Category Archives: mother trouble

Anger and feelings

Now my ergonomic keyboard isn’t working. Because there is a conspiracy to destroy my arms.

Today was a therapy day. We talked about my feelings. Cause I have them. And I pay someone to listen to me fucking talk about them.

Something that happened before with running: after a while I can’t tell the difference between the different kinds of stomach pain. Anxiety, hunger, and illness all feel the same. They can all involve vomiting (or not) and tons of nausea. There isn’t much difference. So as my exercise increases and I’m using more calories my belly hurts a lot of the time. And I can’t tell the difference between hunger and anxiety. Which freaks me out chemically.

We talked a lot about my feeling angry earlier this week. And how my reaction to feeling anger is days of self-recrimination and punishment. I don’t feel like it is ok to be angry.

Even though these days the extremity of my anger is expressed through slamming a cabinet shut. And not that hard. Because I’ve already had to repair cabinets I’ve ripped off the wall and I uhhh don’t want to do that again. I’ve got enough shit to do.

I have punched a hole in a wall in years. I haven’t cut myself in years. I haven’t hit anyone in years. I haven’t inappropriately screamed and screamed at someone in a long time. I have screamed at my kids, but not recently.

I’ve been holding it together. I haven’t flipped out on anyone beyond a quavering voice in a long time.

I realized today that I haven’t had a panic attack in months. (I think that this is helped by how much pot I use.) That is a big deal. Through my teen years and my twenties I didn’t have very many months without panic attacks. Heck, for much of that time I didn’t have many weeks without panic attacks. They tend to go in waves. They get really bad for a while then they subside a little for a while. I’ll take whatever reprieve I can get.

I’m doing better. I really am. People who have known me since I was a teenager tell me I am much more calm. That’s a good sign.

But when I feel angry I treat that as deserving as much punishment as if I went to the park and started slapping kids. My standards for myself really aren’t within a range I can accomplish. I can’t stop feeling angry sometimes.

I haven’t raged at anyone in a long time. This is about as much control as someone like me gets. I spend a lot of time feeling like I am pathetic and disgusting if this is the best I can do. I’m not actually a nice person. I can just play one on tv.

My shrink asked me why on earth have I been babysitting so much for other people lately. I told her it is because I want those kids to know me. I want to have real relationships with them. I have known some of them since birth. I desperately hope they will see me as more than just an occasional party host. I want them to think of me as a caregiver.

That requires giving some care. With a smile on my face. When I feel frustration I need to ACKNOWLEDGE it and talk about how I will deal with it. That conscious modeling teaches the kids so much. My kids and other kids.

“Gosh. I’m feeling really frustrated because this isn’t going how I want it to go. I suppose I have a few choices. I could scream and jump up and down. Will that make things better? (Kids chorus: “No.”) Err, I could get mad and break it because then I won’t have to deal with this again. Will that make things better? (Kids chorus: “No.”) Oh. Am I going to have to take a deep breath, calm down, and try again? (Kids chorus: “Yes.”) Ah crum. That sounds like work. Alllllllllllll riiiiiiiiiiiight.”

Whine is intentional. It makes them giggle.

I’m not sure when I will feel like what I am doing is “good enough”. Part of my problem is, I deeply admire people who are making radically different choices. I want to emulate them. I want to pattern after them because I like them and respect them and look up to them.

But if I do I will wreck the good thing I’ve got going here. Some things aren’t compatible.

I told my shrink that I’ve been having a lot more sexual fantasy/visualization stuff again. She asked like what. I said I miss going to grocery stores looking for a trick. My favorite game is going to a vanilla place (not just grocery stores–but man I love them) and looking for someone. I win if I can get someone home and naked in under two hours. I’ve won the game. Not every time, of course. That wouldn’t be a very fun game.

I think my shrink hasn’t quite fully picked up on the “queer” thing. Multiple times she used very heterosexually focused language to describe who I would pick up and what I would do with them. I corrected her.

Girls who like casual sex are much harder to find than boys who like casual sex. That doesn’t mean I like boys more. Just that when it comes to going hunting, sometimes I like shooting fish in a barrel. Ahem.

She told me that the fantasy shit is “very empowering”. Which is a phrase that triggers my gag reflex. I’ve uhhh heard a bit too much about how victims should empower themselves. It always sounds squicky to me. (Squick, for those who don’t know, is the visceral, physical sensation you get when someone does something you really don’t like. Like someone sucking your toes if you hate that sort of thing. When you get that instinctive shiver of “yuck“. I kind of want to go on to a long list of things that squick some people but I’ll be kind.)

The scared, shameful, dirty feeling after I get angry is probably the most pressing “PTSD symptom” I have right now. That anxiety eats me for days. It means I can’t sleep. It makes me shorter and shorter.

If I feel intense anger it is really hard to calm down. It is really hard to stop feeling attacked and threatened.

I’d like to be clear that I’m rationally aware that no one is attacking me or threatening me at this stage of my life. Not no one. It’s been a long fucking time. I am not saying that I’m getting threats and so of course I’m scared.

No. If I go through the experience of getting angry (my baby-sitter being kind of flakey is annoying but not really that catastrophic–I get other kid care right now) even if I don’t do anything inappropriate I have days of fierce, mean, nasty self-recrimination. I eat irregularly until my stomach is a mass of pain. I don’t sleep enough–not nearly enough. The last few days have involved a lot of staying up late and still waking up early to grind on what a disgusting piece of shit I am.

I’m better than I was. I can distract myself if I’m awake and in front of a screen and smoking pot. Then I can stop the inside-voice-ranting. If I try to lay in bed and go back to sleep… Forget it. The brain weasels will eat me. I’ll end up crying and retreating to the garage to let Noah sleep anyway.

I suppose I use writing about the way I would use a sponsor if I were the AA type. Instead I smoke my pot. With the blessing of no less than two doctors and a therapist.

My shrink told me that I should probably move my blog to being behind some kind of wall. Folks under 18 shouldn’t be allowed to get access to my main writing.

I have feels about that. But if I’m going to be publishing books for the under 18 market I might now also want to have a public blog where I talk about the super hot stripper who was happy to uhhh come to the bathroom with me at a strip club one night. Or the other really hot girl I fucked in an elevator at a club. We really weren’t supposed to be doing that there.

My life has been pretty good.

Yeah. I like girls.

Running and body stuff

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Bodies are weird. People are weirder.

I spent 2012 running because I wanted to be able to check “run a marathon” off of my bucket list. I had not been much of a runner before that. In the process I found that my body changed substantially. I was already riding the wave of lower-than-usual-weight because my Uncle Bob had recently died and I had divorced my biological family and that was really hard on me and I lost a lot of weight from not eating. I was down to the weight I had previously only reached while starving myself on Weight Watchers and exercising five days a week.

So having the “thinner” body is associated with lots of bad stuff for me. I get there when I’m starving myself and/or dealing with a lot of psychological pain such that my stomach hurts too much to eat. It’s not fun.

Also: when I lose weight the amount of street harassment goes up.

Think about the implication of that. I lose weigh *because* I am already having problems and then all of a sudden the ambient harassment I get in public increases.

Folks ignore the chubby chick running around the neighborhood. When I get thinner men start telling me they want to “come with me” or “distract me” or they just yell shit. And my neighborhood is pretty safe. I know enough of the neighbors that if I have a problem I can go three or four doors down, bang on a door and say, “I’m sorry to interrupt but I’m having a problem.”

I love my neighborhood so much. I appreciate that my neighbors are so friendly with me. I’ve been here for eight years now. I know people.

So it’s not like I’m scared but I really don’t like dealing with it. I feel worn down and tired. Being “thinner” feels more like being a piece of glass that gets thinner and more breakable with time. It’s not a good thing losing mass.

I don’t own a scale and I haven’t in a while and I don’t want to. I don’t care about tracking the number. Knowing it occasionally is just to have data. My recent doctor visit says I went back up to 170. Given the running schedule I’ve put together for the rest of the year… that won’t be true long.

Right now I have a belly. I like my belly. It means my forking pants fit. At this weight my “skinny” pants are tight and my “fat” pants are a bit loose but I can wear everything. It’s convenient.

If I lose a bunch of weight again I should probably just buy some clothes that fit instead of holding my pants on with rope the way I have been doing for a while. I don’t like most belts. So I use the rope belt that Jenny made for her Renaissance Faire costume years ago. She made it by braiding really bright ribbons.

I use this belt all the time. Every time I run it holds up my pants.

Every time I wear the belt I think of Jenny. I think of her kind of silently blessing my endeavors. Jenny loves me. Jenny wants me to keep on keepin’ on.

Being smaller is a weird thing for me. For one thing it means I am more shaped like my mother and that’s a mixed blessing. On one hand, she’s pretty cute. On the other hand… when I catch a glimpse of my body abstractly in a reflection I miss her so much I feel like I get hit with a solid fist of pain.

I want my mommy. I’d much rather be fat and never see her in the mirror again.

But if I’m going to run I don’t think I’m going to pull off fat. No matter how much I eat and let me tell you I try to keep weight on while I’m running. I eat like a hummingbird–my weight sixteen times over a day.

Running puts a natural limit on how much I can eat. After I get accustomed to the pace again I won’t be able to over eat very often. When I’m running my stomach picks a size and that is the size it is. I don’t get to under eat and I don’t get to over eat any more. It’s a really weird feeling. I didn’t exercise as a kid enough to know if that happened then.

So I do my best to eat a lot. I up the calorie density of everything (mmmm butter). But it turns into muscle and I melt away. Because apparently the me I see in the mirror is composed up of a lot of fat.

I don’t actually come from a family of heavy people. The only people in my family background who are heavy are the people with severe mental illness who are entirely sedentary. Everyone who isn’t so depressed they stop functioning is pretty fit.

I think I’ve tried to ignore that most of my life. I’ve always been sedentary and chunky-to-fat.

Losing the label of “fat” is weird and hard. It has been part of my identity for most of my life. I’ve been one of those prideful and hostile people. I don’t mind being fat and I will yell at people who act like it is a problem.

The heavier I am, the less sexualized I am to random men. Of course, there are guys like Noah who like heavy women but they generally are the kind to be chatty and friendly at a party and not the kind who yell things on the street. Which is to say: getting laid isn’t a problem at any size. But I like the invisibility of being heavy in day-to-day life.

My joints bother me off and on. Particularly my hand joints. I now compulsively make the same hand gestures as my mother. This getting old business sucks. As a result I semi-regularly don’t wear my wedding ring set.

I picked a platinum monstrosity. It’s gorgeous and I still feel a giddy thrill of “ohmygod someone let me have this?!” when I look down but it’s solid. Some days I can’t wear it because it makes my finger burn like fire. Which is unpleasant.

Oh holy shit do men feel like it is ok to just get close to me. I don’t remember this from when I was younger. “Hi” is usually the limit of the conversation with the strangers because I think my facial expression is not “welcoming”.

That being scary business is useful.

I wish I could be friendly without getting harassed. Gosh that would be nice.

I can. When I’m fat. So I look at my running schedule for the rest of the year and I have mixed feelings. On one hand, I sure like being fit and strong and there are a lot of things I want to go do with my body that require as much or more fitness than I have now. On the other hand… being attractive kind of sucks.

I’m really kind of funny. I spent most of my early life working as hard as possible to attract as much sex as possible and now that it is appropriate (hey–at least more than it was when I was a kid!) I’m trying to figure out how to make it go away. I’m kind of stupid.

I seem to never be willing to do what is expected of me.

It is easy for me to be loving with my body when I’m fat. I feel less betrayed by my presentation to the world. When I’m fat it is easier to take long baths and rub in lots of lotion and give myself gentle touch. When I’m skinnier I tend to take showers and try to get “being naked” over with as fast as possible. I don’t really want to look at or touch myself.

I can tell by my clothing that my weight is shifting a bit. I’m trying to be conscious of the nicer things I do to myself and I’m trying to not stop.

I’m not sure if stopping the nice stuff is because I was that skinny during periods when I was insanely busy or depressed and most of my “me” time available was spent on exercising or working. I didn’t have as much time to sit around and take a bath.

So is it the chicken or the egg? I don’t know.

There are all these layers of things. When I’m running I mostly eat a reasonable diet… only I can’t keep my sugar under control. Sweet bread. That’s my down fall.

The difference is the exercise. When I get into a good routine for exercising, training for longer distances means specific conditioning, it’s a shit-ton of calories. Not to mention that I’m building muscle, which is more efficient at burning calories.

I think I partially stopped running cold because uhm… I was starting to have thigh gap. I think I stopped having thigh gap when I was eight. I don’t feel all that good about having it now. Yes, I’m aware some women are obsessed with it. I do not want to be in that camp. I don’t want to be associated with that camp.

I want to be strong and fit and have the fucking body I’m used to. God damnit.

If I could be a marathon runner with a size 16 body that would be perfect. That’s what I would want if I got to pick a body out of a hat. Unfortunately when I’m seriously training I’m more in the 8/10/12 range depending on brand. I hate the brands that tell me I’m an 8. First of all: no I am not. There are standards, you fuckers. Stop lying to people. Second of all: it is really fucking frustrating to have to take three or four sizes of something into the dressing room in order to find something that fits. Fuck all you fashion bastards.

I fucking hate buying clothes.

And where am I going to store my “fat” clothes? I sure as fuck am not getting rid of any of it. I’ve very carefully found my wardrobe. Maybe under my bed? Oh man.

I like being strong. I don’t like that it seems to come packed with being thin. That seems stupid to me. See, no one asks me what I want. Whine whine whine.

I understand that I live in a time and place where being thinner is a fucking billion dollar industry. (Many billions? I don’t track.) People seem to waste their whole lives on trying to lose weight. I don’t get it.

Ok, I did Weight Watchers when I hit my lifetime maximum weight and I could no longer ride the rides at Disneyland Paris. That bothered me. Being kicked off a ride because I was too physically big was uncomfortable emotionally. So I didn’t want that to be true. Also: I was in the bdsm community and I was on the verge of leaving my Owner and I needed to hunt. So I did lose weight on purpose then.

Then it came back and I was a lot happier.

Then it went away and I wasn’t so happy.

Then it came back and I was a lot happier.

Here we go round again.

I think my lowest adult weight was 148 when I was depressed after Puppy left me and I stopped eating for a month. I was living on a Jamba Juice a day. I got the big size. Sometimes I could swallow cheese. Sometimes it made me puke. This happened right after I moved out on my own to live alone for the first time ever. No one was there to care. So I didn’t care.

My highest non-pregnant weight was 218 as measured at Weight Watchers. I suspect I was a bit heavier a few weeks previously when I was at Disneyland Paris. Pregnant was 222. In between pregnancies and for a lot of my life I hung out in the 180’s. During my previous “more fit” periods I hung out around 165. Running leads me into the low 150’s.

I know some people gain and lose more than a hundred pounds. I know people who have gained and lost more than two hundred pounds. A range of 70 pounds isn’t that extreme. But my body changes a lot. I understand that in the world of Fat Acceptance I max out at what some people consider “skinny fat”. But if I’m fat enough to have employees of department stores sneer at me and tell me I won’t find anything in their store and if I’m fat enough to have people yell it at me while I walk by… it counts.

And every time I gain and lose my body changes shape. I’m hoping that soon I will look matronly enough to be left alone. I notice the dangling chicken wings below my arms with delight. I have old lady arms! Yay!

I’m not dead. I get to be an elder. Even though I’ve never respected my elders, most other people do. People are getting nicer to me with every passing year.

I note these changes with happiness. I feel kind of confused by the people around me who want to remain as young looking as possible. Being young has not been a good stage for me. I want to leave it behind. Far, far behind.

I like being bad ass. I even like being hot. I don’t like being treated like I am responsible for the random desires of men I don’t know. Yeah, I used to be interested and I didn’t mind so much then. Things change. Figuring out the signals is really hard.

I don’t want to be hostile but I haven’t found a better way of getting men to take “no” the first time I say it. Any softer “no” leads to extra pushing. If I am sure the answer is “no” the first time I must say it with great conviction. Otherwise they will push much farther than I want them to. This is consistent.

Anyway. I’ve been running on schedule for about a week now. I’d been running inconsistently one to three times a week for a while. I trained semi-efficiently for the Oakland half in March and I seriously hurt by mile 11. I need to treat my body with more respect and train better this time. Which means being a lot more serious about my cross training and weight training and stretching.

Which means my body is going to change pretty fast. My body, much to my surprise, likes picking up muscle. The more exercise I do the more it snowballs. I come from a family of fit people. My brothers were sports nuts. They had some talent. Tommy’s team was on its way to the Little League nationals when he got hit by a car. (Not literally on the way. The game was a few weeks? days? away. I can’t remember. I was little and living in a different state.) Oops. I never did hear what came of the team. I was too little to care. My other brother was sixth in the state for cross country in high school. But he was expelled two weeks before graduation for having alcohol on campus so it didn’t go anywhere for him. He could have gone to college on scholarship. Whoops.

I understand more now about genetics. When I was a kid I mistook the fact that I was learning for being unable to learn. I thought that because the people around me were so much better than me and they always won that meant I always would lose and I had no ability to improve or ever win.

Now I feel really sad that no one ever stopped and said, “Dude. You are four. Stop comparing yourself to people who are five and eight years older than you. Go compete with people your age. You are doing just fine. Keep trying.”

I gave up before I ever tried. And moving the way I did meant that I never had… anything. I just stayed home because it was the only way to be safe. Being sedentary was mandatory. So I never improved and it became a self-perpetuating “I can’t because I don’t”.

The things I know now…

If I had somehow had the will to exercise I probably would have been a much scarier kid. Probably better that I preferred reading.

But my kids are buff. My kids have so much freedom to move. Sometimes my inner eight year old weeps at how unfair it is that my kids have so much freedom compared to her. That was probably one of the worst periods of “can not leave my room without pain being inflicted on me”. That piece of me is specifically alive and well and bitter as a pull out of my inner child. It is as close as I come to having multiple personalities. The traumas I incurred at different ages have left specific big knots of scar tissue.

I wasn’t hurt physically for all of my life. For most of the time I was just left alone. Even though I am an intensely social person. Just like Shanna, I came alive at the sight of another person. Shanna can, and does, play alone–but it’s very different from her interactions with people. She gets to be with people all day every day. Well, sometimes I tell them to go play and I spend an hour in the garage. But they have never ever been left actually alone in the house. Well, not beyond taking the trash out. I don’t forking count that. I’m on the property. I can hear them.

Stopping to pay attention to this connection (my inner child acting up means my body has more activation and energy and I feel pissy) is part of the re-parenting process. I feel self-conscious and bad because this is part of what I want to get from the home schooling process.

I have to work through my resentment of other people getting “better” than I had. It is a lot of conscious effort to relax and calm down and be able to be present with my children. I have to actively forgive myself for having the childhood I had. It was not my fault. Both of my children are well into the ages when I was out finding neighborhood kids for oral sex. My kids don’t know what oral sex is. It has never entered into their fuzzy little brains. They are too busy whacking things with swords. As they should.

In being nice to my children through their developmental stages I work through understanding what should have happened to me. I learn what appropriate behavior is by reading multiple developmental books and educational theory books. I cross reference and design a model of an “appropriate” teacher for this stage. And I embody it to the best of my ability.

When I fuck up I apologize, explain what I should be doing and I do better next time. Just like my kids do.

We are all in progress here. I tell them, “I have never been a mother to a six year old AND a three year old at the same time before. I am still learning how it works. I’m sorry I made a mistake.”

Our mistakes are small and our forgiveness is huge. It works out.

My children will never remember anything other than a mother who is physically fit. They will not understand that I spent most of my childhood in a depressed haze sitting very still watching the same few VHS tapes over and over and over.

I’m in one of those phases where I understand why the “Trauma Recovery” people say that you have to forgive. My mom was not in a position to give me what I needed. Not at all. Not even a little bit. I can see why I was so hard for her. I’m actually impressed she didn’t beat me more often. Now that I understand the context of her life better… oh poor Mom. I’m not being sarcastic. I feel really bad for her. But I don’t think she could keep from fucking up my kids. Maybe in thirteen or so years I can look her up. We’ll see.

I am a very active person. It’s kind of insane that I spent my childhood as stationary as I did. I get why it happened. But it was really crazy-making.

I did have periods of activity. Auntie was good about making kids go play in the woods. Well, more accurately… she worked night shifts and I was alone most of the time when I lived with her. So I went out into the woods. I couldn’t wander neighborhoods in the random other places we lived because I got lost or got into fist fights. Auntie’s house was consistent enough that I could learn the lay out.

My relationship to my body has always been one of frustration. I have always been torn between being mad that I’m not bigger and being mad that I’m not smaller. Ok, I’ve lost the desire to be smaller. When I was younger and trying harder to pick up sex partners I was wildly jealous of the women who were 5’1″ or shorter. Now I think it would be inconvenient. I retain my desire to be bigger so that I could be more physically capable. I just don’t have the leverage to do some things. It is really annoying.

It has always been weird how much I trade off using my actual weight for using strength as I get smaller. Many of the tricks to use my weight as leverage stop working. Even twenty pounds of difference is a lot. That’s a lot of strength to make up.

Bodies are complicated.

“Trigger” shit

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Oh man. Some TOTALLY MEAN PERSON put a cutesy pictoral thing about Harry Potter on Pinterest. It involved saying “what you got” from a variety of characters. I say a TOTALLY MEAN PERSON because I don’t like the bit about how a mothers love is the greatest force on earth.

Fuck you. Now I’m going to cry for hours because my mommy didn’t and doesn’t love me.

I sit here and cry and remember that the only time during my childhood that someone protected me was when I called 911 and said, “I don’t know how to report my dad for molesting me. I need help.” Thank you San Bernardino Sheriffs for not being as shitty as the Santa Clara County Sheriffs.

I feel guilty for still being upset. No, I feel ashamed. I haven’t actually broken any rules so it isn’t guilt. I feel like I inconvenience people by having these feelings.

When I don’t sleep because I am up crying my day suffers. Poor kids. But today is unusual. Today the kids get lots of babysitter time so I can work on the book. Maybe that won’t be so bad.

I think I had sex with so many people because I was trying to find out if I could make anyone love me that way. It didn’t work very well.

Yesterday I was thinking a lot about my Owner. I was thinking about how we said we “would be friends” but that mostly consists of me needing to be a “good girl” and not care that he plays the same script in every relationship. His relationships are about his needs and his needs haven’t changed since he was fifteen. He’s got pictures of a whole series of women in exactly the same equipment with the same facial expressions.

It took a long time for me to be able to look at the picture archive without crying because I wasn’t special at all. I worked on that for years. I tried to convince myself that I *was* special to him.

Ha.

I was just stupid enough to be the Slut Of The Day for four years.

Right now I want to find a way to invalidate any real feelings any one has ever actually had for me. I want to find a way to “prove” to myself how worthless I am.

What I want to do is open my arm from elbow to wrist. I love you too, mommy.

I don’t know how to get past my mom. It’s not about my Owner. Even though he was the best Daddy I ever had and he dropped me when I no longer wanted him to hurt me.

Given the limitations I put on what Noah can do to me… it’s hard to wrap my brain around the idea that he will stay for what I offer. No one else has really wanted me.

Yes, I know my kids want me. It’s different. I appreciate them. I love them. I want them. I don’t plan to kill myself and abandon them. Sometimes it is really hard to turn around and hand them a bunch of love I’ve never received. I feel petty and small and like I’m tired of having to learn how to love my children from books because I have no personal experience of being a loved child. I don’t even know what that would mean.

It is hard to make something you’ve never seen. What is a “happy family”?

I’m in one now. Mostly. I’m the most sad person in my family these days. Everyone else seems to be doing ok.

I feel like I’m pretending the happiness I feel. Even though I felt happy yesterday and it didn’t feel like pretending then. In this moment it feels like I’m just lying to myself about there ever being better moments.

Deep breaths. This moment will pass.

The stakes seem so very high with my kids. If I fuck up the only person who will love me is Noah. (Yes, I have friends. It’s different. If you have a family you cannot understand what it means to *not have a family*.) It doesn’t feel like I have whatever “thing” makes other people intrinsically lovable. I’m just missing that bit. I have to earn relationships in a way other people don’t.

There are lots of kinds of privilege.

My family sided with child rapists over me. Some year I will stop feeling like that is a reflection of my worth. Apparently that year isn’t 2014.

As distraction, surfing youtube for half an hour… are there any people on tv who aren’t white and so thin I worry? Yes, some people are naturally that thin and it is normal and totally healthy for their bodies. It’s a very small segment of the population. I’m glad I miss most tv. Even if I do occasionally watch clips on youtube out of curiosity. Three minutes is all I want to see of any of these shows. And holy shit do I not have the warm fuzzy glow of memory for high school that other people apparently have. Wow.

I’m starting to feel the medication I took when I woke up. Thank goodness for medication. It was nice to calmly explain to my therapist why I started flipping out when she said “need to go on meds”. I’m on a medication. I cannot express the difference that cannabis makes in my life. The ability to be distracted from my grief is a gift. It is a chemical shift in my brain. Saying that it “doesn’t count” is very invalidating to my experience of life.

It is very hard that it doesn’t really matter how many other people in the world tell me I have worth, as long as my mommy doesn’t love me…

Some days I wonder if I am capable of feeling like I am loved or lovable. I stay. I go through the motions of acting like a mom who is worthy of being loved. But I don’t feel like I am.

Fake it till you make it. My kids won’t be crying for hours in thirty years because they wish that I loved them. They have already made it through milestones. Calli has lived in the house she was born in for longer than I have lived anywhere other than here.

This is the only home I’ve ever had. And my daughter was born in the kitchen. The daughter that I conceived on purpose because I wanted someone to pour love into. I know there is balance.

I know that I have it better than a lot of people. I know that many people go through their adult lives and are never loved as much as Noah loves me. Lots of people who want to be able to raise children the way I am raising my kids can’t.

Privilege is a funny thing.

It is always easy to undervalue what you have and focus on what you don’t have. I want a mommy who loves me. I’ve never had one. My mommy didn’t want me from the day I was conceived. My mommy never knew how to take care of me.

If my mom had tried to have an unassisted childbirth with me, her problems would have been solved. I was born with the cord around my neck. It was the intervention of bossy doctors screaming at my mother that prevented her from choking me to death as she tried to go through her standard ridiculously fast labor. I was the last kid. Just get it over with already. My mom was a lot better at having babies than me. I wonder if it was the childhood of sitting on horses.

Deep breaths. Youtube started annoying me. I should probably start rereading the Diana Gabaldon series. I get the latest book in a couple of weeks when I get to go to a reading by the author. I’m pretty excited.

I have a lot of good things in my life. I have a lot to look forward to. I appreciate what I have. I really do. I don’t think I’m oblivious to how lucky I am. But I have a nasty headache from crying. (I’ll drink more water.) I’m tired. I feel like shit.

Luckily I have five hours today to work on the book I wish I had been able to read when I was twelve. I’ll hopefully make it so someone else doesn’t have to make quite as many mistakes as I made. They can go make better mistakes. More useful ones.

Money, money, money by the pound.

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I’m scared and insecure. Let’s talk about money. I won’t feel as bad about myself. That can’t be healthy, can it? I feel insecure about some parts of my life. Let me wander over and assure myself that my social problems are not going to derail me getting to do whatever the fuck I want to do. Maybe that isn’t unhealthy.

I have decided that I can’t buy an RV for the road trip until I have maxed out on saving for the road trip and I have maxed our emergency fund. That seems S-M-R-T.

This month’s salary + bonus (the bonus Noah is whiny enough to say isn’t high enough) will almost entirely go off for credit cards, mortgage, etc. Luckily I can now say that the second business I helped fund has been so successful I have been bought out. The check is on its way to me. I’m a god damn entrepreneur. Go me.

With that bump I will have $21,000 (rounded, obviously) out of the $25,000 I want in the checking account before I travel and $25,000 out of $40,000 in an emergency fund. That means I want to save an additional $19,000 before I buy an RV. And it means that I will be blowing a huge hole in my emergency fund that I will have to recoup. So uhm. Erf. But I think I can do that in the next few years. Seriously, he makes obscene amounts of money. If I can’t do that then I’m a fucking loser. Technically I have been saving at a rate to make the goal on the emergency fund in four years and some. I want that as back up before we go over seas.

Yeah yeah yeah I have an IRA, 401k, two 529s, and additional investment stuff going on. Don’t tell me, “Oh gosh if you have that much cash you should invest!”

I like having a cushion. I invest, but I like my cushion. Shit happens. I like having many options. I like knowing that I will be able to do what I want to do.

Noah has already earned $15,000 out of the $60,000 I think we will need for the around the world trip. His ability to earn money continues to blow my mind. That is kept in a third account.

My real “back up” in case Noah loses his job is the fact that we have $60,000 in cash distributed between accounts nominally in the name of other more shallow goals. Of course all such frippery could be tossed to the side in case of a catastrophe. I’ve got back up plans for my back up plans.

I… don’t earn money. But I manage it very well. He wouldn’t have this much if he had to manage it himself. That isn’t his strength. That’s my strength. I’m not so good at earning.

A friend was mentioning how her partner needs to hire a professional organizer and I said, “I’m close to putting out my shingle. I’d charge $30/hour.” She yelled at me for a while. She thinks my starting rate should be $50/hour with the possibility of a sliding scale if I’m feeling fucking generous.

I am going to potentially have four whole hours tomorrow to edit the book. Maybe someday it will earn money. Probably when I’m dead. That’s usually how it works for writers. Luckily I have children who will get the income. It won’t just go to a publishing house. Ha.

I feel pretty weird about having this much money. But looking at it does help calm me down.

My mom spent my whole childhood crying over money. All the time. Almost every day. My mom has experienced poverty in a way I will never really understand. Children don’t get it. Kids don’t understand being poor vs. rich. It is too complex. Now I feel like all I can do is try to imagine my mother’s experience.

I’m so grateful I don’t have to endure what she went through. She has no money sense. Even when she has enough in her pocket to cover all her expenses this month she can’t do it. I don’t know what broke her or when.

Even if things in my life were to go badly they can never ever ever go as badly as they have gone for my mom. I have a college education and a history of helping to start businesses. I have a rich and varied work history and a lot of people who would vouch for me. I could find work at a reasonable salary. My mom never could.

The head of my union told me that if I ever want to go back into teaching it doesn’t matter if they are hiring or not they will hire me. I can teach gang kids. I can form personal relationships and help them understand the benefits to them of literacy.

That’s a god damn marketable skill.

I feel really bad for my mom. She is becoming a Dickensian character in my mind. She never had my options. She never had the same privileges I had.

I went to Los Gatos High School. Maybe only for my sophomore year but I got to learn about the standards of college and a rigorous set of expectations as a teenager. My mom graduated from Bakersfield High School pregnant with absolutely no expectation that she would need to learn anything more complicated than cooking, baking, and sewing.

For the record, she’s great at all three. Better than me.

It is harder and harder for me to be angry with her as the years pass. I feel really sorry for her. But I can’t let her hurt my kids.

My children have absolutely no exposure to toxic, bitter people. None. The last few years have been the nicest of my life. I have felt suicidal less often then ever before. Pretty frequently I find myself consciously making choices that work to extend my life because I’m not ready to die yet.

I never felt this good about myself when I knew my mother. Having pity for her is fine. I can pity rabid animals too. I shouldn’t pick them up.

It’s all mixed up. My mom. Money. Feeling scared. Feeling attacked. That asshole “funny” unschooling dad. The mom who keeps making cracks about me. Scheduling difficulties and feeling unimportant. Other people have their own shit and aren’t just my support units. It all feels the same. The same unworthy, stupid, bad. Talking about it feels manipulative, but I don’t want anyone to change what they are doing.

I feel this way right now. I don’t always feel this way. I write it down partially so I can prove to myself, “See–it changes. It goes up. It goes down. You have weak boundaries right now. That isn’t anyone else’s fault. It’s ok. They will come back up again soon.”

Soon I won’t feel like everyone hates me and I should go eat worms.

I wonder how much it is tied to Shanna’s current defiance. She’s getting very close to being the age I was when I caused the fight with Tommy that involved Uncle Bob burning Tommy with the hot coffee.

The punishment for that was moving to Texas and my brother got hit by a car. I will have a hard time handling this defiance streak. “Abreact.” That’s my therapists favorite word. Reliving trauma. Supposed to be in a therapeutic session but welcome to my life. Flashbacks?

I’m not having flashbacks. But I am reliving some of the terror I felt when I was disobedient. When she turns around and flips out at me I feel like it is all my fault and I am about to be punished and then I over react.

It’s going to be a rocky few months. Holy shit on Crisco. But we will get through it and we will develop new coping methods for handling triggering situations without abuse. Like you do. If you want to know your kids in thirty years.

I tell my kids that I’m sorry for my mistakes a lot. I hurt Calli yesterday. We were playing and dancing and I twisted her arm a little wrong. I’ve done exactly that dance move with her hundreds of times. But she gained weight recently and it pushed her past a threshold. Oops. I’m really sorry. We spent a while cuddling with an ice pack. She’s fine now. But she was really freaked out and she kept yelling that I hurt her.

Yes. I did. I’m really sorry. It didn’t hurt the last time I did it. I won’t do it any more. You are too big now and I didn’t notice because I wish you were going to be my tiny baby forever. As you grow up I will sometimes hurt you because I misunderstand how your boundaries are shifting. I’m so sorry. I can’t be perfect. There is no such thing. I will make many more mistakes. I’m so sorry.

By the end we were petting the cat and each others faces and she told me she forgives me and we went on with the day.

It doesn’t really matter if some woman who will never be my friend makes jokes about my lack of value. But I miss my mama. And I wish that my mama had thought I was valuable. My mama didn’t miss me when I was gone for a month either. No one really misses me if I’m gone. I know.

Some days it hurts more than others.

I’m not “funny”. Instead people “can’t tell the difference between my whining and my talking”.

I am a whiny baby and I don’t like being picked on.

It’s really not fair that I have to continue having involvement with this group for the sake of my children when I would rather just not go back. That’s how I handle these things. I can’t have a fight. I can’t make drama. If I don’t like how I’m treated, I leave. But I can’t leave.

I can make sure I stop talking to this woman. She thinks she is “funny”. I think it’s not funny to tell someone who has been suicidal for most of their life that no one would miss them.

Happy fucking Mothers Day

I’m almost done with the third quartet from Tamora Pierce. I’ll go back to reading about people who are allowed to start fist fights with bullies. Sometimes I wish my life were that simple still. I am going to read every book she has ever written. I even have the add-odd short story collections. I’m really glad she is out there writing.

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I think I use Twitter as the way to lean over and kind of whisper in Jenny’s ear. I know she reads my blog but it’s different. She interacts on Twitter.

Today is going to be a good day. I wish I hadn’t woken up crying, but there you go. I miss my mom. It is an inconvenient fact of my life. I can pretend it isn’t true all I want but that doesn’t alter reality. I will probably always miss her.

Thirty years so far.

Yesterday the kids wanted to talk about the Loma Prieta earthquake again. (We’ve been talking about disaster response stuff.) They finally got around to the point of asking why my cousin had to rescue me–where were my mom and dad?

I started crying. I was glad I was driving because they couldn’t see my face.

During the Loma Prieta earthquake I lived in a house built on the side of a mountain just a few miles away from the fault line. Our house rocked off its foundation. It was pretty scary. I was alone in the house and after the quake my cousin ran in and grabbed me and carried me out past all the broken glass and debris. I wouldn’t have been able to get out without injury. I was seven.

Some day I will write more about my cousin Daryl. It will sound exactly like all the “my cousin Daryl” jokes you have ever read only it freakin’ happened. I’m waiting until I see obituaries though because he’s a nice guy. He’s just… a little slow. Stuff happened. It’s a long story. Later.

But they’ve been asking for more details. “Where was your mom?”

I didn’t want to tell them that my mom was sitting Shiva next to my brother’s bed while he was lying in a coma.

Where was my father? Living not far from where my brother was in a hospital. He tried hard to keep my mother from being there.

I had just gotten back from Texas. I was with Auntie because no one else was willing to take me. I wanted to be closer to my mom but none of our extended family were willing to tolerate me because I was such an unpleasant child.

Sometimes it is surreal to me how often people comment on my children being good. I was told I was bad all the time by freakin’ everyone. I don’t understand how I have come through that with the ability to do anything right.

Now I understand why I set them off. I get it. I wouldn’t let a sexually inappropriate child in my house either. I need to keep my kids safe.

It’s a no-win situation.

Sometimes it is weird feeling like I am ok as an adult but even me-as-an-adult would shun me-as-a-child. It is right that all people shun such monsters.

The day is supposed to be good but it is starting out pretty mixed. I have medication to fix this.

I don’t choose to spend my day stewing about the fact that people I don’t know any more didn’t like me as a child. Oh well. Nothing I can do about it now.

Are those kids monsters though? I didn’t molest everyone. Just the other kids with poor boundaries. I did well with people who had firm boundaries.

By the time my kids are tweens I hope that if a young sexually inappropriate child came over things would be ok. My kids would understand about sex and boundaries and when the kid needed to be told to stop it would happen in a natural and appropriate way.

If there is a God–that is what I’m praying for. My kids will know how to have boundaries. Not because they have been hurt but just because they have been taught to know the limits of their comfort and prioritize their needs for safety. That sounds weird. I don’t know how to describe it.

I want my kids to learn who they are as being separate from the people around them. “Just because you want x doesn’t mean I have to want it.” “Just because someone asked me to do y doesn’t mean I have to.”

I struggle with this. Still. This is a pervasive problem. If someone asks me to do them a favor… I don’t really say no.

I no longer have sex with anyone who looks at me too long. I appreciate the buffer that is my kids. I’m aware that if I went longer periods without them around I would miss the hunt more. I worry about the future.

It scares the shit out of me that Noah is who I have. I have friends–but if things blew up with Noah I would be pretty much on my own. Not that we are having problems. Not that having Noah is bad (I can see how the wording of this paragraph is ambiguous.) it’s more that I worry about solitary systems. I like back ups. I don’t really have many back up plans.

I read in survivor books that “I have to make this work” is one of the keys to developing true problem solving resiliency in the face of serious problems.

This dude (Al Siebert is my favorite author on that topic) is almost exclusively talking about work problems. He’s not a trauma writer.

Trauma writers don’t really know how people get over things. It’s A Mystery. (Ok, some people believe they have the explanation but I’ve read enough directly conflicting accounts that I’m pretty skeptical.)

People write about getting through concrete business problems. They write about getting over financial hurtles. There is much less conflict on the resulting opinions. Which makes me feel a little more secure about thinking, “These tactics may actually have some level of moderate effect.”

I’m not a business. I’m just some chick. I don’t really have financial problems. In a time and place where many people are struggling we… aren’t. It’s because Noah picked the right obsession in early childhood. It doesn’t seem fair. But then again, what is fair?

I’ve read a lot of marriage advice books too. “We can’t get divorced” is as good a reason as any to stay married. Neither Noah nor I have anywhere to go if we left one another. He and I are both uhm weird in ways that make us very hard to match up. We would find other people to date–sure. We are both rather trampy like that. But we match.

Noah is the only person who has ever really wanted to know my story. He’s the only one who wants to be there every morning whether I want to have sex or whether I need to cry. He doesn’t need me to be a one trick pony. I can be a lot of different things.

My Owner could help me calm down after a nightmare but he explicitly didn’t want details and he went right back to sleep after the initial panic subsided.

Before Noah my Owner was by far the nicest person to me I had ever lived with.

Yes, there are other people who are caring in the world. It’s a big picture compatibility thing.

We are having a date tonight. It’s a Godmama weekend. I am kidnapping him and running away with him. We will return on Sunday. This is perhaps our last chance to do a weekend mini-break sorta thing for a while.

We are negotiating things we don’t seem to be able to do in our house. I seem to be developing a lot more boundaries around bdsm play in my house. It doesn’t feel like bdsm it feels like domestic violence. They are very different.

I think I need to know that it’s not ok to make me grovel in my house. Fuck you.

Which is weird considering some of the things we talk about doing after the kids are grown. Am I going to need all of it to be done while traveling? That’ll get weird.

I don’t know.

What I want is to someday build a room on a second story and that is the only place I’ll act like that. And my kids can’t come in. Ever. No matter how I’m dressed.

Boundaries are interesting. Everyone has their own. They are what make you interesting and unique.

I like being with Noah. I worry about it not feeling like a choice and instead it feeling like I “have to” stay. Because I don’t have anyone else.

It is hard to know that I probably could never again attain this degree of emotional intimacy with anyone else. Partially because of sheer time spent and partially because Noah went out and memorized a lot of things about behavior and human interaction and family dysfunction before he ever got to me.

Let’s not forget the massage training. And the cooking classes. I swear the boy trained up for me. And he didn’t even know me.

In turn, Noah’s grateful to have access to my uhhh range of skills. Trades are good.

It’s good to be valued for what you have to give. There are a lot of things I’m not. If Noah spent a lot of time pining for those things our lives would be pretty hard. Instead he says thank you for being what I am.

He wants me to pay attention to him. He likes that I track his projects and prod him along and care about the results too. It makes him feel important. He tries harder because I give him his gold star. (Although he came home with a work evaluation yesterday that makes my gold stars look as pathetic in comparison as they are. I’m too snarky. Apparently he deserves flowery florid praise. I’m not the girl for that.)

He probably eats more vegetables because I encourage it. He goes to the gym partially because I praise the efforts. “If I have to stay alive–so do you, motherfucker.” Staying alive is more effort than it looks. We have these kids to teach about life. Exercise is part of it.

I feel really proud of the way that Noah has kind of settled into the traces. That sounds bad. He’s not trying to merge the party lifestyle and the parent lifestyle and I’m fucking grateful. I don’t really miss it. I’m glad I’m not dealing with my kids on the weekend while hungover or tired.

Instead both of us decided that this portion of our life is the only time we will have to hang out with our little kids. So we are doing it. Because we wanted them so bad. It only seems fair.

Not many things in life are fair, kiddos, but every once in a while you luck out.

We will have a nice day. At some point I will stop crying. Stupid tears.

We are spoiled and pampered and I’m going to stop and notice that today. I feel very grateful for the life I have. Things haven’t always been this way for me. Today I’m going to drive past the house I lived in during the Loma Prieta earthquake and I’m going to think about how far I have come.

They are all still there. My Auntie and all of her kids. My mom is either there or with my sister.

And I will drive right by. Who is rejecting whom? It’s a whirlwind.

In twelve more years if Shanna wants me to take her, I will. I won’t bring it up. I kind of hope she doesn’t think to ask. They will not be able to hurt her and they will love her. They will think she is wonderful.

They will like Calli too. But I think Calli would like them less. We’ll see. There is a lot about her personality I can’t see yet. She’s not quite four.

I think Shanna will want to meet them at least a few times and she will feel basic affection. I get the impression Calli is going to hate them for hurting her Mama. That’s the vibe I get. I’m not really encouraging either response. I answer questions about my family with as few words as I can. I’m as neutral as I can be. They will make up their own minds as best as I am able to allow.

We are leaving our laptops home. I don’t plan to bring my phone out of my backpack all weekend.

Rest is good for you, I hear.

Mama

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In the night

sometimes my kids say in their sleep,

“I need you Mama.”

I need you too.

I need you to heal this hole inside me.

It was formed when I was three.

“Mama, I need you”

but she wasn’t there.

She still isn’t there.

My mama picks rapists. Not me.

So I go to my kids.

I try to not wake them up with my crying.

I have to let the tears roll down my face in silence.

No shaking. Must not sob.

Mama. I need you Mama. Where are you?

Never again.

No comfort for me.

Just the comfort I give.

Calli says, “I need you Mama.”

I need you too.

You are all I have.

Easter morning

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Kids will start arriving in five hours. I feel pretty ready. I counted the eggs. I do, technically, have 300 but 15 of them are out of general circulation because I turned them into games. I can live with that.

I’m putting 100 in the front, 100 in the back, and 85 in the house.

Big kids will be told they musn’t look lower than their waists. There are plenty of high up eggs and then some. You can only pick low lying fruit after the little kids give up. There is plenty of candy. If you get zero candy from eggs, go take some off the table. I have enough to cause comas in at least ten kids. Hopefully spread out among 20 kids and 20 + adults it will just lead to stomach aches. Or people will be smart and take most of their share home to savor over multiple days. We’ll see.

Other people are bringing most of the real food. Thank you all. I’m so glad someone is a responsible adult around here. Yay!

It should be a lot of fun. The house is ready. I have ~30 minutes of decorating to do once the sun is up. You can’t put crepe paper outside before the day you want it. I learned that the hard way.

I’m sending Noah and the kids to the farmers market so that I can stay home and hide eggs and finish the clean up. I will assemble the fruit and vegetables we have in the house while they are gone and Noah will finish the food set up when he gets back. By that point I will be on the driveway trying to corral a growing horde of children. It will be fun. I’m going to put the giant chess set out there and chalk. I can keep them entertained for at least 15 minutes. I will probably also get the kids to chant the guidelines in a group. That way they won’t break things. “The top shelf of EVERY BOOK CASE is off limits to kids.” “Big kids look for eggs above their waist.” “No eggs in the bedrooms or pantry or bathroom.”

As of this moment I have had 45 people say they are coming. Want to make bets on it being closer to 20 people? People like to change their minds at the last minute.

Either way it will be fun.

The preparation for parties is hard. Yesterday I was grumpy. I yelled three times. Four? Maybe a fourth. Once when Shanna was hitting me with a balloon and accidentally knocked over something breakable. I yelled to get out of the kitchen. Not great.

I wasn’t even that *mad*. I just screamed it. I had been in the process of asking her nicely to take the balloon out of the kitchen and then there was a loud noise then broken glass then… I screamed. Get Out Of The Kitchen.

When I was cleaning up their stuff and sorting things into piles to be put away properly Shanna came over and spread all the piles out and started recombining them because she was making an “art gallery”. When I noticed I yelled at her to get away from my piles. That’s not nice. I could have asked.

I don’t feel like I had a lot of “ask nicely” left. The kids have fought me really hard on every step of party prep this time. When I say, “Please pick up x” instead they go dump the whole box that x goes in and leave that in the middle of the floor.

I don’t think I’m up for more parties this year if this is how they are going. I’m not going to fight the kids tooth and nail so they can have birthday parties. That sounds hellish.

Lately we are having a hard time with them believing they should not ever have to do anything. I understand this is a common belief and all but I don’t share it and I kind of don’t like people who have it. I know lots of grown ups who think it is fine to not do anything. I am not nice to them.

Entitlement is a real issue for me. I am not here to serve you.

I am being strict but I don’t think I’m being completely unreasonable. I’m not making them clean up stuff that is my mess. I want them to pick up their toys and empty the dishwasher and set the table. If that is too much to ask then I think that I am all of a sudden out of energy to cart you around to do every fucking thing you want.

I just…

I don’t know if I am being a petty asshole or if I am setting appropriate boundaries. I don’t make them pick up every single toy every single day. I do ask that they keep the main walkways clear because I don’t appreciate hurting myself just because they wanted to dump out a tub of Lego’s and walk away. Not cool.

I’ve screamed a lot this week. Way up from average. But I feel more pressure to clean up the house. And when I feel more pressure to clean up the house and the kids consciously go on a destruction binge…

I don’t know how this should be handled. But maybe Step A is that if I am going to be fought every step of the way for parties we won’t have them. I’m not up for battles like this. It’s shitty and no fun and stressful and it does a lot of damage to our relationships.

I can’t do all the work with a smile on my face while I am also tripping over the stuff I have asked you 1,362 times to clean up because it is hurting me and you haven’t played with it in three days anyway.

I get mad. Very mad. I hate you and don’t want to be in a room with you because I am afraid I will lose control and do something I will regret.

I regret yelling. I don’t want it to escalate. I can live with some regrettable yelling. That’s not going to convince me I’m a shitty parent who should die.

I don’t call them names. I don’t say things that attack their character. No matter how angry I am I stop to clarify. “I love *you* but right now I am very angry about the way you are behaving. Your behavior is not working for me.”

And when we are not stressed we talk about the whole “sometimes your behavior won’t work for people and you will have to decide how much you care. Sometimes it is expedient (yes I defined it for her) to conform and do what people want and sometimes you have to harden your heart and do what you know is right.”

Life is complicated.

Mostly we get along so well I feel like the fact that we usually get along so well handicaps me for handling it when we are in discord.

Last night as we were going to sleep Calli stroked my face and said, “Mommy, sometimes when you get mad you are SO FIERCE. I like it. It makes me feel safe.”

That kind of statement both comforts me and scares the shit out of me. Am I training them to be attracted to intense, violent, angry people? Oh that’ll go well.

Sometimes it is really hard to know if I am doing right. I don’t want them to believe that it is ok for people to scream at them. We talk a lot about how it ISN’T OK EVER for someone to scream at you. Sometimes it happens anyway because bad things happen to everyone. You can either internalize it as a sign that you deserve such treatment or you can think, “Wow they are having a bad day.”

You can’t do anything to deserve people treating you badly. Them treating you badly is about them.

Sometimes that is hard. Sometimes the only thing you can do is get away from the person. That is so very hard.

But that’s not true. There are things you can do. You can ask for boundaries. You can ask for concessions. You can state what you need and you can leave if you don’t get it.

You have lots of options.

When I’m getting too nasty my kids stop me and say, “Mom I think your tone of voice is way more fierce than you mean it to be. I feel scared.”

I stop and hug them and apologize for scaring them.

I am a very fierce person.

Is it ok to be fierce and a mother? I’m not sure I have a point at this time. I will never be one of the gentle ones. I will always be one of the loud, scary, aggressive ones. I will always be one of the ones who startles you and challenges you and makes you think about why you are doing what you are doing. I don’t take excuses well.

You did what you did and now take the consequences. I’m not going to make this easier on you. Sometimes consequences suck ass. I’ve received a lot of them. I know very well how much it can suck to be held accountable for your behavior. But that’s the way the world works.

Shalyndra–you are right that people in a social setting penalize women for displays of aggression more than men. We are silenced. We are told that it is unseemly for us to be so angry or difficult or nasty. The men are encouraged to be manly. (insert grunting noise)

But when it comes to things that sound like *threats* women are given a pass. People do not believe they are capable of “true” violence. Men are told that their random jokes are threatening and that they must now be punished.

It occurred to me while I was running yesterday–this situation is kind of like the BMI.

Individual women want to punish individual men for the reality that statistics say men commit more crime. Whether or not that man is a criminal.

Women are given a pass on being believed as violent–we are shushed and told just to calm down now, we know we couldn’t do anything violent anyway. Women aren’t that way.

The BMI is applied to individuals without regard to individual factors. Many people in the obese category are far more healthy than people in the thin category and yet… stigma.

Us/them. The enemy.

Noah told me he doesn’t know how things will ever change as long as us loud yelling women on the internet think of him as the enemy.

I went running with another angry woman. (I hope that description doesn’t bother you. You aren’t “always” angry. But you can do the angry woman stuff.) I told her what Noah said. She said, “He engages in behavior that reinforces the status quo. He doesn’t want to give up what he has so that someone else can have a more fair share. That means he is the enemy.”

Wars start over resources. At this point the United States is going through one of the harshest equality differences we’ve seen.

Is Noah is the enemy? Sometimes I think so. Sometimes I understand that he is just a symbol and *he* is not at all my enemy. But he’s done bad things.

He hasn’t done anything that is worse than things I’ve done. Not even close. So if he is the enemy… am I?

Monsters, monsters everywhere and not a one to beat.

Grumpy day.

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I’ve screamed more than once. I am really tired of being asked for candy 3,523 times a day starting ten minutes after they loudly and rudely refuse to eat breakfast. My screaming has mostly consisted of “IF YOU WILL NOT EAT REAL FOOD YOU WILL NOT EAT CANDY. STOP ASKING ME.”

Next year I will buy all candy for the event the day before. I will not have candy in my house for a week again if I can avoid it.

Deep breath. Today will end. Yup, today is kind of rocky. All three of us have cried and said we feel really sad because of how we are interacting. We hugged and said we would try harder.

That’s all you can do, right? Some days are hard. No one actually did anything all that bad. Stealing candy isn’t the end of the world. Yelling about stolen candy isn’t the end of the world.

But we are all kind of sad. Some days are like that.

post-therapy

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Yesterday was a moderately challenging therapy session. I didn’t cry or anything so it doesn’t get to the level of “hard” per se. My therapist was uhhh “kind” enough to tell me about another support group in Oakland. No, actually, having to drive to Oakland more often would not lower my stress. Sorry.

My shrink and I talked about the difficulty driving. When I am alone in the car I distract myself from my irrational desire to drive the car into dangerous situations by playing music very loudly and I sing along at the very top of my lungs. Frequently when I arrive places I’m hoarse from all the screeching. My kids get kind of pissy with me when I play loud music or scream along with the radio so I don’t do it when they are in the car. Which actually makes driving with them harder than driving alone.

I wish that I didn’t have suicidal ideation so often. I wish that I could make the decisions about my life without factoring in, “Well, how many hours of self-harm thoughts can I entertain today without slipping?” I’m a lot better than I used to be. There is definite improvement. I’m not “all better”. Driving is still really hard. Most of my slipping these days comes in the form of massive dissociation so I have no idea what is going on with my body so I am constantly covered in bruises I have no idea how I received. It’s pretty minor compared to the cutting so this is a big step up. But man all the bruises have been hurting more lately. I’m getting old. Ha.

We did EMDR on the driving ideation issues. The phrase that kept coming up (sometimes I get word phrases sometimes I get picture associations) was “terrible trouble”. As I’m driving places my stomach shreds itself because I am afraid of the trouble I am going to get into on the other side of the drive. I get it going to the grocery store so it’s not all social anxiety I can kinda sorta justify. It’s just associated with driving,

I was really in trouble all the fucking time as a kid. I’m not over it. Sometimes that feels pretty pathetic.

We talked about the whole “getting in trouble for vomiting” thing in the form of the demanded apology. (I heard back from the woman who wanted one. I think she accepted my apology. I still have some mixed feelings about needing to give one for… vomiting. Not like I picked the activity of the night on purpose to fuck over her life.)

I am so delighted that when I get in trouble these days… it’s really not a big deal. If the two women who were mad at me continue being mad at me till the day I die…. that’s really not that big of a deal. Ok, one seems to be over it, the other has already hated me since I was 19. If she keeps hating me it isn’t a loss. Really if she hates me that may be a badge of honor proving that I am making correct choices in life.

That happens you know. People disliking you is sometimes a really good sign.

Depends on whether you want people like that to like you. If you don’t particularly respect someone it can be a particularly good thing for them to dislike you. I’m just sayin’.

When I walked into my therapists office she said, “Wow. You look exhausted.” That can’t be a good sign. Yes, I am. Notice how I haven’t been writing? I’ve been sleeping in lately. Even with getting several hours of extra sleep each night for a while… I still look like shit. I’m not sure if I’m sick or what. My stomach was really off yesterday. Eating at all was awful. But no food no fuel so I have to eat even when it hurts.

I don’t have “cold or flu” symptoms. Just stomach pain, exhaustion, and general pain. Maybe that is a flu like symptom. But I still don’t know that I have the flu. and I am officially not allowed to get sick for at least five days. Damnit.

I’m struggling with my outsiders view on another persons marriage. I’m experiencing a lot of anxiety about situations I can’t control. Terrible Trouble. It’s coming. Always. Always. Always coming.

I feel scared, helpless, worthless, and stupid. I don’t know the right thing to say or do. So it must be because I am defective.

I feel weary.

In therapy we talked about my latest efforts to be hypervigilant about my hypervigilance. Maybe this is why I am so fucking tired. I am trying to stop counting people in a room. I’m trying to only check for exits when I arrive in a new place instead of checking every few minutes like an OCD routine. I am not made more safe by checking that the exit door is still there every three minutes. I am probably made more unsafe by obsessing over whether the door is still fucking there. Really, genius? The fucking door is going to move? No. I’m afraid I will get disoriented and lose the direction. It’s not that the door will move. It is that I spent a very high percentage of my life dizzy. I’m always afraid I will lose my inner compass and not be able to make it out. Yay vertigo.

I do wonder if that is a lot of what is wearing me down. Being that conscious of my nearly sub-conscious obsessive checking is really hard. Restraining myself from counting the people in the room over and over and over is a lot harder on me than just doing the fucking counting. I’m trying to extinguish this behavior on the slim hope that some day I won’t have to obsessively concentrate on my nearly sub-conscious behavior. Hopefully some day I will have the energy back from the obsessive counting and the monitoring of the counting and I will be back in the net positive. Hopefully this is saving long-term effort.

But those gambles only sometimes work out. The deficit of exhaustion in the meantime is really rough.

I wrote to Noah’s family yesterday. That always increases the shitty I feel. I miss my mom. Why do I only get to talk about my kids with these people who don’t like me anyway? It’s really hard to keep trying when I know his mother doesn’t actually have any affection for me at all.

But she loves my kids. And my kids deserve all the love they can get. And Noah isn’t going to facilitate a relationship because he doesn’t care or understand what a complete lack of family can do to you. So it is up to me. I understand the scope of the problem and I’m not as personally repelled by the situation. I get why he ran away and didn’t come back. But that attitude will hurt my kids and I can’t let that be their entire experience of life.

Noah’s mom may not win prizes for being perfect but she is being a great mail order grandmother. I should not denigrate that. The kids appreciate that she thinks about them and makes effort. I need to respond. I wish it weren’t so fucking hard.

I’m doing one of those cycles where I don’t understand why I try so hard for relationships when people don’t really like me anyway they tolerate me as an alternative to being completely alone.

I can find ways to minimize the amount I believe anyone might like me. It’s a super power. Or something. Even though people come over. Even though I can tell you that it is irrational.

Irrational feelings happen anyway and they are very tiring. Exhausting. Trying to argue with your brain all day that people don’t actually hate you is really hard.

My arms hurt. I’m so tired I keep randomly crying because I can’t force myself to not cry. It’s too hard to not-cry.

Ain’t we always looking for a silver lining?

What am I grateful for? Noah. Always Noah. Shanna. Calli.

How come my “what” I’m grateful for always comes down to a “who”? Because outside of having access to a non-shitty keyboard I can live without pretty much every what. Ok, I need food/shelter/booze like they tell you in Yakitat. But really what do I feel grateful for? My garden. That’s a what.

It’s not about what. It’s who. I get to spend all day figuring out how to be nice. We talk about how sometimes folks put their meanie-pants on. That doesn’t mean they are necessarily ALWAYS mean. Everyone has bad days. Bullying is quite the discussion here. Just because someone has done something you dislike that doesn’t automatically make them a bully. Pleasing you is not a mandatory part of life. Being mean to you is different than doing things you don’t like. And even your best friends will have days when they put their meanie-pants on. The meanest of people will have good days.

What makes someone a monster?

If I’m not qualified to judge who the fuck is?

Calli and I went to sleep talking about how my teddy bear, Ted. T. Bear, is very good at scaring off creepy crawly night monsters. He’s nice to his humans and super fierce with night monsters. Sometimes the best of creatures have to be scary sometimes. Sometimes being scary is part of being able to survive.

For the whole rest of my life I am going to treasure the memories I have of my children. There will be no more relationships in my life that represent such perfect trust.

I am so sorry, mommy.

I wonder how long my kids will like me. My therapist wants me to believe that the people I know are all aberrations. I think I can count on my fingers the number of people I know who like their parents and who actively want relationships with their families. My shrink tells me this is because I broadcast a wavelength that scares the shit out of people who like their families and they don’t really want to hang out with me. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist. It is possible that I will come out the far side with children who like me.

If I make it to a natural death that is a win on my life. Sometimes I feel so sad that it is true. When I drive I feel scared that I don’t want to be alive bad enough. Some day my lack of burning desire to be alive is going to be a problem. It’s not just that I have to deal with the “want to die” urge. I need to find some way to actively want to live. I don’t think I do. I don’t want to hurt people. Is that a good enough reason to stay alive? If that is all I have it has to be good enough for today.

Calli and Shanna and Noah. That has to be enough. I don’t want to hurt them. I’ll just cry. That doesn’t hurt anyone.

I don’t even know for sure why I’m crying. I don’t know if this is just exhaustion. I can’t even tell if I’m sad. I’m just crying and crying.

I feel bitter right this minute that smoking pot is the most effective means of getting it into my system if it weren’t for my pre-fucked up lungs. Thanks for all the chain smoking, mom. Chronic bronchitis. If that kills me it will be kind of ironic. It can, you know. Stupid pills aren’t very effective. Well, they are kind of effective. They make me tired as fuck. Which does slow down the anxiety. But in a less useful way.

I’m clearly trying to avoid smoking. Otherwise I would just write about how awesome it is a medication. Instead I will grumble.

Hey, that’s a ‘what’ I’m grateful for. Pot. Pot provides more than 60% of my ability to stop feeling scared and instead feel calm and happy with what I’m doing. How sad is that? Well it would be way the fuck more sad if my state still had this medication banned. *phew* So I’m glad that this medication exists. I’m grateful for all the lovely official dispensaries that will give me medication IN THE FORM OF CANDY. Oh man. The candy is awesome but a bit more expensive than the pills. Everything is a trade off.

Not to mention that I try to avoid eating a lot of medicated candy in front of my kids. That spells trouble.

They are very clear on the appearance of medicated candy and that they must not eat it. We have looked at the medication specifically and talked about how it looks like candy but it is really medicine and it will make you feel terrible if you take it when you don’t need it.

We talk a lot about appropriate doses of things. I eat more food than them. I drink more water in a day. I take more medication. These things are body-weight dependent activities and I am bigger. Trying to take in more than you need is really bad for you and lets go over the list of why until you can rattle it off as fast or faster than I can.

Don’t eat food, drink water, or take medication above what you actually need or it is bad for you. Just seems kind of logical.

Uhm, I base the “don’t eat too much food” on my childhood where I went through periods of forcing myself to eat long past the point of hunger… sometimes cause I had nothing else to do. When I was in eighth grade I hit this stage where one package of ramen just didn’t quite fill me up. (Now as an adult I would say “add an egg for protein then” as a kid… I would neither have thought of that nor been willing to actually consider it if I did think of it. Eggs come one way: scrambled hard.) So I forced myself to learn to eat two because I didn’t want to throw away some noodles.

I’ve got some issues around food and money and stuff. Like you do.

As much as I love Pam I’m kinda glad she’s busy tonight. I’m annoyed with myself for adding an extra dinner guest to the week on Thursday. Friday night Noah and I have a babysitter scheduled so we can go on a date. If I can fucking stay awake. Pathetic. But the extra dinner guest is a friend going through a really hard break up. I could be selfish and say I’m tired. He’s so sad though. Really all I’m going to give him is 2-3 hours of attention. I’m not so tired I can’t get it up for that.

At the end of your life you will not be remembered for how you felt. You will be remembered for how you make other people feel. I can cough up 2-3 hours of talking to a grieving person. It lightens the load. It really and truly does. If I thought it “did nothing” I wouldn’t bother but it does a lot.

I’ve read too many cases of near-suicide. “Someone surprised me by paying attention to me and convincing me that I still had worth.”

I can see worth in just about anybody. I can sit down and explain the worth I see in you if you want. If it will make you feel better I’d be thrilled to help you see how you fit into the kaleidoscope of life. You have worth. You matter? Want me to point out the spokes in your life? I can show you who you touch and how. You matter. You do.

Why is it so much easier to see for other people than myself? Don’t know but it is. Well, I can see my worth. I just don’t always feel like I have the strength to keep on keepin on. My worth is mostly in my ability to lighten the load for other people. I’m really good at it. It is a particular talent.

I used to think that my only “talent” was speed reading. You can’t go to a talent competition and win a prize for it so of course I thought I was a loser as a child. Now I think I have always underestimated the value of my brain.

Now I think my strongest talent is empathy. It’s a super power. At least occasionally.

But I’m tired. So very tired.

Drips, drabs, ups, and downs.

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We went up to San Pablo yesterday to see some friends. This is after that specific friend coming to my house monthly for ohhh four years now? I am starting to try and do some trips up there in exchange for all the trips to my house. The distance between us is not shorter just because he is a guy with no kids. I can do effort too.

And when I drive up there I get to spend time with his lovely wife. I find the visits to be highly educational in diverse arenas. For one thing: she knows way the fuck more about gardening than I do and she’s happy to talk about plants. Lately getting near someone with lots of plant knowledge who does not eschew my children is somewhat tricky. I’ve tried to sign up for gardening classes THAT ARE BEING ADVERTISED ON AN UNSCHOOLING MAILING LIST and I was told I would have to get babysitting. Stop fucking advertising in this space if my fucking kids aren’t welcome you fucking fuckers. I didn’t say fuck to the people in question. I just dropped it.

Beyond the gardening stuff, I am having a bit of trouble with Callidora. Well, phrasing it that way sounds more extreme than it is. Many of my parenting approaches work really well for Shanna and don’t work at all with Calli. Luckily my friends’ wife seems to identify really strongly with Calli. They are very similar temperamentally and she is giving me a lot of feedback for how to tweak our interactions so they work better.

I feel so much gratitude I don’t have words. Someone is willing to look at me and look at my daughter and look at our relationship and say, “You are doing ok, but you both might be happier if you did……”

Err, in defense of my hubris more than once I have said, “I’m afraid I am going to have to do ____” and her response was “Yes. That is exactly what you have to do.” So she isn’t entirely telling me new information. But she is very good at skimming out the bullshit and getting to the heart of the matter. “This is failing because of x.”

I don’t trust many people to give me feedback. I’m not sure why I trust her feedback as much as I do. For one thing she doesn’t use the word “should” and I’m not sure if that has become a specific trigger. Maybe I explode at people for that word rather than because I am completely unwilling to accept advice? It’s hard to tease out.

Also, she tends to say “Calli seems to be a lot like me. When I was a kid I had x and y and z experiences and this is how it went well and this is how it went badly. If Calli is as much like me as she seems right now, you are going to have to deal with a and b and c. It’s not a good idea to do d.”

I guess there is an implied “should” in that but she doesn’t say it.

It also occurs to me that I push Calli in a way I have never pushed Shanna. When Shanna was three I had a one year old. We did not spend a lot of time pushing the absolute physical limits of what she could accomplish until she collapsed in frustrated tears.

I’m having a hard time understanding fully that Calli wants to be able to do things she isn’t ready to do yet and I need to find a tactful way of bailing her out even as I push Shanna to try. Differentiated instruction is a bitch.

(Err, the bicycle riding project is coming along. We’ve hit a few hiccups. As my wise new running mate commented, “Dude. You’ve been out with them four times? Relax and do more low pressured practice.”

Yeah yeah. You may have a point. But we bought the bikes because we want to ride to the park. I need to decide in my adult brain that even if that is the eventual goal… we sure as shit can’t start by doing that. I should probably not try to leave our housing development again until June. We need more low-stakes practice than we have had. Hours and hours and hours and hours.

It is not just a form of transportation. It is about entertainment. It has to be about entertainment at first or they won’t gain enough proficiency to use it as transportation later. The transportation part doesn’t have to be worked out at three, instantly. Relax you bitch.

Medication has been spotty this week. I (re?)noticed a pattern. Whenever I get to the point of using sufficient medication that I actually feel good instead of having just the edge of the pain taken away I punish myself for days with under medicating so I feel a lot more pain. I’m not supposed to be using pot like a pot head. I’m not supposed to be trying to get high. I’m supposed to be just managing the pain.

I think I am too much of a Puritan. My sister told me I had ancestors on the Mayflower (Not her–different fathers.). Maybe it is too deeply buried within my DNA? I can’t stop believing that I must suffer. Anything that feels good MUST BE BAD.

I have been very consistent lately about giving up my morning “off time” to wake up with the kids. I’m not sure if this is good or bad. On one hand I’m more frazzled and I’m not taking a compensatory amount of time later. On the other hand… we are getting along better. When the kids open their eyes in the morning to me in their bed smiling at them… the whole day is easier. The first thing they hear every day is, “Good morning. I’m so glad to see you again. I’m looking forward to our wonderful day together.”

They smile back and say, “Me too!” then grab my neck and pull me close. Then I get a sleepy “Good morning.”

Sometimes it feels weird knowing that I do this as a parenting gesture in large part to make up for the hole in my heart. No one was ever happy to see me during my childhood. I was a terrible, unwanted burden.

I completely support mothers who need to abort children born of rape. I wish my mother hadn’t allowed her religion to force her to keep me. I was not wanted. And they made my life hell.

Now I have something different. It is so very nice. But it’s a lot of emotional and mental and physical work. And I get really tired.

When I’m tired it is harder to be consistent. When I’m scared I start screaming. That’s consistent.

Calli has asked me to stop raising my voice at her when I’m repeating orders/requests/whatever you want to call them. Demands? She told me (while making eye contact so this is serious as a fucking heart attack) “I will be able to listen to you better if you get close to me and whisper in my ear that it is important.”

If a three year old can so clearly ask for the kind of interaction she needs then I am a fucking asshole if I ignore the request. This is how I teach them ownership of their body and consent and boundaries.

I’ve been working on it. I kind of feel that I should create some accountability tool for myself. Maybe another sheet of paper on the wall. I can ask Calli to help me decide whether I approached her correctly or not and we can decide if I get a mark in the “right behavior” column or the “not so right” column. It will also help her clarify which aspects of the raised voice stuff are a problem for her.

My kids are not going to grow up thinking adults are perfect and kids need to bend to the adults around them. Ha. Ha. Ha. No. We want to live together. We need to adapt to one another.

I’m happy about the upcoming social stuff. I’m feeling a little overwhelmed that people are agreeing so delightedly to come to my events. My RSVPs fill up fast. (Err, RSVP for Easter if you are coming… not many spaces left.)

I have had something like six people in the last two weeks get really excited when I confirm that I’m hosting Easter again. “OH! You throw the best parties!”

I do?

Oh.

Well that’s awesome. How do I do that? What makes them “the best” for you? Because I spend my parties in kind of an anxious hell hoping I don’t offend everyone and run them off such that they never want to come back.

And yet I keep hosting. Irony.

I don’t seem to be running people off. I mean… I do… but I don’t. I run some people off.

I feel very guilty when I admit to myself that I run off people who need things from me that I can’t give. My anxiety and shame around not being able to meet their needs makes me angry and cruel. It isn’t my fault I can’t meet their needs. It isn’t their fault I can’t meet their needs. It isn’t their fault they have needs. I have needs they can’t meet either. But I get mean. This is a major character flaw of mine.

I don’t do this with people who have small needs I can easily meet. If people need something from me that is going to be an up to five hour commitment one time… I love doing that. That helps me feel like I am part of a community and I’m useful and all kinds of good feelings. When someone starts to need 3-10 hours of work from me every fucking week in order to have a relationship with them…

I get mean. I am awful. I am not a nice person. I don’t know how to have healthy limits without being an asshole. I’m not making excuses or justifying my behavior. It’s wrong.

I have been talking to a friend a lot about how different it is in America versus other more crowded countries. Americans apologize for bumping into someone. In China you would never say any word other than “sorry”. So they don’t bother.

I spend a lot of time apologizing for taking up space. I spend a lot of time apologizing for being inconvenient. I spend a lot of time apologizing for not being able to do/be what someone else wants/needs.

I am sorry I am so inadequate. I clearly see that I am.

Right now I’m having anxiety attacks because some folks are mad at me. Folks I don’t really need to “care” about per se. They aren’t my friends. They are the close friends of one of my friends. They are mad at me because my vomiting on Friday caused them some inconvenience. I have apologized profusely for inconveniencing them. I’m sorry they were brought into the situation by our mutual friend. But yeah. I’m the bitch.

And I feel consumed with shame and I have for days. I inconvenienced them. I stole hours of their life and made them about me when they already kind of hate me. I’m really sorry. I did apologize. I have not been acknowledged and that is what I assumed would happen.

I get into these situations. I’m sorry I inconvenienced you. I have very little control over when I vomit. I’m just glad I didn’t make a mess on my floor.

But it impacted your life. And you wish I didn’t impact your life. So you are angry with me because I popped up and existed in a way you couldn’t tune out.

I’m really sorry.

This is more or less why I avoid that whole segment of the “community”. I don’t really like feeling like I am doing something wrong by breathing in a way they can hear.

So yeah. I don’t think I will teach with my friend again. There is a bunch of stress in the lead up and if I get sick there is lots of acrimony, blame, and anger. Not from my friend. He was mellow about the situation. But he didn’t feel qualified to handle the class alone and those are the other people he has in his life to turn to for support.

Yeah well, me hanging around near them feels like an abusive family reunion where they all wish I would drop dead. The sooner the better.

More one of them than the other but… well that’s not a story I’ll write down yet. Maybe a few more decades. It being thirteen years ago still isn’t long enough. Some day.

It’s not all her fault. I was a bitch. But man. Oh man. Ok. Shiny change of topic.

I’ve been having a lot of feelings all week over that. I was doing great last week until I started vomiting on Friday.

I associate vomiting with letting people down and being a bad and weak person. When I get sick my association is that I will also be in trouble for some reason. I am inconvenient when I’m sick.

Noah is working hard to change some of these patterns. He’s nice when I’m sick. He does a lot of telling me that it isn’t my fault and I didn’t do anything bad. I feel really pathetic for needing it. But I do. And he does it. I am so grateful for him as a partner.

I like teaching though. I will look for more opportunities to teach. Just no co-teaching in a situation potentially wrapped in shame-inducing trauma. When I had to cancel a class as a professional teacher… no one made me write a formal apology. I’d like to go back to that kind of treatment. Thanks.

My running mate wants me to stop thinking of writing as a hobby and start thinking of it as a business. I’ve sold enough forking copies of my book that I can stop pretending I’m not a real writer. I shouldn’t have to pay for my book editing and publishing stuff out of my “fun money”. It’s not my hobby. Noah doesn’t take his business expenses out of his fun money. It’s a separate category in the budget. It’s not very healthy for me to demean myself in this fashion.

I will severely limit my career as a writer if I can’t employ an editor until I save up enough fun money by denying myself everything. Denial as a full-time lifestyle in a household that otherwise has a lot of privilege… that’s kinda self-hating. It’s being weird. It’s unhealthy.

Why do women do this to themselves? My writing “doesn’t count”. It’s just… something I do. Like the laundry. And when there are expenses for it, well, they are “mine”, right?

I developed a lot of habits over the years of having the annuities and living with men. What I could have was very strictly limited to what I had in that $1200 every month. I didn’t over extend. And now I have no real personal income and… I’m flailing. The $100/month of fun money is… not enough. Not for me to feel like I can track all of “my” spending separately from household stuff.

We just have a clothes budget. It is for all four of us. If someone gets something then the other three have to wait a while. *shrug* But it changes how I think of things. Although… when I bought the pretty clothes in Portland I took a big chunk out of my personal money. I spent more than $500 on two items of clothing. It didn’t seem fair to make my family give up that large a share of the clothes budget on me getting two items. So more than $300 came out of my fun money. That seemed fair to me.

When the kids really get a big clothes splurge… it goes in the “kid” section even though mostly they come out of the main category.

The kids have a big section of the budget that is amorphously used for classes, home school supplies. books, toys, gear of whatever kind (was baby carriers and diapers now it has moved on to bikes), and rarely clothes.

A long time ago I consciously went out and started spending time with older men. They could talk to me about money. How they got it. What they did with it. I made my own judgments about who lived in which kind of house and who had how much money. I’ve always been tactless as fuck. I would point blank ask them how much cash they had in the bank and whether or not they had investments.

I didn’t understand most of what they told me. But I remembered it. It’s kind of funny to have little memories float up now and again as I’m trying new things with investing.

Be sure you are right, then go ahead. I will, Davey. I will research and research and research and I’ll figure out what I think is right. Of course I know I could always be wrong. Some minute change in my life might make all of my careful risk calculations moot and irrelevant.

I have no way of predicting that. So I have to just act and hope for the best.

Save.

Debt is evil.

Make your money work for you.

Pay yourself first.

Sometimes I think I turn to these mantras as the only way I have of blocking out all the voices in my head who want me to think I am stupid and a bitch and I should just stop inconveniencing them by breathing.

I’ve been really stunned by the intensity of my suicidal ideation this week.

I also haven’t been doing my daily check in calls with my friend. She’s really busy on a project. She’ll be back in a week or so. I support and respect her participation in this event and that means she has no time to think about me. I am a big girl and I’ll keep my big girl panties on.

It is interesting how suicidal ideation is not always about depression. I don’t feel like I am feeling depression symptoms. This is more on the anxious/overwhelmed side. Manic is a word people like. But I’m not… doing anything manic.

Just out of the blue driving on the freeway I see a weird opening where it would be possible to turn and be hit by a semi-truck and I want to do it more than I want anything in the world. I want in that moment to feel a lot of pain and then die. I want it as much as my heart wants to beat. It is immediate and visceral and all encompassing.

I have to breathe very lightly and lift my hands so I have a very light guiding pressure on the steering wheel. Sometimes I get off the freeway to breathe and stretch my neck and remind myself, “Not today.”

The reasons I don’t like driving are varied and complicated and… I’m willing to bet that someday I will not be able to drive any more. It is part of the reason I am as strongly motivated to make friends near my house as I am. Walking will always be a good idea. Forever. For my health.

Thanks, Pam, for letting me write this morning.

My head feels better. I feel a lot less shame. Writing it down helps.

I don’t need to feel shame because other people would prefer that their world didn’t overlap with mine. I could reject our mutual friend so that they never have to hear about me again, but given that he values his relationship with me that seems kind of awful.

But I think I should have different boundaries. Still working on where those need to be. Boundaries are tricky things. You only find out you have them when they are transgressed. Ha. THAT WAS THE WHOLE POINT OF THE CLASS. And what I got out of it is: I need to make sure I never have to deal with your extended friends again. Awesome.

That’s a lesson I can learn.

They aren’t going to like me. No matter what. Ever. I need to not care about that. They are allowed to have their experience of the world where I am… something. I don’t know what. I shouldn’t speculate. I would surely overstate my importance. I certainly don’t suspect that either of them while away hours just hating me. I’m not that important.

So I don’t need to feel shame because they are feeling irritation. That’s not something I need to take on. I gave an apology. I offered restitution to the best of my ability. That’s what I’ve got. Move on. I didn’t vomit on purpose.

And when I feel shame for my social behavior I rush home to assure myself that I am managing my money properly. No one is going to be able to force me to move. I’m allowed to stay here. I’m jumping through all the hoops that actually matter for my life. I don’t have to care that they dislike me. There won’t be any consequences.

And then I can stop thinking about it.

Thank you internet. That’s the end of my confession for today. I have some dirt to play with and a fence to sand. Tomorrow a bunch of little kids are going to come paint a few sections. We are adding more year by year. Drips and drabs. It’s really fun.

Saturday is the Girl Genius Volume 1 read aloud. Email me for details if you want to come hear Noah do all the hilarious voices.

Every day love

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My kids like to go to sleep curled up against me. It always takes us a while to stop talking about how much we love each other. We say “I love you” many many—maybe more than dozens of times a day.

Sometimes I feel like it is weirdly excessive. Sometimes I feel like I am managing to finally experience what I’ve wanted my whole life. People actually like me here.

I haven’t been able to handle being on the PTSD forum lately. I can’t handle the way people talk about coping. Yes, these emotions are scary. No I don’t think that I should hide my scary life experiences. No, I don’t believe that the only appropriate place to talk about trauma is in a therapy office.

People who want to “get better” talk. People who want to “get better” have to take the risk of being hurt again. You have to trust with your whole heart even though it is terrifying and awful.

I am so grateful for Noah. These people talk about being married for decades and never telling anyone about their history. They have severe troubles in their marriage because their spouse doesn’t have enough information to be helpful even if they want to..

I am so grateful that I get to be with people every day who like me. Who don’t need me to just shut up and play a role for them. My kids know I cry. They don’t need me to go away and stop bothering them when I’m feeling sad. They give me a hug and say they are sorry I’m feeling sad. It’s not a huge deal. It’s not part of our daily or even weekly routine but it happens.

They validate that I’m allowed to have my feelings. They offer the comfort they can provide (a hug) and then we move on with our days. You can’t have this kind of support without admitting that you need it.

Noah is so nice to me. SOOO nice to me. He actually wants to see me every single day. He actually enjoys talking with me day after day. It is overwhelming.

My mama couldn’t stand me. I don’t understand why anyone else has an easier time. Only now that I’ve been a mom for a while I think I can understand why my mom had such a hard time with me. I was a truly difficult child. If they had used the phrase Oppositional Defiance Disorder when I was a child I’m sure I would have been diagnosed.

I’m not saying I am awesome and everyone is bad for not wanting me. I’m not saying that. I was awful. I was really hard. I was mean and spiteful and vicious. I still am if you catch me in the right mood. I was a complete fucking asshole.

But I wish my mama had loved me any way.

Every day when my kids tell me they love me I want to deflect it. I want to say, “No you don’t.” or “You wouldn’t love me if you really knew me.”

But yesterday Shanna asked me to read a book about development with her. (It’s So Amazing! It’s a book about conception/pregnancy/sex but it’s not exactly graphic. It’s a kids book.) We got to the part where every girl is born with all the eggs in her ovaries she will ever have.

Shanna told me, “So I was part of you when you were born. No wonder I love you so much.”

I almost lost it and it was hard to continue reading in a calm voice. No wonder I love my mommy so much. I’m part of her. I was part of her through all the suffering of her early life. I didn’t go off and separate until after most of the worst trauma. I am intrinsically and basically on her side.

But I have to protect my kids whether I want my mama or not. Because they are part of me. And it’s my job to keep them safe. That is my only fucking job. I wish that keeping my children safe did not mean shunning my mama.

I don’t feel I deserve the love of the people I live with because I can’t love my mama right. If you can’t do that surely you deserve eternal punishment. Chain me up right next to Prometheus. We both suck.

But the thing is, talking about my PTSD allowed me to develop the relationships I have. I could not have this supportive of a relationship with Noah if I did not talk about my life experiences. It is literally impossible.

So feelings. Talking about the feelings is hard. Talking about the feelings is the only way to build the intimacy that creates trust that alleviates the symptoms. The whole cycle is shitty and awful because talking is so hard because I don’t have that basic trust to start with.

Today is Lego Club day. Whatever my feelings are, they are mine. They stay here in Wonderland. Only Noah has to really hear about them. A little bit leaks out with other friends but not a lot. And I’m going to a home school event. I am there so my children can make friends not so I can get support. And I don’t fucking forget it.

I am grateful that I have three people who love me. That’s more than a lot of people get. I am so glad I get to have the life I have. I feel so safe. I feel like it is ok for me to take risks.

I made the event mailing lists yesterday. If you were not invited that is probably because I could only invite ten people at a time so I picked the first names who came up in my address book. I am having a crises of confidence. If I didn’t send you invitations and you like being invited to things at our house, email me. I am in the invitation list formation stage.

I think I made Google Groups so people can join or not and I no longer have to be afraid that I shouldn’t be bothering people with invitations. I have terrible anxiety about inviting people over. I don’t want to be told no. But I understand that everyone is very busy. If I have people who opt-in to “Sure invite me as often as you like and I’ll come when I can” maybe that will filter some of the anxiety. Maybe. (Seriously–please ask to join the list if you have any inclination. I’m not rejecting you. I’m being paralyzed with anxiety that you might reject me.)

I also finished the petition and printed it out. The kids and I should start walking the neighborhood to collect signatures today. Oh goodness.

I was very careful in my wording. I want everyone in our neighborhood to be happy, healthy, and included. Let’s find a way to work together. No one should be pushed out. But sometimes in order to cohabitate peacefully you have to talk about boundaries. Healthy relationships have boundaries.

Cross your fingers. Davey Crockett says: “Be sure you’re right. Then go ahead.”

I believe I am right to try and intercede. I believe that there is positive to gain for the people in our neighborhood if we can negotiate for the limits we physically need for health.

Despite waking up and feeling like I should spend the day under my desk rocking and crying (some mornings are just like that) I will do a lot of community building. It doesn’t matter that I feel like I “can’t”. The plain and simple truth is that I can. I just have to get up and do it.

Dear Mama

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Hi. Long time no talk. I miss you. I miss you all the time. I don’t know if you miss me or not. I have never been very nice to you. I’m sorry for that.

A lot of things happened. It has taken a long time but I really don’t blame you. You had a very hard life. I can’t really imagine what it is like to have a life as hard as yours has been.

I’m sorry that I am one more person hurting you. I’m sorry you don’t get to know my children while they grow up. I’ve read a lot about incest. If I want to break behavior patterns in my family I have to keep my kids away from all of the supporting behaviors. That is the best I can do right now to keep my kids safe. And I have to.

I’m really sorry that I’m hurting you in this process. I would really like to write to you about them. I don’t know if that would hurt you more or if it might ease the pain you feel. I don’t know if complete mystery is easier than a partial story.

Every single day I am sorry that I don’t get to share them with you.

Some day, when my kids don’t need me any more I want to study incest. I want to figure out how to help people change the dangerous behaviors so that families don’t have to be separated to break the patterns. Right now there really isn’t a better answer. I’ve looked. I’ve spent years searching.

I am so sorry mama. It isn’t your fault.

I love you. I have always loved you. I will always love you.

I’m so sorry.

Wired for sound.

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That’s the expression I use for vibrating with anxiety. I woke up because a kid turned the bathroom light on. I need more sleep. But I’m AWAKE.

Yesterday we went to the kid dentist. Both kids got A+ from the dentist. I feel weird about them getting graded. After telling Shanna with great enthusiasm that her teeth were perfect the dentist looked like he was sucking a lemon when I said that Shanna has been brushing and flossing herself for a bit over a month now. “That’s not ok. She’s not able to get her teeth clean yet.” …. did you or did you not just tell me that her teeth were perfect?

He’s also concerned about the size of Calli’s tonsils. Especially given that I do the gasping for air thing that probably means I have sleep apnea. The dentist also bitched me out for that. I should go do a sleep study and seek treatment because apparently sleep apnea can take up to six years off your life.

“You don’t understand. That gasping for breath sends your body into fight or flight mode. That can shorten your entire life span.”

“Uhm, with all due respect I have PTSD and live in a hypervigilant hell of fight or flight every day. I don’t think the sleep apnea is what is going to kill me. But thanks for your concern.”

He looked taken aback at that return.

I spent two hours reading about autistic adults yesterday. I have some ideas about how to manage my current boundary problems with a friend. I’m going to need to solve them and not expect a fix from my friend. Some things can’t be fixed by other people. Some things you have to do yourself. He can’t guess where my boundaries are.

I don’t want to stop weekly visits. But I do want to stop having to spend seven days processing each visit before another one happens to rocket me into feeling angry, used, and like I want to beat the shit out of someone non-consensually.

I think step one is going to be, “I would like to stop discussing the bdsm community with you at all. I can’t be free to say what I want to say in front of my kids and you say more than I think is appropriate and then I can’t respond and then I’m just fucking pissed. I need to not do this.”

That needs to be step one. If you can’t spend a two hour visit talking about something other than the bdsm community then I need to make the visits less frequent. Too much is leaking out around my kids. Not to mention that I’m only tangentially involved in the scene at this point and I really don’t need to be spending my time freaking out about what other people are or aren’t doing. I don’t need this shit.

That is step one. That is as close as I can get to not black and white thinking on this. Move the goal post. I don’t need to end the visits immediately because I’m experiencing too much emotion. I need to figure out how to have less emotion. It’s not “all his fault” I am having these feelings. But having theoretical conversations about what other people should or shouldn’t do causes me more distress than happiness and I would like to stop doing it.

That doesn’t mean my friendship has to go away. Let’s just have a bright shiny change of topic. All the autistic forums recommend going for as blunt and straightforward as possible. “I’m experiencing a full week of activation after our visits and I need that to change. One idea I have is that we could take the topic of the bdsm community off the table for a while and I can see if that is the problem. If that isn’t the way to solve the problem I may ask for further modifications in the future but for now I’d like to start by talking about other things. It’s only two hours. Surely we can find something else to talk about.”

I love you. I value you. I want you to exist not only in the abstract world but in my world. Right now I’m spending seven days a week being pissed off at you and that isn’t working for me. Let’s try something else.

People don’t trigger me because they are wrong or bad or pick a negative adjective. People trigger me because I have a long personal history of crap. My emotions reside inside my body and aren’t the fault of anyone. If I need to manage myself differently that doesn’t mean that someone else is wrong.

I wish I found my boundaries without feeling this much destructive rage. That would be useful. Future Goal And All.

I asked a friend how she handles her autistic son when he’s on a topic she doesn’t want to talk about. She said she tunes him out.

Tuning someone out is hard for me. I do kind of the antithesis of tuning my kids out. I’m nosy, probably borderline invasive (if I listen to my kids this much when they are 12/14 it will probably be an invasion of their privacy–I tell myself that small children have different boundaries) and I believe that the only way I can know my kids are getting what they need is if I provide it. I don’t trust that things will run smoothly unless I micromanage the fuck out of it. (I understand that other people go through life without micromanaging and things turn out fine. Bully for you. I have issues I’m managing.)

We’re always solving yesterday’s problems.

I think it’s funny how people say things to me and it becomes a major touch-stone theme in my writing for years. These little phrases. I am made up of thousands of people. I steal their words and ideas and sometimes their boundaries.

Sometimes loving someone means deciding, “I would rather not talk about _________ with you.”

It has been very rare in my life that someone has been able to provide me with such clear boundaries. I am slaveringly grateful when people can state clear boundaries around conversation. Otherwise I tend towards the “inappropriate”.

It is hard for me to guess which parts of my normal day to day life might traumatize other people. Ok, maybe not my current day to day life, but my past. I can talk about some things with some people and it’s bloody hard to guess what with whom. If I slip then I am a terrible person for traumatizing someone. So I hear. It’s hard to get over having therapists tell me that I should never discuss my history with lay people or I am being abusive.

“Group therapy isn’t appropriate for people with your level of trauma. You will just be abusive with the group members.”

Ouch.

I’m supposed to shut the fuck up. No, I’m not supposed to shut the fuck up. I’m really not. I’m not going to no matter how much some people wish I would. Noah likes reading it. He’s my ideal reader. Stephen King tells me I only need one and then I’m golden.

To abruptly change the topic: Calli is in a phase. I ask what she wants. I say ok, sure thing and move towards doing the thing. She changes her mind. I say, “I’m already 75% done with foo”. She explodes and starts screaming at me about how she wants the opposite of foo. I am terrible. I don’t love her. Hysterical crying. Flailing of arms and legs. It is the end of the world. If we are out in public I pick her up and carry her back to the car and drive home. If we are home I ask her not to scream in the living room and carry her to a screaming room if necessary. Then I need some time alone.

I’m too highly activated all the time. I’m worried about my reflexes right now. I’m punchy and twitchy.

I’m trying to just roll with it. I know from books (thank you child development books. You are the best things in the whole fucking world) that this is normal and standard and the best way to handle it is to teach emotional self regulation slowly and patiently. Validate the emotions and help them learn to calm down. Yup, you really are that disappointed all of a sudden. That sounds hard. Sometimes when you make a choice you have to live with it or get nothing. That’s how life goes. Yup, it’s terribly hard sometimes. Sometimes it is so hard you cry. I can see you understand that step already.

But it takes so much patience and calm. My well runneth dry.

A while ago I told a friend that her husband required the same kind of patience from me as her children. She looked kind of startled. A fair number of my friends (I almost defaulted to the sexist “male friends” but then I stopped and thought–nope it’s not gender related I just have issues with people.) require the same kind of “must stop and patiently explain what I’m thinking to someone belligerent and unfamiliar with my vocabulary” kind of behavior from me. I totally don’t mind doing it with kids. That has always been easy. Explaining “down” doesn’t bother me. It feels just and I don’t get nearly as frustrated.

I’m kind of a raging asshole when it comes to adults. I didn’t try to go for being a college professor for reasons. I don’t have fucking patience for them. Shut the fuck up and get your shit done you stupid fucking piece of shit.

Yeah, 8th period social club was way more effective as a teaching method.

(I don’t really believe that people are stupid pieces of shit for not knowing things I know. But I’m really not a very nice person in my head.)

No one has commented on my lack of tact in years. I wonder what that means about my social skills. It isn’t that I spend less time with people. I spend time with very different kinds of people. And I’m not hunting for sex. That probably is the biggest mellowing feature.

These days hunting for sex is more like shooting fish in a barrel. It changes the vibe. Hunting for sex is one of the least activating activities in my life. *nudge* “Wanna?” “Yes!”

It’s flattering but not exciting in the same way. It’s nice. I’m not complaining. Ok, moving on.

Hi, non-neurotypical brain let’s try to figure out how to make you interact with my trauma damaged brain without an explosion from adrenaline. Your tics and my tics have got to combine. We can find a way. Damnit. Fourteen years. I don’t want to lose more long time friends. Sure you piss me off. Everyone else does too if I spend enough time with them.

If I avoided people because they pissed me off I would never leave my house. Which would suck.

People delight me more than they bother me. It’s hard to hold that focus sometimes. That’s the extremist black and white thinking. “I love you. I hate you.” Me and Taylor Swift.

Our babysitter keeps asking for modifications based on how tired she is. “I know we said going until x’o’clock but can it be x-2’o’clock because I haven’t been sleeping well.”

On one hand I have thoughts of “unprofessional” and on the other hand I feel so delighted by her confidence in caring for her body. She’s a growing kid. I’m glad she is smart enough to prioritize sleep. I am unflaggingly sympathetic and willing to be flexible. I need her more than she needs me. I’d better fucking be nice.

In every loving relationship there is a power imbalance. Whoever loves the most has the least power. That’s what my mama taught me.

Is it mercenary to take stock of whether I need someone more than they need me and plan my behavior accordingly? It means I am much more of an asshole with people who need me more than I need them. That’s not exactly cool. I’m not talking raging asshole, but I’m less flexible.

Are those enough words so that I can sleep? Maybe. I have improved the ergonomic set up but it isn’t perfect yet. I need a better keyboard. The neck angle isn’t perfect but it has improved. At least I’m using the tray and a better mouse already. I do need a better keyboard. This one is way too narrow for me. I’ll save it for kidlets.

Just breathe.

I should post pictures of my garden. It’s beautiful. I have tulips and narcissus and sage and rosemary and the Japanese lantern all in bloom. The rose leaves are beautifully red. The Joseph’s Coat roses in the back are starting to bloom. The strawberries and blueberries have lots of flowers and starting fruit. The blackberry isn’t going to give me fruit this year. The hacking stunted it. I get it. Sorry, dude. I needed to change your trellis. The plum tree is covered in flowers. Yesterday I saw the buds on the cherry tree finally start opening.

Spring is here. We have peas, beans, and squash left to plant. The corn has appeared but I need to let it get a bit higher before I plant the peas and beans that will climb up the stalks. Then a few weeks after that the pumpkins.

The artichoke is huge but I don’t see signs of fruiting yet. I have no idea what it will look like. The asparagus is coming right along. I don’t eat them this year. Next year.

Patience, grasshopper. You have a lifetime.

My neighbor dropped off a few more strawberry plants. I’m thrilled to have them. I have a whole bed of strawberries and one of those strawberry pots. I was given it. I use pots that I’m given. We spend so much money on strawberries every year. At least $200/year on strawberries. I’d like to grow a whole bunch. I understand that Noah and I will eat fewer than when we have no small fructivores in the house. Still.

When I am old I hope my intestine will allow me to largely live on raw fruit from my back yard and meat. That would be rad. Way less cooking. I’ll get me a George Forman grill and I’ll be golden. Rice in a rice cooker. Fuck vegetables. That sounds like the amount of cooking I like doing.

I eat vegetables now because I’ve been brainwashed into thinking my kids must eat them and I must model eating them.

I’m going to take six years off my life due to sleep apnea. Heh. If I manage to live long enough to die of natural causes That’s a win.

It’s interesting how different people have different goal posts.

Getting to know you

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Callidora is an adventure every day. She isn’t much like Shanna. Watching Calli and seeing how frequently I dramatically underestimate her gives me perspective on my mom. I understand better how she ignored me–maybe ignore is the wrong word. I understand why she had trouble seeing me.

In some ways I’m an open book. I will talk about a lot of things with ease that other people simply cannot discuss. But I talk about things on my terms and on timing that I pick and fuck everyone else. I didn’t tell my mom much about what was happening when I was a kid because she didn’t believe me when I tried. So I stopped trying. I can see how I could have that problem with Calli if I’m not careful. I work so hard to stop and sit down and listen to her. I need to treat her like she matters if I want her to believe she matters. That belief or lack of it will largely come from me.

No pressure.

Shanna has a kind of preternatural self confidence that blows my mind. She has been walking up to strangers and announcing, “I’m Shanna and I’m awesome” for pretty much as long as she has been able to walk and talk. She could speak fluently by 18 months so this is a very well established pattern.

Calli doesn’t do that. Calli is more scared that people won’t like her. Calli is less willing to believe with her whole heart that she is awesome. I feel like that is my fault. I sure haven’t spent the first few years of her life staring into her face and talking about how much I like her the way I did with her sister. It’s harder with divided attention. I feel like I’m letting her down over and over all day every day. I’m trying Calli. I know you want more attention. I’m doing my best.

I’m trying really hard to have special one on one time with Calli. She needs to feel like she is as important to the wholeness of the family as any of the rest of us. When I say “she needs to” I really mean, “I hope I can help her feel like”. I can’t make her. I can’t require her to have an emotion. I can’t force her to feel loved and accepted.

Calli has a lot of extreme jumps in emotion. Very sad to angry to happy within a short period of time. Sure, it’s normal for the age but emotional self regulation is a major thing to learn. We are trying. It’s hard. She is going to struggle more than Shanna. She has less inner peace to draw on. I feel like that different amount of starting reserve is my fault. I didn’t give Calli the center-of-the-world experience. I couldn’t. I try to help her see that even though there are down sides to having a big sister there is a lot of upside too.

Sibling rivalry has absolutely arrived but it is pretty mellow compared to some families I’ve seen. My kids have been harped at their entire life, “Your sister is the primary person who will be on your team in this life. You be nice to your sister and teach her how to be nice to you. Otherwise she won’t want to be your friend when you are a grown up and that is horrible and painful. Be nice to your sister.”

Shanna needs to back off and let Calli have more space. Calli needs to learn how to assert her boundaries without hitting. It took me till my late 20’s to master that so I can’t really throw any stones. We’re working on it.

I like that Calli likes different books and different colors and different foods. I’m getting good at that mom-skill of preparing separate meals from a joint list of ingredients. “Column A for people 1 and 3. Column B for people 1, 2, and 3. Column C for people 3 and 4.” Etc.

Both children have decided that since Noah and I don’t eat onions they are done. Fair enough.

Even though I get all tetchy and I wish I had a bit more personal space I’m still grateful every day that I get to have this life. Watching them grow up feels like magic.

I read parenting things that say that you shouldn’t tell your children that they are beautiful. You shouldn’t comment on their bodies. There should be respectful silence due to their right to privacy. Or something like that. I’m sure I misunderstand. Or rather I’m sure someone would be happy to yell at me and tell me that I’m misrepresenting the position somehow. Anyway.

I comment on my kids. I talk about the fat on their bodies and it coming and going as they grow. I do it in a positive tone of voice. “OOh! Your cheeks are getting chubby! You will grow soon. Want extra food?” “Oh your face thinned out last night. Here and here and here grew–I can see it. You are so beautiful. I love watching you change.”

We watch documentaries about history and culture and discuss why bodies vary throughout the world. There is a fairly distinct difference between your average Samoan person, your average French person and your average Japanese person.

Jared Diamond’s work has been incredibly instrumental in guiding how I talk about these things. I talk about what kinds of foods grow in different climates and why people evolved differently in different parts of the globe. And I tell my kids to assume that every kid they meet on the play ground is a Californian until they are told otherwise. You no longer have any idea where someone lives based on how they look. Totally irrelevant. Just because their distant ancestors were in Asia or Africa or Europe that doesn’t necessarily mean much about the behavior, likes, dislikes, or language skills of these current kids.

I am looking forward to traveling with the kids so much I ache with it. I don’t know why I have this strong need. I want to take off with them for a long time. I want them to have this basically risk-free chance to get good at meeting people when they are young. They will have a small taste of the perpetual new-kid experience I had but with a guide and assistance and safety I never had.

We are always trying to solve yesterday’s problems. That’s mostly because we can’t get enough perspective on the problems of today to understand what we should be doing. You solve the problems you can see. That’s all anyone can do.

All three of us Gibbs girls are now bike enabled. I asked Calli if she wanted to ride on a tandem sort of device with me or just get her own bike and she absolutely insisted on her own bike. I’m scared shitless. Bikes are terrifying to me in a way that other people simply can’t understand. Bicycle accidents have done a lot to ruin the lives of my family members. It’s a big deal.

We’ll see how it goes. Calli is on a balance bike and Shanna has training wheels. I tried to talk her into learning balance first and she refused. Ok, whatever.

I want us to be able to seriously get around on bikes. I would like to be able to do most of our activities on bikes. I would kind of like to move towards being a one car family again when one of ours dies. That means the kids and I can’t be trapped in our house without a car. We need to be able to live.

Not everyone in the world gets to have their own personal use car. I probably don’t really need to be one of them. But because I have the privilege and the luxury I’m going to wait until my kids are big enough to kind of get around more on their own steam. Like a lazy person. Because I can. Because that is what privilege means. It means getting to decide yes or no instead of having a choice thrust upon you with no alternative.

My mom usually had access to a car. Except when we didn’t. The idea of choosing to only have one vehicle is really scary for a lot of “I want to be able to leave in the middle of the night if I have to” kind of reasons. Not that things with Noah are bad.

I just like having options. I have other random shit I do to “be prepared”. That’s not the point of this journal entry though.

I see a lot of parallels between myself and my mother. I think I am past the point of being upset with her over not preventing the abuse. She didn’t. That’s the end of that tale.

If I try to be generous, at the end of the day I basically like myself. I’m interesting and motivated and stubborn and sassy. All traits I highly esteem. I learned a lot of those traits because my mother let me.

Clearly she isn’t all bad. She didn’t try to control me much. She let me explore and try things on and she would roll her eyes and accept every phase.

My mom hit me when my actions caused her to feel like she was failing as a mother because I was so bad. I get it. She was trying to instill boundaries. She didn’t have other models. She hit me less than she was hit. She hit me less than my father hit all of her other kids. She hit me less than my aunt and uncle hit their kids. She hit me less than my uncle did. She hit me less than my siblings did.

She tried. She really did.

She survived a rather hellish and horrible life by putting her head down and just getting on with it. If I would come crawling back she would take me. She loves me.

My mama used to scream at Uncle Bob that he didn’t need to hit me. All he had to fucking do was explain it and then I would do what I was supposed to do. My mama did that for me.

No. I won’t hit my kids.

When I think of what my mother was going through during my childhood I’m kind of amazed she was as nice to me as she was. I was like Calli only turned up a lot of notches plus constant sexual acting out. So uhm yeah. I feel a lot more compassion for my mother as the years go by.

I hope there is a way to consciously choose to fix these issues in my family. My mom was ignored because her mom dealt with mental illness and I don’t know what else. I was ignored as my mom dealt with mental illness and trauma and horror. My kids aren’t ignored.

I hope this will be enough of a difference.

Today’s run was long and hard. 10.75 miles. Took me 2 hours and 40 minutes. Everything just sucked. I wasn’t there. I was so sad. Tommy. My mom. Am I paying enough attention to my kids? Too much? Are they excessively self absorbed? Oh man. How the hell do you judge? God I don’t know if I am doing this right. Are they going to be able to take care of themselves? Oh man oh man.

I’m down to 12 years with the first kid and 14 years for the second kid. For some reason all of a sudden that doesn’t feel long enough.

I’m scared. Will I be able to teach them enough?

Scheduling, guilt, and other things.

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I had a great chat with one of the Godmamas yesterday about schedule stuff. They keep a really rigid schedule. They get up at the same time, eat the same foods daily, exercise on a rigid schedule, etc. I admire that and can’t do it.

The only food I have ever had that I can eat day after day without feeling stabby is ramen. And I shouldn’t eat that every day. It is down to 1-3 times a week and I feel a lot of pride in myself for weening my addiction down that far. I supplement my lunches on other days with “real food” involving vegetables and meat.

From month to month our schedule is dramatically different. The only consistent point is “busy”. It doesn’t matter if it is a month where we are busy at home with gardening and language stuff or if we are going out a lot or if I’m doing painting. From month to month our lives look so different.

I wonder if I am breaking my children. An awful lot of what public school has to offer children is stability and consistency. I do not underrate how important these are for child development and I concede that public schools are very good at stability.

I worry. I worry that I am not consistent enough to teach stability.

Most days I wake up between 3 and 5. I spend time in the garage until I come out around 6:30. Except for the days when the kids need me at more like 5. Those days I don’t get time off.

We eat breakfast every day but the time varies based on a lot of factors. We can eat as early as 5:45 and as late as 9. If we eat early we have second breakfast at 9:30 or 10. If we eat a late breakfast we don’t eat until lunch.

Our dinner can start anywhere between 4:45pm and 7pm depending on what is happening. Usually we start between 5 and 5:30.

We usually go to park days on Tuesdays but we skip one or two a month for a variety of reasons.

For some months of the year we have swim class. That is a once a week thing for the months we do the class. But we don’t take swim class in the summer and we sometimes have one or two other months in the year where Shanna says, “I’m ready for a break.” So we probably have been doing swim class for 6-8 months out of the year for the last few years.

Our diet is hugely variable. We eat a lot of different kinds of meat and a wide variety of vegetables. They rotate through because we get bored.

Our diet is partially so variable because I want my kids to be able to walk into any restaurant or any home and find something to eat. Everyone I have talked to who grew up with a really consistent diet struggles with that. They can eat a narrow range of “familiar” foods.

I want children who are freakishly adaptable. Kind of like me, without the trauma and anger. We’ll see.

My kids will eat ethnic food of absolutely any stripe. They will try anything once to see if they like it and usually they do. They are starting to not be into shrimp (like Noah and I–I think it is a group identification thing as much as a preference because it was abrupt) and they don’t like bell peppers. Past that, Shanna will absolutely eat everything and Calli probably will.

I run four days a week. Mostly. During the ~ 13 months of my life I have been a runner. (Those are non-consecutive and there was a gap of ~14 months in the middle.) Mostly my exercise is weird and sporadic.

Gardening is so inconsistent. Many months I spend less than two hours all month. Some months I spend 40-60 hours in the yard. Depends on what season it is.

I know that daycare babies often are on a strict napping schedule by the clock. I’ve heard of a couple of stay at home moms who manage similar schedules. I never did. My kids had random naps at random times, usually on me. We slept out of necessity and with great resistance. That’s not true. Naps were easy and awesome. I read and the kids slept on me. I miss naps. Lots of enforced sitting for me. My kids have never slept well alone.

Every morning I tell my kids what is going on during the day. I usually tell them three or four days in a row of what is happening. Unless it involves socializing with a flakey person. Then I tell them, “We might see a friend and I will tell you when confirmation happens.” Sometimes they hear that someone is coming over an hour before it happens because that is when I get confirmation. I feel guilty about running interference in this way with flakey people and I feel like I was seriously fucked up by being flaked on over and over. Better to just skip that early on.

I don’t even write/edit/make “writing people” progress every day.

I don’t even clean my house once a week. Sometimes I do. Then I skip doing it for weeks in a row. Luckily Noah never bitches.

The uncle has been showing up once a week (occasionally twice) for a while. That’s consistent.

I try to go see home schoolers at least once a week, sometimes twice a week. Some freakish weekends it happens three times in a week. It’s hard to predict.

Am I going to be able to teach them how to be functional grown ups? Do you have to be able to follow lock-step-predictable schedules for months or years in order to be functional?

With moving around so much as a child I think the only time I was “consistent” was the 2.5 years I was a public school teacher. And I wasn’t consistent the first year because I was part-time. Even when I was teaching full time for that 1.5 years my weeks varied from 50 hours to 70 hours long. That’s not very consistent. Of course I had summers off. I loved that job pace.

When you look at how trauma impacts the brain you see that it kinda sorta changes your DNA. Sorta, not really. The Godmama gave me a great metaphor (thanks!): Your DNA stays your DNA but if your DNA was a large bookshelf full of books, then your life experiences often decide which books you can fully access and read. Some books are not available to you because stuff happened.

That’s not just trauma related, actually. It’s part of the whole nature/nurture debate. We have our inherent traits and potential (good and bad) and how we are treated and what we experience activates different part of our DNA strand.

I think that is accurately stated.

So I have many generations of abuse behind me. I was probably going to be a repeated rape victim given my family background and tumultuous early life even if things had kinda improved by age ten. Things do run in families. How do I change that for my kids? What do I have to do to overcome the basic programming and instincts they have inherited?

I’m kinda terrified that the scheduling stuff plays into it somehow and I am Doing It All Wrong. I have a lot of stuff to fix in my kids. It isn’t true for every parent. My kids have a genetic legacy of alcoholism, drug addiction, sexual dysfunction, depression, suicide, anxiety, bipolar disorder, learning disabilities and potentially schizophrenia. That’s a long list of problems to have in your DNA.

How I treat them during their childhood goes a lot of the way to deciding which parts of their DNA will be activated or not. How they are treated by other people matters too.

I think my children are very sheltered. But apparently I mean something different by the term than other people do. My children are not kept ignorant. They are educated to the degree their little brains can hold the material. I’m not quite as bad as Rick Moranis is in Parenthood but I’m not that far behind either. Ahem.

I think my children are sheltered because they don’t have to find out how the world works yet. They don’t have to have many broken promises experiences. They don’t have to develop the kind of “patience” that kids develop in day care or school while they wait for other people to do their thing. My kids are sheltered from boredom.

Shanna has told me she was bored about four times. Each time resulted in me getting her up and forcing her to start cleaning. About 20 seconds later she said, “Hey I figured out what I would rather be doing so I’m not bored!” Ha.

I don’t want to be more scheduled because if we were more scheduled we would miss out on the days when I read for three hours. That just wouldn’t be in the schedule, let-me-tell-you. I could “commit” to 30-60 minutes per day. But it would have to be at some random time or I would have to choose to not do other things that day including turning down socializing opportunities. I could not agree to 30 minutes of reading right before bedtime. I fall asleep. I could not agree to 30 minutes right after breakfast because we frequently walk out the door immediately following eating.

There isn’t a time of day I could pick without impacting other parts of our life.

I’m very conscious to average more than seven hours in a week. But no, it isn’t regularly timed.

My patterns are more macro than daily. I look for averages over weeks and months. 7-8 homeschooling events in a month–I don’t care if there are three in one week it will balance for the month. I try to not drive more than three days a week. Dinner with three adult friends other than the uncle. (There is a very long list of people I slowly rotate through.)

I feel ashamed of myself for not being able to keep up more of a treadmill. I do what I can do in a day. I hope it all balances out in the long run.

I’m having some intense feelings of guilt because… err… actually Shanna is behind on standards because uhhh she can’t read. If she were in public school I would already be having chats with an upset teacher because my daughter is “behind”.

I didn’t start reading till 6.5. There are many schools of thought that believe that pushing reading before 7 or 8 years old is damaging. If a child spontaneously learns to read early–great. But forcing it isn’t a good idea.

So I have these conflicting forces. I feel guilty and like I should “push” harder in order to make it easier for her to potentially enter a classroom and be perfectly grade level. Even if she never enters school she should be the minimum level of competent to not get push back from teachers for being an ignorant homeschooled kid. I know she will be walking into stigma anyway. She can at least not be too far behind.

But I actually believe it would be silly and kind of damaging for me to push harder. It is really hard to not push. I’m kind of glad right now that I didn’t train in early childhood education. If I had acclimated to that curriculum I would be slipping shit in.

I don’t want to be coercive about learning right now. It’s a choice in principles.

I tried to have my kids even closer together. I knew that I am a lazy bastard and I am unlikely to want to do two full separate ways of teaching. I suspect I will be laissez faire (with a dash of authoritarian when it comes to safety rules) until Shanna hits 8 and Calli is 6. I will try to go gentler on Calli as I transition into more direct teaching in the first few years. Differentiated instruction is a complicated beast. But I doubt Calli will get the 8 years of soft living Shanna will get. Sorry younger sibling. That’s how it goes. But I don’t bother to push one without semi-dragging the other. That’s too hard.

Will I ever direct more? I don’t know. I know that I “could” have Shanna in music already. She doesn’t ask about those classes though. I’m waiting until she cares.

I don’t see a lot of benefit towards pushing her towards doing things or being things yet. She’s playing. She’s figuring out who and what she wants to be. She’ll let me know when she’s more sure of her interests and then I can nudge her along. Then I can help build the structure and scaffolding she will need to develop the necessary schema. Until I have a better idea I’m pretty scatter shot with what I talk about.

Hey Pam! The term is strewing. It is a method unschoolers employ. It generally means consciously having materials around and in front of your kids as a potential inducement to playing with it but you don’t schedule time. Like, we have tons of art supplies. I don’t ever schedule art projects. They just happen.

My kids are going to grow up and find out that I have no interest in science shit and be shocked. I certainly talk about it all the god damn time. I’m still drawing from the stores of what I was taught in the public system (thank you for existing) and supplementing with resources. We have several cubes of science books; I’m working on expanding what we have. (I love Ikea bookshelves and that love infects my writing–sorry.)

I know other people are good at using the library. My kids are reasonably decent with their own books and rip every library book we get. I don’t think that is nice of us so we don’t use the library. I try again every so often. This is an ongoing thing I work on. I’m grateful I have the privilege to buy so many really interesting books.

I just read to them. Noah does too.

We live in a time and a place with infinite opportunities. If you tie yourself down to one rigid schedule then you narrowly limit what opportunities you can follow. That’s ok. It allows you to be more focused on specific goals. But maybe that’s not an all the time way of life for everyone.

I whole-heartedly agree that it is probably the best lifestyle approach for someone going into medicine. You need consistency and body memory in every part of your day. I don’t though.

I feel bad about that. I feel broken and like I’m going to hurt my kids.

I don’t know. They can follow a routine for a set period of time. They are responsive to just about anything I throw at them. We do have periods of time where we eat a monotonous diet. Then I get fussy and change it.

We are planning to travel and intermingle in local, regional cultures–not just hit the tourist spots. We won’t be in a Made-Western-Person-Safe hotel. We can’t be rigid about our approach to the day and handle that well. It just wouldn’t go well.

I want my kids to be good at finding a new normal. Not focused on keeping their normal normal, damnit.

I don’t think I know what is right and other people are wrong. I think I have a very particular priority list that doesn’t look much like other peoples priorities and I worry about that. I am scared that I am doing it wrong.

Reflections

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Today I took the girls to visit an old friend of mine. I haven’t seen her much since I had kids. She’s older than me and she has a grown daughter. Talking to her is different now than it used to be.

Now she actively tries to tell me not to use her as an example. I don’t know if she was simply unaware of how I tried to pattern match off of her in the past or if it seemed more harmless.

Now she adamantly tells me that I should not make similar choices to her. She is not all that happy with the far side of the parenting road and she thinks that she made a lot of wrong choices.

Given that she is a specialist who works with developmentally delayed children (wow I know a lot of them) I did my normal poke, “Several friends think I should have Calli evaluated as potentially somewhere on the spectrum or possibly a speech delay. What do you think?”

She snickered. She said, “I have a 3.5 year old client who can point and say “unh” when he wants something. She’s really not delayed.”

This was kind of weird because I realized how much I want to brush off the encouraging and/or positive comments I receive about my children. Instead I worry and worry about the outliers who tell me, “I think you should ____”.

I never know how to feel about that. I don’t spend a lot of time talking about it, but lots of strangers stop me to grab my shoulders and stare at me in a really intense way and say, “Do you know how exceptional your child is?”

It happens every few months. I uhhh don’t know how to react. This is usually after ten or so minutes talking to Shanna. Talking about that sounds like bragging but honestly it makes me uncomfortable.

It’s not like it only comes from the sweet old grandmothers. It comes from a wide variety of people in a wide variety of circumstances. They are a lot easier to brush off and not think about much. I worry about the criticisms.

I want to believe that people are seeing the real experience of my life when they see potential areas I’m fucking up and not when it’s going right. The going right must be a fluke, right? I don’t believe compliments or positive statements. Although I’m not looney–I know my oldest child is advanced in speaking. But yeah. Whatever. How’s that going to effect the price of tea in China?

When I first knew a lot of my friends as mothers they were still young-ish mothers. I knew them through the periods they talk of with regret. It’s weird to now hear that side of it because I didn’t know anything at the time. I thought they were so great. Now they tell me not so much.

I’m worried, like I am. What am I fucking up? What am I missing? What am I not catching that a competent professional would catch?

Then I went on to read a thread on a homeschool email list about the idea of seeing a speech pathologist/therapist/getting kids evaluated for autism/etc other labels. The point was made that many, most issues (like speech stuff) would naturally resolve around six but we put kids into therapy earlier than that “so they don’t get used to the stigma of being deficient”. (Not my phrasing–emphasis is mine.)

It was a long thread and I’m quoting a very small part and the person I’m quoting had many interesting ideas so I’m not trying to paint it badly. But it was one of those “howdy there, juxtaposition” moments. (I’m working my way through a book on how people reach insights. It’s fascinating how connections layer.)

Anyway. The point was I think it is kind of interesting that I’m dithering about getting Calli evaluated. I have not been able to make up my mind if I want to pursue it or not. If she has speech delay it is extremely minor and most kids resolve minor issues on their own by six. She doesn’t have a severe speech issue. That is clear. She seems to have some difficulty with some sounds, but we do exercises. I’m not sure speech therapy would have much to offer her. The pediatrician does the basic autism screening and has at every appointment. The pediatrician says Calli is fine. But I worry.

And I hesitate to put my sticky little feet near the waters of the system. Do I really want my local school system building a dossier on my kids so that they can pester me about what I’m doing and whether I’m doing it right?

I go back and forth about how I feel about working with charter schools and it comes down to, ultimately, the fact that if I got the wrong “supervising teacher” to work with I would explode with rage.

That’s not so healthy or functional, I know.

I don’t do well with people who have a small amount of arbitrary power and then are petty. It’s a super common trait though and not a situation I really want to deal with.

But I worry about the idea that I am flying blind with no one to supervise me. The trouble is finding someone I respect who would be in an appropriate position to work with me. Mostly I just ask different people who have different specialties for informal evaluations.

Yeah. I feel mixed about the “methodology” I’m following. It’s uhm. Well. It’s unschooling. I don’t have a rubric of right or wrong. I’m just… doing.

What I’m trying to do is teach me and Shanna and Calli how to be polite to people. We have very good manners together. We can go to a grown-up only house and behave exactly how we should because there are Rules and we gosh darn spend the whole car ride there going over them. There are different rules for different places

I consciously and deliberately always specify why a rule exists.

You know that obnoxious “why” phase parents bitch about? We don’t have much of that here. I explain why before they can ever stop to consider how to react to an arbitrary rule. We don’t have many arbitrary rules.

Even “no food on the carpet” is “except on party days or very rarely with something that has NO CRUMBS”.

I need my children to be able to pick up on subtle behavior clues. I need it like I need water. It is not normal or natural to be as obsessed with it as I am. That means that it is not acceptable for me to expect my children to just be able to do it.

It means I have to explicitly teach my children how to evaluate how to talk to people. It means I have to go through and explain detailed body language stuff. We work on it a lot.

It’s controlling and wacky and crazy. But I tell them a lot, “I’m teaching you what I have learned. I don’t know everything. Sometimes I’m just flat wrong. As you grow up you will have different experiences than I’ve had and you will decide that I’m very wrong about some things. That happens to the best of us. For now, try to get some idea of what I’m looking at. It will take time and practice and you are going to make some mistakes and feel embarrassed. Brush it off and try again. You have to fail a million times before you can be an expert at anything.”

I want my kids to have the self confidence that comes from being allowed to try 30 things that fail before you find something that works.

And that means I frustrate the shit out of them.

I sorta think of myself as aspiring to be a cross of Mary Poppins, Mr. Miyagi, and Professor McGonagall. But more cuddly than that list implies.

I’m very demanding and exacting and I expect that is going to suck to live with long-term. We’ll see.

I don’t like curriculum but we talk about history a lot. I believe that studying history is important because many of the mistakes that we might make were already made by other people–go see how it worked out for them and then decide if you want that kind of result. We talk about historical people and periods and events and we read biographies.

When Shanna makes a grammar error and I correct her she does actually say, “Why was that wrong?” so I guess I get some “Why” questions. Mostly she says “What does ____ mean?”

I set the framework in their heads. We talk about space and biology and evolution and chemistry and physics and botany.

We haven’t been seriously working on language stuff but our play sometimes includes bouncing between using all the words in our collective vocabulary in every language we know to name objects in a space. It’s fun. They teach me words. (I verify things on the internet…) That will only get bigger as they get older. It’s a great way of getting them to sit still and be patient. I start by pointing at something and I will say it’s name/color/some descriptive term and someone will respond with a variation or move to a new object.

Unschooling means we spend our lives learning. The kids have spontaneous jam sessions where they sit down and make up song lyrics for a half hour to an hour. I uhhh look askance from a distance as someone who has always felt excluded from the cliqueish world of playing music. Shanna really likes making music and making up lyrics to go with what she is playing. It is a lot of fun to watch. It’s not “serious learning” but I would argue that it’s also important. She’s only five. Yes, some disciplines believe you can force children to learn even younger than she is. There is also some reason to believe it is better to start at more like seven or eight when the kid will really understand the range of options.

For now I’m comfortable with dithering. Or maybe I just think eight because that is when public schools start music. Who knows.

Shanna’s learning enough right now. She really does have a lot she’s trying to do.

We play math games. I don’t start them. I would probably avoid math much more if I could. Ugh. Shanna is very focused on math to my jaundiced view. She probably sits down to spontaneously do math work every week or two. She’s not a prodigy or anything but she’s interested and she feels like she is successful at it and she knows that understanding math is important for many careers. She doesn’t have any opening for bias that might imply she might be potentially bad at math.

We spend our days moving back and forth between subjects all day long. Cooking is chemistry and math. We talk about how much food costs. We talk about why we make the choices we make with the money we spend on food. There are a lot of shoot-off topics from there. Sometimes I do sit down and draw out how something would visually look if I think it would be hard for them to imagine.

But it’s all organic. (I don’t mean the hippy dippy shit.) I mean it just kind of happens. I respond to their questions all day long. I alternate filling their heads with so much information they sometimes look like they might explode with telling them, “I don’t know how to do it. You figure it out.”

We are loud people. We want to be heard. That is the last trait I want to extinguish in my kids. Same with not punishing them for whining. *I* whine. I’m not going to forking punish my kids for doing what I model. That would make me a despicable hypocrite.

I do not punish my kids for doing things I have taught them to do. Iron clad rule.

Does everyone live with rules? This many rules. So many rules. I feel like I am drowning in all the rules, rules, rules. Be this here. Be that there. Be something else someplace else.

I like the Biblical phrase “a house divided”.

Fall. Fall. Fall.

Only I’m not divided. I promised me I’d never do that. I would never split off my memories so that only certain parts of me existed at a time. Apparently that is one of the main ways folks like me get out of childhood. That’s what the specialists tell me.

I’m not splitting. But I’m learning how to be polite in a wide variety of different cultures and it’s hard. I think I only get to like 70% correct anywhere I try.

I always say too much. I’m too forward. I’m too loud. I’m too inappropriate (although this one has faded now that I only over-share sexually with some of Noah’s random co-workers at Christmas parties. Surely that’s uhm not as bad as I’ve ever been before. That’s been it for the last several years running.

This is big.

And yet I shouldn’t talk about it because it is indiscreet. But controlling hypersexuality doesn’t go away when you are married and monogamous and having moderately good sex with your husband. (I post about bad spells and he goes, “Ahh. An opportunity. So if I put in more effort I get more sex? H’okay then!”) We’re too tired for the earth shattering kind of sex. Some day we’ll get back there. *cross fingers*

I feel like that is the main overwhelming fact of parenthood. Exhaustion. I actually sleep pretty well these days. What, I only miss 2-7 hours in the average week lately? I’ve been sleeping pretty well. I wake up when I want to and not because I have to. That’s doing ok. But I’m still exhausted.

Yes, it’s a running day and I’m tired after eight miles. But it’s not that. I think the running makes me feel better about being this tired because I am whether I run or not. At least when I run I get to have this macho swagger for a while as I feel my rock hard thighs. Holy crap. I didn’t know my legs did that. (They stopped being rock hard when I defrosted and relaxed after the run… but they had like an hour there.. Maybe I need more mid-run stretching breaks… hm.)

I think that the schedule I should keep is either run or edit seven days a week. I only predictably have till 6:30am to work. The whole rest of the day is too overwhelming with kid-need-to-communicate. I love them so much but sometimes I feel like a wrung out sponge.

When I look kind of deflated Noah says, “Well we didn’t pick the low intensity kind of parenting.”

Nope. Not so much.

If I get through this twenty year period and I end up with adult children who want to be my friends and who can go off into the world and have happy lives…

I don’t want a codependent relationship forever. I don’t want two dependents. I want to engage in loud, wild, crazy sex in the middle of my living room. You can move out some day, kiddos. I have plans.

But I hope and pray every day that they will want to be my friend. I want to hear about their lives. I want to know what happens to them. Sure, I hope that they will tell me sometimes that I am a good mom. Mostly I hope that I will look at what they do with their life and think quietly to myself “That was a good choice.” I should keep my mouth shut. It is not my job to judge who they become as adults. Not one way or another.

I don’t judge them much now. I evaluate them. But I describe everything in terms of progress and development. There is no “good” or “bad”. I’m just making sure you are doing what a three year old should be able to do.

I worry that if I decide to have her evaluated she will have a very small delay and I will be told that I “really should pay for therapy so she won’t be more delayed later” (when that is only a faint possibility).

Yeah, I over think things.

If she has a 10% or 20% delay then she is still in the range of normal. She’s just not right at the center line or above it. I don’t believe there is a chance that she is more delayed than that. And her expressive language is advanced. I think she just has to grow into her mouth.

I want to give her time. I think that is all I have to give her. I don’t want to think of her as “behind”. She’s Calli. She’s not the most advanced in every single part of human development but she is certainly not struggling to be understood.

If she starts having problems having conversations with strangers because they can’t understand her then I will take her in for an evaluation. That seems like a good bar. As long as strangers can understand her and have a pick up conversation she is doing well enough for three.

Ok. I think I can stop worrying about that now. (I can dream, can’t I? Actually I can’t because I’ve started having pot at night again. Thank you blissful slumber. Yes, my tolerance is lower.)

I feel like I am so tired I will go fall in my bowl of soup. Maybe time to start getting ready for dinner. I’m so glad it is a leftovers night.

I planned out dinners for February and March. I’m pretty good about sticking to my schedule if I make it. I’m hoping to uhm bring down my food budget a little. It’s hard given some of my food priority stuff. I do my best to buy my meat from actual farmers. I make a big exception for sausage. I’m going to hell for the sausage. I have some very strong feelings about the unsustainability of factory farmed meat. But man I know how expensive it is to be all prissy about “food ethics”. Maybe this year I should be better about tracking food spending. I wonder what I’m putting where. I could look at vendors. on Mint… Hmmm. Now I’m procrastinating. Put down the darn keyboard, Krissy.

Unusual session.

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I don’t cry much during therapy. It’s just not part of the process for me, mainly. I don’t cry in front of people very well. Today I probably cried for half the session. Partially as a result of that and partially just because well duh she sent me home with a book. The Cannabis Health Index. It is an examination of all the published medical studies about cannabis. It is meticulously footnoted and researched. If you want citation, this is the book for you.

PTSD is not one of the best studied issues in the book. Only three published studies and whereas they are hopeful/positive they aren’t strongly conclusive. Fair enough.

One of the things I like about the book so far is he says that cannabis is not dangerous but it isn’t harmless. There are demographics and populations who really shouldn’t be using pot; there is harm to come from misusing any medication. But when you compare it to the tens of thousands of people who die from medical prescription issues or the combined hundreds of thousands of people who die from alcohol and tobacco… it’s not dangerous.

A lot of what he (Uwe Blesching, the author) talks about is how cannabis allows you to change your mental state so that you can begin to unravel the problems in your mind which are manifesting in your body. He’s very specific and detailed as he examines how it can often allow you to be positive and think through the things that are hurting you. Often we hurt ourselves by being unable/unwilling to change patterns in our lives. He proposes that pot is a way to build a bridge between the mind and the body.

We all have confirmation bias, right?

I’ll point out that he is pretty serious about using the lowest dose medically appropriate and being on it for the shortest period of time possible. He wants people to use it as a medication to allow them to heal and then move on.

I’ve heard from a lot of people that alcohol more or less worked that way. They “outgrew” the need they had for alcohol even though for some period of time they were dependent on it.

A lot of my problem is that I am emotionally retarded. I do not mean stupid or any similar derogatory meaning. I mean underdeveloped. I mean immature. I mean held back. I mean less advanced than is typical or expected for someone my age. Like, literally emotionally retarded and not “I’m so laaaaaaaame.” (Yes, I’m defensive and worried about being misconstrued.)

So, I’m emotionally retarded and I feel a lot of shame around that. Pot allows me to stop feeling mired in the intense self belief I have that I am inherently bad and unlovable. Pot allows me to stop feeling like I should be punished for hurting the people I have hurt in my life (my mother is one of the main people). Good golly I want to be a martyr.

Pot allows me to be patient with myself as I try to work out how to have emotional regulation so that I can on-the-spot teach it to my children. I believe that my job is to teach my children emotional self-regulation. The primary way that children learn is through modeling. With pot I can manage emotional self-regulation. I can respond more “appropriately” to different stimuli instead of going into gut-level flight or fight response.

The problem is that I feel intense guilt about spending the money on pot. That’s one of the biggest problems I have. Krissy you are rolling in money. Get the fuck over it. (Ok, I’m not “rich” by the standards of the people I know. Which freaks me out. I’ve been in more than one $10 million home.) Only I can think of a million and one things that I believe are “more worthwhile” than me being relieved of torture in my brain. I’m much more inherently comfortable with the idea that I should be suffering than just about any other possible life result for me. This is kind of a problem.

I felt immediately defensive when the author suggested that maybe I don’t actually want to get over PTSD because it feels more safe/comfortable/whatever. If I feel immediately angry and defensive… I should probably examine whether something is accurate. Because I’m like that.

Cannabis is the only medication I have ever taken that produces significant positive, measurable, real difference in my life and mood. But it’s not cheap. And I feel enormous shame and guilt about being such an expensive pet.

Noah doesn’t begrudge me. Not at all. I don’t get push back from Noah about money. So far he says he is very happy about what I do with the money he earns. He specifically praises me and expresses gratitude.

I still feel ashamed.

That euphoric-ish feeling of not hating myself pretty much only comes with being pretty stoned.

Ok. I ordered some. I’m going to make tincture. I’ve been doing ok with what I have tried of it. I’ll cross my fingers that it lasts me long enough to be cost effective. *choke*

I think it is pretty miraculous that I got to pause in the middle of writing this and spend an hour researching strains before ordering from my local delivery service. Talk about luxury. I can have my pot delivered to my house after my doctor gives me the recommendation. God Bless America.

The book stresses that one of the benefits of the medication is that it allows you to feel at peace with being where you are. If I were to paraphrase his message I would say: pot allows you to not feel guilty about the number of spoons you have and it helps you cheerfully decide how to spend them. It’s not that pot increases your spoons by that much. But feeling guilty and feeling a lot of shame over having the number of spoons you have does actively decrease your spoons further. So pot sorta seems like a way to raise spoons.

Does that make sense?

I’m not far into the actual guide. I intend to read all of it. My head is going to be bursting with things that are hard for me to recite accurately. Oh man. Apparently Multiple Sclerosis is the most focused on area of study by far. I look forward to what I will learn. So far I’m just through the introduction (all 72 forking pages of it) and the sections on Aging (the first) and PTSD. Cause, duh.

Yeah. Feelings. Nearly time for sleep.

Medication and mood.

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Now that I’ve been not stoned for a long while I’ve got to say that this sucks. A lot. I miss being stoned. I miss the feeling in my abdomen of lower stress and less pain. I miss the automatic pause in my thinking before I react to anything that happens to me. That few seconds of “Must process what I think of this before I react” was awesome. The hypervigilance means I react without even thinking about what I want to do. My startle reflex is so fast. Which means I have banged the kids around a bit in the last two weeks on accident. Like, they jump on me and my body instinctively kind of blocks it so they fall off and hit something.

I’m not saying I’m shoving them or anything. I’m not being violent. I’m just recoiling and trying to avoid getting hurt. Instead they get hurt and then yell at me because I’m SO MEAN. When I was stoned all the time I didn’t have the quick recoil so they would hurt me instead of me accidentally hurting them and then we could talk about why doing ____ wasn’t a great idea. I feel like that was probably overall a kinder trade but they are jumping on me with slightly less force after a few weeks of falling off and it hurting.

The marks on the paper on the wall are really working as far as helping me control my volume. I haven’t screamed lately. I did yell at Shanna once yesterday. But all I said was her full name and “go to your room” after I’d been asking her nicely to leave the muffins alone for like an hour. (She grabbed one off the counter when I was trying to put them in bags. After her time out she came out and said, “Mom you misunderstood. I wasn’t going to eat it. I was just going to hand it to you. I don’t think I deserved time out for that.” I said, “Did you wash your hands with soap before you grabbed food that would be shared with other people?” Her eyes went big. “Ohhhh. No. I didn’t. That was a mistake. I’m sorry.” “I don’t always yell at you just because I’m a big meanie head. We have rules for a reason.” “Ok.”)

I’ve been working hard on inculcating them with the mantra of “before we prepare food we wash our hands with soap.” I have a variety of tunes I sing the process to. “Before we can prep our food we must wash our hands wash our hands. Before we can prep our food we must wash our hands and always use soap.” That one is more or less to the tune of “The wheels on the bus.”

So if that is the only shouting in a day I feel that I could continue to improve but I’m not doing shitty. I’ve been around other mothers lately. That always resets my bar on “Oh yeah. I’m not actual much of a yeller in the scheme of things…”

I feel weird about the way I’m kind of two faced about rules. On one hand I feel like we don’t have a lot of house rules. On the other hand holy shit we have a lot of house rules. Things like washing your hands before you prepare communal food. Is that a rule or a habit I’m trying to instill? I can’t really tell how to think about these things. I spent too long in the poly community. I have a lot of anxiety and guilt around imposing “rules” on people. I’m “inappropriately controlling people by putting my rules on them.” But these are my kids! I’m supposed to create the rules!

I have a lot of rules around food. No food on the carpet. You have to wash your hands before you prepare communal food. (If you are making a pbj for yourself and no one else I don’t actually care–if you want to eat your own filth that is your business.) No licking communal food tools–that’s nasty. I’m inconsistent on table manners. On one hand my children have experienced a fair number of lectures about “proper” behavior at the table. On the other hand I tell them that there are a lot of circumstances where it doesn’t matter how gross you eat and at home the rules are a lot more relaxed than they are when you are at someone else’s house or when we are at a restaurant.

My kids have been very carefully exposed to a lot of different kind of restaurants and they understand that some restaurants they can fuck around in and on some they have to be on their absolutely best behavior. I have no fear of bringing them into expensive chi-chi restaurants. They do better than the average adult. But I coach them in advance and I talk about why it matters and I talk to them the whole time they are in the restaurant and I keep them engaged. It’s a lot easier to follow the rules when you are having fun and you want to be where you are. My kids treat going to different environments like games. “How do we act when we are someone who goes here?”

I’m tense and anxious but I haven’t been simmering with rage. That’s a great step for me. The inappropriate anger is a serious problem for me. That I’ll medicate for and not feel super guilty about. It’s not ok to take my random ambient anger out on my kids. It isn’t their fault I’m angry and I’m not going to take it out on them. In this house shit does not roll down hill. Calli has enough trouble dealing with Shanna. I’m not going to be mean to them because Calli would not handle being at the bottom of the shit hill well.

When I clean my kitchen lately I spend a lot of time crying and apologizing to my in-absentia mother. I’m sorry I hurt you so much. It’s my fault. I’m sorry I wasn’t a good daughter. I’m sorry I betrayed you. I understand that you weren’t the one who hurt me, but you did fail to protect me and I’m sorry that you have gotten the life you have gotten. I’m so sorry you went from a family where you were treated badly to a family where you were treated worse. That’s not fair. And then your reward in your old age is ungrateful children who have all abandoned you. Life is genuinely not fair. I’m so sorry.

(Today is a therapy day so I have to figure out how to talk about this.)

My frightening thoughts are not as bad as they are sometimes but with less pot they are more dominant. Probably only like a 3-4 severity.

I can’t tell if I count as “avoidance” behaviors in a lot of cases. I am avoiding people and situations I used to go to but mostly I don’t think they are appropriate for my kids and I don’t want to waste my few hours off on going to pursue people who are living lives I can’t be part of any more. I have a lot of guilt, depression, and worry. Not about tangible real stuff. My life is very (blissfully) stable right now. So depression/guilt/anxiety symptoms are probably riding in the 5-6 range as far as causing distress.

My startle reflex is through the roof. I’m tense and on edge a very high percentage of the time. I’d say up in the 7-8 range. I feel like I have to be prepared and ready to fight all the time. Luckily I’m not having outbursts of anger. *phew*

I feel like I am managing my anxiety symptoms by doing the future-tripping stuff I do. Planning for things I will do in the future gives me more of a feeling of control over my life. I can’t control what happened to me in the past. But I can make sure my future has the shape I want it to have. I need to think of the 3,592 things that could go wrong and have contingency plans for all of them and then I can feel ok for a little while.

Future tripping isn’t just about travel planning. Garden planning. Meal planning. Setting up schedules for when I will pay what bills or deciding when I should transfer money for x event.

I am ridiculously proud that Shanna’s 529 is already 1/4 funded. She’s only five and her college fund is 1/4 of the way to where I want it to be. Because it is invested (and investments grow all by themselves like magic) I may be close to done contributing in her name. This year I will be contributing a lowly $1200 towards Shanna’s fund and Calli is getting more like $5000. Gotta get the ball rolling. Calli has nothing so far. I try to justify this to myself as “Well, we will be done with the mortgage for like ten years before Calli goes to college. If I don’t save enough in advance we should probably be able to pay it as she goes.” *cross fingers*

Sometimes I feel weird about the avoidance symptoms of PTSD. I can’t tell if my behavior is avoidance or if I’m just continuing the patterns begun in my childhood. We did stuff for short periods of time then we moved. These patterns were set by my mother, who almost certainly has PTSD. I only spend time with people for fairly brief periods of time then I don’t know them any more. Or if I do know people it becomes distant. Most of the people who have been big parts of my support network over the past 15 years are people I sorta still know in a distant way. But being close with people is hard. I’m bad at it. At this point it feels like I am just bad.

I don’t know how to behave in a way that makes other people feel comfortable. So I deserve to be alone. Many of my relationships have historically depended on me chasing people and I can’t any more. So they are mostly over.

I treasure the people who invite themselves over. I feel slightly more confidence that they actually like me. I don’t feel very likable. I feel like a nasty, stupid bitch.

Sometimes I wonder if I will get past the child-rearing intensity and just withdraw entirely from the world. I go out as much as I do because I have to provide my children with community. When I am no longer home schooling and hanging out with the home schooling people will I stay home and just not see anyone? I’ve read 16 books so far this January. When I no longer have children will it be a solid 23 books so far?

I don’t know.

I’m not going to be clingy with my adult children. I will encourage them to go or stay as it suits them. And when they go I will do my crying in private. It will not be their problem. I am not their problem. But I don’t know what I will do.

I’m scared.

One day at a time.

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This coming weekend we are having family pictures taken. I’m going to have a specific picture taken of Calli to match a picture taken of me when I was three. It’s the same dress. The thing is, that picture of me was taken to match a picture of my mother in the same dress. Her grandmother made the dress for her.

I keep going back and forth in my mind about whether it would be cruel or kind to send a copy to my mother. I don’t know if it right or not. But Calli is her blood and Calli looks like her and me.

I don’t want to hurt my mother any more than I already have.

Suicidal ideation

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Suicidal ideation is what happens when your brain experiences too much pain and doesn’t know how to cope any more. In many ways it is the “lazy” way out. The more suicides happen close to a given individual the more likely that person is to see suicide as a reasonable response to a given set of circumstances.

My grandmother, father, and brother all committed suicide. Overdose on prescription meds, carbon monoxide poisoning, and self-immolation being their respective choices.

When I was going through my laundry list of traumas on top of the fairly severe neglect I experienced during crucial developmental stages I was not allowed to cry about what happened to me. I was required to be stoic. If I cried or exhibited obvious signs of sadness I was beaten. “To give me something to cry about” because clearly what had already happened to me wasn’t enough to deserve tears.

I regret that this set of life experiences led me to the point where as an adult it is very hard for me to cope with psychological distress without suicidal ideation.

I know it “isn’t an option” at this stage of my life. But luckily I have a husband who understands that there is a very high likelihood that when this phase is over that ban will not be in effect any more. It means a lot to me that there is at least one person who understands and says he won’t be mad at me. He will be sad, of course. But if some day I do that at least I won’t have the karmic debt of betraying him.

Fifteen more years.

Yesterday while we were walking Shanna made a comment about how it was her fault that I was mean sometimes. That led to a long and intense conversation where I said over and over again that *I* am the only one responsible for my behavior. Not anyone else. It is never EVER a kid’s fault if a grown up does things that a grown up shouldn’t do. She said, “But the chemicals in your brain make it harder for you and then I’m not nice so it is my fault.” NO NO NO. Yes, the chemicals in my brain do make it harder for me. That’s true. But it is still my responsibility to work as hard as I need to work in order to be nice to my kids. If I slip and do something mean it is ALL MY FAULT. It is never a child’s fault when an adult does something mean. Never. Never. Never.

I told her it is like when Calli bites her and she doesn’t bite back because she wants to show Calli how to be a good sister. Sometimes Calli makes a mistake. Being a good big sister means that you tell her it was a mistake and you try to show her how she should be acting, not that you turn around and do the same mean thing.

I told Shanna that it goes double and more for grown ups. Grown ups don’t get to blame bad behavior on children. If a grown up blames a kid for their behavior the grown up is doing something wrong and immature and inappropriate. We can all only be responsible for our own behavior.

Just like if Shanna or Calli do something I don’t like it isn’t all my fault. They made a choice. I don’t have to like it.

I was raised in a world where shit rolls downhill and it is always the fault of the youngest person in the room when something happens. My children will not grow up in such a world.

I’ve been having a pill a day for a few days now. That is smoothing out a lot of the rough edges, but I’m not stoned and controlling my behavior and ideation is really hard. In order to just get rid of the pervasive negative thoughts I have to be pretty stoned.

I don’t know how I am going to find balance on this. I think there is the non-zero possibility that I will find a way to earn money of my own over the next few years and eventually just be ok with being extremely stoned for most of the rest of my life. That may be the way I avoid killing myself. I’m trying to feel ok about that but I’m not there yet. I still feel disgusting and like I should be shunned and punished for being so dirty.

A woman I don’t know posts a lot of porn on her tumblr page. I’m cool with that. A lot of it is really hot. Yesterday she posted a picture that was one of those animated gif things. (I find them kind of creepy.) When I looked at the picture I could tell that other people would be fixated on what was happening with the genitals. I looked at the woman’s face, like I do. Her lips appear to be saying, “Please stop” over and over and over with that frenetic animation that gif’s have.

I am extremely supportive of adults wanting to do consensual rape play. Many healthy and whole human beings have the desire to role play rape and I think that is normal and acceptable.

But rape play done as pornography where people can end up with a singular shot from the scene that looks… entirely like rape instead of like rape play makes me feel very sad.

I feel very sad about how rape is normalized in the world. It’s just a valid way for guys to get off. But thanks to not being very stoned in weeks I get to wake up to horrible dreams of being raped. Now in my dreams I like to cut the throats of rapists. It doesn’t actually improve my mood when I wake up that I am now just as much of a monster as any of them in my head.

I feel small, selfish, and bad.

Suicidal ideation is very selfish. It is about looking for a way to stop hurting.

I used to do bdsm as a way of looking for catharsis. When someone is beating me I’m allowed to scream and cry and process some of what I store in my body. (I’m a big fan of Babette Rothchild’s work on trauma–The Body Remembers.) I have a lot of physical and emotional pain stored in my body that I have never been allowed to cry about. I have never been allowed to deal with the physical reality of all the things that happened to me.

After a while I stopped thinking that bdsm was a valid way of attaining the catharsis I need. Too many DMs stop my scenes because they don’t like the screaming. Public play spaces are for people who are doing light, fluffy sexy things. Not for people who want to genuinely experience awful things and scream about their pain.

I mean, I have been crying for years but I haven’t been crying for decades yet. I didn’t start really crying about these things until Uncle Bob died. Before that I would have bursts of crying randomly that weren’t very soothing or cathartic. They were the smallest increments of blowing off steam I could manage in order to not kill myself that day. I have always cried from stress. My sister spent my entire childhood being nasty to me for crying out of frustration. It wasn’t very cathartic.

After Uncle Bob died I finally had a time and a space where I was *allowed* to cry and cry and cry and cry for hours upon hours for days. Thanks to my friends showing up to take care of my kids for a week. Even when I went to Jenny after my father and brother died I cried a little, but not like I’ve been crying for the past few years. Not in a looking for catharsis way.

Suicide is about being overwhelmed with pain that you can’t handle. I’m scared about how much pain I carry around. I put a brave face on it, mostly. Most of the people who know me will see anger more than they will see sadness or pain. I do that on purpose.

Being vulnerable is scary. Most of the people I have ever tried to be vulnerable with are… gone. It’s my fault and I know it. If only I hadn’t been so intense maybe they might have wanted to keep knowing me. But I’m too much of an asshole. I have no one to blame but myself.

That doesn’t really leave me feeling like there is a lot I can do other than die if I want to stop hurting people. No one else is to blame for my reactions or emotions or behavior. It’s my fault. If I am scary or violent it is my fault.

It doesn’t matter how much people lie to me. They are “doing their best” and it isn’t ok for me to react with anger. I am allowed to withdraw and that’s it. And if I withdraw it is my fault I don’t get to have relationships with people. I chose to back out because I couldn’t handle the trade. That is about my failure, not anyone else’s.

I would rather be disappointed by the truth than lied to. The truth is that no one other than Noah is ever going to show up and want to be supportive of me with all my conflicting, complicated, layered issues. I’m a lot of work to know. It isn’t worth the trade for anyone else. Even Noah has distinct limits about what he can and can’t do or handle. I have to respect those limits. If I have more needs than he can handle that is my problem and not his.

People who get support are people who were born into a support network I don’t have. It’s not their fault they get it. It’s just luck. Do you know who “gets over” PTSD? People who have a large support network to help them process their grief and trauma and pain. People who validate them and tell them that it is absolutely right for them to have the feelings they have. Do you know who doesn’t get over it? People who are told to get over it.

Life is pain, Highness. But the way you process it and move on is by acknowledging it and thinking that it is pain and you need to process it.

Maybe if I had more support to give I would be able to find people who would be able to give me more support. But I’m empty.

I will raise my kids. They will hopefully internalize my many lectures about how other peoples behavior is not their fault. They are not my support units even though they are starting to do more chores. That’s pretty cool.

I need to find a way to be enough for myself. That may mean giving absolutely nothing to anyone outside of my house. I have a lot of need. It isn’t anyone’s fault any more it just is. I have to bear that whether I like it or not. It just is.

Less than six hours to a doctor appointment. I hope this will result in less pain in my body. I hope that less pain in my body will result in less suicidal ideation.

Hope springs eternal.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Category Archives: mother trouble

Anger and feelings

Running and body stuff

“Trigger” shit

Money, money, money by the pound.

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Easter morning

Grumpy day.

post-therapy

Every day love

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Wired for sound.

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Unusual session.

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Suicidal ideation