to my own detriment because she was stealing my pay checks. I don’t owe her anything.

I am angry this morning. So angry. I woke up so angry I feel like the top of my head might come off. I am still just me. But I cancelled my therapy appointment. I feel very defensive about that. I know I need to continue therapy but I don’t have anything I want to talk about in therapy today and is that relationship about meeting my needs or is it something I am doing so that I can check of check lists of what crazy people like me have to do on a set schedule for the rest of my life?

Today the opportunity cost of having to drive for two hours and spend about $18 in gas on top of $150 for the privilege of talking to my therapist… that’s too high of a bar for what I will get out of it. On many days it is the right choice and I shut up and just do it. But today what I will get out of the session will not be worth the opportunity cost. Why is that something I feel guilty about? Because I feel like I have to be accountable to other people in order to ever be right. I don’t feel like talking to my therapist today. So I’m not going to do it. And I feel angry about having to defend that. I really feel like I have to go down a long list of justifications about why. Because I don’t want to isn’t good enough because I am crazy and bad and I need to go talk to a therapist. Uhm, yeah. That’s fucking useful.

Do you know what I’m mad about right now? The price of juice. I don’t need to go talk to my therapist to find my way down the rabbit hole of why that pisses me off. I am even tactful enough to not write the story on the internet because such things actions are kind of tacky given why I am mad about the price of juice. But I am going to go inside and tell my family the story. And then I can stop being angry. I don’t need to pay someone else $150 to listen to the story so I can stop feeling angry. Once I explain it to my family we will figure out what we can change so that I can have help changing the feeling of anger. I can do something about my problems. That’s what makes it a first world problem? My problems are all things that I can solve or out wait and they will go away. I have short-term temporal problems right now. Life is harder than advertised and all that.

Right this minute Calli is crying. I have no idea why. Noah is on duty. I feel like I should stop what I am doing and go try to solve whatever is happening. She would probably settle down more with me. But she would demand to nurse. I’ve already nursed her once today. When she is upset like this she is especially rough.

These are problems that will go away. Calli is already done crying. I can hear her playing. Maybe I don’t have to fix everything. Having Sarah here feels different than I thought it would. I didn’t know I could have another adult in the house so much and still feel so lonely. Sarah has a lot of health issues and keeps a very different sleep schedule. To be fair she has made remarkable progress towards being more in-synch with the kids. We keep very different schedules. And she has spent a lot of time by herself. She’s used to being silent in her room all the time. It’s different. Sometimes it feels like we talked more when we were both on IM a lot.

I had a really exciting November. I went out a lot. I got to have a lot of really intense conversations. It was wonderful. I had a lot of interesting experiences I can sit and think about for a while. That’s not my life though. My life is quiet, mostly. There is a lot going on–don’t get me wrong. But it’s house work. And laundry. And gardening. And taking She-Ra to swimming. And being home from the zoo/park/museum in time for nap or all hell breaks loose. And laundry. And trying to make sure Calli doesn’t nap too early in the day or we will all pay. And more house work. And laundry.

I only make breakfast occasionally if I feel the desire to. Like, a couple of times a month. I make maybe four lunches a week. I have to come with dinner three or so nights a week. It doesn’t get to be take out any more.

I don’t get to be bitter about my problems because they are of my own choosing. Why am I choosing to be bitter about the life I am choosing that no one else is forcing me to have? Let’s be clear here. Noah is not pushing us towards saving. He pays no attention and I could financially ruin us and he wouldn’t notice for years. Instead he is tolerating me forcing him into an ascetic life ridiculously cheerfully. I am choosing every part of my life. From how much I clean to how often I have friends over. Why am I bitter?

I feel like I am not really choosing it. I feel like it is forced on me because no one else wants it. That’s true and not true. Sarah and Noah are both willing to do more when asked. And when I stop working hard things keep going the house just isn’t as clean. I’m cleaning to please myself. Ok, I feel upset that I have to work as hard as I do to have a house that looks the way I see my house in my head. That’s an interesting entitlement.

I was never really allowed to play. I was a reader because I wasn’t really allowed to have toys. My mom always gave my toys away because she didn’t want to clean them up. She went through my room with trash bags several times and just got rid of everything. I don’t build attachments to things very easily. I can’t. Things are easy come easy go. I’ll forget about it eventually, except those weird pangs some day. When I realize that there is very little evidence of my life. Only my sketchy memory and the random shit my mother chose to save. Items that are essentially meaningless to me because I will never know the story attached to them. I am invisible to myself because I have no reflection. I have no one to tell me what they saw.

I have a lot of guilt around the fact that I make Noah and Sarah and the kids get rid of things. I don’t let them keep all of the things they have sentimental attachment to. I can’t. We don’t have room. And really should not have a storage unit with stuff we will never use again that was important or fit or was relevant a long time ago. No. That’s money that needs to go elsewhere. It’s not rational. But the push back is that I require the house to be easy to clean. That means we really have to limit how much stuff we have in our house and everything must have a clearly defined home or it must not live here any more because the clutter builds and builds and then my life is a nightmare. I won’t let anyone else make my working environment hostile. I don’t go take a shit on your desk at work, thanks.

But then you have to figure out how much space should belong to each person. It’s hard to define. I feel like my day and life will be better if I stay home and save money and instead talk to Noah and Sarah about the stuff we can have some effect on. I can figure out actual compromises and do actual work instead of just telling more stories about my mom. Today, maybe just for today, I don’t really want to talk about my mom. I hate that most of my stories about her are so awful. She’s my mom. I love my mother. Irrationally. Completely. Intensely. Why was my mama so mean to me?

Because my mother had problems. She didn’t choose to handle them well and the collateral damage was massive. That happens sometimes. At this point my actual problems are all fairly small and easy to isolate. I have a lot of lasting damage, but I feel like it’s maybe time to start leaving the scab alone. Maybe just for today. That’s good enough.

Why am I choosing to be monogamous? If I reach down in the pit of my stomach it is because I don’t want to be a free person off living my life. I want to be part of an intense dyad. I want to be one with Noah. I don’t want him to be a free person off living his life either. I want us to be sharing this life. That’s why I married him. I have an easier time collaborating with him to do elaborate role play situations about pretending to sleep with other people than I do finding extra curricular sex that doesn’t make me feel like shit in some way. The opportunity cost is so very high.

I don’t think I want monogamy because of ideals, necessarily. I want to be able to stop thinking about this part of my broken. I don’t want to have to deal with keeping a tight leash on my compulsive behavior and only meting it out in small carefully considered not-quite-destructive doses. God it’s a lot of work. I’m tired of doing it. I am so very conflicted about sex.

My shaman told me that broken is a component of whether or not you have a range of emotions and a range of intensity within different emotions. Like if you always go from 2/3 to 9/10 and you stay in only two or three emotions you are probably in a broken place. If you have a range of emotions and a range of intensities… sure. That’s how you feel. Why not. It’s not broken it’s just where you are. I like how he alternates challenging me and affirming that I am already fine just how I am. It means I get to pick how I grow. Well, that’s part of why it didn’t work as a closer romantic relationship. I couldn’t deal with how much I would have to push back. It’s very hard for me.

Sometimes I wonder if my shaman has consciously created a personality for me. He speaks about his multiples fairly frequently. Fairly casually. I know that he alternates between very distinctive approaches in how he talks to me. It’s part of why I like him less around other people. He is so very different. He really is a different person, one I don’t know or like as much. He can listen to me and not challenge me and go down a laundry list of points to affirm that who I am and how I am is working well in every way. At the same time he can absolutely force me to speak in detail about all the specifics of why I am doing any of the things I am doing. It’s hard to be honest enough to be worthy of the conversation. I can’t do it very often. It is too hard to be present with him as intensely as I am present with him. Maybe that is why I don’t like him around other people. I am also attuning to the other person instead of him. Hm. Interesting.

It’s probably time to go in and start working on my first world problems. It makes me really happy that I know I can walk in the door and explain what I am upset about and talk about the root of why I am upset about it and have people be sympathetic and give a shit. Then we can figure out how to solve it. Because we will. This life thing will happen. Today will end and tomorrow might be anything. Some of my first wold problems won’t be solved yet, but they will. All I’ve got is time.

Thinking about forgiveness

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Do you know what not forgiving means? It means dying alone and angry no matter who is in the room. I don’t want to die alone. I don’t want to die afraid. I don’t want to be angry that after all this misery all I get is death. I don’t want that. I want to die knowing that I have honest to fucking god made the world a better place. I helped other people be happier, better, stronger, wiser. I want to die smiling. I want to know that I did exactly what I was supposed to do and I helped as many people as I could. I want to feel peace. Some day I want to know peace.

As long as I am angry like this there is no room. I have nothing to give. Being angry takes up so much of me. I don’t want this. I don’t want this to be my life. I don’t know the path and I am so afraid.

Every marriage involves different compromises. Different accommodation of irritations. Different forgiveness. Because the human condition is that we bump each other funny sometimes. Thank you to all the women who wrote me to tell me that you are angry at Noah too. It actually made me feel better. I felt like the anger wasn’t just mine. And that’s complicated too. Life is long and life is hard. Noah really fucked up. But he has never done anything to break my trust like this before. He has carefully in pre-negotiated ways pushed me right up to the edge of my limits and off a cliff. But that’s not the same thing as breaking trust. He has never broken trust before.

That does have to count for something. He knew he was being a raging dick. He didn’t mean to do what he did. I have never seen him cry before. He says it hasn’t happened since junior high. He probably already feels bad enough. Beating him down isn’t a way to have a happy marriage. It really isn’t.

I will never again bear a child. That is a decision I have made for myself. I want to spend my life with the only person I will ever really completely join my body to. I want to. And he’s going to fuck up some times. And I am going to get very very angry with him. But I keep my promises. I promised him a lifetime.

What does forgiveness even mean? It means telling him how I feel about sex with other people and watching him cringe. It means filling in the dots for him on some of my broken. It means telling him that I don’t want to have sex with other people any more. Even though taking that hit on my identity is going to be massive for me. I am going to feel compulsive. I am going to want it. And I think I shouldn’t do it any more. It’s not actually a good decision for me any more. Given who I am I don’t think it will actually be a healthy thing for me to do with other people ever again. I think this broken is too deep.

It’s time to try something else.

OO money and other opportunities

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I haven’t heard back from anyone in a while. I get the impression things are in flux. That’s ok. I was approached about an opportunity this week which will use up a lot of the money. It will be a community building way to spend the money, but a very different community. I’m not going to say specifics yet, but I’m excited.

I don’t do very well with trying to join groups unless I have a reason. I need a job. I need a role. I know that’s fairly common. I’m trying to find a way back into a world I miss. I’m not sure what I want to get from the experience, exactly. I want to serve. That’s part of it. Tonight someone laughed and told me I want status. Not really. I mean, yes, of course. I do love my status. But I want the chance to be able to be effective. I want influence more than I want status for the influence. I’m not sure I’m explaining well.

I will never be a big part of the public face of this opportunity. I will be back end. But that means I get to decide things about the back end. This is me rubbing my fingers together. What things to I want to see? Am I right about my priorities? I might get to find out. I have spent a lot of years sitting in the cheap seats watching other people try and have various success with their efforts. I don’t know what all I am going to do in life, yet. But it will involve taking as many opportunities as I can.

Why do I want to do this? Because it’s an opportunity that won’t come again. Something that will make for great stories for the rest of my life. Something that irrevocably slams that closet door wide open. I like that. I like doing that now in one fell swoop. I don’t know yet who or what role I will really have in the community. I’m looking forward to finding out.

Irrational feelings

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Noah made the comment that our nonmonogamy rules are based on polite fictions. I did not yell or scream or hit or punch or any of the things that went through my impulse queue. He just called me a liar. But he did it in one of those civilized ways you can’t really argue with. He can get away with it.

He’s not calling me a liar. He’s pointing out that my emotional experience and the actual real experience often differ and we planned for my emotional experience. He’s kind of a fucker that way.

We originally said we wouldn’t date until Youngest Child (whoever that would be) was five. We think that little kids need a lot of attention from their parents. I’m starting to realize that I overestimated how much I would be able to give to my kids without getting anything for myself. I planned on seven to ten years of me not getting any attention. Maybe that was poor planning.

Noah points out that I’m being unfair and dishonest about how I’m representing the breakdown of our respective time off. Maybe. I’m not going to say yes to that yet. I have too many years of him having a lot more time and space than me. I’m still dealing with being completely overwhelmed and unable to function. I’m trying to figure out where the happy medium will be.

The class he signed up for? The one we thought was six week? It goes till March. So much for carefully figuring out how our reserves of energy will be spent over the next few months. Not how I have been planning. Ok. I can regroup. That’s fine.

Noah is going to want to go out on a date. I don’t know when. Not this year. It will probably come up some time next year if I’m even vaguely honest with myself. With how much time I have spent on okcupid lately I understand why women will line up to date my husband. I don’t like feeling like part of a group. I have trouble with being out with my family of five sometimes. If I wasn’t so clearly a huge needed constantly necessary part of the group I wouldn’t be comfortable. Parties are hard. I feel like I never fit in. If I go to a party and I feel awkward and uncomfortable from the time I arrive but Noah looks like he fits in I feel like I should leave. I should let him have this space he is comfortable in. It’s his. Not mine.

That’s kind of how I let Tom have the south bay bdsm community. If I am attached to someone and they disengage from me in any way when we are out with a group I feel the instant need to panic and leave. I can’t be there. I’m not wanted any more. I have no place. No identity. I’m nothing. I vanish once the identity I have in the group leaves.

I can’t be one of Noah’s girls. If I am one of Noah’s girls I don’t exist when he is not with me any more. I feel like I am watching someone else live my life. Someone else gets to be Noah’s partner. I guess that means I stop existing as his partner. When he was dating W. I sat at home crying and cutting. I didn’t tell him about the cutting much. Everyone knew about the crying. I wanted to have as much physical pain as emotional pain. I wanted to see how big of a wound I had inside. I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t tell how big, how destructive the pain was until I saw how much of my leg I had to sacrifice to it. I had to know how big it was. Do you know why I stayed? It was never more than a two or three slice date.

I think I’m done with writing about when I started cutting, for the book. I haven’t continued to bring it up because it seems weird to do so. For about seven years I cut more days than I did not. Do I really need to say that over and over through the story? Should I talk about the fact that I learned to measure my emotional pain by how many cuts it took to get me to calm down?

I am nonmonogamous and deal my intense jealousy and emotional break downs around Noah dating because it is only a two or three cut activity. That’s not that bad. I didn’t need to cut every date. I established how much pain it was. There were times when I used to make cross hatches on my thighs that were five or six inches long. I would make hundreds. Two or three cuts that are only an inch or so long? Psh. This really isn’t so bad.

It’s hard when Noah says that are rules are based on fictions. What he is saying is that I was making up a part of me. Or making up what I thought I should say. I was lying. I don’t want to be a liar.

I don’t want to be a liar. But I can’t figure out how to explain what is going on with me. I’m saying the closest thing to the truth I can at any given moment. Sometimes, when I’m dealing with my emotional experiences, the truth is like water. It flows wherever it wants to paying no attention to previous course corrections.

I’m dating. I shouldn’t lie about it. I haven’t found a boyfriend, but I’m dating. Maybe I should stop trying to set rules about how long we have to endure any given state of life. I keep fucking up my guesstimates.

I said five years because I was hoping that by then I would feel secure enough with Noah that I wouldn’t feel so threatened every time he looked at another woman. So scared of losing him any minute. I don’t think time is really going to give me that though. I would feel just as paranoid in twenty years. And I can’t seem to be monogamous. I’m not ok with being a hypocrite. That’s a lot higher in my personal scheme of sins than almost anything. I’m acting like a hypocrite. Shit. I don’t wannnnnnnna stop.

I didn’t ask for monogamy as part of our marriage. I specifically excluded it from our wedding vows. I knew I didn’t want it. I have to let Noah figure out what he wants without dealing with temper tantrums. It’s not fair. It’s not the kind of marriage I want to have. I can’t freak out in front of the kids when he is out, either. Luckily it will be a smooth transition for them because they already don’t see him several nights a week.

Speaking of appropriate topics, I won’t be able to make fresh references to Noah’s whores. That uhh won’t go over well. Maybe I’m going to have to work on that whole thought process a lot over the next few months. I doubt he would try before the end of the class he is working on.

I’m weaning at eighteen months. I’ve decided. That’s the end. I’m gradually working her down. I’m only allowing her to nurse twice a day right now. It will be once a day for the last while. There are things I want to do with my body that I don’t want to do while nursing. It’s time to stop. I want to be able to make choices based on what I want rather than on what I have to do. Do I get tossed out of the crunchy mom club for not doing child lead weaning? I’m not making it to two years either. Calli is fifteen months tomorrow. I feel like I will lose my mind in the next three months. I hate nursing. That’s all I’ve got in me.

I’m going to try stopping the pot in December. I am going to start actually training for running. I need to stop coughing. Eek. I’m nervous. I’m going to talk to my psych about that and using Ativan more than I am. I was given six pills for a month and I still have two left. But I’m still smoking pot every day because of the writing. I’m going to stop writing on the 30th. I’m going to switch to using Ativan instead. With the goal of not needing anything at all in the next few months. I’m already cutting the Ativan in half and I may need to cut them into quarters if I use them more. Right now they make me fall asleep. I really and truly am not safe to drive within four hours of taking one. That limits my life.

So I need to be able to cope if I want to go off and do the things I want to do. It’s time to get off the crutches. That’s going to be explosive for a while and I’m scared. I smoke pot because I have a temper problem. Because it’s hard for me to be calm and patient 24/7. I just don’t have that naturally. I’m going to need to find other ways of dealing with my anger. Running is going to be a lot of it. But I also seem to be using dating to fill a lot of my energy input needs. I feel deeply conflicted about it. But I am.

I fucking need something. I don’t want to just sit here and eat and try to convince my brain that I’m happy that way. It’s a false association. Being fatter doesn’t actually make me happier even though I have this really strong self-belief that it is true. My weight is pretty irrelevant but the other circumstances in my life matter. I have usually been happier while I was fatter. It wasn’t because of the weight though. I need to stop feeling bad about not being fat. Yeah, that convoluted.

I’m bigger than my mother. I’m not fat. I need to let go of her endless lectures about what a cow I am. I’m not. I’m a fairly average sized woman. My mother is extremely petite. Let it go Krissy.

Tonight we are going to spend money we really shouldn’t be spending this month on an over the top luxury meal with my lovely Complication. She’s worth it. I’m going to enjoy every fucking minute of it. Later I will have a panic attack at the AmEx bill. Then I will stop, breathe, think of the sight of my Complication eating good food and pay the bill without complaint.

That’s what you do as a rich person. You facilitate life being good. For yourself. For other people. Because you can. Because why the fuck not. There is no deserve. There is no “right” to these things. I’m not bad for spending this bonus money on an over the top good meal. I’m not wasting it. I’m enjoying it. I’m enjoying every bite. I’m enjoying every minute that I can of a life that is full of a lot of ups and downs.

When you have much greater lows than normal it only seems fair that you get to have better highs, right? I’m about to go to the French Laundry for the second time in two years. I am a lucky bitch. I have a husband who loves me tremendously and is willing to spend most of his spare time on figuring out how to earn more money so he can pamper me more and more. Because he wants to. Because he thinks I deserve it. Because he thinks it is great that he can do that for me. Because wanting to give to me makes him want to go out and conquer the world so that he can give it to me.

I think I will need to be ok with him sleeping with other people once in a while so he can come back and appreciate me more. I really am unique. When I sleep with other people I come back and tell Noah what they did wrong. He does the same. It’s a very bonding experience for us that we match perfectly for pretty much every part of sex. The rhythm is ideal. No one else quite gets there. Those other people are fun and awesome, don’t get me wrong. But Noah is home. And I am that for him.

These irrational feelings are hard.

In which I reveal the extent of my ego.

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I wrote just over 5,000 words on the book in two hours. During that time I also did major reorganizing on the whole book. And ate breakfast. And wrote a few posts in a few places. Last night Noah and I had a very intense conversation about what being a slave was like. I’m getting closer to being able to write about it. It won’t happen until after this book is done. I’m getting so close. 45,000 words. It’s not done. It’s far from perfect. It needs a lot of editing. I want to hit at least 60,000. 8 more days. 15,000 more words.

I want to be the kind of person who gets things done. I want to be the kind of person who really can sit down and write a book in a month. I want to be the kind of person who completes a marathon. I didn’t say run. Pay attention to that word. I may be the last person over the finish line. I’m ok with that. I will do it. As one step on that journey on Thursday I’m walking a 10k with a friend. I get to start seriously running in December. So far I’ve been half-ass running but mostly just working on being able to walk farther and farther. I’m trying to build up to running slowly. My knees are not used to this shit. I don’t want to push it.

I don’t want to be famous because my father held a gun to my head and raped me. I want that to be a small footnote in my life. Right now that takes up too much space in my brain. I need to find other things I want to do and talk about. Sex is always going to be a prime topic. But I need other tracks. I need other roles. Why not running?

And if I’m going to run I’m not running to get out of the house. I’m doing it to accomplish something. I need to have a goal. Something big enough and hard enough that people will be impressed. Or I won’t bother. Because that’s just how I work. I have to be fighting to do something uncomfortable.

That was part of why I had to leave the bdsm community the way I did. I always have this compulsion to be the biggest bad ass. Even if only this one small secret way I don’t tell anyone about. I want to be the edge of the bell curve in intensity. That’s frankly dangerous in some communities. So after I broke up with Tom I knew I had to get the fuck out of that community. I wouldn’t survive more intense than what I did with Tom. I would have wanted someone who was a cocky asshole who had something to prove. If you’ve been hanged by the neck once you don’t need to do it again. I feel fairly certain that some day someone will fuck me with a gun. I don’t know who or when. That’s why I’m not in the bdsm community. I don’t need to find that person any year soon. I don’t need that temptation any year soon.

It’s hard knowing that I just don’t have the same attitude towards the sanctity of my life that other people have. I want to know what else I can survive. What else will get me off?

And I want to serve. It will happen again some day. I will find a way. I will figure out what I mean when I say I am a slave. And I will find a way to make it real in my life. I want to be part of building something. I want to subsume myself. I want to make a King.

I think talking about money is important.

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So after covering the checks I have already written for Occupy I have ~$32,000 sitting in my bank account. Do you know how much money I have to pay this month for various expenses? I owe $17,000 on credit cards. That will be paid off this month. I still haven’t paid property taxes or the mortgage or the domestic help or my therapy. That’s another $9,000. This is an unusually expensive month. Our income is settling in to about $8,000 per month. I am waiting to write checks for $17,650. That means that on the 30th of this month, if I succeed in giving all the money away, I will only have around $6,000 in cash. We have months that cost $15,000 on a fairly regular basis. We pay for a lot of things.

People who know me know that having a large financial cushion is kind of a ridiculous driving force for me. It’s unhealthy. I grew up in a kind of poverty I honestly don’t like thinking about. But holy fucking shit is my life different now.

That money was originally earmarked to pay off the Disney timeshare. I bought the timeshare when I realized it was only took four trips of the kind Sarah likes for her birthday to pay off the investment and we really do want to be at Disneyland every year… I bought it for Sarah and me. Noah wasn’t thrilled. Noah is not interested in spending that much time at Disneyland, thankyouverymuch. He’ll go. But not every year.

I have done Disneyland with Sarah enough times that it is worth it to me to buy the time share. Do you know why? Mostly because she is disabled. It is hard for her to expend the energy to travel long distances, sometimes even with motor devices. If we are in an apartment that is just a few yards away from an entrance she can afford the spoons to rest in the middle of the day and really enjoy evening stuff. It feels loving to be at Disneyland with Sarah. She appreciates it the same way my mom does. Just sitting on a bench with a book while people walk by makes her happy. Disneyland is a place to just sit and feel joy.

So I bought a fucking Disney time share and I feel like a privileged asshole. I feel strangely embarrassed that I bought this stupid thing. What a dumb fuck am I, right? Only dumb fucks buy time shares. It’s a racket. Geez. What a fucking waste of money. A number of people have told me off for this.

Do you know how many weeks of joy this has already brought me? Sarah and I get to dream about future vacations. They are paid for. I will have to pay for park tickets and gas to drive there. Otherwise we can cook in the apartment and it’s not any more expensive than being at home. Really.

It’s financed at 10% and I’m pissed off with myself for continuing to carry that debt. I wanted it paid off in a year. Err, that hasn’t happened. Other things keep coming up. Like getting my heart Occupied. Why is this so fucking important? Because people matter. We need a William Wallace. We need someone to step up. This is a Revolution. Hell, we need everyone to step up. What can you go do, today, tomorrow, and the next day to make the world a better place? Stop sitting in your house whining about your problems.

Says the whiny blogger who has barely left the house in months. Cause Jesus Christ, if anyone should stop whining it’s me. My life is the fantasy. My life is the mythical American Dream in all of the particulars. Oh, except that pesky PTSD shit. How do I fix me so that I can enjoy the American Dream?

Well, I’m writing. I think good will come from it. I think that is one of the gifts that was given to me in this lifetime. I can give people things to think about. They won’t always agree with me, probably rarely. But I want them to get to the point where they say, “Ok, I guess I can see why you feel the way you do.” That’s what I fucking want. I don’t need to have other people agree with me. I need them to understand WHY I am different. Why my opinion is different. Because maybe that will ripple. Maybe other people who have different opinions are ok too. Can we stop beating the shit out of political parties? What is the fucking point? Grow up you stupid babies.

People are people. I’m neither a Democrat nor a Republican. I kind of hate you all equally. And don’t get me started on how I feel about socialists. Or the members of my own, Libertarian party. I feel pretty embarrassed to be associated with them. Good grief. But it is the closest to what I believe.

I’m getting away from the point. When my heart was Occupied my priorities shifted. Noah is never going to want to stay home with me while working a part time job. He doesn’t want to. Ok. The dramatic need to lower our monthly expenses so that can happen… doesn’t really need to happen. If it takes longer and I pay more interest in the time share, that will be ok. Really. I can deal having to “tighten my belt”. We are part of the 99%. In order to maintain all the insurances folks consider necessary we have more than $6,000 of our income promised before it arrives. It’s $8,000. We have months where we put $17,000 on the credit card. You do the math. No really, that’s going to require some belt tightening. But I don’t exactly feel like I can complain about that.

And I have the money to spend. Occupy needs it more than I need to be able to have the lifestyle to which I have become accustomed. The fact that I can preplan 50 years of vacations means that my life is already as good as it needs to be.

The reason I feel I need to give the money is because people need a spark of hope. They need to see things being done. I can’t be the William Wallace for this movement. I really kind of wish I could. But that’s not my story. I’m trying to bait other people. I’m trying to push them to expand their dreams. Whoever is going to be the firebrand to lead this Revolution, (s)he will not have much money to start with. But there will be so much hunger. So many dreams. That person will say, “Yes give me your money so I can change the world.” I hope. I really hope.

In the meantime I took my family to a park clean up day in Oakland the Occupy folks organized. I have marched. I sit in the encampment and eat lunch and talk to the people who live there as I feel I can emotionally. I think my next clean up day should be in Fremont. I think that I’m about out of spoons for driving to Oakland.

I think maybe I should just open my front door and walk out it. I think I should Occupy the space I am in. Why am I trying so hard to give this money to Oakland? Why am I beating people over the head asking them to please please please take the money? Why don’t I start my own fucking occupation. Hm. It’s an idea. What would I do if I occupied Fremont? Hmm. I would start putting up notices for neighborhood clean up days. I’ll be surprised if I’m the only one out there. This is a small town in the middle of a big urban sprawl.

I’ve been surprised by how many of my neighbors have lived here for more than twenty years and they don’t know any of their neighbors. There is so much hostility and fear and isolation here. Why? I feel sad saying that I sat at the local diner and listened to the waitress be casually racist with the other customers. Despite the fact that I actually know a fair number of people in Fremont… I don’t see them. Pretty much ever. If you live in Fremont and you are “interesting” you spend your life in your car trying to get anywhere but here.

I’m getting tired of this attitude. Fremont is beneath people. I’ve done it too. I spent the first many years of our marriage being fucking pissed off living in this fucking house in fucking Fremont. This is one of the lowest socio-economic areas. Not the lowest, by any stretch. This is more like what I grew up with. My friends keep telling me to move to Alameda. I really don’t want to. I’m neither interested in the housing cost increase nor the insularity. I actually like that my neighborhood is not predominantly white. But I’m scared here. This is not really the safe bubble people think of in the bay area.

I’m in the closet. I can go protest in Oakland and be a radical and a pervert and a queer and whatever. People here just see me as that nice weird lady. I’m really polite to people in my neighborhood (uhhh except for the one time I yelled at a guy for wasting water while he was trying to deal with his lawn; long embarrassing story). I’m getting to know my neighbors very slowly. Very distantly. I’m trying to be consistent in my behavior over a long period of time without exposing them to my mood swings. I can’t afford to piss off my neighbors. Do you know how much pressure that is for me?

How in the hell can I expect my really diverse neighborhood to be thrilled about having a whore who writes about sex on the internet in their neighborhood? I’m out with the kids all the time. Aren’t they going to start looking at me as if I am dirty if they find out? Don’t I need to hide?

I think it is interesting that my friends think the Occupy movement is about money. I think it’s about pushing for the right to exist and be different and have a different life. Whatever the fuck that means. Our entire culture is set up around streamlining people so they can be more and more similar. I’m not fucking like the folks who grew up in small town Duluth (love you). And that’s more than ok. It’s awesome. I had different experiences so I got to go off and become a completely different kind of person. I’m not like the people who grew up in Rotorua, either. Or London near as I can tell. I go a lot of places and I meet a lot of people. I never fit. Nowhere.

Maybe I need to stop going out into the world trying to find someplace that is right. I think the Occupy movement is about seeing that something that needs to be changed and doing it. That will be financial for a lot of people. But it’s also about recognizing that we have abdicated a lot of responsibility to the system. Any system. How’s that going for folks? Maybe if we want something we have to just go fucking do it.

I want to feel ok in my town. I have to live here. But I can’t stay in the closet. This is horrible. I’m not much like most of the folks around me. But I’m not like folks anywhere. That’s ok. I may not be the right kind of Fremonter, but I’m the right kind of me. Yeah, it’s a stupid stupid little thing I say. I say it because I hope it’s true. I’m trying to convince myself it is. It’s very hard to believe that who and what I am is ok. That feels like a lie. So so so so so so many people tell me that I’m not ok. Not directly. Not to my face. But in the very air I breathe in this culture. I am so fucking wrong.

The General Strike showed me that I don’t feel that way because of the incest. I feel that way because I am an American. In fact, that seems to be our national culture. Anything different is wrong and bad. People, you need to lighten the fuck up. Maybe instead of sitting in an encampment in solidarity with people in Oakland I should be organizing a neighborhood group to figure out a way to meet the needs of the people within walking distance of me. That’s a significantly better choice for the planet.

But I will have to do that alone. I won’t be able to throw money at that problem and walk away. I will have to find the drive and determination to do that. I will probably mostly be the one doing that, if I think it should happen. It makes me tired. I can’t do that yet. I feel like I am failing my human beings. I feel like every day that I allow children to walk past my house on the way to school who are going hungry and I ignore that I am just as bad as the people who didn’t help me. I have so much rage at all of the people who didn’t help me.

Who the fuck am I helping? I don’t know. I hope that the RV comes through. That would be something. I wish I knew where my life was going. I feel like I am littering the path with burning ambitions. Things that hurt me that I am not focusing on them exclusively. You can’t focus on a dozen things exclusively. There isn’t enough me for that.

I really hope this movement spreads. Please people, you can change the world too. It doesn’t actually take money. It takes the desire to do good. You’ll find a way. Please?

Fun plotting.

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I’m drawing pictures of my imaginary house. I like to think about what I would change. It’s kind of daunting to think of paying for it. I don’t want to finance it. I’m really repelled by the idea of paying interest on things that I want. It strikes me as the wrong approach to life. It is going to cost at least $250,000. Realistically, a shit load more than that but not everything has to be bought at once. That’s about the original asking price of the house.

My neighborhood is full of renters. This area could change for better or worse easily. I have no guarantee of recouping my investment. That will be an easier pill to swallow if I save up the money in advance and have it to spare. The problem with loans is that you are signing on to always and forever have this obligation. It makes me uncomfortable.

A lot of it could be done for cheaper if I wanted to do it myself and deal with “close enough”. After looking around my garage for a few months I can tell you I won’t be happy with “close enough” forever in my whole house. I’m kind of tired of living in a cage. I want a house with a lot of light. My entire childhood I lived in close dark cramped quarters. I don’t have to do this forever. As my children grow and invite friends over… I am going to need to have somewhere to go other than my bedroom. If I want my kids to have friendships that do not bend at my whims, I have to have a place to be away from them.

When people glorify the Noble Savage and idealize that behavior into AP dogma things get twisted. I don’t live in a tribe. It’s not possible for me to give as much constant contact as that requires. AP as preached by the extremists on MDC (just to be clear who I am talking about) is pretty restrictive. And the choices they advocate can be right given a very narrow set of circumstances which apply to their lives.

I honestly believe that if I lived in po’dunk North Dakota I would not have vaccinated my kids and I would have laughed my ass off at people who told me my kids were at risk for the diseases that are mostly wiped out in this country. If I lived in Missouri… I’d look at what diseases are happening in Mexico and I’d vaccinate based on that. I like international travel. I like going off and creating stories. I feel absolutely driven to be an interesting person. Damnit. My kids need to be vaccinated.

But not for chicken pox. Or rotovirus. Or the flu. I think we overmedicate as a country. I will tell my kids about chicken pox and try to expose them when they are young, but if we don’t catch it in the wild I will vaccinate them at 12. Earlier if they tell me that I am nuts and they don’t want chicken pox. I get the impression Shanna will be the kind of girl who speaks her opinion. At least occasionally.

Anyway. All this to say that I think we will get along better as she grows up if we have a bigger house. I have issues. I know this. The thing is, all those Noble Savage societies have a very different structure to their entire community. They have more support than a nuclear family does in America. It’s an apples to oranges comparison. It’s not that a child must have mommy 24/7. A child needs to be cared for by consistent caregivers 24/7. It’s not the same thing. I can believe that an infant in the first few months may fare better with just mommy. I now have a toddler and a kid! I don’t have a baby any more!

The upside of having married Noah is… I can have dreams and know that I don’t have to be the only road to accomplishing them. I can’t express the safety that feels like. It makes my breath come short. When I’m hiding by myself of course I dream of having the book I write in November be good enough to publish. It’s a nice dream. But I spend about five minutes doing that. I don’t think it’s good to think too hard about that. I think about what I want to say. And why it’s worth saying.

I have a lot of format ideas that I’ve been noodling with for years. Noah has listened to more teary conversations where I sob that I want to write a book about everything that has happened than I care to count. I need to do it so I can move past this phase of my life. I’m not over it. I haven’t said enough about it. There isn’t anyone in the world who knows the story from start to finish other than me. I lost the people who were my witnesses.

I have to write it down. I can’t be the only one who knows I exist and why I exist the way I am. It’s not fair. They can’t do that to me. They can’t take away my right to have eople in the wolrd who know know me. They can’t isolate me. They can’t tell me I am a liar. They can’t take my story away from me and call it a lie. Fuck them.

I want to write my story because it is true. And it fucking bothers me that no one but me saw it. I’m tired of being told that I am lying. I need to feel that intimacy with people. And a few people will read it. I hope it will be told in a way that is good enough to publish and a lot of people will read it. I hope people will get an edutainment out of it. It’s not that I’m always right. I’m not. It’s that my perspective is different. It is jarring to people. That is why I identify as white trash. I have a way of speaking, of presenting myself into the world with aggression. But not just that. I call attention to myself with things that are kind of tacky.

Just wait till I’m done with my house, y’all. It’ll be great. Do you know what I’ve learned sitting here in my wonderful garage? I’m not satisfied with close enough. I despise the unfinished wires. I loathe the exposed pipes. I have a friend who offered to help (he means do all the work; he’s sweet) me fix a lot of that cosmetic stuff. But none of that would change the fact that the city of Fremont says this can’t be a living space. It’s a garage. That’s why I won’t call it a den or office or whatever. It’s a garage. It’s a great garage… but it’s a garage. I want to move up in the world. This will never be good enough for me. I will always feel like I am hiding in the dark. I need more light. The living room isn’t really good enough either.

I won’t ever be happy in this house until there is a lot more light and higher ceilings. It’s too claustrophobic and dark. It reminds me of the house in the mountains. It’s not the color of the walls–which I like. I am not a tall woman. I can touch my ceiling. I have tall friends. I dislike that they have to duck and be made smaller in my house. It’s a standard ceiling. I have to jump. I don’t care. It’s like trying to get around in a 6′ town when you’re 10′ tall. I hate it. I would never have picked this house. And moving isn’t the right option for a variety of reasons. A more expensive house would still be wrong because what I want is a custom house. I can do that here.

So how the fuck do I raise that much money. Well, as it so happens, I married this geek. He makes a decent salary. If he keeps going at the rate he is going financially it can happen in about 13 years. That’s a long time to be impatient. How much do I want the money? When would I like to do the remodel? These are interesting questions. The big structural stuff I simply can’t do. I can’t add a second story full of windows and reinstall the solar panels. I’m good, but I have my limits. We just replaced the roof. Most of the stuff I’m seeing says that I can expect it to last 15-20 years. Tap fingers. It’s been on for two years. Twitch. Well. That gives me a lot of time to save money. There is no chance I will tear it up in the next ten years. That’s a kind of wasteful that would turn my stomach.

Ok. I can fuss with the garage. And try to be frugal. And put money away. I can have that dream. It’s just long-term. I kind of hate the long-term. Ack. It’s terrifying to think of committing, truly committing, to being in this house in ten years with a track record of maintaining the same financial pattern for that long. It makes my blood run cold. That’s a lot of fucking pressure.

Side note. Right now I have Rascal Flatt’s song Stand on repeat.

On your knees you look up
Decide you’ve had enough
You get mad, you get strong
Wipe your hands, shake it off
Then you stand, then you stand

Learning to marathon means that some goals are just not a high priority. No matter how intense they feel in some moments. I will have to learn how to live in close quarters with a lot of people for a while. I do need privacy. I need to learn how to create that space for writing. I need to get the book done and over with. I have too many uuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhh I wannnnnnnnnnna in my brain. I need to get one of them done. I have proven to my own satisfaction that I know this story. I can tell it. And I can certainly do it quickly. I can write the whole thing down in one go.

But I can’t blog it. Blogging is different. Every time I blog I write to a different person. I have a different ideal reader and I’m trying to coax a different reaction. I need to write the book for Noah. And I can’t do it with him reading and nodding and changing his behavior in random ways near me. I would be influenced. It’s really hilarious to me to think that. Noah is too important to me in a global fashion. If I want to truly create something for him I have to do it in complete absence of his knowledge of it. Otherwise he will come home from work grump on a day when I posted something I am particularly proud of and I will feel crushed and I will stall on writing.

I use blogging as a crutch. I have learned to write in blogging. I don’t know if that will translate to a book.

Take what you are given before it is gone

I have a story to tell. Not telling it is interfering with my life. That means it is time to stop medicating to prevent my story from being present. It means telling it fully from start to finish. And then stopping. And letting it go. Maybe only Noah and Sarah will read it and care. I don’t believe that is true. I’m actually terrified. I’m afraid only Noah and Sarah will read it and care. I’m afraid that it will only influence them. Because it will influence them.

Writing this book will change Sarah and Noah. Eventually it will change Shanna and Calli. I won’t tell either of them about the book until they are adults or until it is so famous I have no choice. But this having this book in existence in complete form means that I can have people who can fully speak my verbal shorthand. I can create a way to be fully present in all my broken glory with the adults in my life without having to constantly think about it and try to keep it away from my kids. Blogging isn’t enough.

I want stories to be comfortable and familiar. I don’t want to feel like I am unmasking more abuse constantly. I want the adults in my life to be able to help me censor for my children. I want to be able to say that I am thinking about Tommy and have them be able to ask, “What about him?” and be able to give them a useful answer. One that will allow them to be present with me as an adult as someone who sees me without me having to tell this long gory story in front of my kids.

I feel this constant pressure to monitor every word out of my mouth. I feel horribly uncomfortable because I want to feel this intimacy with Noah and Sarah and it eats me alive. I can rectify this problem. I can spill my guts. And then I can relax and listen to them talk and stop feeling so driven to share my story all the time. I want to be able to listen. Right now I don’t listen. I blog and then I nod along waiting for them to mention it and help me process… only those bastards have lives. My writing is for me.

I need to just write for me. It’s not working how I want it to work. Let’s try a different approach.

Life’s like a novel with the end ripped out.

It’s time to go do life.

Evil Soul

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So I’m a counter phobic 6, as least that is what Noah tells me. And Rebecca. And other people concurred. Maybe someday I will study the Enneagram and I will decide if I agree or not. Until then all I know is the more something scares me the more intensely focused on it I am. And right now I am so terrified of what I am currently thinking about that I am shaking. It is difficult to type. The thing is, what I am afraid of is being called a liar. I’m afraid of someone reading this and saying it isn’t true. When I first starting writing about things like this I was in graduate school. It was actually a fiction writing class. I chose to write creative non-fiction, basically telling stories about my trauma, because I couldn’t think of anything else to write. I didn’t present it that way to the class. One of the other students was very assertive in her position that what I was writing was unrealistic and not very good. I haven’t ditched that criticism yet, though I should.

I’m scared to write about these things because they are crazy. Really, seriously crazy. Why do I think they are that crazy? Because I have spent my adult life around atheists who have no patience for the woo. But I believe in the woo. And I need to own that and stop beating around the bush and just… say it.

Oh god this hurts. I found it. I had to come back to it. I had to come looking for the dark place instead of waiting for it to find me. That was harder than I thought. It was a lot harder than I thought to get back to this frantic state where I have to type or I am going to explode. It is even neat to me that I can’t say these words, I do need to type them. Thank god for computers. Fuck computers. That’s my life. And I’m already losing it. Shit.

After therapy this week Noah and I decided that it was a great night to go do more of the two chair thing starting at about 10. I was wired for sound. Something that came up a lot in therapy and then later with Noah was thinking about my current level of suicidal ideation. It’s really at an alarmingly high level. I feel more active compulsion than I have in years. My therapist asked me if I wanted to get into it with her and I told her no. When I told Noah that I had done that he responded with, “Ah! A challenge!” or the slightly less bombastic equivalent, which nonetheless means the same thing.

I am suicidal. Statistically speaking it’s really quite unsurprising. My particular brand of suicidal seems to be spurred mostly by shame. But here I am using my analytic voice. And each word of composition is ponderously considered, difficultly spelled, and not conducive to actually doing this. Let’s try something else.

It’s really scary to let these feelings come up. I feel intense pressure in my chest. I feel my throat tighten. I want to sob uncontrollably and yet I can’t breathe enough to get out sound. This is one of the feelings that produce intense, copious liquid tears. Often in other times when I cry I rack with sobs but no liquid comes out. I wonder why there is such variation in crying. And oh look. That was a really weak ass, uninteresting derail. Maybe some discomfort? Ha.

I don’t wanna. I don’t wanna talk about being terrible. I don’t want to say out loud that I believe I am evil. I believe my brother and my father are dead because I was loud and drew attention to myself and everything bad that came after is all my fault. I believe I am evil because my father whispered into my ear from when I was a tiny child that I was a witch. I have casually told stories for years about my maternal grandmother being a witch and I’ve told stories about things she supposedly did.

I learned every single one of those stories from my father. And the grandmother in question was not his. He was villainizing—no… he was literally demonizing my mother’s bloodline. He bloody well convinced me that I cannot escape being evil. He repeatedly encouraged me to seek out black magic because I had powers. When I was a teenager I read a bunch of books about Wicca, Shamanism, and a few other off-shoot pagan religions. I tried to cast a spell on a then-boyfriend to make him become obsessed with me. Hey, The Craft had just come out. He did become pretty obsessed with me. I think it’s much more likely that he became obsessed with me because I was a pretty girl who was willing to have sex with him.

But oh my god. I have built up this entire narrative in my life about how that scared me off of trying to pursue more magical endeavors because I have power. That is the crux of it. I have power. I do. The fact that I have survived my life is pretty much proof. I have survived my father molesting me all through my earliest memories. I have survived risky sexual activity during the periods of intense acting out I have had. The 25 year old man who fucked me at my request when I was 12 years old didn’t wear a condom. He was a drug dealer in Santa Clara. His name was Sean David Segura. And no, I don’t feel bad for naming him. Yes, I do. I hate that I feel like he deserves the shield of anonymity. He didn’t rape me and I’m not claiming he did. Only I was 12 years old and reeling from the last time my father sexually assaulted me and I wasn’t being supervised because no one gave a shit about me and I ran wild. I did it because everyone in my life was forcing me to be a grown up but I wasn’t fucking ready. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready. I have been having sex as a consenting adult since I was 12 years old. That’s 18 years. Super Bowl Sunday is my “anniversary”. No wonder I feel so.fucking.old. I started working when I was 15. It was intermittent at first, but I contributed an awful lot towards my support. My mother would pick up my paycheques and dole out my $20/week allowance. It was festive. This is relevant, but not what I am doing tonight.

I have power. I have gone through fucking hell. My early childhood was abusive in ways I am just beginning to be able to understand. I became an adult at 12 years old. I made some really really bad choices along the way. I did not choose the straight and narrow at pretty much any point. Why did I survive? How was I able to keep so much of me private from my family and the abuse? I think I have power. I don’t know how to explain this and I’ve spent my lifetime wracking it back and forth in my brain. I don’t even know if this is just how it works for absolutely everyone on the planet. But when I decide I want something I god damn make it happen. Whether it is good or bad. The only thing really big goal I have set that I haven’t made was getting my masters. But I started grad school because I wanted to have more knowledge before I started being a teacher because I felt unqualified. Uhm, well, I met that goal. Why again am I a failure because I didn’t obtain a piece of paper that would impress other people but not improve my life? Yeah, scratch that. I am a god damn rock star. When I say I am going to do something, I do it.

Only that’s not true. That’s the positive side of my brain. I’m there maybe 70% of the time when I’m doing extraordinarily well. I’m there like 45% of the time right now. It’s odd to flipflop back and forth between that kind of optimism and the kind of overwhelming self-hatred I have. I don’t have ‘meh’ feelings about myself. I either think I am amazingly wonderful or I am so despicable that I am using the power I have to do evil. Oh, and I have lots of silly examples of things that I decide I want and then they magically appear in my life (no really) but the best one is the dream about Tommy’s accident. I haven’t explained that yet. It’s 11:43 pm on a Thursday night and my children will be awake (possible multiple times) within 6 hours. Why the hell not tell that story. (Editing note: it is now 3:48 am on Saturday and I haven’t slept much since starting this.)

(Minor background note: my parents divorced when I was 3. There was knowledge at the time of the divorce of sexual abuse but the belief was it only happened to my sister. Or at least that is what I was always told growing up. I am currently struggling with my feelings around what I think my mom did or didn’t know and that’s challenging for me. But that’s a digression for a different day. My mom and I bounced around moving a lot. I went to 25 schools before dropping out of high school in my junior year. My brothers mostly lived with our father.)

So to start this right, I have to set the stage. That’s what you do, right? I was either 6 or 7. Tommy wanted to come live with us for a while. We were living with Auntie and Uncle B. in Northern California in the house they still live in. One night Tommy and I were bickering, as a 6ish and 10ish year old sibling pair will do that sort of thing. My uncle intervened. Specifically speaking he started yelling at my brother and spilled a cup of boiling liquid on my brother. Luckily my brother escaped major damage. But that was it. We were out.

Basically, I baited my brother and then we had to move. But I don’t want to leave the story like that. There was a lot going on. My brother and I had weird sibling dynamics. I was significantly more intelligent than him and better in school but he was good at sports and charming and knew how to get along. I was prickly and difficult and acting out. I wasn’t an innocent victim in the situation, but neither am I to blame for all of it. And ultimately it was my mother, as the adult, who handled the situation badly and abused us and set us up to fight so… yeah. Maybe not any of it was really my fault. But it will always feel like my fault. It will always feel like I was mean to Tommy and then everything in my life blew up. That is my story. That is what is stuck in my head. That is the age I am. I’m 7. Maybe I should do some research on 7 year olds. And that is the end of where this digression is useful.

My mom packed up our stuff and drove south through LA to drop off Tommy back at our dad’s house. My mom and I went off to Oklahoma and Texas and that was a whole adventure. Texas is was where I was raped for the first time when I was 7. But one night in May of 1989 my brother Tommy was hit by a car. Specifically, he was hit by a drunk accident injury attorney. It’s almost comedic. Only it’s tragic. He was on drugs and the belief is that he was more or less trying to commit suicide. He succeeded. He was hit by a car on Imperial Highway, which if you know Southern California is a major road.

(Side note: shoulders, center of breath and ability to move between mindsets)

Tommy died. Sure they brought him back but he was never the same. He had a severe traumatic brain injury. He had a horrible life up until I prosecuted my father and Tommy once again tried to kill himself. This time he went out walking and bought a gas can. He went behind a shopping center. He doused himself in gasoline and he lit himself on fire. Tommy was still alive when they got him to the hospital even though 80% of his body was burned. My father, in one of the most magnanimous acts of his life, told them to turn off life support and let Tommy die.
The story in my head is that Tommy’s suicide was my fault because I prosecuted my father and Tommy couldn’t handle the idea of our father going to prison. But it’s total fucking bullshit. The truth is Tommy had been suicidal from when he was a small child and he tried over and over and over and over in more and less successful ways over the years. There was a long period where he had to wear a helmet and boxing gloves full time because he had a habit of shoving his head through windows for fun. How in the hell is it my fault that he finally succeeded?

But it is. And I am trembling with terror as I try to write this. My lizard brain is screaming out in terror no no no no no no I’m bad I’m bad I’m bad it’s all my fault. I killed Tommy. I killed Tommy twice with my selfishness. God gave him back and let me have a second chance at being a good little sister and I killed my big brother twice. And I believe this because I believe I have the power to influence things great and small. And I hated Tommy more than almost anyone on this earth.

Admitting that about my poor, dead brother makes me wrack with sobs. You are not supposed to speak ill of the dead. Tommy had a brain injury. It wasn’t his fault. I should be loving in my thoughts towards him. But I’m fucking glad the son of a bitch is dead. As much as my every memory of my father is laced with molestation, every memory of Tommy is laced with cruelty. He liked to see me in pain. Really it was my first SM relationship and I just didn’t know it. Tommy would arrange to have other people beat me up. Tommy was there the day I was thrown off the monkey bars and broke my arm when I was 6. He pretty much told the kid to do it. After the accident Tommy hated me with the intensity of the sun. He did things to me that hurt every single day. Practically any time I came within arms reach. As he got older and further through puberty he would attack me and try to knock me down so he could rape me.

Our father told him that if he couldn’t get sex outside the family it was my responsibility to provide it for him and he was allowed to take it.
This was my reality growing up. These were the things that went on behind closed doors. And I’m talking about them. I’m telling the secrets. And I feel like I will choke to death. I feel intense shame and horror. Seeing these stories in front of me like this hurts. When the stories just keep coming and there is detail after detail after detail and I know I am leaving 90% of the horror out of the story for the sake of time to write it all down…oh my god. It was monstrous. Why does this continually surprise me? Because day by day one atrocity at a time you can’t see the picture. You can’t see how horrible it is. And this is a nice digression and all, but it feels awfully comfy and that can’t be useful.

Yes, actually there is something very useful here. I grew up to have a four year long bdsm relationship with a man named (tbd). I called him Daddy. For two of those years (the middle two) we were in a 24/7 Master/slave relationship. Oh my god. There is so much there to write about. I need to write about him. But not today. Not till he says it is ok.

I’m supposed to be talking about being suicidal. But I really don’t want to. It hurts to talk about being suicidal. And I’m experiencing a lot of bursts of manic creativity in other directions and that is really rare for me so I am on to something big. This has to be huge. What the fuck is this.
I’m feeling a lot of internal pushback about talking about the witchcraft stuff. This is really hard for me. This is the part where I start to feel awkward and uncomfortable because I don’t feel secure that it is ok to have the beliefs that I have. Right this minute I’m feeling very freaked out because what portion of my very odd belief structure is taken directly from my father’s brain washing. Oh my fucking god I was brainwashed into believing magic and believing that I am an evil force in the world.

No no no no. Fuck you. I’m not going to do that. Saying that does not make it true. I feel incredibly uncomfortable with the idea of being brainwashed. I’m not going to let that be something I sit with right now. I’m allowed to make that choice.

I believe in magic. I believe that if you want something bad enough you will take action and create that thing in your life. I believe this is a
positive and good thing. Given that I have repeatedly managed to shove myself through ridiculous amounts of work in very short periods of time I would say it works for me. I’m allowed to have this belief without my father being allowed to take it away. I wonder if that is behind the current obsession with Alice in Wonderland. I’m playing in my mind with the idea of agency and Alice is certainly a very different character through the different representations of her. I feel like I am turning about looking in funhouse mirrors trying to figure out which version of my agency is the right one. How much control do I get to believe I have in the universe.

Oh god this hurts. I found it. I had to come back to it. I had to come looking for the dark place instead of waiting for it to find me. That was harder than I thought. I believe that my father’s death is my fault. I believe it with an intensity that consumes me. And I have a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome and I want my fucking Daddy. That is what is going on. I am thinking about him molesting me. I am thinking about him hurting me. I want him. I want to be hurt. I want to do an intense sm scene. I want to do something horrible and destructive.

I want to kill myself.

What other act is there in the world that I could commit that would prove beyond the shadow of a doubt to every single person in the whole wide world that I am a worthless piece of shit and my father wanted to rape me and I kind of wish he had. I wish he had raped me instead of killing himself because then I wouldn’t feel this fucking guilty. And that is what I am hiding from. And that. Oh dear god.

I believe that prosecuting him was an evil act that forced him to do it. I believe I had the ability, with my hate, to do that to him. But I don’t really have that power. And I wasn’t acting out of evil. I was a scared half-kid-half-adult who was flailing around trying to not die. There was no bad in defending myself. I’m allowed to say no. I know that now, as an adult.

The funny thing is, reading this… you’d think I have trouble expressing boundaries. But I don’t. I’m actually fantastically good at expressing boundaries. I explore how to expand and retract them as necessary on a frequent basis. I put exhausting quantities of energy into defending my boundaries in a way that I believe is in the “range of acceptable normal boundaries” and I have to see it that way or I can’t do it at all.

I’m going to take a break here to say that this piece of writing is brought to you courtesy of a California Medical Marijuana permit. Without it I would be crying and beating my head against a wall and trying to slit my wrists. Instead I am writing productively in a way that is completely outside the parameters of my normal life and I am able to carry on as a functional human being during the day. Right now I am fighting to save my life because if I don’t deal with the extent of my father sexually assaulting me I don’t know if I will see my daughters grow up because I don’t know where else to begin fighting the monsters in my head. I have to say all of this out loud. And that is hard. That means going places my brain doesn’t want to let me go. I have to hack my brain and it hurts a lot. I’m not sure I can say I recommend this method of dealing with trauma. But if you feel like you don’t have a lot of time, why the hell not. I think this is my favorite digression ever.

See, I don’t want to talk about being suicidal. Being suicidal hurts. It makes me cry. I feel like I am evil and bad. No really. I believe that with an intensity that overwhelms me at random points in my life and I cannot focus on what is before me. I think I am barely aware it is happening, but it colors my intense paranoia. I am not reaching out to specific people right now because I believe no one wants me to. And I truly know this is paranoia because I sent out an invitation to a birthday party on Labor Day weekend five months in advance and within 24 hours I had 27 people who said they wanted to be there. It is simply not possible that everyone in the world thinks I am bad. It is more likely that people are busy and don’t notice me. It’s not personal. But I am doing what my mother does. I am sitting at home feeling like everything is wrecked forever and ever and ever because this terrible thing happened to our family and I can’t get passed it. Only for me right now it is the story of my abuse. I am stuck in cycles that are not good for me. I am trying to blow up my life because I cannot handle stability. I cannot handle stability because I was horrifically abused. I need to work through that and it’s going to hurt.

I am suicidal because I am the victim of incest and sexual assault. I am suicidal because I believe the things my father told me. I believe I am evil and a witch. I believe it deep in my monkey brain and I don’t know how to get these things out of me.

No. Fuck that noise. I don’t know yet. I haven’t done it yet. Just because I haven’t done it yet doesn’t mean I won’t. It will just be harder. I’m really tired of harder. I’d like a break one of these years. But if I have to get stronger I will. Because that is what I do. Because that is who I am. I have a really good, really stable life now and I am not going to fuck it up. I am going to hold it together. And I am going to write in the middle of the night. And I will get passed this.

But not in this essay. Because it is now 5:22 am on Saturday morning. My agenda for today is rather a busy one you see. Today I get to: finish the side yard drainage problem no matter how long it takes me nor how much it hurts because otherwise I won’t have a smooth pathway for people to walk on when they come to my Easter party and it is very very very important to me in my neurosis that when people come to my home they have a smooth path. No one there would judge me poorly in any way if I said, “We had a flooding problem in the last rainstorm and the yard is full of weird potholes because I have been dealing with a severe mental health crisis and I haven’t had time to deal with it!” But that’s not ok to say. That would be stepping all over the boundaries of everyone who wants to be generically, softly encouraging of my life in a light social way. So instead I will write intense journal entries in the middle of the night. I will frantically repair my side yard until I believe that I will not be embarrassed to have people see it. Before anyone gives me a panicked phone call, I’ve got it mostly done. You see, I don’t have the luxury of sitting down to do a project all in one go in one day basically ever. I’ve been working on the side yard for days. My entire body hurts. I am physically and mentally exhausted. I feel like I have nothing left to give to any part of my life.

But do you know what I will do? I will finish the delicious scone I have been noshing on with a nod to my wonderful online girlfriend who is doing a lot to help me grow right now and I will plaster a smile on my face. This was a really really big success in the war for me. I’m proud of it. No one gets to make me be silent any more. I can talk about my demons. I can brainstorm ways to deal with them. I can invite commentary. I can be real about the fact that there are two sides to every story but the only one that matters in my recovery is mine. I have to be aware of not losing my story to thoughts of being the scapegoat. I am not to fucking blame for almost anything that happened to me as a child. And I have behavioral patterns that I watch like a hawk. Because I have come a long way. I do hold it together. Shit. Or maybe this will be a rough day. Fuck.

The best things in life are free

2 Replies

There has been a lot of talk lately ’round the old homestead about what we want from life. We have been coasting. This is a hard phase and we need to just ride it out until things improve. But that’s not happening fast enough and I need some kind of change. I need to be growing towards stuff. GOALS! Necessarily this promotes conversation about what kinds of goals to set.

What I am beating around the bush to say is, Noah wants to be rich. But that doesn’t really tell you much, does it? What does rich really mean? Does it mean rivaling Bill Gates? Does it mean getting to sit down for a chat with Warren Buffet? Not so much. Our goal is for Noah to have to work 20 hours or less for us to maintain our current lifestyle. In my opinionated opinion our life is rather comfy. Our life is rather comfy because he earns a lot of money. The important thing to remember is that we are just beginning with this goal. Most likely we will mess up in several big ways (already have once) and I’ll talk about those here too. I think there is no value in trying to make us sound better than we are. Ok, on to figuring out what we have. This may take more than one posting.

Right this minute we have three checking accounts (long story[1]) and one savings account. The sum total of cash in them is $7,439.28. This wouldn’t sound so bad if our current credit card balances didn’t equal $6,223.43. That is the closest petty cash:debt ratio in the course of our marriage. Typically our buffer is much higher than that. But ok fine. We’ve had an expensive couple of years with having two kids and replacing our roof and such. That’s ok! Not to fear. This is less dire than it appears because we are… privileged people. Oh good grief are we privileged. Soon we will be getting cheques from a wide variety of sources. And not just in the, “Oh I swear” kind of way.

I think I will start by examining our spending for the past 15 months that I have been using Mint.com. Now you will see how ridiculously extravagant we are.

I first looked at 15 months of financial history on all of our credit cards.
Total spending: $68,660[2]
Average monthly: $4,577
Lowest month: $1,968[3]
Highest month: $8,540[4]

That’s a rather significant variation there. (Keep in mind that this is credit card spending and doesn’t include things like our mortgage, another rather sizable [5] payment each month.) Oof.

Then I went on to looking at our largest expenses which are unusual and/or not likely to be repeated unless we choose to. So for example, I will not be having another child. I will, however, continue to need sudden and unexpected medical and/or dental treatments for goodness knows what in the future. And my children will have accidents. So I did not include most medical items. I also excluded house repairs, vehicle repairs, computer purchases, and the ongoing maintenance fee for the time share.

This left me with (on credit cards):

Travel: $9,654
Turek: $3.250 [6]
DVC: $7510
French Laundry: $1,053
Therapy: $750 [7]

The largest unusual purchases out of our checking account were:

NewsLabs: $12,734 ($25,000) [8]
Toyota: $24,694 [9]
Home Birth: $4,000
Lawyer: $2900

Travel is the most obvious thing to cut, only we haven’t even started traveling for the year. My second oldest friend in the world is getting married in Scotland. And I really love travel so realistically this isn’t something I want to suspend long term. Luckily we don’t have to plan for another vasectomy any year soon. I won’t buy into another time share. I promise. I’m thrilled with the one I have though. French Laundry isn’t something we will be doing again any year soon so that can come off. The investment money for NewsLabs came out of stock so isn’t really part of my budget. The van was part of the refinance so doesn’t really count for this. And I don’t think we’ll be needing to pay for another home birth nor to do that kind of intensive legal work.

That means I am trying to convince myself that $18,713 is fairly unlikely to happen again and are the result of an unusually expensive year. This is what I tell myself, right?

If I subtract $18,713 (the truly unusual stuff) from $68,660 (the total) that gives me $49,947 or $3330/month.

That’s an interesting number to me. Most months one paycheque pays mortgage stuff and the other paycheque handles the credit cards. Previously Noah was taking home ~$2900/paycheque. Noah has since gotten a different job with an increased salary. I kind of love this valley. Hm. I am not sure where to go with this now so I’ll let this be. I will come back to this topic though. I want to figure out how to get to the point where passive income is sufficient.

1. Ok, short-ish version: One bank account I have had since I was 18. That’s where my annuities are deposited. It is a pain to change anything with the annuities because I have to do it through the mail and everything requires visiting a notary. They will stop coming in September of this year and that is the only activity in that account. The second bank account was our failed attempt at a higher interest checking account. E*trade sucks. It is being phased out. The third checking account (and the savings too) are now with a local credit union.
2. Yes I’m rounding. I’m lazy.
3. Second lowest was $1,974 so not a complete fluke.
4. Second highest was $7,520 so this is an unusually high month.
5. Is anyone sick of the footnoting yet? Noah just taught me how to do it and I’m excited. And our mortgage payment is $2164/month but I pay $2300/month.
6. Noah’s vasectomy; worth every penny.
7. Therapy is a new-ish category because while I have gone intermittently for a while I need to be going regularly for a while and that is a new $600/month expense.
8. Our first attempt at Angel investing. We did better than median (lose everything) but we only did that because the company folded so fast they didn’t have a chance to blow all the money. Right. I hear that some of the other companies we saw that day (none of whom wanted our money) are doing very well.
9. We refinanced our house and took out some equity to pay off the van because it had a ruinous interest rate and our new mortgage is 4.375%. It was a rather good trade.

2 Replies

So my first living on less challenge for myself. We have Easter coming up and I would like to host a brunch for some friends. I think it sounds like fun. Because I am a huge dorkwad a lot of what I want to do is get my back yard to a place where it would be fun to be in. I need a short-term goal to reach. I want to spend no more than $50, to be taken out of our entertainment budget. How am I going to reach this goal? There are many things to figure out. How many people would I like to host? In particular, Shanna and I are both excited about the upcoming egg hunt. I’m not sure if our friends-with-small-kids will want to come over though. Well, you have to ask if you want things so I’ll figure that bit out. We’ll have to decide what kinds of foods to serve and decorating. On $50. It’s a good thing I have some time to plan.

Luckily I already have someone coming (hopefully today) to take the shed out of my back yard and I found a table/chair/umbrella set on freecycle a couple of weeks ago. That’s the first big step towards making the backyard more fun for a party. I also need to go find some free fill dirt for some of the fuss in the yard. That’s going to be exciting. But! This can be done!

I would like to have some decorations as well. I wonder what Shanna and I can make. 🙂

And the next phase begins.

4 Replies

This weekend didn’t quite go as expected. I didn’t know I was standing on the edge of a precipice about to fall in as fast as possible. I’m ready for my life to be different. I’m ready to go find some new dreams. I realized a while ago that I was feeling frustrated by the limited scope of my life, but I wasn’t sure what to do about it. We are stuck, right? We have these little kids and we made agreements about how we wanted them raised so now I am stuck with those decisions (and this situation) forever. Or at least till the kids are older.

But isn’t life dynamic? This situation is untenable. Something–or, rather, a whole lot of things need to change. So we got to talking. We got to talking about what our lives could look like if we were luckier, or richer, or more determined. We talked about the extremes of what we would each like to have. We tried to figure out how our separate passions and interests can work together. The odd part has always been that we have tremendously different focii in life, yet we manage to be obsessed with one another and we get along far better than I’ve ever gotten along with anyone. Ok, if we are going to be very different people on very different paths, we need to find a way to hold hands at least from our separate paths. I can do it! I can reach out and hold on to the most important man I’ve ever had in my life.

Noah’s dreams are his to share, so I’ll let that rest for the time being. But as for myself, I need a change. I need to be more than a lactating, cleaning, cooking machine. No thanks. I want to have things that I do that are interesting to me. I want to *complete* projects. I want to grow and develop ambitions of my own. Some of the ways I want to grow do actually involve working–but not necessarily for someone else and not necessarily for money. I have to learn how to value me and my time appropriately. I’ve had good reason to think about that lately.

So I’ve been trying to determine what my dreams/goals can be. In what areas of my life do I want to stretch my wings and fly? The first and most important thing to me is realizing that it’s ok to be weird. That must sound odd to anyone who knows me. I experience a lot of anxiety around being odd. Especially in some particular ways. I’m totally ok with making financial choices and living with the results of those decisions. Unless the results make me look like my vision of poor white trash. There, I said it. I have class issues. I grew up being driven around in ugly, old trucks–often that had been “modified” with a blow torch (like my uncle’s truck that had been an RV and he used a blow torch somehow to take most of the RV shell off and leave a weird almost pick up truck from the RV shell). No thanks. I have to discover the difference between having shit because you can’t afford any better and having shit because you want to fly to Europe instead. Not that any part of my house actually qualifies as “shit” and I sold Noah’s ugly truck already.

I live in a small, not especially nice home. There isn’t much I can do about that other than change my attitude and possibly my decor so that I actually like my house. There are always going to be limitations to living here–it really is a small home and the layout is not the best–but I can work on changing things about this house so that I like it here. I am in this house at least 16/24 hours 7 days a week. Lately, much much more time than that. Why shouldn’t my house be someplace that makes me happy? So I am going to change things. I’m nervous about where I will find the money. I think that house projects need to become my big ‘entertainment’ budget and I should stop buying my children clothing to fund it. I’m kidding. Mostly. It is lucky that we are set for clothes for pretty much the rest of the year.

Right this exact minute we are nearly in a financial place that gives me hives. We are running out our buffer. We are doing so for quite a few good reasons and the money will be replaced this year–but I’m scared. I can feel the terror of being poor. It’s hard to convince my lizard brain that we are not on the verge of poverty. This would be because of vehicle maintenance and property taxes. Ugh. But it is temporary because the checks to fix it are on their way. I’m just over-sensitive. You see, I have panic attacks if we drop below three months of salary in savings. And Noah makes a lot of money. But! It’ll be ok. It’s probably a good thing for me to be cautious with money. Noah does want us to get rich.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Category Archives: goals

Evading laundry

Bucket list: Run a marathon

Stupidly defensive.

Compulsions

frustrated

I’m sorry

Anything is possible

First world problems

Thinking about forgiveness

OO money and other opportunities

Irrational feelings

In which I reveal the extent of my ego.

I think talking about money is important.

Fun plotting.

Evil Soul

The best things in life are free

And the next phase begins.