Category Archives: queer

Anger and feelings

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Now my ergonomic keyboard isn’t working. Because there is a conspiracy to destroy my arms.

Today was a therapy day. We talked about my feelings. Cause I have them. And I pay someone to listen to me fucking talk about them.

Something that happened before with running: after a while I can’t tell the difference between the different kinds of stomach pain. Anxiety, hunger, and illness all feel the same. They can all involve vomiting (or not) and tons of nausea. There isn’t much difference. So as my exercise increases and I’m using more calories my belly hurts a lot of the time. And I can’t tell the difference between hunger and anxiety. Which freaks me out chemically.

We talked a lot about my feeling angry earlier this week. And how my reaction to feeling anger is days of self-recrimination and punishment. I don’t feel like it is ok to be angry.

Even though these days the extremity of my anger is expressed through slamming a cabinet shut. And not that hard. Because I’ve already had to repair cabinets I’ve ripped off the wall and I uhhh don’t want to do that again. I’ve got enough shit to do.

I have punched a hole in a wall in years. I haven’t cut myself in years. I haven’t hit anyone in years. I haven’t inappropriately screamed and screamed at someone in a long time. I have screamed at my kids, but not recently.

I’ve been holding it together. I haven’t flipped out on anyone beyond a quavering voice in a long time.

I realized today that I haven’t had a panic attack in months. (I think that this is helped by how much pot I use.) That is a big deal. Through my teen years and my twenties I didn’t have very many months without panic attacks. Heck, for much of that time I didn’t have many weeks without panic attacks. They tend to go in waves. They get really bad for a while then they subside a little for a while. I’ll take whatever reprieve I can get.

I’m doing better. I really am. People who have known me since I was a teenager tell me I am much more calm. That’s a good sign.

But when I feel angry I treat that as deserving as much punishment as if I went to the park and started slapping kids. My standards for myself really aren’t within a range I can accomplish. I can’t stop feeling angry sometimes.

I haven’t raged at anyone in a long time. This is about as much control as someone like me gets. I spend a lot of time feeling like I am pathetic and disgusting if this is the best I can do. I’m not actually a nice person. I can just play one on tv.

My shrink asked me why on earth have I been babysitting so much for other people lately. I told her it is because I want those kids to know me. I want to have real relationships with them. I have known some of them since birth. I desperately hope they will see me as more than just an occasional party host. I want them to think of me as a caregiver.

That requires giving some care. With a smile on my face. When I feel frustration I need to ACKNOWLEDGE it and talk about how I will deal with it. That conscious modeling teaches the kids so much. My kids and other kids.

“Gosh. I’m feeling really frustrated because this isn’t going how I want it to go. I suppose I have a few choices. I could scream and jump up and down. Will that make things better? (Kids chorus: “No.”) Err, I could get mad and break it because then I won’t have to deal with this again. Will that make things better? (Kids chorus: “No.”) Oh. Am I going to have to take a deep breath, calm down, and try again? (Kids chorus: “Yes.”) Ah crum. That sounds like work. Alllllllllllll riiiiiiiiiiiight.”

Whine is intentional. It makes them giggle.

I’m not sure when I will feel like what I am doing is “good enough”. Part of my problem is, I deeply admire people who are making radically different choices. I want to emulate them. I want to pattern after them because I like them and respect them and look up to them.

But if I do I will wreck the good thing I’ve got going here. Some things aren’t compatible.

I told my shrink that I’ve been having a lot more sexual fantasy/visualization stuff again. She asked like what. I said I miss going to grocery stores looking for a trick. My favorite game is going to a vanilla place (not just grocery stores–but man I love them) and looking for someone. I win if I can get someone home and naked in under two hours. I’ve won the game. Not every time, of course. That wouldn’t be a very fun game.

I think my shrink hasn’t quite fully picked up on the “queer” thing. Multiple times she used very heterosexually focused language to describe who I would pick up and what I would do with them. I corrected her.

Girls who like casual sex are much harder to find than boys who like casual sex. That doesn’t mean I like boys more. Just that when it comes to going hunting, sometimes I like shooting fish in a barrel. Ahem.

She told me that the fantasy shit is “very empowering”. Which is a phrase that triggers my gag reflex. I’ve uhhh heard a bit too much about how victims should empower themselves. It always sounds squicky to me. (Squick, for those who don’t know, is the visceral, physical sensation you get when someone does something you really don’t like. Like someone sucking your toes if you hate that sort of thing. When you get that instinctive shiver of “yuck“. I kind of want to go on to a long list of things that squick some people but I’ll be kind.)

The scared, shameful, dirty feeling after I get angry is probably the most pressing “PTSD symptom” I have right now. That anxiety eats me for days. It means I can’t sleep. It makes me shorter and shorter.

If I feel intense anger it is really hard to calm down. It is really hard to stop feeling attacked and threatened.

I’d like to be clear that I’m rationally aware that no one is attacking me or threatening me at this stage of my life. Not no one. It’s been a long fucking time. I am not saying that I’m getting threats and so of course I’m scared.

No. If I go through the experience of getting angry (my baby-sitter being kind of flakey is annoying but not really that catastrophic–I get other kid care right now) even if I don’t do anything inappropriate I have days of fierce, mean, nasty self-recrimination. I eat irregularly until my stomach is a mass of pain. I don’t sleep enough–not nearly enough. The last few days have involved a lot of staying up late and still waking up early to grind on what a disgusting piece of shit I am.

I’m better than I was. I can distract myself if I’m awake and in front of a screen and smoking pot. Then I can stop the inside-voice-ranting. If I try to lay in bed and go back to sleep… Forget it. The brain weasels will eat me. I’ll end up crying and retreating to the garage to let Noah sleep anyway.

I suppose I use writing about the way I would use a sponsor if I were the AA type. Instead I smoke my pot. With the blessing of no less than two doctors and a therapist.

My shrink told me that I should probably move my blog to being behind some kind of wall. Folks under 18 shouldn’t be allowed to get access to my main writing.

I have feels about that. But if I’m going to be publishing books for the under 18 market I might now also want to have a public blog where I talk about the super hot stripper who was happy to uhhh come to the bathroom with me at a strip club one night. Or the other really hot girl I fucked in an elevator at a club. We really weren’t supposed to be doing that there.

My life has been pretty good.

Yeah. I like girls.

 

Identity stuff

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I had the night off. So I went for a run (about 3.5 miles), took a shower, then headed off to see one of my Daddy’s. We went to a gay bar for kinky queers night. I spent a lot of the night reminiscing about the good old days.

On the drive down I rolled all the windows down in the car and I played my sluttiest collection of songs and I took a trip down memory lane.

Sometimes, when I stop to go through the mental rolodex, I feel very grateful for the life I have lived. I have touched (metaphorically and literally) an awfully high number of really interesting people. First love songs are kind of funny because I get to pick and choose between which early partner I kind of miss.

My life is so different than it was. That was a lot of the theme of conversation. “Wow. Things are different now.”

In August of this year it will be ten years since I left my Owner. Lots of changes. Basically every single individual piece of my life is different.

I think hard about why I’m making the choices I’m making in contrast with the other choices available. I am doing with my life exactly what I set out to do. But I didn’t know it would work out the way it has. I didn’t go into parenting expecting mostly vanilla monogamy. But it is what is working for us right now.

I have feels about that. About how I have changed. I don’t know if it good or not so good. It just is. This is just another thing I’m doing for a while. I don’t know how long it will last.

Slutty songs in my world are always interspersed with sad songs because I listen to a lot of sad music. That means I alternate thinking about those who are no longer in my life with Those Who Are No Longer With Us. I usually spend a while in such moments crying about the fact that Noah will die some day. I ponder how I would handle it.

It’s funny how my mood changes. On some days I ponder celibacy as a widow because man, no one can measure up to Noah. On other days I think about a fuck-buddy relationship with the dear friend who is kinda in the #2 slot as far as the Top 5 go. Then I think, “Nahh. I’d go to a queer leather con and find 5-10 women. Oh hell yes.” I miss girls in a way I just don’t miss boys given that I fuck one quite regularly.

It was very nice last night to be in a space at an event where ogling the hot women was not only ok it would have been a little rude to completely not observe how much effort they put into their hotness.

Oh man. The nice girl in the legging pants with the flirty ruffled short tunic that completely didn’t cover her loverly ass? She had nice shoes and nice legs and an ass that can make a grown woman cry for joy. It was so nice of her to stand so near my line of sight for extended periods of time.

I kinda miss fucking women. It’s just different. I am different when it happens.

I’m feeling stress, so I took a trip down memory lane. Dylan Thomas says you can never go home. I feel like I can visit home, but I can’t live there any more. And that’s ok too.

Mostly it was just lovely having a night where I could bounce from topic to topic to topic and I didn’t have to worry about offending or scaring anyone. These are some of my wonderful old friends and play partners. They’ve known me for more than 1/3 of my life. (They are older than me so the percentage is lower in the other direction.) They are blog readers (at least occasionally) and have been for most of a decade or longer.

It is so nice to sometimes be able to jump around talking about widely disparate parts of my life and identity. I could talk about the stuff that I’m feeling weird about and why I’m choosing it even though it feels weird. They could listen and understand why I would make the choices I’m making. Oh how I live for validation.

Sometimes you can’t go to the home school mommys and ask for validation. They don’t have any idea (not really) of what I gave up to become a parent. They have no idea what the contrast is like between me now and what I was like before. Their evaluation of me is… kinda limited. They can judge what they see today, not progress.

I feel so lucky for my old friends. I feel so lucky that these hot, fascinating people say “You ever decide to break the Big M give me a call.”

Hawt.

Not that I’m breaking my monogamy. I was a good girl and all. But I got to talk about why I am doing this.

Of course it would be lovely fun to have you beat the shit out of my while I scream “Monkey Fucker” again. That was a really good time.

When I’m talking to people who had reasonably good childhoods who went into Leather later in life… it’s weird talking about how I am doing this partially so I can step back and understand why other people react to me the way they do. This is as close as I can get to experiencing “childhood” as other people know it.

Sometimes I sort of think of my approach to parenting as being similar to people who go into monasteries and take vows of silence to really test themselves. My life is hard. It requires a tremendous amount of focus, concentration, and effort to do what I am trying to do. Because my standards are so high with regards to my behavior… it’s a fully time job just managing my emotions. This is my boot camp. These are the only judges I will ever fucking care about and the way I judge is to watch our interactions. A high percentage of our negative interactions are clearly my fault and I work on minimizing the damage I do in presenting negative behaviors.

I never punish my kids for doing something I model. No punishments for swearing. You learned those words from my mouth. Why would I hurt you for listening to me?

The hitting is a thing though. “I’ve never hit you?! Where in the world do you come up with the idea that it is acceptable to solve your problems with your fists? I never taught you that!” That sort of indignation. Sometimes, if they are in the back yard alone… I let them fight it out. I feel guilty but I know that kids who go to school have so many more fights than my kids that I’m maybe doing them a disservice if I never let them practice and learn… I feel deeply conflicted.

And last night I could talk about it and not feel scared that I was going to offend the shit out of people till they will no longer talk to me. I feel scared in the home school group. Best behavior, Krissy!

Relaxing is so nice. It’s nice knowing that I have already changed dramatically on every access and these people still like me and respect me and are glad they know me.

I can’t be doing everything wrong.

Oh, and because I was too chicken shit to say anything about this last night with a stranger: yes, some white people do occasionally get confused for one another. True, that happens. But when that happens it is usually two white people who have some major overall similarities.

When two Asian women who look nothing alike and who are widely diverse in age are treated as interchangeable in a community because all of the six Asian people in the bdsm community are treated like they are interchangeable… maybe white people don’t need to talk about how it’s no big deal. It is alienating and othering. Sorry, white people don’t get put into a little pod and treated like they are all interchangeable. The #knowyournegro and #knowyourasian campaigns were started by small very specific groups of people who are widely treated like they are more or less the same person by a HUGE NUMBER of clueless white people. It’s just kind of different.

If people who are not white are complaining about the fact that they are not recognized as an individual person with their own personality… if you are white… just shut up. Seriously. Don’t try to one up this. It makes you look like an asshat.

A shorter brain dump.

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I apologize for the terrible typos. Welcome to the world of first drafts. 🙂 I’m a generalist. Not a.. whatever I wrote instead. (I’ve already forgotten. Awesome.)

I spent a while yesterday fantasizing about my ideal next Ikea trip. I spent almost an hour with measuring tapes moving around my house. I asked Noah and he told me to go ahead. It will be almost $2,000. I choke on that number. Ok, I’m rounding up, closer to $1800?

It will involve a radical difference in the pantry and give me a lot more space to move around and more storage at the same time. It will also give me more bookshelf room in the living room. I will be getting a lot of drawer pull outs and door things. These things now come in hot pink and turquoise. Perfect.

It also involves getting two of these as my next non-pee-filled couch experience. If you put these facing each other you can get a 15′ runway for summersaults and wrestling. That sounds like rainy day awesome to me. And I won’t have to scream at the kids all the time to stop jumping on the couch. No springs to potentially injure them. Excellent. No, they aren’t very “grown up” but they will get me to stop yelling so much and that will be nice for everyone.

All told I would be getting 43 new cubes of storage space. That’s a lot. Less than just getting two new 5×5’s but I don’t have good places for 5×5’s. (Obviously I’m an Expedit girl.) Instead I will get sizes that fit better in my house. I didn’t like the floor to ceiling book shelf thing in the living room. I tried it for a few years and I always felt like I was hyperventilating from lack of space. I like having all the pictures on the walls.

I feel like my suicidal ideation has been at a low ebb since I put all the pictures up. Other parts of my life are going well too, so it’s not like I think that one thing made all the difference or anything. But it reminds me that people do still love me. They just aren’t in my house right now. I feel a kind of benevolence as I see them smiling on me every day.

I like having all the pictures up because it is so hard for me to believe that anyone even could like me. But I have pictures of Jenny that are twenty years old. And now I have pictures of her daughter, whom she named after me. Even I’m not deluded enough to think that there is a lack of emotion there. But it is so hard to feel. It is hard to remember that these connections really are what life is made up of. No, not everyone gets to have a family like Pam. Life just doesn’t work like that.

I have pictures of Pam that are fourteen years old. Now she makes videos for my kids because she isn’t here all the time and she wants to be able to read them stories.

I don’t really “believe” I am unloved. Not any more. But it is hard to feel like I deserve love. It is hard to believe that I can love people without damaging them in some major way. It is hard to believe that I am not a monster and all of these people are going to find out the truth about me and then they won’t love me any more.

So I compulsively admit every time I scream at my kids. I tell people that I have to be conscious of my stress levels because when things get too bad I kick holes in walls or kick the cabinets apart.

I don’t want to be in the closet. I think the closet would just magnify all of my shame. I wouldn’t have the knowledge that I have to admit in public how bad I am. My dad got away with so much. My siblings are compulsive liars. I don’t want to be a liar.

The money I spend at Ikea is about my knowledge that if you have a solve-able problem and you choose not to solve it you can’t take your frustration with the results out on anyone else.

In other words: if I don’t deal with the mess in the garage by really finding homes for all of it I can’t get mad at my kids for making huge messes with the stuff left on the floor.

Our boundaries are generally very clear. If stuff is on the top shelf, you have to ask an adult before you get it down. If stuff is down low then you can play with it.

Do you see how fucked I am?

Shanna is old enough and clever enough to know she is getting away with stuff. But I didn’t tell her that the boundaries still existed as these things were temporarily on the floor.

So here we are. And boy that is a big mess of Valentines crap.

But hey, we will only have to make one card in February.

Yesterday was a shouty-day. I differentiate between shouting, yelling, and screaming. Screaming is the stuff that hurts my throat. That’s too much, period. Yelling is about tone. Yelling sounds mean and doesn’t even have to be all that loud. You can “yell” at someone without raising your voice. It’s about berating and being harsh. Shouting is being a little louder than normal but not aggressive or punishing or shaming.

“Right! Another pile! No really, come over here next because we missed a lot!” Not fierce, more commanding?

I partially judge the difference based on their response. Screaming results in crying and freaking out. It’s just not ok. I always end up comforting them when I scream and apologizing a lot because it scares the shit out of them.

Yelling has a variety of results but it is differentiated by a shame overtone in some way. Yelling makes them defensive or they cringe.

Being shouty results in shrugs, eye rolling and back talk while they more or less do as I ask.

Isn’t that part of childhood?

Learning to do things even when you don’t want to is part of life. I fucking guarantee you I don’t feel like doing laundry as much as I do. I really don’t feel like cooking as much as I do. But it has to be done.

Sure I could structure my whole life around trying to get around those tasks but I don’t like any of the trades.

I’m trying to get better at even bringing shouting down. I may still be mad at K for telling a large group of people that I was the biggest bitch there but she has a point.

I think I’m ok with being the biggest bitch at the beach. I can live with that.

I don’t want to be a bitch to my daughters. They are special.

Why do my priorities matter so much? I need my children to understand that their physical actions have measurable impact on the world. If you leave something on the floor, someone else will step on it. If you don’t pick up your stuff either someone else has to do it or the space has to go unused.

We live in a fairly small house by modern American standards. Including the garage we have ~1400 sq ft. If you make space unusable by other people that’s a pretty selfish thing to do when you have moved on to taking up other space as well.

We have pest problems if we aren’t mindful. This has been proven repeatedly. These are not constraints I have just dreamed up.

We have people over a minimum of once a week and usually we have people over three or four times in a week. We are very lucky that people humor me. Leaving my house unusable is uhhh not an option I am ok with. We need to clean up after ourselves.

I can’t expect other peoples kids to understand fluctuating weird boundaries. My boundaries need to be simple and clear. Nothing off the top shelf without permission. Food on the linoleum. Stay out of the adult bedroom and the pantry and the side yard with the gate. I should probably paint signs on the door and the gate.

I want to create self teaching space. I could do it with the shelving I have but it would involve a lot more down sizing than I want to do or just messy piles left about.

I know that every single time I do something like this I am pushing back future goals. I think of the cute folks in “Up” who keep breaking into their savings. I know that a boat is a hole in the water you pour money into. A house is the same way. When do I stop?

Well I’d be out of room for furniture and I think that would set me up for the next 5-10 years for what I want.

But next year there will be something else. And the year after that. etc. You get my point. I can stop belaboring. Or can I?

Like the dishwashing machine; it’s breaking. The whole top rack comes off periodically. We will probably want to replace that because I tell you fucking what I don’t want to be responsible for hand washing all of our dishes.

Here we go, all what I want to pay for right about now:

  • Seal the garage door
  • gutters
  • bookshelves
  • couches that don’t smell like pee and that allow me to yell less
  • dishwasher
  • pipes in garage
  • washing machine

I think that is it. They would improve the feeling of being in the house tremendously. I notice as winter comes and the garage is unpleasant in the morning. Brrr.

But we also want to take vacations. I feel very guilty when I think of how much money I want Noah to spend. It isn’t a reasonable thing in the current economy. Not for the vast majority of the country. But he is doing it.

Why is what he knows how to do worth so much money? Clearly it is.

He’s really busy. The thing is, if he wasn’t trying to earn money in the time he would be playing video games. Or hunting. He wants a lot of time and space away from us. The intensity is hard. I get it. Ha ha ha I get it.

I met someone new at the park yesterday. We talked about how to deal with overwhelming people because parenting advice because. No specific details.

The conversation was fine but I had to take a break to use the bathroom. Like, duh. When I came back the response was a big grin and, “I’m sorry I need to stop talking to you because I feel overwhelmed.” I spun on my heel and walked away. I also forgot to gather up all of my belongings because I left as quickly as I could get the kids together.

I know it was “a joke”.

But I don’t really think that is a signal I should ignore. Not at all. Not in the slightest increment. Not if I want to be welcome back later.

I’m not there for me. I’m there for my kids. Next time I will make sure I say a whole lot less to anyone who isn’t more tested.

Maybe that isn’t fair. Maybe… maybe.

Be careful what you say to people you don’t know. I thought I censored pretty well. I didn’t say anything explicit beyond being involved in the queer and transgendered communities. I said that to indicate that the group does actually have queer families. And yet we have Mormons. It’s awesome. It takes all kinds. We are all very nice to one another at the park and on outings. I think it is great.

I’m sure it was a joke. And yet.

I am too sensitive. This is true. It’s not like I will shun this person permanently but I will be a lot more timid in the future.

Managing boundaries is hard. I didn’t talk about sex. I talked about entirely vanilla life experiences. I was G-rated if you don’t think “queer” is a dirty word.

Do you know that my mother put makeup on every single day? We were very poor so it was the cheapest and most garish makeup available. Every. Single. Fucking. Day.

No, no I don’t want to wear makeup. Thanks.

There’s a first time for everything.

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NSFW.

A long time ago in a life I used to have I hit girls a lot. I don’t mean that I gave them playful slaps on the arms. I mean that I liked to make them scream and cry and beg me to stop. That’s kind of my thing. I don’t care how hard or how soft I have to hit you–we will be doing so until you beg me to stop.

That sounds pretty bad, right? I negotiate up front. I tell people what they are in for. I like to punch and slap and pinch and kick. I don’t like using instruments. I want to be in as much pain at the end of the scene as the person I am playing with. Ok, maybe not quite as much.

There was this one time. I was in the middle of my Cheers-period of attending the local fetish club. I went every Wednesday. I had been involved in the bdsm community for five or so years at that point. I had been broken up with my Owner for a while. I was hunting. I went out a lot.

So there was this one time I was there and a friend came. She was someone I had known for many years. We had been slaves together. We were both no longer with our former Owners. That’s complicated shit, yo. She had even been married to her Owner which is even more brutal.

One of the thing about the serialist nature of relationships in the bdsm community is there doesn’t look to be much room for depending on being interesting if for any reason you need to develop lots of limits. People with limits aren’t interesting. Newbies–fresh meat–are interesting because they say they want to try everything.

So when I saw this friend on that night we had a conversation. She and I had played a fair bit back and forth. I’m not sure that we ever crossed to what the vanilla’s would deem lesbian sex but I beat her, she beat me, her Daddy beat us both, my Owner tied us together (clothed because he’s into clothes) and “made us” kiss and wiggle for their entertainment. That sort of thing. We were friends, after all and isn’t that how friends behave?

She and I had a similar problem. We don’t safeword very well. Safewords are generally thought to be the way you signal “I’ve had too much and I need to stop.” We have both incurred physical damage because of play that has gotten too intense and we both have differently troubled psych histories. So we bond and all that. And when you bond and like someone you want to make them feel good. We were taught that the way we were supposed to make people feel good is through a mixture of pain and pleasure.

Culture is complicated.

So I don’t even know how things got started on that exact night. We didn’t play every time we saw one another–it was more sporadic than that. She mentioned that she was having trouble with her ongoing inability to safeword or something like that.

“Well… have you ever actually said “red” during a scene where that was a prearranged conditioned? Wait–no. Let’s back up. Have you ever said “no” to someone who was beating you?” (I have the background knowledge of knowing that she plays with the biggest, baddest, nastiest people in the community. Sure they are teddy bears on the inside and all that but they fuck people up.)

“Uhm… no.”

“Ok, we’ll start there. That’s what we are doing tonight. I am going to hit you until you tell me to stop.” Then I smiled and grabbed her by the hair and pulled her roughly into the play area. That was a very short negotiation. Usually I go on and on but I’ve played with her a lot and we had a history of experience to build on. I wouldn’t do that with her now. Even if it were permitted within the boundaries of my marriage I haven’t played with her in more than seven years. I don’t have the right any more. It worked then.

I slammed her really hard against the St. Andrew’s cross. I grabbed her shoulders and pulled her forward then repeatedly slammed her back again and again.

She kind of gasped and made thumping noises. Intermittently she giggled. We like to have us a good time.

I started in with light punches on her upper chest. I thought long and hard for maybe a minute about whether or not I should properly warm her up.

If you want to be nice to a masochist you start out with a series of light blows and you slowly wake the skin up and get their endorphins running. These hits don’t hurt. It’s just patting the skin. It’s a very kind gesture and all.

If you don’t want to be nice to a masochist (or if you want to be very nice to a masochist) you don’t bother and you hit them beyond their ability to read something as “strong sensation” and well into the realm of “holyfuckingshit that hurts” pretty much instantly. I may have even given ninety seconds of consideration before I started slapping her hard enough to leave large hand prints.

Upper arms, sides of hips, upper thighs inside and out/front and back, chest and breasts. Not as hard on the breasts. Cysts are bad things. Be gentle with breasts.

I didn’t even bother to take her clothes off. I wasn’t here to get her off–I’d do that somewhere other than a bar with random lookieloo’s. I was here to teach her a lesson. We all have to learn how to say no. There is a god damn first time for everything.

If you are cautious and want to extend the length of a scene then you give people time to breathe in between blows. You let them “process” the pain. Folks who are being hit usually appreciate a bit of time in between strikes. I didn’t really do that.

I beat her hard and fast. I switched off between slaps and punches. Sometimes I would pinch a section of muscle in my hand and pull her forward before slamming her back.

I could see her panic response rise.

The whole time I was doing it I was leaning in and yelling (the music was loud) as softly as I could into her face so no one nearby could hear (ha) what I wanted from her. I took her on a journey.

“It hurts, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Do you like it?”

“Yes.”

“Ok, then I’ll switch things up.” I do know what she likes after all. “Uhm, so are you still enjoying it?”

“Not so much ma’am, not so much.”

“Then we are finally getting somewhere!”

All of this probably only took about five minutes of hitting. I’m really mean when I want to be. In between taunting her I like to try and build her up. We had a lot of the conversation go more like:

“I think you are beautiful and I love you.” (She cries harder.)

“I think you are worth protecting. When you stop wanting this I want you to tell me to stop.” (She cries harder.)

“Please, please tell me to stop when you don’t want it any more. I don’t want to hurt you. I love you. I only want to do things to you that you want. Please please tell me when to stop. I love you. I love you.” (I beat her harder and she cries harder.)

At some point I have to back off because she is hyperventilating–I don’t want to kill her after all–and I just stand there holding her hands while she gets her breath settled down. Then she nods at me again and says the fucking hottest thing I’ve ever heard:

“I want more.”

I beat on her until my fists were bruised and mangled. The beating lasted something like forty five minutes. When I was done we were both sweaty sobbing balls on the floor.

I could see it coming. I wasn’t allowed to cry till the finish and I could feel my composure slipping and I could see her finally see that.

“Stop! Stop! Please stop.”

I grabbed her and hugged her and we fell to the floor and rocked each other and cried and cried. She thanked me and I thanked her.

When you are in a bar you can’t sit on the floor very long and “process” after your scene so we moved over to a booth. We didn’t talk we just held each other. There aren’t words sometimes.

When I think about missing bdsm what I think about is that feeling of transformation. Before that moment she had never said no. After that moment she had. If she does it once she can do it again.

I’ve learned how to say no. I have boundaries that I previously didn’t believe I was allowed to have. My life has changed.

Nothing is set in stone until you are dead. And even then the bastards keep re-writing history.

{tmi} pick up play

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Fairly explicit sex stuff. Read at your own risk.

Noah would like it if I could get it up tonight. Which means I’m trying to get in the mood. Right now my favorite song is Stuck on f*cken you. It makes me happy. I’ve been thinking about what stories I want to tell in the book. On one hand this is my version of exhibitionism; on the other hand I’m not just doing a gratuitous listing of the sex I’ve had.

I have been thinking about a woman I dated for a while when I first got into the scene. Technically I dated her and her master. I was already seeing Tom but we hadn’t decided to be monogamous yet. I was out having experiences that he didn’t really want to know about. I had an interesting time hearing them talk about doing drugs and playing. That was something forbidden in Tom’s corner of the scene.

I met all of these people through an IRC channel. There was a local room. I spent a lot of time there. When I was bored late at night I would periodically ask people what they were doing. Then I would meet up with them wherever they were. This couple in particular lived in San Francisco. She was a database administrator for , a large internet company with ties to many nations. He worked at the same company in a much less prestigious position. I suspect it was partly because she was technically his superior at work that it was so fucking hot to own her and have the right to degrade her whenever he felt like it. 

I remember visiting them in the office. She was babysitting something and couldn’t leave. I drove up from San Jose. She mostly worked but occasionally walked out for a fondle or a grope. The guy and I had a highly suggestive conversation. Of course we would be going to their place once she finished up for the night. While we were killing time the guy told me to walk over to the large windows at the front of the building. It was after ten at night in the financial distract–at least there weren’t many people around. When I was there he talked me through masturbating in front of the window. He was quite explicit in how he wanted to see it happen. Pull my skirt up. Move my panties to the side; don’t take them off. It’s nice seeing the cloth bunch up in the crease between my thighs. It’s dirtier. He had me fuck myself with my fingers for a while. Then I sucked them clean. I smiled when he asked me if I was a dirty whore. Only on my best days.

When we went back to their place it was interesting. The woman and I pretty much had to wrestle one another to decide who got to be in the middle. Who is more aggressive? It was clear that the boy was going to be giving most of the directions. Who had to be on the bottom of the pecking order?

Wasn’t me.

I hurt her. I hurt her a lot. I spanked her. I used a cane on her thighs. I beat her with her clothes on. He smiled and watched. They both knew I was new and he gave me occasional pointers. She was generous and accommodating with her smart ass comments designed to provoke me into hitting her harder. Eventually I got tired of pushing her around the living room and I grabbed her by the hair. I asked him where their bedroom was and he pointed. I half dragged half pushed her in an awkward position somewhere between being down on all fours and up on her knees down the hallway. I didn’t want her to get there in any kind of comfort or dignity.

We had our safety chat with her on her knees in front of me. STD prevention is important.

I lay back on the bed and pulled my skirt up and my panties off and she decided I was a low enough risk that she was happy to start licking my cunt without a dental dam. I have never managed to figure out dental dams. I feel like this is a failure in my sex life. Anyway.

After a few minutes of squirming I sat bolt upright and said, “Right!” Then I grabbed her by the hair and dragged her on to the bed on her back. I stopped and breathed a big deep breath and smiled slowly and deliberately. I knew this would be different. When I got her pants and panties off I smiled again.

“Nice clit, girl.”

She beamed at me. She glowed. She looked like it was her birthday and Christmas all rolled up in one. She bit her lower lip as she squirmed. I think she liked how I looked at her.

“How do you want me to touch you?”

She showed me.

I was fascinated. The point was not to get the biologically-still-a-penis hard and sit on it. What the hell do I do now? It was different. It was lovely. The point was making her squirm and moan. The point was alternating biting her thighs with gentle strokes on her clit. That made her fists clench and her toes curl and she had the best throaty growl/giggle.

After a while I started getting bored again but I wasn’t sure how to transition. Luckily she was a perceptive girl. “You want a dick, don’t do?”

I conceded that this might in fact be the case. She sighed deeply and reached over her head towards a drawer. I looked because I am nosy as hell. Out came a strap on harness and dildo. Oh my.

She was really good at fucking. This was back in my oh my god it all feels so good I think I’ll orgasm again, thanks stage. I miss that stage. We went through a variety of positions and eventually my head was buried in a pillow as she fucked me from behind. She alternated slamming her cock into me with slapping me on the ass to make me scream.

Her partner got tired of watching. I found this out when he grabbed her by the hair and yanked her off of me. I only knew that was happening because she cried out when it hurt. Then I felt him behind me. I reached back with my hand, felt a condom, and started saying, “Yes” over and over. He fucked really well too.

I like fucking people who expect to get a show. They both wanted big reactions out of me and they were quite happy to taunt me, ridicule me, hurt me, or be sweet and loving if they had to. But not for long before they want back to hurting me and fucking me. I liked them liking me. I felt really hot.

Sometimes with slutty people I think, “Ah! You have low standards” and sometimes I think, “Ah! You are highly sought out” and it’s more fun to fuck the second kind. With the first kind it feels kind of extra dirty in the less fun way. I still do it because I have low standards. See, this is why I don’t want to do that any more. I digress.

There is a particular kind of fame that comes from being able to do the fun-to-watch performative sex well. It’s very limited in scope unless you get into porn and then it defines your life in a different way. I have never been paid as a pornographic model though I have done it for free. It’s all about fuzzy lines. I’ve never been a sex worker.

The after cuddling was almost as fierce as the sex. There is an intense bonding from violent sex. You are orchestrating an experience together that is about skirting the line of how much pain can be doled out. It’s a complicated balance. In my experience I feel a lot of bonding emotion short term and I always maintain a little bit of a connection. Sex is intimate. With them there was a lot of relief all around at finding another person who gets us. Wanting to be hurt the way we all hurt one another isn’t common in the vanilla world and we were all young and fairly new to the scene. We still had the thrill of recognition of tribe.

She is the one who told me that I shouldn’t call myself bisexual. I asked her why not. She asked me if I wanted her to pick a gender and stay there or is she allowed to play somewhere in the middle. I told her that she can do whatever she wants. She told me then there isn’t a binary gender and I’m not “bi”. I asked her what I was and she told me queer.

I remember how she raked her nails down my neck. It hurt. It burned. It felt really good. It made me gasp. I like it when my breath comes short like that–with a little squeak. I like being surprised.

I watched them have sex next. I asked them to tell me why they like each other so much. It was quite sweet hearing what they each like about the other. The beauty they find in one another. I was just a visitor–what bound them together?

I had private reservations about some of the things they said but I decided that it wasn’t my life and I could be just supportive. I focused on the good sex. How can I help you two?

Eventually I passed out on the bed. I think I ended up in the middle. I love being in the middle of multiple bodies after sex. It feels comforting and assuring. Here are these people who like me and will be here to guard my dreams. If you have the intimacy of shared sleep after group sex it is a different experience, in my experience at least.

Your early experiences form who you are.

I run into her every so often. Him too. They aren’t together and haven’t been in a long while. Life has taken them very different places. When I saw her last I told her I didn’t feel like I was queer any more and she laughed at me. She stroked my face and told me that leopards don’t change their spots. Then she kissed me. I lurched towards her to kiss her back. I would have done pretty much whatever else she wanted too.

Now I’ll never kiss her again. I don’t feel very queer any more. It feels like my orientation is “not hunting”.

But when I masturbate sometimes I think of her. I think of touching her. I think of her smile and the way she sighed. I think of the taste of her. I think of how surprising it was to have her suddenly start fucking me. I think of how nice it was when it wasn’t a surprise any more and we had been fucking for weeks and we knew the rhythm and the height and the speed. She was really good at fucking. She taught me how to use a strap on. She bought me my first vibrator and taught me how to make myself come.

Eventually the guy kind of scared me and I stopped coming around. I didn’t like finding out he was on ecstasy while single tailing me after I had been made to bleed repeatedly. I would have made a different choice.

Once you say yes once your only way to say no is to walk. That’s my life experience. It makes it hard to have ongoing relationships. I have to be very careful what I say yes to.

Time to go think about this Noah person.

Passing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s easier to pass.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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