Category Archives: home improvement

Suicidal ideation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I should probably go start breakfast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Playing house and thinking about destiny

1 Reply

I have to say that typing my name into the url spot feels good. It’s like I finally have an online home. It’s my god damn sand pit. Excellent.

I have been enormously busy. In the past two days I finished the play house (well, I haven’t attached the planters and I haven’t got climbing plants established–but wood is done), built and mostly installed a raised bed. Started 36 plants indoors and I have a few new food plants coming up in front from the seed spread a few weeks ago. I never label when I do that so I have no forking clue what is growing until it’s done. It’s SCIENCE!

Inside the house I have kept up with the kitchen (doing so requires 2+ hours of work/day between cooking and cleaning), washed and/or folded seven loads of laundry. Cleaned up the whole floor so I could vacuum. I swept the kitchen and the kids scrubbed the linoleum for me (their idea–I swear) and after wiping up the big puddles with a towel the floor is as clean as with mopping so I’m happy.

I also took Shanna to dance class and I have spent 3-4 hours reading aloud over the past two days. I’ve watched three episodes of The West Wing and an interesting documentary called Whore’s Glory (it’s available instant on Netflix–this is how I get movies). If you don’t think white privilege exists go look at what it means to be a woman of color. They don’t have the same options for getting out.

In this country and in Europe prostitution can be a choice. The kinds of scenarios that exist in other countries isn’t enacted here in the same way.

White prostitutes by and large choose it. They may not make the choice with happiness and glee… but it’s a choice.

My great- grandmother was a prostitute and had an illegitimate daughter. My grandmother got “out” of that profession and into a marriage because she was able to blend into society and not be tarred by the brush of her mother.

In some countries if you are a whore you are locked into a ghetto. You are not allowed to leave that slum. Your children are raised there and aren’t really allowed to leave either. None of you have enough money to go anywhere anyway.

My mother was knocked up in high school. She graduated pregnant. She found someone to marry her weeks before the baby was born so that she wouldn’t really be a bastard. Even by 1969 it wasn’t a great situation. Much better than in the 1920’s when my great-grandmother did it.

My sister got married at seventeen had a baby at nineteen was divorced at twenty. Then she had another baby at twenty-two with “guy of the moment” because she didn’t want her kids spaced too far apart and she didn’t want just one. Then she was strongly admonished that she “should” have her tubes tied and she consented. No one in the hospital told her that the procedure wasn’t covered by the state medical plan. It took her more than ten years to pay for that surgery. My understanding is the main benefit has been that she has been able to have a lot of unsafe sex.

People do what they are taught and what they are allowed to do.

I was born into a family where I was not allowed to say no to sexual contact. It was beaten into me.

I am trying to create a family where no one has to do things they don’t want within reason. Like, if Shanna has ballet… sorry Calli you have to go too. Even though you don’t wanna. I understand. I’d like to stay home too.

So there has to be some compromising. But I want them to learn how to be very conscious and deliberate about those compromises. Your opinion matters and the only person who can advocate for you is you.

But there are a lot of boundaries. If you want to scream, that’s fine. Go outside or in the playroom with the door shut. You are not allowed to hurt me by screaming in my face.

It’s weird. I feel like I am negotiating all the time. And I constantly have to put a pause on the whole maelstrom in my head to go mediate some dispute and I have to act completely calm and fair and not scream and be matter of fact and… bleh.

But being able to deliver that consistently… that’s what the pot does.

I don’t know how to describe what it feels like to live in constant heart stopping terror as I go about my daily life because I don’t really think I have ever consistently not felt this way enough to tell the differences.

Sober I have many panic attacks in an average day. I can slow my heart rate through sheer force of will and breath control if I concentrate on it really hard but it makes me seem spacey and kind of dazed. I have to be really selfish and think about my body and it makes me snappy and impatient with everyone else. I often am heard to say “Just leave me alone” even though I know it’s not a good one. I need to develop a better script there but managing panic attacks is really fucking hard. They usually happen out in public where I have none of my usual coping methods.

My kids don’t need to have to learn to live their life around my agonizing stomach cramps. It doesn’t matter to them that I may vomit any minute if I’m not careful. I swallow a lot of bile because I don’t want to admit what is happening. Long-term it’s just not their problem.

The noise is a lot of it. When they get older we can have different discussions about noise but I’m really worried. Our house is loud all the time. We all like to talk. Hilariously, sometimes all four people will be in separate rooms shouting to be heard. I am having a really hard time with how we handle noise. And yet when I lower my voice Noah gets louder and I cringe more and my stomach hurts more and… ugh. It goes better if I try to match his excessive volume.

And the kids are very young and their volume control issues are normal and they are progressing in a completely normal developmental fashion and I need to just be nice about it. This is why people like the part about handing their kid off to another caretaker for most of the day. The noise is unbearable. Sometimes I make my children play out back. We live in California. Even in winter this is a reasonable thing to just go do in underwear. Vitamin D is good for you. And no I don’t put sunblock on any of us. I haven’t in years and I think I can count the number of times I’ve put sunblock on my kids on my fingers. Most of them in New Zealand for playing in the pool. That was necessary, dangit.

And last night I ran 2.67 miles in 31:08. I felt pretty happy about that. I am training for a 10k with my running buddy. We don’t live near one another so a lot of this training is separate but we will be able to practice together a few times. I’m looking forward to it.

I like feeling like getting and being stronger is something that I just do. So our 5k this month was 39 minutes. That means for our 10k we probably should pray we can <80 minutes. But it would be really fun to do it in <70 minutes. That would take actual work towards getting faster. Something I have traditionally been (ironically) steadfastly against. But the goal is different. We have ten weeks. That’s not shaving off a lot of time. If we took it seriously we could.

But it would mean treating out bodies like racing animals. It would mean meal planning for optimal nutrition. It would mean spacing out our exercising as it feels right for our body not for our schedule and hahahaha we will get it in when we can. It means consciously getting stronger alongside the running. Something I struggle with.

And it’s not like I have anything else on my mind at all. Or anything else to do. Why the hell not. Let’s just go with OCD thinking about my body again. CAUSE THAT LEADS TO LIFE BALANCE. Excuse me while I hack up a hair ball.

And my friend? She’s the kind of busy that makes it kind of seem like, “Hey stay at home mom… what is it you…do… all day?” Not that she is like that. But her life is very busy. She has a lot of balls in the air. Way more than I can handle. That’s ok! She’s not me. So it feels kind of extra special that I am getting so much of her attention for this period. Muahaha. I monopolize you for exercise motivation. I’m only kind of a loner. I get lonely.

I get to see Tay today. It’s going to be a great day. I have a life of ease and luxury. It is an accident that I have it this good. I really like having multiple days in a row where I don’t have to drive. I feel so much more physically relaxed. Being in the car is such a high stress load that it really doesn’t leave me with much on the other end. That feels pathetic. But I’ve gotten to stay home. I haven’t been in a car in over twenty four hours! It’s like a miracle. And I have worked. Things came into the house. They are finally resettling again. I get the general impression other people don’t get rid of things at the rate of 2-5 large garbage bags every month. It isn’t because I buy so much. We have generous grandparents. And a lot of old stuff. And figuring out how things work is a gradual process.

Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the stuff in my life. Why do I have any of it again? If I ask myself too often things disappear really fast. February is already a two bag month and I’m looking at things that are on top of the book shelves because I have nowhere else to put them and I’m feeling fussy. I don’t like looking at all the crap. Grrr Waaa kerflumph.

Tay is coming today and we have swimming. We might walk depending on how moods are going. And we aren’t going anywhere tomorrow. We might get to have three full days without the car in a row. It is really weird to think about. Children and adults need to exercise. The only reason to drive to swim practice is because it’s about 1.8 miles away and sometimes I don’t leave enough time to let the kids walk there. I really should just always plan my day around walking. That’s what their body needs. Mine too if I’m honest.

I have two choices right now. I can either be at the nursery when it opens and get work done before Tay arrives. Or I can take advantage of Noah being home and go to the gym for a dance workout class thing. I honestly think I will be happier with the dirt. Is that weird? This is why I don’t identify as a dancer. I do actually really joyfully describe myself as a gardner these days. I find it kind of ironic that in terms of time spent gardening is probably going to outpace theatre in a few months. I have already been semi-serious about gardening longer than I was really active in the bdsm community. I wonder how many years it will be before I have spent more hours of my life gardening than having sex. I think that will take a while longer. I’m actually looking forward to it.

I’m looking forward to being on the other side of a lot of these little clocks in my head. I am not quite counting the months until my father has been dead for more of my life than he was alive but almost. In three more years it will balance.

I think I’m going to go get myself some dirt. I’m feeling pretty grateful for my mother-in-law money right now. I just deposited one last Christmas check from my grandmother-in-law. $300. Today is the day I’m buying yellow roses. I have today and tomorrow to get them planted. It’s going to be a wonderful day.

I’m almost ready to take pictures. Almost. I’m not sure why I’m feeling so vulnerable about sharing but I am. My house is increasingly beautiful to me. Even the problems are things that I am looking at differently than other people. And I know what I will get to do round about the time I hit fifty if everything goes according to plan. And you know how life is about shit like that.

I don’t care if my words are judged. If anyone says anything mean about my house I will cry.

If you build it, they will come.

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I think I’m figuring out what I want to do. February is a bust. I’m going to survive it and get on with my life.

I’m going to keep seeing my therapist every other week and I am not going to continue the group. I don’t have it in me to try and guide them towards being a semblance of support for me. Right now they aren’t. It isn’t their fault. It’s that whole GU(Geographically Undesireable) thing.

I like where I live. I want to build community here. I am trying. I am working hard on that. There are a few projects I have in my head. One involves asking my next door neighbor and probably Tay if they will donate a few hours of labor towards building a play structure in the back yard. I know what I want. It isn’t that complicated. They both have more tools and experience doing what I want to do. They won’t do it for me but they will guide me through doing it. But that’s in the summer when my neighbor has more time. He is drowning right now.

What I can do right now, is go talk to my other neighbor. I don’t know her name yet and I’m going to have to figure out how to memorize it. I may ask her to write it down for me and I will call Pam and ask her to help me practice so I can be not-insulting when I try to speak to and about her. I want to talk to her because her fence faces the elementary school and is a regular target of graffiti. I would like to talk to her about painting some kind of mural there. I will pay for all of the materials.

Let me break the plan down more. If the woman agrees to that I would like to walk across the street to the elementary school and conveniently talk to my next door neighbor (who is a lovely woman–we exchange a lot of food through the year because of gardening) who works at the front desk. I will tell her I would like to put forth a contest open to every child in the school. The best design for the fence will be painted on the fence and the say… top three best drawings otherwise get to help me paint it on the fence.

The parameters are: the picture needs to be simple and clear. I’m not good at fancy shading or anything you can do with a pencil. This will be done in fairly simple paint. Unless you are that good with spraypaint–which I’ve never used so I would hesitate to use it for a project like this. So it has to be something that will handle the transfer of medium. There have to be clear lines.

I would like it to be about living around here. What are the things you like to do that people can walk to. Why is living here fun. Why do you want people to like it and be nice to our neighborhood?

I’m still working on the exact phrasing of that. It has to be something where potentially a kindergardener could produce something workable or it isn’t fair.

We will do the painting as it can be scheduled with the kids sometime around April or May when it is dry enough to let the paint dry. I have no idea what would be best in terms of the school schedule. Maybe they have a week of minimum days at some point and this would be a great time for a project like this?

I think it is bad advice to always tell people to run away from their problems and only be around people who make your life easier. It isn’t anyone else’s job to make my life easier. I don’t live in a culture who grants that to women in my position. Sometimes I seriously wish I was Chinese. My close friend is Taiwanese and when she talks about her family I feel a lot of envy. I wish there were people in the world who love me the way she is loved by her family.

But I compare my envy of that and my relative position with articles like this one about lynching in America. It is very weird thinking that the right to grow up and walk away from all the terrible evil shit from my childhood is a right I have because of my face. Watch the music video at the bottom of that article.

There are a lot of people in my neighborhood who don’t look like me. I could choose to feel uncomfortable about that or I could work to meet their children through community projects and get to know them as human beings.

I’m going to ask permission to use the school parking lot for a block party after graduation (not the same day. obviously.) because I want the parents to meet one another. I like that so many kids in my neighborhood ride bikes outside in the afternoon. I wave at a lot of runners.

I want to live here. I want to keep getting ridiculously unhealthy frugal advice from the dear lady a few blocks away. She lives on a very fixed income so she tells me about every deal. I thank her. And bring her oranges.

I think I feel mortally offended by the idea of leaving the trees I planted. I want to eat that god damn fruit. Some mother fucker would buy this house, chop the trees, level out the dirt and put in a god damn lawn.

No. Those are my roots. I planted them. If I want community it has to be near me. It has to come to me. Sorry. That’s just how life works out sometimes. It’s not a personal affront. I just find I don’t enjoy travel much. It takes a really lot to justify it. I need to believe that and make a choice. It’s not that I will never visit anyone or that I will never leave my house except on foot.

I need to act like staying home is a conscious priority. It’s a choice. It’s something that dramatically makes my life better. If I am not home I can not do my work. If I can not do my work I feel rather bad about myself as a person. LIfe is not meant to be a long string of tiring days spent “entertaining” myself or my children.

I have a few painting projects in the house I’ve been thinking about. Doing them will make me happy. I have to be home in order to do that. I have to choose to not have engagements.

I need to not blow with the winds of change. Change needs to happen in the world around me. I need to keep to my work. I need to make measurable progress in my own estimation or I won’t respect myself as a person.

My daughter is right on the very cusp of being able to go run around playing out front basically unsupervised. She’s not quite trustworthy enough. She’s close though. I don’t taunt her with this difference I just think about it. It’s time for me to get my head out of my ass and meet the neighbors.

The awesome thing is we have a family to model off of who live (depending how you count) three or four perpendicular blocks away from us who have behaved the same way. They have already talked to the city about this kind of organization stuff.

I need to start building more community where I am. You were right K. I need a project.

Homeschooling and hubris and motherhood is not a career

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The whole world might explode.

Evading laundry

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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.

Had a good day.

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Yesterday was the best day I’ve had in a long time in terms of anxiety. It’s kind of funny that it worked out that way because I started out the day freaking out. Night before last I posted something on facebook about processing while crying and three very helpful women told me that it was common and normal. I had been relaying that my therapist was congratulating me on how unusual it is that I can do what I do. But these three women wanted to make sure I didn’t think I was a special snowflake. That’s not what they thought they were doing so I decided not to debate.

I kind of think of it like someone in North Carolina telling someone in NYC, “Shoot we get storms all the time. Why are you people whining about a little water?”

Scope. It’s about scope. And I’m not going to get into it on facebook. I feel character limits there. Plus I was on the ipad. So I deleted the post and went on with my day.

It was a great day. I went up to my friend Kira’s house. In the way of everyone who loves me she and her husband have something of a hoarding problem. Hoarders fucking love me and I don’t know why. Nearly all of my close friends over the year have had similar issues. Anyway. Apparently I was the first person to point out the connection between severely messy homes and mental illness to a few friends. I feel surprised that they hadn’t made that connection already.

Hoarders don’t feel loved by people so they collect things. That is my off-the-cuff semi-dismissive view of the people I have known who have this problem. I’ve known several dozen honest-to-dawg hoarders.

I like people. I like being around them. I like feeling useful and helpful and like I have something to give. I think I find the hoarders because they lack a specific skill set I excel in.

Holy shit can I clean and organize. I am not attached to things. Things are the opposite of safety for me. Things mean Problems. GET RID OF IT seems to be my obsession going through life.

So I went up to Kira’s house yesterday. We’ve worked on it a few times over the past two years of friendship. I anticipate many more days doing similar things. Mostly because I had such a great time. I didn’t medicate and I was more relaxed than I can remember being in years. I was useful. I was good. I was doing stuff that will have reverberating effects on their day to life for a long time. I probably did stuff that will make their marriage better (everyone has fights about messy houses) and it will be easier to parent.

That makes me feel good. The problem comes when I get too enmeshed and I either want to help more and fix more (what I did with Sarah) or I realize I am in over my head and I shove them away really hard (more complicated than that–but that’s basically what I did with Alex).

I’m scared of the process of finding appropriate boundaries. How much help can I give? Well, let me tell you, it’s probably good they live in Oakland. I don’t feel compelled to help very often so I don’t get overwhelmed. It’s just too far. The hurdle of helping is so high that I can’t do it much. When I do show up I move 1/3 of the furniture in the house by myself and move dozens of loads down the (frightening and perilous) steps into the basement.

I feel like fucking Superwoman. Kira took care of the kids. I would totally be the man in a dyke society. I have a hard time sometimes with how “womens work” my life is because I would rather be a construction worker. I kind of fucking hate cooking.

Cooking is endless fucking drudgery and making new messes that i will fucking have to clean alone so that people can uhm not notice that I did it. Whatever. In ten minutes this is out of existence and doesn’t ever fucking matter again.

When I go clean someones house and get rid of many years of piled up paper their house feels dramatically different and their life tends to feel more positive and easier for a while. They literally have less work looming over their head.

When you supply a meal you just need another fucking meal in four hours. I hate cooking.

I’ve been thinking about my negative feelings about my house. I’ve been thinking about the fact that I probably wouldn’t be able to afford going out and buying what I see in my head anyway. It only kind of exists. I’ve seen things that are similar but not quite.

Noah actually will be able to give me the house I want. It’s just going to take about twenty-five years because first we have to finish paying off the mortgage and then we have to wait until we need a new roof. I’m not going to tear off a perfectly good roof on a whim let-me-tell-you. When I think about it that way it just means I have more time to get the design right. I have more time to decide what I really want and that feels really exciting. At that point in time our kids will be mostly done with college (if they go–we’ll see) and we will have had the house paid off for a long time. That will be the first time we have had “extra money” in our marriage.

I want what I am doing so bad. I need this. It’s ok that I have a crappy ceiling (I may figure out how to fix what is bugging me so I can stop the internal whine track) because I have lived in this happy home for longer than I have lived anywhere in my life.

I really like my kids. I was so proud of them yesterday. I worked for a solid eight hours. They had to play in a back room by themselves and they did it. They were so good. When they had needs they came out and cheerfully asked for what they needed. When they were feeling like they missed me they would come ask for a hug then go back to playing.

Kira’s husband kept trying to get me to carry things through the front door because there are fewer stairs. I liked going through the back because then I got to see the kids.

At the end of the day Shanna told me it was sad that I didn’t get to watch them play so she hopes the next time we go up I can stay with them. That feels really good.

I’m going to change topic and go back in time chronologically. In the morning we first had swim class (Calli was freezing and upset the whole time) then we went back to the house so I could move the laundry into the dryer and get food for the kids to eat as we drove up to Kira’s because it was already a bit late for them.

I feel terrible guilt that I leave my kids in their car seats in the car with the windows cracked for about five minutes at a time sometimes but I’m not going to stop doing it. It takes fucking forever to get them in and out. A four minute errand becomes a twenty minute errand and I am screaming and them to hurry up and move. It’s really stressful and shitty. So I don’t do it. I deal with guilt instead.

As we drove up to Kira’s house Shanna told me how nice I was for getting them food because they were really hungry. I said, “I try.” She said, “Did your mom feed you?”

I assume most children ask these kinds of questions. I feel like I am hit in the stomach over and over. I laughed and said, “Of course she fed me. I grew didn’t I?” But I thought about it. I added, “My mom gave me ramen. She couldn’t afford things like fruits and vegetables. As a result I had a lot of stomach and body pain my whole life. I have terrible teeth. In general I am not in good health and some of it is that I wasn’t fed the things my body needed when I was a child. I’m trying very hard to ensure that you have a different life experience.”

“That’s very nice of you.”

“I think so too.”

I love talking to Shanna. I feel like Shanna is the only one who can say things to me without me feeling minimized or dismissed. I’m not mad at the women who commented on facebook. But I freaked the fuck out when I read their comments.

It has been a very long and very hard journey for me to get to the point of understanding that for me to do things is not the same as other people doing things. My brain and body work differently for a wide variety of reasons.

When I say I cry and process emotions I mean that sob hysterically and type one to three thousand words an hour (depends on how easily accessible the memories are–if they are right on the tip of my tongue then my fingers fly) while physiologically having the experience of having a heart attack. I have terrible panic attacks. I hyperventilate and gasp and panic and feel like I am dying.

Not very many people spend many hours at a time feeling like they are dying from a heart attack and just continue to think about what they are thinking about. That kind of experience is very overwhelming. It’s not the typical “crying”. Yes, I understand that people cry and talk about their feelings all the time. Uhm, scope.

It has taken a long time for me to have the courage to say, “My life experience is different and harder and I get to say that without having to feel like I am exaggerating.” Not every part of my life. I am really god damn good at cleaning.

Most people who feel like me just die. It hurts so much to live as me. I am in a fairly tremendous amount of pain basically all the time. It is extremely bad for your body to live with how much fear I feel. Organs are significantly impacted. Stress will kill you and I live with an amount of stress most people only get from living in an active war zone. And I have felt like this for about twenty-five years.

I am moving hell and high water to ensure that my kids do not understand this stress. That this is not passed on. I live a fairly ordinary life. I do have an extensive and varied social network. There are a lot of people who are close to my kids. Not every day close. I have to learn that most people don’t have much of that. My kids are active in the community we live in and our homeschool group and Noah and I have a lot of friends who are talking to our kids a few times a year. Not a lot, but relationships build over time. It’s normal to have a period where you stay home a lot after having babies.

Part of the problem with PTSD is that it triggers atypical depression. I’ve been looking more into this part recently. It’s probably why it is so easy for me to “turn off” being depressed when I want to. It isn’t true chemical depression it is my bodies coping mechanism for stress when I am stuck in one place. It keeps me from hyperarousing myself into death.

The brain is fascinating to study. I think it is interesting to read papers that I would previously have been convinced I was too stupid to understand. I just had to build a shared vocabulary.

I’ve been thinking about my discomfort with not knowing lately. It’s not like being a know-it-all has been good for me socially.

I was a “know-it-all” in school after school where I got beat up for paying attention in class. But now I have strangers arrive in my inbox, “Hi my name is _____. I am friends with _______. I told her that I was raped/attached/abused/experienced incest/etc and she told me to come talk to you.”

That feels like a lot of responsibility to know things. I have to learn more. If I am going to help people I have to know more. If I am going to show up and tell someone that I can completely reorganize their life I have to be telling the fucking truth. I can’t fall short. I can’t be almost good enough. I have to deliver. Or I am a failure.

Kira you want to know where I get my energy? From the driving terror to prove I can do what I say I can do. You notice how I don’t often show up and say, “I am committing to __________ work.” That’s because I take those kinds of promises ridiculously seriously. It’s really most of what I build my sense of self on. I am able to accurately predict what I can do. Then I’ll kill myself getting it done or I will feel gnashing anxiety until it is done.

I am so glad I painted the stripes in my laundry room after more than a year of waiting. I seriously felt bothered all the time. I feel a lot more relaxed. That’s why I haven’t yet decided what I am doing to deal with the insulation on the garage door. I don’t want to commit to anything yet because then I will hate myself until I get it done. I bought myself a good year of procrastination without anxiety. I don’t know what I want so there is no internal push to move forward.

Today I get to bring baby clothes to two friends who are expecting. Wonderful women who have blessed my life. I don’t see either of them very often (I think once so far this year) but I have known them for many years. I’m trying to understand in my gut that relationships wax and wane. If I’m a nice person the relationships will grow closer when they have kids. If I’m an asshole they would be wise to keep their kids away from me.

I don’t think very many people want to think about themselves that way. If I am a bad influence for your kids, by all means keep them away from me. I try very hard not to be. I try very hard to ensure that, partially because I have limited contact with most people, I am a good influence. I try to model good behavior. I consider modeling good behavior to be my primary job for the next fifteen years.

My kids were ridiculously good while I busted my ass for eight hours yesterday. I wish I could extract this emotion and freeze it in amber so I could put it on a string and wear it around my neck always.

Someone asked on the PTSD forum I frequent if anyone consciously re-parents themselves. I said, “Oh yes. I know that my voice is the voice that is going to be playing inside my kid’s head when they are adults. I’m trying to replace my mother’s voice with my daughter’s voices. So I’m really nice and have firm with boundaries with my kids and they do the same right back at me. I win.”

My kids are my reward for living right now. I am ridiculously grateful that I get to have the life I have. If Noah didn’t happen to be a rich guy I would probably be in a really bad spot right about now. I wouldn’t have the safety I have. I can’t imagine how bad my body would feel if I actually had to worry about money. And yet I’m turning down every invitation from the home schooling group that involves money. That raises my stress level every time.

I tell myself that they are two and four and won’t remember anyway. I tell myself that they are much better off staying home to play with me not feeling more stress all the time. I am an awful lot of fun when I’m not feeling extra stress. Driving is extra stress.

I love the parks we can walk to. Yes, we walk two and a half miles to the park. What else should we do with our day?

That’s the vacant void of guilt. What else should I be doing? Well, today we are going to drive Noah to work and use the Prius to visit mamas-to-be who live near where he works. It will be quite cheap as our excursions go. That eliminates 75% of the stress I feel around driving. I really hate spending money. It’s a fierce nasty knot in my belly. I don’t want to. That’s why Noah feels like he should make more money. Naw, I’d be like this even if you made millions. I just hate spending money. We have enough. I just want your time. I swear.

I’m really excited that I’m pretty likely to have two excellent days in a row. That’s a blessing.

P.S. Judith-the braces make all the difference in the world. Thank you.

Shrink your world

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One of the problems with living your life through the internet is there is this constant reminder that there is someone awesome in the world… only you don’t get to see them. They are far away. Sometimes they feel “only” thirty-five miles away. In the bay area that’s no big deal for dinner.

But all of this travel has a cost. The cost isn’t as obvious as it used to be. One upon a time thirty-five miles was probably multiple days of travel. Now… why are you being so lazy? Why don’t you join a group that has a one hour meeting once a week forty miles away from your house. I go to therapy in Oakland because I can’t find a compatible therapist closer. I spend four and a half hours and $10.50 on the trip. That’s a cost.

Life is about a series of choices. You can deny that you are making them and whine about the results but you can’t change the fact that it is happening. Most of the time people do nothing. They watch tv or play a video game or whine on mothering.com. Not a one is more moral than any other. What would people do if they were doing? How would they live if they didn’t center their lives around “making money”? The vast majority of software that gets written is thrown away without being used. The vast majority of my work is thrown away. Laundry and dishes are eternal. They are just life. Everyone must deal with them. They take so much time.

What do we do when we go do something? Do we go watch a movie? Do we build something? Do we go somewhere interesting? What is interesting about it? Why is it interesting? Everyone has a set of decisions they make that satisfy their priorities.

I spend a lot of time at home. More than anything I want my home to be beautiful. It is kind of becoming the thing I care about. I don’t care about cars. I don’t care about my clothes overmuch. I still wear clothes I bought when I was fourteen. (polyester cotton blend dress–I may have it till I am fifty–it fits from 135 lbs to 205 lbs miraculously) I’m not going to focus much on fashion.

I can’t control Noah and I can’t control my kids and I can’t control very much of how my life goes over the next few years. I have made long-term choices that require frugal living. No whining.

I want my house to be pretty. I want to feel proud of it. This is going to be an interesting journey. I’m going to have to learn how to do most of this by myself. When the kids get older they will probably help but I can’t reliably count on anyone else. I don’t know how much money I will have for these projects. All signs point to less than $100/month. I love freecycle like nobodies business. I feel guilty sometimes because I kind of feel like I am stealing from genuine poor people. I am making the choice to not spend money and someone else may not have a choice. I don’t feel like I should let that worry cause me to sit in a depressive rut in my house. If the only way I can get stuff is freecycle, I have as much right as anyone else to ask. Sometimes I win; sometimes I don’t.

I crossed two things off my to do list today. I finally got the van maintenance done (I’ve been putting it off for over a month) and I signed the kids back up for swim class. They have their own section of the budget so they get to do activities. I don’t feel like it is reasonable to throw them into a life of poverty in favor of some someday when things will happen. Their lives will be better if they know how to swim. I’m not signing them up for fifteen classes, but we’ll manage some things. I think that is fair.

My neighbor is pressuring me to put Shanna into a private (religious) school with her son next year. Hell no with a side of biscuits. Shanna keeps asking about kindergarden. I may sign her up for the online charter just to shut her up. I feel like my mantra in life right now is “We’ll see”. Whenever the kids ask me when something is happening or if something is happening I say, “I don’t know! We’ll see…” like a tv announcer. This would be more effective if they had ever heard/seen this schtick before. I think it is hilarious that when they see pop culture they will think it is imitating me long before they know I didn’t make this stuff up. I really like being cool.

The biggest limitation is how much work can I do while still being nice. Gosh it varies. But if I do manage to get a lot done I am more likely to feel good about myself than in any other set of variables. Of course.

I’m obsessively thinking about money. Some time in the next month I’m going to lay out the year, talk about my problem areas and why I’m being stupid in the ways I’m being stupid (cause we go for the honesty here). Sometimes I’m stupid. Unfortunately my family has to live with that. And I’m the kind of freak who is going to explain to the internet how so and why. For no reason beyond I want to. Then I stop freaking out about it. It’s a coping mechanism. It’s better than most of my traditional ones. Just go with me here.

And I want to write out why I have the attitude I do about Christmas. I have been feeling really weird about writing lately. I’m not making any progress. I’m not able to work on editing. It’s too god damn depressing. I think I need to explore some non-typing, spoken word technology for the next book. I’m kind of worried about my arms. Luckily I have friends to ask about this.

I need to go get ready for a tea party. We invited the nice waitress from the local breakfast restaurant. She often brings small gifts for my daughters and we have gotten to know one another over a period of about six years. I’m scared. I want her to like me. I will be crushed if she decides I am bad. I’ll keep my mouth shut and the door to the bedroom with the pornographic pictures closed. No actually I don’t care if my kids see them. One is a really gorgeous artistic shot done by a friend of mine and the others are all me naked while pregnant. So not “pornographic” but people have expressed shock. Bite me. I think they are cool.

I need to stop wasting time. But I don’t want to work. Of course not, Krissy–you are depressed. Never the less the work waits. Here I sit. Yup, still here. Suck.

Tried something different.

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“Do you know why I usually don’t touch you when I cry?”
“No. Why?”
“Because my mom used to hit me when I cried.”

Last night I cried on Noah’s chest. I’m not 100% sure but I’m pretty sure that you can count how many times I have done that on one hand with fingers left over. We have been married for six years. I cry nearly every day. Often for many hours. I cry alone.

“No one wants to see that Kristine. No one wants to hear it either. Didn’t I tell you to shut up? Fine. I’ll give you something to cry about.”

The fact that I was raped over and over wasn’t good enough. The fact that people chased me home from school throwing rocks at me wasn’t good enough. The fact that I moved constantly and didn’t have friends or toys I could trust owning wasn’t good enough. The fact that I usually didn’t know if we would have a place to live next week or if we would be homeless wasn’t good enough either.

I cry alone. Often (though not always anymore–I kind of glory in being able to make noise when I cry now) I cry completely silently. Even my breathe barely raises in volume. I shared a bed with my mother till I was sixteen. I know how to have tears run down my face and slowly control the sobbing with breath so that I don’t get hit again. Mostly I just prefer to be alone in a room.

I was always told that I wasn’t allowed to cry unless I was hit–that’s the only good reason. Sometimes I wonder if I found the bdsm scene because I knew I needed to cry and I’m just not allowed to cry without being hit.

When other people think of “bdsm” I’m not sure what they think. I think there isn’t a lot of point if someone isn’t crying. A lot. Mostly uncontrollably. As a top I am ridiculously sadistic. Don’t play with me unless what you want from today is to end up curled in the fetal position on the floor sobbing your heart out. That is what I have in me to give. I prefer when my play partners nearly kill me. I want them to hurt me terribly and risk my life. I know I am not important. I know that very sick people exist in the world. I hope that if I can give them a cheap thrill they won’t hurt someone important.

When Noah raised his hand to stroke my face I flinched.

I was kind of randomly curious tonight so I looked it up. I’m pretty sure that I qualify for SSI for disability due to PTSD. If I had to hold down a job right now my life would be pretty nightmarish. I have continual flashbacks. I have a lot of panic attacks. I barely leave my house. I have to talk myself into believing there are “safe” people on the other side who don’t hate me before I manage. Going to the grocery store is hard. I understand that it is for most parents. But when other peoples kids misbehave in public they don’t crumple to the floor crying because it seems so overwhelming to deal with. I feel like a very pathetic person.

In order to figure out how to talk to my kids I sat around reading Jane Austen books. That is the language Shanna learned. That is why she is so excessively polite. I model it all the time. I made sure that for the first few years of her life she rarely heard anyone but me talk and I modeled extreme manners constantly.

I am trying to figure out how to shape the voices in my children’s head. I know I don’t control who they become. But I *do* control the messages they get about themselves right now.

My children believe manners are not optional and the world will crash to a halt with horror if you are rude. So they don’t do it. Except for the one big exception. “If anyone is ever touching any part of your body in a way you don’t like you need to ask them politely to stop once. If they continue, hit them. Scream. Run away. You are allowed to defend you.”Shanna is extremely aware that her vulva is a private space and that no one should touch it until she is full grown and has asked them politely to touch her there. I told her the “whys and whens” around sex are conversations we will probably have in more like ten years. She tried to ask for more information. I said, “At four all you need to know is no one can touch you there. You won’t be grown up for a very long time.” She’s ok with that for now.

It was weird to cry on Noah. I felt really bad about getting him all wet. The snot flows like a river. Mmmm sexy.

One of the things that is hardest for me about being rich is how isolating it is. I feel like I have gotten to know my neighbors to an unusual degree. They are certainly all shocked that I am attempting to do so. My experience of poverty (I understand that my life is not universal and I do not have the “universal poverty experience”) was that people had a lot more time on their hands. There was a lot of time to kill and no one had any money. People had to either fall into a depressive rut in order to survive or they had to get creative.

I am very creative. Unfortunately I hate working alone and I am really struggling with the period of time when my kids are no help and instead a bunch of extra work. I’m willing to bet that in two or three years Shanna will be able to do most of the things I like to do. She helps a little now.

I like building things. I like having a concrete change on the world. I often get very frustrated with myself because I am a perfectionist and I get little practice to practice so I’m not improving at skills at the rate I want to.

Noah not wanting to build with me is hard. He doesn’t want to do any kind of physical labor on the property. I feel like I am having to drag him kicking and screaming (by the god damn hair) towards the idea of doing any help with homeschooling beyond teaching programming. It is feeling very invalidating of the “us” label.

I feel like I subsumed who I was into my family. My life, my time, my work are all spent on things that directly benefit people in my family other than me. It feels like. Because I am self-serving like everyone else and I enjoy lying to myself.

I do home improvement stuff and I cook and I clean.

It is kind of funny because I feel a little competitive because many of my friends have kids in the same age range. Shanna is behind most of the kids we know academically. (I am tracking various kids in my head. It’s interesting.) On one hand I feel like this means I am failing as a homeschooling parent. On the other hand I have the belief that early academic instruction is a bad idea. I am making a conscious decision. It still feels weird that all my friends kids knew their ABCs faster, can count earlier and higher. Blah.

I believe, because research tells me so, that early introduction of these concepts does not improve IQ or overall achievement down the line. I still feel kind of weirdly insecure about my kid and what I am doing. I don’t exactly think my friends are drilling their kids. Why are they picking things up so much faster? I have no idea. But I feel insecure. That is one of the many things I am just going to have to live with being insecure about. I made a decision based on sound principles I still believe.

What I specifically miss about having community was there were always two or three women in the kitchen talking. I thought that was what the future looked like. I’m very sad because my life won’t look like that for another fifteen years. And then they may very well want to go off into the world and spread their wings. I may do all of these years hoping for that and not get it. I have to be ok with it. I can’t spend my life wishing for that. I would be doing something inappropriate. It’s so hard to know that I can never hope for that. I tried to have that with Sarah. She hid from my anger in her room. I don’t blame her.

I don’t share my anger with my children. I share it with the adults in my life. I’m afraid that if I have hopes for what they will do as adults I will get very angry with them for disappointing me. Talk about poisoning the well. I try very hard to not have expectations of them beyond how they are treating me right now. I treat them how I want them to treat me and by and large it works out. When they are having a bad day and they freak out and cry a lot I comfort them even though my head hurts so much I start to cry too. I rock with them. I tell them it is ok to cry.

I tell my kids over and over, “When you feel sad you are allowed to cry.” I will be their inside voice whether they are with me or not. I want them to believe it is ok to exist. I don’t want them to feel like me.

I tell them it is ok to be frustrated. It’s not ok to shout at people. Let’s figure it out. And mostly we do.

I feel like oozing toxic waste. I feel like poison. I am so sad and so angry. I miss my mom. Isn’t that crazy? Shouldn’t I just be glad to be away from her? But she’s my mommy. I ache for her so bad I feel like I can’t breathe. I feel like my organs want to go into failure. I want my mommy. I have been crying for my mother my entire life. Even when I had her I didn’t have her. My mother didn’t take care of me. My mother damaged me.

My mother told me I wasn’t allowed to be angry when I was raped. She told me I wasn’t allowed to yell or scream or cry. I have made my bed and now I have to lie in it. Silently. While men do whatever they want. And I still miss her. Sometimes that feels like the most fucked up part.

I am sad about not having a father. I do not miss James Archer. I didn’t know him. I don’t even remember what he looks like. That part makes me sad. Sometimes I think of writing Jimmy a letter and asking for a picture. I don’t know if he would send me one. I feel very sad about not being allowed to know what my father looks like. My mother gave Jimmy all the pictures of him many years ago. When I was still a child. I don’t even know if he kept them.

I don’t miss my sister. I think a wall came up when I found out about her forcing my niece to give my nephew a blow job. She became the living enemy. Being in a room with her and not spitting in her face is tantamount to supporting her behavior. No thank you. I think she is a piece of shit I stepped on.

I wish I felt like people loved me. I wish I could feel loved. I think part of the reason I cried on Noah last night was because I wanted to feel like he loved me. I didn’t feel that way. I feel dead inside. I feel like I went on an extended vacation to Chernobyl and my insides are radioactive and not quite functioning right.

I feel hollow and empty. I feel already dead. I feel like the cessation of breathing is a mere formality.

I have been here before. I know that how I feel right now is not how I feel all the time. I am dimly aware of that. I did have the chutzpah to up and get married. I felt loved. But mental illness is a liar.

When I was in the teaching credential they told us that a child has to hear ten positive things to cancel out everything negative said to them about themself.

When I think about what my mother said to me I cry. My inside voice is strong and loud and dominating. Shut up Kristine. No one cares, Kristine. Shut up.

I’m very ready for this cycle to change.

Hand-me-downs

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I think I know eight pregnant women right now. And a close friend has a one month old. And there are lots of slightly older kids. It’s weird thinking about getting rid of things, now. There are a few ways I can go about maintaining sanity in my house. I can ensure that we have a small enough number of items that cleaning it takes very little time or I can allow items to creep in and spend more and more and more time cleaning. It’s time to purge.

This is more complicated now that the stuff is “Shanna and Calli’s”. I really shouldn’t just raid their stuff all the time getting rid of things. That’s rude. Sorta. Letting them make my life shitty is far more rude let me tell you. I have no fear that the river of stuff will run out. More will come, inevitably. They age out of things anyway. How do I allow them to form sentimental attachments and yet bow to the inevitability of life that stuff comes and must go? I think we are going to go through stuff today and make piles. Shanna loves giving gifts. How can we be generous with our bounty?

This leads to all kinds of maybe-not-polite-but-necessary corollary conversations. One pregnant friend has few friends and no family. Others have many friends and large, wealthy families. We have people in our lives who have very different levels of need. That makes a very large difference in how I behave with people. I offer to treat friends who are barely surviving. I let friends who have more money than me pay for me. I smile and say thank you. I don’t offer to return the favor. For me I am very ok with accepting favors from people who have a lot to give. Sure, no problem. I struggle with allowing friends who have more need than me do things for me. It’s complicated.

I feel like it is important for me to be very clear what my values are and why. I’m teaching how to be a part of society. What part do I play? To have great privilege is to have great responsibility. What does that mean? What does that mean in terms of our life? What does it mean that the people around us have equal and sometimes greater privilege? How do I think responsibility trickles around us?

Part of what I am teaching is responsibility to the household. It is not fair that I have to spend so many hours cleaning up messes I am not making. If she can’t clean up after herself we need to start scaling back so that she can. She needs to learn how to take care of the amount of space she can handle. I need to give her a smaller scale so that she can succeed. Right now I am failing her by giving her a task that is far too large for her. I am not properly scaffolding her learning experience. That’s fine. We have pregnant friends.

Today is going to be one of those structured learning days, as I am starting to think of them. I have a specific lesson I am working towards. We are all responsible for maintaining our stuff. How much stuff do you actually think you can handle? I am going to do a preliminary pull of stuff that will be good to give away. We’ll negotiate from there.

It’s going to be a long day. It will be a good day. As long I remain patient today will be fantastic. Shanna is really happy to work with me towards goals like this, at least for now. She likes making decisions. She likes being generous. It makes her feel good to think about other people being happy to “get” her stuff. I talk about how neat it is that objects can take on a history and a story. “Oh this used to belong to ____ and then it went to _____ and now it is _______’s.” We have things like that. We tell those stories often. I constantly talk about the origins of objects. Shanna thinks her grandparents in Texas are the most generous people in the world because most of her favorite clothes and toys arrive magically from them. She thinks about it a lot. I have feelings about that but I keep my mouth shut about all of them. What I say to the kids is, “Your grandparents love you.” That’s it.

Shanna and I will have fun going through the clothes pile and deciding which pregnant woman needs that item more. She gives good “why’s”. Not all needs are financial or material. With most people I expect the story of items to be lost. When the story of an item is important I have to be careful who I give it to. We have a lot of clothing from Noah’s family. We may be the second or third in hand made clothes. That story matters to me. It’s not particularly rational. This is the story my children are being born into. This is what they have of their family on that side. I want them to know where it goes once it leaves them. I just do. That means I need to be careful where I send it.

I want to send the clothes to people who will take pictures of their children wearing it and give them to me. I want to be able to send them to Noah’s mom and show that things she made are still being used and loved. That is all the family relationship I will ever have. That depresses the fucking shit out of me. I feel like I come from nothing and I will become nothing and there will be no trace of me. I have no connection to anything that will outlast me. I want other people who touch me to understand that the touch carries on. They are still actively doing good in the world by having done this thing years ago. Thank you for doing that. It’s a thing. Maybe it isn’t a rational thing. But this is what I have right now. It’s the best I can do.

So when I think about pressuring my daughter into going through her belongings so we can give them away it’s kind of a loaded thing. This is going to be a long and emotional day. Which things can I give to people and have no expectation of the story carrying on? Which things do I have an attachment to the story moving on? How will I deal with it?

This is why I normally give stuff to a thrift store and come home and cry. Letting go is hard. I do understand attachment. I just can’t function and be a nice person when I have to clean all the f’in time. No. It’s just not necessary. We have to figure this out. Ok. I think I have girded my loins and set my purpose and all that shit. Time to go mommy. Oy.

Things are improving

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I have made a lot of progress on the house. At this point there are 20 boxes left. Some of those are dvds/cds that need to be ripped before they are gotten rid of. Most of them are childrens/young adult literature and are waiting for the bookshelf that arrives next Saturday. (!) I will spend next Saturday and Sunday painting the bookshelf and then the rest of the “unpacking” should take ~30 minutes. Then the boxes will be out of my house. I am posting on freecycle today to get rid of the boxes.

So when I say I am capable of really ridiculous amounts of work, that’s what I mean. I cried. I ranted. I had a few emotional breakdowns (it’s really good that Sarah and Noah can be patient with me) but we dealt with why I was having them and I soldiered on. Because that’s what I do. The actual “unpacking” has less than two hours to go.

Now we get into sorting, decluttering, and storage. Ugh. It’s not really part of “unpacking” but it is the hardest part of combining two households. We have been making nearly daily runs to the local thrift store with a van full of stuff. I had to make a trip over this morning because we can’t put the kids in the van yet and Sarah wants to take Shanna to the museum. I must say that I experienced writing that last sentence with butterflies in my stomach and I had to bounce from joy. Someone other than me is going to take Shanna to the museum. Oh man. I’m excited. I find that I am having trouble feeling present with the “joy” of parenting when I do it 24/7. That is already changing.

On the decluttering front: we have already gone through bakeware, pots and pans, purses, the glass cabinet, bathroom stuff (this was huge), and a ton of Sarah’s clothes. We’ve done massive book purges, but we probably need to get rid of more. I had a hard time this weekend because I have already gotten rid of everything I have ever owned that qualifies as “permanent storage”, such as my baby box. All my teaching stuff. We truly do not have space for things that are not in use. And I just won’t pay for a storage unit. I uhhh did not bring this up in a polite way, but I brought it up. From what I could tell, both Sarah and Noah were unaware that I had already done that and it kind of changed their perception of how serious I am about storage. Maybe. That could be projecting. But they had interesting facial expressions as I sobbed. Getting rid of stuff is hard. It feels like I am erasing my very existence. So I get why Noah and Sarah are more resistant, but we only have so much space.

I need to have this house decluttered to the point where everything has a home and we can clean it quickly. I just can’t deal with all the stuff any more. I am in this house night and day. I have to feel comfortable in it. I really feel emotionally overwhelmed by excess stuff. I feel rather bad that I lured Sarah (who has a lot of cool stuff) into joining the semi-broken dynamic I have with Noah where I constantly badger him to get rid of stuff. In my defense I get rid of my stuff before I get rid of anyone else’s stuff. Does that make it better? Probably not. But as long I am responsible for the vast majority of the cleaning, I have to be able to do it. And I can’t do it if I can’t put everything away.

And if I paid a maid service I would still be doing like most of the cleaning. The problem with cleaning is that you have to be able to sort, put things away, do dishes, do laundry, and be present for the incidental spills 100% of the time to actually be useful to me. The part a maid could do would only free up about an hour and a half or two hours a week. And I really loathe the experience of trying to get the house tidy enough for maid service and then let it stay tidy until they arrive. It’s stressful. My kids (until today!!!!) don’t usually leave the house without me so I can’t schedule things around them not being here to mess the house up. Only now I can. Hmmmm. Maybe this is a more appealing option now than it used to be. I’ll think about it.

I suspect that part of the problem is that I have gotten past the easy (for me) parts of adding an adult to our house I am freaking out because the next bits are hard. I have to walk a fine line between pushing people to get rid of stuff they have emotional attachment to and letting everyone decide for themselves what stuff they need. I don’t need the same stuff as Noah or Sarah to be happy. We are incredibly different. We are materialistic Americans with hobbies, yes there are things we feel we need to keep doing the things that make us happy. That’s not a moral failing. But where does the stuff go? This is a small house. When I measured the rooms years ago I determined that inside the house is around 950′ sq of living space. Adding the garage adds 528′ sq. I am not thrilled with the layout, but I can make it work.

I need to sort through and organize the books and ~~linens~~ (finished before thrift run) and notepads. Those are the current most over-full areas of the house. I’m kind of terrified of books, honestly. I’m not sure where we would put another bookshelf but we may have to find a spot. Part of the problem is, this house is dark. If you completely line the walls with bookshelves (that I also don’t want to pay for) then it feels like a cave. I wasn’t happy in the house like that. That was how the living room worked for years. And it is always messy because the kids destroy the books. Ugh. That’s why there aren’t adult books in the living room. I wanted to kill my kids because they were constantly strewn across the room. I feel anxiety in the pit of my stomach just thinking about it. I was constantly hurting myself and tripping. I couldn’t keep the floor clear for more than 15 minutes and it was awful. I just don’t want that in my life. It sucks. We have to fit this layout of books. I can’t put them back in the living room. I can’t deal with the stress. Or Sarah will find a good bookcase for her room. Oh god. Not the living room. And those freakin notepads. Does anyone want any 3 ring spiral notebooks? We have enough to furnish an elementary school for a year. Freecycle. That’s where those should go.

Which is to say, I’m actually past all the hardest work. I’m fidgeting stuff around until it fits now. The kids can be in the same room while I work without making a mess so I can work all day long. Though I did take yesterday off from the unpacking/sorting. I’m to the point where I am pretty sure I could stack things in the storage area and have the party this weekend. Oh man. That’s a lovely thought. I really don’t want to do that, so I’m going to keep plugging away.

It’s probably worth explicitly stating that when I am miserable I post a lot. When I’m being productive I don’t post. I rarely feel the need to steal moments away from happy times to announce on the internet that I’m happy. Things are on an upswing. I’m still a stress monkey because I am. Yeah. Dude. Uncle Bob died less than three months ago. Divorcing my family was also, less than three months ago. I think the fact that I am to the point where I’m just over angsting about unpacking isn’t actually so bad. I’m still having a hard time being nice with friends. I think I’m doing well with the girls. They are both cheerful and seem to be thriving and growing.

I need to just hit post.

unpacking hell

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Work. Work. Work. Work. You want to do this fun thing? I assign you 100 hours of work first! You want to do this other fun thing? I will assign you 1,000 hours of work first!

Being the mom means I have to be the one who gets up and works when no one else wants to or there is a huge mess… and I have to clean it. I don’t want to make it sound like Noah isn’t involved or that he doesn’t help. He does. But he’s gone 50 hours a week doing other work. I’m here. All. The. Time. So I work all the time. I don’t have space for me in my life right now. I haven’t really written in weeks. I don’t have time or mental energy. I’m not even writing emails because I am so exhausted and brain dead.

I have really mixed feelings about my upcoming birthday party. I’m not going to have the energy to put together the kind of event I was imagining. And that sucks. I am scaling down a lot. I have to. That’s life. But the party was a big scale down from the trip I wanted to take. So I am scaling down again. That’s just kind of how my birthdays go. Historically speaking my birthdays pretty much suck and I spend most of them crying because I feel like it is reinforced that I just don’t matter much to anyone. Having to do this much work before I can even begin to think about doing any work towards making the party fun means that it is going to be a very generic party. People will come and pat me on the head and eat a bunch of food (they better or I will have too many leftovers) and leave. And then I won’t see people again for a few years. I’m feeling conflicted about how this is supposed to “fill up my cup” so to speak.

I feel ungrateful and whiny. My friends have supported me in the best ways they’ve been able. My family is not deliberately making work for me. No one is oppressing me. But I feel like *I* am not in my life any more. I could be replaced easily by a robot with a better temper and more patience. I feel like me being present means very little. But dear god I better get off my ass and start working again. I want to have people come over, right? That means there has to be somewhere for them to go. That means a whole shitload of work right now. It also doesn’t help that I have a lot of internal baggage about my house being shitty. I feel like it proves that I am shitty and lazy and too stupid to care for a house properly. Inviting people over to see it just twists that knife.

Right now I want out of my life. But there is no where to go. This is part of the “for worse”. I really need a break from worse one of these years. I would like to feel like I exist in my life some decade soon.

Stalling on the house.

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I set myself a rather ambitious schedule for house renovating. It was going to be very difficult for me to accomplish. I would have to keep up my energy and motivation through quite a bit more hard work. Right now I can’t do it. At this point I feel like the schedule was going to not be met anyway, or if it did… barely. With my uncle dying there is no way. I am spacy and unfocused. I am crying. I have no more patience left. I am on edge and brittle. I have to stop the big work.

Which is to say I need to finish puttering in the garage organizing stuff. But that’s not stuff that other people help with very well. 🙂 So I am going to get everything into the garage, install a grown up level lock on the door so Shanna can’t get into trouble, and I’m going to get it done slowly before my birthday. As much as I wanted to get this done so I could put pictures up and feel proud of myself… I’m not there. And I’m not going to be able to get there for a while. I’m having too hard of a time functioning.

I need to spend time with Shanna doing Shanna stuff for a while. I need to get her off the movies that turn her into a serious brat. Oh I cannot stand her behavior when she is watching a lot of movies. I need to get the sugar that I have been binging on out of the house. I was very deliberately using sugar and caffeine to fuel my ability to keep working. But my body feels like shit. Shanna is whinging and demanding sugar all day long. It needs to get out of my house again.

I need to come back to the center of what my life is right now. What am I actually doing at this stage of my life? I am raising my babies. I am trying to create a space where they have freedom to play without getting yelled at. I’ve been missing the mark on that one lately. I want to put a lock on the garage because I want her to be able to have a “yes” environment most of the time but then there is an adult space in the house where we can go to practice civilized behavior when I am up for it.

Right now I just can’t direct any more people. It takes energy, both physical and mental, that I don’t have. It is amazing to me that as wonderful as it is to have people come help, I still have a lot of work to do when they are here. And all of a sudden I can’t do it. Even though I wanted to. I’m so sorry I canceled on people.

The end of the all depression all the time hour.

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I mention, in the long serious trauma posts, that I kind of have a split personality thing going on right now. I am sleeping weird hours (but getting more sleep than it probably sounds like) and working constantly on a humongous list of stuff. That’s why I am not posting during the day about all the cheerful stuff going on in my life. I appreciate the phone calls I’ve been getting, but really… it doesn’t matter how suicidal I fell, I won’t allow myself to be the kind of person who hurts my kids that way. That is not my story. So even though I have really bad times I am not going to give in to this compulsion. I have an awful lot of will power. I’ve been using the home improvement stuff to kind of meditate and stay present during the day and it’s really awesome. I may not chop wood and carry water but I do a lot of dig dirt, carry bucket. I say that over and over all day. And I smile while I do it. And I feel at peace with the world. And I enjoy my beautiful children. And I really and truly am genuinely happy.

But! Today is a slack day! Thanks to the efforts of our wonderful friends Paula, Andrew, Alex, and Yani we get to have a day of rest. Noah suggested that folks might find it kind of cool to see what I’ve been up to so here I go. I have thusly suffered through the agonies of technology. It took me over an hour and a crying fit at Noah before it occurred to me that if a program wasn’t working… maybe I should restart my computer. I’m a quick one I am. So I didn’t have three days of everything going right, but uhm as a bump that one is ok by me. I uploaded a bunch of pictures on flickr. I’m going to try to write commentary.

Mostly I have relaxed and read web articles. It’s been a blessedly work-free day. Sometime soon I will have to figure out dinner, but not yet.

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.

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. 🙂

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Category Archives: home improvement

Suicidal ideation

Playing house and thinking about destiny

If you build it, they will come.

Homeschooling and hubris and motherhood is not a career

Evading laundry

Had a good day.

Shrink your world

Tried something different.

Hand-me-downs

Things are improving

unpacking hell

Stalling on the house.

The end of the all depression all the time hour.

Evil Soul