This video about identity is worth the 20 minutes.

People come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.

If you know something is right you have to say it even if there might be consequences. Consequences are part of taking action. I would rather take action than put my head down and keep my mouth shut.

That means I’m going to have problems.

I’m super anxious about ninetyeleventybillion things right now. Many of them are not writing material.

Identity is a funny thing. Knowing that I am who and what I am is a funny thing. I don’t have pretentions about being a gentle or a kind person. But I can play one as a role sometimes. Lately I’ve been feeling haunted by the phrase “I’m not a violent person.”

I am a violent person who has learned a fuck ton of control. Is my control perfect? No. And that creates problems. I know. I’m trying to figure out how to make my slips less frequent and only in more controlled manners.

Because I believe that life requires violence sometimes. I don’t think it is wrong to be a violent person. But I don’t like casual threats of violence.

You only bring violence into things if you are totally fucking serious that you think it needs to escalate to physical violence. You don’t jump up and cross a room and punch your fist unless you are serious about hitting first. You just don’t. You don’t tell someone that if they ______ your wife that you are going to break their legs unless you are serious about breaking their legs.

Last year was a fascinating year for violent posturing. The funny part is, I’m the only one of the bunch who will think of themself as violent even though I wasn’t the biggest out burster of the year by a long shot.

I look angry and dangerous. I don’t directly threaten people anymore. I haven’t in a long time. And so I’m scary. Ok. Yup. That’s true.

I can be pretty fucking terrifying sometimes. I don’t have to do anything. Just stand there and glower and I can make a whole room full of people cower. Uh, it’s a skill. I try not to use it.

So having this as a skill means I think about how intimidation plays into violence. If someone feels I am trying to intimidate them, they will react with an escalation of violence because that seems fair. Whether I was trying to be intimidating or just moving through the world processing the feelings I was fucking having anyway or not.

Identity and perception are interestingly cowoven phenomenon.

Noah wants me to take a lot more of my identity and worth from being married to him. That’s complicated. I know I picked a winning horse. But… that’s… a different thing from having earned what I have.

For the legal definition of homeless we were homeless for most of my childhood. I didn’t live on the streets, we couch surfed for a few days or weeks or months at a time. Sometimes we had our own place when my dad was willing to pay child support but he mostly wasn’t. So we lived in our car. I was put in foster care over and over because my mom couldn’t find places that would take both of us. My sister got married at 17 because that was the most likely way she could find a stable place to live. It didn’t work.

That feels more like who I am.

Jenny wants me to see my story as starting from when I had agency.

Sometimes I wonder why I imprint on people the way I do. I might be a right pain in the ass, but I come back and come back and come back and come back and do work all the time I’m being obnoxious too.

Blacksheep came to visit so I thought about her. She payed attention to me in a polite, respectful, boundaries having way at a time in my life when I needed that so desperately I was a walking festering sore. She was like a salve. An abrasive, sometimes caustic salve. If she sees something that ain’t right… she’ll fucking tell you. I always wonder why Jenny has such a huge piece of my heart. Because she does. Because she was there on two of the most crucial nights of my young life. She was there for me after the suicides. When my mother or sister or aunt or uncle or cousins would not offer me comfort when my brother and father killed themselves because the whole damn house thought it was my fault Jenny could look at me with pity and tell me it wasn’t my fault.

I imprint like a fucking duckling. I’ll come back. It might be expensive… but I’ll show up over and over and over for as long as you’ll have me.

I could keep going but I don’t have a cord for this laptop out here. I don’t have that much longer to type.

I need this project to end.

I’m going nutty. My poor kids. I’m glad they will be out of the house for four days this week cause I’ve been a bitch lately. I’m losing it. I’m yelling about things that don’t need to be yelled about. Noah has intervened and told me to leave the room.

There are advantages to him working from home. I don’t like it or him when he’s doing it but I’m grateful for it in the long run. Let’s minimize how much I fuck up our kids. Cool, yeah.

Fuck.

I have no room to judge. But fuck if that stops me. Judgmental bastard.

I’m wrong about my judgments sometimes. I remind myself of that. I’m not G-d. I don’t know everything. I just don’t. I just have fucktastically strong opinions. Often backed up by extensive research.

As dear Michelle reminds me… I do know a lot about child development. Not enough. Never enough. I’m still studying. I don’t know if I will ever stop studying.

If identity and purpose are about things that are ongoing drives instead of about short term goals then I think I have to examine things a little differently.

I may be an artist and a sometimes painter but that isn’t my life. I put down my paint brushes for years at a time. Why do I so strongly resist thinking of myself as a dancer just because I have down years?

Because I wasn’t one of the rich kids who got to take lessons so I wasn’t a real dancer. When it came time to public social dancing I was told over and over how I wasn’t stage performance material.

Yeah. I know. Could ya shut the fuck up and let me have a few fucking minutes to enjoy being in my god damn body before you tell me I’m doing it wrong? No?

Fuck.

I was hostile and angry and defensive about being called an artist for decades because in kindergarden they yelled at me and told me I was doing art wrong and I decided that meant it wasn’t for me.

My kids are going to be much better than me. They practice about ten times as much as I do and they have never had it internalized that art is for other people who can follow these specific rules.

It is weird to me that they like math and we play verbal math games all the time. Written math is still coming along, but verbally they can do a lot. That’s interesting for me. We are exploring learning through whatever modality works best for them. We play a lot of counting and number games and that is how they learn math. We are doing more formal writing too, but that’s harder and slower. Eldest Child is about two months behind grade level at this point. Given that she started out the year two full grade levels behind, I’m going to say I’m pleased with progress and we’ll keep going how we are going until she decides she is ready to slow down a bit.

The purpose of the first seven years of life is to work on socializing and emotional self regulation. You need to be put into real life situations over and over and over and over and over until you are able to manage them.

Practice, practice, practice.

Sometime around 7-10ish kids will naturally mature into being able to learn to read and read to learn in a few months so that they can explode in knowledge acquisition. But it requires providing a scaffolding of survival/people skills so that the person can see themselves as autonomous and on their own path.

I would be fine if Eldest Child wanted to start going to school at any point here. But she’s not ready. So I have to provide curriculum of some kind now. Because that’s the deal for home schooling.

You teach them about being a good citizen and what it means to take care of business in life and then you help them educate themselves. Because all education really happens in the mind of the student. The teacher is just there as a companion to help you find resources.

At least, that is how it works in my dream world.

That is how it works in Wonderland.

That would be a fun kids book series. How Education Works in Wonderland.

I could be as liberal with my definition of Wonderland as I wanted. Carroll doesn’t really own it you know.

That’s the end of the battery. Until we meet again oh internet, I am semi-faithfully yours.

Happy Christmas to those of you who recognize such a holiday. If you don’t celebrate this holiday, I hope you have an easy time avoiding us annoying assholes who do. I’m sure it gets annoying year after year.

Today is going to be a day for thinking. I’m thinking about that article about dating losers that I posted yesterday. I’m thinking about it because… way too many of those points describe me. More than a couple feel kinda like Noah. We have some issues. But the big difference between us and that article is that we both feel that we fuck up. We talk about how we are behaving badly. We try to change. We have both changed a great deal in ten years. Some of those behaviors were a big problem early in our relationship and have mellowed a lot.

But I don’t have the spoons to get into it point by point. Which is feeling anxious-making. We really need to work on our relationship going forward. Which feels hard this minute.

I put primer on the wall in the play room yesterday. Today I will do the background/sky/earth colors in there so that tomorrow when folks show up to paint Minecraft… they can just go. It’ll be fun.

I finished the ceiling in autumn/winter. It’s gorgeous; it looks like storms chasing across the sky. I’m so in love.

I spent a lot of time talking to the construction worker yesterday. I’m down to just one now. Which means he may be here till February. I talked to the main boss guy yesterday. He’s not happy with my prediction for how long this will take. He says it has to go faster. The worker and I raise an eyebrow and shrug. No. It doesn’t have to go faster. It has to be done right. It might not be finished till February and that’s ok. The boss guy says I am the most patient client he has ever worked with to the point where it’s a little weird. He said, “We have already more than doubled the time I thought it would take and you are ok with tripling it. That’s never happened to me before.”

Well, the work that is being done is gorgeous and I’m not going to fuck with a good thing. I’ve been waiting two years. I’m not going to rush once we get to the beautiful tile I will have to look at every day. If the pace slows down to a crawl because hand setting each individual tile sucks… I will roll with that. I just want the playroom back. And vanities in the bathroom (which won’t get in the way of tile) so I can get all the shit out of the living room.

I can handle moving slowly with tile. I want it done right.

This is not a normal tiling job where you put on sheets of tile and rarely have to cut anything. This is a bitch.

He may get an assistant who is also mainly a tile guy. We’ll see.

Also: I got my wish to be humanized with the dude. We talked for hours and we have many more hours of talking in front of us. We talked about where he is from, his life path, his family, his children, his faith and his struggles with it, and lots of random little details about his life. I said, “I know y’all talked back and forth a lot about _____ and _____. Would you be interested in hearing why?”

He said yeah. When I was done telling him stories about myself and why I’m doing this art and no for pity’s sake my daddy is not paying for this… he said, “This is why I kept telling the other guy not to judge. You don’t know someone else’s story till they tell you. It makes sense that you are doing what you are doing after I hear all that.”

Holy crudmonkeys that is an intoxicating kind of validation.

Then I absolutely hate myself because I should not care what he thinks of me. It should be entirely irrelevant to my life. I’m so stupid.

It’s a big deal to me that I move through the world explaining why someone might be crazy. It makes sense. It is all internally consistent. I do it in large part because I cannot count the number of people who tell me they are more patient and understanding with lots of people in their lives because they understand what they may not know about them now that they understand me and my story better.

When I say I write about myself because I want to be a character in peoples heads… that’s a lot of what I mean. I mean, don’t mistake me for wanting to be holy but… a friend said she thinks, “What Would Krissy Do” sometimes and my heart exploded with a firebomb of joy.

Holy shit. People think of me.

That’s important. That matters. That’s a real thing.

Even if I can’t touch it, see it, or smell it. That’s a gift that people are giving me. They allow me to take up space in their brains. Oh thank you so much. I feel so very loved. You think of me the way I think of you. I try as hard as I can to create models of y’all in my head in the same way. I sit and go through different people in my head and try to figure out how they would react based on what I know about them.

Sometimes I even guess right. Often I don’t. But I’m trying.

I’m difficult and you still try to understand me. That is a gift. You know what? Even the folks who hate follow me… you are here to see a train wreck and you go off and mock me in other places. Ok. But guess what? I’m still a story in your head. I take up space in your brain. You still think about me because I am compelling.

Nyah nyah nyah nyah.

The maturity, I have all of it.

Recently I noticed that the main place I knew about where people sat around and talked shit about me evaporated. *phew* Bye fuckers. Apparently the forum went away because folks were so nasty to one another that it just couldn’t be sustained. Well done, y’all.

Traumatized means: subject to lasting shock as a result of an emotionally disturbing experience or physical injury.

It is fair to say that I have traumatized people. I leave a lasting impression on people. It is fair to say that people have traumatized me. I will think about them forever.

How much of traumatizing other people do we need to process, forgive, acknowledge, work on… I’m not sure. I leave a lasting god damn impression on people. Sometimes in a bad way. I don’t really know that I have it in me to become a smaller person so that I leave less of an impression. That’s what it would take. It would take me trying to squash big parts of my personality.

What do I owe other people? If your culture says that people like me are a serious problem… maybe avoid me? I’m unlikely to adapt myself so that I fit in with a culture I don’t live in/with/around. That’s kinda like suicide. For better or worse I live in the cultural context in which I live. I mean…

I try to change the cultural context in which I live. I exert active pressure on it in a variety of ways. But I see a lot of factors outside of my control.

I have to deal with the sexist, racist white assholes in the world. Sometimes I kinda need to have all the force of personality of a bazooka in order to absolutely assert with great force I WILL NOT HAVE THAT SHIT HERE. NOT IN MY PRESENCE.

If you can turn that kind of thing all the way off entirely and pull it out when you need it then I’d love to hear how you pull off that trick. I turn it down to like 1 or 2. That’s as far down as I know how to turn down that force of personality. It is always measurably there… but barely….

I don’t know why I have this kind of force of personality to enforce a reality distortion bubble. It’s not really about the factors that currently exist in my life. I did this shit when I was a small, helpless, destitute, homeless child. I’d still turn to someone and go off like a bottle rocket if they did shit that I thought wasn’t ok.

This has gotten me in trouble all my life. I got beat so much for sassing teachers in Texas and Oklahoma partially because I called them on being assholes to me and the other students. I have memories of pointing out that they were picking on people so they turned to me instead. I’ve always kind of liked being a lightning rod. I think my attitude is that I am tough and I can take it.

I’ve jumped into fist fights and gotten them to stop hitting each other.

I’m not shy about asserting my presence in the world. No. This will not happen on my watch. Whatever that means.

Noah thinks it is funny that in junior high I was pulled out of class to go through training on how to be a conflict mediator. The school saw me interfering in everyone else’s business and wanted to harness that. I was pulled out of class constantly because I did really well at being fair. I wasn’t biased. I hate everyone the same and I was not big on favoritism.

If you are my best friend and you fuck up… I’m kinda throwing you under the bus.

You do the crime, you do the time buddy. In this case it normally meant apology letters, but whatever. I’m big on the idea that everyone should have to apologize for fucking up and I always have been.

I didn’t mean to traumatize you but I also can’t let someone sit at my table and tell me they will threaten me whenever they want. Nope, nope, nope. All the nope in the entire nope-universe. If it traumatizes you to find out that I won’t accept that…

I will just have to live with that.

I’m a bully. Because when someone says flat out that they will threaten me whenever they want I respond and respond and respond and respond and respond until they leave, saying I am traumatizing.

Ok.

And I have even less control over how strong I come on when I’m tired.

Goodness I need to figure out sleep in this lifetime. And when I pull all nighters I need to not talk to people for two or three days later. I’m such a bitch. I have no volume regulation and my tone of voice goes straight to shit.

Hey, it’s like I have less control over my body when I’m exhausted. Weird.

Or entirely predictable. Take your pick.

And I’m having another baby. I will cuddle my exhaustion to me like a warm blanket.

I’m freezing. I’m going to move to the heater and I can’t bring my computer with me because it is a brick when unplugged. Whine fuss moan. And the dishwasher is still broken and now the repair guy is dodging calls.

Cheers.

I had a good conversation with the construction worker who speaks the best English. He spent a lot of time apologizing for the swearing. It was a constructive (ha) conversation.

Then I noticed that the walls in my bedroom are covered in mold. Oh shit.

And… my laptop is 100% a brick when it isn’t plugged in.

Cheers.

I’m dipping my toes into the water of seeing people again. Know what I’m remembering? I constantly feel like I’m forcing my presence on people and they don’t actually like me. They just don’t want to feel mean for telling me to go away.

For most of my life, I didn’t really have anywhere to invite people over. My house was… not ok. That was true for most of my first 25 years. I would try. I love inviting people over but nothing could ever be consistent or predictable. My life wasn’t consistent or predictable. That has changed a lot since I’ve been living here. Except the last two years have been really rough. For going on two years now I haven’t felt good about inviting anyone over here.

I bless the hearts of people who invite themselves over. You have no idea how loved I feel when you make that effort. It’s such a big deal. When I’m in a dark place and my head wants me to believe that no one could actually like me, I trot out lists. “But ____ just invited themselves over. SEE! I’M NOT A COMPLETELY WORTHLESS SHIT PILE.”

I do that. Literally. Thank you for seeing me and coming over. It’s a much bigger deal than just the visit. I console myself with the knowledge of you in between visits.

I used to invite myself over to other peoples houses. I did tons of that with Jenny. I never knew for sure if she wanted me there or if she didn’t want to deal with the conflict of telling me to go away.

I still feel that way about people in my life. If I invite myself over, does that mean they want me there or that they are afraid of the conflict of telling me to go away.

It doesn’t actually take much conflict. A short simple email, “I think I’m done seeing you.” I will never make eye contact with you in public again.

I’m easy to get rid of.

I think I’m going to need to retreat back into inviting people to my house. They will come if they want to and I don’t have to feel like I’m a bad person for inviting myself into their space.

This is probably part of why I haven’t tried harder to maintain hobbies. I never feel comfortable being in other peoples spaces. I always feel like an intruder, an unwanted intruder. I am the problem.

I don’t invite myself over because I want to torment you. I invite myself over because I love you and I think you are wonderful.

I am sorry to impose.

I am sorry. I am so very sorry.

So if you ever wonder why I don’t invite myself over, this is a lot of why. It is hard.

Do you know what I think is kind of funny? I spend a lot of time feeling paranoid because I talk a lot about my social anxiety and how hard interacting with people is for me. But then I come across men who tell me that they just can’t do social interactions because they are so much harder for them than they are for me. HAVE YOU READ MY BLOG?! DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH TIME AND ENERGY I SPEND PROCESSING EVERY GOD DAMN SOCIAL INTERACTION? I PREPLAN SCRIPTS. I AGONIZE OVER PRESENTATION AND TONE AND DEMEANOR. I RIP MYSELF APART AFTER EVERY CONVERSATION CONVINCED THAT I RUINED EVERYTHING BY BEING A WORTHLESS PIECE OF SHIT. AGAIN.

Tell me again how hard socializing is for you.

I COME HOME FROM VISITING FRIENDS AND SPEND DAYS CRYING BECAUSE I’M CONVINCED I SAID THE WRONG THING.

Tell me again how hard socializing is for you.

I maintain relationships as my religion and I put as much effort into it as most people put into their education and career. I’m an incredibly lucky person that I am able to put this much time into this part of my life.

That doesn’t mean it is easy.

The people I love are very different from me. Sure, we’ll have one or two things in common about which we bond… but mostly… I’m different. I’m just something different. I don’t have a lot in common with anyone. And yet I do. It’s weird. I have things in common with almost literally anyone. I’m good and I’m bad and I’m intense and I’m experienced in a wide variety of areas.

I can bond with almost anyone if I guess the right angle first. If I fuck it up and attempt to bond on a non-connecting point I often alienate the shit out of someone and there isn’t recovery from that.

Believe me, I know.

But I guess right a lot. I do well.

That doesn’t change the fact that it is hard. I just don’t let it being hard slow me down. I cry because it is hard, but I don’t stop. Ok, maybe I do let it being hard slow me down. I don’t always have enough energy to pour into trying to create connections. It’s been a slow year. It’s been a year when the energy of pouring into relationships exceeds what I get back so every touching of base is hard and I know I need to do it anyway.

I don’t maintain relationships because they are perfectly fulfilling in every exact moment. I maintain relationships because I think you are wonderful and I want to see what you do with your life. I am curious about you. I want to know if there is anything I can do (pathetic as I am) to help you have an even more wonderful life. Because I want to see you have a wonderful life–even if there isn’t a darn thing I can do to influence that.

Why not? There is no deserve. There is no should. There is no “right” to have any kind of life. Why not help you have a wonderful life? No one deserves one. Not to have one and not to not have one. Why not work towards it if possible?

What makes a life wonderful? Oh that varies. What people value varies so much that there is no one twue way.

My daughter asked me yesterday if I expect her to have children. I told her that I don’t. I want her to have the life she wants to have and I have no desire to tell her what that will include. I don’t know what job she should do. I don’t know if she should parent. I don’t know if she should end up monogamous or polyamorous. I don’t know where she should live or if she should stay near me.

Those decisions are not up to me and I need to be supportive of whatever she decides. I don’t own her. I just get to enjoy her company for a little while before she decides who she wants to be in this world.

I’m getting to lead the life I wanted to lead in a more profound way than almost any creature ever experiences. I picked this life when I was 17. Now, going on 20 years later… I’m doing what I said I would. It is more fun and joy than I expected it to be. I thought it would be much harder.

I plan for the worst.

Having more children is terrifying. I have two children who knock my socks off. They each have areas where they do super well and areas where they are utter crap and we have built systems around supporting them in these differing developmental areas.

What am I going to do if next kid is a completely different set of needs. It’s like the problem of adopting, where it is just a roll of the dice. Only with adoption you start out with separation trauma.

My own separation trauma is so huge. I am still barely learning what it means to be a mother. I’m still learning what it means to be a person and a friend. Recently I’ve been reading through studies about what it does to the brain of an infant to have their mother not want them, to hate them in utero, to not stay with them.

It explains a lot of my sensory seeking, impulsive, self destructive behavior in life.

I mean, not really. There is no “x causes y” like that in life and behavior. Not really. But there are connections and impacts that radiate out like a wave.

Being the product of rape hurts you. I wasn’t in foster care until I was three, but then I was in foster care on and off until I was, what 16? And the three years I lived with both biological parents were full of violence, screaming, drugs, rage problems, and sexual assault.

I’m having a really really really hard time dealing with having men in my house who call me a whore.

This is getting really hard. I’m feeling so sad.

And now we are getting to the tile. Where I’ll have to be in with them all day. I’m trying to figure out how to handle this.

Talking to their boss only helped a little. I sorta wonder if I should sit down with my damn grammar workbook and dictionary (no I do not want to just use google translate) and try to write up some things I want to say in Spanish. I am not confident in verb tenses and that is a lot of what prevents me from being able to speak at speed.

I need to deal with this.

It’s kinda funny to me. I like having Noah call me a whore. Sometimes. In some circumstances, which are very highly constrained. That shit can’t just be used all the time.

It’s funny to me. I think sex work is a highly respectable and respect worthy line of work. I’m not fussed about someone thinking I might do sex work.

But don’t stand in my house and call me a whore. Ok, they said puta. WHAT-FUCKING-EVER.

But I understand that shit talk is a lot of how these men of color deal with living in an unfair system. I’m not a victim here.

I really want to stuff all of this and sit on it and grit my teeth and just get through the project.

I want to figure out how to sit there and tell stories. I want to tell them why I am making the art I’m making. I want to say that no, my daddy is not paying for this. My daddy was a violent pedophile who killed himself instead of going to prison for raping me.

No. My daddy’s money is not paying for this.

Fuck you.

But without the fuck you.

The best case scenario here is that we are all humanized more. I don’t want to attack them to defend myself. I want to see if I can be seen as a person instead of as a symbol of a system that does deserve to be attacked.

If you really see me as a person and you still think I deserve to be attacked, fine. But I’m having a hard time dealing with all the shit talk.

To be fair, things have cooled off a little after I emailed their boss. But it slowed down it didn’t stop.

I’m struggling with how to deal with my feelings. And it is a cloud hanging over my head. I don’t see my therapist till January. Fun. She’s having a great international vacation. Good for her.

Know why she keeps not getting fired? Because when we have a conflict she models fantastic conflict skills. That’s a woman who could walk through fire. If I start shouting in a way that normally triggers the fuck out of people–I make people want to fight she will say, “Oh, you have a point.” Then… the anger just kind of deflates. I drop from this huge anger posturing and bullshit upset to… oh. Yeah. I do.

All of a sudden I can feel the anger but I don’t have to act it out.

It’s kinda weird to explain.

It was good to articulate how I set therapists up as Authority Figures and it is very challenging when they fuck something up. That Fucks With My World View. I’m a strangely rigid person in many ways. I need my Authority Figures to  be kinda… invisible in how they are human.. It’s not fair. It’s why I try not to let my Authority Figures be people who are seriously in my life. That’s not a fair role.

We all fuck up.

She asked if there was a way to repair trust. I said that telling me that I have a right to be angry with her because she fucked up and she is sorry… goes a long way.

Sometimes it feels so complicated that every person who acknowledges a wrong doing is part of this huge thing in my life where I’m trying to repair the damage caused by very important people not being able to apologize for what they did.

My father can’t exactly apologize, now can he? Fucker.

But i can apologize to people when I fuck up. I can try to do better.

I can figure out how to not run from every problem but instead figure out how to repair and move on. If other people meet me part way. It is looking for that part way that is important. What does that mean? It means something different in every relationship. In every time I talk to anyone.

I  need to get better at figuring out what someone going a certain distance means. It’s so much work.

I love you. I’ll probably keep trying. Hard isn’t really that much of a deterrent.

I don’t know how much my mother loved me, but I believe she did love me a little. In many ways I was the joy that came out of a lot of sorrow for her. But she also didn’t want me. These things are complicated.

There’s a line in a Reba McEntire song that I never really got until recently. “I don’t need any more accidents in my life.”

Man. That song. The class issues. The gender issues. Respect. What does it mean to be worthy of what. What is survival.

And my breakfast is ready. The day is starting. No more time for navel gazing.

I found my phone. I guess it fell out of my purse in the van. *phew* That’s way better than it could be.

I’m going to type slow and funny because yesterday I took a piece out of my finger with the blade for the blender. Whoops. And other finger tips hurt a lot too.

Today involves martial arts for the kids, acupuncture from me (all my health care providers are happy to see me again after taking a few months off because I was freaking out about money with this stupid remodel), a trip to Home Desperate to deal with some broken fixtures (damnit), pick up a little bit of paint in colors I used to have for fixing the drywall all over the house, and go to Winter Bash. I really like touching base with the crowd I met through Renaissance Faires. The only trouble with the party is it is so far away. But once a year I can suck it. Driving and the party will fill most of the day.

I stopped typing there to snuggle and pay attention to people. I appreciate getting the body contact plus conversation plus rest. Kinda awesome if you ask me.

I am at a weird point with social contact and work. I scheduled a really intense 16 days and then I got sick and had to reschedule people and then others got sick and got overwhelmed with life and… that just didn’t happen. Out of the 13 scheduled dates with friends only 5 or 6 (depending on how you count) wound up happening. Oh. Well that’s ok.

Some folks are rescheduled. Some folks… I guess I’ll just miss seeing them this year.

I’m getting to the tile and paint section of this remodel. The part I need to be around for. When I am completely burned out on being in the house around noise, judgment, and hostility. I’m weary.

Yesterday I listened to the dudes be rude for a while then it occurred to me to turn on an audio recorder, and they mostly changed the subject. Damnit.

I certainly am aware that they shit talk a lot of people, not just me. I don’t think I am the only thing they talk about. But I’m tired of being a topic.

I find it interesting that they think I am so awful for making my kids work. My kids do some chores (unload the dish drainer/dish washer/ fold and put away your laundry/ pick up your toys/ help with cat maintenance) and they do 30 minutes to 2 hours of academics a day. (Eldest Child isn’t 100% caught up, but she is probably only about two months behind so I’m slowing down our pace dramatically. I have been pushing hard and she’ll enjoy learning more long-term if I don’t always act like we should be accelerating. I don’t have to treat her like she should do four grades in a year to get to the point of being advanced. At this point we are going to need to change our approach soon. She’s done some drill and kill and she can regurgitate a lot of data she didn’t have at the beginning of the year… but it’s time to figure out a more holistic data drop method. Change faster, Krissy.)

And I’m a mean terrible person for insisting on this work? Really? Wha?

STOP TALKING ABOUT ME IN MY HOUSE. YES, I KNOW YOU THINK IT IS WEIRD THAT WE HAVE SO MANY BOOKS. I DON’T GIVE A FLYING FUCK. LEAVE ME ALONE.

Having these dudes here is really fucking up my paranoia. I know they aren’t talking about me all the time, I understand enough to hear a wide diversity of topics… but they think I can’t understand them so they are free to be really disrespectful of freaking everyone and everything. It’s making me crazy.

I just want my home to be peaceful again.

I’m feeling weird about how much I want my house to be peaceful. I have to consciously and deliberately shut out influences and people if I want peace. There is no way to be all inclusive and have peace. Inclusivity means conflict and discussion and negotiation and compromise.

I have never really felt like my moral compass, values, ethics, and behavior were “ok” in almost any environment. Guess what? My house. My rules. I’m starting to understand what this feels like and I understand why other people have always been so angry about me not understanding what they expected in their space.

I really couldn’t understand that before.

It isn’t that I expect everyone to agree with me in my space. But I feel like I do a lot of deciding which topics are and are not ok. We do a lot of constructive criticism in this house. Kind of an obscene amount. But I’m just not ok with the shit talk for the sake of shit talk. We don’t… do that.

I’m not made bigger by making you feel smaller. I’m not saying I’m perfect about judging… I’m a judgey mother fucker. I’m very honest about that. I have a lot of fucking opinions. But I’m not going to walk into your house and tell you how fucked up your life is.

If I love you I might say, “Ok, this one thing… doesn’t seem like it is working” which is over stepping and a rude as fuck thing to do. I need to stop that too. Unless someone asks for my feedback, just shut up.

I’m going to stay home and shut up for a while. I’m not hanging out on Twitter. I’m having a hard time with what I am internalizing. I’m getting a little too much validation for the idea that there is nothing I can do in my whole life to make up for what a despicable waste of resources I am. It might be true. But I still have to try. I may fail. I may never do anything that makes me worth the air I breathe. But I have to try instead of giving up and curling into a ball and crying until I die.

Which means I’m doing too much spying on facebook through Noah’s account. I feel like I can’t leave comments that way so it saves my blood pressure. But it increases how lonely I feel.

I got my niece’s Christmas presents in the mail. *phew* By “I got” I mean that I packaged it and Noah took it to the actual mailing location because he had something to drop off too. Team work.

Noah bought the Christmas presents for his family this year and I didn’t. I feel proud of us. Good job on this one. I’ve done it for years and felt very resentful. So I didn’t do it this year and I don’t feel resentful and he did send presents to the people who are loving and supportive in our direction. I call that a mother fucking win.

I feel weird about how much my relationship with my in-laws is about letters and gifts. We don’t have an IRL relationship. Don’t fucking tell me that my internet friends aren’t real. They are as real as my in-laws.

Christmas this year is… surprisingly wonderful. Decorating has been slow and chill. I haven’t felt any anxiety at all. Noah hasn’t had time to make cookies… which is maybe not the end of the world. We have a lot of sugar around. We’ve had a very mellow December all things considered. Not frighteningly social. We aren’t hosting much at all. I’m not trying to decorate much because so much of the house is not accessible. So Christmas threw up on my living room. The kids had a blast.

They did their gingerbread house building with the baby sitter. We’ve done walks to look at Christmas lights. We went to Dickens Fair. That’s the Christmas season. We’re good.

I haven’t gardened this week. I don’t know if I will again till January. Fuss.

Today is Winter Bash. Tomorrow the kids get to go visit some friends. So I get to see my friends too. We had lunch with some of Noah’s friends last weekends. We’ve seen some of his other friends a couple of times recently. Our friend came over for a visit.

I try really hard to make sure there is a balance. We are all supported in different ways by different people. We get different kinds of recognition and understanding from very different people. It is as much about them as it is about us. We all have different things to give. I feel so very blessed to know the variety of people I know.

What would it be like to have to make due with only knowing a dozen or so people and having to just not acknowledge needs that my group couldn’t meet.

Wow. That’s not an experience I can easily understand.

I bet that is much more common than my experience. I bet most people normalize off of maybe two or three dozen people and just… don’t… expand their network much to really understand why people are different.

See, here I am judging again. What an asshole.

But it’s the whole monkey sphere phenomenon. I mean, I’m assuming a fairly low number of people. I think folks know lots more folks than that, but I think most people don’t assume they can take needs to most of the people I know. I’m a transactional motherfucker. I’ll ask folks for a trade of needs. “I have this range of skills to offer as a person; I have this range of needs. Do you see any overlap for trades?” Sometimes this is just the ability to have a conversation with someone who can talk about some weird ass topic that not everyone in the world is very nice about. Sometimes it is providing emotional support in trade for physical labor.

I think that it’s all reasonable to trade for. We all have needs.

This is part of why I completely understand sex work as a job and think it is as honorable as anything else.

We all have needs. Some are complicated and some are simple. That’s ok.

For example: we all need to eat food. But my body in particular needs a fairly high quantity of meat with a lot of vegetables. I need starches, but I do better when wheat is a less than about a quarter of my starch consumption.

So sometimes the need is simple: need food. Sometimes the need is complicated: in order to achieve maximal health I need this kind of food in this kind of way.

I think everything can be looked at like this.

I think a lot about abuse and intimidation and bullying. What is abuse?

How can someone say with a straight face that hitting their children is not violence but a man looking at a woman is violence. Violence that deserves starting a fist fight over.

I believe that some of my behavior is abusive. How much of that is really abusive and how much of it is outside the culturally mandated perception of how a woman should behave? I’m genuinely not sure. I default to the point of view that I’m a fucking monster and if someone says I’m hurting them I need to assume they are correct and do whatever I can to mitigate hurting that person. Whether that means breaking off contact because I am the problem or changing my behavior or changing what circumstances in which I interact with someone or… the possibilities are pretty wide ranging.

I do not know how to both assert myself as an individual and never risk hurting someone.

I’m sure someone has managed this but I don’t know how.

It’s different writing now. I used to do a lot more hiding and crying. These days it is pretty common for me to sit in the room with the kids and just make sure that they can’t see my screen. Damn those literate children.

Our lives feel both more and less integrated. It’s fascinating. There is more room for me to be me sitting on the couch because I’m not nursing or watching them or absorbed in trying to help them. I can be in the room with them and ignore them. It’s glorious. I don’t ignore them all the time or anything, but there are more healthy boundaries. I have moved far from helicopter parenting and it is healthy. I’m still around, available, and often interrupted. But I’m allowed to have a mind that thinks about something other than my children.

Oh fuck. I’m going to have another baby. I kind of want to weep. I’m going to lose myself again. For years. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

I have enjoyed coming out of the early childhood period. It is brutal.

If only I didn’t feel so completely not done. I want to meet the rest of the children I’m supposed to make.

I really really do.

I was reminded that Twitter allows me to feel like I’m reaching out without getting the benefit of feeling like people reach back much. My friends have been reaching back in real life and I’m reminded that the internet can be a sink hole where I throw my desperate desire for connection and get… nothing back.

Not nothing. But not enough to feel like I am supported and sustained.

I spend too much time worrying about what people think of me. I am desperately afraid someone might perceive me as lazy. So I work to the point of damaging myself. Better to end up permanently disabled so I can say that I literally can’t work any more than to say, “I need to rest so I’m going to stop working voluntarily.”

I’m taking my cat to the vet today for pain killers. Hopefully her life will be less shitty soon. She’s almost 19. It’s ok if she is drug dependent for the rest of her life. I don’t mind at all.

Why are we as a species so opposed to humans ending their lives in a blissed out haze? I’m telling you, if I get to 80 I’m going to try heroin. Why the fuck not.

We’ll see.

I’m tired and I wish I was sleeping but my body hurts. I’m so anxious. I need these people out of my house. I’m tired of feeling on edge for 8-9 hours a day. This body load is seriously hurting me. I don’t relax at all. I’m tired of listening to them harp on how lazy I am. I’m tired of listening to judgment about how I live. I just want to be allowed to be weird in my god damn house without comment. YES WE READ A LOT OF BOOKS. SHOVE YOUR OPINION THAT READING IS STUPID WHERE THE SUN DON’T SHINE.

I’m going to be a real fucker for a minute here and say that shunning books may not be in the long term best interest of your entire family. I’m just saying.

I am getting farther and farther into the space where all the reading of books that I have done makes a serious positive impact on my life, relationships, and work potential. I’m not going to stop reading because ignorant people can’t see the value in reading. Your lack of insight on this topic doesn’t need to slow me down.

I need to slow down because I’m exhausted though. That’s a problem.

It’s winter. We have the heaters on. Thus, I am coughing up huge wads of green crud. This year I may actually go see yet another doctor about my chronic bronchitis. I have the lungs of someone who was a two pack a day smoker and I’ve never really smoked cigarettes. Thanks, mom. Yes, I do smoke pot… but I had this problem before I started on pot. So yeah. This is an annual nightmare for me and has been for years. That said, I’m going to pack up the pipe today. Time to take the rest of the winter off from smoking. Edibles may be less awesome but there is less damage involved.

Harm reduction, yo.

I woke up and had a piece of (medicated) chocolate this morning cause I hurt. See, I’m totally responsible.

At this point the construction dudes are finishing up the stone facade out front. After that… I think it has to be tile. There isn’t much else to do before that, from what I can tell. The tile, under floor heating, vanities, light fixtures… Is that all? I think so? CAN YOU HURRY UP ALREADY?!

Ok that’s not fair. But I’m really frustrated. They are on week 13. This company has been here for 13 weeks. They estimated 6-8 weeks total. This project started almost two years ago. I’m losing my mind here.

Hurry up and do this prep work for us because we are going to start it tomorrow! Just kidding, we won’t start that piece that you stayed up all night working on for four weeks. But you should panic and do this other work now!

I’m not dealing well with the constant panic and reassignment of work and changing of priorities and timing. I’m feeling overwhelmed and cranky.

I will say that the house is sorting itself out better underneath the chaos. It is lovely to see happening. I’m not done yet but things are improving dramatically.

Next Thursday and Friday before Christmas Eve I will probably try to go through and do a bunch of the touch up/repair painting throughout the house. That’s going to be fun. There are little bits of drywall damage throughout the house that need to be painted over. They fucked up the hobbit door in the entryway. I have a sad. Luckily I’m a competent motherfucker and I can fix a lot of shit. But I’m not thrilled about this process. I’m tired.

The house is definitely not getting finished in December. Sigh. I’m praying that I’m not dealing with it clean through till February.

Oh god.

We haven’t even made any Christmas cookies because this month has been so overwhelming. If you know us… that’s practically the sign of an impending apocalypse. WTF?

I’m back to doing the “pass out when the sun goes down and wake up in the middle of the night” thing.

Oh, and I started bleeding yesterday. We went off birth control officially late in December. My period tracker app says that the day we “started trying” was probably 2-3 days after I ovulated. So I guess we kinda sorta can say that we are now 4 for 8 tries but only kinda. Of all the problems I have with my body, fertility isn’t on the list. I have consciously tried to get pregnant for 7 months (ok, now 8) of my life and I’ve fallen pregnant 4 times. I only risked pregnancy three or four other times in my whole life (does sex with no ejaculation count as much of a risk? Yes… I guess…) with my myriad of other partners and luckily didn’t get caught then.

I’m having some hope for the next fertile window though. Technically, because of how things fall, my next fertile window hits at the end of December. We haven’t even completely missed the month yet.

Part of me hopes that we’ll have at least two or three months of trying this time. Trying-to-get-pregnant sex is basically my very favorite ever. I don’t think much in this life is as hot as trying to impregnate me. Biology is totally weird.

In movies there is always a “it’s ovulation day so we need to have sex” scene. For us it is: “well we’d like to get pregnant this month. How about if we have sex every 12-16 hours so we make sure there is no way to miss the window.”

But I’m bleeding now. Whereas we do have sex sometimes during my period, we aren’t squicked by blood or anything, I often take it as a sign that it’s ok for me to rest. Sex is work. It isn’t work I get paid to do (just like almost all the work in my life) but it is work nonetheless.

I often think of the hitch hiker I picked up in New Mexico and drove through Arizona. I asked her what work she did and she put her head down and said she didn’t have a job. I burst out laughing and said, “You may not get paid. But I’ll bet you work.”

The look she gave me was incredible. I remember that.

Yes. You do work. It doesn’t matter if you get paid or not. Dude, you said you just spent more than a month with your sister and her children? You worked. You worked and worked and worked.

Don’t devalue that work.

Why do we do this to ourselves? I do it to me.

Noah recently said (in context that made sense in the conversation but I’m not rehashing it all here) that things won’t be balanced for folks until women feel the same gnawing emptiness from lack of material success that men feel. The trouble is, I feel that already and it doesn’t god damn help my issues in dealing with men. I feel like a loser because I don’t have “a job”. I feel like a burden on society because I don’t get paid for doing anything. Sure, Noah likes to say that half of what he earns is mine. Legally a court system would say that half of what Noah has is mine. He filed paperwork to make sure even his pre-marriage assets would be split evenly.

I know, honey. The trouble isn’t with your desire or ability to provide. The problem is that existentially I feel like I take more than I give.

Because we measure these things in money. Because we are broken.

If we get anything like the settlement that our lawyer is asking for (I have the best damn lawyer. That woman is worth her weight in gold.) then I am going to immediately pay off our mortgage. It means that the HELOC will stay higher than I’m thrilled about, but the HELOC is a lower interest rate than our mortgage. I pay a penalty fee (only $500, so not a huge deal) if I pay it off before three years are up. With how I structure paying off debt I’m pretty certain I will calculate such that I’m paying off just a few drips and drabs in the last six months. I’m absolutely on track to be out of debt by 2020.

Oh the women I will pay when that happens. I’m not going to roll 100% of what I have paid for housing into supporting women, but I will probably send 50% or more of it. Some of it needs to go into long-term savings and investments for Noah’s long term life security. I owe that man a safe and comfortable old age. I need to make sure I can provide it. It’s kind of funny that I think about retirement as when I need to figure out how to make sure enough money appears. At some point Noah will be done being the primary wage earner and my ingenuity will be what covers things then. I’m working on it.

I’m god damn serious that life has been unfairly generous to me. I need to pay it forward. I need to help people. I have a lengthy and growing list of people I send money to. I look for opportunities to help in a lot of ways. I know that some of the ways I send money off into the world are judged as “inefficient” but not all of support in life has to be about maximizing efficiency. Human connection is complicated.

Do you know how many months of my childhood my mother had a whopping $200 for the whole month for feeding us, sheltering us, and providing for all other needs? I remember. I remember the crying. The fear. The constant awareness that we did not deserve to be safe or comfortable the way other people do.

I have reached a point where I can toss money at a bathroom in a way that kind of horrifies me. I’m spending more money on my bathroom than people all over the country spend on their whole house.

I’m growing more certain that even if we move… I can’t sell this house. Rent it, maybe. I need to be able to come back here when I am old.

I need to know that at the end of whatever hard work I have ahead of me… I can come back to Wonderland.

This house really is becoming my reward in life. See, look at what I can build with enough hard work, time, money, and effort. I did hate this house when I moved in. Just wait till you see my bathroom. It is a thing of beauty, joy, and love.

Even if I don’t much like the folks helping me build it. Whatever.

I’m allowed to not like people who will stand in my house and call me a puta. It’s in my personal contract in life. On page 39.

Don’t you wish you got to know what is on page 36. Whoo.

I haven’t been working on the book for my mom. I regret that. But I also think this book is going to be something I work on for ten years before I really finish it. I have a place where I’m sticking things I want to add to it. It’s going to be completely hand written. It’s going to take me a while.

I want to write a book that will show my mom how much I love her and how sorry I am that things have gone the way they have. I don’t think that our problems were all her fault. It really fucking sucks that things are how they are.

I can’t fix her pain in this life. I really can’t. But I want to let her know that I see her pain and it is important and I’m very sorry for it. That may be the best thing I can do for her in this life. I want her to know that my children do not see her as evil. They see her as a sad victim.

I just try to not talk about my sister. I say that there are very good reasons I will not acknowledge her if she is in a room and I tell my Eldest Child that if she wants to grow up to be friends with her siblings, then she needs to think very carefully about her behavior because it’s totally possible to fuck things up forever.

She feels very proud that I see her as the big sister I wanted to have. I deeply admire the way that she is giving, generous, and helpful. Youngest Child is kind of an ungrateful prat about a lot of it. They seriously don’t understand or appreciate what they have. I get it, you can’t imagine what you’ve never experienced… but it’s hard to watch sometimes. EC will be generous and kind and YC will complain bitterly about not getting ALL of something. I feel deep frustration about this dynamic sometimes and I don’t know how to interact with it in a more healthy way. I’ll keep researching. I’ll find a way. I just don’t know what it is yet.

Your sister is not going to laugh at you and hang up on you when you call in the middle of the night scared to death and needing a ride home. Baby, how can I teach you to value the fact that you have someone who loves you enough to give up things they want because you need something? It happens over and over in big ways and small. I watch it. Baby, how do I show you just how loved and supported you are?

Sometimes I think a semester of school would help YC appreciate their life a whole lot more.

Kid. You spend so much time complaining that how dare people want to wake you up an hour or more after we wake up. How would you cope with genuinely being expected to adapt to other people!?

YC is the least morning-person in the house. They tend to sleep until breakfast is on the table then complain that we woke them up too early. But they complain bitterly if we eat without them and let them sleep. There is no winning this game.

We don’t eat breakfast later because most of us wake up ravenously hungry and we get super bitchy if we don’t eat. Breakfast must not be delayed.

I mean, I can wait. But I get increasingly pushy about wanting to control every fucking thing in the universe and bossing shit I have no right to boss. It’s super fun for everyone. Let me tell you.

So even though I love you bigger than the sky, kiddo, I’m not going to delay eating until you feel like waking up. It won’t improve your day.

Someone I like a lot has a habit of posting things about fucked up relationships. I always read them and wince. Specifically recently was a link to this post about sick systems.

Are we too busy to think? I don’t know. We do a lot of very conscious planning and reflecting on how well we are doing on goals we set ourselves. We are too busy. That’s true. But the busyness is not imposed by other people. It’s self-imposed for both of us as we stand next to each other. I’m a seriously unhealthy example for Noah, but I don’t actually push him as hard as he pushes himself.

We are both tired as a lifestyle choice, it is true. Is that something we created for ourselves?

We definitely feel like our success is tied to one another. Holy shit yes. We both feel like we have a massively symbiotic relationship. Synergistic and everything. Is that actually a sick thing to enact?

Our sex life is our reward system. Yes, it is intermittent. My cunt gets worn out and needs breaks. I just can’t be more damn consistent, ok?

My life has absolutely been a series of crises for as long as I’ve been alive. The funny thing is, mostly they get smaller year by year. I have more ability to plan and prevent them. Things have improved so much that sometimes I’m shocked by how mellow my life is. That doesn’t stop there from being a steady stream of crises. They are just smaller and more manageable these days.

Things are better now. My life is at the best place it has basically ever been. I’m more patient. I have better control over my behavior. I’m happier. I have lots of constraints, sure. I’m exhausted, sure. But my life is in a really great place for me. Everything is relative.

My real rewards in this life are happening now. I get to be with my children and teach them. I get to travel. I am reaching a point of financial security almost no one in my generation will see. I’m here. This is my life. As I look around I wonder, are the systems in my life sick? Yes. But maybe they still produced something that doesn’t suck? Despite the complaints I can come up with (I’m talented like that) my life is pretty fucking fantastic?

Do Noah and I have problems sometimes? Yes. Do we fight? Yes. Has he done things that scared the shit out of me? Yes.

Are we monsters? Yes. Does that mean we are incapable of producing something that is positive for us?

Fuck if I know.

You know what I’m careful about? The most involvement my family has in my medication routine is to occasionally say at meals, “Have you taken your pills?” because sometimes I forget and then I end up taking huge hand fulls of pills to catch up on the damn vitamins and ugh erf no thanks. I’m not taking anything timing dependent. I just don’t enjoy taking very many fish oil pills at once.

But they remember to say it once a week or less and I just take my pills every day. I don’t make other people responsible for my medicating. That’s broken.

Chop up their time. Oh god that’s my life.

Noah and I have been talking more bluntly about the degree of enmeshment we want in our marriage. We have a lot of enmeshment. But where is the line where it is damaging? If you go talk to poor, rural, long-time married folks… lots of them are incredibly enmeshed. (I mention that demographic because it is where I personally have had most of my long-winded chats about marriage and what it means. I have less experience with other demographics who are long-term married.) When I moved into the house I live in, this city was a suburb. It was pretty quiet. It is exploding in population and growth and it feels more like a city and less like a suburb. I am finding myself longing for rural life more and more.

I’ve lived rurally for a lot of my life. I’m familiar with, “Get dressed up and go to town” because it takes a good half an hour to get to where people are so you might as well dress up for the experience. Living near folks means you need to get up and get dressed like you might have company every god damn day. Ugh.

I love my neighbors, don’t get me wrong. But pants?! That’s a lot to ask of a body.

The kids have begged to have a specific brand of chocolate for Christmas. Both Noah and I said we haven’t bought any. Then Noah said, “You’d better hope Santa brings some because otherwise you aren’t getting any.” Which means I get to go to Cost Plus now. Damnit.

It’ll be ok. I haven’t gone anything like over board this year. Oh crap. You know what I haven’t bought? Sporting equipment. I didn’t know where the fork to hide it in the house. Dagnabit. Ok. I’ll go shopping. It is 11 days away. That’s what YC wants from Santa. Sporting equipment. What the ever loving fuck?

HOW ARE YOU MY KID?!

Ahem. I mean I’ll support you in whatever interest you have, my love.

There will be sporting equipment under the tree. You asked Santa. Totally cool.

But but… sigh

I got a doll every year from Santa. Until I was 17. I don’t buy my kids dolls much at all. There are eight god damn dolls on the living room floor right now. Six came from grandma. I don’t need to buy them dolls much. (I bought one of the dolls. EC spent almost all her allowance buying YC a doll for their birthday and I got EC the matching one so they could do the games they want with those sister dolls.) And I got them each a curvy Barbie. The first Barbies I’ve ever bought them. Otherwise… the dolls don’t come from me.

Mostly I buy books. And games. We play a shocking number and variety of games. I was so shitty at playing games as a kid that this constantly surprises me. I’ve played more Monopoly with my kids than in the rest of my life I think, or very close. Soon I’ll pass the mark if I haven’t already. It’s fun. We all work on being supportive of one another winning. I really appreciate that this is a group of people who want the others to do well. So we are working on losing well too.

Yesterday Noah was on his computer doing work and the kids were doing academics and I was washing dishes. It felt really lovely. I love that we can all hang out together doing the separate work that we each need to do but we don’t have to be apart. It’s ok to work and be near each other.

I feel very lucky.

Noah leaves today and is going to be gone till Friday. He’s going to southern California to visit his actual job site for the holiday party. I was completely not up for the trip. We will miss him. It’s going to be interesting adjusting to how this job means we see more of him day-to-day and we lose him for more trips. The switch in balance is going to be kind of challenging.

Youngest Child is campaigning that once we are done with the remodel we should stay home for a month other than grocery shopping and martial arts classes. Those exceptions should be the only time we get dressed for weeks. I’ve gotta say, it sounds very pleasant right now.

My stomach hurts. Pretty much every joint hurts. Whine. Fuss.

Ok, I’ve been awake for three hours. I think I can fall asleep again. Two more hours would be lovely.

Alright. So I’m feeling really bad about myself. I feel like I’m ruining Noah’s life. I feel like I am a bad person who deserves suffering.

Why?

Because I know that Noah has worked and worked and worked to support me and I feel like there isn’t an amount of work I could do to repay what he has given me. Noah has given me safety, security, love, attention, and adoration. Things I didn’t really ever have before him.

I devalue almost everything I give.

Last night Noah and I had a date and a very positive conversation. It occurred to me that part of the problem with either of us dating outside the marriage is that both of us came into this marriage with extreme adoration deficits. Essentially: we both grew up being despised by everyone around us. It was perpetrated in different ways and there were vastly different surrounding circumstances… but the basic fact remains that we both arrived in adulthood feeling like we are unlovable.

Both of us drink in positive attention from one another like it is necessary for life. Seeing that elixir of life be given to someone else feels like the most extreme betrayal possible. You are supposed to be the one person who adores me and who doesn’t take it away to give to other people.

Shit.

Want to know something funny? My friends and my therapist are all starting to chant in unison, “Why in the hell do y’all consider dating?! Be swingers. Swinging is fine. Y’all like sex and don’t feel threatened by it. STOP DATING.”

Which is kind of hilarious to me. Ahem.

I feel like such advice would not have been on offer 20 years ago. I feel like I am uniquely blessed in having friends who see intimacy and sex as separate. I feel like I have managed to find a support network that probably sees us as basically healthy but we need to respect one another’s boundaries in this way.

Well, I don’t know if folks see me as basically healthy but an awful lot of people are rooting for my marriage.

Thank you. I am leaning heavily on your hope and your belief. I am depending on you all to believe for me when I can’t. Because if you carry the load for me while I can’t then maybe when I am able to pick it up again by myself it won’t be broken.

I find my attitude that I am alone in this world to be idiotic and hypocritical in the extreme. If I am more charitable I would say, “This is a part of my brain that is not able to recognize current reality through the damage that was done early in my life.” I have ridiculously loyal and wonderful friends. They touch base with me in a myriad of ways. The troublesome part is that they live so spread out that I don’t see them very often and that fucks with my sense of reality. I know that they are out there in the world loving me and rooting for me. But I don’t see them very often and that is hurting me. I miss Pam. Having her visit once a week for so long was a serious balm to my soul. I felt bad the whole time about the emotional variation she witnessed because she was around so often as a safe-to-vent-at-adult. But it was incredibly healing.

It is occurring to me that I need to schedule a night a week where I interact with friends. I’ve spent a lot of years just kinda hanging out in my house not interacting with people outside of the house that much. It hurts me. It hurts that it feels like I exist to meet the needs of Noah and my kids and I’m supposed to wait around and be nothing in and of myself in between when they have needs. I cannot keep this up. It is hurting me in ways that are going to cause big problems forever.

Have I mentioned that a few wonderful friends invited themselves over in December? I am so grateful I feel like a puddle of goo. Thank you for loving me enough to reach out and say, “Hey I’m free on this range of days. What works for you?” That was perfect and loving and kind.

Thank you.

What is the difference between intimacy and sex? I need intimacy with people other than just my family. I need it. It’s not optional for me. I feel like part of the reason I went for sex this year was because I need intimacy and I don’t have a lot of time in which to get it so I try to get a maximum size dump as quickly as possible. But I hurt Noah a lot in this process.

I’m not the only one in this relationship who feels like I should die if the other dates.

(This post has been open for a few days and I’m not going to keep going with it. So you get kind of a weird ending here.)

Do you know what I like about my marriage? We are the sort of people who want to schedule a 12 hour day of emotional processing and then we just do it. Hammer away at topic after topic after topic.

I haven’t been posting that much. Part of that is I feel like kind a fuckwad for how many ups and downs there have been. I understand that most relationships have ups and downs and all, but most people don’t publish them on the internet. I get to feeling self conscious and stupid.

I feel kinda bad about being a train wreck sometimes.

Things are improving a lot. I think. I don’t get to speak for Noah. We are doing a lot of bonding sorta stuff. We are talking about the nitty gritty of our insecurities. “I’m sorry I flip out when you date.” “Yeah but I do it too…”

It’s complicated.

What do we want from one another or from other people in our lives? Shit if we had an easy answer to that we wouldn’t need to spend so god damn much time talking.

Seriously, we had to get the kids out of the house so that we could talk and talk and talk without interruption. It is glorious having a Bonus Family in our lives. I gotta say. Support is fucking awesome.

Today we took turns wrecking our bodies and taking care of each other. Because it facilitates bonding in some weird ass way. When you are helpless, sick, and incapable of caring for yourself it just feels different having someone take care of you. We take care of one another all the damn time. We have an incredibly codependent relationship and we like it that way. But it’s different. If you can get up and do it for yourself… it’s a lot easier to take it for granted when someone does it for you. But if you are stuck sitting in one place as you kinda flail and you are incapable of doing for yourself…

You take care of me. I love you.

It’s complicated, yo.

We talked about M/s stuff and what it means to me. We really didn’t get that into what it means to Noah. Not really. I think that needs to move up the agenda in importance. Luckily we have another trash our bodies and talk all day event coming up soon.

These events have to go away soon. This is our last shot for years cause I don’t act like this while pregnant or nursing. I want to say and/or nursing because I know how it goes for me. Oh boy.

Anyway. We are trying to get a whole bunch of processing in before my body only kind of belongs to me. We tried doing a bunch of “set the rules and coast” ten years ago. It was mixed. I wonder how it will work this time. I made deals I could not keep. I was stupid. I was… uhm, I’ll call it optimistic to be generous with myself.

I thought I could take one for the team. Whenever it was needed. Forever. Guess what? I really fucking can’t.

But what does that mean?

Noah asked me what M/s means to me. I said it is kind of like a highly bred puppy. If the right person buys the puppy and trains them and enters them in contests… that puppy could be a shining star. That puppy could enrich the life of its owner both literally and metaphorically.

But if the puppy instead ends up in a shelter and is adopted as a random mutt… guess what? That puppy probably won’t hit its potential. I’m not saying it will be completely worthless and have nothing to offer in terms of companionship… but the animal probably won’t be as healthy. The animal will not be as comfortable or as cared for.

M/s, to me, is a way of taking responsibility for one another. It is a way of saying, “As the slave it is my job to serve you and make your life better and make us as a unit better than we can be alone. It is your job as the Master to look at me and sometimes know better than I know myself what I need to be ok and successful.”

It’s not really a fair deal, is it?

There is no fucking fair.

We are doing a lot of specifically talking about the work we do for one another. It’s a fucking long list. I used to be an asshole and say that Noah was lazy… uhm, err I haven’t thought it in years and I’ve been a terrible influence on him. At this point he probably works far past the point of healthfulness.

Dude, he showed me the scheduling program he uses to track how to be an adoring husband and how to be a devoted father (in addition to a wide variety of more selfish/not me related topics) and… I swear I got an organizational hard on. Holy shit. I’m a job.

He has taken notes for years on how to be a better partner for me. He writes down what brands and styles of things I like. He tracks what kinds of prep to do before dates (take a shower, trim beard, research activities… he lists it all).

I god damn know I’m unworthy. Holy fucking shit.

I feel kind of guilty for not having taken more notes. heh (I keep it in my head better.)

Noah knows that one of the straws that broke the camels back when I left my Owner was that after four god damn years of eating together at McDonald’s together the bastard had no idea what sauce I ate on my nuggets week after week after week. That… that showed me how little I existed in front of my Owner.

Noah has heard all of my stories and he makes damn sure I don’t have to complain about the same problem repeatedly.

Except for the things where I do. Because life is like that. Damnit.

But there are some things that are easy to fix. He can see the simple stuff and make sure he doesn’t fuck up there. Holy tomato that’s a lot of effort.

We were talking about how hard it is when the other of us falls in love. He kinda asked why I fell so hard for Deity. Oh, that’s easy. Deity managed to jump up and down on one of my big buttons in life. He talks to me and about me like he is proud of knowing me.

I’ve fucked a lot of people. Do you know how many of them announce in public that they are connected to me and they are proud of that and they think I’m just so god damn awesome. If I stretch I could definitely get off a second hand of partners. Which means I’m probably under a 10% rate.

The vast majority of people who fuck me act kind of embarrassed about it later. They don’t introduce me to their families. They don’t bring me around their friends. They don’t talk about me in public.

Even most of my friends don’t introduce me to their families. I feel like Sarah, Jenny, and Pam stand out in that arena. They are the friends who have absorbed me seriously into their families. Blacksheep has done this to a slightly less extreme degree but I get the impression that if she liked her parents more I would have been introduced. I certainly know her moms-in-law.

It’s complicated.

I feel shitty about myself a lot of the time. I steal pride from the people who love me and pretend I felt it all along. Even though I didn’t. So having people be all, “Dude, you are AWESOME” is a completely self absorbed reason for loving them. They see me as lovable and that makes me love them.

I’m not sure if it is pathetic or just kinda normal.

I don’t want to make it sound like no one else has introduced me to their families. That’s hyperbole. It’s… there is a difference between, “Here is my buddy. You’ll probably never see them again” and “This is MY Krissy. You will be nice to her. She’s mine. I’m keeping her.”

I get that sometimes. I am that fucking lucky sometimes.

Pam treats me that way. Sarah treats me like that. I’ve known Jenny’s family so long that… if I’m around for family events I do feel invited even if I’m kinda sorta inviting myself. The trouble is physical proximity not emotional distance.

Noah didn’t have a great relationship with his family before me but when his family acted like I was to be shunned he ditched them and kept me. It’s a big deal.

As we look at having more children and we talk about why we want it so much and why our kids blow our minds… Our children don’t have that hollow, brittle, breakable feeling that people like us have. Noah and I both act like we are empty inside and we desperately need to chase love in order to be accepted. We manifest this drive differently but it is a very similar motivation.

Our kids don’t have that. Our kids glow with feeling loved and accepted.

I’ve been trying hard to reach out to adults who might be able to help me understand Youngest Child’s journey better. I need to write a whole separate post about this process, but in very short I’ll say: I’m hearing from a lot of different people that the fact that I want to help and I want to accept my kid however they feel they are… that’s going to make the difference.

I really and truly hope they are right. I’m trying so fucking hard to provide support. I want my kid to feel like whatever they needed, I found a god damn way to provide. I mean… I’m going to not do everything right. They will hurt and fail sometimes.

I recently read a thing. I feel bad about plagiarizing but I seriously can’t remember where I read it. It talked about how someone was reading The Little House on the Prairie and Laura Ingalls wasn’t traumatized by her life it was Just Something That Happened. It made me think about a thing.

People aren’t traumatized by bad things happening to them. It is bad things happening when they really should’t that traumatizes people.

That is complicated. There is a difference between everyone everyone starving because there isn’t food that is different from sexual assault. My whole life will be colored by that sexual assault shit. But why? When will it stop mattering? When it stops impacting how I interact with other people and it really still does.

I was talking to Noah about religion. I won’t tell his story because that is his to tell, but I keep coming back to how humanity is my religion. Not individuals. People. As a whole. I work and I try and I grow because I want to be better for people as a whole. I want to do better for you. I want to help all of us. From some person I’ve never met in Maine (I recently met a lovely Mainer for the first time) to people in Africa and Australia. It doesn’t matter to me that your life isn’t about me. I want to be better for you when I meet you someday because maybe I will. I do like to travel.

Do you know what I really suck at? Understanding that everyone has individual temperature comfort ranges. But anyway.

I should stop typing but I’ve missed you, internet. Thank you for being here. Thank you for giving me a place to feel like I get to exist even as fucktastically weird as I am.

We are made entirely of flaws stitched together with bad intentions. (And I didn’t make that phrase up either.) I meant good intentions. Now there is a slip…

I have been thinking about this constantly for months. What is it I got out of fucking people other than Noah? How does that help me have an individual self?

For one thing, it is about making a choice with my body about my body that isn’t about Noah.

I haven’t made many choices in the last ten years that didn’t have Noah as a strong influencing factor if my choices didn’t flat revolve around him. I moved into his house. I manage his money as respectfully as I can to ensure that he has a safe and comfortable old age. I do a lot of cleaning and organizing because it makes the house easier to live in and he agrees that I’m right. My work does improve his life.

Sometimes it is hard to feel like our children aren’t his children. Which is stupid and bullshit. I wanted these kids. I want them so much my heart aches. But I still feel like a nanny to his kids a lot of the time. It doesn’t help that just recently I’m feeling shitty about the fact that I’m the awful parent who enforces rules and academics and he is fun. I’m not very fun.

I interact with a lot of people. Is it for me? That’s such a weird question.

I spend a lot of time listening to people. I love it. I seek it out. I’m a great listener. I often wonder if people see me when I’m listening to them or am I taking the place of a useful stuffed animal? Sometimes I wonder who there is to see if someone looks at me.

I’m told I am “so strong” because I have “overcome” so much. I don’t feel strong and I don’t feel like I have overcome. Yes, I’m not poor anymore. Yes, I did get an education. So?

What do any of these things mean? I know people who went through college and had absolutely no individuation in any way. They participate in their parents sorority/fraternity and hang out with the children of people their parents knew. They marry the kind of person they are supposed to and occupy the position in society that was more or less carved for them at birth.

I really do know a lot of kinds of people.

I know people who live in extreme generational poverty and who will probably never escape that cycle even though they have “overcome” great hurdles in terms of mental health problems or domestic violence.

What are we overcoming? What does that mean?

I’m not in a political fight. There is no competition in my life. What have I overcome? My family of origin? My own inner desire to ensure that everything in my life turns to shit as proof that it was all meant to be to start with?

Not everything I touch turns to shit. There are things I do well. I am a good teacher. I was a good teacher to other peoples’ children and I think I am a good teacher to my children.

What does it mean to be a teacher? For me, part of being a teacher has always been the ability to set aside my point of view and figure out why someone isn’t understanding something then back fill the schema necessary to help them understand.

It’s god damn exhausting.

Am I an individual when I do that? I feel like I give up bits of my personality over and over in this process. I am not an individual. I am a sliver of a thing greater than myself and I need to tap into that connection we all share in order to help you.

Is that individuation or melding?

I am scared to fucking death that when people think/say/hear “Krissy Gibbs” they will think, “Oh–Noah’s wife” or “______’s mom”.

I feel selfish and terrible because I want to be something other than an accessory to their lives. I don’t want to be the brood mare. I really don’t.

Which is kinda stupid. There are people all over the damn country who know me and who barely know Noah and who have only a nodding relationship with my children. Why isn’t that enough? Why do I feel so damn small?

Because for a very large chunk of the last 10 years my life has been inside my house cleaning. Woo.

Sometimes one of my female friends will indicate that the level of cleanliness in my house causes them to feel bad. Want to know something funny? When I go to their houses and I see the chaos I feel like, “Ah. Signs of someone with something better to do than clean. I feel envy.”

The grass is always greener.

I hate myself for my feelings. I feel deeply inferior to the women in my life who have jobs and careers and who help people and who accomplish things other than cleaning the kitchen.

But I don’t want to stop home schooling my kids. I really don’t. I would not give this up for a $250k/year job. I really wouldn’t.

So what the fuck. I created this bind and now I bitch and bitch and bitch about it.

Having babies is not a thing to do with a life. A life is bigger than that.

I miss teaching. I miss that feeling of connection. I god damn loved having a benevolent dictatorship where people came to learn in an environment where I set the rules. Ok, my house is that exact same dynamic only bigger. My students had a very strong sense of me as a person.

Sometimes I wonder if my students had a better sense of me than my children because my students had more perspective. My children barely view me as a human being separate from them. My children barely perceive me as getting to go pee without them.

Fuck. I’m about to lose the ability to use the toilet alone again for years. Sob.

I feel so incredibly torn. I want another baby. I really do. I want to meet this child. I love my kids so much I feel pain when I think of them and I definitely want to sign up for more of this. But I have such mixed feelings. Noah calls the way we handle babyhood the “high intensity version of parenting” and I call it “idiocy combined with little support network”.

I kind of give up the idea that I get to have needs in the first year of life. I exist as a life support unit. It really sorta sucks. But I pray it pays off in the long run. To be fair, my two existing children glow with attachment and health and love. Could I have done that with less effort? I’ll never know.

I am curious how it will go with two older children in the house who desperately want to bond with a baby. They won’t be adult support (I wouldn’t know what that was like anyway–not in an ongoing way) but they will be there to help play with a baby while I do the dishes. It’ll be different.

I’m still grateful that Sarah, Jenny, Andrew, and Paula babysat when Eldest Child was under a year old. Y’all are wonderful, amazing people to sit through that damn much crying. Holy shit that kid was hard. I did have some support. I can remember all the dates I got to have that first year. There weren’t many.

It isn’t that I have no support. I have some support. It is that it is sporadic and I can’t depend on it in an ongoing way. Not Sarah, not Jenny, not Paula nor Andrew will be around for Next Kid.

I’m not mad. I’m reflecting upon reality.

Why is it not worth it to me to let Noah date so that I can date if that is the easiest/best way for me to feel individuated at this stage?

Because I am honestly afraid I will not see my children become adults if I do. I really don’t like me very much. I’d kind of appreciate it if Noah replaced me so I could go. I can’t set up that possibility. It isn’t fair to anyone involved.

But that doesn’t mean I get to date and Noah doesn’t. That ain’t happening for a whole bunch of reasons.

Instead I’m flipping out in my house. I’m brittle and difficult and snippy. I’m being awful.

I need to find something that I can do by myself outside of my house that has no connection to my family or sex.

You know… maybe I could tutor at the library. It’s a small commitment. It’s local. It’s not a BIG THING. It’s not something Noah would find threatening. It would be small scale teaching. It would be contact with people outside my family.

I’ve been flailing for a while. I need to find an option to consider that is very different from what I’ve thought about so far. I’m not sure I can handle a hobby. They tend to consume my life. But I could find a way to have a 2-4 hour/week commitment to a volunteer thing. Noah would absolutely support that. He would shove my ass out the door with a big smile saying, “Have fun!”

It wouldn’t be threatening at all.

I think this is one of the more positive options I’ve come up with in a while. Maybe I should look into that. Do I have spare time? No. I really don’t. But 2 hours/week? That I could do. That wouldn’t eat me alive. It would be a commitment to something outside my family. I really fucking need that right now.

I’ve always been shit at taking criticism. That’s not new. But I feel like an old habit is popping its head up and making trouble lately. I can sometimes take criticism well. Sometimes I just… I feel like every specific “You could do x better” is the same as “You are a piece of shit who should die.”

This is kinda shitty for the people in my life.

Noah is still justifiably upset about a lot of what I did during nonmonogamy. I’m not upset that he is upset. He’s allowed to have feelings. What I’m not handling is long lists of “And then you did this and then you did this and then you did this” because I want to turn around and deflect blame. MAYBE I DID THAT BECAUSE I WAS SO FUCKING SICK OF YOU FUCKING ME WHILE I CLENCHED MY GOD DAMN FISTS AND GRITTED MY TEETH. IF YOU ARE SO PISSED OFF AT WHAT I DID MAYBE LOOK AT WHAT YOU DID TO ME FIRST.

It’s like my shrink immediately jumping to assuming Noah has ADHD (because I was diagnosed and we suspect he has it) and he needs to have his behavior excused for it but I still need to work on my behavior because my behavior isn’t good enough.

I’m feeling…

I feel like I’m standing next to the fucking golden boy who can do no wrong and I’m the evil bitch who is ruining his life by not being passive and accepting and giving enough.

I’m feeling really angry.

If I respond badly to being hurt I am bad.

I’m sorry I am not a fucking saint. Noah is the one campaigning for sainthood, not me. Yes yes, he’s perfect. He tries so much harder than other men so he can’t be criticized whereas I’m just an ungrateful bitch who is not trying hard enough to deserve him.

I’m feeling…

like shit.

I don’t feel good enough for anything and it makes me feel really mean.

I feel overwhelmed with waves of sadness.

I asked the construction workers how much longer this would take yesterday. I was told 5-6 more weeks. I wrote 7 on the calendar. They will be here till January. I’m living in hell till after Christmas. Weee.

Well, on the upside I only have ~20 hours of tile layout left and 3 weeks in which to do it. But a lot of the other settling can’t happen yet. I’m going bananas. We are on week 9. Of a 6-8 week project. And we have 5-7 weeks to go.

I want to put my head through a window.

Be cheerful! Be chipper! Wait on everyone! Do it with a smile! Come up with intellectual exercises to stimulate and develop your children constantly without rest! Do manual labor all day then throw your legs up in the air with a smile! Don’t be ungrateful!

Fuck gratitude.

I am very seriously struggling with the fact that I’m not allowed to self harm to force myself back into the small box I’m supposed to be living in. I’m supposed to do it with just force of will.

I’m running low on willpower.

I should get everything done without being obnoxious about scheduling and neurotic about following through on things.

Oh yeah. That’ll be effective.

Geez Krissy. How dare you show your strain and inconvenience people. How rude.

I’m having big feelings.

I’m hiding from my neighbors because quite a few are Trump supporters and I just can’t talk to them right this minute or I will scream at the top of my lungs that I hope they die slowly in a lot of pain like they want to cause to minority groups. Not really useful. I’ll get back to useful dialogue. Right this second I have no persuasion or tact or diplomacy in me.

Fuck you and your bigoted actions that have damned millions of people. Fuck you with a fucking chain saw.

I have no patience for fools.

I’m not good at asking for what I need. I would go so far as to say I am a complete asshole. I bottle things up until I explode and then I’m mean.

Not good at asking for my needs. Not at all.

This is complicated. The reasons I am this way are many and beside the point. I can stand up for some needs in some ways. I’m way better at advocating for other people than I am for myself. But I can stand up for myself in some ways. In some specific ways it is harder than other areas of my life.

I am bad at telling someone I am deeply emotionally involved with about my sexual needs. Especially if I perceive my needs as being different from theirs and I am not supposed to make things difficult.

I’m really compulsive about responsibility for sexual gratification. Having a father who tells you over and over again that it is your responsibility to get people off makes that hard. I know that a great many folks have gotten the message in some way in some spaces but it’s different when it is your father and you are a toddler/young child.

Imprinting, yo.

I have tried very hard over the years to live up to my end of the bargain. I have tried to be always-available-at-your-pleasure-cum-dumpster. I was told by my mother that when you get married you agree to whore for that person forever, so pick wisely.

I have spent a lot of my marriage feeling like I married someone who wants sex every day and that means I get to do that. Because as my shrink says, Marriage is about meeting your partner’s sexual needs.

I’m hurting myself really badly in service of this belief.

I mean, I think I have slowed the damage. I think things are improving. Our sex life is getting less frequent and a lot better when it happens.

But no, I’m not good at asserting boundaries until I am attacking you because how the fuck dare you do that to me.

No it isn’t fair.

Do you know how hard it has been for me to learn the academic skills and organization stuff I do? All of a sudden I’m getting validation that yeah it is shittier for my brain to do these things and it feels like it comes way too late to do any good. I feel like I missed a lot of windows on being able to be functional or more adult than I am because I couldn’t fucking settle down and just do the thing.

I am as defensive and nasty as I am because my entire sense of self is built out of match sticks and playing cards. If you breathe on it too hard it might fall down. Then I have to build it again painstakingly. It is fucking annoying to do at this point.

I think that in life you pick your battles. You can’t have everything you want. You can’t win every fight. So be careful what you argue about.

I have not wanted to argue with Noah about the sex stuff harder than I have for a lot of very complicated reasons. And I hit a wall. A wall where I needed to see what is me and what is us.

I had a lot of time to think while he was in Cincinnati because I apparently just don’t need sleep if he isn’t here. I also didn’t eat much. It was swell. Anyway, I spent a lot of time thinking.

I have always assumed/acted like Noah not having much natural empathy means he doesn’t have the same feelings I have. Which has apparently been causing some problems and serious misunderstandings. Whoops.

It did take the second time of crying to feel like Holy shit this is really real and isn’t going to go away as a source of pain. Maybe that’s because I’m a self absorbed piece of shit. Noah sat here in this house and waited for me to go have an adventure on the road trip and then I came home and treated him like shit.

This has not been one of my best years.

I don’t understand why Noah thinks that being married to me is much better than not being married to me but as long as he’s staying, I am.

But we do need to find a way to build more separation into our relationship. We are merged to a point where it is causing problems. I don’t really have a me left and I need one.

Yeah yeah I went on the roadtrip… I worked in my mom role 24 hours a day 7 days a god damn week. It was me-not-me. There wasn’t room for just me. I had a handful of adult conversations that were not on the internet but not that many in 5.5 months.

I like my kids. I’m grateful I get to be with them as much as I do. Sometimes I feel like I am going to lose my god damn mind because I am with them too much.

More than one thing can be true.

Noah is making fun of me because he doesn’t think I will ever slow down my rate of working. Is the work enough to feel like “me”? Not really. What would be enough? I don’t know.

I tried going back to one of the most successful ways of solving problems in the past. It failed really big time this time. I really wasn’t trying to be more malicious than that. I was being selfish, I was being short sighted, I was callous. I was not consciously malicious. I wasn’t trying to get even. I was trying to find a different way of coping with a problem that is frankly bigger than me.

What is abuse and when should you flee from it and never look back?

Who gets to decide?

My mama had to run because her husband beat and raped her children. That seems pretty clear cut. Noah’s parents don’t split up despite periodic stretches of interpersonal violence directed at one another.

Who gets to decide what is abuse? Culturally these things vary.

Recently someone was trying to describe me unfavorably and they said that I give people money because I feel guilty.

That’s pretty damn accurate. I feel guilty in an existential sense. I have survivors guilt like a motherfucker. I was the beneficiary of a lot of help I didn’t deserve more than other people and they don’t get the help. I don’t know how to pay it back other than to pay it forward. There isn’t a rational system of “I help you because you deserve____” It isn’t that methodical. It is about giving what I can even knowing it is never enough. It is better than nothing. It isn’t enough. It really isn’t. I don’t think I’m solving a problem. I’m not a hero.

I’m just trying to not be a complete piece of shit given the options available to me in life.

I have put my money where my mouth is when it comes to supporting diverse businesses. I support communities I am not part of. I don’t think all help has to be for me or people like me. There are a lot of underserved populations out there.

It’s not all about race. There are other demographic factors involved. This isn’t that post.

But this money stuff is part of the sex stuff with Noah. I have incredibly mixed feelings about the fact that I am entirely dependent. Noah tells me frequently that I am entitled to half of his salary. He says I have earned half his salary.

Bleh.

I mean yes, I’ll take it. But it almost feels like blood money. Noah loves his job. I don’t want to denigrate that. But it’s a system I have resoundingly rejected being part of, only it is making me rich. I am complicit.

Noah is going to work in the industry he’s going to work in. It’s not about a particular company. I don’t want him to quit. He loves his work. It feeds a part of his soul and that’s super important. But it is super super super not my culture. Only I sorta married in. I have feelings about that.

What have I done with my life? I married a tech boy and had babies. Oooh. How original.

Ok so there are some fun details that I left out in that sentence. But I need to have more of an identity than wife and mother and I’m really not feeling it and I don’t know how to fucking feel it.

Slut has been comfortable for most of my life. That was a separate me. But it comes at too high a price.

The threat of him fucking people is good for our sex life. The reality of him fucking people often tanks our sex life and I go on a bender of suicidal ideation. If I could press a button and make this cycle go away I would.

If I could just be ok with him falling in love so fast and wanting to be there for someone else and…

I’m a bitter asshole about the fact that I’m with the kids more and getting the kids alone for a bunch of extra time so he can go be lovey dovey just fucking rains on my parade. Even if it is in trade for me getting time off to do the same thing. It isn’t the same kind of balance. He doesn’t spend as much time with his fucking kids. I mean, ok he spends a lot more now that he works in the house but still….

It’s different, yo.

When he says he wants to go see friends, that’s fine. He gets a kind of support from that interaction that he really can’t get from me.

I swear to fucking god I don’t feel suicidal because I want to manipulate him into doing what I want. I’m inconvenienced by this. It sucks. I am at a point where I am doing better than I have ever historically done and I still don’t like me an awful lot. I perceive him finding romantic happiness with someone else as a relief. Maybe I can be done here. He found someone better.

Pretty much anyone would be better.

Yeah yeah I don’t think that in reality it would be so simple. I’m not replaceable. It’s complicated. Blah. Blah. Blah.

Impulse problems. I’m trying to cope.

I have spent most of my life dealing with my self hatred by hurting myself in a myriad of ways that are basically completely off the table right now. If you eliminate all the small reactions then you get build ups and big reactions and those cause fucking problems.

It isn’t that Noah is hard to talk to. This is me. This is about my internalized inhibitions and prohibitions and safety and brokenness. But I think there is stuff he has had trouble communicating about too.

I’m being an asshole about “But we both suck” lately. I’m cool with taking responsibility as long as it is crystal fucking clear that I am not the only asshole in this relationship. I’m not sure it is a positive place to be.

I’m jumping up and down demanding credit for the parts I did do right. I canceled dates. I stopped doing things. I stopped seeing people. It was a collapse which is mixed… it isn’t sustainable either. But I stopped without being told to.

I didn’t make him veto people. I didn’t make him demand that I stop dating.

I just… stopped with the understanding that I’m not going to be monogamous and we’ll figure out what that means exactly later.

Noah wants to be the center of my world and he is. But what does that mean. How consuming does that need to be?

Too much to think about. But at least I started bleeding and I feel slightly less depressed.

Noah got the book Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel. I’m almost half done with it and I swear this woman knows my life. Yes. A lot of what I did earlier this year is explained in the book.

I’ve spent my whole life being textbook, why stop now?

You just have to find the right textbook. So I’m weird, I’m a statistical outlier… in a completely predictable set of ways. Humans are funny.

I desperately want to study other people who grew up in incestuous households and find out what else we large scale have in common. Anyway.

I have spent most of my marriage parenting. I have spent most of my marriage in my house relating to the people who live here and not many other people. If you look by time spent… I seriously don’t have that tight of relationships with anyone else. Attachment. Attachment. Attachment.

But who am I? Where did I go? Where is the space for me to have separation? Does it exist? In some ways this is like a teenage rebellion and in some ways it really isn’t.

I feel bad coming back to this over and over, but Noah has a career. He has a career where the best in the world in his field invite him to join them at lunch because they understand he is the up and coming in the field and they want to share his knowledge. Sure, he feels insecure about how much he “deserves” to be at the table… but he also has the job that was hotly contested and his heroes are glad he got hired.

Uh. Yeah. I’m a great mom.

Wooo.

You know what kinda sucks? I know a lot of great moms. They manage to do it and still have jobs and friends and hobbies and…

I spend a lot of time shutting everything else down to focus on parenting so that I don’t blow up inappropriately at my children. I go months without touching dirt in my back yard because I can’t even find time to garden because I need to keep my workload low or I will freak out at my kids and that isn’t fair.

What does “being disabled” mean?

What does individuation mean?

I have my friends. That’s kinda what I have. And it’s very important that I not depend on any of them too much so I need to have a really large number of them so that I can have a part time job in managing my connections to people because…

Otherwise there isn’t a me that is separate at all.

This is hurting me.

I mean yes, I write. I write a lot. Furtively. Usually before everyone has woken up or in stolen moments like these.

I feel shamefully small and unimportant and useless.

And I’m going to have more babies to compound my sense of being trapped and useless and limited with nothing to offer.

I have nothing to give beyond what I give to my children. I feel really bad about that.

I sideline sex with Noah too. There isn’t enough me in my life for me to desire sex for myself. Which means I have sex “for him” “for my marriage” a lot of the time and I feel sad and withdrawn and frustrated.

I used to have sex because I wanted to get off.

For a long time now it hasn’t been like that. Ok, things improved this year. This year has been great.

I’m scared about the previous 2-5 years and what is going to happen again.

We spend so much time quantifying our sex that we don’t pay a lot of attention to the quality of our sex.

And it is hurting me very much. I’ve done it. I’ve been complicit. In many ways I’ve helped drive it. I’m not denying that.

I have always been partial to self harm.

Hunh. I think I just figured out part of a dynamic we deal with. When I feel overwhelmed with work… I’m not great at recognizing that it is my project and I have to deal with it. I get kind of pissy and I push other people to work more. It’s not a great/healthy approach to life. I don’t care what you’re a workaholic about… just work. But the thing is, if I am the only one working, meaning not resting, people want me to take breaks to entertain them because they’re bored. Noah expects me to still have the same energy for sex even when my body hurts and I’m exhausted.

So yeah. I push them to work until they understand how I feel so they don’t fucking have the expectation of me that I feel as rested as them.

I don’t think I push the kids as hard as I push Noah. But that is something I’m going to have to watch because I get around my impulse to do so by reminding myself “Their work is play”. How will I behave when I perceive their work differently?

When I finish the remodel… I’m going to be directing Eldest Child’s screen time for the first time ever. She will be specifically encouraged to start working on a set of concrete skills and I’ll be supervising it like academics. She has stuff she wants to be able to do. The way you do that is to build the habits.

Guess what I know how to do like a motherfucker? Build habits. I’m not sure how I developed such a rigid, workable, way to acquire skills so quickly. In retrospect probably moving schools so much.

I went to 25 schools before I dropped out of high school at 16. Later I went to 7 colleges and universities.

I can adapt to environments and expectations and new rules. Sure.

That kind of flexibility is part of why I like traveling with my kids so much. I’m there with them for a much more structured, supported version of being dropped in a variety of environments.

Since we aren’t going to be going around the world doing work on farms with a tiny baby or a toddler… I just… can’t… I wonder what we will do with that allotment of energy and mental planning around. Hm. There was a lot I wanted to learn. A lot I wanted to do with my body. I won’t be able to a) manage my mood & b) manage my pain levels & c) learn & d)effectively transcribe for my older children & e) care for a baby. Nope. That’s… too much. I can’t.

Home schooling my kids is my primary job. Not learning a skill I want to have. Even if that feels frustrating.

I “say” that we take it year by year and I don’t know how long we’ll home school. As long as the kids want. I’m setting up for the long haul.

I did an awful lot of training so I could shepherd my children through this process. As I go through the experience and I bring dusty plans out of a box because, “Hey I’ve already worked through part of my plan for this situation. No trouble” and I can handle things that would be too hard to deal with one after another after another if I didn’t know what I was doing.

I’m not perfect. Not by a long stretch. But I have Plan A and Plan B and Plan C and Plan D… because I know I suck. I know I will fail. That’s why I make so many fallbacks. And when I run out of plans I just improvise at full speed. Sometimes I’m shocked/thrilled by what comes out of my mouth. I have better impulses at a lot of this than I expected.

Expectations. That’s where we get into trouble. We the collective we, not me and my intestinal parasites. My family builds around getting a certain portion of support from me. When I don’t feel like I have it to give, because I feel under too much strain for whatever reason…

I don’t know how we figure out that fallback. That’s something I don’t have a plan for and we are fucking it up. I feel pressured all the time to be a god damn wind up toy for their pleasure. And we are together 24/7. I need to have less to do. I’m not sure how I feel about being so depended upon to be amusement and stimulation of all types.

I feel…. pissy. I was at the point where my kids were getting old enough to have some space from me. I was individuating and it was rocky and it sure as fuck wasn’t Noah’s favorite…

Baby.

I feel like I reached the end of a tether while wearing a choke chain.

I want the baby. I want the child. I want the person. I’m god damn pissy about the timing. I’m frustrated there was no warning so that I could have mental plans around this.

I spent so much energy mourning a future I wanted and couldn’t have and now it is kind of landing in my lap. I feel like an ungrateful piece of shit. But it’s complicated.

What will it be like going through those early triggering stages again with a different child? Will I reprocess them again? Oh goodness. I hope not. All I know is they will be something different. I like something different.

It is funny to me how much I’m not saying right now. So many specifics I’m not writing down. I’m already the problem. How deep do I want to dig myself?

Tile is coming along. Shifting stuff to more permanent homes is happening. I’m creating space in sections that are likely to expand. I haven’t done any painting lately because at this point I need to reclean the walls in the kitchen before I paint again and… oh man. It’s just a whole process and I’m tired. I have to get tile done. That’s soon. That’s other people work. I’ve done one whole wall of the wet room. I’ve done more than half of the wall next to it and the shower wrap around wall. I have done part of the facing wall.

I need to do: the small partial wall between the toilet and the shower. The walls around the bathtub and up near the sliding door.

I’ve done partial/decorative pieces for both spring and summer and I honestly think that’ll be fine.

A friend is currently remodeling their home and is interested in maybe having me use a whole bunch of my leftover tile for that project. Which is kinda thrilling to me. But crazy. I’ll probably ask to go lay out the tile and oh will that be fun for my back.

At least they are getting the 3″ tiles instead of the 1″ and 1/2″ tiles. That has been the hard part. All those tiny little fuckers to pinchy maneuver. Oh my hands.

There’s going to be a lot to look at in my bathroom. I’m so excited.

Last night the kids and I watched Pirates of the Caribbean for the first time. In the bath tub. It was glorious.

I like my life. I like the people in my life. I just…

I was individuating. Now I can’t again. It is feeling really hard. I know that the attachment is important. I know I want the long term relationship with adult children. I know it is worth it to me to put in another 20 years on kids. But I’m chafing. I was down to like 12 on a lot of measures.

I want to meet these people. These people who are like me but who aren’t touched by incest.

I really want to know people like that. I know that probably seems like a weird thing to motivate wanting children. But it is a huge factor for me. A lot of my feelings that I’m a monster originate in this idea of being “tainted”.

I’ve been thinking about cultural perceptions of violence and intimidation. By a great many measures I’m… not a particularly violent or controlling person. Not compared to some norms that exist.

What is the norm against which I ought to be judged? I’m really not sure.

I’m really not sure.

I’ve come really far from where I started. But is it far enough?

I don’t know.

I’m sure not. There is more I have to fix. Problems I need to solve. Ways of being that I have to root out and excise.

It’s an obnoxious process.

I’m tired. Most of the time that Noah has been gone I’ve been working very long hours. I have to put in my hours with the kids, then after a while they watch screens for about three hours while I work. Then I stay up long after they are asleep working. I’ve not gotten a lot of sleep in the past week. My body hurts. But I got a lot done.

It’s funny how resetting the house lets me see lots of things that I would like to “fix” long term. Not this year. Not next year. I’ll start a list for maybe 2019. Maybe that can be a project year. Maybe.

We’ll see how much slack I manage to keep in my schedule for how long. We’ll see how much debt I manage to pay off between now and then. Breathe in, breathe out.

The kids will wake up soon and I don’t have a buffer grown up. I should get off the computer now.

I’m finding myself extremely distraught over the reality that I’m told I have to just accept everything that other people do because they can’t help it but I need to hurry up and change.

I am the problem. No matter what I give or how much I give it will never be enough. No matter what I accept or adapt to, I still need to be more accepting.

I still need to change because I can’t expect other people to.

I’m the abusive monster. This is apparently a reality that… just is. I’m the problem.

I don’t feel any kind of hope right now.

Shut the fuck up you stupid bitch. Open your legs. Shut your mouth. This is what you are good for.

I don’t feel like things are hopeful. I feel like the next few years will be a nightmare of hyper vigilance trying to not be an unwitting part of a giant Milgram experiment.

Then there is my personal life. I still don’t know but I’m scared of that too. I’m scared because I opened Pandora’s box.

I’m fantastically angry about some things. I’m angry about being told that other people “can’t help” what they are doing and that means I have to accept things they do. How come I always get told that I have to change but others can’t help how they are? Am I magic?

I’m not saying I shouldn’t have to change anything. I’m just feeling annoyed about some dynamics.

I truly wish I had more ability to just change how I’m told. I wish I were less impulsive. I feel sad.

 

I think it is pretty funny that I pushed Noah to go see a therapist so the therapist could encourage him to leave me. Because his life might be better without me.

I wonder about that. If I thought that disappearing from life would improve Noah’s life I would probably do that. I’m not convinced though. He’s pretty fucking dependent on me. Not as dependent as I am on him–I know.

It’s complicated. We depend on one another for validation of our existence. We depend on one another for a listening ear and support for growth. Not many people, in my experience, want to push others into growth as aggressively as we do with each other. Does it always go well? What is life without a little risk.

We talked a lot last night, after our dance lesson. After a stormy relationship around the entire concept of dancing Noah went and scheduled an Arthur Murray dance lesson for us. We went to the place that is just over a mile from our house. We had a lot of fun. The instructor seemed quite impressed that we were “new students” but we actually can dance. Woo. The instructor there is probably the best dance instructor I’ve ever personally worked with. He can evaluate things like “You are technically on the beat but you are arriving as soon as the thought of the beat arrives which is a little fast.” He took feedback really well. When I said, “You can’t explain it to Noah like that. You need to say concretely, ‘Ok that trick didn’t work. Let’s try something different’ to let Noah know that you are no longer trying to get him to do the same adaptation.”

I understood that he was drifting from “try walking past her” to “stand in one place” but it was fuzzy and Noah just can’t have fuzzy dance instructions. I was impressed with how well the instructor took it when I said that Noah has baggage around bad dance instructors and he needs clear instructions. Super flexible guy.

Not that I really want to spend money right now. Ugh.

We might do it for a month or two because it sounds fun but I don’t think we are signing on for a serious many months long commitment. If you pay for four private lessons in a month you can get as many group classes as you want. I could handle dancing a lot more for a bit… I miss dancing. If he is finally coming around I don’t really want to miss the gravy train.

My end goal is to stay married to Noah. Why?

It’s so many things. I feel deeply selfish for most of my reasons. No one else on this whole planet looks at me the way Noah does. I want that. More than the sex or the money or the weight of shared history… it is the way Noah looks at me. I’m not sure I would be able to be as good of a parent without him. The way he looks at me creates the possibility for me being the best me I can imagine.

I can’t do that without Noah. Without Noah I get the me that is reflected off the rest of the world. I’m kind of a petty bitch in that light.

People who have known me for a very long time sometimes tell me how shocked they are by how much I have changed. Noah believed I had the potential all along. He isn’t shocked.

I need that.

I feel like I spent the first 25 years of my life being almost completely underestimated then Noah married me and said, “Alright. Now you’re off leash. Run.”

I need that.

I will accomplish, I will be exponentially more in life if I stay with Noah. I’m selfish. I want to see what that means.

I went and saw my massage therapist. I said, “My elbows and low back are killing me”. She said, “Ah. You are back to tile I see.” Like a clairvoyant genius.

I gotta stop fucking up my body. Oh yeah. I’ll stop typing now.