Category Archives: personal time

I love country music.

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I was feeling mopey thinking about my early childhood and I had the Dixie Chick’s song So Hard on in the background.  It’s nominally about fertility problems.  It’s not hard to ignore about three lines and generalize it to other topics.  I’m just saying.  I’m having a hard time with this whole parenting gig sometimes.  I know my reactions are wrong.  I know when I sound like my mother.  I don’t know who else to sound like.  I don’t have very many people I feel comfortable around.  People make me feel tense.  I get edgy.  And bitchy.  And shit still rolls down hill.  I’m minor compared to everything I knew.  I know that.  But this isn’t who I wanted to be when I grew up.

If I’m not satisfied with my behavior I need to change it.  It’s hard right now because Calli is in the last throes of babyhood before becoming a talking person.  I’m having a very hard time waiting for that jump.  It came so early with Shanna.  I’m not a fan of the pre-verbal phase.  I still think Arwyn said it best.  I feel triggered when I spend a lot of time with my kids if I have to do anything else at the same time.  As long as I can be idle and just focused on them I can handle them.  They are not too much stimulus under those circumstances.  The problem comes when I am trying to get something done (like making breakfast) and it isn’t happening fast enough for Calli.  She starts screeching and it hurts my ears.  I start feeling anger.  It’s hard to tamp it down.  I have so much anger rolling around in me right now.

Reading through the whole story yesterday made me see spots where I have new perspective on why my mom and sister acted the ways they did.  Being a parent changes my point of view.  Funny, that.  But writing my story down means I can’t retreat to the sanctity of the parents point of view, either.  I stand there feeling bad for Calli that life is so hard.  She really and truly can’t have what she wants very much of the time.  She wants to be able to touch me any time she wants any way she wants.  She feels like she needs that from me.  But I can’t take how rough she is.  Oh gosh she is rough with me.  I get really angry.  I’m tired of being hurt.  I’m so. fucking. tired. of. being. hurt.  It’s so hard.

But she’s in the last throes of babyhood.  Soon it will be gone forever.  I don’t want my kids to remember me being angry all the time.  That is not what I want them to have as their story.  I don’t want them to remember me retreating with dramatic explosions.  Even though I’m not insulting any one.  Even though I’m just stomping my feet and huffing.  I don’t want to be that person.  How do you just decide to be someone else?  I was someone else with Shanna.  I narrowed my world to just her.  I gave her every single scrap and ounce of patience I had for any and everything in the whole world.  It was a nice year.  I couldn’t do that with Calli.  It’s so hard being a younger child.  You never ever get your needs fully met. You are short changed from birth.  Says the self-pitying youngest of four.

But then the song changed.  Best Days of Your Life by Kellie Pickler.  And I got a very nice email.  Right that minute.  My chest exploded with this moment of Oh My Fucking God.  When I’m feeling upbeat and I think about my life once I became an adult… well.  I’m pretty fucking cool.  I’ve done a lot of really neat things.  And I’m going to do a lot more.  As much as I possibly can.  And part of that is going to involve me figuring out how to be the person I want to be.  I will make mistakes and I will have bitchy days.  But when I do I tell my kids, “God I know my tone of voice sucks.  I’m really sorry.  It’s not you honey, I’m fussy about other things.”  I don’t think I was ever once told that.  Every bad mood that happened within a three block radius was my.fucking.fault.

Maybe I have already changed.  It’s hard on days when the kids want to test to see if I love them.  I do.  But I also have limited patience these days.  It’s time for the pendulum to swing back to them.  I think we should go out and play today.  And I’ll play the upbeat country songs.  The ones that make me feel like hot shit.  Because I rock like that.

High Maintenance

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I’m not uniformly high maintenance across the board.  And things shift a lot over time.  Once a boy I was interested in told me that I was “high maintenance but low drama”.  He could handle one date a month with me.  We never got very close.

Being high maintenance is very different based on how you do it.  I need a lot of intense emotional support.  I need to be told things many times.  I need to be touched or not touched immediately and without question based on my whims.  I have a lot of control over what conversational topics happen around me because if I start getting angry for some reason I tend to escalate.  I manage that by walking away from things that anger me or people who are engaging in conversation I don’t want to hear.  I don’t mean that I tell everyone to shut up.  I just mean that if I can’t handle what is being discussed I go sit in a different room.  It’s not the easiest thing to live with.  I have a lot of “systems” in place that make perfect sense in my head and I can’t explain them to other people because I know them in a kinesthetic fashion.

I am extremely particular but Sarah says not outside the normal range.  That kind of weirds me out.  Really?  Other people have as many stupid little mandatory preferences as me?  You know When Harry Met Sally?  You remember how she ordered food?  I’m not quite as fussy as her… but almost.  Although I’m less fussy about food.

I’m sensitive.  I wish I wasn’t.  I wish I didn’t have a sensitive nerve ending in my body.  Sometimes my skin is hyper sensitive and small touches hurt.  Sometimes if I am not in the mood for a conversation I feel intense sadness or anger because I have some tangential thought process running tandem that is really unhappy.  The stupidest things can trigger me into devastation and feeling like I am alone in the world and everyone around me would dance on my grave.  It’s often hard to believe that someone like me could have any worth at all.

That’s high maintenance to live with.  It’s fucking irritating.  Especially because I go back and forth between these terrible lows and feeling like I’m a lot better than those other schmucks, so what’s the problem?  (“Better” being defined as not having whatever problem I’m reading about on the internet.  If you set a low bar, you can always achieve it.)

I’m not sure, but I would guess that one of the hardest things to live with is how quickly I expect people to make decisions or act upon things I have said.  Because if people don’t respond/acknowledge/move fast enough I whirl in place and stomp off to do whatever it was I was talking about by myself while muttering.  It’s not a very nice thing to do and I try to stop myself.  I whirl away because it’s hard for me to ask for things sometimes.  I should probably ask for some kind of visual acknowledgement that they heard and understood my speech so that I know to stand and wait while they think.  Right now the problem is that I state what I want, don’t see immediate interest, and I feel like okfineI’lldoitmyselfit’snotabigdealanyway.  It is a little huffy, but it’s huffy in a “I don’t want to be a burden and I feel like I should have done this for myself without mentioning it anyway.  I mentioned it because sometimes you leap up to “do things” for me and it feels nice but if you aren’t in that space I’ll just go do it.”  But it never comes out value neutral.  I always look pissed.

The anger.  The anger is probably the hardest thing to live with.  I get angry so easily over such stupid things.  I let it go quickly and I apologize profusely, constantly because I know it is inappropriate to get as angry as I do.  But a lot of my anger is justified.  And I apologize for that too.  Because I’ve been told over and over, “Wow.  You get angry a lot.”  Because I feel like anger is wrong and bad and I should stop feeling anger.  People comment on me being angry.  That must mean I am inappropriately angry, right?

I feel shamed by comments on my anger.  If people can see it I am failing at life.  I feel this enormous pressure to develop a cheerful mask.  Repression be thy name.  I don’t really want to have to repress my anger.  I want to not feel it.  I want to not get so angry over tiny little things.  I’m aware that a lot of the problem is sleep deprivation and stress.  I can’t even tell if I get angry at a normal level.  I don’t know.  I can’t tell how often any one else gets angry.

Except for Noah.  I freak right the fuck out if he gets angry.  It’s been very difficult for us to work towards a space where I can let him be angry and not make it about me.  I still have to check in about the fact that he’s not angry with me at a particular time.  And then I want to fix whatever is upsetting him.  It’s very codependent of me.

And you know how much I write about myself?  Noah talks about this shit for hours and hours and hours and years.  It’s frankly creepy that anyone other than me has this much interest in me.  I’m so keeping him.  Noah repeatedly, adamantly gives me approval for everything I am and most everything I do.  He is a fount of affirmation and support.  It is very important that my support network be well supported.  I’m trying to do a better job at supporting them.

I feel like we are getting a lot closer to a balance.  Things are a lot better with Sarah here.  I haven’t had an exchange with Shanna I would call ‘nasty’ since the train coming down from Scotland.  I think that a tirade going on about two minutes longer than necessary about train manners in a bad tone of voice after a month of travel is forgivable.  I have been rude, and I’ve apologized and she seemed perfectly ok with the apologies.  That goes both ways.  Her behavior has been up and down, but I feel like it’s all been handled well.  I’m taking time by myself a lot more and I’m a lot more calm because of it.  The smoking helps, but I spend a lot of time out here not smoking just because I dislike the physical sensation.  I’m just hiding.  I’m just intimidated by the intensity of being mom.

I’m sensitive and my kids frankly freak me the fuck out sometimes.  It’s hard to enjoy ice cream if you are allowed to eat nothing but ice cream.  I mean, my kids are more meat and potatoes.  I can handle eating them every single day.  Now there’s a metaphor.  But even though I want meat and potatoes every single day I want meals in the day where I’m eating something else.  Variety is good.

I used to think I was an extrovert who was forced into solitude.  I’m beginning to see that I am an introvert with occasional social needs.  It’s kind of a weird identity shift.  At this point in my life I think of every single person I talk to in terms of how much of my energy they will drain.  Sorry, friends.  I love you!  That’s why I spend the energy I do.  A friend is coming over this morning.  Hopefully she won’t read this until after she has been at my house.  I’m honestly kind of freaked out by having her come over today.  Her son is very energetic and I’ve been trying to get Shanna to be slightly less messy in the house.  Throwing things outside is great.  Inside…. not my favorite.  I know that the right thing to do is to ask them to help clean up during the visit.  We’ll see how that goes.  Ugh.  I’m just so tired.  I don’t want the extra mess.  Fuss.  Whine.  But I want to talk to her.  Ack.  Personal time is over.

I’m baaaaack

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And of course the first thing I do is plop myself down in the middle of a big thought process around priorities.  I’m thinking about my priorities in life because right now I have to start acting on them in terms of living my life.  I no longer have a brick wall event coming that forces a reordering into crisis mode.  How do I actually want to live?  Priority number one: deciding my priorities needs to not become an obsessive thing that disrupts my life.  (Here I will make a side note: I have already had multiple funny asides I wanted to make but I can’t remember the code for how to create a footnote and trying to think about how to make them is derailing my thought process.  I’m annoyed.  I may have finally found a motivation for learning how to code.)

It is 10 pm and my entire family is asleep.  Seems quite reasonable.  Only… the kids and I went to sleep at 1pm.  We are going to have an interesting adjustment from jet lag.  I’m up thinking about the patterns of our days and unschooling and my mental health and getting the house ready for Sarah and food and gardening and…

So I am thinking about priorities.  Sarah will be in our house within 20 days.  I am so excited I can barely sit still.  But that’s not a hard dead line in any negative traumatic way for me.  I don’t have to have the house to a certain “readiness”.  She could move in today and it would all be handled.  I can do work before then that will make the integration process easier, and I’m doing that.  But it’s not an emergency.  It can happen or not in whatever time or order I want.  I’m done with the scary bits of that project.  I just get to anticipate having Sarah here.  Everything else is gravy.  So right now I really am at the place where I get to sit down and think about how I want my life to look just because I get to start making it real now.

While I was on the trip I spent an obscene amount of time on Mothering.com because I was stuck in hotel rooms.  I don’t have any idea how much I posted and I don’t want to think about it.  I also wandered around the net looking at other parenting websites.  I learned that I need to stay on MDC.  I do not have the time or energy to go find a new forum.  My story is long and complex.  And I can’t tell people little comfortable sound bites that ensure that they feel comfortable enough with me for me to say things without being attacked.  I have a long posting history on MDC.  Folks recognize me.  It feels like a community to me.  I have noticed it becoming more close knit after the recent mass evacuation.  A whole bunch of people have reached out to me during the decline of the site.  I feel increasingly seen there and I like it.  I suppose that means I am moving up the hierarchy of the clique?  But in a war of attrition I will lose.  I have too many other things to do and I am going to go do them.  I don’t want to prioritize the kind of time it takes to stay popular on MDC.  I have a life to live.

I started this blog because I wanted a place to feel accountable to so that I could document my life.  I am not good at staying productive in a vacuum.  I need a boss.  Which isn’t to say that I think I owe accountability to anyone specific on the internet.  Y’all can kiss off.  (said with love)  But I am choosing an unorthodox path for my family.  I want to prove to myself that I am actually doing what I say I am doing.  I don’t know another way to give myself the motivation to keep working without trying to produce some result.  I want to talk about what I’m doing.  I miss the camaraderie of having a job.  Raising my kids is my job.  And sweet sony Jesus don’t make this into a stay at home mom versus a work out of the home mom thing.  That’s not what I mean.  I mean that I have decided to not only stay home, but I am educating my kids.  That’s a separate job as well.  I am responsible for preparing them for the world.  Every parent is responsible for raising their children, and we all get help along that process.  Each parent chooses a different amount of help.  There is nothing wrong with that and I’m not judging how much “time” people spend with their kids.  I’m really not.  I’m trying to figure out what parts of raising them, educating them, preparing them for the world, entertaining them, etc. I actually have to do on a day to day basis and what parts of that can I and/or should I farm out?  There is no need for me to be a martyr.

My other job is being me.  Being me is high maintenance.  Being me (near as I can tell) is a lot more work than it is to be someone else.  I can’t get good trade in value, so I’m sort of stuck with being me.  If I want to be me well I have to put a lot of work into that.  I am trying to get to the point where I respect and like myself enough that I feel good about all the time and effort I put into me instead of feeling ashamed that I require so much effort.  That is complicated.  Since we got home I have been doing a lot of emotional eating.  I can tell.  I can feel it.  I can look at what I am eating and see why it is making me physically feel bad.  But I can’t seem to motivate myself to deal with it because of all the complicating factors around being exhausted from the trip.  But tomorrow we have a local farmers market.  And I’m working on giving myself permission to make specific choices that are short term suboptimal in favor of preparing for the marathon.  It’s weird.

I don’t know if I am making any sense.  I am also, once again, able to medicate for my anxiety.  Thank you California for recognizing that I should be able to have control over whether or not I have to feel that upset all the time.  I haven’t yelled since we got home.  And my stomach isn’t hurting all the time.  I’ve been able to slowly start stretching out the muscles in my head and neck and I no longer have a headache.  I had that headache for a month straight.  I’m fighting with my guilt to allow me more than the absolute bare minimum to be not full of rage.  It’s 10:23 and my kids are likely to wake up in the middle of the night.  So I will be on duty and that requires being mostly sober.  But then I will get edgy.  Ah fuck it.  It is better for me to ensure that my stomach stops hurting.  That requires more than the amount that takes the edge off of my anxiety.  Tonight, that is the right decision.

I worry about putting things on the internet because I worry that I will only put the bad things.  Or only the bad things will be true.  I need to get back to a place where I am loudly doing the good things too.  That’s the only thing that will allow me to feel safe.  And in order for me to feel like I am doing the good things loudly… I need to figure out what doing the good things are so I can know if I am actually doing them.  Seriously.  Do other people have to stop and think about this stuff?  Do you just know?  Ugh.

I don’t think that today’s noodling counts as a binding agreement.  Just so it has been said.  But I want to give my boss a status update.  I’m like that.

I think that it’s time to set priorities.  What things actually matter to me.  And I need to act like I really do believe my priorities.  And if I can’t act like I believe them… I need to decide how I feel about not believing them anymore because I need honesty.  I can’t deal with hypocrisy.  But it’s complicated because sometimes it isn’t about hypocrisy, you just aren’t meeting ‘x’ priority because you are still stuck on ‘g’ and it is more important.  I want to be very clear with myself about when and where I am stuck on g and when I have simply stopped believing that x is important.

For example.  The local food thing.  Wait, no… I want to back up.  I want to start at the beginning.  It’s my story.

So I spent a lot of time on MDC during the trip.  One of the best things I got out of it (and the side track over to Trolls With Wooden Spoons) was to examine some of the ways in which I really did drink the Kool Aid at MDC.  And some of the things I have gotten from the experience have been good for me and I’m thrilled, and others suck.  But I’ve been forcing myself to take it as a package deal.  It’s not.  No matter how rabidly people on the internet berate me for not meeting one specific point on a checklist… dude.  Really.  I’m not failing at life if I stop doing something perfectly.  Uhm… not that I have been perfect at any step on this journey.  I think I need to stop making perfection a goal or part of the conversation.  I just need to figure out what it means to be me and do that.  How pretentious is that?

I feel about as self-involved as an adolescent.  Shanna and I are at the same space in development, and in some ways that’s true.  As I am discovering myself on the journey to recovering from incest, I really am starting in about the same place Shanna is.  I am reparenting myself.  But I’m far harder on myself than I am on Shanna.  Maybe I should be a lot more gentle with both of us.  My daughter is already a shining example of vitality.  I need to stop acting like I need to feel guilty for neglecting her.  I’m not neglecting her.  I am treating it like my only job is to educate her and she’s blossoming.  Ok, she’s weird… yes.  But she’s trying things out.  None of what she is doing is for keeps.  Geez, she’s only three.  But why can’t I have the same latitude?  Why can’t I be just figuring out who I am too?  That’s also my job.  I didn’t get that when I was a small child the way normal kids do.  I was too busy keeping secrets and trying to be the person other people wanted me to be.

The thing is, part of who I am is a responsible adult.  I need to ensure that I am meeting the specific priorities that actually matter to me and to the people and community around me.  I am quite literally responsible to and for the people and things around me.  I have obligations.  I have no interest in walking away from my obligations.  I really don’t want to leave.  I have a wonderful life.  But it is work.  I have many jobs there.  I have been hiding at home for a long time because I haven’t been up to the work of being in a community and being me and being a parent all at the same time.  I’ll be frank and say that I worry about that decision.  I worry about that decision partially because I know that I describe my life on the internet in ways that make some people worry about my children.  I want witnesses.  That sounds awful.  I want there to be no way in the world for me to get away with doing anything bad to my children.  I want there to really and truly be no way at all I could hurt my kids and it would be invisible.  And that means a blog is not the whole answer.  That means people who interact with my children a lot and watch them.

Side note: this blog post about being queer just made my day.  I struggle a lot with queerness as an identity.  I feel pressured to engage in homosexual sex in a way I don’t feel pressured to engage in heterosexual sex.  It’s self-imposed.  But that is part of me figuring out who I am.  So maybe this isn’t a side note after all.  I’m crying because I know I am begging for permission for spending time on thinking about myself.  I want to believe it is ok for me to take up as much space as I need to take up in my day.  That’s part of my job!  Damnit!

Another side note: the more I think about Lady Gag’s The Edge of Glory video the more I think that woman is a fucking genius.  In most of her videos she hands you a fully fleshed out STORY and you are not allowed to project your own stuff.  There is no room for you in her stories.  She is sharing her fantasy.  Not this time.  In this one there is a lot of room for the argument that she isn’t presenting a story at all.  For once… she’s just … on the edge of a story with you.  And this time you get to tell it.  “I think that at this point in the video I would do…”  And yet you can’t get away from the fact that it is a Lady Gaga video because even when she is downplaying all the stuff that is her normal trademark she is still so very her.  So in this video she is inviting collaboration.  I don’t think she made this video so simply because she is a cheap bastard.  I think she wanted to give her fans a place to project themselves into a relationship with her.  I think she is that willing to be vulnerable.  And that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.  Seriously.  This video is a love song to each and every fan.  She didn’t want it to be a big dance number song.  This is how she feels about every person and she wanted it to be one on one.  This is how she wants to fuck every single one of her fans.  I think she is a genius.  She wants to feel like she is in love with each person.  She is Mother Monster and she wants to be lover as well.  I really think I should take the trouble to learn more about her and become more of an actual fan.  Because only in talking to other fans will avoid sounding like a lunatic.  ha.

I need to not focus on what other people should or shouldn’t be doing outside my family.  That needs to drop off my priority list entirely.  So when I notice at 11:22 that I am no longer able to coherently write I need to go to sleep instead of trolling the internet.

This is why I sprint.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How I’m learning to marathon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first step.

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I feel like I spend most of my life lately saying, “It’s complicated” because no matter what subject I am looking at there are many different things that could be combined/fixed/told.  And I don’t know how to begin.  Luckily I have the internet, and friends who are awake.  My friend Peter pointed me towards the class where I met him.  There is material there.  And he’s right.

My first semester of graduate school was in 2003, before I met Noah, right after Tom ended our M/s relationship.  Before Tom and I were poly I started grad school.  Naw, that’s not even true.  That’s when I applied to grad school.  I started spring semester so I started grad school in January of 2004.  I met Noah in late February.  So this story is going on concurrently to me starting to tell the story of my abuse out loud in the context of my relationship with Noah.

I went to a fiction writing class.  Honestly I picked it based on when I wanted to be on campus.  Always the best selection criterion, I tell you.  I did write some fiction for the class but all of the fiction I chose to wrote was borderline pornographic (or very explicitly pornographic depending on which story) or I wrote creative non-fiction.  I didn’t tell the class that I was writing about my own childhood abuse.  I did not explain that the horrific, gut clenching story about a 7 year old being raped was my story.  I kept distance there.  Most people in the class responded just fine and they gave me very valid feedback on my writing.

But there was this one woman.  Liz?  I think her name was Liz.  She didn’t like me much.  She didn’t like my stories.  She didn’t like my attitude.  She was one of those out and proud lesbians who acts like all heterosexual sex is rape.  I doubt she would have actually said that, but that’s pretty much the place she was in.  Now, like 7 years later, I can see why she was the way she was.  Then she just felt mean.  She picked on me when I shared my stories.

What do I mean by that?  I mean that when I was visibly upset when people were workshopping the story about my rape she was very hostile.  She specifically said, “This story is ridiculous because this kind of thing doesn’t really happen to people.”  Now I kind of wonder if she was denying her own abuse.  Her response was really hard for me.  I brought stuff that was too intense to class and I felt like I got screamed at for it.  To be perfectly clear, the professor was awesome.  I’m quite sure he had strong suspicions about me because he gave me great writing feedback and he gingerly patted me on the shoulder and told me I would make it.  Men like him have been the rock I have built my life upon. Women rarely manage that kind of support properly.

But oh man.  I’m not over Liz.  How dare she tell me that my story was unrealistic?  That’s not fucking writing feedback.  We had a guy in class writing stories about people who were kidnapped by aliens!  She chose to tell ME that my story was unrealistic!  Ok.  Fuck her.  I feel like she is part of the great evil cabal that wants me to kill myself instead of speaking because she doesn’t want to hear about my pain.

But I’m in a lot of pain.  And that’s a hard thing to talk about.  How do you express your pain properly without hurting anyone else?  I mean, the problem with Sharon and Liz is that they feel I am overstepping their (or someone elses) boundaries and I don’t have the right to do that.  Thing is, I don’t have any clue whatsoever where boundaries are supposed to go.  I flail and I fuck up.  Sometimes they are really far away from me and no one can get close enough to have a conversation and sometimes they are in so close that I can’t defend myself when someone rapes me.  I do not know what healthy boundaries feel like to naturally have them for ones own body.  I don’t.  I pretend.  I try to make it up. My boundaries shift depending on time of day, how many people are around, how recently I have thought about my family, what I’m eating, how often I sleep…

And that’s not cool for the people around me.  That’s messy and abusive.  Because then I go off on people for correcting my grammar.  I saw that I know it is a little thing, but it felt abusive.  It felt over the top.  It felt like you were trying to publicly humiliate me and make me look small and stupid and you look big and powerful.  Thats not what was happening, but that’s how muddy my boundaries are. I can KNOW things and not feel them.

I hate being sober.  I can’t tell the stories.  See how I am dancing here?  But Sharon made a crack about the marijuana and how I should stop using it and go on psych meds.  Despite the many many many years of problems I had trying to get psych meds to work.  Despite the fact that the people who are in my house with me monitoring my behavior tell me adamantly that marijuana is the right decision right now in this crisis point because it is clearly helping me and it does not have the miserable side effects.  But someone in authority, someone I feel “knows more than me” told me that I should stop.  So I am not smoking this morning.  Even though I am going round and round in circles and winding myself up.

I don’t know how to get past the anxiety and look at the stories without it.  My brain is too effective at shutting down those avenues of thought.  When I try to sit here and think about being raped when I was 7 years old my stomach starts to hurt, my neck hurts.  I feel tense.  I am breathing fast and rapid.  If I were trying to speak out loud I would be doing it so fast and so quiet that people probably wouldn’t really be able to hear me.  I’m scared.  I’m small.  And I have no real voice.  Even if I could start rattling off the facts, I was 7 years old when a neighbor raped me.  There was a witness in the room and another witness (his mother) came in and saw what was happening and then walked out leaving it to continue.

Many many people saw my story.  People were there watching it while it happened.  People actually physically saw me being raped and didn’t stop it.

Why shouldn’t I be angry again?  Why in the hell is it surprising that I have rage issues?  Why in the hell should I learn to tell my story in a small, inoffensive way so that other people don’t have to be hurt by my story?  Why is that my responsibility?  I didn’t do anything.  All I am doing is telling the truth.  All I am doing is saying, “Hey I was a little kid and people hurt me” and people then react to me as if I am a monster.  They want me to shut up.  They want me to be little and silenced.  They want me to make my story palatable.

Well fuck you, none of this is palatable.  This is disgusting and horrible and I had to live through it.  How fucking dare people tell me that I don’t have a right to speak.  How dare people tell me that I have to make my story palatable.  I had no choice.  I was raped.  I was raped over and over during my formative years.  I was programmed to think that my value was in sex and I should be silent the whole rest of the time.

But I am not that person.  I am loud.  I am here.  I have a voice.  And I’m not going to stop using it.

In May of 1989 my brother Tommy was hit by a car.  My entire childhood is told in relationship to that event because that is the Big Obvious Date that I can remember.  I turned 8 in September of 1989. Tommy was in a coma for five months so he woke up in October.  When he was hit by a car we were living in Texas.  I dreamed about the accident and woke up and told Mommy that I saw Tommy get hit by a car.  She told me it was just a dream but couldn’t get a hold of my dad for three days to find out how Tommy was.  I have no idea how long this lasted, but my mom was there for a bit before rushing back to California to sit at Tommy’s bedside.  She left me with Denise (my sister) who was pregnant and her then husband Bobby.  I was raped after my mom found out about the accident but before she left.  So I am pretty sure I was 7.

This is how it works with all of my memories.  I have to stop and think of all the collaborating details or I am afraid I am making it up.  I have to be able to list off long, extensive lists of things that happened the same day to prove that I was alive and I had that day and I saw those things and other people believe me about all the other things (often these details are verifiable) so therefore they will believe me about the abuse.  But people don’t.  People tell me that I am lying or exaggerating.  That my stories cannot be real.  But they are.  My stories are real.  I am real.  This was my experience of the world.  It is bad and scary and hard.  But it happened.  Dirty things were done to me but I am not dirty.  I am not bad.

His name was Michael and I had quite the crush on him.  I followed him around.  I was desperate for any sign of love and affection.  I was willing to do anything he wanted me to do.  I don’t think I told that part in the story in class.  This event wasn’t the first time Michael and I had sexual contact, it was just the last.  One day when we were in Michael’s room and he and his cousin were playing video games in between saying degrading things to and about me.  I can’t tell the whole story right now.  Not right.  Not the real thing.  I can’t.  I want to but I don’t feel safe.  I feel like if I tell the whole story again someone will be nasty, and they might and I can’t control that.

I feel like it is my fault Michael raped me because I put myself in the dangerous situation.  I went after him.  I pursued him.  I am in the phase of recovery where I can’t tell the story from the point of view of a victim.  I am the monster.  Right this minute I want to tell the story as a bragging story.  I want to talk about how I am so into sex that I knew when I was a little girl that I wanted it.  That I picked a boy I wanted and I went after him.  I didn’t let any obstacle get in my way.  And I fucked him.

That’s all I want to say.  I want to sound tough and bad ass and brave.  I want to sound like I had choice.  I want to sound like I was active player.  I wasn’t a victim.  I wasn’t abused.  I wasn’t raped.  I was just ready for sex earlier than other girls.  Do you know how many times I have told that story?  More times than I can count.  That is how I survived.  That right there.

I have been raped so many times in my life I’m not sure I can count them any more.  The vast majority of the sex I had was only consensual in the sense that I got into a situation where a guy wanted sex and I didn’t believe I was allowed to say no.  I wanted to be touched.  I wanted physical contact and I knew no other way to get it.  When I was a toddler and I sat on my fathers lap he would put his hands under my panties and slip his fingers into my vagina.  That was love.  They showed me porn.  My mother started giving me tips on blow jobs when I was 11.  It was my fault, of course.  I brought it up.  I asked.  She didn’t initiate that conversation so she feels like she is innocent.

But my mother gave me advice on better blowjob techniques when I was 11.  That’s not ok.  She needed to hold that boundary.  That is how she continued the cycle.  That is why I do not trust her.  My mother does not know what kind of boundaries other people have either.  But she is in her 60’s and she still doing things that are that kind of inappropriate and if you call her on it she goes into this long explanation of why she isn’t responsible for her behavior.  Bullshit!

I am responsible for my behavior.  Me.  Not God.  Not my father.  Not my mother.  Not my sister.  Not my therapist.  Not my husband.  Not my children.  Me.  Me.  Me.  At the beginning of the day, at the middle of the day, at the end of the day… I am with me.  I always have been.  I always will be.  I am not looking to be any one else’s ideal of the right person.  I’m afraid that right now I am at the point where I have to stop relying on anyone else.  Maybe I can find the right therapist if I keep looking but it will really and truly have to be the RIGHT therapist.  Sharon isn’t it.  Sharon wants to make me into her image of the perfect post-abuse mother.  No.

Why do I want to recover these memories.  Why am I doing this to myself.  This is horrible and I am beating myself over the head with it.  I am very good at forgetting.  I was told I have to forget.  I was told to be quiet about what I do remember.  But instead I am completely structuring my life right now so that all I can do is look at these memories.  But I’m letting the memories control me.  I am letting personal time become all the time.  Why.  That’s a big thing to do.

I’m afraid that if I let myself have these memories fully, if I really examine them I will become the people who hurt me.  When the people around me react with horror I feel silenced.  I feel like I am driving myself insane.  I have to say these stories.  I have to tell them in all their tear filled agony and I cannot bear to see peoples reactions.  I think that officially makes me a writer.  Right now Noah is making breakfast and my babies are playing and singing with him.  I am not allowing my rage to destroy my family.  My family is beautiful and strong as I am beautiful and strong.  Most of the time I bear my burdens lightly.  I do not feel weighed down by the weight of incest.  I know the right road for me and I am on it.  I don’t want to change who I am.  I really like me.

I want to feel like it is ok to be me.  I want to feel like who and what I am is right.  I want to feel like it is ok that I am different from everyone else.  I want to feel like it is ok that I am special.  That sometimes I need to say, “Hey can people use gentle voices with me even when I try to escalate things” and have the people around me understand that saying that is humiliating and embarrassing and I feel like a disgusting person for saying it.  I need it to be ok that I talk about my past.  I need to get to a place where I know in my heart what the right amount of information to give my children is.  I do not want my children twisted by my legacy of shame.  I want my children to continue to grow in the absolute safety I have provided.  My children are a strange mix.

So here’s my thing.  My daughter is verbal.  Astoundingly verbal.  Exceptionally verbal.  Who knows what that will mean in terms of her overall achievement in life.  That’s not the point.  It’s not about competition and I don’t know how to talk about it without it sounding like I am being an asshole.  So I don’t speak about this problem.  This is a problem.  I am having a very hard time with how verbal Shanna is.  Shanna asks me questions and she mentions things in off-hand ways that sound like they might maybe be questions and I don’t feel like I know what the appropriate amount of information to give her is.

Shanna wants to know why I am sad.  Shanna is acting out being sad and I feel horrible about it.  So far I have told her that I am sad because bad things happened to me a long long time ago and I think about them sometimes and that’s hard for me.  I have described my anxiety as “I have a lot of work to do.  And you know how you feel when you are tired and really hungry?  I feel like that all the time when I am trying to do this much work.”  I have no idea if I am doing this right.  I honestly think that I am freaking out so much because I feel like I have to hurry up and get over feeling like this because otherwise my kids will grow up with someone like me who just checks out for a while.

And I have a lot of shame about that.  That is what my mother did.  My mother was on so many drugs to numb her pain it was absolutely ridiculous.  She popped so many pills it was unreal.  That was normal.  I grew up convinced that I wouldn’t do that.  And I have such an aversion to taking pills that prenatals were nightmareish for me and I have now stopped taking them because I simply cannot do it even though I should take them as long as I am nursing.

Instead I am smoking pot.  I’m not drinking.  I’m not taking pills (and I won’t), but I’m smoking pot.  I am having a hard time with that.  I am not a lifelong pot smoker.  I really don’t enjoy doing this.  I’m not enjoying how it feels.  But it keeps me level.  It keeps me from snapping while I can’t get the memories under control.  It is making me go flat line.  And while I am doing it during the day I have people here watching my kids for me.  That is the difference between me and my mother.

I cannot meet all of my children’s needs by myself right now.  I am having a crisis.  But I am dealing with it.  I am dealing it with it in a way that is safe for me, for my children, and for the people who are offering help.  I am not stepping on anyones toes.  I am not doing something bad by asking for help.  I am not imposing.  I am not hurting anyone.  I am weaker than normal and I cannot carry my load.  People with room to spare, people who love me are helping me.  I am doing the right thing for me.  I am.

Believing that is the first step to recovery for me.  That’s it.  Right now, for this moment of this crisis that is my step.  I have to believe it is ok for me to be weak and need help.  I have to believe that it is ok for me to ask for help.  I need to feel like I can allow other people to help me.  I need to actually accept the help.

Baby steps, people.  I see several of the offers and I love you and I want to respond and I can’t right now.  That is too big of a step.  I don’t yet believe I am allowed to take it.

I choose life

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As of Saturday morning things were not so hot with my dear friend.  However, on Saturday evening I got a phone call from that friend.  He called me to tell me was sorry for the ways in which he was derailing the conversation.  The stuff I was talking about made him think about very uncomfortable things from his own life and he couldn’t handle it and he wanted me to stop talking.  He admitted the whole thing top to bottom.  I laughed and I cried.  I thanked him for trusting me enough to be honest with me completely and totally for the first time in our friendship.  Then I bossed him around (see how that works) and I told him to come back over.

Noah, my friend and I sat around and talked about broken dynamics.  We talked about where we are reacting to old baggage and where we have created new stuff together.  We talked about the parts of our dynamic that are good and healthy for us and we talked about the parts that are not healthy for us.  Then we tried to figure out how we can get more of the good and less of the bad because we are ready to grow up.  We are ready to stop hurting the people we love so much.

And I can’t get very detailed because an awful lot of what we talked about isn’t my story.

And Sunday we had brunch with another very long time friend.  I like to call him the California Mindfucker because he is very interested in getting into peoples brains and playing with the goo.  Not to mention that he was one of my first lovers/play partners in the bdsm scene and he has done a fair bit of fucking with my brain.  But the ways he does it are so screamingly over the top weird California new-agey feeling.  I love it.  Of course we did more spelunking into brains but this time, for the first time ever, I paid attention to his story.  That feels horrible to admit.  I feel like I should not be the one who “takes” in a given interaction.  But I often am, and that feels bad.

But oh man.  Since I have started consciously trying to ask for and accept more help I have seen a dramatic increase in the intensity of my friendships in a really wonderful way.  I am allowing people to do things for me I’ve never allowed them to do before.  I didn’t realize how lonely I have been my entire life.  No wonder I pursue sex with such vigor.  It’s the only time I let myself have a close, mutual relationship.  I don’t let anyone I am not currently fucking do anything for me and I make those people go through hell before I let them do stuff for me.  Instead I set myself up as the victim/martyr with all the need.

Interesting.  Enh, sorta.  Ok that’s hyperbole too.  But that’s my story about myself sometimes.  Anyhow, at this point I am trying to change up how I relate to people I love the most.  It’s an interesting process because almost all of the people I love the most have some fairly major issues.  That’s the whole “prickly and difficult” thing.  In order for us to get to a place where we know how to be more respectful of one another I have to start to look at my friends more.  I have to actually see them in a way I have never looked at them before.  I need to figure out where my defensive mechanisms are and actively try to change them.

I’m not really going to be able to go where I originally thought I was going with this post.  I got derailed by a wonderful, awesome person.  I got to go talk to an old friend and tell her about the highs and lows of our relationship and she gave me feedback on her perspective of them so I could figure out where I end and she begins.  And she tolerated a lot of babbling.  It was nice.  She has been my friend for so very long.

I’m starting to realize that anyone who is in my life at this point is fucking serious about loving me or they wouldn’t be in my life.  It takes intense effort and tolerance to be my friend.  And lots of people do it.  No really, lots of people.  I am putting out feelers for my birthday party and fixing my house and people are showing up.  Not hundreds, but lots.  Lots and lots.  More than I imagined.  I am really lucky.  I am really blessed.  I want to figure out where I end and they begin.  I want to see them more clearly.  I want to stop seeing ghosts.

I choose life.

Crossed wires

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I have a thing for difficult people.  I am not an easy person to be friends with and I tend to like people who are also difficult to like.  Sharp people with a lot of edges and defenses.  I understand them.  Unfortunately there are some down sides to hanging out with folks like that.

Last night I invited a good friend over.  The support group I am in is going to involve me sitting down and trying to tell my ‘whole story’ some week soon.  I haven’t spoken these things out loud much.  The majority of my communication about these topics has been through writing.  I feel like I go mute when I want to speak of them.  It is very difficult to overcome a lifetime of taboo and speak the words.  I need practice doing it.  The thing is, I like difficult people.  People with sharp edges and defenses.  It didn’t go so hot.  Basically what happened is that this friend and Noah both have similar geek tendencies and in order to feel optimally comfortable they don’t step outside those patterns when they are in the same room.  But uhm, those geek tendencies make it so I am completely unable to speak about my stuff.

So when things weren’t going particularly well and they were not reacting in the ways I needed I got very frustrated.  And then Calli woke up and I had to go nurse.  We had been sitting in the hot tub.  I was hoping the dark would make it easier for me to talk.  When I got out of the hot tub I realized that I was pretty much done outside anyway.  I tried to communicate that I did not intend to come back and they should follow me in fairly quickly.  I didn’t mean for them to do so instantly because I needed to nurse the baby anyway.  But the wires got crossed.  They didn’t come in for about an hour.

So I sat on the couch and rocked and felt increasingly invalidated.  This isn’t exactly something I do much.  I don’t even say the details out loud to Noah much when we are doing our metaconversations.  No really, I am not able to physically speak about these things well.  As time passed I felt increasingly unsafe and like I had made a bad decision to try.  They came  in and acted like little kids who broke a window and are hoping no one noticed.  I flipped out.  I called them names and ran to the office and sobbed.  Then I got up and I went to the cupboard for a towel and I walked back into the office and I picked up the scalpel.

I don’t know what it is like for other cutters, but I love it.  I love the fact that for those seconds the only thing in the world is the hot, terrible burn on my leg.  I can’t think about anything else.  By the time I get to cutting I am no longer capable of finding the words to talk about the monsters.  I can’t.  I am too much absolutely in the present.  I cannot think about the past because I am unrelievedly in the present.  I feel like cutting is a gift.  Cutting allows me to walk away from any situation in my past and not think about it.  No matter how intense my feelings are, I can make them stop.  I can go completely and totally flat line.  It’s not disassociating.  It is forcing my body to have no space for anything other than the pain.  That may sound unpleasant, but I promise you that emotional pain is harder and hurts more.

I yelled at Noah that he said… something.  I don’t even remember what.  Something about them wanting to hurt me.  Noah’s response was, “No.  We didn’t say that.  And you will know it later.”  I thought that was wonderful.  It gave me space to think it then without trying to demand that his reality supplant mine right then.  My friend apologized profusely and genuinely was upset.  He is a wonderful person and he would move mountains for me.  He loves me a lot.  But you see, I like sharp, difficult people.  And they often have a lot of defenses.  He was trying to make himself feel comfortable because the things I was talking about upset him.  He wanted to comfort me, but he didn’t know how.

I spend a lot of time living at that juncture.  That is what living with an Aspie is like.  They can stand near you and really not understand at all that you are having a whole emotional experience in front of them.  I don’t know how to describe what that is like on a day to day basis.  To be fair, Noah has learned my “tells” for when I am having an emotional experience at this point.  Noah is quite good.  It took him years and we’ve had some awful arguments.  But he learned.  My friend hasn’t learned my tells.  And when Noah is distracted by other people he stops staring at me intently looking for tells.  So they both managed to miss almost all of the signals from start to finish.

They didn’t mean to, but they did actually create a space where it was unsafe for me to talk.  And they are big boys and get to put on their big boy panties and deal with feeling bad about that.  And I need to put on my big girl panties and accept the fact that I set them up to fail.  Talking about this stuff is hard for me.  I need very specific kinds of support to do it.  There is not a worse possible two person combination for creating that space amongst my entire network.  Both of my boys can be wonderfully supportive and safe to talk to… one on one.  When I get to dictate 100% of the terms of the conversation.  Heh.  But when they are standing next to one another (or sitting, whatever) they all of a sudden have to take one another into account and I feel like they are both pathologically unable to be safe for me around another alpha male geek.  I’m not sure why.  But they trigger the fuck out of one another.  (Ok, I have suspicions as to why, but that’s not part of this story.)

Thing is… this isn’t news.  At all.  And I invited these two men to be the ones I tried to practice telling my story to?  Awesome way to ensure that absolutely everyone is upset.  That was the wrong decision.  I could have invited just about anyone else.  I could have invited that friend and sat with him in a separate space from Noah.  I could have told them early on in the night that I need them both to take a vow of silence because if they talk over me I will be unable to speak–and they would have done it.  They love me.  They love me so much that they have both been through years of me being nasty and mean to them.  The friend in question?  Uhm, I cracked a few of his ribs years ago when I was overly rough with him.  He wasn’t thrilled, but he has never ever been nasty to me because of it.  (It was an accident.  Really.)  Naw, it is part of this story.  I think this friend would have walked away from whatever else he was doing and married me if I had asked him to.  He loves me.  A lot.  And Noah and he kind of have a low level dick contest when they are together.  And they are both socially clueless all the time anyway.  Yeah.  I really invited the wrong combination.

Why do I do that?  Why when I get to the point of wanting to spill my guts, do I need to talk about my sexual abuse in front of men who feel slightly competitive towards one another and are unwilling to be flexible when the other is present?  Maybe because I don’t want to tell the story and I want reason to be upset and angry instead so I can focus my energy there.  I want to be mad at my boys because they love me so much and I want to hurt them badly for committing the unforgivable sin of loving me.  I want to start getting hyperbolic now because that’s the headspace I am in.  I think that is the underlying reason.  I think I picked them because talking about these things is horribly painful and I would rather derail onto another strong emotion than look at them.  I would rather look for any reason in the world to turn around and start emotionally kicking the people who love me as hard as I can.  I am quite certain my friend didn’t sleep well and he probably feels very bad for hurting me.  At this point he probably is blaming himself for being a terrible friend.

Or not.  Or maybe that is my story and he went home and slept great and he thinks that I am in a place where I am hurting and he is sorry that I am hurting so much and it’s not about him.  I hope that is what happened.  I’m not sure he has boundaries that strong, but I’ll hope for him.

And that leaves me.  In the office.  With a leg I can’t let my kids see for a long time.  Right before our big European vacation.  Awesome.  It won’t blow up my life, but it is going to add a low level of stress for a long time.  I am going to be freaked out about the possibility of Shanna seeing it.  We are kind of a naked house.  I am more of a clothes person, but when it is hot I don’t have a problem with stripping.  I often work in the yard with no clothes on because I’m easier to wash off.  It just seems practical.  But that’s off the table for a while.

It’s really not big as far as patches go, at least not for me.  I was pretty tentative last night.  I haven’t used a scalpel in a long time and I was having trouble figuring out how I wanted to hold the blade.  You see, as much as I may be suicidal, I am a perfectionist.  I am not interested in going in deeper than I intend.  I want to be very particular about going through just one layer of skin at a time.  It makes it a much longer more burning process.  It also requires more self control to move very slowly.  That is what gives me the intense focus that severs my connection to the memories.  My old therapist, Traci, was a Harm Reduction person.  She didn’t think that addicts or cutters, or whatever other self destructive behavior pattern you have, necessarily needed to stop.  Obviously they were filling a need.  You just should be aware and careful of how you use it.  Obviously it is better to find other ways of coping.  But if this is what you got, you use it.

I haven’t needed to cut in a long time.  Last night it didn’t feel optional.  Last night I felt like I was completely unsafe and in danger of being actively hurt or reprimanded or something if I continued to feel those feelings.  It was not ok to be in that part of my brain.  I’m not even sure I understand entirely why.  Ok, yeah… their behavior was sucking.  But I know that about them.  My entire relationship with both of them is predicated around me bullying them into acting how I want them to act.  I’m probably not supposed to admit that out loud, but no… really.  The default expectation when we are together is I decide how they are allowed to behave.  I give them longer and shorter leashes depending on my mood. Really.  That is pretty much the only way I can stand being around them and oh man that sounds horrible.  I’m feeling terribly guilty right now.  But the thing is, I’m setting boundaries.  And it’s ok for me to set boundaries.  The boys don’t notice when I try to set my boundaries in subtle, nuanced ways because that is not part of their language.  They both really appreciate a 2×4 upside the head because otherwise they do not notice what is going on.  They cannot step outside their own stuff to listen to other people unless the other person bullies them into silence.

What an interesting symbiotic relationship.  To be fair, I am describing them while picturing them at the absolute worst of their combined behavior while together.  Both of them are much easier to communicate with one on one and I normally only need a flyswatter and not a 2×4.  Ahem.

Through the writing of this I have gone through feeling hurt, angry, sad, melancholy, amused, and at this point I’m shaking my head with resignation.  My boys were my boys.  The problem is, I wasn’t me.  The little girl who was badly sexually abused and who was badly emotionally abused at home isn’t part of who I am on a regular basis.  I am not a hesitant person.  I am not withdrawn.  I am engaged with the world.  I am strong and assertive.  I have opinions and by Gawd I’ll not hesitate to share them.  But I’m also nice.  I believe in justice and bullying is one of the fastest ways to make me stand up and shout someone down.  My boys are bullies.  Lovable bullies, but bullies.  Normally I am great with that dynamic.  I think it is fun and funny.  It is endearing.

But my little girl doesn’t need a bully.  I shouldn’t have invited that friend.  That was a very hurtful thing for me to do to both of us.  This is the kind of thing that is normally a stumbling block to forward progress.  I know that the friend in question doesn’t know this blog exists let alone read it.  So I could go forward feeling like I made my mea culpa to the world and “oh look how evolved I am for dissecting my feelings” and then I will stop trying for a while because I proved that talking about these things in person is unsafe.  But the thing is, I picked someone who doesn’t know how to talk to a little girl.  That’s not really his fault.  He doesn’t have that life experience and he doesn’t recognize whatsoever that I’m having a massive psychological experience in front of him.  He thinks I’m me.  And I’m just as much of a bully as him and I love him for it and he loves me for it.  We accept and like that part of one another.  In respectful ways.  Our dynamic has gotten much healthier over the years.  I still have to set the terms for our interactions.  And I didn’t last night.  I’m not sure I would have been able to keep it up even if I had tried because the space where I can talk prohibits that kind of strength.

I need to talk to someone else.  And that’s normally the stumbling block to progress.  I need to create space in my life to talk about this more.  It’s hard though.  Calli is uhm, resisting weaning efforts.  I think she is nursing twice as much as she was three weeks ago and I’m ready to put my head through a window.  She is, in fact, in the living room with Noah fussing loudly.  But I have 2 more minutes of personal time.  Damnit.

Food, Glorious Food

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I’m pretty excited about the party today.  I probably should be off starting to prep for it right now.  The reason I am not doing so is because it is still pitch black outside.  I think the first thing I do should be to hide the eggs so the girls aren’t woken up by me moving around in the house before then.  Excellent.  Time to think.  One of the things that has been on my mind a lot lately is food.  Seems normal, I think everyone focuses on food.  Especially when they are about to host a party.  But that isn’t really what I mean.  I mean that I’m thinking about food in the abstract.  I’m thinking about what it means to me.  See, I’m doing that because I’m not really eating.  Yesterday I had an egg mit from Noah’s Bagels and a 16 oz drink from Jamba Juice for breakfast.  For the entire rest of the day I had a slice of cheese, a couple bites of sausage, half a bowl of ramen, and about 5 bites of meat at a Japanese restaurant.  I am not a small chick.  I am breastfeeding.  That is simply not an adequate number of calories for a day.  Right before going to bed I asked Noah to bring me food and he did and I ate a sandwich.  I did that because I knew Calli would be up all night nursing (I was mostly right) and I didn’t want to deal with the level of stomach pain I get if I let her keep nursing when I’m over hungry.

Maybe that is part of why I hate nursing her so much.  And that’s why my jeans are falling off.  It’s this weird thing.  I am so clearly punishing myself.  Wait.  I’m getting ahead of myself.  I’m not telling the story right.

I’ve been thinking about food a lot.  I’ve been thinking about food a lot because I’ve been playing games with denying myself food.  This feels unsettling and weird to me because… it’s not October.  I accept that I do things like this every so often, but it never crossed my mind until this morning when my wonderful online girlfriend asked me about it.  My father committed suicide in the beginning of October.  I think I have spent every October since his death not eating.  This was actually an issue with Tom.  He got very worried and upset the first two years of our relationship when I didn’t eat for a month.  I mean, I do eat some.  But I eat 25-50% of what I normally eat.  And my weight tends to plummet rapidly during this time.  I’ve always gotten a lot of positive feedback about that and uhm, that’s weird.  It’s weird that I get so much overt societal approval for being that specific flavor of fucked up.  Society as a whole would love for me to develop this kind of overwhelming shame at all times so that I could finally have the appropriate body size.

And yet I’m not real inclined to do that.  I have very quiet anxiety that I don’t express to almost anyone about being “too fat” where I don’t know where the line is.  And I don’t even know exactly why I feel so bad about this anxiety.  Ok, here’s the thing: my actual shoulder bones are very narrow.  And for whatever reason I don’t tend to put on much weight in the very upper arms/shoulder/upper back areas.  So my upper body is always going to look funny in larger sized clothes because they hang wrong.  And I feel like I can never look attractive in my clothes.  And that really bothers me.  It really and truly bothers me that when I am heavy it is literally impossible to find things that fit me in the shoulders.  I’m starting to wear strapless dresses/shirts because then I can wear an open size medium sweater that doesn’t hang off my shoulders.

So obviously this is a complicated issue.  Food is love for me.  Very very much so.  I love to feed people and I surround myself with people who think food is love.  And then I do things like telling Noah last night that if he ever tries to get me to eat Japanese food again it will be proof that he is a terrible person who doesn’t love me because something in the flavor palate really bothers me.  Ok, I didn’t use exactly those words but that was strongly the gist of it.  And for the record I apologized as soon as my brain caught up with what my stupid mouth had just said.  I was horrified.  Oh man.  For the record the Japanese food thing is almost certainly connected with my overall food issue right now.  Nothing tastes good to me these days.  It’s complicated.

And that’s a lot of why I feel so awkward right now.  I’m really nervous about my ability to pull off being adequately social for the party today.  I don’t know how to talk to people because I am leapfrogging from one yucky thought to another about food stuff.  Why do I surround myself with feeders and then refuse to eat?  Because I don’t deserve love.  Because I’m saying bad things about my Daddy.

And that is why I don’t eat in October.  I am paying penance for killing him.  Without ever having considered if I should or shouldn’t, I am.  That’s an awful thing to think about.  I don’t think he deserves it in my big kid brain.  I don’t know where to begin to find a road around this obstacle.  Even if he doesn’t deserve it the little girl inside me is really upset about hurting her Daddy.

I’m kind of twitching about using that name for him.  You see, I tend to refer to him as my father.  Because he fathered me.  He spawned me.  That sort of thing.  I have had multiple Daddys at this point and they’ve been good men.  It’s kind of an odd story really.  Even I am not slow enough to have missed the connection between me having multiple friends and lovers I call Daddy and thinking about my father molesting me.  It’s kind of odd that the process has healed me in many ways.

Side note: I noticed that it was 5:30 and that I was kind of hungry.  I made a conscious decision to get up and get something to eat because it is absolutely mandatory that my mood be stable today.  I don’t want to eat it.  It actually tastes disgusting enough that I am having difficulty chewing and I feel nearly unable to swallow.  I’m eating a Vanilla Chip Chewy Granola Bar made by Cascadian Farms.  Normally I think these things are just about heaven on earth.  Right now my mouth feels coated and waxy and I feel repulsed and I am having minor gag reflex responses at the idea of taking a third bite.  But I don’t want to be a nasty bitch to my friends today so I took my damn third bite and I will just try not to think about the taste.  Because if I do this, if I allow myself to sit in this cycle today, I will cause a nasty big blow up fight in public and I will feel humiliated and proven right that I am an unstable bad person.

No thanks.  I’ll eat the fucking granola bar.  And every time someone tells me to eat today I will.  Because even if my little girl thinks I deserve to lose all my friends and be punished because I am a terrible person for prosecuting my father my big girl says fuck that shit.  I am not going to do this to myself any more.  I have people in my life who are just itching to feed me and love me.  I really should let them do both.  Even if I can’t love me when I am breaking family taboos and talking about family or relationship secrets.  But I don’t even know if that is it.  I just know that I feel upset enough when I am processing abuse stuff that I begin to withhold food from myself.

Hmm.  Interesting thought.  I wonder if part of the reason I am so prone to attach strongly to people who show love with food because I know I do this to myself and I know that *for me* it is necessary for me to have a cushion of fat to deal with these times of punishing myself.  Years ago I did Weight Watchers and I lost 50 pounds.  It was rather dramatic.  I was also doing a lot of intense exercise and I got into rather good shape.  (I realize now as I mourn that vigorous body.)  I’m trying to get back to feeling like I have that kind of energy.  Though now it occurs to me that it will probably not happen as long as I am waking up at 4 in the morning to write about being sexually assaulted while I was little.

But I have to wake up at 4 and write about it or I will answer cashiers in grocery stores with, “Hi, I’m Krissy and I’m a sexual assault survivor.  Specifically incest that primarily happened in the first ten years of my life, and multiple horrifying rapes when I was 7-10 years old, and a few date rapes and near misses as a teenager.  And then I prosecuted my father and he killed himself and I’ve been a hot mess ever since.  But thanks for asking how my day is!  I hope you are having a good one!”  That wouldn’t be ok, you know?

I hold that boundary.  And I don’t talk about my abuse and trauma very much during the day.  Even though this is an intense period of processing I don’t allow myself to talk about it during the day outside of therapy much because it isn’t appropriate for my kids to hear.  That has to be a boundary.  So instead I just punish myself.

And I grow to resent my children.  Especially nursing.  They are taking so much from me right now but I keep picturing this wonderful scene from a movie I recently watched.  The movie was Mother and Child with Annette Bening.  I sobbed my heart out through the whole story.  But specifically towards the end a woman is successful in adopting a baby after great personal sacrifice trying to do so.  She calls her mom in the middle of the night and throws a temper tantrum about how needy the baby is.  The grandmother in question, S. Epatha Merkerson, pulls back into this stern dignified look.  She then proceeds to tell her daughter off up one side and down the other for daring to have the gall to complain about a baby having needs.  These days when I start to feel pissy with the girls I close my eyes and picture that stony face of disappointed fury telling me to get off my ass and take care of the god damn baby.  And I plaster a smile on my face and get over myself.  I am not always as fast in some of my responses as I would like because I have to stop and take deep breaths to deal with my frustration level sometimes.  But everyone here is happy and healthy and growing and feeling really loved and supported as part of a whole unit.  A big part of that is I have decided that the version of Attachment Parenting we want to practice does not involve all the extremism that some loud voices in the “Natural Family Living” community think it should.  And that’s ok.  I don’t have to think that everything in the mainstream is wrong just because it is a common thing to do.  That is conforming to a specific kind of non-conformity and oh man it is killing me.  So I’m not doing the perfectly available 24/7 thing anymore.  And you know what?  It’s helping a lot.

You can see why I feel that thinking about food is complicated?  But the sun is stealing slowly over the horizon.  I can now clearly see the outline of the tree in our yard.  It is time for me to get up and go hide Easter eggs for a party.  I have something like 12 kids coming on a hunt today.  It will be super fun.   Luckily 5 of those kids are too young and 1 is probably mostly too old because I only have 48 eggs.   Always look on the bright side I say.  The kids will all have a wonderful time and it will be a great party.  I will eat every time someone mentions that I should.  The awesome thing is, no one who loves to feed me will have a chance to read this journal entry before the party.  But they will read it later.  Then the game becomes, do I tell them this morning what stupid destructive game I am playing so they can help me break the cycle?  Or do I act like a crazy person and create drama.  Yeah.  I think I’ll be talking to them as soon as possible.  I wish I didn’t need as much support as I do but I’m really glad that I can get it since I need it.  I am very lucky.

Personal time

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This morning I am enjoying my personal time while doing reading on the internet. I am appreciative of that for a few reasons. I’m going to be going over to try on the mock up of the bridesmaids dress that is being custom made for me. I cannot express the excitement I feel at the thought of having a custom tailored dress. And it will be a 50’s style dress. And it will fit me. And I can nurse in it. And I like it. And I like the material. And I like the color.

I think I just died and went to femme heaven. You see, I’m not normally much of a femme. I’m actually a low maintenance girl in that way. But, like most every woman, I have a funny shaped body and clothes are rarely comfortable. I talk to Noah dreamily about a custom made wardrobe all the time. It just occurred to me that it doesn’t have to be a lottery fantasy. If I do it slowly, one piece at a time… why not? The clothes I am ordering from a website are nearly as expensive. If I find a seamstress who is interested in a steady commission it’s totally possible. And that sounds really nice. I would like to be comfortable in my clothes for once.
I don’t even know where that came from, but I like it. I like that I have time to sit here this morning and think about taking on that kind of many-year-long project because I will be here. This will be my life going forward and I’m allowed to have things I like. Once we get through this early childhood period we will even be able to have extra time so things like that are easy to do. Oh that sounds wonderful.

I like that I have requested that I am not “on duty” until 6:45. If I want to hang out in a closed room by myself doing whatever it is I want, I get to do that. (OF course this is after nursing Calli.) I can sit here and stare out the window and watch as the sky gradually changes from black to purple to navy blue to a saturated blue with white showing through, and now I can see the shapes of the clouds. It will be very cloudy today and probably rain. I think the sky will stay at a blue tinted gray.

I was thinking about that faith in gray thing again today as I watched the movie The Karate Kid. It’s cheesy, but I feel vaguely inspired to do more reading about Zen Buddhism. I’ve been doing a lot of focusing lately on the task at hand as a way to stay balanced and focused. I like having my early morning time be fairly quick reading of the people I enjoy on the internet. I have a lot of time during my day when I have moments of being trapped under Callidora. I am really struggling with my resentment of nursing right now. If I have something to think about, something that connects me to the outside world then I don’t feel trapped and angry. This allows me to have a part of my brain that always feels like me and I can settle into having the whole rest of my attention focused only on the kids. I imagine it works the way I used to use knitting in class. If I have one other track plugging along I can settle into focusing hard on one big one. I am not good at having just one focus at a time if I dislike the task. I have to have something that makes me want to keep enduring. That is carrying and building part of me. If I don’t have this time then I spend Calli’s nursing sessions trying to surf the internet and she interrupts and I am angry the whole time and I resent her.

I like that I have this time to come in here and try to relax into the knowledge that I am not the only responsible person in this house. I don’t need to feel anxiety at all times that I have to be responding in whatever way my children want whenever they want. I don’t have to have a child centered house. Ok, maybe that sounds obvious and preferable to many if not most other people. I grew up in a child centered home. I think a lot of the problems in my family were because we moved at the whims of children. In order to have a peaceful house we need larger and longer patterns. Those can’t be set by children. That’s my job. Oh man. I’m not sure I’m ready to be a responsible adult yet. I have 16 more minutes! Until then, I can be as big of a slacker as I want. So I’ll close this, send a good morning message to my wonderful online girlfriend and have a great day with my friends and my kids.