Fuck fuck fuck a duck
Screw a kangaroo
I thought the trolls would leave by now
But I was just a fool.
I spoke too soon.
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Category Archives: internet judgment
Are they gone yet?
I ain’t seen a hit from that site in a while. Have they decided to move on to being snotty about someone else?
YAY!!!!
Let me tell you something about the internet.
When you use “do not link” so that it isn’t obvious where you are coming from… it’s still obvious that assholes are dropping by.
Just so you know.
Do you know what the difference is between mean and bullying? Bullying would be coming to my sandbox to tell me off. Y’all ain’t doing that.
You have my sincere gratitude and appreciation for that. This is really fucking mild in the world of being disapproved of. I see that and I am grateful.
Being mean is showing up so you can come up with reasons to go back to your own sandbox and cackle.
You know what? I think everyone is mean sometimes.
But I’m really really really grateful that I’m not being bullied. I’m really not. It’s ok for people to not approve of me and to talk about that.
It’s ok.
I just don’t need to read it.
Progress?
Noah says I’m handling this round of assholes better than usual. In the past I would have been reading the thread and crying all day long. I’m getting better about thinking that I don’t have to be aware of other peoples opinion of me. I don’t have to know. I don’t have to ask. I don’t want to ask. I don’t want to know.
I’ll stick to caring about the opinions of people who show up and act like a reasonable, respectful person towards me.
But my hits are still high. That pisses me off. Vultures.
Y’all have no boundaries. If you’re here because you want to mock me, you aren’t a good person. You get to live with that. Thank goodness I don’t have to live with people who have as poor of boundaries as you. *phew*
Am I fucked up person? Well, probably. I’ve been documenting my issues for over 10 years. I’ve been in therapy for 30 years because of all kinds of shit.
Yeah. I’m fucked up. But you are here. Because you have… no boundaries or respect for your fellow human being.
Who is fucked up?
Holy craptastic
450 hits. Y’all are… something. Clearly you don’t have enough to do with your time that is productive.
Perspective
I had a great visit with a neighbor today. We chatted for two hours while the kids played. Towards the end I brought up the troll shit. Because I’m a whiny bitch. I mentioned what I had read of specific criticisms. (I don’t know where the thread goes beyond where I did my idiotic number of responding to questions and I really don’t want to know. I’ve been idiotic enough to log in and see that the fucking thread exploded but I had just enough self control to not fucking read it.)
I don’t actually need to care about these peoples opinions of me. They will never actually spend time to get to know me. They have already judged me and it doesn’t matter what I’m actually like.
Everyone who has ever read my writing says, “Wow you are different in person.”
This is the absolute most extreme of my thinking. I’m really a lot fucking milder in person. I have a lot more self control than you might perceive as a judgmental random person.
I don’t really give a shit. I’m not writing for you. I’m writing to organize my thoughts for myself. I’m not writing with the goal of communicating with you, Oh Jane Blow.
I’m writing for Noah. And he does know what I’m doing. And he does track my behavior and my interactions with the kids. So, uhm, your “concern” is … yeah.
You aren’t concerned. You are entertained by feeling superior. That’s a wee bit different.
You know what? I won’t ever come back and read. It’s totally cool for you to have your space to say whatever you want and it doesn’t have to impact me. But for the love of shiny green apples, go the fuck away.
I have managed to chase off most of the folks who really wanted me to become a source of porn for them because they wanted to jack off to thinking about me being raped as a little kid. How hard can it be to chase off a pack of “concerned strangers”?
You aren’t actually concerned about my children. I mean, sorta you are in a self serving anxious way. Not in a way that reflects any awareness of my children.
My children glow with love and health. You really… yeah. I don’t know many people who haven’t been hit by their parents. I know extremely few people who think they have the right to say “Stop” to their parents.
I’m ok with what I’m doing. I mean… no… I’m not ok with all of what I’m doing. I know I get to the point of being a bully. I’m learning a lot about the size and shape of that and what I need to do to create space for myself where I don’t do that.
But you don’t know anything about me. You don’t know how I talk to my children. You believe you do. You seem to think you know a lot. Have fun with that.
Children vary. What is wildly inappropriate or abusive for one child is necessary and or desirable to another child.
Also, cultures vary lots. People all over the world have incredibly different views of what it means to be a child. My children are not having a privileged American childhood. Yeah, they are being taught about work.
It was hilarious when I listed off some of the things people were complaining about. I said, “I’m always afraid these kinds of people might be right. I really don’t want to hurt my kids.”
She started laughing. She told me about how she handles her kids, how her parents handled her, how her siblings handle their kids.
You know what? Eldest Child is probably right. I’m about average. I’m not that great. I’m not that bad. Mostly because I do some things very very well and some things very very badly. So I sorta average out.
I’m getting better at working around my very very badly areas.
Yes. I have severe developmental delays and I don’t know how to do everything I probably should know how to do.
Duh.
My children are preternaturally confident. They are very sure of who they are, what they want, and what they should get from the world. And they bloody well expect to be treated with at least civility or they will object with great fervor.
I spend a lot of time writing that I want to beat the shit out of my children. I don’t say it that often. Even when my kid told me to knock it off it wasn’t that common and it was mostly muttered under my breath. I don’t yell at them. I don’t threaten them that they must do x work or I will beat them.
I acknowledge to myself that I’m done. Then I turn to them and say, “My drawer of spoons is completely and totally empty. Can you help?”
But yeah. I don’t write for your clarity. I write so I will remember the most extreme bits and not try to deny that they happened.
I’ll remember the good parts. They are so very wonderful.
Gotta go hang out with my friend. And my friend’s kids. And my other friend. And my husband. And my kids.
Because I’m doing ok. I’m not perfect. But I’m doing ok.
Wow.
Seriously people. 300 hits? So you can make fun of me. That really doesn’t say good things about you.
I need this to be a one night bump.
I am so fucking pissed. Yup, come read a few blog entries then gather like fucking cackling hens to talk about how much better you are than the mentally ill woman.
I hope you feel very good about yourselves. Clearly you are superior to me in every way. That’s fine. I can live with that.
I don’t need this to be a competition. If it is a competition, fine. I lose. Can we move on now? Are we still in grammar school? This isn’t even high school level snark. I know. I went to five then worked in them. High school kids are usually mature enough to leave mentally ill people alone. Grammar school kids pick them as a target.
Ask me how I fucking know.
Yes. You have not done the terrible things I have done. I know. You are better than me. I know.
There really isn’t a lot I can do about that.
It doesn’t really matter that I’m a fucking piece of shit. I have to wake up tomorrow and smile brightly and coax a very reluctant three year old through potty training. I have to clean some bedrooms because holy crap I haven’t finished unpacking. This will take a week or more. I feel like I’m drowning. I have to help a five year old learn how to use scissors. I have to help a six year old work on reading. I have to help a seven year old work on printing because it’s time.
My to do list is about as long as my arm. I have 93 other tasks I want to get done in the next two weeks. And you know what, I’ll get them done. Because I’m going to have a big god damn party with the very large number of people who think I’m god damn fantastic. And when they walk into my house… there will be comments of “Wow I love what you’ve done.” Utterly predictable every year. Because I always change things. Because I barely stop working long enough to sleep.
Because it really don’t matter that you think I’m a piece of shit. It doesn’t matter if you are better than me. I am here and you are not. My children need me and they don’t need you. So it doesn’t really matter that you are better.
There is nothing for me to actually win or lose here. My life will continue on with or without your approval. But I’ll tell you plain that knowing that a bunch of women, including someone I tried to befriend think it is fun to sit around and talk shit about me…
Well. There are reasons I believe people instantly when they say folks are mean to them or they were abused. People are fucking mean. The average human being likes to be mean for sport.
I really don’t have time for such nonsense.
I’ve got bigger fish to fry. And more important people to care about. Instead of pointing the finger at strangers on the internet I look around the people who actually fucking stand near me and I try to help wherever I can.
So judge the hell out of me. I guess it’s a hobby. I guess you need to have something to do with your time. Uhm. Ok then.
You do you. That will give me all the more reason to do me.
Edit to add: ok high school kids are that mean. I shouldn’t lie.
My kids are nice to me.
Yesterday I didn’t talk very much. I had headphones on for a lot of the day. I was in an evil, hateful mood and it was so clear to me that it wasn’t the fault of anyone I was standing near. (Sorry, Pam.) So the birth control pills haven’t leveled out my mood yet. But I’ve only been on them a week and I started mid-cycle so who knows. Next month will be more of a test. I haven’t felt suicidal so far, just homicidal. See, this is why I don’t own big weapons. Mood swings are bad.
I feel so much guilt when I unfriend, unfollow, unsubscribe anything/anyone. Like I owe these people my attention. I really don’t. I don’t have enough time in the day to pay attention to everyone who is on the internet. I just don’t. I’ve cut my reading back substantially. If the people in my daily life wrote blogs I would follow them religiously. (You turkeys are not providing me with nearly enough voyeuristic delight.)
But I’m really tired of following people I don’t really know and I won’t know them better. Some people aren’t interested in me and that’s cool. I can be annoying.
I’ll just leave you alone. You can spend time with the people you actually like and I’ll be over here. Doing something else. Maybe alone and maybe not. Who knows. I don’t mind being alone as much as I used to.
Although the more alone at home time I have, the more lonely I feel. To this effect I’ve been back on Mothering.com. Mostly hitting up the unschooling board to talk about philosophies with people who aren’t going to send periodic reminders that if you aren’t TOTALLY AN UNSCHOOLER you should go somewhere else. My local list is not very inviting. There is some kind of metric of purity I don’t understand. If you say something too homeschooley that isn’t unschooley enough (No one is able to tell me an actual difference) the mods get really upset and tell you to take it elsewhere. They remind us extensively that there are other homeschooling-not-unschooling groups where we should be instead.
I’m getting really upset about feeling shoved out of a club I am clearly in. There are very few people on this planet who get to assign me hoops to jump to prove something. These women? Not so fucking much.
I would really like to know more unschoolers. Not because I want to ditch the school-at-home friend or because I want to fill up the time so we can’t see traditional schoolers.
There is a huge difference between talking to other unschoolers about school-related-anxiety than talking to someone who schools. Schooling parents (whether at home or brick and mortar) have different anxieties about learning or not. For me, is my child experiencing holes in her learning because I was really stupid and I missed something really important? I am responsible. And I’m not following a road map. That is scary sometimes. If you follow a curriculum… you have a road map. Your kid will vary, sure…. but you at least have the fucking map.
Someone drove me out in the middle of the desert, blindfolded, gave me a water bottle and a compass and said, “See you later, sucker!”
Other unschoolers have more of the same experience. Unschoolers make some stupid choices. We reinvent the wheel every fucking time. “Hey, there’s this great way to teach this subject you just buy this curriculum and…” “Oh no! NOT US!!!! WE WANT TO MAKE UP OUR OWN PATH.” Not so smart, I think.
Ok, I could defend it at great length. There are reasons I make the much harder choice of reinventing the wheel (twice–my kids have dramatically different education needs and not just because of the age gap) but it’s hard. I want advice. And if you don’t unschool… it’s conjecture.
I listen to conjecture with way more grace than I used to. Let us give me credit for that.
I think my social circle is probably pretty much set for the next ten years. But I’d like to find 2-5 more unschooling families. Preferably within five miles of my house. (Since I’m writing a wish list.)
I already know three home schooling families who live within a four mile radius of us. If you include further afield in Fremont, but still “local” we know four or five other families but we don’t see them as much.
If I got to write my future (not that I think I will necessarily get to do this, but this is my fantasy here) I would find two additional families to the ones I’m already really tight with. Eventually my cat will die (I feel so guilty every time I think of this) and the one family will be able to come over again. (My cat is causing them breathing problems and that is just Not Ok. I support them not coming over indefinitely until circumstances change. We meet at the park instead.)
Anyway back to what I want. I would love to have five families within a 6 mile-8 mile diameter circle so the kids would be able to ride back and forth to one anothers houses within a few years. What I would *love* is to have periods of time where we do co-op type learning. Mondays are at house A. Tuesdays are at house B. Wednesdays are at house C. Thursdays are at house D. Fridays are at house E (or alternatively–Friday could be “at home” day for everyone–maybe I just want one more family–ha).
Different people are good at teaching different things. I don’t mean English/Math/Science/History (although as the kids get closer to middle school that could be hella fun). I mean, I would love to really teach the kids about painting and building and gardening stuff. These are skills I like teaching to children. While they are small is a great time to learn it so they just have it in their back pocket for later. I am *not* the best mama to teach most cooking stuff. I mean, I can. But it’s not my passion. Other people want to do that crafty shit I mean wonderful stuff. (I can’t sit down and work with my hands. So I’m kind of a jerk sometimes. I’m sorry.)
It’s a process.
I think I want this because I read about something similar in an off-beat parenting book. I think My Mother Wears Combat Boots but I might be wrong. She had lots of neat details about unschooling her kid.
I don’t necessarily mean spending 6-8 at the various houses. 3-4 hours might be plenty. Partially I would love to let Shanna have the experience of seeing *the same group of people* that many times a week. Mostly my kids have to be ok with the fact that people in their life are all on very long rotations. I just can’t handle driving more.
Noah and I have been having some pretty fierce debates about feminism and gaming and how when you support the system that helps the rapists (sure–you can have a great excuse but what about political dissidents?!) then… well. I was a dickhead. I said, “When the Nazi’s were killing Jews there were people who put the Jews on the train. And there were people who stood there and watched and said, ‘There’s nothing I can do.'”
So I lost that argument according to Godwin. I can live with that. For the record I’m not calling Noah a fascist. Nor a Satanist (which he shouted at me yesterday because he was using a straw man because he didn’t want to directly argue with my main point.) No, you aren’t a fascist nor a Satanist. But sometimes you are a rape apologist. Sometimes you think it is way more important to protect 10,000 guilty men rather than risk 1 innocent man and fuck how many women are thrown under the bus in the process.
No, I don’t think you are a Nazi. Nor a Satanist. I’m more realistic than that. You don’t do anything bad. You just stand there and say, “There’s nothing I can do.” That will always be hard for me. That will always feel like complicity. I know it isn’t *Noah’s* fault any of this happens. I know he isn’t the one out there harassing women.
But the men who do aren’t going to listen to women like me. They are going to listen to men. Only men are allowed to change male culture. Not me. And I’m really tired of being told that I should somehow come up with a way to fix something that exists before me, outside of me, and almost entirely out of my sight. I am not welcome in any of the circles where it could be fixed.
It isn’t my fight. Not really. I can fight defensively from my side. (Which means offense, but I’m learning to be more careful with that.) I can’t change that side. That is literally Not Within My Power.
I don’t think Noah is God or anything. I already gave that handle away. (And now God has a kid! The universe is really interesting sometimes. No, they didn’t name the kid Jesus. I did not pronounce that like Jesus Christ and more like Jesus who picks your veggies.)
My expectations are too high and thus I will be disappointed. I know that. I know it isn’t Noah’s fault. I don’t actually expect him to get on his white steed and run off to save all the womens. That’s not really a role I would assign him.
What do I even want him to do? Not defend the behavior that protects rapists. Reddit and 4chan are wrong for covering up the identities of people who steal pictures of women and putting them on the internet.
That’s not free speech. That’s permission to commit as many crimes as you want. Different.
Stealing and displaying something isn’t free speech. It isn’t. It isn’t. It isn’t.
(If you live in more than a bubble than I do–some asshole on 4chan hacked into Apple’s icloud storage and stole some naked pictures of celebrities from the database. Some have been claimed as true and some have been denied as fakes. I haven’t seen any and I don’t intend to. They were Not Made For Me.)
I am pro pornography. If you want good pornography I can ask you some genre questions and probably refer you to one of my friends who works in that genre so I can give you high assurances they aren’t being exploited and in fact they love their job.
I am going to submit my book to two publishing houses on Monday. Like, put it in the mail. I have almost all the stuff together.
I have a handful of early readers (no comments yet) so that is… nerve wracking. I’m pretty sure that me and the editor are the only ones to read it cover to cover yet.
The planter boxes are coming along. I’ve painted the pallets on top and one of the bases is about 85% done. The kids did it by themselves. They just missed a few small spots. No biggie. Easy to fix.
Noah, I think you are a saint for putting up with me. I’m really pretty harsh with you. You tell me that my level of happiness is directly tied my expectations and you are right.
And yet… I am a controlling person. I like having influence. Over the ten years you have known me, you have changed a lot. I wish my methods had been more gentle. I appreciate that when I hit something you are unwilling to change you are very clear so I can move on. I don’t like wasting my effort. I put a lot of effort into you. I want it to be useful instead of wasted.
I love you. I know I am not easy to live with. I know I move things around all the time and you have trouble figuring things out. I get the impression you grew up in a static environment. I’m sorry I can’t give you one. This is the least dynamic my living environment has been. I am practically static. All I do is shift my organizing stuff as the proportions change. Not that much real change. But sometimes the canned foods are in the kitchen and sometimes the garage. It sorta depends on how many we have.
I’m trying to figure out how to fit. I’ve never fit anywhere ever in my life. This is really hard. I don’t know what it even means.
I was on NextDoor last night (my shrink recommended it) and I sorta went off on the people who were being nasty about how poor people maintain their homes. “Don’t they have any pride?”
There were many years of my life when my food money per month was less than these women consider “just part of life” to spend on a gardner. And yet at this point, I do have a gardner. Whom I overpay because he doesn’t actually do almost anything. But I’m happy about it. He does whatever I want, he’s always super nice and he’s got a kid in UC Davis. I can overpay him a little.
I said that I spend a lot of time walking in our neighborhood and I talk to anyone who will put up with my chattiness. Many of the untended yards are due to poverty or disability or maybe both. Are these really people who need to be shamed because they do not have the resources to keep up with the Joneses?
I’m probably not going to be popular. I can tell.
I’m never going to be quiet again. I have all the privilege I could ever want and more. I am secure. It would be pretty hard to threaten me. Once someone starts threatening my life I will start practicing more with the cross bow I was kindly given and I’ll carry around my baseball bat.
You aren’t going to chase me out of my home. So I feel pretty fucking secure. Maybe it is hubris–if people with guns started hating me I could die. But there isn’t much I could do to protect myself from such men anyway. (Could be women but statistics say it is unlikely.)
Who am I? What am I?
Don’t know. But I’m going to be loud about it.
Drips, drabs, ups, and downs.
We went up to San Pablo yesterday to see some friends. This is after that specific friend coming to my house monthly for ohhh four years now? I am starting to try and do some trips up there in exchange for all the trips to my house. The distance between us is not shorter just because he is a guy with no kids. I can do effort too.
And when I drive up there I get to spend time with his lovely wife. I find the visits to be highly educational in diverse arenas. For one thing: she knows way the fuck more about gardening than I do and she’s happy to talk about plants. Lately getting near someone with lots of plant knowledge who does not eschew my children is somewhat tricky. I’ve tried to sign up for gardening classes THAT ARE BEING ADVERTISED ON AN UNSCHOOLING MAILING LIST and I was told I would have to get babysitting. Stop fucking advertising in this space if my fucking kids aren’t welcome you fucking fuckers. I didn’t say fuck to the people in question. I just dropped it.
Beyond the gardening stuff, I am having a bit of trouble with Callidora. Well, phrasing it that way sounds more extreme than it is. Many of my parenting approaches work really well for Shanna and don’t work at all with Calli. Luckily my friends’ wife seems to identify really strongly with Calli. They are very similar temperamentally and she is giving me a lot of feedback for how to tweak our interactions so they work better.
I feel so much gratitude I don’t have words. Someone is willing to look at me and look at my daughter and look at our relationship and say, “You are doing ok, but you both might be happier if you did……”
Err, in defense of my hubris more than once I have said, “I’m afraid I am going to have to do ____” and her response was “Yes. That is exactly what you have to do.” So she isn’t entirely telling me new information. But she is very good at skimming out the bullshit and getting to the heart of the matter. “This is failing because of x.”
I don’t trust many people to give me feedback. I’m not sure why I trust her feedback as much as I do. For one thing she doesn’t use the word “should” and I’m not sure if that has become a specific trigger. Maybe I explode at people for that word rather than because I am completely unwilling to accept advice? It’s hard to tease out.
Also, she tends to say “Calli seems to be a lot like me. When I was a kid I had x and y and z experiences and this is how it went well and this is how it went badly. If Calli is as much like me as she seems right now, you are going to have to deal with a and b and c. It’s not a good idea to do d.”
I guess there is an implied “should” in that but she doesn’t say it.
It also occurs to me that I push Calli in a way I have never pushed Shanna. When Shanna was three I had a one year old. We did not spend a lot of time pushing the absolute physical limits of what she could accomplish until she collapsed in frustrated tears.
I’m having a hard time understanding fully that Calli wants to be able to do things she isn’t ready to do yet and I need to find a tactful way of bailing her out even as I push Shanna to try. Differentiated instruction is a bitch.
(Err, the bicycle riding project is coming along. We’ve hit a few hiccups. As my wise new running mate commented, “Dude. You’ve been out with them four times? Relax and do more low pressured practice.”
Yeah yeah. You may have a point. But we bought the bikes because we want to ride to the park. I need to decide in my adult brain that even if that is the eventual goal… we sure as shit can’t start by doing that. I should probably not try to leave our housing development again until June. We need more low-stakes practice than we have had. Hours and hours and hours and hours.
It is not just a form of transportation. It is about entertainment. It has to be about entertainment at first or they won’t gain enough proficiency to use it as transportation later. The transportation part doesn’t have to be worked out at three, instantly. Relax you bitch.
Medication has been spotty this week. I (re?)noticed a pattern. Whenever I get to the point of using sufficient medication that I actually feel good instead of having just the edge of the pain taken away I punish myself for days with under medicating so I feel a lot more pain. I’m not supposed to be using pot like a pot head. I’m not supposed to be trying to get high. I’m supposed to be just managing the pain.
I think I am too much of a Puritan. My sister told me I had ancestors on the Mayflower (Not her–different fathers.). Maybe it is too deeply buried within my DNA? I can’t stop believing that I must suffer. Anything that feels good MUST BE BAD.
I have been very consistent lately about giving up my morning “off time” to wake up with the kids. I’m not sure if this is good or bad. On one hand I’m more frazzled and I’m not taking a compensatory amount of time later. On the other hand… we are getting along better. When the kids open their eyes in the morning to me in their bed smiling at them… the whole day is easier. The first thing they hear every day is, “Good morning. I’m so glad to see you again. I’m looking forward to our wonderful day together.”
They smile back and say, “Me too!” then grab my neck and pull me close. Then I get a sleepy “Good morning.”
Sometimes it feels weird knowing that I do this as a parenting gesture in large part to make up for the hole in my heart. No one was ever happy to see me during my childhood. I was a terrible, unwanted burden.
I completely support mothers who need to abort children born of rape. I wish my mother hadn’t allowed her religion to force her to keep me. I was not wanted. And they made my life hell.
Now I have something different. It is so very nice. But it’s a lot of emotional and mental and physical work. And I get really tired.
When I’m tired it is harder to be consistent. When I’m scared I start screaming. That’s consistent.
Calli has asked me to stop raising my voice at her when I’m repeating orders/requests/whatever you want to call them. Demands? She told me (while making eye contact so this is serious as a fucking heart attack) “I will be able to listen to you better if you get close to me and whisper in my ear that it is important.”
If a three year old can so clearly ask for the kind of interaction she needs then I am a fucking asshole if I ignore the request. This is how I teach them ownership of their body and consent and boundaries.
I’ve been working on it. I kind of feel that I should create some accountability tool for myself. Maybe another sheet of paper on the wall. I can ask Calli to help me decide whether I approached her correctly or not and we can decide if I get a mark in the “right behavior” column or the “not so right” column. It will also help her clarify which aspects of the raised voice stuff are a problem for her.
My kids are not going to grow up thinking adults are perfect and kids need to bend to the adults around them. Ha. Ha. Ha. No. We want to live together. We need to adapt to one another.
I’m happy about the upcoming social stuff. I’m feeling a little overwhelmed that people are agreeing so delightedly to come to my events. My RSVPs fill up fast. (Err, RSVP for Easter if you are coming… not many spaces left.)
I have had something like six people in the last two weeks get really excited when I confirm that I’m hosting Easter again. “OH! You throw the best parties!”
I do?
Oh.
Well that’s awesome. How do I do that? What makes them “the best” for you? Because I spend my parties in kind of an anxious hell hoping I don’t offend everyone and run them off such that they never want to come back.
And yet I keep hosting. Irony.
I don’t seem to be running people off. I mean… I do… but I don’t. I run some people off.
I feel very guilty when I admit to myself that I run off people who need things from me that I can’t give. My anxiety and shame around not being able to meet their needs makes me angry and cruel. It isn’t my fault I can’t meet their needs. It isn’t their fault I can’t meet their needs. It isn’t their fault they have needs. I have needs they can’t meet either. But I get mean. This is a major character flaw of mine.
I don’t do this with people who have small needs I can easily meet. If people need something from me that is going to be an up to five hour commitment one time… I love doing that. That helps me feel like I am part of a community and I’m useful and all kinds of good feelings. When someone starts to need 3-10 hours of work from me every fucking week in order to have a relationship with them…
I get mean. I am awful. I am not a nice person. I don’t know how to have healthy limits without being an asshole. I’m not making excuses or justifying my behavior. It’s wrong.
I have been talking to a friend a lot about how different it is in America versus other more crowded countries. Americans apologize for bumping into someone. In China you would never say any word other than “sorry”. So they don’t bother.
I spend a lot of time apologizing for taking up space. I spend a lot of time apologizing for being inconvenient. I spend a lot of time apologizing for not being able to do/be what someone else wants/needs.
I am sorry I am so inadequate. I clearly see that I am.
Right now I’m having anxiety attacks because some folks are mad at me. Folks I don’t really need to “care” about per se. They aren’t my friends. They are the close friends of one of my friends. They are mad at me because my vomiting on Friday caused them some inconvenience. I have apologized profusely for inconveniencing them. I’m sorry they were brought into the situation by our mutual friend. But yeah. I’m the bitch.
And I feel consumed with shame and I have for days. I inconvenienced them. I stole hours of their life and made them about me when they already kind of hate me. I’m really sorry. I did apologize. I have not been acknowledged and that is what I assumed would happen.
I get into these situations. I’m sorry I inconvenienced you. I have very little control over when I vomit. I’m just glad I didn’t make a mess on my floor.
But it impacted your life. And you wish I didn’t impact your life. So you are angry with me because I popped up and existed in a way you couldn’t tune out.
I’m really sorry.
This is more or less why I avoid that whole segment of the “community”. I don’t really like feeling like I am doing something wrong by breathing in a way they can hear.
So yeah. I don’t think I will teach with my friend again. There is a bunch of stress in the lead up and if I get sick there is lots of acrimony, blame, and anger. Not from my friend. He was mellow about the situation. But he didn’t feel qualified to handle the class alone and those are the other people he has in his life to turn to for support.
Yeah well, me hanging around near them feels like an abusive family reunion where they all wish I would drop dead. The sooner the better.
More one of them than the other but… well that’s not a story I’ll write down yet. Maybe a few more decades. It being thirteen years ago still isn’t long enough. Some day.
It’s not all her fault. I was a bitch. But man. Oh man. Ok. Shiny change of topic.
I’ve been having a lot of feelings all week over that. I was doing great last week until I started vomiting on Friday.
I associate vomiting with letting people down and being a bad and weak person. When I get sick my association is that I will also be in trouble for some reason. I am inconvenient when I’m sick.
Noah is working hard to change some of these patterns. He’s nice when I’m sick. He does a lot of telling me that it isn’t my fault and I didn’t do anything bad. I feel really pathetic for needing it. But I do. And he does it. I am so grateful for him as a partner.
I like teaching though. I will look for more opportunities to teach. Just no co-teaching in a situation potentially wrapped in shame-inducing trauma. When I had to cancel a class as a professional teacher… no one made me write a formal apology. I’d like to go back to that kind of treatment. Thanks.
My running mate wants me to stop thinking of writing as a hobby and start thinking of it as a business. I’ve sold enough forking copies of my book that I can stop pretending I’m not a real writer. I shouldn’t have to pay for my book editing and publishing stuff out of my “fun money”. It’s not my hobby. Noah doesn’t take his business expenses out of his fun money. It’s a separate category in the budget. It’s not very healthy for me to demean myself in this fashion.
I will severely limit my career as a writer if I can’t employ an editor until I save up enough fun money by denying myself everything. Denial as a full-time lifestyle in a household that otherwise has a lot of privilege… that’s kinda self-hating. It’s being weird. It’s unhealthy.
Why do women do this to themselves? My writing “doesn’t count”. It’s just… something I do. Like the laundry. And when there are expenses for it, well, they are “mine”, right?
I developed a lot of habits over the years of having the annuities and living with men. What I could have was very strictly limited to what I had in that $1200 every month. I didn’t over extend. And now I have no real personal income and… I’m flailing. The $100/month of fun money is… not enough. Not for me to feel like I can track all of “my” spending separately from household stuff.
We just have a clothes budget. It is for all four of us. If someone gets something then the other three have to wait a while. *shrug* But it changes how I think of things. Although… when I bought the pretty clothes in Portland I took a big chunk out of my personal money. I spent more than $500 on two items of clothing. It didn’t seem fair to make my family give up that large a share of the clothes budget on me getting two items. So more than $300 came out of my fun money. That seemed fair to me.
When the kids really get a big clothes splurge… it goes in the “kid” section even though mostly they come out of the main category.
The kids have a big section of the budget that is amorphously used for classes, home school supplies. books, toys, gear of whatever kind (was baby carriers and diapers now it has moved on to bikes), and rarely clothes.
A long time ago I consciously went out and started spending time with older men. They could talk to me about money. How they got it. What they did with it. I made my own judgments about who lived in which kind of house and who had how much money. I’ve always been tactless as fuck. I would point blank ask them how much cash they had in the bank and whether or not they had investments.
I didn’t understand most of what they told me. But I remembered it. It’s kind of funny to have little memories float up now and again as I’m trying new things with investing.
Be sure you are right, then go ahead. I will, Davey. I will research and research and research and I’ll figure out what I think is right. Of course I know I could always be wrong. Some minute change in my life might make all of my careful risk calculations moot and irrelevant.
I have no way of predicting that. So I have to just act and hope for the best.
Save.
Debt is evil.
Make your money work for you.
Pay yourself first.
Sometimes I think I turn to these mantras as the only way I have of blocking out all the voices in my head who want me to think I am stupid and a bitch and I should just stop inconveniencing them by breathing.
I’ve been really stunned by the intensity of my suicidal ideation this week.
I also haven’t been doing my daily check in calls with my friend. She’s really busy on a project. She’ll be back in a week or so. I support and respect her participation in this event and that means she has no time to think about me. I am a big girl and I’ll keep my big girl panties on.
It is interesting how suicidal ideation is not always about depression. I don’t feel like I am feeling depression symptoms. This is more on the anxious/overwhelmed side. Manic is a word people like. But I’m not… doing anything manic.
Just out of the blue driving on the freeway I see a weird opening where it would be possible to turn and be hit by a semi-truck and I want to do it more than I want anything in the world. I want in that moment to feel a lot of pain and then die. I want it as much as my heart wants to beat. It is immediate and visceral and all encompassing.
I have to breathe very lightly and lift my hands so I have a very light guiding pressure on the steering wheel. Sometimes I get off the freeway to breathe and stretch my neck and remind myself, “Not today.”
The reasons I don’t like driving are varied and complicated and… I’m willing to bet that someday I will not be able to drive any more. It is part of the reason I am as strongly motivated to make friends near my house as I am. Walking will always be a good idea. Forever. For my health.
Thanks, Pam, for letting me write this morning.
My head feels better. I feel a lot less shame. Writing it down helps.
I don’t need to feel shame because other people would prefer that their world didn’t overlap with mine. I could reject our mutual friend so that they never have to hear about me again, but given that he values his relationship with me that seems kind of awful.
But I think I should have different boundaries. Still working on where those need to be. Boundaries are tricky things. You only find out you have them when they are transgressed. Ha. THAT WAS THE WHOLE POINT OF THE CLASS. And what I got out of it is: I need to make sure I never have to deal with your extended friends again. Awesome.
That’s a lesson I can learn.
They aren’t going to like me. No matter what. Ever. I need to not care about that. They are allowed to have their experience of the world where I am… something. I don’t know what. I shouldn’t speculate. I would surely overstate my importance. I certainly don’t suspect that either of them while away hours just hating me. I’m not that important.
So I don’t need to feel shame because they are feeling irritation. That’s not something I need to take on. I gave an apology. I offered restitution to the best of my ability. That’s what I’ve got. Move on. I didn’t vomit on purpose.
And when I feel shame for my social behavior I rush home to assure myself that I am managing my money properly. No one is going to be able to force me to move. I’m allowed to stay here. I’m jumping through all the hoops that actually matter for my life. I don’t have to care that they dislike me. There won’t be any consequences.
And then I can stop thinking about it.
Thank you internet. That’s the end of my confession for today. I have some dirt to play with and a fence to sand. Tomorrow a bunch of little kids are going to come paint a few sections. We are adding more year by year. Drips and drabs. It’s really fun.
Saturday is the Girl Genius Volume 1 read aloud. Email me for details if you want to come hear Noah do all the hilarious voices.
my life is good when I’m not chemically out of whack
The new ergonomic keyboard doesn’t have all the parts necessary to work. This is annoying. That is going to be the low point of my day. Which is really cool. I can exchange my biggest problem of the day.
Every single day I wake up grateful for Noah. He is so nice to me. He is so kind. I have received more love and caring in the past seven years than in the previous twenty-five years put together. I am so lucky.
Many people have childhoods as bad as mine. Most of them don’t go on to have happy adult lives. At this point in time my strife feels like stuff I’m opting into or it is so structurally vast that it isn’t really a day-to-day problem for me. I have conflicts with my friends because I pick intelligent, opinionated, fierce people for my life. I go out and hand select them out of the bunch of quieter and more complaisant people. I can’t bitch that we have conflict. I can learn how to manage it without having a heart attack–damnit. Or I’m fighting things like rape culture and whereas it is a problem every day it isn’t a Daily Problem if you know what I mean.
If I was hungry that would be a Daily Problem. If I didn’t know how I was going to pay rent that would be a Daily Problem. I don’t have those kinds of problems anymore. My big problems are that sometimes my kids scream more than I like or I am inconvenienced by a major electronics retailer.
I just can’t bitch too loud, you know?
My garden is so beautiful lately that it takes my breath away. I MADE THAT MOTHERFUCKER!!! WHOO HOO!!!!!!!!! *happy dance*
I no longer feel like everything I touch turns to shit. Some stuff doesn’t work out. It isn’t all my fault and I am not poison. I can do things. My corn is popping up. Clearly I can do something.
I see so much green. I have more plans. It’s going to take years and every day of work will be a joy. I get to stay here long enough to make long-term plans. I get to dream about the future. Shanna likes to talk about building one of the houses next door so we can tear down the fence between the yards and build a second story walkway between the houses. (Technically she just wanted to fully connect the houses. I voted for the second floor walkway so we could still have the side yards in between for plants. She decided that I am smarter than I look. She is my kid.)
I think that sounds pretty magical and wonderful. When I remodel my house I am getting a sound proof room so my husband can beat me and no one will hear. I want to have that privacy in the future (I’m kind of sick of not being able to play at home) but I also want to have the connection with my kids. I like them as people. It’s not about having control over them forever. I enjoy their company. If they enjoy mine I’d be thrilled to keep hanging out with them. I genuinely like them.
I feel so lucky.
When you decide at seventeen that what you want is to be a home schooling parent there is a lot of room for things to not work out. I feel blessed that not only did I find a partner who is supportive but my children and I happen to have compatible temperaments. They have a lot of freedom to do things that bug me without penalty. Frequently I will acknowledge, “This is not my favorite thing. But I don’t get to control everything you do. I hope it goes well. I can’t watch.”
I feel incredibly lucky that my dreams are coming true and it’s actually a pleasant process. That is a rare dichotomy. Usually if you get what you want you find out it isn’t that great.
Noah is that great. The joy I feel spending all day with my kids is that great.
This weekend was basically perfect. I ran 12 miles. Socialized with a very old friend (16 years and counting–more than half my life now) for three hours; rocky stuff happening in her life but I’m glad she has the fortitude to take the steps she needs to take. It is kind of amazing the way her life is 100% different than it was three years ago. She has a new job in an entirely new field (she left theatre) she has a kid and she’s about to be single for the first time in a very long time. That’s a lot of big changes. Got an ergonomic keyboard and new running shoes. Otherwise we hid in the house. That’s a very slow weekend for us. Eight hours of bustle for me and no one else.
Of course because I was in the house and only busy for eight hours out of forty-eight I did a bunch of yardwork. Grow wildflowers, grow. Damn you. I hung up the hanging pots! I’ve had them for over a year and I haven’t gotten around to it. I’m getting all my residual chores done that I’ve been procrastinating on now that I’m procrastinating on editing. Doo de doo. I’ll get it done.
And the petition. I’m going for upbeat, friendly, everyone should get to live here without pain.
I’m really grateful that my neighbors are becoming so much more friendly over time. I will know everyone on the block some day. We have a new family! With kids! They are visibly Islamic so I will cross my fingers that I can behave in a socially appropriate enough way to manage to not offend the parents so our kids can be friends. My lifestyle is different. I won’t corrupt your young children.
I will wait until they are teenagers.
Ahem.
I will corrupt them with ideas like, “No one gets to touch any part of your body unless you actively want it to happen. If someone does so, find other adults who can help you deal with the situation.”
And, “Sex is awesome and if you want to have it then that is between you and your conscious. If you are going to have heterosexual sex, use two forms of birth control every single time you have sex. Always a condom no matter what. Always another form of birth control for the woman. If you are going to have homosexual sex then one barrier is fine. Use barriers. Every time. Even for oral.”
When you are young you don’t know what is going to happen to you 50 years from now. You won’t know you want to do until you get there. Leave as many options open as possible. Protect your body and your sexual health. There are no take backs once you contract a disease and you can’t tell by looking at people who has what. Even medical testing is iffy for a lot of diseases. Protect yourself until you are ready to have children. Or you get married and are on permanent birth control because you have ruled out kids. I don’t care what married people do. When you are a kid and you can’t take care of a kid, USE BIRTH CONTROL.
I support you having one kid, two kids, twelve kids, twenty kids (though I will instinctively wince just because oh man I can’t imagine that) or no kids at all because oh man kids are icki.
Maybe I will corrupt your kids. I want to introduce them to the concept of plurality. There can be more than one right answer. Your way isn’t the only way. My way isn’t the only way.
I admire many of the tenants of faith from all of the major religions. I think religion is mostly a set of written down rules on how to be good. Every one has their own idea of what “good” means. I think there need to be many sets of rules because we need many kinds of people.
All progress depends on the unreasonable (wo)man. If no one has a belief that is unreasonable to you then progress won’t be made. We have to stretch the borders of acceptable parameters.
Yes, autistic ways of being should be better understood and supported from earlier in life so that folks have an easier adulthood. I struggle with how to deal the bitterness from the current adults who didn’t get any help.
I understand what it feels like to desperately need help during your childhood and to not get it. I have more options for help now that I’m an adult. Autistic adults… not so much. The vast majority of all people with mental illness do not have the resources I have.
I am one of the lucky ones. How much of that is privilege granted to me by the color of my skin? How much of that has been my ability to meet the right people so I can get help? How much of that is that I first had access to state funded therapy and then I had good health insurance and then I had a rich husband?
If you prosecute your rapist then you get state funded therapy. You will be part of the victim-witness support network. That shit is worth its weight in gold. My PTSD has been classified as severe for more than half my life. The state has a vested interest in keeping me off of a bell tower with an Uzi. The state also wants me to not kill myself. The state put a lot of money into educating me and the state wants a productive citizen out of the deal, damnit.
“Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” JFK was a guilt trippin’ motherfucker. But he’s right.
My autistic friends teach me over and over and over and over that it really doesn’t matter what you “mean” when you say something. It matters what other people see, hear, and feel as a result of you saying something. If you play it right then you get the reaction and relationship you want. If you play it wrong then you alienate people and they hate you and blame their feelings of discomfort on you.
I’m such an asshole. I totally treat other people the way I am treated. Them’s just the rules of the jungle.
But if you consciously believe with your whole heart that it takes all kinds and there is value to every life then you ought not to be that kind of asshole. This is troubling. This is where my ethics and morals and behavior don’t line up. This is not so cool. Ok. When your behavior doesn’t match your ethics you have a few choices.
A) Ignore the mismatch and be a flaming hypocrite.
B) Acknowledge the mismatch and say, “But I have REASONS” and be a flaming hypocrite.
C) Acknowledge the mismatch and decide whether to change your ethics/morals or your behavior. This has mandatory follow up steps if the goal is to change your behavior. If you have no later checks then you will resort to “easier” instead of doing what is right.
Well, as much as I believe that it takes all kinds and everyone is valuable and shit I think that people have the right to reject me. I believe that people have the right to not want to know me. I believe that people have the right to not invite me to their parties and not invite me to their homes because I am rude and offensive. They don’t even need a reason. They can just be not that interested in me.
They have the right to not want to be my friend. I don’t get to take that away from them just because I long for community.
Like my neighbors. Some engage with me more than others. Even the ones who are clearly uninterested in a relationship they have gotten to the point of obvious recognition and acknowledgment of humanity.
My monkey sphere is pretty fucking full. It’s ok that not everyone in the whole world wants to be my best friend. I am incredibly overwhelmingly lucky to have the diverse relationships I have.
Not all of my friends are “nice people”. Some of them are canonical “nice people”. I like variety. I have something to learn from everyone. I am imperfect but striving. That is all I can do.
I’m glad when the anger passes. When the sudden rage dissipates. I don’t really “know” what causes it. It’s about a lot of different factors all exploding at once. It’s different every time.
In the wake of it I feel gratitude for the absence. I’m glad I didn’t fuck up a relationship. I didn’t scream. (One yell. But it was of the “I WOULD LIKE TO FINISH A SENTENCE WITHOUT BEING INTERRUPTED” variety and there are much worse things I could have done. Not great but I call it a win anyway.)
Children are supposed to test boundaries. That is the whole point of childhood. You learn what happens when you do things.
Shanna tries to be a joker. She likes to lighten the mood. She wants to make a face and make me laugh and have everything be all better now. It’s honestly kind of weird to me. Some of her “joking” faces have all the markers of “I want to start a fist fight”. I have taken to asking, “Is that a silly face or an angry face?” The answer is almost always, “Silly!” (She does get mad too–but that’s usually more clear and related to a situation I can understand.)
When my kids ask me to lighten up I either do so or leave the room until I can calm down because I’m flooding. They have a right to not be around a stress-tastic person. I want them to learn how to have boundaries too.
The thing about our relationship is that we always come back and snuggle after tense moments. We are incredibly physically affectionate. If my kids rejected my affection I would stop but they beg for more. I hug, cuddle, and kiss them hundreds or thousands of times a day. Maybe we have the odd day when I only kiss the top of their heads like ten times.
We check in and then we run off to do our thing again.
Are you still there? I still love you and want to be around you. Ok, I’m going to do my thing again.
I have wanted this my whole life.
I feel horrible guilt but at this point I can have two to three hours by myself on many days. My kids can be told to go in the back yard with snacks and they don’t come back for hours. I feel like I shouldn’t be abandoning them for those periods. But it’s good for all of us so I do it. Other parents don’t force their kids to be alone so they can get alone time. They put their kids in daycare so they can play with other kids instead of being forced into solitude. I don’t feel like a nice mom.
I would feel differently if Shanna were less social. I think Calli loves it. She checks in when she needs to for her hug and kiss and then she goes back to playing.
I spend my days making up songs about how much and why I love my kids. My children will not be the type to grow up and wonder if their parents loved them. My kids are more on the smothered end. Only I take them to the park and classes and parties and turn them loose. They are very engaged with the world and they do not allow me to mediate any more. Shanna flat tells me to leave her alone at parties. She knows that my anxiety cramps her style. It’s… a little weird. But she seems to be working with what she has so we’ll see where it takes her.
I’m not the boss of her life. I mean, I sort of am for a little while. But not for forever. It is my job to teach her the rote body memory necessary for caring for yourself with ease an adult. You will just be used to “This is what we do all day to take care of our bodies.” It won’t be this weird thing that involves transactions with other people all day long to get your basic needs met.
The thing I hate the most about all the American bastards who wrote about “self sufficiency” and “self reliance” and living out in the woods by themselves WOULD HAVE STARVED if not for the generosity of women in their communities.
Fuck your self reliance.
And yet! There is a basic level of self care that I believe that every human being should have. I feel rather disturbed by the number of adults I know who say, “I can barely boil water”. What the hell. That shows a dramatic and disturbing hole in your education. Your parents failed you. I’m sorry for that.
See, I’m a judgmental bastard all over the place.
And if you catch me on the wrong day I may rant at you about how debt (in particular consumer debt and school loans) is the boogeyman. It will eat your soul. It will force you into a crappy and terrible life where you have no ability to change the system. Debt will make you a slave.
Ugh and ick. I’m looking forward to the days of not having a mortgage. I feel grateful for this fact. I’m scared I won’t manage it in the five years I was hoping to do it. I’m afraid it may take six or seven because then we will have to come up with mortgage payments during the WWOOF year and that will be kind of annoying.
But it wouldn’t be the end of the year. And maybe if we rented out our house for pretty much the mortgage we could make it work.
“I will find a way or make one.” Roman Carthaginian general Hannibal didn’t fuck around.
The number of opportunities in your life increase as you build skills. I feel increasingly confident that I can meet the challenges that come my way. I may not get rich–but I think I will manage our resources well enough to not eat cat food in my old age. At that point my supposed food ethics may go to hell. I will eat what I can afford. I had better never develop actual gluten issues or I’m fucked. Giving up ramen would be traumatic.
I don’t have a lot of answers. I think I am ready to set some boundaries in a nice voice without being an asshole. I feel more relaxed after the weekend. I feel grateful that my problems are this small.
Six days till my next race. I’m ready but I may be slow. That will be ok too. I hope to best three hours. We’ll see.
My life is pretty cool.
Thinking about stuff else-net.
Sometimes I look at the way people “ask for help” and I think “you don’t actually want help. You want to be pissed at people for failing to help you.”
It is easier to see it when someone else is doing it in front of me. I’m pretty sure I do that sometimes.
I’m struggling with the line between “I want to help EVERYBODY” and “Well, I don’t want to help you because you annoy me.”
It’s a good thing I don’t have a lot of spoons left to hand out any way. This person is clearly more interested in being pissed off about the stuff that happened a long time ago than in doing actual healing.
Healing from trauma is messy, painful, and inconvenient. If you expect therapy to “make you feel all better” without any messy or painful bits then you can keep dreaming. And keep firing therapists. You can say that it is all the fault of all 50 of those therapists that you aren’t better.
But you know what? You are responsible for you. Not anyone else.
I’m responsible for me. If I want to be “better” I have to first define what “better” means and then I have to do every single step of walking to get there. No one can do it for me. It’s hard. It’s life. I can’t make someone else have an easy journey. I can’t make me have an early journey.
Sometimes life is just hard. And on that note I am going to stop beating my head against the wall with this person. I can’t fix him. I will never even know who he is. He can’t be a project of mine.
I have too many projects going already.
Online usage
The only reason I can use twitter is because I have an iron-clad policy of not arguing. I am not capable of arguing in 140 characters and knowing that about myself saves me a lot of blood pressure spikes.
Someone told me they “take issue” with the word “allow” with regards to people being sex workers. (Specifically I said: #FeministSolidarity means allowing women to choose any kind of work that is appropriate for them–including sex work.)
I mean, by allow, that there should be no laws obstructing people. Someone says I should have said “support” so that I don’t sound “paternalistic”. But uhm, I don’t “support” people going into the medical field or into computer programming so why in the hell should sex workers be special?
I think it should be a legal career. Just like all others. But no I’m not going to support people in it any more than I support my local plumber (uhm, other than when I hire him/her of course). If I feel like hiring a sex worker for uhh services then OF COURSE I should help support that person by paying the appropriate fees. Otherwise, nope I’m not supporting them.
But I will stay the fuck out of their way and give them a big thumbs up.
And that is the end of my argument and I’m not linking this random person to my blog because that sounds like an unending rain of shit.
I feel fairly weird about the fact that 2014 is starting off very well for me (because I’m not doing much or going many places–I sit at home and read) but many of my friends are having spectacularly bad starts to the year. So far I’ve finished twelve new books and I’m in progress on two more. I’m really enjoying reading lately. I feel like this is the most ready frenzy-ish I’ve been since before graduate school. I’m so glad that graduate school did not kill my love of reading forever.
I’m doing the stretches the doctor recommended. Not sure I’ve seen that much progress yet. I am glad the radiating burning pain in my neck disappeared when he dug into my skull with his hands.
As soon as my contract is up I’m going to give up data on my phone and try to get a non-smart phone that is hopefully harder to smash to pieces than my current Android. I wish I could go back to the clamshell I had when I first got a mobile phone. I bought a paper day planner and I think I may be mostly done with giving my information to Google. I’m not very happy that they are following Facebook into giving peoples information up more and more. I don’t want everything I do on the internet made public to anyone who wants to look whether I like it or not. I may need to pursue other email options.
Not that I think I will ever have real privacy on the net. I’m not stupid. But I’m angry at companies who want to sell me without my consent. I like to be asked before such activities occur.
I think I am going to cut back my internet usage dramatically. I’m not in a period where I am accessing research journals. I’m spending too much time reading shit I don’t care about because I am killing time. I should do that with books. My kids don’t understand the purpose of computers. If I’m on a screen they want a screen and for them that means watching a few select shows over and over or playing games. I don’t object to them doing some show rewatching (Yay West Wing!) or playing some games but they should not have screens on for many hours every day. There is no good reason to do so and some reason to think it isn’t good for you. So I have to model.
Plus what I’ve seen for research says that the more screen time you have the harder it is to control your behavior. It’s probably best for me to limit that.
I have used the computer a lot for years as how I connect with people. I discovered computers in high school for AOL chat rooms. Then I went to IRC. Then I went to G-Blog. Then I went to Livejournal. Then I went to Mothering. Then I went to Facebook. Now I’m kind of in limbo hell. I’m not hanging out with my friends online. I’m … I don’t know voyeuristically noticing the lives of people I don’t know and will never know? Time to do something else.
Time to try and have relationships with people in real life. Right now that means my kids. Maybe some day I will stop alienating other people and figure that out.
I feel scared that the next 15 years of my life will involve a lot of me “hanging out with people” I can’t talk to about anything I really think about because most of the home schoolers are not people I will talk to about personal or real things. I have to Be Nice so my kids can have friends.
The trouble is that I’m not very nice.
I suppose I had better learn how to fake it better.
Attention seeking.
I read a lot of really nasty things on the internet about how mentally ill people are just “attention seeking”. Every single time I read something like that what I get out of the experience is, “No one gives a shit about my experience of life and I should never ask for help.” Luckily I live with someone who demonstrably thinks that attitude is bullshit and he *does* want me to ask for attention when I need it.
Yesterday started off rocky but improved. Noah was very nice to me in those ways that Noah is very nice. I really like living with him. My issues with my body predate him and aren’t because of him and nevertheless he tries hard to make my life better. When I communicate that I am doing especially badly he takes a deep breathe and finds a way to be more giving.
Sometimes that means making all the food instead of just most of the food when he is home. Sometimes that means a lot of massage (yesterday was a fantastic rubbing day). Sometimes it means reading me books as a way of paying attention to me but not focusing on me. It’s a subtle distinction but very important.
When Noah is nicer to me in these ways I tend to feel a lot more inner push to make sure I’m finishing “my share” of the work around the house. Things get much tidier after he has paid attention to me because he likes the house tidy. I try to streamline things so he doesn’t have any more stress than usual. If he spends the whole day rubbing me there is basically a 0% chance I will turn down sex. You’ve totally done the prerequisite touching. Ok.
The folks on the PTSD forum spend a lot of time talking about how “not safe” it is to talk about having this disorder and what it means. They believe you should only tell people if you HAVE to. If there is no way to avoid mentioning it. Like, if you are going to marry someone you have to tell them in advance but they can usually justify not talking about it for years of dating.
I have the opposite approach. I tell everyone. I document the ups and the downs. Not because I expect lots of people to react or to treat me particularly differently. Partially so people can (hopefully) understand that my extremes are not their fault. Clearly I have extreme reactions all the time to seemingly inconsequential stimuli. It is not someone else’s fault when I suddenly have intense feelings of shame and worthlessness and suicidal ideation. It just happens sometimes.
I can usually pull together a basket of “Ohhh…. this happened and that happened and that thing over there and that’s when I lost control” but the fact that I lost control isn’t the fault of cause A, cause B or cause C. I lost control because maintaining control is very hard and I struggle with it all the time and sometimes I slip.
I am outbursty, loud, and over-sharing pretty much all the time. So it’s not because of you. Nothing YOU did caused this.
Well, unless you are one of the many people who abused me. But I doubt it. They are pretty much gone from my life. And I don’t even think that my issues are anyone in particular’s fault. My issues are the result of a tremendous number of small and large failures on the part of people who were responsible for the safety of a child.
Now that I have the responsibility for the safety of children I can see that. It’s not my mom’s fault. It’s not my dad’s fault. It is my mom and dad and sister and aunt and uncle and brother and school principals and school teachers and neighbors and therapists and….
My brain wouldn’t have gotten so fucked up if I hadn’t been severely neglected and abused. That was a joint effort to create.
But here I am. What do I do now? Do I expect people to dance like monkeys for my entertainment to try and make up for all the shit that happened before? God I hope not. I visit with friends when I have the self control to make our visit mostly about their feelings of comfort and safety and I avoid people when I can’t manage to behave well enough. I invite people to parties mostly because I know a tremendous number of really cool people and I think their lives would be better if they cross pollinated. I don’t expect to be the center of attention and if that starts to happen I will leave the room.
So man I have feelings about this whole “attention getting” thing. It sure sounds like people shouldn’t be seen. It sure sounds like no one should allow the truth of their life to be visible to other people and I don’t like that one bit.
I’m sorry that my truth is so melodramatic and sad. I really am. Lying about it in order to make other people feel better would drastically increase the likelihood that I will die from suicide. It’s always there for me at the corner. I don’t do it because enough people have convinced me that *they personally* would be hurt that I can’t do it. I love them a lot more than I love me and I can avoid causing them pain. If the trade is pain for me or pain for someone I love I will always volunteer to be the one in pain. I’m used to it. I have a lot of experience with pain. Most of the people I love are much less experienced and I want to keep it that way.
It’s a dance. This attention seeking bullshit. I need enough attention that I can talk myself into not dying and not so much attention that I need to leave the room because I can’t handle people looking at me.
I was asked (on the forum) how I could learn to see myself with compassion. How could I work towards seeing the value I add to the world that my friends can clearly see. How do you move past feeling like a worthless piece of shit?
I don’t really know. I am an over-achiever to compensate for my feelings of low self-worth.
This means that when I go to random parties and I don’t care about whether people like me or not (like Noah’s work Christmas party) I have a rather ridiculous number of cool stories to tell. I usually feel surprised by how many neat things I have done. Wow. I’ve had an interesting life. I don’t notice except when I am telling someone new. When I’m just sitting around being me I feel lame, boring, whiny, and obnoxious.
Don’t forget! I whine every day!
Over-sensitive, whiny baby. Things like the comments my friend made about the Christmas presents I bought. I will never bring it up with him because I’m not fucking interested in being told he was just joking and I should lighten up.
Have you noticed how I’m not a “lighten up” person?
Yes, this is manifestly all my fault and a problem I have. I know. I fucking know. I know that many people have teasing as a love language. I get that. It doesn’t change the fact that I leave and go home to cry and cry because that teasing doesn’t feel like love to me.
Am I allowed to have my reactions and feelings or do I have to conform to what makes other people feel comfortable?
I’m sorry I am so sensitive. I really fucking wish I wasn’t. But I am. I could deal with it by not talking to people any more so that I don’t get upset with them. I could deal with it by allowing people to say whatever they want and I’ll just do my crying in private. I could deal with it by asking people to stop (boy does that have a shitty track record–usually letting people know that it intensely bothers you is a cue for them to intensify how much of it they do). I could try to weed out the people who are teasers–but that doesn’t work.
Some days I can handle more of it than other days. Some days some teasing is genuinely ok and I don’t leave to go cry. Some days when I hang out with people I can pull off happy and cheerful while they are with me and I am crying before they are to their car. Or before I am to my car if I am at their house.
“Oh they didn’t mean anything by it” does not help me feel better. I don’t feel better at all that people casually say nasty things to me. They don’t mean to be nasty. It isn’t nasty from their point of view.
This is the walking on egg shells shit.
I feel dismissed and like it doesn’t matter that I have a whole frame around why I have the reactions and feelings I have. I don’t matter. What matters is that I maintain the structure and shape of what makes other people feel comfortable. Obviously I am over-sensitive and thus it is just my problem.
I’m looking forward to the grief ritual in February. There are parts of it I won’t enjoy. I get very angry when people meet for these kinds of things and declare that we have “created a community together and now we can support one another.” Bullshit. You are people I will see at a weekend conference and then probably never again. Maybe we will wave at a coffee shop. We are not a fucking community. God I get so angry when people say things like that to me.
I get why they say it. Most of the people in the room are students at a particular university and they have lots of classes together. They *could* form a community. I am not interested in joining your school (I’m not going to do the commute nor the cost) so I am not part of your community. I get it. I am not part of the community for reasons of my own choosing. I get it. It’s my fault. I get it.
I am enjoying having many days in a row where we aren’t seeing anyone. It is no one else’s fault I am so touchy and difficult and I wouldn’t be able to calibrate to someone else right now. Better to not be near people if I can’t be nice enough. I don’t like dealing with the long-term damage of people knowing just how difficult I can be.
Because seriously, when people complain about me being difficult that is on the day where I saved up all my easy. I’m fucked no matter what I do.
I feel sad and angry and trapped. I’m not trapped. These feelings will fade. My life is good. I am not upset because of anyone who is standing near me and I’m very sorry I have these feelings.
They will pass.
Discrimination sucks.
This isn’t about me. As I get older I experience less and less discrimination. But every day I read on the internet someone or other saying that _______ is the last acceptable form of prejudice. “It’s ok to hate fat people.” “It’s ok to discriminate against the mentally ill.” “THE LAST FORM OF TOLERATED BIGOTRY IS AGAINST TRANS* PEOPLE!!!”
Err. The fact that I have read three posts like that in the last hour means there probably isn’t “one remaining form of prejudice.”
The older I get the more privilege I have. I don’t think it works this way for everyone but it does for me.
When I read about how every year a person should expect to not have more money than last year because of the terrible financial position the country is in I think… but my finances have steadily improved every year since I was eighteen. Not always because of my own hard work–let’s be clear.
I no longer think of myself as a boot strapper in the slightest. I’m not and for me to claim such status is disrespectful.
I had a settlement. That provided all of my early financial security (my income went up every year after eighteen because I did part-time work in college and then went into teaching which was much more money than my mother had ever made–I felt filthy rich). Now I have Noah. His ability to earn money blows my mind. He’s just doing it.
I’m trying to figure out how to write to twelve year olds about the fact that every twelve year old has it shitty without sounding like I am propping up the system. Some twelve year olds have it worse than others but almost no twelve year old is capable of understanding that or evaluating what it means or how it works.
All discrimination sucks. There is not “one last” form of discrimination. There are as many kinds of discrimination as there are people with a stick up their ass. You couldn’t possibly list all of the things people are discriminated over.
But I feel kind of cranky about fat white women being very sure that they have it worse than anyone because prejudice against fat is the LAST REMAINING THING IT IS OK TO PICK ON PEOPLE FOR.
Err, haven’t you noticed that there are more black men in prison now than were ever slaves in this country? Maybe you aren’t at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to discrimination. Maybe.
I get that it sucks to be picked on. I really do. I don’t understand why people need to justify that their experience is shitty by saying that it is the shittiest thing ever.
I don’t think my life was the shittiest thing ever. I really don’t. I meet people all the time who are much worse off after their respective lives. I had a lot of bad things happen to me. I also had a lot of good.
I have a lot of privilege. I always have. The older I get, the more cemented it gets the more I can see the tendrils of it stretching back into the beginnings of my life.
I was *always* tolerated for interrupting class when I was a child. I was massively disruptive in almost every single one of the twenty-five schools I went to. It was tolerated. I wasn’t sent to special ed for bad kids the way the black or hispanic boys were. They were *not* more disruptive than me. The biggest difference between me and a lot of the boys I knew over time was that I knew the right answer in class.
I’m brilliant. Now that I’m an adult and I’m not worried about people beating me up if I say it out loud I can accept it. I’m brilliant. I just understand things faster and more easily than other people. It’s a gift. I’m not a better person, but school was a fuck-ton easier for me than it is for people who need slow and careful explanations. I got punished less because I was smart.
I don’t believe there is any “one last” discrimination left. As long as there are billions of people alive there will be way more things to discriminate about than that.
I feel really sad when I see people who are like me (I have been a fat white woman for most of my adult life–I’m not fat at this point but I expect I will eventually be so again) thinking that they have it the worst of the worst. First that makes me sad because the individual person feels that bad about themselves and their life. Second it makes me sad because that person has such a limited view of the world.
Have you read anything about children in Afghanistan lately? No one in America gets to talk about the “last acceptable discrimination”. We just don’t. We can talk about being unhappy about how we are treated–totally reasonable. That’s ALWAYS OK.
But the hyperbole bothers me. It erases so many people.
The older I get, the longer I stay alive the more I recognize how very lucky and blessed I am. Sure, I’ve had bad things happen to me but most people do. Life is just like that. Bad things happen. It isn’t about deserving. It just happens.
But every morning I wake up in a house that is warm or cool as I see fit to make it. I have a husband who wakes up and makes me breakfast just because he loves me. I have little girls who wake up and the first thing out of their mouth is, “I’m so glad to see you again!” because that is the first thing they have heard every day of their lives (Godmama weekends excepted).
I am lucky. I am safe. I was reading about food insecurity yesterday. I really need to figure out what the hell I want to do with my life. I’m bothered by how many people in my neighborhood are statistically hungry right this minute. I think ignoring those problems is not ok. It makes me feel bad about myself as a person.
I know what it means to not have food. I know what severe malnutrition feels like. I live with a lot of the long term effects and they suck. But I have medical insurance so I can go to the doctor when I have problems now because of what happened to me a long time ago.
I am so very lucky.
(I don’t leave comments on other peoples blogs because they don’t need to know that I am irritated with them. My sandbox, my rules.)
more thinking. less err, tmi
I’ve been sitting here listening to The Coup more. It is nice that youtube has these automatic playlists so you can listen to a whole album. And have a screen open next to it with the lyrics at the same time. A lot easier to understand. Ok, Violet isn’t actually one of the best ones. But it made me think about relationship stuff.
(I’m trying to not think about my bits. Bear with me.)
Well, more accurately it made me think of when and how I have done drugs. I usually have done so because I saw no other way of making that person like me. I want people to like me. Not many people like me. When people talk very nastily about young kids who use drugs… I think education is the path. Not hostility.
I have tried a pretty fair variety of drugs. A lot of them I tried because I was in a situation where I was dependent on a man (I thought) and he said, “Here. Do this.” I’ve only gone after a few drugs for my own reasons.
I was thinking about that because I tried a different intake of medication today and apparently the cheeba chews do a lot more to deal with the stomach pain than smoking, vaporizing, or pills. I’ve tried all in the last two or three days. I tried a different kind this morning and I’m probably down from a 6 or so to maybe 3. But I also wrote at the same time and writing often relaxes me. Column A and Column B?
Anyway. I have been horribly uncomfortable in social situations my entire life. I am very aware that I am bad and that sooner or later people will figure it out and I will be punished/reprimanded. This is just how I go through life. Usually I slink away like a pathetic puppy never to be seen from again. It’s my cycle. I own that.
Is this actually me letting people have boundaries though? When someone puts up boundaries I take that as a sign to just leave. Obviously I am not wanted here.
Well, I don’t know that I always manage to avoid people forever. I don’t. I travel through a variety of communities. I have land-mine people in all of them. So this is about me and my issues.
Only if I try to go through all of the situations in my head… no. It isn’t always my fault. But I am often someone who triggers people to have strong feelings. They will then tell me those feelings are all my fault. They want to alleviate it. So I am told things like I must dedicate my life to a 12 step program (it is permissible for me to pick my own of course–obviously I have a wide variety of different options I could be eligible for–I am pretty crazy and all) or I am bad.
I don’t think that is about me. That is about someone else deciding “A Good (Mother/Person/I don’t fucking know) acts like _____________.” I never signed on for that role. I like to negotiate my own roles. I like to be able to say, “Am I allowed to ask for this, this, and this–it is ok to say no.” I don’t ask unless I am ok with no.
I am not trying to make other peoples lives harder. I do not write about my anxiety in order to create anxiety in other people. I write so that when I am done writing I can have a 2-6 sentence pitch that is calculated to make it sound appealing to my specific audience that I am talking to in person.
Have you ever noticed that I don’t talk nearly as much as I write? I am rehearsing. I am refining. If that process bothers you, well, don’t watch. I need to do this. And I have learned through long experience that I won’t write just for me. I stop. I get depressed. And then I spend a lot of time cutting. I don’t want to cut any more. I really can’t take the risk of not blogging at this stage of my life. This is rather important to my mental health.
I have to be selfish about this. I have to be selfish about my right to process my feelings in a public way. Blah blah me talking about my trauma will traumatize other people blah blah blah. Have you ever learned the variety of tricks for closing a computer screen? Bam. Problem solved.
Don’t silence me to make you feel better.
Yes, I’m making different choices than you. I go through a different thought process than you.
That doesn’t mean yours is bad. It just means that it belongs to you.
Recently someone told me I was weirdly permissive and authoritarian at the same time with my kids. I explained the permissive part by saying, “I am saving up my “no’s” for when they have boyfriends. If I can say yes I do.” But I am very authoritarian too. Mostly I effect this through modeling.
We spend a ridiculous amount of time practicing our “manners” and “nice talk”. “How do you introduce yourself?”
“How do you look for clues about a person that are a good introduction to conversation? What things must you not mention or people feel sensitive?” We look for examples in books and movies and games and take them apart. “How does this make you feel?”
Even when I am depressed and pathetic and lying on the couch my children get a lot of attention. They bring me books and we read endlessly. Well, or until my throat goes out. Then Shanna starts explaining/reading the books to me. Then Calli takes a turn. We talk about all of them.
Because I know that it doesn’t matter what is going on in my mind or my body I need to keep working on educating them. That is my job. That is what I am here to do. I am responsible. There is no one to whom I can pass the buck.
It keeps me honest.
I grew up in a house of people who rarely got up and did anything. They were all massively depressed. I didn’t learn how to do things until I was an adult. I know this is common in my generation. Latch key kids with a microwave don’t know how to actually survive.
My body actively rebels at eating “normal” food. I should not have any vegetables or fresh fruit while I am otherwise dealing with a terrible multi-day diarrhea outbreak but that’s all I have in the fucking house. (Well, I do have rice. But I think we are almost out of white rice. We do have a 50 lb bag of brown rice! Uhm.)
I don’t know what the happy medium will be for “healthy” in my body. I know that following the advice of “eat lots of vegetables and fruit!” is not actually going well for me. This hurts. This hurts. This hurts. It is distracting all the time.
I kind of wonder if ecstasy stopped working for me because I took too much of it (I didn’t have that much I know people who have had twenty or fifty times as much as I had in my whole life.) or because the trips became about pleasing other people. I was supposed to be entertaining. I wasn’t there because I wanted to be having an experience alone in my body. I was there to please someone else. It stopped having the ability to raise my serotonin. I just felt anxious and sad and like I knew I was going to be disappointing no matter what I did.
My birthday party was described by many people as “The weirdeest e trip ever.” Well, I knew going in to it that I was evil and bad for doing it. I had been told so quite explicitly by someone I loved.
I don’t know many people who can take a hit of ecstasy and still feel suicidal. But I’m special. At this point in my life there aren’t really drugs powerful enough to over ride my basic belief that people do not like me and I am bad.
Pot lets me not care. I feel more relaxed about it. It doesn’t take it away. I still know that I am bad. I still know that I am someone who does not deserve to be alive. But I’m apathetic and kind of tired and happy that I get to play with the two kindest and most wonderful people in the whole fucking world all day. Pot lets me stop and appreciate what I am doing this moment.
Even if no one else in the world values me, these two people do. I religiously keep my promises. I am fierce about my boundaries. I am loving and kind and gentle the vast majority of the time and I apologize when I am too rough. My kids are allowed to say, “Don’t glare at me. It makes me feel sad.”
I don’t like how tired edible pot makes me. It is much more extreme than smoking. I feel weak sometimes. I feel like I am swimming instead of walking. I am tense and fluid at the same time. I don’t like that I often don’t feel anything from a pill for over three hours. That means I have to wake up in the middle of the night and take a pill if I want my stomach to not hurt by breakfast time so that I can eat.
An old man in our neighborhood recently commented, “You’ve lived an awful lot of lives for someone so young.” I laughed.
I feel tired sometimes. I feel like I am not worthy. I feel like there is too much here.
I was talking to a mom at the park. She has many more kids than me. I asked if it was rude to ask her questions about how she manages. She laughed and told me it was ok. I asked a few generic ones. Then I said, “Based on what I’ve read it seems that a lot of what it is that you have to just do your best and trust to the grace of God to make up for the rest.” She laughed. Yeah. That. “This is my problem though–as an atheist I’m pretty much screwed.” She laughed at me some more. Yup. That must suck.
I don’t think there is a chance in this lifetime that i could forgive a so called “benevolent” god for what I have experienced.
It is kind of funny. I understand age of consent laws so much more now than I did when I was a child. I used to sit on men’s laps and say, “I know that you really aren’t supposed to fuck someone my age. But I promise I will never tell. No one cares what I do. My mother won’t even know.”
I did it a lot. To their credit most of them told me no. They understood that it was a crime for them to commit. I was lectured quite a bit sometimes. But then the ones who lectured me or yelled at me proceeded to ensure that there was a larger scale public shaming. Everyone should know that I am contemptible.
I can’t say I enjoyed most of the sex I had as a child. It hurt. But I knew I was “supposed” to do it. I thought it was supposed to hurt like that. I didn’t think sex could be comfortable or fun or nice. Well, maybe for someone else. Girls like me don’t work that way. I grew up just a little more and moved into a sub culture that taught me that “vanilla” girls enjoy being touched gently. Girls like me were masochists and that was way cooler anyway and the goal was always supposed to be to learn how to take more and more and more pain. More degradation. Give up more control of yourself. Become less of a self. Be just a servant. Be no more important than a piece of furniture, hell, sometimes you are the furniture.
I can’t isolate to deal with my social anxiety any more. Instead I have to pretend that I know how to be normal and have friends. I don’t know how I will deal with the fact that my life is a rotating cast of characters. People come and go and the only people you can depend on seeing are me and your dad and each other. The Godmamas have been very consistent for years. That is your next best shot. K has been in our lives for three years. Of course this means I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. Same with Tay.
Pam comes and goes. I think that is good. I think she would find that she disagreed with more and more if she spent more time with me. I think she likes me more from far away.
I don’t have enough that is predictable for the kids. We do go to home school stuff. They will know those kids. But I will never be one of the people at every event. I can’t handle the driving. I feel bad about it, but it is what it is. Well, and I’m less willing to pay for things than some people. That’s ok too.
There is a rock climbing place walking distance from our house. I honestly think my kids are too young. But in a few years I bet we will start hanging out there a lot. If you have a kids membership you get a free adult in (one per kid) and I bet we will spend some time there. That would be fun.
I can’t predict the future. I doubt most of the people I know now will be in my life in twenty years. If I look at twenty years ago, when I was eleven, I think the last person standing is K from Lakeside. She occasionally reads my blog and we chat on IM sometimes. She is very busy. That is the only person left. I would not have predicted that she would be the one, let me tell you.
I don’t trust that people will want to know me that long.
Shanna talks about how we will need to add an upstairs apartment some day because she will need the down stairs for her family. I tell her, “We’ll see.” It is funny that when I first thought of having children I knew I would be the kind to boot them out the door at eighteen.
Now Shanna talks about wanting to be a firefighter two days a week and a doctor two days a week and I will be here to home school her kids. She will stay home two days a week because of course her kids need their mom too.
A permanent fucking dependent.
Once upon a time that was not a disgraceful thing. That was not a sign of being worthless. That was life for some people. Why are only some kinds of lives “worthy”?
I am not someone who could survive Wall Street. I couldn’t work there. I would scream and hysterically cry and have a panic attack when someone snapped at me because it would be just one god damn thing too many and it would be bad.
I am not saying that everyone there is bad or that having that kind of life is bad. I am saying I am not suited for it.
I’m also unlikely to ever really understand what it means to be Chinese. Or black. Or a man. I have to imagine. If I am imagining instead of experiencing I don’t get to treat them like they are equivalent experiences. My imagination is just a comfy place inside my mind. I access it in my garage. I’m safe.
I will never understand the feeling of walking down the street and having white women cower and clutch their purses. That would piss me right the fuck off. That would make me want to start a fight. I’m an angry person with a long list of done-me-wrongs.
I always only need one more thing.
This isn’t about anyone else. People cannot walk on egg shells. They have to hold their boundaries. They can step back. They can say, “In this piece of language _______ it sounds like you are kind of attacking. Can I ask for clarification on that?” I will of course say, “Ah. Poor choice of words. Let me attempt to reword. Is this better?”
Ok, maybe not of course. But I’ll try.
I like questions. I like people wanting to understand. I am not dealing well with people saying that I make them feel bad. I’m not trying to. Is there something very specific that you can ask about? No? Yes?
I am not ranting because I am mad at you. I’m ranting because very soon I have to put the mask on and act very polite and very normal and very controlled. For the love of all that is holy I have to stop crying. I need to clean up the four napkins full of snot and go get started on the day.
It doesn’t really matter how I feel. Shit will get done. That is how life works. I do not want to miss life. So I show up for the work.
Piercing the veil.
I do not write as a passive aggressive way of controlling the people around me. I write because otherwise I have trouble noticing patterns of behavior in myself. If what I write makes you think hard about your life and consider some issue, great.
If you ever feel that I am saying too much about you or your family or your pet you are free to ask me to stop.
Otherwise I’m getting kind of tired of the fact that I’ve spent the last fucking month bouncing between people who are upset with me for things I write. They feel attacked.
Uhm, no one is forcing you to read. If you feel upset by what I am writing feel free to take a break. I am not feeling ok with the pressure to stop writing. I am feeling more angry by the day about how many people have gotten really angry with me in the last month as I try to deal with my anxiety.
My anxiety is not your problem. No matter who you are. I am not writing this post to one person. I have had intense exchanges of one sort or another with at least seven people in the last month.
I have to stop being responsible for other people having feelings. If my writing triggers big feelings in you that bother you and make you unhappy, stop reading it. This is an opt-in space. I do not think it is appropriate that I should have to stop and feel anxious every fucking day about the fact that me processing my shit is going to make someone else feel attacked.
I’m not attacking you. I’m sitting in my fucking garage trying to figure out how to not blow up when I am with people in person. I do this because I know in my gut that no one deserves me blowing up. I do it for environmental reasons–not usually for actual provocation. If you don’t like knowing how I go through that process, opt-out. We can have a cordial in person relationship where I can tailor what I say to your personal preferences. I can not fucking handle the stress of trying to please everyone when I write.
I am not responsible for your feelings. No matter who you are.
I have to say this.
The older I get the more I learn about my own introvert nature. I always thought I was an extrovert. I needed people. I had to take what I could get in terms of company. I need time where I get to write. I have to empty my head.
Notice those days where I bop around from social media tool to social media tool? I feel lonely. I want to feel like I am seen and part of the world.
I don’t use social media more because I am afraid. I am afraid of being yelled at. I am afraid of being told I am bad and stupid. I am afraid that if I actually said more of what is in my head that people would not want to know me any more. As lonely as I feel at this stage of my life I know this is the absolute best I have ever had it. I try very hard to understand what this might mean in the scope of my life. If I blow this… I know how that goes.
I am ok with someone getting to know me and disliking something that I do. That’s fine with me. No matter who you are you do things that I don’t like. I’m fine with you feeling the same way about me.
But I desperately want people to believe that I am allowed to exist. Without having to offer sex. I want to have some kind of value in the world. I want to be needed. I want who and what I am to be useful. And without having to change so that I can be more like other people.
It is kind of funny to me when people tell me that me making the choices I make reflects negatively on them. Well, funny in a horrified kind of way. I can tell you in great detail exactly why I am bad for every single choice that I make. I know all of the arguments down the last specific. I don’t think that my choices are “good”. I don’t think that other people are bad for not being like me. I think I am bad for not being like other people.
I think I am rather pathetic for not being able to work while having children. I know a lot of women who do it and everything is working out great. I would be an abusive monster. I cannot handle that stress. I feel very ashamed of my limits.
I think it is rather pathetic that I can’t deal with hiring childcare on a daily basis so I can go get work done. I think it is extremely pathetic that I would use that time to hide and cry. But I would.
I worry a lot about isolating my children. I think there are HUGE benefits to public school. I am not sure I am doing them favors by encouraging non-conformity and inability to follow institutional rules. I’m not sure I am doing them favors by showing them that they should be very angry with any one who tries to tell them when and where they can use a bathroom. My kids think they have the god damn right to decide when and where. If you pester them to “just try” so that you don’t have to be inconvenienced later they will lash out at you. I’m ok with this. I feel the same fucking way. I don’t act like accidents are that big of a deal. I’ve had too many because of problems I have in my body due to a lifetime of malnutrition and control issues in institutional settings.
I worry a lot about being a parent with mental illness. What am I teaching my children about “normal”?
No. I don’t look down on people for making different choices.
I believe with everything I am that no one can judge what is the right choice for another person. I don’t believe I ever have enough information to judge what a different person is capable of accomplishing. For good or for ill. I under estimate and over estimate. I just can not judge. I don’t feel that other people judge me very well.
I’m going to be semi-egotistical and say that I am an extremely competent person. I know how to do a wide variety of skills at a better than average level. I have had to learn how to do things for myself and by myself. I am a ridiculously hard task master.
But I don’t think I am capable of much. Notice how I actively avoid anything in life that might lead me to having power? I don’t want to have a powerful job. I don’t want to associate with “powerful” people. I don’t especially want to have a rich lifestyle regardless of how much money I ever have. I would feel wildly uncomfortable.
When I picture my old age I would be just fine with living on a trailer on a piece of property in Oregon where I am legally allowed to decide when I die. Sure. That would be fine.
I don’t think that most people uhhh set their aspirations at such a level. I want to have enough money to never need to work again. I’m trying to use this ridiculous income of my husband’s to ensure that it happens without him having to work for many more years. I don’t want him working himself to the bone for decades to support my sloth. That’s not the deal.
I want both of us to be able to do things we want with the hours of our days. Luckily for him, the shit he likes to do for fun will probably generate a modest income. Eventually I will do something for some pay. I don’t want much. I really fucking don’t. I already have more than I need.
I feel like I have grown up in a weird space of intersection. Boy howdy have I seen the American Dream up close and personal. I see the stress. I see the trade offs. I see the A/B decisions that started with your parents decisions and I know that I will never be able to be competitive. It was done before my birth.
Oh man does that make me want to opt out of the system. I want to have my private, isolated life where I don’t have to try to step on anyone else’s neck in order to inch my way up.
I don’t have that in me. That fight was lost too long ago.
So what am I teaching my children? I worry. I worry all the fucking time.
What kind of adults will my children be? They will never experience deprivation of any kind. They will grow up with a mother who responds to any and all signs of entitlement with the nastiness of a viper. You are not fucking entitled to the labor of my body. Do for yourself. (I try to tone things down because they are kids and all but I am getting less patient by the year and by the time they are adults I won’t feel any desire to tone it down.)
You have to care about how the actions of your body effect the people around you. You have to. Period. If you are not willing to care about that, well you can bloody well stay in a room by yourself. (For an age appropriate number of minutes on a timer. Then you come out to kisses and hugs and talk about how much you are loved.)
I don’t know that I am doing anything right. I don’t really feel like I am in a position to look down on what anyone else is doing.
My life is such a bizarre mix of trauma and privilege that it is hard to tease out what is positive and what is negative. What parts of my behavior and character are positive or negative depends entirely on your point of view.
Recently (this year) a lot of my reading has been about what personality traits enable people to thrive despite adversity. I may be a whiny bitch because most of my current adversity is all in my head but other people in the world deal with real adversity. It is still relevant reading and all. (See that denigration about the mental illness bit. IT’S ALL IN MY HEAD! Well, what isn’t?)
Apparently one of the most important aspects of character is the ability to live with having conflicting traits in yourself. Be ok with the fact that you are patient AND impatient. Be ok with the fact that you are trusting and suspicious. I really am quick to judge people. I give people a lot of fucking rope. Then I hang them hard and fast and walk away.
I don’t like being alone. I find being alone significantly preferable to being in social environments where I have to try very hard to be “good” or I might be expelled. I think of basically every social space that way. I’m not invited to that many parties any more. Part of it is the kid thing. Part of it is that I make people feel fucking uncomfortable. C’est la vie.
I feel intense guilt for not being able to unschool the way I see some people doing it. I can’t have my kids involved in activities six days a week to meet social needs. I just can’t. I am not capable.
When I was a kid it was a joke in most of the schools I was enrolled in that I shouldn’t bother enrolling because I missed so much school. I have never been a consistent part of anything. I can manage a few months, maybe. I taught for 2.5 years at S.T. That is the longest I have ever consistently done anything in my life. I was technically in the graduate program at SJSU for seven years… but I attended one class a week for most of that and I had years off in the middle.
I lived with my Owner for three years and dated him for four. Outside of my mother he is the person I have lived with the longest consecutively by far. I’m not sure my mother beats him by much and after I was four years old I never lived with her for four years in a row again.
I have lived with Noah and Shanna longer than I have ever lived with my mother in a go. When I write it down it becomes a thing I can look at. Holy shit. That’s really pretty sad. When I just feel anxiety and frustration because I am having a horrible time with the pressure that comes from trying to provide stability for children I don’t think of it in such terms. Of course this is hard for me. Of course I am struggling. I’m swinging without a net. So I pursue relentless competence at a wide variety of skills. Most of which are utterly without value to anyone beyond me. I can’t care about that. People like me die if they worry too much about which skills to pick up because they will invariably make the wrong decisions.
I’m trying really hard to make my 10,000 mistakes. I’m not sure what I will be a “master” of but I think I will be much more calm. What is another mistake at that point? I can do anything and it doesn’t matter.
I want neither the path of complete disconnection from other people of Zen nor the immersion in community behavioral norms I have always known. I don’t know what my path will be.
I can neither lead nor follow. If I am making other people feel like they are wrong then I need to work on my communication skills.
I haven’t figured anything out. I just keep walking because I don’t know what else to do. I try new things because I don’t know how to do the same thing for a long time.
I want to raise children the way I am doing this because my children are going to be the only people I ever have this kind of intensity with. I have absolutely no other window into such an experience. I am a selfish piece of shit and I want it. I want it. I want it. I want to find out what it means to live with someone 24/7 for 18 years. I understand that other people get enough out of that experience with their kids being gone for school and I’m totally cool with that and I think it represents a healthy approach to life.
I can’t. I can’t miss this. I have no other way to find out what a normal childhood looks like. I want to watch this so fucking much. I am so scared that I will miss part of it and I won’t be able to understand why something later is happening. I need to fucking know what is happening to them. I NEED to know. I can’t just trust a daycare provider. I can’t. This is a failure in me.
I need to know in my bones that when they are eighteen I have kept them safe. I can’t pass the buck on responsibility. I don’t trust anyone enough. I am not saying that you don’t love your children. I am saying that I am broken.
I worry so much about what I am doing to my children. They have never had a daily relationship with anyone but me and their dad. Even when we had a housemate she did not appear during their awake hours every day. They have literally never had a relationship with anyone else where they saw them every day for two months. Not even five days a week. And I take them on trips away from their dad, sometimes for weeks.
I worry a lot. Is this ok? Is this basically broken? It makes me feel hellza better that Laura Ingalls Wilder was way more isolated than my kids. I mean… isn’t that part of the American story? We are all alone. Even when we live in suburbs shoved cheek and jowl. Most of my friends talk about a loneliness of the soul they felt because even though they went to school… they never had friends. I collect self-identified “rejects”.
This is a lot of why I am trying so hard to get to know the people who live in our neighborhood. We actually see people and have conversations with them pretty consistently.
But I’m not providing little friends. I’m not sure school would anyway. And man it would waste their time. And teach lessons I don’t like.
It all comes down to control. Do I think the American government is doing a good job in how it is raising kids? No. Ok. I’m super glad I have the privilege to opt-out then. Not everyone does. Everyone has different privileges.
My choices are about what I can bear. I know that what I am capable of is pretty pathetic in some core ways. If you go spend some time studying brain developmental stuff you might cut me a little more slack. Not a lot. I don’t need a lot. I do very well all things considered. But there is a cost to all things considered. My kids have to bear that. I can’t understand what that cost will be in advance. I am fucking worried.
Did you know that rape is down 58% since the 1970’s? (http://prospect.org/article/should-rape-porn-be-banned)
Complicated stuff, yo.
Back in my day (*cough* choke*cough) I wanted to “play act” things that are much more extreme than average. I have had the last several years of being a parent where I have done the “trapped under a baby” thing and I was alone all the time. I’ve had a lot of time to think about why I have done the things I have done. How many of them are things I will ever do again?
I will never again allow someone to put a noose around my neck and lift me off the ground because he wants to be able to look at the picture later and masturbate. The risk/reward ratio will never be tipped in that direction again. I’m really willing to go pretty far to be “good enough” for someone who wants to hurt me.
My daughters will not believe that anyone has the right to hurt them. What they go do in their sex lives will not be my problem. My children will not believe it is ok for an adult to grab them by the arm and drag them along. It is fucking assault. You see it in schools all the time.
I am not strong enough to teach my daughters how to be strong in that world. I don’t have any appropriate coping skills. My coping skills got me raped and beaten over and over again.
I worry so much. What do I have to give? Is anything about me worthy of learning about? Should I just shut the fuck up so there is never any reason for them to have to know how very self absorbed and bad and stupid I am.
I’m teaching my kids that adulthood is very free form. No one is your boss. You get to decide what to do with your time. If you need money (and everyone does in one way or another) then you need to figure out how to get it. All career paths involve training of some kind even if you are working retail or cutting hair (holy moly the training for hair dressing is intense). Lots of careers involve college. If you think you are heading down that route we will have some serious conversations in five, seven, and nine years from now about what you want to do to prepare for that experience because it will be up to you to pull it off. I won’t be part of that.
I don’t know what you will be when you grow up. Do you have ideas? What do you want to prepare for being able to do?
I’m trying to learn what I will do when I grow up too. I’m not ready. I’m sorry. I know that is a sign of my basic immaturity. I get it. But I am where I am. I am sorry that my development is so retarded. It isn’t my fault. I’m trying. I’m trying so hard. I can’t be anything other than what I am.
Life is in medias res. We are all part of the continuing story of humanity. We are part of the story of our individual families. We are bearing the body load of their deprivations, excesses, tendencies, and flat bad choices. Or you can be one of those people who is happy and healthy and your family has been for…. Well as long as any one can remember. Great. Thanks. I’m happy for you. Sigh.
Ok, well so what does this all mean for my kids? In order for me to change the narrative of my family I need to change the narrative of my family. Which I have done in some major ways of which I am proud. I continue to examine my behavior and attempt to make progress on doing course corrections.
I can’t do anything but what I am doing. Oh, that’s bullshit. If Noah died I would cope. Well, I still wouldn’t work. He made sure of that before I quit. But shit happens. I could still have to get a job. I reiterate that I would cope. I think I would not be a very nice mother any more. I think my children would effectively lose both parents and it would be horrible. I would not be able to be present for even 1/10 of what they expect. Good grief they are entitled little things.
They think they are entitled to my love and attention at absolutely every fucking hour of the day and night. Whoa. It is over whelming. After five years I have pulled back my boundaries like mad. When Shanna was born I did it twenty-ish hours a day (Noah had the other four). Calli has never had quite what Shanna had. It just isn’t possible. But they sleep together.
The three of us are a little self contained unit of affirmation and approval. We love each other and only sort of need anyone else. I feel bad about the ways in which we leave Noah out. He’s just not around enough to make as much impact on them. (I say as I hide in the garage away from them. But geez I’ve been low on personal time lately.)
I have to militantly believe that it takes all kinds or there is no chance that it is ok for me to exist. Sometimes that is hard to live with.
We all live in the middle. I come from hard core religious zealots and prostitutes–and that’s just on my mom’s side. How about you?
Not so good at the whole “boundaries” thing.
Intense EMDR therapy session today. My therapist commented, “It sounds like you are having a hard time keeping your boundaries up when other people are having feelings.” Why yes, that is a very accurate description. I feel that other people having feelings automatically trumps anything I might say or do. That’s part of the whole worthless thing. So of course when people start telling me that I am making them feel bad I agree that it is because I am a terrible person who should be driven out of all society. Not really a helpful response.
I think I should back off of the ptsd forum. I’m kind of tired of having people yell at me that they know “all about trauma” and “obviously I am making bad choices” and my problem is that I can’t “stop re-enacting trauma with untrustworthy people”. That whole set of rants in relationship to meeting someone in a coffee shop. Because obviously meeting up with a guy to say, “Hey something you said bothered me” is the same as putting myself in a position to be raped again. Same damn thing. I’m too stupid to be able to evaluate which situations are safe. I should just stay home or only talk to people who never make mistakes.
Oh, and of course anyone who is part of the bdsm community should just be shunned. They are all Bad People.
You know what, lady? I think I am going to take my experiences of the bdsm community over yours. There are decent people who happen to get off on bdsm. There are assholes and predators and rapists who are not in the bdsm community. I don’t really feel that deciding that a demographic of people is terrible is the way to have a happy life.
Of course she wants me to start with all men and move on from there. All men are dogs, don’t you know. (Ok, technically it was a man in the thread who said, “I hate to say this because I am a man… but all men are dogs.”) No, they aren’t. And fuck you while we are at it.
I don’t want to pretend all men are terrible. I don’t want to believe that all _______ whatever are terrible. The reality is that some percentage sucks and a large percentage is neutral and another percentage is great.
Why would I want to talk to men like him? Why in the hell would I want to talk to men who have experiences in the same ball park as me? Oh… maybe because when I talk to men who have known me for more than 1/3 of my life and I tell them some things about my childhood they can say, “That explains so much of your behavior for the entire time I have known you. I wish I had known earlier. Our entire relationship would have been different.”
I want to be seen. I want to matter. I want to be a full person to the people who know me. I want my story to be in the heads of people who look at me.
I don’t want to just be some chick at a party with a lot of secrets. That isn’t what I want.
I don’t think my life is well served by staying home and crying about how terrible all men are. If I do that I will miss out on a lot of joy. Many of my closest and dearest friends are men. I have no plans to abandon them–even if they say things I don’t like sometimes. I look for patterns of behavior and I have no problem with walking away from relationships that don’t work for me. I have done so over and over and over.
No one has a crystal ball. No one knows how things will play out.
My willingness to share my story has meant that I have gotten to find out the life stories of some incredibly complex and amazing people. I sincerely doubt they would have started sharing if I hadn’t brought things up. I have a list of people I can call in the middle of the night. I have a list of people who say, “If you are freaking out call and babble on my voicemail and I will call you back the second I can.” Many of them are men. Some of them are survivors of some really horrifying things.
Why do I trust them? Do I trust them? Well I will be honest and say that there are some of them I don’t plan to be alone in a room with. But I will sure as fuck call them. We have a great phone relationship. Do I actually think anything bad would happen if I was alone in a room with them? No. But I still don’t think I could do it. I don’t trust all men enough for that. I don’t even trust the men I trust enough for that. Well, maybe alone in a room if people were just on the other side of a door and I was able to scream.
I don’t want to give up on the men I have in my life. Even if other women with ptsd are absolutely certain that my talking to men is self-destructive and stupid. I disagree. And my opinion is the only one that matters about my behavior and life.
I went and talked to this guy and that other guy in the scene after fairly carefully weighing the downsides.
When that asshole Paul who raped me offered to meet to talk with me “even though he didn’t remember” I didn’t take him up on it. There was no upside for me. That would have been straight masochism. So I didn’t go.
I *do* actually try to weigh risk. My life will never be risk-free. I’m not that kind of girl. Harm Reduction not Elimination. Life involves both the risk and the certainty of harm.
I read an interesting article on misogyny in activist spaces. I cannot count how many groups I have left because of men who were extremely aggressive. I just assume they are more interesting to know than I am. That’s why they are kept around.
I feel torn between wanting to isolate myself because I don’t seem to be very good at having relationships and wanting to go out a lot and make a bunch of new connections. I offend people. I make them feel like I think they are bad. I’m not trying to but it happens anyway. Maybe they are better off not knowing me. Maybe I shouldn’t be allowed to speak any more. If I went out and made new connections (new connections are easy) then I could just walk away from my current problems.
Only my problems follow me. I am the cause of my problems, not someone else. It’s really hard to get away from being me.
I left therapy feeling pretty positive. I had a nice visit with a friend afterwards. Now I’m starting to crash emotionally again. I know that I have people who say I can call. But I don’t call much. I rarely call anyone. I assume they don’t actually want to hear from me and they are just telling me I can call because it is an empty gesture. I don’t trust that people actually like me, ever. I think I have fairly good reasons to think that people don’t like me.
But some people do. They come here and visit. Maybe I should do more of that hermit-only-talk-to-people-who-will-jump-my-hurdles thing. At least when people get sick of me and stop coming it isn’t as jarring as no longer being welcome in some space.
I like people. I like being around people. I like socializing. I just don’t feel very comfortable going almost anywhere. Some guy will say some thing and I will be “too sensitive”. Some woman won’t like me and I will spend my time there crying because I am so sorry that I am such a bad person and she doesn’t like me.
Gosh I like my house.
Since I’m pissing people off.
The past few days have been an extreme emotional roller coaster, even for me. Fear, anxiety, anger, rage, sadness, grief, self-hatred, exhaustion, nausea and horrible body aches and pains. So I’m feeling sensitive and pissy.
I wrote about going to see the guy yesterday on the PTSD forum. Some people decided to chew me out because meeting up with him was stupid and there was “no possible potential for any healing I’m just trying to re-abuse myself.” Excuse me? And then one guy said that as a married woman I have no business meeting a married man alone for a conversation.
And my friends think that if I parent differently than them and if I judge the system in our country then I think they don’t love their children as much as I do.
Oh fuck it.
I don’t think I have implied that anyone who puts their kids in public school doesn’t love their kids.
I have wanted to home school my kids since I was seventeen and they weren’t yet a twinkle in my eye. Maybe me wanting something isn’t a reflection on whether or not you love your family.
Why do people need me to conform so bad in order to feel validated? I don’t want to try to blend in just so you feel more comfortable. That isn’t my job. I’m not putting you down for making the choices you are making. I’m saying I don’t want to make them.
Before Noah showed up and asked me to marry him Plan A was that I would continue being a part time high school teacher and have a kid by myself. Said child (my proto-Shanna) was going to have no choice but to go to public school. There wasn’t a different option. I don’t think I would have loved little proto-Shanna less than I love the actual Shanna I get to home school.
Not everyone is temperamentally suited to home schooling. I have flat met people who should not be doing it. I don’t think home schooling is universally appropriate.
I just think America is doing a very shitty job of educating its kids. If you have an actual argument with me, go ahead and try that. If you think that me saying that America is doing a shitty job of educating its kids means that you don’t love your kids…
Well good fucking grief. Can we or can we not have a conversation about large scale problems? Can we acknowledge that maybe I am aware that there are some good schools and of course there are some good teachers and of course there are districts with shit-loads of money and there are parents who are actively involved in their kids lives and…
I believe we need some sort of public education system. I believe that what we have is broken. It is still all we have right now. I don’t think that everyone can opt-out. I’m not trying to talk people into that.
If I’m going to be flat honest I don’t believe that every parent with a high school diploma is qualified to home school. There. I said it. I don’t think you have to go to get a teaching credential or graduate school, necessarily, but I think there is a blending of education, experience, and temperament which is far from universal.
I really don’t believe that everyone should home school. If I were having a harder time managing my temper–for example if I could not control myself and I resorted to hitting my kids I would stop home schooling. I would be aware that my kids need other people watching them and checking in on them and it is no longer at all appropriate for them to be isolated with me all day. Then they have no contrasting opinions on them being hit.
I think that home schooling involves a lot of specific sacrifices that I don’t think most people are prepared to make and without those sacrifices I think it is educational neglect. So there you go.
And I think it is highly likely that Shanna will not home school beyond second or third grade because she keeps asking to go to public school. I won’t send her for kindergarten or first because of philosophical reasons. I’m not willing to let a five or six year old over rule what I know about education just because recess sounds fun. Sorry. By second or third grade I will let her pick. I just want that base line.
Do I think that people are going to be failures if they are in the system in kindergarten and first grade? Of course not. Give me a fucking break.
I don’t think someone is going to be a failure at life if they live on hamburgers, mac’n’cheese, and hot dogs either. But I’m not going to feed my family that way. I don’t think that people who do hate their families. I just don’t want to do it.
I don’t think that public education is the devil. I think it is a waste of time. I don’t want my five year old dealing with someone else wasting her time. Other people believe that is just part of life and you need to get used to it. Still other people believe that it is what they need their kids to do and they need someone else to do most of the heavy lifting on teaching their kids how to behave. Actually, the public school system is usually better at teaching this than parents are. Patience.
These are valid approaches to life. Many people are well served by their conformity. I don’t think my kids would be.
My kids would come home to me. My kids would bring my phrasing and attitude to school. I’ve already gone through school with my phrasing and attitude. It doesn’t go well.
I know it wouldn’t be the same for my kids. For one thing they will never be enrolled in school in Texas–they won’t have long stories about all the teachers beating them. I had a smart mouth. The best way to cure someone with a smart mouth is to hit them, don’t you know? That way they will shut the fuck up when they are told. Or not. Maybe hitting them will make them twice as defiant. But that just means that they should be hit more!
I don’t think my kids are me. But I have seen kids of parents like me.
I know parents who have raised very successful people in the public education system. I don’t think I am capable of doing what they have done to make their children successful. Does that mean I love my children less because I cannot do what is required to make them comfortable moving alone with the herd?
That is the only reasonable corollary to people not loving their children if they don’t home school. Obviously I don’t love my children because I can’t help them through the public system. I can’t help them be “normal” so I’m not trying hard enough.
How about if different people make different choices based on ten thousand factors you may know nothing about and whether or not people love their children is just not something that can be judged from the outside?
I don’t think I am a better parent than most. I honestly don’t. I think that putting your kids in a good daycare and being present and happy with them for the available number of hours you have is just fine parenting. You are meeting their needs.
I want the things I want partially because I am being a selfish piece of shit and I am using my children as objects in the story of my life. *I* want to be a home schooling mom. Fuck you if you want to go to public school. (Ok, I have not said fuck you to my kids. At all. Ever. But I did tell Shanna that she didn’t get to pick kindergarten.) I worry about that. I worry about whether I am making the right decision or not.
I do not have a crystal ball. Just because I believe the public education system to be broken that does not mean I am going to do a better job. That’s hubris.
I don’t know if I will do a good job or not. I don’t know if I will do better or worse than if my kids were just enrolled in school. I really don’t know. I might completely fuck up. I accept that possible future. I like that if things turn out badly it will be all my fault.
A lot of the reason I am choosing to home school is because I can live with the knowledge that I have to be very careful and I have to take measured steps to do my job right. I can’t live with the knowledge that my kids are out in the world having to defend themselves at these tender ages.
Is that rational? No, not really. Is that a sound reason for home educating? Enh….. Good thing I don’t need a sound reason. I’m allowed to just do what I think is right. Yee haw. I love my state and country.
I swear to a god I don’t believe in that I am not sitting here thinking that only people who make decisions like me love their kids. I don’t believe that. I just think that other people take care of their kids in ways I don’t. That doesn’t make it wrong. It just makes it something I can’t do.
Maybe my inadequacy is a poor judge of whether or not someone else is loving.
I’m glad I went and talked to the man yesterday. When I told him I cried for three days after the wedding he looked like I kicked his puppy. He was very upset. He did not mean to hurt me.
I am not good at judging which things people do in a loving way and which things people do in a consciously hurtful way. I understand this about myself. I know this is a large blindspot.
I don’t judge whether or not people love their kids. Sometimes I do sit over here in my head and judge whether or not someones choices are working out for their kid as they hope… but it’s not about love. I don’t think that I can judge that. I try not to write down those judgments much.
Who the fuck am I to judge whether someone else is doing a good job? I see small snippets of their lives. I don’t know what is happening.
I can judge if something would work for me or not and then I have to just move on. I don’t have a crystal ball. I don’t know what will happen in thirty years. We will all find out.
I want to still know most of the people I know now. I don’t think I will be overall very successful at pre-judging who is going to have a happy life and who won’t.
That kind of means I need to not alienate people. Well shit.
I can’t influence what other people do very much. My friend Pam says I am inspirational but then she writes me long emails about wanting to hand out a bunch of work sheets when she’s subbing in a kindergarten class. I may be inspirational but people are still going to do what they are going to do. (I think it doesn’t actually matter what you do darling. You will have the kids for ~10 hours of their educational life. They are used to work sheets. It doesn’t matter if you hand them out or not. Love you.)
I can understand and believe that the system is broken and deficient and still understand that people have to conform to it en masse.
The punishments for not conforming are huge. I don’t wish a generational amount of punishment on people. I really don’t.
But my kids have to live with me. I am not a conformist. I teach my kids very consciously how to evaluate which rules to ignore and break. I will teach my children to be far more interested in their own will than in the will of someone else. Will this blow up in my face? Well… it might. I don’t have a crystal ball. I don’t know for sure that I am doing them any favors.
Does that mean I love my children less than the people who are teaching their children arguably more socially healthy coping methods?
I would feel sad if someone thought that. But I wouldn’t change my actions based on their evaluation. I love my kids. I believe I am adapting to their needs as they have them. I could easily be lying to myself.
I was talking to one of my neighborhood moms about the kids recently. She’s also a home schooler. But my kids are very different from her kid. Her kid is not allowed to scream, basically at all from what I can tell. (She’s a lot older so this is apples to oranges.) I noticed the moms reaction more than anything. We were talking about how I’m trying to manage the screaming lately.
My kids have strong opinions and I’m ok with them expressing their wants and desires. I just don’t want to be screamed at. My kids have a tendency to get loud. I have not trained loudness out of them. Does this mean I don’t love them? I’m not training them properly for society.
If you go through life worrying about whether or not your parenting choices make random other people think you love your kids you are going to spit into the wind and get your whole face covered in saliva. Not a fun feeling.
I can’t make my choices based on the appearance from the outside. I can’t make my choices based on trying to not offend people. I offend people. Moving on.
I think it is funny the way I ricochet between feeling like people disapproving of me and disliking me is a good reason to kill myself and thinking it is a good reason to believe I am doing the right thing.
Historically speaking, outliers are put to death for the good of the herd. I get this.
I also know that outliers are a lot of who drive progress. They are necessary and important parts of the system.
I don’t know what my kids will be like as grown ups. But I’m sure looking forward to finding out. I am not saying that people who make different choices than me dislike or don’t love their kids.
Give me a fucking break. If I’m not exactly like you does that mean I don’t love my kids?
Maybe it just means I know how to show my love in a very different way. I hope that doesn’t mean anything bad about me or about you. I hope that us being different is something that makes the world better.
I think that no parenting decision, really no decision of any kind but I’m talking about parenting, can be judged in a vacuum. I have strong views about education. I know what I want to do with my kids. I know that I am able to make the set of choices I want to make due to a very specific and long list of privileges.
That doesn’t make me better than anyone else. It just means I am able to do what I want. Other people are able to do what they want.
There is not going to be a one-size-fits-all approach to parenting. There just isn’t. I kind of hope that means we can all be making right decisions instead of meaning that we are all making the wrong decisions.