Noah has invited me into masturbation three times recently and it went really well. It was fun and sweet. Last night we had a date at the Citadel and it went really well. We had a lovely two hour scene that was full of talking and emotional power exchange and a light spanking and a little bit of manual genital contact… It was a really fun scene.

It’s not that we can’t have successful play or sex.

I don’t feel I have done al the work and Noah hasn’t done work. I feel like both of us have worked on major areas of ourselves for our marriage. For one thing: Noah shows up and is consistent for me and the kids in a way that is frankly kind of miraculous given where he started out in the executive functioning department. When I met him he was not capable of getting all his bills paid on time. Things have changed.

Being regular for me is a huge cost for him. I do understand that. Showing up every single day and cheerfully providing multiple meals and doing a job that supports us all in a kind of luxury that is barely conceivable in the scope of human history…

Noah does a lot for us and I don’t want to make it sound like I think Noah doesn’t try. Noah tries very hard all the time.

But I think that Noah hasn’t put a lot of work into dealing independently with his sexual shame. I think being able to say that there is an area where he hasn’t done a lot of work is different than saying he hasn’t done a lot of work. One is overly broad and one is specifically pointing out that no one can get to fucking everything.

But we have to work on this one. Or rather… he has to work on it and I have to help make space for that work. I can’t do the work. I can’t fix it. But I can try to create an atmosphere where he feels safe addressing it.

We talked last night about how a fair characterization of our first 10 years of marriage is we have both spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to read one another’s body language and respond to the non-verbal cues as much or more than the verbal cues and they seriously don’t align.

Like… Noah has said many times over the years that masturbating with me might be an acceptable alternative to sex. While never initiating such contact and being surly when I bring it up.

So that’s complicated.

Just like he responds to me saying one thing with my body language and something else with my words. It’s a hard situation. We both do it. We both want to be doing what the other really wants and we both treat one another’s words like lies compared to the unspoken stuff.

That makes communication kind of suck. Because we both spend a lot of time feeling lied to and a lot of time being angry that the other person isn’t fucking believing what we say. Whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine.

I do not believe that I’m the one trying and Noah just doesn’t care. I am instead frustrated that we can both try this hard and still not solve our problems.

I feel like maybe we are starting to get somewhere on talking about how and why my body reacts to a bunch of stuff. I feel like I’m starting to find language for stuff that I have struggled to articulate for years. It feels frustrating and demoralizing because I don’t want to keep trying. I want to quit. I want to declare this problem too hard. I can’t be fixed. Fuck it.

It is hard continuing to show up and try. But we are both doing it because we really don’t want a different future than the one we are making together. This is what we want. But is it good for us?

I woke up crying again.

I had a great conversation with FMC last night. They are trying really hard to get in touch with their feelings and figure out what being in their body means. It feels like such an honor to help them with this process. They are being very vulnerable and honest with me and that is a gift. They are feeling completely normal anxiety about being replaced by Lightning.

I asked them if they know why they are here on this earth. They looked down and mumbled a little bit, “Because you wanted me when I was a baby.” Then there was this very sad but heart warming intermission where they looked at me then looked away then looked at me then looked away and asked so softly I could barely hear them, “But do you still want me now that I’m so hard?”

Oh my sweet, beloved wonderful child. I want you so much. I adore you. I think you are wonderful and fascinating and you are a really great teacher and I’m so delighted that I get to have you in my life. I feel like I love you more than I love being alive. I stay alive because I want to see what happens to you. I want to see the adventure that is your life and I hope I will be good enough to you all of your life that you will want to talk to me about what it means to be you.

God I want you.

They asked me what they teach me. I said, “You know how EC is pretty calm and chill and you have to antagonize her a fair bit before she explodes at you?” “Yeah.” “You know how all someone has to do is look at you wrong and sometimes that makes you explode?” “……. Yeah.” “Well I’m more like you. Only when I was your age I was so much worse than you are now that you can’t even imagine it. From you I learn how to regulate my body. You have calms between your storms that I never had. When you were a tiny baby my body taught yours how to breathe and poop and eat. Now that you are big you teach my body how to calm down after being upset because even though you have BIG FEELINGS you also basically feel safe in life. I learn a lot from watching how that works for you.”

They glowed and hugged me and looked like they felt a lot better about themself.

Sometimes watching the innocent pleasure and joy my children feel in having a body… I feel really bad about myself. Because that hasn’t really been part of my story. I feel like my story was tainted before I was conscious of it being my story.

I’m 36 years old and I spend a fantastic amount of time just staring at my children because I’m trying to learn what it means to feel safe.

It feels really pathetic.

My body isn’t about me feeling pleasure. My body is about what services I can offer to other people. What work can I perform to cause you to put up with my horrible presence? I really wish I could learn how to like me at least a little.

It took me about 15 years of having sex to learn how to orgasm. Do you know that most orgasms aren’t really all that pleasurable for me? It’s a muscle contraction that I need to perform.

Sex is a performance. It’s not about what I feel. I have always been very confused by pillow princesses. I can’t lay back and be the focus because it doesn’t feel good and I will panic and fight and feel trapped and scared. I do people. I don’t really get done much.

Sex is how I buy my right to be allowed to stay.

It didn’t use to feel this sad to me. But now it does. Because I don’t want my children to ever ever ever ever ever ever ever feel this way.

Thinking that my children are doomed to feel like me forever makes me kind of want to lock all the doors and set the house on fire with us inside. Because no. I’m not going to do that, obviously, instead I am going to find a way to teach my vagina enhanced children that they deserve to feel good in their bodies. And they should absolutely fight off contact that doesn’t feel good. They don’t owe anyone shit. Nothing. Not a god damn thing. They exist for themselves and not for someone else’s pleasure.

It’s kind of amazing watching them internalize this when I can’t.

I’m a very good teacher. I can teach a lot of things I don’t understand or I can’t duplicate within my own brain or heart.

But it hurts. I feel so invalidated. I am still what my parents made me to be and it hurts.

It isn’t that I want to give up on sex and never have it again because it is so awful. I think that would actually be an easier place to be, mentally, than where I am.

I want sex. I just want it to not hurt. I don’t want to feel degraded at the end of it. I don’t want it to be something that I owe in trade for rent and food. I don’t want to be buying my right to stay alive with my cunt.

And I don’t feel like I’ve ever done anything but that. And it hurts a lot.

It isn’t that there are never flashes of feeling good, but I bury it so fast in this robotic performance. I know what is expected of me and I know how to deliver on it.

But I don’t feel like there is very much me in that performance. It’s about trying to live up to expectations and requirements. It’s about trying to make up for how horrible of a person I am. Maybe if I am good enough at sex I will be forgiven for what a disgusting monster I am.

I do not want my children to feel like me.

I can’t tell if my mother wanted me to feel like her or if she didn’t think that feeling another way was an option. I can’t ask.

When I talk about spending an obscene amount of time looking at my children… I get the impression that sometimes other parents hear that as a competitive thing. I don’t think this is because I’m a better parent. I think this is because I am trying to learn how to be an undamaged human being by staring at them. I don’t do this because I’m better. I do this because I am starting from such a point of disadvantage that this much makeup work is necessary to get to par.

It’s kind of like how some people can go through college doing 10-ish hours a week of homework and some people spend 50 hours a week on the same assignments because they can’t work as fast.

I may be a fast reader but I’m literally retarded in many areas of social development and trying to catch up is so very hard. I can do homework quickly but I can’t learn how to feel safe very quickly. It’s so god damn hard. I’ve been trying and failing for so many years. But I’ve made a lot more progress. My children seriously help.

I feel very ashamed of myself because I know that it isn’t cool to have children to “give them a job”. Children should not have to do anything for their parents That’s not how the flow works. But I need to have someone show me what it means to feel safe and I need to see it over and over and over and over for so many hours over so many days over so many weeks and months and years because my body is just not wanting to absorb this lesson.

It is hard that the stated goal for a while has been that we (kind of collectively Noah and I but sort of the kids too) are trying to find ways for my body to be in less pain so I can stick around longer. We have absolutely hemorrhaged money as a family trying to fix what is wrong with me. But then I bounce around between my various forms of self harm, including sex, and I feel like it is all my fault I’m in the state I’m in.

Doing the tile work was frankly stupid. My body isn’t recovered and I stopped doing that project in fucking March. But it’s so pretty!

The road trip did serious damage. I don’t know that I’m fully recovered physically from it. That was so physically demanding and exhausting. But I remember sleeping.

I remember night time wake ups in the tent. I’d have this moment of “I’m awake. I should pee. Wait. Climbing out of the middle of this fucking air mattress is a nightmare. I can wait.” Then I’d go back to sleep. It was great.

I can’t… otherwise do that much in life.

I have incontinence issues. I hear they are common among early childhood sexual assault folk.

I feel like something inside me broke on the road trip. Broke may not be exactly the right word. But I had a long time of barely having sex. What sex I did have I really wanted to have and it was very limited in when it could happen and it couldn’t be all that performative because of limitations of privacy and… Stuff. I came back from the road trip just… not able to resume the pattern I had been playing out.

I still don’t really understand what it even means. It’s been two years (almost) since we got home and over a year of that was the fucking remodel which was draining and hard as hell. Now we are trying to establish what our new normal is and…

I’m a twitchy weird ass bitch.

I feel like I don’t know what I want. I want sex to stop hurting me. I want sex not to be something that I’m supposed to show up for and then dissociate through because I’m not really an important factor in this performance.

It’s like when you are driving and you get somewhere and you can’t remember the drive? That’s what sex is like for me a lot of the time. It’s a thing I show up for and zone out and then it’s over.

And I don’t want to anymore. Sex is supposed to be about connecting, I keep being told. If my mind isn’t really present… what connection is occurring? Why does that even fucking feel like god damn connection to you? You might as well be trying to connect with someone who is on a heroin bender. Good fucking luck.

My current shrink says that in their opinion we are going to have to work on the dissociative sex stuff within the structure of our M/s relationship or it isn’t going to work.

Do you know how fucking weird it is to have a shrink god damn say that?! Even a supposedly kink positive therapist?!

I’ve seen probably close to a dozen “kink friendly” therapists. Guess what. Mostly bdsm was kind of weird to them and they didn’t want to talk about it much. But they didn’t openly pathologize me for it… which is a step up from the non kink friendly people.

I don’t think our sex problems are Noah’s fault. I don’t think these problems stem from him being inconsiderate or mean. I don’t even think he is coercive at this point. He’s sad. I think I came into this marriage with a set of coping skills that have become a big problem.

My whole life is kind of an exercise in “Figure out how to cope with something that isn’t ok then figure out how to stop coping like that because once the situation changes if you try to cope like that you are the fucking problem.”

I feel so weary. I feel so broken and like it doesn’t matter if all of it is my fault I have to carry it no matter what anyway.

Sometimes FMC seems to have this almost primal wounding. Because I am woo as shit, I view it as kiddo having quite a connection to ancestral grief.

I am so sad that I didn’t bring my children to the last ritual I got to attend with Sobonfu. I didn’t know they would be welcomed or I would have. I believe that both of them could have learned a lot, but FMC could have benefited the most. And now she is gone. That is how life goes.

FMC’s shrink was asking me about traumas that happened near FMC when they were small. I can point at a few things. Their birth was literally traumatic and there is interesting research about the impact that has on a person forever. When they were under a year old my uncle who raised me died and I went through an intense grief period where my friends came over and watched me all the hours Noah was at work because I could not be trusted to care for myself or my children. Then I divorced my family and wrote about my childhood and that was all… highly dysregulating for me.

That has an impact on my kids.

It is hard knowing that from here on into infinity… what happens to me impacts my children and that’s part of why I have to figure out how to reduce how much harm I’m causing to myself.

Because I owe them.

I know that there are a lot of people in this world who believe that if you are mentally ill you have no right to have children.

I know.

I know that there are lots of people in this world who believe that if you are mentally ill you should not be in a romantic relationship–you should go off alone and heal yourself before you inflict your broken on someone else.

I know.

But I wouldn’t have gone off and healed. I would have gone off and died. Because I am a waste person who does not need to exist.

Instead I got married and had children and became a person who is absolutely not expendable to the people in this house. And instead of killing myself I am trying to figure out how to live up to what they need. I am trying to become the person they need me to be. It’s very hard and I fuck up quite badly on the path, it’s true.

I know that my fuck ups are why I don’t deserve to be here.

But if I left at this point it would create as big or bigger problems than staying will. I made quite a pickle. My option is to fuck everyone over or work to change.

I’m working as hard and as fast as I can but the scope of what I have to change is so daunting.

For many years I stared at EC and I watched my internal video of what was happening in my life at her ages and I relived trauma after trauma as I watched her safe easy life happen at the same time and I tried to understand. I tried to wrap my head around what happened to me and why that impacted me the way it did.

At some point… EC has stopped being who I look at. I’m looking at FMC. FMC is a much more accurate reflection of comparison between how I would have been without trauma vs how I was with trauma. Watching EC frankly makes me feel bad about myself. I don’t have a personality like hers. I think she would have coped very differently from me and I can’t make the leap to understand her coping as well. Now FMC is like a lit ember hiding in the mast of a forest ready to explode into a raging forest fire. Kid has some fucking intensity. Yeah… I’m more like that.

If FMC were abused more… they would be a lot more like I was. There is no “this is the idealized child I could have been if I were safe” it is more like, “Yup, this is the child I’m supposed to have to make me look in the mirror at all the parts of my personality that are hard. Awesome.”

And I love them so much for giving me this opportunity. Because it’s a lot easier to see how to love them than how to love me. They aren’t a monster the way I am. They have been fairly effectively prevented from doing all the shit I did. They don’t have my list of regrets piling up.

Even at their age I already knew I was bad and that people shouldn’t be around me much. I remember at Lakeside when I stopped being invited to playdates or birthday parties because I was inappropriate. I bounced in and out of that school so it was the only place I faced the ongoing rejection. Everywhere else I was in and out so quickly people didn’t get to know me enough to object to me in the same way. I remember parents telling me not to talk to their children because my behavior was unacceptable.

K, you don’t know how I hold on in my memory to the fact that you talked to me. I always got the impression you weren’t sure if you liked me because you were sharp, but you talked to me. Even when I came back in 6th grade and everyone else was completely over me. You talked to me. Thank you.

I watch how my children fit into their life and their classes and their friendships and I marvel. Before I was 18 I lived in one place for three years (the house I was born in) and two places for 18 months (Apple Valley and Whittier) and otherwise… it was very brief stops everywhere. I didn’t fit anywhere. I didn’t belong. I was wrong for every place I laid my foot.

My children belong. My children are accepted. Their neighbors know them and can rattle off their life story. The local places they have been taking classes in act like they are just… part of the community. It’s so different.

And all of this is tied up in sex for me.

What is safety? What is connection? What is belonging? What is pleasure?

Today is going to be kind of brutal and I still feel kind of sick. A Skype chat with a friend first thing in the morning. Then I am going to go try out the local acupuncturist place that focuses on fertility/pregnancy/chronic pain. Then I come home and do school with the kids. Then I go see the pain doctor. Then I go to the CPAP fitting. Then I have dinner with a different friend. Since I’m driving out of town I might as well stack all the things so I don’t have more driving days.

I’m about to give up on driving and that sounds so awesome right now.

At some point in December or January I’m just going to stop leaving town. Because I don’t want to anymore.

Is that pleasure?

Part of it is that driving wipes me out in this complete physical and existential way. It’s really hard to do how much exercise I should be doing and drive frequently. I need to switch gears to exercising. My life may literally depend on how fit I am when I go into this labor.

So I’m going to spend the third trimester doing gentle but persistent exercise to the degree I can handle. Nothing with a heart rate over 130.

This isn’t really optional if I want to meet my obligations to my family.

In the next two months Noah will be gone for ten days. He has two work trips and he’s taking the kids to see his family in Texas for a weekend. I will get a whole weekend off in December. It overlaps with my father’s birthday so I don’t think I’m going to be all that cheerful and outgoing.

That means that I will have gotten 13 days of vacation from my kids this year. Holy shit. That’s a lot.

Yesterday was a good example of what I think Noah means when he says that he feels good about it when I do stuff I really don’t want to do but I’m doing it for him. I booked the trip to Texas. It took me about a fucking hour because between the flights and the hotel and the car I was just having a bitchy time getting things to load and figuring out what would work for them and… oh I was cranky. But I did it. Mostly because I pushed Noah to take the kids to Texas and I know how much dealing with his family stresses him out. He hasn’t seen them in two years (except for that dinner when his parents came through San Francisco in I think January?) and I get the impression that he doesn’t care to change it for himself. But the kids really want to know their relatives. So he’s taking them. And I booked the damn trip. Because even though neither Noah nor I particularly like his family… it’s different for the kids. It will always be different and it’s a good thing that we facilitate the kids having the level of relationship they have.

I felt so alone through my entire childhood. My children feel connected and loved. My kids think their Texas relatives adore them.

It must be lovely feeling so loved.

And my head comes back over and over and over again to, “But whores don’t deserve that.” And I was born to be a whore. So if I get abuse instead of love, that’s just. If I am hurt instead of appreciated… that’s appropriate. I’m not here so I can feel good. I am here because dicks need to go someplace.

A nice person asked if my sleep people had asked about the cosleeping situation because lots of moms can’t sleep with all these darn kids around.

Reasonable question incredibly tactfully phrased. Well done.

We’ve tried having the kids in different rooms. It didn’t help me much. I feel like the best sleep I’ve gotten in years was when I was wedged between the kids on the road trip. I was physically exhausted every day and I felt really secure all night long. I thought that was lovely. I didn’t even have to get up and use the toilet 4 times a night during that period. For reasons passing my understanding my bladder understood how much of a pain it would be to try and get out of the middle of the air mattress in the tent and I just didn’t have much urgency. Which is freaky and unusual for me.

When I’m alone in a room I basically don’t sleep. I can sometimes but it is rare. When I lived by myself I arranged the people I was dating on a schedule so I could go from bed to bed because I don’t sleep well alone. Mondays I went up to SF to see M&L. Tuesdays and Thursdays I stayed with T (that nice boy you used to date, J–he was really nice to me) Wednesdays and either Friday or Saturday (sometimes both Friday and Saturday) I stayed with the boyfriend who became my Owner. Sundays I either found a random person or didn’t sleep.

Sometimes it is hard to explain what promiscuity has been in my life. Why do I do it? Because I need to sleep. Because that is what I was born to do and so I have to do it even when it hurts. Because this is who I am.

Being married and having to change my self perception is really weird.

My kids help me sleep, they don’t usually keep me up. Once in a while someone will do something kind of annoying all night long, but once I’m asleep I can sleep through major earthquakes. It is convincing my body that it is safe enough to really get to sleep that is the problem. My kids help me feel safe.

My husband bothers my sleep as much or more than they do because he is a very light sleeper and I’m a thrasher so I spend a lot of time barely asleep because I’m afraid of moving and waking him up. I try so hard to be still so I don’t keep him up that I don’t sleep very well. With my kids I don’t care. They sleep like the dead while kicking and thrashing all night long. I sleep like the dead while kicking and thrashing all night long. It works very well for us.

And my kids aren’t in my bed at this point and we haven’t done “family bed” in years. My husband can’t deal. Future Middle Child is on a crib mattress on the floor right next to my side of the bed so they can touch me while sleeping, but it’s a reach your hands above your head and hold hands sort of situation.

I love that when FMC is sleeping they will still reach up and find my hand and grip it like a climbing plant.

I’ve been thinking about FMCs obscene need for one on one time. It’s not obscene, but it is EXTREME and sometimes that’s… complicated.

I’m wondering if I can talk them into shorter daily dates. Like, if we had a ritualized 10-30 minutes a day where we truly go somewhere behind a closed door or out of the house and they get to feel like they are the only sun around which I orbit… I can’t do the weekly 4-5 hour dates they want. That’s hard scheduling wise. We do it once or twice a month but I can’t promise four times a month. I just can’t.  But 10-30 minutes a day we could probably figure out.

I think we are going to figure out how to convert “my” room into some sort of meditation space. I’m not actually in this room very often. But I need a place where I’m allowed to go in and shut a door and be alone. Frankly… everyone in my family needs access to that. Every. Other. Fucking. Piece. Of. This. House. Is. Common. Space.

I’m struggling so I get why everyone else struggles too. We have this rule that you can’t tell people they have to get out of common space (I’ve got issues around that from childhood) but if we had a room where anyone was allowed to go in and say “I’m here for alone time” and folks have to leave them alone… that might be a really good thing for the dynamics in my house.

We’ll try it.

Yesterday when we were riding in the car Eldest Child asked what the word bipolar meant (it was used in a comic book) and we gave a description that combined “in the general sense” and “in the mental health sense” because we are pedantic as fuck.

Then Future Middle Child piped up and asked, “Am I bipolar?”

I said that I don’t know but it is a possibility. I told them that children as young as them are not diagnosed because kids have trouble with their feelings and that’s not necessarily something that will carry through your whole life. But our family has a strong history of emotional imbalances and kiddo does have BIG FEELINGS that change at the slightest provocation so… we’ll see. I told them that if they do we will find doctors and medications to help them cope and it won’t be a big deal. It will be some work, but it won’t change how wonderful they are.

They seemed to accept this response pretty well. We talked about how I *don’t* have bipolar disorder and I know it because I’ve tried the medications and instead of helping me calm down they completely freaked me out and that means I don’t have that kind of chemical imbalance in my brain–I have other problems. If they get bigger and think it is a good idea to try medications to help with mood regulation they will quickly find out if it is helpful or harmful and we will go from there.

Since she was born I have wanted to believe that my daughter represents my idealized self–what I could have been if I were born into a family that wanted me. The more time passes by the more I realize that my sweet kid is much more like the self I would have been. I would never have had the emotional stability my daughter has. She didn’t get that from me. She’s kind of a miracle to me. Instead my kid… my kid is so familiar and like me that I weep for them. I’m sorry dude. It’s probably going to be a rough road even though it will be easier than the road I walked. Your brain is probably going to be kind of bitchy sometimes.

I learn so much from my children. All of my life I have tried to learn from people. I have tried to learn how to cope and behave and process my emotions like other people and mostly I have failed because I just don’t have the background or skills to pull off what other people do. My children teach me what it means to feel stable. My children teach me what it means to be safe.

I think I have learned almost as much from my children as I have from all of my therapists put together… but I wouldn’t have been in a position to learn from them if I hadn’t had all the therapy. The pump was primed and all that.

I learn by teaching them. My daughter is so emotionally self aware it blows my mind. She can talk about her ambiguous feelings and accept contradiction in herself without feeling upset about it. It doesn’t bother her in the slightest that I’m the worst mother ever and the best mother ever. That’s fine. It’s just… what is. (Sometimes when she is charitable she will say that ok fine maybe I’m not the worst mother ever but I’m certainly annoying as shit. So true, dear.)

I learn so much from teaching my emotionally dysregulated child. They don’t feel comfortable with ambiguity. People should be perfect or terrible. But baby… am I perfect or terrible? No. And that bugs the shit out of them.

I love you so much.

I learn from my daughter how to sit and feel calm and feel like everything is ok… because it is.

I learn from my kid how to sit and feel dysregulated and not break everything nearby even though life is frustrating as shit… because it is.

Thank you both for these lessons. I need them very badly.

Yesterday FMC got to have the experience of being A Big Kid and they fucking loved it. My kids were left alone in a room with a 3 year old and a 5 year old for hours and FMC stepped right up to be the Good Example and spent the whole time trying to boss and be helpful with the little kids. “I told them that they needed to follow this rule and that rule and in this house we have to do _____ and…” They said they felt very grown up and responsible and it was really nice.

I think that’s the feeling of competence and mastery that makes oldest children thrive so much. First children tend to do best… across the board. It’s an interesting phenomena. There is speculation that it is in part because oldest children constantly have to master and teach skills before they are truly ready so they just go through life with that approach.

I would like to point out that every successful revolution has been lead by a youngest or only child. Viva la revolucion. Pretend I have an accent mark but my keyboard is being bitchy.

I learn about paying attention to people and placing their needs above my wants and my needs above their wants from my kids.

Do you know that most of the time when my children and I walk into a one hole bathroom situation they both gesture at the toilet and me and say, “Smallest bladder goes first.” I have more trouble with incontinence than either of them. At some point around 3 or 4 years old my kids figure out that they have more capacity to wait than I do without an accident. On one hand it’s kind of embarrassing… on the other hand it’s really awesome because my kids act like my body is important and they’ve paid attention to me enough to know that I genuinely can’t hold my urine as long as they can. I go to the bathroom 2-4 times as often as they do and they know it and they kind of feel bad for me. Usually our rule is “whoever speaks up about needing the toilet first goes first” but if it’s just an “in case” trip they default to pushing me to go first.

The line started when FMC was tiny. When the three of us would walk into the bathroom when FMC was like 18 months old EC would try to race for taking her clothes off faster and I would resolutely say, “No. That’s not cool. Smallest bladder first.”

It’s kind of like how my kids say “Yes ma’am” because I’ve always said it to them and they have internalized that it is the appropriate response to people asking you to do things. It’s not a top-down authority thing… it’s a “we love and respect each other and display that respect over and over all day long” thing.

My kids do feel some amount of fear for me. I feel guilty about that. But I’m not sure that I am capable of never inspiring some level of fear in folks. I’m an intense motherfucker. Even if I don’t do anything. Even if I stand in one place and I just have feelings and mind my own god damn business. I scare the shit out of people because they imagine that I might do something terrible because clearly I have feelings and that’s scary.

Sigh.

I had too many giant football players cower and tell me that I was the most terrifying person they had ever interacted with to try and believe that I’m not scary. Ok fine. I’m scary. What am I supposed to do about that?

I have a lot of sympathy for Black men who “scare” people just by existing. That shit’s rough. It’s not god damn fair. Or hell, Black women get that too. Life sucks.

My kids are some of the most effective teachers I’ve ever had. Because I want to learn these lessons.

The rare cross post. If you saw this on fetlife, you don’t need to reread it here.

I’ve worked pretty hard on changing my perception of myself over the years. I no longer believe I am worthless. I have substituted the belief that I am an incredibly effective tool. I know how to do a lot of different kinds of work and when I show up to do work… I get a lot done. I have developed quite a bit of pride in how effectively I can get work done over a broad swath of types of work. I’m not a one trick pony.

My family wanted me to perceive myself as stupid but all of the GATE testing when I was a kid and grown ups going “Holy crap this kid is SMART” means that their attempts to make me think I was stupid just kind of failed. I’m brilliant and I’m comfortable with acknowledging that. The rate at which I read complicated non-fiction books helps me not ever succumb to the belief that I might be stupid. But I have to keep working consciously on expanding what I know or I would start chanting this at myself. I view smart as something that has to be constantly worked on or it doesn’t count.

I could go through a long list of specifically triggering things I’ve worked on, but the problem that keeps coming up and I just can’t fucking deal with it in a rational way… is what I was born to be.

Let me explain. My father raped my mother when she knew she was fertile and she didn’t want to have more kids. He wanted to make another kid to rape. He was already raping the children they had. Like a true pedophile, gender wasn’t that important to my father.

So from when I was a tiny baby the story I was told about my existence is that I was made so that men would have more holes to use and how I felt about that really didn’t matter.

This is the problem I keep coming back to. This is the core belief I have not been able to shake or move or change in years of trying. This is what I am here for. It doesn’t really matter if it feels good to me or if I like it or if I want it. That’s why I am here. It is literally why I was made.

I don’t know how to alter these wires in my brain so that I stop giving a shit what my father’s intentions were and start feeling like I get to define what I am here for.

This piece is just sticky as hell and I have not figured out how to change it. This is what brings me to my knees over and over sobbing and feeling like I need to die to get away from the terrible burden of being responsible for taking more and more and more pain inside my body.

Even when my partners (my husband most of all) have tried to figure out how to fuck me without hurting me we always run up against this strong limitation that I can’t really talk in the moment about sex hurting my cunt. I dissociate away from that so fast I am literally physically incapable of talking when it happens. Even though I’ve done decades of work on trying to fix this.

I’ve fixed a lot of pieces of this. But this spot still persists and I have not yet figured out how to rewire this in my brain.

I can write about it when it’s not happening. I can barely speak out loud about this topic without melting down into tears or screaming swear words like FUCK YOU FOR HURTING ME. Which is not all that productive.

I continue to be impressed with my husband’s persistence in wanting to help me deal with my laundry list of problems.

I sabotage efforts to make sex not hurt me. Because I have this internal motivation that I have to be providing a lot of sex, even if it is damaging me and I have to initiate even when I’m in pain and….

I know I create a lot of this problem with my utter unwillingness to act like pain in my cunt is worthy of acknowledgment in the moment. There were a few times when I was very young when I mentioned that it hurt to partners and the response was a solid wall of “So?” and I just completely lost the ability.

The kinds of 25 year olds who like to fuck 12 year olds really don’t care.

This internal belief, that fucking is literally why I exist, is why I push so hard for sex with so many people. I have an internal programming that dictates that I must ask for sex. Because this is why I exist. To give this experience to people who want it.

This has gotten more complicated as my partner has gone through a shift from actively wanting polyamory when we met to very actively wanting mainly monogamy with very rare occasions of group sex.

Fitting into the expectations that are currently held for me takes a lot of work. I’ve adapted as best I can. It’s not always easy. But the good I get from being part of this family is so breathtaking. I get to belong somewhere. People care when I’m crying. People care about me in this house. I am important to them. It’s worth a lot of pain and suffering to try and deal with more layers of my mental illness to try and stay here for more of this.

Recently I went through a multiple month period where I genuinely didn’t want to die. That is the longest I can remember feeling like that in my entire life. I have always wanted to die. That has been the drumbeat chasing me through life for just about 30 years now. “I should die because this hurts too fucking much.” I want more of the not-wanting-to-die feeling. And I have to change this belief to get there.

This is tricky because I partially married my husband because he has the highest sex drive of anyone I ever seriously dated. He’s been the only one who wanted to keep up with what I wanted to initiate.

But a lot of what I initiate hurts me. And then there are waves of consequences.

This is so unfair.

It is desperately unfair to my husband and frankly it isn’t fucking fair to me either. It is fucking shitty being in my head and in my body. It isn’t anyone’s fault at this point that it sucks so much to be inside of me… but it’s a fact.

One of my buddies idly mused that I get a lot of self esteem from my interactions with my children.

Children are the only people I know how to interact with without feeling like I am failing in not offering sex. That’s the only time I feel like it is completely appropriate for me to not be offering sex. It’s safe in a way nothing and no adult ever is.

I don’t ask everyone for sex all the time for a variety of reasons (I’m pretty sure you don’t want to be asked, I’m pretty sure my husband would flip out, etc) but I have had to grow up and work on my boundaries to get to this point. It took a fair bit of maturing before I understood that my father was lying and not everyone wanted that from me.

Thanks to all the folks who have skillfully and tactfully turned me down over the years. I’m glad you didn’t follow that up with refusing to know me because I was so rude/tactless/gross/insert word of choice.

I’ve tried to grow up as fast as I have been able. I’m a lot closer to my goal of “grown upness” than I actually believed I would make it to… but I’m not there yet. I’m hoping I manage around the time my 9 year old makes it to adulthood.

What am I here for?

That’s this huge existential question, right? I’m super partial to the work of Viktor Frankl, a psychotherapist who went through the Holocaust. He wrote the book _Man’s Search For Meaning_. His general hypothesis is that folks can survive any horror in life if they have something they believe in and it doesn’t matter what it is. It could be “I want to see my wife/husband again”. That kind of belief is enough. If you believe that your love for someone else is your reason for continuing to be alive then you can make it enough to see you through anything.

I can’t control why I was made. I can’t control the intentions behind my makers.

But why do I stay alive?

Maybe that needs to be the focus of the next stage of work. I can’t change what I was made for or whether I did my best to live up to that for the first few decades of my life.

But why now?

I feel really guilty that a lot of why I’m staying alive at this point is a science experiment. Will I be a good enough mother that my children will want to know me when they are adults? Am I capable of treating them in a way that will cause them to want to know me?

I feel guilty about this because I feel like I “should” pick something that is more oriented towards my husband and… that’s different. It’s really complicated that I already feel like I have failed at being a good wife and I feel like there is no walking back from that. He’s not leaving because I’m better than nothing but I will never make it to good. I can’t hang my hat on that in this life.

Ok, so “I am bad” and “I am a monster” are strongly tied in with what is causing me these eternal problems.

It is hard because my husband is having a hard time with how much the shift into being a mother has derailed a lot of the hypersexuality and a lot of my strong need to be hit so much. I’m boring now.

I feel like I am bad for even trying to work towards a future where my cunt will hurt less because that will mean I am not meeting his expectations for how often he wants to get laid.

And the cycle continues.

I don’t feel like I’m about to rip off my skin suit. That’s a good sign in terms of me doing something drastic. That feeling is so awful. It feels like I am a bubbling, swirling cauldron waiting to overflow. I still have pockets of sadness but I don’t feel frantic. I don’t feel like I HAVE to DO something right now about how horrible I feel. It’s ok to just sit and look at the sadness again.

I am still sad.

I am also now prepared in terms of baby clothes. I took the whole family to Outrageous Outgrowns last night. It’s a consignment sale event in San Jose. We split up with the list and were there for 2.5 hours. We didn’t find leggings for the big kids (in the bigger sizes they wear out before they can be sold for cheap… seems legit) but we got almost everything else they need in the next size for the winter. We filled in the gaps I had in baby clothes up to size 9 months. My lovely friend who has given me a bunch of baby stuff just… skipped the 9 month size (a reasonable choice) so I filled in that gap and added in the 3 and 6 month stuff I didn’t have yet. I’m quite partial to sleeper sets. My kids live in them because I’m too lazy to put on complicated adult looking outfits on a tiny baby. I’m always afraid I’ll hurt the kid dressing them in stiff jeans.

We found a Johnny Jump Up even. That sucker was used all the time in our house. Our first two kids loved it. (The swing seat that hangs in a doorway. I don’t know what you call it. I call it what my mama called it.)

I don’t need any more clothes. I would say my need list at this point is for diapers, and an additional baby carrier. I really want a ring sling that is water compatible because that’s how I wash babies best. (Not in the first 2-3 months, obviously. Before neck control this wouldn’t go so hot…) And a travel sized wet bag for the diaper bag. I don’t have one and gosh that sucker will be crucial. It gets kind of irritating using Ziplock bags for this purpose. I’ve done it, but they break at inopportune moments and that’s just nasty.

My whole family was super nice and helpful last night. It was lovely not having to carry all the shit alone. We spent around $500 and bought 91 items. Given that it included a car seat in really good condition and maternity clothes and kid clothes for both big kids and all the baby gear including a Boppy and… I feel we made out like bandits. Only Noah didn’t get anything because they don’t really sell much in his size. Ha.

I feel justified in my desire to give each big kid a warm dress for Christmas. Both of them asked for dresses and couldn’t find a warm dress at the sale. I’m glad there are already Christmas presents in the closet. I think we are about 8 pairs of leggings away from set for the winter.

Which is good. I’m going to hibernate this winter and if you need something and don’t have it your ass can do without.

It continues to fascinate me that my little girl is getting increasingly butch and my delightful little Enby is outrageously femme. What does gender mean anyway? Do whatever makes you happy. I’ll smile when I look at you no matter what you wear.

I rarely participate on the Gender Spectrum forum because mostly as the parent of a gender non-conforming kid I think my role is support and not… being the center of something? So I watch threads and I comment once in a while. Yesterday a mom was having a hard time coping with how their kid dresses so I talked about how I handled it. I hope she feels less alone. I hope she feels like it’s ok for her to accept her kid doing whatever. Another young trans kid was expressing worry about whether they might detransition later in life and does that make their current feelings wrong or a lie?

I told them I have known trans people who have floated up and down the spectrum in terms of presentation throughout their lives for a variety of factors including physical and political safety or even just emotional safety. They are still who they are inside… they just have to adapt to changing environments. It’s ok to manifest yourself how you feel you are safe today and it’s ok for that to change in the future. That doesn’t make any of what you do wrong or a lie, you are totally telling the truth on any given day. You are just keeping yourself safe within your truth and anyone who will attack you and claim you aren’t being “real” isn’t respecting your right to be safe. Only you can decide what presentation is safe for you and that doesn’t change who you are inside.

I hope that I said the right thing to that kid. It’s the truth I have absorbed from talking to 50-70 something year old trans folk.

It’s kind of funny how dealing with Aunt Candy makes me feel really protective of little trans kids. Many of them don’t have a parent like me who will come back like a viper defending them. I wish everyone had the solid wall of support my kid has. That would make for a much better planet.

For all the shit I’m doing wrong in this life and if I started listing those things I’d never stop… I think I am supporting my wonderful Enby pretty well. Of all the things they doubt about themselves (and there is plenty) they don’t doubt that they are non-binary and that’s just ok. They have strategies in their pocket for arguing with people who tell them they don’t exist. They feel supported and seen. I’m not doing everything wrong. (They bought a few very butch pairs of pants for winter. I was kind of shocked. That’s not their normal style but I said not a word. Ok, I said “Are you sure you want to advertise for this sports team?” and that’s all I said.)

They were excited to support their local sports ball team. Uhhh swell. Sure, why not. Sweat pants are sweat pants.

I still feel like I’m walking uphill through a river of molasses. But my brain isn’t fizzing. If that’s the best I can get just now, ok.

I feel like taking three doses of pot a day is helping a little. I am staying more in the placid, “I don’t need to react with drastic measures” state. That’s helpful. I can see the unhappiness and not freak out about it.

Instead I have acid reflux like a motherfucker. Awesome.

Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of this week have been lower in appointment quantity than usual. I’m so grateful. Only the one trip to Outrageous Outgrowns in San Jose for out of town driving. I’m so exhausted.

I’m feeling really guilty and kind of ashamed of myself for asking for a schedule shift with Sarah. She’s drowning in work right now and she has to attend to that. It’s not any kind of personal rejection and I know that. I completely support her making this career jump and I think she’s doing stuff that is important to her life. But she needs to reschedule the Skype calls a fair bit and that’s feeling so hard for me. I’m in such a horrible place emotionally to be flexible and I’m afraid if I keep myself in the position where I need to be plucky and cheerful about shifting timing… I’m going to put myself in a position where I throw a tantrum at some point and that would be so awful. It’s not that I want to stop talking to her. I just… I need it to be more flexible in my head right now. I need it to be a “We will try and see when it works” instead of “I will be there unless something comes up” because that framing makes me feel like I’m always the least important thing. I don’t think it is true that I am one of the least important things in her life. I hope I handled this right. She’s really busy and I’m tweaking on hating myself. It’s a dangerous combo for me doing something rash. I hope this way I won’t blow up at her because of my inappropriate expectations.

Managing my expectations sometimes feels like a job.

I talked to Pam yesterday. I’m really glad. It’s been a couple of months because she’s busy. It’s hard that two out of my three Most Important People that I cling to like a fucking limpet are really busy with important life transition stuff. I support them doing it. I think both of them are doing stuff they really need to do right now. I’m trying as hard as I can not to bitch about the reduction in attention I’m experiencing. It’s not about me. It’s about them being who they want to be in life and that’s IMPORTANT. It’s hard being supportive of their separation and their running off to pursue their dreams when I’m this depressed. But find some god damn support or shut your stupid mouth. They have both supported me through so much. It’s important I get this right. This time in their lives is not forever. If I want to have the right to spend more glorious time with them when this is over… I have to be nice now.

And that includes not blowing up at people because I have asshole-entitled expectations.

They are my friends. Friends give you what they have to spare and you say thank you. If my friends have nothing to give to me then I’d better give to them and get through the gap in time where they have nothing to give. It’s ok. They have carried me in the past.

I’m feeling a lot of anxiety about every one and every thing… but I still feel gratitude for my friendships. The less deeply enmeshed layers of my friendship life are doing a really fabulous job of trying to carry me lately. Make new friends, but keep the old. You need them both.

But talking to Pam yesterday was one of those conversations that reminded me what the difference is for someone who has spent probably tens or hundreds of thousands of hours listening to me talk about myself. I can switch topics and people so fast and she follows every jump of my misbegotten brain. I feel so seen when she’s on her game and I can spew everything I think about every single person and situation in my life and just kind of go “Waaaaaaaaaaa” and she nods and points out some connection I hadn’t noticed or she points out a minor tweak that would make things better.

She’s on my side and she’s not afraid to tell me I’m fucking up and I need to change something. I love this woman so much I feel like I could explode.

And she shares her beautiful family with me. Her parents are great and I love her baby sister. I even get along with the extended family members I see more rarely. It sounds like she is going to need to start going back to Taiwan more often to see elderly relatives so that’ll be hella convenient if we can manage to meet up with her there when Lightning does their first trip abroad. I’m already saving up. When my kids are around 9 months old, they go on their first big trip. It does a lot to set the stage for how mellow my kids are about travel. I don’t know why I need them to be adaptable in these ways but I need it. I’m sure I could manage it with domestic travel, but we learn so much about life this way.

Pam has been telling me about how beautiful her country is for almost 20 years. I’ve seen pictures. It would be glorious to see in person.

And hey I can talk to her mom a bunch more. That always makes my day. I think her mom finds me a bit odd, but she’s super nice. I’ll take it. Pam’s parents are shockingly open minded given stereotypes about Asian parents. They’ve supported their kids through some meandering career choices. Pam worked in theatre for decades and her parents were totally cool with that. Most of my friends who are Asian have told me there is a trifecta: engineer/doctor/lawyer. Pick one or you will be expelled from the family. Pam’s family isn’t like that at all. They are really pretty chill and loving. I want to be at least a little bit like them. Probably with slightly less Buddhism because that feels appropriative to me.

I find parents to inspire me everywhere.

I’m not entirely sure why I’m feeling the need to post stuff on fetlife. I think because I’m trying to fuck with my boundaries and most of what I know about stating boundaries I learned through the bdsm community. They are my teachers. So as I stumble through trying to figure out what this is going to mean to me… I want to talk to my teachers. But I know that the answer is unlikely to come from a rich old white guy. I appreciated him telling me he wishes he had the answer any way… but yeah. I didn’t expect *you* to have the answer for me, sweetheart.

He’s still one of the only people who has sexually assaulted me who apologized. This is such a wacky world we live in. I remain in contact with a bizarre list of people… Sure he apologized ten years later when I sat him down to tell him my story in context and then he felt bad… but it felt really fucking validating. At least one person who assaulted me recognized how badly they fucked up and they saw how much they hurt me and they wanted to apologize. That was a really big deal to me.

He was a jerk and he crossed a stated boundary and that blows chunks. But he did apologize. With my history, can I ask for anything else?

It’s so complicated.

Future tripping keeps me moving. I think we want one more out-of-the-house Christmas event in December. Maybe lights in the park or city lights down in San Jose? That way we do one out of the house event per week up to Christmas. I’m not hosting a Christmas party. I mostly feel like no one cares any way so why should I put so much effort into it?

I’m feeling really pathetic and like no one gives a shit about me and I can’t deal with proving if it is true or not and it doesn’t matter and I just can’t. So I’m skipping a Christmas party. I always feel like I’m doing a mean thing by forcing busy people to acknowledge me and I can’t cope with that feeling this year.

I feel sad and disconnected. If it weren’t for worrying about my children I think this would be an ideal time to die. I feel so very done. But I can’t take my burden off and give it to my kids. That isn’t how this is supposed to work. I need to carry this burden until its journey is done and it doesn’t have to be passed on. The layers of generational trauma have to stop at me. It really doesn’t matter that much how much it hurts me. This is my job. This is my place in this dynamic.

This is justice.

This is how I feel about racial reparations too. It isn’t that important that my generation feel guilty about the shit sandwich that our ancestors made. It is important that we eat it instead of passing it down to the next generation because that is taking responsibility for it existing. I didn’t make it and it isn’t my fault it is here. But I can make sure you don’t have to eat it. Responsibility, not guilt. Guilt doesn’t help anyone.

It doesn’t help my kids for me to feel guilty about handing them a load of trauma. It helps my kids for me to put my big kid panties on and carry my trauma instead of passing it along to them to lighten my load. That’s just fucked up. I get why people do it…

I have to do something different.

I owe my kids in a way that other people might not owe their kids. My kids were very conscious creations even given the layers of generational trauma I know they will inherit and I know I will have to walk them through processing. My kids were born needing help existing in their bodies because our family is fucked up. I picked that reality for them. If I walk into that with full knowing and mindfulness… I don’t get the excuse of “Well I did my best.” I have to give them what they need… not my best. Fuck my best. Get it right.

Do you know how fucking hard it is to center their needs like this? I’m a selfish bitch and I’d really rather care more about my pain than theirs. But I made them. I made them out of nothing. Out of a sex act. They came from the cells of my body.

I need to do this. I need to put my mental illness and pain aside and be what they need. Even if it hurts and it is hard and it involves strain and pain and learning I never even imagined.

Even if it means I have to figure out how to shift my core beliefs about who and what I am and what I am here for.

I am not just here for people to hurt. Sure, I take pain rather than handing it to my kids but that is so different from being a hole for someone to come in.

I told my daughter recently that if my tone of voice sounds harsh or mean it isn’t because I’m upset with her. It’s because this topic is very important and I have to respond right. This response is part of what will decide in the long run if I am a good parent to her or not and I’m scared I’m going to mess up–so yes my voice sounds harsh. Because I’m worried and feeling harsh with myself because I Have To Do This Right. I have to support you. I have to meet this need and I’m afraid I will fail and that makes me sound harsh. I need to do this for you. You matter. You are important.

I have to get this right.

Even if no one ever got it right for me or thought they needed to do this for me. That’s old news. Live in the now.

All I can do today is take responsibility for where I’m standing and the shit sandwich on the table. I won’t make you eat it.

All my life I was told that shit rolls downhill so too bad for me I’m at the bottom of the heap. You know what? I’ll stay here at the bottom. I’m not going to roll my shit onto another person.

I don’t want to.

I love how you shine and I do not want to dull you. I want to polish you up and set you to glitter in the sun. You like doing that. You feel good that way. I’m just glad I get to look at you and stand near you. And sometimes you hug me.

That’s better than passing on the shit sandwich.

I spent a while on the phone with my cousin last night because she is freaking out about stuff in her life. She’s not freaking out about small stuff. Her life is complicated and hard in a way my life will never be again. She doesn’t have the support network I have in any way shape or form. She doesn’t have the kind friends or a partner to help her. That’s really sad. She was expressing some bitterness about my niece (my sister’s daughter) having a huge network of friends she leans on. I get why my niece built that network of friends–it’s not like she will have support from her bio family.

I heard some very sad news about my niece. She’s going through some extreme pain right now and I’m very sorry for her. I hope things get better for her. She made an incredibly hard choice and I respect her for that. Sometimes hard choices are the right choice. I don’t know if she made the right choice, but I respect that she did the absolute best thing she could see to do. I’m sorry she’s hurting. Even with Auntie and Uncle Bob trying to give her stability she had a bad early life.

All of us did.

And look how broken we are.

No more shit rolling down hill. No more.

Not in my house.

Nobody gets what they deserve–not for good nor for ill. Really there is no such thing as deserve. There’s just what you get and what you don’t get. There is no fair.

Life fucking sucks.

Cause I always have a project. Identify core beliefs and figure out how to change them. This is going to be super woo intensive because therapy hasn’t moved these bitches in 3 decades.

I anticipate this kind of sucking. But maybe the far side will suck less.

I have to figure out how to change this belief that I only exist to absorb pain. I am not a god damn anguisette.

I need to figure out how to frame my story in my head so it doesn’t matter what my father wanted me to be or what he thought I was. I need to stop thinking about what my mother said and believed.

I was not born to be a whore. I did not get married to be a whore.

Maybe Sobonfu was born to carry the stories of her tribe and to be a healer… but that doesn’t mean that the pronouncements made at the birth of every child work out. It worked out for her and that was a really tremendous thing.

I don’t have to care what I was told I was going to be.

And I don’t really know how to change this yet. This is going to be hard.

I feel like I am always surprised when an intense suicidal jag comes up. Why so intense? Why now? It’s not like things have actually hit a fever pitch of bad in my life… why now? I don’t know. Because these are the cycles I live with.

Lightning spends all day and most of the night whacking me telling me that more life is coming and death is…

I don’t even know. But good grief this kid is lively. It’s hard to sit around and think about offing yourself when you have something this alive inside of you. I’m capable of doing it because I can multi-task like a boss… but it’s kind of weird.

I don’t really want to kill Lightning. They clearly are ready to be born and to make an impact. Probably with their fist or foot. Ow. Some of these feel like out and out head butts.

In that way I have of not really acknowledging “now” and instead focusing on future tripping so that I’m constantly preparing for a future I may not have… Noah is really encouraging me to do baby prep. There’s a big piece of me that feels like I’m being ridiculous for buying anything for this baby. In this minute I still feel like I shouldn’t be here in four months.

But I made a list of all the shit I probably ought to get at the consignment sale anyway. Because if I don’t off myself… I’ll need this shit. And if I do off myself getting rid of that crap will be the least of Noah’s problems.

Oh, hey K… did you hear that there is a new fire in the Santa Cruz Mountains near Boulder Creek? There is an evacuation center at Lakeside and somehow that feels so close and scary and like it is part of my story even though I don’t live there now. Bear Creek Road is shut down and that’s… that’s so close to where we grew up. My family is still there in the mountains. My family’s home is risking being burned down. My bio-family should probably be looking into evacuation. My extended, very disabled, very poor family should be looking into evacuation. I feel like a monster because I’m not calling Auntie.

But I’m not calling.

Auntie and all three of her kids and one of their partners and probably my mom are living less than 10 miles from this fire.

And I’m not calling to offer help. Even though they kept me alive as a kid.

I’m sorry, mama.

Yesterday my kids asked me if my mama was pretty. It was kind of funny because I wanted to say no, but I say yes too. I think she started out a pretty woman and then life was really unfair and the tracks of her life walk right across her face.

You can’t fake or hide grief lines very well. There are these deep gauges that folks get in their face, lines that go from the corners of the mouth up to the nose. The deeper those marks go the more grief you have carried. The more time you’ve spent crying or trying not to. It’s not really mistakable. When I notice that someone has them I feel this wave of compassion and comradeship–I understand.

I wear my life on my face too. No amount of moisturizer will cover these lines and tracks.

We had a family therapy session yesterday. We walked out with some ideas of how to handle some issues we’ve been having. I feel it was a fairly productive situation. I have endless appreciation for the fact that my kids are willing to be honest and frank about what they are doing and why. “Sure I smacked so and so. I was feeling X and it seemed like the right thing to do.”

*blink* Well… at least we can talk about it…

I grew up with so much denial. Why do I write down all of this awful roller coaster of emotion? So that later I can never ever deny that it happened. Yup, I was genuinely that difficult.

Things are hard but feel like there are whiffs of more positive with Noah. We’ve tried some different ways of having sexual contact and it went better than normal. But we are both so raw and untrusting that every step and every attempt at anything is complicated. We are clinging to each other in that lost child way we have. But it feels like the wounds are still actively aching.

How in the fuck do we make this work? I need for my cunt to not be hurt anymore. Even if the cost is that I am the shittiest wife on the planet who will not meet her husband’s needs. I’m feeling better every day about my desire to fire the therapist who spent 5 years telling me I needed to compromise and put out because Noah does so much for me I owe him.

I don’t need more of that god damn voice in my ear telling me that I owe anyone my cunt.

I’m not opposed to touching Noah’s body. I’m not opposed to being part of his sexual life. But I need that to not mean that I am required to submit to burning pain as part of the deal. This has to change because I am not physically nor emotionally capable of continuing to do that and be ok in other areas of my life. I will have to blow things up in very bad ways in order to cope with that and that’s going to create other problems. If I have that much pain brought into my life all the time… I have to cope however I have to fucking cope and I don’t give a flying fuck if you like it.

And Noah’s really opposed to some of my coping methods because they hurt him a lot. Fair. So let’s stop damaging me, m’kay?

I can’t pull off the amount of boring and staid I pull off and be constantly pushed into dysregulation by pain like that. The amount of pain I deal with from my body in general is bad enough. I can cope with back and hip and neck and arm and shoulder and head pain with just being surly. It’s a deeper ache that I process differently. The burning active injury feel inside my cunt is different and activating in a very different way. I have to either face it head on and do as much sexual activity as I can to cause the area to go mostly numb so I can step into a dissociative state to deal with it or I need the god damn pain to stop.

Because this pain is something I can’t cope with and pull off this mommy-act I play all day.

This pain means I’m just a worthless whore and if that is all I am then I need to be that with a vengeance.

It’s complicated.

I like the role I’ve been playing for years now. I like the way my kids look at me. I like that when they are having big feelings a lot of how that manifests is for both of them to literally fall out of their beds because they are reaching for me because they need the physical contact to reestablish connection.

We fall asleep differently when Noah is around. Noah requires silence and stillness in the pre-bed ritual. When he’s gone the rest of us wiggle and flop back and forth like a fish dumped into a boat. We talk for 20-40 minutes about the stuff that’s bothering us and we talk about how to cope with our big feelings. Noah doesn’t love this period. It’s distracting and bothersome for him. I call it getting out the wiggles and it helps me and the kids. Last night I told Noah to chill and let us do it when he asked us to shush.

The kids needed the extra snuggling and talking really a lot. They are struggling to make their own sense of living with a depressed mother and their parents are fighting about something and they are transitioning away from their beloved babysitter still and they are adjusting to this school having OUTRAGEOUS REQUIREMENTS LIKE TURNING IN TWO ASSIGNMENTS PER MONTH PER SUBJECT, OH THE INDIGNITY and a variety of other such factors. They are taking a lot in and trying to figure out what it means to them. A lot of how they do that is to lay on top of me and talk about how they are trying to put the pieces together.

I feel so honored to be part of this process. I love you.

I don’t want to hurt them. And leaving would hurt them so much. Noah would try to be as emotionally supportive as I am…. but I think he’s not even aware of just how much emotional support and scaffolding I provide.

My kids have never really had to struggle with hard feelings on their own. They have had me around their entire lives to go to, “This one is super hard huh? Yeah. Getting through the big hard feelings hurts and it’s a struggle and you don’t have to be alone for it.”

It was funny having the family therapist kind of nod in agreement/appreciation of how I take myself away from the children to go cry. Adults have to manage their own shit; it’s not ok to ask a child for support. I mean… that’s such a funny weird line to walk. I actually did allow the children to comfort me/grieve with me over my cat dying. That was a very appropriate kind of grief to share.

My horrible crying that goes on and on and on year after year… it would be wrong to share.

Sometimes my kids look at me with these shining eyes and they tell me that they really appreciate that they have never had to be alone.

One of my children talked yesterday about how they are struggling to deal with half an hour separations from the family because it feels like it will stretch into YEARS OF BEING ALONE. I understand that feeling so well, but it’s really kind of hilarious in the context of our little family. I gently teased about the YEARS part and they stepped it down to MONTHS and then got to WEEKS… and I said, “It really does feel like that, doesn’t it? And that feeling is so hard to live with because even five minutes starts to feel like a whole lifetime.” They nodded in this sad and heart broken way.

They are so real and so honest and so present with everything they feel. I love being near them.

EC is ready to start doing the pre-teen pull away thing and FMC is flipping the fuck out. FMC is feeling abandoned by their sister and by me because a baby is coming. EC wants more time on her own to be quiet and contemplative and to be thinking about what being a teenager means. FMC is all “What do you mean you don’t want to play dolls with me forever?!”

This is such a normal milestone to have to work through. It’s hilariously ordinary and that is just… whoa. This isn’t trauma, this is life.

But life hurts too.

Both kids are finally talking about their anxiety about how things are going to change when the baby comes. It is sinking in that they will get less direct attention from me and they are both clinging to me like a life raft. FMC is saying that they need LOTS of dates in the last few months here because they need to fill their bucket up until it is overflowing to help them get through the drought.

EC is in this point where she feels she should be trying to be an adult and I’m ragging on her to stay a kid for a few more years. “This time passes so quickly and you never get it back! Be a little kid for EVERY MOMENT YOU CAN.” She wants to be responsible and a good example. I told her she can do that by being the best little kid she can be and not striving for being an adult before it is time. She gave me that funny “I see what you are doing there, mom” look. I love that look. It’s like I’m gazing into my future at all the times when she is going to get sick of my bossing. I can’t wait. “I can handle it, mom”. Yes ma’am. I know you can. I was just… helping.

I want to die because carrying the burden of being the source of pain for so many hurts. And I’m a coward. I don’t want to hurt like this anymore.

I want to live because people look at me in the most beautiful ways I can imagine and I’m really not done being looked at like that.

Life hurts.

Thank you very much for reaching out to let me know that you care about me and you want to support me. It is incredibly kind. It is thoughtful. It is loving.

I’m not reaching back because I’m still in that place where I would manage to turn the most innocuous statements into proof that you hate me and you think I should die. I don’t really think you believe that so I’m just not getting into that conversation. Because I don’t want to do that to you. I’m holding my breath and waiting for the wave to finish passing by. I don’t want to damage my relationship with you just because my brain is being a complete asshole right now.

I don’t document these kinds of ups and downs because I want to distress you or ruin your day. I can tell you are worried. I’m sorry I’m scaring you. I document these sorts of dips in my psyche partially because someday my children might say, “Remember when I was x years old and you flipped out? What happened?” I will be able to go look in my archive and answer that question.

I asked my kids if they have heard me swear at their father much, this was in context of a conversation on contempt, and they sat there and thought hard and counted on their fingers and said they can remember 7 times. So those are 7 times in their whole life when I have been disrespectful enough in your presence to call him a name. That’s not good. But you notice how I don’t do that casually? We have a fight every so often and I have this incredibly bad habit that there are things I can’t say out loud until I’m screaming them with a curse word. It’s really bad. But I don’t refer to your father that way casually or very often because I don’t want to demonstrate contempt. I don’t want to feel contempt either… but you don’t call people names all the time. It should be rare or never. I mean, it would be best if I could grow the fuck up and fight without yelling swear words…

I’ve come a long way…

With Noah holding the key to all the stuff in the house that is lethal I’m pretty sure you can go back to checking my blog once a day. I made it hard for me to off myself.

It isn’t that I feel better. It’s that I’m thinking long and hard about the impact on my children and I’m not viewing my pain as equally as important. My baby is struggling so hard to become an emotionally regulated person. I can’t do this to them. They are struggling hard with impulse control and they are terrified that having less than perfect impulse control means they are a terrible person who is beyond redemption.

If I went now… they would assume blame forever. And baby it’s not you.

Oh it’s never you.

I can’t make my baby feel like me.

It’s really weird knowing that as much as I feel like I am poisoning everyone around me… my kid will listen to me telling them that they made a mistake and now they need to shake it off and try again because that’s just life. They listen when I tell them that it’s not good to internalize that mistakes make you a failure. Mistakes give you chances to learn. They are valuable. Mistakes are necessary and important and that means they really can’t prove that you are bad. Don’t make some of the truly heinous mistakes more than once… but once… you know…

You have to learn.

My kids believe in me more than folks believe in Moses. My word is law. It’s the weirdest fucking phenomena. I don’t think I ever felt like that about anyone as a child. Even though my kids know I’m wrong sometimes and I make mistakes… they view me as just about perfect.

It’s the fucking weirdest thing.

I may be a shitty wife… but my kids look at me like I’m the best thing ever. I don’t want to hurt them like that.

Even if that means I keep hurting Noah.

Only 4 days this week of leaving town. I’m so fucking tired.

How much pain can I absorb in this life? I don’t know. Are my kids going to keep looking at me while I do it? Because I’m kind of a macho show off. If I think I’m impressing them I can go pretty far.

My wonderful, beloved friends… I do appreciate that you reach out. But the thing about chronic long-term mental illness is… I can’t treat everything as a crisis. I know there is terrible advice out there telling people “Every time you feel suicidal, go to the ER!” No. Don’t do that. Well, if that is what you feel you need to do to get through a night… you do you. I will never do that. Never ever ever ever ever.

I will never risk having an authority figure strap me down because I have the unfortunate tendency towards having emotions they do not want me to have. Not again in this life. I can’t.

I will not risk being shot up with drugs I do not consent to. I have no rights in this country as a mentally ill person. The minute I enter the system they can do any abusive thing they want to me and I have no recourse.

No. That’s not a way to “get better” and if you try to force me through that… you aren’t a good person. I don’t care what you tell yourself. That’s terrifying and abusive and just plain wrong. Even the fucking UN believes I deserve better than I can get in my country.

I got to meet one of the lawyers who helped draft their position. What a beautiful and inspiring person.

I feel less frantic. Frankly I’m in the danger zone. Because this is the kind of mind set where I have enough energy going spare that I could get up out of the house and get it done. I still believe it might be the right decision. Except for my kids.

My kids…

I know what suicide does to a kid.

I’m not sure my pain is that important. Maybe when they are in their 20’s or 30’s and they can understand chronic conditions… but they won’t ever get over it right now.

That’s a choke chain if ever there was one. Last night my baby wanted to have one of our bed time chats where they ask me about tremendously serious, ethical, philosophical matters. They need me. They need someone to sit there and talk through how to think about boundaries and consent and limits and showing love. They need someone who will compassionately say, “Yeah, we all screw up. This is how we do better.”

They need someone who is invested in seeing them as someone with potential.

That’s supposed to be your mother.

And the waterworks start again on cue.

It just occurred to me that I’ve been friends with my former students for about half of their lives at this point. They come back because I look at them as someone with potential and they want to see that reflection.

I get it.

I see so much in you and you and you and you. I am sorry I am harsh in how I phrase my criticisms. I’m much harsher with myself. You do get the gentled down version of how I look at the world. I see you as so capable and I’m an asshole about how I prod that. I’m sorry. You deserve better.

I don’t know that I have better to give… but you clearly deserve better.

That’s so complicated.

The thing about suicide is… if you prevent me on a given day you will only increase the horrible lethality of the method I will choose on another day. This is not a “temporary mood problem” I have where you just need to lock me in a box until it is over. This is a long term chronic problem that isn’t going to go away until I am dead. I mean… maybe it could… but I’m not holding my breath on that.

*You* can’t panic and give up pieces of your life when I fall to pieces. If I am in a place where I need you to be a physical/emotional/spiritual place to block me from killing myself… I’ll ask. I really appreciate the offers of support, but sometimes I’m not in a place to take the support because I will twist it and turn it into more poison. I’m good at that. When my uncle died and I did not believe I was capable of taking care of myself well enough to survive the week alone… I asked for help. I wasn’t alone for over a week. I do recognize different plateaus of coping…..

Even that week I didn’t want to talk much. I just needed an adult in the house to watch me and the kids.

One week out of the 9 years I’ve been a parent. I don’t need that kind of support much. Mostly I have to put my head down and get to my life.

I have to pull the meaning from where I am standing… or I’m not going to last very long. I have to pull the will to live from what I’m doing or I’m in trouble.

But I love you. And I’m glad you love me.

I really struggle with what it means to be human. I struggle with what it means to be allowed to defend yourself. What does it mean to be allowed to assert yourself even when others don’t like it.

I hurt Noah a lot last year. I think I will flinch when someone says “2016” for the rest of my life. I hurt him emotionally for several months. Yup. That happened. I did that. I did that in large part because I was trying to cope with the physical damage that was happening to my body.

I don’t think Noah was damaging me on purpose. That wasn’t his “goal”. His goal was connection and he was seeking it in the best way he knew how. But I showed up in this relationship broken.

I wrote in my first fucking users guide I think in 2004 that I have extensive scarring damage in my cunt. Vaginal sex hurts me. I keep having it because I like it even though it hurts me. There are times when it doesn’t hurt that much and there are times when I feel like I will go out of my mind from the pain. Because it is so deep inside me I can’t get away from it. I feel like I want to scratch my skin off to get away from that fucking pain. I want to reach inside me and yank my cunt and uterus out and never have anyone use me like that again. Sew the fucking hole closed.

I have been trying to talk about this for years. I have been writing down that it was an active problem for at least 13 years. It is not news.

I have never treated it like a problem my partners need to care about. I have been incredibly callous about it. But if you had been taught that you were going to have a problem your whole life starting when you were a baby and it was a problem for the next 30 years you might be kind of callous in how you deal with it too.

Having sex with multiple people changes how my body operates. It’s like switching a car’s gears. For one major factor: it is so much easier to dissociate. I enjoy the sex way more when I’m only sorta physically/emotionally present. Which is fucked up. The more numb my cunt is the less I am aware of how much it hurts but I have to have a really freaky amount of sex to get there. I have to be wearing out a bunch of people before I get to this state. When I access this mode of existence… it’s just different. My body hardens itself against what I am forcing it to put up with.

Which isn’t a slam on the lovely people who fuck me. Y’all ain’t doing a bad thing.

I can show up for the kind of sex I have perceived Noah as wanting without feeling emotionally battered by it when my body is in that mode.

I have really struggled with matching Noah’s sex drive over the years. I have done my absolute best to carry that god damn quota even when I was in a lot of physical pain and I really should have loved myself enough to say that I wasn’t up for sex. But I don’t really love myself so protecting myself seems like such a stupid waste of time.

I’m a waste person. Might as well use me up and discard me instead of take care of me.

So I’ve grit my teeth and shut my eyes and I’ve had a lot of very painful sex. All in the name of “connection” and “showing love”.

Do you know how degrading it feels to have someone tell you over and over that they are showing you love by reaching up inside you and damaging your insides?

I have tried to talk to Noah about this pain over the years and I have not found words that got the message across. I have failed to explain why this is a problem and how I need it to change. So last year I hit a boiling point in my ability to cope and given that I’m not supposed to be mutilating myself to cope I had to find something else in my bag of tricks that would let me carry the burden farther. I went with an old trusty standby–promiscuity.

In many literal ways promiscuity kept me alive for decades. It kept me trying again when it came to reaching out to people. It kept me in a mindset where I could put my head down and just work at the things I needed to work at because I was dissociating hard from the pain in my body. I am a very effective tool when I am not paying attention to myself. Promiscuity aids me in that.

Noah perceives it as an existential threat to our relationship. I view it as giving me the ability to cope with things I can’t cope with. I get that I can’t ever date again and keep Noah. Any and all sex I have with anyone until Noah dies needs to include Noah. I get that. I get that Noah can’t handle me going off the rails like that because it ties into Noah’s core wounding from when he was a kid.

But what in the hell are we going to do about my cunt and the fact that trying to be in less pain, trying to cope with the pain I am in makes me bad and an abuser because I’m hurting him.

How come it is so easy to label me as abusive when I am trying to insist on less damage happening to my body?

A friend posted a review of the movie Bladerunner the other day. I’ve never seen the movie and I never want to. The review was incredibly triggering to me. It explained the movie as being about A.I. slaves who are only allowed to live for four years and they are killed if they rebel. Creatures that are created to be sex slaves are killed if they ever assert their right to say no.

I can’t watch that movie. That’s not entertainment. That feels like my life.

Ok, not really. But too fucking close for comfort.

I am bad because I hurt Noah. I hurt Noah so bad that he believes that no reasonable person could hear his story and think he should be married to someone as abusive as I am.

oh.

I am really struggling with what it means to exist in my body. Flailing through insisting that I have the right to exist without constant pain means I’m bad. Insisting on less damage to my body means I’m bad because I’m “withholding sex”.

I think I wanted to fire my last therapist as badly as I did because she spent a lot of time telling me how I have to care about Noah’s needs and marriage means I need to have sex with him. She was so hard on #TeamNoah that I felt like I was an expendable piece of the puzzle.

That’s a shitty dynamic with someone I’m paying $180/hour to help me feel better.

How much pain am I required to be in in order to be “good”?

I can’t keep this cycle up. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.

I cannot act like my cunt is an acceptable expendable part of my anatomy in service of other people getting to feel good and it’s ok if it makes me want to die.

And if I’m a bad person and a monster because I flip out as this is happening then maybe it is better that I just go ahead and die now because I just cannot continue this dynamic. It is better to be dead.

I have no more ability to absorb damage. I’m done. I’m tapped out. I know that makes me a bad wife and a bad person. Fine. I can be out of the picture then.

I would much rather be the horrible wife who killed herself to get away than be the monster who sat here hurting him decade after decade. Isn’t one decade enough?

But the problem is one of my kids is… really kind of in a crisis point. I’m not going to write about it because this isn’t my story to tell at this point but if I died any time soon my child would believe for the rest of their life that I did it because they were bad.

I feel the weight of that like an anvil on my head.

I really don’t want to hurt my baby like that. I know that dealing with my suicide would be hard enough. This timing would be catastrophic for life.

But I can’t wait until Lightning is here. That’s really not ok.

I understand the mothers who kill their kids when they kill themselves. Not that I have any plans to kill Eldest Child or Future Middle Child. I really don’t. I can’t handle slapping or spanking them… I really wouldn’t be able to talk myself into killing them unless there were horrifying extenuating circumstances like they were about to be killed in a slow brutal way by a bad person so I do it quick. Something ridiculous and dramatic that is never going to come up.

So yeah. Can’t wait till the third kid is here. That gets too complicated.

But if I feel like I’m a bad person for hurting Noah by cheating on him that’s nothing compared to the damage I would do if I killed myself right now. My babies would not get over it. I think FMC would be a basket case for life. I think EC would kind of hold it together but she would feel hollow inside forever.

I don’t want to hurt either of them like that.

It feels so selfish to want to be done. It is selfish. I know.

If being good means letting people hurt me inside my body forever so they can feel good…

I’m not sure I care that much about being good either. Who is selfish here?

People have been telling me for almost 20 years that sex is supposed to feel good and make you feel connected to people. Excuse me while I laugh until I need supplemental oxygen.

Sex is alienating and degrading and painful. Sure, I get off on it. I’m a masochist. But that doesn’t change the poison I carry around inside me.

Noah is kind of bitter about the times when he asks me about connecting physically and it turns into him rubbing me and I fall asleep. To him that feels like him not being allowed to get what he wants. That’s not sex. That’s not connection.

The only thing that counts is the thing that hurts me. So sex isn’t about connecting with me. It’s about using my orifices until you are done. Can we stop fucking pretending that this is about emotional connection then?

If sex was about us connecting emotionally and about my body feeling good… those times that start out as a massage and that’s how far it goes… would count.

But they don’t. And I am bad every time that happens. So sex is not about me feeling good.

Me feeling good is the opposite of the point of sex.

And I’m supposed to cope with that by shutting up and opening my legs. Or I’m bad. I’m not allowed to fuck other people to make it easier… that makes me bad. I can’t say “no” because then I’m bad. I can’t…

I can’t exist in this dynamic and be good. There is no good for me in this set up.

And I guess it is my fault. Because I haven’t managed to negotiate in a way that meets his needs and allows me humanity. I’m bad. I’m hurting him. He should leave me because I am so bad. Any person who cares about him would tell him to leave me because I am so bad.

That’s what he believes.

Being me really kind of sucks.

Should I be permanently investing in lidocaine so I can stop feeling my cunt and I can stop acknowledging that the pain matters at all? Is that really what I should be doing.

That is sure as shit what I walked away from my therapist thinking she believes I should do.

“Marriage involves compromise, Krissy. You need to meet his needs.”

Or I need to die. That could work too.

I have fucking tried to talk about these problems. Have I done a good job? Well no. I don’t have good language for all of this. This is the water I swim in, how do you describe it? I have sex that doesn’t hurt… occasionally… it’s kind of random and I can’t predict it very well… So how in the fuck do I say “more like that”? Mostly it god damn hurts.

And I’ve been shutting off my brain when that happens for more than 30 years. If you have similar experience I’d love to talk about it and if you don’t I don’t fucking care what you think and you can shove your fucking opinion where the sun doesn’t shine.

Side note: I can’t remember if EC and FMC were as active in utero as Lightning. This kid is a tornado. Constant barrel rolls inside me. This is a very alive creature. I fear this child will be born running.

And I’m so tired.

Sometimes it feels like the kid is actively protesting my depression and my thoughts of killing myself and thus my parasite. “NO. I AM HERE. THAT IS NOT OK. I HAVE SHIT TO DO. LET ME OUT.”

I’m going to add a third dose of pot for a bit. I’m crashing too hard in between doses and I don’t care if some medical providers want to hysterically wave their hands and talk about “But oh no! We don’t have adequate safety testing!” Yeah but it’s safer than anything you want to replace it with so shut up.

If you ever 5150 me you are fucking dead to me. Do not think about calling the police for a safety check. If you report me as suicidal then they may or may not find my body. Don’t do it. Is it scary for you to read that I’m having big feelings? Put your big kid panties on and cope or stop reading my blog. I am documenting the ups and downs of mental illness. If that roller coaster is too much for you, then you are allowed to step off. I am not allowed to step off no matter what. When I hide what I am feeling so that people do not punish me for my feelings things get worse. If you 5150 me you will be punishing me for daring to talk about something you find scary. The hospital will not help me in any way shape or form.

Do you know what is a lot more helpful? My friends letting me know that they love me and if I need them they will do whatever they can. I probably won’t ask for anything. Mostly I’ll say “thanks” and just walk right past the offer. If I don’t say thanks I’m sorry for that–I should.

This is not a journey you can change for me. This is not a journey that would be helped by more people in authority showing me that I don’t matter and hurting my body to make me more convenient for them to manage.

I am long term chronically mentally ill. That means I can’t act like everything is a crisis. I have to be moderate in my response to my brain freaking out. As K points out, I document the waves and ride them and mostly that’s what I’ve got. More drugs don’t make things better–I’ve tried over 30 psych meds. I’m on the most effective one and it’s far from perfect. More therapy isn’t that helpful at this stage. I still go to therapy… but it’s not a silver bullet. It’s not going to magically fix me.

I’M DOING ALL THE THINGS THEY WOULD INSIST ON IF THE GOVERNMENT WERE MORE HEAVILY MICROMANAGING ME SO SHUT THE FUCK UP AND LEAVE ME ALONE.

Just because you are doing the All The Things to manage mental illness that doesn’t change the fact that it is a shitty ride.

Ok, that’s pithy and wonderful. I love that sentence. ha.

*pat self on back for clever line*

Noah is talking to Pam. Noah doesn’t feel he can lean on his friends because he believes it will turn his friends against me and they will all be constantly telling him to leave me and he doesn’t want to hear it so he’s talking to my best friend of 20 years. He thinks I’m mad at him for this. Mad really isn’t the word.

Either he’s right that anyone he talks to will grow to hate me and believe he should abandon me and I will lose my best friend or he’s wrong and maybe he needs to fucking hear that he isn’t right.

But I’m terrified about this. There are layers here. If he’s right and I deserve to lose my best friend when she hears his side of the story… that will suck but I made my bed and I get to lie in it. If I deserve to be abandoned then I should be. If Pam tells him to divorce me and save the kids… it will be because that is necessary.

I think he needs to talk to someone. If Pam is the only person he feels he can talk to, so be it. I find some irony in the situation for spiteful reasons I won’t write down. But yeah. Talk to someone. If it is Pam, fine.

If I lose another person… I deserve it.

Besides, if I off myself Pam would probably be one of the people who supports Noah the most over the years with the kids so I need to make sure that bridge is well established. They might need it.

I think ahead.

I’m sad and I’m tired and I feel hopeless about the possibility of being in less pain. I feel like I will never never never never never matter enough for that to be enough of a priority to make it happen. It’s too hard. It’s not worth what it would take.

I know Noah has tried over the years to make sex better for me. But if we are starting from me having the mindset that sex hurts and that’s the way it is… that’s only going to be a marginal improvement and I’m going to still flip out sometimes because I can’t cope.

I’m not saying it is his fault. I’m saying I don’t know how to change this.

Sex hurts is a core belief. I believe that sex hurts like I believe that gravity exists. Like other people believe in G-d. It’s just… how it is.

How do I survive this? How do I change this? How do I make it so that I’m not a terrible, horrible person because I am tired of my cunt burning and aching and hurting?

I’m pretty sure that Noah and I don’t fight much where the kids can hear because yesterday we had a doozy and the kids heard and they were both absolutely shocked that they heard us yell swear words at each other. They both commented on how weird it was. “What happened?”

None of your business.

Sometimes people fight.

They are 7 and 9 and they don’t have memory of us screaming at each other before. That’s kind of fucking miraculous to me.

I know we need to not make a habit of this.

You figure out how to fucking have a civilized conversation when all you want to do is put your head through a window. I don’t fucking know how right now.

I am trying to reach out. I am trying to communicate. I am trying to figure out how to change things so that I’m not so freaked out. This is hard.

There is this section in the Rihanna/Drake song “Work” that I really like:

 All that I wanted from you was to gimme
Something that I never had
Something that you’ve never seen
Something that you’ve never been
But I wake up and everything’s wrong

That’s what we are trying to do here. Something I’ve never had or seen, something you’ve never been.

I have friends who identify as women… who don’t have vaginal sex. There are various reasons for this and every case is quite unique. But when I find out this is the reality they live with… I have this shocked attention experience. “Wait. Wut?” It isn’t that I believe that they should. It is that… they have relationships… with people who have penises… and… they don’t seem to be perceived as bad for having this limit.

How does that work?!

I’m not even saying I want to swear off vaginal sex forever. I do like it. But I’m not allowed to be good and have limits around how often or when… how do you manage to be good and not do it at all?

I don’t understand.

It’s like you just told me you were born with three tongues in your head. How in the fuck does that work?

My cunt has been such a non-negotiable part of my life. I am very curious how it works for other people. What does sex look like when you get to just declare parts of your anatomy a no-go zone? I mean… yeah I’ve read about queer sex. My queer sex involves a lot of strap ons because penetration is…

I don’t really understand sex without penetration. That’s not my reality.

I’m a hole. That’s what I am. That’s what I was made to be. That’s why I was born. I can’t understand being something else.

But it hurts. And I can’t keep hurting like this. Even if I’m bad for insisting that it stop. Even if I’m so bad that I deserve to be alone and unloved forever because I’m not compromising enough.

Ok. I should probably stop before I get onto the 9th page of writing this morning. It’s been a good hour of writing.

I can’t create safety for other people.

I can’t sleep.

I can’t reach out and ask for support.

I can’t stop thinking that the only way I will stop being bad is to die.

I can’t stop thinking about all the all the all the all the all the fuck ups. I deserve what I get.

I can’t stop being a monster.

I can’t be worthy.

I can’t be good.

I can’t stop crying.

I can’t be on a different path; this is the one in front of me.

I can’t be quiet enough with my crying to be allowed in the bedroom and that’s hard.

I can’t stop thinking that she will hate me now too. Another one bites the dust. I deserve it.

I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.

I can’t stop thinking about my mama, about mothers, about how does any mother ever figure out what “good enough” means.

Gosh I’m boring. I don’t keep up with most of the tv people watch. I can’t discuss makeup or hair fun or nails or… any of the things that seem to make the people I like feel like they are more interesting. I can’t really discuss fashion. My fashion statement is mostly sweats and a baggy t-shirt I stole from someone else.

For tv I watch The West Wing, Madame Secretary, Orange is the New Black, and Call the Midwife; I’ve tried a few others but I don’t really manage to continue. They are interesting but there is a higher barrier to watching so I just don’t bother. That’s not a list of shows that gives me good conversation material with other people.

I feel more and more like discussing children is a way to make people feel bad. I notice that I’m not holding on to mom-friends very well. I don’t think that how I parent is superior to how other people parent… I think I make some weird as shit choices that wouldn’t work for most people. I don’t think my way of being completely enmeshed with my children is the most healthy option available. I think that I’m coming from a family background of severe mental illness and difficulty attaching and that’s why I make the choices I make. They sure as shit aren’t appropriate for everyone.

I don’t feel like I have much of anything to talk about that is fun or light or entertaining. I’m not pretty. I’m not fun. I’m not interesting.

Hi, I’m Debbie Downer and I deliver.

I don’t have interesting hobbies to talk about. My poor plants are barely staying alive because I’m so fucking exhausted I’m not watering like I should.

I feel like I’m failing at everything. I’m failing at being interested enough in my friends. I’m shitty support right now. I feel like I’m boring and stupid.

I feel like I should stop reaching out to people at all because I have nothing to offer and all I am is this boring pit of need.

I’m so tired.

On the upside, this is not a suicidal version of feeling bad. Just… a whiny one. I suppose that’s better than it could be?

Noah pointed out something at breakfast. October 6th is the anniversary of my father killing himself. I managed to… miss that it was coming this year. He said he was watching my increasing suicidal fervor and talk about being a worthless whore with one eye to the calendar as he watched that date come up. Within 24 hours of it being over the panic broke like a wave.

He thoughtfully didn’t want me to be aware of the incoming anniversary if I wasn’t bringing it up. He didn’t want to invalidate the feelings I was going through or even sound like he was saying they weren’t real because they were connected to an anniversary.

I’m married to an incredible person.

I find some comfort in knowing that this is a predictable part of my pattern. Oh, yeah. It’s the beginning of October. No wonder I’m flipping the fuck out. For over a decade I basically didn’t eat in October from stress. Oh yeah.

I said, “Oh yeah… and it’s coming up on Sarah’s anniversary of losing her dad…. Ohhhhh….” Noah and I discussed that Sarah and I are doing unusually well this year as we are both in our pits of despair to reach out with occasional messages of “I’m a needy pit of doom. I love you and have no support to offer. I’ll check in again soon.” Neither of us have expressed any feelings of frustration because the other isn’t up to jumping into a codependent neeeeeeed circle. We may or may not be feeling them, but what we are saying to each other is going really well.

Boundaries and understanding your limits are good things.

This is beginning to more strongly resemble what a healthy relationship might look like. Though I will say that I have enjoyed our decade + of codependency very much

I am always going to struggle with my mental health. There will always be times of the year when I kind of… need to crawl under a rock. I think I’m doing better at handling them as the years go by.

I’m a little concerned about the fact that Lightning’s estimated due date is four days before my brother Tommy’s birthday. He’s the dead brother with all the problems. Sigh.

Yet another thing I get to get over.

19 years since Tommy and my father killed themselves. I still feel like a worthless whore. But it’s better than it was.

Things are changing. Sometimes it feels like at a glacial pace, but the change does happen. Will I ever really grow up enough?

Another busy week again. Whyyyyy do I feel my children must participate in so many damn activities?! This week I get to drive to Mountain View, San Jose, Pleasanton, San Pablo, Mountain View, Union City, San Francisco, and San Jose.

I’m so fucking tired. Ok a bunch of those drives are for medical appointments. And a birthday party for the children of former students and a birthday party for a grown up, and visits with grown up friends… so I can’t just blame the kids.

I am blessed to have people who love me. The kids and I are going to have breakfast with one of my ex’s this week. I’m going to see if the kids can sit at a separate table with their academics because after breakfast they are getting a haircut and it’s entirely jacking up academic time for the day. I catch up with him once a year or so. I catch up with most of my ex’s every so often. I date nice people.

Every week is busy for a while here. Basically until I go into confinement. I fucking love confinement. I know that not everyone does it and I know that opinions vary on how necessary it is… but I slow my life down at the end of pregnancy. I will probably basically shut down after Christmas. We won’t do the second semester at the out of town class place because that’s a lot of driving for Noah. It’s not so bad for him to do the driving for all the classes that are within 10 minutes of the house because it is an hour or so of interruption a day if they have multiple classes… but the out of town classes necessitate a four hour or more window of being out of the house and that’s just too much. He has a job.

The bay area has such fascinating perspective on how much time is worth spending in a car.

I’m kind of glad that EC is stating with firmness that this is going to be the only year in a charter. She plans to spend next year studying religion and she’s not interested in having to follow the state standards for producing specific items every month. Ok. Sounds good. I know she will do a lot of serious reading. I will assign projects. It’ll be fun. FMC is ready to set fire to the curriculum so yeah. It was an experiment. They are pissed off about being judged. Yeah my kids are going to make fascinating adults.

I’m almost done Christmas shopping. We are sending the library of books about trans folk to Noah’s family and sending to Jenny’s family and giving inside the house and I think that’s about it. We will make food stuff to give as gifts to other people because we like to do that, but I’ll be done shopping and spending money before November I think. We can schedule what date to send the mail to folks and Noah and the kids can do it as an Advent activity. Ha. I’m staying home.

We will probably discuss adding a couple more Advent activities that are out of the house… but our calendar is already about as full as it can get without me being pissy all the time.

We are going on the light train thing on my mother’s birthday. So far we have a massage scheduled for my father’s birthday. We should probably do something fun with the kids that day too. Because I often get weird around these dates I’m thinking ahead.

My life is pretty fun. It is hectic because my children are lucky enough to have a ridiculous number of opportunities in life and I feel like I must provide access to a lot. It’s a job. A job a lot of mother’s do. (And other parents too!) It’s fucking exhausting. Our ancestors did not do this shit. Little Johnny did not get six hours a week of getting driven all the fuck over the place. Fuck this shit.

I’m looking forward to confinement. Hell yeah. My body is more important for a few months. Nyah nyah. You have to wait.

Yeah… I’ll go back to being your bitch. But I get a fucking fourth trimester too. That’s the deal.

Dude…. I start out with fucking health problems. This shit is hard on my body. Recovery is a bitch and if I don’t take it seriously I’ll pay forever. I have to be careful how much damage I deliberately add to my body. I don’t recover fast. It doesn’t matter what other people are capable of. It doesn’t matter what I would do if I had to in order to put food on the table. I’m not in that position and I’m in shitty shape and I’m trying to figure out how to hurt less. I can’t force a quick recovery.

I’m speshul snowflake, mkay?

Time to stop babbling.

Today the kids and I were gone for 12 hours. We went to Sacramento for a field trip. We didn’t really talk to many folks from the charter school but we did enjoy the Crocker Art Museum. The docent we toured with was 71 and super entertaining and had super fun hair and visible neat tattoos and she was just awesome. She was thrilled that my kids already knew terms like impressionism and realism and cubism. She said no kid has ever known about cubism before so I’m doing something right.

Dude, it’s on Khan Academy…

I like talking to my kids about art. It’s the most friendly introduction to art I’ve ever had.

We had an emotional day. Both kids are acting rubbed raw and sensitive and fussy and ugh. Both kids keep pushing the other’s buttons. Both kids are being insensitive and they are shaming one another and it really sucks. We are talking about it but it’s a tough phase. When we talk through, “So you did x. Why? What did you hope to gain? What actually happened?” They always spontaneously realize that they did something shitty and they should apologize… but we had to go through this process like 7 times today and I’m fucking worn out.

I’m really impressed that both kids can have me say, “So what you did was x” and then they can fill in most of the other blanks. “When I said/did x it probably made my sibling feel _____ and that’s not very kind. I wouldn’t want them to do the same thing to me. I should apologize.”

That’s good and all, I’m glad they can do that… BUT I’D LIKE TO GO A DAY WITHOUT HAVING TO GO THROUGH THIS FUCKING PROCESS MORE THAN HALF A DOZEN TIMES. I’M REALLY GOD DAMN TIRED AND EMOTIONALLY SPENT AND BEING FUCKING NICE ABOUT THIS IS HARD.

We need to go back to the museum because we didn’t get through half the exhibits and they were really neat. We have free passes. If only it weren’t in fucking Sacramento.

On the way home we stopped to visit Aunt Candy. She is Noah’s mother’s sister. She’s the entomologist who sends us the cool bug stuff for the kids. She also sends a huge box of candy at every possible holiday occasion because she has no children or grandchildren and she has an incredibly stable/comfortable life.

I like talking to Aunt Candy and Aunt Cookie (Aunt Cookie is the one who sends the boxes of cookies every year from Oregon.) about Noah’s family. Today Candy was telling me about how she and Cookie and Uncle Nod (the brother in the family) spent all of Noah’s childhood talking about how unfairly he was treated and cursing the school system for tormenting him. Apparently Nod spent most of Noah’s childhood a few inches away from going to the school to hit kids. Nod was very angry about how Noah was treated as a kid. He wanted to get involved and did not believe that Noah’s mom would permit it without being nasty to Noah as a result so he stayed out of it.

She reflected that Noah’s siblings (at least the boys) are better at fitting in to the small shitty town dynamic and Noah’s just… different. Candy was saying that she thinks that part of Noah’s problem is that he is too much like his mother and she never fit in there too. Really Noah’s mother’s entire family didn’t fit in that well in the shitty town and Candy speculated that Noah was treated badly in school partially because of the halo of people remembering Candy and Cookie and Nod.

I asked Candy if she felt her family was physically warm. She was adamant that they are not. Only Cookie is a hugger and everyone else feels really bothered by her desire for physical touch. She said that Noah was an incredibly touch starved little kid and he radiated sadness for most of his life. She was glad he got out at 17 and never really came back.

Before we left for the trip this morning I was talking to EC. I don’t remember the exact framing of how this came up but she mentioned that Noah and I wouldn’t care if we had a boy or a girl or another enby. I told her that it is true that we will be thrilled with any child we get… but we do kind of want a boy and that’s complicated. She asked me why a boy would be different.

I told her that having her has been very healing for me because I have been able to see a little girl get the things I desperately needed. That fills a hole in my heart that pretty much nothing else has filled. It’s different for Noah because he felt like he grew up watching little girls get what he couldn’t get so she doesn’t fix the same wound in him. He would probably benefit from watching a little boy grow up getting kisses and hugs and being told that crying is healthy and ok. He would see himself reflected. He would have a way to give what he couldn’t get and that’s a big deal. I also told her that I have issues with men and boys that are hard for me to get over. I believe that if I had a son I would have to confront the fact that I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that this child has never hurt me or any other woman and I would have to learn how to trust and extend gentleness to little boys in a way that is currently really really hard for me. I’d be thrilled to have another daughter or enby… but there’s a hole in my heart that I think a boy would fill in a different way. And that sounds disgusting but I don’t mean it like that.

She kind of thought about that and said “hunh. I guess that makes sense.”

But I have the best damn girl’s name I can imagine lined up so I’m going to be really kind of bummed if I don’t get to use it. So a boy isn’t the be-all-end-all. We talked about the dictionary definition of the middle name we like and she agreed that any little kid would be lucky to carry that name. IT’S SO COOL.

I have a friend’s little sister to thank for the inspiration. I love my friends and their little sisters and the fact that they share their little sisters with me. I’m a lucky bitch.

This weekend the only thing we have scheduled is book club. Nobody finished the book. Ha. So we are going to get together to talk about the first half and I suspect Noah will read us a chapter (he’s so damn good at reading out loud… he can make lists of names of organizations sound interesting). We are definitely going to finish Uninvited Neighbors and I think I will read it a few more times before I internalize more of what it is really saying. It’s super dense and full of facts. It’s about the migration of Black folk to and from the San Jose area and it’s really fascinating. The chapter we were just reading spends a lot of time talking about Warm Springs and that’s… 3 miles from my house. This is real California history. The part that is usually hushed up. It’s wonderful only it’s kind of disgusting to read just how awful people like me act. The book is well researched and documented. I recommend this book to anyone and everyone who lives in this valley. This is our story, this is our history.

Random topic shift. If you have not heard the new Kesha album… you should. I only dislike one song on it. My favorites are: Rainbow, Woman, Praying, and Learn to Let Go. I like more of the songs on the album… but those are the ones that I keep hitting repeat on.

There’s big emotional stuff I’m just… not writing about. I don’t know how to frame it. I don’t know what to say. I am not sure I understand what I feel. But I know that I need to find a way to put words to pieces of it or I’m not going to get past this cycle of feeling like a piece of shit who should die. This is going to be really hard because it’s going to involve saying things about my marriage I don’t feel ok about saying.

I’m scared of yet more backlash. I’ve already kind of fucked everything up. If I do more to defend myself what else is going to come crashing down on my head? Shutting up and just continuing to feel like shit will do less to make my life come to an end. I’m really not ready for it to be all my fault I lost everything.

A woman I like a lot posts a bunch of stuff on social media. She writes a lot of cultural/gaming/technology criticism. Reading her stuff is like having to wade through a dick contest of guys arguing with her telling her that she hasn’t thought about stuff properly.

Maybe it’s completely awesome that I’m such a bitch. Do you know how often dudes try to tell me I’m thinking about something wrong? I can generally count the times in a year on one hand. And those dudes rarely make it a full paragraph into their digression before I start biting their fucking head off and they don’t come back to do it again.

Being a woman is a tricky thing. I’m “supposed to be nice” but most of the women I know deal with micro-aggressions they try to “be nice about” all fucking day long.

I’m not real nice. If you are going to argue with me about something it better be because I got a fact wrong because if you argue with my OPINION I am going to rip you a new asshole. Opinions are allowed to differ and everyone is entitled to any wrong opinion they want to have. Don’t.Fucking.Come.For.Me. I will make you sorry.

Why doesn’t that kind of attitude trigger the same, “I’m so bad I deserve to die” loop tape?

That puzzles me. There are pieces of my abrasive personality that trigger these intense shame spirals and I feel like there is no hope for a worthless piece of shit like me, I will never be worthy. Then there’s the fact that most dudes are annoying as shit about wanting to control the thought process of every woman nearby and Fuck That Shit.

I may feel like if any of the dudes wanted to talk about trauma and I interrupted their story that I am the worst person ever. But if they come to my sandbox to tell me I’m wrong about something (THAT IS A FUCKING OPINION) I will respond like a honey badger. And I don’t feel bad. There are some kinds of defense-of-self that don’t feel like a problem to me. Being willing to take the head off of people who argue with my opinion apparently is enough and that seems weird.

It’s a strange reason to feel justified in acting like a harpy. Only it is such a pervasive part of my culture.

This is about when I have a fierce conversation with a man and I have a different opinion and I refuse to concede that the Penis-Holder-Is-Always-Right I get called a bitch. Once I turned and said, “Would you tell a man who held a similarly strong position that he was an asshole?” Dude said no. They would just be a strong man.

This is where I wonder about gender and presentation and trans identity. I’m a woman. But I am not a woman who will be shoved in the woman box. I am a woman who is very happy to be stronger than the men standing nearby. That’s Jim-dandy fine with me, motherfucker.

I take my inspiration from what I read about Chinese Dragon Ladies. (I sure as shit hope that isn’t a rude racist way to refer to them as an outsider, I’ve read a fair bit of stuff that acts like it’s a common culturally accepted term.) Basically matriarchs who take no shit from anyone and boss the whole damn family around as well as anyone who walks too close to them.

That sounds great.

I am my own pillar of my community. I may look around to consider what other pillars are holding up, but if I don’t agree then I’m not fucking conforming.

As lonely and stupid as I get when I don’t see people much–I’d much rather be alone than conform to expectations that don’t work for me. This may be one of the most rigid parts of my personality.

I. Don’t. Need. You.

It’s a protective mechanism. When you cannot grow up needing your parents you pretty much have to form a barrier between yourself and the world because you can never need anyone. I have to be ok if everyone walks away. Noah, my kids, my friends… I can’t need anyone too much.

Some day Pam or Jenny or Sarah might divorce me. Sarah and I had that super traumatic separation as the result of my horrible behavior. I fucked up once. I could do it again. I’m not blaming anyone else for my fuck ups. I fuck up every so often and sometimes it is big. If there are consequences I get to pay them.

And I will need to keep walking. With or without the people who make me feel like maybe I’m not a worthless piece of shit. Because maybe I am and I deserve to feel that way and until the day I lay down and die… I need to keep moving. So I don’t hurt people too badly with who and what I am.

I found an incest cohort person who told me they are absolutely ecstatic to have a word for us that isn’t “victim” or “survivor”. I was thanked profusely and told they will use it forever in conversation because that is the best word for us they have ever heard.

Even if I am divorced by everyone I love. I still want to do research on my cohort. IDB still calls my name. I want to make a database about the incest cohort. Maybe it’ll turn into ICDB. I don’t know. I just reset the clock on that. Shit.

This research is going to be literally physically dangerous and I can’t do it when I have little kids. I’m going to make perpetrators very angry and they are going to want to silence me. What they don’t yet understand is the more you try to silence me THE LOUDER I SCREAM.

You should have heard me years ago at a bdsm dungeon. I was playing with an idiot who wanted me to growl/moan my way through him beating me. I got louder with every fucking hit. He was very angry I refused to process in the way he found sexually appealing.

Watch me weep for you. Oh wait, I won’t. Nevermind.

We didn’t play again. He went back to the “good submissives” who would do as he said. Well, whatever.

I do not exist to affirm the “rightness” of random men. Oh hell fucking no. Even though women are expected to default to that role left and right whether they want to or not. I may hate myself. I may think I’m a bad person.

I think I know my own mind better than you do, motherfucker, and don’t you fucking dare argue with my opinion or I will make your day very unpleasant.

I think this is partially because between my brain being an asshole and my body hating me… I have a lot of unpleasant days. Why should I feel bad about sharing that joy? You interacted with me motherfucker… you started it. But I get to finish it however the fuck I want.

I talk to my kids a lot about the fact that violence is very seldom the correct answer to a problem. But when it is you need to bring overwhelming force and not hesitate a millimeter or it’s going to go poorly for you. Avoid violence wherever possible–y’all are little bodies. You can’t withstand much violence so Don’t Fucking Start It. But I tell them there is no such thing as fighting fair in a real fight. Let’s talk about how to inflict serious damage and pray you never ever have to use this information.

Most of the women I talk to are not prepared to defend themselves with extreme violence. That breaks my heart. You deserve it, baby. And you don’t need to have a man defend you. You can bring a whirlwind of scary all on your own. I’m not a big woman, but I have a force of personality that scares the shit out of a lot of people. I get out of a lot of scary situations by looking implacable. People mostly don’t want to fight.

An instructor in a suited self defense class told me that the vast majority of muggers/random people who assault are not looking for a fight so people like me… just seem like bad targets. He stressed over and over that I was easily using twice as much force as is necessary to get someone to think I’m a bad target. Because in my head if someone targets me I need to eliminate that person. They need to never target anyone again. I don’t need to kill them… but I need to do enough damage that they will never think it is smart again.

I rehearse weak targets in my mind. Eyes, nose, throat, groin, knees. What will I take out first?

Where does this fierce desire to protect myself come from? Don’t I want to die? Don’t I want to suffer because I am bad and I deserve all the pain? Why don’t I put my head down and accept more pain as just?

Because even if I deserve it, I don’t deserve it from you and you are a fucking problem who might target another woman after me. I need to convince you how unwise that would be.

A friend commented “We marry our parents”. I said no I did not. I DID NOT marry my father. Has my husband committed rape? Yes, he has. But he is not a serial predator. He does not target children. There would be signs and I’m incredibly well educated about them. My kids know all the clinical language for their bodies and I don’t think they could be molested in secret. They don’t keep secrets. Christmas in this house is a hilarious round of “SHHHHHH. SHUT UP AND DON’T TELL YOUR SIBLING.”

My husband doesn’t terrorize his family. My husband is… not a small man but he’s not big either and my father was a giant. My husband is gentle and helpful and sweet. My father was a monster. The only interaction my father had with his kids was coaching sports teams, otherwise he wasn’t involved.

I didn’t change a diaper in the first month I had a child. I’m very certain it didn’t go like that for my mom.

I didn’t wake up crying, that’s good. This pregnancy is so rough.

I’m not reaching out to folks much for support because I am very much in that irritable and bitchy stage of depression and it’s easy to wear out a support network this way. I’m talking in depth about it to one or two people who are at a slight remove so I can’t bitch at them the way I might someone who feels closer. Mostly I’m talking to moms-of-many who are talking me through pregnancy depression stuff.

I get very different flavors of support from different friends and I need all of you.

Moms-of-many have something to offer me that moms of one or two or non-breeders don’t have. It’s not because y’all are lesser people. It’s just about a specific set of life experiences. Once you get to the point of not having enough hands to control all your children… the game changes.

I told Noah that if I have to have a C-section then a 4th child is not on the table even though he has talked about possibly wanting us to go there. I’m not doing two C-sections in this life. I’m just not. If I have a section I’m going to ask them to tie my tubes while they are in there. Then we won’t have to deal with another vasectomy. If I have an easier vaginal birth we can talk a year after Lightning is born. But if this is rough… I can’t do a fourth. I don’t have that to give in this life.

Pregnancy is so fucking hard. I’m 6 days away from 5 months. I’m still a pound below my pre-pregnancy weight. I’ve been bouncing up and down in this pound for a couple of weeks. I’m supposed to be gaining by now. The baby is not supposed to be actively stealing my fucking body. But hey, everyone goes through pregnancy in their own special, shitty way. My parasites eat me alive. Literally.

In a pregnancy gaining 20-35 pounds is a good thing. I’m 21 weeks in with 19 weeks to go. Haven’t gained a pound yet. But my belly is sure expanding. I told a non-breeding friend that a breeding friend commented that I’m bigger than I have any right to be. The non-breeder was very confused and asked what that meant so we looked at pictures of belly bumps on the internet. Yup, I pop and look like I’m in my third trimester just about instantly. Even though I don’t gain weight. I just bloat and fill out in the belly like whoa. I pointed out how the uterus is way down here and look at these tiny little dainty bumps… I don’t do that.

Bodies are weird.

I think my body adapts to pregnancy-shape really easily. Despite feeling awful, my body likes this shape. My abdominal muscles are excited to release. They think this is their moment to shine. This is not the standard American ideal, but what the hay.

I’m doing way better about eating vegetables in the past few weeks. We have attained Veggie-Soup-I-Like status and I’m consuming it copiously. I have way less diarrhea. I suspect this is related.

Sometimes it doesn’t work. I hang my head in frustration.

I’ve had several days in the past two weeks when I’ve added a third dose of pot to my day because I’m really not doing well. If I weren’t pregnant I’d be dosing four or five times a day. I’m trying hard to keep to two when I can manage but when I’m a weeping ball of useless… sometimes I just have the third fucking dose. It’s do that or hurt my existing kids by neglecting them AND hurt the in utero kid because being that upset is really bad for a pregnancy. There are reasons they put pregnant women on drugs that could hurt the baby because not being on anti-depressants is worse for the baby.

My drug has less chance of harming my kid than anything else on the market. I need help.

I could be content with three kids. I always wanted three kids. That was what I walked into this relationship hoping for. I would feel like my family was complete. But I get the argument for third kid needing a buddy. We’ve been doing better at going for walks in the evening. It’s really beautiful watching EC and FMC hold hands and talk and play as we walk around. They are such good friends. Yes, they fight sometimes too… but when they separate for longer than an hour they get anxious for one another.

We are a tightly knit group. I worry that Lightning is going to feel like a fifth wheel. If things go smoothly I will consider a buddy for their sake. I don’t think I need a fourth child.

I know some of my friends think I need to worry more about the ecological implications of having more children and impact on the planet etc. I’ve had over half a dozen non-breeders tell me that I can have extra kids and call them their contribution to the planet because they aren’t having kids. I’m a good mother if I’m not good at everything else about life. My kids are great people to add to the planet.

We’ll see.

I’m so scared of birth. But I love feeling Lightning jitterbug inside my belly. I’m going to have yet another super active kid.

That’s ok sweetie, we will understand.

I’m going to confess something I find funny. This entire post was written in the time it took me to poop. Have a nice day.

Oh, here is an article that talks about why I am SO ENTHUSIASTIC to support Noah having friends. Noah needs to feel that beautiful love from his friends, even if I am not involved. Especially if I’m not involved. He needs separation and love from not-me so that he can understand that he is not defined as worthy or not based on the amount of love I am showing on a given day. He deserves more than that.

We all need to be loved.

We watch Call the Midwife a lot. It’s a fun show. It explores a lot of interesting topics. Something that comes up is the historical idea of “being ruined” by having sex before marriage.

I was ruined before I hit puberty. My cunt is damaged. It means that I am incapable of being a good wife who says yes every time I’m supposed to. Well, I can avoid saying no and grit my teeth and get through it, but there are consequences.

At some point I will explode and go behave in ways that I’m really not supposed to behave in order to cope.

Because I am ruined and bad.

I’m having a very hard time perceiving any future where I will be anything other than bad and horrible and disgusting and right now it doesn’t feel like a good thing for me to stay alive so I can keep hurting people and being bad.

I haven’t wanted to die this much in a while. It’s really bad.

It’s kind of funny to me that as I list off that I’m a bad wife and I’m a bad friend and I’m a bad person…

In my head I say I’m not a great mother. But I don’t believe I am a bad mother. That’s the one area where I’m kind of pinning my hopes that I can stay just barely on the line of good enough that I shouldn’t die because if I died I would hurt them far more than if I stay alive.

I do not deserve to shuffle my pain onto them and that is what I would do if I killed myself. So I can’t. That’s complicated and hard.

I’m scared that I won’t be as good of a mother to Lightning. I’m scared I’m older and out of patience and in more physical pain.

I would dearly love to spend my morning beating my head in a futile attempt to beat these words out of my head.

I feel like I should cancel what appointments I have with friends because I’m afraid I will say or do something that is going to damage my relationships. I feel so empty and needy and desperate and that makes it very hard to listen and be caring and that means I don’t deserve friends.

I don’t deserve anything but to crawl in a hole and die.

In which I reveal how judgmental and bitchy I am.

There’s a specific class of person I don’t do so well with. I think of them as cream cheese. They are white. They grew up in a basically safe environment–sure their parents might have been alcoholics, but they weren’t beaten and they had food and they had a consistent roof and appropriate food and after school activities and…

No one gets through life without some trauma. No matter how safe or easy your life… something shitty has happened. I get that.

But cream cheese people had fairly… digestible pieces of trauma. It’s easy to sweep it all under the rug and pretend that everything is smooth and creamy.

I don’t do well with cream cheese because for cream cheese I am ALWAYS the problem. Racism isn’t the problem, I am the problem for bringing up racism. Sexism isn’t the problem, I am the problem for bringing it up. Etc.

These are the people who hate my fucking guts for refusing to be more conformist… but they can’t say that out loud so instead they come up with a bunch of digs about how inappropriate I am. *shrug*

These people are, in my judgy as fuck experience, always low key white supremacists and misogynists. Not the kind who would you know… call someone a rude ethnic name… but the sort who will not mix. The sort who will talk about race and violence as if there is only violence in some groups. The kind who will have two daughters and talk about how “they just never shared my interests” but now that they have a son… they can teach about their hobbies.

But they are Nice White People! You can’t say anything bad about them! That’s carefully cultivated. They won’t do things you can criticize in public… but they will entirely preserve the status quo and be against peaceful protests because they are so “rude”.

Flint Michigan not having clean water for more than three years is unfortunate but no one’s fault, amIright? Those people shouldn’t complain loudly and be rude.

Cream cheese people think that “paying it forward” means volunteering in their child’s all white upper middle class school. Naw… that’s not paying it forward. That’s closing the circle. That’s ensuring that all the resources stay with people like you.

I am always far too rude and abrasive for such people. I take that as one of the best signs that I might have some real character. If they approved of me… I wouldn’t like me anymore.

But the fact that I can’t/won’t get along with cream cheese is kind of rough for Noah. He’s fine with putting up with them. He isn’t particularly cream cheese, but he can mostly fake it for a weekend. He can have close friends like that. It’s hard for him that I can be in the room with cream cheese for about an hour a year before I start picking. I start going, “Oh look… I see some mold….” Then I’m the fucking problem again.

My friends are people who can listen to me rant about the shitty history of white people without getting personally offended. “Yup, we did that.” My friends tend to be people who can listen to me say, “So have you noticed how shitty you are behaving? Let’s talk about that.” Because my friends look at me in similar ways. When I’m fucking up my friends tell me so explicitly. There’s no passive aggressive hinting and “letting me make my own mistakes”.

My friends want me to do better. So they challenge me.

Thank you. I’m really grateful that not everyone in this world is cream cheese.

Who am I at this intersection of my future and my past?

White trash. Upper class.

I will never be what you expect with my redneck mannerisms mixed with erudite speech.

I grew up with tacos and enchiladas and ramen and potatoes and meat.

You used to sneer like I was the ground under your feet.

What does it mean to be a waste person? What does it mean to be valuable instead?

Who decides. Who cares?

I will never be good; it is too late.

Do I always have to be bad? Is that just my fate?

People alternate between telling me how strong I am and how fragile.

I am a whiner and I cry too easily, clearly I only do so to manipulate.

That is how it goes with white women.

I cannot be something other than what I am.

I read on the internet that I should be very angry by someone pointing out that I am white. Oh.

Dude. I know.

I know how my whiteness has shielded me and revealed me as unworthy of camaraderie.

At some point it becomes apparent that I just belong nowhere at all.

I hide in my house. I try to make myself small.

I try to not take so much from people. I know that anyone would be more deserving of it all.

I want to hurt myself; it is how I atone for my sins.

I am told I must not. I must try to create a path for my children to step in.

Children mimic and copy, they cannot help but do so.

Do as I do my dears. Talk about your feelings. Write them down. Breathe through.

Maybe it will feel like enough for them. It never does for me though.

I am not enough. I never will be. I will always be too weak and small.

People who have suffered more than me do not waste so many years hiding and crying.

The world is too big for me. I feel like I am out of trying.

I am out of ways to try to be enough. To try to be good.

No matter what I do I never arrive. I’m not even sure if I could.

Noah  is gone for the weekend. He is visiting with his two best friends from college. I’m super thrilled for him. The last time the three of them went on a trip like this it was at my initiation because I made Noah schedule it. This time one of his friends suggested it!!!! I’M SO HAPPY.

Noah is a great guy but he isn’t doing a fabulous job of maintaining friendships. He’s doing that guy thing where he hangs with his family and his job and that’s mostly it. I’m glad he has monthly lunch with a group of folks he likes. I’m hoping that running off with the college friends becomes more predictably an annual thing. Noah needs friends.

I insist on my friendships. I prioritize them. I force space in my life for them because I will crumble without them. My friendships keep me ok. Noah is lovely and I’m glad I get to spend the vast majority of my time with him… I need my friends too.

Noah is afraid to talk to his friends about our marriage and ask for support. Because I’m such a shitty wife he is pretty sure anyone who cares about him will tell him to leave me. I feel really sad that a) Noah believes that is the only thing someone could think about me if they really knew about me and b) Noah doesn’t think he deserves such advice and support if it is really the best solution.

If Noah really feels that abused… he shouldn’t be married.

He says he doesn’t. But he also says he can’t tell his friends anything about our marriage or it would go badly. So.

It is hard that Noah genuinely believes he deserves better and that his friends would tell him so if they only knew so he lies about me.

I didn’t mean to grow up and be this bad. But I suppose given my background there isn’t much more that can be expected of someone like me.

It is hard that I tried to use my words and ask for Noah to stop using my cunt as a fleshlight and that didn’t work so I exploded and did my best to cope within the skillset I had and that means I deserve to be abandoned and alone forever. Because I am a bad wife.

I made my bed and I have to lie in it. But sometimes it really isn’t comfy. Oh well. It’s my own fault so I guess it is fitting.

My mama was right. You get married and you have to whore and there isn’t really a choice about it. If you don’t do it how you are supposed to you are a bad wife who does not deserve to be kept. But Noah is suffering through and he doesn’t want to hear that he should dump me. So he doesn’t ask anyone for support in dealing with just how bad of a wife I am.

I’m sorry.