Category Archives: projects

Good day

I write because when I am all done writing I feel empty and soothed and more calm. It is like taking an ice cold bath when you have a fever. I have a better day when I write. Maybe it is like taking a hose to the dirty screen.

Yesterday I cleaned the house. The older I get the weirder I feel about how much I love cleaning the house. At the end of the day when I walk through the house and everything is all orderly and sorted I feel so much better about myself. I feel like I am now free to start any project I want because I AM CAUGHT UP, MOTHERFUCKER!

I like the feeling of being done with what I was doing. I’m an asshole towards Noah about cleaning the kitchen. He has particular parts of cleaning the kitchen he cares about (mostly the dishes). So sometimes he will come to me and say, “I cleaned the kitchen” and I get snarky and snotty and say, “Then why do I need to spend an hour cleaning the kitchen?” We clean differently. We are bothered by different things. (Ok, I don’t actually say much about the kitchen any more beyond thank you. It’s nice when he does things and I appreciate the help and I try to not be an ungrateful bastard.)

The kids didn’t help much and I did not act like an asshole. That’s important to me. If cleaning is my thing then I need to be nice to other people while I do it.

Some day my wonderful children will be all grown up and off. My house will be clean. I don’t need to be an asshole to my kids right now as they are also living in the space. I’m glad they are here. I’m glad they are making a mess. I’m glad they are taking up space. I want them to take up space.

Shanna is always going to be a chaos muppet. There is merit in her style of creativity. I just hope I can teach her the balance and usefulness of order. You don’t have to always be ordered, not everyone cares. But it is important to be able to create order.

I understand that my need for order is about me. I don’t think it is morally right. I think I feel out of control and scared and having a neat house makes me feel less out-of-control. That doesn’t mean it is “right”. It just is.

Today the girls and I will work on painting their play structure. The kids feel really proud of doing the work. It is wonderful to watch. They are very studious and careful and yet still so uncoordinated. I think they are adorable. I like working with them. They force me to carefully consider whether I care about the process or the result of a given task.

That’s really important to how you teach something. Do you care about the process or the result? It makes such an impact.

It is fun to talk to the kids about painting. “Ok, where is your drop cloth? You must stand on the drop cloth. You can’t step off of it while you are wielding your paint brush or you will drip on the dirt. Look for drips as you spread the paint around. See how it is much thicker right here than anywhere else? Can you smooth that out? Yes! Just like that.”

I like talking to them about how to pick what colors they want. I like talking to them about what they want to see. I like finding out what they like and what they don’t like. They are so distinct from me–we don’t have similar impulses. I like having to stop and wait while they do what they want to do. I feel surprised by what they pick. Oh. You like… that? Well… ok.

I like moving slowly with the kids through tasks. I like talking about what I’m doing and why. I appreciate that they want to talk about everything. I am so glad that I did not end up with taciturn children. That would have been a real struggle for me. Thank goodness they are talkers.

After spending seven hours cleaning I took the kids out to dinner. (We got coupons in the mail. Whoo hoo.) We went to Home Town Buffet. The kids were quite excited. They like getting to pick from a wide variety of things. Hilariously the biggest hit is always the jello.

While we were there one of our neighbors came in. One of the elderly people who walk around and stop to talk to us. We haven’t seen him in a bit. It turns out he doesn’t live in our neighborhood anymore. His girlfriend of 34 years had to move into hospice care due to Alzheimer’s. She owned the house and emphatically did not want to get married because she had a previous messy divorce. So now he is living in an apartment on his own. He lived in the house for 21 years.

I didn’t tell that man anything even remotely sad about myself. I didn’t tell him one negative detail. Well, he asked why I moved around so much as a kid. (He was talking about moving a lot.) I said, “Enh sometimes it happens when you are poor.”

I spent the conversation trying to figure out if he is taking advantage of support systems because he isn’t doing very well emotionally or spiritually right now. He’s feeling very hopeless and sad. His son is sixty so he feels well past any point of usefulness. He spends one hour a day with his girlfriend in hospice and he said he is just waiting till she doesn’t remember him because he knows the day is coming and he doesn’t know how he will keep living when the most important person of his life can’t remember him any more.

I didn’t need to play poor-me with him.

It was kind of weird that he spent a lot of the time telling me about how wonderful it was to have someone like me move to the neighborhood. He said that walking by my house and seeing how it changed and progressed made him feel inspired. He said that seeing me with my kids gives him hope for the future. He’s glad to see people like me who exist loudly in creative ways because they inspire everyone to think bigger. (He hasn’t even seen the mural because he moved out of the neighborhood just before I painted it. I told him to come check it out.)

I didn’t go fishing for compliments. He just walked by every day and saw us outside. Shanna shared fruit with them as they walked around.

I’ve started asking the senior citizens in my neighborhood point blank questions about food security. I feel kind of anxious and like I am over-stepping but I know that a few of them don’t have kids nearby checking on them. I think that in the next few months the kids and I should figure out some kind of way to get involved in helping provide food. I know there is a local service who brings food to folks fighting cancer. That might be a good first starting place.

I was talking to the kids about classes–what they want to take next, what they are enjoying about the classes they are in right now. I don’t think I will end up with dancers. They get to take two PE classes at a time. Right now they have creative dance and gymnastics. They both say that at the end of this session they want to drop dance and go back to swimming but gymnastics can stay because it is awesome. So I hear. Near as I can tell they both want to be in swimming until they can just head out into the ocean. I told them that is still a bit off. You need to be able to swim in a pool without a life vest.

Shanna emphatically wants to start music of some kind in January. I haven’t been finding a lot in our area for five year olds so I’m not sure what she will start with. We own two ukeleles (thanks to Noah’s family) but I can’t find a local teacher who will teach a five year old. The local ukelele teachers are all unwilling to work with kids under eight. We’ll see. Hunt harder.

I wanted to start martial arts with the kids next year but I don’t know that Shanna will be willing to give up gymnastics or swimming. So I may start on my own. I haven’t decided yet.

I’m watching Walk the Line for the second time in two days. I will be sending it back to Netflix today. It is interesting thinking about what it takes to create a specific image that you must maintain under pressure. What kinds of ambient stress does that create? How do people break down when they have to be able to pretend upon demand that they are happy and cheerful?

What does it mean to find someone who is a good partner for you?

What kind of support do you need? What kind of support do you want?

Noah wants me to encourage him to do new things. He wants me to listen to him talk through his subject material in order to help him figure out how to teach it better. I may not be good at programming but I understand what it means to teach someone a new subject. I know how the brain learns. I know how to get peoples attention and hold it for at least an hour. I know what tends to make people remember things. I’m not good at everything. I’m good at sticking in peoples minds. People remember things I say. I’m not even entirely sure why but it is something that people comment on regularly so I think it is true.

Noah likes that I organize him so he doesn’t have to think about it. Noah likes that I do a lot of background work so he can do the last-fill-in-the-gaps with his subject matter knowledge.

I don’t think Noah would be pursuing teaching the way he is if he didn’t have someone at home to bounce ideas off. I get the impression that he is scared. I help him deal with that feeling. I believe in him enough to fill in the gaps where he doesn’t believe in himself enough.

I hope that living with me is nice. I hope that it is nice to live with someone who thinks you can accomplish just about anything provided you have a detailed enough plan, enough sleep, and enough rest.

If Noah had a different partner he would probably be more focused on the money. Long-term I don’t care if we are rich. I want a specific pre-planned level of safety and then I don’t need a lot. Money for travel. That will be the big long-term expense. Even having enough money to be safe is something that not everyone manages. What does it even mean to be safe? What is safe enough? I know that Noah has the potential to make a lot more money than he does but it would involve even more working than he does. I don’t want that trade.

I feel guilty that I don’t lighten his load enough. I feel like the burden of my financial need is unfair and unbalanced. Surely it doesn’t even out in terms of effort even if I do fold his fucking underwear. (I think folding underwear is stupid. He wants his folded. I fold it.)

I think life is about trade offs and choosing to be happy with what you have. If you defer happiness “I will be happy when I get _____” you will find that mostly you never reach happiness.

I am not a happy person but it isn’t about my life circumstances. I am trying to be a happy person. I believe with all my heart and soul that I have every reason in the world to be ok right now if not very happy.

I know a lot of people who can’t count three people who love them. I have three people who love me and hug me and tell me I am wonderful every day. We are really big on words of affirmation in this house.

We wake up to, “I am so glad to see you again.” We go to sleep saying, “I had a great day. I was glad to be with you today. I am so glad I know you.”

I smile as much as I can make myself smile. I know I am lucky. I know that not everyone gets to have people who are as nice. I get to have this mostly because I am creating it. My kids are nice to me because I am nice to them. I have to be consistent. I have to make this environment. If I don’t make the environment it won’t exist.

Speaking of environment, Calli has been bringing me books and saying, “Can you read this to me? I LOVE reading books. I think books are the best thing ever!” My kids see me read all day long. I talk to them about what I am reading on the computer. “I am reading a blog article. It is talking about ______.” They see me pick up a variety of books. I’m reading several non-fiction and a couple of fiction books at the same time. Every so often I sit down for a few minutes and plug away. Then I talk to them about the chapter I just read.

Right now one of the books I am reading is A History of the World in 100 Objects and the kids are really enjoying hearing me talk about the history. They ask a lot of questions. “Who were those people? Where did they live? How were they different from us?”

I like that my kids believe the world is to be questioned. Everything is worthy of a question. Sure it makes them less than convenient sometimes but I don’t want convenient children.

I feel proud of myself when I look at my kids. I have nothing else in my life I want to point at and say, “This is what I want to be judged by.” I fuck up everything else too much. But I haven’t fucked up my kids. My kids are happy, healthy, sure of themselves, and smart as can be. Not that I think that children must be “smart” in order to induce pride. But my kids are my kids and Noah’s kids. They are really smart. They figure things out. I like standing near them.

I want kids who are infuriating because they take everything apart. I want kids who want to understand the world so much that they have trouble containing their curiosity and destructive urges. Even though it is hard to live with. My kids now come to me and say, “Hey mom! I want to do an experiment so I’m going to make a mess in the kitchen. Is that ok?”

Sometimes I say, “No problem.” Sometimes I say, “Well… let me come check your set up and make sure everything will be easy to clean up; this might be an outside experiment.”

I feel sad that I am not better able to be a nice person under pressure. If you can only be nice if everything works out exactly right and you are in total control then you aren’t really a nice person, now are you?

But it isn’t true that I make everything about me. I talk to people without saying anything about myself often. I feel scared that I will screw up other peoples day so I try to pretend I am mostly just an audience.

I think that most people feel alone. I manage to find the vein of sadness that pretty much everyone is trying to hide. I can find that and I can tap into it. I wish to be seen. I wish for support. I wish for love. I think that most people have things they are hiding. Ways they need support. I think that hardly anyone gets enough love.

I like looking at people. I like seeing them. Seeing other people makes me feel like I am actually doing something. It makes me feel like I have value and purpose and a reason. I am good at doing something that people desperately need and most people suck at doing. Ok. That’s a reason. That can be enough.

Shanna expresses frustration sometimes for being where she is. “Why am I not better?” “Well, have you noticed how you started doing this two weeks ago and you are comparing yourself to someone who has been here for years? Uhm… yeah. Things happen in stages. You have to practice. You have to suck. You have to be frustrated or you won’t learn and you won’t get better.” “But this is frustrating.” “Yup. Life is. Keep plugging.”

I like that I can point out which things they can do now that they couldn’t do a week ago. I like that I can detail how they are growing and changing. I like that this is allowed to fill up so much of the space in my head. I like that I don’t have to things that matter to other people. I’m glad I don’t have to care about the priorities of a company. I am so grateful that I don’t have to fret about money.

I feel so unworthy of the life I have. This kind of safety should belong to people who can properly appreciate it and relax into it. I am wasting the security. Only I’m not. My kids will not be like me. My kids will not shake with fear for the majority of their lives. My children are able to move between many different environments comfortably and pull off “appropriate” behavior in nearly any context because they believe that they can do it. That is the main hurdle that people have to get past in life. You have to believe you can do what you want to do.

I believe that my daughters are capable of adjusting to any circumstance because some human being has done so at some point in time. I tell them so. Thus they believe it too. I coach them, “This is going to be different from most of the places we go. In this space I need you to _____.”

I’m very specific. Why will it be different? How will it be different? What do you need to do? What will other people be doing? How should you react? How do you tell which people want to talk and which ones don’t? How do you figure out what body language means ‘I want to socialize’ and which body language means ‘Go away’?

Most people in the world want love. They may not want it at this second from you but they want it. How do you convince them that maybe… just maybe… you might be a good person to be loved by.

Lately we are working on the fact that you don’t get to touch people just because you want to. Hell fucking no. Everyone gets to decide for themselves if they will be touched or not. Your body had better be respected. You have the right to defend yourself when someone touches you in a way you don’t like even if they think the touch is “mild”. It is always best to start defending yourself with your words but if you have to then escalate. Defend yourself. You matter. You matter so much.

How would I be different if I had thought I mattered?

I will never know what might have been for me. I feel so lucky that I get to watch my kids. I’m so glad that they just know that they are worthy of defense and love.

I am here. There is no right. There is no deserve. I am loved. Today will be another good day. My children and I will work together. Hopefully we will finish painting the play structure today. I’m ready to take a break until the new year. I need to finish Outrunning and that is going to be all my brain power for the next few months outside the daily rush.

So much to do and so little time.

I’m making Noah slow down his rate of work in late November and December. I think that both of us should have a few weeks of not doing extra projects near the end of the year. We are both tired. We both need to spend some time together. I love touching him. I like the cuddling we do. I like that we can touch one another a lot without it having to be sex all the time.

I’ve dated a lot of people who wouldn’t let me touch them unless it was leading to sex. They wanted their space. Noah doesn’t have a lot of interpersonal boundaries with me. If I want to flop on top of him and just lay there for an hour he’s ok with that–provided of course he has no specific reason to get up. He likes touching me too. I don’t think I have ever been around someone who makes me feel like they like looking at me the way he does.

It was really weird with my Owner. He wanted a fetish item. He liked the shoes and the clothes and the production of being the current woman in his fetish items. He passes the clothes and shoes from woman to woman. He picks us because we fit into what he already owns. Of course he does make/get new stuff for each new girl too. He took thousands of pictures of me. I should have felt like he wanted to look at me.

In a lot of the pictures I made sure my face was averted. I was aware he was taking a picture of the shoes and not me.

He wanted the pictures because he wanted the reminder that he had seen someone in those shoes. It wasn’t about him liking me. I mean, I think he did like me. I’m not hard to look at. I’m not ugly. I’m just… I just wasn’t very important to him. He didn’t care about me. He didn’t want to know me.

Noah wants to look at me. Noah asks me questions and listens to my answers and demonstrates that my answers impact his behavior.

I have never felt this important in my life. I try to appear happy because I know I should be. I know that I would be if I wasn’t broken. I have every reason to be happy. If only I could stop feeling scared.

Not proud.

4 Replies

In my continual efforts to not have secrets about which I feel shame, yesterday we had kind of an incident.

I had to dismantle the slide. An adult friend who was far above the weight limit decided to take a ride. It broke. No fucking shit. It ripped some of the bolts through the plastic and fucked up the wooden support under the slide. So it had to be taken apart. I could fix it with much larger washers, but it was a pain in my ass.

The entire time I was working on the slide, ok that isn’t fair–the first half of the time, the kids were not very happy with me. I tried to patiently explain what I was doing and why. I explained every tool and piece of equipment I was using. I showed them the damage and told them why I had to dismantle it in order to fix it.

The kids stood there and YELLED at me that I was mean for breaking their slide as I took it apart. Even though I had explained why and showed them how I would put it back together.

I fucking lost it. They have been yelling at me that I am mean a lot lately. Basically every time I do not instantly comply with their demands.

I turned around and started screaming at them that if I am so fucking mean go in the fucking house and leave me the fuck alone while I do this fucking work for your fucking play structure.

I don’t feel proud of myself.

I am not sure what the right thing to do there would be but I wasn’t capable of turning around and being nice. I just couldn’t. I am so fucking tired of being yelled at that I am mean while I am in the middle of doing demanding physical labor for someone else’s benefit. I just can’t sit there and tolerate that. I fucking can’t.

But I should figure out how to handle it without yelling “fuck” at children. On one hand I feel bad. On the other hand, wow have I never yelled fuck at my kids like that before. That was special. I’ve been remarkably good for me about swearing over the past few years.

I called K to calm me down. These days it feels like she is the only stress relief I have. The Godmamas are overwhelmed by familial need (that happens) and Noah is working a lot. A lot. A really really lot. He works his primary job, comes home for an hour or so then goes in the garage to do different work. This weekend he’s at a conference.

I used to get 3-5 hours of not-parenting every day. These days I’m under two hours. I do all of my work while managing the kids. Which isn’t something I deserve pity for. I wanted this and all. But it is hard to have enough patience for everything.

We did another hour or so of painting on the play structure. Calli has painted most of the stairs by herself. I was very impressed. I “helped” by doing a last few smoothing strokes on each board but she put the paint down and mostly spread it around by herself. Her paint clothes are now solidly covered in paint because she sat in it while she was painting. It was totally adorable.

Shanna painted the kid-side hand rail mostly on her own. I came along and did a little edging of the parts she had trouble seeing. That’s ok. There were a lot of little corners. Those are easy to miss.

I’m working on the rainbow. It’s a pain in my ass. But it’s coming along. I have used three fucking ladders in order to reach everything. I could have gotten away with two ladders if the thing was about three inches shorter. But it isn’t. So I needed a third ladder. C’est la vie.

I’m starting to have trouble sleeping again. Once I get six or so hours of sleep I feel like my sleep gets lighter–I come up to a lighter sleep cycle and then I just can’t really rest more. I get up to use the bathroom and then I fret. And fret. And fret.

Do you know what makes me feel worst about yelling at Shanna like I did? She came back to me and apologized for yelling at me about an hour after I yelled at them. I apologized to her too. I told her that I was sorry for yelling “fuck” at her because that isn’t very nice or respectful or loving. She said, “Well, we weren’t being very nice to you.”

I said, “No you weren’t. But you are kids. Kids push grown ups. It is my job to be the grown up and hold boundaries. It isn’t very cool of me to scream at you for being a kid.”

She told me she forgives me.

I don’t know how to be a better mother than I am. But I feel she deserves better. She is such a wonderful kid. It is kind of funny that I feel like I am mean to them. But never for the things they yell at me about. Those things are never the mean things. They yell at me that I am mean when I am doing nice things. If they yelled at me while I was actually being mean I think I would just nod and agree.

I think that when they start yelling at me I need to immediately separate us whenever possible. Not because they are “getting in trouble”. If you have feelings like that go express them somewhere else. You are allowed to have them. You aren’t allowed to yell at me like that. Hell, I barely yell at them the way they feel free to yell at me.

My kids are so fucking not abused. The cocky little… oh man. Clearly not abused. Abused children aren’t this god damned demanding.

I haven’t made progress on the book this week. I am thinking about it a lot. I know what I want to say. I just haven’t sat down to write. The minute I sit down the kids jump on top of me and demand that I do _________. (The list is long.)

I feel like we have phases where I can do independent work (like the mural on the fence) and then I just can’t for a while because they feel clingy and upset about being ignored and they won’t allow me to focus on anything. Right now I can’t do the dishes without them bugging the shit out of me to entertain them in some way.

I spend a lot of time saying, “It is not my job to entertain you. Go entertain yourself.” Sometimes it works. Sometimes not so much. That’s the process.

This is hard. I absolutely understand the impulse to just “put them in school”. I feel like there is stuff here to learn. There are lessons in this learning-to-put-up-with-people that I have to learn. I need it. NEED.

When I am an old woman I hope I will be proud of myself for doing the things that I knew were things *I* needed to do. I don’t in any way think that other people should mirror my path. I need to figure out how to be with kids.

When I lose it, which doesn’t happen very often–I do record pretty much all of them–I feel like I am proving that my children deserve to be removed from my care and given to someone who could treat them better. Only when I talk to so-called-“normal” (not diagnosed as crazy from a young age) mothers most of them spend a lot more time screaming at and/or punishing their kids. There is no way in hell I could treat my kids the way I hear/see other mothers doing it. I would not be able to look at myself in the mirror.

But I don’t think they are abusive. I don’t think their kids are damaged or fucked up in any way. So why do I feel so strongly that if *I* behaved that way I would be an abusive monster?

Is it the slippery slope argument? I can’t scream at my kids frequently because screaming just makes me more and more angry (being the one to scream means I am the one to escalate) and I have a really hard time controlling my urge to hit when I get too angry. And when I start screaming I am more or less incapable of screaming without cursing every other word. That is just part of the whole dynamic for me. I see other mothers who are able to scream or discipline and they don’t have to chant fuck fuck fuck over and over.

Right now my kids are sleeping in the cutest way possible. Shanna is “normal” direction but curled up in child’s pose. (Now I get why that is named that way.) Her nightgown is rucked up around her waist and she didn’t wear panties to bed. So she’s mooning the hallway. Calli is also in child’s pose but her head is firmly up against Shanna’s side so they are at a 90 degree angle to one another. They make a T.

I love how connected they are. They fight more now. But holy tomato they are attached to one another. They want to be near one another. Even when they are mad they don’t like separating. They do play in different rooms sometimes (Calli is very willing to run her own games when Shanna is being too bossy) but mostly they don’t like being away from one another.

Shanna keeps telling me that when she is a grown up she is going to go find my big sister and teach her how a big sister should act.

I tell my kids a lot, “How you treat your sister teaches her how to treat you. If you hit, pinch, kick, or shove you are saying that it is ok to do to you. I will not intervene until you get to the point of serious injury. You need to learn how to be nice.”

It is really interesting how Shanna is starting to take responsibility for “I am older and have more self control so I have to teach my sister how to act.” She frequently tells Calli, “Oh Calli! Please stop pinching me. It is hard to not pinch you back when you do that.” Once in a while she does pinch back. Then Calli wants to cry foul. I play at being deaf.

Today is a weeding day. The front yard is really bothering me. I haven’t weeded all summer. My pansies are getting choked out and fuck that noise.

The asparagus are growing like mad. I had no idea they looked like that. They kind of look like fennel as they grow up. It’s really neat. No one believes me that they are asparagus.

Tomato season is (thank goodness) nearly over. I will probably get another 5-10 lbs this year. One more batch of sauce. I’m ready to stop processing.

I am learning a lot about how I feel about food preservation and eating from my yard. I don’t know where I am going to put more raised beds in the future (maybe my roof?) but I think that long-term I will mostly want to figure out how to eat what is in season and do staggered planting. Like putting lettuce out to start every three weeks. Eat it as it comes ripe. We tend to not preserve a whole lot of fruit from the yard so far. Partially this is just current production size but partially it is that we gorge when things are in season. It feels nice. Then we have a break and that feels nice too. Preserving and eating the same things all the time causes me to get really bored and not want to eat at home.

I am sorta keeping to the schedule I drew up. That makes me feel good. I haven’t worked on Outrunning this week but that is the most serious deviation.

I’m having a hard time writing. I think that I’m actually feeling writers block about the book. I’m scared. I’m scared of really and truly committing to what I think a 12 year old should know. That feels like a heavy responsibility. I don’t want to do it wrong. I don’t want to give too much information and push kids towards making bad decisions.

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot is that no one wants to seriously think about how much power they have. People don’t like acknowledging to themselves who and what they really are in the scope of things. People either under or over rate themselves. It’s hard to be accurate.

I don’t know how much influence I might potentially have and that is really scary. If Torque (the guy who publicly apologized to me and who gave me specific permission to use his handle whenever I talk about him) had understood how much it meant that he publicly say, “I screwed up and I am sorry” he would have done it ten years ago. If he had been willing to actually deal with me, what difference might that have made in my life?

Sure, he was a softball sized trauma. He violated my consent in a painful way. But he didn’t have sex with me. He didn’t rape me. He did beat me… but I had asked him to so it is a really weird thing to figure out how upset I am allowed to get about the whole situation.

I asked him to do a scene. Scenes are potentially fraught. Everyone has to be responsible for themselves or they SHOULD NOT ENGAGE IN BDSM. If you need to be taken care of then you are not someone who should engage in bdsm. Period.

But he did stuff I told him not to do. And when I screamed “no” and “stop” he ignored me until I said “red” even though I had negotiated not using safewords. But I did have a safeword. I did make it stop.

Recently I was thinking about the last rape. What I really really really hope will be the last rape.

I gave permission in advance for a rape scene. I didn’t understand the difference between compliant rape and a rape I would actually fight against. I never fought before that. I was trained to not fight from when I was a toddler. I was literally physically taught to not fight against being raped from when I was a toddler. When I was twenty-five I finally fought back.

I still lost.

I still got raped. Even though that time I didn’t want it and I was upset enough to fight and I fought as fucking hard as I was physically capable of fighting.

I haven’t ever done that before. I always give. I always know that it is right that I lose. I know I deserve to be raped. I know I deserve to service the needs of people around me because I am a whore and that is what whores are for.

But that last rape was different from all the others. That is the only time I can look at and really believe in my heart, “I was not able to stop that.”

Every other time I acted like it was like the scene with Torque. If I knew the safeword I could stop it but I don’t play with safewords so mostly I will eventually go limp and try to not die.

I don’t say “no” to sex. Well, I do now. Rarely. Barely. I started in pregnancy. I made Noah promise in advance that if I decided to not have sex from the date of conception to three months after delivery that he wouldn’t divorce me. I knew there was the non-zero possibility. I know that happens for some people. I was really scared. I made him promise because clearly he picked me because I am sexually compulsive and at that point we were still non-monogamous and I was pretty scared that he would wander off and not come back if I cut him off.

He didn’t.

I went and did a lot of bdsm because I wanted to find out what it felt like to believe you were allowed to say “stop” and have it work. When that mechanism failed me…

I don’t say “no” much. I learned how to say “stop”. Barely. It took a lot of effort and work. It took really consciously trying to do it. My Owner worked with me. He did a lot of very dangerous things where I HAD to say stop or he might end up in jail for manslaughter and we don’t want that now, do we?

It is kind of funny because outside of sex I say “no” more easily than almost anyone I’ve ever met. I’m pretty happy to add a “and go fuck yourself while you are at it!” But that sex button thing is old.

Lately I’ve been waking up in the morning and looking in the mirror and saying repeatedly, “You will not be held accountable for your feelings; you will only be held accountable for your actions.”

I have big feelings. I have mean feelings. I have sad feelings. I have hateful feelings. I have painful feelings.

I’m not hurting anyone else by having these things inside of me. If I control my temper and manage to not lash out (screaming that I am not fucking mean for fixing the fucking slide aside) then I am not hurting people. If I am not hitting anyone I am not hurting anyone. If I control my tone of voice such that I do not sound mean or hateful then I am doing fine. It’s ok that I am playing a game.

That’s the point. It is all a game.

No one is against you. They are for themselves. Don’t take it personally.

You will only be held accountable for how you act. I don’t know how you feel. I can’t know. That is forever a shut door. I just know how you act. I care about how you act.

That is comforting and very disturbing.

Just another whinging Friday

Leave a reply

It isn’t that I think my kids are bad or anything. They are just excellent boundary pushers. I want them to push boundaries. I flat encourage them in that direction. I want children who are tenacious, stubborn, and sure that their idea is A Good One. But. But sometimes I wish I could say, “I know I’m willing to argue/negotiate with you all day every day but can I please have a friggin break on my birthday.” They just aren’t old enough to understand.

We did have good moments. I feel really bad that it seems like all I do is complain. Doesn’t anything make me happy? Am I ever satisfied? Is there any point in reaching for satisfied or is that just not something I can feel? I feel really guilty for not being able to turn this into a fun trip. It should have been a fun trip. I hate that I am such a downer all the fucking time.

But it felt really bad getting yelled at for what I wanted to order for lunch. I fucking told them four days in advance, “On my birthday I want us to have gumbo and papas fritas and beignets for lunch. That’s what I want.” They were enthusiastic and supportive until we got to the park. Then I was a mean and terrible person for not letting them have popcorn for lunch. Or ice cream. Or a Dole Whip. Or…

My kids rarely have extreme cases of the gimme’s. I don’t buy them things all that often on our outings and I’m kind of nasty about being pestered to buy stuff. Holy.Fucking.Shit. This trip was the most gimme-gimme-gimme I think Shanna has ever been. She actually sat on her ass in the middle of the store and started yelling at me because I wouldn’t buy her a FUCKING SECOND MUSIC BOX. SHE HAS ONE AT HOME THAT SHE BOUGHT WITH HER ALLOWANCE ON OUR LAST TRIP.

I almost lost my shit. If we had been within an hour of home I would have left the park fifteen minutes into the day.

The really funny thing is the DMV portion of the trip was the best natured and happiest all three of us were on the whole trip. We played games and met people and it was a really enjoyable 3.5 hours. Hell, I’m talking to a lady via email after that. She’s nice.

I think it is that whole kicked puppy thing. I was acting like a kicked puppy. I was begging them to please let me have a turn. When you act like a low status person you get kicked like a low status person. So my kids kicked me (only literally a few times figuratively much more often) all day.

It all feels like my fault. If things go badly it is because I planned wrong or anticipated wrong or… something.

Having them both scream at the top of their lungs that I was mean and nasty multiple times before 10am felt really hard. I know this is a current tick. I know that the best way to handle it is to not engage. At this point in time I am having trouble not bursting into hysterical tears or hitting them. I have strong impulses to do both. I’m not doing either but I want to.

Just breathe. This moment will pass.

I have spent ~15 hours over the past week and some working on scheduling. I’m getting close to knowing the shape of my days all the way through the end of the year. If I stick with my schedule. Ha.

In order to make it so that I can potentially accomplish what I want to accomplish I need a schedule with a lot of rest time scheduled. I need to not be booked all day every day. I have to have multiple days in a week where what I do is hang around the house and putter. I need to have scheduled “sit on the couch and read books and snuggle” time with the kids just about every day.

I have to run more. I just have to. Not running is feeling a lot worse than running. Which is hella funny. We have gone out all four of us a couple of mornings in a row. We hope to get the kids used to going for a morning jog. Noah and I take turns doing sprints up the block and back to the family because the kids are a lot slower.

Outrunning Suicide is starting to take shape. I have mostly written several chapters. I have a skeleton. This one is very different than No Secrets. The entire writing process feels different. This will feel more like a collection of essays than a story, but there needs to be some sense of story in it as well. I am trying as hard as I can to be conscious of the fact that I want this book to be appropriate for twelve year olds. Even though the mothers of twelve year olds will say that it is too mature. The mothers are wrong.

I need to start working on painting in the back yard. All of the stuff that was built this year needs to be painted so it doesn’t rot quickly. Oh man.

I don’t want to go out very much over the next few months. I want to get work done. I want to home school my kids. I need to stop looking outward for a while. We will go to park days. I will continue to try to make time for Noah’s friends who have all had kids and the few people I have hanging on who had kids.

I need to stop looking for new people. I don’t have the bandwidth. My monkey spheres are full.

I like having a lot of… I’ll call them third tier friendships. People generally don’t want to think of themselves as third tier, but oh well. At this point the only person I have near daily contact with who I don’t live with is K. Thank goodness for her. That is the first tier. Second tier are all of the people who have kept contact with me for long-stretches of time and they know real things about me and I know real things about them. These are people who very consciously schedule with me and make sure that I know that they think about me. The third tier are the people I don’t see a lot of and they know very little that is real about me but I want to feel acceptance and love so I try very hard to maintain Appropriate Behavior around them and I know there are consequences if I slip up.

The third tier is where you get into the idea of Community. These are people I want to know. They add value to the world and to my life in particular but I don’t think they actually like very much about me so I have to carefully construct what they see or I will be shunned again.

I can’t overload my second tier. When I overload my second tier then I see the ending of nearly-decade-long relationships and the backlash hurts me for years.

The third tier is where I spend most of my time. I carefully dole out just small bits of my personality to people. It all tends to feel very artificial. I know I need to be careful not to be too real. I need to not saying things that will upset people. Good fucking luck guessing who is sensitive to what.

Why is the third tier so important? Because I have absolutely stressed the first and second tiers to the limits of their ability to support me and if I have free-floating miasma of need and I get it met in bursts of random kindness from the universe. I depend on a lot of Pay It Forward. Mostly this has worked out fairly well. Humans in general are loving, kind, and they want connection.

But then we get to this punishment thing. I think that most people have trouble understanding that they are punishing people. I know that I struggle with understanding how and where I punish people. I do it but it is hard for me to understand the mechanism of it. It is hard for me to understand that I have the power to punish people. I don’t feel like I have such power. I feel weak and powerless.

My second tier has worked very hard to step up since I had kids. As much as I am still in a place of great hostility towards the idea of “chosen family” (given that most of the people who have emphatically told me that I am their family no matter what no longer speak to me I think I get to be hostile to this concept) I… feel conflicted. Clearly I have friends who have moved into family roles.

I feel like I am understanding how other peoples limitations work better as the years go on. Like, I’m not inviting people on trips. It isn’t that anyone wants to hurt me (I don’t think that the desire to hurt me played any part in people not being able to go on the trip–major health concerns came up for everyone) but I am still here hurting. How do I move towards hurting less?

I have been asking for help with things where I can’t handle the answer “no”. That is always where I get into trouble. This is consistent for me. I wait until the lack of support will be crippling then I ask for support then I get told no because other people don’t have the bandwidth and I crumble.

I need my life to require fewer spoons. I need to not need help.

Having children has been humbling and humiliating. The amount of help I have needed has been really hard. Things like going to the doctor for an ultrasound of my abdomen. That turned into a huge long lecture at Kaiser about how I need child care or I can’t get health care. I understand why my dentist pushed me to get the dental implant I needed while I was pregnant even though the pain meds aren’t optimal because “Mothers don’t take care of their teeth when they have children under ten.”

It is kind of weird and hard to talk about but since having children I am more house bound than I was before simply because of how my bathroom habits changed. I have always had a small and urgent bladder (common problem with early childhood sexual abuse) but after the kids my life-long diarrhea problem became urgent and explosive too. And then there is how my periods have changed. Having a body sucks.

Having kids is hard but I did not anticipate the specific ways this would be so hard. I anticipated getting sick of laundry and wiping up poop and being screamed at. I didn’t understand that after having children it would be a rare thing for me to be able to handle three hours between bathroom trips–I get a few freak days once in a while. I normally go to the bathroom every half hour or so. I don’t think I would physically be able to teach right now. I used to have 110 minute class periods. I can’t hold my bladder that long any more. And it is illegal to leave in the middle of a class to use the restroom. I did it anyway but you aren’t supposed to and there are severe potential punishments.

You want to know why I have so much anxiety about neglecting my children when they are playing in another room and I can’t see them but I can hear them? Because I went through teacher training and discovered just how much trouble I can get in if I don’t “properly supervise” other peoples kids. Apparently properly supervise means sit on top of the child and physically prevent them from ever breaking the rules. Good luck.

I swear this all ties together in my head.

I have historically depended heavily on the third tier. Why do I consider them third tier? What I can ask of them is much smaller and more limited and I have to be careful of watching how often I ask. The tiering is how much of my need they have demonstrated an ability to handle. It isn’t about me judging them negatively or thinking they are bad people. I’m intense. I hurt people without trying. I need to be careful to notice when I am hitting stress points for people and withdraw so there can be a next time. If I push third tier people too hard they eject me from their lives.

With children this is different and difficult. At this point I feel like a user if I ask people for anything. I try hard to bully K to let me come do work at her house because I feel like such a user all of the time given how much support she gives me. It isn’t actually a better dynamic.

I have a hard time knowing that at this point in my life I need more support than I give. It has been true for years. Maybe for all of my life. This totally plays into being financially dependent. I feel ashamed of myself. I look at the women in my life who are not dependent and I feel pathetic. This is part of that defining myself by being not-like other people. It isn’t good for me or anyone else.

I don’t feel like the things I do are good or worthy. And yet I really really really want to do the things I am doing. With fervor and intensity I want these things in the world and I don’t think anyone but me will do them. I take that as a sign they probably aren’t worth doing and I am just a waste of resources.

Part of the problem with an extensive third tier is someone always needs help. People are always struggling and I wish I could help more. I wish I had more to offer. I wish I had more energy. I wish I had more time to give them.

But instead I will stay home and weed my garden and write a book and paint. I am selfish and small. My life is limited and unimportant. I totally struggle with that Gen Y thing of, “But I am SPECIAL”. No. I’m really not. I don’t have anything unique and special to offer the world.

But sometimes I feel like I do. Sometimes I feel like I am good at helping people see their own value. Because I think so little of myself I view basically everyone in the world as higher status as me. When I explain to people all that I see about them that is good and wonderful they tend to be surprised. They are not able to see themselves that way. Isn’t that ability good and useful? Is that enough? What is enough? Enough of what? Enough for what?

I don’t know.

But I need to pull back into my little shell. I need to count my spoons and carefully lay them next to tasks. I want to read more books this year. I want to look out my back window on New Years Eve and see a rainbow castle. I want to finish writing the book that I really needed to read when I was twelve. I want to teach my children the daily habits of picking up after themselves. Even though it is hard. Even though you would rather do it later. If you do it now then you are free to go do anything you want on a whim. It takes practice to learn these habits.

I want my children to think that physical activity is just part of life. So I have to model it every day.

I want to not be fucking screamed at. I have already made a lot of progress on my own screaming. I will figure this out. It is going to be hard and it will take patience. We will figure this out. Without anyone getting beaten. There may be a fair bit of time out in our future.

I don’t think that anyone did anything wrong per se on my birthday. But I think that at this point my birthday is such a thing that I’m not sure anyone can do right. I don’t think it is anyone else’s fault at this point.

Rope bridges last a long time but eventually decay. You aren’t doing anything wrong by jumping up and down as you go across a rope bridge. Sometimes a log may break and you could plummet to your death. No one actually did anything “wrong” but there are still end results that suck.

I don’t know how to feel special. I want that feeling so bad. I want to feel loved and appreciated and like people are really really glad I am alive. I don’t feel that way. I feel like people tolerate me so long as I can fill their needs and not be too annoying. I know that people don’t actually feel that way about me. I don’t think I offer enough trade to actually justify that belief.

It isn’t that I believe that Noah and Shanna and Calli secretly hate me. It is clear that they all love me with great intensity. But something inside me is broken. It is like pouring boiling water into a tank of liquid nitrogen so that you can warm it up. That just isn’t going to work how you hope.

I feel raw. I know I am “over sensitive”. I know I “shouldn’t take things so personally”. But I am. I just am. Maybe I shouldn’t be. Maybe I shouldn’t exist. But I do. And this is how I feel. And I can’t make it go away just because it is inconvenient for me or for other people. The only thing I can do is try to stop being in a room with anyone else on my birthday so that it is very very clear that this problem is in me and not because of anyone else.

My birthday is really hard for me. I’m afraid it always will be. I desperately desperately want a kind of feeling loved and cared for and appreciated that I’m not getting. I don’t know what it is or how to get it. Everything I have tried so far has failed miserably. I really and truly have tried to change this pattern.

I wish I could stop feeling like it would be better if I was dead. Then I wouldn’t be so fucking inconvenient.

I know it isn’t “true”. I had kids so that I would know beyond the shadow of a doubt that my labor is necessary for a few decades. Nothing would be better right now if I was dead.

But I don’t know how to feel loved. I feel despised. I feel unappreciated.

Which is ridiculous. Noah couldn’t work harder than he does. And he clearly is doing it for me–he didn’t work like this before me. My Owner was a workaholic. Noah was kinda lazy when I met him. He was certainly unfocused–that is probably a better word than lazy. He works like a dog, largely because he is doing it for me. He wants to make all of my dreams come true.

And I reward him by crying and crying and crying and feeling like a worthless piece of shit. He is very confused. If I knew what to ask him to do he would do it. I don’t know. I don’t know how to stop feeling this way.

I mean, in the abstract I know how to deal with this feeling. Feel it. Cry while you have it. Wait. It will end.

That’s the awesome thing about feelings. They change.

Sometimes I do feel that Noah loves me. Sometimes I do feel that my kids love me. But somehow when it comes to my birthday that is broken. There is this big brick wall. I don’t feel attached. I don’t feel love or loved. I feel worthless and stupid and pathetic and bad and mean and unwanted and like I should just die.

And god I miss my mother. I miss my mother so much I want to curl up into a ball and never eat again. I am not worthy. I dishonor the woman who bore me. I am a piece of shit. I am not protecting her and taking care of her. I know she needs it. She has always needed it. She has always needed to be taken care of more than I need it.

And I think my kids need more taking care of than I need. Except for one day a year. Where I think I am going to need to have different boundaries.

I have started grieving really hard for the apology I was told I would get and I didn’t get. That guy in the scene I went and talked to who said he would write an apology. I’m sorry I made myself vulnerable to that.

I’m even more grateful for talking to the guy who made me uncomfortable at the wedding.

I know that I have to keep trying with people. Every relationship is unique. Every dynamic changes over time. I need people to jump over hoops for me. I need it. I’m pretty clear and direct about how and where I need it. I try not to be too demanding of any one person. But I do ask people to jump through hoops for me.

I want people to show me with their actions that I am actually as important as they verbally claim I am. I want my body to matter. This is a really dangerous kind of validation to want. Because I am not going to get it. People will say they will do ______ and not do it.

Do you know what makes people happy? Giving help to other people. Do you know what makes people feel shitty? Needing help. I hate my neediness as much as other people resent me inflicting it on them.

The kids are slightly sick. Runny nose on elder child, both are coughing. Younger child keeps telling us she needs a bucket but she isn’t vomiting. I’ve been crying so much I don’t know if I am sick or not. I scheduled a potentially light weekend because I am S-M-R-T.

I am looking forward to fall and winter. It will feel really nice after the frantic work pace of spring and summer. It is a puttering kind of day. I will go grocery shopping. I should wash the windows. Then they can color on them again. Ha. Right now they are too full to be fun.

I should stop typing. Annnnnnnny minute here……

Caved.

4 Replies

I sat down yesterday at my computer intending to buy three tickets to Texas for December. I said to Shanna, “You understand that I’m not going, right?”

Her eyes got as wide as saucers. “But you have to go. I can’t go meet new people without you. When I am talking to people I don’t know well and you are there I am brave because I know I am wonderful. When you aren’t there I am scared and I can’t do it. I need you.”

“If I went with you to Texas and I stayed in the hotel with you but you had to go to your grandmothers house with just your dad and sister would that be good enough?”

“Yes. That would be good enough.”

I’m going to Texas in three months, apparently.

I’m fucking serious about not setting foot inside that woman’s house again. Maybe I will go visit the great grandmother or great aunt instead. Or I will sit inside a fucking Starbuck’s.

I can be nice in letters–I think I am very fucking nice in the letters I send. I sent five to seven page letters about the kids a few times a year. I’m all neutral but upbeat and such.

I want my kids to know them. I want my kids to have a family. But I’m aware that they will never be my family. Such is life.

The whole rest of the year is travel heavy. So much for a save year. My end of the year reckoning on Mint is going to involve some head hanging with shame. It’s a good thing Noah is earning money at a faster rate than planned for. I’m not making every savings goal. But I do have a god damn fabulous back yard now. It’s a trade off.

We leave on Monday for Disneyland. It will be me and my girls. We will have fun together. Since Calli’s birthday Shanna has been drawing me picture after picture because she wants to decorate for my birthday. I think I will bring a stack of them and scotch tape and put them up on the windows in our hotel room. I am so fucking glad I get to be their mom.

I haven’t been sleeping well. Lots of mom stuff. The last three nights have been pretty bad. It’s lead up to my birthday so I’m not surprised. Six days and counting. I think that knowing that I will be alone with the kids is both helping and hurting. On one hand, I feel sad. But I don’t have the anticipation of waking up in my house with having it just be one more shitty day when I should do laundry and scrub the floor. (Not that my days are shitty–I like my life and I like my job. But man I’ve got this birthday thing.)

I don’t give very many birthday presents any more. I want to spend time with people on their birthdays (or near their birthdays) but gifts aren’t the thing. Only if I find something that seems talisman-like. That’s hard to just decide to find.

I have things scattered throughout my house. Talismans. I’m loved. I should keep writing. People want to know what I am thinking.

Connection. Multiplicity. Embrace plurality. So many things to think about. How to not be scary.

I feel like over the last year or so I have had to realize that all of those hours I spent during my childhood practicing my “scary” expressions worked. Becoming non-intimidating is taking a lot of conscious work.

I feel like I am walking this razor thin line. If I am intimidating then I run off the people I want to love. If I am not intimidating… well I know how that goes.

Better to be undefended and on the verge of death at any moment. That makes people like you more. Then you aren’t scary.

Maybe being scary is just one of those important parts of life. I’m pretty sure my kids aren’t actually afraid of me. When I ask them they emphatically say they aren’t scared. Shanna says, “Sometimes you startle me. But that’s not the same thing.” But I am scary to other people. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen the fear.

Speaking of fear, I bought a bicycle. One that can have a kid trailer thing on the back. First I need to take Shanna out on her bike. After she feels comfortable riding then we will get the trailer for Calli. The bike store fellas told me I can’t have a kid being pulled and a kid on my handle-bars. Just one or the other. Bah humbug. I bet it would have worked two years ago. They are a lot heavier now. I went on a five and a half mile bike ride. I haven’t done that since high school. I only felt like I was going to die for 75% of the time. Hopefully that goes down.

People in my family get hit by cars while on bicycles. It happened to both of my brothers and my dad. My mom and sister were smart enough to stay off of fucking bikes. Now I’m stupid. And risking my kids. Oh god.

September and October are probably as fully booked as I want them. November is probably already as booked as I want it. In December we will be out of state for nine days. I will probably not do very much other than travel in December. If I don’t decorate for Christmas in November I won’t do much beyond a tree. So realistically I have the next three and a half months scheduled. I won’t be bored. I have a lot to do.

It’s time to write Outrunning Suicide. I want it done before New Years. I have a rainbow castle to paint. (This sucker is huge.) I have to install a bunch of hardware for the swings in the back yard.

Not to mention educating my children. That is probably enough to do for the next three months.

Disneyland, two camping trips, over a week in Portland and a weekend in Texas. So much for 2013 being a light year.

I can’t go to Disneyland next year. (No time share points) I think the only traveling I want to do in 2014 is a half marathon in Portland with two of my very favorite ladies in the whole wide world. I hear I already have buy-in from the spouse of the one who will have to travel. This is a good sign.

I’m wussing towards encouraging the home schoolers who live within five miles of me to start thinking along the lines of a Free Democratic School. Driving is a real issue for everyone in the bay area. Having to drive 40-50 miles round trip in order to hang out for a few hours is prohibitive on a long-term basis. If you look at history a lot of who people know is based on who lives near them. It isn’t about “who is best“. Life is about making the best of who is there.

I think that part of the reason I am doing the stuff to my house that I am doing is because I think of future parties and events. I am not good at going out into the world. I am not good at feeling like the world wants me very much. If I make this a good place to be, people will come to me. That is just the nature of how things work. I feel like a spider spinning a web. Err…only I don’t want to eat anyone.

I want to know lots of kids and watch them grow up. I want to have them love visiting my house. So I build a playground. And I paint murals. And I provide endless quantities of fruit, vegetables, and cheese. I only rarely make guests eat ramen.

The part that makes me feel like a spider is how I know that I have to sit and wait. I’m not actually ready for the kinds of relationships I want to have with growing up kids. I don’t mean that my house isn’t ready–though it isn’t. If I went and grabbed people now and tried to fill my house with people… well… my kids would rapidly learn a lot of things I don’t want them to know. My kids are not yet ready to have their reality fucked with.

I’m fairly aware that I go through life with a big reality distortion bubble around me. (I think everyone does to a greater or lesser extent–you see the world from your point of view and not from an objective point of view.) Right now I am carefully crafting the reality my children will have as “baseline” for the rest of their lives. Based on everything I have read about child development and psychology this is important.

Most people don’t seem to think about this much. They just live their life and their kids share it and that is how reality is created thankyouverymuch. My childhood had no consistent reality. I moved more than fifty times. I got to see that every “reality”, every set of rules that people lived by were totally arbitrary.

That means that if I want to I can sit down and make up the rules for reality for my children in any fashion I want. There is no right way. I personally believe there are a lot of wrong ways but not any particular right way. What is right is so individual based on personality and inner strengths.

How I behave with my children is a carefully constructed little universe that isn’t a lot like how I am with the rest of the world. How I am with my children is how I am without defenses and without fear. I do not have the ability to extend that beyond my front door at this point in time.

I feel so lucky that I get to be alone with them so much. I feel so glad that we get to spend a lot of time in an environment where I set the rules. Pam says I am a permissive authoritarian. I think that will shift a lot with time. After a while it won’t be my place to set the rules with such fierceness.

Only I think in some ways I will get much more fierce. I told Shanna flat out one day when she was being very rough with me, “This is not an acceptable way to treat my body. If you continue to treat me this way as you get bigger I will eventually start hitting back. I am not your punching bag.” She stopped hitting me. She hasn’t tried to punch me over and over since.

I have no idea how this will go over the years.

I want my children to believe in the core of their body that they have the right to beat the living shit out of someone who crosses their physical boundaries. I want this to not be a question in their mind. It is just simple fact. We are animals and sometimes we have to defend ourselves. Yup. That’s part of how it works in the world.

But here in Wonderland we don’t hit. We don’t scream. This is a safe place. The violence needs to stay out there in the world. We do not hit our family members. Well, until they are clearly beating on you then go ahead and defend yourself. It needs to take a lot of provocation though. Don’t. Hurt. Your. Family. We are in this together.

I make a big deal out of this being a conscious creation because this is not like anything I have ever known. I was taught to expect people to hurt me. I was taught to hit people as a sign of affection. I was taught that the way to make yourself feel bigger is to hurt the people around you as much as possible.

It is hard for me to change. It takes so much conscious effort. But my children show me the fruits of my labor every day. It is worth it. They are worth it. This life is worth it.

I think about my mother a lot. I think about what she taught me and how she taught me. And sometimes when Calli moves her head just right I see my mother so clearly it is like she is in the room. I have no idea how this will all go.

In medias res. We are always in the middle of the story. There is no beginning and no end. My children have to go to Texas. That is part of their story. I get to choose how much disappointment mom delivers when. I will never be enough to meet all of their needs. That just isn’t how life works. But I have choices about how many needs I meet and when and which particular things I want to skip.

I have so. much. privilege.

All I’m doing right now with my life is hanging out and being available to meet their needs. This is surprisingly exhausting. And sometimes I pick up a side job or two. Mostly if I am not available to meet a need of theirs it is because I bloody well choose to not do it right now.

I sent Shanna to Texas once without me. Sending both seems different. And Shanna is a lot more sure she wants me to go. Some day she will want to do things I will not be up for doing. Then she will go without me. I can understand her wanting to stand near my reality distortion field. I am what she has always known and I have been really good to her. Other people are less predictable. She has figured that out already. I am always ready to smile at her. Other people… not always.

I will focus on this hurting me in my writing though. This is a choice. I’m not a victim here. But I’m making a choice that is questionably right for me. I don’t feel very good about having a relationship with Noah’s abusive mother after walking out on my abusive mother. I don’t know how to describe the kind of betrayal that represents.

My sister told me over and over and over “Abused children are the most loyal.” She said that consciously to tell me not to talk about what I saw in our house. I broke ranks. I broke fucking ranks. I can’t now go silently put up with someone else’s abuse. That’s just not ok. No. I’d rather punch the fucking bitch in the face. And it’s not really cool to fly from California to Texas in order to punch your mother in law in the face so I just won’t set foot in her house. I understand my triggering mechanism. I’m rather realistic all things considered.

“Just be nice” isn’t useful advice for me. Part of the reason that I don’t want to go is I know I have a rather lot of latent rage and she’s a nice safe not actually threatening target who likes to act like people are kicking her all the time. I’ve met me. If you stand in front of me and whine and cringe and cower as if I have been kicking you for hours… I will start kicking you. I understand this impulse only too well. I try to avoid kicked dogs for this reason. My experience of Noah’s mom is that she is a kicked dog.

I am a kicked dog. That is how I went through my childhood. I recognize it very well in others. Being a kicked dog is part and parcel with being a bully. You assume that people are mean to you so you push them towards being mean to you–you antagonize on purpose. Kicked dogs are the meanest little curs.

It’s a vicious cycle. I try to stay out of vicious cycles these days. I try very hard to stay in virtuous cycles.

A virtuous cycle, for the purpose of this essay, is one in which my positive behavior towards a person is rewarded by positive behavior and so on. I believe that kicked dogs need love too but they usually can’t get it from one another. They need to go find someone who isn’t a kicked dog, best if it is someone who is kind of bewildered by the experience, who will react in non-patterned ways.

Patterns are the problem. Patterns are how it keeps going. Vicious cycles. If you snap at someone and they snap back then it goes from there. If you snap at someone and they blink at you and say, “Are you ok?” well… that’s just not a similar sort of pattern. If you snap back it is obvious that you are a fucking asshole and that’s not good. Don’t do that.

Virtuous cycles involve people who are able to look at you and say, “You are having feelings. They are not about me. Would you like to talk about them?” Vicious cycles are more like, “You are clearly having feelings ALL ABOUT ME AND NOW I AM GOING TO YELL AT YOU ABOUT THEM.” Well, other people have other vicious cycles. But the ones I’m thinking about right this minute are like that. There are lots of other cycles. Don’t mistake me here as being the source of information about vicious cycles. Oh man.

I am home schooling my kids so that as they go through life they always have someone standing near them who will smile back. In my lofty experience there is always someone in the world who will smile back. Even if you happen to not be standing near that person right now. It is hard for me to keep faith in that belief sometimes. For most of my life it has been just a faith not unlike most peoples faith in G-d. Someone will smile back.

A while back I read some article about “computer face”. If you turn on peoples cameras secretly they all have the same slack jawed expression. I very consciously work on smiling the majority of the time. I try hard to have my muscles assume that position by default.

I have very deep grief lines. I turn thirty-two next week. If I am not careful I will be a very stern and unapproachable and lonely old woman. I know this to be true. If I want to have my future be the way I want it to be I will have to work hard on every aspect of my character. It feels so daunting.

I had children so I would have a permanent motivating force to change and get better. So I’m going to fucking Texas. I’m not going in the house. My reality distortion field is big enough to extend that far. Yes, Shanna. I will go so you know you are wonderful.

In the end, she won’t remember it much. I’m only kind of sort of doing this for her. I’m doing this so that I know I made all of the choices about creating space between us for reasons I feel ok about.

Recently I was talking to a mother who was not feeling happy about her day care experience in one relatively confined way. Mostly she was satisfied so she said, “I just had to decide that when you are paying someone you have to accept that they are doing their best and let it go.”

That, in a nut shell, is why I cannot put my kids in day care. I would do it if I had no choice and I had to work because I needed the money. But that is why I have made the choice to stay home. (That and ridiculous financial privilege, let’s be clear here.) I don’t want to just put up with the best that someone else feels like giving me.

I need to know that when they are eighteen and I send them off into the world (really I doubt it will be that long) I need to know that my kids have had all of the experiences they need to have in order to be competent at handling themselves. I can’t live with trusting someone else to “do their best”. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I’m glad that other people have such loving trust. I think it is quite healthy.

I don’t know anyone I trust enough to have the charge of my kids like that.

I trust the Godmamas enough that I send my kids there unsupervised and I have legal documentation saying they are the next of kin. But I still don’t want them setting reality for my kids. I love them and I want their influence… but as an add on or in case of critical system failure. Err, I’ll be a dick and say I think that I will do better. But they will be getting traumatized kids and I can’t think of anyone in the world I would trust more to adequately and lovingly raise traumatized children who started out being raised by me. They will be the most gentle adjustment to not-Krissy reality of anyone in the world. So I don’t pick them to be like me. I pick them to love the results of being like me. It’s kind of a different metric.

But geezus on toast I don’t want someone else teaching my kid how to be a kid for eight hours a day. I don’t want my daughters going through life not sure if someone will smile back.

There are a lot of gifts I can’t give them. I don’t mean financially–I mean in terms of spirit and family and community and sense of place. I can give them Wonderland. Where they are wonderful to me. We do go out into the world lots. And they are doing more and more things away from me.

I’m going to Texas because I had to rock myself to sleep crying for my mother too many times. I need to be there. Just in case. She won’t always be little. I won’t fucking do this for a twenty-five year old I shit you not. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t do it for a fifteen year old. This trip will hurt me. This trip will hurt a lot. This trip has the high potential to be miserable. I have to go through airport security. I probably should not fly with pot. Alcohol makes my stomach hurt and that makes my temper shorter. I do have trusty-dusty Lorazepam! I will have to cut the pills up substantially more to take them during the day. I take 1mg at night and that knocks me straight out. (Not every night. Thirty pills lasts me for four to five months.)

Texas really hasn’t been good to me. I don’t like going there. I must like these kids a whole lot. It won’t be very long. I will be there for moral support. I will read a book. Maybe five. Maybe I will spend a lot of quality time in coffee shops writing Outrunning. That would be kind of funny. Not ha ha funny. Just funny.

Time for breakfast. I have missed you, internet. I shouldn’t make a habit of this for a while. The book is going to eat my hands.

Walking on eggshells

Leave a reply

I do a lot of defining myself in negatives. I don’t just mean that I am derogatory towards myself. I mean that I think of myself in terms of, “I am not like _____; I do not do _____” It is one way of making yourself different. Not a useful way. It means that you are constantly placing how other people are as primary. I’m not like you. People take it as a rejection or as a negative statement about them. Going out and creating an identity without negatives is much harder. It takes tremendously more emotional and psychological energy to go create something from scratch rather than just reject everything that walks by as being “not you”.

I was asked how the party went. Well. Where in my stress cycle should I answer that question from? I think that most people had fun. I absent mindedly made a minor social faux pas early on and never stopped hearing in my head how stupid, rude, domineering and offensive I am. When everyone finally left I cried for hours because I felt so guilty for offending someone.

If you are going to move through life being an asshole but you cry every time someone lets you know that you are crossing their boundaries… you aren’t giving people a way to have a relationship with you that is not basically subservient. If I don’t want subservient relationships (I don’t) then I can’t keep doing this bullshit. It’s not ok to cause other people to feel guilty for having boundaries. They need to have them. I need to take my wrist slap and move on. That is the adult way to handle such things. That is how you have relationships.

This is why my therapist wants me to stop socializing for a while. I spend a lot of time examining all of my interactions with people and looking for reasons that person is very likely to walk away from knowing me any minute for a long list of good causes. I know that I push my luck every day and in every way. When will people be sick of my shit? I get that a lot. My paranoia is not baseless. Is it paranoia to watch for tornados in tornado country?

But the paranoia drives people away as surely and as quickly as if I was chasing them away with a fire hose.

On my last day of teaching English at the Hindu temple one of the kids brought up suicide. A kid from their school jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge last year. They are all still thinking about it. I talked to them about how hard it is to get help when you are mentally ill. It wears people out. They want you to hurry up and get better already so that you don’t inconvenience them. What do you do if you can’t just snap out of it and behave the way other people want? Either you can put up with being punished for being how you are or you do what you can do to get away from the pain. Sometimes that is suicide. Not that I know exactly why that girl jumped. There are as many reasons to do it as there are people who do it.

Walking on eggshells means trying to place someone else as the primary character in the story and not being sure what your lines are. “What do I say so that this delicate and sensitive individual is not upset?” Can’t be done. As soon as you are reacting from that place you have already assumed that offense is likely and just assuming that means that the offense is already communicated. Game over. You lose.

Sometimes people snap at my social faux pas because they are not feeling patient today but they feel patient on other days. I am probably similarly obnoxious on both days but the difference is not about me. If people try to pick their behavior towards me based on my mood they will mostly pick wrong. It drives me batshit. You can only act how you feel like acting. Faking it will make neither of us happy. And acting like you have already been kicked makes people want to kick you. Really hard.

Some days I am going to wander off and cry if someone blinks too hard in my direction. It isn’t about someone letting me know that I crossed a boundary. When I have been crying two, three, four hours a day for over a week… my emotional reaction is not about you and I’m sorry that I’m standing near you when it starts such that you will feel responsible. You aren’t. My feelings come from inside me. The kind of shame I feel isn’t something that people I know now put on me. It is about old tapes.

I don’t keep people in an ongoing way if they seriously shame me. I don’t fucking think so–I don’t need that crap.

I think very hard about every person who is in my life. If I invite you to my house (even if you think you are one of the casual people) I have spent many hours thinking about you. I have mulled over every piece of data I have ever acquired and I have carefully weighed it. I know you because I want to know you. I don’t have accidental friends any more. I have people in my life because I choose them out of a long list of ever rotating acquaintances.

I am mercenary. I do not see any benefit to being less than frank about this. I don’t pick my friends based on them being able to wait on me or do work for me or babysit or give me social status. I pick my friends based on them having character traits I desperately admire and want to be able to watch develop more closely. I don’t understand. I want to. Please let me stare at you until I understand.

I don’t think that most people in my life understand this. I want you near me because I want to figure out how and why you do _________. This is something I want to understand in this lifetime and I don’t know another way of accessing this information. I want to know why you want to do the things you want to do. I want access to your motivations. I’m trying to hack my own motivation system. What makes you do the things you do? It isn’t that I will use your motivation to do exactly the same thing as you, but clearly you have learned some neat tricks I don’t know.

I never really understand what I have to offer though. That end of the deal keeps me up at night. I see what I get out of knowing people. I see clear value. I don’t understand what I have to offer. I don’t understand why anyone bothers to know me. I don’t see how the unpleasantness of my company could possibly be balanced by anything I know or do.

I can understand that Shanna and Calli are tied to me. Children need their moms. I get that. I can certainly understand how Noah finds enough value in the trade. Past that… I don’t really get it. I think that is part of the reason I read as mean. I am sad and bitter that I have nothing that is worthy of trade for a relationship. I feel broken and angry about it. I don’t know how to build people up and make them feel happy about being themselves while standing next to me. I know how to make people feel angry and irritated and like they don’t want to stand next to me any more. It is a self-fulfilling prophesy. I do this a lot.

I can’t be perfect in order to not annoy people. I can only be. I have to accept the rebuffs when someone lets me know I am crossing a boundary without turning that into a federal case or people won’t feel comfortable communicating boundary incursions and they will just stop talking to me. No one likes drama. No one wants to feel guilty for having boundaries.

Not everything is about me, yo.

I woke up early because I have to get my crying over early before a busy day. Not many left before I hit “vacation” for a couple of weeks. I’m looking forward to this. I need to get my stress levels down to the point where I am not crying for multiple hours a day as a way of avoiding beating the shit out of people.

I cry partially from frustration. I don’t know how to let the intensity of my emotions defuse without doing something. I used to cut. I like being beaten. I have punched holes in a lot more walls than I should admit. These days I feel like I live in a glass cage. If I hit anything it will break and I will be in a shower of shards. So I cry. And cry. And cry. I don’t know if it is healthier or not but it is certainly less violent. Progress?

See, this kind of thing is actually huge progress. I don’t know that I would give myself much credit for it without writing. I have progressed past hitting other people constantly to deal with my frustration through punching walls to crying. I have progressed past cutting myself into letting other people hit me in consensual and pre-agreed ways into crying. Progress, not perfection? I am moving in a less self-hating direction.

Now I cry over someone pointing out that I said something four times. (Which is annoying. I know.) You know… at least it is much better than my previous coping methods of hitting her or cutting myself would have been much more inappropriate. Both are ways that I would have dealt with that interaction in the past.

Most of my friends have social anxiety to some degree or another, I think this commonality increases their patience for me. But it means that some days my anxiety runs into their anxiety and then things just get worse. Neither can break the cycle. Awkward.

In my life the only thing I have found that really and truly breaks the stale mates and allows relationships to continue is time. If you both continue to spend time together despite acknowledging sometimes feeling awkward… you continue to have a relationship. Not every relationship is comfortable every moment. If you choose to have the relationship then you look for ways to spend time together even if it is kind of weird. Even if you do have some defensive conversations.

I need to get my stress levels down. It is a physical limitations thing. I can only monitor my social behavior so closely if I am doing a lot of major physical work. I have been using my body unusually hard for the past few weeks. The mural and the backyard work have both used a lot of muscles I’m not used to moving. They have both taken a lot of patience I didn’t actually have going spare.

I need to figure out what it means to do projects as a parent. I’m still not handling the energy allotment thing very well.

I feel scared a lot of the time because I can’t control what other people do and I am worried about driving people away from relationships with my children. I do not want to isolate them. But it seems pretty awful for me to expect people to put up with me being an asshole just so they can help take care of my kids when no one but me and Noah owes my kids anything.

My kids are neat. They will be more neat if they know people like you. You are neat. This is all stuff that floats around in my head making me vulnerable and scared all the time. I feel my children deserve relationships that I do not have or know how to create.

I don’t think my kids want to see their grandparents because they want to hurt me. I think that one or both of them will decline to go when they finally understand that I’m not going. I will do my best to not share how I feel about the trip. What they need to know is that they have grandparents who love them and a mom who loves them and their mom is very happy to help them pack and I will kiss them goodbye and tell them to have fun. That is more or less the end of the story in our house.

But I am still going to cry when they are gone. I am still going to be very sad that it has worked out that I just don’t get extended family this lifetime. I’m grateful that I managed to get a nuclear family thing. I get to be sad about this. I get to grieve about that. It doesn’t hurt my kids if I spend my alone time crying.

If I describe visiting their grandparents… I don’t have to sell it or try to make it sound fun in a fake way. When they go see their grandparents they need to remember a bathing suit because they have an indoor pool. They need to remember clothes appropriate for riding a horse because they have horses. Not to mention cows and I don’t know what other animals. There is a whole floor of a house that is just toys. You and your dad and your sister will stay on an apartment by yourselves and you will be able to go play with the toys probably anytime you want while you are visiting.

I mean, shit dude. I don’t talk about the people much or try to predict how the relationships will be. I don’t know these people. I say that her aunts and uncles all play music–maybe she should bring her uke so they can teach her cords.

I think my daughters are very lucky to have connection to a lot of rich, talented people. She should take advantage of the fact that she was born into that family. She should go meet the old Great Aunt who has traveled all over the world doing whatever the fuck she wanted for most of her life. She’s a neat lady. Maybe if she met Shanna and Calli she would be more enthusiastic about coming to California for visits. So far she is kind of lazy. I’ve asked.

My children will not have my story. My children will not grow up without a family. They have connections. My children have people in the world tracking them and caring. I am not going to do anything to make that network smaller than I have to. I cut my family off because I don’t think my family is going to stop passing on the incest without some kind of intervention I don’t know how to do. So I’m keeping my kids the fuck away from them. I feel very sad that this is required but it is. It just fucking is.

Whenever someone tells me that I should forgive my mother because she won’t live forever I see my adult nephew breaking down as he told me about his rape experiences. No. No. No. No. My children will be kept away from them. All of them. I don’t think it is their fault that it happened to them but we haven’t had someone avoid incest in a few generations. I’m keeping my kids away from all of them.

When people tell me to just “get over it” and “stop thinking about it” I think “That shit is why it keeps happening generation after generation.”

I think about my mom a lot. I miss her. It doesn’t help that my Leather Mom is going through a lot of strife and I’m not helping very much (partially because of my limitations partially because she is telling me no). My Leather Mom and my birth mother share a birthday. I find that thinking about one or the other of them brings up a lot of really strong feelings.

Why do I think about my mom so much? Because everyone else gets to talk to me about their moms all the time. It’s just normal conversation. So I think about my mom and try to stay silent. I feel bad. I feel like a dirty terrible person.

One of the last things my mother said to me was that she would kill herself if I took my kids away from her. I keep checking on the internet and she isn’t dead. I guess that is just one more broken promise.

Broken promises are a big thing right now. What does it mean to say, “I will do _____.”

Relationships are about choices. Sometimes they are uncomfortable. Often that discomfort comes from inside me and is about the fact that I am thinking three hundred painful things all while I’m trying to have a relationship. When I can get those three hundred thoughts under control and actually focus on the person in the room I am grateful to have that relationship. I am glad it is still there. But it feels like I’ve been phoning it in from somewhere else for a while. I never understand what benefit there is to other people in putting up with me.

I am scheduled to be at Dad’s for Thanksgiving. How long is this going to continue? I have had him in my life more or less for going on fourteen years. We have a fairly distant relationship but honestly I do better with those. I have a hard time with being good-enough when people are around more often. I am able to behave perfectly appropriately for my target audience when I only see people once or twice a year. I feel ashamed that I can’t keep up the game with people I see more.

It makes me wonder if I have my anxiety as under control as I think with my kids. Some of my recent frustrations have made me realize that I need to start writing names on the white board in our room. I don’t want to discuss my relationship fluctuations in front of the kids any more. Shanna is starting to sorta follow and have her emotions influenced. I’m having to do a lot of backpedaling and defending of people with her and that’s… awkward.

I don’t want my kids to share my emotional experiences of people. My children are having different experiences. My experiences are my problem. My experiences are distinctly shaped by having an anxiety disorder. I do not want my kids learning my emotional dysregulation. If they develop their own later I don’t want it to be clearly my fault.

This is part of what I like about Unschooling. I have to pay attention to what I am doing, all DBT like. I have a bad habit of loving and hating people. My kids don’t need to hear about it. I don’t need to teach them to obsessively over analyze every conversation before and after it happens. So far they seem pretty good at talking to people.

I went to a book club meeting yesterday. I need to update my reading list, I’ve added three or four. Book club always turns into a small scale therapy/support group. I find it interesting how the folks who are consistent are unschoolers who come from abusive backgrounds. Other folks come and go. Not that I’m consistent enough to actually say that. Maybe my few attendance points are flukes. I should probably keep that up. My therapist wants me going out and doing stuff without my family. Book club is not terribly threatening. Most of the places I would choose to go involve fending off sexual advances and I’m not in the mood.

What the hell else do people do?

That gratitude stuff.

Leave a reply

Today I feel lucky to have so many people who love me even though I am so broken and so difficult. High Maintenance they call it.

My husband is going way above and beyond the call of duty lately. He has broken concrete, made breakfast every day, made dinner most days, swept and mopped the house, and moved over 500 lbs of sand so I didn’t have to. These are all things he doesn’t especially like or want to do. But he is helping me. And he did all that outside of his work hours, where he earns enough money to support me in a lifestyle I never previously imagined. (Jenny said she would show she loved me by paying someone to do this labor rather than doing it. It’s a love language thing. I can’t pay someone to do work how I want it done–this is something I learn over and over again. Having Noah just help me do it is really a big thing for me.)

I do not feel like I deserve this. I’m grateful anyway.

Many of my friends are finding ways to hang out and talk to me or be supportive. I am grateful that people stare at me hard enough to say, “You are clearly in a depressive state. I can tell based on ____ and _____ and ____.”

Holy shit. You care. That’s… that’s… whoa. Ok.

It is hard to believe that I am a piece of shit and have people treat me this way. It feels wrong. It feels like I should hurry up and do something awful so they recognize that helping me is the wrong decision. I am not worthy. Self-sabotage is kind of my MO.

That’s part of why my therapist wants me to stop socializing for a bit. When I bounce between lots of people I feel like I am supposed to be trying to figure out how to please all of these people and that takes a lot of thinking and emotional energy. When I am consumed by feelings of worthlessness it is much harder to figure out what is “appropriate” behavior.

Yes. I have to work on my behavior all of the time. You have no idea how much profanity and nastiness lives in my head. I consciously choose what I say or I say things that are really mean and critical. Even if I like something very much I can always tell you 4,920 things that are wrong with it. Whether that is a person, a place, or a thing. Or an idea. Just to cover all the nouns. It doesn’t matter how strongly positive my feelings are there are still more negative things I could say. I have to consciously choose to not be like that. It’s hard.

Right now my friend is reading to my kids. I’m going to have a hard time when she leaves California again. I know she loves me no matter where she is but having her nearby feels like such a blessing. I don’t have to try to please her. I can sit still in a chair and she pays attention to my kids and loves on them and I don’t have to worry about my behavior.

I feel grateful for friends who put up with how loud we are. I know that the volume in our house is very challenging for a few of my friends. (Oh.Forking.Man. The last place we went for a playdate [K-babysitting is different] had hardwood or tile floors throughout with very high ceilings. I no longer think my house is loud. My house is awesomely sound dampening. YAY MY HOUSE. I no longer want hardwood floors or high ceilings. I would lose my fucking mind. I like my house more with every year. <3

I need to go out back and tack down the landscaping fabric. Then I will fill the sandbox. Then I will take a shower and get ready for teaching. After teaching I need to come home and start preparing food for the party tomorrow. Oh man.

I feel very lucky to have the people I have in my life now. I know that I am crazy and all, but not everyone has as many people who love them fiercely as I do. Even if I don’t feel loved I know that I am. I see the actions of the people who show up in my house.

I’m trying to see you for who and what you are instead of the projections from my broken brain. I’m trying. I’m trying.

Tomorrow will be a kick-awesome party. Just sayin’. Not many kids coming, this is the “grown ups who show up to see the kids all the time” party really. Calli listed the people she wanted to invite. Only one person who visits regularly isn’t coming and that is because he doesn’t like the noise much. He and his wife were invited but not pressured to come. They don’t like crowds.

It is really neat finding out who Calli feels attached to. She has a varied and dear family whether I understand it or not. I’m really glad that my daughters feel so loved in this world. I’m doing something right.

Perspective is everything.

5 Replies

Yesterday I spent a while talking to a woman who has been fighting/is slowly dying of cancer. When she got the diagnosis her plan was to not fight and just go when it was her time. Then her grandson got engaged and she wanted to be at the wedding. Then her grandson knocked up his long-term partner just before the wedding so even though the wedding already happened she just doesn’t quite want to go yet… even though she is very tired.

Let me fucking tell you I did not burden this woman with my problems. It was fascinating to listen to her though. Why does she decide that suffering is worth it? She is at a point where she isn’t sure she has fight left in her. Does that mean anything bad about her will to live? How much will to live should anyone have? She is already in her 70’s. She has had a good life.

I got married and had children because I wanted to believe there was a way I could have those things and have it be different than what I have known. I have managed to have a very different relationship. It requires me to be isolated most of the time because I can’t handle more stress. But I’m doing what I wanted.

When I’m done with this isolated early-childhood experience my children will be socialized the way I want and they will have a very secure attachment from which to go out into the world. I don’t think they are mine to control forever. I just think I am not capable of keeping them safe if there are too many factors in our lives. I lose track of what the left hand is doing if my right hand has to multi-task eight things.

She asked me a lot of questions about what I am doing with the kids. Why am I home schooling? Why do I believe the things I believe about early childhood development. I had answers. Lots of answers. Non-depressing answers! I was proud of myself. I told her at one point, “I’m usually Debbie Downer but I’ve been chipper this whole conversation so I’m pretty proud of that.” She laughed. Overall talking to her was a delightful experience.

The older I get the less people hate me for being weird. I don’t need anyone else to accommodate me any more. When children are weird it creates random and unpredictable work for adults. That is very annoying.

Yesterday I was told that having a big garden is one of the best things I can do as a parent. When my kids misbehave–make them weed. It is productive, non-painful, but always has to be done. Excellent advice. Ha.

I find that older women listen to why I home school and think for a bit then they say, “I wish I had had the courage to keep my children with me. Go you.” I’ve heard that a lot. I’m not sure it is about courage, exactly. I am this selfish. It has taken a long time for me to realize that a certain level of being selfish is utterly required for a human being to have a happy life. Some people are “altruistic” to such a degree that it is actually quite selfish.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it would take for me to make the jump to seriously not wanting to die in a permanent way. I mean, I don’t have a choice about dying some day. It is the universal equalizer. How do I stop wanting to be done?

I haven’t had suicidal ideation in a few days. More than a week? It’s kind of hard to track because the closer attention I pay to tracking it the more present it is.

What would have to change in me, what feeling of security would I need to have in order to really want to live? Noah feels sad that he isn’t enough. He isn’t. Noah represents too much potential pain. I trust him more as the years go by. I didn’t think that a man would ever be able to spend time around me without requiring degrading sex. He doesn’t. I don’t really know what to make of him.

I’ve been writing more letters to Noah’s family. Doing so always makes me feel sad. I tell them things because I wish I could tell my mom. I’ve been thinking about my mom every day. Lots of grieving left to do there. I am so sorry, Mommy. I know I have hurt you so much. Maybe in the end I have hurt you more than my Dad did. I feel so bad about that. I’m sorry.

The only way I know how to move the pain away from you is to take it on or move it to my children. The only way you know how to deal with pain is to blame children and say everything bad is all their fault. Even though the bad started before they were born. I can’t let you do that to my daughters. I just can’t.

My children believe that everyone makes mistakes and we have to forgive one another but you are not to blame for actions that are not yours. Not ever. If you are not the one who did something then you should not be punished. Period.

That’s on the long list of reasons I can’t send my kids to public schools. Teachers have to punish whole groups or whole classrooms because they can’t single kids out every time there is a problem. No. Just no. I don’t think they would be destroyed. Yes many generations of Americans have lived through it and “everyone is fine”. I don’t want it for my kids. I’m not fine.

Solving yesterday’s problems. That is what I am doing. It isn’t right. It isn’t fair. It is what everyone does.

I like talking to older people. I more or less beg them to tell me that there are stages of life with less pain coming. Near as I can tell the pain shifts. I will have less emotional pain and more physical pain. I can handle that trade. That won’t be worth dying over. I feel like a loser but I will take physical pain over emotional pain every day of the week and twice on Sunday. Why do you think I cut for so many years?

I was brave yesterday. The person who is building stuff in my yard has a lot going on. I completely respect that. I get that he has five thousand things pulling at him. But every time he comes he gets slightly less done than he hoped to do and he rarely stays for more than two hours at a go. (I track everything.) He originally told me my list of projects would take ~5 days. He is about halfway through those hours. I asked him if he could come more days over the next week because I would really like the yard uhm, neat enough to clean up before the birthday party. Right now I keep hurting myself tripping on lumber in the back yard.

Why is this brave? Because I feel like a fucking asshole for asking him for more times of showing up but once he is done then I won’t have to pester him any more. It is hard to say that I want him to treat me like a priority so he can get this over with and move on. But he’s been coming since February for five days of work and it is August. Time to finish up. I’m not mad. I just want it to be done.

It is hard to ask for things. It is hard to not feel like an overly-demanding harpy. I don’t know if I have been or not. I think I am going to stop hiring people I know for work. I can’t be demanding with them if I otherwise know the circumstances of their lives yet I feel like I really want to be able to be demanding when I am paying someone to do something. Conundrum. (The work he is doing is beautiful. I really appreciate all of his labor. I am not slamming this man in any way shape or form. I’m sorry I am so impatient. Please don’t be mad at me, L.)

Today I need to clean. I’m pretty sure I never cleaned the house in July. I don’t think I vacuumed once. (To be honest now I mostly vacuum before a crawling baby comes over. I only did the once a day thing while my kids were eating floor candy.) I haven’t swept or mopped in a long time. (Thank goodness for a good exterminator getting rid of the ants. Ha.) I have kept up with dishes and laundry because those things getting out of control is just too hard for me. I took pictures at the worst of the mess because K feels so insecure about my ability to keep my house clean all the time. Ha. No, it isn’t clean all the time. I just make sure that I keep little enough stuff in my house that everything has a home and everything can be picked up and put away in under three hours. Or I would want to beat the shit out of someone.

If it took eight hours to clean my house I would be homicidal. It would not be ok with me. No one has the fucking right to expect that much labor from me on a given day. I don’t know where my entitlement comes from. But man I don’t want a bigger house.

The longer I stay in one place the more I like it. The more I feel like I am picking out behavior traits from a menu that was not previously available to me. “Feel content–check.” It isn’t that I am “happy” all of the time. I’m not sure I am physiologically capable of being “happy” all of the time. I spend too much time scared or angry. But I feel secure. I feel safe. I feel content. I feel like I have done such work as deserves pride. I’m not Rembrandt but my house is neat. My yard is fun. It is small and packed with interesting things to do. I make it more interesting by the year.

(Seriously, I spend a lot of time hiding in the blue potato vine secret club house. I pull a chair in there and read during the heat of the day. It is perfectly cool and shaded and surrounded by pretty flowers. I feel so lucky to have the life I have.)

It is kind of funny to notice that I feel anxiety about “not having a job” because I feel like I am letting the sisterhood down. But uhm, the sisterhood has by and large not been great to me as an individual. I’m loudly feminist. I am supporting the Cause and all. Isn’t it ok for each of us to choose what makes us happy? What load we can bear?

I keep thinking that I want to start observing the Sabbath. Not in a believing in anything kind of way. More from a “no technology and no work from sundown to sundown” sort of thing. Human beings need rest. We are bad at observing that. Keeping the Sabbath is actually a very physiologically healthy thing. Then follow that by walking to the farmers market on Sunday morning? That feels like a recipe for increased health compared to what I have always known.

Reduce the harm you inflict on yourself. Step by step, bit by bit. I’m trying. (Every single time I stop and notice that the pain in my abdomen is gone since I stopped drinking carbonated water I feel a bit more stupid. Wow. We really do cause our own misery; we usually don’t understand how we are doing so but we do.)

Ok, people with lifelong disabilities will hate me for that. No, not everything that happens to someones body is their own fault. As a culture Americans are spectacularly bad about causing physical problems through our choices. Walking away from that line of thinking now.

The woman I spoke with yesterday asked me what I get out of thinking through past mistakes. I said it is very important to me to make 10,000 mistakes instead of 10 mistakes 1,000 times each. She laughed. I told her I have the kind of family that makes 10 mistakes. I don’t know how to change that pattern without being very aware of it. I’m not making the same mistakes I used to make–not at all.

Well, there is that whole existentially an asshole thing. But come on, who is paying attention to that as a mistake? That’s mostly considered a personality bug at this point. A very useful one that I don’t trot out much any more. I don’t think I will ever be willing to give up on it. I just try not to inflict it on non-deserving people.

I think I will always be prone to shouting at people who have the audacity to say racist and sexist things to me. I don’t think I have the desire to stop reacting. I don’t want to be one more silent person. Silence is consent. I’d rather be an asshole.

The fence project

2 Replies

I want to blog about this more later. http://www.flickr.com/photos/rightkindofme/sets/72157634785800521/

to do on fence

Leave a reply

Cover up the hideous face/hat thing. I tried to fix what the neighborhood chickees did and it looks stupid and awful. Time to cover it and try something else. Someone showing up for thirty minutes to “help” doesn’t always help.

I am up to 43 hours of work. Between Pam and Noah there have been ~5.5 hours of help. I think this means it will actually end up being a 60 hour project. YAY! It can use it.

Add buildings with religious symbols.

Add animals on Mission Peak.

More people playing in Aqua Adventure.

Add library

Add GLITTER

Add princess, unicorn, and other fantasy stuff to the enchanted garden.

Holy f’in shit. How will I do all of that in ONE DAY?!

BY GETTING OFF YOUR ASS YOU LAZY SLUG.

Three more days in the month, paint faster.

1 Reply

I am going to do 13-23 more hours on the fence. I want to finish this week. I suppose that means that I will be painting all day today and tomorrow and maybe Wednesday. The kids will *love* that. Not. They are very very done with me doing a task that requires intense concentration and that they not walk up and touch me. But it’s coming along!

Yesterday I started the work of unwinding the blackberry bramble from the trellis it has been on for the past year and a half. Hard to believe that the bush has been in my yard for only a year and a half. That’s one massive sucker. I have probably another five hours of work before it is transferred over to the new trellis structure (which mostly consists of retired Twisted Monk rope. Ha. My yard is visually full of it. My stuff is far too old for safe suspensions and I don’t do enough floor bondage to care. Not that I suspend anyone lately. Sigh.).

Ice skating was wicked fun and I didn’t fall *once*. I feel so proud of myself. I went off and did some speed laps on my own when the rest of my family was worn out from falling. I find it strange that my thirties are the decade of physical independence and strength. I have the courage to try things now. I am not so afraid of failing that I stay home and cry instead of showing up. I have always been afraid. It is weird to not let fear run very much of my life.

“Falling is part of the learning process. If you are afraid of falling you will never be good. You can’t get real mad either. You just have to accept it and try to do better.”

I learn these things as I teach them.

I went and talked to an old acquaintance who is a Contra dance leader person last night. I am curious about bringing the home school kids to a Contra dance because I think it is potentially interesting to them. It sounds like I should wait until more kids are closer to ten. That makes sense. That’s ok, I don’t need to do everything this year. I will start trying to teach some things in the park though as pre-prep.

It is kind of weird constantly thinking about scaffolding. What do I want them to be able to do when they are thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, fifty that requires preparation at this point. There are more things than anyone wants to think about.

Life is about a series of A/B choices. As you go on your list narrows. Do you want children–yes or no. Did you actually have children–yes or no. Do you want to work or stay at home–pick one. When you make choices you close a lot of doors. I get this. I don’t think that one road is morally superior than other roads. I don’t think that picking home schooling proves I love my kids more than anyone else. It is just the A/B choice I wanted.

Recently I wrote a fairly defensive six page letter to my grandmother-in-law. She has been expressing clearly that she has never seen home schooling go well and she does not approve. Ok. Well, I know a lot of people for whom it has gone well so if we are doing the anecdote thing I win. If we are looking at actual fucking data then I win and win and win and win. So fuck you. Home schooling has been around since the dawn of time so can we not act like the American public school system has a lock on education? Give me a break.

But I don’t say “fuck” in letters to the grandmother. Even I recognize some limits.

What I have been doing instead is writing long philosophical letters where I mention all the educational theorists and I talk about the strengths and advantages of different systems and I talk about schema and scaffolding and all the shit I’m doing.

I knew I wanted to home school my children when I was seventeen years old. I went to college, graduate school, and I got a teaching credential because I wanted to home school my kids and I believed it required preparation. No, I really and truly don’t believe that everyone should home school their kids. However I think I am fully fucking qualified and I’m not going to be nice to people who imply otherwise.

I prepared for this for more than ten years before having children. I did that knowing that there is the very real possibility that I will home school my kids till they are seven or so and then they will say, “Screw you mom, I’m going to school.” I did that knowing that if I had a child who was blind, deaf, autistic, fill in the blank special needs, I probably wouldn’t be able to home school. I prepared anyway and hoped for the best. My children appear to be very “normal” in terms of development. Shanna is advanced verbally but not emotionally or in terms of education. She just can talk. Calli is very on track to be average.

I can handle average kids. I really can. I understand that lots of people worry about home schooling as an educational choice–I worry too. But I have yet to meet someone who comes out of the public education without major gaps in their education… I can’t believe that home schooling would magically be worse. Not if I seriously undertake it as my profession.

I’ve tried to figure out how to use a word other than vocation. Now that I know I am using vocation wrong (it has way less emphasis than I want) I’m not even sure how to talk about it. Some children know very young they want to grow up and be a nun. It’s a calling. I knew I wanted to home school.

I want this intensity of relationship. I understand that not everyone wants it. I am not trying to claim that this intensity is the healthiest or the best or superior for everyone. Noah sure as shit couldn’t do what I am doing with the kids. He would go bananas. He gets very short with them by the end of a weekend. I would not leave Noah alone with the kids for more than a week by himself. I mean, no one would die or anything. They wouldn’t have much fun though.

I have been alone for most of my life in a way that other people can’t understand. Moving around all the time such that you literally don’t have friendships that last longer than three months is quite traumatic in and of itself without mentioning all the other shit in my life. I really am a freak. It is pretty verifiable if you go talk to medical professionals.

I want to be with people all the time. I want to be able to hug and touch people safely without them expecting me to offer blowjobs. I haven’t had a lot of that. I have spent most of my life believing that if I am not actively offering sex I should leave because no one is interested in my presence.

I don’t believe I “love my children more” because of the choices I make. I believe that I am using my children to meet my needs in some ways that could be massively unhealthy if I am not careful.

Shanna asks me why I see a therapist almost every time we go. She doesn’t want to be away from me for the hour of the appointment. She complains loudly. “You know how I cry all the time? Well, I cry because I’m thinking about things I need to talk about. No, I can’t talk to you about these things. It would be totally inappropriate. It is wrong for grown ups to bring their problems to children. I need someone to talk to. She helps me be a better mother.”

I am very careful that neither child becomes my “little mother”. That’s not what I want. I think that is very wrong. That is what my mother did to me. That is what my grandmother did to my mother. I am not passing on that generational wound. I believe that I (I’m not fucking talking about anyone else so don’t take this as a projection) would not be capable of taking care of my own shit and holding down a job. I think that if I had a job I would expect my kids to pick up a ton more slack than I do right now. I would expect them to “help me” because you have kids to help you–right? Isn’t that how the tradition goes?

I didn’t have kids to help me. I had kids because I want a life long relationship so bad it makes me shake with need. I had kids because I want a reason to not die and I don’t think I have very many good reasons. I don’t think other people are worth staying alive for. Other people don’t do much of anything to make my life a demonstrably better place to be. They can’t. It isn’t that they don’t care. It’s that they are living their lives and they can’t stop to take care of me. That’s not healthy in any way–there is even a word: codependence. I don’t expect people to do that. Hell, I don’t want anyone to stop their life to try and take care of me.

But being a parent means that I have to think about how relationships work all day every day. I have to do measurable work on myself to deserve this relationship. I have to change.

I was talking to a new person last night at a party. I don’t know how we got on this topic but we were discussing parental guidance with regard to reading. When I was eight my aunt (who was basically a foster mother) told me I wasn’t allowed to read Sweet Valley High books because they were too mature and graphic. (The kids made out in the sand at the beach or something.) I left her house and went back to my mother’s house where I read Bertrice Small books. Small is very into incest, pony play, harems, sodomy, raping, kidnapping, dildos, bestiality, LOTS of group sex.

That is, in a nutshell, the conundrum of my life. Those kind of hard-core pornography books were the only books my mom had in the house. I went between being punished for thinking about kissing a boy to being given a detailed instruction manual on how to have really graphic sex that I bloody well followed over and over.

I was eight when I started trying to memorize these books. What was I supposed to do in order to make people want me? I thought it was very important. I thought that was the only way people might let me be around. When the characters were taught how to behave in the harem I god damn took notes.

My children will not be reading Bertrice Small pre-puberty. The books are in my room up on a very high shelf. I still have them. I still wank to them. Oh man formative literature.

I no longer think I deserve to be beaten and raped. That is a fairly big step for me. That is how I found the bdsm community. I thought that was what I deserved and I went on the internet looking for men to do that to me. I was told to buy SM 101 and that was it. I found what I was supposed to be doing.

Let me tell you I have some cognitive dissonance sometimes. What am I supposed to be doing now? Well, painting a fence. Winding some blackberry bushes. Preserving tomatoes. Loving children. Teaching reading and writing and arithmetic.

I am supposed to figure out how to be stable and happy and a “good influence” whatever that means. Am I a good influence? I don’t know. I think that you, whoever you are, are someone who has unique gifts and talents and things to offer the world. I don’t know what they are so I can’t tell you what you “should” be doing. You have to figure it out for yourself.

When I was young I believed that my only talent/skill thing was being able to read fast. I didn’t see how that could possibly be a big deal later in life. I thought I was pathetic. Now I think that being able to read as fast I can has been an unbelievable gift in this lifetime. I can learn anything I want to know.

I am teaching myself gardening. It is complicated and there is a lot to understand. I’m learning it. I am teaching myself cooking. It’s fucking chemistry. I understand that these are things that humans have been teaching themselves without books for thousands, maybe a million years. But I am really progressing at these skills at a pace my forbearers could not imagine. That’s kind of cool.

It is hard believing in the pit of your stomach that you are stupid, worthless, and unworthy of breathing while also knowing that you are an unusual specimen of the species. It doesn’t fit in my brain. I am more competent at being able to learn things than average. Why do I feel so weak and pathetic? Because these things are impossible to measure in any useful way. Because the measurement of these qualities has nothing to do with feelings. Because I just think I suck. (Yes, but what do you suck? Suck is a transitive verb.)

I know a lot of people who make choices without thinking a lot about them. I’m not saying that is a terrible decision. If you are following the pattern you know and it works for you there isn’t a strong need to question the normal M.O. That’s fine. I can’t do that though.

I don’t think I am making the UNIVERSAL BEST CHOICES. I don’t think there is any such thing. I think I am making the choices that make the most sense for me given my set of issues and life circumstances.

I worry a lot about whether or not I am making the best choices for my children. I look at studies that say that children, in general, do “best” when they have a stay at home mother. I look at studies that verify that home schooled children, on average, do very well. But those things tell me literally nothing about whether or not I am meeting the needs of my children. I’m not sure if I am capable of knowing at this point.

My children are clean, well fed, and loved. That’s what I know. But that is pretty much exactly what the neighbor said about me to justify why she didn’t tell anyone I was being raped as a small child. How in the fuck do I know if what I am doing is right given that set of knowledge? Am I actually taking care of my kids? My mom thought she was and she wasn’t.

I tell my children that they don’t need to be like me even though I apparently have a desperate need to be like my mother. I am doing her job and I am doing it god damn better than she did. My children are safe in a way my mothers children were never safe. My children don’t need to grow up and do what I am doing any more than they have to grow up and do what Noah is doing. There is a whole wide world out there. There are so many people living in so many different ways. If you don’t like my approach, well let’s go study some other approaches. I can’t explain them like an insider so we will have to find people so you can ask your questions.

If I do anything right in this lifetime it will be to teach my children that being like me is not necessarily part of being an adult. I’m a special fucking snowflake. Don’t try to be like me.

It feels so sad that it always comes back to, “Don’t be like me. I am bad.” If you want people to like you, don’t be like me. If you want people to think you are a good person, don’t be like me. If you want people to let their children play with you, don’t be like me. Throughout my whole life people have been keeping their children away from me because I am a bad influence. From when I was three years old people have said to my face that they don’t want me around their children because I am a bad influence.

No, don’t be like me. There is no good to come of that road.

Am I really that bad? I don’t even know. I don’t know how these things are measured. I don’t know how they are decided. That process is invisible to me.

It’s kind of funny that I rarely decide that a person is “bad”. I frequently think that someone made a bad decision. I don’t conflate anyone else’s personhood with whether or not they make bad decisions sometimes. I do for me though. There is no redemption out of this pit.

Yesterday I worked on the fence for two hours. One of the old white guys who walks around my neighborhood chatted with me, as they all do, about the painting. He said that he recognized the Hindu Temple but “wished they would just go away.”

I went off. “Uhm, my family doesn’t share that opinion even slightly. I teach English classes there. My family has been taking Hindi classes there. We are glad it is on our street as a valuable resource to our community.” He looked gobsmacked.

I recently read a neat blog entry (I can’t find the link) about a white woman talking about her feelings of discomfort when people make racist comments to her and why she doesn’t say anything. Basically she wants to feel safe.

I don’t feel, as a white person, like it is ok for me to choose to feel “safe” rather than speak against racism. I think that is white privilege at its most insidious and disgusting. If another white person says something racist to me I do not keep my mouth shut. Silence is consent. When my neighbor told me his Hispanic gardeners trimmed his tree wrong and he threatened to kill them over it I told him that what he did was a criminal act and he should be ashamed of himself. He later told he apologized profusely to the gardner. You had god damn better. What the fuck were you thinking in the first place?

To me all of this consent-for-sex, racism, feminism stuff is all entwined. It’s not ok to have a better life at the expense of stepping on someone else’s neck.

Breathe in. Breathe out. It will be a long day of hard work. That will be ok. It will end. Tomorrow will be a long day of hard work. That will be ok too. Hopefully by the end of tomorrow I will finish the fence. *cross fingers* I want to be done in July. One month. I want to give this project one month of my life.

And my beloved husband has finished making me breakfast. This isn’t a eat-in-the-garage-alone-because-I-can’t-stop-crying morning. Time to go in and tell my children that I missed them while I was sleeping. I have hugs and kisses to give. I hear that they need them.

Progress report.

Leave a reply

So.Forking.Off.Schedule.

I did five hours of unexpected painting today. Now I think this will be a forty to fifty hour project. Oh man. I don’t think I booked enough time over the next month. I don’t know how this is going to work.

Well, no way to get through it but to just up and do it. This too shall pass.

I am always much happier about the idea of being done with a project than I am about the work. I was bitchy for over an hour of painting. Then I finally relaxed.

I had a lovely chat with the lady who lives there. She thanked me repeatedly for painting her fence and gave me three little tomato sprouts. I thanked her. I’m shocked she is letting me do this. So far she likes it. That’s good.

The old guy down the road wasn’t avoiding me. My paranoia can end. *Phew* He was just super busy and then out of town. I got to hear all about his travels to I-de-ho recently. He is getting bawdier and bawdier and he swears more and more as he talks to me. He is starting to think of me as One Of The Guys. I can tell. It is always a funny shift when older men realize they can’t shock me.

Today I feel so glad that I get to have this life. My therapist wants me to walk around my house with a video camera looking at the pictures on the wall. She wants me to tell a story with them. She thinks it will be good for me.

I told her that I put the pictures up because I have a hard time reminding myself that anyone would care if I died. I largely put the pictures up so I can’t walk through my house and pretend I don’t matter. There are a lot of pictures on the wall of people who would be very upset and hurt if I died. I need to remember that.

I tell my kids that I put them up so that the kids will learn who their family is. That’s a much better story for them.

I appreciate that my therapist validates me as a parent so much. I mean, I think I am doing a good job of meeting the goals I am setting for myself as a parent and as a person. I really and truly have gotten my temper under control. I don’t rant and scream. I don’t hit. I don’t terrorize my children. I just don’t. I have a very mellow relationship with them. We are all working hard on life together.

We have one more Hindi class before two 1.5 hour oral exams. Oof. I need to study more.

I start teaching English on Thursday. I need to copy the short story. I need to pick the short story. And put together questions. And decide what I’m going to teach. And, err, basically every other aspect of teaching. No big deal, right? It’s only in 36 hours. No rush or anything.

Enh, ten kids for two hours. No big deal.

I’m really grateful for my friends. I know some good people.

I had a raunchy good time at a sex party this weekend. My husband puts out very well. Yay! I continue to have mixed feelings about how much better sex is when someone is watching. That would be exhibitionism, ma’am. I feel quite grateful that I found a partner who is so sexually compatible. *swoon* I no longer need to find many men for a night. Ha. He’s enough.

I’m not actually that off-schedule. Just a bit. But I’m going to need to up how much I plan to paint this week. Oy. It will all work out. The work, it will get done. I will it so.

I feel weird about how much I feel like most of the effort of my hands “doesn’t matter” and “isn’t important” and “has no value”. How much of that perception is tied to my internalized misogyny and devaluation of womens work?

Today I told a (female) friend that I am glad that my daughters are growing up in a little bubble where most movies/tv/books pass the Bechdel test (1. It has to have at least two [named] women in it. 2. Who talk to each other. 3. About something besides a man)

My friend said that sounded exhausting after we talked about the three movies she recently watched in one weekend all of which fail the Bechdel test. I kind of blinked. Exhausting? I think that my world is wonderful and comfy and carefully constructed over many years. I feel like I finally get to relax for the first time in my life. No one here is going to tell me that I can’t do _____ because I’m a girl. Noah assumes I am more generally competent at most of the butch tasks in our house… because I am.

I don’t live in a world of female side kicks. I’m not going to fucking be one. I don’t need women to be the only characters but it is very rare for me to watch an all male movie. (Big exception for Shawshank Redemption.)

I look at the world created in mainstream media and don’t see a place for me. So it isn’t part of my life. I don’t miss it. I don’t feel sad about not participating. I don’t see why that would be exhausting. It’s a good thing everyone gets to be different.

I want to learn about the wisdom of women. I have no grandmother to learn from. I read books and watch movies. What lessons have women learned before me? Which wheels do I not bloody need to reinvent? I don’t find those same lessons in male-oriented movies.

Given that I am not allowed to punch people randomly in the face when I’m in a bad mood I don’t find action flicks enjoyable. It raises that “want to punch people” feeling. It isn’t that fun to suppress.

August needs to be slower. Ugh. We have another wedding coming up. (I’m not the officiant but it will be great!) Lots to look forward to. Lots to do. I can’t die yet.

Day one of painting

Make art.

Leave a reply

-In the next month I will be painting a fence belonging to a fairly random neighbor.

-I asked my daughters swim school if I could bring in sketches for a mural in their space and they are enthusiastic.

-I am working on a logo for the new Hayward Hackspace because I was asked to make it.

-I want to repaint my kitchen. It is bugging me. I have a weird thing on my ceiling post-light replacement so I need to fix it. I will probably redo the whole kitchen because it was never finished last time. I have a lot of ideas.

And to think about five years ago I would have sworn up and down that I am not creative.

And then! We paint.

2 Replies

Today some of the home schooling folks came over. We painted my house. Nine kids between the ages of 2 and 11 and two moms (including me–we did clean up not major painting) produced some pretty fun stuff. I particularly like that the butterfly/rainbow are right at eye level when I sit at the table to eat. And just off my line of sight it says “Love You”. I’m glad I did this.

Plants are personal.

3 Replies

Not eating sugar is hard. There is hidden, extra sugar in freakin everything. I’m trying. And I’m not being a fascist with the kids. When other people hand them sugar when we are out I don’t say anything.

Today is a gardening day. And my friend’s husband is coming tonight. I’m going to get a whole bunch of work done. I can feel my heart go pitter patter. It is hilarious how happy getting work done makes me. Slowing the inevitable decline of my house makes me feel better about living in it. It’s a thing.

I’ve been doing a lot of gardening. I really want to put up pictures of my yard. If I’m good I may do it today. I’ve made a lot of progress lately. I will be putting out word that I have more starts than I need pretty soon. The lavender is taking off. I’m going to have almost a dozen plants out of this batch. I’m going to have 40+ tomato plants. Over a dozen chard plants. Those are the ones I have massively popping up so far. I think the parsley is taking off. Lots of carrots are coming up outside. The celery looks happy. Artichokes are doing great. We pulled the flowers off the blueberry bush because you shouldn’t let it fruit the first year.

Lots going on in the yard. I would really like showing off. But I’m bad at taking pictures so I dislike posting what I take. Oh well. Get over it.

I need to write the Easter egg hunt email. I’m thoroughly excited about this year. This is our fourth hunt. I think this will be the first one with a lot of kids. I’ve been hoping that one of these years we would hit critical mass. The hunt is the day after I drive back from Portland. I think this year will be pot luck. And I have to have the house completely ready before we leave. The only thing I will have to do is get up Sunday morning and hide the eggs. You can’t do that in advance anyway. It’ll be fun.

I feel like I live my life preparing for events. That’s how I structure my time. “X event is in Y days so I should do Z work so I am ready.” I check in with my calendar multiple times of day. I keep long task lists for separate areas of endeavor (yard, cleaning, crafty-schtuff, cooking, etc) and I move back and forth between the lists as my priorities shift. Sometimes, when I’m feeling lonely I think about taking pictures of alllll the lists next to one another because it amuses me. But I feel weird about it so I don’t.

Which is to say: I live in an era of over-exposure and I know that everything I put into the world becomes part of how people judge me. How much of my insanity do I want to reveal? Shaping an identity comes in inches. I think it is funny that I have considerably less compunction about writing graphic sexual stories than I have about posting pictures of my gardening.

My gardening is actually personal. I am slowly working towards an image in my mind. I have plans. I am creating something. I am creating something that I want to see for the sole reason that I want to see it. I am being very selfish. I am using a tremendous amount of time and energy.

It feels really good. I will get to hide here for the rest of my life. And I will make it beautiful. That is personal.

Most of the time when I have fucked people it hasn’t been very personal. Probably 80% of my partners were fewer than four uhm occasions. Around 60% were once. I didn’t know them. They don’t know me. They don’t want to know me. I have had sex with somewhere between 120-130 people.

Sex is a physical need. Also, I have spent a lot of my life trying to get through one more night. I grew up with the belief that I should be constantly searching for a sex partner and tolerating inappropriate contact from men. Being married and having kids means that I have the “acceptable model” to kind of default into. It does happen to be a relatively healthy model.

I’m not interested in spending all of my time out being entertained. That sounds like a lot of work and a lot of money to me. I don’t want my children to look at the environment around them as owing them entertainment. They need to create their own entertainment. That’s life. You have to create what you want to see in the world. How are you going to do that? My kids do some really cool things with play silks. They have a lot of time to fill.

I’m excited about the idea of charter school money. I know what the standards are. I know how to measure them. I know how to introduce concepts. It doesn’t require curriculum. It can just happen.

And I forgot to hit post again. That’s ok. Tomorrow will be festive as well. Tomorrow is my last day of incest support group. I’m relieved.

Playing house and thinking about destiny

1 Reply

I have to say that typing my name into the url spot feels good. It’s like I finally have an online home. It’s my god damn sand pit. Excellent.

I have been enormously busy. In the past two days I finished the play house (well, I haven’t attached the planters and I haven’t got climbing plants established–but wood is done), built and mostly installed a raised bed. Started 36 plants indoors and I have a few new food plants coming up in front from the seed spread a few weeks ago. I never label when I do that so I have no forking clue what is growing until it’s done. It’s SCIENCE!

Inside the house I have kept up with the kitchen (doing so requires 2+ hours of work/day between cooking and cleaning), washed and/or folded seven loads of laundry. Cleaned up the whole floor so I could vacuum. I swept the kitchen and the kids scrubbed the linoleum for me (their idea–I swear) and after wiping up the big puddles with a towel the floor is as clean as with mopping so I’m happy.

I also took Shanna to dance class and I have spent 3-4 hours reading aloud over the past two days. I’ve watched three episodes of The West Wing and an interesting documentary called Whore’s Glory (it’s available instant on Netflix–this is how I get movies). If you don’t think white privilege exists go look at what it means to be a woman of color. They don’t have the same options for getting out.

In this country and in Europe prostitution can be a choice. The kinds of scenarios that exist in other countries isn’t enacted here in the same way.

White prostitutes by and large choose it. They may not make the choice with happiness and glee… but it’s a choice.

My great- grandmother was a prostitute and had an illegitimate daughter. My grandmother got “out” of that profession and into a marriage because she was able to blend into society and not be tarred by the brush of her mother.

In some countries if you are a whore you are locked into a ghetto. You are not allowed to leave that slum. Your children are raised there and aren’t really allowed to leave either. None of you have enough money to go anywhere anyway.

My mother was knocked up in high school. She graduated pregnant. She found someone to marry her weeks before the baby was born so that she wouldn’t really be a bastard. Even by 1969 it wasn’t a great situation. Much better than in the 1920’s when my great-grandmother did it.

My sister got married at seventeen had a baby at nineteen was divorced at twenty. Then she had another baby at twenty-two with “guy of the moment” because she didn’t want her kids spaced too far apart and she didn’t want just one. Then she was strongly admonished that she “should” have her tubes tied and she consented. No one in the hospital told her that the procedure wasn’t covered by the state medical plan. It took her more than ten years to pay for that surgery. My understanding is the main benefit has been that she has been able to have a lot of unsafe sex.

People do what they are taught and what they are allowed to do.

I was born into a family where I was not allowed to say no to sexual contact. It was beaten into me.

I am trying to create a family where no one has to do things they don’t want within reason. Like, if Shanna has ballet… sorry Calli you have to go too. Even though you don’t wanna. I understand. I’d like to stay home too.

So there has to be some compromising. But I want them to learn how to be very conscious and deliberate about those compromises. Your opinion matters and the only person who can advocate for you is you.

But there are a lot of boundaries. If you want to scream, that’s fine. Go outside or in the playroom with the door shut. You are not allowed to hurt me by screaming in my face.

It’s weird. I feel like I am negotiating all the time. And I constantly have to put a pause on the whole maelstrom in my head to go mediate some dispute and I have to act completely calm and fair and not scream and be matter of fact and… bleh.

But being able to deliver that consistently… that’s what the pot does.

I don’t know how to describe what it feels like to live in constant heart stopping terror as I go about my daily life because I don’t really think I have ever consistently not felt this way enough to tell the differences.

Sober I have many panic attacks in an average day. I can slow my heart rate through sheer force of will and breath control if I concentrate on it really hard but it makes me seem spacey and kind of dazed. I have to be really selfish and think about my body and it makes me snappy and impatient with everyone else. I often am heard to say “Just leave me alone” even though I know it’s not a good one. I need to develop a better script there but managing panic attacks is really fucking hard. They usually happen out in public where I have none of my usual coping methods.

My kids don’t need to have to learn to live their life around my agonizing stomach cramps. It doesn’t matter to them that I may vomit any minute if I’m not careful. I swallow a lot of bile because I don’t want to admit what is happening. Long-term it’s just not their problem.

The noise is a lot of it. When they get older we can have different discussions about noise but I’m really worried. Our house is loud all the time. We all like to talk. Hilariously, sometimes all four people will be in separate rooms shouting to be heard. I am having a really hard time with how we handle noise. And yet when I lower my voice Noah gets louder and I cringe more and my stomach hurts more and… ugh. It goes better if I try to match his excessive volume.

And the kids are very young and their volume control issues are normal and they are progressing in a completely normal developmental fashion and I need to just be nice about it. This is why people like the part about handing their kid off to another caretaker for most of the day. The noise is unbearable. Sometimes I make my children play out back. We live in California. Even in winter this is a reasonable thing to just go do in underwear. Vitamin D is good for you. And no I don’t put sunblock on any of us. I haven’t in years and I think I can count the number of times I’ve put sunblock on my kids on my fingers. Most of them in New Zealand for playing in the pool. That was necessary, dangit.

And last night I ran 2.67 miles in 31:08. I felt pretty happy about that. I am training for a 10k with my running buddy. We don’t live near one another so a lot of this training is separate but we will be able to practice together a few times. I’m looking forward to it.

I like feeling like getting and being stronger is something that I just do. So our 5k this month was 39 minutes. That means for our 10k we probably should pray we can <80 minutes. But it would be really fun to do it in <70 minutes. That would take actual work towards getting faster. Something I have traditionally been (ironically) steadfastly against. But the goal is different. We have ten weeks. That’s not shaving off a lot of time. If we took it seriously we could.

But it would mean treating out bodies like racing animals. It would mean meal planning for optimal nutrition. It would mean spacing out our exercising as it feels right for our body not for our schedule and hahahaha we will get it in when we can. It means consciously getting stronger alongside the running. Something I struggle with.

And it’s not like I have anything else on my mind at all. Or anything else to do. Why the hell not. Let’s just go with OCD thinking about my body again. CAUSE THAT LEADS TO LIFE BALANCE. Excuse me while I hack up a hair ball.

And my friend? She’s the kind of busy that makes it kind of seem like, “Hey stay at home mom… what is it you…do… all day?” Not that she is like that. But her life is very busy. She has a lot of balls in the air. Way more than I can handle. That’s ok! She’s not me. So it feels kind of extra special that I am getting so much of her attention for this period. Muahaha. I monopolize you for exercise motivation. I’m only kind of a loner. I get lonely.

I get to see Tay today. It’s going to be a great day. I have a life of ease and luxury. It is an accident that I have it this good. I really like having multiple days in a row where I don’t have to drive. I feel so much more physically relaxed. Being in the car is such a high stress load that it really doesn’t leave me with much on the other end. That feels pathetic. But I’ve gotten to stay home. I haven’t been in a car in over twenty four hours! It’s like a miracle. And I have worked. Things came into the house. They are finally resettling again. I get the general impression other people don’t get rid of things at the rate of 2-5 large garbage bags every month. It isn’t because I buy so much. We have generous grandparents. And a lot of old stuff. And figuring out how things work is a gradual process.

Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the stuff in my life. Why do I have any of it again? If I ask myself too often things disappear really fast. February is already a two bag month and I’m looking at things that are on top of the book shelves because I have nowhere else to put them and I’m feeling fussy. I don’t like looking at all the crap. Grrr Waaa kerflumph.

Tay is coming today and we have swimming. We might walk depending on how moods are going. And we aren’t going anywhere tomorrow. We might get to have three full days without the car in a row. It is really weird to think about. Children and adults need to exercise. The only reason to drive to swim practice is because it’s about 1.8 miles away and sometimes I don’t leave enough time to let the kids walk there. I really should just always plan my day around walking. That’s what their body needs. Mine too if I’m honest.

I have two choices right now. I can either be at the nursery when it opens and get work done before Tay arrives. Or I can take advantage of Noah being home and go to the gym for a dance workout class thing. I honestly think I will be happier with the dirt. Is that weird? This is why I don’t identify as a dancer. I do actually really joyfully describe myself as a gardner these days. I find it kind of ironic that in terms of time spent gardening is probably going to outpace theatre in a few months. I have already been semi-serious about gardening longer than I was really active in the bdsm community. I wonder how many years it will be before I have spent more hours of my life gardening than having sex. I think that will take a while longer. I’m actually looking forward to it.

I’m looking forward to being on the other side of a lot of these little clocks in my head. I am not quite counting the months until my father has been dead for more of my life than he was alive but almost. In three more years it will balance.

I think I’m going to go get myself some dirt. I’m feeling pretty grateful for my mother-in-law money right now. I just deposited one last Christmas check from my grandmother-in-law. $300. Today is the day I’m buying yellow roses. I have today and tomorrow to get them planted. It’s going to be a wonderful day.

I’m almost ready to take pictures. Almost. I’m not sure why I’m feeling so vulnerable about sharing but I am. My house is increasingly beautiful to me. Even the problems are things that I am looking at differently than other people. And I know what I will get to do round about the time I hit fifty if everything goes according to plan. And you know how life is about shit like that.

I don’t care if my words are judged. If anyone says anything mean about my house I will cry.

If you build it, they will come.

2 Replies

I think I’m figuring out what I want to do. February is a bust. I’m going to survive it and get on with my life.

I’m going to keep seeing my therapist every other week and I am not going to continue the group. I don’t have it in me to try and guide them towards being a semblance of support for me. Right now they aren’t. It isn’t their fault. It’s that whole GU(Geographically Undesireable) thing.

I like where I live. I want to build community here. I am trying. I am working hard on that. There are a few projects I have in my head. One involves asking my next door neighbor and probably Tay if they will donate a few hours of labor towards building a play structure in the back yard. I know what I want. It isn’t that complicated. They both have more tools and experience doing what I want to do. They won’t do it for me but they will guide me through doing it. But that’s in the summer when my neighbor has more time. He is drowning right now.

What I can do right now, is go talk to my other neighbor. I don’t know her name yet and I’m going to have to figure out how to memorize it. I may ask her to write it down for me and I will call Pam and ask her to help me practice so I can be not-insulting when I try to speak to and about her. I want to talk to her because her fence faces the elementary school and is a regular target of graffiti. I would like to talk to her about painting some kind of mural there. I will pay for all of the materials.

Let me break the plan down more. If the woman agrees to that I would like to walk across the street to the elementary school and conveniently talk to my next door neighbor (who is a lovely woman–we exchange a lot of food through the year because of gardening) who works at the front desk. I will tell her I would like to put forth a contest open to every child in the school. The best design for the fence will be painted on the fence and the say… top three best drawings otherwise get to help me paint it on the fence.

The parameters are: the picture needs to be simple and clear. I’m not good at fancy shading or anything you can do with a pencil. This will be done in fairly simple paint. Unless you are that good with spraypaint–which I’ve never used so I would hesitate to use it for a project like this. So it has to be something that will handle the transfer of medium. There have to be clear lines.

I would like it to be about living around here. What are the things you like to do that people can walk to. Why is living here fun. Why do you want people to like it and be nice to our neighborhood?

I’m still working on the exact phrasing of that. It has to be something where potentially a kindergardener could produce something workable or it isn’t fair.

We will do the painting as it can be scheduled with the kids sometime around April or May when it is dry enough to let the paint dry. I have no idea what would be best in terms of the school schedule. Maybe they have a week of minimum days at some point and this would be a great time for a project like this?

I think it is bad advice to always tell people to run away from their problems and only be around people who make your life easier. It isn’t anyone else’s job to make my life easier. I don’t live in a culture who grants that to women in my position. Sometimes I seriously wish I was Chinese. My close friend is Taiwanese and when she talks about her family I feel a lot of envy. I wish there were people in the world who love me the way she is loved by her family.

But I compare my envy of that and my relative position with articles like this one about lynching in America. It is very weird thinking that the right to grow up and walk away from all the terrible evil shit from my childhood is a right I have because of my face. Watch the music video at the bottom of that article.

There are a lot of people in my neighborhood who don’t look like me. I could choose to feel uncomfortable about that or I could work to meet their children through community projects and get to know them as human beings.

I’m going to ask permission to use the school parking lot for a block party after graduation (not the same day. obviously.) because I want the parents to meet one another. I like that so many kids in my neighborhood ride bikes outside in the afternoon. I wave at a lot of runners.

I want to live here. I want to keep getting ridiculously unhealthy frugal advice from the dear lady a few blocks away. She lives on a very fixed income so she tells me about every deal. I thank her. And bring her oranges.

I think I feel mortally offended by the idea of leaving the trees I planted. I want to eat that god damn fruit. Some mother fucker would buy this house, chop the trees, level out the dirt and put in a god damn lawn.

No. Those are my roots. I planted them. If I want community it has to be near me. It has to come to me. Sorry. That’s just how life works out sometimes. It’s not a personal affront. I just find I don’t enjoy travel much. It takes a really lot to justify it. I need to believe that and make a choice. It’s not that I will never visit anyone or that I will never leave my house except on foot.

I need to act like staying home is a conscious priority. It’s a choice. It’s something that dramatically makes my life better. If I am not home I can not do my work. If I can not do my work I feel rather bad about myself as a person. LIfe is not meant to be a long string of tiring days spent “entertaining” myself or my children.

I have a few painting projects in the house I’ve been thinking about. Doing them will make me happy. I have to be home in order to do that. I have to choose to not have engagements.

I need to not blow with the winds of change. Change needs to happen in the world around me. I need to keep to my work. I need to make measurable progress in my own estimation or I won’t respect myself as a person.

My daughter is right on the very cusp of being able to go run around playing out front basically unsupervised. She’s not quite trustworthy enough. She’s close though. I don’t taunt her with this difference I just think about it. It’s time for me to get my head out of my ass and meet the neighbors.

The awesome thing is we have a family to model off of who live (depending how you count) three or four perpendicular blocks away from us who have behaved the same way. They have already talked to the city about this kind of organization stuff.

I need to start building more community where I am. You were right K. I need a project.

Learning and shame

2 Replies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m sorry

2 Replies

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.

Mostly parenting babbling

2 Replies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time to go inside.

I’m going to run out of steam

Leave a reply

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Category Archives: projects

Good day

Just another whinging Friday

Caved.

Walking on eggshells

That gratitude stuff.

Perspective is everything.

The fence project

to do on fence

Progress report.

Make art.

And then! We paint.

Plants are personal.

Playing house and thinking about destiny

If you build it, they will come.

Learning and shame

I’m sorry

Mostly parenting babbling

I’m going to run out of steam