Category Archives: identity

Perspective

I’m thinking quite hard about about the different kinds of bdsm play I have engaged in. It seems somehow important. Who did I play with and how? Was heavier play a sign of greater trust or greater stupidity? I’m not sure.

It feels weird to talk about being a masochist. Mostly it hasn’t been part of my life since having kids so I haven’t thought about it much in years. Except that I’m starting to feel that itch. Part of why I picked Noah as a partner is the way he reacts to that itch. I like the way his reactions make me feel. When I want him to hurt me he gets excited. Visibly excited. Nearly trembling with excitement. I like that I can make him feel that way just by saying yes. Ok, I usually say a lot more than that. I’m kind of a talker.

I don’t think I would be able to come up with an accurate list of “everyone I have played with”. I think of different event spaces as my way of trying to come up with memories and it isn’t a fool-proof system. It’s easy for me to forget. I remember some more than others.

The night before Dore Alley in 2000. I hadn’t “met” anyone from the scene yet. I hadn’t been to a munch yet. An old guy from match.com sent me to the Power Exchange. He gave me an address and told me to go. He didn’t explain what I would find. Technically he sent me two weeks before Dore Alley. I was a towel girl with my sister. I was afraid to go alone. She was freaked out. I came back the next week by myself. A gorgeous trans woman picked me out of the crowd and beat me. It was my first flogging. I don’t really like being flogged. But it was intense. It was my first experience. I’m grateful. I had to top it off by finding one of the PE employees and expressing my interest bluntly. He pulled me into the laundry room and fucked me there. He wasn’t supposed to have sex during his shift. Oh well.

It wasn’t my favorite scene ever, but it was my first. It broke the ice. It taught me that there were indeed people who wanted to hit me. It wasn’t my imagination. If I found one person I could find more. The next day I went to Dore Alley and spent time with two lovely queer men I knew through campaigning for Californians for Same Sex Marriage. They took delighted half naked pictures of me at the street fair. I had just pierced my nipples. They wanted to see. Sure, why not?

It isn’t enough for me that I have done these things. That in the privacy of my own mind I can think back on these events. I like talking about them. I don’t like being the only one who knows. When I feel like these stories are only in my head I feel like I should be actively trying to hide them. If people know this about me they won’t respect me any more. They won’t like me.

When I was eighteen I ran to the sex communities as fast as I could. I had sex with just about everyone who was willing to say “yes”. It was awesome. There is power in being a young woman who is willing to say yes. It’s a power I have watched slowly slip through my fingers as the years go by. I appeal to different people now. I don’t know how to approach them. And now it doesn’t matter. I will never go hunting again.

I learned hunting as a skill. I learned how to smell for people who would be interested in me. It’s not just that I break the Embargo left and right it is that the kind of sex I want is not standard issue. And for the love of shiny green apples I wish we could dispel this myth that men want to have a lot of sex and women don’t. It’s horse shit. Some men want a lot of sex. Some women want a lot of sex. And vice versa. Move on. I have ended up with a shockingly high number of partners who were completely uninterested in trying to keep up with my libido. I’m really tired of this myth that men want tons of sex and women turn it down.

When I am thinking about my compulsions fairly clearly I can direct them. I know how to ask for kinds of pain (spankings, canings) that really aren’t going to damage me long term–they don’t carry the inherent risk that cutting has. Cutting myself with a scalpel is far more potentially dangerous. People do slip and cause too much bleeding. Hit the wrong blood line and you are in trouble. I’ve looked into that a bit and I avoid those areas but that isn’t the point.

Somehow using spanking as a means of controlling my paralyzing anxiety seems nearly benign. I asked Noah for a spanking this morning. I don’t feel the strong urge to start the day by smoking pot. My stomach isn’t churning. It relieves a lot of that ache. Forcing myself to go through and experience negative/painful feelings causes a relief from the miasma of crazy that rules my life. I can feel a lot more control over how much I hurt when I decide the causes of pain. When my pain comes from the fact that I’m just plain crazy–it’s been a rough life–I can’t do a lot about that. I feel helpless and scared and trapped. When I am being hurt by a partner as a conscious decision it takes up the same space as my normal crazy and my normal crazy kind of has to back off into a corner and take up less space.

It’s going to be interesting to describe my relationship with Tom. I used him. He didn’t want to understand what I was doing but I had a pretty clear picture of what I was doing. He didn’t want details. I filled my life with externally supplied pain because that allowed me to be much closer to functioning. It couldn’t do all the work. I’m still me.

I would like to move through the world without fear. That sounds trite. I would like to move through the world without feeling heart-pounding-terror that people will hate me. Soon more people will come who hate me. They will hurt me. I am different. I am bad. People like me end up in jail. When will I go there? What will I have done? I don’t know. I feel like I haven’t done anything that bad. That doesn’t always seem to matter.

If I lived in the wrong time and place I would absolutely be locked up for being a sexual deviant. That’s scary. It is weird knowing that I exist at this intersection of privilege and experience. I don’t know what the future will bring. I don’t know what experiences I have yet to come.

I’ll tell you though, I look at Noah and I’m a lot less scared. He is my bulwark. I feel guilty when I think about my history of partnership because I was desperately searching for someone who was not close to their family. I can’t be all that close to someone who has a close relationship with their parents. Steve’s parents hated me and openly attacked me at Christmas dinner. Tom’s parents didn’t like me but weren’t loud or rude about it. Puppy’s parents and siblings openly ridiculed me and laughed.

Noah’s mom hated me when I met her. The first time I met his parents his mom sneered at me that she wanted to have a private conversation with her son and pulled Noah off for a three hour tirade about how awful I was. Noah’s response to this was to stop coming home for holidays. He has only gone back to Texas for his brother’s wedding. He only did that because I pushed him to do it.

I don’t understand why people hate me so much. I know it must be my fault if it happens so often. If the only consistent force in your relationships is you then you must bring the problems, right? Why do so many people feel the urge to berate and belittle me? Why do so many parents feel like they have to tell me how disgusting and bad I am? Steve’s parents told me I was going to ruin his life. That was part of why I ran. I couldn’t live with that. I couldn’t take on the position of whipping girl in a new family. I couldn’t once again be the person whose fault every bad thing was. I just couldn’t.

Noah picked me. Noah didn’t like his family much to start with and he was quite ok with the idea that his path would diverge from theirs. He says their dislike of me isn’t my fault or my problem and I don’t have to deal with it. I feel so guilty about being the reason he doesn’t see his family. To be fair he saw them aout as little as he could get away with before we were together. But now that tolerance has dropped to once every five years. His family has met Shanna once. They haven’t met Calli.

I can’t be in the closet. I can’t keep my mouth shut about who and what I am, about the things I have done. I just can’t. I can’t act like I am ashamed. Silence is consent to the larger social order. I don’t agree with it. I break the rules. I do it loudly and consciously.

For years I have known someone who refers to herself as a sexual outlaw. She did a lot of actual sex work: stripping, phone sex, escorting, being a prodom. I don’t do things for money. I do them because I want to. It’s confusing. I don’t do these things because I need to earn money and I don’t mind doing them. I do them because I can’t not do them. I need them. I want them.

I like stripping. I’ve done it in clubs a few times. I always let the people who are on shift have the money. I like having sex with lots of people. I like cybersex and phone sex. I’ve done them with a myriad of people over the years most of whom I can’t really remember.

What does it mean to be a sexual outlaw? I think I have avoided money partially because I don’t want to deal with the potential legal ramifications. It’s one more thin line I don’t have to skate. My income has been small and traceable my entire life. Well, until marrying Noah. Now “my” income isn’t small. It’s still highly traceable.

I have slept with a number of very inexperienced boys/men. I have done the whole, “I’ll teach you how to do this” thing. It’s quite fun to take very well endowed boys condom shopping. When they discover that there is a variety of sizes and brands to try so that maybe condoms won’t hurt anymore… they light up like a roman candle. You just gave them a present beyond measure.

Sex is a skill like any other. I found out a lot about the variation possible. It was fun. How can I talk about it without sounding like I am still hunting for it?

I’ve been thinking about my Top Five. Why they are there. How I feel about them. How I feel about the fact that there are four men walking around in the world I will have a difficult but not impossible time saying no to. They are the ones who have earned privileges over many years. They are the ones who understand the compulsive hypersexual part of me. They are all compulsively hypersexual as well. That is a lot of why I bonded with them so fiercely. Not very many men understand the degree to which sex has shaped my life. Very few men have enough sex to understand it. Very few men run across women who are willing to have the kind and quantity of sex I have had.

The internet is not providing me the data I want. Stupid internet. All I can find is that most extremely promiscuous women max out around twenty lifetime partners. That makes me giggle. I love how websites say: “Then you find out your 23 year old girlfriend has slept with 17 men and you feel kind of repulsed.” Ha. By 23 I hit triple digits. I’m repulsive. Awesome.

Why does this make me repulsive? I don’t understand. It’s a taboo. I rigorously get STD testing. When I was being rampantly slutty I got tested every three months and I used condoms religiously and I even used dental dams a few times. I never got good at them, but during the really risk-taking stage I tried to figure it out.

I feel defensive and sad. No one is actively judging me this minute (I can believe this because it is early in the morning and normal people are sleeping) so I don’t need to feel these feelings. Sometimes life just works that way.

Working is fun.

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I don’t know what I was thinking. How did I think I would get through over-night without Noah and the kids yesterday? Ha. I came home for bed-time. I called and told Noah to let the kids stay up a bit late and wait for me. When I got home I felt better.

I crawled into the lower bunk between Shanna and Calli. I cuddled both of them. Shanna rapid-fire told me all about her day. I wanted to know. I wanted to know about every second I missed. I was sorry that I missed them. I was sorry she got hurt yesterday and I wasn’t there to kiss it. She survived, of course. Kids get hurt. It’s ok. It sounds like she figured out most of the “class” parts of ballet. No more telling the teacher no one else was present. Ha.

I spent the day working in a coffee shop. That’s tiring work. I worked from the minute I arrived until I left. I took one ten minute break. I was in the shop for seven hours. Then I left to find food because I was starting to feel mean. I can understand why people in the community tell me that they don’t come in because they don’t like the food selection. We don’t have filling food. We have snack food. Hm. And I don’t want to take food from the shop because we need to make money and I’m too stubborn to pay for my food there after working that hard all day. Complicated. Luckily my share of the tip money (which I didn’t expect to get–that was kind) covered dinner. Woo.

At the shop I am working with Noah’s former partner. The one he was dating when he and I originally met. It was quite smooth. She has a very cheerful professional “face”. If she has a problem with me it was totally absent from her training me for the job. I wouldn’t say I felt comfortable but there is no way that I can say that any discomfort I felt was her fault. I was really impressed with watching her as an employee. That woman works like a demon. She takes pride in where she works. (Not this whole Gay Pride weekend stuff.) If something needs to be done she up and does it. She doesn’t wait for anyone else. She certainly doesn’t wait to be told what to do. I’m quite glad the coffee shop has her. I doubt we would have made it this far this year without people who just up and do things like she does.

It was kind of funny. When I got there an employee I don’t know was the only one working. I introduced myself as one of the owners and asked what work needed to be done. She gave me tasks and it worked out. She kind of fished around for how I got involved. I told her I met R many years ago at Shibaricon and then I ran TNG4 with him. D and I knew one another in junior college–we met when I was sixteen. She expressed surprise. Oh! Then you do know these people. Because she has never seen me around it is hard to understand that I existed all that time. Ha.

I like talismans. I like fetishes (in the traditional sense not in the modern “kinky” version). “An inanimate object worshiped for its supposed magical powers or because it is considered to be inhabited by a spirit” Like that. Noah and I do not have a formal all-the-time d/s or m/s relationship. We play with power exchange occasionally but it isn’t a formal all the time part of our life. This means that I have strong feelings about collars.

In the bdsm world that I grew up in there are signals. Signs that help people understand how to relate to one another. Different collars are used in different ways. The thing is, this varies by person. I have seen patterns emerge but there are always people who break the pattern. Nevertheless I observe trends. I have given away most of the collars I shared with Tom. He wished that I gave them back so he could reuse them. I said hell would freeze over first. You are a rich guy. Fucking replace it if you care so much. No you may not use my god damn collars on your long-line of women. Just no. Anonymous people with little-to-no-connection can have them with pleasure. Enjoy them. I still have some collars we shared. I don’t think I will ever have them around my neck again.

When I am going out to a bdsm event and I do not want to be hit on I have to think about signaling. I have a Big Shiny Wedding Ring quite on purpose but in the poly world it doesn’t matter much. In the bdsm world many people are at least open to playing with many people even if they won’t have sex with them. If you represent yourself as property then you aren’t approached as much. People have to feel really fucking confident that it’s ok before they ask to play. And they don’t do things that are pushing my boundaries because they want to respect my partner. It’s hilarious. People don’t seem to care if they offend me but if I look like property they want to not offend my owner. Fuck all y’all.

So I wore a shiny padlock on my sternum. It’s a very simple, old fashioned sort of collar. Dog choke chains make a statement. It’s been a long time since I have gone out in public making this sort of statement. I notice that I have a different kind of wariness now. I assume I am invisible now. I feel like I have learned better camouflage as prey. I no longer feel hunted a large percentage of the time. The space I take up in the world has changed.

I have spent a lot of my life moving from place to place. I always meet people easily. Looking friendly and approachable was part of how I had friends at all. People see me from across the room and come over to say, “You look like a good person to talk to.” I can generally talk to just about anyone. I am quick with words. Part of this was because I was in the habit of scoping every room I was in for people to have sex with. It makes you look friendly. Seriously. You smile a lot. I don’t do it any more. I can feel my facial expression. I always look harried an frustrated. Ha. Harried and frustrated looks like it might bite your head off, not give you a pleasant chat.

I spend my life in a very small and secluded sphere. I live in my role of “mom” for the vast majority of my time. Even given how much time I spend on that role I give it a disproportionate amount of energy compared to any and every other thing I have done. I am no longer hunting. It’s quite simple, really. I am not looking for lovers but I’m also not looking for friends. I have a full roster right now and I don’t even feel the need to particularly seek out new acquaintances. People will wander into and out of places I am standing. I don’t feel the need to chase them any more. I don’t need to fill up idle hours of my life. I’d give anything to have more idle hours. Oy.

I have no interest in modeling m/s or d/s while my kids are little. I want them to see a partnership. I want them to think that women are bad ass, not obedient. I want my kids to see an actual long term partnership. Staying together is important to me. People get distracted and unhappy with one another and they turn to other relationships to keep things interesting. I want my kids to think that their parents find one another interesting. I want to spend a lot of time with Noah. I like him. Being near him and talking to him makes me feel far better than I have felt at any point in my life. There is no other person on this planet who is as willing to put a mountain of time and energy into me. I am special to him. If he took that energy and gave it to someone else I would know. It would be an active withdrawal. There is a limited amount of time and energy in this life. I have something really special. I want to nurture it, not ignore it.

I have learned a lot about being gentle from being with Noah. He is the only big-tough-guy I have ever dealt with who will actively tell me I am hurting him. He’s both extremely picky and not picky at all–meaning that he chooses when to talk about when he is feeling. He can endure things stoically like the next big-tough-guy. He just doesn’t do that with me. He thinks I shouldn’t hurt him. He doesn’t want to be hurt by me. So he tells me when and how I hurt him so that I can lean to do better. Mostly we don’t hurt each other any more. It’s rare to have a slip. I don’t even lick his nose.

I feel really glad that I get to model the relationship I have with Noah. Some day we will do more with other power structures because we want to. I really like that it will happen after many years of earning careful trust. In the modern USA “slavery” is kind of an ephemeral concept. It’s not real. It’s not binding. It’s a choice to have a conscious power structure with someone else. It’s just a consciously and specifically chosen relationship style. There are a lot of Father Is In Charge mentality left in this country, I’m not sure why people are surprised that people want to formalize this. The language is charged, yes.

Right now I am using all of the caring-for-other-people energy I have for my children. They will not always need it and some day it will be unhealthy for me to pour this much energy into them all the time. I will still have this energy. I had this before I had kids. Noah spends a lot of time massaging me. He went to massage school as part of his learn-to-pick-up-chicks training. He really did go to school for how to be a better partner for me. I win. He also did hypnotherapy training. I’m totally going to be able to make him sound like a freakishly good fit when I write about him. I’m thinking about dialogue. I think I am hilarious. This will be a very different book to write.

I’m thinking very hard about what slavery meant to me. What did I do with Tom? How did that relationship fill my needs? I was under contract for two years. He ended that part of our relationship in a couples therapy session wherein the counselor told me that our problems were all my fault because I was asking too much of him by saying that he should follow the relationship rules of the contract we both signed. Needless to say, I felt quite good about myself at that point, right? That was when I started hounding him about kids. I was nearing the end of college. I had told him that I had no interest in getting married before I graduated from college. There was the strong implication that I wanted to get married after. He prevaricated for a while and pushed me to consider grad school.

I decided I had two paths for teaching. If I was going to do the get married and have kids thing I should teach K-12 something. If I am going to “be a grown up” forever and build my life around the bdsm scene I should teach college so that I can be out. I decided to start the masters program first. Either way I didn’t feel qualified to teach much yet. I felt like there was some magical level of smart I would feel at some point and then I would be qualified to teach. I would know enough about a topic that I felt comfortable saying, “Yes! I know this!” It’s ironic that I failed the final test after years of getting good grades and being told I was good at this–writing, that is. Oh well.

I asked Tom if we could open our relationship in December of 2003. I didn’t technically have sex with anyone till January. I think I knew from the first person that I was hunting. I started the masters program first but I started the teaching credential the next term. I moved out of living with Tom in October about six weeks after I broke up with him. I started the credential and broke up with him at the same time. He would never answer the marriage and kids thing. So I disengaged. I threw that energy out into the world. I went hunting. I started dating Noah in February.

It’s going to be really fun to write about Noah. Knowing how this story goes it means that I am having an interesting time figuring out how to approach tone. This is going to be so different to write. How do I represent my time as a slave? What did I tell Tom? What kind of relationship was that?

I want to wear a lock on my sternum while I am working at Wicked Grounds because I want to announce that I am protected. I am wanted. Someone has already found me. When I was part of those communities I was always hunting. Always willing to say yes. It changed how I talked to people. In the past I have had issues with men taking liberties. I want to discourage it. Signaling is complicated.

I have been raped at a public sex party. I’m aware that it happens. A coffee shop isn’t a sex party. But I have had people casually touch my breasts. I have had people grab my ass. These actions aren’t “rape” but I’m kind of a ticking time bomb. One of these times I am going to break something on someones body as a result of them grabbing me. And it will probably escalate from there and be “all my fault”, right? I’m scared. I don’t like that I am scared. It is very hard for me to be in places I think of as hunting territory when I am not hunting. I feel physically sick. I feel scared. I am going to bring any fetish of protection I have.

Slavery is a way of acknowledging that someone is that interested in me. Different people do slavery differently. I’ll write more about that later. It’s time to start getting ready. Today will be a long day. I need to bring a water bottle and specifically drain it every so often. I think I was dehydrated yesterday. I know I was hungry. I ran five miles yesterday morning before working on my feet for seven hours making food and washing dishes. I ate a bowl of oatmeal, a thin slice of quiche… and that wall before dinner. By which time I was starving and had a raging headache. I think I should take better care of my body today. Today is supposed to be a “cross training” day. I hope this counts. I hope it will be fun. I had fun yesterday. It was fucking awesome to get to talk to people with a counter between us so they couldn’t touch me. I have serious issues. Whatever. It worked. I felt safe. I felt like I was doing something and I had a place and a purpose. I was using some of my caring-for-other-people energy on that community. Twelve years is a long time. I’m not gone. I’m on sabbatical. I’m training for my next relationship. It will be very different to use more of that energy on Noah. I feel specifically spooked.

And I should go take a shower.

Passing

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I feel like I have been blessed at this point in my life. I have a wide variety of friends who tolerate my moods and writing about all kinds of hostile things. In person I generally behave myself. I have a hazy understanding of the fact that most people are guided by rules of behavior. I just don’t understand what they are, mostly, and when I do I actively want to do the opposite. Just because.

I’m told that I shouldn’t care what people think of me. I’m told that because Noah grew up one of those Gibbs’ in his town. The rich ones. He doesn’t have to care what people think. He has a fairly codified set of permissive behaviors that are tolerated from the rich geek. He knows how to behave. He knows when and how he has to care.

There is this unspoken set of behaviors that people follow. Mostly they have no idea what it means about them. If I follow the behaviors I was taught then it is patently obvious that I am still white trash. I curse regardless of who is around. Sometimes I dress in absolutely trashy clothes–to be fair I’m mostly eccentric and not “trashy” in my clothing style. I’m weirdly conservative. I have spent my entire life dodging the “you must have asked for it” line about being raped. I make sure no one can tell me it is my fault because of what I am wearing.

I have a carefully constrained life. The most important piece of my life right now is that I learn how to pass. I need to learn how to pass as a normal, stable member of the middle class. I need to learn how to not offend people. It’s harder than it seems. It’s easy for other people because they were taught to be unoffensive from when they were quite young. I was taught quite the opposite.

This weekend I spent time with a friend I have known for more than ten years. We met in a bdsm relationship class on protocols. It was a six week course on Dominant/submissive and Master/slave variations. It was more interesting than it sounds. What is protocol? I’m not going to steal the Lady Victoria’s class and tell you much about it. If you like such things, I recommend the extended classes. People find interesting things to say.

Anyway, I was hanging out with this friend. I met her early in the M/s portion of my relationship with Tom. I asked her if she was aware that I was depressed and cutting through my relationship with Tom. She said she had no idea. She is pretty sure no one knew.

I pass pretty well when I want to. But I don’t always pass as what I want to pass as.

I know how to be not-me. I’m not great at the fine tuning of what people really see. I have a nervous energy I get at parties. I giggle a lot. I’m scared shitless. I usually feel like I want to vomit on the floor. Being around more than two or three human beings triggers my hypervigilance and in my head I am rehearsing polite ways to deflect attention I don’t want and I’m praying for attention I do want. Long before I can try to get attention I have to decide the appropriate way to deflect unwanted interest. Or I get in trouble. My natural reflexes are not PC. When I am given truly unwanted attention my impulse is to be violent. I don’t hesitate. I have to defend myself and no one else will. Ever. Period. I live in a “polite” society, though. I am not allowed to be violent in defense of myself. I try hard to think of ways to “use my words”that won’t get me booted out. If there is a problem it will always be my fault. I’m sure that this guy who has raped other women (I hear the stories) could not possibly have done anything rude to me I am just over reacting. I’m the problem.

I know how to be not-me. I know how to pretend a certain level of passivity so that I can be tolerated on the fringe of society. I don’t know how to feel safe. I don’t know how to feel like I belong. I don’t know how to make friends with multiple people in a demographic. I tend to hold on to a few people from each community. I don’t know how to interact with large groups of people because I’m used to tailoring the things I say to one individual person. I can skirt the line of offensive more easily that way. When I’m around a group I feel petrified with fear because someone in the group is going to be an outlier in a different direction and someone will be snotty or aggressive or … something. Someone will behave in a way that I read as picking a fight. And I will have to walk away or bear the consequences. I can’t engage. I can’t respond at all. I will be the problem.

I don’t mean that I spend my life wanting to hit people. I mean that I don’t verbally spar with people. I shut up.

I have friends I can argue with. I have people I have known intimately I can argue with. Unless someone has been close to me at one time I am unlikely to take the chance of arguing with them. I don’t go looking for random arguments on the internet. If I bother to argue with you it is probably because I have years of pent up frustration I need to vent in your direction. You have been pissing me off for a very long time. Mostly I felt that I had to keep my mouth shut. At some point I will feel comfortable enough in the turf and I will fucking tell you how you have pissed me off. I can only do that with people who have shown a previous tolerance for me. It’s terrifying. I have to trust there will not be repercussions. I’m wrong, still. I go off on people and lose friendships.

I’m supposed to pass as a not-angry person. That is a mask if ever there was one. The same people who tell me to “be myself” are the people who tell me to not be angry. It’s a lie from the first breath. And I can’t point that out. And I can’t be angry about being lied to over and over.

There are a lot of things I have to pass as. I’m in the first truly stable period of my life. I have lived in this house longer than anywhere. I have to pretend I know what this feels like and I am comfortable here. I am so uncomfortable I am ready to crawl out of my skin. I want to move. I want to not have to feel scared when I leave the house. I don’t feel scared when I feel invisible. I feel so scared here because people have been seeing me around for a long time and they have expectations of me. I feel like I am going to let people down at any moment. Soon they will learn how very angry I am.

I feel very weird about the other ways I pass. I pass as straight. I am now in a monogamous relationship. We don’t have the time to be non-vanilla if we wanted it. Not really. I have to walk away from being the kind of freak I was.

Not everyone does. I can’t be part of an experiment to raise children in an “open” household. I can’t. I need more boundaries than that. I want my children to have a theoretical knowledge of my sex life. I don’t want them to see my sex life parading through the house. It’s different with their dad. We don’t flaunt our sex life. It isn’t obvious that I’m keeping him around for that. I do though. He’s great at sex.

I feel weird about the fact that I shouldn’t talk much about being queer. I certainly don’t tell the lesbian moms in the home schooling group that I’m queer. I don’t want to see rolled eyes. I have two options: I can shut the fuck up, or I can roll out my CV to prove I am the person I say I am.

It’s easier to pass.

It seems to me that queer is complicated. I can never take back the fact that I have had sex with a good thirty or forty women. I don’t know the number any more. Hard drive crash. But people don’t know that when they look at me. How could they? I have a much larger body count than most heterosexual men. How in the hell can I ever be not queer? But I don’t partner with women. I have too many issues with them. I have a hard time working things out with women. With a man I assume he won’t be able to figure anything emotional out so I’m ok with spelling things out in small, easy to digest words. With a woman I get incandescently angry that they are so stupid about figuring out my emotions and I just refuse to keep talking.

Women are scary in a way that men aren’t. My experience of the men I choose to get close to is that they are not passive aggressive. They are aggressive. They do it or they don’t do it. My experience of the women I get close to is that they are going to serve #1 first but they will actively lie to you and say that you are first, no really. When women speak I have this filter in my brain, “Are they lying to me” that I just don’t have in the same way with men. Men lie too, but generally about different things and in different ways. Men are easier to predict. Men feel less complicated. Women can smile at you and poison your drink. Women are like me. Women are terrifying. But hot. So there you go.

I loved Julia. I lived with her. I thought we could find a way to figure things out. She showed up one day out of the blue and said she was moving to Boston next week, uhhh bye.

I grew up in a house of women. Women aren’t going to do the bad things to you. They are just going to leave you. They are going to let you down when things are hard because they have been overstressed for a long time and they never told you and now they have to focus on themselves and you just aren’t important. My mom did that. My sister did that.

And I can’t be angry. Not if I want a shred of relationship left. Not if I don’t want to be alone. I’m telling you, though: I’m angry. I’m fucking angry. I have to pass as not angry. It will be a carefully constructed lie because I am no better than anyone else. Because I know that continuing to behave in my normal fashion won’t teach my kids how to have healthy relationships. I have to pass as someone who is capable of having normal, healthy relationships.

It’s hard. It’s a game I play every day. How to pass as a “normal” person. I’m not. Normal people didn’t go out and get a PhD in sex. I haven’t heard of very many things I haven’t tried. That was my hobby for the first twenty-five years of my life. It has been one of the largest parts of my identity. It decided my behavior. That is how I use identity. I decide what identity I want/need to have and then I align my behavior with it. I am not just Krissy. It’s all a game. Who and what I am varies dramatically in different situations.

I didn’t tell my dentist he was a fucking asshole when he told me that he wouldn’t recommend my book to people because it is too hard and people shouldn’t have to know about such things. Instead I just told him, “That attitude is why it happened. Because no one can bear to know I exist.” I hope he felt bad.

I have to pass. If I don’t then people don’t want to acknowledge that I exist. I have to have a presentable, tasty candy coated shell. I have to pretend to be good enough. I have to pretend to be of the class of the people I am talking to.

I’m god damn tired of being scolded because my manners are terrible. You have no idea. Go to hell.

Everything about the life I am choosing right now is a carefully constructed lie. See, I’m a good mom. I can play this role. I can be patient and kind. I can be tolerant and mellow. I can be careful what behavior I model. My children are not going to learn how to be a whore by watching me work. When I am in the mood to I can go pick up sex basically anywhere. There is usually someone willing if you know how to look. I’m trying to learn how to ignore those signals. I’m modeling the behavior that I believe a “good” woman would have. I’m a fucking fraud.

I don’t even make people buy me dinner before I fuck them and leave. I want to have physical contact, not intimacy. I don’t want my children to learn that. Not from me.

I think that my relationships with my children will be pretty much the most intense ones of my life. The most intimate. My mother treated me like an obnoxious burden. I don’t do that to my kids. My mom dumped me on people I didn’t know. My kids are getting to know a short list of people very well.

I will spend significantly more time with my children than anyone else. Far more time than Noah. Noah will take decades to catch up on time spent because he likes his alone time. I will have a good solid ten years of being with my kids before they start really trying hard to get away from me. I have to pass as a good mother.

What makes someone good or bad? I’m not sure. I’m told that you are bad if you do bad things. I’ve done a lot of very bad things. I guess that’s that.

After my experience with my girl friends a couple of weeks ago I remain convinced that I am not a dancer. If I am to be defined by my behavior I am not a dancer. I occasionally dance. I enjoy dancing. I’m not a dancer.

I am a mother. That will never be taken away from me. Nothing can change that. I think it is the most permanent part of my identity. Will I ever want to pass as not a mother? In order to act like a slut I would have to. I don’t want to. I want to have this permanent change in who and what I am. If it is possible to simply be another person I want to be. I want to figure out how to stop being bad. It’s not that I think that all people who have multiple partners are bad. The sex I like is the most high risk kinds there are. I just can’t model that to my kids. I can’t. I have to pass. I have to.

What does being queer mean then? How is that going to work in my life? Am I giving that up to? I was talking to a friend about passing this weekend. The Godmama. She said she doesn’t really think about being queer any more. It’s there but it’s not a conscious part of her life. I said, “You are trans and married to a woman. You don’t have to think about it to wear it on your face.” I am who those disgusting ministers point at when they say that you can get over being queer. I pass.

I tell my children that they grow up to love men or women or men and women. I tell them that the most important part of relationships is that you respect your partner and can trust them. Some day my kids will figure out that I know some really weird people. It’s probably going to take them a while. To them this will be normal.

Why do I want to consciously construct a heterosexual monogamous life and model that? It’s not the norm. Not really. Look at history. I want to model picking a life and really doing it. I want to not be distracted by all the could-be’s in life. I want to be creating something with a person. Noah and I have a lot of joint goals. We are building something together. It happens that he is a guy. It was a lot more convenient for that “having kids” thing I wanted. No woman ever wanted me the way Noah wanted me. That’s why I picked Noah. Not because I don’t like women. Not because I’m not attracted to them. No one ever wanted to take on the project that is my mental health. I don’t blame them.

My teenagers will understand that non-monogamy is a common, perfectly reasonable path that I do not choose. They will hear which people we know are doing it well (Grandpa J) and which people are not doing it well (name redacted). We will talk a lot about ethics. Heck, we already do.

Am I trying to pass as not depressed? Yes. I don’t want them to learn the physical behaviors of depression. I don’t want them modeled. I want my kids to grow up around productive people. It’s ridiculously important to me. It doesn’t matter how I feel. I have a place in my head that allows me to go through the rote motions of life. I may not be cheerful but I consciously work on maintaining a neutral facial expression and I god damn do everything I am supposed to do. I make food. I do chores. We go to the park on park day. I have a role to fill. It doesn’t matter how I feel. I can pass. I can do this.

Sometimes when I sit and think about what hard things I have done I feel confused. Like those must be the acts of a different person. Doing those things would make someone strong. I feel so weak. I’m trying to get stronger every day. I have to. Even if I have no interest. I have amazing willpower. My willpower seems to be inhuman. I have tremendously more control than I let on. That’s part of the game. That’s part of passing. You have to fake it until you can make it.

I have a picture of Jenny and her mom in my garage. I think about them and their relationship a lot. I try to puzzle out the has been from the should have been. I haven’t been able to stand near very many mother-daughter relationships. I don’t understand them very well. Jenny doesn’t have overly close relationship with her mother for a variety of reasons. I think about the lessons to be learned from the choices her mother made. Jenny’s mom was nicer to me than any other mother of a friend when I was a kid. It’s complicated in my head to set that aside and think of her from other perspectives.

When I’m trying to create this person in my head, the person I am supposed to “pass” as I think hard about my role models. I try hard to think through the long-term consequences of their behavior. I don’t want to adopt other broken models. That’s not useful. I feel scared. When I look around my life I see that most of the people who want to know me are people who also come from problematic back grounds. People would rush to say, “Not like yours!” but whatever. No, incest is not rampant among my friends group. But people who tolerate me probably had an emotionally unstable parent or close relative so they have coping skills. That’s kind of not great.

I feel afraid because I feel like I am trying to create a person who genuinely could not exist even under the best of circumstances. I know a handful of people who came from stable, happy, affectionate, appropriate families. They are oddballs. They know it. They are nearly mythical. At least in my head. I’m not trying to be Mary Poppins.

We live in a strange time. Through most of history people basically grew up to do what their parents did. Sure there were transition times when people left farms and came to cities, but then the family found a trade in the city. Mostly people did what their parents did. What kind of person do I want my children to grow up with?

On the subject of body wind: Noah tells me that farting is one of those things that tells you which class someone really is. Rich people ignore bodily functions. Middle class people apologize for them. Poor people laugh. I go back and forth between ignoring them and giggling. I feel anger over the idea of apologizing for them.

I am expected to follow all these stupid made up rules. They have no basis. They are regional. They don’t matter. That’s what you are supposed to do in “polite” society. How in the fuck am I supposed to teach this shit to my kids? My goal is to take them out of the country at formative ages so they understand exactly how irrational and arbitrary these rules are. But I don’t want them to feel the same anger I feel.

I don’t want my children growing up with the idea that getting angry all the time is normal and natural. That’s really hard on your body. It causes long term stress for the rest of your life. So I have to model not being angry. This is not a good cycle for me.

It’s ironic that I had two girls. It means I have to work on my emotional intimacy issues with females. Festive. When Shanna gives me a nasty look I respond with surprise. I say, “Oh gosh! Am I looking at you like that?” Then I rub my forehead to get rid of the deep lines of scowl and I repeat whatever I had said to her previously. I explain that I wasn’t feeling angry but I was thinking hard. She generally smiles and repeats whatever it is she is on about in a more friendly way.

I’m going to have a hard time with the homeschooling group. I don’t really like how often the topic is, “Obviously we love our kids more than working mothers.” I’m not yet in a position where I can sit and argue with people. I keep my mouth shut and my eyes on the ground. It’s horse shit. It’s self-serving dogma. You can’t measure love. You don’t take care of your kids a certain number of hours per day and compare it to a chart to see how much you love your kids. Not all mothers want to subsume their complete identity into parenting. Some people might call that healthy.

Not all homeschooling mothers subsume their entire identity into their children either. But they give up a much larger chunk. Either that or they drag their kids along into their identity. Is there or is there not a barrier between your children being full members of your life? For me there just isn’t a lot left they can’t be part of. I go to adult-only events sometimes but it’s rare. I have a lock on my bedroom door so that I can have a sex life. I write behind a closed door. I don’t smoke near them. That is all I do away from them. They are part of the whole rest of my life. I really enjoy the company. I really enjoy feeling seen all the time. I enjoy the fact that what I do with every minute of my day matters because I am going to be accountable to this person for the rest of my life for my behavior. This relationship is the opposite of temporary. This is the the most intensity I will ever have in my life. I want to really experience that. I want to drown in it. I want to find out what it is like to really and truly be responsible for another human being at all times. Yes, working parents are still responsible for their kids, but they delegate a lot of the day-to-day supervision. The ultimate responsibility is still there. Just wait till your kid steals a car. Ha. I did that.

I am integrating my children into my life. I am creating a life that is fully appropriate for them. Who do I want to be? What kind of person are my children likely to respect and trust as they grow up? What do I have to do to pass as respect-worthy and trust-worthy?

This is so hard. I was not taught to be this person. I am a judgmental bitch and I will say that I did not grow up around people with a strong work ethic. Most of my family survives on welfare of some kind. There is no impetus for working to better your life. You just have to learn how to hussel to fill in the cracks. Declare bankruptcy every so often. Let other people support you. Don’t pay your rent and get angry when your (relative) landlord tells you that you have to move because they need to make enough money to pay the mortgage. You are owed a living, aren’t you?

I grew up angry poor. The kind of poor that is surrounded by beauty and wealth which only emphasizes how terrible it is. My Uncle Bob and Auntie live down in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It’s beautiful. When you spend most of your childhood surrounded by the California Redwoods you travel and think, “I can see that they have nice bushes but where are the trees?” It’s a very wealthy area. Our neighborhood slowly gentrified during my lifetime. When my relatives bought in it was the cheap and cruddy area. The poor people lived there because it was what they could afford. The original mortgage more than forty years ago was $40,000. Last I heard the mortgage was several thousand a month and Auntie had to work full time to pay it. She was in her seventies.

Our house was the unsightly dump at the end of the road. Lots of cars on blocks. You know those big metal storage PODS people use? There were a few there as permanent instillations. Several big ramshackle barns on the property. It was a serious health hazard. Uncle Bob was a serious hoarder. He spent money like it grew on trees and never got rid of anything. So he could never find anything in he mess and would go buy new over and over. He was so bitter about not having… something. I never knew what.

I went to Los Gatos High School and I was on the free lunch program. There weren’t many of us. When I went to Lakeside, up in the mountains, it was different. There were always a few other poor, problem kids. A lot of fucked up people go hide in the mountains. Which isn’t to say that everyone in the mountains is fucked up. Anyway.

I wasn’t allowed into the nice homes. I was only invited to play with the other kids who had alcoholic parents. The other girls who watched their parents have sex. I had Brittney. That was it for a stable friendship in my life. Every family has issues, even Brittney’s family. I learned some bad things there as well. Mostly lying.

What do I want to teach my kids? How do I need to pass out there in the scary world? I would be less scared if the consequences mattered less. How do I not fail my children? How do I not teach them to grow up and act like they have an alcoholic parent? This is hard.

I feel like they shouldn’t have to deal with the fact that I am an angry person. Full stop. I’m not angry at them or about them so it isn’t their problem. I don’t give other people the same leeway. I’m not sure why.

Shanna and Calli are unabashed in their need. They still truly need me in order to grow up whole and healthy. I have to be a positive force in their life. Someone who makes them feel good about being themselves. That’s my job. It’s a lot of pressure, meeting their needs all the time. It’s a lot of work. In many ways it is unsatisfying work because they feel like bottomless pits of need and I never make a dent. But that’s not true. They are very happy people. Life is going well for them. They don’t have unmet needs. Even though I feel like I can’t I can’t I can’t I am.

I think about how their needs are going to change. How I have to be the bad guy sometimes. I have to be the mean mom. That’s part of the deal. I have to set limits. If I don’t then you won’t learn how to deal with them in the world. Everyone has limits. People who tell you that you don’t have to worry about what other people think are mostly lying. I want my kids to make the conscious choice of which opinions to care about. I hope they will respect me enough to care about mine. I don’t take it as writ.

How do I need to act in order to be someone they can respect? That feels like a lot of pressure. How do I need to change? How do I need to pass?

More on anger.

5 Replies

Right now I’m having internet connectivity issues. I read comments on my phone but the interface on blogger and lj mobile suck. I’m not going to type responses with my thumbs. Especially because my thumb bloody hurts. In the past week I have cut it more than once and I have a nasty thorn or splinter or something I can’t get out. I’m not going to write elaborately on my phone. On the computer I am composing in Word and then when I get five minutes of being connected I hit post. Which is a long winded way of saying this post will hopefully include the things I would say to people individually and I like comments.

I think that class things play in as well as gender things, yes. Men and women talk down to me differently. Men treat me like I am stupid. Women treat me like I am not important. Men know that I have some use at least.

I grew up in a very female dominated environment. Men came and went and weren’t big influences. I lived with my mom and my sister and Auntie and my cousin and her daughter. The boys were Uncle Bob, my nephew Denny (who is eight years younger than me), and my male cousins would rarely show up for dinner. The avoided the hen house. Uncle Bob thrived in an environment where he was the only cock. It allowed him to strut and act like he did the important male jobs and we were all weak and stupid. The important jobs like sitting in his chair and waiting to be served. Awesome.

Over and over my experience of men is that they talk down to me and expect me to be grateful that they are imparting wisdom. It’s not just an engineer thing. I get the same kind of condescension from the maintenance guys at the local elementary school (That’s what Uncle Bob did for the last ten or fifteen years he worked). I am more surrounded by engineers these days than I used to be and the feeling has intensified. I feel like being an engineer takes male bravado from seven to eight. They are just slightly more full of themselves. Either way I’d like to walk around with a baseball bat taking out kneecaps. Maybe they would stop fucking looking down on me.

Not really. I’m kidding. Mostly. The thing is, I like men. I find them comfortable to be around. Men think I’m not as smart as them so they don’t expect much from me. When I do things they are surprised and complimentary. Wow! You can do that? Why always the tone of surprise? Oh yes. Because it is a shock that I’m not sitting at home waiting for a man to deliver. Right.

I used to work technical theatre. I had two bosses. The technical director is a sweetheart and I adore him still. He is equally insulting to everyone who walks through his door. He does not treat women as less competent. I thought it was beautiful to watch him interrogate boys the way I normally only see women be questioned. “Have you ever used a drill?” He assumes everyone who walks through the door is completely unskilled because otherwise his liability lawsuits would be enormous. I can respect that. He works with large saws all day long. The other boss was in charge of more hand-wavey shit like lighting design and painting and directing. He is a piece of shit misogynist. He openly made nasty comments about women and he and the “boys” would sit around laughing. He was constantly rude to me because I was doing a “man’s” job.

I was one of two people trained to work the rail. The rail is the system used to hang the large backdrop pieces. It is a very carefully balanced pulley system that involves a lot of loading 10-50 lb bricks onto the device from a platform 50’ in the air. It’s not for sissies. The boss I liked thought I was one of the most attentive people there and it was safest for me to be in the air. The other boss would do things to make it harder for me. Like stop in the middle of the ladder right in front of me in order to have a conversation with someone. I just had to hang out on the ladder indefinitely. He would hear I was up at the rail and make loud comments about how we should evacuate the building before I kill someone. To be fair, before I figured out a way to attach the wrench to my belt loop I dropped it once. That was a dangerous mistake. He didn’t attack any of the men the same way. Even if it was their first time walking into the building and they didn’t know an Allen wrench from a Philips head screwdriver.

It’s not just about sex. It’s about the meeting point of class and gender. That’s where I feel stuck and angry today. Men and women manifest the ways they look down on people differently. I have different kinds of anger at them. Women are more subtle and horrible. Men talk to you like you are a piece of shit. Women will smile prettily and spew poison behind your back. Women are afraid of direct confrontation so you have no idea what to expect from them, ever. Women will lie and use relationships to manipulate people. Women get people to “take sides”. I do it too. I’m not going to lie.

My experience of the difference is that men charge through life just asserting that they are better whether it has any reflection on what they have actually done or not. Women go through making sure other people can’t buck the system. They impose order. Once you are at the bottom of the barrel women don’t tolerate social climbing. You are bad and they won’t let you forget it.

I say these things and wonder how defensive my friends feel. Obviously I don’t want to set the whole world on fire with a torch or I probably would have. I’m expeditious. There are people of both genders who are not terrible people. Most people are not terrible people. Most people are self-obsessed and just don’t bother to notice how they are treating other people. I think that is part of what makes me so god damn mad. They aren’t trying to be mean. They just don’t bother to think about how they are acting. People really don’t put any thought into their tone of voice by and large. And the ones who say they do? They are often the worst. God save me from men who consider themselves feminists. It can go strongly one way or another. Either they are genuinely willing to consider me an equal human being (rare) or they like to tell me how evolved they are and that means that sex with them will be better. To this I say: Bitch, please. The sex is better with raging misogynists and I know it. Why are we lying here?

I think that is a lot of the problem. I do think the sex is better with misogynists. That is a lot of why I have kept my mouth shut in the ways I have. Men who carefully treat me like I am breakable don’t hit my radar. There is an assumption of basic competence when someone drags you through an experience because that is what they want to do right now. There isn’t a lot of room for, “But I have this weird little quirk”—they don’t want to hear it. They don’t want to hear about how easily my vaginal tissue tears. They don’t want to hear about the various health issues I have as a result of violent sex. They just want to get off. There is this assumption that my body is going to handle whatever they feel like doing whether I enjoy it or not.

What? Not everyone has their father train them that all sexual contact is supposed to hurt and you are supposed to learn how to keep a straight face the whole time? That’s not what toddlerhood is like for most people?

I’m broken. I’m broken because I like people who want to hurt me. In a deep animal way I can respect them. In an animal way I don’t have a lot of respect for the people who use kid gloves even though I desperately need the kid gloves at this point in my life. I am so terribly wounded. I don’t think I can continue to just get up and moving on while people hurt me. At some point you lose the will to live. I need to stop accepting what I am used to accepting.

I feel deeply confused by how other people manage these things. For the life of me I don’t understand why I have the friends I have. I have quite a few really intense relationships. They enjoy my company for no reason I can fathom. I’m trying to just show up. I’m trying to trust them.

I hate how much dissociation I still have from my body. I am not interested in soft gentle bunny sex because I can’t feel it. My body doesn’t pay attention, mostly, until pain is applied. I feel very broken.

I have trouble with women, I perceive, in large part because of the Embargo. I’m hoping that fades as I am no longer competition. I can’t count how many women have told me, “I hated you when I first met you but then I started to kind of respect you.” Oh thanks. I’ll try not to let my head expand from that praise. People really don’t give a shit what they say to you. I’m so glad I have earned some grudging respect. That makes me feel better. I earn respect, near as I can tell, from trying to very seriously to do what I say. It’s unusual. I don’t stop doing things because they become annoying or difficult or unpleasant. That is when I feel a rush of adrenaline. I fucking said I would do this and I am not going to god damn fail. I don’t very often. It’s why I don’t casually say I will do things.

Men and women are different kinds of liars. There is overlap, of course. Men are more likely to trash talk you while giving you a chance to do it anyway. Women will gently put their hands over yours to prevent you trying because you don’t want to be humiliated when you fail, right? They are just trying to be kind and save you from your own failure.

The flavor of the condescension changes a lot as social status changes. Low class men talk down to women differently than very educated men. It’s easy to argue with low class men. I suppose I should say that it isn’t hard for me to convince a low status man that I am higher status than him. I can get them to back the fuck off. I am smart and extremely well educated on an unusual arrangement of topics. Low status men can be convinced that I am useful. Once they see that I have skills they specifically respect (no shit, I can build things) then they mellow in tone.

This is where my anger and rage at the engineers come in. They have no respect for all those low status skills I have. They really don’t care that I can do a wide variety of low status low paid jobs. It’s just more proof that I am not as good as them. If I can’t sit there and pretentiously spend my life talking about some minute thing they learned in college I am not as good as them.

And as much as I like all the people in my life who went to CMU or Stanford or whatever Ivy League school I’m really pretty tired of them spending parties talking on and on and on about their teachers. Isn’t college over? Can you move on? Yes, we are all aware that you went to this bad ass school. That’s nice dear. Have you done anything since? Get over college. Seriously. If it was more than ten years ago it is probably a good thing to talk about something more recent. Those of us who are not in the clique are heartily sick of it. We talk about you behind your backs. We are sick of hearing about your college experiences.

Why? Because my college experience was kind of shitty. I went to CSU Hayward before it gave up its place identity. I knew the names of three fellow students when I graduated because those were the ones who talked to me during classes. I lived with Tom. I was a 24/7 slave during college. I went to class, sure. But I went because there were hoops I had to jump through on my way to having the life I wanted. Not because college was so awesome. I went there after junior college. I certainly have stories about the college period of my life but the fact that I was in college wasn’t really the point.

When I deal with people who had transformative college experiences I have trouble being patient. They tend to overinflate the importance of that experience. Like you can’t truly grow up unless you go through an experience like that. But I didn’t have an even remotely similar experience. I read my books and wrote my papers and argued more in class than the teachers liked but it wasn’t my life. It was background noise to my life. It feels like one more way there is something wrong with me.

I didn’t have the same kind of experience other people had. I can’t talk about that period in the same way. It feels alienating. It feels like once again I did it wrong. I’m kind of tired of having to hear people over and over and over describe how awesome college was! Really? Uhm, whatever.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad that people have good experiences. I’m glad that other people have transformative experiences. I’m just tired of having to listen to the same ones over and over while knowing that my transformative life experiences are ones that I should keep my fucking mouth shut about otherwise people will be appalled and horrified. My life experiences are disgusting and inferior. Can’t I shut up about them already? I would harp on that less if I was told to shut up less. I am told to shut up and give everyone equal time to talk. So I can listen to forty people tell me the stories of their college experience and they can all tell me the same stories about the same professors and the same papers they had to write. But sweet Jesus no one wants to hear about my shit. It’s just too hard.

In graduate school I wrote about some of my early life experiences. I was told it wasn’t realistic and I should try to write about things people will believe. I really can’t get over that. I can’t get over being told that I should make up a life story that won’t offend people so that I can participate in the vapid cocktail chat. Fuck no.

Men and women talk down to me differently and I hate them differently for it. I suppose that part of the problem is a big part of me accepts that men will always look down on me. When women do the same thing I can’t contain my rage and violence. It feels more visceral, more offensive, more shocking. When I say, “Can’t contain” what I mean is I say very mean things in my head, silently.

When a man talks down to me I can roll my eyes and shrug it off. When a woman talks down to me I want to punch her in the face because doesn’t she fucking know better than to act like that? What is her fucking problem!? I think there is a part of me that is just as big of a misogynist as anyone else. I hold men and women to different standards. I expect women to have a better idea of how to talk to me and they really don’t. It’s not fair or appropriate.

I suppose I expect women to give me the same tolerance I give men. Ignore my attitude and tone of voice and we will do fine. But I don’t give them the same tolerance. I think it is because they do it differently. If a woman is the same kind of angry-tetchy I am we can normally figure out how to get alone. There is a lot of bluntness available and we can muddle through how to relate. It’s the ones who have a high idea of protocol in their head that I will never measure up to that I have trouble with.

I deal well with other wild animals. I can respect that. It seems to be a harshness of spirit that I can recognize from a ways away. Very wounded people all seem to move or smell the same. It transcends gender in a variety of ways. There are two kinds of wounded people, in my experience. There are victims and there are wild animals. Victims think that they are wounded because they were terribly treated. Wild animals think that life is hard and sometimes you don’t get out of the way fast enough. There is a basic acceptance of brutality that I can work with. I don’t have a lot of patience for victims. Victims seem to think that the world is basically a just place so why were they treated badly—it’s not fair!

I have never had someone who was black hear about my life and tell me, “You should be dead.” That has only come from white people. Only white people seem to think that the indignity of what I experienced is such that I simply should not keep going. People of other races nod and say that shit happens. Now what am I going to do?

It’s a very complicated intersection of race and gender and social class that drives my anger. I’m tired of being treated like a delicate wilting flower. I’m tired of being told that I should not survive what happened to me. I should lay down and die. I should shut up. I shouldn’t offend people. I should accept my place in the pecking order and stop being angry about it. There isn’t a point. Actually there is a lot of point. I’m glad I have enough anger to walk away from tense interactions more determined that these fuckwads are not going to kill me. They don’t get to win.

Sometimes I’m angry with people I don’t need to be angry with. That is unfortunate. But it’s life. Sorry. I apologize a lot. I think I’m quite the sorry individual. And that is why I am so angry. I believe I am low status. Despite all kinds of markers in my life that might indicate otherwise. I am completely convinced that there isn’t a lot of point in me continuing to waste oxygen. Ok, at this point someone has to raise my children but wouldn’t they be better off with someone who was less disgusting? Someone who was more appropriate?

I think a lot of this anger is all self-directed. Why can’t I be what I see in my head? Why can’t I be just a good upstanding citizen? Why do I have to fight all the damn time? Why do I have to argue? Why do I have to deal with men telling me that I am willfully blind if I do not see the world exactly as they do? I don’t think I am the blind one. But I seem to have bought into the idea that I am less than them. And I hate them for it.

Status

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I finally found one of the threads in my brain I’ve been trying to turn into a full tapestry. Let’s see how this goes.

How much do other people think about status? I think about it a lot. I think about who has it and why. Status is far more important than people want to admit in pretty much every area of life. Dancers try to tell me they aren’t status whores but they have spent many thousands of dollars on costumes to be impressive. Really?

I’m status obsessed. I can say it out loud as well as in writing. I think about the potential status repercussions for my actions. I like to toil in isolation and show up with something cool. I don’t like being seen sucking. If I can’t do that, well, I guess I don’t need to come out of isolation.

I’m a weird place socially. I am not present in any community enough to be an Alpha. I know it. I accept it. I don’t really want to be a leader. It’s a lot of pressure. But I’m not really a group member. I suck at that. My experience of being part of the hierarchy is that I have to be on the bottom and shut my fucking mouth about it.

I re-watched the movie Whale Rider recently. The little girl was explicitly told she had to sit in the back and not participate while the boys were trained. Obviously she wasn’t as good as them. They had dicks. They are better.

That was really and truly how my childhood was oriented. If someone had a penis and he wanted to be “right” you had to let him. I certainly went off and lived that experience again with Tom. I don’t do that any more. I argue with Noah. I am kind of an asshole when I am right. I have a lot of years of bitterness around being told I am wrong. It’s not fair to Noah. He thinks it is a small sin in the scheme of things. I have gotten much more polite over the years.

Noah and I have long, complicated conversations about status. In terms of income we are in the top 10% of the country. In the bay area we are fairly median. We consciously choose to live in a smaller, cheaper house than most of our friends want to live in. Noah deals with a long commute so that he doesn’t have to spend way more money on a mortgage. This was what he could afford to buy ten years ago. I’m told we should upgrade now. My thought is, “Nah, I can remodel when the mortgage is paid off.” I won’t be able to buy a house that feels perfect. I’ll have to change it too. Why not just put all the effort into this house? Why leave my garden? I’ve done a lot of work here. This is my piece of dirt. I have changed it.

Because where I live is rather low status.

People snicker occasionally. You live in Fremont? I don’t really understand the sneering. Mother fucker my family is from Bakersfield. This is a step up. I promise. It helps that even my neighbors think we are on the low end of things. We don’t spend money in flashy ways. I think a month-long trip to Europe is a high status thing to do. I’d rather do that than spend more money on rent.

Noah was talking to me about how people want to be able to identify very high status people and very low status people and they don’t really want to think about the bits in the middle. That’s sticky. I’m in the middle these days. I have been on the bottom. I know very well what it feels like to be looked at and judged to be less of a worthy person just because of the things you don’t have. The rest of my family has standard poor-person-values in terms of wanting status symbols. You may live in a roach infested dump but damnit you have expensive shoes. Or a big car. Or something. I don’t want to have. I want to do.

Most of the people who inhabit my world are fairly bright. I know a lot of ivy-league-educated people. I live in that kind of place. I always know I am not one of them. I know that I am a social climber. I know that I really belong on the lower end of societies scale on most things. I spend my time around people who are demonstrably higher status than me wondering when they will look down on me. I didn’t go to CMU or Stanford or MIT or… They still talk about it all the time. Clearly it is a big part of their self-perceived status. If it is such a demonstrably large part of their perceived status it isn’t much of a jump to think that they therefore judge other people on the same criterion. All I have to say is that my university was named for a city when I went there. Now it’s just “East Bay”. Woo. That’s pride to have. Even the school isn’t proud of being in Hayward. Let’s try to pretend we have some relevance compared to places like Berkeley. We’re part of the bay area too! Ugh.

I forget that the ivy league educated people aren’t any smarter than I am. I feel intimidated by them. I never even took trigonometry. Obviously I am as stupid as a rock. At least that is the attitude the geeks have. In their little status hierarchy I am extremely low status.

I think I married Noah because, near as I can tell, he has a higher opinion of my status than anyone else. Even before marrying me. He thought my experiences and strengths add up to a person of considerable value. I think he married me because I look at him and see very high status. I can’t believe someone like him would want someone like me.

I crawled out of the gutter. I come from uneducated people with no work ethic to speak of. I come from drug abuse, alcoholism, and heinous abuse of various flavors. It feels like I am an untouchable. How could a trust fund baby from an ivy league see anything worth having? Status is a complicated thing. If you are sufficiently mobile you can trick people into only seeing your current life situation. If you do that then you can have some degree of social mobility in the middle. You will never be high status that way. Such assignments carry longer term consequences. They are for people who are fairly consistent in their life. You can carry low status with you. I feel like I am trying to outrun mine.

How much do I have to do? How much do I have to accomplish? What do I have to learn? What do I have to do to throw of the stink of being low status? I don’t know. These days it seems like the stench is only in my own mind. I have managed to learn how to pass. People don’t question me about my status unless I tell them I am white trash. Maybe that is why I do. I’m fucking tired of how these middle status people don’t want to honestly talk about what that means.

I’m in the middle. Probably lower than you. And sometimes I can’t help myself but I hate you for it.

anxiety purge

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Living with Noah has changed how I think about computers. I don’t think of them as magic anymore. I think about them as the result of a large set of mathematical equations. I’m getting closer and closer to being interested in thinking about that. Right now my brain is pretty full.

I’ve been thinking about what the gardening represents for me. It’s a combination of learning biology, which feels like an intimidating “science” thing for me, and learning how to do manual labor. I haven’t done this sort of physical movement much in my life. Uhm. It’s hard. I feel like a tremendous loser because it is so hard. A lot of the time I feel frustrated and scared because I don’t even know how I should begin. I feel like I am doing it all wrong. I lost two plants this year. Well, I wanted a place to put yellow roses any way. Noah’s mother sent me $75 as a congratulations for finishing my book. I want to buy yellow roses with that money. It will make me happy. It will make me think of her gratefully when I am outside of my house. It will give me a reason to think of her positively.

I’m not going to have a relationship with Noah’s mother. Not really. Noah totally has an Oedipal Complex because he went off and married his mother. When he talks about his childhood it sounds like something I could easily do if I didn’t deal with my mental health issues. It sounds like it is hard to be his mom. Being in her head must hurt. She feels a powerful fear all of the time. I can understand that. I can’t have a relationship with that. I have too much fear as well. Neither of us has the ability to make the connection.

The one time I went out to meet his family his mother spent three hours telling Noah how inappropriate I was. We were already married. I am poor white trash and his mama knows it. We will never have a relationship. I was out fucking every kid in the trailer park when I was young. They don’t like my kind where his family comes from. Really, what mother wants a girl like that for her son?

So his mother and I will never have a relationship. There is too much fear between us. Too much judgment. Too much crazy. We are both wounded animals. I don’t know what wounded her and I really can’t care. I’m too busy tending my own wounds. But I want to plant yellow roses in my yard and think of my mother in law in Texas sending me a very lovely gift.

I hate the color yellow. I have since I was a kid. I had a yellow dress and yellow earrings and a yellow headband and my mama told me, “Oh God. You’re just like your father. You like yellow. Ew. That’s his favorite color.” I have had a hard time with yellow since. Occasionally I get yellow clothing as hand-me-downs.

I stopped dressing in hand-me-downs when I had kids. No one gave me adult sized clothes any more. Now I buy them. It’s weird. I feel like I am supposed to develop “taste” and I don’t know what that even means. I still want to dress like Punky Brewster. I want to go shopping each time and buy something weird and colorful and end up just… not… owning neutrals. I’ll look weird. That will be ok.

But it isn’t. Because I’m ugly and my mama dresses me funny. I was told that over and over and over and over.

Today isn’t shaping up so good. I have a lot of insecurities. It’s hard to access them one at a time. They are all interconnected. Why am I so afraid of rejection? Why can’t I let that woman be part of the park group? Because I can’t be near someone who is going to send of pot shots. I just fucking can’t. I don’t want positive comments from an insincere person. I want to be invisible. I’m really not invisible. I don’t want to become invisible so that I avoid comments.

I know how to dress in ways that will not attract attention. I’ve been doing it for a while. I wasn’t ok with that whole “I can touch you because you are pregnant” thing. So I can dress in ways that don’t attract notice. Why should I have to? Because I don’t want people to comment on me. But I like it. Oh fuck.

I don’t want to have to think about how my actions are going to effect someone else. I want to just do what I like. When I know I am going to be around someone who is quite happy to be vicious and spiteful in my direction I am immediately hypervigilant and I have to think about every fucking aspect of this interaction from what I wear to what I say. I pick my kids clothes out. They are neutral and subdued. Gender neutral, even.

My kids pick their own clothes out 99% of the time. They are not remotely subdued or gender neutral. They both like dresses in neon shades of pink. I think it is hilarious given that Shanna didn’t have them when she was smaller. I only had boy hand me downs for a long time.

I always liked wearing bright colors. I’ve always liked the casual, easy, positive interactions I get with value neutral people in public when I dress the way I like. I don’t like comments from people I know. I don’t want to have to store up in my head that they said something nice to me now I am expected to return the favor and next time I should probably start the nice exchange and. No. Just no. I can’t. I have no fucking interest in getting on the manners bandwagon at this stage of my life. I have to stay here. My kids get to grow up in one place.

It is challenging to manage my emotional needs as my relationships get longer and longer. I have to not expect anything from people in order to continue to know them over time. It’s a very hard line for me. If we are doing an activity together and have no outside connection it is easy. I have no expectations of people I see at an event. They don’t owe me a smile or a conversation. Friends are hard for me.

It is hard having people visit my house. Part of the reason I stress about housework is because I want to have a house that is “company ready” all the time. Not for them, exactly. My friends don’t give a shit. I’ve seen their houses. When my house is “messy” it’s really not bad.

My friends are busy. They have shit to do. They hold down jobs. They have vibrant social lives. I uhhh hang out in my house with my kids. We do go places. But it goes in waves and it’s rarely for more than four or five hours. We are here a lot. If I leave the house messy then I have to live in that mess. I have to work and think in that mess. I find it horribly distracting. I don’t go to Noah’s job and pick up all the stuff on peoples’ desks and throw it in the air. That would make doing actual work hard.

So I sit here and think. What is my job here? To educate my children. Basically. What do I want to educate them in? I want them to have the ability to have any kind of life they want to have. That means they need to start off in a whole lot of directions at once. Sure, we can do frilly princess and makeup. Her best (girl) friend is always the prince. They think role is about personal preference not about gender identity. That’s fucking awesome. But I’m not trying to bring up a little gender queer so I can have street cred in those communities. I need to not be invested in any results.

I’m teaching the kids that your body has to be active if you want to engage in a lot of activities. I want us to go work on farms for a year. It would not be a kindness to bring the average kid around here to a rural farm where they don’t speak the language. We have to be ready. We have to think about this in advance. What will that mean for our bodies? We should probably find a way to actually get ready. Which means that step one is for me to learn a whole lot more about gardening. Which is intimidating.

If you hadn’t noticed I’m flooded with a lot of stress chemicals. Being in that state makes it harder to learn. This is a lot of how I live my life. But I really want to do this. I don’t want to fail. I want to be able to be a productive and useful person on a farm. It’s important to me. When people talk about their “roots” well, working on a farm is part of most of our roots. You may have to go back a bit, but really. People have to eat. Food has to be provided.

I didn’t think about it very much until I had kids. I didn’t think hard about where my food came from. When I look at their bodies I want to give them food that will help them grow up as strong as possible. I want them to be able to handle anything that life gives them. I won’t be able to protect them forever. I have to do what I can now.

I don’t understand how blasé other people seem to feel about parenting. When I talk about feeling insecure or doubting myself people quickly tell me they don’t feel insecure. They must be lying. I can’t be the only insecure person. Give me a break.

I talked about feeling kind of insecure about unschooling the kids. I’m going to spend a lot of time revisiting that concept. I’m going to think hard about what that means to me. “Back in the day” people raised their children to be just like them. Uhm. I don’t want to raise my kids to be just like me, thanks. I want my children to live with fear like I do. Bad things happen. Then you move on. Normal people don’t get caught in these loop tapes. Normal people have some normal to fall back on. Some sense of themselves that was formed during the long stretches of their lives without trauma. Depending on how you think about consensual bdsm I haven’t had a period of my life without traumatic events. Hell, even having my second kid almost killed me. Woo.

I live in stress chemicals. They are all I know. I’m trying very hard not to teach that. The problem is, living in stress chemicals makes it hard to learn. All I am doing with my life right now is helping my kids prepare for life.

So I was looking at the California Content Standards for grade K. If I’m going to prepare her for being part of this society part of that includes having a vaguely similar knowledge base with her peers so that if anything happens she can transition back into a schooling environment. Things happen. I could have to work some day. Within the next two years (because she isn’t old enough for kindergarten anyway) she has to learn hygiene and how to stand in line. She’s otherwise pretty much there on the kindergarten standards for my subject. She has letters, morphemes, basic introduction to syntax, grammar… Math she isn’t quite there yet on all of it. She’s halfway there with two years to go. Obviously I have not failed her horribly so far.

Part of my weird social anxiety is that I really like being a teacher. That feels good to me. I don’t like being didactic with peers so I feel like I have nothing to say. I don’t know how to have conversations among peers. I can be a student or a teacher. That was, really, the primary positive relationships I had. That was my “normal” period that could be good. I had a lot of teachers who liked me. I had a lot of teachers who hated me.

There is a feeling I have when teaching. I am allowed to have intense bonding conversations within that format. I know there is a time limit on it. I know that the exchange is limited to what we are doing. I have no further expectations.

I get into a lot of trouble when I have expectations of people. I have to keep them further out at arms length. I can’t handle being told “no”. So I just can’t ask. I think the intensity with which I feel this is somewhat higher than average but there is a constant component of it in my head. I have to keep in mind that I can’t ask people for things. If they freely want to give me something I can take it, but I can’t ask. It’s hard to ask people to come over for this reason. I wouldn’t want to insult something I have worked so hard for by having a messy house. I have no idea why I have picked this standard of measurement because I am otherwise a specifically crappy host.

I don’t want my house to broadcast my social class. I want people to be continually surprised when I talk about how bad it was. That means I am living right. In my head I can’t separate out the messy house from the overall neglect and abuse and poverty. In my experience my friends who have decidedly messy houses have issues with their mental health and/or control. That’s not a nasty statement. *wave hand in friendly way* Whether people want to admit it or not, your perceived social class has distinct influence on your life. I am a stay at home mom. If I didn’t clean my house that would have social class implications. There is still a very strong element of “What the hell do stay at home moms do anyway?”

The point here is to teach them to be functional adult. If you have your house so messy that you constantly have to buy new things to replace things you have lying around somewhere and you don’t have the money to really support this behavior then you aren’t functional. That’s broken. It’s not a huge broken in the scheme of things but it’s a behavior I specifically don’t want to model or teach. We don’t have the money to be callous with our things. We can’t just go out and replace things right now. I mean we have money in savings but we don’t have any spare money in our set budget. It is not a responsible or mature decision to be callous with our things. We don’t have extra any more.

When you live in a messy house you break things and lose things. Ask me how I know. I don’t want to teach that. I really don’t. That means modeling doing things differently and not being a preachy asshole about it.

Now I’m just ranting. Ugh. My stomach hurts. Time to go look for food.

Learning and shame

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Therapy was unusual last night in some awesome ways. I showed up half an hour early because I wasn’t sure about public transit to the new location and the appointment before me cancelled so she was just sitting around. We could have started early but instead she decided to pick my brain. She moonlights as a guidance counselor at a middle school. The school is more than 60% black and over 30% latino. They have some problems. I don’t think I can explain how good it felt to talk to her about how to handle these children. She is the “emergency” therapist who sees the kids who are in serious crisis Right Now. I had a lot to say. It was interesting how the end of the conversation was quite sad. We had to plainly discuss the fact that there ARE things that can be done for these kids, but how much time and energy do you have? What are the things that you can really sustain doing? It’s hard to evaluate. She took notes on the things I said. I felt so respected. She told me that she is going to strongly consider how she can get me up there to talk to her really at risk kids. She thinks it will be good for them to hear a white person with my history because they don’t believe a white person can understand. I used the fuck out of that misperception when I was teaching. You can’t buy tools as handy as that.

I told her about what an asshole I am being to a friend who is having issues with the public education system. I told her I don’t understand why I still have friends. This directly linked into a lot of my attitudes about education and child rearing which ties into a lot of my feelings about having less worth in society because my earning potential is really quite low. Being a stay at home mom is not a very respected position. Oh well.

We talked about my frustration and confusion that Americans don’t seem to be training their children to be adults. They prepare the kid for preschool so the kid can be prepared for kindergarden so the kid can be prepared for the lower grades, then middle school, then high school, then college, then graduate school, then a PhD program, then a postdoctoral… I suppose we should all be college professors? I suppose some people transition into working in industry. Many companies run a lot like schools. It’s odd. Outside of academia I have worked in food service. I worked in the library and the theatre in college. I have taught. Really those have been my jobs. I feed people and help them learn. I like it–mostly.

I feel a lot of uncertainty about the future. I’m sadly aware that many of the people who are alive and making decisions now care very little about the long-term consequences of what we are doing as a society. I feel like it is ridiculously important that my kids understand that we are animals that require food. What are all the steps involved in arranging for adequate, constant food. My children will probably never know food uncertainty. What can they learn and figure out about how to help other people have the same life experience? What problems are going to crop up in our food supply? I’m quite nervous about this. I want my children to be incredibly practical. One of the up-sides of doing all these home improvement projects by myself with the kids is they are seeing how to do these tasks. Very soon they will be learning how to do them.

I also think my children will need to know how to program. I suspect that will be a mandatory skill for people who want serious job prospects in the future. I want my children to have options. I want them to feel like they are prepared to take the world by storm when they are adults. I want them to know so many things that they feel completely competent to go learn whatever they need but don’t yet know. I want them to see themselves as strong and able to assimilate new information.

I struggle with learning a lot of things. I don’t have the best memory. I read extremely quickly and I can synthesize ideas quickly but I forget things. That’s kind of a problem. I hope my kids get Noah’s memory.

My therapist and I talked extensively about how I feel like the next fifteen years are a gift. I have always wanted to go learn things but I didn’t want to go alone. Soon I will be able to go to dance events with my kids. Soon I will be able to do martial arts classes with my kids. I already practice languages with my kids. I’m discovering that I remember more Spanish than I think. I’m not as incompetent as I assume. It’s nice. I have these wonderful companions to learn with.

Shanna and Calli don’t think I am lame for how little skill I have at gardening. I feel really pretty silly for the intensity of my emotions around gardening. I grew up with people who had no respect for farming as a career and as a result they tried hard to never touch anything growing. My family felt they “got off the farm” and they had no interest in looking back. My family hasn’t farmed in at least three generations on all sides. Why is there so much hostility? Such disdain? We don’t garden.

Only I’m going to have this house paid off in another decade or so and I’m going to be stuck looking out that back window for all the remaining years of my life. I’d like it to be pretty. I feel kind of vain and silly about that. I would like to look at a colorful, interesting yard. I want it so bad I ache with wanting. I want to feel like a stupid, incompetent, worthless person still gets to look at something nice because I have the physical ability to create it.

It’s always harder than I think. I forget to water. I don’t have good weeding technique. I would starve to death if I had to take care of a whole field in order to eat. I feel ashamed of that. I feel weirdly pathetic because I can’t figure out the physical motion that will allow me to do this work quickly. It’s hard. I don’t know what I can do without damaging the plants I want to keep. I’m trying things and experimenting. It’s a slow process.

When I can remove my idiotic self-deprecation from this thought process I find it really kind of wonderful that I am learning all of these things and talking them through with my kids. Calli is too young to really understand yet, but Shanna is picking things up. I am really moving at about the right speed for Shanna. I feel ponderously slow and incompetent. Really I’m just moving at four year old speed. If I went faster she would feel left out. I wouldn’t want to outpace my companion.

It’s a lot of how I think about running. How do you find a pace for running with other people? I worry about it. I have several upcoming opportunities for running with friends. Some who are far more experienced runners than me and at least one who runs less than me. I’m fucking thrilled by the idea of running with someone who runs less than me. I won’t feel like I am slowing her down. I won’t have to feel embarrassed when I need to walk. I’m scared of running with people who are honest to dawg athletes. Standing near them makes me feel like my low status in their world is blinking in neon over my head. LOSER WHO CAN BARELY RUN. Physical Education classes were never kind to me.

It was an odd experience to look around the park on Tuesday and realize that whereas the home school kids will have various “coaches” they won’t have a PE teacher. If they do that position will fall to me. What athletic activities do I think my kids should know how to do? I have to figure out how to teach them or arrange to have someone else teach them. I think I should buy a small soccer ball and bring it. I feel odd about that. I want them to love things I don’t love. I want them to have access to ideas and hobbies I am not actually into.

This was one thing that surprised my therapist last night: how focused I am on trying to figure out what I don’t know that I should be teaching my kids. I feel intense pressure to work constantly on dealing with the extent and damage of my ignorance. I feel crippled by the extent and volume of my ignorance. I am not trying to be a know-it-all. I’m trying to be an actual competent person. The problem is that I value an odd combination of competences. I am extremely specific in what I care about and I totally ignore things I don’t understand or see value in. That’s kind of a problem. I simply can’t limit my children due to my biases. I want them to be competent adults. I want to know in twenty-five years that I have loosed two extremely fucking competent women on the world and they are off building and learning things I can’t wrap my mind around. They took the genesis of information I gave them and went off to do things I can’t understand.

I like being a jill of all trades. I don’t really aspire to master many topics. I’m a generalist. I like and highly value generalists. But like many people like me I feel like my lack of mastery means I am low in status. I’m not the best at basically any task. I notice and have a hard time with that emotionally. I don’t do competitive things because I can’t handle the fact that I’m never fucking going to be first. Do you know what second place is? The first fucking loser. I cried watching people pass me during the half marathon. I’m an idiot.

I want my kids to either be such prolific generalists that they terrify people or able to become masters in something. Other than talking to abused kids, which really… I’m awesome at that, I don’t think I will attain mastery of any subjects in this lifetime. That really kind of bothers me. I’m trying to gain peace with the idea that I will never really take anything to eleven. I will never be the best. Not everyone gets to be. lame.

My wonderful daughter just wandered out to sit on my lap. Today we are going to the redwoods to cut down trees so I can build her a play house. I should really take pictures of this process. I have a vision in my head. I know what I am going to do. It’s going to be really neat. You’ll see. I’m good at taking pictures in my head and turning out a decent approximation. Heck, look at my daughters. This looks like my picture in my head of a family. We are kind to each other. Maybe I do have a reality distortion field.

Trying to learn what my needs are.

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Running in the morning is awesome now that there is pretty close to full light by six. I didn’t cry today. Right now I am flirting hard with hitting 5.5 mph as my average. Not quite there, but close. I have just over five months to the marathon. Eek. I wonder how fast I will be then. Not that speed is the point. But this is really interesting. This running business is several journeys all in one. My body is changing shape again. Still? Other people hit “stable weights” and I never have. I rarely spend more than six months in a given shape. It’s different this time because I eat any and everything I want. I haven’t tracked in a few days because I haven’t been on the computer much. Right now I have other things to think about.

For the past few days we have been choosing to not use any lights. At 6pm I get up and quickly tidy up the house and clean the kitchen so breakfast will be easy to make in a mostly dark kitchen. Noah and I both actively want more sleep and more sex in our lives. This seems to be the easiest way to manage that shift right now. We put the kids to bed at eight and then have the rest of the night to lie in bed and talk until we figure out if it is a sex night or not. That works better than going to bed at ten or eleven. I’m less likely to be hostile to his advances because can’t he tell I am fucking exhausted?! I’m just less tired at eight.

Sex is such an interesting journey. I’ve been having intercourse (by choice) for more than eighteen years now. It has only been fairly recently that I no longer hurt most of the time. I started out thinking it was supposed to hurt. It was supposed to be agonizingly painful and you were supposed to take that in order to please someone else. You have to be a masochist to enjoy sex. I didn’t use such language when I was significantly younger, but that is what I was doing. I feel like I am no longer interested in being that kind of masochist. Most people never do it at all so it probably seems weird that it is hard for me to stop. The thing is, I wasn’t doing “scenes” with people. I wasn’t doing SSC (safe/sane/consensual) bdsm per se. Sex hurt and I didn’t know how to deal with that. So I let people hurt me. Mostly they didn’t even know because I couldn’t tell them. I had no language. I didn’t understand what I was doing. I never felt safe saying, “Uhm, this is hurting and I wish it wouldn’t”. I still have trouble telling Noah. But he has mostly learned the signs. And he has mostly started stopping on his own. I feel such an out pouring of love for Noah that I feel like I will drown in it.

Noah cares if I am in pain. He will take active steps to stop hurting me. That makes me cry. It is probably true that other people have done it as well, but not like Noah. Certainly not with sex. Noah has paid attention to me for years he can tell when his touch is good and when it hurts by watching me. He modifies his behavior based on my reactions. This feels miraculous. This feels like an unlooked-for-gift. I didn’t believe anyone would ever give a shit.

As life goes on I hold it close to my heart that I have had sex with significantly more people than average. I have given lots and lots and lots of people the chance to be nice to me. Noah has chosen to learn how to be nice to me. I want to be monogamous because I don’t want to go back to believing that sex just hurts and it does with everyone but Noah. For one big thing, condoms suck. That’s no one else’s fault. And bareback sex with people other than Noah feels really emotionally bad and scary to me. I don’t want to feel good that way. It makes me feel disgusting inside. Because no one else is going to bother to pay attention to me the way Noah does. I will always be hiding myself. I don’t want to share my body that way with someone I am not genuinely close to. I didn’t understand what that meant before I tried it, getting close to someone that is.

Noah treats me like I am actually important. Like my needs and wants matter. Other people want me to meet their needs and wants. . . . . . Yeah. Don’t care.

It feels like my “to give to” list is full. Shanna and Calli need so much from me that I really just physically can not care what any other adults need. Forget them. I’m busy. They need to deal with their own stuff. They are big kids now. Dating is about filling needs. Seriously ongoing relationships have to involve a balance of meeting needs. I can’t do it. I am a giant cavernous hole of need. I don’t have a god damn thing to give.

It’s interesting figuring out sex with Noah. He has needs. I have needs I didn’t know I had. I need to not be in pain. I need to feel physically comfortable. I need to feel respected. I need to feel cared for. I haven’t felt these feelings during most of my sexual life. I won’t say that I have been in pain every time, because that is hyperbole, but I have probably experienced pain significantly above 50% of the times I have had sex in my life. At least half the time. And it tends to go in batches where it will be just screamingly awful for weeks (I used to get raging yeast infections that have never been treated in my life) and then it will be fine for a couple of weeks.

My diet is radically different from what I ate as a child and young adult. I don’t get yeast infections any more. Sex doesn’t hurt as much. We will never use condoms again. That has probably played the biggest part in lessoning how much pain sex has caused, honestly. And I am firmly in the camp that says the foreskin is important to sex. Unprotected sex with circumcised men is far more painful to me than sex with an intact man. Yeah, multiple samples of each. I wasn’t very smart when I was younger. Or older. Ha.

All of this feels important. Not to anyone but me, of course, but I need to understand how my body works. I need to actually know what it is like to feel good in my body. I have to not mask my body sensations with pills. I don’t want to get up every day and take caffeine (I don’t drink coffee so instead we have these mints–100 mg of caffeine. That’ll wake you up.) and then have a sleeping pill before bed. I don’t want to wince every time I sit down because sex tore the hell out of me last night. I want to wake up in the morning glad to be in my body.

I want to be touched in ways that feel good instead of ways that hurt me. I want that to be a fucking priority in the lives of the people around me. I can’t believe how intensely I need this. And he just does it. He tries so hard. He pulls back if I wince. He stops. He will stop having sex and just hold me if I stop responding. He doesn’t ignore me and get himself off. I am not a hole any more. It’s really weird.

The thing is I don’t think that any of my former partners would be happy with hearing me say that they treated me that way. Not really. I haven’t had that many one night stands. I tend to have sex with people several times. I tend to be friends with them before and after. I don’t think they would feel good about treating me that way. Some like to pretend but they don’t really think of me that way. Not very many men are comfortable thinking about the fact that they are capable of behaving in a way that will allow a woman to feel that way. Notice the careful language in that sentence? I ain’t accusing anyone of anything. So no panties in a twist.

I don’t think Dan believes he is a rapist. But if you have sex with an unconscious girl it’s rape. Someone cannot consent if they are not awake. Even if they want to have sex with you when they are awake it isn’t the kind of thing that is permanently transferable. Consent has to be actively given or it doesn’t exist. If I don’t have the option of saying “no” then I can’t actually say “yes”.

That is where a great deal of my problems have happened during sex. I don’t feel like I can say no. I was conditioned to sit still and not respond while enduring sexual pain. It’s pretty crazy to think about. I watch my daughters now and I think about it. I think very hard about what I want them to experience in this lifetime. What do I want them to be conditioned to expect from life?

I was conditioned to have sex with as many emotionally distant men as possible. Woo.

I want to know in the core of my being that I will never ever let someone who is not close to me emotionally into my body. My body deserves better treatment than it has been given. I want to set the bar so high that Noah really is the only person who will ever be part of me again. I know this is something that other people take for granted.

I’m afraid that I will cheat. I’m afraid that I will be afraid to say “no”. I’m afraid that I will hide behind my long-standing excuse of being crazy and impulsive and self-destructive. I’m afraid of being the person I was conditioned to be. I don’t want to try to set personal “hit this number” goals in my head. Because I totally would. I’m a tiny tiny bit miffed I didn’t get my “triple digit party” like I was promised. (A close friend I lived with told me she would do it. I actively discouraged it at the time because I felt uncomfortable but now I kind of wish it had happened. I am lame like that.)

Not every person who is nonmonogamous is a slut. But I am. I don’t want to model that for my children. What do I want to model?

Ack. The dryer repairman will be here in ten minutes. I’ve never been the first visit on a day before. Time to go.

Food comes from a can

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Today was the kind of “running” day where I mostly walk. I try to consciously go slower when I am crying. I don’t want to trip and injure myself. Today I thought about my mother. I thought about the way Shanna begs me to never leave her. Maybe she will go to college, but she plans to come right back and “take care of me”.

I remember promising my mother that once I was an adult her life would be better. I could help. Things would be better. I suppose that depends on what you mean by “better”. My life is better. I have no idea how her life is going. I have no idea. I wonder if she is proud of me. I wonder if she knows that I grew up into a strong, good person. I wonder if she is glad that I can defend myself now and I can stop being a victim. Somehow I doubt it.

I don’t know how to reconcile in my head that my mother, the person who was responsible for taking care of me when I was helpless, prefers that I not grow up to be strong enough to defend myself. She thinks I should be defenseless. At least within the family. Should I fuck my sister too so she can finish moving through our family? Maybe she isn’t bi. Maybe I should just be fucking my sister’s boyfriends. They all tried. They tried long before I hit adult height. Watching my kids is hard. I’m not sure how to explain this.

I want my kids to travel so much because I want them to actually see how different the world is from their home. I mean the whole bay area. It’s fairly safe here. We have managed to create this little bubble where we are safe from the natural world and even the other humans aren’t that dangerous. The police are far more dangerous to us than our neighbors because I take my kids to protests. Welcome to modern America. My kids are white, upper middle class, and female. Other than sexual assault, which won’t fucking happen on my watch, my kids don’t really have much to fear. Cars. Abstract concepts. Stories. The unknown.

I want my kids to understand what it means to survive. I feel like a privileged asshole. I want to take my kids to other countries so they can play tourist on actual hard lives. I want them to not have to have hard lives but still understand the spectrum. Me telling them stories and showing them pictures isn’t good enough.

I want to know what it feels like, as a rational adult, to have to eat what food is put in front of me or go hungry. I want to change how I feel about this. I’m terrified that it means learning to eat seafood. The texture fucking bothers me. I don’t want to be that American. I don’t want to feel like a snob. I don’t want to deal with that rejection pattern. I don’t want to go to other countries and come home to hide in my house and declare that every one every where in the world dislikes me. I’m too difficult. I shouldn’t bother trying to do anything with my life. Obviously I suck. I can totally see me doing that. I could be that asshole.

The problem is, that means I didn’t really survive. That means I died a long time ago and there is nothing left in me. Because it’s just not true that I am disliked and reviled.

I am thought about.

If that is happening, and a lot of it is positive, that means maybe I’m not too hard. It’s ok to be different. It’s ok to have preferences. But when I am imposing on people I need to learn how to accept with gratitude what people choose to give me. My needs are my own to meet. I need to not act like other people are responsible for meeting them. It’s my problem. If the best I can do is a fish and rice at a given meal I need to eat the fucking fish and smile.

I want that for my kids. I want to show them what that is like. I remember my mother and feel sad and anxious. Food was so hard for me as a kid. It was bad. As an adult I’ll say that my mother was a fairly bad cook but everyone we knew loved her food. That makes me wonder. My family has all gotten to the point of heating up preseasoned food at every meal. We didn’t eat produce, and certainly not good produce.

I feel like my life is consumed with my body lately. I am trying to learn how to meet my needs. I wasn’t taught. I wasn’t taught to check in on my body and see how different parts of me felt. I was taught to ignore my body. My body wasn’t important. Anyone was allowed to do anything they wanted to my body and I was expected to just accept it. Food was what I could control.

I don’t think I’ve ever thought of it that way before.

My food life is unlike any that I have ever experienced before. Since I had kids I have radically changed how I eat. But I’m not interested in getting to a point where I’m supporting my family on my farming efforts in my backyard. Just to put a scope on this. I recently read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and all I have to say is sweet sunny Jesus NO. I felt anxious pressure reading the book. I’m an idiot. She grew up farming and married someone with a similar background. That’s just not something I will ever try.

So that leaves me in a weird position of feeling like I don’t know what I want to accomplish. I swear to G-d this post has a cohesive theme. I have to actively decide which of my behaviors in life are about what I was taught to do by my mama and which things are right for me. I also need to think about what is right for the other people in my family. We all have different needs. I wasn’t taught to think about people that way. I’m training for a marathon. My body is going to have different needs than the other members of my family. Why do I plan to feed us all exactly the same way? Because when I try to do that I end up snacking in the garage.

I resist eating the food in the house. I don’t actually like the crap I make my kids eat. I really honestly think vegetables and fruit are pretty gross. I only like the heavily processed with corn syrup version of fruit because that is what my mama likes. I don’t really want to teach my kids to be like my mother. Her version of surviving looks a lot like death to me.

I have less than eight years to really get my shit together so that I can take my kids around the world to find out how other people live. My kids will find out what it means to have to work in order to eat. I will find out what it is like to have to work in order to eat. I want to show up and not feel ignorant as a pig. I don’t want to show up ashamed of myself for my ignorance. But neither do I want to show up and act like all they need is a honky.

I want to feel like the labor of my body and the work of my mind has some value. I can accomplish things. I can work. I am not fucking useless. I try not to bullshit myself. I am not going to learn what it is like to have to do manual labor to survive. That is the understanding of a lifetime of work I have not had and won’t have. I feel weird about that. It is hard to keep in mind. I can’t keep my yard weeded–yet. I think that is probably what I have eight years to build towards. I need to be able to physically do all of the labor in my yard. I probably should get a bit more ambitious in that department. I want to be able to do farm labor. At the moment I would be annoying and useless.

In eight years I will still be very ignorant. I will be moving to different climates. I will be moving to different plants. I will know nothing. All I will be able to do is go out and try over and over and be publicly bad and I will probably be laughed at. I need to have that experience as a rational adult. I need to learn to not break down in tears just because people are laughing at me.

For my mother food comes from the freezer and cans. I was not taught how to cook food. I have a hard time eating seasonally. For many seasons of the year there aren’t very many products I recognize as food. I’ve learned to shut up about this and eat what is put in front of me.

I need to learn how to eat more food. I want my kids to have more options than me. I want them to develop a broad palate so that we can be polite guests who do farm work in exchange for being allowed to learn about people. We can be company for a while. We should be polite, grateful guests. That is hard to think about.

I have to believe my labor is such that it is worth putting up with my company. I want to have something to talk about other than what a sad terrible life I have had. I want to have something to talk about other than what a devoted slave I was. I want to have something to talk about how much I enjoyed that short stint of teaching. I want to talk about something other than just being a mother.

What else am I? Food is going to be a big part of this journey. I want to find out where food comes from. I want to teach my daughters where food comes from and I feel ashamed of myself for knowing so little. I think food comes from cans.

We should be learning languages. I suppose that means picking areas already. Oh goodness.

I cry when I run because I wonder if my mother will feel proud when she hears about me some day. This valley isn’t that big. I tremble in fear when I am in San Jose. I’m terrified of seeing her. Will I pass her in silence like somebody that I used to know? Will I introduce my kids? Will I introduce her as Vivian? I have trouble saying her name without crying. I haven’t said it much in my life. She’s my Mommy.

I do have to think about things like this. I have to decide in advance what I will do. I have to play it in my mind so that I don’t freak out. I have to decide in my head and in my heart what an appropriate adult reaction is to my children. What is it going to be like to move through the world for a whole year that I don’t have to check over my shoulder for my mother?

My mother knows where I live. I wouldn’t put it past her to show up some day. How do I want to behave? Do I want her to show up? No. Not really.

If I showed up she would pretend to be nice for a while. Then she would feel comfortable. Then she would proceed to talk about how disgusting the food is.

Learning this is too hard. I have to take feedback if I want to improve but not from her. She can never again be allowed to weigh in on any part of me. What she thinks of me is not my business. Never the less when I run I cry so hard I can barely see because I want her to be proud of me. I hope she is proud that she did manage to raise kids who can survive even if she couldn’t keep them safe.

My mother drove adult men to my house when I was a young teenager because those men wanted to have sex with me. My mother manifestly didn’t care for me. She did not teach me survival skills. She taught me skills that will kill me.

Why? Why did she do that? Is that all she knows? Was I really so hard to teach? I can’t know. I expect I was nearly as high needs as Shanna, maybe more given the abuse. Do I really want to model how my mother dealt with it? Now I understand it more. It’s complicated.

All of this is so complicated. How do I stop looking at all of life as one big mass of things that I don’t know yet and therefore I can’t know and I am trapped? When do I learn how to fail in front of other people? When will it be safe to try things in front of people without being told I am pathetic for being bad on my first try? I don’t have a safer audience than my kids. I feel bad that I don’t get to teach them very many things that I am already good at. I feel kind of sad that their entire lives will be a journey through my learning experiences.

I wish I had “become” a bit more before having kids. I wish I had been less resistant to learning. I wish I didn’t feel humiliated when I don’t know the answer. Maybe that is how my mother felt. How do I want to feel?

This is all so very complicated. And I should go in because Noah has to go to work.

You are good. You are smart. You are kind.

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Noah agreed to be married to me for better or worse. I think he might actually mean it. I think that even though I’ve been miserable and mean and sick for almost five years he shows a remarkable resiliency in cheer. All I have to do is have sex with him and he’s suddenly good to go again. It’s kind of weird. I don’t have quite the same system. I need so much support in so many areas and I am deeply ashamed of that need. I feel like my need is a sign that I am pathetic and lazy. I feel like I am a failure because I cannot completely do every thing in my life by myself. I’m a stay at home mom. I don’t have a job. All I have to do is keep the house clean, the kids fed and clothed, and at this stage… play with them. It’s not exactly hard. Right?

It’s really fucking hard because it takes so much patience. I am not a very patient person. I am a very demanding and exacting person. I don’t like delays at all. I spend most of my days wanting to bash my head through a wall as a pressure relief. Instead I take a deep breath, count down from ten silently, then I try to smile and say, “Let’s try again.” That’s my fucking job.

I have always been very clear about the fact hat I behave differently “at work” than I do “in my life”. In my life I do a lot of things I have to hide from my work. When I was teaching I was not particularly “out” about talking about my queerness or sexual history. I didn’t talk about going to raves and doing drugs on the weekends–although I did. I think that being in the closet about those things was wise. It meant that when kids started talking about things I understood the language but I wasn’t their “buddy” because I wasn’t an obvious peer. I’m not sure I am phrasing this right–I need to make my mistakes past-tense. I can’t talk about them while I’m doing them because then I get muddled up and unable to be honest about my mistakes. I know that I am doing stupid shit but I can’t admit it yet because I want to keep doing it for a while. I didn’t need to tell students I did that.

Noah came in to talk to me so whatever train of thought I had was gone. As Calli likes to say, “Whoops!” She also spreads her arms and yells, “Ta da!” I can’t wait until she can really talk. End sidebar.

And a new day dawns. I still don’t know exactly where I was going with that train of thought. I’m going to keep going instead of hitting post because I don’t get comments anyway. So what if things are long and complicated. I’m apparently just writing for me. And Noah. He talks to me about my writing. That feels like a manipulative ploy but I don’t mean it to be. People talk to me about my writing when I can get them in person. I’m not subtle in asking for feedback. I really like finding out what my writing makes people think about.

My wonderful complication was over for dinner recently and she told me that she thinks about me. It was said in the context of, “I’m glad it is ok that we don’t IM very frequently because you just know I think of you.” No, actually I didn’t know that you think about me. Wait. You think about me? Oh shit. What do you think?! When I get to that point I am trying to learn to reference something I got from Ashley Judd “ I hold that it is none of my business what people think of me.”

That’s hard for me to wrap my head around.

I was taught that it is my responsibility to influence and control what other people think of me. I should be careful what I reveal. I should tell different people different stories so that I evoke the right reactions from people. It’s a lot of why I do large information dumps on people and then run away. I believe in the core of my being that I am “doing it wrong” and I am bad for what I am doing. It is bad for me to be rude and inflict my inner stupidity on other people. No one wants to hear about how pathetic I am. No one wants to read the same whiny bullshit year after year. Grow the fuck up already. Stop being sad. But I can’t. I can’t stop. I wish I could stop. I don’t know how to stop being sad. I am sad. I just am. And while I am sad I have to make believe that I am happy and cheerful and that we live in basically a good world. That’s my job.

I need to have some place where I can say over and over again that I was hurt very badly and it still hurts. I would give anything to make this pain go away. I would give anything if I no longer needed to sit in a room by myself and cry every single day because I am so fucking sad. I cry and cry until I am dehydrated. I drink nearly a gallon of water a day. I shouldn’t be able to get dehydrated. But that pee doesn’t lie. (See, there I go with the tmi.)

It hurts. I miss my mom. I’m horrified every day because I look at Shanna and I think, “I was out having oral sex with multiple children already.” My mother didn’t keep me safe. I look at Shanna and wonder what I would be like if I had been allowed to be innocent. What would I want in life? How would I feel about the world? How would I be different? And it bothers me. It bothers me all the time.

I feel like I am a dirty, bad, mean piece of shit. I’m really glad that other people tell me, often, that they do not have that experience of me. I feel pathetic and stupid for needing to be told that. I’m told that you have to say ten nice things to balance out every bad statement to a person. That’s kind of the way it affects your sense of self.

I spent my whole childhood being told I was stupid and bad and a whore and little bitch and worthless. I’m thirty years old and I still sit alone in a room and cry about it. Because it still lives in me. I was told those things so many times that I agreed. I thought they were true. If fucking everyone tells you the same story how can you believe anything else? If it walks like a duck and it sounds like a duck and it swims like a duck? It’s probably a duck–right? If one person tells me to buy horse shoes I’m going to look at him funny. If two people tell me to buy horse shoes I’m going to think about it. If three people tell me to buy horse shoes I am going to get moving towards the store; I probably need them, right?

I spent my whole childhood being told I was stupid and bad and a whore and little bitch and worthless.

It still hurts. I’m not a fan of that old saying, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” I have healed from every broken bone I have had. My arms work fine. My hand works fine. I have been hit with sticks. I have been hit with stones. Those things heal. I can forget that kind of pain. It isn’t important. I believe I am a worthless piece of shit. I believe I am dirty and bad.

Noah gave me shampoo and conditioner for Christmas. This is kind of funny because I haven’t used such products in years. Since my hair is hella short I’ve been using them because it really doesn’t matter if my hair frizzes. I’m discovering something I had forgotten when I switched to baking soda and vinegar. It doesn’t matter how many times I “soap” my hair it always feels dirty to me. Dirty in that way that indicates “not washed”. I feel like there is no way to get the dirt and the bad off of me. It is a physical feeling. I remember my mother complaining about my hair. The only way my mother liked my hair was about an inch long so that she could ignore taking care of it. She was very resistant to me having long hair even though she complimented me on how I looked far more when I had long hair. Hair has such a weird place in my life. My mother was always thrilled when I wanted to play with her hair. Sissy loved to have her hair brushed. I don’t like having other people care for my hair because no one ever wants to be gentle enough. It hurts when other people touch my hair. My mom and sister liked it when I did their hair because I was more gentle than them. I was taught to touch my head and hair roughly. To treat it like something gross. Because I am dirty. When I switched to baking soda and vinegar I had a feeling of at peace with the feeling of my hair. It didn’t feel “clean” but it did feel soft. It’s interesting to use shampoo and conditioner again. My hair feels rough and dirty again. Specifically dirty. And I think it is making my dandruff worse. See, more tmi.

I feel stupid because I want to talk about how bad I feel about being an animal and having hair and being dirty. I need to talk about this because I don’t want to teach my daughter to feel this way. My brother is a stupid moron because he thinks the way to break behavior patterns is to not talk about them and pray they go away. Yeah. That doesn’t work. Not talking about things creates a festering wound because GUESS WHAT?! It is still a wound. It still hurts. Just not talking about it isn’t working.

I have to work very hard every day to decide what I want to teach my children because what I was taught was that I am bad, dirty, worthless, useless, and a whore. I know that I must be something else. I must be other than just what I was taught to be. Somehow I did that. How did I do it? Where did I do it? What should I do instead? I don’t know what to do. You can’t deal with a problematic behavior by just “not doing ‘x'” you have to replace ‘x’ with something. You have to have some idea of what you are moving towards. I don’t know. I don’t have very many good examples.

I don’t get to watch other parents very often. When I do I spend most of the time thinking, “Oh they do ________ better than me.” Of course this means that I offer criticisms. Because I’m like that. I expect that they are judging me so I start first. Just to get this going. I guess. I need to hear peoples criticisms of me. I suppose this is why I am asking people for feedback in person. I don’t need to hear the random criticism of people on the internet who don’t know me or what I actually do. When you only know me through my writing you are hearing a very random sampling of things from my brain. It’s a poor example of my life. That’s the joy of mental illness. I can be totally fucked up in my head but life just keeps plugging right along. I’m doing my best to be functional at my job and how that works is going to change over time. I’m trying to figure out the right way to act. I’m trying to figure out my idea of the best mother for my kids. It’s not exactly like me. I’m having a very hard time figuring out how it will interact with my sex life. We have a lock on our bedroom door.

I feel disgusting for needing sex. I am developing more of a complex as time goes by. Noah is, understandably, not thrilled. This is going to be hard to work through. For some strange reason he seems to be willing to go through this with me. I ask so much of him. Far more than I should ask. I know that it isn’t ok to need as much support as I need. That doesn’t change the fact that I need it. And he is willing to give it. He says. We’ll see. I’m so scared. I hurt so much. I need so much. I know I’m not supposed to talk about it. No. That’s not true. I’m supposed to talk about it one hour a week in a therapists office and then be all better. Right?

I hurt so much. I cry so much. I am so fucking sad. But my personal time is long over. Really I’m being kind of an asshole to Noah right now. I need to cry though. I have to. I can’t not cry today. And I don’t like doing it in front of the kids more than necessary. They will see enough sadness from me this lifetime.

Words have power.

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In the current landscape of my life people talk about the various -isms. Racism, sexism, ableism, etc all have problematic words. You are supposed to just not use those problematic words any more. I can’t sleep at night for wondering when someone is going to call me on my inappropriate words and tell me that I am bad for using them.

One of these days a sex worker is going to be angry with me for referring to myself as a whore because I have never actually been paid. Just wait, it will happen. I will make them feel marginalized. I will be co-opting their language of oppression. At least, this is what I sigh deeply and expect. A long time ago I decided that whereas sex work is a perfectly valid form of employment it would not be healthy for me. I already have issues internally with figuring out where my consent actually is.

When I try to picture in my head what it will be like to talk about the book in public, once I get up the nerve and all, I think of what I might say to scathing people who are upset that I use the expression, “white trash.” I expect to be called a racist at some point. It has happened repeatedly. These days I just start singing, “Everyone is a little bit racist sometimes” and I try to respond to any actual substance. Am I racist because I believe that my cultural background is white trash? I think it depends on who you ask. Given the brutality of my childhood most people I talk to cede that it deserves harsh labeling. I really and truly do not know a better way to describe it.

I am trying to not be white trash any more. I do associate it with racism. And sexism. And homophobia. And and and and. Part of needing that phrase is my overwhelming shame that I would not have gotten help at important times if I was not white. Part of needing to identify myself by that bit of race privilege is to acknowledge that no matter how bad I think it was for me… I still was given a pass in ways I don’t even understand. There are still brutalities that are not mine to endure. I don’t speak for the “trash” experience because people who are not white get an entirely different reception. I don’t know from personal experience what it looks like but I hear it is pretty bad.

Who the fuck am I to think I can speak for a neutered carefully non-racial experience of poverty? I think that would be a far graver sin than acknowledging that my poverty and brutality carried with it an air of people who didn’t believe they were at the bottom of the barrel even though in every measurable way they were?

My nephew used to work at a movie theater. I think he worked there for about two years. He quit because they wouldn’t promote him so he didn’t feel adequately “respected.” Then he went on to just not work for years. The hilarious thing is, he has a bunch of stories about breaking expensive equipment at the theater. He thinks these stories are great. He tells them with pride. Then he honestly can’t understand why they don’t promote him and he thinks it is more dignified for him to sit at home asking for money from his sister–the one who was working fast food while a high school student.

Oh man. There is such a warped perception of the world there. It’s not unique to being white, no. It’s not one story. It’s the whole fabric. My uncle believed he was superior. That was what I grew up hearing. It is subtle. I don’t feel like it is a stretch to say that their culture was actually bad. The funny thing is, not everyone in the family monolithically believes the ad-copy. Auntie is a rather dignified and respectful soul. She treats everyone decently regardless of any part of their “identity.” She just doesn’t care what someones race or sexuality or religion is. She’s doing her thing and she’ll smile at you and ask you about your day regardless of how you differ from her. She doesn’t see it as relevant. Why couldn’t she be the one to create my culture?

That’s the thing, she did. She created a household where she adamantly believed differently from the prevailing loud noise in the house and she kept her mouth shut. Silence is consent. The only reason I know she believes differently from the common speech I heard every is because I have quietly watched her actions for decades. When you are bringing up children that kind of dichotomy doesn’t work. I have her in my head as a contrast to all the hostility and hatred, yes. But I feel like she is also just a random piece of flotsom in the river of that family. She gets pushed back and forth between the currents and she goes along with whatever happens without raising a fuss. She doesn’t see it as her place. That means that when children are repeatedly victimized she isn’t willing to see it or deal with it. She wouldn’t even know how.

I know that my family being white trash is offensive on its face. I know how charged that phrase is. I use it because it is true. I don’t think that carefully avoiding it because it bothers people is the right approach. The right approach is talking about it and figuring out how to stop being that. Silence just enables the ongoing problems.

White trash believe that they are being unfairly persecuted by all the people of other races who want welfare or support even if they have been on the doll for generations. That is my experience of my family. That is why I include that in my personal definition. I was taught hostility with my Pepsi and Snickers. We didn’t do mothers milk.

If I am hopeful I say that I don’t think I am currently white trash. The problem is I don’t know who or what I am. I don’t know who I am becoming. I don’t know what I will be like. I feel like I am at a crossroads. I’m kind of hard to describe.

I had lunch with a friend. She said that she feels like she spends a lot of time with her kids. My eyes kind of went wide–she has a job! She is away from her kids for at least forty hours a week! How is it possible to spend a lot of time with your kids if you have such a commitment! I have been thinking since about why it is so important to me to be not-separate from my kids right now. (It’s not for any moral superiority.) In having two daughters I got to once again experience that feeling of one-ness that exists between mothers and children. I did not get to have the standard slow separation from my mother. The more I read about attachment disorders the more I cry. The idea of being away from Shanna and Calli for consistently more than about twenty hours a week makes me want to cry. I hurt inside thinking about not seeing them for that much time.

I stay with them and I spend my whole life with them right now because this is the only time I will have to repair the damage I have from my mother not being with me. I have one twenty year period to fix these holes in myself. Out of the whole of my eighty-something + year life that means I had twenty years to fuck it up then I get twenty years to fix it before I enter into the next stage of actually being an independent adult. I need every minute I can get now because the wounds are so deep and they are festering and they need a lot of care. I need the feeling of one day at a time separating. I will need that long to be ready for it.

My daughters are not mine. They are on loan for a brief time. It is so complicated to think about the fact that I do not own them. I can’t control them. Once they are adults I have no guarantee of ever seeing them again. I have this time and that is all I am promised. If I miss even one minute of it I will hate myself for losing the most precious time I will have this lifetime. This is the only time when I will be able to keep them safe and build them up to be as strong as I can. It’s hard for me to do. I’m having to figure out how to do it for myself at the same time. I’m not starting from a place of feeling strong and capable and worthy.

My children will not be white trash. It’s not about the poverty. It’s not about the violence. My children will not grow up in an environment of bitterness because they feel the world owes them for some undisclosed worth they just have. For me acknowledging that I am white trash is partially about feeling the overwhelming shame that comes from knowing that as bad as things were it was mitigated by so much racial privilege. It is all tied together.

Calling myself a whore is a similar kind of acknowledgment for me. I was diminished to the point where I was convinced that I should never accept money for sex–I just gave it away for free. I couldn’t even see any value in what I was doing. I was not good enough. I was not pretty enough. I was not stable enough. But I still would go out and have compulsive sex with large numbers of people. I have had six month periods where I slept with nearly fifty people. But I wasn’t ever paid. It’s a false feeling of security. Do I actually know what it is like to sell my body for coin? No. So why do I feel like I get to use the word whore? When you are taught by your family of origin that you are a whore and that your eventual livelihood will come from being used for sex… Maybe I am co-opting. Maybe I don’t deserve to sully the word for actual prostitutes. They aren’t necessarily compulsive sexually. I shouldn’t conflate my psychological issues with a real-world profession. But I do and I always have. Since I was a young child I have believed that it is an accurate word to describe me. Slut just isn’t the same.

Sluts have sex because they want to. Whores have sex because they have to. Sometimes because they need the money. Sometimes because, well, they just have to. Not all whores are adequately paid for their work. Pimps are a common problem. This is not a well run free market economy.

I try really hard to imagine what kind of mother I want to be. I want to show my kids an awesome example of parenting. It’s the most important thing in the world to me. I don’t care about a job or vocation or hobby very much. I care about the people in my life. I care about what kind of person I am going to teach them to be.

I don’t want to present my culture of origin as de facto. I don’t want to teach them compulsive behavior about sexuality. What does it mean to be actively not racist? Does it mean giving up the phrase white trash? But it has so much utility. It has so much purpose. It is so effective at provoking conversations and anger about the layers of filth involved. How can that be used in a productive way rather than just being one more way that another white woman is an asshole?

I don’t know. I know that every time I talk to someone in person about why it is important to me they agree that it is “ok” for me to use it as a self-label. I do talk to people who are not white. I don’t like this feeling of seeking approval from “Representatives From the People of Color” in order to talk about my experience of race. I cringe when I bring up this topic. I feel like the only way for me to talk about race is to sit back and shut up. My experience isn’t important. Only it is to me. How in the world can I create a different experience for my kids if I don’t figure this out? I know that if I try to just not talk or not think about these things that I will never have the ability to really change my behavior. I won’t know what behavior is important to change or why. If I stop using the phrase in writing or in speech I won’t take it out of my head. I will just be censoring myself for select audiences. Silence is consent. I don’t think I can agree with the idea that I shouldn’t talk about my experiences.

I wish I understood more about what knowledge I am really searching for right now. I’m not even sure. There is a conversation I long to have. I am not so good with the almost-there-but-not-quite things I know of. It’s time to run off.

Always with the defensive, this girl.

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Yesterday was one of those magical running days. The kind where the beat of the music and my grief match up perfectly. It’s hard to describe what I enjoy about running. There are several stretches of blocks in my neighborhood that I use for sprinting. The lines on the sidewalk just require it. When I get to those specific streets I pray for the right fast song. I run until I can barely breathe. I run until I am gasping out sobs and I can barely see anymore because I am crying so hard. There is so very much to cry about.

I have so much grief. I feel like I will never stop grieving. I will never feel like I can move past these feelings. I’m trying to trust the process. I’m trying to believe that even though this cycle of mourning isn’t over it will end some day. I just don’t know when. It’s hard to keep going.

Why was I crying yesterday? It’s hard to remember specifics because I cover so many topics in my head. I spent a lot of time thinking about why I am the sort of person to send nasty judgmental shaming letters to. I get them every so often. I trigger the shit out of people. It’s the same reason my former therapist fired me. I don’t do things how other people think they should be done. In the process I am deeply distressing. People don’t like feeling distressed by how “off from the norm” I am. They want me to fall back in line, damnit. I should do _________ in order to be acceptable to them. I can’t.

I can’t ever be acceptable to everyone in my life. That isn’t an option open to me. I will always bother people in some way on some level. Pretty much everyone. I will always talk about subjects that make you uncomfortable, no matter who you are. I will search for that topic that bothers you the most and then I will harp on it constantly. I do this on an unconscious level. I default to challenging people. A lot of the time I’m not doing it on purpose. I believe with every part of me that I would not have survived if I was willing to let other people set the terms of my reality. I would have crumbled a long time ago. I would have to believe that I was who they say I am.

This time I would have to believe I am an addict. I am bad. I am helpless before these things that control me. My cutting, anger, drug use, and sexual activity are bad. I am bad for being addicted to these things. Bad. Bad. Bad. I know. I’ve always known. I know that you think I am bad. That doesn’t mean that you are right or that I have to agree. That’s an opinion not a provable set of facts. I’m obsessive (even though I hear this kind of pedantry means you lose the argument I am going to do this anyway because it is my fucking blog and I’m only arguing with myself which means there is no such thing as losing) so here’s a definition for you:

Addiction is defined as the continued use of a mood altering substance or behaviour despite adverse consequences.^[1] This can include, but is not limited to, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, exercise abuse, and gambling. Some defining characteristics of addiction include: impaired control over subtances/behaviour, preoccupation with substance/behaviour, continued use despite consequences, and denial.^[2] Habits and patterns associated with addiction are typically characterized by immediate gratification (short-term reward), coupled with delayed deleterious effects (long-term costs).^[3]Physiological dependence occurs when the body has to adjust to the substance by incorporating the substance into its ‘normal’ functioning.^[4] This state creates the conditions of tolerance, and withdrawal. Tolerance is the process by which the body continually adapts to the substance and requires increasingly larger amounts to achieve the original effects. Withdrawal refers to physical and psychological symptoms people experience when reducing or discontinuing a substance the body had become dependent on. Symptoms of withdrawal generally include but are not limited to anxiety, irritability, intense cravings for the substance, nausea, hallucinations, headaches, cold sweats, and tremors.

That’s from Wikipedia. I use marijuana under medical supervision to deal with psychological issues. Yes there are technically adverse side effects because smoking is bad for your lungs. Overall it makes my life so much better it isn’t funny. I repeat that it has fewer side effects than any other drug I could be on.

Cutting, sex, and anger are all in a hand wavey category. I have a problem with the 12 step language of weakness. “I’m not responsible. A higher power has to save me.” Well… I am certainly addicted to harming myself. I do it in a variety of ways. I don’t give any particular method much higher billing than any other. I think that is what he really meant by saying I am addicted to these things. But of course he’s blowing hot air out of his ass so he doesn’t quite see the pattern. I go through long periods without cutting. I have gone many years between periods where I feel bad enough about myself to need that release. I can easily channel that frustration and rage into other areas if given the slightest chance.

Cutting works to put an end to bad emotional states that would otherwise lead to suicide. Is it a great approach? No. It isn’t. But for an awful lot of my life I didn’t have a better choice and I think that cutting was significantly better for me than suicide. No one is going to take that belief away from me. I had to cope. I managed. I survived. The last time I cut I had kind of an epiphany that it wasn’t working any more. I threw away my scalpels. I have moved beyond the utility of that as a coping method. I didn’t stop because someone shamed me or told me I was bad for doing it. That kind of response is only likely to cause me to go do it more and more and more. I stopped because I realized it was insanity to continue. Insanity in the sense that it doesn’t make sense to keep doing the same activity and expecting a different response.

I no longer have a life where I need a physical outlet for my emotional pain. Thank you, Noah. Thank you for being my bulwark against the dark. Thank you for providing me with a safe place to live for the rest of my life. Thank you for supporting me so that I can do work I am better suited for and I don’t have to go out and “get a job” to prove I have worth.

The emotional pain I feel now I can talk about and find solutions for. I think the only place where the language of addiction is particularly useful for me is where it talks about the diminishing returns issue. Or if you talk about the cost being too high for the benefit.

I asked Noah for monogamy partially as a way of providing myself an ‘out’ on dealing with a lot of my problematic behavior. I’m not good at self-regulation when it comes to sex. Now I am safe. Now I will always be able to say, “I’m in a monogamous marriage; I can’t have sex with you” instead of having to be able to say “I don’t want to.” Saying I don’t want to have sex with someone is hard. I feel unworthy of doing so. I feel like if someone is suffering for lack of sex it is my job to fix it. I can be a sacred whore, that’s fine–but I must be a whore. I don’t say no very well. I am going to hide behind monogamy and be grateful for it. I feel guilty that I am dragging Noah behind me kicking and screaming into this change. I feel like I am unfairly punishing him for a problem he doesn’t have. But I asked and he agreed and he doesn’t really want to talk about whether it is fair or not. It is. Move on.

I cried yesterday because I feel terribly bad that in order to protect myself from my own impulsive behavior I have curtailed Noah. It seems selfish and immature and just flat mean. I am such a bitch. And I’m trying to learn how to tell him “no” in general. I no longer close my eyes and go away and let him have sex with me. It’s hard. It’s hard to feel like I am not breaking rules. It is hard because I feel like I am bad for not giving him release when and how he wants it. I am not holding up my end of the deal. He is supporting me–don’t I owe him? I told him that thirty years of being a whore is enough for anyone. It’s time to retire.

Noah isn’t attacking me. Noah doesn’t require that I put out because he wants me to. I project that onto him. I fear that belief. I have it. That’s enough.

Am I an addict? Maybe? Yes? It seems to be an irrelevant question. Unless you believe that someone who takes thyroid medication is also an addict it is simply a innate bias to say that the pot is a problem. It’s not your preferred kind of medication but I’m a hippy and my doctor agrees that it is good for me. Imagine me sticking my tongue out at you. I also see a massage therapist and an acupuncturist (ok, not since pregnancy but I will get back there some day–I believe in the benefits). I think I should see a chiropractor about something going on in the lower right hand side of my back. That has been a problem since Jeremy sodomized me when I was like ten. I have never been able to get it to stop hurting. Running is teaching me a lot about my body. I think I have a better idea of how to deal with the pain.

So! Am I an addict when it comes to pot? Wikipedia says no. I’m going to go with that. Sex? Well… obviously I’m doing as much “recovery” from that as I can do. I am not actually interested in celibacy and trying to be celibate just because someone else might think I should be would result in me not being married any more. Noah wouldn’t tolerate that. He’s dealing with me saying “no” a lot and he’s dealing with not being allowed to have sex with other people. I think he’s a god damned stand up guy. No more can or should be asked of our marriage as I’m figuring out this shit with my relationship to sex. So am I addicted to sex? Maybe? But it doesn’t matter because I’ve figured out how I can have a healthy relationship with it and I’m moving forward. Kind of a useless thing to sit around and go to meetings on at this point. Just sayin’.

I haven’t cut in nearly a year and I no longer have my favored cutting tool. I could some day acquire another one, sure. I don’t think I will though. I don’t want that modeled for my children as an option of coping mechanisms.

It’s interesting to me how this evolution has happened. I cut for many years. When I stopped cutting my body as a teenager I started cutting my hair. It got shorter and shorter till I shaved it when I was seventeen. My mother was so angry with me it wasn’t funny. I felt like the whole world was radiating anger with me for cutting my hair. I was told constantly how ugly I was and how unflattering my “new look” was.

It’s been very weird and uncomfortable that people keep gushing about how good I look with a shaved head/short hair this time. It makes me cry. Because when they say it I hear my mother ranting in my head and I want to hit them and cry that they are lying to me. I feel rage that this person is lying about finding me attractive this way. I try to not do more than clench my fists. I try to not stomp away. I smile. I say thank you. I think that I flinch sometimes and then people simply become more emphatic. Noah certainly tells me that he likes it often. That is one of the things I cried about yesterday. “Hair” was on.

I wonder if my family hated this as a hair cut because of how intense it makes me look. I feel like I have to plaster a fake smile on my face all of the time or I look like I might punch you in the face as soon as say “hello”. It’s weird. I feel like the effects of aging are doing interesting things to my face. I am going to wrinkle like fuck. All the women in my family have deep lines of care from a fairly young age. We live hard lives and it shows. I look at my hands and I see my mothers hands. I see the rope appearing. My hands are the hands of someone who does manual labor. Well, I don’t have deep callouses yet. But I will as soon as I get up the energy to do more gardening. I would have done anything to prevent aging the way I am if I had stayed in a relationship with Tom.

One of the things I cry about when I run is thinking about how resentful Tom would be of the changes in me. It’s strange. I cry because I loved him so much and he wanted such a small piece of who I am. I feel bad that after my family he felt so very good to me but we didn’t know how to be real people together. Tom lives in a world where “pretty” and “sexy” are such a high bar that they become a vocation. I’m naturally pretty lazy. I don’t think I am that pretty and I don’t see much point in dressing up a plow horse to take it to town. I know I am attractive but it’s different. As I age it becomes more dramatic to me. I am intense in a way that precludes pretty. Pretty is about unoffensive and I will never be that. My perception of the world Tom lives in is honestly kind of bleak. I would not be happy in it. I can’t stay dedicated to something I feel like I will never actually attain. It involves a lot of specific activity and specific idleness that I just don’t want. I think back over how I lived my life and I feel glad that I made most of the choices I made. I was always running.

A boyfriend from high school sent me a congratulatory message about the half marathon and sent me a link to a marathon training program that is way more awesome than what I had been doing. By which I mean I am so grateful that this program wants me doing two miles for the first few weeks because it feels like such a wave of relief I can barely stand it. Doing only two miles for the last two days of running has meant I have practiced sprinting. It uses different muscle groups and it feels good to stretch my legs once in a while.

I lost my train of thought a while ago because my cat jumped on the keyboard and then I got mad at her. We had to pause and have a negotiation wherein she glared at me and looked sad that I had thrown her the floor. I sighed deeply and went and got a blanket to prevent her from drawing blood and I moved my computer so she could lay on my lap. Puff’s mother gave her to me when Puff was only a few days old. Her eyes were still closed and I bottle fed her to keep her alive. Puff’s mother brought us the babies to save them from a rain storm that would have drowned them outside. The feral mama wasn’t willing to come inside and care for the babies and she didn’t want anything to do with them later, but she did save them. That feels important. I have had Puff for fourteen years. My niece named her. T said, “She looks like a puff of clouds.” She is white with grey nearly-Siamese markings. For a couple of years after Shanna was born Puff avoided me. I feel like our relationship has deepened a lot over the last year or so. She doesn’t mind Calli the way she minds Shanna. She loves that I sit in the garage alone. I attribute a lot of our relationship growth to the smoking, actually. It keeps me away from the kids and she is quick to remind me that our alone time should be special, darn it!

I feel the need to apologize for my many typos. I stop writing when I am abruptly pulled away to do something else and I really don’t have time to edit. I’m not a professional writer so it feels ok to be sloppy.

frustrated

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s time to go parent.

Perspective is everything.

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Jenny’s father is dying. It’s at a somewhat unexpected time because he isn’t that old but he had a weird injury and it wasn’t treated and… that’s how life works. There is nothing I can do to help her with this. This is her own journey of grief. I imagine what it would be like to lose a father at this age after having had a relationship with him, having lived with him, for so many years. I can’t imagine that. Not really. It’s going to be bad when my mom dies. I will feel so much guilt. I don’t even know if I will be told. For all that Jenny isn’t close with her family she has never broken contact. She has always treated them appropriately and with respect.

Everyone has a complicated relationship with their parents. It’s a difficult relationship. I understand it more from the side I am on now. It seems to me that parenthood is a relationship based on temporary, stored power. Right now I have incredible power over my children. I get to decide pretty much everything about their lives. In fifteen years Shanna will be an adult. My power over her will be limited to the amount of influence she chooses to allow me. It will depend on how well I have earned that respect.

Yesterday I spent my off hour reading/watching videos about Steve Jobs again. I like his Stanford commencement speech and his sister’s eulogy is gut wrenching. I also watched a few random videos about happiness because D sent them to me. What does it mean to live?

When we were up in Portland I broke a large relationship rule. This is part of why I say I am not good at monogamy. Noah was right next to me and handed me the implement so he’s not as angry as he could be. What happened is we were at Dad’s birthday party (non-bio dad) and I got to talking to one of my sisters-in-perversity. Dad has a whole harem of daughters you see. The one in question is the youngest in terms of being newest to the family but she is a year older than me and thus technically the oldest of us. I refer to myself as the senior daughter for clarity. He adopted me first. We like to ignore the one he adopted second. She’s not my favorite sister.

I don’t keep in close contact with this sister most of the time. Her life is in a very different place than mine and we are both busy. It’s not a slam or a negative judgment. It’s nice to catch up when we can. At this party I heard a lot about this guy she had fairly recently broken up with–see, there he is. She spent a lot of time watching his scene with another woman. Her heart was on her sleeve. One of the things that breaks my heart faster than anything is seeing a woman I love pining over a piece of shit man. And from what I saw of this guy… yeah… he’s a piece of shit.

I don’t like men who pursue mastery to be degrading to women. If you only want to own women you can insult then I have a low opinion of you. I don’t mind that you want to use those names sometimes, but if that is what you think of your partners I think you have a personality disorder you fucking piece of shit. You are not better than women.

My sister managed to kind of get involved in the scene. She really wanted to play with him. The girl he was playing with was slightly less extreme of a bottom than my sister and my sister pretty obviously wanted to show off. The guy demurred. He had been using his belt as a whip. He gave it to his slave/submissive/bottom/partner/whatever her chosen identity label thing is. He then taunted and forced her to hit my sister. She did, but it was lackluster and obviously not that intense. It was a giggly good time. The guy started encouraging fairly random other people to hit my sister. One got her in the eye because he didn’t know what he was doing. I felt like I was watching a train wreck.

I nudged Noah and told him to give me his belt. He did. See how it feels kind of fuzzy for him to get mad at me for doing it? But I’m not supposed to play with people any more. It didn’t feel like a scene, exactly. I sure didn’t do it for my sexual gratification. I did it because I didn’t want to listen to those asshole men tell her that she was a dirty whore. They didn’t mean anything nice by it.

My sister has had times in her life when she needed to feed her kid and she didn’t have a job. She has sold her body to put food on the table. I felt such an explosion of anger when he was picking on her for it. They dated. He knows her history. He was explicitly picking on something that is a mixed circumstance in her life.

I changed the intensity of the scene. I only used the belt and I stayed on her thighs: the fronts, backs, and sides. I hit her hard and I hit her fast and I forced her emotional reaction towards panic as hard and fast as I could. And while I did it I started a litany to her. You are not bad. You are good. You are strong. You are brave. You are fierce. You have survived things that would take down lesser people. You are strong. You are good. She tried to interrupt me and tell me that she was a whore. I paused long enough to hold her face in both of my hands and tell her that even if she has had to prostitute her body to survive she isn’t a whore. You are not defined by what you do. She is a bad ass mother fucker. She sobbed and clung to me.

Bdsm is rarely about sex for me. That is not how I grew up in the scene. I made every top who was kind of sort of leaning in to get in on the hot available action flinch and back off. I was not going to be one more person starting a pile up on a poor girl. I was nastier and meaner and harsher. I kind of like being the visiting bad ass. This wasn’t a game. It was very serious business.

I do bdsm because it is one of the best ways I know to force the body to get rid of the excess energy that poisons people. There is atonement and release and a journey to find the core of yourself. When you are in the middle of a very intense scene you can’t hide who you are. You react from the animal core of yourself. I am a vicious animal who will strip you down to the bone and show you what it looks like. I will tear the flesh from your body so that you know that I can see all the way through you. I see exactly who and what you are.

And you are beautiful. Your strength amazes me. That you can allow me to do this to you amazes me. I worship you. I adore you. I love you. Thank you for showing me this fierce core of strength and intensity that other people simply don’t have. It takes a warrior to experience pain like that over and over and over. We don’t have a good place in our current world for people who have to suffer. Even being a soldier is more about being a cog in the machine.

I see in my sisters-in-perversity a desire to be made clean through suffering. Not all people in the bdsm world are after the same thing. But I know my sisters when I meet them. I see the same need in men, but I am less able to address it. It has long felt like a flaw in me. I can’t offer the same experience to men. I am too locked in being afraid of men. I can’t look at them the way I can look at a woman. I can’t identify in the same ways. I have always believed that is a grave failure. I’m sorry for it. There is a part of me that understands men as other and I don’t know how to change that. I see a specific wildness in women. I see women in bear traps thrashing about. I understand their feelings. I don’t have to know all their feelings. I don’t have to really know everything about their lives. I know that trapped. I know that desperate need for release.

I know how to rip someone down until they can no longer stand nor defend themselves. I know how to make them cry and hurt and wish they could do anything to get away from the pain. The pain I am giving is just a stand in for all those things they can’t change in their lives. All the things that hurt and hurt. All those other things make you feel worse about yourself. Because it hurts and you can’t stop it. It weakens you over time because no one can stand up forever under an onslaught.

My beatings are short in duration. And the whole time you are taking it you are being coaxed and reassured and told that what you are doing is impressive. You are showing your mettle. You are proving how very strong you are and I will delight in building you up with it. By the end you know that you are an intensely strong person and you can go do fucking anything. Anything in the whole world. Most people are cowards compared to you. Not very many people will permit a beating like I give. I only hit the girls who can’t say no. They have outrageous pain tolerances. Other people want warm ups and I’m not here for that shit. I’m here to prove that I can take you apart but it will be a lot of hard work for both of us because you are so god damn intense.

I always stay in contact with my sisters-in-perversity for a while after a visit. It seems important. They see a part of me I don’t reveal much in life. It’s interesting for me to get perspective on how we are changing over time. I learn a lot more from brief flashes of my wounded warriors than I do from dozens of conversations with people who have never been hurt. This is the part I hesitate to say because it sounds so awful. I learn what mistakes are there for me to make. When I see my wounded warriors I see There But For The Grace Of God Go I. In their struggles to perceive themselves as valuable I see what could happen to me if I had a lower opinion of myself. I know that I was brought up to be one of them. I was quite literally brought up to be competitive about being able to take more pain during sex. Thank you, Jim. You were an inspiring father.

I have been binging on sugar for the past few days. It’s kind of obscene. I came home from Portland and both girls are acting out in various ways. I feel trapped and angry and frustrated. My life fucking sucks. But my life only sucks because I have a bad attitude. I look at my sister-in-perversity and I have to understand that my life is quite cushy in terms of me having everything I want when I want it. Sure, I have to do it with my kids along. That just means I need to figure out how to work with my kids.

Someone on facebook linked to an article about why French parents are happier. Apparently in French they do not have the concept of “discipline” the way we do here. They constantly think that they are educating their children. My entire life right now is an education to my children. What am I teaching them? Dissatisfaction. The funny part about sitting in the garage as I write… it’s a constant reminder that I get work done with my children around. I didn’t have child care when I insulated the walls and put dry wall up. I didn’t have child care when I painted a mural. I had help sometimes. I had friends who did it with me. But my children were around and under foot and I cared for them. I had help for all the stuff that was genuinely beyond my ability to do it alone. I could not have done the drywall without the consistent and reliable help of T. He saved my ass. I’m going to owe that man for a few lifetimes. He doesn’t understand what he is to me.

I have been struggling for a long time with feeling trapped. It’s been a lot of … well… all of it. I have a lot more freedom than most. More than most people for all of history. I am somewhat unique in being financially secure in a tumultuous period of history. Yes, we could be hit with disaster. For now I am going to continue with the fact that I am ridiculously safe. I have a lot of options. Even as Noah and I fuss back and forth about the fact that we have to carefully budget… we have a lot of options. Noah only gets $600 to spend on a weekend trip with his buddy. Cry me a river. We have a really good life.

In every relationship I have in my life there is a mixture of uplifting and wearying. I need to start thinking a lot harder about the uplifting or I am never going to get out of this muck. I have a marathon to run. I can’t be hanging out in the muck. It’s too tiring. I will injure myself. I have to run five miles today. You know–just get up and do it. And tomorrow I’ll run three miles. On Saturday I will run seven miles. Next Saturday eight miles. So on.

When I run I feel strong and capable. What I used to get from getting my ass beaten. I don’t know how to get it from getting my ass beaten any more. Now I’m always mad that Noah isn’t doing _______ exactly how I would. It’s kind of sick.

I don’t know how to be a follower right now. But we don’t have room for much else in our relationship and I don’t know how to guide us. I don’t know how to guide Noah. That’s an interesting thought. I resent being the guide for more than a couple of minutes. I’m impatient. I want to be lead. There are journeys Noah simply can’t lead me on. He doesn’t know how to get there. I’ve had kind of this dawning horror around this topic recently. I have some ideas. I’m not ready to spill them yet.

I don’t know what the future will bring. I hear that if you spent more time focusing on the positive you can change your life. You can actually make things better. I am fairly uniquely positioned to do so. Dr. Frankl taught me that if you have something you are burning to do you can get through any circumstance. Some dude on a Ted talk yesterday brought up the idea that everyone desperately wants to live. Then I listened to Steve Jobs talk about how much he wanted to live.

How does one go about finding their own path? Well, I think by definition I can’t ask anyone else. Whatever it is they did or would do will be wrong for me. That’s why I’m not fond of advice. I do like hearing stories though. I like finding out what other people have done and why. I’ve been reading a lot more recently.

When I feel fussy about what I am doing I need to decide what I would rather be doing and do that. That’s part of the binge eating of sugar. The kids are pestering me for sugar. We have a lot in the house that we don’t normally have. I am tired of fighting the kids off of it. I’m tired of being whined at for it. I’m eating it with them them till it is gone. Then we don’t get dessert unless you can talk me into making some with sweet behavior. I like doing it when I have a cheerful house to do it for. I won’t do it for whining. It has worked for me in the past. I think we ran out of chocolate last night. Now the sweet snack in the house is fruit. When the answer is, “We don’t have any chocolate in the house; would you like an apple?” The response is more positive than you think. And then we just don’t think to buy it at the store. It works out. One of these days she will remember to ask for it at the store. That will be figured out later.

I’m getting defensive already. That’s lame. I felt cheerful through most of the writing. I’m tensing up as I think about going in. The family is awake now. The girls are extra clingy right now. I will miss these days. It’s a lot of physical contact for me. I feel bad about how difficult it is for me to handle physical touch sometimes. I wish I liked it more. This is part of my feeling of inadequacy. I’m not sure why I feel inadequate though.

I’m supposed to think about three things I am grateful for. I’m always grateful for a white wall in my house. I like thinking about how I will paint it. I think I should paint it next month after I get the book edited and up on Amazon. We’ll see.

I’m grateful that I get to raise two daughters in an environment where I am not under ridiculous stress all the time.

I’m grateful for stories to think about. Something is bubbling in my head. I’ll think about it on the long run today. I’m going to run to Lake Elizabeth. It is just over five miles roundtrip. I hope it warms up soon. I have to leave by nine. Noah is having a late start day. I should probably go see him for the time I can today.

Anything is possible

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Yesterday we took advantage of our date night to shave my head. First Noah used the clippers, then a straight razor. I discovered that straight razors hurt a lot more than safety razors. This is the second time I shaved my head. The first time was when I was 17. I shaved my head around three weeks after my father killed himself. It was time for a new beginning then. It’s time for a new beginning now. From 17 until now I have made most of my decisions about my appearance based on the opinions of men. I feel kind of ashamed when I write that. It’s not the “me” I’m supposed to be. I’m supposed to only care about pleasing myself. You don’t amass a body count like mine by only trying to please yourself.

I’m taking more comfort from monogamy than anyone but Noah knows. I don’t have to hunt any more. I never have to leave the house wondering if I look good enough for someone. Well, I’ll still dress in stuff Noah likes occasionally. But I’m done trying to find people who are willing to fuck me. It’s a different approach to life. Non-monogamy is fairly all-consuming for me. I don’t have many non-hunting periods. I didn’t hunt during the breeding period. I didn’t hunt much for a couple of the years I was with Tom. Tom had me jumping through enough hurtles that I was content.

Noah is different. Noah is happy to have sex with me at any time. No factors beyond, “Are the kids occupied and safe and fine on their own?” matter. He looks for child care or sleep. Then he’s good. I think he’s enjoyed the various colors and he’s finding something to like about every length of my hair. Today the tiny cuts no longer sting so I bet he’s going to touch it a lot more. It is neat feeling. Last night it still hurt and the pillow was annoying so I didn’t want him to touch much.

I put a body stocking on after we shaved my head so that I could stay warm. The plan was to tie me up and mess with my head being different. That didn’t happen. Instead we talked about the way our sex life is causing me to feel unsafe. The way our sex life is dramatically increasing how much I dissociate. We talked about the fact that every time he rapes me there is serious long-term damage. How much damage am I really expected to bear this lifetime? How many of these does he think I can handle before I jump off a bridge? I have been sexually assaulted over and over for nearly thirty years. I think I need at least a few years off. At the very fucking least.

This is something I struggle with. It seems like most of my appeal is that I am someone you don’t have to care whether I am interested or not. If you want to fuck me, sure go ahead. It seems like that usage is really the only purpose for my life, so why not? That doesn’t increase my ‘bonding’ feeling during sex for some reason. It means that pretty much all sexual contact has to be treated as potentially unpleasant and I have to learn to block out all of those sensations, forever. Because that way I can survive being repeatedly raped. I won’t feel it any way. I can’t work on getting back to the place where I can orgasm. If I do that, how will it be used against me or withheld from me? How will I be hurt in exchange for being stupid enough to present more vulnerability in my body?

It’s time to start new. For the first time in my life I never have to give in to that compulsive feeling again. I never have to earn my social admission with my cunt. I no longer have to advertise that I am there to fulfill sexual needs other people have. It’s not my problem. I am no longer the designated whore. I don’t know what else I could be. What else am I good for? If I’m not going to be that, just generically, I think I am tired of being raped too. I think it’s time to say that my husband should really start to respect the word “No.” I should be allowed to be in control of my body. I deserve it. I have carried this body around for thirty years. No one else has the knowledge of it that would allow them to treat it with respect. Just me. So right now no one treats it with any respect.

I need to change that or I am never going to stop feeling like I am one push from jumping off a bridge. Life is harder than advertised. Life hurts. That doesn’t mean I should accept with resignation the idea that I have to tolerate being raped for my entire god damn life. No. Even though so many people obviously think that is what I am good for, they show my by continuing to rape me, I am done thinking that is all I am good for. I don’t think I am strong enough to keep getting up afterwards. I don’t think I have many more rapes left in me. I think my body is nearing its limits. I have already been taken down all the pegs I can be taken down. If you put me any further down I’m going to fall off the board.

I go through the world in the body of a woman. I don’t think it works like this for men. Every day, whether I put time or energy into my appearance or not, I have to be braced when I am out in public. People feel quite free to comment on how I look and act. Most of the comments are nice. I get told ridiculously often that I have a nice smile. It’s one of the reasons I am completely uninterested in braces. My smile is special and unique to me. It is nice enough that random strangers tell me they are happy to see it when I walk around by myself. I think what God gave me was good enough. Even though my teeth aren’t perfectly straight. Even though they aren’t very white. I didn’t discover teeth brushing until I was twelve and I started noticing that it was really gross when boys didn’t brush their teeth before kissing. I decided that applied to me too and I started brushing my teeth. I have a lot of legacy damage from poor dental care. I have an ass-rapingly-expensive dental implant. Oh wait, did I just make a rape joke?

Of all the people in the world, shouldn’t I take it more seriously! Don’t I know that this topic isn’t funny?! I have been raped far more times than I can count. It is just part of life. I’m going to joke about it. Otherwise I cannot live with the constant effect it has on me. I know that other rape victims feel differently. I’m sorry if what I say offends you. We are all just trying to get through the day.

I am almost out of pot. I will either run out today or tomorrow. We have $29 left for this month in the health budget. I plan to see my therapist one more time and that will be $150. I don’t think I should buy more pot. This is already going to be dinging next month. Budgets suck. I am *only* going to be able to pay for therapy next month. Nothing else. I need to start saving room in that budget because soon I will want to buy another massage package. The massage probably is more important given the current strain my body is under. Intimidating.

It’s time to start again. The only way I know to be a parent is to be the kind of adult you think your kids should respect. I want to be worthy of respect. I want to make choices that are actually good for me instead of being a less bad form of self-harm. Sex is often a form of self-harm for me. That’s one of those things I will only admit on days when the wind is right. I have as much denial around that topic as everyone else. Having to be available to basically anonymous men is a form of self-harm. I’m putting myself at enormous risk. For the thrill of hopefully having judged right and the sex doesn’t hurt this time. Maybe instead of trying to figure out how to write just the right personal ad I should tell my husband I want him to stop choking me and raping me. Please can our sex life not be something that hurts me. I don’t want to perfect the art of asking other people to stop hurting me. I want to just close that book and walk away from it. There is no point in pursuing that story. I don’t want to keep upping my body count. It’s not a goal any more. Whatever there was to get out of that activity I did it long ago.

I know, everyone else who is non-monogamous will now tell me how they want to have connections and I’ll tell you that fucking me is one of the fastest ways to ensure that I am going to avoid you in the future. You want more of those connections in your life? I can have boundaries and keep myself safe if I treat the people as disposable so I don’t have to care what they want. It is excruciatingly hard to tell Noah about the results of his (occasional, rare) actions because I already feel like I am letting him down.

He wanted a poly marriage. He wanted to have a life where he got to be a highly individualized person. He wanted a lot of time to himself to keep having other people and things in his life. He wanted to continue on being a cheerful sadist. He wanted to be allowed to do the things he imagines. And I am not only backing out on being the recipient of his urges but I’m telling him that he shouldn’t do them with anyone else either. I feel like the worst kind of double crosser. I am a piece of shit. I am changing the deal.

I can’t handle being raped anymore. Maybe ever again. This hurts so much. The cost is too high. I cannot live with someone who really likes it when I don’t enjoy our sex in any way. Well, that’s too harshly worded. I can live with him. But I can’t keep doing that. I’m tired of barely being able to feel my vagina. I’m tired of rearranging furniture in my head during sex. I’m tired of feeling scared in my home. I never get to be safe anywhere in the whole wide world.

But Jesus-H-Christ. I am now a partial owner of a bdsm coffee shop. I am going to have to figure out how to negotiate those kinds of worlds knowing that I will never really feel all that much like I belong. I don’t want to be hurt any more. Nor do I want to hurt anyone else. I don’t want to be raped any more. I don’t want to fuck everyone who is kind of hard up. What good am I then? I don’t know. But maybe it is time to find out.

I did’t shave my head to make me ugly. I don’t think it does. But I did do it to remove the distraction of trying to be appealing. I don’t want to actually be pretty right now. It is hard figuring out how to let guys down gently in a way that doesn’t result in me getting nasty treatment. I have to instead figure out how to just not attract them. Because if I am attractive it is my own fucking fault and I’m just an asshole cock tease if I don’t follow through.

I went to a friend’s party on Saturday. I spent my time clinging to the few people who have come to my house. I only had one conversation that was not me clinging to someone who has proven they like me. The one-off was about babies. And someone rapidly left the group when I talked about my labor experience. I felt like I should just get up and leave the party. Everything I have to say is repulsive and depressing. My experiences are things people don’t want to hear about. I’m not pleasant enough. My life isn’t pleasant enough.

I think I need to learn how to just stop speaking at all. Can you pick up selective mutism as an adult? Probably not. But I need to appear happy and perky. I need to smile. I need to be polite (whatever that means). I need to look and act like I had a different life than I had. That is what people like. Those are the people who are liked. I’m not nice. I’m harsh. I’m abrupt. I sound angry. I’m unpleasant and difficult and prickly. I swear a lot. I have no idea what manners most people follow. I am bewildered in every social space because I am inevitably wrong and I don’t know why. I don’t understand and I don’t think I ever will.

I own a business now. I don’t have a choice about going out into the world. I have a specific format that interaction is supposed to revolve around. I have a job and I’m perfectly capable of behaving myself at work. It’s time to try again on leaving my house and interacting with people. Even if I’m not the biggest bad-ass bottom in the room it’s ok. There is no where else in the world I can talk about the intensity of my sex play without people running in horror.

Just because I don’t want to be raped any more that isn’t truly going to send me screaming into the closet. Once your sex life is as weird as mine it just morphs. It doesn’t really contract. There have to be other avenues to pursue. Surely not everyone in the world is hurt constantly during sex. They wouldn’t have so much of it.

family roles

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When I was in middle school we moved up to Redwood Estates. My aunt and uncle bought a new house and left some of the family behind at the old house and took some of the family with them to the new house. Eventually all but their middle child ended up living in the new house while the old house was rented out. When I say “all” I mean their two other children. And my male cousin had a girlfriend who had three kids. My girl cousin had a kid. My sister and her two kids. My mother and me. That’s what I mean by “all”. It was a five bedroom house.

We lost our driveway in an El Niño storm. I have a lot of respect for nature. We were stuck in the house for two weeks without running water, electricity, or phone. We could hike up the mountain to get to roads so we did get help and what have you. Eventually they brought in this awesome massive bridge and drove the cars over the pool onto the neighbors driveway. Then we parked down in this little cul-de-sac and had to walk up a hellacious stair case to get to the house. The stairs were unevenly spaced, very awkward to walk on, and really shitty to fall down. They were also slick all year long from the water on the moss.

In losing our driveway we mostly lost the ability to get heat in the house. Propane couldn’t be delivered. They didn’t have the money to fix the driveway for years. We just dealt with the stairs. When we wanted to move someone in or out (that happened all the time) we would just open the gate to the neighbors driveway and hope she wasn’t home. She hated us and if we used her driveway much she made our life hell.

One of my strongest memories during my childhood is coming downstairs from my bedroom to see Aunt Vonnie slowly walking into the kitchen with her arms full of grocery bags. I asked her if there was anything left at the bottom. She said yes but told me she needed to rest for a minute before going to get it. Aunt Vonnie is older than my mom by a good ten years. My mom was thirty two when I was born so Auntie is ~forty two years older than me. I must have ben thirteen or so. Let’s call her sixty. So my sixty year old aunt was trudging up these treacherous stairs with her haul from Costco while most of the family sat in the living room watching tv. There were children ranging in age from three to thirteen, most of them on the older end. And several adults. All of whom have health issues, sure… but so does Auntie. And she’s the oldest one present.

I went around the room slapping everyone, regardless of age, and told them to get off their fucking asses and get down to the car right now. If you want to fucking eat, you get that food into the house. Auntie isn’t your fucking servant. Go. Now. They listened, grumbling all the while. I pushed and pulled them down the hill then loaded them up and sent them back up the hill. I carried the heaviest load even though I wasn’t the oldest or strongest there because he was a lazy piece of shit. As usual. I think he grabbed the roll of toilet paper. When we got to the top Aunt Vonnie thanked me. I knew that I was the only one who was going to lighten her load.

It always appalled me the way she was treated like a dog. She worked from the time she woke up till she finally fell into bed far too late at night. She cooked and cleaned and did all the shopping and worked and raised many many children. When my sister makes comments about how she will be the matriarch after Auntie dies she doesn’t understand what that means. She has no idea how much effort it is. Aunt Vonnie is the matriarch because she is the only (semi-)effective person there. She is the one who maintains a roof for everyone. She is the one who ensures there is food. She hosts because she does all the work and has a stable home.

The last Christmas I invited my family to my home my sister sat here and informed me how it was going to be hard on mom to be passed over as matriarch because it was clearly going to be my sister because she was the one who does all the work. I blinked. I looked at her. I sat there thinking about how many of the holiday meals I have hosted over the years. My sister hasn’t done it once. I thought about how much money they have all asked me for. I thought about how often I have been asked to save their asses.

I don’t want to be Aunt Vonnie. I am not going to walk around for the rest of my life muttering about how there is no point in saying anything because nothing ever changes I just have to do all the work for everyone. I have too many anger issues to take that role. It is not a fit for me. I will break too much of my house.

I was told over and over how much everyone was sacrificing “for me”. It was my fault that they had to spend money on me so that I could live. I owed them for their sacrifice. Not right away, of course. But they always knew that I had the annuity money coming. Comments were made. Selfishness is one of the biggest sins you can be accused of in my family. It’s kind of funny. It was never being selfish when it came to discussions about Aunt Vonnie’s share of the work load.

Shorter and shorter.

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I’ve been pulling at my hair for an hour in that way that means I will cut it again today. I have Hair on repeat. Really if you think about it, Lady Gaga singing about hair is somewhat ironic. She wears wigs. As she says over and over, “I am my hair” she is saying that she is something that is external. She has so much control over who she is that she decides differently on a daily basis. Does that mean that people who have abrupt changes in their appearance are changing who they are?

This is all too angsty; I know. I love semi-colons. Damn you, commas. Jenny likes to remind me that the “rules of writing” were just randomly invented by some twat one day. Ok, that’s not exactly what she says. But it is what I hear. It makes me smile every single time. Because if some twat just made it up one day I don’t need to feel bound to it. I can do whatever I want. It’s a fun kind of rebellion–normally invisible.

Along with my hair getting shorter I notice how my field of vision is shortening. I’m not responding to emails or text messages unless I have seen the person recently. Recently as in seeing them within the last month. People I haven’t seen in many months… I don’t know. I just never seem to remember when I am at the computer. Or it is something like right now where I am actively avoiding. I don’t know why I am actively avoiding. I do. I don’t want to say why I am actively avoiding.

I’m not at ease in my skin right now. I feel not-ok in a way that I can’t ignore. I feel like a thousand monkeys are jumping on my chest. It hurts just behind my breastbone. Right now I don’t feel like I can look people in the eye. I feel dirty. Small. Less than. It’s not anyone else’s fault. At this point in time I don’t think there are very many people who know me even casually who think that of me. Not really. Sure, there are people who dislike me.

Outside of my family I don’t actually believe that people wish me ill. And they all feel very guilty for wishing me ill.

I am trying to see my shaman on Thursday. Since our babysitter quit I’m not 100% sure that is going to happen. And I may have to reschedule with him because of a meeting in the city anyway. It feels kind of like the universe doesn’t want me to see him. I want to see him.

I’ve got my bangs too high that I don’t stand a chance. I think I need to ask my shaman to shave my head. There. That is the compulsive. Why don’t I ask Noah? Why do I want to keep this away from him? Why is my shaman more appropriate?

Well didn’t I just fucking load that question. What does ownership mean? I don’t know. I really don’t. I am very much like a wild animal. I run off and do things by myself sometimes. I can’t accept having everything in my life have to come from Noah. Right now there is so very little in my life that isn’t for him. That plays a part in why I was dating too, I think.

Noah doesn’t have the same wounds in identity because of his appearance. I don’t see the deep fractures in his soul from feeling bad about how he looks. My shaman has spent a fair bit of time being upset with his physical body. Even my use of male pronouns is part of that fight. I feel like it is a failure in me that I cannot default to gender neutral pronouns. They all feel wrong, false, not grammatical. Not allowed.

Does that mean that people who are not easily labeled by one of those correct pronouns do not exist? It certainly feels that way. I suppose that since the dominant name and label is generally male it is close enough. That is awkward to say and write about. I feel like I am jumping on the crazy train, but who am I kidding? I was already here.

I want to see my shaman. I want to talk to him about my shifting sense of self. I want to talk to him about feeling so very bad about existing. I don’t have a church. I don’t have a congregation. But I do have a shaman. I’m not sure how these things happen. How does a life get built, anyway?

The part of me that is fighting with my compulsion admits that I want to use sex to get close to my shaman. I want to feel connected with him. Given our history I know it wouldn’t work in the way I wanted it to, anyway. We have an odd time connecting that way because we go at very different speeds. We are not a match or it never would have fallen off. But I feel like I should do it anyway. I love him so much. I feel like I have to earn the honor of his regard. I have to prove to him that I do want him. I do love him. There is nothing else I have to give that has any value or worth at all. Absolutely never is the pleasure of my company a possible exchange. I know there is no pleasure in my company. I am too mean. Too sharp. Too vicious and unpleasant.

I take comfort in getting to explain to him that I am not allowed to have sex with anyone else anymore. It’s not my fault. I’m sorry I am changing the deal. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry that I will never meet that need again. Please, please don’t reject me now. He won’t. But I feel absolutely terrified anyway. Hell, he doesn’t remember the last time we had sex. I was not pleased when I figured that out. Butthead. Apparently he doesn’t value me based on the things I think he does. He doesn’t even remember the parts that I think are the most important thing I have to give.

What the fuck is it that he is getting then? I need to ask. I need to go to him and talk to him about starting to dye my hair when I first started pulling away from my mom. The colors have gotten increasingly bolder and more odd and aggressive as I have felt angrier and angrier with my mother. The bleach is kind of a bitch though. I had a temper tantrum while trying to comb my hair one day because I couldn’t get the knot out. I cut it out. I did a bad job. It was fun for several days to try to even it out and giggle because with the curls and the weird dye job (I think five colors in splotches) it really doesn’t matter much if it is “even”.

But I’m tired of going out in public and hearing the comments. I smile at the children who ask. I frown at the boys who snicker “clown”. It’s like fucking junior high all over again. I’m done. I’m not hunting. I’m done. I feel like that part of me is gone. I miss my hair. I miss being able to turn my head and get a curtain to hide behind. It was part of how I dealt with my vast discomfort in public. I lost my veil. I feel exposed in a way that feels deeply uncomfortable. I have nothing to hide behind except my eyelids. They do not feel like adequate cover.

I feel like me shaving my head will happen like all the cutting. In the bathroom by myself. I know my shaman doesn’t keep up with my blog. He frankly tells me he doesn’t have the time to read my ever-increasing flood. That’s ok. It means I can talk about him all I want.

I feel like part of what is going on with the less-than is I feel so very weird about my place in the social hierarchy lately. I don’t feel like I am behaving. I fit nowhere. It was a true thing I said when I told my therapist that the only way I will ever fit into a group is if I leave Noah and am a poor single mother. They just don’t make groups for me any more.

What does that mean? I guess that means this is the American Dream then. Solitude. More of it. I don’t understand why. I’m not sure where I got broke and I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t fit. I feel wrong. I feel like everything in me is wrong. I still feel bewildered by my lack of anger. I don’t have that energy right now. Anger is normally a big spur to me getting off my fucking ass and getting shit done. It’s one of the things I use to fuel my productivity and I don’t care if that’s healthy or not. Everyone dies, right? I could very carefully never ever use my body harshly. I don’t think I would be very proud of my life.

What am I proud of? I kind of want to go ask my shaman to bait it out of me. He drives me insane. He says irritatingly true things. One right after another. It’s hard to not hate him sometimes. I would ask him to take the last of this shame from me when he shaved my head. But I don’t think I am going to ask. Because this is one of those things I have to do alone. He can’t take shame from me. Not really.

Shame is something that I own all by myself. I have to learn to wear it or I have to take it off. I don’t know how to take it off right now. I feel stuck. I feel too little and small. I haven’t done anything to really be proud of. I have done things that other people do and I expect far more support for it. I am small and selfish and petty. I am weak. Really? Am I? Maybe. Yes? Of course?

I recently saw this picture, one of the canonical “starving children in Africa” pictures. I feel terrible describing it that way. But these pictures are used as bludgeoning tools. You can’t ignore the fact that seriously, right this minute a small child is starving to death in another part of the world. While you wear big fur boots and lots of makeup and talk about how pathetic they are. It’s kind of an American trope, this guilt.

If I ever feel bad for myself I am supposed to remind myself that I am at least not a starving child in Africa and go on about my life. Well doesn’t that just support the status quo. I don’t much like the status quo.

The thing about guilt and shame is they aren’t useful. They are paralyzing. They rarely spur people to much action beyond denial.

When the children hiss hostile words at me I hear my mother telling me that all the people in the world think I look stupid. Everyone thinks I am ridiculous. Why? What have I done? Why is it ridiculous to play with your appearance? Why is it expected to be a set thing that doesn’t modify as time goes by? Why can’t I change? Why am I to be mocked?

But you know what? I’m a fucking grown up. My triggers are mine to manage. I am not going to get all the children in the world to stop making fun of me. They are little assholes. They can’t help it. So are their parents.

I have a lot of interesting feelings emerging as my hair gets shorter and shorter. My mother liked my hair short. She wanted me to look like a boy. She commented openly on it. I’m really intrigued by how harsh my face appears with short hair. I’m not sure how I feel about that as a lifestyle choice going forward. I am going to have an interesting time as it grows out. I want my veil back. It’s interesting knowing that if I want long hair going forward in my life I have to stop doing anything to it. I’m stuck with baking soda and vinegar for the rest of my life. I will have gorgeous hair again.

It’s weird learning what self-care means. It’s weird thinking about learning to take care of my body. It’s weird learning what it means to be gentle with myself. It’s happening in unexpected ways. I don’t feel bad about the cutting. I hope I don’t do it again because the marks aren’t fading fast and I don’t want my daughters to learn it as an appropriate coping mechanism. It means I need to figure out what to do. I don’t know right now. So far the answer seems to be, “Don’t hate yourself.” I’m not sure what that actually means as something to teach my kids. How do I do that? For the love of shiny green apples, how can someone like me teach anything other than hating yourself?

I’m going to a homeschooling meet-up tomorrow with the kids. We will be doing Sharpie tie-dye. I won’t shave my head before then. They deserve to know what they are getting into with our family. We are weird. Get used to it.

"Go see a therapist"

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You go see a therapist when you are stuck in some way and you can’t change by yourself. Otherwise you just change by yourself and save the money. Therapy is expensive, yo.

Who do I want to be when I grow up? What patterns am I actually stuck in and which patterns can I change if I think about them? What is a happy life? What do I want to do with my time and my life? That really is the crux of it, isn’t it? The way you spend your hours is the way you spend your years. I think I am saying it wrong but someone had something like that as a sig line on MDC. Where is my Zen place? What is it that I should be doing for my spirit to be in alignment with my body? (By the way I don’t use the word Zen in a way that is associated with any actual definition or official usage. I am a co-opting piece of shit.)

I told Noah this morning that I don’t feel like I am having sex for me and I don’t like that feeling any more. I am having sex so that I can continue to be this construct in my head. I am not really getting off much these days. That’s a big change. Sorta? It started with pregnancy. It kind of came back and then it seems to be gone again. I can get close and I have all these nifty hypnosis tricks in place so I can trigger muscle spasms in the appropriate way such that I suppose it feels like an orgasm, kinda. It’s like eating soft serve. It’s just not ice cream even if it looks like and is presented as the same thing. Even with sprinkles. It’s not ice cream.

You aren’t supposed to say that on the internet, right? The way we are having sex isn’t working for me. I don’t want to be this right now. I’m not saying never again. I am saying I need something other than what I have right now. This is hard to write about because I am trying very hard to not represent what Noah wants. I don’t think I really know or understand what Noah wants. It’s not his fault, but I think we are operating with a lot of unspoken assumptions and I should only speak for me.

I’m sitting here thinking and thinking and thinking. In these arguments I always get stuck with this huge load of rage and I scream that I don’t want to spend the rest of my life doing laundry. Dude. The rest of my life will involve laundry. Shut the fuck up already. Why does this become such a sticking point? I could dissect it. I could start having the other adults in the house do the laundry; they would if I required it. Really and truly, they would. But it would require reminding and fussing and then I would never be satisfied with the results. They would fold the damn shirts wrong.

This isn’t about laundry.

I don’t have very many pictures of my mother. But in several she’s doing laundry. I remember the sighs. The long tirades about how much she hated having to clean up after me. I remember her bitterness at having to go out and earn money and come home to the messes I made It’s honestly one reason I don’t want to have a job. If I had a job I would resent the ever loving shit out of my children for having the audacity to live in the house and make a mess when I wasn’t there. It offends my dignity. Oh God help someone who breaks a dish when I’m not home. I’m completely unreasonable. But if I’m standing in the room and not the one who does it? My reaction is, “Thank God it wasn’t me!” And I’m not mad. Mistakes happen.

I don’t forgive slights that are done when I’m out of sight. I’m not sure what is up with that. Hunh. Ok, that’s actually a big one. I’m going to have to think about that one for a long time. I resent having to be a support network for a life and for happiness I won’t get to share. It really bothers me. It makes me feel angry that I spend ‘x’ hours of week doing extra work so that Noah gets to have ‘y’ hours of time completely alone. Because the hours aren’t equal. Not in my head.

There is a tally. He doesn’t understand it or track it. It is totally invisible to him if I do it right. Sex is part of the tally. Part of the things I “have to do”. The tally that “should be” invisible to him. Which means the cost should be invisible as well. I’m having trouble writing a coherent sentence about this. If I don’t explain the tally system he can’t change his behavior based on the different costs.

For the whole rest of my life Noah will have more effect on me than anyone. Dealing with him is effort because he is a human being and that’s just life. That’s ok. That’s more than ok. I want to put a lot of effort into him because I like him sooooooooooo much. If he doesn’t understand where I am putting effort and why… it’s kind of silly, you know? I don’t know that I am using my effort to good effect. I don’t know where I am spinning my wheels and trying to do things to please dead people.

Who do I want to be when I grow up? What would I be like if I had grown up believing that my body is mine and people should only do things to me that I want them to do? I wonder if she is more or less fierce than I am?

Obedience. What is it? Obedience to what? To blind ideals? To stupid short-sighted goals? To instant gratification with a high opportunity cost? What cost can I bear? Honestly–a high cost. I really can. But where should the cost be spent? I don’t think that decision should be made in a vacuum. Years ago Noah offered me an abusive relationship with off-switch. What does it mean to be off? What does it mean when it is turned on? I’m not afraid of Noah, not really. Noah told me flat out this morning that he doesn’t believe me when I say I won’t leave. He’s a smartie, that one. The part that I don’t think he understands is I wouldn’t be able to stay gone. I can never actually walk away from him. He is the father of my children. Until his death he will be in my life. That is complicated. Noah doesn’t actually know what it means to talk about a broken home. I do. I want a home.

Even if it is soft serve, it’s home. That sounds terrible. Even if I am nothing exciting you will still stay. Even if I am a poor imitation of what a wife should be. Even if I am not anything like advertised. I feel like I am ruining Noah’s life by being so conflicted about sex. I don’t think Noah’s sexual performance has suddenly gone down hill.

Who do I want to be when I grow up? I don’t think a therapist can just fix me. I need to figure out who I want to be. No one else can tell me that. What would I be like if I could move through the world without the sure knowledge that if someone asked me for sex I am essentially required to say yes, or at least only say no to a very small number of people in specific categories. Anyone in category A should be good enough.

People are not interchangeable. They really aren’t. And I don’t fucking owe anyone anything. The Embargo is not my fault. It really doesn’t matter what my father told me. I don’t have a cunt so that I can get as many dicks as possible.

hair cutting

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No one really knows what the boundaries are for another person. You have to speak for yourself, only, always. I decided to stop hunting and I cut all my hair off. In the bathroom with nail scissors. And now I’m going to feel like a fucking schmuck for years. Something broke. I think if I believed I could get away with wearing a burqa I would. I feel like a melodramatic, stupid, immature moron. Not to put too fine a point on it.

Ok, so what really happened is I was in the process of trying to leave the house one day and I couldn’t comb through the snarls. I lost my temper and badly cut the knot out. I have been compulsively going into the bathroom to fix it ever since. It’s rather short. My hair is not ok with bleach. I have a fairly ridiculous amount of shame around the fact that this is not the first time I have stopped hunting and shaved my head. I should tell that story. I don’t know if it is in the book or not.

I was seventeen and at West Valley. I was hanging out with Praveena. It was towards the end of our time hanging out together. I was on the tail end of one of my whoring-around-phases and feeling really bad about myself. I was getting to the point where I noticed that everyone who fucked me ditched me really soon after. I was at Praveena’s house and we were having a conversation about the fact that it bothered me that people no longer wanted to be my friend after we had sex. She thoughtfully looked at me and said, “Then why don’t you find out if they want to be your friend before you have sex with them?”

I started shaking. You don’t understand. People don’t spend time with me very often. Sex was how I got people to look at me. I moved around so often that I knew that I had to get attention quickly or I wouldn’t get it at all. I know what I’m supposed to act like. I know my “role”. I couldn’t verbalize any of that at the time. I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to be near me. I just sat there shaking. I had been cutting my hair at home compulsively for a while. It was probably three or four inches long. I asked her for shaving supplies. She was kind of confused as to why I wanted to shave my legs right then but she got them.

I went out in the back yard and shaved my head. She watched in wide mouthed horror. She had hair almost to her waist. She was a gorgeous Persian girl with super thick luscious hair. She sputtered and gasped and tried to talk me out of it. I remember the look of squick on her face. I laughed.

My mother didn’t laugh. To put this in larger context, this happened in October of 1998. My father had killed himself a couple of weeks earlier. Tommy had killed himself in June. My mom said a lot of very rude and nasty things to me about my looks. She pointed out that my head was exceedingly lumpy. She pointed out that given how fat I was, my head looked especially small and stupid. I need that big bushy hair to balance out my fat ass.

I was invited to go to a ‘formal’ dinner related to the haunted house event I volunteered at. My hair was only a few millimeters long at that point. I covered my head in glitter and wore a tight black velvet dress. My mom didn’t say anything, but she shook her head and grimaced.

At the time I felt awkward and stupid and barely spoke to anyone. The reality is that people were perfectly nice and civil to me. The people who knew me at all were friendly and strangers went out of their way to be nice. I never went back to that organization. My mother extensively talked about how stupid I looked and how she bets they would be making fun of me behind my back.

I’m not really cutting my hair because I think it makes me look ugly. When I feel ugly I feel compelled to cut my hair. I really do have beautiful hair. My hair is lovely enough that someone who feels and acts the way I do should not have that much camouflage to look “normal”.

I can’t possibly explain my mothers furious disgust at people who dye their hair “funny colors”. Oh my god. Anyone who would do that is disgusting. They are lesser, dirty people. They are not normal. Above all we must be normal, right? I don’t even know what that means.

I really and truly did dye my hair because I thought it was fun. I have enjoyed catching glimpses of myself in reflections and seeing the shock of color. It makes me smile. Unfortunately my hair is quite fine and the bleach destroys it and it gets shorter and shorter and… yeah. It’s time to deal with letting it grow out again.

And that represents so much internal conflict of self-expression and self-identity. It’s ridiculous that it matters so much. As I listen to Lady Gaga sing about her own hair experience I feel trite and ridiculous and like I am such a product of my generation. Of course I dye my hair odd colors and cut it myself in ridiculous ways. I’m Emo, right? I guess I never got over high school.

This is part of what I mean when I say I don’t fit. I don’t really know the rules. Do you want to know the main reason I’m cutting my hair myself? Because it really doesn’t matter if I pay someone to do this. Pretty soon I’m going to just buzz it because it’s time to start fresh. There really isn’t a point in paying someone to do that. I’ve been looking extensively at our budgeting. I’m going to continue paying for Noah’s haircuts because I like them. Enh, I’m just done paying for them for a few years. It makes me twitch to pay that much money on hair care. Curly hair is very forgiving and it’s not like I’m trying to impress anyone. That feels bad to say.

I have fun cutting my hair. I like trying to figure out the shape of my head. I get compliments from random people when I am out so I think I do a reasonable job. I’m not ugly. I don’t really think that having short hair makes me ugly. I don’t think that other people with short hair are ugly. But when I am feeling ugly I compulsively cut my hair. I’m trying to change what I see in the mirror. I want to have more control over what I see. I don’t want to go pay someone else who will try to make me look like some mainstream idea of beauty. Whatever it is that society values and requires of women I am not it. Let’s get the advertising straight.

There are fifty sides to every story. I like cutting my hair. I think it is fun. I think it is weird. I think it is a slightly self-harming behavior but fairly harmless so it’s ok. I think it is an obsessive compulsive tick when I am overwhelmed with my sexuality. I think that other people will judge me badly for being the kind of person who will do this. I don’t know why I care. Thank goodness we are through picture season.

I need to let the roots get a bit longer before I decide how short to get. Until then I get to cut off bits and pieces every time the urge strikes. I think it is kind of funny that I do this during cold weather. I guess I’ll just have to wear my Cheshire Cat hat all the time for a few months. That’s subtle.

I told Noah some truth last night. I wonder how that will work out.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Category Archives: identity

Perspective

Working is fun.

Passing

More on anger.

Status

anxiety purge

Learning and shame

Trying to learn what my needs are.

Food comes from a can

You are good. You are smart. You are kind.

Words have power.

Always with the defensive, this girl.

frustrated

Perspective is everything.

Anything is possible

family roles

Shorter and shorter.

"Go see a therapist"

hair cutting