Category Archives: marathon

Perspective is everything.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anything is possible

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In which I reveal the extent of my ego.

I wrote just over 5,000 words on the book in two hours.  During that time I also did major reorganizing on the whole book.  And ate breakfast.  And wrote a few posts in a few places.  Last night Noah and I had a very intense conversation about what being a slave was like.  I’m getting closer to being able to write about it.  It won’t happen until after this book is done.  I’m getting so close.  45,000 words.  It’s not done.  It’s far from perfect.  It needs a lot of editing.  I want to hit at least 60,000.  8 more days.  15,000 more words.

I want to be the kind of person who gets things done.  I want to be the kind of person who really can sit down and write a book in a month.  I want to be the kind of person who completes a marathon.  I didn’t say run.  Pay attention to that word.  I may be the last person over the finish line.  I’m ok with that.  I will do it. As one step on that journey on Thursday I’m walking a 10k with a friend.  I get to start seriously running in December.  So far I’ve been half-ass running but mostly just working on being able to walk farther and farther.  I’m trying to build up to running slowly.  My knees are not used to this shit.  I don’t want to push it.

I don’t want to be famous because my father held a gun to my head and raped me.  I want that to be a small footnote in my life.  Right now that takes up too much space in my brain.  I need to find other things I want to do and talk about.  Sex is always going to be a prime topic.  But I need other tracks.  I need other roles.  Why not running?

And if I’m going to run I’m not running to get out of the house.  I’m doing it to accomplish something.  I need to have a goal.  Something big enough and hard enough that people will be impressed.  Or I won’t bother.  Because that’s just how I work.  I have to be fighting to do something uncomfortable.

That was part of why I had to leave the bdsm community the way I did.  I always have this compulsion to be the biggest bad ass.  Even if only this one small secret way I don’t tell anyone about.  I want to be the edge of the bell curve in intensity.  That’s frankly dangerous in some communities.  So after I broke up with Tom I knew I had to get the fuck out of that community.  I wouldn’t survive more intense than what I did with Tom.  I would have wanted someone who was a cocky asshole who had something to prove.  If you’ve been hanged by the neck once you don’t need to do it again.  I feel fairly certain that some day someone will fuck me with a gun.  I don’t know who or when.  That’s why I’m not in the bdsm community.  I don’t need to find that person any year soon.  I don’t need that temptation any year soon.

It’s hard knowing that I just don’t have the same attitude towards the sanctity of my life that other people have.  I want to know what else I can survive.  What else will get me off?

And I want to serve.  It will happen again some day.  I will find a way.  I will figure out what I mean when I say I am a slave.  And I will find a way to make it real in my life.  I want to be part of building something.  I want to subsume myself.  I want to make a King.

This is why I sprint.

I’m tired.  I am bone weary.  I am exhausted to the marrow of my bones.  I feel like I can barely stand.  I’ve been up since 1:15 this morning.  It’s a long story.  I should start at the beginning.

Yesterday was Family Dinner.  I asked Alex to cook because I spent all of yesterday painting and Noah is really fried as well.  The first problem is that he showed up nearly an hour and a half late.  That’s a big hot button for me.  I ask them to come over at 4 because that way we eat around 5:30/6 and the kids get to play after dinner before bed.  That’s a good routine for me.  If we vary from that we have a hard time.  But Alex usually eats dinner at 10pm.  You can see where there is an issue here.

So there is a basic conflict of schedules there.  And then you add on that we are all human beings with big quirks and not-so-awesome coping mechanisms.  Well, that just leads to trouble.  I will say that I grabbed a granola bar when they arrived.  By the time it was 7 and we still didn’t have dinner I did sit quietly on the floor whining at Yani, but I didn’t hurt Alex’s feelings.  He was trying.  He went really far out of his way and comfort zone for me and I need to respect that.  I need to love him for how hard he tried, not yell at him for how much he inconvenienced me.  That’s hard when my stomach is hurting because I am hungry.  If I am asking Alex to make dinner maybe I need to assume that my whole family should have a noticeable snack at 3:30.  That is probably the right choice for how to solve this.  Alex is not going to be able to shift his rhythm to a 5:30 dinner.  Maybe some day, but not right now.  He has shit of his own.  And I need to love him enough to make that accommodation.  Because I do love him that much.

Dinner went well though.  Once I started eating I was ok.  I fell asleep on the couch before they left.  heh.  I used to do that in high school.  I had similar disordered sleeping habits then.  This way of sleeping makes me feel on edge and ready to snap all the time.  But last night Noah woke me up when he went to bed.  Normally that is something I like.  I’ve asked him to do that.  But right now I’m having major insomnia issues; if I wake up I can’t get back to sleep.  Noah woke me up at 1:15.  See the problem?

I realized at some point in the night, thanks to medication, that I was done with my mandatory work other than packing.  I have a whole bunch of things I want to do, but if they don’t get done it’s not the end of the world.  If I want I can sit on the couch all day and play with my kids while watching movies.  See, this is my privilege.  I am this lucky.  I can do this today.  I’m not up for dealing with the world today.

So I decided that instead of acting like a martyr I would look at the needs of my family members.  Noah is also struggling with sleep issues because of stress.  I yelled at him a lot in the middle of the night because he woke me up and disrupted my sleep.  But he was trying so hard to be kind.  That’s how things have been around here lately.  Because I’m brittle and snippy.

I thought about this for hours and I decided that the right decision was to let Noah sleep as late as he was able to given work constraints and treat that like personal time.  He’s bloody well entitled to time off.  I decided by fiat that he should have some today in the form of sleep.  That’s what I can provide to him to relieve the pressure on him.  And my pressure just dramatically lifted.

That’s how you learn to marathon, right?  And I needed to get so tired that I can’t be frantic right now if I want to.  Maybe if my house was on fire.  Maybe. 🙂

How I’m learning to marathon

It occurs to me that I am using this space intermittently to track my progress of how I’m becoming a marathoner in this life stuff (and the running sense too, ironically) but I’m not being explicit about why I’m doing that. Most of the time as I browse around the internet I see people documenting stuff in their life that is obviously the one and only corner of their life they are willing to let people see in that much detail… only I don’t put it together like that. What I see is, “Look at how together these people are, aren’t they better than me!” I’m really competitive. It’s why I hate playing games. I can’t handle seeing my constant life struggles made fun of. Losing feels traumatic. I feel like I just got punched in the face. I have thrown the board at people, decks of cards…

My mom. My mom and I played gin rummy for years and years. She gloated a lot when she won. Not in a severe way. It was subtle. I don’t have a clear memory to explain why it bothered me so much but it really did. I was the loser at absolutely everything in my family. I’m tired of always being the one to be the pathetic one. The one who fails. The one who loses. So when I see these blogs all over the internet from these Perfect Attachment Parents! Who are doing everything Right! I feel like shit. I feel like a failure as a parent. I feel like obviously I am this horrible abuser and my children will be damaged and fucked up and traumatized… only they aren’t. My children are wonderful. Everyone who speaks to them marvels about how they glow with life and vitality. “They just seem more…aware than most children!” I am truly not a bad parent, even though I yell sometimes. In fact, I am a good parent. And sometimes even a good parent says stupid things like, “If you do that again I am going to hit you. No I am not because hitting is wrong. But dangit Shanna I am going to scream until I feel like my eyes want to pop out of my head and then you will cry and I will fell bad just please stop doing that!!!!” And then she stops doing it and apologizes and I apologize for losing my temper and we hug.

Yeah, I do have anger issues. But in the process of becoming a marathoner I have to acknowledge them. I have to know that I am making progress on dealing with them. I have to know that I am actually proving, beyond the shadow of a doubt that I am a better mother than I had. Even if I can’t make 200 cookies for Christmas.

My mother was a sprinter. She went from huge project to huge project. Sprinting isn’t just about wanting to move, though that is a component. My mother, DOES CHRISTMAS. She makes pans and pans and pans of cinnamon rolls to give out as Christmas presents to every Tom, Dick and Jane she knows. Even people she frankly dislikes because she needs to be “fair”. When I was younger the time to make this many pans of stuff to give away dominated a lot of my life. My experience of Christmas was my mother working and having nothing to do with me.

Just like I’m doing with my kids and documenting on this stupid blog. I don’t think I am actually a Narcissist at all, but I think that if I have no formal documentation I don’t know how to keep myself accountable. I love my sprints and sometimes I can do them in ways that are healthy for everyone. And sometimes I can’t. And it is obvious in my writing when I can’t. If I am in here writing that means I am making no progress on my side projects because I am spending all of my other time with the kids and trying to keep the house at a hygienic level.

I don’t think I am addicted to substances, though I do use them to help me work (mostly sugar and caffeine). I am documenting my sprints here. Y’all don’t know that I didn’t start blogging about the gardening stuff until I had done massive amounts of work to get it to a level where I don’t feel too pathetic starting off. And the remodeling stuff… you’ll notice I haven’t posted pictures lately. That would be because I am not willing to put my pride on the alter and show you how messy it is. I want to show final product but I am running out of time. You aren’t seeing pictures because I am consciously choosing to spend my time in the house with my kids. I am lowering the stress in my life by resting after my sprint. I am hibernating with my babies.

We are playing and doing tons of arts and crafts. I’m taking pictures. We are learning and growing and talking and exploring. We are back to two movies a week: one on Monday, one on Friday. We have been getting out into the community in small quiet ways. We have been making a point of going to the local breakfast places more and settling in as regulars. We haven’t driven down to San Jose just for breakfast in a while. But I love that Donna, at the local Original Pancake House, lights up and yells “Shanna!” and runs over as quickly as she can. Donna’s grandsons live across the country and she doesn’t get to see them much. She adores Shanna. Randy at the building department went and found his card and told me to call and email with any house owning questions I ever have. He thinks his job as a civil servant is to help the community. I am getting to know my building inspector because I have the same guy every time.

I have small one on one interactions like that and I manage them. There has been a plumbing fiasco, but that will be fixed soon and I am dealing with resolving it bit by bit. I can’t handle it in big chunks or my stomach acid production goes through the roof and I am suddenly nasty and yelling. So I am learning that if I have to call the plumbing company I medicate first. Now that we have reached the point of impasse I am writing them a letter and I will mail it as a registered overnight letter so that I don’t have to speak to them on the phone again. I am going to schedule the work for the weekend so Noah is home and I am going to sit in my room. It’s not rational, but I have ridiculous fear right now. So even though it is irrational I will ask my husband to handle it and I won’t be macho because I would start a fight. I would escalate tensions. Noah will passively observe work being done.

That’s how you become a marathoner. Right now I have to walk very very slowly through life. I catch up on work and lightly jog a little through the day playing with the kids and doing dishes. Mostly I’m resting. The sprint with my incest stuff is too fresh and if I try to be macho right now I will injure myself metaphorically. It’s just not worth escalating my stress levels like that.

This being a grown up thing sucks. Which is to say Liz, yeah. I think you are right.