Category Archives: money

stop wasting your life

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Recently I got an anonymous comment on the post My Father Raped Me:

“I don’t think you’re disgusting. So you masturbate while thinking about getting raped, so what? I masturbate to the exact same kind of stuff, and I know I’m not disgusting. Human sexuality is nutbar. Might as well stop fretting and embrace it. You’re just wasting your life with all this moaning and groaning. Get out there and live, goddamn it!”

I read these things and think, “OH MAN. WHY DIDN’T I THINK OF THAT YEARS AGO?!?!?!!!111”

And then I get up and I get dressed and I leave the house and I do something stupid or someone says something minor to me and I have a panic attack and I run back home and I don’t leave the house for a week or three. Unless we need food. I have a minimal level of functioning I manage. We can walk to a farmers market and to multiple small food markets (yay ethnic food) so we can get by within the limits of my cope.

You see, in order to drive I have to be sober. So all my functioning out in the world right that involves driving has to be without the anxiety medication that makes me functional. We walk miles and miles. I think Shanna walks at least ten miles a week and many weeks more than that if they successfully pressure me to go out. Calli is in a transitional stage where she literally can’t keep up with Shanna but she wants to and resents almost everything we do to manage it. She hates the Ergo. She only wants to be carried in arms. I’ve been a stupid typist for a decade–my arms go numb in a minute or two and that’s not particularly safe. We are in a fussy period. I recognize that other people would push a stroller but I quite frankly feel resentful as fuck about doing it so I don’t. We manage what we can manage. Sometimes there is crying because Calli is so fucking pissed that she can’t physically do what Shanna can do.

It’s funny when I’m not listening to the screaming.

 When I am stoned and Calli gets to this point in frustration/exhaustion/rage I will force her kicking and screaming into the carrier (I’ve got mad skillz) then I walk along with my hands stroking her legs and her back and her behind and I talk to her about frustration. I tell her that she is strong for walking as far as she did. There is no shame in needing help–that’s why you have a mommy. Mommy’s help their kids. I comfort her while she cries and I calmly in a near whisper ask if she can please lower her voice a little because my head is really hurting.

When I am sober I shake and clench my teeth and have trouble not exploding with rage of my own because most of the time screaming triggers horrible headaches and I would cheerfully like to shove my head through the nearest car windshield just to get the fuck away from that noise.

It’s like being two different people.

One is able to be compassionate. One is already hurting too much.

My problems are not because of what I think about while masturbating. My problems are because my brain was damaged by long term severe neglect and child abuse. Telling me to stop moaning and groaning is pretty dismissive.

A long time ago I explained to a therapist (I can’t remember who or when) that I manage my symptoms through stress management. I have fine tuned what I can handle and if I go over what I can handle then I have problems because all of my coping methods are bad.

That is still mostly true. Being a mother has not worked out like I thought it would. I can’t financially afford to do as much as I would kind of like to do. Life is just like that. I get to do a fantastic amount compared to most people. I don’t complain about the fact that my life has limits.

The deer jumping on the car is going to be kind of hard to absorb financially. I’m going to have to make a lot of choices not to go anywhere just because I can’t pay for gas. The van is really expensive to drive. Going to the homeschool park days is approximately $12 in gas for every trip. That’s a toll that adds up. Given that Noah had to drive the van for two weeks our gas budget was more than twice what it usually is during that period. I have to absorb that. The only way to do so is to cut back on my driving.

It’s going to be kind of lonely but I expect the kids and I will get a lot of exercise and the house will be decorated. We will do a bunch of projects.

Ack. breakfast.

One of those not sleeping nights.

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An awful lot of why I respect Noah as much as I do is because of his single minded fixation on his goals. Which is not to say that all of his goals serve my goals–they don’t. But he’s very honest about that. He is very specific about which sand castles he lets me build–that was the result of years of screaming at him about doing that inappropriately with other people he dated. Ok, I didn’t scream. But I was vehement.

If you are not going to fucking do something then you are a piece of shit asshole when you give women the impression that you will. That is rude, disrespectful, and disgusting. I didn’t hold back. That was pretty surely hard to live with. But he decided that he wants to be married to me. He stopped letting chicks do that. Then he stopped dating them because he wanted to keep me.

Noah is having a good time where he is currently working. I have specific areas of disgruntlement which have resulted in me poking him with a sharp stick. This lead to him poking his head up around and looking around at options. But he has this buddy at work. Sigh. Ok. I will keep putting up with areas of disgruntlement. I don’t actually have any right to complain about his job. He’s the one who has to do it. I am a fascist about enforcing that his work day has an end point.

Any extra time you “choose” to give your company is time you are choosing to not spend with your wife and kids. Why are you doing that? Why are you saying fuck you to me? Living with me can’t be easy. I expect him to work ridiculously hard while he is at work so that he can advance (no really–this is an expectation) and then to walk out the door and pretend that work is almost invisible. That’s a tall order. He’s delivering but the strain is becoming more apparent.

Every so often I have a window into what it is like to be Noah. I understand his perspective just a little. An awful lot of why I respect Noah as much as I do is because of his single minded fixation on his goals. Noah exists. Noah is a force shaping change. It is unpredictable and sometimes everything he works for gets thrown away on a whim.

And for being able to create things out of thin air he is paid handsomely. I think I hold it against him. Sometimes I think I should have deliberately married a loser–that way I would feel like I had gotten what I deserve. Instead I got Noah.

I think that Noah and I fit together partially because we are both so alienated from society yet we are really lonely. Not many people are as alienated from their families as Noah and I are. Noah doesn’t have abuse issues like me–nothing like. But he doesn’t feel like part of that family. It is weird to me. They don’t really understand him–ok. They are ignorant and violent in defense of their ignorance–ok. But he feels no obligation whatsoever.

I feel obligation. I feel terrible guilt about walking away from Aunt Vonnie and my niece and nephews. I feel horrible guilt that I abandoned them to the horror. I can’t believe they are my problem. I can’t fix them. I can’t make their lives better. I just have to run if I don’t want to be like them.

I think that part of why this relationship works for me is Noah has handed all of the day to day money over to me. I get to be in control of my financial safety. In 2011 we spent a bit over $28,000 more than Noah made. It wasn’t a problem–I had the annuities and then we had Sarah’s rent. This year I have already saved $7,000 of Noah’s income. He didn’t get a raise. My book hasn’t even paid off the editor. If the next few months are on target I will have spent $40,000 less this year than last year.

I need to be the one controlling spending. When I am the person doing it I can dramatically shift my lifestyle and feel ok about it. Other people have different priorities. I can’t handle feeling deprived at someone else’s whim. It makes me angry and rebellious. If Noah set our current budget I would freak out. I am cognizant that I am reaching my goals on time or a little ahead of schedule and I try to eek out occasional blips of stress relief.

But from where I am sitting I have a freezer stuffed full of a wide variety of meat I feel good about eating. I have to have a variety or I get pissy and nasty about eating at home. I can’t eat all beef all the time. I have preserved enough local berries to get us through till next year. I have stocked up on dry goods. My grocery budget for the next five months will be almost nothing. I have saved enough that I have already paid next years property taxes in that budget column.

When I am feeling anxious or if I want to buy something I go look at www.mint.com. I am trying to keep my focus on what I’m doing. When I want to spend money I am generally trying to distract myself or soothe myself or get some feeling of pleasure. I know that the thing won’t make me as happy as having the feeling of safety.

This month our bank account cash balance will hit $40,000. This is the first time in my life that has happened because of a slow accumulation instead of from a random extra check arriving. It feels different.

And all of this feels weird because I don’t earn any of it. I feel that so acutely. I am the manager. It helps me not spend money on myself. I use the money in service of our shared goals. I have a specific small subset of the budget that is my personal spending money. I need cheaper hobbies if I am ever going to Starbuck’s again. The book. Race entry fees. Running shoes. A Disneyland annual pass. Lady Gaga tickets. I think that’s a pretty awesome year of fun things. I’m glad to not do a lot of smaller things. No I’m not. I’m lonely. But I still don’t want to change my priorities. I’m doing what I want to be doing.

It is weird to feel envy for what people have and do and know that I am consciously choosing to not do it in favor of other goals. I don’t compromise. It’s kind of weird to recognize about myself. I am on my own course. It doesn’t overlap with other people very often. Other people don’t want to do things in the times and ways I want to do them so I do them alone. That’s ok.

That’s the direction I have to grow, isn’t it? It’s ok that I am alone. I am doing what I want to do. Other people don’t share my interests or timing. That’s ok. It just happens that way sometimes.

This is a lot of why being with Noah is so weird. We are trying to figure out how to grow closer together. It’s hard. Everything we do seems to want us to be separate in space. We don’t overlap in hobbies much beyond sex. That’s a hard one while we have kids around. I have all kinds of issues. I have a brick wall between my sexuality and my children.

At least until they can read. Then I will tell them that if they read my blog they will have to learn how to self-select out of information they don’t want. Ha. I hope they won’t find it till they are basically adults. But I’m not going to hide it. I just don’t need to bring it up or talk about anything I write about spontaneously. It isn’t their business.

I think that Noah and I are comfortable with one another because neither of us has much expectation that the other will change to be more like us. We will change, but in often weird and surprising ways. I see some couples that become practically one person. Neither of us want to renounce main character status. You can’t be that deeply pair bonded and be a main character.

I think that is where the longing for G-d comes in. That would be something I could love without having to give up the essential aloneness that seems to be part of my self-identity. God could love me even when I wouldn’t allow myself to believe anyone else could. Sometimes I don’t allow Noah to be someone who loves me in my head. I mean that when I am thinking of him it doesn’t occur to me that he could love me. He couldn’t act like that and love me at the same time. In my world view those things are incongruous. But not in his world view. He is on a completely different track than me.

I can’t change him. He will always do things that make me feel alienated and alone and completely unloved. That doesn’t mean that he stops loving me during those times. It means I have attachment issues. I do not believe there is a way for me to try to change him that would prevent those feelings from happening. I think it would be unhealthy to try.

That is what my sister does. She wants people who will “try harder” to be what she wants. But at the end of the day they are still them and they just aren’t good enough. It’s a bad cycle.

Noah isn’t perfect. But he is consistently him. I can predict him. I asked him to stop dating people because there would always be bad communication because he would be trying to tell me what he thought would hurt me least. Not what was true. Because that is what he does. If he’s not in a situation where his sex life is on the line he doesn’t worry so much about just telling me.

My sister believes that relationships are good or not based on how much time you spend with someone. This is why she doesn’t work and she dates people who don’t work. They can be together 24/7. It’s awesome! It has been hard for me to deal with how much separation is “normal”. I feel abandoned all day every day. I feel hurt. I feel unwanted. I know that these are entirely irrational feelings. I know that Noah is doing the right thing in every way by working.

When I was a child I couldn’t imagine that being a grown up meant learning to tolerate being alone. Being away from you is part of how people support having a relationship with you. I didn’t understand. I feel like I still don’t.

Someone on the internet (obviously a sound source) said I was a train wreck who depended on my husband too much. I couldn’t agree more. I just can’t work out how to depend on him less. I try to just not talk. I try to not be demanding. I try to just be grateful for what he offers.

Oh who the hell am I kidding. I’m very demanding. I’m sorry for it. I just can’t see a way to survive that involves less demanding. I mean, I could do the ghost thing. But that’s not really surviving. I don’t want my kids to learn that.

I have to act in a way I want them to act. I want them to believe that their needs are worth meeting. Sometimes that involves being demanding.

More whining. I’m sorry I woke up so early.

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I’ve been staring at Mint for half an hour. I play with columns. The Sarah experiment was expensive. Not because of anything malicious on her part or anything like that. Life costs money. I’m ok with that. I’ve been slowly trying to dig myself out of that hole all year. This month is the first month I am not over the food budget. I will remain in the green as long as I don’t spend any money on food in the next three days. Good thing I’m well stocked. And if nothing else I have a yard full of tomatoes and carrots. Shanna may hate me, but we’ll have tomatoes for days.

I have felt ashamed of the fact that supporting me requires work for as long as I have known it was true. My father and mother would talk about what I owed them for supporting me. My mom has always felt guilty about how much work she has added to Auntie and that guilt has made her act out in some weird ways. I feel terrible about needing someone else to go work for me. I’m a lazy piece of shit. I can’t fucking support myself what good am I? I’m being terrible at the whore thing this month. I don’t really want to be touched right now. So, what fucking good am I?

Noah’s book is priced a lot higher than mine. He has made a lot more money at that than I have. It feels… appropriate. Everything about who and what he is dictates that he be paid a lot for what he has to offer the world. I give people free downloads. Because I know I am not really worth anything. Nothing that I have to give could possibly be worth anything.

I’m still selling copies. One or so a week. Heh. Maybe if I did something resembling promotion it would help. Those are pretty much random finds. Holy shit. Random complete strangers on the internet (it is an e-book) want to read about me. I get lovely emails sometimes.

I feel angry with Noah because he has worth and I don’t. But I don’t particularly want to go get a job. The idea of missing this part of my childrens lives makes me feel sick. No. I need every minute of intense love I can get. I need to be loved. I need to have my day full of people who genuinely like me and want to be near me. I may never get this feeling again. They will be adults before much longer. Maybe I’ll work some day. I don’t know what I’ll do, but certainly not now.

So I have nothing that the world values. That’s part of simple market economics. And I don’t really have much time to make things that could potentially be judged as valuable or not because I am busy being loved. And I feel like making that choice means that I am choosing to be nothing. I am something that only has worth and value for a short time. Then I cease to matter at all. In some horrifying ways I feel like more than other people I know that the support a mother gives is a one way obligation. I don’t expect much of anything from my kids as adults.

Which means I spend all day every day feeling like I am pouring all of myself, all of my energy, all that I have to give to the world into two people who will leave me. I feel scared all the time. I know that I am using all this energy–all of these resources in ways that will long term not serve me. I expect to have my fifties to look forward to while feeling like I have done nothing with my life but want love.

Even a cursory glance at my life makes it fairly apparent that for me it is true that no one stays. Noah says he will. I’m crossing my fingers because I don’t really believe him. I think that all I have to do is be a little meaner and he will understand how bad I am and he will go.  I just need to show him who I am. Don’t worry, he will go. Everyone does.

I’m really struggling with how alone I feel. If it weren’t for my kids needing me to wait on them hand and foot I don’t think I would make it through today. I don’t want to. But I have to stop crying soon.  I have to put this feeling in a box. It doesn’t matter what I want. I made a commitment. It doesn’t matter if they will leave one day. I made the decision to bring two people into the world who require care. I have sixteen more years of duty. I don’t get to shirk that. They really and truly need me. Even though neither of them are nursing. Even though they aren’t really “babies” any more. They need me.

Shanna needs someone who can deal with her intensity. She reminds me so much of me. I was beaten and shamed and told I was disgusting and annoying for being like Shanna. No one but me is going to want to love her so much. I really don’t think other people would have as much patience for her quirks. I can be gentle with her and forgive myself for being punished. I know she isn’t worthless. I know that this investment of time and energy and love will be good for her. I don’t know how it will work out for me long term, but I know that she will go off into the world knowing that it is good for her to yearn and do and be. Calli is quite clear that she wants me. Mama mama mama. If I am out of her sight for an hour there are a lot of tears. I can’t leave her.

I’m really sad. I’m really scared. I’m really lonely. There isn’t really anything I can do about these feelings. It’s time to go run. I have a race in 38 days with a very good friend.

It’s not that I think I don’t have friends or people who love me. But I spend fifteen to twenty hours a month with adults other than Noah who know me and like me. I don’t count the home schooling group because I go there and keep my fat mouth shut. It’s isolating and hard. I feel bad all the time. Like *I* am bad. With my kids. With people I associate with for my kids. It’s hard. It’s really hard.

anxiety purge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More money.

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When I turned thirty we lost $14,400/year in income. I hadn’t thought hard about how much we depended on that to catch budget shortfalls. It was a cushion because I officially budgeted as if we saved all of it. Ha.

We have to start saving money. We have to if I am going to be able to keep my promise to Noah that he can quit his job and do something important to him. I have to be able to fund that promise. Noah doesn’t touch money very often. For a few years he didn’t have a pin number for his atm card. (That wasn’t actually my fault.) It’s weird having so much control over money I haven’t earned. But I feel like my annuity money was in the same category. I didn’t exactly earn it.

How different would my life have been if I hadn’t been essentially independently wealthy when I turned eighteen? I instantly had access to more money every month than my mother earned to support us both. What kind of sanctimonious bitch am I to judge how she managed to survive when she never earned enough money. No one was willing to pay her very much money.

My mother and I had very different approaches to being poor. I feel frantic if I am in the red in one section of my budget. I want to save for large purchases in advance. I want to pay in cash. If I don’t have the cash to spend then I can’t fucking afford it. My mother liked to impulse buy and worry about finding the money later. She was very status symbol focused. She had a large wardrobe of name brand clothing that she bought for a few dollars each because she worked in the Ross mark down department. I worked in the stock room. I saw things when they came in. She hid things under fixtures for months until it went into deep discount then she bought it on the employee 40% weekend. She had nice clothes.

I still wear a no brand random $5.00 dress I bought when I was fourteen. It hasn’t come apart at the seams. It is still fairly figure flattering, why not? I don’t go shopping until I’m about to be stuck running around in public naked. Or there is an important party coming up. I have a really nice costume collection. Most of that comes from the Tom-era.

I digress. Right now I am terrified Calli is going to spill a water bottle on my laptop. Corrective action taken. I can’t regain that train of thought.

So I’m having trouble downsizing our lifestyle in a way that isn’t bullshit. What I’m doing right now is bullshit. I’m depending too much on things being paid off over several months. I’m not saving up money in advance. I’m not getting ahead in any area. And I’m not saving anything. This isn’t working.

A rather large chunk of his salary goes towards things like property taxes, home owners insurance, life insurance and other such festive big chunks. Things that are fixed expenses. I need to build big buffers. I can’t just expect Noah to make more money to cover shortfalls. I can’t. That’s not reasonable. This is going to feel hard.

Things like: in the Sarah experiment I gave up a kitchen mixer. Whoops. That kind of blows now. I can’t purchase another one. I don’t have anywhere in the budget I can put it. I have a blender. I have a pastry blender. I can bloody well use my hands.

It’s interesting to think about. I am stopping to think about what messages I received when I was a child. If you didn’t have the “right” equipment you just didn’t do things. We were always waiting for our lives to begin. I wasn’t taught to use my hands. I was taught that you use money to buy a machine to do work. If you can’t buy that machine you can’t do the work. I’ve worked really hard at learning how to do hand sewing for minor repairs. It’s a simple skill. Sorta.

I’m thinking a lot about my mom and my class issues. But I have to go make dinner so those thoughts will stay in my head for now.

Planning

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Noah is a lot smarter than he looks. He let me buy into the Disney time share program. Even though it was a lot of money. And he hasn’t gotten mad at me for not paying it off faster. He’s really quite patient with me. I say that he is smart because a lot of how I manage self-discipline is in service of some goal. I can talk myself out of eating out if I know that all of my Disneyland spending money in October and December have to just come out of our normal budget. I have to save up gas money in advance. I can’t buy a race day t-shirt at the marathon unless I save money. I have to think about these things in advance. If I want to have the money then I have to save now. Our income dropped dramatically. I can’t just doall of the things I expect in the back of my mind to do. It’s feeling hard to adjust to. We lost a big darn cushion. I always planned for us to live on his income and the reality is we spent every penny of extra income too. Some of it was shuffled off to savings/investments but not a lot. We have had a really comfortable and fun life. It’s been awesome.
Noah wants to try some big hard stuff. My role in that is to be the one to save the money in advance that will allow us to take this risk and not suffer from it regardless of the outcome. I have to plan in advance and it’s feeling hard. It’s feeling like more self discipline than I have.
Part of the reason I am walking as much as I am with Shanna is I’m trying to see if I can live without the van and be ok with the kids. Can we get to the places we want to go? I’m trying to learn what places near here we want to try. Every additional car adds a huge amount of liability: gas, insurance, repair. Saving multiple thousands of dollars a year is a lot. It just limits my range with the kids a lot. We are thinking hard about that.  Things like: it would really suck to not be able to go to many home school events. I’m trying to figure out when they happen and if I could manage it. I should probably actually investigate options on the peninsula because then it makes a lot more sense to take Noah to work and use the car during the day. Most everything we do now ranges up and down the east bay.
I saw my therapist last night. Yeah. I feel like this. And that is probably going to keep happening. This is my normal. Time to move on with life. Life isn’t going to wait for me to feel better. I have to think about things that matter. Things like: what are the actual needs in this house? How can I meet them? What would a life that meets those needs look like? I need to backwards plan this. I need to draw up a long flow chart so that I can figure out what I should be doing now in order to move towards those goals. Yes, my stomach hurts. Yes, I feel like I am about to puke. Yes, I feel like my heart is racing. Yes, I am afraid.
But Noah slept in and I have to go make breakfast. That’s a lot more important. He really needed the sleep. And he will want to go in early today because we are having dinner with a friend tonight.

I’m going to run out of steam

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I’ve been thinking a lot about this whole “having limits” thing.  What does it actually mean?  Does it mean that I have pushed myself so far that I end up in a hospital?  I’m not sure if something is going to have to go wrong internally or if someone is going to over rule me on putting me in a psych hospital some day.  I suspect that part of the reason I put off finding a therapist last year until I did was because I had to get past the lowest point on my own because a professional would have made different choices.

What life am I choosing and how do I want to live it?  I wanted to give the money to Occupy and be done with it.  I knew I didn’t have extra spoons.  Instead I was asked to invest in a company that exists to support a community I am only kind of attached to any more.  And now I am a business owner.  And now I have Responsibilities.  And simultaneously I have also discovered that I was inappropriately depending on help from some sources.

Lately Shanna is increasingly cranky.  Some of it is her age and normal development.  A lot of it is me.  I can see my facial expressions and I can hear my tone of voice.  I am teaching her to be an angry person.  I am teaching her that life is overwhelming and not something that can be done to ones satisfaction.  I am teaching her that life is a series of failures and let-downs to be bitter about.  On one hand, not everything works out and learning to roll with that is part of life.

I don’t think that I can truly be accused of not coping with the things life throws at me.  I do it.  But I’m not a nice person.  When people promise me things and then don’t deliver I am so angry I can’t function any more.  Part of that is I am over-scheduled and over-promised as well.  When someone lets me down I have to either suck it up and find a way to do even more with less or I have to let someone else down.  A large number of my biggest fuck ups in life have happened because I was terrified of letting someone else down.

My children are 17 months old and 3.5 years old.  They must be supervised 24 hours a day.  When I am trying to figure out what I can accomplish in a day the very first thing I have to account for is watching my children.  Once again it is me and Noah.  Noah is working from home one day a week now so that I can continue to see my therapist.  That means he is down to being unavailable for ~55 hours/week.  That is better than it was.  If I am going to go anywhere during any of that time I have to pay someone to watch my children.  I don’t have enough money in the budget to pay for a date night with my husband once a week.  I am sure as shit not going to pay a babysitter so I can go work for free.  I can’t.  That’s a hobby I can’t afford.

Because of how much our income has been reduced my driving is severely curtailed.  I get to put about a tank and a half of gas in the van every month.  That’s it.  And my kids deserve to still go to homeschooling activities.  Sorry, that’s basically all of my gas money.

I get $100/month to spend on all of my personal entertainment.  My extra commuting money comes out of that and means I don’t get to do anything fun.  This fund also has to buy my running shoes and running bra (that I still don’t have).

I have less than two hours a day where the children are guaranteed to be ok-to-ignore.  That’s only if they nap at the same time.  That happens most week days, but certainly not all and Shanna is trying hard to drop naps entirely and Calli really wishes I would move the start time of nap-time up by 2 hours.  But then I would be in the house having to keep kids (alternately) quiet for four hours and never get five minutes off.

I am of the opinion that my children are rather freakishly independent and able to entertain themselves.    Unfortunately Shanna’s favorite game is still, “Let’s dump every drawer, shelf, item of bedding, toys, and anything else I can find all over the floor!”  She has been a force of destruction all day every day since she attained mobility.  I refold every item of clothing in their room multiple times a week.  Often multiple times a day.  Now that Sarah has moved out I think I am going to give them a sleeping room and a play room.  The sleeping room will have about five toys in it so that during quiet time Shanna can’t rip them all out.  Her clothes can go in a different damn room.

During the day I have to deal with the fact that if I am absorbed in something I am doing (delete details I am not allowed to give in public about something very hard to learn that requires a lot of training, education, and higher learning thinking) Shanna is probably going to decide that when she pees she wants to use the little potty.  And she wants to be helpful and dump it into the toilet herself.  In the process she sprays half of the god damn bathroom with pee.  Do you think this is an isolated incident? Oh god no.  It’s worse when she shits.

You have to supervise children.  You can’t ignore them to go do adult things at these ages.  You just can’t.  It’s not ok to do.  They get into trouble.  And when they get into trouble guess what happens?  I get angry.  And then inevitably I say something I shouldn’t.  I don’t name call.  But I’m louder and fiercer and more blaming than is appropriate.  “It’s your fault I have to do ________ and I don’t want to.”  Whereas it’s true that I wouldn’t be doing whatever I was doing if not for her making the mess the blame is on me for not supervising my freaking three year old.

I can’t have so many adult things requiring a lot of my time and attention.  It doesn’t work.  I know it is the modern way that people have to be multi-tasking at all times but multi-tasking means I do everything badly.  I have to supervise my children.

And the second most important priority in my life has to be sleep.  If I don’t sleep I get physically ill and my emotional problems go through the roof.  The single most important piece of holding my mental health together going forward is probably going to be sleep.  Not sleeping makes me crazy and suicidal.  The strain of feeling that way makes me incredibly difficult to live with.  I’m quite sorry I wake up as early in the morning as I do.  I would give just about anything to change that, but I can’t.  If I go to bed at 8pm I get enough sleep.  That is just how my life has to be for a while until my body decides to allow this to change.

Those are some pretty big limits to have in this life.  If I was more able to deal with sleep disruption or change my sleep schedule I would have a lot more options.  But I really and truly can’t.  This is the make or break of me getting to be sane.  No one can ask me to give that up.

That does still leave me some wiggle room.  Not a lot, but a little.  I could start using Noah-home time for business related stuff that I can do from home.  There is a fair bit of that.  I am not going to give up the marathon training, but that doesn’t use up that much time yet.  I’m not happy about it.  I think I shouldn’t.

I wanted to donate the money to a cause I believed in not get tied to something that was going to steal what little down time I have.  I’m not sure how this is going to work.  But I think I am going to have to push really hard and really fast for limits on what I am giving.  We need to find a way that will make it work or walk away.  I’m not killing myself for a business I can’t set foot in because I am stupid enough to be a breeder.

I don’t want to be angry at my children because they need my attention.  And I don’t want to be doing tag team parenting so that I can go put in more work for someone else.  That’s not something I can support right now.  I’m not getting anything other than the knowledge that other people get to enjoy it. Fuck that.

I’m not being effective.  I’m spinning my wheels and focusing on the wrong things.  I’m not thinking like Sebastian here.  I’m acting like my time doesn’t need to be treated as valuable.  That’s really not an approach to life that is going to work for me long term.

Keeping this business would mean giving up writing.  There just isn’t enough time in the day for me to do both.  I’m not going to do that.  I think that’s another limit.  If something is going to cut in on my time to such a degree that I can’t write… I should strongly consider just not having it in my life.  Writing is how I find my way through this life.  I decide things and think things while I am writing.  I can’t do the same thing any other way.

When I am going through the day working I can’t finish my thoughts.  I can’t make connections.  I have to be in the moment responding constantly.  I have to have time to finish my thoughts or I feel increasingly angry all the time.  I am not going to get much socializing out of this business experience. I’m not going up there to schmooze I’m going up there because we need someone to fucking wash dishes and we can’t pay people right now.  And the smell of coffee makes me want to vomit.  I’m not going to learn how to barista.  Having to wash the dishes is disgusting enough.

I gave the money to this company because I was willing to walk out front and dump the pile of money on the ground and light it on fire if I thought that would do something in the world I cared about.  That doesn’t mean I have the energy to go get a job.  I don’t.  That’s a big difference.  Ok.  I’ve been negotiating wrong so far.  I need to change my approach if I am going to get what I want.  It’s time to go inside.  Noah is going to work soon.

Just life

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Yesterday I had a weird realization.  I read back a bit in my blog and I noticed that for all I discuss my mental state (obsessively, constantly) I say very little about my life.  This was interesting to me to note as I also got to a place where I had to talk to Sarah about my plans for the yard.  They are connected, bear with me.

I get up every morning and I look at the stats page here on blogger.  I feel lame admitting that.  I can tell which traffic sources are probably just spam and I sigh.  But I look at the other ones.  The numbers are growing.  Every day I close my eyes and I smile and say thank you.  Even though these people are not talking to me, even though they feel no motivation to contact me in any way… someone sees me.  I’m not invisible.  It’s hard to admit how visceral and important that is to me.

How often do you call your mother?  How much do you resent talking to her?  I think about my mother every day.  I think of the things I would like to tell her.  I think of the off-hand comments I would like to make about my daughters because my mom would understand them.  Most of the time I just bite my lip.  I know that her responses would vary from completely on the same page to shaming and horrified.  She has always reacted like that to me.  I last spoke to my mother in May.  It had been many months since the previous contact.  I have barely spoken with her at all in twelve years.

What is my life actually like?  I clean a lot.  It’s a lot of how I deal with my compulsive tendencies right now and given the ever-present terror of losing my children for being an unfit mother.  I think I read MDC too long.  I worry that if I have a basket of laundry sitting out I’m screwed.  I read books to the kids.  I play a lot of Lego’s and blocks and Play Doh and I draw and I dig in sand.  I haven’t been gardening recently.  Running has been taking most of my physical strength.  I’m doing more of it than I post on facebook. I always want to put a smiley when I am being defensive and I have a firm commitment to myself that this journal will be smiley free.  It’s awkward relinquishing that desire to appear friendly.

I don’t mean to be as harsh as I sound most of the time.  I spend a lot of time apologizing for my tone and I worry about that, actually.  I hate that I apologize for speaking so much.  I speak quickly and directly, why is that so bad?  I’m not attacking.  I’m really not.  I’m left feeling like there is nothing I can say that will be taken well so I should just shut up.  It’s not my favorite.

I’m glad that Sarah is here now.  I’m not alone.  I have had people ask me, when I’m discussing issues I have with Sarah, if Noah would allow me to make Sarah leave.  I thought that was hilarious.  Sarah is mine, not Noah’s.  I don’t know what Sarah is to me, but she’s mine.  And that’s that.  I don’t know what that is going to mean going forward.  She has an awful lot of needs I can’t and won’t meet.  Life is complicated.  Right now we are just trying to raise these babies.  We’ll see what the future holds.

It is interesting that for me “closeness” is out of sight and out of mind with some people and not with others.  I feel betrayed by the fact that people didn’t make an effort to see me when I was a child.  That I went all those lonely years without continual on-going relationships.  I would meet people once or twice and then maybe never see them again.  I barely saw my brother Jimmy.  I rarely saw my father.  Aunt Vonnie and Uncle Bob were weirdly intermittent, hell–so was my mom.

I have been sitting here working on my running schedule for two days.  I am going to be ready for a marathon in October.  Damnit.  It’s just a matter of making the schedule and then doing it.  Once the schedule in place it’s just fill-in-the-blank.  This was part of teaching that I loved.  I love knowing what I am going to do on so many days in the next year.  I love that I don’t have to wake up and decide.  I’m going to make up another hidden calendar for housework.  I’m going to start tracking it and schedule it more.  If I have a schedule and I’m just keeping my schedule I don’t feel resentful.  If I have to look around the house and think, “Well what’s a mess now?” I feel pissy.  I feel angry.  I feel god damn sick of cleaning up after these fucking people.  When I’m just keeping my schedule and doing the job-of-being-me I don’t mind.  It’s a mind-trick.  It mostly works.  Until I slack on my schedule and then I resent the schedule and then I stop following it and instead I am resentful of the housework.  Cheers.

Life is what happens when you are killing time on your way to dying.  Being suicidal means not wanting to kill the time anymore because it is so unpleasant.  If you have something to do instead of killing time you are building something you feel proud of.  I really did pay attention Mr. Frankl.  Thank you for giving the world your insights.  It’s not just about building something like a building.  What are you living for?  What is your purpose?  “The meaning of life is to find your gift.  The purpose of life is to give it away.”  That’s from a picture on facebook.  I don’t know who actually made it and it’s been reposted so many times I’m going to admit that I’m a lazy fuck and I don’t know who started it.

There is such a high burden in conversation these days.  Every single fucking thing you reference must have a citation.  I don’t think that we would have ended up with T.S. Eliot this way.  Maybe that’s a good thing.  Maybe I’ll start a revolution.  When I’m not trying to prove a specific point and instead I’m babbling I’m allowed to just say what is in my head without worrying about who said it first.  Maybe I’ll just start adding little things at the bottom of all posts: I plagiarize at will but since I make no money or fame off it I don’t care.  I won’t bother.  But I should.

What is my life like?  Noah makes me breakfast most days.  It feels really sweet.  My kids climb on me and love me and scream at me (volume control is a few years away) and run around in circles around me.  My life is quiet.  My life is slow.  I feel like I alternate between getting very little done in the greater-good-sense and periods of intense productivity where I remodel the house or do a bunch of yard work.

Now I have scheduled running into forever.  It’s time to start thinking about how I will balance my energy load.  I am going to build a playhouse for She-Ra (we have capitulated to her requests) and Calli this month.  It will be cute and little and very rough and rustic.  Simple plans mean I can follow through.  Excellent.  It’s time to break ground outside and start prepping for this year.  I need to talk to Sarah.  She is going to be doing starts in the house.  I have no idea how much work I’m signing on for.  But given that we can’t spend any money, why the heck not?  We can’t go elsewhere and do stuff this year.

This is going to be a save money year.  Even stuff like gas really is significant when we go anywhere.  So it’s time to stay closer to home for a while.  We’ve been gallivanting a fair bit.  I’m thinking about my financial goals for the year.  I should say “our” and pretend this decision involves Noah and/or Sarah but I suppose that just means that this is my opinion and our actual household decision may or may not look like this.

Right now I have the budget set such that we can save $1470/month.  It’s not a very friendly budget but it does have perks and fun money in it.  It’s not oppressive by any measure.  I would like for us to get to $2,000/month in saving.  But that’s where it starts feeling oppressive.

And it feels like every single day just involves more things we “should” buy.  Why do I want to save this much money every month?  Because it is stupid not to if we can.  Because we didn’t fund the college savings last year and that’s really not ok.  Because I didn’t pay off DVC with the annuity fund and it needs to go away.  Because we own a house and eventually we will have to do major repair work again and we have almost no buffer.

Really, if I save $24,000 next year this year it will be not even close to as much as I should have saved/paid off last year.  I’m behind in my long-term goal reaching.  Damnit.  And it’s because we had a really fabulous trip to Scotland, I gave away a lot of money, etc.  It was a really expensive year.  If I want to do the things I say I want to do long-term I need to stop bullshitting around and start doing them.  The first step is to stop spending so much money.  That means that we don’t get to have everything we want.  Far from.  It means doing without things that might be convenient or nice because we don’t need them.  I will say as diplomatically as I can that Sarah and Noah tend towards “Let’s throw money at this problem” in ways that give me hives.  I love them both.  We can’t keep spending money and that means choosing to simply not think about the wide variety of under-$5-things that “could” make our life better.  What makes our life better is not spending money.  Really.

We want to have $100,000 per kid for college.  We need to be saving a lot faster if we want to get there.  We have fifteen years until we need to have most of that ready.

We want to travel the world for a year in less than ten years.  We have to get ready.

We want to pay off a $19,000 loan this year so that we don’t have to pay more interest on it.

We want to remodel this house some day, maybe.  We have to do prodigious maintenance whether we like it or not.  That’s really expensive, every year.

We really need to save money.

But I was writing about my life, not future goals.

Right now my life is about going in and playing with the kids.  Bye.

Remembering childhood

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A friend sent me a link: Little Girls or Little Women?  The Disney Princess Effect.  It’s worth a read, though it’s long.

People often feel the need to challenge me when I say I plan to homeschool my kids.  People I don’t know will tell me that I “should” give school a try to see if it will work out.  Uhm.  How about if we give homeschooling a try and see if that works out before you rush to fix something that isn’t broken?  I don’t understand the rabid opposition.

I don’t know who my kids will be when they are adults.  I don’t have an end goal in mind.  But I know what I want them to remember.  I know what I want their self-esteem to be based on.  I know what patterns I want them to have as their default affectionate behavior for the rest of their lives.  I like to plan ahead.

It really bothers me that my family denies my memories.  They remember things as being “not that bad”.  But I say that they were not at the bottom of the shit-pile.  Of course they remember things differently.  They had a different experience.  I know what I want my daughters to remember.  Other people seem very confident that whatever their kids remember is fine.  They will have whatever life they have.

I honestly have trouble with that.  Shanna hated preschool and came home with stories about the kids telling her that she is weird and they don’t want to be her friend.  She cut the mohawk herself.  Yes, we had previously added the pink streak, but it looked very different in longer hair.  It was cute.  Now… she looks less cherubicly sweet.  She’s still cute and all, but it’s a very different look.  Yes, yes, I could have forced her to “stick it out” and “try to find a friend” but give me a break.  No.  Not yet.  At some point she will have to do the hard work of sticking out a tough thing.  It’s not preschool at three.

I want my kids to remember being challenged in ways that they can manage.  I’m not training my kids to fit into the public school system of behavior.  I’m shooting for how I want them to be at eighteen.  I’m trying to figure out a very different set of scaffolding.  I don’t want her to get used to silently doing work by herself while other children play together.  I see no reason to include that as a prominent part of her early memories.

We can be at home working together.  A lot of what I like about smoking less pot is that means the kids can wander in the garage when I’m writing.  I have to bark at them a bit to get them to let me alone enough to work… but they will learn.  That’s ok.  I have to defend this space.  When you walk up talking to me, if I put a finger up, freakin wait until I look up to talk to me.  Or I will be very grumpy because you interrupted my thought.  Yeah, I want them to remember that.  It will be a lesson that serves them well in life.  They need to see more of it.

If I want to be able to work in my home, I need to be able to work in my home.  I need to start getting my kids used to seeing that.  It’s going to be interesting.

I think I became a teacher largely in part because I didn’t know much about the other options.  My sister told me the entire process of becoming a teacher when I was fairly young, maybe ten?  She wanted to be an English teacher.  So when I went to college I always took extra English classes.  I knew I could pass them and I wanted to keep my GPA up.  I didn’t take more than required in Maths because I was terrified of bringing my GPA down.  And I shouldn’t have passed Statistics, but the teacher liked me.  I never tried any class outside of the areas I already had expertise.

I got through high school without really taking Biology, Chemistry, Physics… anything.  I was raised to sit around and read books and think about sex.  Most of the books in our house were historical romance novels of the really-graphic-sex variety.  Once I got passed The Babysitters Club I transitioned into reading my mother and my sister’s books.

I have really strong feelings about how the culture of ones early childhood decides your adulthood.  Above all else I want my children to go forward in the rest of their life knowing that they have the right to ask to have their needs met and get it.  I want them to understand that adults have needs too and I want to learn how to balance everyones needs.

I think that we need to sit down and make some long-term goals.  If we don’t have communal goals and something we are working towards then we are tilting at windmills and wasting resources.  I don’t like wasting resources.  It makes me really angry.  I want money to be as effective as possible.  In order to do that you have to have a communal set of goals.

The reason that people sink together or rise together is decided largely by how they treat shared resources.  My family stays in the whole because they take turns who is acting out by spending a bunch of money.  It’s cyclical.  Denise is the worst now that Uncle Bob is dead.

I feel like I have gotten off track this year.  I’m not going to admit how much money has come and gone.  I feel horrified.  There was the standard 401k investing, but no other saving.  That’s not ok.  A whole year of that is not ok.  Well, no more trips to Scotland or the French Laundry.  No more major house renovation.  This is why I don’t feel like I get to bitch.  Instead of saving we had an adventurous year.  And we didn’t go into debt for any of it.  I think that it’s ok that we had a lavish year.  We can afford it.  But we can’t have a year that good every year.  That may be once a decade.

We need to start saving.  How much?  How far into our lifestyle are we going to cut?  This is going to be a stressful series of conversations.

OO money and other opportunities

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I haven’t heard back from anyone in a while.  I get the impression things are in flux.  That’s ok.  I was approached about an opportunity this week which will use up a lot of the money.  It will be a community building way to spend the money, but a very different community.  I’m not going to say specifics yet, but I’m excited.

I don’t do very well with trying to join groups unless I have a reason.  I need a job.  I need a role.  I know that’s fairly common.  I’m trying to find a way back into a world I miss.  I’m not sure what I want to get from the experience, exactly.  I want to serve.  That’s part of it.  Tonight someone laughed and told me I want status.  Not really.  I mean, yes, of course.  I do love my status.  But I want the chance to be able to be effective.  I want influence more than I want status for the influence.  I’m not sure I’m explaining well.

I will never be a big part of the public face of this opportunity.  I will be back end.  But that means I get to decide things about the back end.  This is me rubbing my fingers together.  What things to I want to see?  Am I right about my priorities?  I might get to find out.  I have spent a lot of years sitting in the cheap seats watching other people try and have various success with their efforts.  I don’t know what all I am going to do in life, yet.  But it will involve taking as many opportunities as I can.

Why do I want to do this?  Because it’s an opportunity that won’t come again.  Something that will make for great stories for the rest of my life.  Something that irrevocably slams that closet door wide open.  I like that.  I like doing that now in one fell swoop.  I don’t know yet who or what role I will really have in the community.  I’m looking forward to finding out.

I think talking about money is important.

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So after covering the checks I have already written for Occupy I have ~$32,000 sitting in my bank account.  Do you know how much money I have to pay this month for various expenses?  I owe $17,000 on credit cards.  That will be paid off this month.  I still haven’t paid property taxes or the mortgage or the domestic help or my therapy.  That’s another $9,000.  This is an unusually expensive month.  Our income is settling in to about $8,000 per month.  I am waiting to write checks for $17,650.  That means that on the 30th of this month, if I succeed in giving all the money away, I will only have around $6,000 in cash.  We have months that cost $15,000 on a fairly regular basis.  We pay for a lot of things.

People who know me know that having a large financial cushion is kind of a ridiculous driving force for me.  It’s unhealthy.  I grew up in a kind of poverty I honestly don’t like thinking about.  But holy fucking shit is my life different now.

That money was originally earmarked to pay off the Disney timeshare.  I bought the timeshare when I realized it was only took four trips of the kind Sarah likes for her birthday to pay off the investment and we really do want to be at Disneyland every year…  I bought it for Sarah and me.  Noah wasn’t thrilled.  Noah is not interested in spending that much time at Disneyland, thankyouverymuch.  He’ll go.  But not every year.

I have done Disneyland with Sarah enough times that it is worth it to me to buy the time share.  Do you know why?  Mostly because she is disabled.  It is hard for her to expend the energy to travel long distances, sometimes even with motor devices.  If we are in an apartment that is just a few yards away from an entrance she can afford the spoons to rest in the middle of the day and really enjoy evening stuff.  It feels loving to be at Disneyland with Sarah.  She appreciates it the same way my mom does.  Just sitting on a bench with a book while people walk by makes her happy.  Disneyland is a place to just sit and feel joy.

So I bought a fucking Disney time share and I feel like a privileged asshole.  I feel strangely embarrassed that I bought this stupid thing.  What a dumb fuck am I, right?  Only dumb fucks buy time shares.  It’s a racket.  Geez.  What a fucking waste of money.  A number of people have told me off for this.

Do you know how many weeks of joy this has already brought me?  Sarah and I get to dream about future vacations.  They are paid for.  I will have to pay for park tickets and gas to drive there.  Otherwise we can cook in the apartment and it’s not any more expensive than being at home.  Really.

It’s financed at 10% and I’m pissed off with myself for continuing to carry that debt.  I wanted it paid off in a year.  Err, that hasn’t happened.  Other things keep coming up.  Like getting my heart Occupied.  Why is this so fucking important?  Because people matter.  We need a William Wallace.  We need someone to step up.  This is a Revolution.  Hell, we need everyone to step up.  What can you go do, today, tomorrow, and the next day to make the world a better place?  Stop sitting in your house whining about your problems.

Says the whiny blogger who has barely left the house in months.  Cause Jesus Christ, if anyone should stop whining it’s me.  My life is the fantasy.  My life is the mythical American Dream in all of the particulars.  Oh, except that pesky PTSD shit.  How do I fix me so that I can enjoy the American Dream?

Well, I’m writing.  I think good will come from it.  I think that is one of the gifts that was given to me in this lifetime.  I can give people things to think about.  They won’t always agree with me, probably rarely.  But I want them to get to the point where they say, “Ok, I guess I can see why you feel the way you do.”  That’s what I fucking want.  I don’t need to have other people agree with me.  I need them to understand WHY I am different.  Why my opinion is different.  Because maybe that will ripple.  Maybe other people who have different opinions are ok too.  Can we stop beating the shit out of political parties?  What is the fucking point?  Grow up you stupid babies.

People are people.  I’m neither a Democrat nor a Republican.  I kind of hate you all equally.  And don’t get me started on how I feel about socialists.  Or the members of my own, Libertarian party.  I feel pretty embarrassed to be associated with them.  Good grief.  But it is the closest to what I believe.

I’m getting away from the point.  When my heart was Occupied my priorities shifted.  Noah is never going to want to stay home with me while working a part time job.  He doesn’t want to.  Ok.  The dramatic need to lower our monthly expenses so that can happen… doesn’t really need to happen.  If it takes longer and I pay more interest in the time share, that will be ok.  Really.  I can deal having to “tighten my belt”.  We are part of the 99%.  In order to maintain all the insurances folks consider necessary we have more than $6,000 of our income promised before it arrives.  It’s $8,000.  We have months where we put $17,000 on the credit card.  You do the math.  No really, that’s going to require some belt tightening.  But I don’t exactly feel like I can complain about that.

And I have the money to spend.  Occupy needs it more than I need to be able to have the lifestyle to which I have become accustomed.  The fact that I can preplan 50 years of vacations means that my life is already as good as it needs to be.

The reason I feel I need to give the money is because people need a spark of hope.  They need to see things being done.  I can’t be the William Wallace for this movement.  I really kind of wish I could.  But that’s not my story.  I’m trying to bait other people.  I’m trying to push them to expand their dreams.  Whoever is going to be the firebrand to lead this Revolution, (s)he will not have much money to start with.  But there will be so much hunger.  So many dreams.  That person will say, “Yes give me your money so I can change the world.”  I hope.  I really hope.

In the meantime I took my family to a park clean up day in Oakland the Occupy folks organized.  I have marched.  I sit in the encampment and eat lunch and talk to the people who live there as I feel I can emotionally.  I think my next clean up day should be in Fremont.  I think that I’m about out of spoons for driving to Oakland.

I think maybe I should just open my front door and walk out it.  I think I should Occupy the space I am in.  Why am I trying so hard to give this money to Oakland?  Why am I beating people over the head asking them to please please please take the money?  Why don’t I start my own fucking occupation.  Hm.  It’s an idea.  What would I do if I occupied Fremont?  Hmm.  I would start putting up notices for neighborhood clean up days.  I’ll be surprised if I’m the only one out there.  This is a small town in the middle of a big urban sprawl.

I’ve been surprised by how many of my neighbors have lived here for more than twenty years and they don’t know any of their neighbors.  There is so much hostility and fear and isolation here.  Why?  I feel sad saying that I sat at the local diner and listened to the waitress be casually racist with the other customers.  Despite the fact that I actually know a fair number of people in Fremont… I don’t see them.  Pretty much ever.  If you live in Fremont and you are “interesting” you spend your life in your car trying to get anywhere but here.

I’m getting tired of this attitude.  Fremont is beneath people.  I’ve done it too.  I spent the first many years of our marriage being fucking pissed off living in this fucking house in fucking Fremont.  This is one of the lowest socio-economic areas.  Not the lowest, by any stretch.  This is more like what I grew up with. My friends keep telling me to move to Alameda.  I really don’t want to.  I’m neither interested in the housing cost increase nor the insularity.  I actually like that my neighborhood is not predominantly white.  But I’m scared here.  This is not really the safe bubble people think of in the bay area.

I’m in the closet.  I can go protest in Oakland and be a radical and a pervert and a queer and whatever.  People here just see me as that nice weird lady.  I’m really polite to people in my neighborhood (uhhh except for the one time I yelled at a guy for wasting water while he was trying to deal with his lawn; long embarrassing story).  I’m getting to know my neighbors very slowly.  Very distantly.  I’m trying to be consistent in my behavior over a long period of time without exposing them to my mood swings.  I can’t afford to piss off my neighbors.  Do you know how much pressure that is for me?

How in the hell can I expect my really diverse neighborhood to be thrilled about having a whore who writes about sex on the internet in their neighborhood?  I’m out with the kids all the time.  Aren’t they going to start looking at me as if I am dirty if they find out?  Don’t I need to hide?

I think it is interesting that my friends think the Occupy movement is about money.  I think it’s about pushing for the right to exist and be different and have a different life.  Whatever the fuck that means.  Our entire culture is set up around streamlining people so they can be more and more similar.  I’m not fucking like the folks who grew up in small town Duluth (love you).  And that’s more than ok.  It’s awesome.  I had different experiences so I got to go off and become a completely different kind of person.  I’m not like the people who grew up in Rotorua, either.  Or London near as I can tell.  I go a lot of places and I meet a lot of people.  I never fit.  Nowhere.

Maybe I need to stop going out into the world trying to find someplace that is right.  I think the Occupy movement is about seeing that something that needs to be changed and doing it.  That will be financial for a lot of people.  But it’s also about recognizing that we have abdicated a lot of responsibility to the system.  Any system.  How’s that going for folks?  Maybe if we want something we have to just go fucking do it.

I want to feel ok in my town.  I have to live here.  But I can’t stay in the closet.  This is horrible.  I’m not much like most of the folks around me.  But I’m not like folks anywhere.  That’s ok.  I may not be the right kind of Fremonter, but I’m the right kind of me.  Yeah, it’s a stupid stupid little thing I say.  I say it because I hope it’s true.  I’m trying to convince myself it is.  It’s very hard to believe that who and what I am is ok.  That feels like a lie.  So so so so so so many people tell me that I’m not ok.  Not directly.  Not to my face.  But in the very air I breathe in this culture.  I am so fucking wrong.

The General Strike showed me that I don’t feel that way because of the incest.  I feel that way because I am an American.  In fact, that seems to be our national culture.  Anything different is wrong and bad.  People, you need to lighten the fuck up.  Maybe instead of sitting in an encampment in solidarity with people in Oakland I should be organizing a neighborhood group to figure out a way to meet the needs of the people within walking distance of me.  That’s a significantly better choice for the planet.


But I will have to do that alone.  I won’t be able to throw money at that problem and walk away.  I will have to find the drive and determination to do that.  I will probably mostly be the one doing that, if I think it should happen.  It makes me tired.  I can’t do that yet.  I feel like I am failing my human beings.  I feel like every day that I allow children to walk past my house on the way to school who are going hungry and I ignore that I am just as bad as the people who didn’t help me.  I have so much rage at all of the people who didn’t help me.


Who the fuck am I helping?  I don’t know.  I hope that the RV comes through.  That would be something.  I wish I knew where my life was going.  I feel like I am littering the path with burning ambitions.  Things that hurt me that I am not focusing on them exclusively.  You can’t focus on a dozen things exclusively.  There isn’t enough me for that.


I really hope this movement spreads.  Please people, you can change the world too.  It doesn’t actually take money.  It takes the desire to do good.  You’ll find a way.  Please? 

Accountability

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Just to keep the time line up to date: offered money as compensation for damages during the General Strike.  Roundly ignored.  Go to morning meeting, mild interest but mostly apprehension about what it means.  Go to General Assembly, get told No!  You start chaos!  Ok.  Post on internet.  Receive emails.  Have phone calls and email discussions and one really exciting in person meeting.

Here is what I am looking at:
“A few friends/local (small mom and pop) business owners and I have come together to put organize a “black friday” event/shopping day.  We are working to put together a map of local shops in the area and making it a fun day of shopping, food and music in Oakland.  I’ve reached out to someone at Occupy so that we can include this day as part of our initiative to boycott corporations and bring Oakland’s local economy in the black.  I can call on Thursday and discuss with you further if you would like.  We are hoping to also get vendors and folks that do not have a store front to join in.  A few business have opened up their doors to adding tables for local vendors to be able to participate in this.

I actually do not need a lot of money for this initiative because our only major cost is printing of flyers and posters.  I have found many people to volunteer their time, as I have, to help support our local economy.  I was trying to figure out who I can get these posters printed by and hoped to find a place that would donate that as well but have had no luck thus far.  Then I saw your email and figured I would send you a note in case you would be interested in supporting this effort.”
  

That is the kind of thing I want to fund.  It’s going to be a few hundred dollars at most.

Another person is in communication with me about a separate fund for repairing damage done to small businesses so they can petition for redress.  I’m willing to contribute to that too.  I’m less sure of the dollar amount.

But the big one?  The individuals who pushed the General Strike through want to buy an RV and make a mobile clinic.  They have doctors and nurses who have already volunteered to staff it.  It’s going to be a logistical nightmare and a fuckton of money beyond what I have.  I’m so excited I could pee my pants.  This is something real.  Medical care for people who can’t afford it?  Yes.  Yes.  Yes.  If my money can provide that, please dear god take it.  My medical care is covered.  Noah spends a fucking insane amount of money on my medical care.  (don’t ask.)  I’m not a special fucking snowflake.  Everyone should be able to have the support I have.  I won’t be able to ensure that everyone gets what I get, but they can get better than they have right now.  They should.

I’m not real enthusiastic about national healthcare, I’ll tell the truth.  But I’m fucking enthusiastic about people in a community saying, “Hey!  We want to help our neighbors get healthcare.”  Washington DC isn’t going to save us.  We have to do it for our selves.

Occupy your heart.

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When I wandered around the Strike on Wednesday my favorite sign was the one that said Occupy Your Heart.  I think a few different people made them.  That one appealed to me because it seems at the root of what needs to happen, in my opinion.  Occupy Wall Street/etc is about being upset about financial stuff.  That’s true.  But it’s also about our country’s desperate need for hope.  We thought Obama would fix everything.  Unfortunately he’s just one man.

What I saw on Wednesday changed my life because even though everyone didn’t understand exactly what they were doing, they were motivated to action.  What can we accomplish with this much emotion?  That many people showed up for the General Strike because they want hope for a better tomorrow.  They feel like their needs are not being heard nor met.

And this all started with some anarchists, near as I can tell.  Or at least people with different ideals than me. I don’t mind.  I’m grateful that the punk kids have had the balls to get this started while I hide at home.  I absolutely respect the fact that they have more courage than me.  I owe them a large debt of gratitude.  They have more nerve, and more anger.  I’m not sure if they have more vision.  I don’t understand much about the end goal of the destructive parts of the Occupy movement.  I’m waiting.

I’m more interested in the building side.  I don’t think I am the enemy of the anarchists.  I think I am the other side of their revolution.  They have things to say.  They have things they can accomplish.  I don’t agree with all of their methods, but I accept that revolutions have unintended consequences.  That is why I originally thought to just repair the damage.  Not because I want to shame the anarchists.  But because I accept a few broken windows as the cost of business and I want to be on the business end.

I am frankly terrified of what is going to happen in Oakland over the next couple of years as the city recoils in horror from the shock of the financial impact of the Occupy movement.  Millions already diverted.  This is going to hurt the city.  I’m sure that services will be cut.  I don’t know which and that scares me.  I worry about who is going to bear the brunt of the unintended consequences of this movement.  I wonder which innocent children will be affected.

I wonder and I feel deep guilt.  Because it won’t be my kids.  I’m not in the 1%, but I’m in the 5%.  My kids will be safe.  That isn’t true of everyone’s kids.  I feel so bad that some other woman’s children may suffer because I was one more freakin body at the General Strike.  Money is not an infinite resource.  The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of someone else’s money.

I believe in the principles of democracy in a small group setting.  I believe that my voice should be able to be matter.  Not more than other peoples, but just as much.  I was told that offering this money to the movement is a way of trying to gain power, and I guess it kind of is.  But a freaking small amount of power in exchange for me feeling like I did the best thing I could do.  Other people have time, energy, and manpower to spend on bettering the city.  I don’t.  I think those things are more valuable than the money I have, quite frankly.  That is what will get the work done.  The people who care.  Not the money.  But the money helps.  The money can make or break the movement because money appearing at the right time means that the right strategic things can happen.

I want someone to be building.  I don’t care who.  If you want to build, please come talk to me.  I believe in you Occupy Oakland.  You Occupied my heart.  You showed me how much power you have.  You showed me that you are mighty and influential.  How can we do things to help other women’s children be as safe as mine?  It’s not fair that so many children are unsafe.  Please, I want this Occupation to make the world a better place.  Not a place with less money to spread farther.

We have to build.

The money

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I was attacked by a pit bull when I was 5.  I’m not going to tell the whole story because it’s going in the book.  But suffice to say, I spent my entire life knowing that money was coming.  I dreamed about it.  I thought about what to do with it.  I wanted to make sure that I got the absolute maximum usefulness about it.  I preplanned how to pay for college, a house… I had financial planning till I was 30 done by about 12.

Then I married Noah.  And the whole game changed.  The monthly stipend was my money through our marriage.  I never felt bad about buying the random shit I wanted because it was my money any way.  Then I got the $35,000 and I couldn’t figure out what to do with it.  I haven’t been able to bring myself to just pay off the time share.  It feels like an insult to who I was and what that money meant to me.  That settlement changed my life.  It was a gift from the universe.  I didn’t earn it.  It’s not like it’s proof that I deserve to be where I am financially.

I feel like the only reason I survived was because I benefit from enormous privilege.  I have enormous survivors guilt.  Whenever someone tells me that I should have died I think about all the girls who did.  Did they die because they didn’t have the hope at 18 of getting out for sure no take backs?  Did I only have the strength to fight every day because I knew that no one could take my freedom away from me.  I was god damn financially independent with $1200 every month.  That was more than my mother often made throughout my life.  I knew how to be poor.  That was easy.  If I was poor for a reason because I had a goal post in sight of when it was no longer true… that’s easier.  If you have no hope of things improving, why should you bother having self restraint when you see something small you want?

This is a big part of my issues with my mother.  She has been robbing Peter to pay Paul for so long that she is incapable of managing money.  Poverty will do that to you.  I don’t even think it’s her fault.  But I can stand back and look at how she cycles and know it’s a bad idea.

At this point in time I have no plans to go make money.  Indefinitely I am dependent on Noah entirely.  Noah makes such an obscene amount of money that I feel staggered by it.  We could survive easily on less than half of it.  And it’s going to go up.  All of a sudden my money seems… so small.  Cheapened?  In the scheme of my life all of a sudden $20,000 isn’t very much money.  In three years we won’t be able to tell a difference in our life because of it being spent.  That’s kind of disgusting.

I feel kind of disgusting.  And yet, this is the American Dream, right?  Whenever people express bitterness that everyone can’t be in the same position as me I feel kind of bewildered.  I don’t think I’m happier at this income than I would be at half this income.  I do more stuff.  I travel.  I fund a very comfortable retirement.  But I’m not happier.  I don’t feel this magical I’ve arrived that I expected to feel.  I feel like a trespasser.  I feel guilty.  I feel like I have done something shameful.

I’ll say frankly that a lot of the reason I feel so ashamed is the response of disgust when I say that I want to donate $20,000 people look at me like I just took a shit on the sidewalk.  Yes.  I have that to give.  This is the very last money in the world that is mine and I want to do something with it I can feel proud of.

I feel really guilty when I admit out loud that I keep having the parable, “If you give a man a fish he will eat for a day.  If you teach a man to fish he will eat for a lifetime.”  Err, or some phrasing like that.  I think it would be wrong and short sighted of me to give the Occupy movement this money for things like blankets and food.  Local people with very little money to give are supplying those things.  It would improve the quality of the food and I honestly believe that’s not something I should be funding.  I am not going to feel like I have made the world a better place because I spent $20,000 on high price snacks for stoners in the park, sorry.

No really.  What the fuck is Occupy Oakland doing?  I want to know what concrete things people want to get started in the community.  What outreach?  What types of demands are being made of the city?  What do people want to have happen?  I can’t be one of the people out doing the work in the street and I know that.  That’s not something I have to give right now.  I would have another messy nervous breakdown and that’s fucking stupid.

But I’m really good at thinking through long-range planning.  And I have a very good idea of how money is most effective.  Ok.  I think I’m ready to write some emails now.  You were right, Noah.  I had to write about it.

I really hope Noah manages to hit the 1% like he thinks he will.  I will make a fucking good philanthropist.  Other people won’t agree with me, and that will be ok.  This is the hard part.  That people are going to disagree.  But people disagree with every powerful person.  You have to stick to your guns. I have a vision in my head of what it means to make the world a better place with money.  It doesn’t matter if other people agree with the specifics of it.  What matters is that I take action on making the world a better place.  That is what matters from everyone.

If I dilly dally and take too much advice I will never get the satisfaction of really attaining self-actualization.  If I want to take up the most space in the world I can, I can’t worry about the fact that other people occasionally have to bend for me.  That has to be ok.  The balance is in finding out how much space I can take up without pushing people too far.  I don’t want to shove people away.  But I do want to take up as much room as I can.  When I feel like I can’t take as much room as I want to, I feel small inside.  Like I’m stepping on all the dreams I had as a child.

Why the fuck can’t I shoot the moon?  I married a rich guy (I swear to fucking god it was on accident) and we are both ambitious people.  Why not?  Why can’t I play a whore for a few years to push Noah up the ladder.  That’s what builds him up the most from me.  I can do that.  Sure I’ll trade sexual favors for performance reviews.  If that makes you smile while you work like mad, why not?  What’s the problem?

And our needs are met.  If Noah never got another raise we would be fully on track to have a perfectly stable and comfortable life forever if he can work for another 10 years.  He’s 35.  I’m pretty sure that’s going to happen.  That means that everything from now on is extra.  We don’t need it.  Noah likes to say, “And what do we call things we don’t need?  A luxury!”  My entire life is about luxury.  I will be honest and say that I feel kind of embarrassed about the amount of luxury in my life.  But I’m trying to own it and be up front about it.  It’s complex.

I don’t know how to explain what I feel right now.  Watching the crowds stream into the port felt like a religious experience.  All those people cared so much.  And they pulled that off with very little money.  Actually, now they pulled that off partially with my money.  Because I paid for the buses.  I feel really good about that.  I feel like that is the first victory for this money.

I want this money to make a big impact.  I want it to be part of the big picture, not the stupid small details that will be handled one way or another.  I want to start learning what it means to be a big person.  I’m not there yet and I know it.  But I want it.  And that’s how you start.  I don’t have much influence with $20,000.  But I have enough.  I can decide which parts of Occupy Oakland I think will have the biggest long-term impact.  I can make a choice about something happening that is for the good of other people.  Yes, the argument can be made that absolutely every single part of the operation is Just As Important.  Whatever.  We disagree.  That’s fine.

Now how do I do this without being an obnoxious cunt.  Because it’s not my goal to make people pry this money out of my grasping fingers and that’s totally how I’m making it sound.  I don’t mean to.  Ok, here’s an example:

One person spoke about trying to have the actual dirt removed from the public areas and have it replaced with organic soil for growing food.  That’s an interesting idea.  It will require working with the city though, because if the city ignores that you did that and comes along and does business as usual next week… err… that was wasted fucking money.  Dead serious.  I’m not interested in funding something that make hippies feel good about themselves for a few weeks.  I don’t care if that sounds bitchy.  I want to know what agreements can be reached with the city for continued maintenance.  I want to know how that will be handled going forward.  And then that sounds like the kind of thing I would fucking love to pay for.  That aligns so perfectly with my value system it isn’t funny.

More blankets… not so much.

But the movement is just getting started.  Right now they are still focused on short-term logistics and they feel resentful of me having a different timeline.  I get that.  But it’s my money and I have to feel good about how it is spent.  When I feel good about how it is spent my response is, “Oh you spent your rent money on those buses?  If you walk with me back to my car I can give you a check for that.  I’m sorry I left my check book in my car.  That was kind of stupid of me.”

I don’t want to haggle forever.  I want to haggle until I am satisfied.  I want to feel like *I* receive the maximum joy from spending this.  Too much haggling means it isn’t fun any more.  I want to haggle just enough.  Ok.  That’s awesome.  I think I know what I want to do.  I want to send an email saying that at the next GA I would like someone neutral to say that this crazy lady wants to hear proposals for concrete things Occupy Oakland can start doing in the community in the next couple of weeks with $1,000-$5,000 start up capital on a given idea.  How would the money be spent?  What are the long-term implications of using the money this way?  How would it be maintained after Occupy moves out of the park (if that happens)?  I will accept them via email.  I need to have a form I want filled out.  Hmm.  Ok, what is that going to look like.

What need in the community do you see that you would like to fill:
How many people will be needed to see this through:
How much money do you think you will need?  How will you spend it?  Be specific:
How will this project be able to exist in six months?  A year?  Five years:
Do you believe this project is one that is likely to find funding in other places when I run out of money?  How do you plan to pursue that issue:

And I will decide which ones sound like things I want to fund and which ones are not well thought out.  I won’t be the most popular person there, but oh well.  I don’t want to be popular.  I want to be effective.

Fun plotting.

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I’m drawing pictures of my imaginary house.  I like to think about what I would change.  It’s kind of daunting to think of paying for it.  I don’t want to finance it.  I’m really repelled by the idea of paying interest on things that I want.  It strikes me as the wrong approach to life.  It is going to cost at least $250,000.  Realistically, a shit load more than that but not everything has to be bought at once.  That’s about the original asking price of the house.

My neighborhood is full of renters.  This area could change for better or worse easily.  I have no guarantee of recouping my investment.  That will be an easier pill to swallow if I save up the money in advance and have it to spare.  The problem with loans is that you are signing on to always and forever have this obligation.  It makes me uncomfortable.

A lot of it could be done for cheaper if I wanted to do it myself and deal with “close enough”.  After looking around my garage for a few months I can tell you I won’t be happy with “close enough” forever in my whole house.  I’m kind of tired of living in a cage.  I want a house with a lot of light.  My entire childhood I lived in close dark cramped quarters.  I don’t have to do this forever.  As my children grow and invite friends over… I am going to need to have somewhere to go other than my bedroom.  If I want my kids to have friendships that do not bend at my whims, I have to have a place to be away from them.

When people glorify the Noble Savage and idealize that behavior into AP dogma things get twisted.  I don’t live in a tribe.  It’s not possible for me to give as much constant contact as that requires.  AP as preached by the extremists on MDC (just to be clear who I am talking about) is pretty restrictive.  And the choices they advocate can be right given a very narrow set of circumstances which apply to their lives.

I honestly believe that if I lived in po’dunk North Dakota I would not have vaccinated my kids and I would have laughed my ass off at people who told me my kids were at risk for the diseases that are mostly wiped out in this country.  If I lived in Missouri… I’d look at what diseases are happening in Mexico and I’d vaccinate based on that.  I like international travel.  I like going off and creating stories.  I feel absolutely driven to be an interesting person.  Damnit.  My kids need to be vaccinated.

But not for chicken pox.  Or rotovirus.  Or the flu.  I think we overmedicate as a country.  I will tell my kids about chicken pox and try to expose them when they are young, but if we don’t catch it in the wild I will vaccinate them at 12.  Earlier if they tell me that I am nuts and they don’t want chicken pox.  I get the impression Shanna will be the kind of girl who speaks her opinion.  At least occasionally.

Anyway.  All this to say that I think we will get along better as she grows up if we have a bigger house.  I have issues.  I know this.  The thing is, all those Noble Savage societies have a very different structure to their entire community.  They have more support than a nuclear family does in America.  It’s an apples to oranges comparison.  It’s not that a child must have mommy 24/7.  A child needs to be cared for by consistent caregivers 24/7.  It’s not the same thing.  I can believe that an infant in the first few months may fare better with just mommy.  I now have a toddler and a kid!  I don’t have a baby any more!

The upside of having married Noah is… I can have dreams and know that I don’t have to be the only road to accomplishing them.  I can’t express the safety that feels like.  It makes my breath come short.  When I’m hiding by myself of course I dream of having the book I write in November be good enough to publish.  It’s a nice dream.  But I spend about five minutes doing that.  I don’t think it’s good to think too hard about that.  I think about what I want to say.  And why it’s worth saying.

I have a lot of format ideas that I’ve been noodling with for years.  Noah has listened to more teary conversations where I sob that I want to write a book about everything that has happened than I care to count.  I need to do it so I can move past this phase of my life.  I’m not over it.  I haven’t said enough about it.  There isn’t anyone in the world who knows the story from start to finish other than me.  I lost the people who were my witnesses.

I have to write it down.  I can’t be the only one who knows I exist and why I exist the way I am.  It’s not fair.  They can’t do that to me.  They can’t take away my right to have eople in the wolrd who know know me.  They can’t isolate me.  They can’t tell me I am a liar.  They can’t take my story away from me and call it a lie.  Fuck them.

I want to write my story because it is true.  And it fucking bothers me that no one but me saw it.  I’m tired of being told that I am lying.  I need to feel that intimacy with people.  And a few people will read it.  I hope it will be told in a way that is good enough to publish and a lot of people will read it.  I hope people will get an edutainment out of it.  It’s not that I’m always right.  I’m not.  It’s that my perspective is different.  It is jarring to people.  That is why I identify as white trash.  I have a way of speaking, of presenting myself into the world with aggression.  But not just that.  I call attention to myself with things that are kind of tacky.

Just wait till I’m done with my house, y’all.  It’ll be great.  Do you know what I’ve learned sitting here in my wonderful garage?  I’m not satisfied with close enough.  I despise the unfinished wires.  I loathe the exposed pipes.  I have a friend who offered to help (he means do all the work; he’s sweet) me fix a lot of that cosmetic stuff.  But none of that would change the fact that the city of Fremont says this can’t be a living space.  It’s a garage.  That’s why I won’t call it a den or office or whatever.  It’s a garage.  It’s a great garage… but it’s a garage.  I want to move up in the world.  This will never be good enough for me.  I will always feel like I am hiding in the dark.  I need more light.  The living room isn’t really good enough either.

I won’t ever be happy in this house until there is a lot more light and higher ceilings.  It’s too claustrophobic and dark.  It reminds me of the house in the mountains.  It’s not the color of the walls–which I like.  I am not a tall woman.  I can touch my ceiling.  I have tall friends.  I dislike that they have to duck and be made smaller in my house.  It’s a standard ceiling.  I have to jump.  I don’t care.  It’s like trying to get around in a 6′ town when you’re 10′ tall.  I hate it.  I would never have picked this house.  And moving isn’t the right option for a variety of reasons.  A more expensive house would still be wrong because what I want is a custom house.  I can do that here.

So how the fuck do I raise that much money.  Well, as it so happens, I married this geek.  He makes a decent salary.  If he keeps going at the rate he is going financially it can happen in about 13 years.  That’s a long time to be impatient.  How much do I want the money?  When would I like to do the remodel?  These are interesting questions.  The big structural stuff I simply can’t do.  I can’t add a second story full of windows and reinstall the solar panels.  I’m good, but I have my limits.  We just replaced the roof.  Most of the stuff I’m seeing says that I can expect it to last 15-20 years.  Tap fingers.  It’s been on for two years.  Twitch.  Well.  That gives me a lot of time to save money.  There is no chance I will tear it up in the next ten years.  That’s a kind of wasteful that would turn my stomach.

Ok.  I can fuss with the garage.  And try to be frugal.  And put money away.  I can have that dream.  It’s just long-term.  I kind of hate the long-term.  Ack.  It’s terrifying to think of committing, truly committing, to being in this house in ten years with a track record of maintaining the same financial pattern for that long.  It makes my blood run cold.  That’s a lot of fucking pressure.

Side note.  Right now I have Rascal Flatt’s song Stand on repeat.  


On your knees you look up
Decide you’ve had enough
You get mad, you get strong
Wipe your hands, shake it off
Then you stand, then you stand

Learning to marathon means that some goals are just not a high priority.  No matter how intense they feel in some moments.  I will have to learn how to live in close quarters with a lot of people for a while.  I do need privacy.  I need to learn how to create that space for writing.  I need to get the book done and over with.  I have too many uuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhh I wannnnnnnnnnna in my brain.  I need to get one of them done.  I have proven to my own satisfaction that I know this story.  I can tell it.  And I can certainly do it quickly.  I can write the whole thing down in one go.

But I can’t blog it.  Blogging is different.  Every time I blog I write to a different person.  I have a different ideal reader and I’m trying to coax a different reaction.  I need to write the book for Noah.  And I can’t do it with him reading and nodding and changing his behavior in random ways near me.  I would be influenced.  It’s really hilarious to me to think that.  Noah is too important to me in a global fashion.  If I want to truly create something for him I have to do it in complete absence of his knowledge of it.  Otherwise he will come home from work grump on a day when I posted something I am particularly proud of and I will feel crushed and I will stall on writing.

I use blogging as a crutch.  I have learned to write in blogging.  I don’t know if that will translate to a book.

Take what you are given before it is gone

I have a story to tell.  Not telling it is interfering with my life.  That means it is time to stop medicating to prevent my story from being present.  It means telling it fully from start to finish.  And then stopping.  And letting it go.  Maybe only Noah and Sarah will read it and care.  I don’t believe that is true.  I’m actually terrified.  I’m afraid only Noah and Sarah will read it and care.  I’m afraid that it will only influence them.  Because it will influence them.

Writing this book will change Sarah and Noah.  Eventually it will change Shanna and Calli.  I won’t tell either of them about the book until they are adults or until it is so famous I have no choice.  But this having this book in existence in complete form means that I can have people who can fully speak my verbal shorthand.  I can create a way to be fully present in all my broken glory with the adults in my life without having to constantly think about it and try to keep it away from my kids.  Blogging isn’t enough.

I want stories to be comfortable and familiar.  I don’t want to feel like I am unmasking more abuse constantly.  I want the adults in my life to be able to help me censor for my children.  I want to be able to say that I am thinking about Tommy and have them be able to ask, “What about him?” and be able to give them a useful answer.  One that will allow them to be present with me as an adult as someone who sees me without me having to tell this long gory story in front of my kids.

I feel this constant pressure to monitor every word out of my mouth.  I feel horribly uncomfortable because I want to feel this intimacy with Noah and Sarah and it eats me alive.  I can rectify this problem. I can spill my guts.  And then I can relax and listen to them talk and stop feeling so driven to share my story all the time.  I want to be able to listen.  Right now I don’t listen.  I blog and then I nod along waiting for them to mention it and help me process… only those bastards have lives.  My writing is for me.

I need to just write for me.  It’s not working how I want it to work.  Let’s try a different approach.

Life’s like a novel with the end ripped out.

It’s time to go do life.

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I have a secret.  I carried a balance on my credit cards last month.  Almost $10,000 (it is more than that now).  I did it on purpose because I knew that I would be able to pay them off now.  I just got my last annuity check.  Every month since I turned 18 I have received a check for $1,200 every month completely tax free.  I was attacked by a pit bull when I was a child and my friend’s father represented me.  I think he did a fabulous job of handling my settlement.  On my 30th birthday the payments end with a $36,200 check.  (Last monthly payment + $35,000 pay off.)  I’m so thrilled about how much cash I have in my bank account that I’d kind of like to take a screen shot and frame this.  Before the credit card payments go out this month I will hit $50,000 in cash for about a day.

I’ve been talking to Sarah about this a lot.  I’m not sure if someone who grew up in a safe, secure home can understand the kind of elation I feel right now.  This is so much safety and security.  It’s freedom.  If I was truly feeling like I could not handle my life right now I could bail.  I’m not going to.  But right this minute I have all the means I need to disappear if I want to.  I don’t want to.  I choose to be here.  This is what I want.  That’s a weird feeling.  I am not a victim of anything in my life because I choose it.

Right now I’m having a lot of strong mood swings.  I’m doing a lot of hiding from the kids.  As a result the kids are extra-super-clingy.  Which cycles my moods faster.  It’s really nice to have this money appear right now to smack me in the face right now that I really and truly want to be here.  Even with the things I miss about going out.  Even though I miss friends and communities… I can never get this time back.  I really want to be here with my kids.

I’m struggling with the fact that I will no longer be supplying $14,400/year to the household.  I am, in fact, increasing how much I take out of the pool because I am going to do less work (hiring a maid) instead of working more and contributing money as well.  It’s hard to feel like I have enough worth to be in this position.  I find it rather odd to be trying to live more according to Noah’s principles than mine.  You see, I didn’t grow up with intellectuals.  I grew up with stupid, uneducated people.  Not all stupid people are uneducated and not all uneducated people are stupid.  But my family is both.  The idea that any mental work I am doing has value?  That’s odd.  If I have not done substantial physical labor I feel guilty all day.  I’m not supposed to rest.  People like me have to earn rest and there is no chance I have worked enough lately.  I’ve been lazy all week!  Well, sorta.  This is all vague.

Noah believes that me reading, improving myself as a person, writing, and interacting with other adults in intellectual ways are actual priorities.  He wants there to be time in my life for these things.  He does not think I should be working all the time.  It’s weird.  Those are not pastimes I was raised to appreciate.  I have always done them, but it was furtive and hidden.  Shameful.  My secret life.  But what if it isn’t a secret?  What if I get to sit out here in my personal Wonderland and write.  What if that is totally ok?  How about if I learn how to write while sober so that the kids can wander in and out so they don’t feel cut off from me?  Enh, that may be a stretch.  Hm.  I should think about scheduling.  The problem is that I don’t generally smoke on a regular schedule so I have ebbs and flows of how effective it is.  This is why I’m thinking about scheduling things.  I can’t believe I am thinking about scheduling my life so I can be a more effective stoner.

I’m weird, Sir.

The best things in life are free

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There has been a lot of talk lately ’round the old homestead about what we want from life.  We have been coasting.  This is a hard phase and we need to just ride it out until things improve.  But that’s not happening fast enough and I need some kind of change.  I need to be growing towards stuff.  GOALS!  Necessarily this promotes conversation about what kinds of goals to set.

What I am beating around the bush to say is, Noah wants to be rich.  But that doesn’t really tell you much, does it?  What does rich really mean?  Does it mean rivaling Bill Gates?  Does it mean getting to sit down for a chat with Warren Buffet?  Not so much.  Our goal is for Noah to have to work 20 hours or less for us to maintain our current lifestyle.  In my opinionated opinion our life is rather comfy.  Our life is rather comfy because he earns a lot of money.  The important thing to remember is that we are just beginning with this goal.  Most likely we will mess up in several big ways (already have once) and I’ll talk about those here too.  I think there is no value in trying to make us sound better than we are.  Ok, on to figuring out what we have.  This may take more than one posting.

Right this minute we have three checking accounts (long story[1]) and one savings account.  The sum total of cash in them is $7,439.28.  This wouldn’t sound so bad if our current credit card balances didn’t equal $6,223.43.  That is the closest petty cash:debt ratio in the course of our marriage.  Typically our buffer is much higher than that.  But ok fine.  We’ve had an expensive couple of years with having two kids and replacing our roof and such.  That’s ok!  Not to fear.  This is less dire than it appears because we are… privileged people.  Oh good grief are we privileged.  Soon we will be getting cheques from a wide variety of sources.  And not just in the, “Oh I swear” kind of way.

I think I will start by examining our spending for the past 15 months that I have been using Mint.com.  Now you will see how ridiculously extravagant we are.

I first looked at 15 months of financial history on all of our credit cards.
Total spending: $68,660[2]
Average monthly: $4,577
Lowest month: $1,968[3]
Highest month: $8,540[4]

That’s a rather significant variation there. (Keep in mind that this is credit card spending and doesn’t include things like our mortgage, another rather sizable [5] payment each month.) Oof.

Then I went on to looking at our largest expenses which are unusual and/or not likely to be repeated unless we choose to.  So for example, I will not be having another child.  I will, however, continue to need sudden and unexpected medical and/or dental treatments for goodness knows what in the future.  And my children will have accidents.  So I did not include most medical items.  I also excluded house repairs, vehicle repairs, computer purchases, and the ongoing maintenance fee for the time share.

This left me with (on credit cards):

Travel: $9,654
Turek: $3.250 [6]
DVC: $7510
French Laundry: $1,053
Therapy: $750 [7]

The largest unusual purchases out of our checking account were:

NewsLabs: $12,734 ($25,000) [8]
Toyota: $24,694 [9]
Home Birth: $4,000
Lawyer: $2900

Travel is the most obvious thing to cut, only we haven’t even started traveling for the year.  My second oldest friend in the world is getting married in Scotland.  And I really love travel so realistically this isn’t something I want to suspend long term.  Luckily we don’t have to plan for another vasectomy any year soon.  I won’t buy into another time share.  I promise.  I’m thrilled with the one I have though.  French Laundry isn’t something we will be doing again any year soon so that can come off.  The investment money for NewsLabs came out of stock so isn’t really part of my budget.  The van was part of the refinance so doesn’t really count for this.  And I don’t think we’ll be needing to pay for another home birth nor to do that kind of intensive legal work.

That means I am trying to convince myself that $18,713 is fairly unlikely to happen again and are the result of an unusually expensive year.  This is what I tell myself, right?

If I subtract $18,713 (the truly unusual stuff) from $68,660 (the total) that gives me $49,947 or $3330/month.

That’s an interesting number to me.  Most months one paycheque pays mortgage stuff and the other paycheque handles the credit cards.  Previously Noah was taking home ~$2900/paycheque.  Noah has since gotten a different job with an increased salary.  I kind of love this valley.  Hm.  I am not sure where to go with this now so I’ll let this be.  I will come back to this topic though.  I want to figure out how to get to the point where passive income is sufficient. 

1. Ok, short-ish version: One bank account I have had since I was 18.  That’s where my annuities are deposited.  It is a pain to change anything with the annuities because I have to do it through the mail and everything requires visiting a notary.  They will stop coming in September of this year and that is the only activity in that account.  The second bank account was our failed attempt at a higher interest checking account.  E*trade sucks.  It is being phased out.  The third checking account (and the savings too) are now with a local credit union.
2. Yes I’m rounding.  I’m lazy.
3. Second lowest was $1,974 so not a complete fluke.
4. Second highest was $7,520 so this is an unusually high month.
5. Is anyone sick of the footnoting yet? Noah just taught me how to do it and I’m excited. And our mortgage payment is $2164/month but I pay $2300/month.
6. Noah’s vasectomy; worth every penny.
7. Therapy is a new-ish category because while I have gone intermittently for a while I need to be going regularly for a while and that is a new $600/month expense.
8. Our first attempt at Angel investing. We did better than median (lose everything) but we only did that because the company folded so fast they didn’t have a chance to blow all the money. Right. I hear that some of the other companies we saw that day (none of whom wanted our money) are doing very well.
9. We refinanced our house and took out some equity to pay off the van because it had a ruinous interest rate and our new mortgage is 4.375%. It was a rather good trade.

And the next phase begins.

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This weekend didn’t quite go as expected. I didn’t know I was standing on the edge of a precipice about to fall in as fast as possible. I’m ready for my life to be different. I’m ready to go find some new dreams. I realized a while ago that I was feeling frustrated by the limited scope of my life, but I wasn’t sure what to do about it. We are stuck, right? We have these little kids and we made agreements about how we wanted them raised so now I am stuck with those decisions (and this situation) forever. Or at least till the kids are older.

But isn’t life dynamic? This situation is untenable. Something–or, rather, a whole lot of things need to change. So we got to talking. We got to talking about what our lives could look like if we were luckier, or richer, or more determined. We talked about the extremes of what we would each like to have. We tried to figure out how our separate passions and interests can work together. The odd part has always been that we have tremendously different focii in life, yet we manage to be obsessed with one another and we get along far better than I’ve ever gotten along with anyone. Ok, if we are going to be very different people on very different paths, we need to find a way to hold hands at least from our separate paths. I can do it! I can reach out and hold on to the most important man I’ve ever had in my life.

Noah’s dreams are his to share, so I’ll let that rest for the time being. But as for myself, I need a change. I need to be more than a lactating, cleaning, cooking machine. No thanks. I want to have things that I do that are interesting to me. I want to *complete* projects. I want to grow and develop ambitions of my own. Some of the ways I want to grow do actually involve working–but not necessarily for someone else and not necessarily for money. I have to learn how to value me and my time appropriately. I’ve had good reason to think about that lately.

So I’ve been trying to determine what my dreams/goals can be. In what areas of my life do I want to stretch my wings and fly? The first and most important thing to me is realizing that it’s ok to be weird. That must sound odd to anyone who knows me. I experience a lot of anxiety around being odd. Especially in some particular ways. I’m totally ok with making financial choices and living with the results of those decisions. Unless the results make me look like my vision of poor white trash. There, I said it. I have class issues. I grew up being driven around in ugly, old trucks–often that had been “modified” with a blow torch (like my uncle’s truck that had been an RV and he used a blow torch somehow to take most of the RV shell off and leave a weird almost pick up truck from the RV shell). No thanks. I have to discover the difference between having shit because you can’t afford any better and having shit because you want to fly to Europe instead. Not that any part of my house actually qualifies as “shit” and I sold Noah’s ugly truck already.

I live in a small, not especially nice home. There isn’t much I can do about that other than change my attitude and possibly my decor so that I actually like my house. There are always going to be limitations to living here–it really is a small home and the layout is not the best–but I can work on changing things about this house so that I like it here. I am in this house at least 16/24 hours 7 days a week. Lately, much much more time than that. Why shouldn’t my house be someplace that makes me happy? So I am going to change things. I’m nervous about where I will find the money. I think that house projects need to become my big ‘entertainment’ budget and I should stop buying my children clothing to fund it. I’m kidding. Mostly. It is lucky that we are set for clothes for pretty much the rest of the year.

Right this exact minute we are nearly in a financial place that gives me hives. We are running out our buffer. We are doing so for quite a few good reasons and the money will be replaced this year–but I’m scared. I can feel the terror of being poor. It’s hard to convince my lizard brain that we are not on the verge of poverty. This would be because of vehicle maintenance and property taxes. Ugh. But it is temporary because the checks to fix it are on their way. I’m just over-sensitive. You see, I have panic attacks if we drop below three months of salary in savings. And Noah makes a lot of money. But! It’ll be ok. It’s probably a good thing for me to be cautious with money. Noah does want us to get rich.