Category Archives: privilege

I’m sorry

Today isn’t starting off well.  I think these physical symptoms are stress not “sick”.  That doesn’t make them better.  We kind of sort of tried to have sex today and Noah finally stopped when he noticed how much I was flipping out.  He’s a kind sort.

I started thinking about how much Noah really wishes he got to go from girl to girl.  He wants that so much.  From the outset, with that want, I can never be enough.  No matter what.  I can’t be multiple people.  I can’t give him that thrill.  I could stand there and watch (or not) him have it.  I can’t give it to him.  Given how much trouble I’m having with sex right now it feels like I have completely cock blocked him in every way.  He didn’t promise celibacy.

I feel like such a failure.  I’m feeling eaten away by stress and failure and all the things I will never be good enough for.  This morning as I was crying at Noah I told him that whenI was a kid I would say: “I’m sorry”, the response was: “Yeah, you’re sorry.  You are the sorriest piece of shit ever born.”  I’m realizing why I don’t notice that I am expressing contempt.  I don’t know much else.

This book is very hard to read.  I don’t really want to think hard about the fact that this is my life.  How can I have these experiences and come out anything but a piece of shit. An angry waste of air.  Yes, yes, happiness is a state of mind, not a circumstance.  I don’t know how to forget everything that happened and just go on to be happy.  I’m hopeful that some day other people will know the story.  Enough people will tell me that I’m not bad that maybe I will believe it.  I still feel like I deserve everything that happened.  It wouldn’t have happened to a nice person.  Someone who was good.  Someone kind.  Someone who wasn’t a piece of shit.  Instead it happened to me.  That must be how it is supposed to work.

Today is going to be kind of rough.  I had planned to take the girls to Fairyland.  But I’m dizzy and weak.  I don’t think that is a good idea.  I wish the stupid place was open during the week.  I’ve been taking sleeping pills for almost two weeks.  I’ve gotten 7.5+ hours for almost that many nights.  I wish my body felt better.  Everything hurts.  I remember my stomach hurting like this when I was a kid.  This was usually my reason for staying home from school.  My mom would always yell at me that I was a hypochondriac or a liar.  At least she let me stay home anyway.  I’m scared.  I’m so very scared.

I just sent an email to some of my co-owners in the coffee shop.  I guess that money is going to be a donation after all.  I asked to have my name taken off the ownership paperwork.  I don’t want the stress going forward.  I bought it when I thought I had more help.  Things change.  If they could give the money back some day that would be great but I won’t be holding my breath.  I wasn’t looking for that.  I wanted to do good in the world.  I hope I did.

I want to be someone who can take care of a lot of people and fix a lot of problems.  Unfortunately I only seem to be able to fix knots in capes.  I can clean up toys.  And three people is the absolute physical limit of how many people I can take care of.  I wish I didn’t know that for sure.  I wish I hadn’t hit that wall.  I wish I got to still have the fantasy of being very competent.  I’m very competent on my best days.  I don’t have best days very often.  I have to plan my life around my very worst days.  Because I have to determine what I can truly carry on my own.  Because I have things I have to carry no matter what.  I have to take care of my family.  I have to.  There is no one else to do it.  No one else is available to just come take care of my kids.  I tried to see if it was possible.  It’s not.  Well, I could pay someone but that would require getting a job.  No thanks.  Once you start upping the ante like that it isn’t figuring out how to adapt my life it is going out and getting a whole new life.

I like my life.  I like hanging out with my kids.  I like writing.  I’m even quite house proud.  I like looking around and seeing the things that bring joy to me.  I’ve created my house very intentionally.  I didn’t pick it but it’s mine.  Maybe the only house I will live in for the rest of my life.  I want it to bring me joy.  I’m pretty selfish.  Luckily Noah doesn’t seem to worry too much about what I do.  For some odd reason he trusts me.  Or he just doesn’t care.  Either way.

Noah told me that he isn’t sure what to say.  I’m convinced I have no value.  He disagrees.  I told him that I’m afraid he is lying.  I am.  I’m terrified.

I don’t feel much pride in myself.  All I see are my failures.  It’s interesting how differently Noah and I view failures.  He tells me often that you learn more from doing things wrong.  It feels like such a privileged thing to say.  It may be true, but only some people keep getting second chances.  I think that’s part of it.  Noah rarely fails at anything that matters.  I do.  When I fail I have to once again deal with the consequences of the fact that I am a piece of shit and everyone is going to leave me in the end for being a nasty, angry, bitter person.  My mistakes in the past twelve months have cost me three friendships.  I run people off.  My mistakes mean that I spent seven years in graduate school but I have no degree to show for it.  Yes, I learned things.  That’s still an awful lot of time and money to spend.  I’m glad I was able to pay off my student loan debt so fast.  If I was still paying for it I would be much more bitter.

Only time will tell how I am as a mother.  I’m afraid.  The stakes are so high.  Even if some day I manage to run Noah off, which I think is more possible than he gives me credit for, I really am afraid that I won’t deserve my children.  It was decided so long ago that I am bad.  What hubris do I have to think I can change that?

Today I hate me.  And I’m sorry.  So very sorry.

First world problems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Go see a therapist"

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

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

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

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

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

This isn’t about laundry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hunting is hella awkward (this whole thing is tmi)

We went from having a weekend of lots of planned sluttery to only having sex together.  This is rather hilarious, I think.  But Noah was approached on okcupid.  He’s making a date.

I love masturbating right after sex.  I’m sore and overly sensitive so it kind of hurts and it takes me a long time to have an orgasm.  I have to really make up a story in my head.  I’m just starting to do this again.  I haven’t done this in years.  I don’t masturbate when my kids are in bed with me.  I like to follow the stories that come up.  Often they involve sex with one or more of my friends.  It usually involves me getting to meet some need in their life.

Having sex with your friends is shitting where you eat.  It’s hard because having your needs met feels really good and it’s easy to get upset when you know people in your life can make you feel that good but they choose to schedule their time elsewhere.  That’s a hard thing emotionally.  It’s a lot of the reason that I am gun shy about polyamory.  I have my priorities set where they are set and no I am not fucking adjusting them for someone else.

I don’t think I have ever hunted the way I am hunting now.  I have never gotten to set the terms before.  It’s really hot.  It’s really hot to have people be willing to seduce me by email before we ever show up in person.  I have a great correspondance going right now.  The problem is that people get to the date and then have performance anxiety.  I don’t have performance anxiety.  I’m that good at sex.  As good as I say and better.  Because if you write me a script in advance I will make sure it is a script I can play and then I will play it to the hilt.  It’s really fun.

People who know me have a hard time engaging with this part of me.  They already have so many experiences that have made them gun shy.  I should make people gun shy on a day to day basis.  I’m kind of twitchy.  You don’t know how my moods will flow, it’s true.  Pushing an agenda on me is normally a questionable idea.

Except when it isn’t.  And I don’t know how to figure out the boundaries around this with people I know.  But I am learning how to do it with strangers and it’s really hot.  One hiccup is that I was asked if choking is really a hard limit.  Uhh, yeah.  It is.  No hands around my neck at all.  I don’t care that you like to assert your dominance that way.  Find another way.  Hey, I’m a nice girl.  How about if I tell you that I have been thinking a lot about face slapping?  You’ll believe me because I’ve been so clear about my boundaries in every other place.  Start slow, of course.  I’m sensitive.  But if that is interesting to you… I would feel put in my place.  Just sayin’.

It’s hard to do these exchanges with people I know.  I don’t trust very many people to that level.  It’s hard to use your friends as one night stands.  They feel bad.  Friends feel used and abandoned.  It’s important to not spike that oxytocin too high with people who already are more emotionally connected than I am.  That’s shitting on people I like.  Because they get hurt.  I don’t like doing that.

I am really thrilled about how many dates are happening.  I’m having fun.  I’m thrilled that Noah’s response to me hunting is to start talking about going to the gym because now he has to compete.  He totally doesn’t.  But I like it when he is in better shape.  Our sex life improves.  And given where it is… oh my.

I think it is funny that I hunt so hard for sex with other people when I know that Noah will be a better lover.  Every time.  It’s kind of like how Noah won’t eat McDonald’s, so I go without him.  I have these tastes for things that are bad for me.  My vices.  I like McDonald’s, ramen, and dates with new-to-me-men.  I’m going to get to the point where those are it.  (I eat McDonald’s like once a month.  Just sayin’.  Happy Meal joy.)

Noah tried to wake me up for sex on Friday night and I bit his head off.  Thursday I didn’t sleep much so I was cranky.  I made it up to him by waking him up on Saturday morning.  And we went to a party and played together on Saturday and had hot sex.  And we came home and had hot sex.  And Sunday afternoon Sarah took the kids out and he tied me up and did wonderful things to me and we had hot sex. And Sunday before passing out we couldn’t stop pawing at one another… so we had hot sex again.

Sometimes just being near him makes me shake with wanting him.  I have felt this voracious need for sex basically all of my life.  For the first time it’s not only ok it is preferable.  Because Noah actually likes me and appreciates me.  I worry about how other people will perceive me for being this kind of person.  I worry and feel stupid for worrying.  Of course people judge me.  So what?

I am not at risk of being hurt.  It would be very hard for anyone to hurt me just because they disapprove of my behavior.  My kids are far more sheltered than average.  They have a fierce sense of body autonomy and you can’t get that if you are abused.  They shine with good health and love.  I don’t have a job that is at risk.  Noah tells me he doesn’t care what I write.  He’ll take the hit.  Because I’m worth it.  I am financially secure enough that I will never have to play a public game again in my life.

Still I feel this fear.  If I feel this afraid, what is it like for people who have something to lose?  I have hubris on my side.  I can limit my hunting pool ridiculously.  I seem to be only hunting among people who have college degrees, often PhDs.  Not because I care but because those are the ones with the cajones to message me.  They are the only people who are willing to put up with a long list of nitpicky requests and demands from me before they meet me.  People who will write a sex script with me before meeting me and allow me to call a large percentage of the shots.  Am I actually doing risk management this way or am I lying to myself?

Communicating clearly that I am a sure thing gives me this sensation of butterflies in my stomach.  That moment of revelation, when I have to say I am interested in sex feels incredible.  Because I am interested in sex.  Not with anyone.  With people who can talk to me and help me make a script and help me figure out why I am there.

That’s what I’m doing with the pre-writing.  I’m giving myself a chance to create the back story on why the kind of girl he is fantasizing about would show up for the experience he is about to have.  Everyone wants a different why.  I’m very curious about why people think they should have sex.  It’s different from the why they have for love.  The why people have about sex tells me so much about their life.

Most people think they should have sex because they are in love.  It’s kind of a weird thing, to me.  Why do I think I should have sex?  Because it feels good.  Because I like carefully balancing how much of my life is devoted to things that feel good to me.  The specific kind of feel-good I get from sex with new people is apparently worth a lot of effort and angst to me.  I’m trying to get to the point where I can attenuate the effort and get rid of the angst.  I’m not for everyone.  The kind of people who are in the right place to do exactly what I want… that’s serendipity.  I need to be honest about the emotional cost.

I need to stop being messy with my emotions in my house.  Sarah has nightmares and I make them worse.  I’m not yelling or screaming.  But I am huffy.  I do visibly shake with anger.  To someone who grew up in a violent household I look like I am on the verge of hitting.  I need better control.  And that means I need to back off on hunting.  It’s taking a lot of my brain cycles and that makes me short tempered elsewhere.

I need to figure out how much energy I actually have left once I am meeting my obligations at home.  Right now I don’t feel like I understand that balance very well.  This is where I don’t have a map.  I guess I do though.  I painted it on my wall.  I’m going into the cave.  Sometimes.  Or I’m wandering off to have an island retreat.

Have I mentioned that due to plumbing mishaps I have a white wall in my house?  The possibilities are endless.  I still haven’t painted the garage door.  All of these things take energy.  Energy I am currently holding in reserve because later today I am going to go shut down the Port of Oakland with a few friends.  I’m bringing my kids.  And after the Port Shutdown I will be dropped off for a date.

There is only so much of me to go around.  I only have so much energy to give.  It’s really awesome; I have to be pragmatic.  What do I want to have in my life?  What are my actual, actionable priorities?  What am I doing with my time and energy and how is it balancing throughout my life?  I have to think about these things.

I am sad things went the way they did with muse, but I can’t say I’m surprised.  I shouldn’t have tried for a month.  I know better.  I know I don’t have that kind of energy for a relationship.  I should have left it at the first date.  If my one night stand hunting culminated in a night of bath house sex where I don’t have to talk to the person after that… that would have been great.  I was stupid.  I tried to get the short-term boyfriend experience.

Know yourself.  Know your limits.  Noah has different limits.  Hell, near as I can tell everyone has different limits than me.  That’s ok.  It’s tricky trying to figure out where I get to have  rock hard limits around what I can and can’t request from people.

I’m interested in one night stands.  If you aren’t, that’s fine.  We aren’t a match.  Move along.  Don’t get mad at me and I’ll try not to rant about you.  I’ll make that promise to all the future boys.  I’ll try not to rant.  Which is to say that I will rant but try to be balanced.  You did good things too.  We just aren’t a match.  No shame in that.

That’s why.  That’s why I’m hunting.  Because I am continuing the behavior I have done my entire life but not I am trying to do it without shame.  I want to find a way to balance this part of me that feels bad because other people do not value it with the knowledge that it does bring good to my life.  It gives me the energy to go conquer the world.

I’m probably not going to schedule a one night stand attempt in January.  I need a rest from that energy drain.  It’s time to re-evaluate the energy I’m giving to my sex life.  I promised Shanna that I would make her a play house in January.  I can’t be tired from staying up all night for sex and do that.  It’s going to be awesome.  Just wait.  But it will take creativity.  It has to fit into Wonderland.

How can I talk about parenting and being a slut in one post?  Because I’m both.  That has to be ok.  I’m not actually doing anything shameful.  I have an unusual hobby that most people don’t share.  Like people in this valley should fucking judge.  You are all a bunch of weirdos.  What the fuck is this geocaching shit?

I think that if you look at history you will find a lot more people who pursued sex voraciously than people who beat some video game.  Who is the freak?  Ahem.

Irrational feelings

Noah made the comment that our nonmonogamy rules are based on polite fictions.  I did not yell or scream or hit or punch or any of the things that went through my impulse queue.  He just called me a liar.  But he did it in one of those civilized ways you can’t really argue with.  He can get away with it.

He’s not calling me a liar.  He’s pointing out that my emotional experience and the actual real experience often differ and we planned for my emotional experience.  He’s kind of a fucker that way.

We originally said we wouldn’t date until Youngest Child (whoever that would be) was five.  We think that little kids need a lot of attention from their parents.  I’m starting to realize that I overestimated how much I would be able to give to my kids without getting anything for myself.  I planned on seven to ten years of me not getting any attention.  Maybe that was poor planning.

Noah points out that I’m being unfair and dishonest about how I’m representing the breakdown of our respective time off.  Maybe.  I’m not going to say yes to that yet.  I have too many years of him having a lot more time and space than me.  I’m still dealing with being completely overwhelmed and unable to function.  I’m trying to figure out where the happy medium will be.

The class he signed up for?  The one we thought was six week?  It goes till March.  So much for carefully figuring out how our reserves of energy will be spent over the next few months.  Not how I have been planning.  Ok.  I can regroup.  That’s fine.

Noah is going to want to go out on a date.  I don’t know when.  Not this year.  It will probably come up some time next year if I’m even vaguely honest with myself.  With how much time I have spent on okcupid lately I understand why women will line up to date my husband.  I don’t like feeling like part of a group.  I have trouble with being out with my family of five sometimes.  If I wasn’t so clearly a huge needed constantly necessary part of the group I wouldn’t be comfortable.  Parties are hard.  I feel like I never fit in.  If I go to a party and I feel awkward and uncomfortable from the time I arrive but Noah looks like he fits in I feel like I should leave.  I should let him have this space he is comfortable in.  It’s his.  Not mine.

That’s kind of how I let Tom have the south bay bdsm community.  If I am attached to someone and they disengage from me in any way when we are out with a group I feel the instant need to panic and leave.  I can’t be there.  I’m not wanted any more.  I have no place.  No identity.  I’m nothing.  I vanish once the identity I have in the group leaves.

I can’t be one of Noah’s girls.  If I am one of Noah’s girls I don’t exist when he is not with me any more.  I feel like I am watching someone else live my life.  Someone else gets to be Noah’s partner.  I guess that means I stop existing as his partner.  When he was dating W. I sat at home crying and cutting.  I didn’t tell him about the cutting much.  Everyone knew about the crying.  I wanted to have as much physical pain as emotional pain.  I wanted to see how big of a wound I had inside.  I couldn’t tell.  I couldn’t tell how big, how destructive the pain was until I saw how much of my leg I had to sacrifice to it.  I had to know how big it was.  Do you know why I stayed?  It was never more than a two or three slice date.

I think I’m done with writing about when I started cutting, for the book.  I haven’t continued to bring it up because it seems weird to do so.  For about seven years I cut more days than I did not.  Do I really need to say that over and over through the story?  Should I talk about the fact that I learned to measure my emotional pain by how many cuts it took to get me to calm down?

I am nonmonogamous and deal my intense jealousy and emotional break downs around Noah dating because it is only a two or three cut activity.  That’s not that bad.  I didn’t need to cut every date.  I established how much pain it was.  There were times when I used to make cross hatches on my thighs that were five or six inches long.  I would make hundreds.  Two or three cuts that are only an inch or so long?  Psh.  This really isn’t so bad.

It’s hard when Noah says that are rules are based on fictions.  What he is saying is that I was making up a part of me.  Or making up what I thought I should say.  I was lying.  I don’t want to be a liar.

I don’t want to be a liar.  But I can’t figure out how to explain what is going on with me.  I’m saying the closest thing to the truth I can at any given moment.  Sometimes, when I’m dealing with my emotional experiences, the truth is like water.  It flows wherever it wants to paying no attention to previous course corrections.

I’m dating.  I shouldn’t lie about it.  I haven’t found a boyfriend, but I’m dating.  Maybe I should stop trying to set rules about how long we have to endure any given state of life.  I keep fucking up my guesstimates.

I said five years because I was hoping that by then I would feel secure enough with Noah that I wouldn’t feel so threatened every time he looked at another woman.  So scared of losing him any minute.  I don’t think time is really going to give me that though.  I would feel just as paranoid in twenty years.  And I can’t seem to be monogamous.  I’m not ok with being a hypocrite.  That’s a lot higher in my personal scheme of sins than almost anything.  I’m acting like a hypocrite.  Shit.  I don’t wannnnnnnna stop.

I didn’t ask for monogamy as part of our marriage.  I specifically excluded it from our wedding vows.  I knew I didn’t want it.  I have to let Noah figure out what he wants without dealing with temper tantrums.  It’s not fair.  It’s not the kind of marriage I want to have.  I can’t freak out in front of the kids when he is out, either.  Luckily it will be a smooth transition for them because they already don’t see him several nights a week.

Speaking of appropriate topics, I won’t be able to make fresh references to Noah’s whores.  That uhh won’t go over well.  Maybe I’m going to have to work on that whole thought process a lot over the next few months.  I doubt he would try before the end of the class he is working on.

I’m weaning at eighteen months.  I’ve decided.  That’s the end.  I’m gradually working her down.  I’m only allowing her to nurse twice a day right now.  It will be once a day for the last while.  There are things I want to do with my body that I don’t want to do while nursing.  It’s time to stop.  I want to be able to make choices based on what I want rather than on what I have to do.  Do I get tossed out of the crunchy mom club for not doing child lead weaning?  I’m not making it to two years either.  Calli is fifteen months tomorrow.  I feel like I will lose my mind in the next three months.  I hate nursing.  That’s all I’ve got in me.

I’m going to try stopping the pot in December.  I am going to start actually training for running.  I need to stop coughing.  Eek.  I’m nervous.  I’m going to talk to my psych about that and using Ativan more than I am.  I was given six pills for a month and I still have two left.  But I’m still smoking pot every day because of the writing.  I’m going to stop writing on the 30th.  I’m going to switch to using Ativan instead.  With the goal of not needing anything at all in the next few months.  I’m already cutting the Ativan in half and I may need to cut them into quarters if I use them more.  Right now they make me fall asleep.  I really and truly am not safe to drive within four hours of taking one.  That limits my life.

So I need to be able to cope if I want to go off and do the things I want to do.  It’s time to get off the crutches.  That’s going to be explosive for a while and I’m scared.  I smoke pot because I have a temper problem.  Because it’s hard for me to be calm and patient 24/7.  I just don’t have that naturally.  I’m going to need to find other ways of dealing with my anger.  Running is going to be a lot of it.  But I also seem to be using dating to fill a lot of my energy input needs.  I feel deeply conflicted about it.  But I am.

I fucking need something.  I don’t want to just sit here and eat and try to convince my brain that I’m happy that way.  It’s a false association.  Being fatter doesn’t actually make me happier even though I have this really strong self-belief that it is true.  My weight is pretty irrelevant but the other circumstances in my life matter.  I have usually been happier while I was fatter.  It wasn’t because of the weight though.  I need to stop feeling bad about not being fat.  Yeah, that convoluted.

I’m bigger than my mother.  I’m not fat.  I need to let go of her endless lectures about what a cow I am.  I’m not.  I’m a fairly average sized woman.  My mother is extremely petite.  Let it go Krissy.

Tonight we are going to spend money we really shouldn’t be spending this month on an over the top luxury meal with my lovely Complication.  She’s worth it.  I’m going to enjoy every fucking minute of it.  Later I will have a panic attack at the AmEx bill.  Then I will stop, breathe, think of the sight of my Complication eating good food and pay the bill without complaint.

That’s what you do as a rich person.  You facilitate life being good.  For yourself.  For other people.  Because you can.  Because why the fuck not.  There is no deserve.  There is no “right” to these things.  I’m not bad for spending this bonus money on an over the top good meal.  I’m not wasting it.  I’m enjoying it.  I’m enjoying every bite.  I’m enjoying every minute that I can of a life that is full of a lot of ups and downs.

When you have much greater lows than normal it only seems fair that you get to have better highs, right?  I’m about to go to the French Laundry for the second time in two years.  I am a lucky bitch.  I have a husband who loves me tremendously and is willing to spend most of his spare time on figuring out how to earn more money so he can pamper me more and more.  Because he wants to.  Because he thinks I deserve it.  Because he thinks it is great that he can do that for me.  Because wanting to give to me makes him want to go out and conquer the world so that he can give it to me.

I think I will need to be ok with him sleeping with other people once in a while so he can come back and appreciate me more.  I really am unique.  When I sleep with other people I come back and tell Noah what they did wrong.  He does the same.  It’s a very bonding experience for us that we match perfectly for pretty much every part of sex.  The rhythm is ideal.  No one else quite gets there.  Those other people are fun and awesome, don’t get me wrong.  But Noah is home.  And I am that for him.

These irrational feelings are hard.

Be Thankful

I often hear people say: You shouldn’t compare abuse.  There is no use.  Trauma is unique and people react differently.  Today I am going to say: yes you should fucking compare.  You probably have no god damn perspective on your life and you really should go out and compare.  You should find out how good you have it.

I feel deeply uncomfortable with how good my life is now.  I’m aware that my current safety and stability is not about deserve.  This is not the natural results of a lot of hard work.  It’s a fucking fluke.  I managed to marry someone rich.  Whoo hoo.  What. An. Accomplishment.  And yet people want to tell me that my life is awesome because I deserve it.

Does that mean I deserved to be raped?  Does that mean I deserved to live in poverty when I was a kid?  No.  There is. no. deserve.  I’m kind of angry that people use that word ever in conversations about money.    It’s not just the money though.

I think that people should sit down and compare abuse for a few minutes.  My father told me that I was a literally-evil-as-in-descended-from witches-evil and a whore.  That it was all I would ever be.  My father taught me that pain should go with sexual contact.  That I should endure it with a stony face.  From when I was a baby.

Did that happen to you?  No?  Well then maybe you should go thank your father.  Maybe you could take a moment to realize that if your dad is an asshole, but never did anything actually bad maybe that was him showing restraint.  Maybe he is not your cup of tea, but not exactly someone who should die in a fire.  Say fucking thank you.  Because I’m here to tell you that you weren’t treated how you were treated because you deserved it.  You were treated that well because no one wanted to treat you worse.  And for one fucking day I think people should stop and realize that it isn’t a birth right.

When people are kind to you, don’t expect it as your due.  Thank them for it.  It’s a gift.  Maybe grudgingly given, maybe cheerfully given.

Did your mother tell you that you deserved what you got after you were raped?  No?  Maybe you should say thank you to her.  Maybe you actually have a much better mother than you know.  Maybe you don’t know just how good you have it.

Did your brother tell you that the only career you would be good at was being a prostitute?  No?  Maybe you should say thank you to your brother.  He might be an asshole, but he recognizes that there is a line. And he didn’t cross.  He doesn’t degrade your humanity and think you are a piece of shit hole.  I promise you he isn’t doing it because you are so fucking awesome that of course you deserve to be treated well.  He’s doing it because he has made a choice about the kind of person he wants to be and how he wants to treat people.  Even if he doesn’t know it.  Because this is a choice.  Be thankful.

When I called my big sister sobbing, begging her for help she laughed at me and told me I was interrupting her having sex.  Then she hung up on me.  I spent the rest of the night trying to OD on crank.  Because no really, no one gave a shit about me.

I think people should compare abuse.  I really do.  I think these conversations should be explicit.  I think they should be candid.  I think people should stop walking on eggshells around this topic.  Given how many people tell me, “Oh I had a hard childhood too” then backpedal fast when I start talking this is a conversation that needs to be had.  People don’t know what a hard childhood is.  They have nothing to compare their own childhoods to most of the time.  There aren’t many books about genuinely bad childhoods.  So people don’t know what it means.  I think people should.  Most people have a lot more to be thankful for than they think.

It’s hard sometimes when people complain bitterly about their families.  I miss my family.  I’ve spent a month telling all the worst stories I can about my family.  I still miss them.  I still know my place there.  Yesterday was hard.  I spent all day rehearsing negative awful things to say in my head.  Because I know that my role at big holidays is to be the one who starts a fight and then runs off crying.  That way everyone has an opening to say how awesome it is when I’m not there any more.

I used to listen to those conversations as a kid.  They would comment idly once I left, “Oh thank god she finally left.”  I don’t think there were very many days in my childhood where my mother didn’t comment about how nasty and awful I was.  I was too critical, always.

Maybe your family wants you to call on Thanksgiving because they love you and miss you and really wish they got to see you more.  And they don’t know how to effect that.  You ran away from them to have your own life and they miss you.  Is that really so bad?  Is that really so terrible?  Is a five minute or even fifteen minute phone call really so onerous?  Really?

I wasn’t alone yesterday.  I have Noah.  I have Sarah.  I have Shanna.  I have Calli.  My Complication (who has yet to tell me if it is ok to use her name) was here.  A friend named Dave (who doesn’t get to opt-out of using his name because there are 3,000 Daves in my community) also came to dinner.  That was nice.  The food was excellent.  Pre-dinner another couple of friends stopped by for a chat.  We all went to bed really early.

I wasn’t alone.  But I can’t shake the feeling that I’m still the problem.  I’m still the wild card.  I’m still the one who might break out crying and stomp off.  I’m still the one who is difficult to predict and triggery and an asshole.  I’m so fucking self-absorbed.

But I tried really hard to talk about the things I am thankful for.  Because I don’t deserve them.  I didn’t deserve the things that happened to me as a kid and I don’t deserve the things that happen to me know.  It’s not about deserve.  I changed my luck.  I’m excited that my life is different now.  But it’s not about deserve.  It just happened.  Life is like that.  I think that people can work their whole life and never get what they want.  I think that people can work for five minutes and get more than they ever dreamed.  It’s not about deserve.  It just happens.

I have relatively good health.  I have a safe, stable home.  I have friends who are willing to tolerate a torrential flow of shit-talk from me.  I have a husband who thinks I can do or be anything I want in the whole wide world.  Well, maybe not an NBA player.  Or an astronaut.  Oh well.

I am thankful for the privilege and security I have because it is allowing me to be a good mother.  Other women can be good mothers with less support.  I don’t think I would be able to.  My life is set up around babying my mood swings and impatience.  I have created space for dealing with my rage.  Because I have Noah and Sarah and a big pile of money.  I’m not a good mother because my kids deserve it.  I’m a good mother because I am lucky enough to set up my life in a way that allows me to be.  I can play to my strengths and minimize my weaknesses.  That isn’t about deserve.  But it is really nice that my kids get to have that.  I would like to find a way to teach them that it isn’t a right without having to hurt them in the process.

I am really thankful that I get to sit down and think about these things and make decisions about them because of my raging privilege.  I am so fucking lucky.  That makes it harder that I’m still bitter.

I’m bitter when I hear people sit around trading off how onerous it is to have families.  I can’t have a family because I believe that it is unhealthy for me to have ongoing relationships with people who enabled me being raped for more than a decade.  What’s your fucking excuse?  Oh, they aren’t your same chosen culture?  Uh.  Grow some fucking balls and learn to deal with the fact that world isn’t just like you.  I promise you that the world isn’t just like me.  I have to find a way of talking to them anyway or I get to be alone.  I think it is hubris to toss away your family.  You never know when you might want them again.  And some wounds can’t heal.

I think people should catalogue their abuse.  And then actually compare.  No really.  Make a decision for yourself.  Either be ok with it or walk away.  The back and forth is bullshit.  Holding on to bitterness for things that happened decades ago is bullshit.

And I do it.  I know I am hurting my life with this bullshit.  This was one of the best Thanksgivings of my life.  Yeah, I spent some of the day in my room crying.  But less than usual.  Far less than any given year from my childhood.  No one had anything resembling a fight.  I had one explosion where I told people to stop bitching about having to call their families.  That was it.  That’s pretty good for me.

I feel really bad that I know that my pretty good would be unacceptable for most people.  Only one melodramatic meltdown ending in tears.  But if you are going to compare you have to really compare.  I had 18 years of people telling me on Thanksgiving that I was unpleasant to be around and difficult and I should just leave.  Was that the experience of most people?  Probably not.  Maybe it’s ok that I still cry.

But I also try really hard to notice that I have it really good.  My life is exceptionally easy and good right now.  I have the kind of life that people dream about.  Maybe I need to stop crying.  I may have had a bad childhood, but whether I have a bad adulthood is up to me.  I can choose to spend every Thanksgiving crying or I can work on not doing that.  It’s not making my life better.  It is no longer a good thing for me to isolate myself.  Once it was a good and necessary thing.  I need to learn how to deal with the discomfort of being around other people.  Even though it is hard and it hurts.  Because I have these amazing people who have stepped up.  I need to be thankful for them, not bitter about my bio-family.  Because there is no deserve.  I don’t have this now because the universe adjusted from an inappropriate tilt and now I have what I deserve finally.

I’m just really fucking lucky.  And not everyone is as lucky as me.  For me to piss and moan and whine is pretty disrespectful, honestly.  It’s bullshit.  And I should change it.

I think talking about money is important.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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

It’s not what you know it’s who you know

I used to have a coworker, Christina.  We were hired for the same department the same year.  I think in our first semester of being teachers together I subbed for her one period.  That is a common thing for teachers to do.  For things like doctors appointments, it’s easier than finding someone outside the school.  You generally don’t get extra pay for it, but the goodwill is huge.

We were both still learning how to put together curriculum and we had very different styles.  She was going from the textbook.  I never checked the textbook out of the book room.  I ran my classroom as close to a college class as I could get away with.  I followed the state standards for educational guidelines, here let’s look at one set as an example (these are the official standards for the state of California):

WRITING (Grades 11 & 12)
1.0  Writing Strategies
Students write coherent and focused texts that convey a well-defined perspective
and tightly reasoned argument. The writing demonstrates students’ awareness of the
audience and purpose and progression through the stages of the writing process.
Organization and Focus
1.1  Demonstrate an understanding of the elements of discourse (e.g., purpose, speaker,
audience, form) when completing narrative, expository, persuasive, or descriptive
writing assignments.
1.2  Use point of view, characterization, style (e.g., use of irony), and related elements for specific rhetorical and aesthetic purposes.
1.3  Structure ideas and arguments in a sustained, persuasive, and sophisticated way and support them with precise and relevant examples.
1.4  Enhance meaning by employing rhetorical devices, including the extended use of paral­lelism, repetition, and analogy; the incorporation of visual aids (e.g., graphs, tables, pictures); and the issuance of a call for action.
1.5  Use language in natural, fresh, and vivid ways to establish a specific tone.
Research and Technology
1.6  Develop presentations by using clear research questions and creative and critical research strategies (e.g., field studies, oral histories, interviews, experiments, electronic sources).
1.7  Use systematic strategies to organize and record information (e.g., anecdotal scripting,
annotated bibliographies).
1.8  Integrate databases, graphics, and spreadsheets into word-processed documents.
Evaluation and Revision
1.9  Revise text to highlight the individual voice, improve sentence variety and style, and
enhance subtlety of meaning and tone in ways that are consistent with the purpose, audience, and genre.

To me there is no part of that needs to include dead white guys or boring work sheets.  I want to talk about controversial books, stories, songs, news articles.  Ok, some of the dead white guys are ok.  I am a big fan of Mark Twain.  I really enjoyed teaching Huckleberry Finn even though I’m sure I wasn’t PC.  I made ever white kid in the class read aloud until they could stop stuttering when they said nigger.  It’s just a word.  Then the black kids spontaneously decided to talk about how it felt.  There were fewer jokes after that day.

Anyway, Christina.  When I subbed for her I made fun of the poem we were reading from the textbook. I did it reflexively.  I did it because I had an instinctive hatred of the textbook.  Of course word got back to Christina.  She was cold to me for years rather than tell me that what I did was unprofessional.  In the week or two before I quit I came into the break room.  She was sitting there alone.  I sat across the table from her and I said, “I feel that I must have wronged you.  I’m not sure what I did.  But you’ve been very angry with me for a long time and I was hoping you would tell me why.”  She tried to deflect me.  Naw, she’s got no problem.  Then I told her the story I just wrote.  I got to the end and I said I was sorry that I poisoned the well when I was an insecure new teacher.  I did it because I was trying to bolster my sense of myself and in the process I damaged hers and that makes me a bully.  I’m sorry.  She cried.

She told me it was hard to keep hating me because I said things that were so funny and then she got mad at herself for laughing because she was supposed to dislike me.  I told her I understand.  People often feel that way about me.

Like they are supposed to dislike me, but they don’t and they aren’t sure why.  I’ve been told that more times than I care to recall.

Yesterday we had our first visit from a housekeeper/babysitter person.  She’s young and in college.  She’s not white.  The things she has mentioned so far make my heart beat faster.  She was turned out at 13.  She has been homeless for most of the time since.  She made it through DeVry under extremely suboptimal conditions because she wants to be a Systems Administrator.

Some of the things she said remind me strongly of Christina, who was also not white and from a less than privileged background.  It’s a specific quality.  If I follow the textbook I will be doing it right.  I have to do what the textbook says.  They are both climbing the ladder by doing things right.  I have always known that there must be an easier way.  And because I was white and I lived in Los Gatos and I was invited into the homes of very rich people and I got to listen to the way they just randomly talk around the house…

Yeah, it’s different.  My family taught me I had to conform and be like other people.  A very firm caste system, if you will.  I had to be who I was born to be.  My circumstances of birth should have dictated my actions.  But you see, I have always been able to find the ability to ‘pass’ around people of higher social class for at least a little while.  I can’t maintain it for long and it feels like incredible strain.  But all those bits and pieces and glimpses have shown me that the people who make it really far are people who believe that their circumstance of birth are irrelevant to their potential.  They simply have a larger hunger than that.

Christina and the housekeeper and me are all hungry in that way.  We want something more.  This is very common.  I’m hitting writers block because I feel like I want to say something that sounds bad or mean, but it’s still true.  I’m paralyzed with fear.

Ok.  I think that Christina and D (chick from yesterday) are afraid to go off book because otherwise they would have to start making up their own path.  They have never been encouraged to do so.  Everything in their lives has pushed them into a fairly narrow walkway for “success” but neither is going to actually reach success that way.

This is my big judgmental mouth here.  This is hard to admit out loud that I think.  Ok.  I feel like they both need to go off book.  If you are always afraid of failing you never commit yourself foolhardily to the most important decisions.

I called the Sheriff’s department and reported my father and had everything set, done, rolling before my mother got home from work.  I knew that if I talked to her she would try to talk me out of making waves.  I was just imagining things.  According to my mother nothing was that bad; there was nothing to report.

I think that Christina needs to learn to stick up for herself and tell coworkers, “What you did was unprofessional and rude” because she needs to learn that she’s worth that.  It will make her a better teacher.  I think D should find a way to live and breathe Sys Admin shit for a few months in someones garage and not bother with DeVry.  She needs to go talk to real live people who do this shit.

In both cases I am struck by their unwillingness to assert themselves with power.  They both wait to be told what they should be doing and how they should do it.  I don’t do that.  I don’t think it is because I am white.  I think it is because I was shown that rich people are assholes and they do whatever the fuck they want whenever the fuck they want.  They can get away with it.  I wanted to learn how.

In Los Gatos High School the kids all got away with murder.  It was eery.  I watched kids be disrespectful in ways that made my eyes bug out.  But the teachers were powerless in terms of discipline.  It was really obvious to me that the teachers were only going to be effective if they form a personal bond.  And you can’t do that with everyone.

Christina isn’t a bad teacher and she doesn’t need to do anything different from what she’s doing.  Her kids will learn just fine.  But she’s not the right teacher for people who are hostile to working from a textbook.  Early on when I was teaching it made me angry that she followed the textbook because it felt like a personal injustice that she was perpetuating the lie that people need to know the stupid shit inside that book.  No one ever needs to read a god damn textbook ever in their lives in order to be educated.

This is my dirty street kid talking.  I didn’t ever read the textbooks.  I didn’t do homework.  I was socially progressed through elementary and junior high because I did no work.  Looking around the room I always felt like the other kids must be smarter or better or… something than me.  For whatever reason I was never willing to do what I was told.  Ever.  I have had several teachers (in public schools) beat me trying to get me to change my behavior.  It only ever made me more stubborn.

It’s scary to stand near people who take up a lot of space.  It feels like they encroach on me and try to make me more like them.  It’s scary to stand next to people who invite boundary incursion.  I don’t want to push anyone to be more like me, either.  I’m pretty fucked up.  Why in the hell would anyone want to be like me.

But I went from the bottom 10% to the top 5% in a time when my generation is crying out against the injustice of lack of social mobility.  It’s hard to not feel like a whore.  I am this rich because Noah fell in love with me.  He wanted a wife who was sufficiently slutty and fun.  He encourages me in doing every transgressive thing I want to do.  Because he thinks there isn’t actually anything wrong with anything that I’m doing.

I think it was easier to go find other groups that would encourage healthier behaviors because I looked enough like the groups that I wanted to be part of.  When I was in neighborhoods where I was the only white kid, I wasn’t invited into the homes of nice families.  I never had the experience of nice families in a multi-cultural setting.  In Los Gatos it took a while for people to notice that I didn’t fit in and then they would stop inviting me.  So in the poor, non-white (the specific concentration depended on where we were living) areas I spent all my time alone.  Occasionally I wandered out for a sexual assault.  When I was in white areas I was surrounded by very affluent, quirky people.

It’s had an effect on me.  So yesterday when this nice girl was helping me clean my house we sat and talked a lot about her school experience and how she feels quite sure that they aren’t teaching her what she needs to know.

You know, I can’t foster children in a house this small.  But I sure as shit can have a long string of people who need money work for me and I can help them network.  You want to be a Sys Admin, honey?  Let me introduce you to some nice girls I know.

The American Dream

The media is telling me constantly that the American Dream is dead.  That no one can better themselves.  That no one can succeed.  I feel so confused.  Then how did I go from being the kind of kid who stole food to the kind of kid who gives people thousands of dollars when they are in a car accident just because I like them and otherwise they won’t be able to pay rent.  How did that happen?  Noah.  I married up.

I feel weird guilt and shame over having access to Noah’s money.  I feel bad talking about anything related to class because I am no longer poor.  I will never be poor again.  Noah comes from the 1%.  He isn’t there himself… yet.  But from everything I understand about human development and financial success, Noah will probably get back there.  People who grow up with that kind of money learn how to make it.  They learn how to be the kind of person who has it.  And I’m just desperate and needy and I have a broken compass.  I don’t have the ability to tell when something is “enough” sometimes.  Not money, drugs, sex … Even though I’m not an “addict” by the classic definitions I still have a broken compass.  I don’t know how much is enough or too much sometimes.

I don’t have very many friends who are willing to live like Noah and I do.  We live really far away from everything.  We live in a house that is much smaller and crappier than we could technically afford.  We live here and we will continue to live here pretty much forever because I’m not willing to spend more money than the astronomical amount already spent on this house.  Noah mortgaged over a quarter of a million dollars on this house.  I think that’s insane.  But it’s really cheap for a house here.  It will be paid off before I am 40.

I got lucky.  I married Noah.  That was kind of sort of how I reached where I am.  But I also went to college and worked.  It’s not like I would have been this wealthy as a teacher, but I would have done just fine.  I still would have felt like I made the American Dream.  Because my goals would have been smaller.  I got out of poverty.  I became the first one to be educated (high school diploma, BA, teaching credential, and 7 years of MA work).  To me that feels like I am done.  I reached the American Dream.  I went to college and I’m not in debt!  I paid it off within a year of being done with classes.  Because I was married to Noah and when I was working and he was working we had an obscene amount of money.

This is the part that is odd to me.  Noah doesn’t make more money than our friends.  Most of our friends have combined househole incomes that are much higher than ours.  We live in the bay area.  Our friends are the ones who went to fancy schools and became computer people.  But no one else I know thinks they are filthy rich.  People complain about not being able to do everything they want or having to compromise on things.

I feel so confused.  I have to wonder if my compass is the broken one.  What do people think the American Dream means?  Do you think it means everyone gets to retire at 35 to free health care forever?  Permanent jobs with a high chance of retirement?  I don’t consider it part of the American Dream that people have to own a house or make a lot of money.  I consider the American Dream to be the willingness to change your stars.

Everyone is born with a future that looks like it is obviously theirs.  They can take it if they want.  Or they can go make their own future.  They can be whoever they want to be.  They can rise in the world.  It doesn’t mean that everyone will be filthy rich, but people who hustle can improve their lot.  I’m told it doesn’t work that way for everyone.  That I am a fluke.

I get told that a lot.  Everything about me seems to be a fluke.  Why did it work out for me then?  Why do so many things work for me that other people say cannot be made to work ever ever ever ever?  For me this is part of feeling invisible.  I never know how to respond when I read things that say it is not possible for me to have done what I’ve done.  Do you want me to burst into flames?

Whenever I think of the American Dream I think of teaching The Great Gatsby.  Gatsby wanted Daisy.  He wanted to be rich too…. but mostly he just wanted Daisy.  He got rich because he was trying to earn Daisy’s love.  Noah seems to feel the same way about me, which is odd.  It’s weird living with someone who thinks he has to earn me.  I’m shit, aren’t I?  Why would someone want to earn me?  Does that mean you try to coat yourself more heavily in flies?  Of course not.

Noah sees me as high status.  That is the American Dream, really.  It is the ability to change your social status.  I don’t understand for the life of me why anyone would associate me with being high status.  Ok, I have access to a hefty bank account.  I didn’t have that before Noah, though.  Why does that raise my status?  Why do I magically become a better person?

Why will people look at me when I am dressed nicely.  Why will people talk to me more now, even though I look increasingly weird?  Sometimes it seems like there is an aura that comes along with financial safety.  And other people recognize it.  It is a relieving of anxiety.  It’s practically a difference in smell.  As if people who have to worry more have a more acrid body odor.  I don’t think that’s literally  true or real.  But there is some strange wall.

The idea of the American Dream mixed with being white trash is the crux.  It’s about being told that I can’t do things that I already have done so fuck you very much.  It’s about feeling like it’s not ok to be who I am because I am weird.  Because I have done things other people haven’t, for good or bad.  Because I am just plain different and I don’t know why.  It is hard to talk about difference without making it sound like being superior or better or aggrandizement.

Some people like chocolate.  I don’t.  I like vanilla.  For variety, maybe peppermint.  Does that mean that vanilla is truly qualitatively better because I like it more?  Demonstrably not.  I don’t think I am a better person than most other people.  Better than my sister, yes.  Better than mom, probably.  Other people?  Enh, not so much with the comparison.  I don’t know what road they walked.  I don’t know who tried to knock them down or how.  I’m not better.  But I have done different things.

I want to understand why I make different choices.  I want to understand that about myself.  I want to be able to hack the system.  I have big life goals.  If I want to reach them I am going to have to work very hard for a very long time.  I cannot believe the attitude that it is hopeless.  I can’t.  I can’t have the feeling about myself that seems to be common for my generation.  I think I can do fucking anything.  I already have.  I don’t identify with deserving anything.  I don’t think I deserve universal health care.  I think that when I needed insurance I had to find weird jobs that would offer insurance that I didn’t really want to do.  But I had different options.

I benefit from enormous privilege.  I’m sure that most of the reason I was able to succeed is just because I am white and slightly above average in attractiveness.  I’m not stunning.  I’m not gorgeous.  But I’m cute.  And I’m bubbly.  And I’m a hard worker and a people person.  I had advantages.

I talk about being white trash because I don’t think it is possible for someone of color to do the same things I did because I see how the deck is stacked against my friends.  They are fighting different wars.  They have to fight at all times covertly because they are watched.  They can’t directly cause fights the way I can get away with.  I feel deeply uncomfortable with this knowledge.  That as I sit here in my smug pretention of “Well I succeeded!” Yeah… I did because of an intersection of lack and privilege.  I don’t know that any part of my life is relevant to anyone else.

Who the fuck am I to talk about succeeding when I had the dog bite settlement that paid for an awful lot of my life.  When I smugly talk about cobbling together insurance I honestly feel kind of sick to my stomach.  I did it.  But I always had $14,400/year to live on.  Ever since I was 18.  Because I was attacked as a kid and half my face was ripped off.  I had a good lawyer.  I think I only had a good lawyer because I am white.

The girl who was born across the street from me.  B.  Her father was my lawyer.  He was my very best friends father.  B wasn’t hanging out with the non-white kids on the street (her New York Jewish parents moved her out of that neighborhood when we were four).  He is an excellent lawyer.  I don’t even think he took his full fee out of my settlement.  It was less than $100k in settlement but he invested it well for me.  I took that money and I changed my whole life.

My brother Jimmy was hit by a car when he was a kid and got a settlement when he was 18.  He spent the money on a raised truck, a killer stereo (that was stolen a couple months later), and a lot of drugs.  It was gone in a few months.

My brother Tommy was hit by a car when he was a kid and got a settlement.  Technically there is $6,000 left of it somewhere.  I’m thinking about claiming it as my father’s dependent.  As an inheritance. Jimmy calls it dirty money and says he doesn’t want it.  I think that money is fucking useful.

I suppose at this point my dream is to stop feeling so angry.  I want to be able to talk and think without being so full of bad feelings.  My stomach hurts.  I’m really tired of my stomach hurting.  I’m not special. I’m not better.  But I did things that other people couldn’t do.  I feel like I should be proud of myself.  And I simultaneously feel like being proud of myself is somehow wrong or bad.  I should be ashamed of myself because I think I have done anything worth noticing.  What kind of self absorbed bitch am I?  Who the fuck am I to look down my fucking nose at anyone else?

I’m not looking down my nose.  I’m trying to figure out why I made different choices.  I wish I understood better when the choice moments were.  I am not responsible for where I ended up entirely.  It’s accident as much as planning.  But if I wasn’t in this house right now having a good life I would be in a different house having a good life.  My teaching job would still be stable financially even if the work was shitty.  I lived in an apartment I could afford on $20k/year and by now I would be making about $60k.  It would have taken a while, but I probably would have bought a house in cash in ten years.  About when I’m going to pay this one off instead.

Because somewhere, at some point I crossed a line.  I will never be poor again.  I have lost the habits.  I make different choices.  I can be broke.  It feels like a difference in attitude.  Do you know why I am not worried about my ability to succeed?  Because I walked into my first real job interview and said, “I know I am the first person you are interviewing and you have three days of interviews to go but if you don’t hire me today I am not available.  Sorry.”  I was offered the job an hour later.  I take a lot of pride in that.

Because the only time in my life I have ever failed at something I wanted to do was passing the MA final exam.  And really I probably psyched myself out so bad that I’m not surprised I failed.  Ugh.  It’s obvious I know the material but I can’t write enough for academia.  I never wanted to be part of academia, not really.  Having an MA would change my life.  I didn’t want it bad enough to make that change.  That is how I feel about it.  Almost like the lit MA was wrong for me.  It would have changed my life choices in a way that would have been ultimately less helpful.

I’m starting to wonder if someday there is social work in my future.  That would be a different MA.  Ugh.  I’m not sure I can handle more school.  Ever.

I feel weird because I am alive during a Revolution.  These are interesting times.  And I don’t feel like I have much to say as part of the Revolution.  That’s weird and uncomfortable.  It’s not like I’m watching Fox news or agreeing with them.  But I don’t agree with a lot of the politics I’m hearing lately.  My opinions are just different.

I want to stop being so narcissistic and notice that other people aren’t as similar to one another as I project.  I’m not a special snowflake.  I’m not more different.  But I think I am.  This is where the hubris comes in.  How can you believe with intensity that you are different without believing it is superior?  Do I think that other people should try to be like me?  No.  Things that work for me won’t work for most other people.  I don’t think other people would be ok with the amount of intense emotion my life contains.  I get the impression other people are more calm.

I feel like the American Dream was always a sham.  Look at Death of a Salesman.  Right there.  He believed that who you know and charisma will get you where you need to know.  It won’t.  I only occasionally have charisma, mostly I alienate the shit out of people.  But I work fucking hard.  I work hard and I know how to game the system.  I wish I could teach other people the rules of the system so they could game it as well.  I don’t think this should be a unique ability.

As crazy, as unstable, as difficult, as confrontational as I am… I do know how to shut up when necessary.  I just don’t think it is necessary nearly so often as other people do.  I, in fact, think that everyone should make a lot more waves than they do.

I don’t think I have “figured things out” or done things in some magical right way that other people don’t do.  I think there is a way of developing your intuition so that you learn which choices are really not safe.  I avoid the unsafe twinges.  I kind of wonder if that is how I survived.  I was afraid at the right times.

I don’t think that people necessarily understand that rage is often, at least for me, the flip side of terror.  I spend my life horribly terrified that something bad is going to happen to me again.  I am genuinely scared.  I shake.  It makes me angry that I feel this way.  That I am so scared of everyone and everything in the world.  I don’t like that when people say things that make me feel invisible I want to hit them.  Obviously I don’t do so.  That would be problematic in a whole new exciting way.  But I’m often not nice.

Nice.  There is that word again.  I wish I was unoffensive.  I wish I was nice.  Somehow it is magically better to be nice.  There is that American Dream again.  You are supposed to be a nice, quiet, middle class person.  But I’m not.  I’m loud.  I’m brashy.  I’m aggressive.  I’m trashy.  I like loud upbeat country music.  And Lady Gaga and Pink.  I like Steel Magnolias unapologetically.  I grew up rural and don’t know city manners.  I really don’t understand why my city gives a shit if I grow vegetables in my front yard and I think they can fucking sue me if they want me to stop.

Being nice feels like lying.  It feels like constant low level lying.  It means you never tell the full truth because the full truth is often uncomfortable.  You always leave stuff out so that other people never have to feel bad.  I FEEL BAD MOST OF THE TIME.  Why shouldn’t I tell people the truth about how I feel?  Why should bad feelings be hidden?  Should they?  Is that what people want?

Let me tell you, if there is a time and a place where it is appropriate to sit around and tell stories about incest I’ve never found it.  Even therapy is only kind of sort of the place.  Because just sitting around and telling the stories seems to be un-useful.  But I sit around and drop those mentions into casual conversations.  Because that is what is in my head.  And it alienates people.  It’s my truth.  It’s my story.  I’m not actually hurting anyone by letting people know it exists.  But it feels not nice.

It is because I think my mental health is more important than other people feeling comfortable that I describe myself as white trash.  There is a self absorption that I witnessed in my family.  A way of seeing yourself as the central figure in this terrible tragedy.  A way of acting like everyone in the whole world is out to get you and everything bad that happens to you is part of this giant conspiracy.  Everyone is out to get us!  They all hate us!  They think they are better than us just because they have money!  Well fuck them!  We at least have pride!

It’s weird and kind of sick.  There is an abnegation of responsibility for everything that happens to you that I don’t understand.  Sometimes I want to slap my sister and say, “Ok so our dad raped you.  Time to stop dating men who are drug addicts because you are trying to get daddy to love you.”  That.  That is a lot of what this comes down to.

Do you know how I survived?  Do you know how I attained the American Dream?  Because people told me that I was shit and I didn’t deserve it.  And my response was to fight back.  It’s not that I think I deserve anything.  I don’t think I have stuff because I deserve it.  I have stuff (college education, money, no car loan) because I made them my top priorities and I didn’t let anything stop me.  I want to say that nothing catastrophic happened to prevent it, but that’s a lie.  Tommy’s accident.  All the rapes.  Going to 25 schools before dropping out of high school at 16.  I did have catastrophic things happen to try and stop me as a kid.  But you just keep getting up and doing things.

And then some day you are 18.  And you leave.  And you never look back.  And with every choice I make I think, “What would my sister do?”  Then I do the opposite.  That’s not actually true, but it’s kind of funny to think about.  I did get out.  Do you know what my family gave me for high school graduation?  Pots, pans, a crock pot, towels.  They wanted me the fuck out.  They wanted me to go.  Because I was different.  Because I caused problems.

I don’t even really feel like my family is white trash, per se.  When I’m being an asshole I include them in the collateral damage.  Mostly they don’t want to be like me though.  They have other dreams.  They are hick and redneck and poor.  But they aren’t white trash.  Mostly they don’t have my aggression.  My sister does.  I would say without reservation that she is also white trash.  Not my aunt or my cousins.  They are just standing too close to evil, manipulative people.

So maybe being white trash is relegated to being an incest survivor?  That’s not really it, but it factors in. It’s so many things all at once.  It’s not one thing.  When people feel defensive and try to tell me that my qualifiers aren’t the right ones because they also fit those qualifications… Oh gosh.  I’m not trying to make you feel defensive.  I’m not trying to be not nice.  I don’t know that at the end my definition of white trash will ever be useful for anyone but me.  I’m not sure it is applicable.  Ok, for my sister too.  But past us?  I can’t know enough of someones story to judge.

I say I am white trash because I am always going to say things about myself that offend the shit out of the people around me.  They will always feel hostile about me saying the stuff I’m saying.  I can only control whether I say it or not.  And sometimes I can’t control whether I say it or not.  I don’t really understand why trauma has affected me in these ways.

I listen to Adele singing Someone Like You a lot lately.  I’m scared that some day my mom will show up on my doorstep.  I’m afraid she won’t.

“I hate to turn up out of the blue uninvited
But I couldn’t stay away, I couldn’t fight it.
I had hoped you’d see my face and that you’d be reminded
That for me it isn’t over.”

The problem with having PTSD is that it is never over.  I have to deal with what happened to me forever.  It will never be over.  I will never be over being a survivor of incest.  I will never get over being a dirty little street kid.  I will never be over being moved around constantly as a child and being prevented from properly bonding with people.  I will never be able to have that stop being true.  I will always have this part of me that feels empty and bad and like I am shit.

It’s not over for me.  And it spurs me.  It makes me angry.  It gives me wings.  And I flew away.  For all that it isn’t over, it is.  I have this husband who thinks I hung the moon.  I have wonderful children who love me and adore me.  I have already made other peoples lives better.

But as I watch the sun come up I question what this American Dream was meant to be anyway.  It’s not the house that matters.  It’s not the money.  The freedom I have is the freedom to say, “No.  You cannot invalidate me.  I exist.  I am different from you.  My life experiences have shaped me.  And I’m ok.  I do not need to change.”  I’m white trash and I’m proud of it.  I’m proud of my ability to fight and over come adversity.  I’m fucking proud of myself.  I think I’m bad ass.  Noah thinks so too.  Does it really matter if anyone else does?

No.  But that’s my American Dream.  I don’t abandon my self label with my change in financial status because that would be too convenient for everyone around me.  They would like to pretend that people like me don’t exist.  I feel like most of the people who are big parts of my life are fairly sheltered people.  Even the ones who were abused tended to grow up in mostly safe, stable places.  They had dads who were emotionally abusive assholes.  That kind of thing.  But they had consistency.  They still only know people who are mostly like them.  Except for me.

I still have to say that I am white trash because people try to excuse my behavior as being some sort of byproduct of unavoidable trauma, the poor dear.  People love me and want to comfort me and tell me that things that happen to me aren’t my fault.  I’m a victim.  Well, sometimes.  But an awful lot of my current problems are my fault.  They are my fault because I choose to be aggressive and hostile.  Because I choose to remain white trash instead of catapulting to being middle class.  It’s kind of a choice and kind of not a choice.  I’m not middle class anyway, I’m nouveau riche.  I skipped the middle class.  That is kind of weird in and of itself, isn’t it?

When I try to think about what I want from my life I’m pretty happy though.  Everything I want is something that I could have.  I want to write and grow.  I want deeper friendships.  I want to have hard conversations with my friends about class.  I love my friends.  I want to find the ability in myself to feel like I have enough.  Like I am not still yearning.  Really, there isn’t much left that I have to do.  Write.  Publish.  Wash.  Repeat.

But first, I have to go cuddle my perfect daughter.

Privilege

I’ve been thinking a lot about privilege since reading this blog and I think I hit on part of it this morning.  I was talking to someone recently and I was trying to explain the pressure of meeting new people and how it is better or worse depending on how much they will matter in the long-run.  Meeting Noah’s friends is stressful because I will have to deal with them for years… I’d better not fuck up.  Which means I inevitably will feel like I did no matter how I actually behave.  In the course of this conversation I said that I can’t handle the pressure to be “nice” when I meet someone.  She seemed shocked, aren’t I nice whenever I meet new people?  I actually laughed out loud.  Of course not.  I walk into every new association wondering if I am going to feel disliked because I am bad.  Whether this person will be “big enough” to overlook how fucked up I am and give me a chance anyway!  (This is said in a cheerleader voice.)

That shit gets old.  Privilege is feeling like you deserve to be breathing the same air as everyone else.  Privilege is growing up in a place that is safe and secure enough that you never freeze up in blind panic when your husband raises his voice the tiniest bit because surely this will be the time he makes you leave.  I believe there is no way that people could love me unless I change myself to meet their needs.  I believe that who I am, at a basic level, is wrong and I deserve to suffer for being wrong.  Because I cannot just “be nice” when I meet someone new.  I can’t do that.  In order to just be nice to other people I would have to first stop expecting them to be vicious to me so that I can stop feeling defensive.  Given what did happen to me I’m really glad that I was good and vicious in response.  It was literally a survival mechanism.

But how do you just stop feeling defensive and vicious?  It’s not as simple as anger management.  It’s not as simple as just meditating and staying in the here and now.  Not for me.  Because the point of all those techniques is to let you relax into the assumed basic training of being a polite person.  I have never had that.  No, that’s hyperbole.  That is not what I had as a child.  That is not my default at rest position.  I can actually get to a place where I feel calm and relaxed.  Sort of.  Briefly.  I can suppress my feelings with the best of them!  But then I am always paying in some way.  I’m hypersexual or asexual.  I’m binge eating or starving myself.  Privilege is thinking that “stopping my anger” will solve my problems.  No, it just moves the focal point of my current problem area.  I am broken and I have to figure out how to fix it.  Being quiet doesn’t work.  Being quiet means passing on broken patterns on to my children even if they are never abused.

Denise’s drug addiction would go in spurts.  She used intensely for a while then she blew up her life and was clean for a long period, or she used so minimally as to be functional.  My anxiety goes in hormonal spurts like that.  I can tell that I’m having totally irrational emotions.  If I can tell that they are totally irrational I can often talk myself through them.  When I suppress my memories and I refuse to work through them as they come up I am left sitting on a powder keg.  I don’t think it is actually reasonable to ask me to deal with as many triggers as I have by just meditating.  Give me a break.  That might work for someone else, fine.  It doesn’t work for me.  I just can’t.

I feel like white trash because as I move through the world something about my physical presentation makes people wince.  Not all the time, I can control it with enough effort, but often.  It’s something about my tone of voice, my looks, my word choice… I don’t even know exactly.  Even when I am not cursing. Even when I am “trying to be nice” people still jolt at me.  I don’t think I am actively yelling all the time. But people react visibly to me.  And it is common for people to comment on the fact that I have a lot of class markers of being poor.  It’s excellent.

That is my basic self image moving through the world.  Then I read news articles about finance talking about how Noah is in the top 5% of the country financially.  I feel this simultaneous shock and horror.  How in the hell can that be me?  I feel like now that I am in this different class I should suddenly know how to behave as if I am of this class.  But I don’t.  I feel awkward and uncomfortable.  I feel fake and deceitful.  How dare I come among good people when I’m obviously common trash.  As a result I am usually rude when I meet people because I have it so deeply ingrained in me that I am bad.  I don’t know how to be anything else.

These are the things I think about when I think about privilege.  Because I have the unimaginable privilege to sit here at my computer whining about my pain when at this point in my life I have it easier than the vast majority of people ever in the history of the world.  That’s perspective.  My problems are so small and so petty.  Why do I act like I’m important?  Because I have to.  Because everyone has to be concerned with themselves first and foremost or they have nothing to give.

Why aren’t I “nice” when I meet people?  Because I am white trash and I don’t know how.  No one ever taught me.

Suppression has limited usefulness.

It’s interesting.  People keep asking me how I am doing, that’s predictable (and appreciated!).  I’m not sure what to say a lot of the time.  “Well, I’m behaving as if I feel more cheerful.  I am less explosive.  I am not nearly as angry.  I also feel completely dead sexually.  When people touch me I feel my skin crawl.  But I’m way more calm with way less time in time out!”  Is that a win?

A number of people have expressed how impressed they are that I can simply suppress these memories.  I can stop having flashbacks.  I can black the body memories.  But it comes with a price.  I don’t get to really be me when I’m doing this.  I’m just a shell.  You see, my therapist is on vacation till August 1st.  Perfect timing.  I don’t really feel up to seeing a new person right now.  I’m… yeah.  I’m just not up for that.  I miss people and I miss going out but I am so happy to be home that I’m kind of afraid to leave.  I haven’t even been up to Oakland yet to see the friend I normally see at least once a week because leaving the house is insurmountable.

Why is leaving the house insurmountable?  Because I only have so much patience right now and at home I can ask Shanna to do a very limited number of things so we have a limited number of fights.  Once we leave the house all bets are off.  We might have a great experience; we might have a horrible time.  By “horrible time” I mean that she will pick a fight in front of other people and I will feel intense shame and humiliation that my child is such a brat.  And I will end up yelling at her with far more intensity than the situation warrants because I am feeling shame and humiliation.  So I would rather not take her out.  It’s not that I never yell at her at home, but it’s far less.  And when I can tell that I am starting to internally escalate things that don’t need to escalate I can safely separate us until I calm down more and can talk.  It’s seamless and non-dramatic at home.  Well, three year olds are dramatic.

I’m experiencing a lot more sympathy for why other people give in to their kids to stop the freaking constant whining.  I still won’t, but my alternative is to send her to her room until she can talk in a tone of voice that doesn’t sound like nails on a chalk board.  I don’t have that when we are out.  Oh it feels like pressure.  It feels like overwhelming-I’m-drowning-where-is-the-air pressure.  It’s not a rational reaction.  It is, in fact, completely irrational.  I am comforted by books that tell me that three is just like this.  Get through the year and it improves.  Please G-d.

At home we do ok!  Really!  We have have far more good days than bad.  Even our bad days at home aren’t that bad because I am way more liberal with “room time” than any “real” crunchy parent would be.  What the hell is gentle discipline anyway?  I don’t hit her.  I do my best not to yell.  But oh man I need space and the only way I know to get it is to tell her that she has two options: she can be civilized and polite, or she can be in her room.  It’s not that all expressions of emotion are uncivilized or impolite.  However, if you have to reach volumes that are harming my ear drums in order to express yourself you can do that outside the main room, sorry.  No, I don’t think that children deserve to terrorize everyone around them as they develop emotions.  And I cannot sit down and patiently let her do everything she wants to do.  Sometimes things have to get done.  I’m almost sorry.  But mostly because it means that not only do I have to do an avalanche of work, I have to argue with her all day about whether or not she will let me do it without being a whiny brat because she wants me to do nothing but pay attention to her. Ugh.

I swear to G-d I do things with her.  I play games.  I teach her gardening stuff.  We play on the swing.  I read to them.  I bake with her.  Et cetera.  Nothing is enough so I need to just say that I’ve had enough.  My needs matter too.  And she needs to deal with that disappointment because life is going to hold a whole lot more disappointments in it.

I think that is what the current rash of articles on over attentive parenting is saying.  I feel like I am trying (and failing) to meet all of her needs because my needs were so extensively ignored and unmet.  But there is a happy medium.  My family didn’t know how to meet my basic needs and Shanna is not in that position.  Shanna never has to wonder if she will have a place to live, food to eat (that is palatable), if she will see her mother or father or sister, or if she will get several hours of positive attention every day, or if she will be abused.  Shanna is safe.  Shanna really and truly is getting the basics that I didn’t have.

It impacts the whole rest of your life to not have those things as a child.  That is why I still identify as white trash even though I feel guilty given the extensive privilege I enjoy now.  I still feel like I’m not sure I will have a place to live or palatable food (this is a serious issue at this point in my life).  Noah went to great lengths to create a family trust and he put all of his separate property I was previously not entitled to, all the inheritance stuff, into community property.  No really, all stay at home moms are not created equal.  I am not taking the risk that other people take.  He truly can’t screw me, no matter what.  I will never be destitute again.  But I still go through periods where I am afraid to do things in the house because I think I will get in trouble.  I angst and dither over doing things because I fear that everyone will be mad at me and make me go.  This is not rational.  This is in my bone marrow.  This is why I feel like white trash.  I feel like a dirty little imposteur and at any moment I will be made to go away from decent people.  I’ve been told I wasn’t welcome before.

I was asked to leave the Seventh Day Adventist church when I was a kid.  As an adult I would say that a small minded bully with no actual authority told me that she didn’t like me… but that’s not how it felt at 12.  I was pushing to do a lock-in with the youth group.  I had been to one at my friend Yvette’s church and I really wanted to do it again.  A woman in an authority like position in the group took me aside and told me how offensive and inappropriate that was.  It was disgustingly sexual and then she told me that I would feel more comfortable in a place that was less Godly.

So I went and fucked Sean.  That’s pretty much the timeline on that.  Super Bowl Sunday was a few weeks after that.  I went and visited family friends who were not making great life choices.  Lots of drugs.  Lots of risky behavior.  My family thought it was great for me to go stay with them!  They were also hosting a different family friend for the weekend.  He also happened to be their drug dealer.  On Superbowl Sunday I told him that I wanted him to do something to me.  He asked what.  I said I was too shy to say the word.  He asked me what letter it started with.  I said “F”.  He started saying the predictable ones: fondle, feel, finger… then he got to fuck.  I said yes.

He turned all the lights off.  He did basically no foreplay.  He didn’t use a condom.  I lay there and physically did all the things I “knew” I was supposed to do.  All the things I had learned from years and years of reading porn romance novels, and stealing my uncle’s pornography.  But I cried while I did it.  I kind of thought that was just how it was supposed to go.

Apparently I unsuppressed some memories.  I don’t want to be dead inside.  I don’t want to feel like I am buried under the weight of all of the bad things.  If I suppress them I say that they are unimportant.  Not worth looking at.  But it is important that these things happened to me.  Maybe it is only important given the whole scope of my life, but that’s ok.  Maybe it wouldn’t be the end of the world story for someone else to say that the cried through losing their virginity.  It’s kind of a different story for me.  I was told over and over from when I was a baby that my only value was in having sex.  At 12 I felt like my attempts to be good and I really and truly was trying, resulted in being kicked out and told that God didn’t love me.  So I turned around and fucked a 25 year old drug dealer–without a condom.  That’s why mental health professionals think I should be dead.  If I started off making choices like this when I was 12?  12!  Oh my fucking god.  I always thought I was so adult.  That I was so mature.  Everyone agreed that I was precocious, advanced, remarkably adult… No.  I was heinously abused.  It’s different.

When I kick myself over and over for sending my daughter to her room because screaming when you dislike something is not an option… I feel like I am crushing her spirit.  I feel like I am abusing her.  I feel like I am not just on a slippery slope, but rather everything I do is inherently abusive because I am an abuser.  No matter what you do as a parent you can find someone to flog you and tell you that you are ruining your children.  I insist that she not yell at me, not use a volume that causes me physical pain, and that she not hit or kick anyone.  Ok, let’s tack on pestering.  I really don’t allow pestering.  Pestering is given warnings.  If you cross these lines, that means you need some time to see if you like being alone more than you like being polite to me.  No no no no.  I AM NOT ABUSIVE BECAUSE I HAVE BOUNDARIES.  I’m not.  I’m not.  I’m not.  I feel like me asserting myself is bad.  Like I don’t deserve to do it.  Like when I inconvenience the people around me for my own comfort, “Shanna you don’t get to play the screeching game inside” I am doing something terrible.  If I have to physically carry Shanna outside or to her room because she has decided to grab onto furniture and get louder?  Well… I still don’t think I have crossed the line of abusive at that point either.  I’m not going to be chased from room to room in my house by a screaming child.  Just no.

Let me break to say that I don’t think she is being malicious.  She’s enjoying the feeling and trying to get a rise out of me.  I still don’t have to like it or tolerate it.  But I worry about my reactions when we are out.  Like on the train when she wants to get to me the easiest way is to start getting loud.  She knows that it is a huge hot button.  So I picked her up and carried her to the vestibule area.  So far still ok.  But then she wouldn’t stop screaming and I wouldn’t stop yelling either. So I made her stand in the corner.  Which she didn’t want to do and she fought me.  Thankfully Noah interceded because it wouldn’t have been pleasant for either of us if he hadn’t.  I got my back up over something stupid.  That was not the hill to die on because I had no method of enforcement that was appropriate and safe for all concerned.  So I was going to lose no matter what.  But the real problem was that we hadn’t given her proper breakfast and she was hungry.  And that’s all our fault.  And the real solution was to be more patient with her when we had inappropriately taxed her physically.  But instead I hissed unpleasantly at her “You are in public and you need to be quiet.  No.  You don’t get to make the people around you miserable.  That’s not ok.”  Over and over. That’s not an acceptable reaction.  That reaction is coming from my own intense fears about being looked at.  That is me being told that I was never allowed to talk about the abuse or unpleasant things in a way that would make people look at me.  I’m passing on that abused feeling.

I think that “abuse” makes you feel smaller, weaker, and less than.  Abuse is being told in some way that you are a less than person.  I feel like I don’t deserve to take up space in the world.  That’s a lot of my suicidal feelings.  I feel like I am a toxic force.  Like I am a toxic waste dump that should be eradicated for the good of the herd.  That’s how I feel about myself.  No, I don’t have the expectation that I will be “nice” when I meet new people.  I expect that I will feel awkward and uncomfortable and I will act out in some way because I am just that kind of stupid fucked up loser and I always make bad first impressions because I am just bad bad bad bad.

I don’t know that I’m going to have a good day.  Who knows.  Maybe I will purge my bile on the internet and then go on with my day.  It could happen.  I’m hoping that purging my bile works.  Noah is home and my no-t-twin is having a house warming.  Maybe we could have a good day and go after nap time.  That would be really nice.  I can do two things at once when I am out in public.  I can watch one child and interact with an adult or I can watch two children.  That means that socializing in public is hard.  But life is hard and this is really a first world problem.  Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean you stop doing it.

I’m watching the sky.  I’m torn between disappointment and elation.  Lately the mornings have been feeling like a beach summer.  It’s slightly humid but very chilly.  It’s uncomfortable to move around the house in summer clothes.  But it’s summer, damnit!  And I keep wearing my summer clothes with layers because I am so eager to strip down to as little as possible.  I miss warmth.  I want it on my skin and I almost never feel this way.  It’s really bothering me this year in a way it never has before.  So the thing is, I want it to be warm in the morning so that I feel comfortable moving around and doing my work and then I can have the afternoon sloth to lie on the couch or play with the kids.  I do most of my big chore jobs in the mornings because the children have more patience and I’m tired of having freezing cold toes.  It’s freaking July.  What the heck.  Right now it is 57 degrees.  That’s pitiful!  (I’m working on the distracting part of suppressing.  The kids will wake up soon.)

I spend a lot of time thinking about why I feel the need to process what I went through the way I do.  It’s not exactly the most pleasant thing to do.  At this stage of my life I feel like I am not in a position to take up a spiritual leader because I would need an intense cult… and yeah.  Like that’s a good solution.  I don’t want a religion to give meaning to my life.  I am not a glory to anyone else.  I can’t come up with any way in the whole fucking world to talk any kind of good about a spiritual practice that does not tell me to pick up a big stick any time someone from my family comes near me.  No, I don’t need to turn the other cheek.  And I’m not in a place where there is enough value there for me to deal with my current issues with organized religion.  Really.  In the cost benefit analysis, I lose.  Just no.

But there has to be some fucking meaning in this story.  Something.  Some reason I did this and survived.  I have to find something worth knowing in the mess.  I have to find a way to believe that being me and existing is a right and good thing.  That I am the right kind of me.  Because being a mother is not going to cut it forever.  I have to be alive and living in my body for me.  And I don’t know a way to be me other than to tell my stories.

The part of me that I like the most is the part of me that looks at my behaviors that I dislike and I try to figure out why I do them so that I can either figure out how to stop doing them –and for real stop doing them, with accountability–or change my opinion of doing the behavior.  In some way it is kind of awful.  I’m developing situational ethics.  But I am trying to reframe it as, “I want to do this, but it is at priority level 9 and right now 3 conflicts with it.  Ok.  Well… shit.”  Because then I have reason to examine my options more carefully on how I am doing 3.  Sometimes I am going to feel like a terrible person and feel a lot of guilt because… 9 is still a priority and I’m failing.  I’m bad.  I’m terrible.  I deserve all manner of evil and badness rained on my head.  That my friends, that is the crunchy guilt for me.  If I do something in a less-than-crunchy way… say only use a plastic bag once and then throw it away.  I have horrible anxiety and terrible self thoughts.  If I only cared more… Ugh.  There isn’t enough time in the day for me to handle my mental health shit and my crunchy guilt.  Ha.

Talking about these things in the ways that I do is part of being me.  I need to stop feeling like I should be silent in public; it’s not like I ever really followed that rule anyway.  Rather I need to stop feeling guilty for taking up space.  Other people are just going to have to deal with their own feelings of shame when I talk about their actions.  That’s not my responsibility.  If you feel ashamed of the things you did to me when I was a child it is right and just.  I get to be that judge and jury.  I’m the only one who experienced it.  There will be people who agree with me and there will be people who disagree with me. That’s life.  And in order to be me and find my own reason for living, I have to learn how to live with that.  I have to stop feeling terrified of the fact that people will disagree with me and dislike me.  I hide at home because I am white trash.  Because I am dirty.  Because I am low class in public.  I explode and yell.  I never can make my children look clean and put together.  I can’t look clean and put together without professional help.  The less said about my husband the better.  *ahem*  (I’m kidding!  I like my husband!  It’s just kind of rare for him to shave.)  We all fit in well together.  We are all similarly messy looking.

That was anxiety producing for me in the UK.  The only time I saw a family that kind of resembled my mental picture of mine in terms of being messily put together they were… very attention grabbing in obviously low class ways.  I had to stop and breathe for a moment as I realized that I shush my children in public and try to talk very quietly when I’m out because I don’t want to be that any more.  I experience so much shame when I feel like people are looking at me the way I look at that woman.  That was my experience of growing up.  My sister was the loud “mother figure” bossing everyone around in this over the top domineering voice so that she could “sound like the boss”.  She’s got a complex.  Oh wait!  She is probably acting like my dad.  I was never really around him so I actually don’t know.  I don’t know what my dad sounded or acted like around people.  I don’t think I saw it more than a few times.  I can’t remember living with him.  So yeah.

My journey is really about finding balance between sharing the stories and working on my behavior while still having control when I need to have control.  Which is pretty much all the time right now.  Rats.

Food is a religion

I think that pretty much everyone has their own personal food religion.  Your pinnacle of how people should feel about/eat/think about food.  Big note: I am not trying to convert anyone to my religion.  So here is my basic approach to how I want to be eating.  My ideals.  The tenets that provoke my guilt when I fail to meet them.

First: eat local and seasonal.  To me, if you are eating what is in season and grows where you live… you’ll do fine.  People survived eating the local stuff for a long time and I think that’s a good basis.  But I’m a spoiled brat who lives in an area with the best damn food in the world.  Privilege much?

Second: I try for organic and/or grass/pasture raised.  My chickens shouldn’t be vegetarians and my cows shouldn’t eat corn.  I have some stupid bias that the food I eat will be healthier for me if it had the best life possible.  However from what I understand it isn’t actually possible for everyone on the planet to eat “organic” produce.  So, err… yeah.  Not sure how I feel about that.

Third: I try to avoid processed food.  But I also try to not beat myself up for eating some.  It’s a balancing act.  Processed food usually means less work for me.  I’m usually skimping on work because I am out of spoons.  (I’m sorry for co-opting that terminology given that I don’t like using it given that I am able-bodied.  But I’m specifically using it in a mental health way so uhm… I’m not sure how else to phrase it.)

Fourth: I’m trying to grow food.  I want to get to a point where I am raising and preserving a reasonable percentage of our produce (like 25% would be AWESOME).  I’m thinking that I might shoot for reaching that by the time that Shanna is 15. Obviously I am not taking this gardening thing real seriously.

So part of the reason that I’m writing this is because I read books on urban homesteading and I find them terribly inspirational.  Or rather, I find them terribly guilt inducing.  I have all the time and ability in the world to really pursue this as a lifestyle choice.  So why don’t I?  Well… honestly… it’s a lot of work.  And I’m kind of busy.  And it is way down there in fourth place on my food priority list and food is way down at like spot number fifteen on my personal life priority list so… yeah.  I just don’t care.

BUT THE CRUNCHY GUILT IS EATING MY BRAIN.  *ahem*

Want to know why I’m doing this much gardening?  Because I’m trying to find ways to learn about new interesting things without having to interact with other people.  Because I’m trying to find hobbies that make me feel good about being a creepy shut in.  Because it’s a G-D science experiment!  I don’t know any of this stuff about plant lives.  It’s really awesome.

Because I’m an unschooler and I want to take this opportunity to learn about life.  This may not be the way that someone else thinks I should learn this topic, after all I could do it way more efficiently if I took a class on gardening.  But I now have a very good idea of why I shouldn’t plant my tomatoes so close together.  I’m trying to decide how I want to resolve my current gardening conundrums.

Have I mentioned that my garden is rad?

tomato patch of doom

Early morning demons

I am a Morning Person.  And becoming weirder about it as I get older and spend a lot of time alone at home.  I sit here nearly motionless and silent until the sun comes up.  Then I strap the baby on my back and start working as fast as I can.  It’s pretty neurotic.

I feel like it is cheating to cut’n’paste that from the other window and yet, I’ve already typed it into the frickin phone!  It counts!

I have to do both.  In the silence and still I wrestle with demons and I have to move quickly once the sun is up or the demons will catch me and wrestle me to the ground and then they have control of the day.  If I work fast enough and hard enough I can escape.  I can instead find my Zen.  I can get lost in the methodic beauty of gardening.  Playing with the dirt helps me stay in the here and now better than almost any other activity.  That is interesting to know about myself.  For most of my life I have lived in a place where plants just kind of grew.  You didn’t really do a lot to try to change what they were doing anyway other than beat them back a bit once in a while.  But you know what, that’s not even true.  Folks up there did plant things and they did follow the seasons.  I didn’t.  I moved so often that I have never before in my life felt the flow of the seasons before.

That’s kind of an intense realization.  I’ll tell you flat out that I’m looking for God in the flow of the earth.  Probably not God in the Judeo-Christian sense.  Maybe more of a Goddess.  Thing is, this shape in my head really doesn’t have a gender.  And saying Goddess requires a gender in my head whereas God is basically neutered.  Even if you do think of God as inspiring men, God inspired women too and there aren’t that many differences and it’s not like God is out there flipping people for who gets to top, you know what I mean?

But I digress.  Only, it’s only sort of the digression.  Maybe this is the point today.  Maybe this is why I haven’t thought about abuse stuff in a few days.  Maybe I am looking for God instead.  Maybe I am trying to focus on the here and now with such intensity because if I don’t I may not be here to have a future.  This is hard to say out loud.  Ha.  And I’m not even speaking.  As Alex said to me recently, “If I say it, I make it true.”  But I think the important point he was missing is: if it’s not true, you can’t deal with it as being true… but it’s still hanging over you thinking about being true.  Ok, so here’s the truth.  I am more honest-to-God suicidal right now than I have been  in over a decade.  My mother called me to tell me that I was not sexually abused as a toddler.  She wants me to get my story straight.

Then why is he in my head and my body like this?  Then why do I so clearly remember the stages?  Why can I now sit down with a textbook on grooming a child for sexual assault and tell stories about every single stage?  There is no doubt in my mind that when I prosecuted my father he intended to rape me.

So here’s the story on that.  When I was 16 I was living in Bakersfield and going all the way across town every day so that I could attend the best high school in the district.  Then our car broke down.  Of course it did.  Because that is what happens when you live in poverty and you do not properly maintain your possessions.  Which is to say, I don’t blame my mother in anyway.  Our lives were really shitty.  It took an hour and a half each way on the bus to get to school.  I was in AP classes: English, US History, Biology.  I finally, for the first time in my life, was actually in the classes for the smart kids instead of sitting on the waiting list behind people who had lived there all their lives and never made the cut.  I loved it.  I blossomed.  I hung out intensely with the kids in the AP classes and they were all religious and obedient but open minded.  They were very interested in ska music and silliness and Veggietales.  Good clean fun.  But I was getting in trouble at school because I didn’t have a computer for research or typing up my papers.  Given that I was spending 3 hours a day on the bus I didn’t really have a lot of time to sit in libraries.  And did I mention that the public water was so disgustingly chlorinated I couldn’t handle drinking the water?  So I spent hours a day making orange juice from the tree in our yard so that I could drink something that didn’t make me want to puke.  We had no money for bottled water.

Anyway.  Not that those layers of poverty really affect the story anyway, right?  It’s not like there are mitigating factors for your father sexually molesting you?  It’s not like he got away with it because I was poorly supervised by a mother who is completely incapable of getting her shit together.  And there’s a digression I’m not up for right now.

So I called my father and told him I needed a computer for school.  He wasn’t paying full child support anyway, right?  He told me that I could have a computer if I came to visit him for the weekend.  I told him I would check with my mom and ask her when she could get a weekend off work so she could come down and supervise.  He said no.  If I wanted a computer I would have to come down there and spend a weekend with him alone, unsupervised.  I felt gobsmacked.  I felt like I was standing on the edge of a precipice and in that fucking moment I got to make a choice.  I could lay down and take my fucking.  Or I could shoot him in the face.  So I hung up on him and called the Sheriff’s office to report my lifelong molestation.

The part of the story that is missing here is the part where I made that phone call to him in secret because I didn’t want my mother to know I was doing it.  And I made that follow up call to the Sheriff’s office before my mother came home.  When she got home the detective was in the living room asking me questions.  It was too late for her to do anything about it.  I think I knew I had to do it that way.  She would have talked me out of it.  She would have minimized what was going on.  She would have told me I was making things up or being melodramatic.  But I wasn’t.  Every single memory of my father in my lifetime involves him touching me in a sexual way.  Ok, not every minute of every visit or anything like that.  But he snuck something in every time I saw him.  He fingered me while I sat on his lap while eating snacks at an amusement park when I was 4 or 5.  When I lived with him and Trudy he would come into my room to “tell me stories” that were about sex and sometimes about evil and magic.  For years he told me stories about my maternal great grandmother.  He said she was a witch and I inherited her powers so I should do some research on black magic.

All this to say that I was absolutely being groomed for rape.  Or, rather, I was being groomed to think it was totally acceptable for me to be my father’s sexual partner.  He told me all about how incest taboos only exist because you don’t want the genetic material to get to close.  But it’s ok as long as the woman uses birth control.  He told me that when I was 12, not long before my brother got married when he came to visit us at our house in Apple Valley.  He came upstairs to my room and felt me up.  He told me that my breasts were going to be large because my chest felt like his older sister’s did when she was my age and she ended up with large breasts.  I do wear an E cup.

My father had every intention in the world of raping me.  I needed to prosecute him.  Oh, and my father was stalking me while we lived in Bakersfield.  He would show up random places and just look at me.  I wasn’t exactly hard to track.  He stood outside our house in the street sometimes.  If I didn’t prosecute him he was going to rape me.  It was ok for me to prosecute.  My father sexually molested me for a decade starting when I was a baby or toddler and it was right for me to prosecute.  And now I’m sobbing.  Because Alex honey, saying it doesn’t make it true.  I wish that saying it made it true.

And we come back to the faith in grey thing.  Was my father a monster for what he did to me?  What he had every intention of doing in the future?  I don’t know.  What I can know is that only a rabid dog attacks with no provocation and at that point you put the animal down.  And I mean seriously no provocation not, “What?  I only acted in this way that in dog-language is really aggressive but seems fine to me as a human.”  It wasn’t actually about me just never calling him again and writing him off because he wouldn’t buy me a computer.  And fuck you very much, Mom, for saying that to people.  He was going to rape me, and soon.  No matter what.  He had a history of molesting people going back decades before my birth.  If he was escalating to the point where he was stalking me?  Yeah.  I’m not even sure I would have survived.  I had to prosecute.  And I had to do it in secret because my mother wouldn’t have allowed me to.  Once the ball was rolling there was nothing she could do about it.

And that right there.  That is why I sit here in silence every morning in the still, quiet time of the day and I think.  I have these horrible, gut clenching thoughts about assault and I try to work them out.  I try to find my peace with these things.  Even being angry with my mother the way I am is just a stage.  I’m so angry because I feel freshly hurt and she is the only one alive who can be blamed.  Isn’t that what mothers do?  And the instant that thought goes through my head I realize that is part of breaking the cycle too.  I don’t want to be blamed for everything that goes wrong for my children.  And I need to stop blaming my mother.  And she needs to stop calling me and telling me to get my story straight.  I have my story straight.  It’s just not a story she can believe and maintain her thin hold on the world.  Even though it is complicated and I don’t want to see her, I want to know my mother is in this world.  I want to hope she is finding some shreds of happiness to lighten her load.  I love my mother.  So being angry with her is almost a derailment… only it isn’t.  I think it’s a different project though.

Today I’m talking about prosecuting my father.  Today I am talking about how complicated all the factors are.  We were poor.  We desperately needed the financial support he doled out in fits of pique.  Prosecuting him was a complicated decision that I had to make in one big temper tantrum.  And in many ways that is what it looked like to people on the outside who didn’t see how dense of a spider web I was standing in.  I had no where safe to step.  That was the moment that saved my life.  And it wasn’t important because I prosecuted my father, per se.  It was the moment when I irrevocably broke the patterns of my family and decided to ACT instead of react.  That moment could have been then or it could have been later.  With my mother and my sister the battle to act instead of react is constant in every single conversation and I feel like a very hostile person.  Ultimately I’m not sure how much of it is their fault.  They are still in patterns of abuse and reconciliation with one another.  They really can’t find a way out of that system.  I don’t know why.  But I can’t be part of it with them.  I feel like I am growing to understand Aunt Vonnie more.  I’m starting to understand that she was the one who stayed in one place and put down her roots in the community and she has a busy, involved life.  She was able to support so many people because she actually had very little involvement in the drama.  She just went about her business as the storms raged.  And she kept me afloat.  Well, her and a whole bunch of other random and semi-random people.  Whether I was in the cycles of abuse or not I was tolerated and supported and encouraged.  I feel I am lucky.  I was helped by more people than I can count.

And so now I wrestle with my demons until the sun comes up, and right now I see a faint hint of blue through the window instead of black.  It is time to go get dressed and start breakfast.  It’s time to smile and kiss my children and sing silly songs.  It is time to hug my husband and wish I had the ability to be the sexual partner he deserves, one who is not held back by monstrous figures in the dark.  Yeah folks, even the freaks lose the ability sometimes.  And I have to smile while doing it.  I have to be cheerful.  My family deserves to live with someone who is pleasant to be around.  And that is the pressure.  How do I live a dual life like this?  When I want to snap because I feel tension and anger at my mother… Let’s go use the rototiller for an hour.  My arms will hurt so bad I won’t have the energy to be cranky.  I love you both, my darling babies.  I will struggle to hold you tonight so I may end up wearing both of you because my arms are weak.  But even if it’s a cranky day.  I promise there will be snuggles.

Better reason than usual for staying up late.

So last night was just a mellow, low key Saturday night.  We stayed in and did a bit of Gestalt therapy.  You know, casual.  Noah explained a bit about it and using the two chair strategy for getting parts of my brain (in this case my ‘little girl’ and my ‘adult’ personas) to talk to one another.  A lot of my recent anxiety feels exactly like being a scared little girl no matter what I am anxious about.  It took several back and forth experiences before I got the hang of “changing the chair” to move back and forth between the mindsets and then it worked really well.

Part of what is upsetting my ‘little girl’ (not all of it, we know we didn’t get to the bottom of the situation, but we skimmed the top layer well) is stuff with Noah.  As we go through this kid-raising thing we are both changing how we behave dramatically.  Noah is tired and kind of withdrawn–almost like he is under a lot of stress or something.  I am experiencing his behavior as being like my mother’s behavior rather that is true or not.  But things are hard and stressful with the kids right now and he is withdrawing.  So I am reverting to pattern in my childhood and I am acting out to get attention and I am doing so largely in potentially self-destructive ways.  I don’t know how to do this “safe” thing.  I don’t know how to just settle in to a place and be there and do that thing on repeat for years, maybe decades.  My life completely explodes every few years and I start over again doing something else.  That’s what I am comfortable with.

So I had this moment where I realized that I am subconsciously baiting Noah.  I want him to get mean to me and nasty.  I want a reason to think of him as my abuser too.  That is the role I know best and I am freaking out because I’m not in it anymore.  How do people do this stable, happy marriage thing?  My only model for life involves relationship-retarded people who are horribly unstable.  My ‘little girl’ part of my brain recognizes that I am trying to kill this.  Trying to provoke him.  And my ‘little girl’ is completely terrified of when he is going to turn around and backhand me for being a smart ass/nasty/difficult.  Noah has (in my mind, not in reality) kind of an aura of simmering rage sometimes.  I feel like he is frustrated and about to snap.  One time early in our marriage he slapped a wall in frustration.  that is by far the furthest and most extreme expression of anger I have ever seen from him.  But in some awful way it feels like a potential entry into his psyche where I can poke him and get reactions that I know how to handle.

To be clear, my ‘little girl’ is mostly upset with *me*.  Not with Noah.  My little girl knows what I am doing and my ‘little girl’ knows it is bad.  I am far more upset with me than him and it’s not about his behavior.

This is what breaking the cycle of abuse looks like.  This is what I have to do right now.  I have to stop and try to tease apart where I am reacting to things that I really need to react to (being molested as a small child is a big deal and I need to work through that) and where I am trying to blow things up so I know how to handle the pattern.  Because both things are going on simultaneously and overlapping.

I realized recently that part of what is both freeing and frustrating is looking at just how much privilege I have.  I really have the luxury of teasing apart the layers of what is going on in my brain slowly in a safe environment.  For all that I’m trying really hard to turn my husband into a monster, he isn’t one.  He’s outrageously patient with me.  He really will keep me safe.  Because of my husband’s job I have ridiculously good credit and I probably have $70k available on credit cards.  If I really wanted to be self destructive and stupid I could get us in a lot of money trouble very quickly.  The interesting thing is how freeing that is.  When my self-destructive impulses start kicking up there is a part of my brain that does lean towards retail therapy.  But when I start going there I follow the path through all the things I would like to buy and what I would do with them.  Because I literally, truly know that I could walk out and buy 99.9% of what I want, today, and it’s just no big deal… there’s no thrill to it.  Ha.  Because it wouldn’t hurt me to buy any of the small impulsive things I ‘want’ I don’t need to buy them.  It’s kind of odd.  I know I won’t incur any difficulty so it’s not worth doing.

Brains are odd.

The best things in life are free

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This left me with (on credit cards):

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

The largest unusual purchases out of our checking account were:

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

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

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

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

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

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