Category Archives: love

Not sleeping well.

I don’t sleep much while it is hot. My err internals are unhappy. I worked on a book for a while this morning. *pat self on back* Now if I can just keep this up I might be more than a one hit wonder. Not that my book was a hit. You know what I mean.

I’m kind of tired and mellow feeling. It is actually nice. Noah is going to take Shanna to camp today (she said please and all) so I will be at the nursery at 8:30 when it opens. A friend asked to come over and garden with me today. I can barely contain my squee. We will be weeding and mulching and such. (Yes, Pam I saw your note about “just use cardboard.” All of the cardboard on my property is still in good shape and the kids play with the boxes.)

I absolutely HAVE to work on the fence today. No excuses! I was productive all of yesterday… just not on the fence. This is going to be difficult to force myself to do. I can tell. I’m terrified of fucking up and having people make fun of me or hate me. Oh well. Keep working.

This morning I was foolish and I read some of that nasty anti-home schooling stuff. Oh boy are some people pissed off about even the *idea* of home schooling. Has someone tried to force you into something? Is there a reason you are SO ANGRY with people who make this choice? No? Ok then.

I get the logic that putting my kids in school would be better for the other kids in the school because then I would be forced to be involved with the school and I would make it better for not just my kids. I absolutely agree with every step in that process.

I just can’t get onboard with the part where I am supposed to throw my kids under a bus because it would be better for someone else. My experiences of public school have been bad. Not just for me as a student, but as a teacher and as a person in the credential program.

I won’t force my kids to be part of that system. I don’t believe it is healthy for our species to be forced to sit in chairs for 6+ hours/day while quietly listening to someone else. Nope. Not what we are meant to do this lifetime.

I understand that this is a privileged position. I believe that I am stinking with privilege. I have choices that many people can’t even dream of. I think that is positive and I am not going to give up my choices just because they aren’t available to everyone.

I don’t see 5 star restaurants going to a McDonald’s level of pricing (and food quality) just so that it is faaaaaaiiiiiiiiirrrrrrrr to everyone involved.

Life isn’t fair. At all. Ever. There is no fair.

That said, I am pretty happy that Noah’s obscene raise came with a much lower than expected amount of money. Ahhh skipping tax brackets. That’s ok. We don’t actually need all of the money. It’s ok that it is being used for services for people who need them. I feel pretty good about that.

I can give some things in some ways. I can’t necessarily give what someone wants or needs. I don’t want to be responsible. I am too selfish. I will donate money and food. I will assist with my labor when I have extra spoons and not when I don’t. I am not going to be forced to sign up for working all the god damn time for someone else’s benefit. I don’t care enough about other people.

I can say that out loud. I don’t care enough about other people to give them the time and energy I want to use on my own selfish pursuits.

Could I donate more time so that I am making other peoples lives at least slightly less awful if not better? Probably. Almost certainly. There is no shortage of suffering in the world.

Some people feel motivated to help a lot a lot of the time. That’s awesome. I’m glad you have so much to give. I don’t have it. If I try to do that I end up spending a lot of time cutting my body to remind me that I don’t matter so I don’t forget who I am supposed to be focusing on.

Cutting really is a useful tool. I think about it a lot. I think about what it does and why it is useful in the ways it is useful. Self-control is both under rated and under valued by most people. Very few people have the self-control to abruptly shift large chunks of their behavior. It is the same thing as not that many people are truly good actors. Same mechanism.

Cutting influences a lot of brain chemicals. Cutting is a dramatic shift to the body chemistry makeup. It induces calmness and a feeling of focus–tunnel vision, really. When your body is in shock it tends to shut down a lot of your nerve endings. You stop getting a lot of distracting messages from your body.

Cutting allows me to borrow spoons of self-control. I don’t really have that kind of calmness in my body without something to trigger a much-larger-than-usual grab of chemicals. Yay drugs! Due to experimentation I have learned a lot more about what my base level is vs. what is my elevated mood vs. what is my depressed mood. It’s a process.

Sometimes it is very powerful to stop and really concentrate on how powerful my brain is (your brain too; just sayin’). The brain scans they are doing these days feel like magic to me. You can see what is happening. The most magical part is you can see how people have the sheer willpower to change things.

I believe that my brain was altered by trauma. What I mean by that is I believe my brain adapted to living in an environment with a freakishly high level of stress. That is the level of stress my brain believes is necessary/appropriate to common life.

If my brain adapted to stress, how can I consciously choose to change the adaptation again? Studies show that mostly people don’t change much. It is hard. It takes will and effort and work and misery.

Being inside my brain sucks bowling balls through a hose. It isn’t fun. The difficulty of changing things is really hard to notice when stacked up to how shitty it is to live here.

I believe in magic. I believe that people make things happen when everyone else believes that it can’t. It happens all the time.

I have had the good/bad privilege of spending a lot of time with people who have experienced severe traumatic brain injuries. I have seen people survive the most horrifying accidents with terrible injuries. Their lives are forever altered. They can’t get back to being who they were.

I have no before picture I am struggling towards. That isn’t part of my story. I don’t have a base line to return to. All I have is the absolute all encompassing belief that I can change the story. I can learn how to be a good parent and I can be present through a healthy and happy childhood. This is not about a return to anything. This is about consciously choosing something different from my life.

Last night we read the part in the Little House in the Big Woods where Pa teases Laura about the kids getting only a switch in their Christmas stocking if they are bad. Shanna’s eyes went wide.

“Those parents hit those kids?”

“Yup. A long time ago people believed that if a kid did something bad the parents were required to hit the kid to teach the kid a lesson. It never worked very well.”

“Gosh I’m glad that no one has to be hit in this house.”

Me too. She cuddled up really close after that and told me that she would never hit me because I have been hit enough. I didn’t really know how to respond. I kept reading.

I’m reading my friend’s book. It is a rather fun read so far. I’m about 20% into it. He combines irreverence and history in his fabulous manner. (He intersperses national/international news events on the time lines to let people get a scope on what is happening. He said which year (I’ve already forgotten–1800’s, I think the last number is a 4 or a 6 but the decade escapes me and that is pretty important.) that Beethoven began de-composing. Similar gems are liberally sprinkled. I’ve always liked his writing. That’s why I know him in the first place. Yay for internet friends.

Why is it that I feel like I am standing still and free falling at the same time? I feel like I am not doing enough and I am terribly bored and I feel like I am doing too much and I am so overwhelmed I cannot possibly keep functioning at this rate.

I’m not balancing the marathon vs. sprint timing thing very well. I’m not actually talking about running–it’s one of those metaphor things.

Gardening has a rhythm and I am struggling to learn it. Some months of the year I need to spend 40 hours/week in the garden. Some months I spend more like 1-2 hours/week. I don’t yet feel this rhythm in my bones but it is coming. Spring is like a drug for me these days. Must move. Must plant. It is weird and primitive.

Summer is feeling different. I am a delicate and trembling flower and I wilt in the heat. More accurately I have attacks of horrifying bowel pain. I HATE SUMMER. I spend hours a day not sure if I am on the verge of spontaneously vomiting or shitting my pants because I won’t make it to the bathroom in time. It is hard to keep a schedule when I feel like this. (For the record I have only had one bathroom accident since childhood. The first day Noah went back to work after Shanna was born I had not yet learned that post-children the urgent signals are uhhh less timely and more actually urgent. Eww. Eww. Eww.)

But I have managed to go to the water park at least one day a week since it opened for week days. *pat self on back* That is a summer routine that I want to start. We only stay for an hour to an hour and a half. We might stay longer if the kids could do more swimming on their own and I had to do less work. As is I don’t have the physical ability to manage entertaining them in water for four hours. I take this as a sign that I am out of shape.

I feel like what I should do is make up a variety of different schedules–the way I did when I was teaching. Year planning was my favorite step. <3 It is like a puzzle! What do you want to do and when? How does it all fit together to make a cohesive picture of education? How do I fit in all of the standards and methods of teaching I want to hit?

I used to list: poetry, grammar, writing, reading boring analytical non-fiction, reading novels, reading short stories all as separate units. How many weeks to spend on each? How many hours in those weeks? How do I pre-test to figure out what people already know so I don’t bore the shit out of people? How do I evaluate people accurately to find out what they really learned?

If I had a dick this process would give me a hard on. It is a control thing. I like feeling like I am dotting all of my i’s and crossing all of my t’s. (I understand that in that case the apostrophe isn’t strictly appropriate but it looks bad any other way of writing it. See, this is what many years of obsessively worrying about grammar gives you. You know the rules and don’t follow them any way because the rules suck. Go English?)

I probably should get out some paper. It is easier without typing.

What are my categories now? Gardening, schooling, social activities, making food, cleaning house, money (there are a lot of once a year payments, for example, so budgeting is kind of weird), kid-separate-from-adult-time (my kids are *not* actually attached to me at the hip very consciously), reading, writing, running, hygiene (this takes time! Every Damn Day!), and I could come up with more if I tried.

They are all on slightly different schedules. Some things are scheduled and balanced on a month to month basis, some things are scheduled and balanced weekly or even daily. How do you balance all of the daily obligations against the weekly and monthly and annual?

Near as I can tell most people do more or less what their parents did because that is what they know of life. Thus I do a lot of robbing Peter to pay Paul because that is what I learned. I do it while squirreling away a lot of money which is, strangely, also what I learned.

I don’t usually mention that my father was rather well off throughout my childhood. I lived in poverty. I ate nothing but ramen and free lunch. I moved every three months because we were couch surfing and my mom couldn’t pay rent. He would tell my mom he was too poor to pay for things but he had a lot of savings. My mom just flat never had enough money to live.

Shanna sees me play with Mint a lot. She asks what it is. I talk to her about the balance of wants and needs and future savings. I tell her, “If you save money and you have a buffer then you don’t have to feel afraid when unexpected things happen. You can just shrug and move on with your life. Not having savings is one of the scariest things in life. It means you can not go out and solve the problems that come up and that is really hard.”

When I lived on $1200/month I had $3,000 in the bank at (almost) all times in a savings account I otherwise didn’t touch. My theory was that I might have to leave suddenly at some point in time and I needed a buffer. I burned through the buffer when I left my Owner. I got down to the point of my bank account only having four digits.

My friend offered me $100. He said that was his friends-need-help emergency fund. I wouldn’t let him give me money. I told him that I would make it come out ok in the end. I was right.

It is harder to deny yourself things you can afford to buy than it is to not buy things when you have no money. That has been my experience. It is harder and harder for me to save money. (In my defense the largest chunk of my spending is going to paying the mortgage off faster. I shouldn’t feel so upset with myself for not “saving” when I am spending the money on debt pay off instead of consumer spending but there you go.)

A while back I read a book, Raising the Perfect Child Through Guilt and Manipulation and whereas I am not up for adopting most of her methods or practices (I’m not taking up Catholicism nor sports) I really latched on to a few important points in the book. If you are really nice to your kids and you are interested in them and you share things with them then they will want you to like them. If they want you to like them then they will make choices that are in line with your values.

Oh man.

What are my values then? I want my kids to be interested in life and in people. Most people are good. Most people are pretty kind when given the opportunity. If someone is not kind to you, pull back first but be able to attack to defend yourself. You are worth defending. Read as much as you can–as many different kinds of things as you can. I believe that there are more things to learn than there is time in the day to learn it. I want my children to believe that their body is theirs to do with as they please–not as someone else pleases (unless it is fun and then I just don’t want details–m’kay?). I want my children to believe that work is necessary and fun. I want them to understand that different people are good at different kinds of work and that is no judgment one way or another on the people or the work. Do what you like.

I want my children to understand that they have privilege. That their ancestors have been privileged for quite some time. What does that mean about our place in the world and in history?

I check a lot of books out of the library that deal with African American issues. Seeing my little Aryan baby read, “A long time ago before you or I were born our people were enslaved” makes me wince. I told her that actually her ancestors were the slave owners. She asked if my ancestors owned slaves and I got to say no. (Yankees, more-recent-immigrants, and prostitutes for the win.) There goes white guilt in full form! But it’s true. Noah’s family owned slaves.

I find that as I get older and as I read more feminist writing I realize that if I were to fall into the most obvious trope presented to me I should hate Noah. I should hate everything he stands for and everything about him.

That is really hard to live with. I’m sure that is as hard to live with as the trope that women are just meant to be props for a man’s life.

I don’t hate Noah. I like Noah. Having the life of privilege he has had has made him one of the kindest and most considerate people I have ever had in my life. But maybe he just treats me that way because I put out. I’m only sort of kidding.

I am nice to Noah and he is nice to me and we have a whole virtuous cycle thing going on. Different people care about different kinds of “being nice”. Different people want different kinds of support.

In the past three days I have talked to four different women who have all been extremely upset with their (male) partners because of a lack of support. In most of these cases the woman can’t even put her finger on what more support would look like but they know they aren’t getting it. (Mothers of many children can come up with a list of what they want without having to pause for breath.)

When I think about how upset these women are I stop and think about how tired Noah is. Then I cycle through my male friends who are working as hard as they physically can to support their partners.

Yes, yes I know that the “love languages” crap plays in with it but it feels bigger than that. I think that evolution wants us to feel like what this person is giving us isn’t enough so that we will go shopping for someone who provides us with more. I think that it is just a good bet in terms of producing prosperous off-spring.

Only it doesn’t work. Because splitting up families is hella complicated. I think about the interweaving needs that exist in a family. I think about how children learn to care for themselves and for one another earlier when there are more of them around.

Then I come back to the fact that Noah started off in this world no bigger or stronger than me but he is now in some ways. He may or may not have a higher IQ. I definitely have a higher EQ. He has a higher earning potential at this stage. I can run farther. We are different. We are not equal.

How does one measure worth? I can hate him as a symbol of oppression or I can recognize that he personally isn’t oppressing anyone and he hasn’t spent a lot of time actively doing any oppressing. Living with me has dramatically changed how feminist he is at work. (I feel damn proud of that.)

He is moving in the direction of having power and influence. And I stand behind him filling his ear with my opinions. Does that make me a prop? Is he a prop? Is he just a paycheque to support my lavish lifestyle?

We are good at very different things. We like very different things. We complement one another. And because we are white that means that we have what is sometimes presented as the widest array of options in life.

My demographic is mocked up one side and down the other in the media. I am an upper middle class rich white liberal. I am a stay at home mom and I home school my kids. I am a punch line and a punching bag. Waa waa poor me.

Do I want to be a caricature? Do I want to treat Noah like he is a caricature? Noah is an upper middle class rich white liberal gamer geek. Doesn’t that make him kind of icki by definition? And don’t let that sicko watch My Little Ponies!! Ahem. Sorry.

What does being anything mean? I never identified as trailer trash despite living in trailers off and on and despite white trash being so much less “ok”. I am not defined by the box in which I sleep. Or in which I fuck random men I just picked up.

What am I?

I told Noah the other day that most of the people in my family would describe themselves as good people who sometimes do bad things. They are rapists and pedophiles. Ok, most of them aren’t rapists. But even the non-rapists adamantly defend the rapists.

I think of myself as a bad person who doesn’t really do bad things very often. I believe I am inherently unworthy of any relationship. It is inevitable that I will kick the cabinet off the wall. Duh. Being the kind of person who can, has, and may do so again means that I am just bad.

Do I rape people? Well, I’m pretty confident that I have not raped anyone since I was eighteen. I am pretty sure that I did commit rape before then. I am so sorry. I didn’t understand what I was doing. I didn’t understand power differentials. I didn’t understand that I was ever capable of having power.

Sometimes I look at Noah and I understand on a gut level that he doesn’t see himself as someone who has or has ever had power. He is still in that timeless place with the little boy who wasn’t treated all that well.

I mean, not that he’s immature or anything–that’s not what I’m trying to say. I’m saying that ones internal perspective doesn’t much resemble other peoples view of one. See how that non-gendering thing is awkward?

I do not believe I am a good person. It is, frankly, freeing. I get to make selfish and self-interested choices without caring that much about the effect. I generally do take the effect into consideration because I will have to live with it and all. That is one of the best parts of getting older. You have had a chance to learn from more mistakes.

Every time someone tells me not to dwell on the past I wonder what they mean by that. The people I know who tell me, “I don’t think about the past” are people who have the same little cycle of life over and over with people who are practically paper dolls. People who are roles.

I don’t hate Noah. I don’t feel I can. The longer I know him the older and more grizzled he becomes. (He’s got quite the beard these days.) But I see him as younger and softer as time goes by. I see more of his innocence and his desire for simple connection. I see more of him wanting to be liked and feeling sad because he knows most of the world doesn’t like him very much. (I mean, he’s charismatic and has friends and all–but he’s a symbol to be hated.)

What does any of it mean? Nothing? Everything? Who knows. I like him. I like the life I get to share with him more than I have ever liked anything in my whole life. I feel grateful for the peace and joy in my life. I have stability, safety, and privilege. I can write for six hours straight (in various places on differing projects) when I have insomnia (or intestinal pain–let’s be clear here) after getting almost six hours of sleep because my husband helps so much.

I can invite two kids over for the weekend and trust that my husband will just be around making food and cleaning up messes and playing with kids as much or more than I do.

Sex. That is the thing to schedule that didn’t make the list. I’m sorta interested in my cycles around that as well. Obviously I am more interested in sex around ovulation. We often have most of our ten times a month sex in a four day period. It’s awesome. But he would prefer other spacing. I struggle internally with treating sex like a chore to cross off the list like brushing my teeth.

And yet.

Why am I having sex ten times a month? (Ok, I’ve actually had at least two months in the past year where I didn’t put out ten times and I’ve had paroxysms of guilt. I try to compensate by some months getting up to more like fifteen. Noah agrees that it balances and all is copacetic.) Because sex is a lot of where Noah gets positive energy. He is drained and tired all of the time. If I put out more he would have more energy. This is a pretty trackable situation in our life.

But it is different for me. Sex is different than it has ever been. HA! I’ve been trying to think for days what base lines I have in my life. People revert to base line when they are under stress. I finally came up with one: picking up strangers for sex. That is probably the primary base line behavior I have had in life. I did it for 27 years.

Monogamy is weird. I’m not even going to call it boring because it isn’t that it is boring. It is consistent, but not boring. It feels different in a lot of ways I don’t feel up to putting into words right now. I hear breakfast finishing up and my arms hurt.

And then I’ll just abruptly stop. Because I can’t end for shit.

Lack of consistency

2 Replies

One of the things that I prioritize with the kids is being consistent. Even if it makes me kind of a dick. I think that children need predictable responses from adults. But I make exceptions.

Last night Calli had a hard time going to bed. She had a hard day in general. Big Sister got to go on a play date alone for the first time. Calli was very jealous and upset. We had a pretty good date by ourselves (yay library) but there were a lot of feelings throughout the day. Then she slept from 3-5:30. So she wasn’t sleepy at bed time.

Noah was kind of done after a bit. His voice started escalating a bit. I decided that I needed to handle everything from her.

I walked her back to bed or spoke gently with her each time. When she came back after a decisive “No really I’m done” Noah got upset and I laughed. Persistent little thing.

I keep thinking that Shanna was still nursing constantly and sleeping with us full time at this age. Why do we expect things of Calli that we in no way expected from Shanna? I can comfort my two year old to sleep without being an impatient bitch. I have that still in me. (I’m thoroughly convinced it is best for all concerned that we are not having a third child. I don’t have anything left. But I can bloody well be nice to Calli.)

I couldn’t be mean to her. She would come to the door and say, “Please snuggle me.” I wasn’t a lot older than her when my parents divorced. My memories of rocking myself to sleep while crying for my mother are so intense and vivid that they haunt me waking and sleeping. I can’t be cruel to my children and deny them the comfort of my presence when they are little and scared and need me. Is it annoying sometimes? Oh golly gee yes. But this phase will be short in the over all scheme of things. I can comfort my two year old.

I have been told that I am an angry person since I was a little kid. That is one of the things people feel free to comment on the most–how angry I seem. I want my kids to remember me as someone who was always always always there when they needed me. I want them to remember me as loving and compassionate. That means I must behave in such a way over and over even when I’m not in the mood.

More than anything in the world I want my children to remember their childhoods well. I want them to remember that it was ok for them to be. If you are scared that is ok; we can handle that. If you are hungry that is ok; we can handle that. If you are hurt that is ok; we can handle that.

My children believe in the marrow of their bones that most things that go wrong in life can be handled by saying, “Well that didn’t go as planned. That’s ok, it’s easy to fix.” They both say it immediately when something starts going off the rails. They believe that problems and mistakes are just learning opportunities.

I’ve been thinking and thinking and thinking lately about how adamantly I used to deny that I was beaten as a child. Up until about twenty-four I would hotly deny that I was beaten as a child. That was because throughout my entire childhood people would hit me and then sneer that I didn’t know what a beating was and I needed to shut up and stop crying or they would give me a real reason to cry.

Now that I have children and I have to have the self-control to not hit them I believe I was beaten all the god damn time. I believe that the adults in my life had no self-control and they used me as a relief valve for their general life frustrations. I had to become a parent before I could see that.

My children will not have memories like mine. My children will remember that when they needed their mom she was there. My children will remember being safe and happy and secure. My children will remember being loved and protected no matter what.

Even when they are annoying in the middle of the night. Even when they push all of my buttons. Even when I am so sick of them I could just fucking scream. I still can’t take that out on them. Period.

Sometimes I wonder about consistency. With children you need to consciously be aware that you have a limited amount of power and control over them. You have eighteen years to be their boss and then you need to shut the fuck up and let them do their thing. Really it is a lot less than eighteen years. You only get to really be the boss for like ten years. Then you need to pray you taught them well and just keep moving.

I am not consistent in pushing them away from me. When opportunities come up where I could hold a boundary and keep them away from me… I suck at that. If they tell me they need me I weigh my opposing needs and more than 80% of the time I decide their needs are more important right now. (My bladder waits for no one.) But even that has been a process. I learned how to hold my bladder after having kids. I do it better now than I ever have.

The most important consistency in my life is being loving towards my children. I am ok with bailing on absolutely every other requirement. I can’t keep too many things in my brain.

When people are under stress they revert to their earliest training. Over coming that is ridiculously hard and takes a lot of very conscious effort. I am not intellectually or physically capable at this moment in time in just writing a whole new pattern of reactions. That would be very hard. I can’t make me into a different person. But I can choose a behavior to move towards. I can’t pick too many at once or I will be overwhelmed and fail.

I can choose to prioritize being loving over any other form of consistency. That is something I can find a way to do. I mean, I told Calli last night, “You understand that my patience tonight will have a cost tomorrow–right? If you don’t let me go to sleep soon I will be kind of cranky and tired tomorrow.” She said she didn’t want me to be grumpy but she really needed cuddles. I believe her. I believe that she needed them right then.

My children are certain of their own worth. They are sure that they are worth extra effort. They understand that taking care of them is work and that I am very happy to do it because I am so glad to know them. But it is work and you have to be patient with me while I do it.

When I feel really bad about myself one of the things I focus on is how easily I make everyone around me feel bad about themselves. I am critical and sharp and mean. I take things apart that needn’t have the scrutiny.

I’m busy enough lately that I don’t need to look at the fact that I have stopped inviting people to do things. I’ve gotten enough “no’s” lately that I just don’t have it in me to invite anyone for a while. I’m going to coast on ballet recital rehearsal and painting probably until the end of the month. We aren’t doing much socializing outside the home school group. It is wonderfully convenient to be able to just sit down and look at their calendar and decide yes/no without having to weigh any emotional friendship factors. Do I want to drive to that event and do we have time/money? It’s very low-stress. I’m very grateful for all the work our Meet-up group organizer does. She makes my life better. She lets me kind of hide from a lot of life. I’m not sure she is aware she is doing that but I appreciate it any way.

I’m not consistent with adults. I don’t feel like I am kind enough to deserve consistency from any other adults so I’ve been avoiding them for a while. I’m not good enough at giving it so I don’t expect to receive it.

When I read stuff about introverts it almost justifies my existence. Being alone is so much easier–but I’m not really alone. I have these two excellent people keeping me company all the damn time. I do appreciate quiet in a way I didn’t used to.

I feel like Noah and I are having trouble connecting lately and I’m not sure how much of it is all a manufacturing of my fucked up brain. He’s tired and being less overly-sensitive of my ridiculous over-sensitivity. Of course that means I feel like he is picking on me. Because that’s how I roll. I don’t really think he is picking on me. But I do feel like he is saying small things that are kind of dismissive and that remind me that I’m just generally not very nice or very worth liking. I don’t really want to argue with the things because I mostly agree with him. I’m not very nice and I’m not really worth liking.

I’m not sure that I’m not just creating this whole cycle basically on my own. I doubt his feelings for me have shifted. He’s just too tired to be neurotically careful about his speech. He’s not being mean.

He used to tell me that I looked nice. Now he says I obviously dress for comfort and not to look good. Unfortunately he said that on a day when I had consciously tried to look good. I had picked out an outfit and had fun with it and everything. (Let’s be honest–I usually don’t try.)

I’ve been thinking a lot about the validation I got in the relationship with my Owner. I’m trying to figure out how to write about it–what to say.

Both Noah and my former Owner strike me frequently as very young in affect. They are both feel to me like enthusiastic teenage boys who are getting what they want when a girl pays attention to them. I know that men continue to be enthusiastic about women throughout life and all, but there is a difference in exuberance. You know the kind of excitement that is way more piqued for toys in young people than in older people? Like that.

I can still tell that Noah likes me and all. I’m not quite that blind. I feel less shiny. I feel like one of the responsibilities of girls is to be comely and I’m not so much any more. I feel like Noah has gotten a remarkably raw deal in terms of actual attention. I don’t pay much attention to him. Well, it depends on how you mean. Over the past seven years I have developed the ability to talk about computer shit on a level I previously resisted with extreme hostility. I pay attention to Noah. I have learned so much stuff from him that frequently I feel like my head will explode. But I don’t look at him and act like I want to jump him.

How much does being attractive matter? How much does feeling exciting matter? I feel faint worry that if I ignore this problem it will bite me in the ass at a later point.

With my Owner cleaning the house was directly paying attention to him. For the first long while I didn’t live there, I just came over to clean. Even once I lived there I lived there the way a cat lives there. Nothing was mine. I was very clearly being permitted to be a live-in servant. That’s not a life sharing partnership sort of thing.

I clean my house now mostly for me. I’m not doing it as service to Noah. He’s not here much and he isn’t all that impacted by how much I clean. Some of it effects him. He certainly appreciates it when I am on top of my chores because then he doesn’t have to pitch in.

With Noah the work is mine because I choose to do it. He would share in it if I demanded that he do so. I do it because I have more time and energy going spare. It doesn’t feel as much like something I am doing for him. I feel kind of weird about that. It often feels like I don’t do much of anything for Noah even though I do far more for him than I have consistently done for any other partner. In the past I felt like I was doing it because someone else wanted me to. Now I’m doing it for me and it doesn’t feel like a magnanimous act. Now it is just life. I’m not doing it to be nice to Noah. I’m doing it so I don’t lose my shit and beat my children bloody. (kidding. kinda. I know that cleaning helps me stay calm.)

Now cleaning is a way of having CONTROL over a small part of my life and that makes me feel more secure. Once upon a time I cleaned what I was told to clean how I was told to clean it. It wasn’t about me except that I felt secure because I was meeting his needs. He had a direct reason to keep me around.

Sometimes it blows my tiny little brain that Noah hangs out with me just because he wants to. He could be a much bigger asshole to his family. He could pull away more. He could isolate more. He could want more space. He could take off to hang out with buddies. He could go in the bedroom a lot and lock the door. He could be like most of the people I have ever known.

Instead he chooses to be near us even though it is obvious that he doesn’t always feel comfortable. I’m hard for him sometimes. He still comes home. He plays with the kids. He does a lot of work in the house and outside of it. I don’t feel terribly justified in complaining about Noah.

Can I feel sad and have trouble feeling connected without him having to do anything wrong? I feel sad and I miss my mother. When I really feel in the feelings of missing my mother I tend to feel like I miss everyone. Like no one is really there. No one really loves me. I know that global thinking isn’t very accurate and all but it’s there any way.

I feel scared and unworthy. Noah is going to leave as soon as he understands what a loser I am–right? I’m not sure how I have kept it a secret for so long. I’m not sure why my kids still like me.

Only I do know why my kids like me. It is a biological defense mechanism. Their tiny little brains are trying to ensure that they will be properly cared for as they grow up. I’m their shot at that.

Noah and I periodically remind one another that we are both very serious about this family business. We get one shot at forever. I am increasingly sure as the years go by that I will never bear another child. I get one baby-daddy. He is already fixed. He gets one baby-mama. I am pretty fucking sure I would never marry again no matter what. I wouldn’t fuck with my kids’ inheritance. Marriage is about property rights and all of my property comes from Noah and goes to our kids. I don’t really want to get that muddy.

What does it mean to pick someone for better or worse? I know a lot of people who were very ok getting married even though they knew before the wedding that it probably wasn’t permanent. That blows my mind. Why get married then? What is the benefit?

If I can make this work then I have a permanent relationship. If I can’t make this work, well then I can’t make relationships work. I couldn’t figure out how to have a sister or brothers or parents. I can’t figure out how to have aunts or uncles or cousins. If I can’t figure out being a mom or a wife then I am pretty screwed. This is my shot. No pressure.

Yesterday after Hindi class I got to be an object lesson in What Not To Do. I was talking to the other teachers (one of whom was a mom of a tween-aged boy we were talking about) about how important practice in when learning new skills. The other teachers were complaining about how smart this boy is and how he manages to coast without studying. He smirked. I told him about failing out of the Masters program after seven years of work because I couldn’t hand write fast enough to get the degree. I was told, “It is obvious that you know the material you just didn’t quite… write enough“. The kid looked god damn terrified. He has never met anyone who had serious consequences for not studying enough. Ha.

Now Calli is starting to talk about going to school when she is a big girl. I’m not sure how this is all going to be handled. So far neither of my kids are enthusiastic about home schooling. Everyone I know who home school says, “Ha! Stick them in school for a while. They will change their minds.” That seems like a lot of hubris. I don’t think I will be able to convince my kids of something in a short period of time just because. They may well love school–many people do.

I am very aware that I want to home school for selfish reasons. Am I allowed to be that selfish with my kids? I will over ride their preferences and keep them home for kindergarten. Will I argue with Shanna over first grade if she decides to really get fierce? I don’t know. I will have to cross that bridge when I get there.

I don’t actually think my kids would have a hard time adjusting to the timing of school. I think they would hate being told to sit still. Other than that they would have fun.

Why do I care so much about a school wasting their time when I certainly waste their time every day?

It’s all a conundrum. Luckily it is one I don’t have to solve today.

It doesn’t seem real.

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Today was the rehearsal for the wedding I officiate tomorrow. The bride, groom, and both sets of parents took specific trouble to tell me how grateful they are that I am participating in the wedding. They all told me how important I am in the lives of the bride and groom. The bride went off on how I was the only teacher she has ever felt connected to and I have changed her whole life.

I cried.

Sometimes I stop and think about the fact that most of the “great” men and women in history were serious assholes. For example, Paul Revere was a thief. I doubt they taught you that in elementary school.

Maybe I don’t need to die quite yet. I do some good in the world even if I am a complete dick.

I’m nervous and excited and happy. It will be over fast. I just need to show up and do my part and pretend confidence I don’t have. At the end of the day they will be married. I’m so grateful that they want me to be part of this.

Now I understand “fuck cancer”

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For most of my life I have been kind of confused by the “fuck cancer” emphasis people have. They seem to be more upset by it than other kinds of death. I’m a death-is-death-how-doesn’t-matter person. Only in the past couple of weeks Kate Bornstein (who is one of the most important voices in gender deconstruction) has had a crowd source fundraising effort because she has cancer–we need her. She has the courage to speak about things that must be spoken about. She is really important.

And another person I know has 6, 4, and 2 year old children. Kate is very likely to survive. She has a very survivable kind of cancer and now the outpouring of love and money she will need to fight for life. His survival chances are in the single digits.

I can’t stop weeping. I “know” my grandmother died from cancer. I don’t know what kind–not breast cancer. I know that much.

The kind of knowing I want my children to have for me is something that cannot come until they are adults and putting it all together in retrospect. I think that I all of a sudden just received a catapulted stone of fear in my belly. How will his children know him?

He told me just before he found the lump that I had inspired him to start marathon training. That process was more or less how the lump started bothering him. That’s why they found this. I told him to start making videos for his kids. One for each birthday up until they are 25 or 30. They need to know you and get the advice you would give them.

Shanna was asking me about parents yesterday. Kind of the standard kid question kinds of things: do only Mommies take care of babies? Oh dear goodness I hope not or a lot of kids would starve to death. I told her that some babies have only one mommy or only one daddy and some babies have a mommy and a mommy (or mama) and some babies have two daddies and some babies have more than two parents of any possible gender consideration. What matters to a baby is that consistent grown ups hold and care for and love the baby. That is all that is needed to make a parent. Not biology. Not anything else. I said that babies are designed to fall in love with the grown ups who care for them because that is how the baby will ensure survival. Mutual love with a grown up means the grown up becomes invested and puts a lot of time and energy towards the baby.

She said, “So it doesn’t matter if it is a boy or a girl?” I asked her how many times it has mattered whether I have a penis or a vulva while I change diapers. I asked her if she thinks our female friend K is too stupid to figure out how to clean her son’s penis. Shanna laughed. I asked her if her father has ever had trouble wiping her butt. She confirmed that he is a poop wiping expert. I said, “Anuses are universal.”

She asked if girls are supposed to stay home with their babies. The timing on this conversation was just hilarious considering what I have been reading on the internet lately. I said girls are supposed to do the things that make them happy. By being happy in front of their kids they are teaching their kids the right way to live. For some mothers this means staying home and for some mothers this means working outside the home for a company. All mothers work. All mothers do a back breaking amount of work. If a mother has an outside job then the children can either stay with dad (I cited families we know) or if both parents work day care of some kind can be arranged (I explained several different examples we know).

Every family looks different because every family is made up of different people. Different people are made happy by different things. That is what makes life beautiful. If everyone was exactly the same life would be really crappy. Every person is on a completely individualized path through life.

I said that different people have different advantages. I talked to her about money. I talked to her about how some people have large extensive families and that is a different very important kind of support. It gives different life options. For example: single parenting is a very different experience if you are rich than if you are poor. Single parenting is a very different experience if you have a large and involved family than if you have no family support. I went on and on. She asked more questions. It kept going.

I tell my children frequently that while they are children they have a few specific jobs they have to work on. Their primary job is to play with the world. The process of play and exploration is the primary thing that children should be focused on. After that you have to learn how to have relationships with people; you have to learn how to be considerate. But the third thing is: with great privilege comes great responsibility. I tell my children explicitly that they are part of the most privileged cohort that has ever been born. They have more access to information and the ability to learn than any person has ever had at any point in history. And my kids have free access to it all day every day because they are not locked in an institutionalized setting following some bullshit agenda that is the resort of so much compromise nothing real is taught. I expect them to take learning seriously.

I talk about how the world is changing and there are a lot of people in the world who do not have access to information. There are a lot of big problems to be solved. People will have to be exceptionally able to synthesize large amounts of data in order to solve these problems. People will have to learn a bunch of cross-disciplines in order to solve these problems. The only way is to start young and take it seriously. Learn.

I tell my kids that I want them to grow up and be fierce and sure of their opinions. They should not believe they are “always right” because that is hubris–no one is always right. But listen to Davey Crockett: Be sure you’re right and go ahead. Plan at leisure; act with haste. If you hesitate then some someone less qualified will speak first and set the plan. That’s really not a great situation. If you can’t find a way; make a way. You will make mistakes or you will never learn and grow. You must make big mistakes. That is part of life.

Even if I get upset with you over a mistake I will get over it. I love you more than I love breathing. More than I love any thing in the whole world. I will get angry with you. I will shout at you. I will never hit you. I will always love you.

Thinking about cancer makes me feel so very afraid of my children not knowing me. Shanna proudly informed me that she was going to grow up and be a bad ass just like me. I laughed. I told her that would make me very happy. I want to see that. I want to see what she is going to be like. I want to know her. I want that so fucking much.

Getting to see what Shanna will do in the world will be my entertainment and reward for still being alive.

And that’s before I even get to Calli. Calli is a born engineer. She is going to need to have a woman behind her saying, “You can do it” for a great many steps in her life. She is going to live in a “man’s world”. Hell she already wants to be Diego–not Dora. Not Alicia. She’s Diego. She’s the god damn main character who rescues everyone.

They need me. It is so clear. Like my friend’s children need him. And I start weeping again and I understand fuck cancer.

There is no right. There is no should. There is no deserve in this life. There just is.

On April 1st it will be the birthday of one of the awesomest women I know. I’m sorry I won’t be in Portland with her. That would have been wonderful.

In other news I am exchanging books with a friend who is also a writer on April 1st. We are essentially work-shopping one another’s books. You know, a real forking editing job. I’m ridiculously excited. I want No Secrets to be finished and I have stalled. It has been almost a year and a half since I wrote it and it still isn’t in paper. Erf.

In September Noah is officially off the leash and he gets to start being a mostly absentee father/husband while he works on whatever he wants to work on. I’m thinking about treating July like my own personal NaNoWriMo. I want to write Outrunning Suicide before I have a hard time negotiating for time. A lot of the shape of it is working itself out in my head. Stylistically it will not resemble No Secrets. That’s for the best. I’ve been reading reviews of writers differently lately. “What will they bitch about with my content–repetitiveness. I can’t just tell the same stories. Hm. Interesting.”

Sometimes it is kind of convenient that I have been through such a ridiculous variety of kinds of extreme trauma. I always have another fucking story. Ha.

A few times lately I have thought about my mother. I’ve thought about what will happen when Shanna is eighteen. Shanna might want to meet my family. She will be allowed to. I’ll drive her to the house and wait at the bottom of the hill for her. She doesn’t have to share my views on them. She didn’t make my bed; I did.

Shanna asked me if I loved my mommy when I was a little girl. I told her that when I was a little girl I thought my mommy was the best thing in the whole universe. I loved her with my whole heart. She was my sun and my moon. Shanna then pointed out that I don’t feel that way now. I said, “No. I don’t. You will have different opinions when you are in your thirties than you have right now too.” She looked thoughtful.

It is really hard giving space for beliefs that are not your own. If I break the incest chain in my family I have absolutely done a measurable good in the world. I just found a biography from someone in the middle of a six generation chain. My stomach hurts too much to read it right now. At some point in the not-too-distant future I will have read everything easily findable on this topic. That’s a little weird to know. It makes me want to create more data.

Life goals:

I want to deepen and broaden the scope of information known about incestuous families. At some point I will figure out a measurable goal around this topic. I don’t have it yet.

I want to live outside my country of origin for a minimum of five years, preferably in one year chunks. I’ll get homesick bad.

I want to see what Noah can do. He has really impressed me so far. I want to see what he and I can do together.

You outrun suicide by giving yourself full permission to do it, but you keep moving the goal posts. “Ok I can do it. But first I have to do…” It’s on the to do list. But a lot of other things are going to happen first.

I want my children to be adults and to be able to say, “Yeah. I agree. It’s time. I love you. Do what is right for you.” Maybe I will have to move to Oregon once I hit 70. When I get there I will get to be near a friend of mine. She is partnered with one of the people who pushed that law through. I feel so grateful that I get to know people who change the world. They give me the courage to keep trying.

Holy fuck. I just had a thought. What age level is Outrunning Suicide aimed at? If I want a lot of people to be able to read it I have to think about that. My writing is rather obtuse most of the time. Well that will take some thought.

When I was a child there were very few periods of time when I didn’t want to die. I stayed alive mostly because I was too depressed to be expeditious. I didn’t know anything other than pain. I was not permitted to act like I was in pain. That was rude.

My life is different now. I didn’t understand what a life free from pain was. It was a myth. I wouldn’t say that I am exactly pain free at this point but I am probably at the lowest level of pain and the highest level of joy I have ever had. These are the best days of my life. And I know it while I am living them.

I keep wandering in my head to a Madeleine L’Engle book A Wind in the Door. The mitochondria are in trouble! The farandolae aren’t deepening! I just read Collapse by Jared Diamond. Help! The planet is in trouble! The humans aren’t deepening!

I don’t know. Lots of feelings. Today I don’t want to die. And I weep at the loss of a great mind. I hope he doesn’t read this. My grief is not his problem. I’m glad his wife has a very supportive family. I’m glad they live near her family and not his. I am so sorry it is happening.

I’ve read tragedies for years. I’ve taught units on tragedy. I never really got it before. I’ve never been deep enough into a community to really understand what the loss of a person means before.

He’s going to fight. He’s that kind of guy. My grief is entirely premature and I need to stfu. But this is where I feel.

I have spent most of my life believing very firmly that for me cancer was one of the goalposts. I wouldn’t fight. I would go quietly into the dark night because I’m not interested in more suffering.

Life is pain, highness. Anyone who tells you different is selling something.

Now I don’t know. When I think about the things I want to do. When I think about not seeing my daughters grow up to be fierce and bad ass? (She-Ra is pretty bad ass is a frequent comment around our house. I said it once. Oy.)

There is no right. There is no should. There is no deserve. There is only what is. And what you go do with it. We live in a time of practically preternatural access to science. If you have money. If you want to fight something bad enough we live in a time of honest-to-goodness miracles.

How much do I want to see my daughters at thirty? Forty? Fifty? Sixty? What will they do with their lives? I want to know so very badly. I am curious. I want to know. I want to see what this being I have unleashed on the world will do.

Somehow I don’t envision her walking onto the family compound at eighteen and not coming back. It’s thirteen years away. She’ll be able to evaluate people on her own at that point. She will have had a lot of practice with a lot of different kinds of people. She will be able to read people well. My family isn’t subtle. Even if she does want to get to know them–and why not, they are interesting people–she won’t want to stay.

She will have shit to do. My family has nothing to do but be unhappy. They will sit in one place doing that until they die. I don’t understand why. It’s like a clock that has run down. Poverty, physical health, mental health, and a kind of apathy I don’t understand. An anger about entitlement and responsibility I don’t understand.

I have had such a ridiculous amount of privilege. I’m only starting to understand the shape of it.

I have had the privilege of being able to set the goal post of “I’ll kill myself if” pretty low but I’ve been healthy enough to always meet a really ableist centric attitude. I have been able to be an asshole about independence. I’ve also had a guaranteed income for most of my adult life. I’ve been financially stable without having to have a job. That’s so fucking ridiculous.

I have no safety net though. I don’t have Bank of Mom and Dad. I don’t have emergency reserves beyond those I create. For most of my adult life I was inches above the poverty line living in one of the most expensive places in the world. I have never come close to bankruptcy and my credit score is ridiculous. I did that with a lot of seed capitol. I feel like an asshole for being glad that pit bull attacked me. It made the whole rest of my life better.

Perspective if everything.

I’ve been thinking about my mom. I have been specifically thinking, “I forgive you. I hope you forgive me.” If my kids ever go and meet her I hope my mom understands why I kept them away. My kids will be different. They will not have broken spirits. I hope she will be able to see that and be glad. I hope she will forgive me. I hope she understands wanting to keep your kids safe.

I hope she will forgive me.

I hope she will still be alive so that she will be able to meet my kids some day. I hope my kids want to talk to her a lot for a while. I bet she won’t live long after that but she will die happier than she has been in a long time. They will be like her. They will be able to ask her questions about things she has had great skill at doing. They will think she is an interesting person.

It’s kind of a weird balance. I have to tell the truth to my children. The truth is that no one is all bad. Everyone has good parts. The thing about life is learning how to find the good that balances the bad and evaluating if the value is high enough. In most families people decide that the kin alliance is worth putting up with the bad. That’s normal and right.

When my kids are adults they will not be children who are easy to mold. They will not be instructed in how sex is natural and fine between family members as long as you don’t breed because it is only in breeding too close to the line that you develop problems.

I hope that when my daughters are eighteen they will have the ovaries to say to a biological family member who solicits sexual contact, “You are a disgusting piece of shit and I hope you rot in hell.” Because yeah. That’s the reaction you should have to incest.

But I don’t think my family would dare at that point. And if everyone keeps their britches on, it’s fine… right? Oh fuck. *beat head on wall* Wait. I’m not supposed to do that any more.

Maybe I should get dressed and run. That would be all healthful and crap.

I want to live. I have stuff to do. I’m scared. Fuck cancer. I can’t be strong enough to outrun it. No one can. It just happens. Am I going to instantly stop smoking so I can lessen my risk of lung cancer? No. I wouldn’t be a nice person. (Vaporizer is still impact on the lungs. My lungs will tell you.)

On the way I will eat more Easter candy. My body says: “Hey, I know-instead of crying: sugar rush and endorphins!” Is this ideal? Nope. We recognize two candy-holidays a year in this house. Otherwise I would get in a long of trouble. I didn’t eat candy like this when I was a kid. It’s kind of weird.

Ok, run.

I feel soft and badass at the same time.

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My skin is so nice. Oh man. Of course the woman giving me the treatment turned out to be my tribe. I didn’t press for specifics (uhhh it seemed inappropriate) but she said enough things that I know it to be true. I just know.

The first half hour I spent in the hot tub or sauna. The room was beautiful and huge. I felt small and I don’t very often. Then I moved into the treatment room. That was more to a scale that felt reasonable to me.

First she scrubbed me really forking hard with salt for a while. I rinsed that off. Then she slathered me up in mud and wrapped me up like a burrito. Then she did stuff to my hair and my feet and my face. Then I took another shower. Then she put oils on me. A few stages of this were billed as “massage” and given who I normally get them from it just didn’t rank as obviously meant to be therapeutic. It felt soothing though. Soothing can be nice.

We talked about intentional parenting. We talked about viewing your children as autonomous beings who do not owe you a relationship. We talked about modeling and mirroring and learning and the pressure of being on all the forking time. She is on the fence. She thinks she might want kids but she’s not sure she can handle them. She’s thirty-six. She’s running out of time.

If you don’t wake up in the morning and cry because you wish you were holding your baby then you probably don’t want to be a mom bad enough to go through the process.That’s how I feel about it.

We talked about having children to give yourself a reason to live and the problems and benefits of doing so. The only ethical way to do it is to think of your children’s needs above your own. Yes, they give me a reason to stay alive. That isn’t their problem. All they should see is that they have a wonderful mommy who loves them more than ice cream. In our house the measure of true affection is how it compares to ice cream.

We talked about hiding yourself in travel and needing roots at the same time. We talked about how you have to hide yourself in order to have “relationships” because if you are damaged and angry every problem will be your fault. It cannot be apparent that you are so angry. How do you mask it? How do you get along?

How do you get over hating everyone else who got to have a mother who loved them? How do you not take that hatred out on them?

I told her that I think very hard about how many people I want to have at my fiftieth birthday party. I want to still know these people. I want to still live here. Ok. What am I going to have to do in order to end up with that happening? It’s not a guarantee for people like me. I’m a runner.

And this conversation came in brief bits and spurts. It was never intense. It was a few sentences at a time here and there over two hours.

She asked me how I hurt my arms so I talked about writing my book and destroying my arms and doing it practically in the middle of the night because I didn’t have any other time and I fucking had to do it. She commented on how I seem to be a very driven person in general. I have managed to do a bunch of things–right?

She said, “I guess people like you are the ones who get things done in life. If you have to do it in the middle of the night you will because you want it done and that is just that.”

At the end she told me that she didn’t think she had ever spoken to a client as much as she spoke to me and she thanked me for coming in. She said that I gave her a lot of things to think about that are really important in her life right now and she’s glad that she met me.

That’s a well spent day, no?

don’t be mad

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So I found a ptsd sufferers support forum. Want to know what they recommend? That I get more obsessive about house cleaning. Yes!

I feel weird and bad about my depression. It feels quite shameful to be this depressed. I am one of the most fortunate people to ever live, how fucking dare I get depressed. When friends in the mental health field start openly worry I feel quite bad. I shouldn’t be worrying people. It’s not very kind. I’m fairly sure I will manage to avoid killing myself for another fifteen years at minimum. Even though I’m depressed. It feels more polite to just shut up about how I am feeling. If I don’t think I am actually likely to do something suicidal I should shut up about feeling like I want to. It’s a “cry for help” and that’s lame. It’s not actually. I don’t expect any one to do anything. I don’t expect anything to change because I am talking about how I feel. I don’t think I do it because I want help. Well, I do.

When I explained to my friend K how I was feeling she said, “How about if I take the girls for Saturday. You have enough on your plate.” I don’t particularly feel like I want people freaking out and panicking over the idea that I might kill myself presently (really I’ve been suicidal for decades there is no sense in getting extra nervous about it now) but it feels nice that people think, “Gosh you feel stress. Here is a bit less stress.” It feels like a gift.

I feel less helpless today. I don’t feel like an animal caught in a steel trap today. I think my body is too exhausted to manufacture those chemicals. I’m pretty fucking tired. And when I was exhausted and past capacity yesterday I didn’t have to also dig deep and find a way to kindly and gently meet the needs of my children. I got to be a selfish bitch just kind of wandering through the world.

Holy shit it feels good. I’ve been doing more of it just lately. Consciously putting myself in the mindset where “I am just a person existing and I only have to care for myself.” It’s weird. Do you know what I do when I only have myself to care for? I clean the house. OF COURSE I WOULD.

It honestly felt good that I got to greet Noah and the girls in a house that was clean and ready for anything. I could react to any request without having to do a bunch of prerequisite steps. That is what drives me crazy. “No, we can’t bake because I have to do dishes and clean off the counters and go to the store first.” Those beginning steps are doozies. If you don’t have anywhere to work you can’t work. If you don’t have ingredients it’s a non-starter. I’m having a hard time with adjusting to what “prepared to work” really means.

Abrupt topic shift: I’ve been told that I should be mad at Noah. Which feels pretty funny given how much time people spend telling me I shouldn’t be an angry person. The thing is: getting angry with Noah serves none of my goals.

I am absolutely willing and able to see that Noah goes above and beyond for me. No one is perfect. Somehow I feel like we fit together so well because no one else understands our shortcomings and properly appreciates us. Noah told me he was over committed. Noah told me that he can’t keep up what we are doing. I have to believe him when he says that. Immediately. Instantly. With love and support. I can’t get mad at him for telling me in a small little boy voice that he can’t do everything he would dearly love to be able to do. When he takes his courage in his hands and tells me that he is going to fail me… he already feels bad. He doesn’t need more shit from me.

Noah works like a demon for me. For us. For our family. When he hits a wall that is because he is cruising along at 80 trying to be everything and do everything for me.

Noah has a full time job that requires more than 40 hours a week and between 5 and 10 hours in commute. Then he has this book he is writing (I’m mildly shocked and appalled by how much money that has earned so quickly) and he is an adjunct professor for CMU on the side. And he does a lot of solo kid care (around 20 hours a week). And he wakes up every day and makes breakfast. He does a fair number of dishes. When I am fussy and whiny and the house is a big mess he cleans up. He comes home from work and makes dinner several nights a week.

When Noah comes to me and tells me in a very sad, very small voice that he can’t keep up what he is doing… I can’t come down on him. I can’t get mad at him. He is working at an unsustainable pace. I know that. When he falters it is normal and natural–not shameful.

It’s still very disappointing. And it’s hard that I have these expectations in my head he can’t meet. It’s not really his fault that he is so busy working on my other expectations that he doesn’t have the time or energy to get through all of my expectations. I have a lot of them. I need to be responsible for most of them. He truly can’t bear any more weight.

I feel lucky. When I met Noah he was kind of a slacker. Not really, but he wasn’t exactly motivated. He worked because he liked what he was doing but he wasn’t goal oriented. In the almost eight years I have known him he has changed. It’s hard for me to reconcile the boy he was with the man he is. I need to not act like he is a boy anymore. He truly isn’t.

When my man runs as hard and as long as he can to take care of me it isn’t right for me to sneer and call him a boy who isn’t living up to expectations. Near as I can tell that won’t lead to a happy marriage. I would honestly really like to have a happy marriage.

But I still have these expectations. And sometimes I am disappointed. Right now I feel like I should think of some more creative solutions beyond “be mad at Noah” to solve this problem. I don’t feel like that would actually help.

I can be honest and say that I try to avoid getting mad at Noah. I will pay a very high cost to avoid being mad at Noah. It is far easier and more comfortable to be mad at me for wanting too much. That’s an old reason to despise myself. My mom spent two decades telling me that I want too much. I’m selfish. I’m self-absorbed. I’m too needy. No one will ever give a shit about me. I know. It’s a lot easier being mad at me than him. It’s comfortable and familiar.

I use Noah up. I wear him out. I wring him dry. I feel like it is my fault he has nothing left by my birthday. Maybe if I wasn’t so fucking needy the other 364 days he might have some “want to” left by my birthday. I doubt I am going to be less needy any year soon. Actually, I think I will. I am far less needy than I was two years ago. I’m going to need less support from Noah fairly soon, actually. Shanna already does for herself. Calli is trying.

Sometimes it feels like running is a lot easier than standing still. I ran 23 miles yesterday (I actually ran for a surprising amount of it) and that was easier to do than filling the hours until Noah and the kids came home. I didn’t know what to do with myself. So I sat down for a bit and I ate and I smoked and then I cleaned. I spent hours cleaning. I don’t feel like I am capable of sitting down much any more. No matter how tired I am. I have to keep moving. Keep doing. I’m not sure why I have ever thought of myself as a low energy person. That was part of my story “I have to have my kids early because I’m a low energy person and it will be much harder when I’m older.” On crack.

Yesterday morning when I was about to head out the door (I was quite decadent and lazy and I didn’t leave the house till 6:30 because I didn’t feel like running in the pitch black) both little girls woke up just as I was leaving. Calli hugged me and kissed me several times and said, “Bye mama. Mama happy.” That’s her way of saying, “Goodbye and have fun.” Shanna said, “Do you have any food with you? It’s going to be a very long run today and you can’t get through a run like that without food. Have you packed food yet?” Yes I packed food, thank you for checking on me. I really appreciate it. I started crying. I told her that I appreciate her thinking about the needs of my body. Sometimes I’m bad at that and I’m glad she cares.

Ironically, I gave my huge bag of trail mix to a homeless guy. I stopped and took the pot edibles out first because I’m not that nice. But he was there. And he had a dog. And he looked so much like Stephan that my heart broke. When I see homeless guys who look like him I feel my heart jump into my throat. (He just looked like a homeless guy in the making. I think he’s gotten a hair cut since then.)

As a result when I was ~4 miles from home I stopped at KFC. I think that I could have gotten home noticeably faster if I hadn’t stopped and bought a mashed potato bowl on the way. Mmmmm. There is something about walking and eating at the same time that I like. I always have. From when I was a little kid walking and eating at the same time feels like a decadent treat. It feels like proof that I am more highly evolved and AWESOME than other species. Squirrels can’t do what I can do with food while moving with the same kind of speed and agility. Maybe monkeys but I’m pretty sure they don’t.

For some reason just knowing how many processes are going on at once in my body excites me. I am breathing. My blood is flowing. I am walking quickly so many muscle groups are responding quickly. I am eating. I am coordinating my hands and my mouth. My stomach is working. My throat is working. AND WHILE I’M AT IT MOTHER FUCKER I WILL SING. I’m not sure why I like it so much but I do. It’s this weird feeling of satisfaction. I am one of the most complex organisms ever. THAT IS SO FUCKING COOL. Let’s feel a little gratitude we weren’t brought into this life as an amoeba, ok? This is better.

It’s hard to feel like a depressed loser when you are sauntering up your street telling every neighbor, “I haven’t finished mapping it yet but I’m quite certain I covered twenty two miles today!” I feel a lot of pride. It’s weird feeling how the pride lives in my chest with the shame. It’s like they are next door neighbors in a condo complex. They take turns who is leaning over the back fence shouting.

Yesterday I talked to one of the neighbors for a while. Little M who isn’t allowed to come over anymore was apparently throwing rocks and dirt at her house. She told me she was thinking about calling the police over the vandalism. She threatened M to her face. Apparently M broke down sobbing hysterically and begged to not be sent away. I had a long talk with her about how she needs to never threaten that kid again because she has a hard enough life and for an adult to keep picking on her is cruel and unacceptable. Every fucking five year old throws rocks and dirt. It’s not vandalism. It is being a kid. Give her a fucking break. The neighbor seemed very inclined to listen to me once I started talking about the abusive alcoholic father. I think she will be nicer to M. I’m not saying let the kid get away with shit–but you don’t need to call the cops.

When did we become a society that wants to call the police because a five year old throws dirt? I feel so sad. I feel like there is no way for people to grow up and try things and see what happens in the world.

The other day Shanna got her hands on the last rogue bag of cookies and brought it into her room. I yelled at her, of course, because crumbs in your room attract ants ohmyfreakinggoodness how many times do I have to say this? When I finished dealing with the cookies I came back into her room and sat next to her. I said, “I have been so busy yelling at you for making messes lately that I haven’t stopped to say that it is really cool how much you have grown. You are very good at taking care of yourself. You are very good at figuring out what you need and how to get it. Most of the time you make very good choices both for your body and for being polite to me. Thank you. I do see it. I appreciate you a lot. I think it is wonderful watching you grow up. You surprise me every day by learning new things and I’m so glad I get to watch you.” She told me, “Thank you for noticing. I’ll learn about the crumbs one of these days.” I laughed and hugged her. I told her I believe so.

It feels like depression is this binary switch in my brain. It goes on and off many times a day. There are many things that bring me joy and when I feel those things I am distracted and the depression switch goes off for a bit. But I can’t do this on purpose. I’m not a rat and it isn’t a food pellet button. I can’t just decide to keep myself distracted. I can’t decide to feel joy. It just happens. Often in connection with my kids.

I feel like the most prideful person on earth when I look at my children. I feel like I will explode with good feelings when I look at them. How did something so wonderful come out of me? I am so grateful that I get to know them. Even though they make my life harder (and holy shit they do) I wouldn’t have it any other way. Without them I don’t have this joy on tap.

So I spend my days walking between depression and shame and anxiety and anger and joy. I can’t just sit down and decide how many minutes of a given day will be spent on which emotion. I can stack the deck in my favor. There are stress relieving choices I can make. But the stress relieving choices are unfortunately often choices that lessen my joy. It’s a weird balancing act. Less bad might mean less good too. More good might well mean a lot more bad.

Today I feel quite confident “not today”. Today is a day of rest. I will spend today with Noah and the kids. Noah will rub my feet because he is nice. We will cuddle and read together. I will get to touch Noah. This morning I am typing from bed instead of the garage because I haven’t been touching Noah much lately and I feel this aching emptiness without him. I like keeping my foot on him. He’s there. He’s real. He’s mine. I’m not alone. No matter how I feel, no matter how I think–he is here. I can touch him.

Noah has spent years trying to get me to understand that I shouldn’t have put up with things from Tom that I did. It wasn’t a “good” relationship it was just a lot better than what I had previously known. I don’t know if I put up with things from Noah that I shouldn’t. I know that, unlike Tom, Noah is working on things that benefit both of us. Noah is very serious about everything he has being for me. It’s a weird feeling. Someone wants me to have as much as can be given to me. I feel constantly unworthy.

I have been diagnosable as “mentally ill” for a long time. It’s not Noah’s fault. I don’t really want to come down on him for the results.

In praise

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I don’t know how other people find self-worth. For me part of it involves being liked by people I admire. People I feel are particularly good at _________.

So I have this friend. I met her when I was fifteen. I met her because I was sneaking out of the house to go to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I started chasing a guy, well–several, named Scott. Scott was kind of available. He didn’t technically have a girlfriend or anything. We dated a bit but nothing serious–you see he was hung up on this other chick, P. I was so jealous I couldn’t see straight. I hated her on sight. Who is this slutty bitch?

Because you see, she had a boyfriend who went to a different university (all these people were five years older than me) and she was STILL STRINGING SCOTT ALONG. Obviously she was bad. I helped him out. I have never liked those girl games of promising and denying. I make up for those chicks. I feel like those girls are hurting the poor boys who have needs because I am a deeply damaged individual.

She was prettier than me. She was older than me (which was a big god damn selling point when I was fifteen). She had great breasts. She was really shapely. Dear god she had a nice body. I had some lurid thoughts about telling Scott, “Well why don’t all of us just…” but I didn’t. I was good.

Time went by. Scott didn’t last long in my life. Guys in that slot (ha) rarely last longer than three months. I ditch them quickly.

Years later I turned eighteen. I ran into the girl at one of the theatres in San Jose. I showed up to do low-level volunteer work at a theatre with a friend and she happened to be the stage manager. The show was Hair. That was such a lovely frisky time of life. Lots of hinting at sex but not much doing it. I was dating Steve.

(I have to give you a name. You seem to like Pam. That’s an acceptable pseudonym-right? I still think you are being ridiculous. You are one of like 3.7 million people with your name.)

So Pam was around. I was spending a lot of time with Kristine. (God bless her for spelling our name right.) I uhhh broke up with Steve because I wanted to sleep with a different Steve. I wanted to sleep with that other new Steve because Pam was stringing him along and I am a compulsive whore. So I dumped my boyfriend. I’m awesome. At least I didn’t cheat on him. That’s always been my line.

I started getting to know Pam though. As things that summer shook out in my life (found the bdsm community, drifted away from theatre) for some reason Pam kept calling me.

And calling.

She would come pick me up and we would hang out. I felt… baffled. Why did she want to seek out my company? People don’t really do that very often. I am not pursued. I am avoided. I am abandoned by people I pour many years of hard work and energy into. I don’t get pursued much. It’s a heady experience.

So I spent a lot of time talking to Pam, because she wanted to talk to me.

It’s been a lot of years. She went off and worked on a cruise ship for five years. Then lived in Australia for a few years. Then Taiwan. Now she’s on the east coast having just graduated from an ivy league fancy-pants graduate school. (I’m proud of you for finishing your conclusion. Get started on the last paper.)

She used to traipse around the world being gone for years at a time doing very interesting things. She’s had a fun life. She always makes time and space for me. She calls me. She calls me faithfully though irregularly. Before I had kids I dropped whatever I was doing to answer calls from her. I once answered the phone while teaching because it is that important to me to answer the phone when she calls.

I do it out of respect. This person has spent a lot of money on international phone calls to me over the more than decade of our friendship because she wants to hear my voice. Because she just loves me. Because she wants me to tell her what I am doing and thinking and talking about. She is interested in me and she respects me.

And she is someone I have a lot of respect for. She doesn’t have all that high of an opinion of herself, which I hear is normal. I’ve seen her do things that I want to do but I’m too afraid. She has had the courage to chase a lot of dreams I can’t handle living. I feel like she is my gypsy self. She actually broke free.

And way back in the day when I was dating Tom she wanted to ahem find out more about the ladies so I helped her out with that. Really we’ve had kind of an interestingly sex-related friendship the whole time.

I support her in being parts of herself that the other people in her life wouldn’t respect. She’s kind of slutty, bless her heart. Not a lot. Nothing compared to me, of course. But she hasn’t settled down with one person and she’s kind of nomadic and not inclined towards monogamy.

Before Noah and I got married I was dating this guy I’ll call Spot. I met Spot at BaGG and he was kind of my “club boyfriend” during the time when I did a lot of clubbing. Given that once he had to drive me home because my drink was spiked I feel I was right in believing I needed a protector in that space. Spot overlapped with the early part of my engagement to Noah.

Pam came back to California for one of her periodic visits during that time period complaining long and loud about how she hadn’t been able to get laid in a long time. Given my compulsive bent I said, “Well, which guy do you want to borrow?” She said both. She’s like that. So I called up both boys and told them to come over for a foursome.

I didn’t want to completely run the fuck and that was the problem. For the first bit I assigned Noah to Pam and told Spot I was starting with him. I did announce this out loud. Spot decided it was more interesting to kind of glom onto Pam while she and Noah were playing and ignore me.

Can you guess how this went? Noah realized kind of late into the evening that I was sitting there trying not to cry. He tried to save. Once Pam realized I was upset she tried to save. Spot… well… I didn’t date him much longer and I don’t really talk to him much any more. He did give me the awesome kitty hat for my birthday though. He’s not a bad guy just… not perceptive.

And when Pam was in town while I was pregnant and not interested in sex I had her come over and fuck Noah so that he would be in a better mood. That was very mixed for me emotionally. I’m not sorry I did it–I got the results I wanted. But the cost was high. I don’t like sharing. I’ve decided I’m not going to anymore and both Noah and Pam are very supportive and awesome about it. They were never “dating” they are both just slutty like me. “I like sex. You are here. Ok!” But they are affectionate friends. Only they don’t really talk to one another unless they are both here to see me.

This must be what a V feels like. I don’t mind that they talk and are friendly with one another as long as they are both here to be paying attention to me. I can share that much. I’m generous and all.

I’m not explaining this right. I’m not explaining why she is important. Pam has had a life that is about as different from mine as a life can be in most of the big, obvious ways. And for some reason she latched on to me and fell in love with me and she has created a long term intense relationship for us that freely mutates with my mood swings. If I tell her to do things she says sure. If I tell her to stop doing things she says sure.

When I told her about the smoking she had this interesting reaction. She said, “Hmmmm. If you were anyone else I would start on a long lecture about how irresponsible you are. But you are you. How about if instead I say: I know that you reach conclusions after a lot of careful research, study, and thought. Why don’t you tell me what lead you to decide that was the best option because I know that it must be the best option out there. Or you wouldn’t be doing it.”

I cried. Part of what this relationship gives me is this ongoing feeling of someone feeling that I am important and worth seeking out. Part of what I get is the modeling of what being respected looks like. Not very many people respect me the way Pam does. Not very many people turn to me and say, “Hey I assume you are an authority on this subject. Will you please teach me part of what you know?”

I feel really silly but it feels good to have this person who is nothing like me so she doesn’t understand me at all but that just leads her to ask questions. She wants to understand me–I’m just different from everything she has ever known. She has to ask a lot of questions. I feel like she cares enough to actually want to know me. People don’t ask me very many questions. People don’t want to bother me. So for the majority of my adulthood I have sat alone in rooms not talking to anyone. Except when I’m lucky enough to have Pam call. I prioritize taking those calls over talking to people who show up one off to hang out at my house. I’ve been kind of an asshole about it a couple of times. Pam is very important to me. I drop everything for those calls.

Although having kids has changed this dynamic a lot. Often my phone is on vibrate or silent and I don’t hear it ring. We have a lot more misses now and that is hard for me. I no longer have the space to give our relationship complete seniority at a moments notice like I used to and it is very frustrating for me.

Pam makes me feel like a main character. She wants to hear my stories. She wants me to talk. She wants to know about me. She likes to cuddle me. She’d love more sex’n but is very supportive of that being off the table and thinks it is good that I’m taking care of myself. She wants me to think I am important.

I am fairly honest with myself. She is never going to live near me. She is never going to be anything but occasional phone calls and maybe a visit a year. But she puts a really lot of effort into writing me long emails (I just expect her to read my blog–I don’t have time for all that much long email writing on top of the blathering I do here and I’m a brat and I want it posted.) and she calls. She puts a lot of energy into making me feel important to her. Into reminding me that she thinks about me a lot. When she needs advice she comes to me. When her sister needs advice she tells her sister to come to me. When her friends need advice she relays stuff to/from me.

She has told me that I am her ideal parent. I set the bar for what “doing it right” looks like for her. She makes me cry.

We have occasional long stretches where I get mad at her for some reason or another. Sometimes with semi-cause (things were tense for a good six months after the thing with Spot) but mostly it’s just me having trouble dealing with the ways in which we are very different. I’m not good at that. But she is. And she talks to me actively about compromise and being respectful of one another. And she lives up to her end of it over and over and over and over and over. It’s pretty easy to trust her. She wears her intentions on her face. She is one of the most blessedly honest people I know.

The weird thing is, I’m pretty sure that isn’t the experience that other people in the world have of her. She does a lot of things that are very rebellious by her standards and she spends a lot of time being wracked with guilt for one thing or another.

One of the things Pam gives me is a constant reason to think, “How can someone so obviously tremendous in merit doubt their worth?” When I get an uncomfortable niggle of self-awareness from that thought I immediately stomp on it with great leather boots, of course.

Pam gives me the feeling that if I believe I am important I can go out and be that in the world. Maybe not to absolutely everyone–no one is. Not even everyone likes Santa Claus and if anyone was going to get universal popularity it is that motherfucker. Not me.

But I can be to a few people. And if I can make one life better isn’t that enough? Isn’t that something? Do I really have to be trying to amass a harem? I don’t want or need to be a guru. I want to be respected, not worshiped. I don’t need to be blindly followed. I don’t want or need people to be like me. I really like that there are people who say, “I want to know about _____ and I know you know a lot about it–can we talk?” It makes me feel like my existing in the world is useful. I do have things to give.

Pam is insatiably curious. If I look at my closest cadre of friends that is probably one of the strongest traits for all of my friends. They want to understand. I think you need to be such a person in order to bear my company for long. I’m what is termed “high needs” in young kids. It’s why Shanna’s questions and thirst for more more more from me doesn’t phase me. I feel the same way a lot of the time. Less now than when I was younger, I’m tired.

Pam I love you for so many reasons. Because your extreme perfectionism gives me a little light on how my own perfectionism is pretty twisted. You are good enough. You are smart enough. You are going to get a good job because you are a god damn amazing speaker and you get people. I think you will do well. You are like a cat. You always land on your feet. No, you don’t make a million dollars. No you didn’t become a famous model. You were thirty and not willing to starve yourself–you knew that wasn’t an option going in. You did fine. I wouldn’t have done as well. Sometimes I kind of hate you in an I love you and you are so awesome it feels painful to stand next to sometimes kind of way. It’s complex.

Pam is challenging to me to spend time with or talk to. I have to really think and process and be on in order to handle her. I’m fucking weird to her so I have to explain a lot of things that feel really tangential to me and it gets kind of hard to stay on a track. That feels frustrating. It feels like she is arguing but she is just pressing for enough information to keep following. I’m glad she has the chutzpuh to interrupt me and ask for clarification–don’t get me wrong. I want her to understand, but it’s been an adventure figuring out tone of voice stuff between us. We have different cultures. Very. Different. Cultures.

I have learned a lot and been challenged in a great many ways over the years as I have been exposed to her culture. She is very happy to introduce me to her other friends and she doesn’t give a shit if I make them feel uncomfortable as long as my subject matter is G rated. As a parent I feel a lot more comfortable with such limitations and impose the shit out of it on everyone around me so that has grown more comfortable. I feel like being a parent has finally given me a bridge into being willing to figure out respectable behavior. Pam is an invaluable resource.

No relationship between mothers and daughters is perfect. Pam tells me about her relationship and the relationships she sees and she teaches me a lot. I don’t really have any other access to such information. When I am in tricky situations with the kids I sometimes think about how Pam would handle something. What do I see her immediately do with my kids? I don’t see many people really walk up to my kids and treat them like people to have relationships with–Pam did from the first minute she met them. They were already people to her in her mind because she asks me about them all the time. She wants to know what they do all day. She wants to know the slightly condensed version of the Collected Works. And she comes back for updates quite frequently so things don’t even have to be condensed all that much. It’s really nice.

I can say, “I’ve been thinking about ____” and she responds with (I can hear her brain whirr) “Wait that is the person who did _______ and ______ and _____, right?” She can cross reference my whole experience with people because she has paid a lot of attention and gotten a lot of details about people over the years.

It’s really nice having this friend who is 100% outside my life so I can tell her what I really think about absolutely everyone I know. I don’t have to worry about polite courtesy. I can be honest. I cherish it.

I’m Pam’s beck and call girl. She doesn’t want a lot of my time and I feel so good about being wanted and appreciated that I’m going to respond as consistently and quickly as I can for the foreseeable future like I have for thirteen years. I like being wanted. Not many people want me.

How can you not understand how important you are?

relationships

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Sometimes it seems kind of funny to me how well suited Noah and I are for one another. I think about this mostly in comparison to the other men I have lived with: Uncle Bob, Tom, Puppy, Steve. No other man had an appreciable day-to-day influence at any point. It’s kind of interesting to think about how I have gone about trying out different lives. I tried to be who they wanted.

Uncle Bob wanted a meekness I never displayed. I was supposed to be grateful and I wasn’t. I was never grateful for anything throughout my later childhood and teenage years. Well, that’s not true. I was quite nice about presents and such. But I didn’t act like a beneficiary of charity. I worked hard for Auntie. I did my best to ensure that my presence impacted them negatively as little as possible. I started working at fifteen, as soon as someone would hire me. I paid my room and board. Didn’t I owe them for taking me in when I was a pitiful little girl? Fuck off and die. Oh wait. He did die. And I didn’t get to say goodbye. They didn’t tell me it was time. He died with a wedge between us. I’m sorry, Uncle Bob. I am grateful. I am. You did your best. I’m sorry that your best was so far from what I needed that I could never have the relationship you wanted. I could never look up to you. I could never treat you like my protector. You didn’t protect me. Not even a little bit. Not even at all. I suppose you prevented me from living in a car. You prevented me from going hungry. I am grateful that you helped me when I was otherwise helpless.

I tried to be what Tom wanted. I looked at his picture files and I dressed how he wanted and I wore shoes how he wanted and I mostly kept my mouth shut like he wanted. He was quite into gags. I have a lot of pictures of me tied up with a variety of gags in my mouth. I don’t look at the pictures much. Mostly what I see when I look at them is how sad my eyes seem. I wanted to be what he wanted. I tried hard. The dream of children was far more important to me than making him happy. That was the right choice. Thank goodness it worked out.

Puppy was a mistake. On paper he had similar attributes to Tom and I thought he was close enough that I could make it work. He wasn’t Tom. He wasn’t at all as close to wanted as I thought. I will never know for sure but I think he was lying to me from fairly early on. He told me what I wanted to hear. I’m not sure why. Oh well. He was always very jealous of Noah. Oh dear me. Now iTunes has provided me with the Heart classic “Alone” and it’s kind of funny timing.

Steve wasn’t the right fit for me. He was very submissive and vanilla sexually. He was repulsed by most of the “crazy” things I wanted to talk about during sex. Leaving that relationship was smart. I wish I hadn’t pushed it as far as I did. I thought he was my only way out. He wasn’t. But he was my first step.

Noah makes me feel comfortable. Noah makes me feel right. The way I want to do things is fine and should be mostly catered to. Occasionally he has a different preference and he’s willing to negotiate. I don’t feel like my voice is onerous. I don’t feel annoying. It is such a sharp contrast to how I feel when I am in the room with anyone else that it hurts. Why can’t I believe that anyone else really likes me? Given that most of the people who spend time with me go through great efforts to do so I know it is completely illogical to act like they don’t like me. Yet here I go. Every time.

I fucked up this weekend. We were invited to a brunch. I read that email at least four times. I put it on the calendar for the wrong day. Uhm. That’s embarrassing. These are people that Noah knows and I don’t really know them well. I have enjoyed all of the interactions I have had. The wife in question was quite pleasant and welcomed us into the house and we had a pleasant visit. Except for me wandering off to “find the bathroom” when I couldn’t control my crying because I felt so bad and stupid and wrong because I came on the wrong day and inconvenienced her. She didn’t seem inconvenienced terribly. It seemed like a nice surprise. Yet I couldn’t enjoy it. I felt horrible anxiety and stomach pain. I felt like I was on the verge of puking on the floor for most of the hour or so we sat there and talked.

I get really irrational about food at times like that. I don’t (can’t) eat a lot but I get very fussy about only wanting to eat real food and not snack food. I get bitey and pissy and fierce. All of a sudden what I eat is something where I get an idea in the back of my head and I latch on to it and I am like a starving dog defending my bowl.

Today I felt like I was vibrating with anxiety pretty much all day. Thankfully the neighbor and I seem to be passing the kids back and forth now. They tend to spend two or so hours at one place then trade off all day. Sometimes both girls go over there and play. It’s useful. It means that I can sit very still and stare at one point and calm down without the kids present in between volleys of screaming.

I keep telling myself that I am not working this hard on my tone of voice and attitude all the time because I am worried about her liking me today. I’m worried about how she will talk to me and remember me in twenty years. I can correct her, and I should–I am her mother, but I don’t need to be a bitch. Ever. I don’t know very many happy people. I feel like a liar.

I feel like Noah knows more about me than anyone. He understands a lot of my moods. He helps me figure out what triggers my mood swings because he stares at me so hard he knows when I have subtle shifts. It’s kind of weird to live with. But it makes me feel good. I feel important. I feel special.

I think I still participate on MDC (mothering.com) because hearing other women talk about the shitty things their husbands do makes me feel so much better about my marriage. I am reminded to be grateful. I feel fairly uncomfortable with how grateful I feel sometimes. I feel rather awkward about the fact that the intensity of emotion I feel for Noah is what I associate with the same feeling of thinking about G-d. It’s not an all the time thing. I couldn’t function that way. But when I stop to think about how grateful I am for what he has done for my life–yeah. I cry. I choke. How could anyone want me enough to change my life the way Noah has? How could I possibly be worth how much effort he has put into me? What have I done to deserve this?

I feel guilty that I am being supported. I feel like I must be taking advantage of him. Using him. What I offer in return is so meager, so little. I cannot possibly be earning my keep. But I’m so tired from working as hard as I can. I can never be enough. I can never do enough.

I try to figure out what it is that Noah wants me to be. To do. He’s a cagey fucker and he won’t give me any instructions at this juncture in time. Probably for the best. I don’t think children should have to deal with a power imbalanced relationship. I have to be responsible for me. It’s quite frustrating. I’d kind of like to relax into being chattel right about now. Then at least I wouldn’t have to wonder if I was doing enough. If I wasn’t told to do more I’m fine. It’s a system.

It’s hard to talk to Noah about my perception of isolation and loneliness. He works in an office and is required to talk to people quite a bit during the day. He’s just having an entirely different experience of life. It’s hard to make him understand how I see things. I don’t explain very well and I get frustrated and irrational quite easily. Luckily he’s patient and lets me control the flow of conversation a lot of the time. I can be testy and stop talking for a while and he doesn’t react much. Stoic. That’s really the word for him.

I worry about what I do to Noah. I worry about how I have changed him. Will change him. I feel guilty for my mercurial lashing out. He seems to think it is tolerable.

I’ve been reading a very long winded book series. Outlander by Diana Gabaldon. I haven’t read it since before I had kids. I think the last time was when I was on bed rest when I was pregnant with Shanna. I reread everything.

I have a different perspective on the comfort of a partner now. In a couple of months Noah and I will have been married for six years. That is far longer than I have consecutively lived with anyone else in my life. I think I only lost about a year and a half of time with my mom over the eighteen years of my childhood. But it was splotchy in pieces. It will be a while before Noah is the person I have lived with absolutely the longest. I think I have lived with him for more time than any of my siblings.

I live with people who like me. It fucking freaks me out. It must be because I am playing the right role right now. I had better not fuck this up. I hope they don’t find out I am bad.

When I was pregnant with Shanna a close friend told me that someone like me (meaning with my mental health issues) had no business becoming a parent. I couldn’t do a good job. I feel haunted by that prediction. Is it a prophecy? I’m aware that the baby shit is convenient for people to focus on. It’s this weird, isolated, obsessive part of life. Everything Feels So Important! Until it’s your third kid. Then you need to move on with your fucking life and things are more relaxed. Anyway.

I have felt very actively depressed all day. I am swimming through molasses. This week is action packed for us. I should probably go to bed. I have to get up and run as early as possible. Taylor is coming tomorrow night and I would like Noah to come home from work early-ish. But I procrastinate. Because I’m too busy singing along with The Verve Pipe and those stupid “Freshman”.

D- I think of you. And that stupid boy we dated. Scott. We can’t be held responsible. We fell in love in the first place. It’s kind of funny that the boy turned out to not be worth it at all but I kept you. I’m glad I have you.

Memory lane

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I had dinner with my ex last night. That was interesting. I asked him a lot of questions and he answered as best he could. I told him point blank that I’m glad the kids thing worked out or I would have kicked myself for the rest of my life for leaving him. I actually kind of wonder if he lost a little bit of his sparkle for me last night. I think I had forgotten a lot of things. His opinion is the only opinion. I remember why we didn’t argue: I bit my tongue a lot. There was no point in discussing controversial topics because he has already made up his mind and he will be condescending, dismissive, and really pretty rude the entire time you talk about something that isn’t his thing. For example: organic farming. He believes it is going to be the destruction of the human race. He won’t talk about the problems from animal feed lots or mono-crops. He thinks there aren’t any problems. Right. I let it go because I don’t care about converting him.

Noah listens to any crack brained thing I bring up in a polite way and when he is doubtful he carefully says, “Can I see some of where you found this information?” If I’m using an idiotic source he lets me down gently. It’s nice to be reminded that for the first time in my life I live with someone who genuinely thinks of me as an intelligent person. I had forgotten. I had forgotten how much everyone before him made me feel like I should shut up and sit down and just let them speak because they are smarter than me. I didn’t always do it but I felt it.

There has been a lot of research lately on how hard it is to change peoples minds. The less smart someone is the more likely they are to be really entrenched in everything they know. Holy crap Tom is narrow minded. He knows what he knows and believes there is no validity in any point of view he disagrees with. It’s fascinating.

He wants to live in a Sci Fi future. He thinks things will be every increasingly technical and people will move to increasingly thinking jobs. I think that is folly. If you look a distribution of intelligence, 50% of people are below average. You really think that everyone in the world should sit on their ass and do a computer job? Really? Not all of us would even enjoy that let alone be capable. I think we should be encouraging people to work more with their bodies if they show the slightest inclination. We are a nation of people who are desperately unfit and unhealthy. The solution is not more sloth.

He wants to have fun. He doesn’t want to create anything in particular. His job is creative enough for him. Every year or so he has a new hardware design project. He is designing things that use basically entirely outside components. He’s figuring out how to assemble the right configuration of after market parts. He doesn’t have much desire to really grow the business. He wants to keep very busy (he’s a work-a-holic in my “I lived with him” opinion) at work and make a lot of money so he can have more and more fun. That means racing his Porsche, tying up and sexually controlling women, and working. I told him to go get a vasectomy so he can make damn sure he never accidentally ends up a parent because he wouldn’t be a good one.

Tom is a just fine person. I think I just got over him romantically. It was sudden. I no longer look up to him. He doesn’t have a talent or a skill I respect any more. That was weird to notice. I am now how old he was when we met. I feel disappointed looking at what he has done with his life in the last twelve years since we met. He doesn’t have to give a shit about my disappointment, in fact he doesn’t. He has enjoyed his life. He wants to keep doing the same shit for another thirty or forty years before he croaks. He is perfectly happy. Another woman will always come along, right? SM is more interesting with new people any way. I don’t want that life and I’m really glad I only stayed for four years. I have now been married for longer than I dated Tom. Noah is a larger influence on my character than Tom was. I’m glad for that.

I asked Tom what it was like living with someone as crazy as me. He said he was unaware of it. I cried alone and he didn’t know it existed. He didn’t know I was unstable.

I cut and was suicidal a great deal while I lived with him. I was still interacting with my family a fair bit. I was quite unstable. He didn’t notice. He didn’t fucking notice. You have got to be fucking kidding me. Seriously? You are that self-involved? You never noticed that your partner of four years was unstable emotionally? It makes me think I should feel a lot more confident in my acting skills. Maybe I am even harder to read than Noah says. I cultivate being hard to read. I practice. Really. I do not want to give away the intensity of my emotions when I am around people. It’s dangerous to be noticed for your strong emotions. I didn’t know I was that good though. Tom remembers that we had a lot of fun and got along well. That’s good.

Tom has never read any of my writing. He doesn’t want to know what goes on in my head. That may be brilliant of him. I didn’t understand how much my writing has always contained a plea for someone to read it and come talk to me about it. Noah does. Noah is the only fucking person who is interested in crawling as deeply into my head as possible. It was really wonderful to be reminded what it is like to be in the room with someone who requires me to have a brick wall between myself and him. Noah is interested in what I am thinking and feeling, pretty much at any point. Sometimes he is distracted with other bits of life but if I write it down and leave it for him he always catches up. He has read my entire archive on every blogging site I have ever used. Multiple times. That makes me cry. Oh my G-d he actually loves me. He thinks I am worth that kind of time and attention. I write a fuck ton and I’ve been blogging for over nine years. I need to poke around old storage disks and see if I can find my g-blog archive. I’m not sure if I still have it and that is sad. I should probably make another LJ book so that I have a copy of it. Other people write in paper journals and keep them.

All of a sudden I feel a little spark of interest in finding out what I actually like about bdsm. I spent a lot of time last night feeling like I’m just not a pervert any more. I have no interest in the kind of stuff Tom is into. I’m not interested in being degraded for someone else’s amusement any more. I think the joke is kind of thin at this point. Yes, yes, I know that I am disgusting and should suffer. Blah blah. I’m tired of the role I had to fill. I’m tired of having to denigrate my own thinking abilities in order to tolerate being bossed around by someone who is so not smarter than me. He knows different things than me and he believes that the only important things to know are the things he knows. He thinks my things aren’t worthy of much respect. That is probably hyperbole. He doesn’t bother to notice that my things are there so he doesn’t have to listen to me on any topic because I’m not very educated. Or something. “Sure I can “listen” to you blather on about something idiotic while I roll my eyes and don’t really listen.” It’s really very similar to how I feel with Alex. To be fair Alex has dramatically improved in this area in one on one conversations, in particular since he started working on it with his therapist. It’s still a thing.

Tom told me he hasn’t done Daddy/daughter play since me and he hasn’t been interested in rape play either. For all of the years I have known Noah he has been staunchly uninterested in Daddy/daughter play–not his kink. After he read the book and he understood the emotional power it has for me he is suddenly interested. Rape play has been a major component of our life. Tom didn’t think I was a fine instrument to be played. He wanted to have fun with a buddy. Noah is consciously working on helping me change because we both want me to. It was weird to understand that at this really deep level last night. Tom knows very little about me. He knows hand wavey bad stuff happened. He knows a few details and will admit knowing them after a lot of pressure. Holy shit. That is actually kind of amazing. I remember Tom’s life. I pieced it together very carefully. I have a whole timeline constructed in my head about his family and school experiences from very young. I wanted to know him so I could serve him better.

We went to McDonald’s a lot, probably every week. Tom wants to rest when he is at home. He wants to eat on the go as he dashes to and from work and parties. It’s a lifestyle. So one time I asked for chicken nuggets and he asked what kind of sauce I wanted. I responded with, “The usual” and he said, “What’s the usual?” and I could feel my face involuntarily fall. We had been dating for multiple years at that point. “Sweet and Sour.” There was some little flick of memory in his face as he recalled my voice saying that over and over for years in his memory. He looked kind of guilty but turned around to the cashier without saying anything.

If I walk into any restaurant with Noah that I have ever been to he can tell me which foods I enjoyed and for what reasons and which drinks I particularly liked or disliked. Sometimes he makes me cry. It’s kind of embarrassing in public. Noah knows what I like. I think that is the most amazing thing in the whole world. He pays so much attention to me. How can a human being be capable of paying so much attention to me? He has a catalog of my smiles. He knows what kinds of memories go with which expressions because he looks at me and asks what I am thinking over and over.

Having dinner with Tom was intense. And then not. And then it was kind of boring. I couldn’t have a conversation with him because he wasn’t interested in my point of view. He was dismissive and cold. He didn’t mean to be. He could speak perfectly politely as long as he could feel it was entirely “fun”. He wanted to have an agreeable conversation and he was perfectly happy to bulldoze and be rude and ensure that I didn’t conversationally disagree with him. I am so happy that I now live with someone who values my opinions even when he doesn’t agree with me. It was really nice to see that I have found someone who suits me far better. I am glad I kept looking.

I have to go run.

Perspective is everything.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

second chances

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There are a bunch of people I “should” email right now but I’m not going to. I don’t have a lot of time free today and I have stuff in my head I want to get out. Maybe I’ll respond to emails later.

I have screwed up a lot of money stuff this month. I’m experiencing a lot of anxiety around that. It’s all stuff that will even out and be ok in the long run. I feel stupid though. I feel wasteful and inattentive and bad. I think it might be harder that Noah isn’t mad. I spend a lot of time feeling like I don’t deserve someone who will be this nice to me. He really is just plain nice. I feel like this nasty bitch he got saddled with. I can’t understand why he would take pleasure in the company of a miserable harpy. That’s what I feel like when I get to the point of being able to loudly put my foot down about my boundaries. I don’t know how to do it in a friendly and loving way.

I ignore things until I blow up. That’s not useful. I’m handling things badly with Sarah because I don’t know what to do. I’ve said my part of things, badly and with hostility because I’m a piece of shit, and now I wait. There is nothing else I can do. I’m not good at waiting. Waiting makes me edgy. Waiting makes me feel like someone doesn’t think I deserve to be answered which escalates my fuss. I feel ignored and unimportant. Ignoring a situation I am heavily involved with means that I feel ignored. And that makes me angrier and harder to talk to. It’s not a great cycle.

I’m reading a book about successful marriages. I’m generalizing a lot of the advice to other areas of my life. I’m not very good at a lot of parts of relationships. That makes sense. You learn how to have relationships by watching the people in your family. I’m worried about my explosive anger because even if I never do anything that qualifies as textbook abuse to my kids I’m still teaching them how to be an adult. I’m still teaching them how to have relationships. I feel quite guilty that someone as fucked up and pathetic as me is their example. I’m sorry I’m not better at this.

When I was pregnant with Shanna a long time friend told me that she thought someone with my emotional problems has no business being a mother. I don’t think I will ever get that out of my head. I feel like such a horrible person. How dare someone as pathetic and awful and broken as me think they have the right to pass on how to be a person. It seems like such a horrible offense. It can never be taken back.

It’s hard knowing that I’m not the only person who thinks I am a piece of shit. I’m not the only person who thinks I am awful. I’m not the only person who thinks I am bad. I don’t really want my children to grow up knowing beyond the shadow of a doubt that someone like them deserves to be looked down on and loathed.

One of the things I fucked up this month was billpay. I sent extra checks to the maid who quit in December. I sent her emails asking her to not deposit the money. She deposited the money and told me it was all my fault and I brought it on myself. I investigated my options. I probably can’t get the money back. She is currently in a homeless shelter. I could press charges and make it so she can’t get a decent job. She graduates from college in February. I can’t have that on my soul. I can’t take her life away from her over this. She broke the law. She committed a crime. But I think she committed the kind of crime I can’t judge her for. She is trying desperately to survive. I can’t turn around and make that harder for her. The deck is already stacked against her in every way. I can’t live with having ruined her life. Yes, she brought it on herself. I still get to decide what kind of person I am.

I don’t want to be angry. I don’t want to go after vengeance. Justice, sure. Not vengeance. I can’t get justice by ruining the life of a twenty year old homeless girl. That’s not justice.

I have a hard time feeling like I’m a sucker. I’m doing this because when I was fifteen the police officer told me very clearly that he should arrest me for grand theft auto. Instead he called my mom. That was a time and a place where punishing me wouldn’t have improved my life. If I had been “held accountable” for my actions it probably would have prevented most of the good that came later. I was given a chance. I was told very clearly what the consequences of my actions should be. Then he let me go home and sob and cry and feel like a terrible person. I have never fucked up that big again. From that day forward it wouldn’t be a mistake again. It wouldn’t be a fuck up. It would be a choice to not care about how my actions affect other people. I can’t live with that on my conscious.

It’s going to be hard to stop reacting to Sarah in angry ways but I need to do it. I need to do it for me first and foremost. Sarah is one of my closest friends and I don’t want to lose her. I love her very much. The fact that I can’t handle living with her does not make her a piece of shit. It just means I can’t live with her. I’m having a hard time because with my family in order to keep myself safe from them I have to be actively angry. When something isn’t working for me I don’t know how to stop it other than this extreme anger. I have to feel like my personhood is being insulted. But Sarah isn’t insulting me. She isn’t trying to hurt me. She is trying to get through her life as best she can. Sometimes her ways don’t work for me. If I manage to remove the franticness from my longing for family I can feel ok with the fact that I just can’t live with Sarah.

Sarah is amazing and wonderful. She is talented and kind. She is patient. She is also not me. Her priorities are not mine. That’s probably a good thing. As I am going full-speed-ahead on my life I can’t expect someone with wildly different priorities to be able to just do the things I want done. It’s not reasonable. A lot of why I am so angry is because I wanted this to work so much. I feel so much disappointment. I don’t react to that well. That’s on the long list of things I need to improve on and fast. I have already done major damage to our relationship. If I don’t want to be responsible for ending our friendship I need to get my shit together now. Sarah will not be able to survive my hostility. She doesn’t have that in her. If I want to still have her in my life in ten years I need to grow the fuck up.

What do I want from a relationship with Sarah? Instead of being so angry about the parts I don’t want it is time for me to figure out what I really get from the relationship and work towards that. There is so much good there. I’m really not in a place in my life where I should be pissing all over a good thing.

Breakfast is ready. Cinnamon bread french toast. My husband loves me.

Mostly parenting babbling

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I’m trying something different this morning, my wonderful daughter Shanna is cuddled up next to me on the couch watching Fraggle Rock. I’m going to see if I can usefully write with her in the room. I’m not sure. I feel very self-conscious about how often I cry in the process of writing. Often I’m sobbing the whole time. I’m kind of weird about crying around my kids. I do it sometimes, but I go to great lengths to avoid it because I feel so terrible about my moodiness. I wish I could manage consistency. I think the only baseline I could have would be anger.

That is what I am having so much trouble with. I feel guilty that I will never be able to be a placid, mellow, just happy mom. That’s not an option this lifetime. I am often happy. I am sometimes mellow. But I am also quick to anger. My anger burns hot. I get very sad. I may be one of the only women I know who isn’t bothered by the term “hysterical”. Even though I know it has nothing to do with my uterus, I really do get a kind of freaked out that men don’t get. At least not in places I can see. Sometimes it seems like I am the example of what is wrong with women. I should try to be more stable. More like the men in my life and all. Because the women in my life are more stable than me, but not by much. I’m sure that’s not a nice thing to say.

I’ve been really enjoying reading Austen novels lately. That’s funny because I avoided them like the plague when I was in college for that English degree. I’m enjoying seeing how very slow their lives are. It feels like it is giving me permission to strive for less. If I want to be a developed and accomplished person I need to have a lot of time spent in my house just improving myself. If I am running around with too many things I am obliged to get done in a day I will spin my wheels in place and not improve much. I’ll be too angry and frustrated to get the lessons from things I want to get.

Writing with Shanna here is different. I’m being vague and that’s funny because she can’t read yet. I’m not trying to spare her. If I want Shanna to grow up reading I need to read in front of her. If I want her to grow up being curious and interested in everything she can reach her hands out and touch I have to be free to walk with her and talk about the things she sees. I have to be non-distracted enough to focus on her questions. If I’m busy then I snap at her to leave me alone. I don’t want that to be our relationship.

I want my daughter to be one of the blessed few. I’m not striving for a “normal” childhood. I don’t think I could create one if I wanted. But she will grow up in this cocoon of love and acceptance and constant education. That’s why I am drawn to Unschooling. We really do sit and talk about things happening all day long. I’m learning how much I know as I talk to her. I know a great deal more about biology than I would have guessed. I am thinking about getting a few books so I can learn more.

Now I am in the garage. Calli called for me after that last paragraph and I spent an hour nursing and cuddling. I got to sit and think about how weird and defensive I feel right now. I’m often not sure what I am writing about until I am done. Randomly: last night I was thanked for writing the post about admiring women. I was weird and awkward and I almost cried. But I didn’t. Self control! I have it!

I don’t think I know how to be a mother, exactly. I’m not sure I know what that means. But I do know how to talk to my children as if they are humans-in-progress and someday, not that long from now, they will know everything I know and more. I tell Shanna every day that my job is to teach her everything I can so that she can be any kind of grown up she wants, regardless of my preferences. I talk to her constantly about how different people have different things they like and she gets to decide how much she will agree with my opinions. I feel weird about how often she wants to be like me. It feels like a lot of pressure for me to think hard about why I have the opinions I have. I don’t want her to have opinions based on my ignorance and bigotry. I don’t want her to become an angry person because I am angry.

I feel like there is a certain level of anger that is normal and occasional and everyone gets to have. I have no idea what that line is because I am often derided for any show of anger about any subject. There doesn’t seem to be a consistent scale. Or, whatever the scale is, it is also combined with the rule “And you are never to express any anger where any one else can hear you.” I missed the rule if it exists.

I often feel like it is perfectly appropriate for me to be angry, but I should probably max out at seven when I express it and I seem to read to other people as much higher than that. What am I teaching? The funny thing is, I don’t have much desire to change this behavior pattern of mine for the sake of the relationships I’m missing out on because people are uncomfortable with my anger. At this stage of my life I really and truly have to just be ok with making people uncomfortable, period. I don’t want to teach my children to do the same thing though. Or, rather, I want them to be able to make a decision for themselves. I want them to have an understanding that I may get intensely angry but most people don’t and most people dislike it. They get to have their own lives and figure out if they are angry or not.

Calli is at a different stage of development. She has grown increasingly cuddly and desirous of physical contact with me. She is starting to imprint pretty rapidly. She is absolutely copying my physical movements, facial expressions, and tone of voice. I have to stop yelling. I don’t actually want to live in a house where yelling happens so quickly and constantly. That places it on my head.

I’m dealing with a lot of my sources of anger. I am going to decide by the end of today if I think I am willing to do the books for the business. The answer is probably. I would like to have a way to be involved with the community. The owners and managers would become people I communicated with more. I would be able to go visit when I wanted. I was told that it isn’t reasonable for me to spend my only off-time doing more dishes. I feel valued. Thanks D.

I am figuring out my limits with regards to house cleaning and how I will manage that. I can’t live in a big mess and Shanna was born messy. When I make sure that Shanna and Calli are the only ones I’m cleaning up after, it’s a different conversation. This is my job. This is what I am doing with my life. I am caring for my children. That means I do have the entire obligation for the tornado. I’m talking to Shanna about why I clean. I show her how I do it. I am increasingly asking her for help. Often she is told, “I will clean up everything but _________. If you want to go to the park today, you need to help me clean up.” I work hard at encouraging her to play with one thing at a time and clean it up when you are done. But that’s not how Shanna plays. When Shanna plays the whole damn house is part of the game and every item of clothing and block and blanket and item of furniture is part of the story. It’s amazing to me that she really and truly has an explanation of what everything is doing. It’s not that she’s messy. She is highly creative. She needs to interact with a lot of items in order to fill her need to manipulate things. I’m trying very hard to talk to her about cleaning in a neutral tone of voice. I only manage when I’m alone.

When I’m not alone I’m angry that the other adults aren’t helping and it creeps into my voice. When I’m alone with the kids I don’t expect any one else to be doing anything so I don’t have a reason to be upset. I’m just muddling along doing my job. I care about doing my job well. When I worked at Ross Dress for Less as a teenager I was a ridiculously good employee. I kept my areas spotless and I always covered more area than I was technically assigned. I knew they weren’t giving me enough work because they were assigning work based on how much other people could get done. I have never been able to tell if I have much more energy and ability to work than other people or if other people are lazy. I think that most of it is that other people just aren’t as invested in (thing of the moment) as I am. I was told over and over and over, “If you are going to do a job, do it right.” And I consider so many parts of life, and therefore work, not optional. If it’s not optional and you have to do a job right… that means you put 100% of your energy into everything you touch, right?

This is hard to sustain. I feel like I am deficient as a person if I leave a job half done. I do it sometimes but I beat myself up for a long time. I’m learning how to put the housework into categories for myself. Right now the living room is a disaster. It looks like it hasn’t been cleaned in weeks. The entire house was completely spotless and I vacuumed and dusted and swept and mopped yesterday. I just can’t get upset. I have times of the day where I am supposed to get up and clean until the house is clean again. Then I am supposed to stop at a certain time. The house always has areas I could be doing more in. I need to deal with filing again, for example. Right now I am trying to not worry about those things because I have (deleted future stressful event) coming up. Lots of feelings.

But it’s time to get back to where I was before I dropped my basket. My kids are getting easier to care for. Calli is still a baby, but barely. She’s very nearly a kid. I realized this week that I need to get my sign language books out. She’s not going to match Shanna’s early learning curve so I need to teach her more signs. She wants to learn them but I haven’t been modeling them this time. That is something I should do. Calli clearly has opinions and wants to communicate. I haven’t been giving her enough scaffolding for being able to do that. I get the impression that her tantrums would disappear if she could just bloody say what she is thinking. Development is an interesting thing.

I’m developing an increasing appreciation of having two girls. I think I would have been the kind of asshole who thought they had boys and girls figured out because they have one of each. Calli is emerging more by the day and I find her so fascinating. She moves like me. By which I mean, she moves like my mother. I see so much family resemblance in her. I see my brothers. I don’t remember what my father looked like, not really. I don’t see my sister. She strongly resembles her biological father. But Calli has the same skull shape as me. I have a picture of me at thirteen months up on the wall in the hallway. Right next to Calli’s six week pictures. It looks like it could be the same kid.

Part of the reason this feels weird is because Shanna has always felt like a mini-me. But Shanna and Calli don’t share any of the things that make Calli feel so very startlingly like me. It feels like a strange split personality situation. They each took very different things from me. Shanna has a lot more of my personality. Shanna acts like me on my very best days. She is friendly and empathetic and eager to bring joy to people. Calli looks and moves like me but is much more reserved. She is very clearly going to be an introvert. She’s seventeen months old and she needs alone time. It’s funny because I have only started to recognize how clearly I need that as an adult. So Calli then feels like more a reflection of my moody and difficult days. That terrifies me.

I have a friend who has a very troubled relationship with her teenage daughter. I’m terrified. I’m terrified of how I will manage to get through the next two decades of trying to impersonate a stable and good mother so that my adult children will want to know me. I don’t exactly take that as a given. When I talk about my fears it’s funny how people always say, “Your kids obviously know they are loved.” My mommy does love me. She just couldn’t take care of me. And when she didn’t take care of me she told me it was my fault bad things happened to me. I’m not afraid of my kids not knowing that I love them. A lot of the reason that incestuous families are so intense is because there is just so gosh. darn. much. love. I’m not worried about my children knowing that I love them. I’m worried about my children only being exposed to age appropriate things. I’m worried about my children being told that they are to blame for circumstances beyond their control.

My children are bright and curious and indulged in activities that encourage both. That means they are going to fuck up a lot as they figure out how everything works. I get to decide what their experience of fucking up is. Do they grow up learning that perfectionist attitude of: if I ever fail I am a Failure? I think not. Everyone makes mistakes. Kids and grown ups alike. Shanna broke a glass yesterday. I can’t remember the last time she broke a glass. I think it has only happened once before. I didn’t yell. I didn’t shame. I didn’t say anything nasty. I said, “Ah man! Ok, that’s why I ask you not to set your glass on the edge of the table. Can you look around and see how far the glass shards went? Don’t get off your chair! I’ll get the broom.” Then we talked about what it means that we have broken glass on the floor. We talked about safe clean up. We talked about where glasses are supposed to sit on the table. And she got a hug and a kiss and a hope that I got all the glass shards up because I don’t want my sweet girls getting cuts on their feet. I did it right. I don’t do that every time.

But isn’t teaching interactions one of those things I’m supposed to be teaching? Ok. So I don’t do it right every time. How badly do I fuck up? How often? I don’t know. How badly do I fuck up? Not very. Not really. How often? Enh, depends on what you mean. How often do I use a tone of voice I regret? Daily. How often do I say something I regret? That’s hard to measure. It goes in bursts. I’ll have like five of them in two days because I’ll feel guilty and off-kilter after the first one. Then I won’t have one for a long time. How often do I do something I regret? Very rarely. I don’t spank not because of some crunchy ideal but because I don’t think I could use it appropriately as a consistent tool and there are much more effective tools out there. My big punishment is three minutes of time out. I lost my temper and kicked things where the kids could see once. And then I dealt with the consequences. If it happens again then there can be a reevaluation of my monster status. Everyone gets to fuck up once.

Right now I feel like I am drowning in my feelings of obligations. I can’t have interactions with people unless I am working to earn them. I’m not sure exactly what the mechanism of this is for me. But I sure treat it in-my-head like I am required to always work in exchange for someone tolerating my company. I must be paying for the effort of dealing with me. I’ll make dinner. I’ll wash your dishes. I’ll do the driving even though you are a single person and this is going to be a nightmare for me with my two kids.

I have friends who have helped me massively. I now have this huge feeling of guilt. I have been in this needy phase of life for a few years now and I feel terrible that I require so much help and I can give so little. I will never discharge this guilt though. And I don’t want to pass it on. I don’t want to feel it. I feel so much less deserving of help than other people. Other people don’t have to rely on their friends so much. Other people have families. My family wouldn’t really be able to help me even if they wanted to. Sure, they could provide “babysitting” but it would be in a neglectful and abusive environment. No thanks. I feel so much jealousy and rage that other people have families and I don’t. To that end I’m supporting Noah’s fledgling efforts to introduce our kids to his family. They aren’t perfect, but they are something. And they want to love the girls. I don’t want my kids to grow up like me. I don’t want them to grow up knowing that there are all these relatives but none of them have any interest in them.

All these feelings around housework and obligation and love and caring for people and physical limitations and support and abandonment… it’s all one big mess. I’m going to be an asshole for a minute and say that acts of service is probably my primary ‘spoken’ love language. Having someone see that I am tired and offer to carry my load? That is a lot of what lets me feel loved and seen. I’m not invisible. Yes, I am happy to do all this work because I love you. But I need to be coaxed too. I need to be coddled too. I am tired too.

Noah spent a while last night laying out his timeline on burdening me. We talked about how it has gone in the past, how it is currently, and how things will go in the future. Noah went down a long list of reasons explaining why he thinks he needs to just step up and do a bunch of things right now. Noah specifically talked about the things I have done for him and why he wants to turn around and help me. I can’t ask for that help. I can’t direct it. I don’t know why. I know that is a failure on my part. Noah explained in detail that he has learned over time to notice a variety of signs that my difficulty level is much higher than I am expressing. On one hand it feels kind of weird being decoded and on the other hand I didn’t know how much I was apparently hiding or lying about or something.

Yesterday I found out that one person recognizes that I am past my breaking point and I am going to get help. In the past week I have made it such that I am not going to be providing much help to anyone but the kids any more. It feels needlessly extreme, but it seems to be necessary for me. I can’t be one of the modern women who gets everything done for everyone. I don’t want to figure out how to rescue an unproductive day. I want to revel in days where we spend all day lying in the sun talking about all the things I see. I talk about plants and clouds and buildings. I talk about how people behave. I talk about how things are made. I talk about metal and plastic and rubber. I talk about what it means to be responsible. Unproductive days mean I am too busy enjoying what I am doing. I can live with that.

I want my daughters to learn that for everything there is a season. Some day they will work. I will almost certainly work at some point. I’ll get bored without something to do. But for now what we are doing is learning together. I have to spend all the time that I can with my kids learning about the world because there is so much to learn. How will we get it all done?

I have let Shanna have basically unfettered access to the iPad. She watches a lot of Fraggle Rock, Thomas, She-Ra and then she has her movies. She is increasingly playing with games. She is doing the letter tracing. She’s fascinated with youtube and what she can learn there. I uhhh don’t know how she found nail polish and makeup tutorials, but she has had fun playing with those. I don’t let her have access to youtube on the iPad. That has to be used with an adult because bad links pop up. I feel comfortable with this now because she uses it for a variety of things and she is incredibly physically active. She likes to go on multiple mile walks with me. I keep telling Calli that iPads are three year old toys. We’ll see how long that goes.

So much is in my head and so much of it I can’t write about. Life is really complicated. I keep telling myself that everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.

From here on out Noah is the person I have lived with the longest of anyone in my life. With the exception of Jenny and our other housemate, I don’t have contact with anyone I have ever lived with. Ok, sometimes I run into Tom, but our lives have diverged. Noah is the only carrier of my story. Noah is the only one I have to worry about being appropriate for. Wow. That’s actually an interesting thought. When I’m having my ambient feelings of guilt for my behavior, Noah is the only one I will really have to worry about. I have the kids for ~17 more years and then they are adults.

That’s a lot more pressure than it seems like. A specific kind of pressure I don’t do well with. I feel I owe my children a decent childhood. I brought them into a world they didn’t make. I have obligations to them. I have a very different relationship with Noah. I owe him nothing but what I choose to owe him. Yet in every way that matters I would be a fool to not see Noah as “rescuing” me. I feel like he took a chance on a stupid gutter kid, and this is how I repay him? By being needy and whiny and incompetent and angry? I feel like he is getting a bad deal. And that makes me feel savagely angry that all I have to give is a bad deal. I am a bad deal.

I was certainly a bad deal for Sarah. I failed her. I need far more help than she can give and I can’t help feeling angry about it. That’s not her fault. That’s not something she is actually to blame for. She’s not doing anything wrong. But I feel it. And I take it out on her. And that’s wrong. I am wrong. I don’t know why I need so much help. It doesn’t seem like other mothers I know get even as much help as I get. They don’t seem to fail as often. They seem to be able to handle getting things done in a lot of different places. I can’t track it. I need to have my responsibilities all lie pretty close to one source.

There are a lot of things I don’t know or understand. Right now I know that the sun is up and the sky is a beautiful blue. The clouds are all drifting out of sight. It’s been raining for a few days here. For once I don’t hear a bunch of people whining about rain. Almost everyone who has commented on the weather has been grateful for it. I feel like for one storm we are all collectively breathing a sigh of thanks. We need the rain. The drought is ongoing. I hope the clouds come back. We need more rain. Besides, when it rains I don’t have to go outside and water. I’ve made a bunch of progress on the front yard recently. Now that the rain washed all those obnoxious white rocks clean, I should probably take pictures. It’s looking more like a garden. I don’t know when I will get the playhouse made. I screwed up billpay and we had some unexpected expenses. The house part of the budget is overspent for many months. I’m sad about that. Oh well. It just means I have more time to dream about it. My kids are getting the house and yard I would have enjoyed growing up in. I hope they like the experience. I’m trying to not be oppressive about it.

Time to go inside.

monogamy

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Monogamy. It’s a weird concept for me. I need to spend the rest of my life learning how to have relationships with people without having sex with them. I think that will be good for me. Weird and awkward, but good. What does that mean though?

I hesitate to talk about this. I don’t want to eat crow later. Mmmmm crow. Never say never. I remember a friend of mine, years ago, telling me, “Of course I don’t like that he plays with other women. But I want to play with other men so I shut up and put up with it.” I think I’d rather not play with other people than feel like I have to bite back my actual opinion. I don’t want to have to learn masking behavior that I use only at certain times. That feels like lying.

Noah playing with other people makes me cry. It reminds me that I don’t ever get to be special. Which is stupid, right? He married me. He didn’t marry anyone else and he is not going to leave me. Why isn’t that enough to convince me? Sex is so mixed up for me. Near as I can tell most people have enormous sexual hang ups without having to be abused starting in toddlerhood.

I don’t want to feel like I have to have sex with people in order to be interesting and I do. I really do. I don’t like that part of myself very much. I feel rather disgusting, really. This is bordering on a lot of things I’m deeply conflicted about. I am an exhibitionist. No one reading this is surprised. I’m not sure how that ties in with a lot of my need-to-feel-available.

I think I want to find out how forever feels. I want to realize that I’ve probably kissed someone else for the last time. Really. He’s it. Forever. I’m kind of excited. I should decide that I deserve to be touched only by someone who wants me enough to actually want all of me. Not just that piece of me.

How am I going to connect with all the people I want to connect with? It’s kind of terrifying, really. What do I have to offer? I don’t know. I have spent my adulthood with people who believe that monogamy is terrible and limiting and to be avoided at all costs. I feel kind of ashamed that I want to keep Noah all to myself.

I feel like I am doing something wrong by joining the Embargo and refusing to sleep with anyone ever again. It’s not fair that all these guys want sex and I won’t sleep with them. This is not a guilt I should carry. It should never enter into my mind that it isn’t fair that this nice guy isn’t getting _____ need met. Life isn’t fair. I bear no obligation to anyone but Noah for sexual needs.

That’s complicated too. I think in some ways monogamy is terrifying because it means that we will both have to be a lot more honest about what we want. If we want to get our needs met, really met we have to talk about them even when it is hard. Even when he’s afraid to say it to me. Even when I’m afraid to say it to him. I do not need to agree to do more than I do in order to be GGG. I need to say “no” a lot more and have more ownership of my body. We need to find a way to meet our mutual needs without me biting my lip and doing things that feel bad. I can’t hold Noah accountable for the consequences of his actions if I withhold information. I can’t decide it is proof that he doesn’t care when he doesn’t notice.

I can’t relax and enjoy this relationship while I feel like I am constantly preparing to be paranoid about Noah running off to fuck someone else. And that is how I feel in an open marriage. It feels like every day is just a count down until he gets to do that again. I feel like I am always doing something wrong by wanting to spend time with him. I should be giving him lots of time away from me to go do and be lots of things away from me because obviously he wants to reserve a lot of himself away from me. He is waiting for someone better than me to give that part of himself to. I don’t blame him. I constantly feel like I am waiting for him to go find someone more understanding than me to go talk to. Someone who is entirely on his side.

I have signed on to be completely dependent on Noah for the next twenty years. No, I am not going to relax my hypervigilance as long as I know that is coming some day. It means I have to steal myself that whole period until that day comes because I will not be able to bear the loss otherwise. I have to create a big hole in my heart and leave it that way and never let you touch it or come near it. Because that is where I will have to go when you are fucking someone else. It’s the same place I go when I sleep with other people. It is a space outside of me, outside of my life. I don’t really bond with casual sex. I have an experience. It is outside of me.

I’m afraid of monogamy because Noah really likes to take it to 11. If I have clamped down so hard on him that he isn’t allowed to go play with other people, how much will I egg him on to do because I feel guilty? I don’t know how to do this in a way that is good for me. Nonmonogamy gives me the eternal out that I can say, “Fine you have this part of you that I can’t deal with… take it somewhere else.” I never have to deal with my own actual limits that way. I never have to deal with telling him, “Fine but no really you have to stop at 8 because my jaw hurts.” That’s harder. Telling him no is a lot easier than having to figure out what I can do.

I’m afraid because I think we are going to have some difficult periods and a lot of crying over sex. I think this is going to be hard. I think we will both have to do a lot of forgiving one another for mistakes and that’s hard to think about. It’s weird to be discussing monogamy after five years of marriage. We really know what we are getting into, you know? Only we don’t. Because things will be very different in twenty years. We will be very different people. Can I really require that he never again touch anyone else intimately? I’m not going to do poly-anything. If he is going to follow my boundaries well, I feel weird about that.

I feel very pressured as the gate keeper. It’s weird to feel so conflicted about this. On one hand I feel uncomfortable with the idea of keeping him from having sex and other hand I’m not thrilled about feeling required to have sex absolutely as much as he wants forever. I don’t have any idea what my limits are.

I don’t like the way I dissociate rather than deal with feeling uncomfortable during sex. I have a hard time dealing with my anxious feelings in the moment. It’s hard to say when I really don’t want to be pushed. He likes pushing so much. It’s so weird to me that he worries about me wanting him. I worry about wanting him so much that I break myself trying to meet needs I can’t meet.

Because the thing is, I don’t actually think there are needs of his I can’t meet. Because I think that if he picks the right days, I probably can actually meet all of his needs. I like to go to 11 too. I feel scared that he isn’t going to be willing to walk around the cracks. I really do like the image of myself as a mosaic. My picture was broken so long ago and put back together so clumsily that it is an entirely new picture. On even median days I like me.

I don’t think he can really just learn a “set of triggers” and avoid them. It’s quicksand. And it moves. I want to find out how it moves. I want to be able to try things many times and know that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I want to be brave enough to not be angry when I say, “Ok not tonight.” I’m not failing if I say that. I’m not failing if my body is not up to something on a given day. I am not failing if sometimes I need to be held instead of hit. It’s hard to admit that I’m not instinctively automatically in the same place as Noah.

It feels like I don’t deserve him. Because I cannot do that. Because I cannot just accept whatever he wants to do whenever he wants to do it. I feel like I cannot require monogamy because I will never be good enough to satisfy him. I will never be enough. I will always fail. I’m scared.

I’m terrified to believe him. I’m so afraid that I will believe him that he wants to be monogamous. Only in twenty years things will be different and I will be expected to just understand. People evolve. Needs change.

I know that I will want to sleep with people. That’s just a fact. I’m not actually in denial about that. I will want to do it a lot. It will feel compulsive for the rest of my life. But I’m going to choose not to do it. I don’t think that I am actually served by following my pointer through life. My compass is broken. I need to think about the long-term and understand that sleeping with other people does not feed any of my needs (ok hyperbole for effect but the problems outweigh gains) and does not meet any of my goals.

Ok, maybe the hookers in Vegas. Because I can get behind you being motivated to attain that salary. Especially because the deal was always that they would be there in case I wore out. You haven’t done it yet. I don’t safeword.

Bonding

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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.

The good bits are really good

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So I’m reading about human pair-bonding habits and the last page made me think of Noah.

Helen Fisher and colleagues (2002:415-17) argued that romantic love includes a consistent suite of traits that cut across cultures. In a sample of Japanese and American respondents, they found thirteen characteristics that were reliably associated with intense romantic love, with few differences between the two samples. A partial list includes:

obsessive, ‘intrusive thinking’

thinking that the other person is unique
prioritizing emotional ‘union’ over sexual desire
focusing on positive qualities of the person, while overlooking negative ones
increased energy and exhilaration
a high sense of empathy and altruism toward the person
sleeplessness and loss of appetite
feeling greater connection to the person during adversity
feeling that intense romantic love is ‘involuntary,’ but also temporary

Except for that last bit, that is not a bad description for how I feel about Noah this week. Luckily, I don’t have to worry about temporary.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Category Archives: love

Lack of consistency

It doesn’t seem real.

Now I understand “fuck cancer”

I feel soft and badass at the same time.

don’t be mad

In praise

relationships

Memory lane

Perspective is everything.

second chances

Mostly parenting babbling

monogamy

Bonding

The good bits are really good