Category Archives: internet judgment

Text has no tone.

No really, I worry about making my friends feel attacked. I don’t really need to alienate people I care about at this stage.

I need you to work and put your daughters in day care because I think my daughters will do that. They will need to ask you questions. They will need to ask you how you did with the mixed emotions you had–because they are really common and I can’t speak to them.

I need you to work and put your daughters in day care because without doing so YOU wouldn’t feel happy or fulfilled. I need you to be who you are. I need to see you in contrast to me so that I can understand where my edges are.

I don’t think you are doing it wrong. I don’t think you are making bad choices. I’m trying to get better about saying that you are doing something that wouldn’t work for me. That’s not because it is problematic.

Have you noticed this whole, “Krissy is crazy” thing? Maybe me not being able to do something isn’t a negative statement about the thing?

I know there is an Attachment Parenting movement and if you read about the Continuum Concept people—whoo boy. There are some extremely “attached”people.

I’m pretty honest with myself that I want this much time and intensity because I am making up for the deficit of being loved and touched that exists inside of me. Every child naturally wants to hug and cuddle and kiss. That is just normal. I wasn’t allowed to do those things as a child without being hurt for the impulse.

I want to stay home with my children because I want hundreds of hours of sitting on the couch with them sleeping on me. I want to be able to stroke their face and watch them exist. I need that time. I need to be able to sit very still and very quiet and just watch them exist and think about the fact that they like me.

When I made the crack about the mothers at the wedding wanting to stick forks in their eyes, that was their words–not mine. I can sort of grok how it would work. I don’t like doing all the physical work for my kids all the time. I get how it can feel annoying, demeaning, mind-numbing, etc.

I have something to prove to me, here. I have to prove that I can stay in one place and take care of someone without neglecting or abusing them. It is very hard sometimes. I feel like a jack ass for saying that.

I got a book on parents who have PTSD for kids. It sounds like it was written to be used by a therapist talking to kids who have parents who manage their symptoms less than I do.

Stopping and being actually aware of the fact that my children have needs is hard for me. I naturally dissociate. I am very depressed a lot of the time. Having to get up and care for my children is difficult for me. But I have to prove to myself that I can do that.

I do not have the self-discipline to schedule a two hour block in the middle of the day to do specific work. I just don’t. I have to have a full day of going from thing to thing or I never get the rhythm. I often miss afternoon engagements because if something starts after I’ve gone mid-way through my day then I can’t handle breaking my flow to go do something else.

I am limited. Everyone is–I’m not acting like I’m the only one with limits. Other people have different limits though.

I don’t think that mothers should have this freakish need to earn their childrens love. I don’t think it is psychologically healthy or anything. I’m just willing to be honest that it is where I am. I think people who are secure enough in being loved to share the care of their children have nothing to be ashamed about. I think that is probably what people should be shooting for in terms of mental health.

When Shanna asks me questions about her mothering in the future I don’t in any way shape or form tell her that she should expect to take care of her kids. I have told her that when you have kids you need to make sure that your kids will be safe and loved. If that means their mom stays home, ok. (Shanna pretty regularly says she would rather have a wife over a husband–she’d rather earn the money and have her wife stay home, ok.) If that means their dad stays home, ok. If that means both parents work and the children need alternative day care, ok. They are perfectly valid paths through life. But you will need to ask working moms for advice because I won’t be able to tell you how to manage that. Good thing we know lots of them!

I can’t teach my kids how to be everything. They have to know people who are different from me. That means people need to make choices that have no resemblance to mine.

I know that when I talk about myself I do not always use qualifiers. I don’t always say “This would be bad FOR ME” sometimes I just say, “This would be a bad choice.” I know that I sound rabid and hateful.

It is hard sometimes to make choices that seem very different from my friends. It feels like I am doing something bad and wrong. So when I talk to myself about it I am very emphatic about why it is not a good choice for me. I don’t mean to hurt anyone else. I don’t really know how else to talk to me. I can’t always evaluate whether something is in abstract a good and worthy thing I can only evaluate whether it is appropriate for me. And I sound harsh as I do so.

There is a big difference between how I evaluate things for me and how I evaluate things for other people. For me I am quick, decisive, snotty and harsh. I have to have a really firm grasp on my limits. Or I will be unable to function. If I try things that work for other people just because it works so well for them I will fuck myself over. Because I do not have that persons situation and resources.

That doesn’t mean that other people need to care or change based on my limits.

I have a husband who is able to go out and make obscene amounts of money. He is very cheerful about supporting me. That is a rather unusual privilege. Not that many people are capable of earning as much money as Noah does. That changes my whole buffet of choices right there.

But I am not an income earning person. I may never be. That means when my working women friends tell me that I deserve time off every day… well… I might agree in the abstract…

There is no right. There is no deserve. There is no should. There just is.

I know I am all melodramatic in writing and such. I know that I have bad days and I have gotten much more explicit in writing about them as the years have gone by. That isn’t because they have gotten worse–it is because I have developed the language.

I like my life. I like the choices I am making. I feel like I will be proud of myself as an old woman. I will feel like I did good things with my life. I did not waste very much of the time I had all things considered.

When you have chronic, severe mental illness you waste a lot of time. You spend a lot of time staring at the wall feeling bad and being unable to do… anything.

I work in weird spurts and starts all day with the kids. We get a lot done but not in a predictable way. We work then sit down to snuggle. Then work then break to play. Then work then go to the water park. Then work then read. What kind of work we do and how much time it takes varies a lot. I am not good at saying, “From 12-2 we will do ______”.

I have constant anxiety about the long list of projects I’m not making enough forward progress on. But getting me out of my anxiety is not as simple as providing childcare. That just means I don’t have to pull myself up by my bootstraps and look functional in front of my kids.

I think I am afraid that if no one is watching I am a clock that winds to a stop.

I wouldn’t have offered to paint the fence if I didn’t have little kids who need to meet everyone in the neighborhood. So the fucking kids need to figure out how to behave so I can finish painting. Ahem. (They aren’t actually being a problem. That was a random hyperbole sort of expletive.)

I know that a body needs rest. I understand that people who tell me that it would be ok if I paid someone for two hours a day of watching reruns mean to be supportive of the health of my body.

That doesn’t mean I am in a space psychologically to make the same priority list. Does that mean I am wrong and I should change to be more like other people? Maybe. I don’t know. But I know that what I am doing right now is putting my head down and just getting through. And it is working.

I have never met a mother who is without hard days. They happen. They are part of life. I don’t think I should be trying to get out of having them. I need to learn how to manage them. I manage them differently than other people for a lot of reasons. Is what I am doing ok? I don’t know. I honestly don’t. I just know that it is what I am doing.

Please continue telling me when you feel I am attacking you. I am not trying to. I want to know if I do so in my ridiculous self-obsessed rambling. You are not my enemy. I have no reason to attack you. I do not want to do so blindly.

I don’t want you to feel bad about what you are doing. You are making the choices that are right for you. Even if I individually might second guess some choices I wouldn’t overall presume to think that I know what is right for your life. I don’t actually have that much hubris.

I get too much wrong for me.

“Recovery” and a brain dump about being an asshole.

Resurrection After Rape puts forward this explanation for how one will recognize “Recovery” when it happens:

  1. When you can face the thoughts of rape rather than having to avoid them;
  2. When you understand the connection between your current self-concept and your rape, so that when you feel down on yourself you won’t accept that as a “permanent truth” of who you are;
  3. When you no longer engage in self-harming behaviors (including substance abuse) to manage emotions and memories;
  4. When flashbacks have diminished to the point they either no longer happen, or no longer interfere with your life and emotions;
  5. When you can appropriately respond to people’s ignorant attitudes about rape, rather than withdrawing from them and wilting in lonely shame;
  6. When you have begun to offer support to other survivors;
  7. When you have begun to view your body as a valuable thing and not as a betrayer or curse, and you take care of its needs;
  8. When you learn to recognize the warning signs of dangerous men and avoid them, no matter how charming they appear to be;
  9. When men no longer have control over your opinions of yourself;
  10. When you are able to confront, challenge, and speak proudly to men;
  11. When you make your own choices whether to disclose your rape to someone because of something you need to say, not something you need to hear for you to make progress;
  12. When you no longer feel guilty for asking for help, or for having rough days, or for taking the length of time needed for growth.

This organization does not recognize the medical studies showing marijuana to be the most effective drug for PTSD apparently. They exist. If you can’t find them then you are too ignorant to be allowed on the internet.

I think I’m fairly solid on 1, 5 (I have some inappropriate mixed in with my appropriate responses but I think I’m in “recovery” territory on this one.), 6, 7 (I thank the marathon for this. I was not capable of properly taking care of my body when I was pregnant–I didn’t know how. I learned during the marathon. It was a weird change.), 8, 11.

I’m working on 2, 3 (I have prescriptions from doctors for all of my drugs. I do use as minimally as I can get away with but I absolutely need these meds at this point. Is that abuse?), 4 (I have the ability to not react to them in front of anyone else. I can’t make them stop. They increase my overall stress levels slowly. I have to periodically go allow myself to consciously think about them or I start having ranty inappropriate outbursts in random settings.), 9 (onman don’t get me started), 10 (Often I am shitty at talking to men.), 12.

Mixed bag as usual. I’m just like that. And this guy doesn’t have a monopoly on definitions.

I will say that I appreciate the section on managing panic attacks. Education + replacement of negative self-talk with positive self-talk has been my approach. Glad to get my little gold star there. I read everything looking for confirmation bias to prove I am “right” like every other human. I like to blame it on public education but that’s a straw man argument.

A question from the book. If rape is a form of theft, what did it steal?

I am afraid of men. I do still stand near them–but I do so uneasily and with great anger. I feel that rape stole my faith in men. People can rant at me all day and all night about how women rape too and that won’t change the fact that I was raped by twelve men not twelve women.

Are twelve men a representative sample of all men? Can I judge all men based on them? Of course not. I don’t actually judge all men. I just avoid the ones who are not already through the barriers of trust. They have to come in sideways. Usually they have to fit in a nice, neat little box so that I can trust how they will behave. I really like men who are emphatically not interested in me even though they like me. When they feel the need to mention that I am completely not their type I feel a little relaxation of tension.

I am not a nice person. I yell. I say mean things. I say hurtful things. I am a dick. I am an asshole. I am a bitch. Pick a word. White trash whore. Sure. I say mean, nasty things. Sometimes there is a very small grain of truth in what I say and I use that as justification for my hurtfulness.

I’m not a sociopath. I don’t deny my actions or the results of my actions. I don’t deny my blame. I just don’t seem to be able to adequately shut my mouth. I think it would take suturing. Luckily I have friends who are into that sort of thing because they agree with me that women should just shut the fuck up. I would be a much nicer person if I just shut the fuck up.

Today I yelled what my mother yelled at me. I feel pretty ashamed of myself.

I have no excuse. I do not get to deflect blame. I could give a laundry list of reasons why I was out of patience. Doesn’t matter. Being mean isn’t ok.

I will never be good enough. Ever. I’m literally not capable of it. Yeah, I probably shouldn’t have had kids. I don’t deserve them. I am not capable of being nice enough. I pray that the damage I cause is slight in the scope of their lives. I cross my fingers that I am a net positive for them. I’m scared.

I feel very ashamed of myself for not being good enough. I’m just not. Just work harder is the only message I have on this score. I weigh, eternally, in my mind if my children would be better off if I got a job and let them go to school. Would they be better off if they didn’t have to deal with me so much of the time?

I don’t know. Every decision is so layered, so complicated I’m not sure I can know what the right decision is. I know what I am doing. I know why. Today was a rocky day. I think I have been over extending myself and I ran out of spoons. I was mean and nasty.

It’s not ok. It’s not justified. I’m not claiming any expiation. My choices and my behavior are my god damn fault. I don’t get to say, “Well I was just acting like my mother” like that excuses anything.

It’s really stupid but I think my next therapy session will be a whole long conversation about hair. About my mother screaming at me and hitting me and cutting my hair into ugly hair cuts on purpose as punishment so people would mock me and the nasty shaming that happened for months when I shaved my bangs off in fourth grade. My mom was so fucking pissed when I shaved my head when I was seventeen. She liked my hair about an inch long so she didn’t have to take care of it. I wanted to be pretty. When my hair was long it wasn’t pretty it was matted.

My long hair was the long unkept hair of a neglected child. I can’t figure out how to care for my children’s hair. And I can’t keep everything in the house under lock and key. My kid has some interesting impulse issues.

And I have a bad temper.

I need to get my temper under control. I need to not say the things my mother said to me. It’s hard having to stop and think carefully about everything you say because what comes out of your mouth naturally is poison. I know how to say what I was taught to say. Do you know why I cuss so much? My entire childhood was full of being told what a fucking rude ass bitch I was.

I’m struggling with the me-not-me boundaries. I know what I was taught to say in these scripts. The scripts I have are bad. I am not ad-libbing well. I am not trying to excuse or justify myself. I certainly don’t think I can continue.

Feeling guilty isn’t good enough. Crying for hours after I am nasty really isn’t good enough. It isn’t even remotely helpful.

This is broken. I don’t know how to fix it. I feel really stupid and pathetic and useless and bad.

You can’t just stop being something. You have to pick what you want to be and move towards that. I don’t want to say what I said today again. I don’t know what I’m going to say instead. That will take thinking. I don’t know what to do.

I have been told that people pity my children for having to live with me. Why do I feel free to say whatever comes into my head? Because people tell me things like that. I feel like I have listened to enough diarrhea of the mouth that I get to have it too. No I’m not taking the fucking high road. Instead I am the crazy ass old lady with the big knife who makes the punks run away in fear.

When it comes right down to it… I don’t actually want to be a nice person. I’m a dick. But I don’t want to be one with my kids. I want to treat them like they have earned better treatment than that from me. They have. They have a variety of character flaws, most of them age related, which I can’t exactly hold against them. That’s the revenge of grandmothers every where. “Ha ha. You used to do that.” And now my daughters do to me what I did to my mother.

Of course my daughter pushes every boundary to the point of breaking at all times. She’s related to me. And I want her to be that kind of adult. Yup, she’ll be somewhat sociopathic. But I hope she understands that I have earned consideration other people haven’t earned and she will be nice to me.

I want to be nice to my kids because I am a selfish son of a bitch and I want to have good relationships with independent adults. I don’t want them to be like me and I don’t want to decide what they should be.

I can’t insult their choices even though I find them frustrating. But what does that mean?

I don’t know. I fucked up today. I’m reading a book on rape recovery that harps up one side and down the other how one must be completely sober forever and ever amen or you are not “healed” and it makes me want to drink a bottle of wine. I don’t actually drink much–alcohol gives me terrible stomach aches. But I was told not to. So I want to.

How in the fuck can I get mad at my kids for being exactly like me? Punishing them for being something I will encourage in adulthood is kind of ass backwards. I am not actually working towards my long-term goals.

I think I need to do some work on my attachment to how my kids look.

didn’t yell “You are a reflection of me and I’m fucking tired of walking around with an ugly little brat.” I just said that it was ugly hair cut and she looked funny and people were going to laugh at her.

I got mad because we are going to be in a wedding in two weeks. I said, “Now you will look ugly in the pictures forever.” That was what my mother said to me when I gave myself a haircut two days before school picture day. You know what? I don’t look any worse than I do in any other awkward school photo. It really hasn’t wrecked my life.

I shouldn’t have said that to my daughter. I have already apologized. But you can’t actually take it back. You can’t unsay things.

I’m not a monster. I’m self aware enough to really understand that on a primal level. I have not done monstrous damage to my children. But sometimes I take a little spike and a mallet and I insert those mean things she will hear in the back of her head forever. I hate myself for that. I don’t want to be her mean inner voice. I want to be the voice inside her head that makes her feel good about being alive.

I don’t want my daughter to hear what I heard. I don’t want her to have these tapes. Mostly she won’t–I get that. I’m already through a lot of important hurdles and I understand it looks like relatively smooth sailing through the next few years of non-anniversaries.

I’m going to freak out. She is going to do things just like me and I will react blindly. I will play the tape that is instantly related to the behavior. I don’t know how to completely circumvent this. Do I just stop speaking at all?

I need more of a plan than I currently have. That’s kind of a horrifying and overwhelming thought.

I need to schedule less. I’ve gotten schedule-happy again. I schedule things because I feel guilty about isolating my children. I know a lot of home schoolers who are out all day every day. I feel kind of uncomfortable about how much socialization my kids get.

I feel like what I am doing is not good. I don’t know why. It’s kind of a creeping fungus feeling. I’m not giving my children what is “normal” for their peers.

I don’t want to in some strong idealogical ways. But I think I drank the Kool-Aid on “Home schoolers aren’t at home”. I feel like I should be more active in the communities that exist. I should present a large peer group to my kids and then consistently expose them many times a week.

I’m struggling. I feel existentially not-ok. I have a really high level of self-loathing. My self-talk is all mean and nasty. It’s been on an uptick for a bit.

I want relationships but I can’t handle them and I don’t deserve them. Life isn’t really about deserve though.

The future isn’t written yet. Maybe my children will remember me as an abusive bully. Maybe not. They are certainly clear on the point that Mommy is not always nice. Sometimes Mommy is mean.

If I ever get dragged in front of a judge in a CPS court all they will have to do is print my blog. I don’t want secrets. I didn’t hit. I didn’t go on an extended tirade. Noah did step into the room and signal me that it was time to stop. Good for him. I’m glad he was home.

It feels very bad sometimes knowing that I am simply not a nice person. I would have died if I had been “nice”. If I had been more passive my life would have been so much worse. Being defiant and nasty has truly been useful.

It is still useful sometimes. Not all the time. It’s a hard character trait to keep under control.

People alternate between telling me I’m a bitch/dick/asshole/whatever and telling me that they like that they always know where they stand with me.

When I get up from this keyboard I need to be mostly done processing this. I need to talk to my therapist about it but I can’t keep going on and on with my daughter. That would be dragging her into my emotional quagmire. She doesn’t have the attention span to still be upset about a random one off comment she will probably never hear again. If I don’t turn it into a thing.

If I drop it and never say it again then I will have succeeded in not passing this tape on. If she wants to cut her own fucking hair she can cut her own fucking hair. I do. I have since I was a very young child. For me to get angry about it is so over the top ridiculous that there aren’t words.

But my tape for mothers is rabid anger because now people will think my child is unsupervised and ugly. She is neither. She does have access to scissors. She is out of my line of sight during the day. We have a small house and they wander at will. I work wherever I am working. I don’t pen them right with me–it seems silly.

If I want children who are autonomous and independent in their actions I need to give them more direct supervision (which would drive me ape shit) or farm it out or be ok with what they do.

Those really are the only options. It is not ok to expect micromanaged results from a free range kid. I honestly don’t want kids who require direct supervision at all times. My kids entertain themselves while I work. I can clean/cook/garden and they run around and play.

Short of putting padlocks on everything in the house, which I am morally opposed to doing, there is no “putting things up” at this point. Kid is too big. Yes, there will be consequences and occasionally fury over her decisions.

You can’t learn without making mistakes.

I tell other people that the way to get good at something is to make as many mistakes as possible as fast as they can–they will learn the most the fastest that way. Somehow that approach doesn’t seem suitable in parenting.

I’m off to feel awkward and uncomfortable and like I’m the biggest asshole in the room. Cheers.

Get over yourself.

So like yesterday when I post something ranty about other people I then have this huge rush of shame and guilt. Who the fuck am I to judge other people? Why in the god damn hell does my fucking judgment matter? Who the hell wants to hear it anyway.

It’s weird writing about what I see in the world. Because a lot of the writing process for me is narrowing down who I want to be. I get the impression that other people can do this narrowing down without being a judgmental asshole out loud.

I don’t think I am better than anyone else. I do think I have a strangely functional marriage–I take very little credit. Noah is amazing and flexible and supportive. That isn’t about me. That’s luck. I found someone who is worried enough about his own future that he will defer a lot of short-term satisfaction in favor of future success. That’s not about me.

No one has to change their behavior to make me happy. No one has to alter the course of their life for me. I am aware of this. I don’t think people need to change because of me. I write because these are the things in my head and if I don’t write them down I feel like I have these fifteen different television stations all playing loudly in my head simultaneously. I can’t hear what I am supposed to be doing over the cacophony.

I hope like hell that I don’t hurt peoples feelings by saying stupid self-absorbed things. I’m afraid I do sometimes. I’m really sorry. I am not trying to hurt anyone.

I want there to be room for me to exist and room for other people to exist. I want it to be ok that I have my opinions (even if my opinion is negative about someone’s behavior) and it isn’t something that people have to take personally.

I don’t think you (generic you) need to give a shit about whether or not I judge you harshly. I truly don’t. I know that I am not the judge nor the jury. If I make you angry I’m sorry.

I want to be allowed to have strong opinions and be a judgmental asshole without actually being an asshole. I really want my writing to be the place where I get to be as loud and offensive as I want.

I promise I will try harder to reign in my mouth when I am in other peoples houses. You did not invite me over to hear my asshole opinions. I hate it when I fail at the basics of civility. It feels like proof that I am a worthless white trash asshole. I am not capable of being nice to decent people.

I swear to god that I walk into some houses and I feel like, “Oh my god these are decent people” and I feel my hackles go up. It isn’t their fault. It is not anyone else’s fault that I walk into their house and feel like I am a lower class than them. It is not their fault that feeling lower class makes me hostile and nasty. I know I have to “get over” this. I really do. I’m better than I used to be. I know that isn’t adequate. I can’t take my class issues out on people and have friends.

I have learned to stop picking on Noah because I developed some enlightened self-interest in that department. I need to understand how other people fit into this. I feel like a complete failure because I am not yet good at understanding in the pit of my stomach how important each different piece of the puzzle is. I still don’t value the contributions that other people give sufficiently. I need to learn how to do that. I need to learn how to stop judging everyone for their ability to meet *my* needs. My needs are not the only important needs in the world.

I’m sorry I am such an asshole. Thank you for tolerating me. I’m really sorry it takes such effort.

Before you speak evaluate if what you want to say is: true, necessary, kind. If it isn’t all three it had better god damn need to be said. It has to be really fucking necessary if it isn’t kind. Mostly saying unkind things is just a way of kicking people. I have to stop kicking people verbally. I have stopped hitting people with my hands. I need to stop kicking them with my words.

Intersection of privilege, feminism, and being “retro” as we head into the future.

I went and read the NY Magazine article on Feminist Housewives. I understand that some people feel insulted by the piece. I thought it was hilarious. Holy tomato do I fall into the demographic she is lampooning. Upper middle class and white. We started into this demographic when I was 27 (right in the middle of the 25-30 age group that is the fastest growing segment) when our combined household income was between $75,000 and $100,000. Over the last six years Noah has nearly made it to $200,000. We are absolutely the “kind of people” this article is trying to insult.

Wait, you didn’t think the author was trying to be insulting? Oh. I read it as if she was trying but failed because I really don’t care about her evaluation. Yes, I am a feminist who does not have an out-of-the-home job. What does being a feminist mean in my position? It means I lobby the shit out of my friends-in-similar-dynamics for them to have the autonomy and freedom I have.

On some levels my marriage is quite “retro” and in other ways it is anything but. Folks wouldn’t look at Noah and I and confirm that the patriarchy is in full force. I have agency. I make decisions.

If I were to work out of the house we would be in a worse place financially than we are right now. My salary would not cover how much we would end up spending on daycare, better clothes, eating out, a house cleaner, or a more active gardner. Let me tell you–if I had a job I would quite certainly do less cooking for the house than Noah does while having a job. My job was more hours in the week than Noah’s… for a lot less money. Really about like the social worker that was lampooned in the article.

I went into teaching for the express purpose of learning how to teach my own kids. I became a teacher because I knew I wanted to homeschool my kids someday and I wanted to be able to do so well. I did not go into a helping profession because I wanted to make the world better. I went into teaching to fulfill my own selfish desires and my own plans for the future.

I didn’t really live with my mother full time when I was a child. I grew up in extreme poverty and that means I often had to go live with virtual or literal strangers because she couldn’t care for me. This has created an ache inside me that time doesn’t seem to dull. I did not learn how to be a person from my mother. I learned how to be a person from books while I was alone in a room. I feel a physical need to have specific one-on-one relationships that facilitate personal growth. I need to see what it looks like when people go through the normal changes. I don’t need to spend the rest of my life looking at one cross section of life and only adapting to that. I was great with teenagers–I need to learn how to deal with all ages. I need to be exposed to all ages.

My life journey will never look anything like the typical journey. Even though I fall into specific demographics of high privilege now I will never be able to change who I am or where I come from. I am not like the other women in my demographic. Often I freak them out.

I can say without reservation that I have an uncommonly feminist marriage. My husband has permitted, encouraged, shoved me towards a degree of autonomy that I just don’t see in other marriages. It isn’t that he makes me do things by myself, though he does. It is that he has taught me about his own journey of aloneness. It is that he has made me understand why he has the limitations he has and he understands why I have the limitations I have and we seamlessly step in and rescue one another. He cares about my individual issues and he never assumes that I am a certain way “because I am a woman”.

I do not believe in biological determinism. I know men who are wonderful stay-at-home-dads (my brother has actually been a SAHD for the entire lives of his children) and I know women who are so non-maternal that I don’t understand why they had children. Because that biological clock thing is No Joke. These women wisely find very nurturing caregivers to provide most of the care for their kids and their kids grow up feeling loved and cared for. That’s what life is about, right?

There is no one path. I want to be near my children because it satisfies deep emotional needs for me. I was deeply neglected and abused as a child. I have baggage I am learning how to work through.

I have to stay home and take care of my children myself because otherwise I will never have the impetus to work on my hatred and rage towards working in groups. Without doing this I am unlikely to value the input of other people. Let me tell you I will never change my opinion if I just take a job where I have to work with people. I hate working with people. That’s my idea of hell on earth. I can be the boss and steer the ship in a group–but that’s different. I’m a harsh taskmaster.

I don’t want to be a harsh taskmaster with my children. I want them to learn how to be functional people. That means I have to model being a functional person. One of my biggest gripes about the American educational system is that we are turning out people who know how to be cogs in the machine–not people who can deconstruct the machine and build a new one.

I don’t know about you, but I think we need a new one.

I went on to read The Retro Husband and thought ouch. He’s talking about Noah. Only he isn’t.

Noah and I met during a period in our lives when we could lovingly be called fuck ups. We had a lot of relationship instability and we both treated people like they wouldn’t be in our lives very long. Mostly we were right. When we got married we both had to abruptly change a lot of things in our behavior. We went from not dating/just friends to engaged to married in five months. Our lives changed fast.

I picked a mate who has a profession that is best served by a combination of locking himself in a room to work alone and going out and teaching what he has learned while being locked in a room. Strip clubs don’t feature heavily. I’m pretty sure he has only been in a strip club once in his life. We went together on the first anniversary of our marriage. We had a lot of fun. (I’ve been to a lot of strip clubs and I love them.) We came home and conceived our first child. Amen.

I picked someone who has a dad who has never left his crazy mother. He understands what “for better or worse” means. I looked at the guys in my generation (and two generations above me) and found such understanding to be thin on the ground. I picked someone from inherited wealth who has a chip on his shoulder and something to prove. He was taught how to make money. That is a set of skills you either have or don’t have. I quizzed a lot of men. Let me tell you: financial acumen is thin on the ground. He wasn’t taught how to budget money. That’s one of the big downfalls of growing up with more money than you know what to do with. However he doesn’t track our money; I do. I budget well. We are very good partners.

I am self-aware enough to admit out loud that I would probably not be as happy if my partner made very little money. I would have different expectations. I think that  when you look at the demographic of “men who do very little housework have more sex” you have a combination of: women who are lavishly provided for feel grateful and men who philander. That’s my experience.

When I was eighteen I was engaged to my high school sweetheart. That was the price of shacking up and we both wanted away from our parents. I didn’t marry him because even though he made more money than me I paid more of our expenses and I did all the housework. He was really lazy at home. I went from that to a D/s or M/s relationship. (That’s Dominant/submissive or technically Owner/property in our case.) I have always fucking cleaned house for people. I’ve been doing it all my life. I even pick fucking friends who want me to come over and clean for them. (I offer. I am really good at organizing people’s stuff.)

I clean because I am an order Muppet. I have to see order in the world around me or I can’t focus and I can’t relax. I think I clean for other people because I am trying to bond with them. I am trying to offer what I have in terms of “benefits” so people will put up with being my friend. I believe I am intrinsically unpleasant. I must offer something in trade or being around me isn’t worth the cost.

I don’t want my children to feel this way. If I had to put my head down and work a full time job and take care of my kids and take care of my house and provide food… I would certainly never ever have reason to believe that people wanted me around for any reason other than I had work to do for them. “The worst burden for a woman is no burden.” She’s talking about privilege and idleness. She can’t shame and say it bluntly. I should be serving other people, not myself. I shouldn’t just exist for the pleasure of my company. Ha. I appreciate how much she believes women should be out working in the world–but I notice that in order to do it herself she had to give up on the marriage/kids thing. I wanted kids.

I don’t think the author of the NY Magazine piece means that I should be working for other people in order to help support the world. I just don’t.

What is the point and purpose of feminism if I am not allowed to say, “I have the financial privilege to stay home and be the primary caregiver for my children and more than anything in the world I want to do it” and have that be acceptable. I don’t want to have 18, 19, and counting so I am a perpetual breeding machine who never has to do anything else but be mommy.

I will engage in the world again. I will do it as a very different person. I am not allowed to fuck my way through the rest of my life. I spent my childhood assuming I would be a sex worker for most of my life. That was my actual plan. I decided to do something else because I didn’t want my children to believe they had to do it. I changed my behavior in large and dramatic ways because I wanted to be able to look my children in the face and say that acting like me is appropriate. Does that mean I think promiscuity is terrible or bad? No. But they should not expect it of themselves because it is not mandatory. It is not common. It is not standard.

I used two forms of birth control very consistently after I was eighteen (I was on hormonal birth control and ALWAYS used condoms for casual sex and used a diaphragm with longer term fluid bonded partners who refused to wear condoms any more because let’s be honest that is how that shit happens) until I was sure I wanted to have kids. I was not going to get caught with some kid I would resent and a lifetime association with a loser ex-partner. I was smart enough to fucking recognize that at twelve years old. That’s when I went on the pill for the first time. I sometimes used depo provera (to my detriment–that shit is bad for you) then I went back to the pill.

No one sat me down and taught me the facts of life. I found things out piece-meal. A little bit at school (I will say that Los Gatos had adequate public health education–that is a huge advantage not everyone has) but mostly through talking to people. I found out most of it by making mistakes. I made a lot of mistakes before I was eighteen. I had a lot of very risky sex. I made a number of stupid choices.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this rape/not rape thing. How do I differentiate between bad sex and rape? I don’t think it crosses the line unless I was saying “no”. I believe that I have to say “no” or it is my fault that something happened. I ascribe the responsibility and agency for such acts to myself.

When I was twelve I asked a twenty-five year old man to fuck me. That wasn’t rape. But it was still a crime. It was still illegal. It was his legal responsibility to tell me no. I was still a child and he is responsible for his actions. That other twenty five year old I dated when I was twelve. He was at least nice enough to not pressure me when I said I wasn’t ready to have sex yet, but he asked me to at least give him a blow job. I felt kind of guilty because he had taken me out to a meal (Johnny Rockets. I had a grilled cheese sandwich, fries, and a milkshake) and he bought me a Christmas present so… didn’t I owe him? So I gave him the blowjob he asked for. It wasn’t rape. But it was a crime.

This is where rape culture blows my mind because of how pervasive it is. It’s all my fault those poor men committed a crime. I asked them to do it–literally in the first case and by inference in the second when I said I wasn’t ready for sex yet.

I brought it up, you see. I was out on a date–of course there were expectations, duh. How stupid am I to not have stayed home. My mother had given me permission for the date. She met him. She saw us off. I was home by curfew.

I know the difference between rape and not rape. If I said no and lay there crying while someone fucked me that is rape. Even if we are both adults now and I would have consented to the sex if he had just put a condom on. That’s not a mistake on my part. That is not something I invited. Unprotected sex is not a right that a man has. He does not have the right to risk inflicting a child on a woman. Period.

I think in my little corner of the world a rapist is somehow less of a piece of shit if he at least keeps his future-children to himself.

I stay home to take care of my children. They are my whole world for this brief window of time. I don’t think I would be able to handle raising the child of my rapist. My mother had a hard time raising me. She did not bond with me as much as she did other children. She had her tubes tied when I was born. You know how “some women rape easy”? That’s my family. We rape easy. I’m trying to do something different with my children. I am escaping into a different kind of social dynamic.

I really have a feminist marriage. Why do I say that? Because I started off in a marriage where it was ok to beat and rape me and then I decided those things weren’t ok and I put a stop to them. (Let’s be clear that I was ok with it to start with–I gave active consent. Well, ok I gave consent in advance for the rape and then changed my mind because I didn’t really think it would turn into a violent rape because I didn’t know I had been dealing with mostly wussy-assed-pansies trying to “play rape” in the past. Hoo boy.)

Folks have called my husband “whipped” and his response was, “damn right”. Only he is a very autonomous being. I don’t have a lot of control over him in general. I have a ridiculous amount of influence on how he treats me. And other men/boys feel the need to let us know that I shouldn’t have so much influence on how he treats me. He should instead align his preferences with those of other men/boys and treat me how those men/boys feel I should be treated.

I really like my husband. He is self-interested in a way I can work with. I can predict how he will react because he is consistent. He has stated goals. When he starts wandering off from them a brisk reminder gets him back on track. He isn’t particularly pulled towards any boys club. He has been alone too much. He has no faith that the boys club will really be there for him.

I have been with him more for more of his life than anyone else. I like him more than anyone else ever has. I really appreciate him. My life has gone from being a nightmare to being the punchline because I am so vapid and privileged. It is… interesting.

When people mockingly say that I am trying to live how my grandmother lived I would laugh and say that I picked an atheist–not a Mennonite or a Catholic. One grandmother was a printer in Pasadena after WWII (she was enlisted) and the other was the wife of a boxer turned dairy farmer. No, I don’t live like them. I neither have to work as hard nor am I oppressed as much. The Christmas before I divorced my family my mom made me a wonderful book. She hand wrote, in her beautiful hand writing–my mother has the most beautiful writing in the world–all of our family recipes into a recipe book. She gave me what she has to give.

I am a much better cook than any of them. They used shitty ingredients and too much sugar in freaking everything to cover up the bad quality of all the canned produce. I have had to learn how to cook from The Joy of Cooking and the internet. I live in an era where there is no fucking excuse for saying “I don’t know how to do _______.”

Yes, I choose to be a stay at home mom. I choose to homeschool my children with the financial support of my husband. I don’t want to have it all. I don’t want the pressure of more people having expectations of me right now. I only have so much energy to give. I know that makes me fairly pathetic but that’s just how the cookie crumbles. I am privileged. I am lucky that I get to make this choice. I wouldn’t have been able to do this in this way with someone who made a lot less money.

Only I probably would. I would live in a cheap rented apartment and I would probably never own a house. But I would still want to take care of my kids. I don’t live in a nice house now. I will never live in an expensive neighborhood. I would feel unwanted and like I didn’t know how to behave in that kind of environment. Here the kids play on the streets and we hear lots of loud music and lots of people. I feel comfortable. I see signs of people living and laughing and putting down roots.

Yes, I want to be a stay at home mom so I can get to know the seventy-six year old man down the street. I wouldn’t have time to stand around and pass the time of day hearing his stories if I had a job. My life would be less full if I had never heard his stories. I would understand people a little less. He is helping me hate men less. He feels pretty safe to stand around and talk with. He has no designs upon me and he would probably freak the fuck out if I made a pass at him. It is a very comforting exchange. I really value having him around. I think I am shoving him in the role of my Uncle Bob. I’m going to freak out when he dies some day. I’m glad my kids are getting to hear from him. They are learning a lot of history.

Speaking of Uncle Bob. Not mine. Uncle Bob Martin is a technical guy who absolutely means well but has a humorous opinion of women. I’m not a fucking lady. Ladies are expected to act in very proscribed ways I will never agree to behave. Men should not treat me like I am a lady. I want them to treat me like a person-who-is-not-like-them. Like a human from another culture. I am a person who has had a very particular set of lifetime experiences. I am not like other people. I am not like other women. I am not like men. I am also not working in the technology industry so obviously I don’t matter–right?

Only I’ve been coding some in secret (not a secret any more) because I didn’t want to tell Noah at first. I’m still not sharing. I am who should be courted into such an industry but they treat me like an insect. They treat me like my brain is rotting inside my skull because I am so mentally deficient as to want to be near children all day. Oh go fuck yourself. Mostly women are treated like they have no value after they have stayed home to take care of children. Only Uncle Bob wants us to be the ladies and spiffy up the place and nurture our cwute widdle pwojects along to help them actually happen. The boys club has noticed that when you get too many boys in one place you need a den mother.

Well he is asking women to come work in a hostile work environment. He isn’t really acknowledging how or why. At the edges of that hostile work environment (the gaming community is kind of the bastard son of the technology community) we have Anita Sarkeesian speaking about what happens to women who have the audacity to look at how women are treated in the gaming community.

I could stay in an underpaid, unappreciated profession where I get to care for other peoples children all day but not really form bonds because the kids are leaving at the end of the year–so I don’t have to grow as a person. I can remain static as I stand there doing the same thing year after year. Like I’m perfect already. ha.

Or I could stay home and raise children and figure out how to grow fruit and vegetables so that when I am old my property will be fairly self-sufficient. I am contributing to my long-term future. Could it all be yanked away from me? Anything could. You don’t have to tell me that. I don’t think many people understand having an uncertain future more than me. But things really and truly have improved. I have changed. I have learned from my mistakes.

Yes, I’m a feminist and a house wife. Being in this position allows me to acquire skills that I want to have. Having a career would not allow me to develop these skills. I want them. I want them with every fiber of my being. I want to have survival skills that are not taught in an office or a school. Those environments are artifacts of a culture that is dying. I want my children to be able to do something else.

We are at a turning point. We have to change. If that makes me “retro” then I’m ok with that. This essay from Michael O. Church is fifteenth in a series (now of sixteen and counting…) about how corporations need to shift from being part of an industrial model to being part of the technology era. He’s talking about getting rich. He’s not talking about my life any more than Sebastian Marshall is talking about my life. I am not part of the technological revolution these men are portending. Yet I am. I am raising the children who will carry it out.

I believe that women have as much of a place in the world as men. I believe that women are as intrinsically valuable as men–not “because we nurture” but rather because if the human race is to continue it requires men and women. We have not found a way to get around that yet. It’s not because we are both awesome “in our own ways” it’s because we simply cannot continue as a race without both genders. And subjugating women isn’t going so well. We live in an era where silencing us is harder than it has ever been before. We fight back now. And bear the consequences of that too. It’s still better than it was. There have always been consequences for standing up for yourself–that is not a man or a woman thing. Unfortunately the consequences for women tend to involve threats that involve her gender, especially rape.

I have never met anyone who has been actually raped more times than I have. Either that or no one has been willing to say it to me. Some day I will meet someone. I have very real reason to fear reprisals for speaking out–the threatened torture has already happened to me. What makes me think I will avoid it in the future?

Because I have learned more about privilege. I was silenced previously in my life because I was young, ignorant, and too weak to protect myself. I am no longer in such a position. Most women and girls do not understand what the process of learning how to protect themselves means. Unfortunately “protecting yourself” often means staying home and not getting to be part of communities and hobbies you would like to join because if you have a bad experience you are on your own. If you defend yourself people may threaten to kill and/or rape you.

In many ways I feel very consciously like I am choosing a life more like a religious life–I am mostly cloistered and I mostly have contact with women and children. I’m doing it as an increasingly zealous atheist which is kind of awkward.

There are many studies that say that men/women in highly defined relationships do better and are happier. So far in history those relationships have followed a pattern of men work- women raise children. It was a biologically unavoidable task. We no longer live in that world. Now men are no more suited to the weird ass work people do in offices than women are–often men are not as well suited. A great deal of technological work involves a kind of multi-tasking that women are shown to be better at. And as my husband shows me week after week after week in our marriage–he is a better cook than I am and he is quite capable of bathing children and changing diapers and cleaning the house. He doesn’t do as much of it as I do, no, and that’s ok with me. Doing those tasks requires time. I have more time to kill than he does. He is genuinely working his ass off for more structured hours of the day than me. I can pick up slack and increase our mutual leisure time because it makes my life better.

I don’t see how these choices are unfeminist. I am being cold, calculating, and I am serving my interests and the interests of my progeny. I am, however, not serving the interests of an Industrial Age leftover feminism. I am not trying to stamp out home life in service of people living in dormitories and working in factories. I don’t want my children to imprint on a group of people exactly their age so they have no perspective on how dramatic the changes in life are. I want my children to grow up understanding that people change constantly. They don’t settle in and “be the same” for decades. You have to grow.

I don’t see a structure for that in the current set-up. So I’m going to go make it up as I go. I understand that has been the normal human path since the beginning of time. I’m ok with being on The Road Not Taken by other people. I will always be weird. That’s unavoidable.

I wish you knew that you were actually on that road too. You are not actually on the same road as other people and you shouldn’t try to be. What do you want to do with your life? That’s what feminism is about.

At the end of that rant the kind of logical next question is: so what about all the people who don’t have my privilege? Fuck if I know. That’s a really hard question.

Sitting on a high horse

I don’t check fetlife.com much. It’s just not where I am right now. When I log in and see a discussion about “What is your favorite punishment” and the asshole I know responded with, “I like to punch them in the face until their eyes swell shut.”

I wish I thought he was kidding. I know he isn’t.The prevailing attitude in the community is that if he can get someone to say yes–it’s all good.

I don’t think it is all good. I unfriended him today so that I don’t have to see this shit any more. When I read things like that I can’t help but feel like I would be doing the world a favor if I shot him and then myself. Not because I hate him–I really don’t. He’s quite charming and fun to talk to. I’m just thinking about killing people a lot lately. I think it’s the news. See–I will never own a gun. It’s a good thing.

Of course I played with him. I played with all the assholes. I meticulously went after all of the heaviest players in the scene. I was rather invested in being one of the heaviest players. Like I do. I like setting the edge of the bell curve.

Four years in that community convinced me that I don’t want to be the most extreme in that community. I don’t want to be the most degraded. I don’t want to be hurt the most. I don’t want to give up more of myself into a subsumed identity. No no no no no. No thanks. I’m going to take a nice comfortable walk back towards Normal. I won’t get there–of course–but I will head in that direction. It’s All Good.

T asked me if I think I am a better parent than others. The easy answer is “Yes. Of course.” If I want to avoid the real question I can include “There are people who rape and beat their children. Of course I am better at parenting than them.” But that’s the asshole response because I bloody well know that is not what she meant. Alright-I’ll stop stalling.

Yes. Sometimes. I try not to but I do. I try very hard to keep that judgment in my head because I am not perfect and my opinion is not very helpful to people most of the time. But it informs my parenting. I see other people do things and think, “Ah. Don’t do that.” I look at children who are in their early teens and I ask the parents how they have handled things up to know. I judge which kids I would want to live with and which kids I wouldn’t.

How would I treat them differently? I think that all the time. How would I treat these kids if they were handed to me.

Of course I know people who are much better parents than me. I don’t think I’m that great. I just think that there are a lot of people in the world who were very badly parented and they have not done work to deal with that. It makes them not particularly successful. It’s sad but it’s something I can’t fix for people so I need to keep that judgment to myself.

And there is the fact that I am extremely conscious of the fact that my behavior and approach to life is non-standard and I don’t think that people should try to solve problems like me because you probably shouldn’t twist yourself around to having my issues. Just sayin’.

I am ridiculously conscious of the fact that I have the luxury to be exactly the kind of parent I want to be because I have a partner with a ridiculously high income. Noah went out and brought home a bit over $130,000 this year. By himself. That gives me a lot of freedom and flexibility to sit around and plan the best ways to handle every little problem that comes up for me because I know my instincts are shit.

Most people really don’t have the time or inclination to sit around thinking about the correct response to various kinds of backtalk or misbehavior from their children. I have spent hours rehearsing the correct tone of voice, facial expression, and body posture for responding to misbehavior. This isn’t to say that I nail what I am aiming for every time. I really don’t. But I practice. I take it seriously as part of my job and it is hard for me so I work at it constantly.

I started when I was pregnant with Shanna. I’ve been doing it for five years. I don’t do it every day but I do it multiple times a week–whenever I have space. I uhh started rehearsing how to do it for “Shanna and Calli” before I was even pregnant with her. I didn’t tell Noah. I didn’t even tell him that when we were selecting names when I was bleeding out during delivery.

The second name was supposed to be his choice. We had a few options. We put combinations together. I was so grateful he picked my first choice. It felt a lot more special. I may have had to push harder near the end if he had gone with something else. Ha.

So, yes. I think I am a better parent than a lot of people who respond instinctually to problems. I think their instincts weren’t programmed well and that isn’t their fault. What is their fault is not changing it. (Incidentally, I’m reading a book right now that focuses on this exact problem– it’s called Giving the Love that Heals and I recommend it. I don’t get paid for this ad. I’m not that kind of blogger. No one pays me anything. Ha.)

It’s always validating when I find a book written by real professionals that lays out what I am already doing on my own. I like validation. It’s like my favorite cookie.

But my kids are 2.5 and 4.5. Let’s not get all excited about how awesome I am as a parent yet. The baby stage is rough but there are some big hills coming up.

Like, actually homeschooling. That’s intimidating. An awful lot of people have felt free to let me know that they don’t think I will be up for the task. Disapproval is bracing like a chilly breeze. Alright. So I have to put on the heavy boots for this task, I see. There may be snow.

I’m very used to people thinking that everything about me is wrong and that I am disgusting and bad. Getting away from that feeling, and the corollary desire to feel like I respect myself more than I respect the people disparaging me, is what has pushed me through being successful. I have been successful. I did end up with a high school diploma. After twenty five schools that truly is an accomplishment. I have a Bachelors degree. I went through seven years of graduate school with high marks and earned respect from a lot of people in my potential academic field. I’m not fit for academia but we knew that. So I don’t have that degree. I taught high school.

Given how many of my former students maintain contact with me I feel like I was successful as a teacher. I wonder how this will work post facebook. One has already tracked me down enough to invite me to her wedding and ask that Shanna be the flower girl. I think they’ll find me. Several are in college working on teaching credentials because they want to be teachers like me. All of my students made substantial progress in my class. That was because if they didn’t make substantial progress on their own then I made them stay after school for 8th Period Social Club.

I would sit there after school for an hour and a half every single day with kids until they brought their grades up. While they were stuck in prison with me I would have lively discourse with them about their friends, social lives, parents, issues that were going on. I would recommend books. I had all the anarchists reading John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. I feel good about that.

I helped girls through pregnancies, miscarriages, and abortions. I helped one boy put off the decision to shoot someone and buy his official entry into his gang. I feel intensely good about my experiences teaching. I helped people think that they were worthwhile. For many of those kids I was the first person in their whole life who told them they were smart.

I did manage to get married and do the kids thing. And I’m nice to them way more than I’m mean to them and they like me so I feel successful at that.

But it all feels like duh duh duh…. SO FAR……MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

My inside voice is a bastard. I’m just waiting to fail. Just waiting to prove that I was never really as good at anything as I thought. Sure I was a good teacher. Only for three years. That wasn’t so hard.

This parenting gig is different. The super intense bit is for a minimum of ten years–more like fifteen. It continues on being hard for another five years.

Gulp. That’s scary. That’s a lot of hard. Well. I’m almost five years in. Only fifteen years to go. Oh god. That’s overwhelming. One day at a time, Krissy, one day at a time.

Enjoy two and four. Enjoy three and five. You will never see this again. Enjoy four and six. Enjoy five and seven. They will never be dependent and ridiculously affectionate as a biological mechanism for survival again. Enjoy it. I do love the cuddling. I try to let them hug the part of me that was starved for attention for so many years instead of the hardened adult shell that is used to being hostile to all touch.

I took a break for kids and breakfast. Whatever I was thinking is gone. I should just sign off.

It’s Monday. It’s time to start working. I should probably solidify my weekly schedule outline today. I have to clean the kitchen and the bathroom. I know that much. Hooo boy do I need to clean the kitchen floor.

Had a good day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s very nice of you.”

“I think so too.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More about privilege

I’ve been reading about privilege all day. Mostly because a friend posted that he thinks the word “privilege” should be added to Godwin’s law. If you mention privilege in an argument you automatically lose. Of course my friend who thinks this is a white male.

I have specifically spent a bunch of time reading rants from (self-identified) straight white men and their anger about the word. It is uhm educational. Near as I can tell most of the anger about the term comes from, “But I’ve had hard things happen in my life so how dare you act like I have had things easy.” I see a lot of people saying that privilege may or may not be relevant in population discussions but it is entirely irrelevant on a personal level. Everyone has so many factors involved that they cancel each other out.

I am white. I have benefited from white privilege. I got to leave my ghetto ass school in the projects in LA and come up to Los Gatos to benefit from a really quality education. There were about six black kids in Los Gatos High School. They all had to be exemplary examples of their race. They were all athletes and had high GPAs and *still* when one walked into the Togo’s where I worked the people behind the counter would say, “Oh shit. Lock the cash register.”

When I was five years old I was attacked by a pit bull and had half my face ripped off. I had excellent legal coverage because my best friend’s father was a lawyer. Because my best friend at the time has rejected me since I wrote the book I no longer feel bad about saying it was Brittney’s dad who sent me the cease and desist letter. The lawyer who protected me when I was five? He was quite happy to threaten me legally now. And given what I know about him I would bet you thousands of dollars that he wouldn’t have allowed Brittney to be my friend if I hadn’t been white. I wouldn’t have had that expert legal counsel. I wouldn’t have had the settlement that set me up for life.

I could go on and on. I could list the things that have been better for me because I am a woman. There have been many times when I was basically spared because I was a girl.

Like when I was fifteen and I stole my mom’s car? I didn’t have a drivers license (or an appropriate licensed driver in the car). I sobbed that I was on the honor roll at Los Gatos High School and had never been in trouble so he called my mom and let her pick me up. You want to guess how likely that would have been if I was a black fifteen year old boy? Or a Mexican boy?

I feel ashamed of the ways in which I have been accommodated yet other people are harmed. There is nothing I can do about it. It just happens.

I can list off ways in which I am privileged. I could keep going for as long as the kids will let me type but that seems kind of pointless.

I don’t actually think that my privilege makes me a good or a bad person. It is pretty value neutral. Whether I am good or bad is not about whether or not I have this privilege. You can be a good person and have privilege. You can be a good person and have very little privilege. They are completely irrelevant scales.

For me the reason that privilege is an important concept to talk about is because we are all locked into our own personal experience of the world. Can we all agree that mine was unusually hell-ish? Yes? Ok, good. Is it right that I get to go out and make decisions about how white men are treated? No. It’s a good thing I can’t. Because I am ridiculously biased. I am very prejudiced. I would not be a good person if I was put in the position of having to treat large groups of adults fairly. For some reason I don’t have a problem with kids. I had a few Mexican kids try to tell me that I was racist when I was teaching but when I made it clear that I hated everyone they backed off.

I don’t think I am perfect. I often doubt if I am even good. What I want is a world where people who have benefited from a lot of privilege (like me) go through their lives actively working to counter the effects of privilege on other people. Does that mean you should work every minute of every day on making your own life shittier (if you are white) because you believe it somehow evens the score?

Why did this become a race to the bottom? Why is this an argument about “You have this tiny advantage I don’t have so I am going to hate you.”

I have a hard time with the concept of white men (something that some of my white male friends express anger with me because I mention) but when you look at my life I am continually learning from white men. They hold most of the keys to the kingdom. When I want to learn about things I usually end up visiting a white guy and having to bite holes in my tongue to deal with their condescension as I try to gain the information I am there for. It’s really fucking annoying. (Ok, not every white guy. I’m mad at two people.)

I don’t feel that privilege conversations should be about shoving white men away from privilege. But I do think that more computer geeks should find ways of volunteering their time.

If you genuinely believe that you do not benefit from “privilege” but you are a white collar professional–why couldn’t you help tutor underprivileged kids? Why can’t you help them in the ways their parents literally can’t? It’s too many hoops? It’s not convenient enough? What’s in it for you?

I feel like post-marathon I have crashed into one of the worst depressions of my adult life. I’m having a very hard time moving from the position on the floor where I have been sitting for a while. I am not sleeping much at all because I cry all night long.

I know that at this point in my life I have almost nothing to give anyone. I am technically taking care of my kids–they are fed, supervised, read to, bathed, taken to educational opportunities… but I’m flailing. A lot of what is crushing me is the lack of community in my life. It isn’t that I have no one who is ready or able to help me–that isn’t true. I have pinch hitters. What I don’t have is community.

A good friend started up a canning group. A whole bunch of people I know through various other communities (people I’ve known for more than a decade longer than I’ve known her) are all joining. Apparently there has been this underground group of people doing this and I had no idea. I think it is wonderful that it exists. I don’t go to their meetings because no one ever showed me how to do canning. I’ve basically figured it out from the internet (I hope) but I don’t do a lot of it and I definitely don’t do so much of it that I have a bunch to give away.

There is this wonderful community forming. Of women I like and know and enjoy their company. I have spent hours and hours crying because it feels like one more group that is only for people who had functional lives and learned skills in the normal ways.

I learned how to be a whore. It’s not very useful these days.

I have unimaginable privilege compared to what I experienced as a child. Other people still have privileges I don’t have. Does that make them bad? No. But I bloody hope they recognize that they have different skills and opportunities. I hope they don’t dismiss me and talk about me being unwilling to work just because I have not succeeded in the same ways they have. I have worked very hard at the things I have accomplished.

Unfortunately not-dying isn’t something for which they give you medals.

When I talk to my male friends about privilege I am trying to beg for the right to be as important as they are. “See, look at all these things that happened in your life to make you have a much safer and in many ways better life than me. Is your life always better? No. But let’s look at the handouts you have and the handouts I have.”

I suppose that the important part is–what do you do about privilege? Well… when I told my friend that many of my female friends were no longer willing to be in a room with him because they find him so offensive his response was, “What is their problem? I’m not sexist.” He can even find one woman to back him up so he’s golden. He’s not sexist. That’s the end of the conversation. The fact that he treats women like servants… irrelevant. The fact that he is rude and domineering in conversations… not relevant. I have watched (the two friends in particular I am mad at) basically shout down a room full of women who were trying to have a private conversation. They thought the women were wrong and they had to tell them so. Over and over. Loudly.

If you are walking into a legacy professorship because of ties you have from when you were a teenager through your parents (who are also professors) you benefit from privilege. Stop telling me about how you work harder than anyone else. You will let your house become so disgusting that if I turned you into county health you would be sanctioned. Because you don’t believe you should ever have to do “work” when you aren’t being paid for it. That’s for losers like those chicks you bang.

But there’s no privilege here.

What do I think white men can do to deal with the fact that they have privilege? Well, for one thing you being offended is not actually a capitol case. I’m offended all the god damn time. Welcome to the internet. Something being less favorable to white men above all others is not reverse racism.

Individuals can suffer while the larger system favors their class. It happens all the time. Just because an individual isn’t getting the absolute limit of benefit from his/her privilege that doesn’t mean that they have none. I wish that people would stop denying that they have had advantages in life. Seriously. Be honest with yourself. What things have you had handed to you that you shouldn’t have been? Where were you lucky?

And then next time you want to pass judgment on someone for not doing the same things as you or for not being in the same place as you–maybe wait a bit.

Technically right now “I” qualify as being in the top 5% of the country based on tax returns. My husband provides well. That is a privilege I god damn didn’t earn. Am I a better person than anyone else? Hell no. I vote constantly for higher taxes and more entitlement programs despite the fact that I think Welfare is inherently broken and should be entirely redesigned. I’m aware that my intellectual issues with it are not very important in the face of all the real-live-people who would suffer and maybe die if I was more selfish.

I tell Shanna (and I suppose Calli though I lecture her less at this point) constantly that with great privilege comes great responsibility. I suppose I feel White Man’s Burden. I have had things handed to me. I have had things easier than other people–what do I do with that? If I spend the rest of my life hiding in my house because my life has been so terrible–oh poor me–then I have failed. I have failed at being a good person. I have ridiculous privilege. What am I going to do with it?

I wish that my male friends felt more of the challenge to be better than spurred to be worse when they think about their lives in comparison to other people. I wish it wasn’t, “I’m going to step on their head so they can’t compete with me.” We will rise or fall as a society together.

I want to rise. So when I notice my privilege I try like fuck to share. Because I didn’t earn it. It’s just there. And I bear a lot of responsibility because it is there. I wish I knew what that meant.

A Tuesday morning ramble.

I’ve had several nearly-fully-formed posts running around in my head for days. Now that I am at the computer? Nada. Typical.

I have been increasing the amount I socialize lately. That is a mixed bag. It means more dealing with people. That’s hard. Being around large crowds of people who are questionably friendly to me is exhausting. The funny part is, one of my default “I’m hiding how I feel” mannerisms is to smile and nervously giggle a great deal. It seems like other people can’t tell the giggling is nervous. So they think I am having a fabulous time. It’s a great cover and I have been working on it for a long time.

I went out dancing on Saturday night. I explicitly told the two friends I was meeting there, “I am here because you two will keep me from hiding in the bathroom and crying.” They were shocked to find out that was a possibility. I don’t have the heart to really explain that without them doing that it isn’t a possibility it is an inevitability. Getting to the dance event is hard. Once I’m there it’s not like I’m out of danger.

I asked two men who were strangers-to-me to dance. Both of them looked at me, kind of twitched, then said they were sitting this dance out and walked away from me quickly. After the second one I didn’t ask again. I danced with my two girl-friends, and three male friends who remember me and generally try to get in a dance with me when they see me. I was grateful for dancing at all. When I come alone, I don’t always get in 1/2 of the dances I did on Saturday.

Sometimes I picture that seem from The Cutting Edge (a cheesy partner ice skating movie) where the coach says about the bitch woman, “We should have been making her a singles skater.” I wish I liked more solo dancing styles. I kind of hate that I like partner dancing and thus I have to deal with other people. It doesn’t help that I will probably never get Noah past his innate feeling that dancing is horrible. A long time ago he tried the dance community and discovered that they are all liars. I’m not going to argue with him, not really. Dancers say that they are happy to see new people and dance with them. In practice this is not so much. They want to dance with the good dancers–the ones they see all the time. Their friends. It’s ok. I just wish they wouldn’t lie about it.

I’ve become cautious over the years. I no longer can act like my actions will have no long-term effects. I want to raise my children in this area. I really can’t continue to just act however I please. It has consequences. I’m left in this place where I don’t know how to behave. I’m afraid. I don’t know what I am or am not allowed to be without the consequences for my children being terrible.

Those same two girl-friends ran a 5k with me on Sunday morning. All three of us kept up a nice steady 5 mph pace the entire way without walking at all. I’ve never run that far without walking. It felt really good. Maybe I should pay more attention to pacing, eh? It seems to work fairly well. Normally I mix in sprints randomly and I have to walk after them to get my breath back. This felt really good. I felt like I could run forever.

And there was a handfasting this week. I got to see all the people who chat with me during the day (*wave*) as well as a lot of People I Kind Of Know. Which is to say, people I have seen around in communities for about a decade but I don’t really know them. I’m fairly certain people think I’m snotty but most of the time I don’t talk to people because I’m not interested in being criticized or told I am wrong. I’d really rather stare at the wallpaper, thanks. It feels like I already, long ago, figured out who would tolerate me and I just don’t talk to new people much.

I have to say that Sarah moving in renewed a bunch of tentative distant connections and they have greatly increased in intensity. I finally had a reason to get over the hump with a few people. That’s good. I’m trying.

It’s kind of weird how much time I spend around former lovers when I go out in public. That’s what happens when you fuck your way through every community. It’s harder to deal with them now. Monogamy is… different. I was “monogamous” with Tom. But girls didn’t “count” and he didn’t care about anything shy of a penis in my vagina. That’s not what Noah and I are doing. I’m no longer really supposed to sit on laps and wiggle. Kissing is out. It’s different. It’s a whole different way of thinking about relationships. I feel terribly uncomfortable. For the love of Christ what else do I really have to offer?

That’s the crux. I offer sex because I believe I have nothing else. That I am nothing else. The reality is I don’t have the time or space in my life to be that any more. I consciously chose to stop offering that. To stop being that. I’m left with not knowing what to do. I have been having sex by choice (rather promiscuously) for my entire life. I go out and find it. When I am not looking for sex and I try to deflect it I usually get raped. So I stopped deflecting. Going out in public is terrifying. I don’t know what to do now. It’s hard and scary telling men to desist in doing things that I used to tolerate. They protest–I like it don’t I? That means they should do it. Even though I said “no”. They know more about what I want than I do, right?

Poly gatherings feel like a meat market even when one isn’t at a sex party. There is a lot of frank appraisal in the gaze. People are hunting. They act available. It’s an undercurrent. When people are interested in sex I can tell. I used to feel like those people were looking for someone like me. Now I don’t. I don’t know how to relate to them any more other than to avoid them. There is no good to come of having to point out that they don’t want me. How could that help anything? Just don’t talk to them.

It doesn’t help that I like talking about sex. It’s one of my favorite topics. I know a lot about it and I like broadening what I already know. It makes life awkward. I have consciously sought out knowledge and experiences my whole life. I fell like sex is one of the strongest biological impulses I have and I like thinking about it and talking about it. I like talking about food, too. Why is one shameful and the other isn’t?

I feel like I am badly adjusting to the concept of having a private sex life. That must sound odd to people. Isn’t sex usually private? Well, not for me. Not really. I don’t want anything I do to be a secret. I used to write scene reports and send them in to mailing lists. (I should probably ask Marcie if I can access those archives and find the scene reports. I lost them many hard drives ago.)

I do not yet have a mental picture on what kind of person I will be in ten years. It’s kind of scary. I know that I will still be a lot like me. I hope I will be better. I hope I will have made progress I can feel proud of. Ending a sentence with a preposition is wrong. I want to feel pride in myself. I don’t want to be an asshole. I don’t want to brag. But I want to know that I can look around my life and see frequent signs that I am a competent human being.

Change topics. Food. I didn’t grow up around people who cooked. In my house dinner was taken out of the freezer and unwrapped before it was microwaved. That’s food. Or you just open a bag and eat. Sometimes you have to boil water first and then let the noodles “cook” for three minutes. No shit dude, top ramen was cooking compared to everything else I ate.

When my mom occasionally felt like she should do more it generally involved one step meat in the oven and opening a few cans of vegetables and microwaving them in bowls. No really, we didn’t cook. I don’t understand what that even means until I try to cook for my family. Yesterday was a great day. In the morning I put another trellis in the ground and yanked the blackberry shoots over so that they can start growing how I want. I spent a while trimming the rose bush. I’m not done because that sucker is huge. (Thanks, former housemates!) It’s an ongoing project. Then it started raining and I came in.

I took the bones out of the fridge and made stock. I put a whole bunch of spices and other vegetable remnants in the pot. I had to think really hard about what I was doing. I had to recreate in my head what I have seen other people do. I let that cook for hours. I started making cupcakes. It took me about two hours because the butter was cold and creaming cold butter by hand is kind of a nightmare. I kept covering the bowl and scooting it closer and closer to the simmering stock pot. Melt! Damn you! Eventually it worked out well. The cupcakes are awesome. I know because I ate four last night. I just couldn’t stop. Holy cow those are good. I don’t make cupcakes very often because four in one day seems a bit excessive. But on the first day, oh man. Have to.

Then I had to do a whole bunch of dishes. Then I immediately started the next few steps on making soup. I was in the kitchen processing food and dishes for at least six hours yesterday. To make cupcakes, stock, and soup. I did sit down in the middle and eat lunch. But that’s a full freakin job right there. No fucking wonder my family didn’t cook. They didn’t have that kind of time and energy to spare.

Cooking is so weird. It feels like an act that is either done from desperation because one is poor and can’t do anything else or it is an act of privilege. Only people have had to cook for a very long time. I don’t know why it feels this way. Why does it feel optional? Why does it feel non-mandatory if you can find a way out? I used to eat out a lot. Other people did my cooking. Cooking is low status unless you do ridiculous over the top stuff.

I feel so weird about food. It feels strongly related to class. It doesn’t help that I visit the kinds of playgrounds where people have to agonize for an hour over what they brought. “I know this isn’t good enough for ________ reasons but this other thing I brought is far superior to what that other woman brought. Can you believe she is letting her kids eat __________?” I don’t talk to other moms much. I read my phone or play with the kids. It seems for the best. They don’t want to god damn hear me tell them what I think.

It’s not that I never have those thoughts. I frequently have the thought, “Holy shit, that woman is letting her kid eat what?!” I’m ok with that. I don’t say it out loud where someone can hear me and feel scorned. I suppose that saying it on the internet isn’t really better. Doesn’t that make me two faced as well?

Women talk about that shit at the park so they can shame other women into getting into line. I talk about it because I want to decide what I want to do. Sometimes I think, “Holy shit, that woman is letting her kid eat what?!” and I decide that maybe I’ve been hyperventilating over something I can relax about. I don’t need to shame people into sharing my values. They might have perfectly fucking good reasons for what they are doing. My values tend to be so at odds with everyone around me that I don’t really want to talk about non-involved people. I can’t judge someone I’m not even in a conversation with. I will talk about my opinions with people, sure. I will share what I do and why. But I’m not going to evaluate a stranger and give them some kind of “score” to a third party. I see no benefit.

Today is park day. I’m feeling nervous. It will be fine. I doubt anyone will even know that I told that woman to take a hike. Lots of people show up once and never come back. I don’t think I am going to get into trouble. We’ll see.

Hm. I just had a thought that should be it’s own separate post. I’ll do that.

Adoption.

A friend is writing about her experiences as an adoptee. I have strong feelings on the topic of adoption. My sister is biologically my half-sister. My mother was pregnant when she graduated from high school. The father refused to accept that he impregnated my mother. My mother managed to meet and marry my father in her third trimester because he was willing to rescue her. Officially he didn’t have to “adopt” my sister but there was a lot of noise about how she wasn’t “really” his. He thought of her as adopted. Loudly. My father raped my sister for many years. When she was a teenager she went and found her biological father and his family. Her biological father didn’t like who she became after years of being raped and he was a nasty son of a bitch to her. She may have been better off not finding him.

I know a lot of people who were adopted. Sure, not that many in a cosmic sense. I don’t work in adoption so I don’t meet that many. I think that kids get to go find their parents. No matter what. This is not a universally popular opinion. I can live with that. It’s an opinion not an incontrovertible fact. I don’t care that parents don’t want to be found. Do I think it can be intensely painful for the parents, oh God yes. I still think that kids get to go find their parents if they feel they need to.

The sad fact about adoption is that while most (maybe) relinquishing parents do it because they want their child to have a better life than they can provide (at least this is the polite fiction) they don’t know what happened. They are happier never knowing what happened. I can understand that. I just don’t give them as much room in my brain. I don’t think that a relinquishing parent gets to feel ok about their decision while a kid has been raped for a few decades. But the statute of limitations has run out! The parent shouldn’t be held accountable or have to feel guilty! It’s not their fault, right? Oh of course not. It is never anyones fault.

I think there is no such thing as a statute of limitations when it comes to dealing with damage in your emotional life. Sure, maybe you can’t prosecute people for a crime (although I found it galling that when I prosecuted my father my sister, brother, and aunts all had similar stories and they were inadmissible because they were too far in the past) but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to deal with the emotional repercussions. Lots of people confront rapists or molesters years after they can press charges. I digress.

In my judgmental opinion you cannot sever the responsibility you have for your crotch fruit. You just can’t. There is no knife in the world strong enough to cut out a child’s desire for his/her mother. Many adoptees reach a place of peace where they don’t want to know their biological family. I respect that. I think it is probably a healthy choice. Many don’t. Many adoptees spend their entire fucking lives hurting because they were given up. I think they have the right to meet the people who gave them up. I believe that with all my heart.

I am the product of rape. I wish I had not been told that when I was five. I am glad I know it now. I think that people should get to grow up and ask questions about themselves. That is a very powerful belief for me. Not everyone shares it. I can live with that.

Sex and consent

I believe there needs to be another word. It’s not “rape” if you never say no. But is the sex actually consensual if you have never said yes? There needs to be another word.

Last night a friend came over. I’m going to call her Popcorn, because I can. She was telling me about a situation with her lover where she said no to something and it happened anyway. While she was talking I could feel my stomach explode with acid. I felt scared and upset. Honey, don’t you know that when someone does things to you after you say “no” that is rape? But I didn’t say anything for a few seconds. When I spoke I very calmly asked if they had a consensual non-consent relationship. She said that the deal is she puts up with what he wants to do or he walks.

We need another word.

We need another word to explain how badly we want to feel that people like us and love us and want to be around us so we tolerate things that make us feel bad. We need another word to explain the intersection of scared-little-girl-who-knows-saying-no-won’t-stop-it and the adult woman who is allowed to make odd choices. I think that people are allowed to choose consensual non-consent relationships. I know people who desperately want to be in no-safeword relationships. Well, ok. If that works for you and you want it very badly, rock on. Not everyone has made that conscious decision. An awful lot of women just think there isn’t a point in saying no. It won’t stop what is happening and if you say no things will get worse, not better. Better to shut up and just take it. The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know.

Last night I masturbated right before going to sleep. I thought about domestic discipline stuff. I thought about what it would be like for Noah and I to come up with “rules” and for me to be held to them. I think that more than anything in the whole world I want concrete proof that someone is watching my behavior and giving me the equivalent of a gold star when I am good. It feels like no one notices or cares. I have a lot of hard days when getting through my basic list of tasks feels harder than running a marathon. I want someone to notice and comment on whether or not I have completed the tasks that make me “good” enough. I try so very hard. When I am not good enough I want someone to care enough to give me a way to earn back my goodness by submitting to correction. I want to be good enough so much it makes me cry. I don’t feel like I am.

I should just tolerate whatever someone wants to do to me. I’m not really good enough to ask for things to be different. I’m not really good. My behavior isn’t good. I think rebellious thoughts all day long. I want someone to know that I am feeling rebellious and tell me that they see that I am still doing the right thing even though I am struggling internally with the process. I want it so much.

Noah told me point blank that he is not willing to discuss “rules” at this stage of our life because right now I have too much pressure on me and he’s not going to be the straw that breaks my back. He’s a very schmott guy, that one.

I struggle with admitting to myself that I do things because I want them. I am so house proud it is kind of silly. I desperately want people to come over to my house and gasp because my garden is so pretty. Wow–I’ve obviously put a lot of work into it and it’s lovely. It’s stupid to work so hard so that phantom people who don’t really care will some day give me a pat on the back. I am doing it for me. Why the lie? I have a powerful need to control the world around me.

It’s all complicated, isn’t it? Wanting love and approval. Yes, Popcorn, being alone is safer. But we are social animals. Being alone isn’t actually safer. So many things can happen while you are alone and there is no one around to help you survive. I want you to survive. I want to survive. We are social creatures. It means different things to different people, yes; I know.

I think about these things so hard because I think about what kind of grown up I want to model being for my kids. I want my gorgeous daughters to believe that it fucking matters when they say no. I want my daughters to believe that no piece of shit man is worth putting up with if he is going to rape them. Complicated. I have some complex feelings about my sexual activity. Do I think Noah is a piece of shit man? Do I think Noah is a rapist? I think about it. I think about what the word rapist really means. Noah has had sex with me while I fought him off–because he had explicit permission in advance to do it once. He doesn’t deserve punishment for doing what I negotiated with him. It was a consensual non-consent scene.

Only that shit fucks you up. That shit fucks up your brain and your body. I consented to it. Did I consent because I think piece of shit girls like me should permit anything and everything to happen to me no matter how much it hurts? I’m not sure it mattered. It was a number of years ago. I went to intensive therapy over that–two or three times a week for a while around that event. It helped me break through a lot of walls around all of the other rapes in my life. I got to find out that I’m not physically all that strong and I can fight as fucking hard as I want to and I still can’t defend myself. I still can’t prevent someone from raping me if they want to.

It’s complicated. At this point in time Noah is very cautious with me. If he senses even mild hesitancy he pulls back and stops touching me and asks for verbal confirmation that I am ok. This man is trying as hard as he can to help me pick up the pieces of my life. This is his life too and he doesn’t want to live with someone who is continually damaged and redamaged. He wanted to have an experience. He wanted to know what something felt like. We found the wall together. We found out what too far felt like. Now he’s careful. I’m not sure he would be able to be careful if he hadn’t found the wall. In the long run I suspect that we will have a better marriage because we shared that experience. We have learned a lot together.

Do I think other women should do it? Well… it doesn’t matter what I think, right? I don’t want my daughters to feel like they need to be violently raped as an adult to prove to themselves that they have no ability to defend themselves. How about if we get them into intense martial arts and self-defense classes at five. Sure, everyone can lose to someone. But let’s improve their odds. Motherfucker. I want my daughters to know how to stand up straight and say, “No I don’t want this” and back it up with leaving because no fucking man is worth putting up with shit that hurts. (Unless they want to consent to SM. I’m not a hypocrite. That’s different.) I want my daughters to feel loved and confident and built up and like they have status and worth and they don’t need a fucking man. Does that mean I want them to be alone and lonely? No. But I want them to communicate about their needs. I want them to believe that their needs are important and I want them to hang out with people who agree that their needs are important.

I like having daughters. It challenges me to think very hard about what kind of woman I want them to see. Do I want them to grow up to be brittle and delicate? I can’t decide who they will be, not really. But I can decide who I want them to see. Who they eventually become is up to them. I can make sure that they do not learn from me that they should tolerate whatever someone wants to do. It’s complicated.

I strongly dislike the idea that people “shouldn’t judge”. Fuck you motherfucker I’m going to fucking judge all I want. I’m going to judge if things are safe or smart. I’m not going to try and control you because you have to make your own choices and live with the results. But I really should judge in my head what is going on. I should evaluate things and decide if that is something I think is a good plan or not and I should think about why. I don’t need to share this process, unless people want to hear it, but I really should judge. Saying that people shouldn’t judge is a good way of saying, “I’m not going to bother thinking about actions in advance and I will be a victim all my life.” No thanks.

If a man tells you he doesn’t care about your needs you need to believe him and get the fuck away from him. He probably won’t wake up every single day and look in the mirror and have to deal with the consequences of your interactions. You will. You have to look at yourself every day for the rest of your life. Do you want to be proud of yourself or ashamed? How do you feel about yourself right now? I’m not real fond of my hair this short, I’ll be honest. Overall it is getting easier to look at myself in the mirror. I know I am actually behaving in a way that is consistent with my values. I am judging the fuck out of myself and using that judgment to change my behavior and mannerisms. I’m changing how I experience my life because I want to model for my children what having a good life means. I tell them actively that people live all kinds of good lives. There isn’t one blue print. But for me, I’m very serious about following a fairly distinct progressive path towards being a better person. I will fuck up along the way, but I’ve already come so far.

Even though I really wish I was I’m not a special snowflake. I’m not ever going to be the best. But I’m ok. Everything will be ok in the end; if it’s not ok it’s not the end. I have to be good enough. I have to keep my kids safe enough. We are an accident prone family and we all get a lot of small injuries. I shouldn’t try to prevent that. But I am careful to ice my injuries now and talk about what things I should change and do differently in the future. I no longer sit around extensively talking about how stupid I am when I get hurt. I turned that tape off. That was a strong tape from my childhood. Only stupid people get injured. Only people who aren’t good at (insert activity) get hurt doing it. Incompetent people. When I had to go see the doctor as a child for injuries I was yelled at.

I think I deserve bad treatment. I have to judge how people talk to one another and decide how I would feel about that treatment being given to me. If I don’t do that I have no perspective whatsoever on what things might be like in the lives of other people. All I know is what I know and what I know is that I deserve bad treatment. I deserve to not be able to say no when someone wants to rape me.

I think we need another word. How can we talk about this rape that is not rape? How do we talk about this lack of sense of self that causes women to not even try to prevent bad things? How do we convince our girls that they should learn these self preservation skills? What does that even mean? It all feels so complicated.

I think that part of it involves learning to tell the difference between fantasy and reality. I think if you really and truly believe that you should be raped over and over again you should probably work on that. I don’t care if it makes me a judgmental asshole or condescending or whatever. If you think you deserve to be raped over and over… you should work on that. If you want to play rape games with your lover but you have a safeword for when things get too intense, that’s fine. In my judgmental asshole opinion. As soon as you lose the ability to say no or use your safeword then you shouldn’t engage in the play. In my opinion. We need a word for that kind of sex. I don’t know what it should be.

Any thoughts?

Learning and shame

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Words have power.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love getting mail. Sometimes.

Yesterday I got a letter. Normally I am thrilled by such instances. In this case I believe the person sent a letter because if he sends a letter I can only respond on his terms. If he sent an email he knows I would just argue with him and refuse to let him set the terms of the conversation. As is, I don’t feel like this letter deserves a letter back of its own so I’m just going to ignore it. Well, maybe “ignore” is a bit strong. I’ll stew about it but I’m not going to respond to him. I hear he has me blocked all over the internet. Hallelujah.

I would like to say in public that I am under the care of a licensed psychologist, psychiatrist, and I do actually have a general doctor as well. The folks who “take care” of me are professionals in good standing in their various professions. They all agree that I should be on some kind of psych med at this stage and if pot is working, why bother replacing it with something that has more side effects. Does that make it an addiction? Is someone who takes thyroid medication an addict? It’s an interesting question.

I certainly need pot. I feel a grotesque amount of shame about that. I’m aware the 12 step folks want me to get off it entirely. Obviously that would make my whole life better. Given the magnitude of my mental health issues I would need to turn to western medicine and pills. Seriously, they make everything worse. But obviously I am a disgusting low life addicts. Obviously.

And because I am obviously I am an addict, that means I am bad and abuse, right? I have anger issues. I’ve had anger issues for a long time. I must be addicted to anger, right? It totally makes sense. I’m comfortable in that emotion so I default to it and if nothing happens for a while to make me angry I’ll go find some moron on the internet to argue with. Since I was eighteen I have kicked holes in drywall twice and punched a hole once. I kicked the cabinet doors off. That is the entire extent of property damage done in my life. That is manifestly an anger problem. I don’t hit people at all any more under any circumstances. I don’t do that “girl” thing of whacking people when they are irritating. I married someone who finds it offensive so I stopped. I’m not going to be doing bdsm play with anyone else again so I don’t think I will ever hit a person again in my life. It’s kind of weird to think about.

But obviously my anger is running my life. I’m angry all day every day, right? No? Wait. What?!  You mean the gross assumptions about me might be incorrect? I spend all day every day in a mellow and cheerful mood. I am edgy and anxious when new people come around and I feel uncomfortable. I have this constant fear that people are judging me (but I get a letter ever year or so from someone telling me that I am disgusting and abusive so I think that isn’t a paranoia on my part) and it makes me more prone to fight with people I think don’t like me anyway. The best defense is a good offense. If you strike me as someone who is likely to shame me and put me down I am going to attack you and be on offense from the beginning. It isn’t always perfect. But then I get letters like yesterday and I’m glad I have that approach.

I’m not going to do what people tell me and then they get butt hurt and *I’m* the one with the anger problem. Right. Obviously if I don’t want to do what he says when he says it I am in denial.

I am not at a place in my life where I can start going to a bunch of meetings in San Francisco. Not even to make other people feel better about my “sobriety”. I can’t bring my kids and telling me that I could get childcare from someone who thinks I am disgusting is hilarious. I would rather drop my kids off to play in the park alone. They would be safer.

A lot of the reason I have no contact with my family isn’t because I am paranoid about them sexually assaulting my kids during an Easter Egg Hunt. I don’t allow my children around my family because my children don’t need to sit and listen to people talk shit about me. I’m far from perfect and I deal with that. My 19 month old and my nearly four year old don’t need to be in the house of someone who feels quite free to put me down and talk badly about me. Hell fucking no. That is a hostile environment for me and mine. Calling it “support” is pure hypocrisy and it sickens me. No you don’t want to support me. You want to shame me and insult me. I’ll pass.

Anger is absolutely the monkey on my back. I deal with it by trying to figure out why I am angry and changing the part that feels like an attack so I can stop feeling defensive. There isn’t a chance in hell I am going to go visit the house of someone who has shamed me up one side and down the other and not feel angry. Then he will take that as more confirmation that he is right. No thanks. That is a lose/lose situation for me. Shaming isn’t love or concern.

That’s the part that matters. When people come to me in love and concern to “talk about my behavior” (it happens) I try to meet them where they are and listen. I don’t think I am perfect. I listen to advice when it is given appropriately by people I respect. Someone who sends me a nastygram letter unsolicited where he recommends that I go stay in a residential rehab facility because I smoke pot?  Yeah. Kiss my ass.  I’m fairly unlikely to smoke for the rest of my life. But it is a drug I need right now. I guess I’m bad for that. I guess I should abandon my children to the mercy of people who think I am bad and head off to a place that will cause me massive panic attacks as soon as I walk in.

And after I walk in I won’t be able to go to the bathroom when I want. And if I don’t draw pictures when they tell me to draw pictures all hell can break loose. Oh wait. I’m just being paranoid. That doesn’t happen to people. Oh wait. It happened to me. Uhm, no. No thank you. I don’t think there is a chance in hell that residential treatment would improve my life. I think that would be the thing that sent me over the bend and I would never be released because they would be pumping me full of frightening chemicals just to get me to stop screaming. I will never go back to a treatment facility. I would rather kill myself. My therapists know this. They don’t think I need to go to rehab. My therapist thinks that rehab would be an entirely inappropriate place for me because I am not hurting my life. I am appropriately using a medication that my body apparently needs right now so that I can go on to be a (mostly) happy, highly functioning adult. What is the problem?

The problem is that someone is mad at me. He has shit going on in his own life that he is upset about and he wants to vent his spleen on someone. I’m a convenient target. This is what being the scapegoat means. This is how such patterns continue on and on in life. He acted like the bringer of truth.  “You’ve surrounded yourself with friends who don’t see you(sic) addictive behavior as anything unusual, and with a husband who is a hard core enabler.” Yes. I have chosen to surround myself with people who are nice to me and who do not send me nasty letters. You illustrate nicely why I do that. You are not right. You have an opinion.

I’m addicted to anger, cutting, sex, and drugs. Apparently. Sure. Why not. All of these “addictions” spring from the same basic place of feeling unsafe and like I deserve to hurt. I’ve been looking into the treatment for these issues for some time.  Guess what the first step is?

Safety. Safety, for me, includes not talking to people who are going to send me long letters about how bad I am. Whether I have issues or not it is not the job of anyone to send me nasty letters about my issues. This isn’t how you help someone. But it is how you contribute to the surrounding feeling of unsafe. I guess I shouldn’t let go of that paranoia of people sitting at home thinking nasty thoughts about me. I have yet more evidence.  Shit dude. He felt motivated enough by his hostile judgment to print out a letter, find an envelope and put three stamps on it! That’s commitment! It wasn’t even an off-hand email in a bitchy moment. He put effort into it. He didn’t open a dialogue about, “I’m feeling worried about you. Are you open to talking about some of the stuff that is going on for you?” He has no interest in my consent. He’s just interested in telling me how bad I am.

“A while back you wrote about how outraged you were when you discovered that there were adults who knew that you were being abused as a child and didn’t do anything about it. Another time you wrote something to the effect that at least your kids were not being brought up by totally fucked up addicts, they were being brought up my(sic) a high functioning addict. I like Shanna a lot, and if we ever meet when she is grown up, I don’t want her to be able to say to me, “If everyone knew my mom was an addict, how come nobody did anything about it?”

This is for Shanna.”

Bam! That’s class A perfect color shame. He’s not telling me these things because he is a judgmental asshole!  No!  He’s doing it for Shanna. He thinks it would be far preferable to be on western meds so that I can sit on the couch and stare at a tv and not do anything self-destructive and recover from my “addictions”.

I feel the love in every line. Don’t you? I was raped over and over. I was moved more than 50 times. I was not allowed to develop any normal attachments in life and I’m bitter about it. Obviously he needs to step in because I am a stoner. It’s the same thing as rescuing me when I was a kid. I’m just as bad.

I’m sure I am not reading this is the best possible light. I hear that 80% of all things read in text are read with the wrong tone. I guess it is too bad that this person didn’t have the respect for me to ask to talk to me in person, you know, if he was serious about wanting to help me. Instead he sent an aggressive and hostile letter (you can’t miss that even if you tone down my paranoia) and I’m supposed to just… what? Smack myself in the forehead and say, “You must be right! How have I lived without such sage advice commanding me how to get my life together!”

Why do I write about these things? Because if I didn’t write about it I would mutter under my breath all day. I would slam cabinets. I would be pissed off as fuck because this fucking asshole just god damn ruined my day. But if I come and write about it I can let it go. I went through all the thoughts. Now I can stop talking about when the kids are around.

There are always going to be people who dislike me and disapprove of me. If I let that ruin my day I can just go kill myself and get it over with. There are enough of those people for every day, forever.

In the best light I can see this letter as him trying to say that he misses having me as a friend and he won’t hang out with me until I get treatment so please hurry because he misses me. There is definitely a way to see it that way if I’m generous.

But this is a whole lot of shaming. I don’t need people in my life who shame me. I don’t need to be made to feel bad. That’s not ok. That’s not an acceptable thing to do to a friend. If he wanted to talk to me about these things he could have. He didn’t. He wanted to sit on high and give me judgments and orders. Well who died and made you the king of anything?

Don’t worry. I’ll tell Shanna you sent me a nasty letter trying to protect her. I’m sure it will make her feel much better.

If someone actually wants to talk to me and offer polite conversation about their concern, I promise I won’t write a hostile blog post about it. If you treat me like a reasonable person I’ll treat you like one. If you send me shaming text, I might print the whole thing verbatim and I might keep it private. You are taking a roll of the dice. I don’t keep secrets very well.

That’s why.

This morning I had an important thought.  If I stop smoking pot now I am going to start cutting frequently.  The Ativan is not a choice that works as well.  I’m not willing to be on a daily pill, even though I probably should at this point.  My mood cycles have been horrible in the last two weeks.  Pot levels it all out and makes me cheerful and just barely stupid.  I am in a great space to sit and play with Play Doh for hours.  I can build with Lego’s all day.  I’m noticing what things I didn’t get Shanna that I probably should have.

I’m enjoying how cuddly and affectionate Calli is… when I’m stoned.  When I’m sober it bothers me and I want to get up and walk away.  There is something wrong with me.  When I am sober it hurts.  She bangs her head on me, she scratches, she steps on me awkwardly or knees me or or or or…  I kind of hate it.  When I am stoned I just mumble, “oooph, gentle with Mommy”.  I’m so glad to be near her that I don’t mind her rough antics.  She doesn’t mean anything by them.  She’s just a baby.

My body isn’t a good place to be lately.  I have to spend a lot of time dissociated if I want to function at all. It’s hard.  Most of my body hurts most of the time.  My stomach hurts terribly from stress, pot also levels that out.

Pot allows me to put aside my grown up concerns and worries and just be present and happy in the moment with my kids.  Most of the day is really quite pleasant.  I only think about things that are relevant to what is in my line of sight, quite deliberately.  That’s how I manage to be a good mother.  I think only of our immediate house and my kids most of the time.  I don’t divide my energy well.  I can work on house stuff like cleaning with the kids around, but that’s the limit.  Sometimes they let me read.  They hate the computer and mostly I have to be in a different room on a break in order to use it.  That’s when I smoke pot.

I go think about grown up things for brief periods behind closed doors during the day.  That is what having Sarah here gives me.  Time to walk away from the kids when my thoughts become intrusive.  When I am starting to feel edgy I can ask for a break.  I’m trying to have the breaks be as effective sober and they just aren’t.  My emotions are too intense.

I have ridiculous self-control and ridiculous patience… within small tight boundaries.  My kids will grow up being told frankly that I smoke because I need the medicine in the plant and there isn’t a better way to get it out for me.  Why do I need the medicine?  Because of something that was broken when I was a little girl.  They won’t be broken in that way so they won’t need the medicine.  It’s rather unpleasant to do, so I don’t recommend it.  Shanna will cheerfully lecture anyone within hearing on how disgusting and unhealthy smoking is.  Yay California.

But sober, I’m edgy and raw.  I cry a lot.  I can’t stand to let anyone touch me and when my kids grab me my entire physical reaction is to want to shake them off like a dog.  I loathe being touched.  It feels like such a disgusting and horrible incursion into my body.  Every touch feels bad right now.  Everything hurts.  The most gentle of caresses feels like a slap.  I can mostly dissociate away when sober, but not enough to smile or pretend I am enjoying it.

I don’t want my children to grow up with a mother who flinches away from them constantly as if they are terrible people for wanting to touch her.  I think I should get stoned instead.  It doesn’t really matter that I feel bad about doing it.  It doesn’t matter that the stupid bitch at PAMF looked at me like dirt because I have a medical card.  It allows me to be a good mother.  I feel so ashamed of myself for needing it.  I guess this makes me an addict?  Officially?  I don’t know.

It seems to me that most of life is about walking a series of thin lines.  I am more ashamed of cutting than I am of smoking pot.  The specific reason I think it is worse is because I will be more strongly judged and censured for cutting.  I don’t know a lot about tribal cutting, I’ve never bothered to find out.  I can imagine there being places in the world where my desire to cut myself to deal with my emotional experience would be viewed differently.  If I were to lose my fear of judgment, I would be able to represent myself in a way that would feel more honest.  I am a person who has experienced a lot of pain. But I did it in a way that is invisible and hard to ignore.  There are scars all through my vagina.  I think the scars should be on the outside so that other people can see them.  I think that marking yourself in proportion to the pain you feel is a way of identifying yourself so that you can find other people to talk to who can hopefully give you relevant advice beyond, “Just cheer up!”  Yeah, fuck you too.

Pot keeps me from feeling suicidal.  I’m just not desperate enough.  It really pisses me off that I can never really be a martyr for any cause ever in my life because if I go in a way that is not completely fucking random people will assume I killed myself.  It’s just got to be the base assumption forever.

I’d really like to kill myself.  But in my personal hierarchy of needs it is far far more important that I never give my children the experience of parental suicide.  Jimmy thinks that just not talking about things and not doing the same things will break the chains and he’s wrong.  The only thing that will break the chains is consciously talking about what we are doing and then choosing to do something else.  It is hard to be a different person.  It doesn’t happen by sitting back silently and hoping it happens.

Who do I want to be?  I want to be someone who doesn’t need to be apathetic all the time in order to function.  This stage of processing won’t last forever.  What do I need to change about my life in order to not get back to feeling this desperate and hurt?  Can I change enough?   Is this just something that is part of me because of my previous trauma?  Will I always find a new trigger somewhere down the road?  I don’t know.  I really don’t.

I’m just bitchy and mean and bored and antsy and angry and touchy when I am sober.  I feel so dissatisfied with everything in life.  I hate that in myself.  And when I’m stoned I’m fine.  No really.  I am doing exactly what I said I would and I do enjoy it when I can focus on it.  There must be something wrong with me if I need pot to focus.  That’s not very functional, only it is.  I’m functional, I really am.  I beg the internet to believe me.  Why do I care so much?  Why do I feel like I constantly have to prove that I have some value.  I am not just a worthless piece of shit.  Even if I do smoke pot.  Even if I am just a disgusting whore.

I think I’m ordering more pot today.

aftermath

I told Noah that I would be fairly ashamed to tell people how we are moving forward.  According to my personal religion that means I am committing a sin.  It’s mixed.  Mostly I would say we are getting along very well.  I’m not starting fights or insulting him or picking on him.  Noah is his usual polite and adoring self.  It’s like nothing happened except we have massively increased how much sex we are having and how degrading our sex is.

We have spent a lot of time talking about how compulsive I am about sex.  About how that works in my head.  We have spent a lot of time talking about how impulsive Noah is about sex.  So far we seem to be at the point where we are both acknowledging that we qualify as “sex addicts” by any reasonable definition but maybe if we stick with each other we won’t cause too big of problems?

Apparently the task of the week is to see how much sex we have to have before Noah can’t handle any more.  So far we have managed three times a day every day.  Then I fall asleep.  I feel mixed about this.  He knows I feel mixed about this.  Hell, I’m writing about feeling mixed about this–everyone will know.    It’s hard talking about the actual needs that casual sex meets for me.  I can meet some pretty fucked up needs without telling anyone what I am doing.  I never have to tell my partners what my internal dialogue is.  I don’t have a very high opinion of myself and my voracious need for sex.

I don’t have a very high opinion of the fact that my preference is for most of the sex I have to be quasi-consensual.  Noah is well aware that a large percentage, possibly “most”, of our sex involves me not being in the mood at all.  It doesn’t really matter if I am interested in sex.  I am interested in being a good whore.  That means I will do what I am supposed to do.  I feel manifestly uncomfortable admitting that.  A large percentage of the sex I have I only have because I feel like I am required to do so.  That is what someone like me is good for.  That is what I am supposed to do.  And I’m really good at it.  And I fucking live for the post-sex adulation.  People I fuck tend to be willing to tell me at great length how good I am at sex.  I try very hard to make sure I work far harder at sex than most women.  I really really want the approval I get after sex.

I feel like something is broken in me.  That I chase this so hard.  Noah and I have been talking a lot lately.  I don’t think I am going to sleep with other people any more.  Regardless of what Noah ends up doing for the rest of his life, I need to stop buying affection with sex.  I need to stop begging my friends to like me by proving that I am better at sex than anyone they’ve ever slept with.  It’s not really a strategy that is working for me.

I like to pick other sex addicts and go have multiple hours of sex with them.  Most of the time they are so shocked by finding a woman who is also as motivated by sex that they are willing to tell me pretty much anything I want.  It’s broken.  I have a partner at home who is willing to do the Jekyll/Hyde thing with me.  He will degrade me and talk about me being a whore during sex.  He will tell me that if I am so motivated by cock I am required to show up at 5am every day and wake him up with my mouth.  And he’s pretty nice to me the rest of the time.

I feel worried by the duality of our relationship.  Most of the time in most ways he really is an amazing partner.  He is a good, stable provider.  He is kind.  He is great with our children.  I have been able to push him towards mutually agreed upon improvements in behavior over the years.  He’s very willing to accommodate me in just about every part of life.  He bends over backwards for me in nearly every way.  He will even call me names and hurt me tremendously during sex if I tell him I want him to.

There is this mythos in my head that slaves and masochists should experience no internal conflict over what they do.  I have massive internal conflict.  I am still upset that Noah lied to me.  And my response is to tell him more and more complex stories that I am terribly ashamed of.  Things that hurt me very much.  And I ask him to use them against me.  I want him to agree that I am just a dirty whore.  There isn’t much else that someone like me is good for.  But I want him to gift wrap it in a package where I don’t have to be at risk going forward.

For me to keep having the kind of casual sex that I like is for me to risk my life.  It really won’t be much longer before I go back for hunting for rough, dangerous sex.  Sure I’m being all loud and snotty this round of hunting because I want vanilla sex right now.  That would fade.  I would go back to wanting people to do dangerous things to me.  I’ve already had a broken bone in the pursuit of good sex, what else will happen?

It is a lot safer to stick with Noah.  He will be able to hurt me as much or more than anyone else.  He doesn’t flinch from doing so.  Noah has not yet inflicted as much pain on me as a small handful of other people, but he has every intention of doing so.  I get the impression that some day he will be the one I have done my most intense play with.  That kind of terrifies me.  Because he has a high bar to reach.  I have already done things that were a really bad idea.  I’m sure I will do more.

If I do this instead of cutting or sleeping around or drugs or whatever other self-harming behavior I can dream up… is that better?  I don’t know.  I don’t know how this life thing is supposed to work.  I hear I am just supposed to magically decide that I shouldn’t be harmed any more, not by anyone.  Not by me, and not by random guys, and not by my husband.  But I need this.  I am so used to feeling shit on.  I require it so much.

Noah has been nice and patient for a long time.  We haven’t done intense or painful or degrading sex in a long time.  He’s been more respectful than that.  So I got bored and went out and slept with other people.  And the thing is, it’s not enough that he does these things to me.  I need people to know that these things are part of my life.  I need for people to know that I am this person.  I can’t have this done in secret.  I can’t keep secrets.

It would be a sin if I did these things and kept them private and secret.  I believe that.  That is something that I have to hold on to in life.  Something is only a sin if I am ashamed to talk about it.  If I am talking about this now, does that mean I am released from the power of it being a sin?  I don’t know.  I worry about needing what I need.  It’s mixed.

I can point in a straight line from events in my early childhood to what I do now.  Come March, other people will be able to do so as well.  Noah already can.  And he stomps all over me with that knowledge.  Only in ways I find hot, of course.  Is that the difference?  Is that the line between what we do and some amorphous “abuse”?  If I tell Noah to stop doing something on a given day he does.  Except by prior arrangement.  Except that I know that I just don’t bother to say no when I’m not in the mood.  I figure out how to let it happen.  I figure out how to permit him the access he wants whether I want it or not.  I don’t generally bother to communicate whether I am in the mood or not.  If he tells me to do something, I do it.

It’s interesting when people talk to me about how self-assured I am.  How self-possessed.  How willing to stand up for myself.  Ha.  Only sometimes.  Only in some ways.  If a sexual partner is telling me to do things I frankly don’t want to do I have limited ability to communicate my wants.  It depends on how I am doing emotionally and it depends on how much I am invested in the partner.  I have casual sex because I can have boundaries with strangers.  I have repeat sex with long-term friends because I have beaten them down in non-sexual settings and they don’t push real hard out of fear of a backlash that will never come.  I don’t have boundaries with my long-term partners.  I barely communicate anything about my limits beyond telling them what buttons will get them the biggest reaction today.  “Today is ____ anniversary so why don’t you hurt me by doing _________.”

It’s not a sin if I talk about it.  I don’t know what it is, but it’s not a sin.  I have decided this for my own personal pantheon of beliefs.

These needs all predate Noah.  They are not because of him.  Most of them are not really about him at all.  These are things that were broken in me as a child.  But he frankly enjoys many of the ways I am broken.  He feels no shame whatsoever in enjoying what I became as the direct result of years of sexual assault.  Well, maybe he feels a little shame.  But not much.  Not enough to prevent him from trying to behave in ways that will keep me from getting bored in the future.  Not enough to lessen his enjoyment of what this deep feeling of shame causes me to do during sex.  His favorite part lately seems to be that I’m really ok with him fucking my throat until he causes me to vomit.  I have a fairly reactive gag reflex.  I consider vomiting to be just part of serious blow jobs.  I don’t think that is normal.  It never feels like it is really a good time to say, “Could you back off on the deep throating?”  I don’t get to set terms like that.  I get to accept.

In about ten minutes I have to get up and close the computer.  I will walk across the house and I will do what I was told to do.  Do I want to?  Enh.  Not really.  My throat and cunt are sore.  I could use about a week off from sex to recover at this point.  But I draw comfort from the fact that I have confessed so I go forth without sin.  I will smile.  I will encourage him.  I will beg him for more, in fact.  It doesn’t really matter that I’m sore.  That’s beside the point.  I don’t think I should go have sex with other people any more.  I don’t think that is a good decision for me.  He says he is going to be monogamous as well.  No, let me be clear.  He will be as monogamous as I am.

I fell compelled by my shame.  I told him he would be allowed to sleep with whomever he wanted, forever.  I promised him that.  At no point did I tell him I would like it or feel happy about it.  I feel like I did a bait and switch.  I feel like I owe him for all the sex he will never get to have because he was stupid enough to marry someone as insecure and selfish and possessive as me.  I feel guilty that I seem to have tricked him into monogamy.  In turn I fell compelled to say, “Ok fine, I guess I can’t be monogamous either–go have fun.”

I sincerely believe I should stop having sex with other people.  I should not act on feeling compelled to earn love and affection with sex outside my marriage.  It’s bad enough that I do it with Noah.  I don’t actually think I should go out and find a harem of men who will cheerfully call me a whore during sex.  I don’t need that.  I do enough of that all by myself.

I feel so broken.  I seem to have absolutely internalized that anyone who fucks this many people is kind of disgusting.  And all I want to do is increase the number so I can increase just how many people will think I am disgusting.

But Noah doesn’t care.  He doesn’t care at all what I’ve done or what I might do in the future.  He wants me.  He takes great pride in me.  He loves me and adores me.  He bends over backwards from me in pretty much every part of life.  Except when he’s being impulsive.  Oops.  His friend told him, “The problem with your situation is it’s hard to know when you are cheating.”  Maybe if the rules are clearer then it will be easier to figure out what to do?

I feel like I have taken something away from him.  He was poly when I met him.  How dare I take that away.  I seem to be the epitome of what Dan Savage and Mistress Matisse warn about.  That evil double crosser who promises poly and can’t hack it.  I’m sorry I am so broken.  I really am.  I wish that I could encourage Noah to do anything he wants with anyone he wants.  Hell, I do encourage him.  But it hurts me when he does it.  I’m sorry that is true.  I really am.

Bonding

I think a lot about why I want to overshare my emotional experience while hunting.  I think that part of it is, I don’t know how these things go for other people.  Does everyone waffle like me?  Noah says he doesn’t.  Does anyone?  I don’t know.

I feel like my whole life has been a weird balancing act.  I have to do enough hard things to balance out the easy things.  I’m not really even sure what that means.  Why do I feel utterly compelled to promise elaborate sex acts to strangers?  I can’t do it with people I know very well because then I feel like I have to live up to that promise all the time.

Last night I did well.  I closed.  Three times.  Excellent.  It helps that this was one of the rare times when I have taunted this person in real life previously.  He was ready for some follow through.  I feel giddy that I managed.  It’s like checking a box on a treasure hunt.  w00t.  Inspired hot sex three times in one night.  And he didn’t finish quickly.  Excellent stamina.  I feel like women are judged this way, why shouldn’t men?

Why shouldn’t I talk about sex as if it is a perfectly respectable hobby?  Excepting religious reasons… no really, why should anyone care?  Granted not everyone wants to hear about it, but I don’t want to hear about golf either.  So?  Why are most hobbies morally neutral but sex is bad?  Why am I bad because I like to feel this way?

It’s not like I have devoted my entire life to it.  I’m doing a few other things as well.  Like writing about it.

Sarah is taking Shanna to Arizona tomorrow.  I will miss them.  It’s always hard for me when Shanna visits people without me.

I have a date Thursday night.  I need to go to bed early on Tuesday and Wednesday if I want to be in the mood.  If it was for tonight I would cancel.  I’m burning too hot.  I’m using too much energy and way way too much at night.  I’m so tired.

I feel the kind of tired where I am emotionally raw.  This is how I always came home feeling.  And my mother would pick a fight.  When I feel vulnerable like this I am sensitive and I easily feel shamed and unwanted.  It doesn’t always happen after sex with new people and it can happen with Noah.  When I feel like I am breaking taboos this sometimes hits.

I feel really bad about telling the guy last night “Maybe” when he asked for a second date.  I feel like I made promises I don’t intend to keep.  I kept my mouth shut about things he said or did that were complete relationship deal breakers for me because oh man is that not a battle I’m interested in.  I’m not trying to hurt him.  I think he is a fine individual.  Just not someone I want to be in a relationship with. Oh the sex was hot though.  If we run into one another at a sex party… maybe.  If I’m in the mood.  He certainly did most of it just right.

It feels like as a slut/whore/whatever word you want to use having those kind of preferences is kind of mean.  I’m supposed to just take people as they are and like them.  Mostly I do.  But there’s always one thing… I know it would drive me batty.  I go home and thank God that Noah doesn’t have/do/think/whatever the thing was.

This is why I don’t feel polyamorous.  Not really.  Only I have my boys.  I do feel a connection to them.  It is pretty much always more intense on their side.  I have a date scheduled with my shaman.  We haven’t been on a date in about six or seven years?  And it was a four or five year gap between that and the previous set of dates.

I have a long cycle sometimes, apparently.  It’s interesting to learn that about myself.  I’m glad I didn’t stay with Steve because I would not have had the room to grow to be the person I am now.  I like who and what I am.  He wouldn’t have stood next to me for this journey.  He wasn’t my partner.  Not like this.  Tom didn’t want to have kids with me.  That is why I left him.  Having children was more important to me than being with him.  I made the right choice.

I am strongly dyadic in my bonding.  I do very intense one on one bonding.  And then it scares the piss out of me and I run away.  Noah is the only person I have ever met who can really match my intensity in an on-going way.  We take breaks occasionally when we are escalating, but we always come back to a topic.  We can always finish talking about something no matter how hard it is.

I have never had a person in my life who will do that.  I would follow him off a cliff because no one will ever make me feel seen the way Noah does.  I’m protective of this space.  I feel terrified of it being encroached on.

That’s why I only go on first dates.  I have no interest in finding a new bond right now.  Fuck you all.  You all suck compared to Noah.  I’m not going to go on a second date and start dealing with the fact that you can’t have conversations the way I want to have them.  It feels like a waste of my time.  I’m not interested in sitting through multiple dates where I have to silently roll my eyes and put up with shit that irritates the fuck out of me.  Everyone irritates me.  Everyone.  But I can turn around and tell Noah what he is doing that irritates the fuck out of me.  I can’t do that with anyone else.

It’s very stressful being around people and being polite.  I’m really not very polite in my head.  But I want polite children.  I have gone most of the way towards creating polite children.  When they start behaving in a way that irritates me it is because they are mimicking something I’ve done.  If I want to change their behavior the first thing I need to do is identify where I am behaving in a sub-optimal way and change it.  I put a lot of pressure on myself right now.

But people seriously irritate the fuck out of me and I’d like to yell at them a lot.  I don’t.  It’s not personal.  I’m sorry I feel this way.  But I do.

I don’t go on second date because that one little thing that irritated me?  I left thinking about it.  I constructed a story in my head about that little personality tic becoming part of my life.  Oh god that would require a lot of patience.  Can’t do it.  I’m sorry.

I’ve done a fair bit of recycling old hits in my head, lately.  I’ve gone on dates with several old flames, with mixed success.  I’m interested in seeing how things have changed with my shaman.  I feel weird about the fact that he is ok with being available for me whenever I want him over the course of more than a decade.  That’s… holy shit that’s commitment.  I love him.  But I’m not and I never have been “in love”.  It’s dramatic that I now have Noah to compare everyone to.  He changed the whole scale.

I like inspiring people.  Really good sex can change your world view.  There are so many good chemicals.  The aftermath of goodness can be bittersweet.  I like inspiring people to feel better about themselves.  I want them to feel affirmed for the one gift I am willing to accept from them.

I’m tired.  I’ve had a week of bad sleep.  I feel guilty that I avoided conversation last night by falling asleep.  He woke me up after an hour and a half to put me on bart.  Fucking slick, Krissy.  I feel bad.  It’s not like I did it on purpose.  I’m really tired.  But uhm, that shouldn’t be part of the first date.  Kind of poor form.

Noah is trying to schedule a date for Thursday.  I have extra impetus to not cancel.  Bother.  This is the kind of thing that inevitably happens around him dating.  If I cancel it gets weird.  He’s just as (or more) twitchy than I am at this point.  He acts like he should be kicked.  I have a hard time when Noah puts his head down and looks like he is in pain.  Like I have already been berating him… just because he feels guilty.  I haven’t said anything.  It makes me angry.  And then I’m going to say things.

This is a bad cycle.  Mostly in our life he acts like my ambient anger isn’t about him.  He goes about his life being cheerful and dandy and on his own time.  This is a good thing.  When he feels like he is to blame for my anger the dynamic changes.  I feel like an abusive asshole because he starts flinching.  It’s hard because it feels like my anger isn’t much higher than normal but all of a sudden I am bad for feeling it.  WTF?  Why do I have to be Miss Susie Sunshine on this sacred topic above all others?  I’m a cranky person.  I just am.  Why is it surprising around this topic?

Why am I only not allowed to feel feelings about this.  You are fine with them on every other topic.

I’m going back and sleeping with my friends because I have already been fierce and aggressive and they have proven they really like me.  It’s weird to show up and let them surprise me with how they actually want to touch me.  It’s weird finding out what is on the other side of the brick wall I build around myself.

First date sex has a certain loneliness to it.  That’s the bittersweet part.  You know that this person doesn’t really know you.  When you plan to disappear in the morning you hide behind that knowledge.  You carefully don’t present yourself at certain times.  It’s not worth finding out how this person feels about ‘x’ controversial topic.  For me to carefully censor what I’m saying…

This feeling.  It’s like what I had as a child.  When I was being sent to a new place.  I desperately wanted to please them.  I wanted to be liked.  Not being liked was so bad.  So very bad.  When people don’t like me they tend to loathe me.  They feel free to say the nastiest, meanest things possible.  They do this because I reveal a lot of intense personal feelings quickly and then other people bond to me.  Then when I reject the bond, because it was ephemeral for me, something that was completely true in the moment and not true later, they know personal things.

I’m being vague.  There is no way for me to recount the people and ways I have been told I am disgusting for the kind of sex I like to have.  I had a good night last night.  I don’t want to do it again soon because of my own issues with being patient with people.  He did nothing wrong.  He’s awesome.  My shaman is wonderful.  I feel much more connected to him than I do to most people.  I only want to go out on approximately a dozen dates over a decade.  It’s not because he has done something wrong.

I feel like running away from intimacy this hard is a sign that I am deeply broken.  If people cannot be everything and perfect then I have no space for them in my life.  And I judge everyone against Noah and find them wanting.  I’m lonely.

A lot of the impatience is just that people feel weird to me.  I never feel comfortable.  I always feel fake and like I have to be thinking very hard about not saying “the wrong thing” because inevitably someone will blow up at me.

Talking about sex and relationships feels especially charged and fierce.  People always feel weird to me.  I’m not very adaptable.  I have times where I can do it, but it’s hard.  I’m always poised for inevitable rejection.  Some woman who wrote me a nasty dear Jane letter felt the need to go back and change her RSVP to a no for an event I had in 2010.  Uhm.  Wow.  Thanks for letting me know, again, that you still dislike me.

I feel inadequate to the task of living my life.  I feel like I keep writing checks my body can’t cash.  I haven’t run in a few days.  I’m too physically exhausted.  Shanna and Calli and I did help shut down the port yesterday.  That was a walk.  I was impressed with Shanna’s tenacity.  I gave her multiple opportunities to wuss out when she got tired.  She said, “No!  I can do it!  I’m buff!”  My strong girl.

I feel a vague desire to probe her for why she introduces herself as She-Ra.  But that’s people hacking and she can’t consent.  So instead when she does it I just smile along.  I don’t know what to say.  Why should she feel more attached to the name I picked out?

I’m teaching her to be kind of weird.  I feel bad about that.  I’m very good at talking to strangers… if I initiate it or if they follow a pattern of questions I recognize as “valid”.  I can answer some questions easily.  Other times I freeze up and feel really dumb and walk away muttering about my inadequate social skills… she notices.

Today there is a park day trip to the park where I used to meet the above mentioned Dear Jane woman.  It’s a great park.  The homeschool group is going.  I keep thinking to myself that I’m not there to make friends.  I’m there to let Shanna make friends.  I don’t know that I can do it.  I can’t sleep in, ok fine.  I need to start going to bed earlier at night.  I’m so tired I can’t function.  This is not useful.

This is part of what I mean when I say I can’t date.  I don’t regulate my energy well.  Right now I’m trying to do too many things.  I can’t do everything.  Time to drop some balls.

Hunting is hella awkward (this whole thing is tmi)

We went from having a weekend of lots of planned sluttery to only having sex together.  This is rather hilarious, I think.  But Noah was approached on okcupid.  He’s making a date.

I love masturbating right after sex.  I’m sore and overly sensitive so it kind of hurts and it takes me a long time to have an orgasm.  I have to really make up a story in my head.  I’m just starting to do this again.  I haven’t done this in years.  I don’t masturbate when my kids are in bed with me.  I like to follow the stories that come up.  Often they involve sex with one or more of my friends.  It usually involves me getting to meet some need in their life.

Having sex with your friends is shitting where you eat.  It’s hard because having your needs met feels really good and it’s easy to get upset when you know people in your life can make you feel that good but they choose to schedule their time elsewhere.  That’s a hard thing emotionally.  It’s a lot of the reason that I am gun shy about polyamory.  I have my priorities set where they are set and no I am not fucking adjusting them for someone else.

I don’t think I have ever hunted the way I am hunting now.  I have never gotten to set the terms before.  It’s really hot.  It’s really hot to have people be willing to seduce me by email before we ever show up in person.  I have a great correspondance going right now.  The problem is that people get to the date and then have performance anxiety.  I don’t have performance anxiety.  I’m that good at sex.  As good as I say and better.  Because if you write me a script in advance I will make sure it is a script I can play and then I will play it to the hilt.  It’s really fun.

People who know me have a hard time engaging with this part of me.  They already have so many experiences that have made them gun shy.  I should make people gun shy on a day to day basis.  I’m kind of twitchy.  You don’t know how my moods will flow, it’s true.  Pushing an agenda on me is normally a questionable idea.

Except when it isn’t.  And I don’t know how to figure out the boundaries around this with people I know.  But I am learning how to do it with strangers and it’s really hot.  One hiccup is that I was asked if choking is really a hard limit.  Uhh, yeah.  It is.  No hands around my neck at all.  I don’t care that you like to assert your dominance that way.  Find another way.  Hey, I’m a nice girl.  How about if I tell you that I have been thinking a lot about face slapping?  You’ll believe me because I’ve been so clear about my boundaries in every other place.  Start slow, of course.  I’m sensitive.  But if that is interesting to you… I would feel put in my place.  Just sayin’.

It’s hard to do these exchanges with people I know.  I don’t trust very many people to that level.  It’s hard to use your friends as one night stands.  They feel bad.  Friends feel used and abandoned.  It’s important to not spike that oxytocin too high with people who already are more emotionally connected than I am.  That’s shitting on people I like.  Because they get hurt.  I don’t like doing that.

I am really thrilled about how many dates are happening.  I’m having fun.  I’m thrilled that Noah’s response to me hunting is to start talking about going to the gym because now he has to compete.  He totally doesn’t.  But I like it when he is in better shape.  Our sex life improves.  And given where it is… oh my.

I think it is funny that I hunt so hard for sex with other people when I know that Noah will be a better lover.  Every time.  It’s kind of like how Noah won’t eat McDonald’s, so I go without him.  I have these tastes for things that are bad for me.  My vices.  I like McDonald’s, ramen, and dates with new-to-me-men.  I’m going to get to the point where those are it.  (I eat McDonald’s like once a month.  Just sayin’.  Happy Meal joy.)

Noah tried to wake me up for sex on Friday night and I bit his head off.  Thursday I didn’t sleep much so I was cranky.  I made it up to him by waking him up on Saturday morning.  And we went to a party and played together on Saturday and had hot sex.  And we came home and had hot sex.  And Sunday afternoon Sarah took the kids out and he tied me up and did wonderful things to me and we had hot sex. And Sunday before passing out we couldn’t stop pawing at one another… so we had hot sex again.

Sometimes just being near him makes me shake with wanting him.  I have felt this voracious need for sex basically all of my life.  For the first time it’s not only ok it is preferable.  Because Noah actually likes me and appreciates me.  I worry about how other people will perceive me for being this kind of person.  I worry and feel stupid for worrying.  Of course people judge me.  So what?

I am not at risk of being hurt.  It would be very hard for anyone to hurt me just because they disapprove of my behavior.  My kids are far more sheltered than average.  They have a fierce sense of body autonomy and you can’t get that if you are abused.  They shine with good health and love.  I don’t have a job that is at risk.  Noah tells me he doesn’t care what I write.  He’ll take the hit.  Because I’m worth it.  I am financially secure enough that I will never have to play a public game again in my life.

Still I feel this fear.  If I feel this afraid, what is it like for people who have something to lose?  I have hubris on my side.  I can limit my hunting pool ridiculously.  I seem to be only hunting among people who have college degrees, often PhDs.  Not because I care but because those are the ones with the cajones to message me.  They are the only people who are willing to put up with a long list of nitpicky requests and demands from me before they meet me.  People who will write a sex script with me before meeting me and allow me to call a large percentage of the shots.  Am I actually doing risk management this way or am I lying to myself?

Communicating clearly that I am a sure thing gives me this sensation of butterflies in my stomach.  That moment of revelation, when I have to say I am interested in sex feels incredible.  Because I am interested in sex.  Not with anyone.  With people who can talk to me and help me make a script and help me figure out why I am there.

That’s what I’m doing with the pre-writing.  I’m giving myself a chance to create the back story on why the kind of girl he is fantasizing about would show up for the experience he is about to have.  Everyone wants a different why.  I’m very curious about why people think they should have sex.  It’s different from the why they have for love.  The why people have about sex tells me so much about their life.

Most people think they should have sex because they are in love.  It’s kind of a weird thing, to me.  Why do I think I should have sex?  Because it feels good.  Because I like carefully balancing how much of my life is devoted to things that feel good to me.  The specific kind of feel-good I get from sex with new people is apparently worth a lot of effort and angst to me.  I’m trying to get to the point where I can attenuate the effort and get rid of the angst.  I’m not for everyone.  The kind of people who are in the right place to do exactly what I want… that’s serendipity.  I need to be honest about the emotional cost.

I need to stop being messy with my emotions in my house.  Sarah has nightmares and I make them worse.  I’m not yelling or screaming.  But I am huffy.  I do visibly shake with anger.  To someone who grew up in a violent household I look like I am on the verge of hitting.  I need better control.  And that means I need to back off on hunting.  It’s taking a lot of my brain cycles and that makes me short tempered elsewhere.

I need to figure out how much energy I actually have left once I am meeting my obligations at home.  Right now I don’t feel like I understand that balance very well.  This is where I don’t have a map.  I guess I do though.  I painted it on my wall.  I’m going into the cave.  Sometimes.  Or I’m wandering off to have an island retreat.

Have I mentioned that due to plumbing mishaps I have a white wall in my house?  The possibilities are endless.  I still haven’t painted the garage door.  All of these things take energy.  Energy I am currently holding in reserve because later today I am going to go shut down the Port of Oakland with a few friends.  I’m bringing my kids.  And after the Port Shutdown I will be dropped off for a date.

There is only so much of me to go around.  I only have so much energy to give.  It’s really awesome; I have to be pragmatic.  What do I want to have in my life?  What are my actual, actionable priorities?  What am I doing with my time and energy and how is it balancing throughout my life?  I have to think about these things.

I am sad things went the way they did with muse, but I can’t say I’m surprised.  I shouldn’t have tried for a month.  I know better.  I know I don’t have that kind of energy for a relationship.  I should have left it at the first date.  If my one night stand hunting culminated in a night of bath house sex where I don’t have to talk to the person after that… that would have been great.  I was stupid.  I tried to get the short-term boyfriend experience.

Know yourself.  Know your limits.  Noah has different limits.  Hell, near as I can tell everyone has different limits than me.  That’s ok.  It’s tricky trying to figure out where I get to have  rock hard limits around what I can and can’t request from people.

I’m interested in one night stands.  If you aren’t, that’s fine.  We aren’t a match.  Move along.  Don’t get mad at me and I’ll try not to rant about you.  I’ll make that promise to all the future boys.  I’ll try not to rant.  Which is to say that I will rant but try to be balanced.  You did good things too.  We just aren’t a match.  No shame in that.

That’s why.  That’s why I’m hunting.  Because I am continuing the behavior I have done my entire life but not I am trying to do it without shame.  I want to find a way to balance this part of me that feels bad because other people do not value it with the knowledge that it does bring good to my life.  It gives me the energy to go conquer the world.

I’m probably not going to schedule a one night stand attempt in January.  I need a rest from that energy drain.  It’s time to re-evaluate the energy I’m giving to my sex life.  I promised Shanna that I would make her a play house in January.  I can’t be tired from staying up all night for sex and do that.  It’s going to be awesome.  Just wait.  But it will take creativity.  It has to fit into Wonderland.

How can I talk about parenting and being a slut in one post?  Because I’m both.  That has to be ok.  I’m not actually doing anything shameful.  I have an unusual hobby that most people don’t share.  Like people in this valley should fucking judge.  You are all a bunch of weirdos.  What the fuck is this geocaching shit?

I think that if you look at history you will find a lot more people who pursued sex voraciously than people who beat some video game.  Who is the freak?  Ahem.

Stop bitching.

It occurs to me that I mean something specific when I say: stop bitching.  I think other people may mean different things.  It’s time to define terms.  In this post I talk about why people should compare abuse.  I need to elaborate more, I’m good with that.

I do not mean that people should suck it up and continue to be abused because things aren’t that bad.  Ever.  Never ever ever.  I mean that people should stop bitching and start acting.  Bitching, to me, is complaining about the same situation year after year without any effort to change things.  This is one of those areas where I’m not popular in Domestic Violence conversations.  Because people tell me at great length how hard it is to leave.  I may not be the best person to talk to.  There are other people who can be more sympathetic to that point of view.  I don’t want to stomp on people.  I’ve had strong experiences that color my voice.  If you at any point feel like I am telling you that you deserve what you are getting or that you should stay please know that it is your own insecurity.  I don’t think that.

But I do think you need to get the fuck out.  I think that planning is awesome.  To me there is a difference between bitching and complaining.  I complain a lot, I have no problem with complaining.  Complaining changes over time.  You aren’t still talking about the exact same behavior situation ten years later.  If you have been married to an abusive asshole for twenty years and you say the same things about his behavior over and over then you are bitching.  Change something.  If you don’t want to leave, put your fucking foot down.  The person you are in a relationship with has no impetus to change unless you force the issue.  They will not magically become nice some day out of the kindness of their heart.  If he’s verbally abusive and you are tired of hearing it start wearing ear plugs.  Seriously.

If you notice that you are saying the exact same complaints as you did five years ago it’s time to change things.  Seriously.  Take responsibility for your life.  It’s yours to live.  No one else.  If you are unhappy with your life what do you want it to be like?  I don’t mean lottery fantasies, though I have them.  I mean what are small sustainable steps you can take?  Where do you want to be in five years?

I think that lack of forward planning is part of the reason people get stuck.  They never get into the nitty gritty of what it would take to change their life.  It is hard.  Very hard.  Life is hard sometimes.  Harder for some than for others always.

I do not think that people should take abuse and shut up.  I think they should stop taking abuse.  If you choose to stay in an abusive relationship, that’s a choice.  Own it.  Figure out what you can do to make the situation work for you.  Find a way to come to peace with your choices and stop bitching.

Get involved with your community.  That is the most important piece for abuse victims, in my opinion.  If you know you are never going to leave your abusive piece of shit husband even though you should… go find something to do with your time.  Find a volunteer project.  Get out of your house and away from that man and find something to do that you can feel good about.

I walk around my neighborhood with trash bags cleaning up.  It’s a random thing.  It’s rare that people notice.  But it’s important to me.  It’s something that I am concretely doing that makes the world a better place.  I can go do it today.  I need no help from anyone else.  I don’t have to organize or commit.  But at the end I have this little feeling of goodness.  I know who and what I am.  No one can take it away from me.  I am a caring person.  I do things that are invisible to other people and I keep a tally in my head.  Ok fine, other people may not appreciate it.  I do.  It’s part of the bulwark of my self-esteem.

If you want to be able to talk about your shitty husband, at least change the complaints.  You need to grow and change as a person.  You can choose how you feel about situations.  You can develop internal bulwarks against abuse.  You can know in the pit of your stomach who and what you are without changing any part of your life.  This will also lead to a cessation of bitching.  Think very hard about what you actually do with your behavior.  Make lists.  Decide for yourself what kind of person you are.

If you are told you are worthless, go pick up garbage in your neighborhood.  It’s a thankless job.  No one will notice.  But you know that you aren’t worthless.  It’s a task that needs to be done and you did it.  You didn’t pass the buck until someone else was paid for it.  You provided effort into the universe.  You can go home and smile a little smile of joy to yourself.  Don’t tell people you did it.  They tend to look at you funny and ask why you bothered.  You know who you are.  No one can take who you are away from you without your permission.

Build yourself up.  Find a way to create an internal life that gives you freedom.  I don’t mean escapism.  I don’t mean drugs.  I don’t mean reading popcorn books.  I mean find a way to know that you are putting good energy out into the universe.  Do something that you feel proud of.  It will change how you talk about yourself and your life.  You will stop bitching.  You will stop bitching because you will feel less bitter.

I complain a lot.  It’s a bad habit.  I write similar stories about my family year after year.  Of course I try to justify myself a lot.  People are like that.  I am trying very hard to get to the place where I am not bitching about my family any more.  I talk about them.  I explore my feelings, but I’m not bitching because I have changed my perspective and how I talk about them and even what I say substantially.

I think people should talk about their abuse situations extensively.  I think they should examine their own experience as many times as they need to move on.  Moving on means changing your life and going and doing something else.  It means stopping the abuse.  Somehow.  I don’t feel like I’m a great person to give advice on how to stop abuse.  I have followed the scorched earth policy.  It’s not required in most cases. I don’t really know exactly what other people should do.  That’s not my story.

Noah told me once that if you couldn’t look back on yourself 18 months ago and say, “Man I sucked” you aren’t working hard enough.  That pretty much summarizes my approach to life.  In no way shape or form do I think people should shut up and take abuse.  People are too important for that.

Why I want to be a stay at home mom

So I was watching the Steve Jobs speech at Stanford and it occurred to me that I should spend some serious time thinking about why I am a stay at home mom.  I’ve been having internal pushback towards my decision making process lately and I think I need more clarity.

I view parenting as accompanying your child through an apprenticeship to adulthood.  One that my mother failed at.  My mother gave me adult responsibilities when I was very young.  I had to be responsible for myself in a way that was not appropriate or fair.  And I failed often.  The result was that I got hurt often.  I don’t instinctively know what skills a child would have to avoid problematic people.  I don’t want to teach my children to be just like me.

I don’t think my aggression is an ideal life attitude.  And I want my kids to be allowed to be them.  I don’t know how to do that without looking at them all day long.  I don’t know how to bond in a shorter time span than that.  I believe that working mothers love their children just as much as I do.  I don’t know how they find time in the day to deal with that much emotion.  I can’t.  It overloads me.  Having to be patient and interactive with them is incredibly difficult.  If I had other things adding stress to my life (like a job) I would be nasty and mean and vicious pretty much all the time.  It is hard for me to be nice and I find that embarrassing.

I only know how to get through the bad days by having a lot of control over every single solitary thing I say and do all day.  You can’t do that and have a job.  So really, I just don’t want to have a job.  No.  That’s not true.  I do not believe I am capable of managing the stress of a job and the stress of children.  I would not be pleasant, ever.  Dealing with my mental health takes up too much time, honestly.

And I am getting to discover what it is like to unfold in a safe, gradually expanding environment.  I am watching how Shanna changes.  It’s amazing to me to look at her in all of her grumpy glory and think, “That is in absence of any external stress whatsoever.  Hunh.  How does that jive with what I remember doing/being/saying?”  I’m learning what it means that someone else can’t “make” you feel something.  My children get on my nerves.  That is kind of their job.  When I lose my temper and start yelling at them I have this huge hammer in my brain hitting me as hard as possible saying, “She’s a fucking three year old!  She doesn’t know this is an annoying thing to do!  You are supposed to be helping her learn not berating her for her inadequacies!!”  I feel like my anger is not supposed to be part of the equation.

Do you know why I feel that way?  Because in my family you weren’t allowed to address small injustices or issues.  You were required to stay silent through small problems and big problems alike.  I was supposed to just smile and “be pleasant”.  “Why is your tone of voice so nasty all the time” was the favored thing to tell me.  I learned that I was simply an unpleasant person because I wanted them to stop “playing” with me in ways that hurt me.  I was a whiner.  At least according to them.  And looking at Shanna… I can understand why people around me didn’t notice that anything wrong was happening.

If I put my hand around Shanna’s hand to hold it when she’s not in the mood it doesn’t matter if I am holding her with so little pressure I barely encircle her hand.  “It huuuuuuuuuuuurts.”  I feel like I’m going to lose my mind.  She is constantly whining about how much I am hurting her, when I am not even touching her body.  When I am walking towards her with the hair brush she starts crying and clutching her head and rolling around the floor sobbing because I have hurt her.  When I haven’t touched her yet.  I did that too.

Do you know what my mom did?  She probably thought she was just trying to get it over with as fast as possible.  Oh how I screamed.  I have done the same thing to Shanna.  You pull them over to the couch, hold them between your knees, and as fast as possible you get the knots out no matter how they squirm.  But my would start with a fine tooth comb at the top of my head and yank.  I have a baby brush with soft bristles and I start at the ends and I pull knots apart with my fingers.  I don’t think Shanna is reacting to what I am doing less than I reacted to my mother.  I sincerely believe that Shanna experiences actual physical pain for less than 10% of the time I am brushing her hair.  My mother could be gentle but when she was in a hurry… well… that was that.  And she was in a hurry a lot.  I was the youngest of four.  She worked most of my life.

If I had to hurry and get Shanna ready for daycare before I got ready for work we would not have a pleasant relationship.  She wakes up slow.  We generally sit in a chair for half an hour cuddling before we do anything at the beginning of each day.  Calli is joining us now.  Then Noah makes breakfast and the kids go back and forth between us.  If I also had to get ready for work then, that would be the end of my writing and relaxing.  That is when I have that time.  The other tasks would get managed somehow by someone else.  I would just lose writing.

It’s hard for me to actually admit that I need this writing.  It feels so banal, so unimportant.  Why would anyone ever care about anything I have to say?  Who the fuck am I?  Because if I’m telling you the truth I want people to read this.  I want people to give a shit what I say.  But I’m not sure anyone should.  Have I thought anything useful?  Have I taught anything?  I don’t know.  Not enough, I’m sure.  What is teaching anyway?  When I worked as a high school teacher my goal was to have the kids be able to argue with me more by the end of the year.  I want them to be ever increasingly sure of their own opinions.  I want them to be able to talk in finer and finer detail about what they believe.  Because only once they can talk about it can they really be a fully integrated person and deal with their little hypocrisies.

I actively want to avoid being a hypocrite.  That means being very sure what my priorities are and changing my behavior when it’s not in alignment.  It’s hard.  It means I don’t get to coast for long.  What are my priorities.

Me.
Noah, Shanna, Calli, Sarah.  Not necessarily in that order.  Spending time with them.
Writing
Learning/Reading
Socializing with other people
Gardening
Housecleaning
Cooking

It’s a short and broad list to start with. That means that when I sit down to read a book to Shanna I am not evading my housekeeping duties.  I’m following my priority list.  I want to stick my tongue out at an imaginary person now.  I feel like there is some judge and jury out there who is going to tell me I am a bad mother because I want to sit in the garage and smoke pot instead of clean my house.  Seriously.  Who the fuck wouldn’t agree with me?  I’m writing, damnit.  Why am I writing.  Why does writing matter.

Writing lets me get out the stupid shit I am thinking about into a format where I can see it, understand it, and recognize that it is idiotic.  If it is just running around and around and around in my brain… I don’t know how to get off the train.  The writing changes it from a train on a circular trap to a traffic loop.  Yes, it is possible to get caught in the center if you are being dumb, but there are exits all fucking over the place.  Just pick one.  Are any of them really worthwhile?  I don’t know.  I don’t know if anyone will read my writing one day and feel like I made their life better.  I gave them an idea they didn’t have before and it made their life just a little easier.  I feel like it is so hard for me to “act normal” that certainly some other people are also just acting and they might like a trick.

I loathe when people say, “Be yourself!”  Yourself is a bizarre construct of all the different influences you’ve had in your life + personal taste.  It’s pretty vague.  And let me tell you, when you do things you genuinely like (like making your hair increasingly AWESOME) people are quick to remind you that you are stepping out of the herd and you should stop that.  I think I dyed my hair because it makes me visually a freak but it doesn’t cause any more pain to my body.  I think that is a god damn excellent direction of progress.

I want to be a stay at home mom because some accident of fate handed me a partner with sufficient money to support me all my life in a manner to which I would like to become accustomed.  We’ve been married for five years.  Until now I have contributed enough to pay for my truly unnecessary stuff.  I was self-sufficient enough.  Now I have no form of income.  Now I am completely dependent on someone else for the first time since I was 15.

Of course I’m secretly having a fucking heart attack and hoping that I do a good enough job in November that I can sell the book.  I don’t want to be a god damn dependent.  But I don’t want to do anything that requires me to deal with other people.  Err, well, that kind of limits the options.  And honestly I wouldn’t take a random retail job right now.  For one thing it would be hard to get someone to hire me because I am so overqualified.  I think I could overcome that though.  It’s called lying.  But I would feel guilty for taking that job away from someone who needs it more.  I don’t want an office job.  I don’t want anything where I have to be doing additional work.  Ha.  I feel like being the housefrau maid for my family is enough fucking work this lifetime, thanks.  And I want to write.  And my husband wants me to write.

I have such intense feelings about Noah’s perception of my writing.  He takes it more seriously and gives it more respect than I do.  I think that Noah is the one who convinced me that I am a writer.  That anyone who compulsively feels the need to write 10-20 pages a day is a fucking writer.  That’s just not normal.  Normal. Normal. Normal.  I hate that word so much and I use it constantly.  I think it goes a long way towards wrecking the meaning I am going for.

Why am I so god damn compelled to be just like everyone else?  When I stand near people too long I start acting like them.  I conform.  I do it in subtle ways at first, then loud, then I explode and yell at them and make it seem like I was being oppressed by the ways I was conforming.  Even if the other person was unaware of the whole situation.  They are just standing there confused.  In my family the constant chatter is about telling you what to think, when to think it, how to think it.  So someone sitting there and telling you something about how they handled a situation is fairly explicitly giving you directions on how you are expected to handle it in the future.  You know that whole, “Childhood as apprenticeship for adulthood” thing I have?

Until fairly recently my aunt and uncle were supporting their three adult disabled children.  And a bunch of grandkids and SOs.  Because they reinforce one another’s behaviors.  They will rise or fall as a unit.  They are all so ridiculously similar it isn’t funny.  Like obsessions with collecting useless things.  Everyone has a different animal.  For every holiday under the sun people compete to find you something with that animal on it.  But they are all dirt poor.  So all the stuff is cheap, ugly, and really pointless.  And they have LOTS of it.  That’s one small point, but they do the same thing with everything.

When I walk into a middle class persons house I instantly put on my ‘acting’ face.  I start to imagine, “How would people who live here behave?”  Do you want to know why I paint my house really dark colors?  Because I grew up in houses with dark wood paneling.  They were caves.  I don’t know how to cope with relentlessly white walls.  We had relentlessly white walls in a series of depressing, horrible rental places.  Or ugly paneling that turned the house into a dark cave.

So I painted my house purple and cornflower blue and green and raspberry and navy blue…. among other colors.  They are dark enough to make me feel calm and settled.  Aunt Vonnie’s houses were the home base.  That was as much of a home as I knew.  That feeling is in a dark house… even though it bugs me.  I don’t want to be the kind of person who has a uniformly dark house.  It feels oppressive to me.  But I like darker, more saturated colors.  Who says a house has to look like the materials came that color direct from nature?  I never got that memo.  I guess I ditched that day at school.

This constant attempt to conform to whomever I am standing near creates problems.  Because then I get angry at the person for “making” me feel like I have to conform and be like them.  I have had this problem in particular with a couple of female friends.  We will be having an intense conversation about something and they are giving advice and all of a sudden I go ballistic and start screaming because I don’t want to be like them.

I don’t know how to handle those feelings very well.  That sudden explosion of fear that they are trying to wipe me off the planet.  I know that it was that fear that got me out of my family.  I respect that fear.  I respect the fact that my individuality comes with a rock solid fist to defend it.  But I really wish I wouldn’t hit my friends.  They haven’t done anything.  This is my fuck up.

I am struggling with the fact that my self control runs out.  I have too many things I am trying to control. I don’t know how to relax and let go of the anger in the moment very well.  It cycles so fast out of no where.  When I am at home I take a time out.  It’s not perfect because I’m doing too much stomping away/slamming doors.

The only normal I care about is the one where my kids aren’t afraid of me.  I don’t want my kids to quake with fear from my voice.  That is not a relationship I want.  But I want to be effective.  Three sucks.

I want to be a stay at home mom so that my kids and I can learn how to be nice to each other without outside pressure.  We can learn how to be a family together.  Because really I don’t know much more than them.  Luckily Shanna is an excellent teacher.  She’s having an emotional period, but mostly she can talk about her preferences and make requests and follow directions.  She is in a rough phase (the book told me to expect it! I love that book) and that’s ok.  Hormones are rough.  I try to be gentle and understanding.  For her, this is just a phase because nothing bad has ever really happened to her.  Minor injuries and scrapes.  Losing her friend Rowan was the biggest loss she’s been aware of.  If I am patient and loving, she will come through this and on the other side she will hopefully understand that three year olds are assholes and I was really nice to her.  This is part of the circle of life.  I wish I could apologize to my mother for some pieces of it.

But that is when we jump on the merry go round again.  I don’t think my mother abused me as a small child.  I think she neglected me to such a degree that it becomes criminal.  I think she tried to enculturate with the only thing she knew… and it worked.  I am indeed, white trash.  Even that didn’t go how she planned.  One of the strongest and most defining things about white trash as I understand the concept is the fierce loyalty.  Blood is everything.  How do you think they get away with incest?  If you are related to someone you are obligated to do anything they want… forever.

Excuse me while I pause to vomit on the floor.  I respond to feeling like I should conform with hostility and aggression because it was a very useful tool at one point.  My friends aren’t trying to convert me though.  Gah.

I should stop writing.  It’s already too long.  But I don’t want to.  This is the problem with trying to do shorter entries.  I don’t always see a clear stopping/starting/dividing line.  How do I talk about things in separate posts when it is all one big concept in my head?  But then I ask and people tell me, yes they would prefer shorter posts.  And then I feel like I am failing to deliver something that people want.  I wish I didn’t do this to myself.  Shit.  This is over twelve pages long.  Ok, I’ll stop.  And it took me just over an hour.  That’s actually kind of hot.

I feel like a big meanie.

I spend a lot of time feeling very mixed about what I write here.  I honestly usually forget what I have written almost as soon as I hit post and I don’t reread things very often.  I use this space to dump the thoughts that are intrusive into the rest of my life.  They are the harshest things I think.  I’m aware that I am “mentally ill”.  Whatever that means.

It’s hard to not feel ashamed of myself for putting these things out publicly.  You are supposed to put these kinds of thoughts in private journals you later burn.  You don’t want to taint the world with any of this.  I worry about some of the processing I do here.  People don’t like finding out how deep my rage is.  It makes them uncomfortable.  I am going to, once again, alienate people.  Not everyone.  Not the people who matter.  But I will lose people who are only casual distant social contacts at best.

It’s weird to know that I have to live with the consequences of my words, for better or worse.  I say a lot of very harsh things.  I’m trying to walk a fine line between talking about the emotions I experience and why I have them and blaming other people for upsetting me.  I know I’m crazy.  I know I’m having a reaction that is out of proportion to our exchange.  But I’m still having it and I have to deal with it somehow.

Just doing deep breathing exercises is ineffective at managing my rage.  Writing works.  And so I will write about things that make me very angry.  And people will get upset with me.  I’m pretty sure this is an unavoidable fate.  Given what I’ve read today I feel like I should be braced at any moment for a death threat.  On one hand that makes my paranoia sky rocket.  Because do you know who is a credible threat to my life?  Pretty much anyone in my family.  Hello illegal connections.  Not to mention that the whole lot also has serious mental health issues and lots of guns!

Awesome.  I really and truly believe that my brother would never come after me.  I think he wants to believe he is above such things.  And his wife is awesome and balances him really well.  He married a really good woman.  The only credible threat is my sister.  She has threatened to beat me up in public in the last few years.  If I publish there is a very real chance she will show up on my doorstep out of the blue with a shot gun.  She’s pretty insane.  And she has done a lot of very bad for your brain drugs for a very lot of years.

Even though I want to puke on the floor thinking about that… I’m going to keep going on writing.  And internet threats seem so very non-threatening.  So laughable.  Really.  Does some wanker on the internet think that they can hurt me more than my family?  More than my father raping me?  More than my brother beating me, arranging to have other children beat me, and sexually assaulting me repeatedly?

I don’t think I will lose sleep over emails.  I’m already up.  Bah.  That’s a snotty ass thing to say.  I’m in a really bad phase right now in coping with my shit.  Some day I will go back to not dwelling on being less than.  I think.  At those times I will be vulnerable.  And it will make me lose sleep.  But I don’t really think there is much that can be done to cause me to stop writing.  Not anything in writing, anyway.  Not from fear.  I think I am kind of looking forward to that first burst of adrenaline.  I do love a good threat.

I don’t know if it is ok to talk about things that hurt other peoples feelings.  But I’m not sure I can help it.