Category Archives: mother trouble

neeeeeeedy

I wanted to write about fifteen miles while it was fresh in my mind. I didn’t. It was euphoric and triumphant. Tomorrow morning I am going to do sixteen miles. I’m changing directions slightly for the early part and adding hill. I’m a little nervous. I’m hoping to once again make it in four hours. That’s cocky. That’s really cocky. We are meeting at the same place. Mmmm rewarding noodles.

It’s hard knowing that it is probably smart for people to keep me out at arms length. If you keep me out at arms length I never start to have expectations of you. I won’t let myself feel like I need something from you. For me to have needs in the direction of people is usually the kiss of death. Noah is the last man standing.

Does that make me straight?

I think about that a lot lately. I think about self-identity. What is the point? The point is that if someone wants to know what the difference is between having sex with someone who is transgendered, transvestite, or a butch dyke I can describe it in great detail from personal experience. It was all fun.

Sometimes I look at Noah and feel kind of weird. It’s sort of ironic that I married someone from a small Texas town who had some kind of semi-status from inherited position there. Given my history I mean. And together we are very cis-gendered.

What does being queer mean, anyway?

What does being a “runner” mean? If I walk sixteen miles tomorrow because I am tired am I a “runner”?

I have endurance. I am persistant to the limits I can achieve with my body. I’m not naturally athletic or gifted. I’m stubborn. I’m angry. I’m sad. I have so much grief. I want to prove to myself that I am as good as my brother. No, I’m not as fast as him. I hope he has matured to the point where he wouldn’t be an asshole about that. I think so.

I’m scared to see him and I’m scared not to see him. He despises me. He despises what I have done and who I am and that I had the utter gall to talk about it in public. But I’m going to drive my husband nuts with having to accomodate me as I train for a marathon on my brother’s turf.

Fuck you. You can’t tell me that I am weak. I am here. And at the end I will still be standing.

Lately I feel very weak. I have a lot of needs that are going unmet. I’m getting brittle. It’s hard because I can only handle asking someone to meet a need of mine if I am very ok with the answer being “no”. If I can’t take a no then I can’t ask. If I ask when I can’t afford to be told no and I don’t get help I will turn my frustration and rage on my unsuspecting friend. That’s not fair. I don’t do that.

Right now there is a towering avalanche of need. But I am so afraid of saying the wrong thing or offending people or being disappointed that I don’t know how to deal with any of it. There are a lot of different things going on right now I can’t talk about in writing. That’s hard for me. That feels silencing. That makes me feel angry on top of whatever I’m feeling anyway.

I’m sure some rational person would say, “Well why don’t you just write it and keep it private then”.

I don’t know. I learned a long time ago that I don’t write for me, exactly. I can only write if I believe someone is reading it. I have never been able to consistently maintain a paper journal but if someone speaks up and says, “By the way I read your blog every day. I care about you.” Motherfucker I’ll write every day. I’ll find the time. I will conjure it out of thin air.

It feels sick. This need in me to be seen. I started crying earlier when I realized I treat that ridiculous random validation as the closest thing I will ever have to a mother checking in on me. I feel so alone in the world. Multiple people asked me if I was ok.

It’s kind of hard for me when people notice me. I feel like Eeyore. I used to play games with not posting on my blog for months at a stretch and people didn’t notice. I took that as validation that people wouldn’t notice or be particularly impacted if I died. It actually made me feel better. Because suicide was an option that would be far less selfish for me than most people. Before I got married. Before I had kids.

I don’t have anyone in my life other than Noah with whom I have an intense on-going relationship. Ok, Shanna and Calli. Every other person in my life spends very few hours with me during the course of a year.

If I don’t write on the internet, do I exist?

If I don’t write on the internet I am surely invisible. My pragmatic self says that if I don’t write on the internet people only know the handful of sentences we exchange in person. That isn’t knowing me even slightly. From that I will decide I should be invisible. I will always believe that is just and right and the natural order of things. People like me are born bad. We should suffer in silence. If we talk about what is going on in our minds then we are traumatizing people and we don’t have the right to do that.

I’m scared of the hunt for a new therapist. During my last search I had a few one time only visits. Including with someone who told me point blank that I should never participate in group therapy or write about my experiences in a public way because that is abusive and traumatizing to the people who hear or read about my life. I don’t have the right to do that.

I have to be very careful who I allow to be an authority in my life. I have done too many things that make me already damned in the eyes of many. For a great many people I am already beyond redemption. If you think I am exaggerating then you have lead a very privileged life. I have to be careful who I allow to judge me. Well, I have to be careful if I am going to care about that judgment.

So when people tell me to just “get over” my experiences. Well, despite the fact that it makes me feel pathetic I may well be in therapy the rest of my life. They are going to always be the longest running relationships in my life outside of Noah and the kids. I need to have something. It’s very easy to deem this need pathetic if you have ways of getting your needs met that are simply not available to me.

I don’t know who are what I am defending myself against. The voices in my head. The reasons my throat feels choked all the time. I should be silent. Just shut up. Just listen. Nothing you have to say is interesting any way. Stop. Fucking. Whining.

I go to bed and wake up thinking that I want to die. I want to stop feeling this way. It hurts to move. It hurts all the time. And I don’t know what to do other than wait it out. That’s what I’ve always done. But this time I can’t do any of the impulsive things I have always done. It’s really hard. I feel like I am vibrating with tension. My muscles radiate.

I need to stretch more. I need to sleep more. I need to rest more. I need.. I need a mommy I can call and say, “Come love my babies for me so I can sleep.” But I don’t have one. And that’s just life.

I have to believe that my grief matters. Whether any one else does or not. I have to. I miss my mother. The price I pay for being allowed to go about my life without being abused is that aching hole inside me. There is a cost to everything. I miss my mother. I miss my mother like I would miss an amputated limb. I reach for her. I smell her. I see her in the mirror and in my children.

I want my mother so much I feel like I am going to explode. But contacting her would be the worst thing in the world. For everyone. For me. For my kids. For my mom. Because if I yo-yo back and forth and ask them to make it up to me I am setting myself up in the power position. I’m saying I want to be the next abuser. No. No. No.

There is a lot more I want to say. There isn’t much more I can dance around with anything resembling eloquence. And besides, I have to get up and walk (I will jog!) sixteen miles.

I will be able to call myself a marathoner. I’ll be crafty and specific. I didn’t saying “running”. That way I deal with no assholes and I still make my point.

It feels pathetic to want to figure out who I am. I am nothing. I came from nothing that should be. Nothing I can claim. I am nothing on my own in the world. I exist in relationship to three people.

I’m telling you people, my family had better not die in a freak crash without me. I won’t make it through the day. I’m only a little paranoid about them dying. But I do cry if the word comes through my head. I can’t lose them. They are all I have.

I need sleep. Sleep. Go to sleep. Stop crying. Sleep. Stretch first. It’ll be ok. Really. It’s always ok in the end. If it’s not ok yet, it’s not the end. If you’re going through hell, etc.

Mental illness is a liar.

stream of conscious

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This has been one of those thinking-heavy but writing-little sorts of weeks. I feel busy. I feel tired and stretched thin. I will be glad when training is over. My race is in nine weeks and two days. The running takes so much out of me and I’m just going to be increasing mileage from here. I feel kind of weird about it.

We’ve had some discipline issues this week. On Tuesdays we are supposed to go to the park with the home schooling group. I feel this socialization is very important. But while I was making lunch (it took an hour because Shanna had a lot of requests–I made scones from scratch, cucumber sandwiches, cut up a bunch of vegetables for dipping and made guac, and and and) Shanna went around the house destroying it.

I’m not sure how other children function. When I describe Shanna as a tornado I’m not kidding. In the hour I was busy in the kitchen she dumped the drawers in her room with clothes, the linen closet, took everything out of the toy box, took several games off of high shelves she isn’t supposed to access and strewed them between multiple rooms, dumped the Lego’s and spread them between multiple rooms, dumped many shelves of books onto the floor, and broke apart the foam letter mat in the garage in addition to dumping all the puzzles off of shelves onto the floor.

I started crying. I can’t go spend hours in the park physically wearing myself out and then come home to that mess. I just can’t. I’m tired. I’m running twenty-five miles a week or more. It’s not like I need my house to be museum tidy but I need to be able to walk through my home without injury. I told Shanna that there was zero possibility we could finish cleaning the house by time to go to the park and I was going to be tired enough after that much cleaning that I was not going to be willing to go late. I would need to sit down and rest.

She cried and screamed and told me I was mean and not fair. I looked at her carefully and then I went to the garage and started cleaning. When she followed me screaming at me I carefully walked her back into the house and shut the door behind me. I’m not going to be screamed at while I clean up after someone. I don’t fucking think so. I was very careful not to yell or scream.

Shanna has been asking me a lot lately how my mother would react in situations. It’s hard. While we were cleaning (after she calmed down) she asked me what my mother would have done. I looked around the house warily and said that my mother would have hit me over and over and told me I was disgusting and bad. She looked shocked. She asked me if I think that about her. I said no. I told her that her behavior isn’t very considerate but that’s about as bad as it is. She thought about that for a while.

A few times lately she has engaged in behavior that would have earned me a beating. I’ve been thinking a lot about that topic as a result. I “wasn’t hit much” by the standards of my family but I was also willing to be told to sit in one place and not open my mouth. I was willing to sit in a chair and read and not move or inconvenience anyone. That’s why I wasn’t hit as much.

Shanna did something, I can’t even remember what, and I felt very frustrated. I started crying, as I am wont to do when I am deeply frustrated. She asked me why I was upset. I told her, “Sometimes I feel very frustrated because I’m not sure what to do when you engage in behavior I dislike. My mom was very mean to me and I don’t want to do that to you but I don’t know what I should be doing and it is very very frustrating.”

Now she has taken to giving me advice on how I should handle things. It’s kind of funny.

I feel like Calli has exploded on the scene recently. Now she talks. A lot. All day. I have no idea how many words she has picked up. I couldn’t begin to count. I think back with nostalgia to how I wrote down every new word I heard from Shanna. I had a list. I don’t have that kind of time or attention now. She adds so many words a day that I have no perception of how large her vocabulary is. Somewhere between 50 and 500. If it isn’t 500 yet it will be this week at the rate she is going.

She signs a lot more than Shanna ever did, and I don’t think it is just because of the videos. She has a lot in her head and a lot of trouble with her vocal cords. She’s annoyed by her speech impediment. She knows she is saying words wrong. She tries to get sounds and can’t. I smile and pat her on the head and say it’s a matter of practice. It’ll come.

Calli is independent in ways Shanna has never been and that means I misunderstand the depth of her attachment to me. Calli runs away faster and farther and doesn’t look back… until she has to be on me for multiple hours and cries and whines if I put her on my back because then she can’t see my face. She has a really strong need to be physically near my face looking at me. She does it for many hours a day. She gets very agitated if she doesn’t get it. I smile at her as much as I can physically force myself. I love her so much.

It’s neat trying to teach them how to be friends. As I’m reading developmental stuff sometimes I feel guilty that I’m not providing Shanna nearly as much peer interaction as would be good for her (she kind of sucks with kids her age) and I hope that Calli and Shanna will be enough company for one another. Yes, we do see other kids. We still spend a very lot of time at home alone. I need to.

I feel very weird about balancing our needs. I need a fair bit of time at home. If I am out of the house too much I am exhausted and I cry inappropriately in public. Crying is a much bigger part of my life than it is for “normal” people, near as I can tell. Being too tired or hungry or stressed triggers tears for me. I don’t have to feel additionally sad. I have enough background sad in my life that I’m always up for a good cry. It’s very embarrassing and hard to control when I’m in public.

It’s a fairly predictable pattern for me. I can schedule things in advance around my needs and I can generally get through an obligation if I make it. But I don’t schedule anything else that day–including dishes. I’m trying to consciously learn more about how this works for me. I need control over this.

It is hard to explain what it is like to be in my body. Based on what I understand from books my body is not typical. My heart races a little frequently during the day. I feel waves of terror spontaneously and randomly. I have long periods of intense negative thoughts while I am engaging in just about any activity. Randomly cutting paper just to practice using scissors with Shanna can trigger a diatribe in my head.

I have a lot of control. These things don’t get expressed very often. But the cost is so high. I feel like thin, like when you wear through the sole of a shoe and can see the sock. Too much friction. Can’t keep going.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the long-term effect being a stay at home mom will have on my life. I’ve been thinking very hard about how worthless my society thinks I am. I’m thinking of the scorn I sometimes see on peoples faces. To be fair if I tell another mother that I am staying home with my kids 75% of the time they say, “Oh you are lucky.” I like that. I am. I am very lucky. I am so very lucky that I get to have the life I have now.

I tell myself that this stage of my life is my gift for surviving my childhood. I went through hell, sure, but now I have this. I feel ashamed of the extent of my negativity and depression and anxiety because I am one of the luckiest people ever in the history of human kind.

I am safe. I have a partner who adores me and helps me. I stopped working in the middle of pregnancy. I came home and sat and read. I didn’t clean. I didn’t cook. He either made dinner or we went out. I sat in a torpor and cried while he was at work. I felt horrible. But he came home to me every day. He took care of me. I will never be able to repay the debt of gratitude I feel towards this man. During the physically weakest part of my adult life he was a gentle and loving care giver. I’ve never had that before.

I have two daughters who see me and feel like the world is wonderful. I have been very nice to them–not that they are spoiled. Well, they are. But they have very nice manners. I’m pretty rigid in my expectations.

I spent my pregnancy reading and thinking about what kind of interaction I wanted to have with my kids. I worked out the details of how I would have to react to various kinds of stimuli. I have to plan in advance how I will react under stress because in the moment I can’t. I can’t plan when I am upset. And I have to react to my children full speed all day long. It’s fucking terrifying.

When you are under stress you revert to your earliest training. What was your earliest training like? You don’t want me to talk about mine.

So! We’re not doing that any more! I mean, I still do it in my head. I still have these horrible tapes playing in the background. I still have all of the same impulses and inclinations. But I don’t do it. And it is physically hard. It is work. All day every day. So I like spending a lot of time alone in a room. It feels so fucking good. I even get pissy about the cat sometimes.

While I run lately I’ve been thinking a lot about my relationship with God. I’ve been seeing the door to door missionaries a lot more. I don’t believe there is an omnipresent anything that decided long ago that every so often there had to be a kid brutally raped by her father. Sorry, no.

I believe it is random. I really do. I believe that life is terribly unfair. I recognize that most of my situational good fortune in my current adult life would not be available to me if I wasn’t white. That bothers me. I don’t think that I can believer in someone stronger than me controlling things and look around at the world and continue to keep going. That is too god damn depressing.

I am a not-so-dumb animal. I want to continue to eat and shit and mate and have non-sexual touching with people I exchange caring with. That’s what I god damn want. These are instincts. I want to be a human being worth knowing. What makes someone worth knowing? Damned if I know.

I don’t turn over any control of me to a Higher Power. It’s the big reason I will never try any of the “Anonymous” shit. Fuck you telling me I can’t do something by myself. Ha. Watch me, motherfucker. Have you met me? Can you really think of something that I am likely to want that I can’t do? There are physical feats I am not likely to accomplish–sure. I won’t be in the NBA this lifetime. I’m really ok with that. I don’t feel like that fact is a reflection of a failure of will power.

I can’t decide to be someone else. But I can be me without any help. I don’t need anyone to decide for me what is right or wrong. I can do that. I know what they feel like in the pit of my stomach. The problem is that I feel a lot of fear when I don’t have enough information. How can I make a decision when I don’t know enough about the situation to know what the right decision is? Oh god. But you can’t go through life that way. You do the best you can with what you know.

I do a lot of research. I don’t hesitate to say, “I don’t know yet but I will get back to you.”

But when you are dealing with children all day every day… yeah. It’s a mixed bag. Some things you can put off and a lot of things you need to react to immediately. I script. I do a lot of research around child development is happening with my kids so that I can react appropriately. I really want to be appropriate.

I don’t believe that anyone is controlling me except for me. Then what about these pervasive horrible thoughts? It’s random. It’s the natural reaction of trauma. I will never undo my life. I can just write scripts for the future that suck less.

I have a really good life. I am treated very well. I’m actually glad that Noah and I are having this period without the raunchy sex. It’s nice for there to be at least one period of my life where liking me means everyone around me is gentle and kind with me. Writing that sentence makes me cry. I have certainly had relationships and people in my life who have never hurt me.

I feel like I have a running calendar in my head: last self injury on _______ date. I’m not telling you the date because I feel embarrassed about this count. I have categories you see. It’s all split up into “well this counts for this but not for that” and I dicker about what I am allowed to do to hurt myself. Like I haven’t cut or hit my head or burned myself or anything like that in a long time. But I’m having a lot of food issues.

It’s complicated, yo.

But Noah is very gentle with me these days. I’m terribly sexually bored by it, but emotionally it feels really important and good. We are going to have to figure out the balance there eventually. I feel like the kids still provide enough physical stress that it isn’t a good idea. The kids are getting less rough with me–we’ve been specifically working on it a lot for the last couple of weeks.

I am not someone who would feel good about being one of the brick makers for the pyramid. I wouldn’t feel like I was awesome and doing something great. And yet someone has to be the brick maker. It’s a required job. I think that people who believe in a Higher Power make great brick layers.

I don’t believe there is a plan. I’m not willing to do something I find awful because it is part of something bigger than me. Fuck you I have suffered enough. Not that brick laying is awful. I’m not suited to being an NBA player either.

Thing is, I don’t know what I am going to be when I grow up. I’m not sure what I’m building towards. So I’m picking things up almost at random. I don’t know very many people like me.

I have had an unusual life. I have done things at the wrong stages and the wrong times but mostly it works for me. I am sexually wired towards some really disturbing things. Whether it is my fault or not is immaterial. It is. I am currently in a phase of my life where I am trying to build non-sexual relationships with two people in a very intense way. There isn’t a lot of me left to go do deviant stuff. It is physically hard on me to not fulfill those needs but emotionally I don’t have the ability to handle more pain right now. I need to know that Noah does not just want me around as a cum dumpster and thing to objectify and hurt. I need to be something more than that to him. But we will get back to playing with that some day.

Fulfilling your dreams is hard because in your head as you have the dream you fixate on looking/being a certain way. Doing things at certain stages. Some people solve this by not growing up in their head. I don’t have any interest in being anything like I was pre-twenty-five. Maybe I’ll think of myself as thirty forever. The year I trained for a marathon. That was the brutally hard thing I did that year.

I just mutate my self injury. I have to get it somewhere and running is enough. Holy shit.

I say I don’t know many people like me because I don’t know anyone else who mutates as fast as I do spurred by fear. That’s not a terrible judgment on people. Most people tend to be paralyzed by fear. Fear makes me move. It makes me change. I have a hard time when I find out that people I know are doing the exact same thing they did ten years ago. It freaks me out. I feel like maybe I’m defective. I seriously doubt there will ever be a period in my life where my days look the same from one decade to the next. Maybe when the fifteen years after the kids move out? I doubt it.

How I am is not good. I am not consistent enough. I am not strong enough. I am not I am not I am not.

Never the less I have to go start today. We are going to meet a friend with little kids at Habitot. I hope it goes well.

Chemical states and relationship transitions

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Something that probably isn’t obvious is: the frequency I write is largely dictated by how much shame I feel about what is swirling around in my head. I haven’t been writing as much. I feel too much shame. I feel ashamed of who I am and how I experience the world. I shouldn’t talk about how I am experiencing things because that is drama. Which means I am running in little hamster circles in my head. It’s almost fun only it isn’t.

I think I am depressed. If I look at my physical activity lately and my attitude I have (for me) almost stopped moving. For normal people this means I am still fairly productive. I do this by sitting down in the morning and drawing up a schedule for the whole day and marking by the half hour what I should be doing. I put in a lot of reading on days when I have to do this. I can follow a schedule and “do what I am supposed to do” if I am just following a set of instructions. I no longer have to think during the day. I check the posted schedule at least five times an hour because I can’t remember what I should be doing.

I feel very sad and disconnected. On one hand I am seeing friends and trying to deepen relationships. On the other hand I spend all of my time with people experiencing a lot of physical distress because I believe in the core of my being that people actually think I am a piece of shit and they are just tolerating me because that is what you do in life. It’s what I do with the pieces of shit in my life. I don’t tell them I think that about them. But I think it. So I firmly believe I am not the only one in the world.

I’m trying. I’m trying to ignore the irrationality in my head but it comes at a fairly high cost. My stomach hurts right now. It has been hurting for quite a while. My throat hurts. My arms even hurt from clenching. My jaw hurts. I can taste the bitter metal of fear and adrenaline a lot of the time. I can’t help but feel like living with this much stress will kill me whether I commit suicide or not. My body is simply working too hard. And I won’t give myself much of a break on the other activities in my life.

It is my job to show my kids how to be productive, sensible, functional adults. That means I can’t really model getting depressed and sitting around with my books and movies for months. Even though I know I used to do exactly that for long stretches. I’d go to roost and avoid people. I can’t any more. My kids can’t deal with that kind of isolation. They actually need people.

I suspect that part of my issue is around money. I use money to fill in the cracks on what I have to do versus what I want to do–I expect that is standard. Right now and for a while I can’t do that. I have to stay home and not spend money. That’s hard because it means I am making today and yesterday and tomorrow a lot harder than they “have” to be so that some day off in the distant future we can do as ok as we are right now while we have a dip in income. Self discipline is hard. It wears through my willpower. I get physically tired. And knowing that I can’t do much of anything with money to make my life better triggers a lot of feeling hopeless about situations in my life. Either I can figure out how to do everything by magic with no money or I can deal with them just not happening. Things won’t get fixed. It makes me feel bad.

I don’t like feeling thwarted. It makes me want to stop trying. But I can’t. It’s not fair for me to stop trying. It’s not fair for me to stop hoping. I provide the structure of everything for my kids. They need to understand that frugality is not a death sentence. They shouldn’t view it with abject horror as making their lives terrible. You need to live within your means. It’s not a harsh sentence. It’s life.

My tomato harvest will once again be epic. I anticipate begging access to a pressure canner this year. I have frozen enough fruit to get us through the winter. I feel good about that. We will need more meat before the end of the year. Ok, I just set up a beef pickup in September. I believe the internet is Magic. This means I can save up the $600 for the meat over more than one month. Woo. I am starting to build my stockpile again. I cleaned out all the food in the house for Sarah so we could build a stockpile of foods we both like to cook with together. That didn’t really happen and I haven’t had a full larder in a year. I have a fair bit of stuff in the freezer I will probably never use because it’s not stuff I like and I have otherwise been just trying to make up the deficit in the food budget for a long time. We’ve been buying week to week until last month. I would like to spend the summer/fall stocking up so that over the winter I can lower the food budget and eat out of stores. We’ll see. Temporarily I raised the food budget by taking it out of other places. Money is not infinite.

I think it is kind of weird that I feel bad for feeling frustrated about money. I have access to far more money than anyone in my family. By far. My mother broke $30k/year for the first time the year she turned fifty. My sister I think got up above $60k/year. Noah makes more than twice that by himself.

When people tell me that they don’t see any relevance for feminism in the current era I think: “Why is everything that women do esteemed so little and why is the stuff men do esteemed so highly?” If you think it is because the men stuff is more important I might kick you in the shins. If the poorly-esteemed work that women do stopped happening then all of a sudden you would have MUCH BIGGER PROBLEMS than if your god damn magical phone stopped working. Or if you didn’t have a computer oh no what would you do?! What your fucking ancestors did for millenium. Stop whining.

We have an interesting way of deciding what is important and what is worth money here. I’m grateful that I get to be on the receiving end of that money but I feel pretty ashamed of the fact that I would never have had a life this comfortable without Noah. No chance. Comparatively I am worthless. That feels bad to me. If I didn’t have Noah I would probably have to go on welfare for a while. I can’t just go get a teaching job. I would have to go back to school because my credential lapsed.

I know that all of my status is worthless if I stop having this man stand next to me. I feel thin. I feel unimportant. I feel permeable and insignificant. So of course I’m binge eating and I’ve gained weight.

I am only worthy of low status occupations and activities. It’s certainly all I do with my time. I garden and clean. I play with my kids. Shouldn’t I pay a gardner and a housekeeper and a nanny so I don’t have to sully my hands with those activities? Ugh. Yet more evidence of my class issues; I suppose. I feel strongly pressured to be idle. That should be the point of all this status I inherited from Noah. Only I physically cannot handle idleness. It makes me feel terrible emotionally and physically.

If I am not working to make my home nicer then I sit here and stare dejectedly at all the things I can’t fix right now and I cry. It’s not better.

I feel really bad because I can’t handle dealing with new people right now. I am slowly moving around the people I’ve known for many many years deepening relationships but I’m terrified of new people. I don’t know how to act around them. I feel so physically bad that the experience is really unpleasant. I feel guilty about this. I don’t believe I am done finding the people I will be close to this lifetime. I’m just really scared right now and I can’t do it.

Well I know one thing I’m doing today. I’m getting rid of the spider web right above where I write that is currently home to a spider the size of the tip of my pinky finger up to the joint. That’s rather disturbing. Awesome.

I feel bad because Noah takes my fussing over money as sign that he is not providing well enough. I’m having trouble convincing him that I believe he is a good provider. I think that is kind of funny. He is supporting me with a degree of luxury I have never consistently experienced in my entire life. Yes, it’s adequate. Really. When my petty cash runs in the tens of thousands no one should feel guilty. Holy fucking shit. We have a high burn rate. In order to ensure that we will actually be ok in case of a temporary set-back we need a very large cushion. It’s simple mathematics. Why does it feel so emotionally complicated?

But he grew up with parents who didn’t work at all and dealt with family investments. It’s a whole different world. He grew up with parents who didn’t have jobs and still paid people to clean their house and work on their property. It’s a whole different world.

I think I don’t want to have an outside job partially because I don’t want my kids to believe that cleaning up after themselves is beneath them and should be done by a menial laborer who cannot aspire to better for complex reasons of race, class, shame, and bigotry. I don’t want to get a job so I can have enough money to pay someone to be beneath me. I never get what I want from those relationships and then I hate people. It’s not a good system. You can’t pay someone enough to care about doing their job. People are either interested in their work or they aren’t. I’m interested in the work of maintaining my house. No one else is. I have to live here. I don’t want to live in a piece of shit house that is falling down around my ears. Maintenance is god damn mandatory.

Part of what I am struggling with right now is the fact that I want my kids to have relationships with people. That means they are going to have to deal with the fact that people are not reliable. They can’t be trusted to tell the truth. You have to be very careful how you partition out trust. Look at what people do and not what they say if you want to know the truth of a person.

This is what I tell myself because I try so hard to do the right thing even though I feel my speech is often offensive and wrong. I say inappropriate things. But at least I am physically doing all the right things at the right times of the day. Sometimes it feels like all that I have to prop up my self worth. Of course I value it highly.

I have been thinking about storyboarding for the book but I haven’t picked up a pen. I’m afraid. I have ideas and I’m afraid I’m not good enough to complete them. I think the best thing about NaNoWriMo is the structured pressure of it. Produce, motherfucker. I am really looking forward to being post-marathon and in a writing phase again. I need a better ergonomic system before November or I am going to damage myself. My arms are tingling as I type. Shit.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the structure and nature of my compulsive sexuality. When do I do it? Why do I do it? What are the lead-up events? It’s a group coping activity. I don’t do it one on one in the same way–even with prey. I do it as a way of finding a position in a group of people. I know how to be the slut. It’s pretty much the only group role I feel comfortable in. As an aging woman it is one I need to get out of before I look more desperate and pathetic than I already do.

I slept. I swear I did. I still feel tired. I feel exhausted in the marrow of my bones. I’m going out tonight. Sigh. Like, after bed time tonight. I leave at dinner time. Lately I have been finding it very important to financially prioritize supporting the endeavors of long time friends. I’ve paid to attend several shows/events recently just because I wanted to be in the same physical space as specific people. I don’t care much about the activity. I never really have. I want the people. I want to stand in close physical proximity to people who know a lot about me and like me. I ache for it. Being an audience is a fairly comfortable role right now. Little is expected of me but I get to make someone else feel good by being present. Nearly half of the fun money I have had for the whole year has been spent on going out to see two people in particular. I like them. I need them. If you add in this one other friend you get to more than half of the money I have spent other than the book. That’s been my money for the year. I don’t go to Starbuck’s. I don’t treat myself to books or music. I did take Shanna to see Brave. That is our movie for the year. We go to the park and to the kid places we have memberships to. We pack lunch. I severely limit my driving. Yesterday we drove to Oakland then Oakley then Vacaville to see people and I don’t think I can drive much the rest of the month. I’ve used more than half of my monthly gas allotment on one day. Well, ok. It was worth it. I only see them two or three times a year. I only drive up once. It’s worth it. That is how I am setting my priorities.

I like relationships that have a lot of hurdles to existence. If they continue then I feel like someone truly loves me. It is hard for someone to prove they love me. I get into trouble with expectations. I try to keep them low but once in a while I am foolish and I expect more from people than they are going to do. I recover from that with ill grace. I’m never thrilled when someone shows themselves to be not worthy of trust I have given them. It causes me to feel a lot of self-doubt about my general worth. I thought I could trust this person to do what they say and I can’t. It must be because I am not worth telling the truth to. It must be because I am not worthy of even thinking about long enough to follow through on commitments. That must be it. I am so fucking pathetic.

At this point I can’t talk about my anger and frustrations about these situations because I can’t express it in front of my kids. My kids get to have their own reactions. They don’t need to learn my anger. So I am doing a lot of stuffing. That means it creeps out in little insidious ways. I’m snippier and shorter of temper. It feels so unfair to my kids. I’m not mad at them. I’m just out of patience because I wasted it on adults.

I feel like I should hide in my house with my kids and not deal with people because that is the only way I can ensure I am just reacting to my kids and not the other people in the world. Only it only kind of works. Because then I bring the trouble home. The kids need relationships too.

This too shall pass. One of the greatest gifts of getting older is I trust that this phase will end. I won’t always feel this way. It’s a cycle. I still don’t think I have bipolar disorder. This is why I put myself on a schedule when I feel like this. If I haven’t gotten anything done by nine in the morning I have to write up a schedule or it will be a couch day. I know it. I have occasional couch days when I believe that physically the rest is probably a good idea. I try to keep those to once or twice a month. I don’t want to teach my kids that a great big part of life is just sitting around not being productive in any way. You need rest, sure. But find a way to get your rest in while still doing something. Reading does count as an activity. It’s a great excuse to rest. Watching movies… well, sometimes. When you are sick, sure why not. Otherwise you need to move your body more than that. We don’t stay in one position while we read.

I love seeing my kids develop my physical mannerisms. I feel affirmed and loved and seen. They read like me. We like to change positions a lot. Sitting still is quite hard. We squirm and wiggle and roll over and over. We stretch at the same time. They get books and do yoga with me. I get to set normal for them. They will grow up believing that what I do is right and good. It makes me cry. I have always been different from everyone around me and I was viewed as bad and a threat to be stomped down. I was supposed to be more like them. My kids think I am great. They don’t know that I have never fit in any of the molds I have been shoved towards. They don’t care. We fit.

I strongly encourage my kids to be different from me. I support them having different opinions. I talk to them (mostly Shanna still) about how I have control over them for a very short period and then they get to make all of their own decisions. I talk about how I don’t want to have control over them because they will have different ideas and opinions than me and they should do what will make them happy. I also talk about how to coexist peacefully. I talk about having respect for people around you. I model what that means. I really love my kids. I get to be good and kind and respectful towards people who absolutely deserve it and have no ability to let me down. My expectations of them are that they are helpless little amoebas at this point who will flail and be random. I’m pretty much right. But they will become adults who understand in the marrow of their bones what it means that Mom does what she says.

That freaks me the fuck out. That pressure. That is what gets me out of bed every morning. That is why I make schedules and get shit done no matter how I feel physically. I god damn need to have more people in the world who believe that I am trustworthy and good and kind. I say some very harsh things and as a result a fair number of people think I am an asshole. I can’t really say they are wrong. But that is such a small part of me. I feel defined by the negativity in me. With my kids I have a perfect chance to have a different experience.

I must say it is going well. This is one of the hard phases. I can objectively understand that my emotional cycles and their behavior cycles are being wonky and I’m being patient with all of us. That is what a good mother does. Well, I’m not patient with the screaming. I will put my hand over a screaming mouth because otherwise I get horrible headaches to the point where I can’t really see straight. If I have to drive I cannot allow them to hurt me in that way. I just can’t. Why do I feel so guilty about covering their mouths? I don’t make it hard to breathe. I am not cruel. I don’t do it for an extended period of time. I don’t shake them. I don’t hurt them. I don’t yell at them. I try to calmly say, “That’s an outside voice. Inside you have to be more quiet.” “No really, that hurts me so you cannot scream in my ear.” I have to teach them boundaries, right?

I don’t feel worthy of defending and my kids are pushing boundaries all over the place. It’s a hard combination. I’m trying to live up to my end of the bargain. I have to teach them how to be respectful of other people. It’s my fucking job. One for which I have managed to trade having a very cushy life. I have an easy job. I shouldn’t bitch about it.

It’s weird to think about how I would handle these emotional cycles if I had a job. I think I never would have found time and space to really write. I think that would be one of the things I had to drop. I would be more volatile. When Noah showed up and asked me to marry him I was trying to work up the courage to ask him to raise a child with me but I thought I had no right to ask him for what I have now. I planned to work and raise one kid by myself. That would have been a very different life. I’m really glad Noah actually wanted me.

It’s really odd to me when I think about how to write about the journey from eighteen to now. My different phases seem extreme. When I was eighteen I was engaged to Stephen and supporting myself by working in the library and the theatre. I planned to make theatre my life. I really wanted to run a spotlight for Cirque du Soleil someday. I knew I wanted kids but I had things to do first. I thought college was a good idea but I was nervous. I really wanted to go to CMU for technical theatre.

Then I left Stephen and found Tom and the bdsm community. I transferred to the English department. I went to college but I did not have the immersive college experience; I was a commuter student on campus two days a week and I took classes straight through from ten in the morning till ten at night. When I finished my BA I had a choice to make. If I wanted to be active in the bdsm community and be an Adult all the time then I should probably go through graduate school and try to work at the college level. Then I don’t have to be as paranoid about being outed. Or I could decide that I wanted children and go for a degree that will give me a schedule more potentially compatible with theirs. Tom was not open to me being a stay at home mom. I went through some graduate school. I decided that kids were more important than Tom. I broke up with him and started the credential program. In order to transition out of that relationship and emotionally distance myself from him I started having sex with a lot of people. It worked.

I dated Noah for the last six months of my relationship with Tom. I think that Noah was probably a lot of the reason I finally had the nerve to end things with Tom. Noah doesn’t permit me to be unaware of why I am doing what I am doing. He’s kind of annoying. I broke up with him for a lot of reasons. I can’t sum that up.

I went through the credential hunting hard for someone to have kids with. I wanted to start soon and I knew it. I was very frank about it when I talked to people I was having sex with. There are some men who ping hard for the idea of having kids and there are some who are repulsed. I needed to know who was potential prey. I was hunting.

Puppy was a mistake. I thought he was like Tom only younger and wanted kids. I was quite wrong. I should have never tried to date someone who thought it was funny that I was an actual Californian and would mock me and my vapidness for living here. And he thought I was fat even though I was at my lowest adult weight. He was very harsh about my body. He was very bitter because of his ex-wife and has a lot of mommy-issues. That relationship didn’t stand a chance.

After that I had a few months where I stopped hunting. Then I met Spot. I knew he wasn’t The One to have kids with. I made up my mind to ask Noah about having kids with me even though I didn’t think he was interested in the kind of relationship I wanted. He wanted the kind of relationship he wanted and I was not going to fucking be the Other Significant Other. Hell Fucking No. I’m not going to make someone my priority as long as I am their option.

But out of the blue he asked me to marry him. Just like that. Five months later we eloped. I moved into this house more than six years ago. Our sixth wedding anniversary is in September. I have to say that it is going well. I have the wonderful four year old and two year old of my dreams. My two year old is currently yelling “baby! high!” because she wants to be pushed on the swing. I should go before she slams the laptop screen on my fingers.

But I’ll come back to edit and tag and add that it is because my life is so good that I feel so bad about feeling bad. I need to stop feeling like someone who has had my life. It’s really hard.

Hand-me-downs

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I think I know eight pregnant women right now. And a close friend has a one month old. And there are lots of slightly older kids. It’s weird thinking about getting rid of things, now. There are a few ways I can go about maintaining sanity in my house. I can ensure that we have a small enough number of items that cleaning it takes very little time or I can allow items to creep in and spend more and more and more time cleaning. It’s time to purge.

This is more complicated now that the stuff is “Shanna and Calli’s”. I really shouldn’t just raid their stuff all the time getting rid of things. That’s rude. Sorta. Letting them make my life shitty is far more rude let me tell you. I have no fear that the river of stuff will run out. More will come, inevitably. They age out of things anyway. How do I allow them to form sentimental attachments and yet bow to the inevitability of life that stuff comes and must go? I think we are going to go through stuff today and make piles. Shanna loves giving gifts. How can we be generous with our bounty?

This leads to all kinds of maybe-not-polite-but-necessary corollary conversations. One pregnant friend has few friends and no family. Others have many friends and large, wealthy families. We have people in our lives who have very different levels of need. That makes a very large difference in how I behave with people. I offer to treat friends who are barely surviving. I let friends who have more money than me pay for me. I smile and say thank you. I don’t offer to return the favor. For me I am very ok with accepting favors from people who have a lot to give. Sure, no problem. I struggle with allowing friends who have more need than me do things for me. It’s complicated.

I feel like it is important for me to be very clear what my values are and why. I’m teaching how to be a part of society. What part do I play? To have great privilege is to have great responsibility. What does that mean? What does that mean in terms of our life? What does it mean that the people around us have equal and sometimes greater privilege? How do I think responsibility trickles around us?

Part of what I am teaching is responsibility to the household. It is not fair that I have to spend so many hours cleaning up messes I am not making. If she can’t clean up after herself we need to start scaling back so that she can. She needs to learn how to take care of the amount of space she can handle. I need to give her a smaller scale so that she can succeed. Right now I am failing her by giving her a task that is far too large for her. I am not properly scaffolding her learning experience. That’s fine. We have pregnant friends.

Today is going to be one of those structured learning days, as I am starting to think of them. I have a specific lesson I am working towards. We are all responsible for maintaining our stuff. How much stuff do you actually think you can handle? I am going to do a preliminary pull of stuff that will be good to give away. We’ll negotiate from there.

It’s going to be a long day. It will be a good day. As long I remain patient today will be fantastic. Shanna is really happy to work with me towards goals like this, at least for now. She likes making decisions. She likes being generous. It makes her feel good to think about other people being happy to “get” her stuff. I talk about how neat it is that objects can take on a history and a story. “Oh this used to belong to ____ and then it went to _____ and now it is _______’s.” We have things like that. We tell those stories often. I constantly talk about the origins of objects. Shanna thinks her grandparents in Texas are the most generous people in the world because most of her favorite clothes and toys arrive magically from them. She thinks about it a lot. I have feelings about that but I keep my mouth shut about all of them. What I say to the kids is, “Your grandparents love you.” That’s it.

Shanna and I will have fun going through the clothes pile and deciding which pregnant woman needs that item more. She gives good “why’s”. Not all needs are financial or material. With most people I expect the story of items to be lost. When the story of an item is important I have to be careful who I give it to. We have a lot of clothing from Noah’s family. We may be the second or third in hand made clothes. That story matters to me. It’s not particularly rational. This is the story my children are being born into. This is what they have of their family on that side. I want them to know where it goes once it leaves them. I just do. That means I need to be careful where I send it.

I want to send the clothes to people who will take pictures of their children wearing it and give them to me. I want to be able to send them to Noah’s mom and show that things she made are still being used and loved. That is all the family relationship I will ever have. That depresses the fucking shit out of me. I feel like I come from nothing and I will become nothing and there will be no trace of me. I have no connection to anything that will outlast me. I want other people who touch me to understand that the touch carries on. They are still actively doing good in the world by having done this thing years ago. Thank you for doing that. It’s a thing. Maybe it isn’t a rational thing. But this is what I have right now. It’s the best I can do.

So when I think about pressuring my daughter into going through her belongings so we can give them away it’s kind of a loaded thing. This is going to be a long and emotional day. Which things can I give to people and have no expectation of the story carrying on? Which things do I have an attachment to the story moving on? How will I deal with it?

This is why I normally give stuff to a thrift store and come home and cry. Letting go is hard. I do understand attachment. I just can’t function and be a nice person when I have to clean all the f’in time. No. It’s just not necessary. We have to figure this out. Ok. I think I have girded my loins and set my purpose and all that shit. Time to go mommy. Oy.

Angry

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Yesterday I was angry all day. It is fairly rare for Noah and I to fight. And when we do we don’t raise voices much any more. We have quiet, intense conversations about things that are normally more emotionally intense for me than Noah. I assume. Based on the fact that I’m the only one crying.

It wasn’t that many years ago, I was an adult, when my sister snickered at me and said, “Still cry when you are frustrated, huh?” Yeah. I do. When I am frustrated tears flow down my face. I don’t sob, but tears come. It’s not real fun. I can halt the process but I have to find a place of coldness in my heart. I try not to live there.

Most of what Noah and I struggle with is the fact that I have a major chip on my shoulder towards many things he represents. It is hard to not take my anger out on him as a representative member of groups. I am really angry in a visceral way that most of the world (or at least my country) considers what I do with my time worthless or a waste of time but oh man… Noah is smart and high status. Because he helps make it possible for people to watch ESPN videos online over and over. Yeah. The world fucking needs that. It is sooooo important. I don’t object to him doing it. It pays the bills. But I resent like fuck the fact that I am shit when standing next to him. I am angry that I am discounted and unimportant compared to an engineer.

I have lost my feeling of impressed with engineers over the years. I see the ways in which they don’t function all that well. They just don’t seem as super human to me. I know what kind of slack-jawed morons sometimes graduate with engineering degrees. Mostly even the fucking morons treat me like they are much smarter than I am. They have a degree in something “real” not something lame like English. A language they are dubiously acquainted with even if it is their native language.

I deal with a lot of men who seem to think “engineer” means “always right”. Yeah, it doesn’t. If I want to get an opinion in your narrow little specialty, sure I’ll ask you. Otherwise I’m going to feel angry when you pull out that condescending “I know everything” tone. You aren’t my father, stop fucking lecturing me. For the record, Noah doesn’t lecture me like this any more. We have worked on that. But he is a representative member of a group I have a problem with. This gets complicated.

Noah has done very little maintenance on this house since he bought it. He did a few things right when he moved in and then just let things be. Things are degrading. Things are going to need to be fixed and/or replaced. Noah feels that such work is not something he has to do. Someone else should be paid to do it. But we don’t have the money for that. We won’t for ten years. With each passing year I watch the spread of the black mold in the bathroom and watch the chinks in the grout grow. I’m sure we are doing damage to the wall. I’m terrified of what I will see when I open the wall. This is going to be hard to fix. I’m scared. Luckily I have a great relationship with the local building department (they know me!) and they are happy to sit down and explain things to me for very long periods. I will find out what all the city codes are and I will do the job right. I will cry a lot in the process. That will be ok too.

I feel like part of my anger is anger that I mostly get the 1950’s ideal situation where I am the “little woman at home” only my husband doesn’t do yard work. Or fix things. That’s on me. I can do it. I’m god damn competent. But sometimes it feels like I’m getting the worst end of 1950’s living and modern relationships. I get all the low status and lack of respect but I am expected to way the fuck more. I am expected to be a massively competent individual while being treated like an incompetent child. No Noah, not you.

Noah doesn’t understand what it is like to move through the world with a different status. I run into men who talk down to me fucking constantly. I’m a mommy. I must be brain dead. He thinks I should just ignore it. It’s not important what those idiots think of me. It’s a broken and crazy system. That’s a really fucking convenient thing for him to say when he doesn’t regularly run into the problem of having to play the game or not be able to get shit done. I can’t always say, “Wow. You are a condescending jack ass. Can I work with your manager, please?” If I am curt in response to someone being demeaning I generally get a fat load of hostility and they don’t actually help me. I have to suck up to those assholes. How in the fuck can I just ignore them?

Noah doesn’t understand because if I send him then their tone of voice changes. He can’t see the problem. I must be imagining things. “If I can’t see it then I can’t judge it.” He thinks I am over sensitive. I think most people aren’t sensitive enough.

And then the Godmamas came over. Marcie asked me if I drill Shanna in numbers and I could feel the spout on the top of my head go off. I wanted to break something. She didn’t mean it like that. We had a tense few minutes as I explained that I had already been angry before they arrived and I was having a hard time listening after that word because I felt really angry. She clarified that she hadn’t really meant “drill” and she explained in detail what she did and how. We had a long conversation about educational stuff I do with Shanna. It was just tense. And I hate that I do that. I hate that I am so angry all the time.

I hate that I feel like I have no worth other than what I produce by “earning money”. To be fair most women in my position go off and find social status in other ways. They become the organizers or the ones who do the grunt work.

I’m in a bad spot. For the next fifteen years of my life I’m going to have to deal with the parent community. The parent community is kind of a nightmare for me. When the other parents start spouting off shit like, “Marriage is between one man and one woman” I can’t really say much. Because if I make those parents uncomfortable then they won’t let their kid play with mine. I can’t do that to Shanna. So I have to shut up and sit there.

When people tell me to find a different parenting group I laugh. It’s been nightmarish finding one as local as this. And it isn’t local. I don’t really relish spending many hours in the van with Calli screaming at the top of her lungs so I can find a more on-the-surface liberal parenting group somewhere more expensive to live. Every option carries advantages and disadvantages. I can consistently get myself and the kids to these events because they are close enough. That means I have to not talk.

I’m angry. I’m kind of tired of being shamed into silence by society at large. Most of my life experience revolves around sex in some way. I had a lot of sex. I can’t talk about most of my relationships or relationship structures. When I say that I am friends with my husband’s ex-girlfriends people look at me like I grew another head. What? Occasionally I am asked how I can be friends with someone my husband has had sex with. I am truly bewildered by that question. Uhhh if I thought people who were former lovers had to be shunned I would have to leave the state. And be careful which state I picked to move to. I never have been to Ohio.

Noah tells me to ignore what people think about me. But what people think about me will determine a lot of how they treat my children. No, I can’t ignore it. I truly can’t. For me to not care and do whatever I want whenever I want would be for me to teach my children a not particularly functional way to live. There are certainly people in the world who like me plenty. I’m god damn careful how I act around them. Very few people find out my unfiltered thinking. It’s not worth the hassle.

Everyone is socialized. I am a lot closer to being a wild animal than most adults. I wasn’t properly domesticated as a child. When Noah says that I shouldn’t think about what other people think it feels like lying. It feels like a manifestation of his god awful heap of privilege that he thinks I can get away with that. I can’t. I can be “out” in some ways at some times in some places. I have to mostly keep my mouth shut.

I can’t tell the women at the mommy group, “Gosh it seems kind of silly to worry about the people he has slept with when I have way more friends that I have slept with.” I care about who he sleeps with going forward quite a bit. The past? I have to let that go. That’s not about me. I’d like to lecture them about how ridiculous they are being.

The thing is, if I get in with the group and I keep my fucking mouth shut for five or ten years and they get to know me then I can “come out”. Then it will be fine. People will have learned how to tolerate me already. But I can’t fuck this up for my kids. I have to be quiet for a long time. I have to care what they think for a while.

I have to very carefully figure out what things I’m allowed to say. This is a homeschooling group. It’s diverse.

I think I am partially so angry right now because I have kind of gotten used to being talked down to by men. When I show up in a group of women and get the same shit I want to break things. I think I hate women (in large groups) more than I hate men. I’m fucking tired of being shoved down the pecking order.

That is not really it though. I’m mad at Noah and I can’t even figure out all of why. I think I am mad at him for not being able to rescue me from every hard thing. And honestly his advice on how to deal with them kind of sucks. I should probably take the other Godmama up on her offer to put me in touch with her mother. The godmama grew up with three parents in the house. That’s complicated.

Noah does things. Noah works hard. I seem to have this giant chip on my shoulder because he doesn’t do something that I have the expectation that he do. Unspoken expectations are bad news.

Noah appreciates me. He is nice to me. He is kind. He helps with a lot of chores. He tells me that he does the low status ones, like dishes. To that I think, “Scrubbing the toilet is much lower status.”

I’m feeling scared. If I have no worth other than what I do as my “work” then all I am is a mom. That’s not really a fair burden for my children. They should not be my entire prop of self-esteem. That’s not functional. That’s not healthy. I sure as shit am not going to keep having kids so that I can keep that role in my life forever. (Five kids! And counting! I’m keeping my mouth shut.)

When I was eighteen I bought a Hyundai Accent. I really liked that car. It gave me freedom and independence. I paid it off quickly so it wasn’t even that much of an on-going expense. I covered the back of it with bumper stickers. Things like “I’m the one your parents warned you about.”

I don’t know how to deal with being the kid that everyone was told to stay away from because I was dirty and bad now that I am the parent. I still have those behaviors that got me ostracized over and over starting at three or four. I don’t know how to do this. Joining groups is hell on earth. I have to care what these people think because I don’t want my kids to have the same life I had. I want them to have stability. I feel broken. I feel bad. I want to sit there saying “fuck fuck fuck fuck” at the park. Seriously. That’s what I want to do. I want to give everyone the heebie jeebies so they stay away from me and I don’t have to smile and nod when they go off on their bigoted bullshit.

I’m mad at Noah because even he is a liar. Even he is wrong. He’s not supposed to be. I’m supposed to be able to believe him. He is doing the best he can given his life experience. It is hard nearly every day. I have to stop and think really hard, “If I was a functional person what would I be doing?” Every day is a conscious choice to do a certain set of behaviors. I pick them as a compromise between what I want, what is best for the kids, and then I have to compromise between what I want and what other people will think.

I don’t wear my “badass as a honey badger” shirt when I am out with my kids. People would treat my kids differently. I don’t want that for them. It’s stupid shit. But it’s there. Always. I am rebellious and inappropriate. You have no idea what my unfiltered thoughts are. I am a very angry person.

Noah doesn’t understand because he has his “work persona” which is different from the rest of his life. But he doesn’t filter as much for random people. He doesn’t understand that my “the rest of my life” is my job. And I don’t know what the tolerances are on my behavior yet. I don’t have a good way to figure out the group.

Other than teaching I haven’t had a phase of my life that wasn’t centered around someone I was fucking in a social group. Not so much an option in the mom-group. Just sayin’. But that tension is there. It’s hard.

I went in and renewed my medical marijuana card. When I was talking to the doctor (who is starting to recognize me after so many times of seeing him) he asked me how I handled dealing with talking about pot with my kids. “There are only so many times you can tell them a skunk was in the back yard.” I told him that I don’t lie to my children. I tell them I use a medication because chemicals in my brain are kind of wonky. That happens sometimes. If you do not need a medication it can make you very sick so never take a medication unless you know for sure that you need it. That is what I tell my kids about pot. He said it was just like being age appropriate when talking about sex. I started crying.

I have to look up in books how to be age appropriate about sex. When I was Shanna’s age I was offering up blow jobs to the neighbor kids. I don’t know what “age appropriate” is. I truly don’t. In the pit of my stomach I know that what I know is bad. That’s all I know. It’s hard. It’s scary.

Shanna knows that her nipples, vulva and butt are off limits to other people. They are just for her. If anyone touches them she needs to let me know because it is my job to help her stay safe. Mostly she just doesn’t spend unsupervised time around people. Shanna knows that sex is for grown ups because kids have delicate bodies and they aren’t ready yet.

I feel scared because I am bringing up children in a country that is moving backwards. I’m watching my rights recede as ignorant men vote them away. I’m scared. I’m scared to travel because I have to submit to intimate touching that feels degrading. I’m scared that something will happen and I will have depended on Noah and then I will get screwed. Because I was stupid enough to think that his status transfered to me. I’m a low status person. I really don’t think I will ever cease to be white trash. That’s just going to be life for me.

How do I keep the filth off of my kids? How do I let Noah make them more like him than like me without feeling invisible and unimportant and stupid and wrong and bad. I don’t know.

I did a hard thing.

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Last February I was sent a nasty Dear Jane letter. Someone no longer wished to know me. I had a panic attack at her house and she told me that I was a bad parent and she could no longer bear to see how I interact with Shanna. She said I am far too hard on Shanna and my expectations are not age appropriate. There was more. I don’t want to read it again.

She showed up at the home school group today. She asked me if it would be a problem for me if she was there. She was smirking while she asked. She had already let her kids run off to play. She said she could round them up and just go “If I was going to feel uncomfortable”. I told her that Shanna still asks to play with her son so it is fine.

I lied. It wasn’t fine. When I got home I sent her an email. I responded to her nastygram from last February (for the very first time) and included the full text. I said, “Given the hostility with which you ended our friendship I would prefer that you not join a group I am a member of. I’m sure you understand given that you don’t particularly want to know me.”

I ended a sentence with a preposition. Bah. That was hard. I’m glad I did it. I’m glad I didn’t wait. I’m glad I didn’t let her get friendly with a bunch of people so that it becomes “drama”. She doesn’t know those people yet. She has met them once. I don’t really want to get chased out of this community. I don’t deal with passive aggressive behavior very well. Someone who will be nasty to me then smile all pretty like has no place in my life.

Her son came over and wanted to play soccer with Calli and I. He got really angry when I insisted he share. He sat down and told me he wasn’t going to play anymore because I was mean. Calli had the damn ball first and it wasn’t his. Yeah. I don’t really need to deal with that family every week at the park. I hope she doesn’t come back. I really don’t think I was mean to him. I was very careful with my tone of voice. I can’t be passive aggressive enough for that family and I have no interest in trying.

Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. I was all set to have a gosh darned good day. By the way, I think it is hilarious that Shanna talks about the “darn freakin’ housework”. I did finally clean up my language some year. Like the year I heard how fluent my three year old was with “fuck”. Neither of us say it much any more. Ahem.

I feel weird. I feel like I was inappropriate in setting this boundary. I feel like I should have kept my mouth shut. It’s not like I own the group. But man. She was freakin mean. I don’t want to deal with her. UUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH.

More money.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’d like to stop talking about my mom, eventually.

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Nights/mornings like these are the reason I tell people not to worry about my “triggers”; you can’t possibly figure them all out. No one can.

Someone I barely know on the internet posted about how her mother died years ago and left a bunch of quilting projects in process. She sent the pieces to her mother in law (because she is a master quilter) and now the woman I know talked about the joy she feels getting these pieces back finished. It’s like more love arriving postmortem.

It has made me cry and cry and cry. Why don’t I get to have a mother who wants to take care of me? Why did that pass me by this lifetime? My mother didn’t want me from conception. She was raped. She gave me the bare amount of care necessary to keep me from dying for a lot of my life.

I like to look at my children when they are sleeping. I like to think about how much I want them. If they disappeared my life would be over. It’s not exactly a healthy response. I think that I love them with all the love I couldn’t give anyone else in my life as a child. I love them as my daughters and my sisters and my friends and my mothers. I don’t have anyone else of my blood and I never will. Well, they could grow up and have children. But that is decades away.

Babysitting makes me think of my mother. He’s adjusting, slowly. It’s hard for him. He is to young to be able to understand what is going on and my girls are being kind of jerks to him. They are young enough to not be able to be sympathetic. They are playing the “Hey if we scream in his face he cries and that is funny” game. It’s not nice. They are also both wildly jealous of this interloper touching theirMama. This sweet little boy was left in my care because his mother trusts me. I don’t want to fuck this up. I cuddle him when he wants it even though it bothers the girls. They can adjust too. It doesn’t make me love them any less because I am rocking an interloper on my lap.

To be honest it makes me think it is highly convenient that my kids are on the smaller side because I can still rock both of them on my lap at once. With the boy I am babysitting it’s a one kid ride. It was weird cuddling him as he fell asleep. With my kids I can’t put an arm on their body as they are falling asleep. Shanna says it hurts. My arm is too heavy. This little boy held on to my hand so that my whole arm stayed on him. He didn’t want to be alone so he held me hostage. It was quite wonderful. I’m not Mama but I’m ok. He is starting to trust me more.

He got a huge goose egg last night. He and Shanna were running around as usual and they slammed into one another before bouncing off of separate walls. Of course I feel like a horrible child abuser. I let them get hurt. I honestly think it is better for them to run and get hurt so I will have this feeling again before too long. Free range parenting is not for the feint hearted. I think they collided because it was right before bed time and they both had slower reflexes than usual. They have to learn how their bodies work. I can’t teach them that by lecturing them and controlling their movement. I have to let them figure it out. That will be painful. For everyone.

I wonder if I will ever stop missing my mother. Somehow I doubt it. I think I will miss her on the day I die. I don’t understand Noah not feeling connected to his mother. I could understand breaking contact because you have to. God I miss my mother. It feels like this ache will never go away. But she hurt me so much. She would hurt my children. I can’t allow that. It doesn’t really matter that I would like to still be on the roulette wheel of abuse with her. It would be something. My mother does love me.

I can’t handle the lying. I can’t handle the stealing. I can’t handle being told that I should be grateful for all that people do for me as I serve them. No one else gets to set the terms of my reality. I can’t sit there while my mother and my sister talk about what good mothers they are. No. You cooperated when your children were being raped. You are by definition bad mothers. My mom at least kind of gets a pass on the fact that she was never in the room. She got to always say she wasn’t responsible. My sister actively taught her children oral sex. She is going to straight to hell on a bullet train. My mother was at least classy enough to only give me verbal pointers. My sister taught her children by modeling and direct instruction. I can’t prosecute and the victims would turn around and lie to a police officer to defend their mother. The only thing I can do is keep my kids away from them.

It hurts and hurts and hurts. I feel like I am not good enough. I wouldn’t be able to protect myself from them. I want them and miss them so much. I want to cuddle up with my mom. I slept with my mother till I was a teenager. I miss her smell. I miss brushing her hair. I miss…

I don’t know what to do with this ache inside of me. I don’t know how to stop crying. I smile during the day, as much as I can. The sun isn’t up yet. The kids are still asleep. I cry.

My stomach hurts. I have this horrible physical sensation of impending horror. Something bad is going to happen. Something terrible. I don’t trust that feeling. That feeling is a liar. Who is going to leave next? Who else is going to stop loving me?

I really want to hurt myself. I want to be in pain right now. I know I deserve it. I know I am bad. I know I am not deserving of good feelings. I don’t really care how I do it: cutting, beating my head on concrete, burning myself. I don’t really want to keep listing the things I have done to hurt myself. It’s fairly humiliating. I know this isn’t normal. I’m not going to. I’m going to cry because it is sad that I feel like I deserve to hurt this much. That’s enough. I don’t need more pain. This is enough.

When I went to the grief ritual a woman invited me to join her support group for people who were adopted or grew up in foster care. I sent her an email a couple of weeks ago. She wrote back asking me to explain my family situation before I could come, didn’t I grow up with a single mother? I can’t tell you again about my fostering situations. I just can’t. You enthusiastically invited me and then ask me to justify myself? I can’t do that. I can’t. I just know that again I’m asking for support I don’t deserve. I need to stop trying to find a support group. I have me. I have what Noah has going spare. That’s it. I can’t try for more. I can’t believe that more exists. Even if it exists for other people it doesn’t exist for me.

So what if I’m sad. Life is hard all over. Suck it up, Buttercup.

Babysitting

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I think that most people want to feel like they are part of something. Families, churches, college alumni—it doesn’t really matter. They just want a group identity. People like being an “us”.

Starting yesterday morning I have been babysitting my friend’s two year old. It’s going quite well, I think. He even slept well. He woke up at four with a dirty diaper. Noah had to change the sheets but he’s used to that. Noah couldn’t get him back to sleep (that’s normal for the kid) so I spelled Noah at five. I pulled the boy up onto my chest and rubbed his back. I talked to him softly about how happy I am that he is visiting us. I told him that he is a wonderful little boy and I’m glad I get to spend time with him. I told him that I loved him and I’m happy to take care of him. He went to sleep with a smile on his face.

I am doing something with my life. I am helping people grow up. We are not a culture that values stay at home parents. We treat it as an unfortunate occasional necessity when people can’t afford to pay day care because they don’t make enough money. I don’t make money. I do things that earn small amounts of money occasionally because that way I can take care of budget shortfalls without having to talk to Noah about it. Noah doesn’t really like talking about money.

We have had to start talking about money more lately. We have fairly large specific goals. Ok, how do we get there? It is feeling pretty humiliating to me that if we are to save money the only option I have is to deny myself things. To be fair, not all of the denial will be to me. I don’t make money. Sometimes being dependent feels humiliating. I’m having a hard time with the fact that I don’t feel like I am helping to build a life with Noah. I feel like I’m sitting at home and waiting for him to bring me a life.

I feel fairly guilty that I want to be with my kids this much. I have no interest in finding a job. Who would take care of my kids? The idea of them being with someone they didn’t know freaks me out. They are still so dependent.

Babysitting shows me a lot of this. He’s not mine. I don’t have an innate understanding of all of his needs in order. I have, in fact, specifically resisted learning even though his mother rattled it off every single time I talked to her for over a year. I have mostly trained her out of that. Learning a baby is hard. It is work. You have to sit there and stare at that person and figure out what the fuck do they need? Their needs are different from mine. They need slightly different foods and liquids than adults. As they age their needs are going to change. I have to figure them out and adapt. That’s my job.

I’m struck by the fact that refusing to call domestic labor “womens work” means that women who stay home are treated like they aren’t doing any work at all. It doesn’t earn money. Therefore it’s not work.

Right now the sweet little boy is crying. He misses his parents. There literally isn’t anything I can do about it but tell him I understand and I’m sorry he is sad. I cuddle him when he wants it but he doesn’t always want to be touched. I get that. Watching him struggle with this tells me so much about my life. I was closer to Shanna’s age the first time I was sent away. I had more understanding of time. He is genuinely terrified that he will never see his parents again. Barring some hideous childbirth accident (You had better not read my blog while you are in labor) he will see his parents again soon once his mom finishes bringing his younger sibling into the world. He doesn’t get it. I can tell him I like him and I am glad I get to spend time with him all day. He’s still going to be sad. I am not his mom. I am just not as good. I know. I really really understand.

Then the storm passes and he plays again. He’s starting to try to play with the girls. He doesn’t have a lot of exposure to other children. Group play is a learned skill. It’s neat watching how he learns it. It makes me cry when I think there is the real possibility that I will spend more birthdays with this boy than I spent with my mother. In two more years I will have lived with Shanna longer than I lived with my mother consistently. Who I am now is already a bigger chunk of my life than any other stage. I have more consistency and routine and stable people. I struggle so hard with this.

I feel scared because every day is a whole new step in doing something hard that I have never done before. I have never stayed this long. I have never been part of anything like this. It’s all new.

I have this image of myself being a nasty, hateful person. I try very hard to pay attention to what I say. My tone of voice is often harsher than strictly necessary, but my words are gentle. “Oh that was an accident. Let’s practice cleaning up.” “That happens. Everyone makes mistakes.” “I love you. I want to spend time with you. Thank you for being here with me.” I am so overwhelmingly grateful for the ways in which I get to spend the hours of the day. I have to steal time on the computer. I’m not bored. Well, sometimes I’m bored. But I don’t have time to kill. Sometimes I’m doing rote work that doesn’t engage my mind and I am trying to find my zone on that. It’s an every day challenge.

How do I do this? How do I be this person? I’m really gentle with kids. Sometimes I don’t enjoybeing gentle. I get so frustrated. I don’t want to clean up any more messes. I don’t want to gently say, “That’s ok. Let’s try again” when a kid makes an enormous mess. I want to scream and jump up and down. I want to hit. But I don’t. I take a deep breath. I close my eyes. I think, “If this is a day they remember, what will that memory make them feel?” I say it nicely for the 3,523 time. Everyone else can be impatient and difficult to adjust to. I’m going to help them learn how to do things without having to feel bad. No one is bad here for having an accident. Accidents happen to everyone. Accidents are value neutral.

He’s not crying. He’s pulling apart my broom. Calli is “typing” next to me on the couch. Shanna went to try out the shallow pool in the back yard. I can see her from where I am sitting. There is about 2” of water. Technically a drowning risk but come on people. I can see her. I doubt she is really going to get in. It’s pretty chilly at this time of day. Nope. She is going to poop on the ground instead. Right. I cleaned it up. She’s in her room for a while. I think it’s time to get off the computer. I have laundry to fold and dishes to wash and kids to talk to.

I’m scared that I won’t be good enough. But I just have to be good enough for a little while. I think I can do that even though it’s scary.

Parenting, anxiety and me!

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Sometimes I feel like a broken record. My anxiety level for the past couple of days has been unreal. My stomach aches all the time. I feel like I want to vomit fairly regularly. Nothing is going on. My life is smooth, relatively easy, I don’t get a lot of surprises… and yet… here I am. I hate this. I hate that my body is so broken that it is incapable of ramping down my ambient stress level when there isn’t much stress in my life.

I have fairly ruthlessly culled people from my life over the past year and some. I didn’t really do it on purpose but the shape of my days is different than it was a year ago. I don’t talk to as many people. I think I grow ever more isolated. It’s hard but it feels like the right thing. People distract me from the business of my life. I don’t feel good about that. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that wanting people distracts me from the business of my life. If I accept the fact that people are not going to show up and suddenly love me and want to help me I get by.

As always I feel like I don’t explain well. Watching Shanna is how I learn about myself. It’s a slow process. I understand things about myself as I see her doing things. Noah likes to tell me that I picked the high-intensity version of parenting. I feel like an asshole saying that about myself but it is basically true. I am with my kids all the fucking time and when I am with my kids I pour enormous amounts of energy into them.

A friend has an autistic son. I asked her to describe what his therapy looked like because I was curious. I felt kind of weird about the fact that my day-to-day interactions with my kids sounds remarkably like the therapy for autistic children. And I do that for 12+ hours every fucking day. I talk and talk and talk and talk. Shanna is, thank God, a highly verbal kid. So she listens to my explanations and takes them seriously. I can talk her into or out of almost any behavior. I explain in great detail why things are important. Hell, I’m coaching her to require a why so that she feels like she knows why things happen. “If I tell you not to do something and you really want to do it, ask me “Why” and I will explain. Most of the time I have a good reason.” I let my kids destroy the house in the name of creativity day after day. I don’t prevent them from doing things that make my life hard. I try to keep them safe. If it’s not a safety issue I will tell her, “Ok I will feel frustrated if you do that but there is nothing inherently wrong with you doing it so I’m going to leave the room and not watch. Have fun.” Usually I say this when she is about to do something that will cause me to be on my hands and knees for an hour picking something up. It’s going to suck. But I’ll do it because that is my job.

My job is to teach my children how to be functional adults. This is fucking tricky because I’m not sure I qualify every day. Hell, I’m not sure I understand what it means to be a functional adult. I see a wide variety of function out in the world. People get by. What is the base line? Am I shooting for the baseline? Oh god no.

I think a lot about why I want to homeschool. How do I want to do it. Am I doing it because I had a traumatic experience in school and I’m afraid my children will have the same life experiences? They won’t. Full stop. I’ll be frank and say that part of the reason I think about it is because I don’t feel like I am really a fully functional human being as long as I hide at home with my kids. Do we really hide at home? Well, it depends on how you mean it.

I feel like this part of my life seems to be focused on figuring out how my body works so I can turn around and teach my kids how their bodies work. As usual I feel ashamed that I don’t already know. I don’t know because I have spent most of my life dissociated from my body. I don’t know how different movement feels. I’ve never paid enough attention to know. I’ve never moved enough to know. I have hit this weird plateau in running. I can’t go faster for a while. I need to stop trying. When I leave my house hoping for just a few seconds faster I spend the entire run feeling angry at the weakness in my body. I’m at this place where I don’t think I can get much faster without a whole bunch of strength training I’m not really doing.

The pickle is I feel like my entire life works that way right now. Everything I am doing is at this stuck, hard place. What I need to do is just be stronger and everything will be fine. I’m at the stage of gardening where I need to weed like hell. Ugh. It’s not hard for the first hour. After that it hurts. Running isn’t hard for the first fifteen minutes. After that it hurts. Going on walks with the kids is easy for the first 3/4 of every walk. Then it hurts. etc.

It hurts in unexpected ways. Today I stopped at about 2.5 miles in and stretched for several minutes because my back muscles were so horribly tight I felt like they were about to spasm. My skinned knee is still stiff and uncomfortable. Other than that my knees and ankles are doing well so I don’t intend to slow down on the running. But I need to stretch more.

There is nothing in my life I need to do “less” of… other than maybe whining. I could do less whining. But why do I feel like a whiner? I whine at my blog (not even daily) and I do it at random opportunities. It doesn’t happen daily. I feel like I am not allowed to feel like my life is hard because I am sitting on a mountain of privilege and I need to shut the fuck up. So many people have it worse than me. Poor fucking baby. That’s not really a useful attitude to have towards one’s self. (oneself? weird.)

I don’t believe that any of the things I am doing is really all that hard. Hell, even the marathon training doesn’t feel that hard individually. What is hard is that I feel inadequate to the long list of work in my life. I don’t see how I will do it all. I keep hitting this terrible wall of desperately wanting someone to teach me how to do this life thing. Where the fuck is my Mr. Miyagi?! Someone who will just pluck me up and teach me how to survive and work and find discipline? I need help.

That’s nice, dear.

Where is my mommy? Where is the mommy who loves me enough to teach me about life the way I am teaching Shanna and Calli? Why don’t I get that? Well, honestly, it’s because not very many people want to put as much time and attention into another person the way I want to do with my kids. I want my kids to move through the world believing that just about everything has an explanation and if they want to know it we can bloody well figure out what it is. That doesn’t happen in school. In school the reason you have to do something is because some arbitrary asshole somewhere made a draconian rule. Bowing to random arbitrary rules isn’t very functional, in my opinion. In my opinion being functional means staying your course and figuring out how to survive in a terribly rigged system. Not a god damn person in the public education system tried to do anything to help me. I’m an outlier, fine. People can tell me hundreds of stories of them having good experiences. Research says that outliers do not do well in our system. Is there any chance in the whole god damn world that my kids won’t be outliers?

It is an Adverse Childhood Experience growing up with a parent who has diagnosed mental illness. Hi. I’m Krissy. During my life I have been “officially” diagnosed with PTSD, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Major and Minor Depression, Bipolar Disorder, and lots of people have unofficially thrown out a variety of other options for various reasons at various times. My kids are going to grow up with that. I can’t prevent that. I can’t not exist in their lives so they can benefit from not being around a crazy person. That feels bad to say, but it is a fact. My kids wouldn’t be able to go to school and be just like everyone else and fit in and progress at the normal rate in the normal manner. They would always have the horrible reality of coming home to me. I would be highly disruptive to a child who was genuinely normal. I’m not good at that type of existence.

Stupid shit. A friend posted pictures of bringing in goody bags and cupcakes to the classroom for her daughter’s birthday. I would be shittier than shit about stuff like that. I wouldn’t want to spend the money. I would resent putting forth effort to do “expected” things and I would be inconsistent and pissy about it. I wouldn’t encourage my kids to dress normally. I wouldn’t encourage my kids to behave in ways that worked in the classroom. When Shanna says, “Shit. My glass is empty. That sucks.” I just smile and don’t worry about it. When she says “fuck” I completely ignore it in the moment. Later I work into the conversation how some people dislike certain words for totally illogical reasons. If you want those people to like you then you have to play their game. I’m not going to tell my daughter these words are bad because I don’t believe it is true. I believe it is an irrelevant distinction. I think they are impolite in some circumstances just because it is good to treat people how they want to be treated. It is important to me to handle it that way.

My kids will have a profoundly different understanding of the world than most kids because I removed the explicitly sexual content from my view of the world and have otherwise just merged them with my experience. To me that is what life is. You take your children with you for your life. Shanna has some interesting things to say about the police given her experiences participating in the Occupy movement. She was upset about not going to the General Strike yesterday but Calli wasn’t feeling well. Sick kids trump politics in this family.

That is what I am specifically teaching to my kids. Life is about this weird slightly moving hierarchy of importance of needs. You have to triage and decide your priorities over and over and over again. If you don’t think about your life that way you won’t really be able to make long-term planning decisions.

Right now we are trying to find balance on budgeting stuff, money is hard and complicated. I’m trying to figure out how to divide the hours of the day. How much time do I spend on different tasks around the house? The thing is, I’m doing the high intensity version of parenting. I do tasks around the willingness and ability of my kids to handle me working. That makes everything complicated. I’m juggling their attention needs, my need for time when I am not being pestered with 20+ questions every minute, the need to constantly be in the fucking kitchen cooking and cleaning up after the mess, and everything else I want to do in this life: writing, running, gardening, have friends. I keep reminding myself that my children won’t be small forever. I’m crossing my fingers that this ridiculous outpouring of energy will eventually slow down. I have no way of knowing. I can’t plan as if it will. I have to plan as if I am going to be this tired and interrupted forever. That way every improvement will be a blessing and a wonderful gift instead of something grudgingly grasped.

I really struggle with this whole “mental illness” thing. I have a lot of days where my body is in active fight or flight mode for a lot of the day. It is very hard to calm it down. I have terrible ranges of emotions. But I’m at work so I stomp the shit out of most of it. Producing people who can function within society is my goal. That means I can’t cause them to develop the same kind of extreme coping mechanisms. I just can’t. How can I teach something I have never experienced? How can I teach what it is like to move through the world without fear? I feel so much fear I want to vomit sometimes. And nothing bad is happening to me. I think that part of the reason that I have so many friends on the autistic spectrum is because I know my emotions are too extreme for the normal range so I need to hang out with people who just won’t notice or care. Honestly hanging out with my kids is similar. Well, my kids notice. But they give me a kiss and a hug and smile and expect everything to be all better now. As far as they are concerned, it is. Because mommy smiles and hugs them and says, “I am so glad I get to spend my life with you.” They do make me feel better. I had this whole range of emotions before I had kids. Before them I had sex with random people or did drugs or cut to deal with my emotions. Now we are trying to move in the “hugs not drugs” direction. The pot is so complicated. I have, uhm, tried a wide variety of street drugs. The pot is different in how it functions in my life.

What is the difference between drug addiction that is bad and being dependent on a medication for survival? Many diabetics require insulin. Thyroid medication is a big deal. Etc. My brain was damaged by what happened to me as a child. It does not function normally. I feel genuine terror and have the full body experience of being retraumatized some days. It really sucks ass. But I can take that sensation away and relax enough to have a conversation with my kids and be mellow. I feel disgusting for needing help. Why the fuck can’t I just be stronger? Such a fucking loser.

Noah told me last night that he can tell I have been feeling unworthy lately. I’ve been struggling with finding a place in my head and my heart where I am comfortable with who I am and what I am doing with my life. In a variety of different places in the past couple of weeks I keep finding stupid things that all remind me that I don’t have a lot of earning potential. My credential has lapsed. I would have to go back to college before I could usefully work in my field again. I think I would rather eat manure. I feel like I am a bad partner to Noah. I feel like he is giving up too much in being with me. I feel like a failure because I can’t figure out how to settle into the traces and just be happy with my life. I can’t figure out how to stop having panic attacks. I can’t figure out how to be calm and mellow. I don’t know how to be happy. I only know how to be scared and afraid and lonely and angry. What fucking good am I? How functional am I? This is what I don’t understand.

I feel defensive and guilty because I want to keep my kids out of school and I don’t want to try to be a “working” parent. It is stupid and ridiculous. No one who knows me is campaigning against me. I am only arguing with voices in my head. Part of the problem is I have this growing horror as I acknowledge that I am going to have to explain to Shanna that a lot of the ways in which I interact with her will get her into trouble out in the world. People don’t like bossy know-it-alls who narrate what is happening in life. They think it is weird. It makes people uncomfortable. They don’t want to hear that. And people get really upset if they think they are having a “private” conversation (loudly, in public) and someone comments. I have never understood why. I’m a sit-in-the-diner-and-talk-to-each-table sort of person. My older daughter is like me only she doesn’t have any brain damage. She loves talking to people and she feels safe and comfortable in the world. So she has virtually no fear. Watching her makes me feel like I am living a good life. I don’t want to miss even five minutes of the Shanna Show. Unfortunately it’s hard to find balance.

Calli is so different. She is not @#$#@ interested in having me narrate for her the way I do for Shanna. She hits me when I try. This is going to be an interesting journey. I am startled by the things she manages to figure out by herself. This is going to be an interesting journey. Shanna thrives on hands-on directed learning. Calli wants to watch and then figure it out on her own. I’m surprised by the physical dexterity she exhibits. She is trying to keep up with Shanna and she is fearless in her attempts. She lands safely more than she falls so she keeps trying to do things that should be far beyond her development. I think I was quieter when Shanna was this age but I can’t remember. The words blur. I think I was a lot quieter. I was a lot more lost in my thoughts. That is the hardest part about this job. I don’t have a chance to think very often. I have to carve out deliberate silence in my life. I crave it. I need it. The constant talking is hard because it requires so much thinking. She makes a lot of conversational leaps that are hard to follow unless you know her whole little set of life experiences and she needs a lot of repeating of everything. Our daily conversational life does literally look like therapy for autism. I don’t set specific developmental goals, I just conversationally speak that way about pretty much everything. If I introduce a weird or new word I will emphasize it and break in the conversation to explain what it means and use it several times in several ways so that it sticks better in Shanna’s head.

It is really weird for me to sit and think really hard about what my life is going to be like in twenty years. What am going to do when my baby is twenty two? What will I do with all this energy? I’m kind of scared. I have no idea what the future will look like. I have no idea if I will ever get to the point where I stop vibrating with fear all day long for no reason at all other than bad things happened a long long time ago. I think being afraid I will always feel this way is making it exponentially worse. I don’t know how to just accept the feelings and deal with them when they come up and wait them out. I have no trust that they will end. They never have. Well, they pause. I don’t always always feel this way. It’s so complicated.

And I don’t even have time to get into sex. I have so much thinking to do about that. And it’s largely being evaded. I don’t think about sex when I am with my kids. That doesn’t leave me a lot of time to think about it. This shit is complicated.

Trying to learn what my needs are.

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Running in the morning is awesome now that there is pretty close to full light by six. I didn’t cry today. Right now I am flirting hard with hitting 5.5 mph as my average. Not quite there, but close. I have just over five months to the marathon. Eek. I wonder how fast I will be then. Not that speed is the point. But this is really interesting. This running business is several journeys all in one. My body is changing shape again. Still? Other people hit “stable weights” and I never have. I rarely spend more than six months in a given shape. It’s different this time because I eat any and everything I want. I haven’t tracked in a few days because I haven’t been on the computer much. Right now I have other things to think about.

For the past few days we have been choosing to not use any lights. At 6pm I get up and quickly tidy up the house and clean the kitchen so breakfast will be easy to make in a mostly dark kitchen. Noah and I both actively want more sleep and more sex in our lives. This seems to be the easiest way to manage that shift right now. We put the kids to bed at eight and then have the rest of the night to lie in bed and talk until we figure out if it is a sex night or not. That works better than going to bed at ten or eleven. I’m less likely to be hostile to his advances because can’t he tell I am fucking exhausted?! I’m just less tired at eight.

Sex is such an interesting journey. I’ve been having intercourse (by choice) for more than eighteen years now. It has only been fairly recently that I no longer hurt most of the time. I started out thinking it was supposed to hurt. It was supposed to be agonizingly painful and you were supposed to take that in order to please someone else. You have to be a masochist to enjoy sex. I didn’t use such language when I was significantly younger, but that is what I was doing. I feel like I am no longer interested in being that kind of masochist. Most people never do it at all so it probably seems weird that it is hard for me to stop. The thing is, I wasn’t doing “scenes” with people. I wasn’t doing SSC (safe/sane/consensual) bdsm per se. Sex hurt and I didn’t know how to deal with that. So I let people hurt me. Mostly they didn’t even know because I couldn’t tell them. I had no language. I didn’t understand what I was doing. I never felt safe saying, “Uhm, this is hurting and I wish it wouldn’t”. I still have trouble telling Noah. But he has mostly learned the signs. And he has mostly started stopping on his own. I feel such an out pouring of love for Noah that I feel like I will drown in it.

Noah cares if I am in pain. He will take active steps to stop hurting me. That makes me cry. It is probably true that other people have done it as well, but not like Noah. Certainly not with sex. Noah has paid attention to me for years he can tell when his touch is good and when it hurts by watching me. He modifies his behavior based on my reactions. This feels miraculous. This feels like an unlooked-for-gift. I didn’t believe anyone would ever give a shit.

As life goes on I hold it close to my heart that I have had sex with significantly more people than average. I have given lots and lots and lots of people the chance to be nice to me. Noah has chosen to learn how to be nice to me. I want to be monogamous because I don’t want to go back to believing that sex just hurts and it does with everyone but Noah. For one big thing, condoms suck. That’s no one else’s fault. And bareback sex with people other than Noah feels really emotionally bad and scary to me. I don’t want to feel good that way. It makes me feel disgusting inside. Because no one else is going to bother to pay attention to me the way Noah does. I will always be hiding myself. I don’t want to share my body that way with someone I am not genuinely close to. I didn’t understand what that meant before I tried it, getting close to someone that is.

Noah treats me like I am actually important. Like my needs and wants matter. Other people want me to meet their needs and wants. . . . . . Yeah. Don’t care.

It feels like my “to give to” list is full. Shanna and Calli need so much from me that I really just physically can not care what any other adults need. Forget them. I’m busy. They need to deal with their own stuff. They are big kids now. Dating is about filling needs. Seriously ongoing relationships have to involve a balance of meeting needs. I can’t do it. I am a giant cavernous hole of need. I don’t have a god damn thing to give.

It’s interesting figuring out sex with Noah. He has needs. I have needs I didn’t know I had. I need to not be in pain. I need to feel physically comfortable. I need to feel respected. I need to feel cared for. I haven’t felt these feelings during most of my sexual life. I won’t say that I have been in pain every time, because that is hyperbole, but I have probably experienced pain significantly above 50% of the times I have had sex in my life. At least half the time. And it tends to go in batches where it will be just screamingly awful for weeks (I used to get raging yeast infections that have never been treated in my life) and then it will be fine for a couple of weeks.

My diet is radically different from what I ate as a child and young adult. I don’t get yeast infections any more. Sex doesn’t hurt as much. We will never use condoms again. That has probably played the biggest part in lessoning how much pain sex has caused, honestly. And I am firmly in the camp that says the foreskin is important to sex. Unprotected sex with circumcised men is far more painful to me than sex with an intact man. Yeah, multiple samples of each. I wasn’t very smart when I was younger. Or older. Ha.

All of this feels important. Not to anyone but me, of course, but I need to understand how my body works. I need to actually know what it is like to feel good in my body. I have to not mask my body sensations with pills. I don’t want to get up every day and take caffeine (I don’t drink coffee so instead we have these mints–100 mg of caffeine. That’ll wake you up.) and then have a sleeping pill before bed. I don’t want to wince every time I sit down because sex tore the hell out of me last night. I want to wake up in the morning glad to be in my body.

I want to be touched in ways that feel good instead of ways that hurt me. I want that to be a fucking priority in the lives of the people around me. I can’t believe how intensely I need this. And he just does it. He tries so hard. He pulls back if I wince. He stops. He will stop having sex and just hold me if I stop responding. He doesn’t ignore me and get himself off. I am not a hole any more. It’s really weird.

The thing is I don’t think that any of my former partners would be happy with hearing me say that they treated me that way. Not really. I haven’t had that many one night stands. I tend to have sex with people several times. I tend to be friends with them before and after. I don’t think they would feel good about treating me that way. Some like to pretend but they don’t really think of me that way. Not very many men are comfortable thinking about the fact that they are capable of behaving in a way that will allow a woman to feel that way. Notice the careful language in that sentence? I ain’t accusing anyone of anything. So no panties in a twist.

I don’t think Dan believes he is a rapist. But if you have sex with an unconscious girl it’s rape. Someone cannot consent if they are not awake. Even if they want to have sex with you when they are awake it isn’t the kind of thing that is permanently transferable. Consent has to be actively given or it doesn’t exist. If I don’t have the option of saying “no” then I can’t actually say “yes”.

That is where a great deal of my problems have happened during sex. I don’t feel like I can say no. I was conditioned to sit still and not respond while enduring sexual pain. It’s pretty crazy to think about. I watch my daughters now and I think about it. I think very hard about what I want them to experience in this lifetime. What do I want them to be conditioned to expect from life?

I was conditioned to have sex with as many emotionally distant men as possible. Woo.

I want to know in the core of my being that I will never ever let someone who is not close to me emotionally into my body. My body deserves better treatment than it has been given. I want to set the bar so high that Noah really is the only person who will ever be part of me again. I know this is something that other people take for granted.

I’m afraid that I will cheat. I’m afraid that I will be afraid to say “no”. I’m afraid that I will hide behind my long-standing excuse of being crazy and impulsive and self-destructive. I’m afraid of being the person I was conditioned to be. I don’t want to try to set personal “hit this number” goals in my head. Because I totally would. I’m a tiny tiny bit miffed I didn’t get my “triple digit party” like I was promised. (A close friend I lived with told me she would do it. I actively discouraged it at the time because I felt uncomfortable but now I kind of wish it had happened. I am lame like that.)

Not every person who is nonmonogamous is a slut. But I am. I don’t want to model that for my children. What do I want to model?

Ack. The dryer repairman will be here in ten minutes. I’ve never been the first visit on a day before. Time to go.

Food comes from a can

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Today was the kind of “running” day where I mostly walk. I try to consciously go slower when I am crying. I don’t want to trip and injure myself. Today I thought about my mother. I thought about the way Shanna begs me to never leave her. Maybe she will go to college, but she plans to come right back and “take care of me”.

I remember promising my mother that once I was an adult her life would be better. I could help. Things would be better. I suppose that depends on what you mean by “better”. My life is better. I have no idea how her life is going. I have no idea. I wonder if she is proud of me. I wonder if she knows that I grew up into a strong, good person. I wonder if she is glad that I can defend myself now and I can stop being a victim. Somehow I doubt it.

I don’t know how to reconcile in my head that my mother, the person who was responsible for taking care of me when I was helpless, prefers that I not grow up to be strong enough to defend myself. She thinks I should be defenseless. At least within the family. Should I fuck my sister too so she can finish moving through our family? Maybe she isn’t bi. Maybe I should just be fucking my sister’s boyfriends. They all tried. They tried long before I hit adult height. Watching my kids is hard. I’m not sure how to explain this.

I want my kids to travel so much because I want them to actually see how different the world is from their home. I mean the whole bay area. It’s fairly safe here. We have managed to create this little bubble where we are safe from the natural world and even the other humans aren’t that dangerous. The police are far more dangerous to us than our neighbors because I take my kids to protests. Welcome to modern America. My kids are white, upper middle class, and female. Other than sexual assault, which won’t fucking happen on my watch, my kids don’t really have much to fear. Cars. Abstract concepts. Stories. The unknown.

I want my kids to understand what it means to survive. I feel like a privileged asshole. I want to take my kids to other countries so they can play tourist on actual hard lives. I want them to not have to have hard lives but still understand the spectrum. Me telling them stories and showing them pictures isn’t good enough.

I want to know what it feels like, as a rational adult, to have to eat what food is put in front of me or go hungry. I want to change how I feel about this. I’m terrified that it means learning to eat seafood. The texture fucking bothers me. I don’t want to be that American. I don’t want to feel like a snob. I don’t want to deal with that rejection pattern. I don’t want to go to other countries and come home to hide in my house and declare that every one every where in the world dislikes me. I’m too difficult. I shouldn’t bother trying to do anything with my life. Obviously I suck. I can totally see me doing that. I could be that asshole.

The problem is, that means I didn’t really survive. That means I died a long time ago and there is nothing left in me. Because it’s just not true that I am disliked and reviled.

I am thought about.

If that is happening, and a lot of it is positive, that means maybe I’m not too hard. It’s ok to be different. It’s ok to have preferences. But when I am imposing on people I need to learn how to accept with gratitude what people choose to give me. My needs are my own to meet. I need to not act like other people are responsible for meeting them. It’s my problem. If the best I can do is a fish and rice at a given meal I need to eat the fucking fish and smile.

I want that for my kids. I want to show them what that is like. I remember my mother and feel sad and anxious. Food was so hard for me as a kid. It was bad. As an adult I’ll say that my mother was a fairly bad cook but everyone we knew loved her food. That makes me wonder. My family has all gotten to the point of heating up preseasoned food at every meal. We didn’t eat produce, and certainly not good produce.

I feel like my life is consumed with my body lately. I am trying to learn how to meet my needs. I wasn’t taught. I wasn’t taught to check in on my body and see how different parts of me felt. I was taught to ignore my body. My body wasn’t important. Anyone was allowed to do anything they wanted to my body and I was expected to just accept it. Food was what I could control.

I don’t think I’ve ever thought of it that way before.

My food life is unlike any that I have ever experienced before. Since I had kids I have radically changed how I eat. But I’m not interested in getting to a point where I’m supporting my family on my farming efforts in my backyard. Just to put a scope on this. I recently read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and all I have to say is sweet sunny Jesus NO. I felt anxious pressure reading the book. I’m an idiot. She grew up farming and married someone with a similar background. That’s just not something I will ever try.

So that leaves me in a weird position of feeling like I don’t know what I want to accomplish. I swear to G-d this post has a cohesive theme. I have to actively decide which of my behaviors in life are about what I was taught to do by my mama and which things are right for me. I also need to think about what is right for the other people in my family. We all have different needs. I wasn’t taught to think about people that way. I’m training for a marathon. My body is going to have different needs than the other members of my family. Why do I plan to feed us all exactly the same way? Because when I try to do that I end up snacking in the garage.

I resist eating the food in the house. I don’t actually like the crap I make my kids eat. I really honestly think vegetables and fruit are pretty gross. I only like the heavily processed with corn syrup version of fruit because that is what my mama likes. I don’t really want to teach my kids to be like my mother. Her version of surviving looks a lot like death to me.

I have less than eight years to really get my shit together so that I can take my kids around the world to find out how other people live. My kids will find out what it means to have to work in order to eat. I will find out what it is like to have to work in order to eat. I want to show up and not feel ignorant as a pig. I don’t want to show up ashamed of myself for my ignorance. But neither do I want to show up and act like all they need is a honky.

I want to feel like the labor of my body and the work of my mind has some value. I can accomplish things. I can work. I am not fucking useless. I try not to bullshit myself. I am not going to learn what it is like to have to do manual labor to survive. That is the understanding of a lifetime of work I have not had and won’t have. I feel weird about that. It is hard to keep in mind. I can’t keep my yard weeded–yet. I think that is probably what I have eight years to build towards. I need to be able to physically do all of the labor in my yard. I probably should get a bit more ambitious in that department. I want to be able to do farm labor. At the moment I would be annoying and useless.

In eight years I will still be very ignorant. I will be moving to different climates. I will be moving to different plants. I will know nothing. All I will be able to do is go out and try over and over and be publicly bad and I will probably be laughed at. I need to have that experience as a rational adult. I need to learn to not break down in tears just because people are laughing at me.

For my mother food comes from the freezer and cans. I was not taught how to cook food. I have a hard time eating seasonally. For many seasons of the year there aren’t very many products I recognize as food. I’ve learned to shut up about this and eat what is put in front of me.

I need to learn how to eat more food. I want my kids to have more options than me. I want them to develop a broad palate so that we can be polite guests who do farm work in exchange for being allowed to learn about people. We can be company for a while. We should be polite, grateful guests. That is hard to think about.

I have to believe my labor is such that it is worth putting up with my company. I want to have something to talk about other than what a sad terrible life I have had. I want to have something to talk about other than what a devoted slave I was. I want to have something to talk about how much I enjoyed that short stint of teaching. I want to talk about something other than just being a mother.

What else am I? Food is going to be a big part of this journey. I want to find out where food comes from. I want to teach my daughters where food comes from and I feel ashamed of myself for knowing so little. I think food comes from cans.

We should be learning languages. I suppose that means picking areas already. Oh goodness.

I cry when I run because I wonder if my mother will feel proud when she hears about me some day. This valley isn’t that big. I tremble in fear when I am in San Jose. I’m terrified of seeing her. Will I pass her in silence like somebody that I used to know? Will I introduce my kids? Will I introduce her as Vivian? I have trouble saying her name without crying. I haven’t said it much in my life. She’s my Mommy.

I do have to think about things like this. I have to decide in advance what I will do. I have to play it in my mind so that I don’t freak out. I have to decide in my head and in my heart what an appropriate adult reaction is to my children. What is it going to be like to move through the world for a whole year that I don’t have to check over my shoulder for my mother?

My mother knows where I live. I wouldn’t put it past her to show up some day. How do I want to behave? Do I want her to show up? No. Not really.

If I showed up she would pretend to be nice for a while. Then she would feel comfortable. Then she would proceed to talk about how disgusting the food is.

Learning this is too hard. I have to take feedback if I want to improve but not from her. She can never again be allowed to weigh in on any part of me. What she thinks of me is not my business. Never the less when I run I cry so hard I can barely see because I want her to be proud of me. I hope she is proud that she did manage to raise kids who can survive even if she couldn’t keep them safe.

My mother drove adult men to my house when I was a young teenager because those men wanted to have sex with me. My mother manifestly didn’t care for me. She did not teach me survival skills. She taught me skills that will kill me.

Why? Why did she do that? Is that all she knows? Was I really so hard to teach? I can’t know. I expect I was nearly as high needs as Shanna, maybe more given the abuse. Do I really want to model how my mother dealt with it? Now I understand it more. It’s complicated.

All of this is so complicated. How do I stop looking at all of life as one big mass of things that I don’t know yet and therefore I can’t know and I am trapped? When do I learn how to fail in front of other people? When will it be safe to try things in front of people without being told I am pathetic for being bad on my first try? I don’t have a safer audience than my kids. I feel bad that I don’t get to teach them very many things that I am already good at. I feel kind of sad that their entire lives will be a journey through my learning experiences.

I wish I had “become” a bit more before having kids. I wish I had been less resistant to learning. I wish I didn’t feel humiliated when I don’t know the answer. Maybe that is how my mother felt. How do I want to feel?

This is all so very complicated. And I should go in because Noah has to go to work.

No social skills

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Today I went and talked to a man who does things. I feel like a lazy slacker when I hear about what he gets done. He’s running a little farm. He works a computer job 80 miles away from his farm and deals with that commute. He is high up in management for a variety of different annual events like historical re-enactment events and Burning Man. He has an intense life. I’m not going to bother to talk about his 15 active hobbies.

Just the thought of having to deal with that many people gives me the shivers. I can do a fairly heroic amount alone but having to work with people is hard. I don’t trust people. I never believe that any one else will deliver on what they promise so I can only plan for what I can accomplish alone. It’s rather limiting.

I will never have a family the way I picture in my head. I have Noah and Shanna and Calli and that’s it. And I’m god damn lucky to have them. There are people who love me. There are people who care about me a great deal. There are people who will try hard to help me. But they all go back to their families. I am not part of their families. I am a spoke person they can have a one on one relationship with occasionally but I’m not a big part of any one’s life. Except for Noah and Shanna and Calli.

I’ve been calling K every day because otherwise I can’t get through the afternoon without crying. I’m glad she lets me do that. I miss days occasionally because I don’t hear the alarm on my phone. I go through periods of talking to people daily or nearly daily on IM. They never seem to last very long.

I don’t really have people to share my life with outside of this house. I have people who want to see me once a year and get an update on how I am living my life. I’m impressed by the people who slog through this blog. I write because I am shouting into the void. I don’t know who or if anyone other than Noah is actually going to read any of it. The fact that people catch what I say bewilders me. I say so much because I have to see the words outside of my head but I know so little about the people who read. Even the people I “know” I don’t really understand. I rarely spend enough time with people to see past my projections onto them. I am not good at meeting people and treating them like a blank slate. I am always looking for patterns.

Patterns are important for my survival. At least they have been in the past. Patterns are causing me problems now because Noah doesn’t follow many patterns. He’s kind of weird. But he understands when I talk about the people in my life like characters in a story. He understands why I look for clues for how to react. Many of my assumptions are wrong. Why do I assume that people who come over to my house dislike me? Why do I physically react to them as if they were threatening? I can like someone and enjoy their company and still not know how to have a positive conversation with them. I always feel like I am being mean and they must think I am bad. (If you are thinking, even me? Yeah, probably.) I feel like I talk too much. I am rude. I dominate conversations. I take up too much space and I should shut up and sit in the back. My turn is over.

Ok you know how people talk about how homeschoolers “won’t be socialized”? Well. I went to public school so I got my socialization there. I think I had five or six teachers over my educational career tell me point blank in class to stop raising my hand because other people needed to have a turn. Teachers and people who are older than me and people in “authority” trigger me heavily. I have very strong internal meters that tell me that pretty much any talking is disrespectful. And I always say weird or wrong things.

I was at a party this weekend and two women were talking. They were doing that “build you up” sort of thing. Life is hard and we must be brave. You can never be too brave. You can never be too balanced. You can never be too strong.

I interrupted there and said, “Actually you have to be careful how you get stronger. Like right now I’m running and I’m learning a lot about how the muscles around the knee work and…” I went on for a while. I felt like a party pooper. “Oh hey, you know how you are trying to build her up and convince her to reach for the stars? Well here’s a cup of ice water in your face. You’re welcome.” I don’t mean to do it. I feel like such an asshole.

I don’t think it was actually that bad. I’m really not good at the art of conversation. It’s a skill and I’m sorely lacking in practice. The real problem is, Noah doesn’t mind if I’m an asshole and I point out things about him that sound rude as long as they are true. I think I grow more unfit for human companionship by the day.

I’m not sure why I have had such an upsurge of pervasive negative thought for the past few days. Is this my brain’s horrible reaction to Noah saying that I was out of the emergency phase?

Anxiety is energy that wants to be put to use but is instead being held in. What energy do I want to expend? Why do I feel so bad? I feel like talking about Sarah would be horribly disrespectful and rude. I’m having a lot of big feelings. I’m not sure why I think it would be disrespectful and rude, but I do. I’m not processing my emotions and it’s not working for me.

It’s not about a list of done-me-wrongs. We tipped the bucket. Lots of water came out. The drip isn’t starting back up again. I’m scared. I don’t get to control what happens in life. That’s hard. I feel sad. I miss my Sarah. Am I emailing her? No. Does that make me a passive aggressive bitch? Maybe. Things were said. Not all by me.

I’m scared and I’m sad. I hurt people.

I have had so many people tell me they were my “family” until I said or did something they didn’t like. I don’t see those people any more. They broke off contact. That’s just how life works. Some, many, of them resurface every few years for a phone call or dinner.

I got really good at lying to myself that I would have what I see in my head as how a family works. I’m too mean and I drive people away. I sit here and wonder why I am so broken. Why don’t I deserve what I see other people having? I missed that life path. It’s just not really an option for me. Pity party: table of one.

In my head I hear this rough amalgamation voice saying, “Don’t you realize that no one gives a shit that your mother didn’t love you? Get over yourself.” I should forget my shit and go out and join something. Subsume my identity into a group identity and stop thinking about my shit. Because my shit isn’t important. But when I get to the meeting or social event or class or or or or or or or I don’t know how to talk to people. I don’t know how to form relationships that go beyond a surface level. Because NOT BEING TAUGHT THOSE SKILLS IS PART OF MY SHIT.

It isn’t any one else’s problem. Well, that’s not true. What am I going to teach my children? Fuck. Who knows. We’ll see. I should go in. I should stop crying again.

If you can’t work it out with your family…

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Someone on the internet said that if you can’t work things out with your family you will never be able to truly love anyone. My response to that: horse shit.

I think that if you want to be able to truly love someone you have to start with loving yourself. You have to start with figuring out what love means. Love doesn’t mean that you do whatever someone wants. Love doesn’t mean that you take care of someone. Love means that you figure out where you end and the other person begins and you find a way to pad that difference with understanding and compassion. It doesn’t mean that you always work it out.

I love my mother. I think about her every day. We can’t work it out. We can’t work it out because her version of understanding and compassion involve telling me that I must keep my mouth shut about the ways in which I was damaged by my childhood. In her version of understanding and compassion the only thing that matters is that you never make people feel uncomfortable. I make people feel uncomfortable. Thus we will never be able to heal that breech. I can’t be quiet and she can’t tolerate being uncomfortable.

Does this mean I will never be able to love anyone? What about my kids? What about my husband?

I feel like I have had to recreate from scratch what it means to love my kids. I certainly don’t have a good, automatic way of showing such feelings. In my family love was equally mixed with violence and anger. It means that if I want to truly love my kids I have to stop and think every single day “How can I love my children without violence and anger today?” It means I think very carefully about the words I use. I don’t call them names. I will never be able to get it out of my head that my mother thinks I am a stupid little bitch. I don’t want my daughters to have those words in their heads.

Working it out with my family doesn’t work. The only way for me to be part of my family is if I shut my mouth and pretend that reality didn’t happen. The only way for me to be part of my family is for me to turn a blind eye to continual sexual assault. As an adult I found out that the generation after me was hurt too. I didn’t do anything to protect them. I didn’t know how to protect them while maintaining the code of silence I was required to maintain while living at home.

I’m not at “home” any more. Or, rather, I have created a new home. As usual it isn’t a home of my choosing. But unlike every other time I am choosing to stay. Even though I didn’t get to have first choice, I get to decide whether I stay or not. It’s rather novel.

I think that in order to love yourself you have to take a good long look at your life and decide if your interactions help you become a better or worse person. I run because I have to be strong and able to handle anything that happens to me in life. I have to be stronger and more fierce than average. I simply do. A marathon seems like a pretty bad ass way to work on being strong and fierce. I garden because I need to learn patience and consistency. Learning to water plants has been one of the most important lessons I have learned this lifetime. Everything needs care. Even me.

I am learning how to look at my husband as a wounded young man who was desperate for love. I don’t think I saw that before marrying him. He was strong and sure of himself and utterly cocky. I didn’t see all the worry and fear and loneliness. Why did he need someone who was so driven and alone? Why did he need someone who came with a barge-load of baggage and a fierce need to survive? I’m not sure yet. But I know that he and I hold back the dark for one another. We are both used to being alone and terribly lonely. We don’t have to be any more. There is so much gratitude mixed in with our love that I don’t know how to separate them. Someone wants to see me every single day. Someone thinks I am pleasant company. Someone thinks that I am a worthwhile person to spend a life with. How in the hell did that happen?

How do you learn to love yourself? By learning how to say no to things that hurt you. By learning how to tell people that the way they are treating you isn’t good enough. You deserve better. Even if you don’t believe it you have to say it. You have to be able to say, “I can’t do what you want me to do. I have to take care of myself instead of you.” It’s hard. It’s terribly hard and lonely most of the time.

I’ve been reading a lot about attachment theory lately. No wonder I have so many issues. I read that people have to depend on one another. This is a biological need. We have to have people in our lives to work with and be interdependent with. This is deeply at odds with the maxim of, “Never do for other people what they can do for themselves.” That is what I have heard from codependent circles. It’s a hard balance.

How do you have healthy dependence? What is the line? How do I love myself and the people around me enough to care for them and let them care for me? What is a healthy level of dependence? I care for my children and teach them how to do things on their own. I care for my husband. I do his cleaning and laundry and I cook for him. He also cooks for me. And he cleans up after me. And he massages me. And he supports me financially. I “can” support myself. Is there something bad about him supporting me? I think it depends on who you ask.

In my opinion there isn’t a problem with someone deliberately exchanging work. There is more work in a marriage than really should be done by one person. I don’t think that 50/50 parenting/work/etc is mandatory. It’s ok to choose to have different percentages.

The problem, in my opinion, comes when you make an agreement and then don’t follow through. If you say you will do something and you don’t, that’s a problem. If someone else has to come along behind you and get your work done then you aren’t actually in a partnership. I am not going to try and name what it is, but it isn’t a partnership. If Noah told me that he would bring home the paycheck, sure thing, but then he didn’t we would be in trouble. If I told Noah that I would care for the kids but I didn’t put food on the table that would be a problem. In order to love myself I have to only partner with people who are going to keep their agreements.

How does this tie in with my family? You don’t partner with your family anyway, right? If I stayed in contact with my family I would have to agree to being devalued constantly. I would have to be around people who would do absolutely nothing to care for themselves and anyone else while loudly proclaiming that they do everything. Uh, no. I’m not going to do that. I can’t work things out with people who are going to tell me implicitly and explicitly that what they do has more value than what I do when I am doing the vast majority of labor to move life along. I just can’t. That’s not a way to learn about love. That is a way to learn that I deserve a lot of bad. I really don’t.

I think it is funny how many people I know are rabidly anti Ayn Rand. I’m no Philip Reardon–I haven’t gone out and built a business empire. I don’t even feel particularly successful. I’m secure and stable but I will probably never have millions of dollars. I will never be important financially. But I do have a family that will happily drain me dry while talking shit about me the whole time. I have a family who would cheerfully take every dollar I earned at a job while telling me that what I am doing is less important and valuable than what they do. I could never figure out exactly what it is that they did that could hold value. Watch a lot of tv? Just existing is enough for some, I guess. Not for me. I was supposed to earn my place. I was supposed to clean and provide money.

In fact I think that part of learning to love myself going forward is learning how much value my labor has. I should not work night and day for unappreciative people. I should teach my children that we rise or fall together. We should all work together. There should not be one person working and another person watching. Hell no. I don’t think that anyone should be allowed to effectively steal from me.

But then I come back to this idea that I will never be able to “truly love anyone” if I don’t work things out with my family. What I need to work out is the ability to say, “I have limits. I can’t support you.” Once I figure out my limits and can communicate them in a healthy way with my children I will have figured out how to work things out with my family. This is the only family I have obligation to. The family I choose, not the family I am saddled with. As my kids grow up I will change how much I am willing to meet their needs. That will be unavoidable. That’s my job, really: to teach them how to meet their own needs. I can’t teach an adult how to do this. An adult isn’t interested in changing the patterns they have formed. An adult is comfortable. An adult has learned how to cobble together enough in life.

I have learned how to cobble together enough support. When I can emotionally handle it I ask for support from other people. When I can’t handle it I maintain silence about my needs. If I never mention them then I don’t feel disappointment about people not meeting them. Ok, that’s not true. But the disappointment is far less when I don’t say anything.

How do I learn to love me? By knowing that I don’t want my kids to remember me calling them names. So I don’t call them names. By knowing that I want my kids to keep their promises so I keep my promises to them. I am very careful with what I say I will do. If I don’t think I can follow through on something then I don’t bring it up. Or I say in advance that the possibility is low. I make this an ok thing for myself by ensuring that my energy load is such that the needs of the helpless people in my life come before every other thing I spend energy on. I don’t get to run or garden or clean or be social until my children have their needs met. That is the hierarchy of needs that I observe. Sometimes I feel like a martyr but that is how I know that I will not be neglectful. There have been too many neglectful adults in my life who cared more about themselves than the children in their care. I can’t be one of them.

I learn to love me by recognizing that I and the children in my care deserve better treatment. We deserve to be important and prioritized. So I do. I am deliberate in how I choose to divide my time.

There are more things to do than can ever be done. At the end of my life, which things are going to feel more important than others? To me the most important thing I will do is prove that I can adequately care for children. I will do this right. My kids won’t have to deal with financial instability because the grown ups spend money like it grows on trees. My kids won’t have to deal with food insecurity because the adults don’t want to be bothered with thinking about the food needs of growing children. My kids will not be left with unsafe caregivers.

I love my children as a proxy for learning to love myself. I see in them the vulnerability and weakness I must have had. I will keep them safe. They will not think they are bad for being children. I will love them, and myself, enough to allow us to make mistakes and grow. I will love us enough to think hard about the right choices before I make a choice at all. I will choose to be alone instead of being with people who are unable to be honest about their own actions. I have Noah and Shanna and Calli. I’m not really alone any more. I have so much more than many people ever have. It has to be enough.

Words have power.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Always with the defensive, this girl.

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Yesterday was one of those magical running days. The kind where the beat of the music and my grief match up perfectly. It’s hard to describe what I enjoy about running. There are several stretches of blocks in my neighborhood that I use for sprinting. The lines on the sidewalk just require it. When I get to those specific streets I pray for the right fast song. I run until I can barely breathe. I run until I am gasping out sobs and I can barely see anymore because I am crying so hard. There is so very much to cry about.

I have so much grief. I feel like I will never stop grieving. I will never feel like I can move past these feelings. I’m trying to trust the process. I’m trying to believe that even though this cycle of mourning isn’t over it will end some day. I just don’t know when. It’s hard to keep going.

Why was I crying yesterday? It’s hard to remember specifics because I cover so many topics in my head. I spent a lot of time thinking about why I am the sort of person to send nasty judgmental shaming letters to. I get them every so often. I trigger the shit out of people. It’s the same reason my former therapist fired me. I don’t do things how other people think they should be done. In the process I am deeply distressing. People don’t like feeling distressed by how “off from the norm” I am. They want me to fall back in line, damnit. I should do _________ in order to be acceptable to them. I can’t.

I can’t ever be acceptable to everyone in my life. That isn’t an option open to me. I will always bother people in some way on some level. Pretty much everyone. I will always talk about subjects that make you uncomfortable, no matter who you are. I will search for that topic that bothers you the most and then I will harp on it constantly. I do this on an unconscious level. I default to challenging people. A lot of the time I’m not doing it on purpose. I believe with every part of me that I would not have survived if I was willing to let other people set the terms of my reality. I would have crumbled a long time ago. I would have to believe that I was who they say I am.

This time I would have to believe I am an addict. I am bad. I am helpless before these things that control me. My cutting, anger, drug use, and sexual activity are bad. I am bad for being addicted to these things. Bad. Bad. Bad. I know. I’ve always known. I know that you think I am bad. That doesn’t mean that you are right or that I have to agree. That’s an opinion not a provable set of facts. I’m obsessive (even though I hear this kind of pedantry means you lose the argument I am going to do this anyway because it is my fucking blog and I’m only arguing with myself which means there is no such thing as losing) so here’s a definition for you:

Addiction is defined as the continued use of a mood altering substance or behaviour despite adverse consequences.^[1] This can include, but is not limited to, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, exercise abuse, and gambling. Some defining characteristics of addiction include: impaired control over subtances/behaviour, preoccupation with substance/behaviour, continued use despite consequences, and denial.^[2] Habits and patterns associated with addiction are typically characterized by immediate gratification (short-term reward), coupled with delayed deleterious effects (long-term costs).^[3]Physiological dependence occurs when the body has to adjust to the substance by incorporating the substance into its ‘normal’ functioning.^[4] This state creates the conditions of tolerance, and withdrawal. Tolerance is the process by which the body continually adapts to the substance and requires increasingly larger amounts to achieve the original effects. Withdrawal refers to physical and psychological symptoms people experience when reducing or discontinuing a substance the body had become dependent on. Symptoms of withdrawal generally include but are not limited to anxiety, irritability, intense cravings for the substance, nausea, hallucinations, headaches, cold sweats, and tremors.

That’s from Wikipedia. I use marijuana under medical supervision to deal with psychological issues. Yes there are technically adverse side effects because smoking is bad for your lungs. Overall it makes my life so much better it isn’t funny. I repeat that it has fewer side effects than any other drug I could be on.

Cutting, sex, and anger are all in a hand wavey category. I have a problem with the 12 step language of weakness. “I’m not responsible. A higher power has to save me.” Well… I am certainly addicted to harming myself. I do it in a variety of ways. I don’t give any particular method much higher billing than any other. I think that is what he really meant by saying I am addicted to these things. But of course he’s blowing hot air out of his ass so he doesn’t quite see the pattern. I go through long periods without cutting. I have gone many years between periods where I feel bad enough about myself to need that release. I can easily channel that frustration and rage into other areas if given the slightest chance.

Cutting works to put an end to bad emotional states that would otherwise lead to suicide. Is it a great approach? No. It isn’t. But for an awful lot of my life I didn’t have a better choice and I think that cutting was significantly better for me than suicide. No one is going to take that belief away from me. I had to cope. I managed. I survived. The last time I cut I had kind of an epiphany that it wasn’t working any more. I threw away my scalpels. I have moved beyond the utility of that as a coping method. I didn’t stop because someone shamed me or told me I was bad for doing it. That kind of response is only likely to cause me to go do it more and more and more. I stopped because I realized it was insanity to continue. Insanity in the sense that it doesn’t make sense to keep doing the same activity and expecting a different response.

I no longer have a life where I need a physical outlet for my emotional pain. Thank you, Noah. Thank you for being my bulwark against the dark. Thank you for providing me with a safe place to live for the rest of my life. Thank you for supporting me so that I can do work I am better suited for and I don’t have to go out and “get a job” to prove I have worth.

The emotional pain I feel now I can talk about and find solutions for. I think the only place where the language of addiction is particularly useful for me is where it talks about the diminishing returns issue. Or if you talk about the cost being too high for the benefit.

I asked Noah for monogamy partially as a way of providing myself an ‘out’ on dealing with a lot of my problematic behavior. I’m not good at self-regulation when it comes to sex. Now I am safe. Now I will always be able to say, “I’m in a monogamous marriage; I can’t have sex with you” instead of having to be able to say “I don’t want to.” Saying I don’t want to have sex with someone is hard. I feel unworthy of doing so. I feel like if someone is suffering for lack of sex it is my job to fix it. I can be a sacred whore, that’s fine–but I must be a whore. I don’t say no very well. I am going to hide behind monogamy and be grateful for it. I feel guilty that I am dragging Noah behind me kicking and screaming into this change. I feel like I am unfairly punishing him for a problem he doesn’t have. But I asked and he agreed and he doesn’t really want to talk about whether it is fair or not. It is. Move on.

I cried yesterday because I feel terribly bad that in order to protect myself from my own impulsive behavior I have curtailed Noah. It seems selfish and immature and just flat mean. I am such a bitch. And I’m trying to learn how to tell him “no” in general. I no longer close my eyes and go away and let him have sex with me. It’s hard. It’s hard to feel like I am not breaking rules. It is hard because I feel like I am bad for not giving him release when and how he wants it. I am not holding up my end of the deal. He is supporting me–don’t I owe him? I told him that thirty years of being a whore is enough for anyone. It’s time to retire.

Noah isn’t attacking me. Noah doesn’t require that I put out because he wants me to. I project that onto him. I fear that belief. I have it. That’s enough.

Am I an addict? Maybe? Yes? It seems to be an irrelevant question. Unless you believe that someone who takes thyroid medication is also an addict it is simply a innate bias to say that the pot is a problem. It’s not your preferred kind of medication but I’m a hippy and my doctor agrees that it is good for me. Imagine me sticking my tongue out at you. I also see a massage therapist and an acupuncturist (ok, not since pregnancy but I will get back there some day–I believe in the benefits). I think I should see a chiropractor about something going on in the lower right hand side of my back. That has been a problem since Jeremy sodomized me when I was like ten. I have never been able to get it to stop hurting. Running is teaching me a lot about my body. I think I have a better idea of how to deal with the pain.

So! Am I an addict when it comes to pot? Wikipedia says no. I’m going to go with that. Sex? Well… obviously I’m doing as much “recovery” from that as I can do. I am not actually interested in celibacy and trying to be celibate just because someone else might think I should be would result in me not being married any more. Noah wouldn’t tolerate that. He’s dealing with me saying “no” a lot and he’s dealing with not being allowed to have sex with other people. I think he’s a god damned stand up guy. No more can or should be asked of our marriage as I’m figuring out this shit with my relationship to sex. So am I addicted to sex? Maybe? But it doesn’t matter because I’ve figured out how I can have a healthy relationship with it and I’m moving forward. Kind of a useless thing to sit around and go to meetings on at this point. Just sayin’.

I haven’t cut in nearly a year and I no longer have my favored cutting tool. I could some day acquire another one, sure. I don’t think I will though. I don’t want that modeled for my children as an option of coping mechanisms.

It’s interesting to me how this evolution has happened. I cut for many years. When I stopped cutting my body as a teenager I started cutting my hair. It got shorter and shorter till I shaved it when I was seventeen. My mother was so angry with me it wasn’t funny. I felt like the whole world was radiating anger with me for cutting my hair. I was told constantly how ugly I was and how unflattering my “new look” was.

It’s been very weird and uncomfortable that people keep gushing about how good I look with a shaved head/short hair this time. It makes me cry. Because when they say it I hear my mother ranting in my head and I want to hit them and cry that they are lying to me. I feel rage that this person is lying about finding me attractive this way. I try to not do more than clench my fists. I try to not stomp away. I smile. I say thank you. I think that I flinch sometimes and then people simply become more emphatic. Noah certainly tells me that he likes it often. That is one of the things I cried about yesterday. “Hair” was on.

I wonder if my family hated this as a hair cut because of how intense it makes me look. I feel like I have to plaster a fake smile on my face all of the time or I look like I might punch you in the face as soon as say “hello”. It’s weird. I feel like the effects of aging are doing interesting things to my face. I am going to wrinkle like fuck. All the women in my family have deep lines of care from a fairly young age. We live hard lives and it shows. I look at my hands and I see my mothers hands. I see the rope appearing. My hands are the hands of someone who does manual labor. Well, I don’t have deep callouses yet. But I will as soon as I get up the energy to do more gardening. I would have done anything to prevent aging the way I am if I had stayed in a relationship with Tom.

One of the things I cry about when I run is thinking about how resentful Tom would be of the changes in me. It’s strange. I cry because I loved him so much and he wanted such a small piece of who I am. I feel bad that after my family he felt so very good to me but we didn’t know how to be real people together. Tom lives in a world where “pretty” and “sexy” are such a high bar that they become a vocation. I’m naturally pretty lazy. I don’t think I am that pretty and I don’t see much point in dressing up a plow horse to take it to town. I know I am attractive but it’s different. As I age it becomes more dramatic to me. I am intense in a way that precludes pretty. Pretty is about unoffensive and I will never be that. My perception of the world Tom lives in is honestly kind of bleak. I would not be happy in it. I can’t stay dedicated to something I feel like I will never actually attain. It involves a lot of specific activity and specific idleness that I just don’t want. I think back over how I lived my life and I feel glad that I made most of the choices I made. I was always running.

A boyfriend from high school sent me a congratulatory message about the half marathon and sent me a link to a marathon training program that is way more awesome than what I had been doing. By which I mean I am so grateful that this program wants me doing two miles for the first few weeks because it feels like such a wave of relief I can barely stand it. Doing only two miles for the last two days of running has meant I have practiced sprinting. It uses different muscle groups and it feels good to stretch my legs once in a while.

I lost my train of thought a while ago because my cat jumped on the keyboard and then I got mad at her. We had to pause and have a negotiation wherein she glared at me and looked sad that I had thrown her the floor. I sighed deeply and went and got a blanket to prevent her from drawing blood and I moved my computer so she could lay on my lap. Puff’s mother gave her to me when Puff was only a few days old. Her eyes were still closed and I bottle fed her to keep her alive. Puff’s mother brought us the babies to save them from a rain storm that would have drowned them outside. The feral mama wasn’t willing to come inside and care for the babies and she didn’t want anything to do with them later, but she did save them. That feels important. I have had Puff for fourteen years. My niece named her. T said, “She looks like a puff of clouds.” She is white with grey nearly-Siamese markings. For a couple of years after Shanna was born Puff avoided me. I feel like our relationship has deepened a lot over the last year or so. She doesn’t mind Calli the way she minds Shanna. She loves that I sit in the garage alone. I attribute a lot of our relationship growth to the smoking, actually. It keeps me away from the kids and she is quick to remind me that our alone time should be special, darn it!

I feel the need to apologize for my many typos. I stop writing when I am abruptly pulled away to do something else and I really don’t have time to edit. I’m not a professional writer so it feels ok to be sloppy.

The specific incident

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So that’s the problem. That other post. Then there is trying to figure out why I want Sarah here so much. After she explained to me yesterday that she can’t live with my explosive anger because it is too much like her mother I went over to my friend Wikipedia. Borderline personality disorder. Oh that is so me. Yeah.

Thing is, I have been absolutely over my stress point for a long time. I don’t know how possible it is for me to get my anger issues under control without getting my stress levels under control.

So what happened is once we got home and I saw the kitchen in that state I walked into Sarah’s room and she was asleep. I stomped into the kitchen and started cleaning. I did so with a lot of banging and slamming. I basically threw the asparagus pot into the cabinet and in the process I broke a glass pan. Sarah says she cleaned that up for me. I then slammed open the other cabinet door and clipped Calli’s fingers because she was closer than I thought. It barely touched her, but it scared the crap out of her.

I honestly can’t remember the next sequence of events very well but I exchanged words with Sarah and she responded with hostility because she didn’t feel she deserved my anger and I kicked the cabinet doors off the wall.

Full stop that isn’t acceptable behavior. I need to never do anything of the kind again or I should probably not be alone with my children. I don’t believe in pie crust promises. You don’t say you are going to do something and then just carry along with your life.

I have to lower the stress in my life. One of the things that Sarah provides for me is that she has lived with an emotionally unstable mother and I feel very uncertain about the amount of time that Noah is gone. I feel worried about how I will be later. And yet having Sarah here makes everything harder and makes me feel constantly closer to the edge than I did before she got here. There is so much more volatility with her here. Because either I have to nitpick and remind her of everything or I have to do it or it doesn’t get done.

Is it getting better? Is she noticing more and doing more? Well… yes… but she is about to go from being home pretty much all the time to having two days a week where she is voluntarily on campus for 12 hours. And she’ll still have a meds day. I anticipate a sudden and dramatic drop in what she does around the house. And I’m going to either have to nitpick her or roll with it. I’m feeling very trapped.

It doesn’t help that part of the reason I feel ok doing Noah’s share of the work is because we have specifically negotiated things around the fact that he bloody well supports me in a life of lavish luxury by my standards. I feel a lot of gratitude for that. I’m fairly happy to do extra work for someone who provides me with a life this good. I don’t have such an attitude towards Sarah. I feel like I am working myself this hard for nothing. So that she doesn’t even have to send me a text message saying that she isn’t feeling well or ask when should dinner be ready.

And yet, I kicked the cabinet door off. No one should live with that. My children should not be exposed to that. I’m going to buy a punching bag. I have a powerful need to hit and there are appropriate ways to deal with it. I need to just do it.

It was interesting reading the BPD article. This part near the end was interesting to me:

The features of BPD include emotional instability, intense unstable interpersonal relationships, a need for relatedness and a fear of rejection. As a result, people with BPD often evoke intense emotions in those around them. Pejorative terms to describe persons with BPD such as “difficult,” “treatment resistant,” “manipulative,” “demanding” and “attention seeking” are often used, and may become a self-fulfilling prophecy as the clinician’s negative response triggers further self-destructive behaviour.^[102] In psychoanalytic theory, this stigmatization may be thought to reflect countertransference (when a therapist projects their own feelings on to a client), as people with BPD are prone to use defense mechanisms such as splitting and projective identification. Thus the diagnosis “often says more about the clinician’s negative reaction to the patient than it does about the patient … as an expression of counter transference hate, borderline explains away the breakdown in empathy between the therapist and the patient and becomes an institutional epithet in the guise of pseudoscientific jargon” (Aronson, p 217).^[84]

This inadvertent counter transference can give rise to inappropriate clinical responses including excessive use of medication, inappropriate mothering and punitive use of limit setting and interpretation.^[103] People with BPD are seen as among the most challenging groups of patients, requiring a high degree of skill and training in the psychiatrists, therapists and nurses involved in their treatment.^[104] While some clinicians agree with the diagnosis under the name “borderline personality disorder”, some would like the name to be changed.^[105] One critique says that some who are labeled “Borderline Personality Disorder” feel this name is unhelpful, stigmatizing, and/or inaccurate.^[105]

Sarah and I are each working through our mother-issues. I don’t know how to work through mine without writing. And that’s not always a fun experience for people standing near me. My mother denies all blame or responsibility for everything that happened during my childhood. She was always quick to blame other people for what happened. I have inappropriate coping mechanisms around that. Because if I got angry as a child I could get people to do what I needed them to do for a while. Yeah, it was the whole walking on egg shells thing.

That’s not very useful as an adult and it isn’t what I want to teach my kids. What do I want to teach my kids?

I don’t know. But not what I am doing. And before people provide me with a list of “stop ____” admonishments… the problem is you have these coping methods for a reason. You need to find a different way of coping, not just stop what you are doing. My methods have been steadily increasing in intensity for a while here. I need to express a whole lot of limits and see how that lands. I have to stop hurting myself so that I can let people encroach on me in ways they don’t even know they are doing.

It’s really easy to feel like the whole problem is my fault. If I only did _____ everything would be fine. But that’s not true either. I really can’t fix everything.

First world problems

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Life is what you do while you are killing time until you die. Really, that’s all it is. Maybe you’ll die soon, maybe it will take a long time. Maybe you will know lots of people. Maybe you will spend all of those years alone; lonely is strictly optional. Happiness is a state of mind, not a circumstance. And yet, we expect people who are financially secure and stable and married and _______ to be happy.

Seeing my shaman was a good choice. I have a lot of oppositional defiance response to people. To him, in particular. Oh man he triggers all of my, “No no no no no no no” buttons. And no matter how frustrated I get with him I will always go back for more because I learn so much about me being with him. I learn more about the shape and size of me. I learn where I need to push back because I really truly believe something. I know something is true no matter what his opinion is.

He tried to tell me that I have previously been just fine with Noah dating. Uhm… no. I have written records. See, this is why I write. I was fine with Noah dating other people during the first six months we were dating and I was living with someone else. That’s true. But I was poly and Tom was monogamous because I couldn’t stand him being intimate with anyone else. He wasn’t real motivated to go find another sexual partner either. He wanted companionship more than sex and I still provided that.

Noah has different needs. No, I’ve never been happy about him seeing other people. I’m not shy with that information. I have tried to accept it as part of him. But I measure his dates in cuts on my legs. I don’t actually think it is good for our marriage for us to do nonmonogamy. If something hurts me that much, he really shouldn’t be doing it. I am totally fine with it in theory. I don’t have a problem with other people doing it. But knowing that my partner would rather be doing that with someone else rather than me? Yeah. That bothers me. I don’t say no. Ok, I do. But it’s pretty rare.

My shaman contends that the real solution is for me to just work on being bothered until I’m not bothered anymore so that Noah can keep doing what Noah wants to do. To be fair, he thinks that I should work on it because I also have trouble with monogamy.

I think it is more useful this lifetime for me to work on other parts of my life that are causing me strife. I only have so much time to spend beating my head against walls of shame and terror and anger and hatred. It’s going to come up around other issues whether I like it or not. Nonmonogamy is complicated. It takes a ridiculous amount of time and energy. I don’t have it to spare. And I won’t invest in this relationship fully if I know that I am just waiting for when he is going to pull away from me so that he can give a big chunk of himself to someone else. Fuck that shit. I guess I’m a selfish piece of shit but I think I deserve better than that.

The thing about first world problems is: they still hurt. And you still have to live with them day in and day out. No one expects anyone to be cheerful about third world problems. But you are god damn expected to just suck it up for first world problems. I certainly expect people to. I will probably die like my grandfather having a heart attack out in the yard while working. He was in his 80’s.

Ok, I’m going to take the first world/third world out of this for the next part because it sounds dismissive and snotty and I don’t mean to be. I’m talking about my perception of the difference between rich problems and poor problems. I’m using the phrases first world/third world reflexively because it is a common dismissive thought process. But I should be better than that.

When I was a kid surviving was different. The life I lead with my mother was different. Being alive day by day was different. Now that I am an adult I have a completely different situation in life but I am still the same person. Surviving my childhood took a very different skillset than … what am I supposed to say about adulthood? I won’t survive adulthood. Ha. What am I going to do with my adulthood. How is the pattern of my days going to look in comparison to all I know.

What I know is a disjointed life. What I know is work that comes and goes. Unending sorrow and bitterness. Trauma. That’s not all I know though. I know how to work with my hands. I know how to build things. I know how to build people. Shit dude, I made two of them. That’s pretty fucking cool if you ask me. I’m defensive about being a good parent because that is my primary job. I feel like I have to be judged on something and apparently that means I will some day be judged on whether or not my children are… I don’t know. Appropriate? Kind enough? Successful enough? Smart enough? Uhm. Yeah. I have no control over those things.

How do you talk about these subjects without blame? Happiness is a state of mind, not a circumstance. Uhm, yes. But if I had been happy during my childhood I wouldn’t have gotten out. My niece is as smart as me. I’m worried she won’t be able to get out. And my nephew won’t get out. At this point simple economics will bind them all together.

I feel I have satisfied any debt I owed my mother for the care she gave me as a child. I have given her thousands and thousands of dollars, often to my own detriment because she was stealing my pay checks. I don’t owe her anything.

I am angry this morning. So angry. I woke up so angry I feel like the top of my head might come off. I am still just me. But I cancelled my therapy appointment. I feel very defensive about that. I know I need to continue therapy but I don’t have anything I want to talk about in therapy today and is that relationship about meeting my needs or is it something I am doing so that I can check of check lists of what crazy people like me have to do on a set schedule for the rest of my life?

Today the opportunity cost of having to drive for two hours and spend about $18 in gas on top of $150 for the privilege of talking to my therapist… that’s too high of a bar for what I will get out of it. On many days it is the right choice and I shut up and just do it. But today what I will get out of the session will not be worth the opportunity cost. Why is that something I feel guilty about? Because I feel like I have to be accountable to other people in order to ever be right. I don’t feel like talking to my therapist today. So I’m not going to do it. And I feel angry about having to defend that. I really feel like I have to go down a long list of justifications about why. Because I don’t want to isn’t good enough because I am crazy and bad and I need to go talk to a therapist. Uhm, yeah. That’s fucking useful.

Do you know what I’m mad about right now? The price of juice. I don’t need to go talk to my therapist to find my way down the rabbit hole of why that pisses me off. I am even tactful enough to not write the story on the internet because such things actions are kind of tacky given why I am mad about the price of juice. But I am going to go inside and tell my family the story. And then I can stop being angry. I don’t need to pay someone else $150 to listen to the story so I can stop feeling angry. Once I explain it to my family we will figure out what we can change so that I can have help changing the feeling of anger. I can do something about my problems. That’s what makes it a first world problem? My problems are all things that I can solve or out wait and they will go away. I have short-term temporal problems right now. Life is harder than advertised and all that.

Right this minute Calli is crying. I have no idea why. Noah is on duty. I feel like I should stop what I am doing and go try to solve whatever is happening. She would probably settle down more with me. But she would demand to nurse. I’ve already nursed her once today. When she is upset like this she is especially rough.

These are problems that will go away. Calli is already done crying. I can hear her playing. Maybe I don’t have to fix everything. Having Sarah here feels different than I thought it would. I didn’t know I could have another adult in the house so much and still feel so lonely. Sarah has a lot of health issues and keeps a very different sleep schedule. To be fair she has made remarkable progress towards being more in-synch with the kids. We keep very different schedules. And she has spent a lot of time by herself. She’s used to being silent in her room all the time. It’s different. Sometimes it feels like we talked more when we were both on IM a lot.

I had a really exciting November. I went out a lot. I got to have a lot of really intense conversations. It was wonderful. I had a lot of interesting experiences I can sit and think about for a while. That’s not my life though. My life is quiet, mostly. There is a lot going on–don’t get me wrong. But it’s house work. And laundry. And gardening. And taking She-Ra to swimming. And being home from the zoo/park/museum in time for nap or all hell breaks loose. And laundry. And trying to make sure Calli doesn’t nap too early in the day or we will all pay. And more house work. And laundry.

I only make breakfast occasionally if I feel the desire to. Like, a couple of times a month. I make maybe four lunches a week. I have to come with dinner three or so nights a week. It doesn’t get to be take out any more.

I don’t get to be bitter about my problems because they are of my own choosing. Why am I choosing to be bitter about the life I am choosing that no one else is forcing me to have? Let’s be clear here. Noah is not pushing us towards saving. He pays no attention and I could financially ruin us and he wouldn’t notice for years. Instead he is tolerating me forcing him into an ascetic life ridiculously cheerfully. I am choosing every part of my life. From how much I clean to how often I have friends over. Why am I bitter?

I feel like I am not really choosing it. I feel like it is forced on me because no one else wants it. That’s true and not true. Sarah and Noah are both willing to do more when asked. And when I stop working hard things keep going the house just isn’t as clean. I’m cleaning to please myself. Ok, I feel upset that I have to work as hard as I do to have a house that looks the way I see my house in my head. That’s an interesting entitlement.

I was never really allowed to play. I was a reader because I wasn’t really allowed to have toys. My mom always gave my toys away because she didn’t want to clean them up. She went through my room with trash bags several times and just got rid of everything. I don’t build attachments to things very easily. I can’t. Things are easy come easy go. I’ll forget about it eventually, except those weird pangs some day. When I realize that there is very little evidence of my life. Only my sketchy memory and the random shit my mother chose to save. Items that are essentially meaningless to me because I will never know the story attached to them. I am invisible to myself because I have no reflection. I have no one to tell me what they saw.

I have a lot of guilt around the fact that I make Noah and Sarah and the kids get rid of things. I don’t let them keep all of the things they have sentimental attachment to. I can’t. We don’t have room. And really should not have a storage unit with stuff we will never use again that was important or fit or was relevant a long time ago. No. That’s money that needs to go elsewhere. It’s not rational. But the push back is that I require the house to be easy to clean. That means we really have to limit how much stuff we have in our house and everything must have a clearly defined home or it must not live here any more because the clutter builds and builds and then my life is a nightmare. I won’t let anyone else make my working environment hostile. I don’t go take a shit on your desk at work, thanks.

But then you have to figure out how much space should belong to each person. It’s hard to define. I feel like my day and life will be better if I stay home and save money and instead talk to Noah and Sarah about the stuff we can have some effect on. I can figure out actual compromises and do actual work instead of just telling more stories about my mom. Today, maybe just for today, I don’t really want to talk about my mom. I hate that most of my stories about her are so awful. She’s my mom. I love my mother. Irrationally. Completely. Intensely. Why was my mama so mean to me?

Because my mother had problems. She didn’t choose to handle them well and the collateral damage was massive. That happens sometimes. At this point my actual problems are all fairly small and easy to isolate. I have a lot of lasting damage, but I feel like it’s maybe time to start leaving the scab alone. Maybe just for today. That’s good enough.

Why am I choosing to be monogamous? If I reach down in the pit of my stomach it is because I don’t want to be a free person off living my life. I want to be part of an intense dyad. I want to be one with Noah. I don’t want him to be a free person off living his life either. I want us to be sharing this life. That’s why I married him. I have an easier time collaborating with him to do elaborate role play situations about pretending to sleep with other people than I do finding extra curricular sex that doesn’t make me feel like shit in some way. The opportunity cost is so very high.

I don’t think I want monogamy because of ideals, necessarily. I want to be able to stop thinking about this part of my broken. I don’t want to have to deal with keeping a tight leash on my compulsive behavior and only meting it out in small carefully considered not-quite-destructive doses. God it’s a lot of work. I’m tired of doing it. I am so very conflicted about sex.

My shaman told me that broken is a component of whether or not you have a range of emotions and a range of intensity within different emotions. Like if you always go from 2/3 to 9/10 and you stay in only two or three emotions you are probably in a broken place. If you have a range of emotions and a range of intensities… sure. That’s how you feel. Why not. It’s not broken it’s just where you are. I like how he alternates challenging me and affirming that I am already fine just how I am. It means I get to pick how I grow. Well, that’s part of why it didn’t work as a closer romantic relationship. I couldn’t deal with how much I would have to push back. It’s very hard for me.

Sometimes I wonder if my shaman has consciously created a personality for me. He speaks about his multiples fairly frequently. Fairly casually. I know that he alternates between very distinctive approaches in how he talks to me. It’s part of why I like him less around other people. He is so very different. He really is a different person, one I don’t know or like as much. He can listen to me and not challenge me and go down a laundry list of points to affirm that who I am and how I am is working well in every way. At the same time he can absolutely force me to speak in detail about all the specifics of why I am doing any of the things I am doing. It’s hard to be honest enough to be worthy of the conversation. I can’t do it very often. It is too hard to be present with him as intensely as I am present with him. Maybe that is why I don’t like him around other people. I am also attuning to the other person instead of him. Hm. Interesting.

It’s probably time to go in and start working on my first world problems. It makes me really happy that I know I can walk in the door and explain what I am upset about and talk about the root of why I am upset about it and have people be sympathetic and give a shit. Then we can figure out how to solve it. Because we will. This life thing will happen. Today will end and tomorrow might be anything. Some of my first wold problems won’t be solved yet, but they will. All I’ve got is time.

"Go see a therapist"

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You go see a therapist when you are stuck in some way and you can’t change by yourself. Otherwise you just change by yourself and save the money. Therapy is expensive, yo.

Who do I want to be when I grow up? What patterns am I actually stuck in and which patterns can I change if I think about them? What is a happy life? What do I want to do with my time and my life? That really is the crux of it, isn’t it? The way you spend your hours is the way you spend your years. I think I am saying it wrong but someone had something like that as a sig line on MDC. Where is my Zen place? What is it that I should be doing for my spirit to be in alignment with my body? (By the way I don’t use the word Zen in a way that is associated with any actual definition or official usage. I am a co-opting piece of shit.)

I told Noah this morning that I don’t feel like I am having sex for me and I don’t like that feeling any more. I am having sex so that I can continue to be this construct in my head. I am not really getting off much these days. That’s a big change. Sorta? It started with pregnancy. It kind of came back and then it seems to be gone again. I can get close and I have all these nifty hypnosis tricks in place so I can trigger muscle spasms in the appropriate way such that I suppose it feels like an orgasm, kinda. It’s like eating soft serve. It’s just not ice cream even if it looks like and is presented as the same thing. Even with sprinkles. It’s not ice cream.

You aren’t supposed to say that on the internet, right? The way we are having sex isn’t working for me. I don’t want to be this right now. I’m not saying never again. I am saying I need something other than what I have right now. This is hard to write about because I am trying very hard to not represent what Noah wants. I don’t think I really know or understand what Noah wants. It’s not his fault, but I think we are operating with a lot of unspoken assumptions and I should only speak for me.

I’m sitting here thinking and thinking and thinking. In these arguments I always get stuck with this huge load of rage and I scream that I don’t want to spend the rest of my life doing laundry. Dude. The rest of my life will involve laundry. Shut the fuck up already. Why does this become such a sticking point? I could dissect it. I could start having the other adults in the house do the laundry; they would if I required it. Really and truly, they would. But it would require reminding and fussing and then I would never be satisfied with the results. They would fold the damn shirts wrong.

This isn’t about laundry.

I don’t have very many pictures of my mother. But in several she’s doing laundry. I remember the sighs. The long tirades about how much she hated having to clean up after me. I remember her bitterness at having to go out and earn money and come home to the messes I made It’s honestly one reason I don’t want to have a job. If I had a job I would resent the ever loving shit out of my children for having the audacity to live in the house and make a mess when I wasn’t there. It offends my dignity. Oh God help someone who breaks a dish when I’m not home. I’m completely unreasonable. But if I’m standing in the room and not the one who does it? My reaction is, “Thank God it wasn’t me!” And I’m not mad. Mistakes happen.

I don’t forgive slights that are done when I’m out of sight. I’m not sure what is up with that. Hunh. Ok, that’s actually a big one. I’m going to have to think about that one for a long time. I resent having to be a support network for a life and for happiness I won’t get to share. It really bothers me. It makes me feel angry that I spend ‘x’ hours of week doing extra work so that Noah gets to have ‘y’ hours of time completely alone. Because the hours aren’t equal. Not in my head.

There is a tally. He doesn’t understand it or track it. It is totally invisible to him if I do it right. Sex is part of the tally. Part of the things I “have to do”. The tally that “should be” invisible to him. Which means the cost should be invisible as well. I’m having trouble writing a coherent sentence about this. If I don’t explain the tally system he can’t change his behavior based on the different costs.

For the whole rest of my life Noah will have more effect on me than anyone. Dealing with him is effort because he is a human being and that’s just life. That’s ok. That’s more than ok. I want to put a lot of effort into him because I like him sooooooooooo much. If he doesn’t understand where I am putting effort and why… it’s kind of silly, you know? I don’t know that I am using my effort to good effect. I don’t know where I am spinning my wheels and trying to do things to please dead people.

Who do I want to be when I grow up? What would I be like if I had grown up believing that my body is mine and people should only do things to me that I want them to do? I wonder if she is more or less fierce than I am?

Obedience. What is it? Obedience to what? To blind ideals? To stupid short-sighted goals? To instant gratification with a high opportunity cost? What cost can I bear? Honestly–a high cost. I really can. But where should the cost be spent? I don’t think that decision should be made in a vacuum. Years ago Noah offered me an abusive relationship with off-switch. What does it mean to be off? What does it mean when it is turned on? I’m not afraid of Noah, not really. Noah told me flat out this morning that he doesn’t believe me when I say I won’t leave. He’s a smartie, that one. The part that I don’t think he understands is I wouldn’t be able to stay gone. I can never actually walk away from him. He is the father of my children. Until his death he will be in my life. That is complicated. Noah doesn’t actually know what it means to talk about a broken home. I do. I want a home.

Even if it is soft serve, it’s home. That sounds terrible. Even if I am nothing exciting you will still stay. Even if I am a poor imitation of what a wife should be. Even if I am not anything like advertised. I feel like I am ruining Noah’s life by being so conflicted about sex. I don’t think Noah’s sexual performance has suddenly gone down hill.

Who do I want to be when I grow up? I don’t think a therapist can just fix me. I need to figure out who I want to be. No one else can tell me that. What would I be like if I could move through the world without the sure knowledge that if someone asked me for sex I am essentially required to say yes, or at least only say no to a very small number of people in specific categories. Anyone in category A should be good enough.

People are not interchangeable. They really aren’t. And I don’t fucking owe anyone anything. The Embargo is not my fault. It really doesn’t matter what my father told me. I don’t have a cunt so that I can get as many dicks as possible.

Feelings. part 2

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I’m having a lot of feelings today. Anger. Frustration. Sadness. Irritation. Elation. Joy. Contentment. Excitement. Fascination. Ambitious. Cockiness.

It all just depends what part of the story you tell, doesn’t it? Isn’t all of life that way? Today is my biological mother’s birthday. I love you mom. I hope that today brings you some joy. I hope there are people out there who can find joy in your continued life.

Do you know what moving on means? It means you go do something else. I’m not going to take joy in my mother’s continued existence today. I am going to go talk to my psychiatrist instead. I’m going to talk to her about how the cessation of smoking is going. Cold turkey didn’t happen and shouldn’t, in my opinion. I’m too volatile right now. Changing any habit is easier when done in steps. I’m trying to figure out what the best steps are.

The Ativan is a mixed blessing. It completely wipes me out. It makes me non-functional. And it just makes me tired and sad instead of angry and sad. So who knows. Not sure it is the best choice ever. The best choice ever is to move the fuck on with my life and stop using any drug. I’m not there yet. Honestly the reason I haven’t stopped smoking is because it is a mild mood enhancer I can have any time. I need an instant jump of ‘more cheerful’ a few times a day if I don’t want to freak out around the kids. And it makes me feel more distractible from my thoughts. I don’t get into thought loops around old emotional patterns.

Pot allows me to feel more engaged in the moment because I’m constantly getting distracted and needing to refocus. It’s counter-intuitive, but it does help. But it also gives me a lot of time to just sit in the garage by myself. I dislike smoking. Most of the time I’m out here I am not smoking. I’m trying to get to the point where the alone time is as effective as the smoking. It tends to mean I have to be mentally working on something. I also think that the pot allows me to not feel guilty about taking the alone time. I won’t let the kids be near the smoking so that gives me an effective barrier and reason for needing to be alone. It’s harder to defend the barrier of my space if I just want it because I want it.

I think that is a lot of the problem, right there. Hunh. I’m using drugs in order to be allowed private space. Well, I suppose that was the only separation I had from my mother and sister’s lives. They kept that completely away from me and otherwise I was totally enmeshed and treated like an adult partner. Is this really what it means to be an adult? That you have to be stoned to bear your life? That kind of sucks.

But that’s not the whole story. I don’t have to be stoned to enjoy my life. But I do have to be fully engaged in what I am doing. Most of my life is treading water. I’m sorry, but I have the housewife thing down. It’s boring. It’s monotonous and it gives me time to run my gears and think intense thoughts but it leaves me with no time or energy to act on any of the things I’m thinking and I get frustrated and angry. It’s not working. I can outsource that shit. Because I am a privileged asshole.

I do have to be stoned to be a hippy housewife. It’s fucking boring. I am losing my mind. But I still want to homeschool. And I still want to be the primary person hanging out with my kids. Tricksy. This will be interesting to navigate.

I’m having a lot of intense thoughts about how my choices are telling me a lot about my childhood. Most of the women in my family were trapped with children and they had nowhere to go and nothing to do and no money and no help. If I had to spend the next ten years stuck with my kids with nothing to do and nothing to think about I would be full of rage and victimization too. I would need to be stoned to deal with that. I’m to the point where I can say that honestly. That’s a lot of what I’ve been working through for the past few years. What do my choices about parenting ideals mean in the context of my life?

It’s an interesting journey. From here on out I need to stop apologizing for the fact that moving on means having too many things to think about to dwell on the past. I need to accept that for myself. I can’t do this live-in-the-moment thing the way other people do. I can’t just sit here and do what I have always done. I have to go write my story. The pattern I’m starting with is broken.

I’m worried about my broken compass. I’m worried about ignoring my kids in favor of other things. I think my main focus needs to remain my kids for a long time. Watching them is allowing me to forgive myself for the things I can’t change. The things I had no control over. I used to think I was so powerful. I wasn’t.

It’s amazing to spend most of my time with my kids because I’m watching them navigate life and I’m talking to them actively about the fact that their agency is increasing day by day. I talk to them about the fact that right now, they really don’t get to have much control and the reason is because they can’t see the larger pattern. I’m always making my decisions for them with an eye on the larger pattern. I try very hard to make every word out of my mouth something that I will think was the right thing to say in retrospect. It’s a lot of pressure. I don’t talk much on days when I’m being bitchy in my head.

So I have to have better things to think about.

There is a part of the story where Noah asked me to marry him that I don’t talk about much. He also asked me to be his slave. I told him I would marry him, but I wouldn’t be his slave yet. I am taking the long-term-view of training your own top. I want someone who has had the kind of experiences I am creating in our life. I want something very specific. Owning a slave is complicated. I want to ensure that he is up for the process. He’s not yet.

But he’s getting closer. It’s interesting to me how having that as a thread in the tapestry changes a lot of the story. My personal goals. What I will put up with on the side.

It’s interesting trying to figure out what being a main character means in my life. I want to homeschool my kids and watch them grow up. I want to grow. I have things I need to do. I have so much nervous energy that I need to go do something with it or I will explode my life. Just for spite. I will and I know it. And Noah knows it too. So he’s handing me good shoes and telling me to sprint. It’s weird thinking about the evolution of a person. Trying to change the direction of it consciously. In order to direct who I will become I have to think very carefully about who I was made to be. I have to think about how to change the patterns in my life. I have to figure out what my default reactions are before I can usefully change them.

I have this broken compass. I think. I call it. Why do I call it a broken compass? Because it was pointing me in the wrong directions. Is it really broken though? I got out. I have gone far. I followed nothing but my own internal drive to get the fuck away. Looking at where I am in my life compared to where I came from… is it really broken?

Other people tell me that I don’t have to be how I am. I could choose to be different. Well, yes. What’s your point? Usually that they don’t think they would make the same choices as me. That’s fine. What’s your point?

You take the opportunities you see. You follow the life path that appears before you. Or you sit at home waiting. This kind of thing is largely determined by who you know. That’s just how life works. If I’m going to move on from the spot I am in that will involve contact with communities I can’t join with kids. That’s my life path. I want to have the grown-up-only life. I’m trying to figure out how that will work.

I am not going to serve someone until that someone has things for me to manage that are worthy of my time and attention. I am not a house slave. Sorry. It’s not my forté. I have other skills. I know I do. I need to hone them. I need to figure out what I really have to offer. I need to find out what it is like when I am taking up as much space as I need to take up. I don’t even know.

This is going to be hard because I need to go make mistakes. Fast. In a hurry. In a lot of different parts of my life and I need to figure out how to be accountable for them. It’s not all that fun.

So many different threads through the tapestry. So many feelings. How do I tell the story in a way that is respectful to everyone involved? I haven’t touched on a lot of why I’m having feelings. I can’t. I don’t know how to tell the truth about those things yet and I don’t want to lie. That’s kind of weird to admit.

I smoked very little this morning because I need to drive up to the city. Instead I’ve babbled too much about nothing at all. So many feelings. I should probably go take a shower now. It’s time to move on.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Category Archives: mother trouble

neeeeeeedy

stream of conscious

Chemical states and relationship transitions

Hand-me-downs

Angry

I did a hard thing.

More money.

I’d like to stop talking about my mom, eventually.

Babysitting

Parenting, anxiety and me!

Trying to learn what my needs are.

Food comes from a can

No social skills

If you can’t work it out with your family…

Words have power.

Always with the defensive, this girl.

The specific incident

First world problems

"Go see a therapist"

Feelings. part 2