Category Archives: parenting

relationship blathering

One of the best things about writing alone in a room is I don’t have to care about “over sharing”. If people want to stop reading they can and it’s really not my problem. Yay! Ok, that is as much of a warning as you are going to get.

I’m sick. I have a low grade fever; I’m coughing; I have post-nasal drip; I have diarrhea; my throat hurts. Yesterday I went running anyway. When I got home blacksheep told me that I don’t have to run when I am sick. This was exactly what I needed to hear. I have a weird attitude towards advice. Long-time readers are hesitant to suggest anything to me because for many years I responded with immediate vicious hostility to any sign of advice. Mostly because people who didn’t know me that well were going off half-cocked. The advice wasn’t always relevant and I’m not a very nice person about handling that. I understand that is basically a character failing on my part. Such is life.

I am extremely careful in my head about hierarchies. I assign people authority and stature in my head and don’t tell them. If you tell the bastards they get a big head and want to take the increased amount of influence for a spin. Bad plan. But I have little weights and measures in my head that tell me about the person who is talking. It carefully decides how much I should give a shit about what they are saying.

I have been told for a long time that I’m a counter phobic six. (Enneagram shit.) I hear they are very hierarchical. Like, for example, I have a hard time arguing in my head with what blacksheep tells me about exercise. I try hard to understand that she doesn’t know everything about my experiences and I have to give her a lot of information before her advice is perfect. But it is very rare at this point for me to think “She’s wrong.” I think, “Ennnnhhhh I think she doesn’t know what I’m dealing with.” I can understand that her advice is right for 95% of people. Today it doesn’t apply to me (or whatever).

I have a lot of authorities in my head. I don’t tell people I am putting them on pedestals. You can’t tell people that.

So a friend was criticizing another friend. She said, “She lets the internet think for her.” I asked for clarification. The other person asks for advice online and then follows it. A fair bit. I could feel the blush creeping up my neck.

I don’t go to the hospital for illness until I have checked with the internet and enough people tell me it is a good idea. I have a basic belief that I am not capable of evaluating my own health state. It’s not a good belief. So I let people on the internet (let’s not fucking kid ourselves I’m not saying these people know me well or have seen my illness state) listen to my list of symptoms and then decide if it is serious or not. I think the internet has a 50/50 rate of getting me to the doctor for major illnesses (bacterial infection, strep throat, mono) and times I’m told “It’s the flu. Go home and rest.” I’ll still listen to the internet because otherwise I wouldn’t care about myself enough to end my suffering when I am seriously ill. The misfires are probably worth it but I can’t bring myself to make the call alone. I just can’t.

Someone else has to think that my suffering is bad enough and has gone on long enough and that person has to tell me to stop the madness. Without that loop I sit here and cry and feel bad and just deal with it. The human condition involves a lot of pain. Don’t be a god damn whiner. Oh but I am a whiner. A big one.

This is something I talked to my therapist a lot about. I am very careful who I let be an influence on me. I’m well aware that the vast majority of people are poison for me. They will tell me that I am bad or wrong for things I can’t change. I am who I am. I don’t need more shame. I really don’t. I don’t hurt anyone. I’ve had a lot of life experiences that permanently taint me, that’s fine. I don’t hurt anyone (who hasn’t asked very nicely). Not even that, now. I will never hurt anyone again. I feel like I have been defanged. I will never again enjoy sadistic pleasure. It’s against the rules.

It’s really weird knowing that on one hand I am absolutely depraved and sick and blah blah blah and on the other hand I’m this really quiet, mellow little suburban mom. Whose advice is relevant to me? How do I pick people to give me advice on different topics?

The older I get and the longer I stay in one place the more I can judge people based on what they do rather than what they say. That has certainly changed the hierarchy of my internal advice pedestal. I pick very carefully who is behaving in ways I want to emulate. I am a copier. That’s what I do. I pattern myself off of people I respect. I do it in ways the people themselves often don’t recognize that way–but I’m just special that way.

I care about who can show up and get the hard shit done, year after year. Who goes through strife and then recovers and moves on? Who has actual coping skills? What are they? How do they work? How did they develop their expertise in a topic? Why should I respect them?

I’m really harsh in my evaluations. If you ever want to know how I evaluate you go ahead and ask. I’ll tell you. I don’t see any point in hiding it or sugar coating it. I’ll tell you the good, the bad, and the ugly about what I see. Only there is this little manipulation hiding in that–the people I have a problem with probably aren’t reading my journal. Ha.

Many of the women I know view their endurance in a shameful light. They do not take pride in their ability to endure. They are in a crappy relationship and they don’t leave so they view that as a sign of their generic weakness. Life is really complicated. Sometimes those crappy relationships are the bedrock of a whole town. If you take away that one relationship it seems like everything else will crumble. You will have to go build a new town. That’s hard. If you haven’t done a lot of big life transitions such a change is terrifying. Noah had better not turn into a shitty husband in ten or fifteen years because I will probably be too chicken to leave him at that point. I will have invested too much of myself in him. I don’t want to leave the parts of me I gave him. I get it.

Up to now leaving has been so easy. I couldn’t understand why people stayed. For me the devil you don’t know is pretty much always safer than the devil you know so jump ship often. You’ll end up in this magical tidal surge that will take you to the right deserted island in the Bahamas. It’ll work out.

I am so harsh in defending myself that I don’t think people understand that I think they are better than me. I’m defending my pitiful right to be less than you. I tell myself often that people disliking me is not a reason to die. Their opinion is not important enough. It’s hard to believe that my right to exist trumps other peoples right to not be bothered by disgusting people like me. These days it seems to me that I only have the ghost of disgusting behavior lying around the house and I should still be sacrificed. It’s for the good of the whole. People who are bad or unruly should be culled for the sake of the herd. One bad apple can spoil a bunch.

I sit here in isolation and think about the threads in my life. The people who touch me at least occasionally. I think about why I know them. I consciously decide over and over if I want to keep knowing them or if I want to just stop making the effort. Not very many people make a lot of effort to keep in contact with me. That’s part of what makes you so unique, D. You have called me every few months for more than ten years no matter where you were in the world. I feel so very special. You want to know what is happening in my life. Even though you drive me nuts sometimes and I can barely understand you because you talk so fast I feel like my life would be empty and sad without you. I wouldn’t have this mirror floating around in the world carrying a positive image of me. Btw- get off the internet and go finish your damn paper.

A lot of people have come and gone in my life. I have to consciously try to not have attachment to people staying. That is how I can end relationships. I know that if I stop trying the other person won’t put effort into it until they want something from me. Sometimes it is years before they look up and around and realize I’m not nearby any more. It is interesting when people still have attachment to me and I have psychologically let them go.

There is a concept called the Monkey Sphere (maybe I’ll add a link when internet comes back on. If I forget you can google it yourself). Basically this theory is that you can only have intimate relationships with ‘x’ number of people and you can only have more distant friend relationships with ‘y’ people and you can only know so many ‘z’ people casually out in the community. As you get higher in the alphabet the numbers generally get higher. People become less of an individual investment.

I consciously think about the inner circle very hard. Who can I allow to be an actual influence on me? It’s a very loaded self-conversation. I think about how much I have hurt people and how much they put up with. I think about how much they have hurt me and how much I can put up with. I think about whether or not this person behaves in a way that will make me safe. Someone can’t be in the inner circle if they will hurt me. I mean, a little bit of occasional hurt is different. Noah isn’t perfect. Neither are my kids. I do have to keep score and be honest about it in my head. If someone develops a long-term pattern of hurting me I can’t ignore that. It would be stupid. It would be self-harming. It would be deciding that this other person is simply more important than my continued safety and health. Err, not a good decision.

People can be part of my distant community and do things that hurt me. That happens. It’s life. You ignore it and move on. That person doesn’t have a lot of influence. The hurt is small and contained.

The inner circle just has too much access. Too much influence. When I notice a bleed out starting I’m better off severing the limb. I have no other options for keeping myself safe. That’s how it feels.

It’s hard for me to decide I am a good person given how callous and self-centered I am. But then I look around the rest of the world and I notice that I’m really not so bad in the scale of things. It is hard for me to be able to feel good about myself while people in the inner circle disapprove of me. Often I decide that it is easier to cut them out of the circle than try to reconcile the situation. I don’t need people who are going to tell me I am bad. What are they basing it on? How much time have they spent with me in person watching my actual behavior? How the fuck do they know?! Because they interpret things from my journal where I focus the vast majority of my writing energy on things I think that are negative and I don’t write about my behavior all that much. Right. Yeah. Don’t need that.

I’m well aware that even my bad days are significantly better than most of the good days I had growing up. I’m doing well at this point in my life. I really am. My behavior is pretty good. Sure I talk about conversational topics that make other people uncomfortable, but that’s not a big sin as things go. I’m not hurting anyone.

I’m not allowing people to pretend that people like me don’t exist. Even though they want to. Even though people would really prefer I shut up and follow the herd. Watch tv. Talk about movies. That’s what I should talk about. Hell, even if I wanted to get back into the academia shit and talk about books that would be ok as long as I only read authors that are approved parts of the Canon. Right?

I’m not like other people. I don’t know why. I don’t understand all of the differences. But I feel a deep hostility towards people who want me to be more like them. It’s kind of funny. I pattern off of people all the time but I pick specific small parts of their behavior. I am not interested in having someone else’s life. I want my life. I may think that someone is better at _____ than me but I can also hand you a long list of ways the person does ______, ____, and ________ worse than me. I’m alright(sic), Jack.

I really like my relationship with Shanna. I’m allowed to be direct with her in ways I’m not allowed to be with anyone else (until Calli can talk more). Why did I want to be a parent? Because I believe that I have a view of the world that does not deserve to be eradicated. Because in the core of my self-serving soul I believe that who and what I am deserves to continue on after I die.

In cutting off my family I am actually showing the things my mom did right. My mother taught me to be strong. My mother taught me that not a god damn person in the world was going to make sure I was safe except for me. That has been an incredibly useful lesson. Is it possible to teach that lesson without damaging someone? I don’t know. I want to find out. In no other relationship in my life do I get to set terms from the beginning. It’s a compromise. I get to just exist in front of my kids and they can’t tell me to change. It’s… startling.

I could abuse the fuck out of them and teach them that the world is hurtful and violent. But I don’t. I teach them how to notice other people. I teach them how to be considerate and polite. I teach them how to ask for things in a way that will make it more likely they will get it. I’m trying to teach the difference between persistance and pestering.

I can go out and interact with the world and seem totally appropriate. I can keep things hidden and just be sunny and delightful and friendly. People don’t know a fucking thing is going on with me. They weren’t able to see the scars I hid. I am a fucking good liar.

I want my kids to have the choice about how people perceive them. I want them to have my versatility without the underlying damage. I’m not sure if it is possible. I don’t want to control what their variations look like, precisely. And I am very well aware that I only get about ten years of setting the terms. Then I have to start handing over control at a quicker and quicker rate. That’s how they become independent.

I don’t beat my kids because I don’t believe in my heart of hearts that what I am asking of them is always reasonable and appropriate. I know that I ask for things they can’t do. It would not be ok for me to beat them for their lack of development. I think that happens more than people want to admit. It truly is my responsibility to put a lock on the side gate so my kids can’t sneak out and play in the front yard unsupervised. Beating them for disobeying won’t help. They will still want to sneak out. They will just try harder to hide it from me. I don’t want them hiding it from me. I want to control the environment and make it safe for where they are now and gradually pull back.

Calli can’t even speak yet. There is no way she should be in the front without adult supervision. A lot of Shanna’s limits are group imposed and we talk about that. I can’t consider individual safety yet because they aren’t ready to do much separate yet. Shanna gets to run five houses down to see her friend. That is the limit of her independent solo movement. She is resentful. I repeat, “I get to make these decisions until you are older. Then I don’t get to control you. Sorry, kid.”

Even though yesterday morning started off rough emotionally I had a good day. I sat on the couch and read. I don’t feel good. Shanna went to her friend’s house and Calli napped on me. It was restful and silent. Oh that was nice. Even when they were both home they seemed to trade off who wanted to interact with me so the day was paced well.

If I think hard about the words I used and my tone it was a pretty good day. My only nasty carping was at Noah about the topic of leftovers. I’m really grateful that he puts up with me. (The kids won’t eat leftovers for lunch and Noah gets food at work. I end up eating the same damn thing over and over and sometimes it makes me cry.) Batch cooking just isn’t for me.

Abrupt topic shift (like you aren’t used to that by now): Sometimes I think it is weird that the sex I have now isn’t much like the sex I trained for. When I was nineteen a sanctimonious bitch told me that no one under twenty-five should be in the bdsm community. People should go explore vanilla sex till their thirties and then start on rougher sex. I was, understandably, unimpressed with her. When I was nineteen I had been having PIV sex for seven years by choice and I had countless oral sex partners. Telling me that I wasn’t ready and I should have more sex was hilarious. Now that I am thirty I am slightly less annoyed with her and I can basically understand why she believes that. I still think she was a sanctimonious bitch and I am still unimpressed by her.

And now the kids are in here.

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.

Working is fun.

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I don’t know what I was thinking. How did I think I would get through over-night without Noah and the kids yesterday? Ha. I came home for bed-time. I called and told Noah to let the kids stay up a bit late and wait for me. When I got home I felt better.

I crawled into the lower bunk between Shanna and Calli. I cuddled both of them. Shanna rapid-fire told me all about her day. I wanted to know. I wanted to know about every second I missed. I was sorry that I missed them. I was sorry she got hurt yesterday and I wasn’t there to kiss it. She survived, of course. Kids get hurt. It’s ok. It sounds like she figured out most of the “class” parts of ballet. No more telling the teacher no one else was present. Ha.

I spent the day working in a coffee shop. That’s tiring work. I worked from the minute I arrived until I left. I took one ten minute break. I was in the shop for seven hours. Then I left to find food because I was starting to feel mean. I can understand why people in the community tell me that they don’t come in because they don’t like the food selection. We don’t have filling food. We have snack food. Hm. And I don’t want to take food from the shop because we need to make money and I’m too stubborn to pay for my food there after working that hard all day. Complicated. Luckily my share of the tip money (which I didn’t expect to get–that was kind) covered dinner. Woo.

At the shop I am working with Noah’s former partner. The one he was dating when he and I originally met. It was quite smooth. She has a very cheerful professional “face”. If she has a problem with me it was totally absent from her training me for the job. I wouldn’t say I felt comfortable but there is no way that I can say that any discomfort I felt was her fault. I was really impressed with watching her as an employee. That woman works like a demon. She takes pride in where she works. (Not this whole Gay Pride weekend stuff.) If something needs to be done she up and does it. She doesn’t wait for anyone else. She certainly doesn’t wait to be told what to do. I’m quite glad the coffee shop has her. I doubt we would have made it this far this year without people who just up and do things like she does.

It was kind of funny. When I got there an employee I don’t know was the only one working. I introduced myself as one of the owners and asked what work needed to be done. She gave me tasks and it worked out. She kind of fished around for how I got involved. I told her I met R many years ago at Shibaricon and then I ran TNG4 with him. D and I knew one another in junior college–we met when I was sixteen. She expressed surprise. Oh! Then you do know these people. Because she has never seen me around it is hard to understand that I existed all that time. Ha.

I like talismans. I like fetishes (in the traditional sense not in the modern “kinky” version). “An inanimate object worshiped for its supposed magical powers or because it is considered to be inhabited by a spirit” Like that. Noah and I do not have a formal all-the-time d/s or m/s relationship. We play with power exchange occasionally but it isn’t a formal all the time part of our life. This means that I have strong feelings about collars.

In the bdsm world that I grew up in there are signals. Signs that help people understand how to relate to one another. Different collars are used in different ways. The thing is, this varies by person. I have seen patterns emerge but there are always people who break the pattern. Nevertheless I observe trends. I have given away most of the collars I shared with Tom. He wished that I gave them back so he could reuse them. I said hell would freeze over first. You are a rich guy. Fucking replace it if you care so much. No you may not use my god damn collars on your long-line of women. Just no. Anonymous people with little-to-no-connection can have them with pleasure. Enjoy them. I still have some collars we shared. I don’t think I will ever have them around my neck again.

When I am going out to a bdsm event and I do not want to be hit on I have to think about signaling. I have a Big Shiny Wedding Ring quite on purpose but in the poly world it doesn’t matter much. In the bdsm world many people are at least open to playing with many people even if they won’t have sex with them. If you represent yourself as property then you aren’t approached as much. People have to feel really fucking confident that it’s ok before they ask to play. And they don’t do things that are pushing my boundaries because they want to respect my partner. It’s hilarious. People don’t seem to care if they offend me but if I look like property they want to not offend my owner. Fuck all y’all.

So I wore a shiny padlock on my sternum. It’s a very simple, old fashioned sort of collar. Dog choke chains make a statement. It’s been a long time since I have gone out in public making this sort of statement. I notice that I have a different kind of wariness now. I assume I am invisible now. I feel like I have learned better camouflage as prey. I no longer feel hunted a large percentage of the time. The space I take up in the world has changed.

I have spent a lot of my life moving from place to place. I always meet people easily. Looking friendly and approachable was part of how I had friends at all. People see me from across the room and come over to say, “You look like a good person to talk to.” I can generally talk to just about anyone. I am quick with words. Part of this was because I was in the habit of scoping every room I was in for people to have sex with. It makes you look friendly. Seriously. You smile a lot. I don’t do it any more. I can feel my facial expression. I always look harried an frustrated. Ha. Harried and frustrated looks like it might bite your head off, not give you a pleasant chat.

I spend my life in a very small and secluded sphere. I live in my role of “mom” for the vast majority of my time. Even given how much time I spend on that role I give it a disproportionate amount of energy compared to any and every other thing I have done. I am no longer hunting. It’s quite simple, really. I am not looking for lovers but I’m also not looking for friends. I have a full roster right now and I don’t even feel the need to particularly seek out new acquaintances. People will wander into and out of places I am standing. I don’t feel the need to chase them any more. I don’t need to fill up idle hours of my life. I’d give anything to have more idle hours. Oy.

I have no interest in modeling m/s or d/s while my kids are little. I want them to see a partnership. I want them to think that women are bad ass, not obedient. I want my kids to see an actual long term partnership. Staying together is important to me. People get distracted and unhappy with one another and they turn to other relationships to keep things interesting. I want my kids to think that their parents find one another interesting. I want to spend a lot of time with Noah. I like him. Being near him and talking to him makes me feel far better than I have felt at any point in my life. There is no other person on this planet who is as willing to put a mountain of time and energy into me. I am special to him. If he took that energy and gave it to someone else I would know. It would be an active withdrawal. There is a limited amount of time and energy in this life. I have something really special. I want to nurture it, not ignore it.

I have learned a lot about being gentle from being with Noah. He is the only big-tough-guy I have ever dealt with who will actively tell me I am hurting him. He’s both extremely picky and not picky at all–meaning that he chooses when to talk about when he is feeling. He can endure things stoically like the next big-tough-guy. He just doesn’t do that with me. He thinks I shouldn’t hurt him. He doesn’t want to be hurt by me. So he tells me when and how I hurt him so that I can lean to do better. Mostly we don’t hurt each other any more. It’s rare to have a slip. I don’t even lick his nose.

I feel really glad that I get to model the relationship I have with Noah. Some day we will do more with other power structures because we want to. I really like that it will happen after many years of earning careful trust. In the modern USA “slavery” is kind of an ephemeral concept. It’s not real. It’s not binding. It’s a choice to have a conscious power structure with someone else. It’s just a consciously and specifically chosen relationship style. There are a lot of Father Is In Charge mentality left in this country, I’m not sure why people are surprised that people want to formalize this. The language is charged, yes.

Right now I am using all of the caring-for-other-people energy I have for my children. They will not always need it and some day it will be unhealthy for me to pour this much energy into them all the time. I will still have this energy. I had this before I had kids. Noah spends a lot of time massaging me. He went to massage school as part of his learn-to-pick-up-chicks training. He really did go to school for how to be a better partner for me. I win. He also did hypnotherapy training. I’m totally going to be able to make him sound like a freakishly good fit when I write about him. I’m thinking about dialogue. I think I am hilarious. This will be a very different book to write.

I’m thinking very hard about what slavery meant to me. What did I do with Tom? How did that relationship fill my needs? I was under contract for two years. He ended that part of our relationship in a couples therapy session wherein the counselor told me that our problems were all my fault because I was asking too much of him by saying that he should follow the relationship rules of the contract we both signed. Needless to say, I felt quite good about myself at that point, right? That was when I started hounding him about kids. I was nearing the end of college. I had told him that I had no interest in getting married before I graduated from college. There was the strong implication that I wanted to get married after. He prevaricated for a while and pushed me to consider grad school.

I decided I had two paths for teaching. If I was going to do the get married and have kids thing I should teach K-12 something. If I am going to “be a grown up” forever and build my life around the bdsm scene I should teach college so that I can be out. I decided to start the masters program first. Either way I didn’t feel qualified to teach much yet. I felt like there was some magical level of smart I would feel at some point and then I would be qualified to teach. I would know enough about a topic that I felt comfortable saying, “Yes! I know this!” It’s ironic that I failed the final test after years of getting good grades and being told I was good at this–writing, that is. Oh well.

I asked Tom if we could open our relationship in December of 2003. I didn’t technically have sex with anyone till January. I think I knew from the first person that I was hunting. I started the masters program first but I started the teaching credential the next term. I moved out of living with Tom in October about six weeks after I broke up with him. I started the credential and broke up with him at the same time. He would never answer the marriage and kids thing. So I disengaged. I threw that energy out into the world. I went hunting. I started dating Noah in February.

It’s going to be really fun to write about Noah. Knowing how this story goes it means that I am having an interesting time figuring out how to approach tone. This is going to be so different to write. How do I represent my time as a slave? What did I tell Tom? What kind of relationship was that?

I want to wear a lock on my sternum while I am working at Wicked Grounds because I want to announce that I am protected. I am wanted. Someone has already found me. When I was part of those communities I was always hunting. Always willing to say yes. It changed how I talked to people. In the past I have had issues with men taking liberties. I want to discourage it. Signaling is complicated.

I have been raped at a public sex party. I’m aware that it happens. A coffee shop isn’t a sex party. But I have had people casually touch my breasts. I have had people grab my ass. These actions aren’t “rape” but I’m kind of a ticking time bomb. One of these times I am going to break something on someones body as a result of them grabbing me. And it will probably escalate from there and be “all my fault”, right? I’m scared. I don’t like that I am scared. It is very hard for me to be in places I think of as hunting territory when I am not hunting. I feel physically sick. I feel scared. I am going to bring any fetish of protection I have.

Slavery is a way of acknowledging that someone is that interested in me. Different people do slavery differently. I’ll write more about that later. It’s time to start getting ready. Today will be a long day. I need to bring a water bottle and specifically drain it every so often. I think I was dehydrated yesterday. I know I was hungry. I ran five miles yesterday morning before working on my feet for seven hours making food and washing dishes. I ate a bowl of oatmeal, a thin slice of quiche… and that wall before dinner. By which time I was starving and had a raging headache. I think I should take better care of my body today. Today is supposed to be a “cross training” day. I hope this counts. I hope it will be fun. I had fun yesterday. It was fucking awesome to get to talk to people with a counter between us so they couldn’t touch me. I have serious issues. Whatever. It worked. I felt safe. I felt like I was doing something and I had a place and a purpose. I was using some of my caring-for-other-people energy on that community. Twelve years is a long time. I’m not gone. I’m on sabbatical. I’m training for my next relationship. It will be very different to use more of that energy on Noah. I feel specifically spooked.

And I should go take a shower.

Passing

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I feel like I have been blessed at this point in my life. I have a wide variety of friends who tolerate my moods and writing about all kinds of hostile things. In person I generally behave myself. I have a hazy understanding of the fact that most people are guided by rules of behavior. I just don’t understand what they are, mostly, and when I do I actively want to do the opposite. Just because.

I’m told that I shouldn’t care what people think of me. I’m told that because Noah grew up one of those Gibbs’ in his town. The rich ones. He doesn’t have to care what people think. He has a fairly codified set of permissive behaviors that are tolerated from the rich geek. He knows how to behave. He knows when and how he has to care.

There is this unspoken set of behaviors that people follow. Mostly they have no idea what it means about them. If I follow the behaviors I was taught then it is patently obvious that I am still white trash. I curse regardless of who is around. Sometimes I dress in absolutely trashy clothes–to be fair I’m mostly eccentric and not “trashy” in my clothing style. I’m weirdly conservative. I have spent my entire life dodging the “you must have asked for it” line about being raped. I make sure no one can tell me it is my fault because of what I am wearing.

I have a carefully constrained life. The most important piece of my life right now is that I learn how to pass. I need to learn how to pass as a normal, stable member of the middle class. I need to learn how to not offend people. It’s harder than it seems. It’s easy for other people because they were taught to be unoffensive from when they were quite young. I was taught quite the opposite.

This weekend I spent time with a friend I have known for more than ten years. We met in a bdsm relationship class on protocols. It was a six week course on Dominant/submissive and Master/slave variations. It was more interesting than it sounds. What is protocol? I’m not going to steal the Lady Victoria’s class and tell you much about it. If you like such things, I recommend the extended classes. People find interesting things to say.

Anyway, I was hanging out with this friend. I met her early in the M/s portion of my relationship with Tom. I asked her if she was aware that I was depressed and cutting through my relationship with Tom. She said she had no idea. She is pretty sure no one knew.

I pass pretty well when I want to. But I don’t always pass as what I want to pass as.

I know how to be not-me. I’m not great at the fine tuning of what people really see. I have a nervous energy I get at parties. I giggle a lot. I’m scared shitless. I usually feel like I want to vomit on the floor. Being around more than two or three human beings triggers my hypervigilance and in my head I am rehearsing polite ways to deflect attention I don’t want and I’m praying for attention I do want. Long before I can try to get attention I have to decide the appropriate way to deflect unwanted interest. Or I get in trouble. My natural reflexes are not PC. When I am given truly unwanted attention my impulse is to be violent. I don’t hesitate. I have to defend myself and no one else will. Ever. Period. I live in a “polite” society, though. I am not allowed to be violent in defense of myself. I try hard to think of ways to “use my words”that won’t get me booted out. If there is a problem it will always be my fault. I’m sure that this guy who has raped other women (I hear the stories) could not possibly have done anything rude to me I am just over reacting. I’m the problem.

I know how to be not-me. I know how to pretend a certain level of passivity so that I can be tolerated on the fringe of society. I don’t know how to feel safe. I don’t know how to feel like I belong. I don’t know how to make friends with multiple people in a demographic. I tend to hold on to a few people from each community. I don’t know how to interact with large groups of people because I’m used to tailoring the things I say to one individual person. I can skirt the line of offensive more easily that way. When I’m around a group I feel petrified with fear because someone in the group is going to be an outlier in a different direction and someone will be snotty or aggressive or … something. Someone will behave in a way that I read as picking a fight. And I will have to walk away or bear the consequences. I can’t engage. I can’t respond at all. I will be the problem.

I don’t mean that I spend my life wanting to hit people. I mean that I don’t verbally spar with people. I shut up.

I have friends I can argue with. I have people I have known intimately I can argue with. Unless someone has been close to me at one time I am unlikely to take the chance of arguing with them. I don’t go looking for random arguments on the internet. If I bother to argue with you it is probably because I have years of pent up frustration I need to vent in your direction. You have been pissing me off for a very long time. Mostly I felt that I had to keep my mouth shut. At some point I will feel comfortable enough in the turf and I will fucking tell you how you have pissed me off. I can only do that with people who have shown a previous tolerance for me. It’s terrifying. I have to trust there will not be repercussions. I’m wrong, still. I go off on people and lose friendships.

I’m supposed to pass as a not-angry person. That is a mask if ever there was one. The same people who tell me to “be myself” are the people who tell me to not be angry. It’s a lie from the first breath. And I can’t point that out. And I can’t be angry about being lied to over and over.

There are a lot of things I have to pass as. I’m in the first truly stable period of my life. I have lived in this house longer than anywhere. I have to pretend I know what this feels like and I am comfortable here. I am so uncomfortable I am ready to crawl out of my skin. I want to move. I want to not have to feel scared when I leave the house. I don’t feel scared when I feel invisible. I feel so scared here because people have been seeing me around for a long time and they have expectations of me. I feel like I am going to let people down at any moment. Soon they will learn how very angry I am.

I feel very weird about the other ways I pass. I pass as straight. I am now in a monogamous relationship. We don’t have the time to be non-vanilla if we wanted it. Not really. I have to walk away from being the kind of freak I was.

Not everyone does. I can’t be part of an experiment to raise children in an “open” household. I can’t. I need more boundaries than that. I want my children to have a theoretical knowledge of my sex life. I don’t want them to see my sex life parading through the house. It’s different with their dad. We don’t flaunt our sex life. It isn’t obvious that I’m keeping him around for that. I do though. He’s great at sex.

I feel weird about the fact that I shouldn’t talk much about being queer. I certainly don’t tell the lesbian moms in the home schooling group that I’m queer. I don’t want to see rolled eyes. I have two options: I can shut the fuck up, or I can roll out my CV to prove I am the person I say I am.

It’s easier to pass.

It seems to me that queer is complicated. I can never take back the fact that I have had sex with a good thirty or forty women. I don’t know the number any more. Hard drive crash. But people don’t know that when they look at me. How could they? I have a much larger body count than most heterosexual men. How in the hell can I ever be not queer? But I don’t partner with women. I have too many issues with them. I have a hard time working things out with women. With a man I assume he won’t be able to figure anything emotional out so I’m ok with spelling things out in small, easy to digest words. With a woman I get incandescently angry that they are so stupid about figuring out my emotions and I just refuse to keep talking.

Women are scary in a way that men aren’t. My experience of the men I choose to get close to is that they are not passive aggressive. They are aggressive. They do it or they don’t do it. My experience of the women I get close to is that they are going to serve #1 first but they will actively lie to you and say that you are first, no really. When women speak I have this filter in my brain, “Are they lying to me” that I just don’t have in the same way with men. Men lie too, but generally about different things and in different ways. Men are easier to predict. Men feel less complicated. Women can smile at you and poison your drink. Women are like me. Women are terrifying. But hot. So there you go.

I loved Julia. I lived with her. I thought we could find a way to figure things out. She showed up one day out of the blue and said she was moving to Boston next week, uhhh bye.

I grew up in a house of women. Women aren’t going to do the bad things to you. They are just going to leave you. They are going to let you down when things are hard because they have been overstressed for a long time and they never told you and now they have to focus on themselves and you just aren’t important. My mom did that. My sister did that.

And I can’t be angry. Not if I want a shred of relationship left. Not if I don’t want to be alone. I’m telling you, though: I’m angry. I’m fucking angry. I have to pass as not angry. It will be a carefully constructed lie because I am no better than anyone else. Because I know that continuing to behave in my normal fashion won’t teach my kids how to have healthy relationships. I have to pass as someone who is capable of having normal, healthy relationships.

It’s hard. It’s a game I play every day. How to pass as a “normal” person. I’m not. Normal people didn’t go out and get a PhD in sex. I haven’t heard of very many things I haven’t tried. That was my hobby for the first twenty-five years of my life. It has been one of the largest parts of my identity. It decided my behavior. That is how I use identity. I decide what identity I want/need to have and then I align my behavior with it. I am not just Krissy. It’s all a game. Who and what I am varies dramatically in different situations.

I didn’t tell my dentist he was a fucking asshole when he told me that he wouldn’t recommend my book to people because it is too hard and people shouldn’t have to know about such things. Instead I just told him, “That attitude is why it happened. Because no one can bear to know I exist.” I hope he felt bad.

I have to pass. If I don’t then people don’t want to acknowledge that I exist. I have to have a presentable, tasty candy coated shell. I have to pretend to be good enough. I have to pretend to be of the class of the people I am talking to.

I’m god damn tired of being scolded because my manners are terrible. You have no idea. Go to hell.

Everything about the life I am choosing right now is a carefully constructed lie. See, I’m a good mom. I can play this role. I can be patient and kind. I can be tolerant and mellow. I can be careful what behavior I model. My children are not going to learn how to be a whore by watching me work. When I am in the mood to I can go pick up sex basically anywhere. There is usually someone willing if you know how to look. I’m trying to learn how to ignore those signals. I’m modeling the behavior that I believe a “good” woman would have. I’m a fucking fraud.

I don’t even make people buy me dinner before I fuck them and leave. I want to have physical contact, not intimacy. I don’t want my children to learn that. Not from me.

I think that my relationships with my children will be pretty much the most intense ones of my life. The most intimate. My mother treated me like an obnoxious burden. I don’t do that to my kids. My mom dumped me on people I didn’t know. My kids are getting to know a short list of people very well.

I will spend significantly more time with my children than anyone else. Far more time than Noah. Noah will take decades to catch up on time spent because he likes his alone time. I will have a good solid ten years of being with my kids before they start really trying hard to get away from me. I have to pass as a good mother.

What makes someone good or bad? I’m not sure. I’m told that you are bad if you do bad things. I’ve done a lot of very bad things. I guess that’s that.

After my experience with my girl friends a couple of weeks ago I remain convinced that I am not a dancer. If I am to be defined by my behavior I am not a dancer. I occasionally dance. I enjoy dancing. I’m not a dancer.

I am a mother. That will never be taken away from me. Nothing can change that. I think it is the most permanent part of my identity. Will I ever want to pass as not a mother? In order to act like a slut I would have to. I don’t want to. I want to have this permanent change in who and what I am. If it is possible to simply be another person I want to be. I want to figure out how to stop being bad. It’s not that I think that all people who have multiple partners are bad. The sex I like is the most high risk kinds there are. I just can’t model that to my kids. I can’t. I have to pass. I have to.

What does being queer mean then? How is that going to work in my life? Am I giving that up to? I was talking to a friend about passing this weekend. The Godmama. She said she doesn’t really think about being queer any more. It’s there but it’s not a conscious part of her life. I said, “You are trans and married to a woman. You don’t have to think about it to wear it on your face.” I am who those disgusting ministers point at when they say that you can get over being queer. I pass.

I tell my children that they grow up to love men or women or men and women. I tell them that the most important part of relationships is that you respect your partner and can trust them. Some day my kids will figure out that I know some really weird people. It’s probably going to take them a while. To them this will be normal.

Why do I want to consciously construct a heterosexual monogamous life and model that? It’s not the norm. Not really. Look at history. I want to model picking a life and really doing it. I want to not be distracted by all the could-be’s in life. I want to be creating something with a person. Noah and I have a lot of joint goals. We are building something together. It happens that he is a guy. It was a lot more convenient for that “having kids” thing I wanted. No woman ever wanted me the way Noah wanted me. That’s why I picked Noah. Not because I don’t like women. Not because I’m not attracted to them. No one ever wanted to take on the project that is my mental health. I don’t blame them.

My teenagers will understand that non-monogamy is a common, perfectly reasonable path that I do not choose. They will hear which people we know are doing it well (Grandpa J) and which people are not doing it well (name redacted). We will talk a lot about ethics. Heck, we already do.

Am I trying to pass as not depressed? Yes. I don’t want them to learn the physical behaviors of depression. I don’t want them modeled. I want my kids to grow up around productive people. It’s ridiculously important to me. It doesn’t matter how I feel. I have a place in my head that allows me to go through the rote motions of life. I may not be cheerful but I consciously work on maintaining a neutral facial expression and I god damn do everything I am supposed to do. I make food. I do chores. We go to the park on park day. I have a role to fill. It doesn’t matter how I feel. I can pass. I can do this.

Sometimes when I sit and think about what hard things I have done I feel confused. Like those must be the acts of a different person. Doing those things would make someone strong. I feel so weak. I’m trying to get stronger every day. I have to. Even if I have no interest. I have amazing willpower. My willpower seems to be inhuman. I have tremendously more control than I let on. That’s part of the game. That’s part of passing. You have to fake it until you can make it.

I have a picture of Jenny and her mom in my garage. I think about them and their relationship a lot. I try to puzzle out the has been from the should have been. I haven’t been able to stand near very many mother-daughter relationships. I don’t understand them very well. Jenny doesn’t have overly close relationship with her mother for a variety of reasons. I think about the lessons to be learned from the choices her mother made. Jenny’s mom was nicer to me than any other mother of a friend when I was a kid. It’s complicated in my head to set that aside and think of her from other perspectives.

When I’m trying to create this person in my head, the person I am supposed to “pass” as I think hard about my role models. I try hard to think through the long-term consequences of their behavior. I don’t want to adopt other broken models. That’s not useful. I feel scared. When I look around my life I see that most of the people who want to know me are people who also come from problematic back grounds. People would rush to say, “Not like yours!” but whatever. No, incest is not rampant among my friends group. But people who tolerate me probably had an emotionally unstable parent or close relative so they have coping skills. That’s kind of not great.

I feel afraid because I feel like I am trying to create a person who genuinely could not exist even under the best of circumstances. I know a handful of people who came from stable, happy, affectionate, appropriate families. They are oddballs. They know it. They are nearly mythical. At least in my head. I’m not trying to be Mary Poppins.

We live in a strange time. Through most of history people basically grew up to do what their parents did. Sure there were transition times when people left farms and came to cities, but then the family found a trade in the city. Mostly people did what their parents did. What kind of person do I want my children to grow up with?

On the subject of body wind: Noah tells me that farting is one of those things that tells you which class someone really is. Rich people ignore bodily functions. Middle class people apologize for them. Poor people laugh. I go back and forth between ignoring them and giggling. I feel anger over the idea of apologizing for them.

I am expected to follow all these stupid made up rules. They have no basis. They are regional. They don’t matter. That’s what you are supposed to do in “polite” society. How in the fuck am I supposed to teach this shit to my kids? My goal is to take them out of the country at formative ages so they understand exactly how irrational and arbitrary these rules are. But I don’t want them to feel the same anger I feel.

I don’t want my children growing up with the idea that getting angry all the time is normal and natural. That’s really hard on your body. It causes long term stress for the rest of your life. So I have to model not being angry. This is not a good cycle for me.

It’s ironic that I had two girls. It means I have to work on my emotional intimacy issues with females. Festive. When Shanna gives me a nasty look I respond with surprise. I say, “Oh gosh! Am I looking at you like that?” Then I rub my forehead to get rid of the deep lines of scowl and I repeat whatever I had said to her previously. I explain that I wasn’t feeling angry but I was thinking hard. She generally smiles and repeats whatever it is she is on about in a more friendly way.

I’m going to have a hard time with the homeschooling group. I don’t really like how often the topic is, “Obviously we love our kids more than working mothers.” I’m not yet in a position where I can sit and argue with people. I keep my mouth shut and my eyes on the ground. It’s horse shit. It’s self-serving dogma. You can’t measure love. You don’t take care of your kids a certain number of hours per day and compare it to a chart to see how much you love your kids. Not all mothers want to subsume their complete identity into parenting. Some people might call that healthy.

Not all homeschooling mothers subsume their entire identity into their children either. But they give up a much larger chunk. Either that or they drag their kids along into their identity. Is there or is there not a barrier between your children being full members of your life? For me there just isn’t a lot left they can’t be part of. I go to adult-only events sometimes but it’s rare. I have a lock on my bedroom door so that I can have a sex life. I write behind a closed door. I don’t smoke near them. That is all I do away from them. They are part of the whole rest of my life. I really enjoy the company. I really enjoy feeling seen all the time. I enjoy the fact that what I do with every minute of my day matters because I am going to be accountable to this person for the rest of my life for my behavior. This relationship is the opposite of temporary. This is the the most intensity I will ever have in my life. I want to really experience that. I want to drown in it. I want to find out what it is like to really and truly be responsible for another human being at all times. Yes, working parents are still responsible for their kids, but they delegate a lot of the day-to-day supervision. The ultimate responsibility is still there. Just wait till your kid steals a car. Ha. I did that.

I am integrating my children into my life. I am creating a life that is fully appropriate for them. Who do I want to be? What kind of person are my children likely to respect and trust as they grow up? What do I have to do to pass as respect-worthy and trust-worthy?

This is so hard. I was not taught to be this person. I am a judgmental bitch and I will say that I did not grow up around people with a strong work ethic. Most of my family survives on welfare of some kind. There is no impetus for working to better your life. You just have to learn how to hussel to fill in the cracks. Declare bankruptcy every so often. Let other people support you. Don’t pay your rent and get angry when your (relative) landlord tells you that you have to move because they need to make enough money to pay the mortgage. You are owed a living, aren’t you?

I grew up angry poor. The kind of poor that is surrounded by beauty and wealth which only emphasizes how terrible it is. My Uncle Bob and Auntie live down in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It’s beautiful. When you spend most of your childhood surrounded by the California Redwoods you travel and think, “I can see that they have nice bushes but where are the trees?” It’s a very wealthy area. Our neighborhood slowly gentrified during my lifetime. When my relatives bought in it was the cheap and cruddy area. The poor people lived there because it was what they could afford. The original mortgage more than forty years ago was $40,000. Last I heard the mortgage was several thousand a month and Auntie had to work full time to pay it. She was in her seventies.

Our house was the unsightly dump at the end of the road. Lots of cars on blocks. You know those big metal storage PODS people use? There were a few there as permanent instillations. Several big ramshackle barns on the property. It was a serious health hazard. Uncle Bob was a serious hoarder. He spent money like it grew on trees and never got rid of anything. So he could never find anything in he mess and would go buy new over and over. He was so bitter about not having… something. I never knew what.

I went to Los Gatos High School and I was on the free lunch program. There weren’t many of us. When I went to Lakeside, up in the mountains, it was different. There were always a few other poor, problem kids. A lot of fucked up people go hide in the mountains. Which isn’t to say that everyone in the mountains is fucked up. Anyway.

I wasn’t allowed into the nice homes. I was only invited to play with the other kids who had alcoholic parents. The other girls who watched their parents have sex. I had Brittney. That was it for a stable friendship in my life. Every family has issues, even Brittney’s family. I learned some bad things there as well. Mostly lying.

What do I want to teach my kids? How do I need to pass out there in the scary world? I would be less scared if the consequences mattered less. How do I not fail my children? How do I not teach them to grow up and act like they have an alcoholic parent? This is hard.

I feel like they shouldn’t have to deal with the fact that I am an angry person. Full stop. I’m not angry at them or about them so it isn’t their problem. I don’t give other people the same leeway. I’m not sure why.

Shanna and Calli are unabashed in their need. They still truly need me in order to grow up whole and healthy. I have to be a positive force in their life. Someone who makes them feel good about being themselves. That’s my job. It’s a lot of pressure, meeting their needs all the time. It’s a lot of work. In many ways it is unsatisfying work because they feel like bottomless pits of need and I never make a dent. But that’s not true. They are very happy people. Life is going well for them. They don’t have unmet needs. Even though I feel like I can’t I can’t I can’t I am.

I think about how their needs are going to change. How I have to be the bad guy sometimes. I have to be the mean mom. That’s part of the deal. I have to set limits. If I don’t then you won’t learn how to deal with them in the world. Everyone has limits. People who tell you that you don’t have to worry about what other people think are mostly lying. I want my kids to make the conscious choice of which opinions to care about. I hope they will respect me enough to care about mine. I don’t take it as writ.

How do I need to act in order to be someone they can respect? That feels like a lot of pressure. How do I need to change? How do I need to pass?

Parenting journey

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Life transitions are journeys. You don’t necessarily understand how long of a journey when you start them. I knew I was pregnant with Shanna when I walked into a sushi restaurant and nearly vomited on the lobby floor. Lavender hand soap was awful. Normally I quite like it. I have had multiple people tell me that my pregnancy was the most miserable they have ever seen. I lost eighteen pounds in the first five months. I could barely eat. My body ate itself. I sucked fat in from all of my extremities. My belly was enormous. My face hollowed out. I finally lost my baby fat. I have noticeable cheekbones. I look far more intense and older.

I regained the eighteen and added twenty two more in the last four months. I discovered acupuncture and like a miracle my nausea disappeared. I was starving. But I couldn’t handle cooking anything. If I cooked something that took longer than about five minutes my sense of smell would become overwhelmed and I wouldn’t be able to eat the meal I had been cooking. It made me vomit. I couldn’t keep it down. We ate out a lot.

I quit my job in the middle of the year at the semester break in January even though I wasn’t due till the end of May. My vice principal did not want to replace me for a whole semester. I feel really bad about the kids I left. My replacement was uhm… not good. My classes were front loaded with the most hostile to authority kids in the school. Because they will work with me in a way they won’t work with authoritarian people.

I was a good teacher partially because of the ridiculous boundaries I had with them. They did not get to know things about my personal life. I was not a peer. I am not your friend. I am your teacher. But I believe that in order to teach people you have to understand them. You have to know what kinds of things will motivate your individual learner.

Thus I had 8th Period Social Club. Otherwise known as academic detention. Anyone with a grade below a C had to come sit in my classroom for an hour after school every day. I talked to them. I got to know them. They had to make up the work and I sat there and talked to them about why they weren’t doing it in the first place. I learned what was happening in their lives.

I asked one of my favorite former students what I taught him. He said I taught him to like himself. I’m really glad. I met him in a period where he was officially Emo and very depressed and I loved him and bullied him and encouraged him and made him live up to really high expectations. I taught him in my first year. The one period I was paid to teach. I gave that class I lot of attention. Two of the kids wanted to be my aides the next year. He was one of them. He came back after he graduated and he did 75% of the physical labor to move me out of my classroom when I was pregnant. It would have been really hard. It would have made me cry and puke a few times. I had a lot of stuff on the walls. He just showed up. He had already graduated. He knew I was leaving because he dropped by every so often just to chat. I was a major support figure for him during a crucial period.

He is the most intense one. I had many others to slightly lesser degrees. My former students still talk to me. I think that is why I don’t like working with really little children. I can’t handle feeling like I will be forgotten. If I am only going to have one year of contact, I want it to be when they will really take the lessons to heart. I want them at the height of teenage angst and then I feel like it will help.

I’m struggling like mad with this young child thing. I’m realizing that these kids will bloody remember me. I have spent upwards of 75% of the entire hours of their lives with them. I am not away from them very often. Every memory will contain me.

One of these days I will think they are old enough and I will start being less super nice at all times. When it is developmentally appropriate for me to think they should bloody well be acting like civilized human beings I will stop tolerating a lot of shit. For now I’m biting my tongue and I’m trying to let them explore the world. I talk to them about why it isn’t polite to do things in different circumstances but I’m not punishing or acting angry at this time.

It’s weird to explain how arbitrary a lot of etiquette stuff is. It’s also interesting how much is about not soiling the laundry. In order to have real grace at eating you have to take your time and practice in a way that few people do. I grew up wiping my hands on the table cloth. Noah and other people keep yelling at Shanna for doing it. I don’t yell at Shanna for doing it but I tell her that when we visit a restaurant or someone else’s house people will think she is gross if she does that. And I wipe my hands on the table cloth.

I want to keep going but Noah has to go to work.

anxiety purge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Learning and shame

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Therapy was unusual last night in some awesome ways. I showed up half an hour early because I wasn’t sure about public transit to the new location and the appointment before me cancelled so she was just sitting around. We could have started early but instead she decided to pick my brain. She moonlights as a guidance counselor at a middle school. The school is more than 60% black and over 30% latino. They have some problems. I don’t think I can explain how good it felt to talk to her about how to handle these children. She is the “emergency” therapist who sees the kids who are in serious crisis Right Now. I had a lot to say. It was interesting how the end of the conversation was quite sad. We had to plainly discuss the fact that there ARE things that can be done for these kids, but how much time and energy do you have? What are the things that you can really sustain doing? It’s hard to evaluate. She took notes on the things I said. I felt so respected. She told me that she is going to strongly consider how she can get me up there to talk to her really at risk kids. She thinks it will be good for them to hear a white person with my history because they don’t believe a white person can understand. I used the fuck out of that misperception when I was teaching. You can’t buy tools as handy as that.

I told her about what an asshole I am being to a friend who is having issues with the public education system. I told her I don’t understand why I still have friends. This directly linked into a lot of my attitudes about education and child rearing which ties into a lot of my feelings about having less worth in society because my earning potential is really quite low. Being a stay at home mom is not a very respected position. Oh well.

We talked about my frustration and confusion that Americans don’t seem to be training their children to be adults. They prepare the kid for preschool so the kid can be prepared for kindergarden so the kid can be prepared for the lower grades, then middle school, then high school, then college, then graduate school, then a PhD program, then a postdoctoral… I suppose we should all be college professors? I suppose some people transition into working in industry. Many companies run a lot like schools. It’s odd. Outside of academia I have worked in food service. I worked in the library and the theatre in college. I have taught. Really those have been my jobs. I feed people and help them learn. I like it–mostly.

I feel a lot of uncertainty about the future. I’m sadly aware that many of the people who are alive and making decisions now care very little about the long-term consequences of what we are doing as a society. I feel like it is ridiculously important that my kids understand that we are animals that require food. What are all the steps involved in arranging for adequate, constant food. My children will probably never know food uncertainty. What can they learn and figure out about how to help other people have the same life experience? What problems are going to crop up in our food supply? I’m quite nervous about this. I want my children to be incredibly practical. One of the up-sides of doing all these home improvement projects by myself with the kids is they are seeing how to do these tasks. Very soon they will be learning how to do them.

I also think my children will need to know how to program. I suspect that will be a mandatory skill for people who want serious job prospects in the future. I want my children to have options. I want them to feel like they are prepared to take the world by storm when they are adults. I want them to know so many things that they feel completely competent to go learn whatever they need but don’t yet know. I want them to see themselves as strong and able to assimilate new information.

I struggle with learning a lot of things. I don’t have the best memory. I read extremely quickly and I can synthesize ideas quickly but I forget things. That’s kind of a problem. I hope my kids get Noah’s memory.

My therapist and I talked extensively about how I feel like the next fifteen years are a gift. I have always wanted to go learn things but I didn’t want to go alone. Soon I will be able to go to dance events with my kids. Soon I will be able to do martial arts classes with my kids. I already practice languages with my kids. I’m discovering that I remember more Spanish than I think. I’m not as incompetent as I assume. It’s nice. I have these wonderful companions to learn with.

Shanna and Calli don’t think I am lame for how little skill I have at gardening. I feel really pretty silly for the intensity of my emotions around gardening. I grew up with people who had no respect for farming as a career and as a result they tried hard to never touch anything growing. My family felt they “got off the farm” and they had no interest in looking back. My family hasn’t farmed in at least three generations on all sides. Why is there so much hostility? Such disdain? We don’t garden.

Only I’m going to have this house paid off in another decade or so and I’m going to be stuck looking out that back window for all the remaining years of my life. I’d like it to be pretty. I feel kind of vain and silly about that. I would like to look at a colorful, interesting yard. I want it so bad I ache with wanting. I want to feel like a stupid, incompetent, worthless person still gets to look at something nice because I have the physical ability to create it.

It’s always harder than I think. I forget to water. I don’t have good weeding technique. I would starve to death if I had to take care of a whole field in order to eat. I feel ashamed of that. I feel weirdly pathetic because I can’t figure out the physical motion that will allow me to do this work quickly. It’s hard. I don’t know what I can do without damaging the plants I want to keep. I’m trying things and experimenting. It’s a slow process.

When I can remove my idiotic self-deprecation from this thought process I find it really kind of wonderful that I am learning all of these things and talking them through with my kids. Calli is too young to really understand yet, but Shanna is picking things up. I am really moving at about the right speed for Shanna. I feel ponderously slow and incompetent. Really I’m just moving at four year old speed. If I went faster she would feel left out. I wouldn’t want to outpace my companion.

It’s a lot of how I think about running. How do you find a pace for running with other people? I worry about it. I have several upcoming opportunities for running with friends. Some who are far more experienced runners than me and at least one who runs less than me. I’m fucking thrilled by the idea of running with someone who runs less than me. I won’t feel like I am slowing her down. I won’t have to feel embarrassed when I need to walk. I’m scared of running with people who are honest to dawg athletes. Standing near them makes me feel like my low status in their world is blinking in neon over my head. LOSER WHO CAN BARELY RUN. Physical Education classes were never kind to me.

It was an odd experience to look around the park on Tuesday and realize that whereas the home school kids will have various “coaches” they won’t have a PE teacher. If they do that position will fall to me. What athletic activities do I think my kids should know how to do? I have to figure out how to teach them or arrange to have someone else teach them. I think I should buy a small soccer ball and bring it. I feel odd about that. I want them to love things I don’t love. I want them to have access to ideas and hobbies I am not actually into.

This was one thing that surprised my therapist last night: how focused I am on trying to figure out what I don’t know that I should be teaching my kids. I feel intense pressure to work constantly on dealing with the extent and damage of my ignorance. I feel crippled by the extent and volume of my ignorance. I am not trying to be a know-it-all. I’m trying to be an actual competent person. The problem is that I value an odd combination of competences. I am extremely specific in what I care about and I totally ignore things I don’t understand or see value in. That’s kind of a problem. I simply can’t limit my children due to my biases. I want them to be competent adults. I want to know in twenty-five years that I have loosed two extremely fucking competent women on the world and they are off building and learning things I can’t wrap my mind around. They took the genesis of information I gave them and went off to do things I can’t understand.

I like being a jill of all trades. I don’t really aspire to master many topics. I’m a generalist. I like and highly value generalists. But like many people like me I feel like my lack of mastery means I am low in status. I’m not the best at basically any task. I notice and have a hard time with that emotionally. I don’t do competitive things because I can’t handle the fact that I’m never fucking going to be first. Do you know what second place is? The first fucking loser. I cried watching people pass me during the half marathon. I’m an idiot.

I want my kids to either be such prolific generalists that they terrify people or able to become masters in something. Other than talking to abused kids, which really… I’m awesome at that, I don’t think I will attain mastery of any subjects in this lifetime. That really kind of bothers me. I’m trying to gain peace with the idea that I will never really take anything to eleven. I will never be the best. Not everyone gets to be. lame.

My wonderful daughter just wandered out to sit on my lap. Today we are going to the redwoods to cut down trees so I can build her a play house. I should really take pictures of this process. I have a vision in my head. I know what I am going to do. It’s going to be really neat. You’ll see. I’m good at taking pictures in my head and turning out a decent approximation. Heck, look at my daughters. This looks like my picture in my head of a family. We are kind to each other. Maybe I do have a reality distortion field.

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.

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.

You are good. You are smart. You are kind.

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Noah agreed to be married to me for better or worse. I think he might actually mean it. I think that even though I’ve been miserable and mean and sick for almost five years he shows a remarkable resiliency in cheer. All I have to do is have sex with him and he’s suddenly good to go again. It’s kind of weird. I don’t have quite the same system. I need so much support in so many areas and I am deeply ashamed of that need. I feel like my need is a sign that I am pathetic and lazy. I feel like I am a failure because I cannot completely do every thing in my life by myself. I’m a stay at home mom. I don’t have a job. All I have to do is keep the house clean, the kids fed and clothed, and at this stage… play with them. It’s not exactly hard. Right?

It’s really fucking hard because it takes so much patience. I am not a very patient person. I am a very demanding and exacting person. I don’t like delays at all. I spend most of my days wanting to bash my head through a wall as a pressure relief. Instead I take a deep breath, count down from ten silently, then I try to smile and say, “Let’s try again.” That’s my fucking job.

I have always been very clear about the fact hat I behave differently “at work” than I do “in my life”. In my life I do a lot of things I have to hide from my work. When I was teaching I was not particularly “out” about talking about my queerness or sexual history. I didn’t talk about going to raves and doing drugs on the weekends–although I did. I think that being in the closet about those things was wise. It meant that when kids started talking about things I understood the language but I wasn’t their “buddy” because I wasn’t an obvious peer. I’m not sure I am phrasing this right–I need to make my mistakes past-tense. I can’t talk about them while I’m doing them because then I get muddled up and unable to be honest about my mistakes. I know that I am doing stupid shit but I can’t admit it yet because I want to keep doing it for a while. I didn’t need to tell students I did that.

Noah came in to talk to me so whatever train of thought I had was gone. As Calli likes to say, “Whoops!” She also spreads her arms and yells, “Ta da!” I can’t wait until she can really talk. End sidebar.

And a new day dawns. I still don’t know exactly where I was going with that train of thought. I’m going to keep going instead of hitting post because I don’t get comments anyway. So what if things are long and complicated. I’m apparently just writing for me. And Noah. He talks to me about my writing. That feels like a manipulative ploy but I don’t mean it to be. People talk to me about my writing when I can get them in person. I’m not subtle in asking for feedback. I really like finding out what my writing makes people think about.

My wonderful complication was over for dinner recently and she told me that she thinks about me. It was said in the context of, “I’m glad it is ok that we don’t IM very frequently because you just know I think of you.” No, actually I didn’t know that you think about me. Wait. You think about me? Oh shit. What do you think?! When I get to that point I am trying to learn to reference something I got from Ashley Judd “ I hold that it is none of my business what people think of me.”

That’s hard for me to wrap my head around.

I was taught that it is my responsibility to influence and control what other people think of me. I should be careful what I reveal. I should tell different people different stories so that I evoke the right reactions from people. It’s a lot of why I do large information dumps on people and then run away. I believe in the core of my being that I am “doing it wrong” and I am bad for what I am doing. It is bad for me to be rude and inflict my inner stupidity on other people. No one wants to hear about how pathetic I am. No one wants to read the same whiny bullshit year after year. Grow the fuck up already. Stop being sad. But I can’t. I can’t stop. I wish I could stop. I don’t know how to stop being sad. I am sad. I just am. And while I am sad I have to make believe that I am happy and cheerful and that we live in basically a good world. That’s my job.

I need to have some place where I can say over and over again that I was hurt very badly and it still hurts. I would give anything to make this pain go away. I would give anything if I no longer needed to sit in a room by myself and cry every single day because I am so fucking sad. I cry and cry until I am dehydrated. I drink nearly a gallon of water a day. I shouldn’t be able to get dehydrated. But that pee doesn’t lie. (See, there I go with the tmi.)

It hurts. I miss my mom. I’m horrified every day because I look at Shanna and I think, “I was out having oral sex with multiple children already.” My mother didn’t keep me safe. I look at Shanna and wonder what I would be like if I had been allowed to be innocent. What would I want in life? How would I feel about the world? How would I be different? And it bothers me. It bothers me all the time.

I feel like I am a dirty, bad, mean piece of shit. I’m really glad that other people tell me, often, that they do not have that experience of me. I feel pathetic and stupid for needing to be told that. I’m told that you have to say ten nice things to balance out every bad statement to a person. That’s kind of the way it affects your sense of self.

I spent my whole childhood being told I was stupid and bad and a whore and little bitch and worthless. I’m thirty years old and I still sit alone in a room and cry about it. Because it still lives in me. I was told those things so many times that I agreed. I thought they were true. If fucking everyone tells you the same story how can you believe anything else? If it walks like a duck and it sounds like a duck and it swims like a duck? It’s probably a duck–right? If one person tells me to buy horse shoes I’m going to look at him funny. If two people tell me to buy horse shoes I’m going to think about it. If three people tell me to buy horse shoes I am going to get moving towards the store; I probably need them, right?

I spent my whole childhood being told I was stupid and bad and a whore and little bitch and worthless.

It still hurts. I’m not a fan of that old saying, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” I have healed from every broken bone I have had. My arms work fine. My hand works fine. I have been hit with sticks. I have been hit with stones. Those things heal. I can forget that kind of pain. It isn’t important. I believe I am a worthless piece of shit. I believe I am dirty and bad.

Noah gave me shampoo and conditioner for Christmas. This is kind of funny because I haven’t used such products in years. Since my hair is hella short I’ve been using them because it really doesn’t matter if my hair frizzes. I’m discovering something I had forgotten when I switched to baking soda and vinegar. It doesn’t matter how many times I “soap” my hair it always feels dirty to me. Dirty in that way that indicates “not washed”. I feel like there is no way to get the dirt and the bad off of me. It is a physical feeling. I remember my mother complaining about my hair. The only way my mother liked my hair was about an inch long so that she could ignore taking care of it. She was very resistant to me having long hair even though she complimented me on how I looked far more when I had long hair. Hair has such a weird place in my life. My mother was always thrilled when I wanted to play with her hair. Sissy loved to have her hair brushed. I don’t like having other people care for my hair because no one ever wants to be gentle enough. It hurts when other people touch my hair. My mom and sister liked it when I did their hair because I was more gentle than them. I was taught to touch my head and hair roughly. To treat it like something gross. Because I am dirty. When I switched to baking soda and vinegar I had a feeling of at peace with the feeling of my hair. It didn’t feel “clean” but it did feel soft. It’s interesting to use shampoo and conditioner again. My hair feels rough and dirty again. Specifically dirty. And I think it is making my dandruff worse. See, more tmi.

I feel stupid because I want to talk about how bad I feel about being an animal and having hair and being dirty. I need to talk about this because I don’t want to teach my daughter to feel this way. My brother is a stupid moron because he thinks the way to break behavior patterns is to not talk about them and pray they go away. Yeah. That doesn’t work. Not talking about things creates a festering wound because GUESS WHAT?! It is still a wound. It still hurts. Just not talking about it isn’t working.

I have to work very hard every day to decide what I want to teach my children because what I was taught was that I am bad, dirty, worthless, useless, and a whore. I know that I must be something else. I must be other than just what I was taught to be. Somehow I did that. How did I do it? Where did I do it? What should I do instead? I don’t know what to do. You can’t deal with a problematic behavior by just “not doing ‘x'” you have to replace ‘x’ with something. You have to have some idea of what you are moving towards. I don’t know. I don’t have very many good examples.

I don’t get to watch other parents very often. When I do I spend most of the time thinking, “Oh they do ________ better than me.” Of course this means that I offer criticisms. Because I’m like that. I expect that they are judging me so I start first. Just to get this going. I guess. I need to hear peoples criticisms of me. I suppose this is why I am asking people for feedback in person. I don’t need to hear the random criticism of people on the internet who don’t know me or what I actually do. When you only know me through my writing you are hearing a very random sampling of things from my brain. It’s a poor example of my life. That’s the joy of mental illness. I can be totally fucked up in my head but life just keeps plugging right along. I’m doing my best to be functional at my job and how that works is going to change over time. I’m trying to figure out the right way to act. I’m trying to figure out my idea of the best mother for my kids. It’s not exactly like me. I’m having a very hard time figuring out how it will interact with my sex life. We have a lock on our bedroom door.

I feel disgusting for needing sex. I am developing more of a complex as time goes by. Noah is, understandably, not thrilled. This is going to be hard to work through. For some strange reason he seems to be willing to go through this with me. I ask so much of him. Far more than I should ask. I know that it isn’t ok to need as much support as I need. That doesn’t change the fact that I need it. And he is willing to give it. He says. We’ll see. I’m so scared. I hurt so much. I need so much. I know I’m not supposed to talk about it. No. That’s not true. I’m supposed to talk about it one hour a week in a therapists office and then be all better. Right?

I hurt so much. I cry so much. I am so fucking sad. But my personal time is long over. Really I’m being kind of an asshole to Noah right now. I need to cry though. I have to. I can’t not cry today. And I don’t like doing it in front of the kids more than necessary. They will see enough sadness from me this lifetime.

Those wonderful kids

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Recently Shanna asked me why I am so grumpy. This was at a time when she had asked me fifteen times in five minutes if she could have a cookie with her snack. I laughed. I told her that I was far less grumpy than I used to be. I asked her why I sound grumpy. She told me that my tone of voice made her think I don’t love her. I stooped down to her level and grabbed her up in my arms. We sat on the floor and I said, “I have never been happy in my life the way I am happy now. Before you were born I was far more grumpy. I sound grumpy because I have a sharp tone of voice and it has nothing to do with how much I love you. I love you more than I love breathing. More than I love ice cream. I love you bigger than the whole sky. It’s annoying to be asked the same thing over and over and I do sound sharp when you do it. Please know that never for one second do I stop loving you.”

She smiled and then buried her face in my neck while she hugged me.

You know how I ranted about nursing Calli? I was going to wean early this time! She’s almost nineteen months and still nursing. I can’t cut her off. It’s just too mean. We nurse once most days but she sometimes pitifully asks for a second time and I can’t tell her no. Pretty much every nursing ends with deep teeth marks on my nipples and me saying ouch. She always gives me a kiss when I say ouch. She never did learn how to nurse very well. When people talk about how wonderfully bonding nursing is they don’t explain that it is bonding because it is horrible and you do it anyway. Horrible experiences that are shared are the most bonding kinds of experiences I know of. You have gone through something together. Yes, there is sweetness in cuddling up to your wonderful baby and having them lie still for a few minutes. Mostly nursing is bonding, for me, because there are these two people on the planet who are alive because I went through the discomfort and awful to keep them that way. I did that. I made you from scratch. Every piece of you started out inside my body. It was uncomfortable and crappy. Then you came out and caused me way the heck more pain. Then you latched on to one of the most sensitive parts of my body and hurt me more. For years. I let you because I love you so much. I let you because keeping you alive is far more important to me than any momentary discomfort. All of this pain is temporary. My relationship with them isn’t temporary.

I think they are worth suffering for. I think their needs are important enough to let my nipples be gnawed on daily for almost four years straight (so far) and counting. Because this precious time won’t last forever. Some day I won’t be able to actually satisfy their needs. Some day the things they need will be outside of this house and outside of me and there will be nothing I can do. I can do this. I can do this thing over and over even though it really isn’t my favorite. I can. I choose to partially just so that I can look back with absolute certainty for the rest of my life and know that for at least a short time in their lives I really and truly did meet all of their needs. I am good enough. I am enough. Maybe just for now and not for always, but I have done this thing.

Nursing is one of the hardest things I have done. It has been a daily invasion of my body for year upon year. I’m not good at that kind of thing. I did it anyway because the most important thing in the whole world to me is that I be a good mother. Is nursing “full term” really what defines a good mother versus a bad mother? Of course not. That’s silly.

I am going to walk a harder road than many other mothers. I am going to be insufficient in ways that other mothers will not be. Life is a balancing act. I will not be able to meet needs that other mothers meet with little or no effort. I will simply be unable to. But I can meet this need, even though it is hard for me. I can. I do.

I’m not resting my arms.

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I have so much going on in my head and I am alone a lot. If I don’t type then I just don’t express anything. My friend who was supposed to come over yesterday was sick so he cancelled. (Good! Take care of yourself!) That was going to be my first sit down and really talk to an adult other than Noah this month. Today another friend wants to come over but I don’t think she should because Noah, Shanna, and Calli are all pretty sick and she’s 29 weeks pregnant. Don’t come over and get sick.

So I released the book and then… sat at home. Alone. Thinking. I’m really grateful that a number of people have called or messaged me to tell me that they read the book. There are a few different pieces of this that I’m focusing on. First: it was readable, right? I’m kind of insecure about my writing style. I’m worried it is difficult to follow. I’m rather abrupt. Second: I really am curious which parts of the story bother people the most or stick with them. Third: I am curious what people think about their own lives as a result. I’ve had two conversations in particular where people used the book as a springboard to talk about a lot of stuff from their childhoods. I felt my heart soar. I made them think.

I had a good therapy session this week. I’m glad I got to go this week. We spent a lot of time talking about how becoming an adult involves a lot of shitty work no one wants to do. You are an adult once you learn the systems involved in surviving and you can do them without thinking or complaining. Because as long as you still don’t know what you are doing, you are a child. And if you are complaining? You still aren’t an adult. These things simply have to be done and complaining about them is pretty ridiculous. Who am I going to bitch at because I have to dust? Really?

We talked about how I have areas of my life where I have strong beliefs about what makes a good person and they make it kind of hard to actually be a good person. I give other people more slack than I give myself. I have these really strong beliefs because of the circumstances of my life. I would have different strong beliefs if I had different circumstances.

I have had a hard time learning the tasks of being a house wife. The repetitive nature is daunting. How do you actually get to the point of having a system? Of knowing how and when all these tasks should be done? Once upon a time girls were trained in how to do these things, I wasn’t. I just have to kind of guess. I am happier in a tidy house because then I spend less of my time hunting for things. Less time tripping and hurting myself. Less time breaking things because it is impossible to be careful in a mess. It’s not a moral judgment, exactly. I have a lot of anger built up around people being able to say, “Well I can’t find it so I don’t have to deal with it.”

Last night Noah tactfully didn’t point out that I want him to do more and more work while being cheerful. Maybe I shouldn’t be so fussy that I have to do more and more work while being cheerful. That’s what being a grown up means in this house. It means that there is a lot of work to be done, and you do it, and you need to be a pleasant person while you do it. None of this work is a personal affront. None of it qualifies as an indignity or imposition. At this point the house is really forking tidy. It’s not much work to keep clean.

I care a lot about tone and attitude. My kids are going to learn their entire approach to life from me. I am keeping them home from preschool and elementary school. I am teaching them what it means to be a mother and an adult and a citizen. I don’t want to teach them to stuff their feelings or hide their emotions and pretend to be happy. I want to model what it looks like to build a life where you are genuinely content. No, not everything is ever perfect. But I’ve picked my burdens in life, it seems like even a bit more so than most people. I really went out hunting for what I wanted. And I have it. It’s a good life.

My beautiful Shanna is on my lap right now. She is engaging and fun. She’s trying to talk me into letting her put the NaNoWriMo bumper sticker on the wall. I think I’m going to decline. She makes me smile. I have begun to notice that the lines on my face do not easily settle into smiling. That feels sad. I want to work on that. I have so much to smile about.

I grew up going between living in truly isolated circumstances and Auntie’s house. Auntie’s house was always busy. There were a lot of people coming and going. I miss people. I miss feeling like part of a hive. I live a very quiet life. I hang out with my kids and that is pretty much it. It’s hard figuring out what conversations are appropriate for Shanna.

Yesterday she asked me if my mother is dead. I told her no. She asked why we don’t see my mother. I told her I would explain more when she gets older. I don’t know how to have this conversation yet. My mother lives thirty minutes away and you can never see her because she will tell you that small stupid things are your fault because you deserve to suffer. I don’t want Shanna to grow up thinking she is bad or to blame for adult matters.

Part of the reason I am alone so much is because I allow other people to have inappropriate influence over me. I try and try and try to do what they want, long after it is bad for me to try. I’m not actually good at boundaries, no matter what I try to claim. I keep my boundaries by keeping my front door shut. I only have to worry about the people and things inside this house. I don’t have to bend to anyone else’s needs or whims.

One of my high school boyfriends told me yesterday that I was always good at boundaries. Ha. The reason I stopped talking to you was because I continued to feel like I had to have sex with you because you wanted to have sex and it’s not very nice to tell people they can’t have what they want.

Noah doesn’t really want to talk about monogamy anymore. He agreed to it under duress and he’ll do it, fine. But he doesn’t want to talk about it. I feel scared. I feel like at some point in my life someone is going to tell me that they want to and I won’t feel like I get to really say no. People like me don’t get to say no. I rehearse in my head, “I’m in a monogamous marriage. I don’t have sex with people any more.” I pray to god I never get in a situation where saying that is ignored. I’m afraid it will. I’m afraid to ever be in a situation where I might be vulnerable to someone asking. I’m so scared. Because I’m afraid that I will say no once and it will be ignored and I will do what I do and I’ll put my head down and shut up and try not to cry and just get through it. And afterwards I will talk about it like it was consensual and I deserve all the damage done. Because I do. Because I always deserve what I get, right?

I’m afraid that part of the reason I stay home so much is because I can’t control what happens to me when I leave home. Bad things happen and there is nothing I can do about it. Even stupid shit like losing my wallet. I feel like being out in the world is dangerous. Maybe it is for everyone. Maybe I’m just stupid and I deserve what happens to me. This is part of what I worry about passing on. Other people don’t seem to be terrified that if they go out they are likely to be hurt. I feel like I don’t have a lot of resiliency left.

The cease and desist letter feels kind of like a punch to my stomach. It didn’t come from someone I outed as abusive in any way. He’s more of a neutral-to-positive sort of character. And he still wants to silence me. I should just shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up.

How you spend your days is how you spend your years. I keep a tidy house. I garden. I run. I play with my beautiful daughters. I’m teaching them about the world. I’m teaching them about how all of life is a process. There are steps you can skip and steps you can’t, the trick is finding out which is which. I read about twenty pages out of The White Trash Mom’s Handbook yesterday. From the title it seems like the perfect book for me. It’s not. It’s all about how to stay within the system and look successful while taking short cuts. I suppose for someone who wants their kids to be “successful” in public school it is full of valid points. I don’t want children who are successful at public school. I want children who are successful at life. Very few of the really successful people in our country went to public school. Think about that. It’s a broken system. It manages to turn out most of the cogs in the machine but it doesn’t turn out people who know how to run the system by and large.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with people putting their kids into preschool and public school. I think it is the norm in our world. I’m not very good at fitting in with norms. I would not be able to “pass” enough for my kids to have a successful public school experience. As I read that book I noticed over and over how the author keeps saying that you have to “play the game” or your “kids will suffer”. It’s true. My kids would suffer because I am their mom in public school. I would do things wrong. They would be punished. They would almost certainly be weird and different and public school is not kind to such children. My children will most likely never appear normal. They are wonderful and great and awesome, but they will always be quirky.

For all that I whine about being alone, I have found a life and a space that fits me. When I am feeling self-confident I have places to go. I have friends. Lots of people like me. I stay home because *I* have issues. And because I’m shitty at managing my kids and doing anything else at the same time. At home I can be all “free range” and not feel guilty. My kids and I are working hard at learning how to coexist. How do I get my work done while they have their own work to do? How do we all get along?

From my daughter I learn that it is better to say, “Hey, will you please help me find the ipad?” rather than “You didn’t put the ipad on the table.” Because I sit here and listen to her talk all day long I am learning where my manners are disgusting. I’m learning where I am very rude. I’m working on it because I don’t want to hear it from her. I think it is good for me. It’s the least judgmental feedback I have ever received. I just have to sit around and listen to her ape my tone of voice and attitude. It’s humbling. There is no one in the whole world I can blame anything on but myself in this house. My daughters have me for an influence. And Netflix. Thank goodness for Netflix. Shanna is learning how conversations go. It’s dramatic to see how this is working for her.

I’m trying to understand better what my social needs actually are. I’m looking forward to the Storytelling at the end of the month. So far I have had one person tell me absolutely yes (yay!) and several others are strong maybes. I’ll take it.

We are also going to a sex party at the end of the month. I’m intimidated. I don’t think anyone will inappropriately push me (the host would kick anyone out who tried) but I think I will feel awkward and weird. What am I there for anyway? What business do monogamous people have being out in the sex communities? What is the point of going? Because that is my community, for better or worse. Even if I never have sex again in my life the alternative sex communities are mine. I belong in them. I am sexually deviant. But am I? I don’t know.

I feel like I don’t know who I am or what I want. I feel scared. I feel isolated. I feel like I should never do anything other than garden, hang out with my kids, run, and clean again. This is my life now. I chose it. I should stick with what is safe. I have never been this safe before in my life. What is wrong with me that I want to shake things up? What is wrong with me that I get bored?

I still don’t feel safe. I feel like this could all be taken away from me if people knew how disgusting and broken I am.

Do you know why I keep my house as clean as I do? Because I live in terror of a CPS visit. I kicked cabinet doors, obviously I am an unfit mother. I have kicked holes in drywall (years and years ago). I yell. I get so very angry. Obviously I am unfit. I do not deserve the goodness and safety I have.

I should go somewhere sleazy and unsafe and become inebriated and unable to say no coherently and forcefully because that is what girls like me do, right? Is it even possible to hang out with people and do anything else? I don’t know. I feel like I don’t know anything at all.

I am never going to fit in. I am never going to be “normal”. And I mourn that. I mourn that I can’t give my kids that because I don’t know what it looks like. Instead what I’m giving them is a very structured environment where we work all day long on communicating with one another in polite tones. How do you ask people to meet your needs in a civil tone of voice? We’re working on it. We do a lot of “try again”. Because here I get a lot of chances. Once I walk out of the front door I give up my right to be able to try things over and over till I get it right. I’m not practicing anymore. That’s the real world. I’m not ready.

I have approximately fifteen more years to learn how to be a functional, polite grown up. Now that I’m thirty that doesn’t sound like nearly enough time. I haven’t managed yet, what hubris do I have to think I can learn in the next fifteen years? I have fifteen years to focus on how to teach my kids what they need to know in order to move off into the world. It doesn’t feel like enough time.

So far I have made ~$140 on the book. That’s about half of what I spent on ISBN and it doesn’t even begin to pay for the editor. I have to figure out how to promote the book or I won’t be allowed to leave the house to do anything fun until November. All of my spending money is pre-spent. I’m not sad though. Even though this is an expensive hobby it is one I needed. And I have eight more spiffy ISBN numbers. (You can buy one or ten and print vs. ebook needs two separate numbers.) I guess that means I should keep writing. I can’t decide what to work on next.

I’m supposed to be resting my arms. But I’m so lonely.

Running and singing and whining and kids.

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When I sing I listen to my ‘healing’ playlist. Mostly women. Mostly at least semi-introspective music. Lots of relationship stuff. Lots of anger and lots of sadness. There are happy songs too. One of the main reasons I don’t think I run very fast is because I can still sing along sorta pretty much the whole time. I pant the words out during sprints. Just like labor, I never lose the ability to talk. I keep hearing about how something doesn’t qualify as heavy exercise unless you lose the ability to talk. I hear that serious labor inhibits the ability to talk. I never lost my ability to communicate. I don’t get silent.

I used to. I used to experience everything scary or hard or painful as something that caused me to withdraw. Now the harder something is the louder I want to be while doing it. I just can’t suffer in silence any more. This means that my neighbors look at me funny while I run around singing fairly loudly. I smile and wave. I decided that if I am going to run in a Cheshire Cat hat complete with ears I am required to be cheerful. People stare at me a lot. If I take the hat off and run with the super short hair they stare just as much. Early in the running I felt kind of defensive and weird. I doubt my facial expression was cheerful. People used to look at me warily. Now I run along singing, at about a normal conversation volume, and I smile and wave and interrupt myself to yell, “Hello! Nice night, isn’t it?” Then I go back to singing loudly. Now people laugh and wave and answer me with some appropriate comment.

I think people dislike me because I project hostility so much of the time. Mostly people don’t have an opinion of me. But I’m a polarizing figure! Whatever. Mostly people don’t have an opinion of me. They don’t care enough to have an opinion.

I’m not sure I can actually wrap my head around that.

Yeah, no. Can’t do it. I have an opinion about everything and everyone. Only I don’t actually. I think I’m lying again. I’m sitting here trying to force myself to have neutral thoughts. It’s more difficult than one might think. If I look around my garage I can think that I don’t have an opinion on the quality of most of the books (I share library space with people who have a lot of books I haven’t read) but I have an opinion on how much room they take up and where they are stored. Is it a neutral impression? Well… if I see the book dropped somewhere else I will have very strong negative opinion about the book. So I think that all of them are just on the negative side of neutral for me which means I have an opinion.

Yeah. I don’t think I can imagine what it is like to go through the world with actual apathy. Do you want to know the problem? The problem is that I have this weird little piece of me in the center and it decides if my opinions are positive or negative today. Pretty much across the board. Today I’m feeling hostile and pissy; I don’t even know why. I could come up with candidates, but they aren’t really big enough. I have too much good coming. I should be excited. At this time tomorrow I will be on an airport shuttle with Noah and we get three full days of no kids.

The running is hard. I’m tired. When I arrive back I am in high spirits. Then I crash the next day. It’s fairly consistent. I am not explosively angry I am just kind of short in temper. Snippy. I feel bone weary exhaustion and the kids aren’t happy unless I’m running with them. I really can’t right now. I’m so tired. I’m not always. I won’t feel like this all day. But it feels like the core of me is just barely on the negative, whiny side.

Noah is trying to express appreciation for me. For all the work I take off his plate. I hate feeling like it isn’t enough. I don’t feel appreciated. I don’t feel valuable. I don’t feel effective. I feel plodding and stupid. I feel like I am barely going through the motions. I feel like I’m looking at everything through a dense cloud bank. I feel like gravity is too heavy. I think that is what I feel. Gravity is too heavy. That makes it harder to do everything. I have to decide if it is worth the effort. I still haven’t started packing. Not for us and not for Shanna. Shanna is getting picked up at two this afternoon. I should probably get started.

It doesn’t help my overall feeling bad that last week Shanna was helping me with cleaning. I didn’t like how nasty her tone was and her word choice in describing the activity. Do you know where she learned it? Watching me. I didn’t say anything to her about it. She was just reflecting what she sees. But I’ve been thinking about it. I haven’t described her toys as crap since. She doesn’t have crap. She has high quality neat toys in a dizzying variety. It’s really not crap.

I’m cheerful sometimes. I’m not sure why it is so hard right now. I’m grieving; I think that is part of it. Grieving for so many things. I’m more than half way through the first round of editing the book. I really don’t want it to be an angry book. I want to tell the story in the most simple and direct way I can. I don’t want to flail around and be angry forever. I just want to get it right. I want to have other people know the simple facts. I don’t want to be alone with my story. It’s scary. I can’t handle being alone with it.

As I run I think about a lot of things. I think about the one who got away. Ha. I have several. I think about the many possibilities I had open throughout my life. I think of what choices I made and where. Which were the most important ones? Where was the tipping point?

I have the life I wanted. I really do. Why aren’t I happier? Why is everything viewed in terms of me failing? How have I really failed? How am I bad? I’m not really engaging in questionable activity any more. I think this is as close to the center of the bell curve as I will ever be. I still feel bad. I still feel like I am bad. That’s what makes everything just negative of center. Because I am. I can’t help it. I was born bad. This is why I run as far and as fast as is safe for my body on a training schedule and I yell out the words to Born This Way.

I’m not bad. I have done a lot of things that other people don’t do. That doesn’t mean I am bad. The balance of my life is heavily skewed towards doing and being good. Why do I still feel so unworthy? I feel terribly unworthy. God knows I don’t deserve Noah. He is far nicer than anyone like me deserves. In this mind frame I even know that he wasn’t trying to cheat. He did act like a jerk, but good grief how much do I expect one man to put up with while never ever doing anything to retaliate? I deserve a good smack down now and then. I get too demanding and pushy and uppity.

I don’t like it when I think this way. I know these thoughts are fleeting. I know this isn’t how I always feel. It’s how I feel today. I’m enjoying this part of growing older. I feel a lot more security around the fact that I won’t feel this way forever. And I really do know that I have far more good than bad in my life.

Today my baby goes to her Godmamas. She is excited. She loves these visits. Recently she asked me if we will be together forever. I told her that depends on how we define it. I told her that we will always be together again but we won’t do everything together all the time. Sometimes we will be in separate places but if she thinks about me real hard and knows she will see me again soon it’s like being together at all times. We will always be together again very soon. She said that works for her.

Calli has changed dramatically recently and I don’t talk about her in writing much. My experience of parenting her has been different. She needs me in very different ways. For the past few months she needs much more intense physical contact than she seemed to want when she was small. She is very serious and when things don’t go how she wants she gets this stricken expression on her face. It’s really pretty hilarious. I love watching her play with things. She looks like she thinks more like an engineer. She isn’t a dilettante. She wants to sit and figure something out. That’s not how her sister approached objects so it’s neat to watch. She makes me understand how uncurious I am. She also makes me understand that I know so much more than I think I know. She holds things up and grunts at me. She wants me to explain. I always start at the most concrete level with name, color, size, that kind of stuff. Eventually I get to imaginative uses. It generally takes several options before I find the right one for her. Then she nods and runs away. I’m not sure if I have finally given her sufficient data or if I finally said the right word. I won’t know until she can talk.

Calli is going to talk on a very different curve than Shanna. That’s ok. It means that she feels much less there and I think I’ve been underestimating her for a while. Her comprehension is fairly astounding. I think she understands a lot more than she obeys. She is willfull. In a very different way than Shanna. If I try to prevent Shanna from getting what she wants she responds in a very wild, free-swinging way. She always has. Calli clenches her fist and shakes with fury. She may or may not release a few ear-drum-shattering shrieks but mostly she just looks like a bull about to charge. She doesn’t swing out but she may lean over and bite. Calli is a runner. Letting her walk on her own is dangerous. She won’t come back and she is going faster by the day. Shanna never went far from me and would come back when I called. This kid doesn’t feel as strong of a leash to me.

Today I need to pack. I should probably go do that. Everything takes a really long time so I had best get moving. Any second now. Don’t wanna.

Those sick perverts

1 Reply

“I’ve been following your blog for awhile, I never comment. However I couldn’t not comment on this. I’m not judging you by any means but I couldn’t pass saying this.

How can you bring someone to your house who you admittedly barely know and met through adult sex venues at that, and let him meet your daughters? That is truly scary. I think a mother should be extremely selective who she brings in the house and to top it all off lets meet the kids. Just my 0.02 cents. “

First, I’m not mad at you. It’s your opinion and you are welcome to it. I met this guy probably eight years ago. When I used to attend BaGG he was a regular there and we had a number of nice conversations, but I wouldn’t say I am close to him. He used to be housemates with one of my girlfriends. I’ve known her for 14+ years and she lived with this guy for years. This guy is also good friends with my ex-boyfriend Spot. He’s not exactly a complete stranger though I understand how it sounds that way.

He was in my dining room for less than two hours with my children. We talked about She-Ra and raising kids and the fact that his mom walked out on him when he was a toddler. Both kids kept their clothes on. We talked about our social anxiety. We talked about what things we do to try and talk to people without feeling dirty and gross and bad. I felt quite comforted by his presence. He’s a nice person and I’d like to get to know him more. I feel completely comfortable with the fact that he won’t challenge my monogamy.

But he’s one of those sick perverts. And I shouldn’t let him in my house. I’m really not better. I guarantee you that if I trotted out my kink résumé it is a lot more offensive than this guy’s. But he is suspect and probably gross. Because he’s a man. And kinky.

I feel tainted and like I shouldn’t ever be alone with my kids. You know, I’m one of those sick people too. I’ve done some pretty disgusting things. I have gotten off on some really disgusting things. Obviously I am too dirty to be here.

I wonder when someone is going to figure out that people like me are just inherently bad and shouldn’t be around children. It should probably happen soon before the irreversible damage is done. I’m sure it is inevitable. It’s not like I’m going to ask this guy I don’t know to babysit. But obviously there is something wrong with me if I think it is ok to let a raging pervert in my house to talk to my daughter about cartoons.

I’m not mad. But I do feel like I am going to be wrong forever and ever amen. I should never speak to anyone again. Do you know how many people I am close to who have never been to an adult-only-sex-venue? I can probably count them on my hands. I guess that means I shouldn’t ever let my kids meet anyone at all. You never know what they do on Saturday night.

1 Reply

Oh gracious. Someone is coming over to dinner. Someone I barely know through adult-only venues. And I’m going to put him in the hot seat of meeting the girls. Oh goodness. This probably isn’t a nice thing to be doing to him. I’m asking him to dinner because he expressed that he liked what he knew of me but he has social anxiety issues so he never really talked to me. By golly that sounds like someone I can talk to. We’ll see how it goes.

Today both of the girls are actually asleep for naps. It’s been an interesting few days for sleep. And moodiness. Lots of moodiness. Well, different moodiness. More sadness. My over all anger level is much lower. There is still a lot of unfinished business and I never like limbo. Patience, Grasshopper. Uprooting takes time. Not everyone uproots in less than forty-eight hours at the slightest provocation. (I’ve done that multiple times as an adult. And I can’t count how many as a kid.)

I’m learning a lot about my life during my childhood. I have a different perspective on interactions now. I struggle endlessly with my inability to grant forgiveness. I am trying to understand that people now are not people then. I can forgive everything that has been done to me as an adult. I think that is why I generally do not think of my adult less-than-consensual sex as rape, fully. Because I do not shun the men. Because I understand their point of view and I know that I did get in over my head. I courted danger and I let my guard down at the wrong time. My bad, right? But now I understand that no one wants to be the bad guy in their own story. Except for me. I don’t seem to want to be anything else.

What does it mean to not be the bad guy? I think I have been an asshole. I think I have been volatile and threatening. I have lost my temper in front of people in ways that scared them. Effectively I lost control. That makes me the bad guy. I was telling Shanna just the other day that bad guys can be girls too.

I want to be something else though. I don’t want to be the bad guy forever. I hear this involves learning to “let go”. I’m never sure what of. They certainly don’t mean of control. I don’t know what people want. What does it take to be a good guy? Damned if I know.

Today both of my children napped. Tonight someone is coming over to supper. I’m going to actually cook. Using ingredients I grew in my yard. That’s so fucking cool. I need to go start figuring out food.

======================================

I left off there yesterday. I’m resuming for no reason beyond I don’t think I have enough mental energy to really write again today. I feel slow and stupid and sad. I’m pretty sure this is chemical depression. I’m trying hard to not get too far mired in the idea that I am a tremendous failure at everything in life. Just because I can’t do everything that doesn’t make me a failure. It’s not all or nothing. Today that is hard to believe because I’m grieving. My body aches and feels heavy and weary. It doesn’t really matter how I feel though. I have chores to get through. Then I really need to take the kids out of the house. I’m thinking Discovery Museum. We are all cooped up and frustrated.

I think I am at the limit of what I can do. Now I wait. I wait and feel this creeping sadness. I failed. I failed.

Mostly parenting babbling

2 Replies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time to go inside.

I’m going to run out of steam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Category Archives: parenting

relationship blathering

Chemical states and relationship transitions

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Working is fun.

Passing

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anxiety purge

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No social skills

You are good. You are smart. You are kind.

Those wonderful kids

I’m not resting my arms.

Running and singing and whining and kids.

Those sick perverts

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I’m going to run out of steam

First world problems